From the Founder | The Pokémon World Finalist and League of Legends Pro Who Met at Stanford and Built AI for Banks

Why Work Here is a series in which Amit Matani, CEO of Wellfound, has honest, behind-the-scenes conversations with founders, executives, and employees about why their companies are worth joining.

The first conversation between Lukas Haffer and Isaiah Williams lasted about five minutes before Lukas made a metaphor about teamwork using League of Legends.

Isaiah's response: "Wait, you play League?"

It wasn't the typical Stanford icebreaker. One was a former Judo competitor, and League of Legends player who'd reached the top ranks globally. The other competed at the Pokémon Trading Card Game world championships. Their friendship would lead somewhere unexpected: an AI company that's now working with the two largest SBA lenders in America.

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"One of the first things that we became friends over was playing League of Legends together," Lukas recalls. "I actually played way too much League of Legends for it to be healthy."

That obsession became central to how they built Casca, a software company that helps banks originate business loans faster using AI. The idea was simple but powerful: take processes that once required weeks of manual review and collapse them into days of immediate insight. The lesson from competitive gaming—you are the only common denominator in all your matches—shaped their hiring, their product development, and their entire approach.

But first, Isaiah had to force Lukas to start a company they hadn't figured out yet.

How Casca Started: A Midnight Ultimatum

You're visiting your co-founder in Manhattan. He just landed a top AI job, 40th floor, corner office trajectory. He just got married. You're sleeping on his couch.

He walks out of his bedroom: "I'm going into the office on Monday and I'm going to tell them I'm quitting my job because we're starting a company together."

He turns around. Goes back to bed.

For Lukas, weeks from Stanford graduation, this moment changed everything. Isaiah had decided to walk away from his top AI job running a machine learning team. Lukas was facing $150,000 in student debt and calls himself a "risk-averse German dude."

"I get up, I knock on the door," Lukas says. "His wife looks at me weirdly, what's happening here. And I tell him, Isaiah, man, I'm worried about you. Look at yourself. You've made it."

Isaiah's response became their founding principle:

"We might not know what we're building yet, but there's an AI revolution happening and it's happening without us. And we have a unique skill set to build something meaningful here in the world."

Then, Isaiah said: "I've saved up enough money to live on ramen for a year."

On the flight home, Lukas did the math. He didn't have ramen money. He realized:

"When he says we'll figure out what we are building, what he means is Lukas will figure out what we're building and he's ready to build it."

Lukas spent that flight cataloging every problem from his career building banking software. By the time the plane touched down, he had a 10-slide pitch deck. Once home, he submitted it to a Stanford VC competition and to Y Combinator, then wrote a script and made Isaiah record it 70 times. Then Isaiah quit his job—before they'd gotten the acceptance.

Lukas explained, “After just ten minutes of the Y Combinator interview, they told us, ‘You’ve made it — you’re in.’”

On Lukas’s graduation day, they packed his Mini Cooper and drove to the batch kickoff.

What Competitive Gaming Actually Teaches You

Both Lukas and Isaiah had spent years in hyper-competitive environments. Not just Stanford classrooms—gaming worlds where reaching the highest levels required constant self-assessment. Lukas had also been a competitive judo athlete, competing internationally.

"One of the lessons that you learn from being a competitive athlete or a competitive gamer is that you yourself are the only common denominator in all of the matches that you play," Lukas says. "Which means if over time you're losing more and more, you're the problem. It's not your team around you."

"There are lots of people that when playing online games, they rage about everything that's going wrong around them. But what it teaches you if you make it to the highest levels of these disciplines, the only way to get there is to continuously look at yourself. After every match, ask yourself, what could I have done better to increase our probability of winning by just a little bit more?"

That mindset became one of Casca's core values. At Casca, engineers work directly with bank users—spending four hours a day building alongside them. Someone can look at your work and say "this makes absolutely no sense." Instead of getting defensive, you get curious.

"It's a world where there's no ego," Lukas says. "Everyone is trying to get constantly better."

