Beyond the Helpdesk: Daniel Gonzalez on the Future of IT Services

Our founding AI lead, Daniel Gonzalez, joins us to talk about what building his first company taught him, how time in the field shaped his approach to technology, and what he's been working on at Shield.

You've been building things since high school. What did you learn from your first company?

During my senior year of high school, I started a tutoring company with a friend. I liked the idea of creating something from scratch and figuring out how to build something that people could rely on.

It ended up being a great learning experience. It forced me to think about things like hiring and training, dealing with customers, and handling situations where expectations weren’t met much earlier than most of my peers.

Looking back, the biggest takeaway, though, was how important the people side of every business is. The people you hire matter a lot. Customer trust matters a lot. I didn’t fully understand that at the time, but it’s shaped the way I think about building teams and organizations today.

From there, you ended up at Palantir Technologies for several years. What did that experience teach you, and what pulled you into the IT services world?

Palantir taught me a lot about forward-deployed work and first-principles thinking. The firm really emphasized getting close to the work. You couldn’t sit outside a customer environment and make assumptions about how the best software and workflows should function. You had to experience it firsthand and work side-by-side with operators.

When I first joined the healthcare team at Palantir, I knew very little about how hospitals operated. I had to learn by spending time directly with nurses, administrators, and insurance teams inside hospitals. That gave me a much deeper understanding of how patient care works, how hospitals make money, and where operational bottlenecks exist. Over time, the work became less about deploying software and more about understanding how organizations function and how our technology improved the human-computer team.

That translated really well to Shield’s approach. Shield embeds deeply within the companies it partners with, so the work starts with understanding how the companies we acquire function day-to-day. When I first joined, I knew very little about the IT services industry. I spent the first few months learning directly from technicians, project engineers, and operations leaders about the metrics they cared about, where inefficiencies existed, and how they defined success.

When you onboard a new partner MSP for the first time, what do the first 90 days usually look like? How do you decide where to start?

The first step is really understanding what makes each MSP unique. Smaller MSPs operate very differently from larger ones. The customer base varies, the services vary, and even the operational structure inside the business can look completely different. A 12-person shop and a 60-person shop look almost nothing alike operationally, so we start by mapping how work actually moves through the business. This is usually the point where we start implementing some of our AI triage tooling.

From there it usually goes one of two ways. Either we focus on co-pilot workflows for engineers, or we go after specific ticket categories to automate. Most MSPs eventually do both but one is almost always the obvious place to start. If the MSP has a strong project services business, we also work on AI-enabled project operations so projects can move faster with autonomous updates and workflow support.

A core part of our thesis at Shield is aligning the people building AI technology with the businesses using it. What does that partnership actually look like day-to-day?

We spend the bulk of our time working directly with the technicians, engineers, and operational leaders inside the businesses themselves. That means sitting in working sessions, looking at how workflows function, and trying to understand where teams are losing time or running into friction.