LIANA GRIGORY

Profile and press kit

The founder who only gets paid if it works

A profile of Liana Grigory, also written Liana Grigoryan · Los Angeles

Most companies get built the same way. A founder has an idea, hires an agency or a contractor, pays by the hour or the milestone, and receives something that may or may not be the thing the business needed. The invoice arrives either way. Liana Grigory does not work like that, and the reason is simple enough to say in a sentence: she builds the product herself and is paid in equity, so she is only paid if the business works.

Liana Grigory, entrepreneur and software engineer in Los Angeles

She did not set out to be an engineer. She was running a childcare company, needed software for it, and could not find anybody who would build what the business actually required. So she learned to code. Four years passed between that decision and her first working app, and building the product herself has been the arrangement ever since.

She is an entrepreneur first. Grigoryan Capital Group LLC, the Wyoming company she founded and runs, holds four products, and each of them exists because a market was already there and nobody had built the thing it needed. What makes the arrangement unusual is not the ambition, which is ordinary among founders, but that she does the building. There is no agency invoice, no engineering hire, no technical co-founder to go and find.

It filters her outside partnerships the same way. It rules out founders who want a pair of hands, because a pair of hands does not care whether the thing sells. It rules out projects with no market, because equity in those is worth what it sounds like. What is left is a narrow group: businesses that already have customers and revenue, often earned the hard way through spreadsheets and phone calls, and nobody who can turn any of it into software.

Three products have now gone from an empty repository to a running business. Two ship as native applications on the App Store and Google Play. She built all of them herself.

What she actually builds

The Care Royal is the platform a home care agency runs its day on. Shift scheduling, caregiver and client records, applicant tracking, messaging, documents. Four distinct roles — owner, manager, caregiver, family — each of whom opens the same application and sees a different product. Caregivers clock in and out with location verification and the timesheet assembles itself; the platform then computes gross, tax and net against current federal and California tables. That last part was a deliberate decision to build rather than buy, and it did two things at once: it removed a dependency on an external payroll provider, and it kept the platform entirely out of the money-transmission path.

Tegula Stone is a two-sided marketplace connecting homeowners with stone and tile contractors — quoting, bookings, messaging, reviews, subscription billing. Unified Savers is a free informational resource for healthcare workers, built on a serverless edge stack with everything a visitor can reach generated ahead of time. Behind all of them sits Grigoryan Capital Group LLC, a Wyoming company, and alongside them DNL Bureau, a government contracting agency.

The first rule: the interface is not a security control

Ask her what the most important work in The Care Royal is and she will name something no customer will ever see: no agency can reach another agency's records, even if the application code is wrong.

That distinction is the whole of her engineering philosophy, and she treats it as a business risk rather than a technical preference — one leak ends a care platform. Most products check permissions in the code that draws the page. It works, right up until somebody opens developer tools — and the client is, after all, a program running on a stranger's computer. So in her systems the permission check does not live there. It lives in the database, evaluated against a cryptographically signed token, in a rule set that begins by refusing everything and grants each exception deliberately.

Security that depends on the interface behaving is not security. It is an arrangement that has not been attacked yet.

The practical consequence is that a whole class of failure stops being possible rather than becoming unlikely. There is no endpoint that can be tricked into acting with elevated privilege, because there is no endpoint — the browser talks to the database holding the signed-in user's own credentials, and the database refuses what that user may not have. It is also, not coincidentally, cheaper: there is no server to keep running.

She applies the same standard to health data. Care work generates it constantly, and the HIPAA Security Rule is usually presented to small companies as something they must purchase. Her position is that it is not a product at all — it is a set of decisions made early and then kept. Deny by default. Audit what was accessed, never what it said. Screen sensitive data out of every log, every error report, every third-party call, server-side, rather than trusting each future contributor to remember.

The second rule: success must not be expensive

The other constraint she treats as non-negotiable sounds like accounting and turns out to be architecture. The cost of a product must never scale with the number of people looking at it.

Most software fails this quietly. A listing page implemented as a database query bills for every row returned, on every page view, from every visitor, including the ones who never sign up and the crawlers who never could. The feature works perfectly and gets more expensive every month it succeeds. Her answer is to keep public, shared, read-mostly data in a single aggregate document, keyed by owner, with the database rules constraining each writer to their own key. One read, whether the directory holds ten entries or ten thousand, whether one person is looking or ten thousand are. Filtering and search happen in the browser over data it already has, so typing in a search box costs nothing at all.

