Code Story | Startup Podcast for CTOs, CEOs and Technical Founders

S13 Bonus: From Lab to Market: Scaling High-Growth Tech Startups with Caitlinn McMinn, Programs Director at TechFW

Thu, 08 Oct 2026 10:00:30 +0000

Today, we have a special episode of the Code Story podcast. Joining us today is Caitlinn McMinn, Executive Director at TechFW. TechFW is a nonprofit startup incubator in Fort Worth, TX. The group is here to prove that the next generation of world-changing companies begins right in the heart of Cowtown. In our conversation today, Caitlinn is going to elaborate on the incubators story and model, illuminating how the team supports local entrepreneurs through opportunity and community.

Questions:

TechFW operates on a 100% equity-free model for founders. In an incubator landscape where equity stakes are standard, why is retaining equity so vital for early-stage tech founders, and how does that alter the relationship between TechFW and its entrepreneurs?
TechFW has been fostering innovation in North Texas since 1998. Looking back over more than two decades, how has the Fort Worth startup landscape evolved, and what core principles have allowed TechFW to remain a constant anchor for local founders?
People talk about 'entrepreneurial ecosystems' all the time, but what does a thriving ecosystem actually look like on the ground in a city like Fort Worth, and what is its most fragile component?
TechFW recently partnered with Texas Woman’s University to launch ThinkLab OnDemand, alongside close ties with local institutions like UNT Health Science Center and Texas A&M Fort Worth. How do university partnerships feed the innovation pipeline, and what advice do you have for regions trying to bridge academia and entrepreneurship?
Through Cowtown Angels, TechFW bridges early-stage founders with local angel investors. How do you cultivate an angel investor community that is willing to back early-stage, high-risk tech ventures right here in North Texas?
Through ThinkLab, you help founders test viability early. What is the single biggest misconception first-time founders have when transitioning an idea into a validated business model?
Startups often move fast and break things, but scaling on top of weak processes can be fatal. In the FastForward program, how do you help founders balance aggressive growth with operational rigor?
Founder isolation is real. How does TechFW build peer-to-peer community so founders don't feel like they're navigating the journey entirely alone?
Your career spans finance, sales enablement, HR systems, and operations consulting before stepping into the Executive Director role at TechFW. How does having that 360-degree operational background shape how you diagnose what a startup actually needs versus what they think they need?
Running an innovation hub requires balancing the needs of founders, community donors, corporate sponsors, and board members. How do you keep 'founder-first' as the North Star while managing those stakeholder dynamics?
Fort Worth and the broader DFW metroplex are seeing massive economic growth. What unique advantages does Fort Worth offer tech startups compared to traditional hubs like Silicon Valley or Austin?
As technology evolves rapidly—from AI to biotech and manufacturing—how is TechFW expanding access so underrepresented founders and non-traditional entrepreneurs can participate in the tech economy?
If an ecosystem builder or civic leader in another mid-sized city was listening today and wanted to spark a tech community from scratch, what is the very first step they should take?

Links

https://www.techfortworth.org/

https://www.linkedin.com/in/caitlin-mcminn/

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S13 Bonus: Automating Local Lead Growth: High-Intent Prospecting & AI Verification with David Moore, Founder & CEO of Stalex.ai

Wed, 07 Oct 2026 10:00:25 +0000

David Moore started day trading when he was 16, along with his brother. By the age of 19, he had a 7 figure portfolio, indicating some solid success. He did some angel investing, and then moved into entrepreneurship, starting a few companies. But eventually, got into a sales role that led to his current venture. Outside of tech, he loves music, and in particular, is really enjoying 15th century classical music. He has a lazy French bulldog, enjoys Italian food, and finds himself either reading Octavian literature, or - his bible.

David got into a sales job for a friend of his, and in doing so, build some tools using AI to help in the business. When he shared these ideas, and eventually was replaced by an offshore resource, he and his brother took off to build their own thing - a solution to help your business score leads.

This is the creation story of Stalex.

Links

https://stalex.ai/

https://www.linkedin.com/in/stalexai/

Current Sponsors:

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Hosted by Noah Labhart | Technical Founder & Startup Mentor.

S13 E7: The AI Legal Shift: Giving SME Law Firms BigLaw Leverage with Dave Berner, Co-Founder & CEO of Parachute

Tue, 06 Oct 2026 10:00:07 +0000

Back in August of 2025, Dave Berner joined the podcast previously in Season 11, episode 11, as the co-founder and CTO of Kinde. A past musician, he took up web development to make his bands websites and his friend's myspace profiles. Fast forward, he has started multiple startups, been the host of several podcasts, and is married with 3 kids.

Dave's co-founder Ryan experienced firsthand that legal AI tools were built for massive law forms. SMB's or boutiques were forced to retrofit expensive, enterprise heavy software to their workflows (and of course, budgets). Alongside their third co-founder, Vivienne, they set out to build an AI-powered legal OS designed for firms with 1 to 200 lawyers.

This is the creation story of Parachute.

Links

https://goparachute.ai/

https://www.linkedin.com/in/daveberner

Current Sponsors:

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Hosted by Noah Labhart | Technical Founder & Startup Mentor.

S13 Bonus: The AI Marketing Cloud: Harnessing Predictive Intent to Scale Growth with Christian Monberg, CTO of Zeta Global

Mon, 05 Oct 2026 10:00:51 +0000

Christian Monberg is originally from a small town in central Maine. His mother was a mathematician, which meant he got into engineering fairly young. This lead him to attend school for engineering, and pursue a career in tech and become a true technologist. Outside of tech, he is married with 2 kids and lives in San Francisco with his family. He likes to re-build old engines, and loves to fly. In fact, some of his favorite flights were through the Grand Canyon at sunset, or seeing Vegas from a plane. In addition, he likes to sail, and is always attempting to tinker with his boat, and sail with his friends and family.

Chris prior company was focused on AI and marketing, and eventually, they were acquired by their now parent company. A lot of the hard earned lessons that he and his team learned through their journey still applied in this age of AI, so much so that it became the backbone of how Zeta built and deployed their products.

This is Chris' creation story at Zeta Global.

Links

https://www.zetaglobal.com/

https://www.linkedin.com/in/chrismonberg/

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S13 Bonus: Scaling Real-Time Search Data: Secure APIs for AI Infrastructure with Alaa Abdulridha, Engineering Director at SerpApi

Thu, 01 Oct 2026 10:00:21 +0000

Alaa Abdulridha is from souther Iraq, but now lives in Austin, TX. Post wars in Iraq, the country had poor infrastructure, which got him interested in building and creating things to better and secure his life. He left the country to study, and ended up in Germany as a security engineer. Outside of tech, he enjoys playing RPG video games. In particular, he likes to play World of Warcraft, and enjoys the open world, and character development from scratch.

Alaa's current company was built to scrape google search engines, in order to get around a blocker for a prior project. In the past, he used to participate in bug bounty hunting during University, and wrote about his exploits. His now founder's came across his articles, and invited him to joint the company.

This is Alaa's creation story at SerpApi.

Links

https://serpapi.com/

https://www.linkedin.com/in/alaa0x2/

Current Sponsors:

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Hosted by Noah Labhart | Technical Founder & Startup Mentor.

E13 Bonus: The AI SAST Shift: Eliminating Vulnerability Backlogs with Santiago Castiñeira, Co-Founder & CTO of Maze

Wed, 30 Sep 2026 10:00:49 +0000

Santiago Castineira has quite the background in international living. He was born in Argentina, but grew up in Spain, then moved to Sweden, San Francisco, and now llives in Germany. He did his grade school and university in Spain, but his masters program across Sweden, San Francisco, and Germany. He's worked in startups, bigger companies, and eventually founding and is leading his own. Outside of tech, he is a Dad of 3 kids, so he stays quite busy when he isn't working. He loves endurance sports, running half marathons and long distance biking.

Santiago and his team were well aware of the fact that tens of thousands of new vulnerabilities are published every year. While security teams were drowning, the rise of automated coding agents were starting to ship code faster and faster. He and his team realized that there needed to be an agent driven platform, designed to evaluate and secure your system like a senior security engineer.

This is the creation story of Maze.

Links

https://mazehq.com/

https://www.linkedin.com/in/santiagocastineira/

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Hosted by Noah Labhart | Technical Founder & Startup Mentor.

E13 E6: The Spatial Web Shift: Building Decentralized AI Knowledge Graphs with Yaniv Tal, Co-Founder & CEO of Geo

Tue, 29 Sep 2026 10:00:38 +0000

Yaniv Tal grew up in the Bay Area in the 90's with parents who were engineers. They were both in electrical engineering, specifically digital/signal processing. He really saw the internet sport up into a massive thing. He studied the hard sciences (electrical engineering, math and physics), and his first job out of college was at HP, doing board b ring up for printers. Outside of tech, he is recently married, having a lovely wedding on a beach in Mexico. When asked "what do you do for fun?", he can't answer it, cause he is a bit of a workaholic and loves what he does. But, he does make sure he spends quality time with his new bride.

In 2017, Yaniv founded a protocol called The Graph, one of the core web3 protocols. After many years on this journey, he started to have a vision around the world's broader knowledge in a decentralized, verifiable way. Eventually, he and his team set out to launch a a solution around this vision, designed to solve fragmentation of knowledge, vulnerable to centralization, silos and misinformation.

This is the creation story of Geo.

Links

https://geobrowser.io

https://thegraph.com/

https://www.linkedin.com/in/yanivtal9/

Current Sponsors:

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Hosted by Noah Labhart | Technical Founder & Startup Mentor.

S13 Bonus: The Enterprise AI Chip War: Rethinking LLM Silicon & Inference with Vasanth Mohan, Director of Product at SambaNova

Thu, 24 Sep 2026 10:00:08 +0000

Today, we welcome a special guest to the podcast, Vasanth Mohan, Head of Developer Relations and Product Marking at SambaNova.

SambaNova is transforming AI with efficiency, security and sovereignty, driven by their relentless pursuit of intelligence, and running the largest models by maximizing dataflow efficiency. Vasanth and I dig into some fun - and heavy - topics at the backbone of where the industry is going with AI Inference, specifically at the hardware layer.

Questions:

Tell me and the audience a bit about you and SambaNova.
The Shift to Autonomy: "When we shift from a user generating a single chat response to an autonomous coding agent executing dozens of background tool calls, loop checks, and file rewrites, how does the underlying inference profile change, and what metric breaks first?
Latency Budgets: "Token-per-second throughput used to be a nice-to-have metric for human readability, but for multi-agent workflows running in parallel, low latency is critical to prevent system timeouts. How are developers designing prompt structures and context windows to prevent compounding latencies during multi-agent orchestration?
Hardware Heterogeneity: "Hyperscalers historically standardized on monolithic hardware, but neoclouds are increasingly mixing high-memory GPUs, specialized inference ASICs, and custom interconnects. How do you decide the optimal hardware mix inside a rack when your customer demand fluctuates between massive long-context reasoning models and rapid edge-like decoding?
Power and Rack Density: "With high-end inference accelerators drawing massive power per node, how are neocloud data centers re-engineering liquid cooling, rack layouts, and power distribution specifically to maximize inference density rather than training throughput?
Decoupling Prefill and Decode: "Disaggregated inference splits compute-heavy prefill operations from memory-bandwidth-heavy decode operations onto distinct hardware pools. What are the biggest real-world friction points when deploying this in production—especially around KV-cache transfer overhead and inter-node networking?
Dynamic Orchestration: "In a disaggregated setup, workload spikes in long-context coding prompts can saturate the prefill pool while leaving decode nodes underutilized. How are leading engineering teams building smart routing layers and dynamic auto-scaling engines to balance compute across compute-bound and memory-bound hardware?
The Economic Tipping Point: "Enterprise adoption is oscillating between proprietary API-driven models and self-hosted open-weights models. At what scale—measured in inference volume, latency SLAs, or data privacy constraints—does it become economically imperative for a company to transition off closed APIs onto self-hosted open infrastructure?

Links

https://sambanova.ai/

https://www.linkedin.com/in/v-mohan/

Current Sponsors:

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Hosted by Noah Labhart | Technical Founder & Startup Mentor.

