About Helen's Foundry

Built by people who've felt the drift

Forge exists because we watched smart teams build the wrong thing — repeatedly, expensively, and avoidably. We decided to do something about it.

The origin

Every day is exactly the same

Helen's Foundry started as a question: why do so many capable teams end up building products nobody wants? Not because they lack talent or resources — but because somewhere between the founding vision and the daily work, something essential gets lost.

Ashley and Justin have spent 20+ years watching this happen across organizations from national laboratories to hypergrowth startups. The pattern was always the same: strategy disconnects from execution, and nobody notices until it's too late. The team is moving fast, shipping constantly, and building in entirely the wrong direction.

Years spent building tools and infrastructure, watching technical teams do extraordinary work on the wrong problems — not because they didn't care, but because they genuinely didn't know. The context had never reached them.

What we believe

Most startup failures are preventable

The dominant narrative about startup failure focuses on execution: teams that didn't ship fast enough, that ran out of money, that couldn't hire. We think the real culprit is almost always upstream — a slow, silent drift between what the company said it was building and what it actually built.

AI has made this dramatically worse. The gap between "shower thought" and "working prototype" collapsed from months to hours. Teams now have powerful evidence of productivity without validation. The feeling of progress replaced the practice of discovery.

Forge exists to close that gap. Not by slowing teams down, but by making the strategic context so visible and so present that drift becomes impossible to ignore.

Every ticket traces back to a real customer problem. Every decision connects to the strategy that justified it. Forge pushes past process discipline and makes a product that works.

The team

Two people who got tired of watching
smart teams build the wrong thing

A
Ashley Maguire
CEO & Co-founder

Ashley is a user experience strategist and front end developer. She has worked for startups such as Mina, Descartes Labs, and Dragos, as well as large government organizations including NASA, CISA, and DHS.

Prior to working in user experience, she developed software for the intelligence community — including the National Reconnaissance Office — and national laboratories including Idaho National Laboratory, Lawrence Livermore, and Sandia.

Ashley holds an M.S. in Human-Computer Interaction from Iowa State University and an MBA from Cornell University.

Cornell MBA Iowa State HCI Dragos NASA CISA DHS NRO
LinkedIn GitHub
J
Justin Poehnelt
CTO & Co-founder

Justin is a full-stack software engineer with deep roots in developer tooling and geospatial systems. He served as a Developer Relations Engineer on the Google Workspace DevRel team and worked on the Google Maps Platform.

Previously he worked at Descartes Labs, the U.S. Geological Survey, and IBM. He has been published in multiple remote sensing academic journals.

Justin holds a B.S. in Computer Science from the University of Northern Arizona and a B.S. in Finance and Economics from the University of Wisconsin La Crosse.

Google Descartes Labs USGS IBM NAU CS UWL Finance
LinkedIn GitHub
Portrait of Helen

A thousand startups,
not a thousand ships

Helen of Troy is one of history's most misunderstood figures. She's been reduced to a face, a catalyst, an object of consequence — the woman whose presence started a war. But read the mythology more carefully and a different figure emerges: someone whose existence forced armies to reckon with what they actually valued, who made the stakes of every decision impossible to ignore.

We wanted our Helen to do something similar for founders.

Not to start wars — but to launch startups. A thousand of them, built on clear thinking instead of wishful assumptions. Founded on real customer problems instead of founder intuition. Executed by teams who know exactly why they're building what they're building.

The original Helen made the cost of every choice visible. Ours does the same — just for product decisions instead of ancient geopolitics. She reads everything you write, asks the question your team has been circling for weeks without landing on, and posts it on the record.

If Helen of Troy launched a thousand ships, we want our Helen to launch a thousand startups that actually ship the right thing.

What guides
our work
Rigor over comfort
The comfortable answer is usually wrong. We build tools that surface the uncomfortable truth before it becomes an expensive mistake.
Context is accountability
When everyone can see the chain of reasoning behind every decision, the quality of decisions improves. Visibility is not surveillance — it's shared understanding.
Integration over replacement
We don't believe in building yet another place your team has to go. We connect the tools you already use and add the layer that's missing.
The record matters
Decisions made and dismissed should leave a trace. Not as surveillance — but because the ability to say "we considered this" is itself a form of strategic discipline.