Justin Poehnelt

Justin owns the technical architecture behind Helen’s Foundry: its bitemporal graph, verification engine, and MCP integrations.

He created the open-source Google Workspace CLI, a dynamically generated Rust command surface for Google Workspace APIs built for people and AI agents. It reached number one on Hacker News.

He was at Google for nearly seven years, on Workspace developer relations and before that Google Maps Platform, and spoke at Google I/O 2024. Before that he built petabyte-scale satellite imagery pipelines at Descartes Labs and machine-learning cropland mapping at the US Geological Survey under NASA funding, work that is in the peer-reviewed record: “Visual search over billions of aerial and satellite images” (Computer Vision and Image Understanding, 2020) and “Automated cropland mapping of continental Africa” (ISPRS Journal, 2017).

Google announced an official Workspace CLI of its own at Cloud Next 2026. Two days later it fired him. By his account, the reason given was that the work threatened the product, a premise the company’s own announcement had already overtaken.

That failure is one reason Helen’s Foundry exists. The product records strategic premises, links them to execution, and exposes the lag before an outdated premise governs another decision. Justin published a first-person account of the firing; the Helen’s Foundry thesis tells the longer product story.

He and Ashley Maguire worked together at Descartes Labs, overlapping for about eighteen months starting in 2018. She recruited him as technical co-founder; he left Google and joined full-time in May 2026. They divide the company the way the problem divides: he builds the infrastructure that moves work at scale, and she keeps it pointed at the right thing, after a career watching organizations build the wrong thing because checking the premise was nobody’s job.