S13 Bonus: Dynamic Observability: Eliminating Telemetry Waste at Scale with Peter Morelli, Co-Founder & CEO of Bitdrift

Wed, 23 Sep 2026 10:00:05 +0000

Peter Morelli was born and raised in San Francisco, one of the few natives of the area. He was front and center, watching the tech scene explode in front of him (and also blow up). He's lived all over - like New York, San Diego, Texas, London - but always ends up returning to the Bay Area. Outside of tech, he is married with 3 kids - one in college, and the other 2 in high school. He is a foodie, and loves cooking, enjoying the communal, connective aspect of having a meal with his family and friends.

Peter spent many years at Lyft, where he and his team became frustrated by traditional observability tools and how they waste money storing unused data. They started to building a solution based on dynamic, real time control paired with local, on-device telemetry storage. Once they realized their breakthrough, they spun off the solution into its own company.

This is the creation story of Bitdrift.

Links

https://bitdrift.io/

https://www.linkedin.com/in/peterfmorelli/

Current Sponsors:

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Hosted by Noah Labhart | Technical Founder & Startup Mentor.

S13 E5: The Dynamic Compute Revolution: Eliminating Cache Invalidation with Julien Verlaguet, Founder & CEO of SkipLabs

Tue, 22 Sep 2026 10:00:37 +0000

Julien Verlaguet is a self proclaimed "French guy", growing up in south of France. He studied in Paris, and moved to the US when he was 27, spending 10 years in the Bay Are and 5 years in New York. He's spent many years developing software, in particular, developing programming languages. Outside of tech, he is married to a Columbian woman, and admits his Spanish isn't as good as it should be. He loves to play Pétanque, merely needing a flat surface to play on.

Julien was a lead programming language designer at Facebook, and lead the open source release of a new programming language. Over time, he noticed that frontend dev was in a resolution with reactive paradigms, while backend architectures remained bogged down by manual steps. In 2022, he stepped out to create Meta-grade creativity usable in everyday software.

This is the creation story of Skiplabs.

Links

https://skiplabs.io/

https://www.linkedin.com/in/julien-verlaguet-b5710a20/

Current Sponsors:

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Hosted by Noah Labhart | Technical Founder & Startup Mentor.

S13 Bonus: The Legal AI Shift: Automating Contract Workflows with AI Agents with Nick Holzherr, Founder & CEO of GitLaw

Thu, 17 Sep 2026 10:00:32 +0000

Nick Holzherr is originally from the Switzerland, but moved to UK when he was 7 years old, to the countryside. He had no real touch to computers until he was 18, when he attended university and everything picked up for him, tech wise. Eventually, he got into building businesses, and of those, he founded a coffee company, HR software company, and whisk.com, which was sold to Samsung in 2019. Outside of tech, he is the father to two young children. He enjoys skiing and snowboarding, and jokingly, he admits that running around ensuring his agents are prompted gets in the way of his family and hobby life.

Through his entrepreneurial adventures, Nick spent large sums of money on legal contracts, ensuring that the i's were dotted and the t's were crossed. While he still feels that lawyers are very important and needed for certain scenarios, Nick wanted to create a way to level the playing field for small businesses, in the legal arena.

This is the creation story of GitLaw.

Links

https://git.law/

https://nickholzherr.com/

https://www.linkedin.com/in/nickholzherr/

Current Sponsors:

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Hosted by Noah Labhart | Technical Founder & Startup Mentor.

E13 Bonus: The Return of Backbox, and AI as a Trusted Advisor, with Rekha Shenoy, CEO of Backbox

Wed, 16 Sep 2026 10:00:01 +0000

Today, we have a special return episode from our friends at Backbox, who we heard the creation story of the company back in Season 8. In this episode, we talk with Rekha Shenoy, CEO of Backbox. Since Rekha took the helm as CEO in May 2024, the company has expanded beyond traditional security automation to launch its major BackBox 8.0 platform, unifying cloud and on-prem infrastructure visibility. They’ve also integrated human-in-the-loop, advisor-focused AI capabilities - and are back to let us know some even more "big things" happening with platform, around agentic .

Questions:

Tell me about yourself—your path into tech and what shapes how you lead (background, influences, hobbies, family).
Tell me about BackBox. What does the company do, and what drew you in to take the CEO seat in 2024?
How has the product matured? How do you build your roadmap?
Zoom out — what are you most proud of in shaping BackBox?
What does the future look like for your product and team?
BackBox describes AI as a "trusted advisor, not an autonomous agent" — four principles: protecting infrastructure, repeatable/verifiable results, supporting (not replacing) engineers, and transparency about how AI reaches conclusions. Where did that philosophy come from, and why hold that line while competitors race toward full autonomy?
What does "responsible AI" actually look like in the product — not as a value statement, but as a design constraint that shaped the engineering decision?
Tell us about your recent launch and what it enables a network team to do that they couldn't before?
How does the launch extend or test that responsible-AI philosophy?
At what point does "AI as advisor" start to feel like a limitation rather than a safeguard?

Links

https://backbox.com/

https://www.linkedin.com/in/rekha-shenoy-950b23/

https://www.codestory.co/episodes/s8-bonus-bypassing-brittle-custom-scripts-implementing-automated-multi-tenant-configuration-backups-and-vulnerability-patching-at-scale-with-andrew-kahl-of-backbox/

Current Sponsors:

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Hosted by Noah Labhart | Technical Founder & Startup Mentor.

S13 E4: The AI GTM Engine: Turning Intent Signals into Warm Outbound Pipeline with Connor Heggie, Co-Founder & CTO of Unify

Tue, 15 Sep 2026 10:00:41 +0000

Connor Heggie grew up in Southern California, digging into technical things early on his life. He played with legos, was influence by Iron Man, and painted pictures on the back of schematics his Dad brought him from Boeing. He went to school at Rice in Texas, feeling a sense of agency and confidence from the program he was in. Eventually, he went to work for startups across computer vision, self driving cars, and AI. Outside of tech, he has a large black Labrador named Captain. He enjoys hiking, being outside, and playing fetch with Captain until he drops in exhaustion.

Post ChatGPT, Connor was working on a side project, creating listicles around products. As he built it, he fell in love with the space of mining information from unstructured data. Once he met up with his co-founder, they started to recognize they could build multi-agent systems that could re-think how Go-To-Market teams operate.

This is the creation story of Unify.

Links

https://www.unifygtm.com/

https://www.linkedin.com/in/connor-heggie/

Current Sponsors:

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Hosted by Noah Labhart | Technical Founder & Startup Mentor.

S13 Bonus: The GPU Bottleneck: Democratizing AI Compute Pipelines with Christian Ondaatje, Founder & CEO of Aranya.tech

Thu, 10 Sep 2026 10:00:38 +0000

Christian Ondaatje is originally from Los Angelas, CA. He got into GPUs as an underclassmen in college, of course through gaming and VR. He ended up starting an eGPU company in his CS program @ Harvard, though it was shut down through some cease and desist from Apple. Though he learned some hard startup lessons, his love for GPUs was only fueled more. Outside of tech, he does a lot of SIM racing. In fact, he has built his own Linus VR racing simulator rig over a couple of years He finds that the formal, online competition is very fun to participate in.

As I mentioned, Christian was way into GPUs throughout many different experiences in his life. He and his team recognized that while demand door AI inference and compute was at an all-time high, setting up bare-metal GPU infra was still complex and slow... so they set out to change it.

This is the creation story of Aranya.

Links

https://aranya.tech/

https://www.linkedin.com/in/christianondaatje/

Current Sponsors:

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Hosted by Noah Labhart | Technical Founder & Startup Mentor.

S13 E3: Architecting Frictionless Creator Infrastructure & Social Commerce with Dumi Mabhena, CEO of Hilite

Tue, 08 Sep 2026 10:00:16 +0000

Dumi Mabhena is originally from Zimbabwe, and has lived in 5 different countries. He now lives in Washington, DC, as he came to the states to attend Georgetown. Prior to that, he has been a podcast host and producer for several years, as well as starting businesses and taking part in the startup world in multiple different places. Outside of tech, he married to his wife, who he met while in South Africa. They love to travel, especially Europe in the summer, and are big into fitness and running.

Previously, Dumi started a podcast, to tell about positive experiences in Zimbabwe. As he went through the process of recording, editing, and publishing a podcast - he realized that the tools and platforms were incredibly fragmented... so much so, that it created friction in the process of telling stories. Dumi wanted to figure out a way to remove this friction from the entire process.

This is the creation story of Hilite.

Links

https://www.hellohilite.com/

https://www.linkedin.com/in/dumi-mabhena

Current Sponsors:

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Hosted by Noah Labhart | Technical Founder & Startup Mentor.

E13 Bonus: From Airbnb's Chronon Engine to Enterprise Real-Time Feature Compute with Varant Zanoyan, Co-Founder & CEO of Zipline AI

Thu, 03 Sep 2026 10:00:12 +0000

Varant Zanoyan was born in Washington DC, and grew up there and in Switzerland as well. He now lives in the Bay Area, specifically San Mateo. He's spent time at Palantir Technologies, as well as a stint building ML tech at AirBnB. But outside of tech, he loves the outdoors, tending to his garden of plants and vegetables. After taking a good hike, he's been digging a good uni pizza for dinner.

Prior to his current venture, Varant was working at AirBnB, developing Chronon - an open source data management engine, used to power AI/ML infrastructure. It was then that he and his team realized that building and managing data pipelines was a bottleneck for AI dev, and decided to spin into a standalone platform.

This is the creation story of Zipline AI.

Links

https://zipline.ai/

https://www.linkedin.com/in/vzanoyan

Current Sponsors:

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Hosted by Noah Labhart | Technical Founder & Startup Mentor.

S13 Bonus: The AI DBA Shift: Automating Database Reliability & Performance with Itamar Syn-Hershko, Founder & CEO of NeverBlink

Wed, 02 Sep 2026 10:00:19 +0000

Itamar Syn-Hershko has been a tech guy since he was a wee lad - IE he was teaching his kindergarten teachers how to use their computers. He learned how to "do stuff" tech wise through playing games back in the day. Back in the day he was one of the original developers on a document based database, as well as building a consulting company. Outside of tech, he is the father of 5 kids, all of them 7 and under... so his hands are quite full. That said, he does enjoy learning new things and traveling, when he has the time.

Itamar founded a boutique consulting agency, helping businesses succeed in data related projects. Like most smart agencies, they built tools to help them to do their jobs better. One of these tools became highly popular, and after 1.5 years of selling this tool to customers, they hit a $1m in annual recurring revenue.

This is the creation story of NeverBlink AI.

Links

https://neverblink.ai/

https://bigdataboutique.com/

https://www.linkedin.com/in/itamar-syn-hershko

Current Sponsors:

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Hosted by Noah Labhart | Technical Founder & Startup Mentor.

S13 E2: Securing Enterprise GenAI: Data Privacy & Security Guardrails with Steven Walchek, Founder & CEO of Liminal

Tue, 01 Sep 2026 10:00:53 +0000

Steven Walchek is originally from the Bay Area in California, but lives in Denver now. He's been there for 8 years with his family. He comes from a family of risk takers and entrepreneurs - for example, his Dad was a tech guy who did his thing and had success in Silicon Valley. Outside of tech he is a family man, married with kids. He enjoys doing anything he can with them, as they are his "why". He plays hockey, coaches hockey, and rides dirt bikes and mountain bikes.

Steven and his team built an application security platform, and ended up hitting every branch on the way down from the startup tree. When they sat down to figure out what they needed to do next, they combined their deep security tooling with a multi-modal platform, to enable complete AI governance in one central hub for regulated companies.

This is the creation story of Liminal.

Links

https://www.liminal.ai/

https://www.linkedin.com/in/swalchek/

Current Sponsors:

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Hosted by Noah Labhart | Technical Founder & Startup Mentor.