Why Small Business Lending

Casca began with a broad thesis: use AI to solve problems across banking. They narrowed quickly to small business lending. For Isaiah, it was personal. "He was raised on the income of his mom from her running her small business," Lukas says. "And so he knew the problem first hand."

The market confirmed their instincts. Small businesses face a brutal choice: community banks offering low interest rates but averaging 90 days to close an SBA loan, or online lenders funding quickly but charging 45% APR.

"Ain't nobody got time for that," Lukas says about the 90-day timeline. "I can't fix the fact that the online lenders just have high cost of capital, but what I can fix is the fact that the community banks of America have bad technology and I can build them better technology."

Someone at a bank used to spend 20 hours sifting through thousands of pages of financial documents. Now they log in and see the analysis complete, with citations showing exactly where each number came from. The transformation from "manual, tedious, repetitive work to pure insight, immediate insight."

In two years, Casca raised over $33 million—much from their customers, the banks themselves. They now work with the top two SBA lenders in the country. "Security and compliance are not optional. They are not tedious things to avoid. They are differentiating," Lukas says.

The Competitive Mindset Without the Ego

That early bonding over League of Legends became the blueprint for how Casca operates.

Isaiah competed at Pokémon world championships—years of strategic thinking and adaptation. Lukas reached the highest League of Legends ranks globally and competed internationally in judo. They both understood what improvement required.

"If you keep going like this, you become one of the best in the world at what you do," Lukas says. "And that is something that we look for in the people that we bring onto our team today."

At Casca, this means a desire to win combined with the belief that self-improvement and growth can get you there—not ego. Not competitive in the toxic sense—the gamer who rages when things go wrong. Competitive meaning: the drive to keep improving combined with the humility to know you're responsible for your outcomes.

Kind People Only

Competitive drive isn't enough. Lukas insists: they only hire kind people.

"You spend a lot of time together in a startup working oftentimes until late at night," he says. "And it's an amazing experience and a great time if you like the people that are around you."

This extends beyond internal hires. Casca has turned down paying customers because the cultural fit wasn't right. Early partnerships require intensive collaboration—engineers spend four hours daily working alongside bank employees who become their teachers.

"The folks that serve on our board are former founders themselves. They know what building great companies is like and they are experts in the sector that we're in," Lukas adds. "When we're in crunch time for a project, they know we're in crunch time and they will ask how can I help."

The lesson applies to customers, investors, employees: surrounding yourself with good people compounds over time.

Looking back at that moment on the couch in Manhattan, Isaiah's conviction clearly paid off. Same mindset that made him one of the best League of Legends players in the world and made Isaiah a world-level Pokémon competitor: focus on what you control, learn from every match, keep getting better.

The stakes now are bigger: helping small businesses access capital, saving bank employees from tedious manual work, and proving AI can be deployed responsibly in highly regulated industries. Two years after that couch-side ultimatum, Casca has grown from a thesis scribbled on a plane to a platform trusted by the top two SBA lenders in the country. Billions in small-business loans now flow faster, employees are spared hours of drudgery, and founders are seeing what responsible AI can actually do in banking.

Not bad for two competitive gamers who started with one forcing the other to quit before they even knew what they were building.

Final Tips for Founders, Recruiters, and Job Seekers

For Founders: Screen for kindness in customer and investor selection, not just employee hires. Early partnerships require intensive daily collaboration. Banks working with Casca spend four hours daily with Casca engineers, teaching them the domain. Choose partners who want you to succeed.

For Recruiters: Look beyond traditional competitive markers (elite schools, brand-name companies). Identify candidates with competitive backgrounds in non-obvious places—gaming, athletics, debate. Then screen for self-reflection: can they articulate what they learned from failures without deflecting blame? The best hires view themselves as the common denominator in all their outcomes.

For Job Seekers: If you want ownership and full-stack learning, seek companies with forward-deployed models where engineers work directly with users. Ask in interviews: "How much time will I spend with customers?" and "Can you describe the journey from problem discovery to launch for a recent feature?" Companies enabling this path are investing in your growth as a future founder.

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