We build what
your business
runs on.

Daniel Bostic's first client came to him with a problem nobody plans for. It was 2017. The company was an energy business that had been running since the 1940s, and its CIO had died suddenly. With him went every password and every idea of how the systems worked. No one could get in, and a company that size cannot run for long locked out of itself. Daniel got in. He worked his way back into every server, every account, every system no one had written down, and then he stayed. Nine years later, it is still a client.

That is what business owners hire him for: someone who understands the company, decides what the technology should do for it, and answers for the result. CYSTRA's clients include a chain of pediatric offices, a high-profile law firm, a regional leader in dental care, a political organization, and an entertainment company. Every one of them has been with Daniel from the start, some for nearly a decade, and several grew from one person into multi-location practices with his help. CYSTRA sells no hardware and no software, so when he says what to build on, what to stop paying for, and what comes next, there is no commission behind it.

He is also Chief Strategist at Rubicon Potomac Strategies, where he has advised presidential campaigns, consulted on Senate and congressional races, and helped build nationally prominent political movements. He is COO of AMDC Film and was producer and second director, with Amanda Milius, on The Plot Against the President, a #1 documentary on Amazon Prime. That work is where he learned how organizations really run when the stakes are high and the deadline is real. Throughout, he has continued working with CYSTRA’s clients.

His AI work starts with a specific job the business needs done. The first assistants he built run his own companies. They read his mail, draft, research, and watch the things he would otherwise miss, and the people who use them reach them by ordinary text message, not another app to learn. He builds them for clients the same way, around one person and one business: what they know, who they deal with, what matters this week, how they like to work. In his words, AI still needs a boss who knows what right looks like.

He grew up homeschooled in a double-wide outside Charleston and taught himself on a salvaged Power Mac. By 18 he was a staffer in Congress. He has been figuring out how things work from the inside ever since. A first conversation with him is about where the business is and where the owner wants to take it. Not knowing yet is a fine place to start.

Levi Bollmann is a principal at CYSTRA, working directly with clients on their infrastructure and security.

He grew up in Adams Run, south of Charleston, and began as an independent IT consultant. At CGI Federal, he worked on battlefield communications equipment while attending Trident Technical College at night. A thirty-day assignment in Washington became four years on the F-35 Joint Strike Fighter program, where he moved from the help desk into security operations and auditing classified systems.

He later hunted threats for the financial sector, taking malware apart so banks knew what to look for. At Deloitte, he spent five years on the Department of Homeland Security's Continuous Diagnostics and Mitigation program, working with technology and security leaders at more than twenty federal agencies to find gaps in their vulnerability scanning and write the policies for it.

One required data connection between two of those agencies had been stalled for five years. Levi tracked down the people with authority to make it happen, brought them together, and got the connection working in a thirty-minute meeting.

He has been drawn to figuring things out and making them work since childhood. The more complex the problem, the more he likes it.