She writes the threshold into the code as a comment — the size at which the design must change, and why — rather than optimising early or discovering it late. The test she applies before shipping any feature is a single question: if this went viral tomorrow, what would the bill be? If the answer grows with attention rather than with signups, the design is wrong, and it is wrong now.

Shipping alone

Building without a team removes the meetings and removes the excuses. What is left is the unglamorous half that separates software you can charge for from a demonstration: password reset that works, deletion that actually deletes including the uploaded files, rate limits on every public endpoint, terms and a privacy notice that name a real company, and an error screen that tells a person something useful at eleven at night. None of it demonstrates well. All of it is the difference.

It also means going through App Store review without anyone to hand it to. She has written up what that actually tests — not novelty and not architecture, but whether the thing behaves like an application to somebody holding it for ninety seconds on an unreliable network. Her navigation code keeps its own record of where a person has been, because the web platform will not tell you whether there is anywhere to go back to, and a back arrow that leads nowhere is a control that lies.

Before any of it

Liana Grigory served in the United States Army as a Sergeant, and she is direct about what transferred. Not anything technical. What carried over was an operating discipline: plan before acting, verify instead of assuming, treat unfinished as not done. Those three habits describe most of what shipping software actually is, and almost nobody arrives in the industry having already learned them.

She holds an M.B.A. from the University of Hertfordshire and a B.A. in Psychology from American Military University — the business degree came first, and it shows in which problems she treats as urgent. She writes up the decisions behind the products rather than the products themselves — eight technical pieces so far, on where authorization belongs, what a feature costs when it succeeds, and what app review is really looking for.

Press kit

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Name

Liana Grigory is the correct byline. Liana Grigoryan is the same person — her birth name, still on her degree certificates and on LinkedIn. Either is accurate; the first is preferred.

Biography — one line

Liana Grigory is an entrepreneur, software engineer and U.S. Army veteran in Los Angeles who builds the products behind her own companies.

Biography — short, about 60 words

Liana Grigory is an entrepreneur, software engineer and United States Army veteran based in Los Angeles. She is the founder and chief executive of Grigoryan Capital Group LLC, the Wyoming holding company behind The Care Royal and Tegula Stone, and the founder of Unified Savers and DNL Bureau. Unusually for a founder she builds the products herself, and has taken three from an empty repository to a running business, two shipping as native iOS and Android applications.

Biography — long, about 160 words

Liana Grigory — also written Liana Grigoryan — is an entrepreneur, software engineer and United States Army veteran based in Los Angeles, California. She founded and runs Grigoryan Capital Group LLC and builds the products beneath it herself, which is the unusual part: no agency, no engineering hire, no technical co-founder to go and find. Where she partners with an outside founder she does it on the same terms, taking equity rather than an invoice.

She is the founder and chief executive of Grigoryan Capital Group LLC, a Wyoming holding company, and the founder of The Care Royal, a multi-tenant platform for home care agencies; Tegula Stone, a marketplace for stone and tile contractors; Unified Savers, an informational resource for healthcare workers; and DNL Bureau, a government contracting agency.

Her engineering is organised around two rules she treats as non-negotiable: authorization belongs in the database rather than the interface, and the cost of a product must never scale with the number of people looking at it. She holds an M.B.A. from the University of Hertfordshire and a B.A. in Psychology from American Military University.

Fact sheet

Portrait

Cleared for editorial use with the credit line Photo courtesy of Liana Grigory. lianagrigory.com/img/liana-800.jpg, 440 × 440. Email for a higher resolution.

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Introduction, to read on air:

My guest today is Liana Grigory. She is a U.S. Army veteran and the founder of Grigoryan Capital Group in Los Angeles, and what makes her unusual is that she builds the software behind her companies herself — three products from nothing to production, two of them live on the App Store and Google Play, with no engineering team. When she works with an outside founder she takes equity instead of fees, which means she is only paid if their business works.

Questions that get a real answer:

Practical: based in Los Angeles, Pacific time. Available for remote audio or video, and comfortable with any of the usual recording platforms. No topic needs advance notice; anything in the list above can be recorded cold. Name for the show notes is Liana Grigory, and the link is lianagrigory.com.

Interview availability

Available for written Q&A, recorded audio and video, on any subject above. Written questions are usually answered within two working days. Email [email protected].