In Leslie Rith-Najarian’s words
Applied Verification was EXACTLY what I needed. Lester is a master engineer, adviser, and educator. I'm a non-technical founder of a B2B start-up offering a mental health education app for university students. When I hired Lester, our web app was live with customers but needed many improvements to scale up for new customers, and we wanted to launch mobile app versions. As a small start-up, we rely on AI coding tools to build quickly and affordably, and as CEO I wanted to ensure we used AI agents responsibly. Lester is incredibly generous with his time, prompt to respond to emails, and quickly makes himself available for meetings.
From the start, Lester helped us organize our processes. He advised on planning tools (e.g., Linear connected to Claude Code), guardrails for AI-driven coding (e.g., rules in agents files), and protecting our IP and user data (e.g., settings on Claude Code Team Plan). My engineering team had tried Linear, GitHub issues, and Trello, but none stuck, so I had to do extra project management. Now tedious-but-necessary tasks (updating cards, close-out summaries) are mostly automated. For the first time in years our planning tools reflect our app's real state and next priorities.
OUTCOME #1: With AI agent guardrails and automated planning in place, we launched our mobile app in Apple App Store and Google Play ahead of our target deadline. Both apps passed on first review.
Lester also created detailed documentation/assessments of our platform infrastructure, authorization/onboarding design, and security. Years of drift had overcomplicated our deployment: multiple repos across 3 deployment methods, one set with two separate automated options configured. Lester meticulously reviewed our code and service providers, asking all the right questions to understand how we landed here. Over the course of two long meetings, he patiently listened, never rushed, and passed no judgement.
OUTCOME #2: Lester helped us triage priority security improvements, add automated testing across repos, and reevaluate our infrastructure. A big win: a deployment process that better balances automation with intentional human oversight.
I’ve worked with many engineers over the years, and Lester is uniquely clear in his explanations to non-engineers. His approach is clearly “teach a person to fish” for themselves. During meetings, Lester taught me to evaluate AI agents’ code quality and recommendations. He did this by modeling, giving example command prompts, critically evaluating responses together line-by-line, and letting me test my comprehension by summarizing back takeaways.
OUTCOME #3: Lester empowered me, as a founder with no engineering background, to better understand our product's infrastructure, and make more informed decisions when “vibe coding". I also feel more prepared to supervise our engineers. Essentially, I now know how to answer “Is this actually working?” for myself.
I plan to continue working with Lester. Highly recommend!!
Leslie Rith-NajarianCEO of StriveWeekly