S13 Bonus: The Intention Layer: Why Coding Agents Need Product Judgment with Drew Dillon, Founder & CEO of Brief

Thu, 27 Aug 2026 10:00:45 +0000

Drew Dillon is a tech founder and product leader, centered in the Bay Area. He is a person who likes to do a bit of everything, having an engineering background, but spending time in design, sales, and product management. He's been a part of many startups - Yammer being one of them, and several others from Y Combinator - along with being a consultant and fractional CPO. Outside of tech, he has 2 kids that take up most of his time. When he isn't on the sidelines of a soccer game, he enjoys woodworking and reading a good sci-fi book.

At a prior startup, Drew built a system using AI, which spit out something reasonably shaped. He took a look at the process he went through to create it, and realized that there are a ton of disparate parts, all separate from the shared organizational context - IE the "why" behind what is being built. He set out to change that, and built institutional memory and product judgement within AI agents.

This is the creation story of Brief.

Links

https://briefhq.ai/

https://mymoxieai.com/

https://www.linkedin.com/in/drewdil/

Current Sponsors:

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Hosted by Noah Labhart | Technical Founder & Startup Mentor.

S13 Bonus: Why Local On-Device AI Compute is the Future of Privacy with Behnam Bastani, Co-Founder & CEO of OpenInfer

Wed, 26 Aug 2026 10:00:28 +0000

Behnam Bastani is originally from Tehran, Iran. He left the country at the age of 17, setting out for Canada, where he got his Masters and PhD, before moving to California. He's always looked at things with the big picture in mind - whether that is artwork, wood work, engineering, etc. He's worked for Hewlett Packard, Meta and Roblox, before starting his current venture. Outside of tech, he loves to exercise and participate in water activities. For peace of mind, he gardens - experimenting with growing trees, replanting, and seeding.

Previously, Behnam went to Meta to pursue the future of wearables. He immediately realized that these wearables required a connected system. He started to ask the question, "why can't we use compute around use to fuel wearables?". Eventually, through stints at Meta and Roblox, he and his co-founder knew they wanted this type of system... and started with the infrastructure to enable it.

This is the creation story of OpenInfer.

Links

https://openinfer.io/

https://www.linkedin.com/in/bbastani/

Current Sponsors:

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Hosted by Noah Labhart | Technical Founder & Startup Mentor.

S13 E1: The Token Winter Is Coming: Why Code Inflation Fails to Ship Real Business Value with Dave Garcia, Founder & Co-CEO of Pensero

Tue, 25 Aug 2026 10:00:16 +0000

Dave Garcia is originally from Barcelona, and recently moved stateside, to the East Coast. He started coding when he was 7 years old, on a Commodore 64, in BASIC language - and when he programmed an infinite loop, he was hooked. He's been curious about machines, and fixing them - even when they weren't broken. Outside of tech, he is married with a young family. He enjoys playing video games - mostly Dad games these days - and loves to do anything on the water, like kite surfing.

A few years ago, Dave decided to take some time off to spend it with his family. When the AI boom started to happen, suddenly the technology became ubiquitous, where AI was changing the life of generations around him. After some investigation, he decided wanted to build something world changing, relevant to the world the knows - which is within the tech mgmt. world.

This is the creation story of Pensero.

Links

https://pensero.ai/

https://www.linkedin.com/in/davebcn

Current Sponsors:

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S12 Favorite - Overcoming Broken Right-Sizing Models to Automate Real-Time Cloud Cost Optimization with Sharad Kumar & Harshit Omar, Co-Founders of FluidCloud

Tue, 18 Aug 2026 10:00:59 +0000

Sharad Kumar lives in Pleasanton, California with his wife and 2 kids. He enjoys playing all musical instruments, and spending time with his family. He has a 2 year old daughter, and a 14 year old son into robotics. He is also passionate about giving back to the community, through their company foundation.

Harshit Omar lives in San Francisco, and is married with a 4 year old son. He used to be a street racer in his college days, loving fast cars and taking risk. Nowadays, he is a big marvel and comic book fan, along side his son. In fact, his son thinks he is Captain America, regularly wielding his shield and mask.

A fun fact about both of these gentlemen: this is their third company to work together in, their second startup, and their wives are sisters. So they are connected by wives, and united by startups.

In their previous startups, Sharad was leading sales and ops and Harshit was leading on the product side. When the company got acquired, it took them 8-9 months to integrate to a different cloud provider. They realized the model was broken, requiring expensive consulting services, and not convenient at all - and they wanted to figure out a better way.

This is the creation story of Fluidcloud.

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S12 Favorite - Rewriting the Rules of End-User Computing and the Rise of Autonomous, Agentic AI IT Operations with Yoni Avital, Co-Founder & Chief Evangelist of ControlUp

Thu, 13 Aug 2026 10:00:04 +0000

Yoni Avital lives in Tel Aviv, Israel, with his wife and 3 older children. The oldest kid is a boy, so Yoni and he try to see as many football games as possible. He enjoys shopping with this girls, though it's cause he is their Dad, not because he enjoy shopping. He likes to travel, hike, and enjoys a nice white wine in warmer weather. His most memorable hike was at Yosemite, when he started at 4 am and came across a lot of wildlife.

Yoni was in the virtual desktop space in the past. What he and his team realized was that troubleshooting these virtual experiences were incredibly complicated. They started to build an enterprise task manager, to centralize a task management UI to control the endpoints. When customers started asking to use it daily, Yoni figured out they had something unique.

This is the creation story of ControlUp.

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S12 Favorite - Making AI Deterministic for Developers and their Agents, with Patrick Vuong of Moderne

Tue, 11 Aug 2026 10:00:32 +0000

Today, we have a special guest on the Code Story podcast - Patrick Vuong, Director of Product at Moderne. Moderne is the agent tools company, building the. Knowledge, discovery and execution tools that AI agents rely on - so they can operator faster, more accurately, and at far lower cost.

In today's episode, Patrick is going to tell us about the company, and how Moderne is enabling developers to build software faster, and with the best context - using agents and agent tools. Their approach to semantic models produce deterministic over probabilistic, or inference driven, tools, which for this engineer/host, has been a point of skepticism for AI since the beginning.

Questions

Tell me and my audience a little bit about you.
What is Moderne?
Moderne is enabling developers to operate software systems at the speed of agents. Tell me about this product suite.
Why do Agents need tooling? Where do we see AI in ROI
Something jumped out at me... you mentioned you are not only building tooling for agents that are deterministic.
As we peer into tech stacks across the industry, where does Moderne fit?
OK so this is clearly a pivot for Moderne. With this, who are your customers now?
What does the future like for your product - what you offer - and your team?
For you personally, you are entering into a new chapter with Moderne. What makes you most excited, going from Microsoft to entering the startup world with the company?
In your journey, who has influenced the way you work? Tell me about a person, or many persons, or something you look up to and why.
So you worked at Microsoft for 8 years, and are now transitioning to Moderne. Say you were getting on a plan and sitting next to someone about to make this same transition - what advice would you give them?

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S12 Bonus: Rickard's Deterministic Return: Converting Scattered Data into Autonomous, Production-Grade Apps with Rickard Hansson, Founder & CEO of Gainable

Thu, 06 Aug 2026 10:00:26 +0000

We have a special return episode, by our good friend Rickard Hansson. Rickard joined us previously on the podcast in Season 8 to tell the creation story of Weavy - collaboration infrastructure for serious builds. Today, he makes a follow up visit to tell us all about Gainable, his new project - which removes data and engineering from being the middle man, and enables your team to build the apps they need now.

Questions;

Last time we talked in Season 8, you were building Weavy. Whats happened since we last talked with that company?
Tell me about Gainable - give me the pitch there, and tell me why this is the right approach to using AI.
Most AI builders wire straight to a frontier model and wait for the next release to fix the gaps. I didn't. Where does the model actually sit in Gainable product, and why only there?
Why is an app factory that is deterministic important? Dig into that.
You use the term "free-range coding".. what does this mean? Unpack the phrase for us.
You point out that tokens still appear to be heavily subsidized to me. What do you mean by that, and what happens to all these AI products when that ends?
We've all read the headlines - Fable 5 got switched off by the government for 18 days. Why do you see this as a turning point, not a footnote?
You suspect flat subscriptions for the top models are done, and it all drifts to credit-based. What signal are you seeing that tell s you this?
If the model is a commodity everyone rents, where's the moat?
What is next for Gainable, and how can someone get started using the platform?

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S12 E30: Wastewater Guardians: Automating Biology to Protect Clean Water with Virginia Szepietowski, Co-Founder of Nyad AI

Tue, 04 Aug 2026 10:00:08 +0000

Virginia Szepietowski grew up in the UK outside of London, and now lives in Alabama. She's had a winding path to her current venture, including body building, triathlons, law, and entrepreneurship. She comes from a family of entrepreneurs, who are deeply ambitious, tenacious, and deeply humble. She finds the feeling of a deep safety net from her family, and she pursues her adventures. Outside of tech, she is married to her now co-founder. She is still a competitive body builder, and likes to push herself to the limit.

Through a series of life events, Virginia got interested in water treatment. She started discovering the world of wastewater operators, and the fact that they were the last line of defense before toxic wastewater moved into our waterways (rivers and such). Using AI, her and her team started to build a platform for these operators to quickly detect organisms in these water streams.

This is the creation story of Nyad AI.

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Timestamps

0:00 Intro and episode teaser on automating biology in critical clean water infrastructure

1:49 Guest introduction: Virginia Szepietowski's background and path to founding Nyad AI

2:45 Understanding the hidden biology behind municipal and industrial wastewater treatment

4:10 The core problem: Why manual microscope sampling creates dangerous operational blind spots

6:05 Origin story: Translating computer vision research into industrial water automation

8:30 How Nyad AI's automated hardware samples and analyzes live microorganisms in real time

11:15 Overcoming physical hardware engineering hurdles in harsh, high-humidity environments

14:00 Preventing biological plant crashes and saving millions in compliance penalties

17:30 Addressing the labor shortage: Supporting the next generation of water operators with AI

21:00 Scaling AI hardware deployments across municipal and industrial facilities

24:15 The future of automated biology in global water security and environmental protection

27:00 Closing thoughts and how to connect with Virginia Szepietowski and Nyad AI

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S12 Bonus: The App-Aware Illusion: Why Infinite Compute Fails Without Underlying Infrastructure Accountability and the Case for "Boring" IT with Richard Luna, President & Founder of Protected Harbor

Thu, 30 Jul 2026 10:00:20 +0000

Richard Luna grew up in New York, never living more than 35 from where he grew up. He is a self proclaimed super nerd, and has been one since he was 13 - at which point, he started coding on an HP calculator. He's always been fascinated to know how things work, and how patterns repeat - which he has observed in the industry throughout the years. Outside of tech, he has 2 kids, one of which is in the business with him. He's an avid cyclist, traveling on average, 120 miles a week.

Richard has been a life long technologist, doing everything from desktops, to coding, to hosting. When he and his team saw the limits of what hosting can do, they dove into developer operations (DevOps), and found where they could add the most value - through SaaS infrastructure.

This is the creation story of Protected Harbor.

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Timestamps

0:01 Teaser on solving complex database report bottlenecks beyond standard SQL servers

0:47 Show intro and setting the stage for application-aware infrastructure

1:32 Host intro: How Richard Luna established application-aware infrastructure

1:49 Guest introduction: Richard Luna's background, coding at age 13, and cycling 120 miles a week

2:21 The career path from desktops, coding, and traditional web hosting to DevOps and SaaS infrastructure

2:41 Origin story: The creation of Protected Harbor

2:48 Defining application-aware infrastructure and why traditional hosting reaches a hard ceiling

4:10 Why "infinite compute" fails when underlying database architecture and queries are broken

6:05 Moving beyond basic server ping tests to deep application transaction monitoring

8:30 The case for "boring" IT: Prioritizing stability, predictability, and uptime over hype

11:15 Strategic trade-offs in hybrid cloud setup and managing hardware accountability

14:00 Aligning MSP incentives with client business outcomes and application performance

17:30 Common pitfalls in legacy system cloud migrations

21:00 The role of operational discipline in modern cybersecurity and IT governance

27:00 Where managed infrastructure services are heading and closing thoughts

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S12 E29: Fractional Talent: Traditional Freelance Marketplaces Fail Enterprise Workflows and the Shift Toward Managed Engineering Teams with Danny Gal, Co-Founder & CEO of Proteams

Tue, 28 Jul 2026 10:00:21 +0000

Danny Gal was born and raised in the UK, and now lives outside of London. He attended University in Nottingham... yep, the same one from Robin Hood. He LOVES challenges, and not just any challenges - the hard ones. He is done Iron Man competitions, ultra marathons, climbed Mount Kilimanjaro, and jumped out of a perfectly good plane, to name a few. He loves doing them once... and then never again. He's got 2 small kids, and believes in work hard, play hard.

