Code Story episode
S12 Bonus: The Microsoft File Trap: Moving Beyond Manual PowerPoint and Excel Workflows to Build an AI-Native "Consulting" Layer with Tim Lidman, Co-Founder & CEO of Clyde AI
Jun 18, 2026 · Season 12 · 28 min
Democratizing consulting using AI
Tim Lidman lives in Denver, CO. He has had an unconventional path to being a Tech CEO. In fact, He moved from London to Sweden when he was 18... to try to be a heavy metal rock star, trying to make it big as a drummer. To earn extra income, he got into tech sales - which went really well. Eventually, he worked with WebEx (around the time it got bought by Cisco), for Success Factors (when they got bought by SAP), and then eventually, doing his own startup (which eventually got bought by Accenture). Outside of his professional life, he is married with 2 girls. From his music years, he extracts skills that drove his success to date, which is the ability to product development and execution down the same way you do music.
In the days of his first startup, Tim's solution was used by consulting firms to power client engagement. Post exit, while overseeing things at Accenture, he noticed that the whole industry was powered by Microsoft files (PowerPoint, Excel, Word, etc.) - IE, driven manually. He started to wonder if he could codify the consulting process, to remove the manual burden.
This is the creation story of Clyde.
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https://meetclyde.com/https://www.linkedin.com/in/timlidman/
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