Staff

The most powerful inflection points in the history of iNTERFACEWARE have always been accompanied by periods of disruption, during which people who no longer served the organization’s purpose were removed.

Each time this has happened, it has been an uncomfortable process. Letting people go is traumatic—but it’s the most powerful lesson every leader must learn. Leadership sometimes means acting alone, doing what needs to be done when others fail to see what is really happening.

In April 2026, after a user conference from which I was excluded by my own organization—as the Founder, CEO, and 100% shareholder of the company I built from the ground up—I had to make one of those difficult decisions.

I terminated every single Canadian staff member. Both they and my customers were shocked by what seemed a reckless decision. But what nobody was recognizing was that artificial intelligence was about to completely disrupt what had been a sleepy middleware market.

Middleware has always been fragmented because the cost of switching was too high to make it worthwhile to change vendors.

I have a powerful mind, and I am able to enter deep meditative states that allow me to see things other people do not. I could see just how poor the quality of existing artificial intelligence was. Yes, it’s a powerful tool. But it needs an iron fist and discipline to wield it. That is not what is being offered by large AI companies like Anthropic and OpenAI.

To truly wield AI like the sword of Damocles it is requires a warrior mindset.

I needed to reforge iNTERFACEWARE into a new, lean, and uncomfortably reborn version of itself.

My staff needed to go. They were just friction in the system.

Eliot Muir Founder and Visionary