Danny has worked in many roles in the past, across enterprises and the like. What he found most difficult was scaling himself. He got to talking with his now co-founder about building something around the idea of scaling oneself, and took it to some businesses to validate it. Once he saw them get excited about it, he figured they were onto something.

This is the creation story of Proteams.

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Timestamps

1:49 Guest introduction: Danny Gal's background, endurance challenges, and career journey

2:50 The core problem: Why traditional freelance marketplaces fail enterprise workflows

4:10 Origin story: Solving the bottleneck of "scaling oneself" in leadership

5:45 Validating the managed fractional team model with early enterprise clients

7:20 Self-serve bidding vs. managed delivery teams: Understanding the structural shift

9:30 Building a software-enabled harness for global engineering talent

12:15 How Chief Procurement Officers should structure external workforce strategies

15:00 Overcoming compliance, IP, and security hurdles in enterprise talent integration

18:10 Balancing speed, quality, and accountability in remote team management

20:30 Closing thoughts and where to connect with Danny Gal and Proteams

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S12 Bonus: The Perishable Supply Chain Crisis: Why Generic ERPs Fail Fresh Food Logistics and How AI Agents Are Transforming Error-Free Order Intake with Sid Dixit, Chief Technology Officer at iTradeNetwork

Thu, 23 Jul 2026 10:00:18 +0000

Sid Dixit is originally from central India, and came to the states for college. He is a technologist and builder at heart, serving in leadership roles across major companies. He has built and managed a fleet of satellites, built robots at Amazon, worked at Microsoft on surface tablets, and finally, at Google working on Android. Outside of tech in lives in the Bay Area with his wife and kids. He loves water sports, especially sailing. He spent 10 years in San Diego, and stumbled on the sport.

Sid's current company started in 1999, and was acquired in 2010. A few years ago, Sid joined the company, at a time when the company was wanting to rebuild its network from the ground up - starting with a powerful index.

This is Sid's creation story at iTradeNetwork.

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Timestamps

1:49 Guest introduction: Sid Dixit's career background across satellites, Amazon, and Google

2:42 Overview of iTradeNetwork and its reach across North America's perishable supply chain

4:04 The origin story of iTradeNetwork and why generic ERPs fail fresh food logistics

5:45 Upgrading legacy software from Systems of Record to Systems of Intelligence

6:37 The role of specialized AI agents: Forecasting, pricing, RFQs, and negotiations

7:23 Solving outdated market data: Building a real-time produce commodity index

8:55 Strategic MVP trade-offs: Narrowing focus to key commodities like strawberries and apples

10:19 Using AI to harmonize unstructured vendor product descriptions

15:00 Streamlining complex order intake workflows across buyers and sellers

22:00 Quantifying the macroeconomic impact of supply chain speed on global food waste

28:00 Future vision for AI agents in global supply chain management

31:30 Closing thoughts and where to learn more about iTradeNetwork

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S12 E28: The AI Throughput Illusion: Why Splurging on Expensive Models Fails to Ship Code and How to Measure Real Engineering Output with Emilie Schario, Co-Founder & Head of Product & Engineering at Kilo Code

Tue, 21 Jul 2026 10:00:45 +0000

Emilie Schario grew up in New Jersey, outside of Newark, and attended college in the state. Currently, she lives in Columbus, Georgia, outside of Atlanta. She mentions she got into technology so she could easily follow her husband's career geographically, and has much success in the industry. Outside of tech, she is married with 3 boys (all 5 and under)... so there is a lot of wrestling in her household. She admits she is often quoted staying she does three things in her life - work, parenting, and if she is lucky, attends CrossFit 3 times a week. In fact, she finds a great sense of community in that world, and brings her kids with her to cheer her on.

A year and a half ago, Emilie's current venture was started, to build the open source orchestrator (or "harness") for AI coding agents. Through some shuffle in the early team, Emilie joined and started in building the fastest AI coding app on the market.

This is the creation story of Kilo.

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Timestamps

1:49 Guest introduction: Emilie Schario's background and career journey

2:51 Overview of Kilo Code as an open source agentic engineering harness

3:14 Differentiating through model freedom and supporting 500 plus AI models

3:58 Kilo Code founding story with Sid Sijbrandij and team history

4:42 Defining the evolving MVP for AI coding tools in a fast-moving market

5:25 The rapid shift from manual prompt engineering to autonomous loops

6:19 Trade-offs and resource allocation: Deprecating the Kilo App Builder

9:09 Modern AI product management: Why multi-year roadmaps no longer work

10:19 Shifting PM responsibilities from tracking engineers to setting context

13:00 The AI throughput illusion: Why expensive models don't equal shipped code

17:00 Measuring true engineering output and productivity in the AI era

21:00 Building resilient engineering cultures around AI coding platforms

23:30 Closing thoughts and where to learn more about Kilo Code

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S12 Bonus: The Dashboard Mirage: Why Aggregate Metrics Hide Revenue Leaks and the Rise of Autonomous, Agentic Analytics with Bhaskar Sunkara, Founder & CEO of Bicycle AI

Thu, 16 Jul 2026 10:00:03 +0000

Bhaskar Sunkara grew up in Delhi, India, and moved to the states when he started working. He has lived in San Fransisco for several decades now, and has spent a lot of his professional life building systems (infrastructure, observability and now, analytics). His prior startup, AppDynamics, was eventually acquired by Cisco. In general, he stays curious about how things work, and likes to deconstruct systems to figure out how they work. Outside of tech, he is a big sports fan, enjoying football, baseball, cricket and basketball. In fact, he grew up watching Michael Jordan and the bulls.

Bhaskar noticed that business teams were drowning in dashboards, and as such, were not sure how to take the next steps in the business. He and his team realized that what people needed was not a retroactive view, but a proactive one - something more akin to a 24x7 analyst.

This is the creation story of Bicycle AI.

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Timestamps

0:00 Intro and episode teaser on the limits of manual KPI monitoring

1:49 Guest introduction: Bhaskar Sunkara's background and AppDynamics experience

2:50 The core problem: Why revenue teams are drowning in dashboards

3:53 Origin story: Shifting from reactive dashboards to proactive AI analysts

4:36 Identifying target transactional verticals in retail, travel, and payments

6:02 Building the MVP: The 1-year journey and defining core capabilities

7:06 The three MVP pillars: Data connection, KPI definition, and dimensional search

8:33 Strategic trade-offs: Choosing vertical focus over generic horizontal BI

10:00 Harnessing LLMs and agentic AI for root-cause context

15:00 Establishing single-source-of-truth KPI definitions across departments

20:00 How AI agents integrate into existing enterprise data stacks

25:00 The future of autonomous analytics and proactive decision-making

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The AI Control Loop: The Enterprise AI Accountability Moment – with Shayne Higdon of Wallarm

Wed, 15 Jul 2026 10:00:38 +0000

Today, we are dropping our final episode in our series The AI Control Loop, How enterprises govern the AI they've already deployed - sponsored by our friends at Wallarm.

Wallarm is the AI Control Platform for Enterprise AI, protecting every AI workload, API, and application in production, giving CISOs the governance they need and CIOs the speed they demand. Organizations choose Wallarm for a complete inventory of APIs, AI agents, and AI apps, patented AI/ML-based threat detection and blocking that operates at production traffic speeds.

In our final episode, we are joined by Shayne Higdon, Wallarm CEO, who closes the series by examining what the accountability moment demands from enterprise leaders, what a mature AI governance model needs to prove rather than promise, and what the next 12 to 24 months look like for organizations that get this right.

Questions

Why is now the accountability moment for enterprise AI?
What has changed between the early days of AI experimentation and today's enterprise AI deployments that makes accountability such a pressing issue?
When we talk about AI accountability, what does that actually mean in practical terms? Are we talking about visibility, auditability, enforcement, ownership—or all of the above?
As organizations race to deploy AI, how should CIOs balance the speed of transformation with the responsibility to govern it effectively?
Why are traditional governance and security models struggling to keep pace with the way AI is being adopted across the enterprise?
Given those challenges, how should boards and executive teams evaluate whether their organizations are truly ready to scale AI safely and responsibly?
And once an organization believes it's ready, what does a mature AI governance model actually need to prove - not just promise?
From an operational standpoint, how do capabilities like discovery, runtime monitoring, and enforcement come together to create a closed-loop approach to AI accountability?
Stepping back and looking across this entire conversation, what's the one mindset shift every enterprise leader needs to make when it comes to AI security and accountability?
And finally, as listeners think about what's ahead, what should they expect the future of AI security and accountability to look like over the next 6, 12, or even 24 months?

Links

Full Abstract

Abstract: Join Shayne Higdon, Wallarm CEO, for this episode, which closes the series by examining what the accountability moment demands from enterprise leaders, what a mature AI governance model needs to prove rather than promise, and what the next 12 to 24 months look like for organizations that get this right.

AI deployment is not waiting for governance to catch up. Across most enterprises, the gap between how fast AI is being adopted and how well it is being governed is widening every quarter. CIOs and CISOs are not debating whether to govern AI. They are trying to figure out how, under real organizational pressure, with tools and frameworks that were built for a different threat model.

That pressure is coming from every direction at once. Boards want AI transformation to move fast. Regulators want documented evidence that it is under control. Security teams want runtime visibility and enforcement capabilities that most of their current tools do not provide. And the AI systems themselves are not waiting: they are accessing data, calling external services, and making decisions continuously, in ways that after-the-fact governance cannot meaningfully constrain.

This is the accountability moment. Not because the risk is new, but because the consequences of undermanaged AI are now concrete enough to land on a board agenda, an audit report, and a regulatory deadline at the same time. What accountability actually requires in practice is the full AI control loop: knowing what AI is running across the enterprise, seeing what it is doing at runtime, enforcing policy before damage compounds, and generating continuous evidence that the governance is real and not retroactive. Organizations that can demonstrate all four are in a fundamentally different position than those still assembling audit evidence from spreadsheets the week before a review.

Timestamps

1:49 Guest introduction: Shayne Higdon's executive background and role as Wallarm CEO

2:45 From experimentation to production: What triggered the enterprise AI accountability shift

4:10 Why traditional CISO governance models fail to keep pace with autonomous AI agents

6:05 Explaining the AI Control Loop: Discovery, visibility, enforcement, and evidence

8:30 Moving from policy promises to continuous, runtime-proven governance

11:15 Balancing innovation speed for CIOs with security mandates for CISOs

14:00 Tackling Shadow AI and establishing a complete inventory of AI apps and APIs

17:30 Runtime threat detection: Blocking prompt injection and data leaks at production speeds

21:00 Board-level expectations and preparing for evolving AI regulatory frameworks

24:15 What AI governance and security will look like over the next 12 to 24 months

27:00 Closing thoughts and how to learn more about Wallarm

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S12 E27: The Real-Time Scaling Tax: Why High-Volume WebSockets Kill Monolithic Performance and How AnyCable Decoupled the Real-Time Layer with Irina Nazarova, CEO of Evil Martians

Tue, 14 Jul 2026 10:00:31 +0000

Irina Nazarova grew up in Russia, and has lived in Portugal, Turkey, and now, San Francisco. She got a computer science degree, but felt like an imposter in the dev world. She went on to get an economics degree, and went to work for JP Morgan. Feeling little reward from her work, she read the lean startup and jumped out to build her own, and eventually joined Evil Martians. Outside of tech, she is a person who loves hiking, traveling, and old school film and photography. She enjoys working with old film, where there is high touch, and you have a limited number of takes.

