Top stories

Buford Taylor, who writes science fiction as Leonard Buford, is building three companies while writing a new novel and an autobiography. He says he has started or joined 17 early-stage companies since 2007, most of which shut down. His current businesses include Casting Call Club, a casting marketplace for voice actors, producers and directors with 2 million users; Closing Credits, an education and community platform for creators; and SHO, a testimonial-collection and embedding service started in October 2024. Taylor was engineer number three at Eventbrite, where he says revenue grew from $4 million to $700 million during his four years there. He later joined Reforge as founding engineer; the company raised $20 million from Andreessen Horowitz. He says Closing Credits reached about $50,000 in monthly recurring revenue in January 2022. Taylor is writing Sol Truckers, about a missing Earth and interplanetary war, and Buford versus Oklahoma, an autobiography covering prison, homelessness, addiction and entrepreneurship. His Nouscraft LitRPG trilogy has sold more than 10,000 copies and averages 4.5 stars on Amazon and Goodreads. Taylor says he uses no AI in his prose but uses AI for most coding, while reviewing all AI-generated code. He argues that writing manually remains necessary for sustained, deep thinking.