John Gillespie — Founder, Hackworth Labs
Meet John Gillespie — Nashville native, full-stack developer, and founder of Hackworth Labs.
Hackworth Labs is a custom software studio built on the belief that the right thing and the obvious thing are rarely the same thing. We work with clients who want the former.
Our work spans AI integration, database architecture, multi-tenant platforms, and the kind of thoughtful systems design that holds up after the demo is over. If you've been burned by software that was easy to sell and hard to live with, we should talk.
Life, Tech, and Everything..
John Gillespie has spent most of his career building places for people to gather — stages, songs, and, eventually, software.
For nine years he owned The Muse, the all-ages venue on 4th Avenue recently memorialized on Hayley Williams' 2025 solo record as "the club with all the hardcore shows, now just a grayscale Domino's." In that same era he fronted My Epiphany, signing to Eyeball/Universal — labelmates with My Chemical Romance, Thursday, and Murder By Death — and releasing the full-length Mirabilia in 2005. The video for the single "Final Battle" was still airing on MTV when the band called it in 2006. He'll tell you more about it if you ask; he won't bring it up if you don't.
The second act was quieter and more consequential. While working in music publishing at SESAC, John apprenticed under James Hamilton, the Nashville open-source veteran and ethical technology evangelist who shaped how he thinks about building software to this day. He moved from personal assistant to business development to project manager, leading complex work across ETL pipelines, database architecture, multi-tenant platforms, and logistics systems — the kind of infrastructure that rarely makes it into a bio but quietly runs everything.
He went independent with Parthenon Technology Partners, leading engagements with clients including Oracle, SunTrust, and Brandford, Kerr & Howe — along with an early-stage platform connecting high school athletes to college programs, which, in hindsight, rhymes suspiciously well with what he's building now.
That work is Hackworth Labs and LegitFuture — an AI guidance platform for students, centered on an AI guide named Yuri, aimed at the stubbornly human problem of helping young people figure out who they are and what they're for. The company is named after the engineer in Neal Stephenson's The Diamond Age, who builds a book to raise a child he'll never meet. It is not a coincidence.
John lives outside Nashville with his wife and son. He is easier to get along with in person than a bio makes him sound.
Contact
I'm always looking for new and exciting opportunities. Let's be about it.
legitfuture.ai