Irina is the CEO of Evil Martians, a well known design and engineering consultancy. During the time of the company, she and the team noticed that websocket solutions don't guarantee delivery. They decided to build a new solution, one that does guarantee delivery, through automatic recovery of messages during connection issues.

This is the creation story of AnyCable by Evil Martians.

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S12 Bonus: The Global Talent Mirage: Why Rigid Immigration Frameworks Fail Elite Tech Teams and the Rise of the Global Mobility OS with Ramiro Roballos, Co-Founder & CEO of Tukki

Thu, 09 Jul 2026 10:00:29 +0000

Ramiro Roballos grew up in Buenos Aires, and 6 or 7 years ago, moved to Miami and now lives in Buffalo, NY. His path to entrepreneurship has been different, as he started out as a musician, and then an orchestra conductor for several years. He eventually got into building how companies, starting his own music school and his own orchestra. Eventually, he got his MBA, worked for McKinsey and some startups before doing his own. Outside of tech, he is married to a cellist, and keeps playing music for fun. He also enjoys Formula 1, and watches every change he gets.

Ramiro went through the immigration process in the US, and was very disappointed in the quality of the service, given the importance of this process in determining a pillar life outcome. He felt there should be a better way, one that has excellent service and quality, and centralizes the expansive process into one platform.

This is the creation story of Tukki.

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The AI Control Loop: What's Missing in AI Security Today - with Craig Thomas of Wallarm

Wed, 08 Jul 2026 10:00:07 +0000

Today, we are dropping another episode in our series The AI Control Loop, How enterprises govern the AI they've already deployed - sponsored by our friends at Wallarm.

In today's episode, Craig Thomas, Sr. Solutions Engineer at Wallarm, returns to the show to dive into why runtime behavior is the critical blind spot, and what CISOs should demand if they want to move from policy to control.

Questions

Security teams are used to detecting incidents and responding after the fact. Why is that model becoming insufficient for AI-driven systems?
Building on that, when we talk about response today, enforcement often means actions like restarting pods, rotating credentials, or shutting down services. Why can those measures come too late in an AI environment?
So if traditional response isn't enough, why does AI behavior require controls that operate much closer to runtime?
And when people hear "runtime enforcement," they may think of existing security controls. What changes when enforcement happens at the kernel level rather than only at the network, identity, or application layer?
Can you make that tangible for us? What does it actually mean to revoke or contain a compromised AI session without disrupting the broader deployment?
How does that kind of real-time containment change the risk equation for AI agents that have access to sensitive data, external services, or production workflows?
With that in mind, what are some examples of AI behaviors that organizations should be able to stop immediately?
Of course, security teams also don't want to become a bottleneck. How do organizations balance strong enforcement with the need to keep AI development and deployment moving quickly?
And once organizations have the ability to discover, observe, and enforce AI behavior in real time, how does that change accountability at the enterprise level? What does good governance look like from there?

Links

Full Abstract

This episode examines what is actually missing in AI security today. Craig Thomas, Sr. Solutions Engineer at Wallarm, dives into why runtime behavior is the critical blind spot, and what CISOs should demand if they want to move from policy to control.

CIOs and CISOs have moved past debating whether AI security matters. The question now is what to actually do about it, and most organizations are finding that their existing tools answer a different question than the one AI is asking.

Traditional security tools were built around access: who can reach a system, what credentials they present, what traffic looks like at the perimeter. AI shifts the problem to execution: what a system does once it has access, whether that behavior matches what the business intended, and how you know when it doesn't. Most current tooling has no answer for that. It can tell you what is deployed and what is configured. It cannot tell you what your AI is actually doing at runtime, on whose behalf, or whether any of it violates the policies you thought were in place.

That gap is where most AI security programs stall. There is no shortage of governance frameworks, compliance checklists, and vendor claims. What is missing is operational control: the ability to see AI behavior as it happens, enforce policy at runtime, and produce evidence that holds up when an auditor or a board asks for it. The four capabilities that define a closed AI control loop, discover, observe, enforce, govern, are well understood as a category. Getting all four working together in production is where the real work begins.

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S12 E26: Your Automated CRM Texts are Ending up in the Spam Folder (And How to Fix It) with John Wright, Co-Founder & CEO of TrueDialog

Tue, 07 Jul 2026 10:00:45 +0000

John Wright grew up in Arkansas, when his family moved from Wisconsin for his Dad's job. He was influenced heavy by his father, who became an entrepreneur with several successful exits. As a kid, he got to see the ups and downs, and how you ride the roller coaster of being a business owner. Outside of tech, he is an active sailor and certified instructor in yacht racing.

Growing up with a family of wood workers, he also likes to build things and make stuff with his hands. Finally, he lives in sobriety and recovery from past addiction, and is active in this community of people.

In the past, John and his team built a platform around email, which they sold in 2001 to a company that is now apart of Google. Post that, he started to noticed the proliferation of SMS in the messaging world, in similar patterns as to what email did - and they decided to build a platform to serve the enterprise in this capacity.

This is the creation story of TrueDialog.

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S12 Bonus: The App Is Dead, Long Live the Outcome: Why Autonomous AI Agents Are Rewriting Data Infrastructure and Transforming PostgreSQL Into a Dynamic Scratch Pad with Ajay Kulkarni, Founder & CEO of Tiger Data

Thu, 02 Jul 2026 10:00:41 +0000

Ajay Kulkarni grew up in tech, as his father was a tech entrepreneur selling PC's in the early 80's. He went to college in MIT, and eventually founded a startup that was acquired by GroupMe (while it was being acquired by Skype... while they were being acquired by Microsoft). He's always been attracted to building things, so startups are right up his alley. Outside of tech, he is married with 2 young kids. He is a big exercise guy... he loves to run, swim and track his steps. Additionally, he loves music - to listen, and to play guitar, piano and drums.

Ajay and his co-founder met 30 years ago at MIT. They reconnected after years of doing their own thing, starting to dig into the iOT world. In doing this, they built a database because they the best solution to store this data... and in doing so, they unlocked their next venture out of this necessity.

This is the creation story of Tiger Data.

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Timestamps

00:00 Accidental Database MVP

00:41 Podcast Intro Setup

01:34 Ajay Background

02:50 Meeting Co Founder

04:11 Why Tiger Data

05:36 MVP Building TimescaleDB

07:06 Postgres Not NoSQL

08:50 Roadmap And Agents

10:40 Hiring The Right Team

11:59 Scaling As CEO

13:23 Resilience And Pride

14:36 Mistakes And Lessons

17:33 Future Physical World

19:18 Stoicism And Influence

21:01 Advice Play Love Triumph

23:54 Closing And Credits

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The AI Control Loop: Detection is not Enough - with Tim Ebbers of Wallarm

Wed, 01 Jul 2026 10:00:07 +0000

Today, we are dropping another episode in our series The AI Control Loop, How enterprises govern the AI they've already deployed - sponsored by our friends at Wallarm.

In his follow up appearance on the Code Story podcast, Tim Ebbers, Field CTO at Wallarm, discusses why detection alone is insufficient for AI-driven systems, what real enforcement looks like at the runtime level, and what accountability becomes possible once all four stages are in place.

Questions

Security teams are used to detecting incidents and responding after the fact. Why is that model insufficient for AI-driven systems?
What does “enforcement” usually mean today, and why can actions like restarting pods or rotating credentials come too late?
Why does AI behavior require controls that operate closer to runtime?
What changes when enforcement happens at the kernel level rather than only at the network, identity, or application layer?
Can you explain what it means to revoke or contain a compromised AI session without touching the broader deployment?
How does real-time blocking change the risk equation for AI agents that access sensitive data, external services, or production workflows?
What kinds of AI behaviors should organizations be able to stop immediately?
How do teams balance strong enforcement with the need to avoid slowing down AI development and deployment?
Once organizations can discover, observe, and enforce AI behavior, what does accountability look like at the enterprise level?

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Full Abstract

Tim Ebbers, Field CTO at Wallarm, discusses why detection alone is insufficient for AI-driven systems, what real enforcement looks like at the runtime level, and what accountability becomes possible once all four stages are in place.

Detection tells you what happened. It does not stop it. For most security incidents, that tradeoff is manageable. For AI systems that can access sensitive data, call external services, and trigger downstream actions at machine speed, the gap between detection and response is where the damage happens.

The enforcement model most security teams operate today was built for a slower threat. Restarting pods, rotating credentials, and updating policies are all responses to something that has already occurred. Against an AI agent that can exfiltrate data, invoke a production workflow, or violate a compliance boundary in the time it takes to page an on-call engineer, that response model is not enforcement. It’s cleanup.

Closing that gap requires controls that operate at the layer where AI behavior actually executes, not at the perimeter, not at the identity layer, not at the application boundary. Kernel-level enforcement changes what is possible: a compromised session can be revoked by user identity or trace ID, connections can be terminated at the workload level, and enforcement can happen without a pod restart, a deploy cycle, or any impact to the broader environment. That is what it means to complete the AI control loop. Discover what is running, observe what it is doing, enforce what it should not be doing, and govern with evidence that the enforcement worked. Organizations that can only do the first two are solving half the problem.

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S12 E25: From Processing $500B at Intuit to Building the Fraud-Proof Ledger: Eradicating Financial Misstatement with Ahikam Kaufman, Co-Founder & CEO of Safebooks AI

Tue, 30 Jun 2026 10:00:58 +0000

Ahikam Kaufman spent most of his career in the Bay Area. After becoming a CPA, he started his career as CFO at a startup company. Over time, he has been giving multiple opportunities to not only serve finance, but serve business roles as well - which prepared him for his own entrepreneurial path. IE starting 3 companies and exiting one to Intuit. Outside of tech, he enjoys traveling the world, spending time with his family, and hiking. But, he notes that the demands of being a business owner limits the amount of time he spends in these things.

Ahikam started to think about how automation can positively impact financial operations, specifically around managing data in the office of the CFO. After the first AI models were released, he got excited, realizing that these models would continue to get better and better, alongside operating with agency.

This is the creation story of Safebooks.

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S12 E24 P2: Why Off-the-Shelf APIs Fail Complex Web Workflows and the Blueprint for High-Velocity Product Engineering with Volodymyr & Vitalii Sydorenko, Co-Founders of Gearheart

Thu, 25 Jun 2026 10:00:42 +0000

Volodymyr Sydorenko lives in London, and collects mechanical keyboards. His most unusual hobby is that he does clay sculptures of characters, or random people at times. He has 2 cats, and likes to spend time outdoors. In fact, in 3 weeks time from this recording, he will traveling to Switzerland to do the Via Ferrata. To add to all of this, he has started to write children's books and hopes to publish them someday.

Vitalii Sydorenko currently lives in Lisbon, Portugal. He is into sports, loves to hit the gym and regularly tracks his calories. Last year he started playing tennis and finds that he can't stop. He enjoy hiking, which is great in Lisbon. And in the past, he spent many years building startups, exiting, and also in venture capital

You may have noticed that Volodymyr and Vitalii have the same last name... that is because they are brothers. As kids growing up, they did a lot of boxing together, as well as cling to classic films like Back to the Future.

Fourteen years ago, Volodymyr got interesting in building solutions, and realized he could only get so far by himself... so he decided to build a team to deliver these solutions. Two years ago, Vitalii and Volodymyr started to consider all the of the shifts in the SDLC, and what that meant for the current business. Vitalii decided to bring his prior startup and VC experience and join the team.

This is the creation story of Gearheart.

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The AI Control Loop: When AI Goes Rogue - with Craig Thomas of Wallarm

Wed, 24 Jun 2026 10:00:48 +0000

Today, we are dropping another episode in our series The AI Control Loop, How enterprises govern the AI they've already deployed - sponsored by our friends at Wallarm.

In this episode, Craig Thomas, Sr. Solutions Engineer at Wallarm, examines what rogue AI actually means in practice, where the risk materializes, and what it takes to move from detection to control.

