First off: some exciting news. I’m hosting a happy hour centered around economic mobility during New York’s Tech Week this summer! This is the type of event I’ve always wanted to be part of, so it’s a dream to get to make it come to fruition. And of course, I’d love to meet you all there. More details and invite to come - feel free to reply back to this email if you want to be first to know!

In a world where anyone can build any software seemingly overnight, the essence of a successful product boils down to one element: user trust. Enterprise software has long been an example of this, with case studies of how corporations choose the reliable and secure software option over more modern, simpler alternatives time and time again.

Yet early-stage startups rarely have the luxury of prioritizing trust first. When product-market fit is still uncertain and runway is limited, security and compliance are often deferred in favor of speed.

That’s why it immediately stood out to me that Blake Robertson and Andrew Tam, founders of Keeper Systems, chose to build compliance into the product before they even acquired any customers. User trust—a must-have for enterprise software—is just as, if not more critical for any founder building in economic mobility.

Keeper Systems’ mission is to build the “front door to social services”. In addition to connecting people with the resources they need, Keeper Systems logs unmet needs and tracks where demand outpaces supply to quantify systemic gaps in America’s social service infrastructure. Their vision is to map where services fall short, where funding should expand, and where communities are underserved so that social service organizations better understand their constituents.

In this interview, Blake shares how Keeper Systems came to be and why his team invests in trust as their competitive advantage.

Can you walk me through your story and how it led you to found Keeper?

I’ll give you the medium-length version. I’m from a small town in Texas. I was supposed to be one of the smart kids, but that wasn’t panning out. I moved to California and started community college.

Through a series of events, a professor connected me with someone, and I started volunteering at a homeless shelter. I got involved, put my life back on track, and naturally transitioned into doing that work for others. I co-founded a behavioral health company with a psychotherapist in Los Angeles. We provided psychological and nutrition services to underserved populations, working with places like the Salvation Army and Veterans Affairs. We also worked with private rehabs and had our own office.

That became my main focus—community college was almost a side job, even though I was doing both full-time. After about three and a half years, I realized I needed to decide whether to pursue a four-year degree. My work partner, who was my boss and majority shareholder, encouraged me to get an education. She said it would be a chip on my shoulder if I didn’t.

I decided to apply to some top schools, thinking I probably wouldn’t get in—but if I did, it would be worth going. I got into Cornell, which completely changed my life.

At 22, I was in the best shape of my life, had meaningful work experience, and was studying human development and gerontology—topics that gave me the scientific background I had been missing in my previous work. Then after my first semester, I got sick with a neuroimmune disease. Within about a year, I was wheelchair-bound.

That was a turning point. I had always believed in high agency and taking control of your life. This was the first time I couldn’t will myself out of a situation. The good news was that there were many resources available—from the city of Ithaca, Cornell, and state and federal programs—that allowed me to continue living independently and stay in school. The hard part was that I didn’t know any of that existed before I needed it.

Eventually, I fully recovered. I had a lot of support along the way and figured out how to navigate the system. That experience gave me the ambition to start this company. There is a safety net in America—not just federal and state, but local resources as well. The problem is that finding and accessing them is incredibly difficult. I believed technology could make a difference.

I went to Yale School of Public Health with the intention of finding a solution in this space. It was a two-year program, and I came out of it building this.

What is Keeper Systems and what's your vision for its future?

We’re building the AI layer to connect people to social services.

AI is emerging as a powerful technology, and historically, the same populations get left behind during technological shifts. I care deeply about social services, so I asked: how can I use AI here?

Our intermediate vision is to be the front door for people to access social services. We use AI to handle intake, resolve simpler issues, and give call center agents more time for deeply human interactions.

Some fear AI will depersonalize services. But have you been through the process? It’s not that personalized. You don’t even feel human—the people answering these calls don’t have tons of time, and not everyone’s getting served. There’s two hour wait times to get your questions resolved. AI can resolve basic needs and optimize workflows, making the system more human overall.

Long term, we want to tap into the full safety net network. Right now, nobody actually fully knows how many resources are available on the ground. No one fully knows how many resources are available or how many needs go unmet. There’s a limited number of people to answer phones and talk to social service organizations. We want to build tools to autonomously check resource availability and be accessible 24/7 to provide that information to people in need.

The future of Keeper Systems is to oversee the end to end process of every aspect of getting help in social services, and that includes improving the data, doing intakes, and following up with individuals. We want to be the data broker of all information pertaining to social services.

We’re already scanning interactions to identify when a requested resource doesn’t exist in the database. We log unmet needs and generate reports. As we expand into call centers—not just chat—we’ll build a full map of who reached out and whether they got help. That data can inform policy and resource allocation.

What has been particularly helpful—or challenging—in building this startup?

The helpful moments are often the hard ones. Early on, My co-founder Andrew and I talked about doing no harm and what it was going to take to make our product safe. And we were doing that before even having a working product. That’s kind of backwards in startup land, which says “move fast and break things.” We were trying to move fast and not break things.

So, we built out our product to be safe and compliant before we could even afford the compliance certifications. It was risky because as a founder, you’re thinking about how you only have so much time to prove what you’re doing so you can make it to the next step, which gives you only a bit more time to make it to the next step.

The truth is, you can get away with vaporware at early stages [of a startup]. But in this space, dealing with vulnerable populations, trust is essential. United Way of Connecticut saw all the time that Andrew spent building a custom privacy layer to scrub all personally identifiable information before we used any of the latest large language models. That got them even more bought in and excited about our product. That built confidence. For our space, it’s a competitive advantage to be trustworthy.

How did you develop that conviction to focus on trust early on?

I feel like I'm a trustworthy person. And I did what a trustworthy person would do. At the end of the day, it's not even really a decision of do I do this or do I do that? It's more a question of who are you? What are you trying to do? I think the only way that you can really make big grounds like a big headway in our spaces is being trustworthy. It's like a currency for governments and nonprofits and interacting with these types of populations.

To close out this interview, what kind of support are you looking for?

Awareness. We want people to understand the problem [that current social service organizations face] and the potential for solutions. We want people to feel the optimism we feel. I watch [my co-founder] Andrew build tools every day that I believe will make a real difference. Spreading awareness about the issue and what’s possible would be incredibly helpful.