Questions

When we say "rogue AI," what do we actually mean? Is it only malicious AI, or can legitimate systems become risky too?
What are the most common ways AI systems drift outside intended boundaries? Once an organization understands what rogue AI looks like, where does that loss of control typically begin, and who is responsible for preventing it?
How do shadow LLMs, unsanctioned agents, and unmanaged AI workflows create risk even when no attacker is involved? If AI drift often starts with normal business activity, where do shadow AI systems fit into that picture?
Why can an AI action look legitimate in isolation but still create serious business, security, or compliance risk when viewed as part of a larger sequence of actions? As these shadow systems become more embedded in everyday workflows, why is it so difficult to recognize risk in real time?
How do APIs, integrations, and connected systems amplify the impact of those seemingly legitimate actions? What changes once those actions begin flowing across APIs, business applications, and interconnected systems?
What kinds of unexpected outcomes worry CIOs and CISOs most today when AI systems are operating across those interconnected environments? As that connectivity expands, what are security and business leaders most concerned about?
And given those concerns, what does meaningful oversight actually look like when AI systems can act at machine speed?
How should organizations distinguish between the experimentation they want to encourage and the unmanaged AI behavior they need to control? One challenge is balancing governance with innovation. How do organizations avoid slowing down AI adoption while still maintaining control?
We know that many organizations can detect risky AI behavior after the fact. But if they can't stop it in real time, what critical gap still remains? Even with governance programs in place, many organizations are still operating reactively. In closing, what's the key difference between detecting AI risk and actually controlling it?

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Full Abstract

In this episode, Craig Thomas, Sr. Solutions Engineer at Wallarm, examines what rogue AI actually means in practice, where the risk materializes, and what it takes to move from detection to control.

Not every AI threat starts with an attacker. Some of the most consequential AI risks organizations face today come from systems that are working exactly as designed, just not quite as intended. An agent that calls an API it was never supposed to reach. A workflow that exposes PII because nobody mapped the data path before deployment. A shadow LLM standing up in an AWS account because a developer needed to move fast and approval processes were slow. None of these require malicious intent to create serious business, security, or compliance exposure.

Rogue AI is a broader category than most governance frameworks account for. It includes the unsanctioned, the unmonitored, and the unpredictable: AI systems that drift outside intended boundaries, take actions that look legitimate in isolation but create risk in sequence, and operate at machine speed in ways that make after-the-fact detection feel like a consolation prize. The gap most organizations have is not in detecting that something went wrong. It's closing the loop fast enough to matter.

Meaningful AI governance requires more than policy and discovery. It requires the ability to observe AI behavior at runtime, understand what triggered each action and what it touched, and enforce boundaries before consequences compound. That closed AI control loop, from knowing what is running to seeing what it does to stopping what it should not, is the operational standard AI transformation demands. Most organizations are not there yet.

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S12 E24 P1: Why Off-the-Shelf APIs Fail Complex Web Workflows and the Blueprint for High-Velocity Product Engineering with Volodymyr & Vitalii Sydorenko, Co-Founders of Gearheart

Tue, 23 Jun 2026 10:00:43 +0000

This is the creation story of Gearheart.

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S12 Bonus: The Microsoft File Trap: Moving Beyond Manual PowerPoint and Excel Workflows to Build an AI-Native "Consulting" Layer with Tim Lidman, Co-Founder & CEO of Clyde AI

Thu, 18 Jun 2026 10:00:04 +0000

Tim Lidman lives in Denver, CO. He has had an unconventional path to being a Tech CEO. In fact, He moved from London to Sweden when he was 18... to try to be a heavy metal rock star, trying to make it big as a drummer. To earn extra income, he got into tech sales - which went really well. Eventually, he worked with WebEx (around the time it got bought by Cisco), for Success Factors (when they got bought by SAP), and then eventually, doing his own startup (which eventually got bought by Accenture). Outside of his professional life, he is married with 2 girls. From his music years, he extracts skills that drove his success to date, which is the ability to product development and execution down the same way you do music.

In the days of his first startup, Tim's solution was used by consulting firms to power client engagement. Post exit, while overseeing things at Accenture, he noticed that the whole industry was powered by Microsoft files (PowerPoint, Excel, Word, etc.) - IE, driven manually. He started to wonder if he could codify the consulting process, to remove the manual burden.

This is the creation story of Clyde.

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The AI Control Loop: AI Discovery isn't just AI - with Tim Ebbers of Wallarm

Wed, 17 Jun 2026 10:00:35 +0000

Today, we are dropping another episode in our series The AI Control Loop, How enterprises govern the AI they've already deployed - sponsored by our friends at Wallarm.

We all know that you can't secure what you can't see, which is why AI discovery is a first principle for AI security, but what's really required for AI discovery? It's more than just LLMs and agents. Today's episode is entitled AI Discovery isn't just AI, and joining us is Tim Ebbers, Field CTO at Wallarm. Tim and I discuss the real requirements for AI discovery, and why the connections between assets and infrastructure are part of the puzzle.

Questions

Security teams often say, “You can’t secure what you can’t see.” In the context of AI, what exactly do they need to see?
What supporting infrastructure matters most when mapping AI risk, such as APIs, cloud services, Kubernetes workloads, data stores, identities, and external integrations?
Where does shadow AI typically appear first inside an enterprise environment? How can it be prevented?
How do relationships between assets change the risk picture? For example, why does it matter which API an agent can call or which data source a workflow can reach?
What makes AI discovery harder than traditional application or cloud asset discovery? What are the similarities and differences?
How should organizations prioritize what they find? Is every AI asset equally risky?
What does “continuous discovery” mean in a world where AI services can be deployed, connected, or changed in minutes?
Once an organization has visibility into its AI footprint, what’s next? What are the biggest gaps in today’s AI security programs?

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Full Abstract

Most security teams know that you can't secure what you can't see. In the context of AI, that rule turns out to be a lot harder to satisfy than it sounds.

AI discovery isn't just a matter of cataloging your LLMs and agents. The real picture includes the APIs those agents call, the data sources they reach, the infrastructure they run on, and all the AI that got deployed without anyone telling security. Building that picture requires understanding relationships, not just inventories, because risk doesn't live in assets in isolation. It lives in what those assets can do together.

In this episode, Tim Ebbers, Field CTO at Wallarm, examines what a complete AI control loop actually requires at the discovery stage: what needs to be visible, why the connections between assets change the risk calculation, where shadow AI tends to appear first and how it becomes unmanaged risk, and what makes AI discovery structurally different from traditional cloud or application discovery. It also looks at what organizations should do once discovery is in place, and where the biggest gaps remain in AI security programs today.

If your team is building toward continuous AI governance, this is where that work starts.

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S12 E23: Why Traditional Enterprise Linux Starves Your Multi-Million Dollar AI Hardware and How to Reclaim Lost GPU ROI with Gregory M. Kurtzer, Founder & CEO of CIQ

Tue, 16 Jun 2026 10:00:40 +0000

Gregory M. Kurtzer is a veteran open-source pioneer, technologist, and entrepreneur with over 25 years of experience in high-performance computing (HPC) and large-scale enterprise infrastructure. He first gained widespread industry prominence as the co-founder of CentOS Linux, which grew into one of the world's most ubiquitous enterprise operating systems, and he later created other foundational open-source projects like the Warewulf cluster management toolkit and the Singularity (now Apptainer) container system.

In 2020, Gregory founded his current venture, with the goal of modernizing infrastructure stacks for the cloud and AI era. He and his team recognized that traditional enterprise infrastructure was too fragmented and ill equipped to handle the next generation of data intensive computing.

This is the creation story of CIQ.

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Developer Chats – Pavel Shchekotov

Mon, 15 Jun 2026 10:00:16 +0000

Today, we are continuing our series, entitled Developer Chats - hearing from the large scale system builders themselves.

In this episode, we are talking with Pavel Shchekotov, Founding Engineer of specializing in voice-first, conversational AI products. Pavel is going to take us through his experience as an agency founder, leading into building voice driven, consumer AI.

Questions

Today you're building AI-native consumer products around conversational interfaces and user engagement. How has that journey shaped the way you think about product engineering?
What did those agency years teach you about product development that most engineers never learn?
What convinced you that voice could be the primary interface rather than just another feature?
What are the hardest engineering and product challenges that emerge when conversation itself becomes the product?
What’s one problem that seemed trivial on paper but became surprisingly difficult at scale?
What did you learn about technology adoption, trust, and user behavior from building for a demographic that much of the tech industry tends to ignore?
How do you decide whether a startup problem should be fixed, optimized, or completely reimagined?
What does being a Founding Engineer actually look like day-to-day, and how is it different from being a senior software engineer?
Where do you think people are overestimating AI today, and where are they still underestimating it?
Looking forward three to five years, what do you think the most important category of AI-native consumer product will be—and what capabilities will those products need that don’t exist yet?

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S12 Bonus: Skillset Mismatch: Fusing Labor Market Signals with Program Catalogs to Build a Real-Time Economic Intelligence Layer with Sushma Vadlamannati, Founder & CEO of zScale

Thu, 11 Jun 2026 10:00:39 +0000

Sushma Vadlamannati is originally from India, and moved to the states over 25 year ago to pursue her bachelors in at Texas Women's University. She comes from a nontraditional founder background, spending 15 years in the Fortune 100 companies, leading large programs with large budgets. About 5 years ago, she started advising startups and angel investing, which led her into the startup world. Outside of tech, she has 2 daughters and loves to do arts and crafts. In fact, she uses scrap material she finds at home to build miniature scenes and creations.

Sushma is very familiar with the startup scene in Texas. As such, she has a keen understanding of the recurring problems for startups - the local talent pool. In addition to this, she noticed the disconnect between schools, workforce opportunities, and students/workers themselves. She decided to pivot into to building this intelligence layer.

This is the creation story of zScale.

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The AI Control Loop: AI Security is API Security - with Tim Erlin of Wallarm

Wed, 10 Jun 2026 10:00:44 +0000

Today, we are kicking off a new series entitled The AI Control Loop, How enterprises govern the AI they've already deployed - sponsored by our friends at Wallarm.

Today's episode is entitled AI Security is API Security, and joining us is Tim Erlin, VP of Product Marketing at Wallarm. We discuss the foundational link between AI security and API security, digging into the role that APIs play in the dev, deployment, and operations of AI. We explore how they contribute to the risk profile of AI transformation projects, and how securing APIs is critical for successful AI transformation.

Questions

When people hear “AI security,” they often think first about models, prompts, or training data. Why do you argue that AI security starts with APIs?
Where do you see organizations underestimating API risk as they move AI projects from pilot to production?
How does the rise of AI agents change the stakes for API security compared with traditional application architectures?
What are the most common API security assumptions that break down once AI systems begin taking action autonomously?
Wallarm’s ThreatStats research points to APIs as a major overlap point for AI vulnerabilities and exploited vulnerabilities. What does that tell us about where attackers are likely to focus?
How should security leaders think differently about authentication, authorization, and API abuse when the “user” may be an AI agent rather than a human?
What is one practical step teams can take today to strengthen API security before AI adoption expands further?
Once you accept that AI security depends on APIs, what do organizations actually need to discover before they can protect it?

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Full Abstract

In the first episode of the AI Control Loop series, Tim Erlin, VP Product at Wallarm, examines why AI security and API security are the same problem approached from different angles, and what organizations need to discover before they can protect either one.

Every AI model needs data to act on. Every AI agent needs services to call. Every AI workflow needs integrations to function. The connective tissue running through all of it is APIs, which means the security posture of any AI system is inseparable from the security posture of the APIs underneath it.

That link is not theoretical. APIs are already the most targeted attack surface in enterprise environments, and AI is making that problem significantly larger. Agents that act autonomously on behalf of users do not just consume APIs the way traditional applications do. They discover them, invoke them dynamically, chain them across workflows, and do all of it at a speed and scale that makes human review impractical. The authentication assumptions, rate limiting strategies, and abuse detection models that worked for human-driven API traffic were not designed for this, and the gaps are not subtle.

Most organizations moving AI from pilot to production are underestimating how much of their AI risk surface is actually API risk surface. Shadow APIs that were never inventoried, overpermissioned integrations that made sense for a human user but not for an autonomous agent, authentication patterns that cannot distinguish a legitimate AI session from an abused one. Securing AI at the foundational level means answering the API question first: what APIs does the AI touch, what can it do through them, and what would an attacker be able to reach if any part of that surface were compromised.

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S12 E22: The Million-Token Context Mirage: Why RAG is Far From Dead in High-Stakes, Zero-Error Global Tax Compliance with Alex Bowcut, Head of Engineering at Sphere

Tue, 09 Jun 2026 10:00:53 +0000

Alex Bowcut is from Salt Lake City, Utah originally, but has been in the Bay Area for the last 4 years. He's always been interested in computers, and was in middle school when smartphones were blooming. He took part in jailbreaking gadgets and such, and all of these things led to a natural interest in CS, mathematics - and eventually, startups. Outside of tech, he is married with 2 Australian shepherds. He and his wife enjoy hiking with the dogs, and skiing - unfortunately, without the dogs.

Alex was approached by the founder of his current venture. He was approached while he was working at another startup, to tackle the creation of AI control and scaling within the company internally. When he joined, he immediately started changing the game in creating the initial version of their assessment model, TRAM.

This is Alex's creation story at Sphere.

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S12 Bonus: The Context Window Mirage: Why Generic Prompt Engineering Fails Enterprise Workflows and the Rise of Dynamic, Task-Specific RAG Orchestration with Ankit Dheendsa, Co-Founder & CEO of Morphos AI

Thu, 04 Jun 2026 10:00:12 +0000

Ankit Dheendsa is a Canadian, born and raised, living outside of Toronto today. He claims he is fortunate to have a great ecosystem of professionals and mentor sin his area, to help advise him through thick and thin. When he was younger, he was inspired to pursue building things after he watched Iron Man for the first time. Outside of tech, he is an avid boxer and kickboxer. He loves to work out and train, but when he's away from the mat, he likes to read lots of books.

Ankit and his team quickly realized that although the advent of AI was exciting, hallucinations within LLMs area a big problem. They started to dig into how to lower and/or eliminate hallucinations, and ensure that the LLMs only hold onto the most important data. And they landed on a powerful approach to vector size reduction.

This is the creation story of Morphos AI.

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S12 E21: Why Your Health App is Drowning in Wearable Noise (And Missing Real Insights) with Marco Benitez, Co-Founder & CEO of ROOK

Tue, 02 Jun 2026 10:00:09 +0000

Marco Benitez lives in Naples, Florida. In the past he lived in Miami, but found Naples much more family friendly. He is originally from Mexico, along with many of his family members and businesses. Outside of tech, he is married with 2 kids. As a family, they love to go outside, be outdoors and visit the great beaches around Florida. In addition, Marco is a black belt in Taekwondo, and also does Jiu Jitsu.

Marco and his team was building a wearable in the past, centered around fitness. They figured out that the real value was around feeding data into these types of wearables. When they were approached by a company who was excited about this type of solution, they started to accelerate.

This is the creation story of ROOK.

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Founder Chats - Daulet Amirkhanov

Fri, 29 May 2026 10:00:30 +0000

Today, we are dropping another episode in our "chats" series, specifically on the founder side - hearing from those scaling the companies themselves.

In this episode, we are talking with Daulet Amirkhanov, Founding Engineer of Bead AI. Daulet is going to take us through his years at Meta and Cognee, leading into how he is building Bead AI, to take on compliance audits and AI automation.

Questions

Tell me and my audience a little bit about you. You've gone from three years on high-throughput reliability infrastructure at Meta, to engineering the GraphRAG engine and semantic memory systems at Cognee, and you're now Founding Engineer at Bead AI — an a16z-backed startup building autonomous agent infrastructure for compliance audits. How did that journey shape the way you think about engineering for the age of autonomous systems?
Let's zoom into the Meta years. For listeners who haven't worked at that scale — what was the exact piece of logging and reliability infrastructure you owned, what does "high-throughput" actually mean in numbers there, and what's one specific architectural decision from those years that still shapes how you build today?
A lot of infra engineers stay in infra. You made a deliberate move from human-scale systems at Meta to agent-scale systems at Cognee. What did you see in that moment that convinced you AI agent infrastructure was the next distributed systems frontier — and not just the current hype cycle?
Cognee is a GraphRAG and semantic memory company, and your work there was on the agent infrastructure side. Your biggest design call was decoupling the MCP architecture so multiple agentic systems can share unified memory through a standalone process, rather than each one coupling to its own Python runtime. Walk us through what problem that was solving and the key design decision you made.
Give us a concrete example: an agent task that breaks when each agent has its own vector store, but works once they share unified state through the decoupled MCP architecture you built. What's the actual mechanism that makes the difference?
Most engineers in this space come from an ML or applications background. You're coming at agent infrastructure from a pure distributed systems lens. What does that lens let you see that the ML-native crowd is missing?
Bead is a16z-backed and going after compliance audits, which isn't the obvious first market for autonomous agents. You joined as Founding Engineer in January and are shaping the technical core now. From your seat: what makes compliance audits the right wedge for agent infrastructure, and what are the foundational decisions you're making today that will define what the product can do two years from now?
Make a technical claim about agent infrastructure that most people in this space would push back on — and defend it. Where are you the dissenting voice?
Without breaking anything confidential — what's the hardest unsolved problem on your plate at Bead AI right now, and how are you approaching it?
Two years from now, what's the piece of agent infrastructure that we'll consider "obviously necessary" but doesn't exist yet? Who builds it, and what does it look like?

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S12 Bonus: The Human In the Loop Bottleneck: Moving Beyond Static Models to Unleash Autonomous, Recursive Self-Improving AI with Kunal Bhatia, Co-Founder & CEO of Hexo Labs

Thu, 28 May 2026 15:00:12 +0000

Kunal Bhatia is originally from India, but moved to the Bay Area to start building his company. He admits there is quite a contrast between the two places, but originally he was from Bangalore, which is like the Silicon Valley of India - so the professional transition felt familiar. He's worked in AI For 12 years, and is on his 3rd company in the AI space. Outside of tech, he is married with a 3 year old daughter. He and his family love to go on hikes and be outdoors.

Kunal and his team have been researching AI technologies within their current venture. In particular, they were focused on building self improving AI. Beyond that, they have started building and thinking about how to build the AI platform that builds all other technology.

This is the creation story of Hexo Labs.

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S12 E20: The Agentic Privileged Access Crisis: Why Making AI Agents "Well-Behaved" Fails and How to Structuralize Their Blast Radius with Ofir Stein, Co-Founder & CTO of Apono

Tue, 26 May 2026 10:00:36 +0000

Ofir Stein is based in Tel Aviv, Israel, born and raised in Jerusalem. He spent many years in the Israeli air force, in infrastructure and security, before he moved to Tel Aviv. He's a tech guy through and through, bragging about his raspberry pi setup at home, which adjust the AC settings based on the temp outside. Outside of tech, he is married with a daughter and a dog. He's connected and close to his family, which he notes is how he refreshes and reloads as a founder, alongside playing tennis from time to time.

Ofir and his cofounder started interviewing CISO's and security professionals on how they feel about access management. The found out that this was the first line of attack for bad actors, but from a business standpoint, access management is a slow to value feature. They decided to build a platform that was based on just in time access, over the slow to value setup plaguing the industry.

This is the creation story of Apono.

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S12 Bonus: The Bearer Token Trap: Why API Secrets are Leaking and the Rise of Dynamic, Zero-Trust Machine Identity Providers with Anusha Iyer, Founder & CEO of Corsha

Thu, 21 May 2026 10:00:10 +0000

Anusha Iyer is a first generation immigrant, born in India. She moved to the states with her family, when her Dad was going grad school at Ohio State. She fondly remembers sitting on her Dad's shoulders for Buckeyes football games, as he was fan enough for the whole family. Outside of her professional life, she has 2 kids in college who were coding since they could walk - but neither of which ended up in computer science. She loves to cook, and notes that she is not a recipe follower - she likes to use whatever is at her fingertips.

Anusha has been in the cybersecurity space for quite some time, starting off in naval research in DC. Further down here career, she had a friend reach out to pitch an idea to build a platform for dynamic machine identification.

This is the creation story of Corsha.

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Hosted by Noah Labhart | Technical Founder & Startup Mentor.

S12 E19: The Real Estate Draw Nightmare: Automating Underwriting and Risk Mitigation Across $3T in Real Estate Finance Data with Thomas Schlegel, Principal Software Engineer at Built

Tue, 19 May 2026 10:00:19 +0000

Thomas Schlegel lives in Nashville, TN, but grew up in rural Virginia. He didn't have the internet for a large portion of his childhood - but, his friends did! So that meant he was spending more time at his friends place, and eventually when MySpace came around, he was the guy to build everyone's custom site. He's always been the wild idea guy amongst his friends, always the tinkerer. Today, he's married with twins on the way. He loves to run, either on the road or the trails. And when he gets the chance, he enjoys a good conversation with good people, contemplating or pondering the bigger things in life.

In the past, Thomas was a lead engineer at a professional services organization in Tennessee. While at a conference, he met the CEO of his current venture, and they hit it off. He was intrigued by their company, and several years later, he started working for the company as an individual contributor - and quickly activated his entrepreneur DNA to solve ALL the problems.

This is the creation story of Built.

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S12 Bonus: Rewriting the Rules of End-User Computing and the Rise of Autonomous, Agentic AI IT Operations with Yoni Avital, Co-Founder & Chief Evangelist of ControlUp

Thu, 14 May 2026 10:00:50 +0000

This is the creation story of ControlUp.

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S12 E18: Legacy Planning Gaps: Why Static Legal Paperwork Fails Modern Families and the Rise of the Continuous, Compassionate Estate OS with Brooke Hipps, Founder of Weekend Will

Tue, 12 May 2026 10:00:55 +0000

Brooke Hipps currently lives in Fort Worth, TX but grew up down the road in DeSoto. She is entrepreneur through and through, from the early years of learning from her parents, to starting three businesses of her own, in fashion, construction and estate planning. Outside of tech, she has three kids - one out of college and 2 still in college. Brooke is an outdoorsy person, enjoying spending time in nature, hiking, camping and playing a round of golf every now and again.

Recently, Brooke's sister passed away. Obviously, this was a difficult moment for her and her family, but what made it more difficult was that her sister didn't have a will. Brooke started asking the question "why bit?", and exploring building something to help Texan's with writing a love letter to your surviving loved ones.

This is the creation story of Weekend Will.

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Making AI Deterministic for Developers and their Agents, with Patrick Vuong of Moderne

Thu, 07 May 2026 10:00:32 +0000

Questions

Tell me and my audience a little bit about you.
What is Moderne?
Moderne is enabling developers to operate software systems at the speed of agents. Tell me about this product suite.
Why do Agents need tooling? Where do we see AI in ROI
Something jumped out at me... you mentioned you are not only building tooling for agents that are deterministic.
As we peer into tech stacks across the industry, where does Moderne fit?
OK so this is clearly a pivot for Moderne. With this, who are your customers now?
What does the future like for your product - what you offer - and your team?
For you personally, you are entering into a new chapter with Moderne. What makes you most excited, going from Microsoft to entering the startup world with the company?
In your journey, who has influenced the way you work? Tell me about a person, or many persons, or something you look up to and why.
So you worked at Microsoft for 8 years, and are now transitioning to Moderne. Say you were getting on a plan and sitting next to someone about to make this same transition - what advice would you give them?

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S12 Bonus: The AI Tribunal: Turning the Gawker Playbook into an Automated, Crowd-Sourced Jury for Media Accountability with Aron D’Souza, Founder & CEO of Objection AI

Thu, 30 Apr 2026 10:00:46 +0000

Aron D'Souza is originally from Australia, the son of a Chinese mother and an Indian-Portuguese father. He is a graduate of Oxford, and got his PhD from the University of Melbourne. A lawyer by training, he has built 12 companies and has had 5 exits - working with folks like Peter Thiel, the New York Stock Exchange and the Enhanced Games. In general, he's a problem solver, and turns all of his fun into work.

Aron made the stark realization that we are a divided society, and do not have a trusted, unbiased media source. He attempted to build a rudimentary version of a solution for a tribunal of truth 20 years ago, but the tech wasn't ready for it. That is, until the most recent advances in AI.

This is the creation story of Objection AI.

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S12 E16: The LLM Wild West: Moving Beyond Fragile Notebook Prompts to Build a Multi-Model Enterprise AI Control Plane with Nikunj Bajaj, Co-Founder & CEO of TrueFoundry

Tue, 28 Apr 2026 10:00:16 +0000

Nikunj Bajaj was born in India, and completed his undergraduate studies there. The intrigue of Silcon Valley in 2013 brought him to the Bay Area, where he got his masters degree from Berkeley. His studies and his time after school supremely informed what he is building now, at his current venture. But outside of tech, he is an outdoorsey person, enjoying running, biking and scuba diving, with his favorite place to dive being Bali. He enjoys playing board games with his friends, and listens to a lot of audiobooks from a wide range of genres.

After joining Meta, Nikunj realized that building machine learning models for the company is different than using public ecosystems. The realized early on that machine learning models will hit an inflection point, where the stacks will need to change and adapt. He and his team decided to take on this challenge ahead of that inflection point.

This is the creation story of True Foundry.

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S12 Bonus: Why Your Enterprise AI Pilots Are Stalling and the Unsexy Data Pipeline Fix for 10x Engineering Velocity with Tyler Hochman, Founder & CEO of FORE Enterprise

Thu, 23 Apr 2026 10:00:30 +0000

Tyler Hochman got started early in the world of entrepreneurship. In Middle School, he got into Gemology, fascinated by the formation of gems, becoming a young GIA certifier. This taught him to get out of his comfort zone, from which he started his first business as a junior at Stanford. Past that, it's been a similar process of identifying a problem and looking at how to build a solution. Outside of tech, he is married with a 1 year old son, and another child on the way. He loves spending time with his son, enjoying all of the things parenthood throw at you.

Tyler built a workforce turnover solution half a decade ago, in the space of predicting employee turnover in a business. It got a lot of solid traction, but what he and his team noticed was that though people wanted to use the solution, they didn't have the infrastructure necessary to provide data to the tool. This led he and his team to swim a bit downstream to build that data pipeline for customers.

This is the creation story of FORE Enterprise.

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S12 E15: The Copilot Fallacy: Why Pure Automation Fails the Real World and the Rise of the Hybrid AI-Human Lifestyle OS with Meghan Joyce, Co-Founder & CEO of Duckbill

Tue, 21 Apr 2026 10:00:19 +0000

Meghan Joyce comes from a long line of people living life to the fullest. She takes a lot of influence from her grandmother, who was an entrepreneur, making and selling dresses in the early 1900's, influencing her to take a hold of every moment in life and capitalize on the time you have. She's led groups at Uber and Oscar, prior to starting her current venture. But outside of tech, she is the mother of 3 children. Her favorite hobby is to spend time with the people she loves, meeting them where they are. But when she has spare time to herself, she enjoys being in nature, hiking or walking on a beach, and staying active.

Meghan was sitting on a bed in Amsterdam, and experienced a problem with parental technology (IE a breast pump) that was keeping her from running things at Uber. While sitting on hold with the company, trying to get another one available, she started to wish she had a solution that would help her with this, while she attended her meetings at Uber.

This is the creation story of Duckbill.

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The AI Ultimatum: Preparing for a World of Intelligent Machines and Radical Transformation with Steve Brown

Thu, 16 Apr 2026 10:00:56 +0000

Today we have a special guest and author on the Code Story podcast, Steve Brown. Steve is a former DeepMind futurist, and recently published a book called The AI Ultimatum: Preparing for a World of Intelligent Machines and Radical Transformation. In the book, he provides a step by step framework to guide leaders in identifying use cases for AI, turning it into business value, and obtaining buy in from employees.

In our conversation, Steve is going to elaborate on why AI is a teammate (not a threat), the top AI rollout mistakes, leadership and management tactics that need to go, and much more.

Questions:

What led you to write this book? Ultimately, what were you trying to accomplish?
We often hear that AI is coming for our jobs, but you argue it’s actually our newest teammate. Can you elaborate on this more?
Let's double back on something you said, around the flavors of agents. What are those 3 different flavors of agents?
Over time, leaders can fall into operating out of their experience - IE assumptions about a particular endeavor. With the advent of AI, what assumptions need to be retired, and what needs to replace them?
In the same vane as the last question, you mention that old-school management fails in the age of AI. What do you mean by this, why does it fail and what needs to be changed?
In the book, you talk about the AI wins you can use today, effectively pointing at immediate impact teams can feel from using AI. Can you talk to 2-3 of the most important ones?
Can you explain why reinvention beats reduction? If this is the case, how can leaders and employees move into this way of thinking?
Today, people are trying to rollout AI and getting it wrong - from the startup to the enterprise. What are the top AI rollout mistakes for companies to avoid?

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S12 E14: The "Ship and Pray" AI Trap: Moving Beyond Vibe Checks to Give Product Managers a Code-Free Validation Engine with Catalina Turlea, Co-Founder & CEO of Lovelaice

Tue, 14 Apr 2026 10:00:28 +0000

Catalina Turlea is originally from Romania, growing up in the countryside there. Post getting her bachelors, she moved to Austria for her masters, and landed in Germany for 13 years. She is married with a 3 year old daughter and many, many pets. She loves to spend time with her family, in nature and the mountains. She used to do a lot of sports, but being a startup founder doesn't really allow for as much running or hiking. She also is into calligraphy, which she calls her hidden superpower.

Catalina has been building products for 14 years, and recently was running a small tech consultancy for startups. What she observed was that a lot of products contained an AI feature, but the "feature" was based on a prompt, didn't work well, and wasn't a good fit for the users. Eventually, she and her co-founder realized they saw the same problem, and built a platform to support products teams in building valuable AI features.

This is the creation story of Lovelaice.

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S12 Bonus: Fusing AI-Powered Predictive Malware Inference with Content Disarmament and Reconstruction (CDR) to Neutralize Silent File Attacks with Dr. Aqib Rashid, Applied AI Lead at Glasswall

Thu, 09 Apr 2026 10:00:07 +0000

Dr. Aqib Rashid was born and raised in London. He spent a lot of time around computers and tech growing up, and his parents pushed him towards becoming an expert in a discipline, being a positive influence on society. But he maintained his balance in life by playing sports, which inspired him to want to lead a team in the future. But outside of tech, he is a Dad to a one year old boy. He enjoys spending time with him outdoors, and finds that the real beauty in life is watching him grow up.

In Sept 2023, Aqib had completed his PhD around the subject of using AI to detect malware. His current venture was looking at how to implement this sort of approach into their products. Quickly, he got to work building a new product to detect malware in your files.

This is Dr. Rashid's the creation story of Glasswall.

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S12 E13: The Death of Legacy VDI: Ditching Costly Virtual Desktops to Secure Enterprise BYOD Laptops Locally with David Matalon, Founder & CEO of Venn

Tue, 07 Apr 2026 10:00:23 +0000

David Matalon grew up in Great Neck, outside of New York City. He's always been interested in tech, way back in the early days of PCs, DOS, Windows and even Novell. In fact, he was the high school kid with an IT Consulting business on the side (yes, he wore a beeper to school). He graduated from NYU, and started his first company Offyx. Outside of tech, he is married with 4 kids. When asked about what he does for fun, he says that enjoys the all compassing nature of work and family life.

David's whole career has been centered around helping companies deliver distributed applications. In most of recent history, virtual desktops or VDI has been the de facto solution for businesses, with lots of issues and pains baked in. David and his team heard the cries of their customers, and decided to build a better solution - one, with a blue border.

This is the creation story of Venn.

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Founder Chats - Vadim Dedov

Fri, 03 Apr 2026 10:00:33 +0000

Today, we are dropping another episode in our "chats" series, specifically on the Founder side, - hearing from those scaling the companies themselves.

In this episode, we are talking with Vadim Dedov, CEO at Catchers. Vadim is going to walk us through what problem he wanted to solve with Catchers, and how his product development journey took him through architectural decisions, product optimization, team building and more.

Questions

Before we talk about Catchers, I’d love to understand you a bit better.
What experiences or responsibilities earlier in your life shaped how you think about work, systems, and accountability today?
What problem were you dealing with before Catchers existed? Not as a product idea yet, but as a real operational pain you kept running into.
At what point did you realise this couldn’t be solved with people, spreadsheets, or manual coordination anymore and that technology was the only way forward?
How did Catchers actually start taking shape as a product? What was the very first version you built, and what did “good enough” mean in a business where mistakes affect people’s income and compliance?
How long did it take to get to something usable, and what constraints defined your MVP?
Looking back, what were the most important trade-offs you made early on?
Things you consciously postponed or simplified, knowing they might come back later.
Let’s zoom in on the product itself. What is the core product insight behind Catchers — the thing you believe differentiates it from a typical HR or staffing platform?
How did your thinking about architecture evolve as scale increased? Was there a moment when you had to stop moving fast and redesign parts of the system properly?
How did you approach building your core team around such a complex, operations-heavy product? What qualities mattered most in the people you trusted with this system?
Can you share a decision that didn’t go as planned and how you and your team dealt with the consequences?
When you step back and look at what you’ve built today, what are you most proud of not in terms of features, but in terms of reliability, impact, or how the system holds under pressure?
As you look ahead, how do automation and AI change the way you think about workforce platforms — and what advice would you give to someone building infrastructure-heavy products today?

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S12 Bonus: Intercepting Risky Prompts and Deploying Local LLMs to Neutralize Data Leakage via Pragatix with Yoav Crombie, Co-Founder & CEO of AGAT Software

Thu, 02 Apr 2026 10:00:39 +0000

Yoav Crombie was born and raised in Israel, serving in the army for 6 years as an engineer. He's been in the tech industry of 35 years, but doesn't see this work as work. He thoroughly enjoys what he is doing, especially with what is going on with AI right now, specifically around the quick creation process. Outside of tech, he has been married for 30 years. He loves water sports - kite surfing, regular surfing and paddle boarding. In addition, he loves to cycle, and was the Israeli road champion many years ago.

Yoav realized that companies were struggling that businesses were struggling to implement and adopt AI. In particular, he noticed that there was risk in publicly sharing your data. But alongside that, other companies wanted more control to how AI functioned for their country. So his company started to build a solution to solve both of these problems.

This is the creation story Pragatix, a product of AGAT Software.

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S12 E12: The Rogue Agent Epidemic: Moving Beyond Laptop Prompts to Build a Centralized, Production-Grade AI Control Plane with Robert Brennan, Co-Founder & CEO of OpenHands

Tue, 31 Mar 2026 10:00:30 +0000

Robert Brennan grew up in Boston and loved it so much that he ended up calling it home again. He spent time in New York between his bookend times, but he enjoys the chill pace and great music of Boston over the fast pace of the big apple. Outside of technology, he likes to read nonfiction and fiction, specifically science fiction. He loves music, and. Has been playing guitar for 25 years now. He frequents the live music scene around Boston, and even lives near a jazz club.

Robert observed the release of the first version of Devin a few years ago, which was very exciting to see agent driven development. But he and his co-founders were concerned with who was going to govern how this software was going to get written - and they hypothesized that it should be open source and community driven.

This is the creation story of OpenHands.

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S12 Bonus: The Predictive Model Trap: Moving Beyond Static LTV Forecasting to Unleash Causal AI and Dynamic Multi-Armed Bandits with Tobias "Tobi" Konitzer, PhD, VP of AI at GrowthLoop

Thu, 26 Mar 2026 10:00:26 +0000

Tobi Konitzer was born in Germany, and studied cultural studies as an undergraduate student. Eventually, he went to Duke to get a PhD in political science. And that eventually changed to be a PhD in computational social science at Stanford - which is basically writing code to answer social science questions. After graduating in 2017, he joined Facebook Research for a year, then founded two AI startups. Outside of tech, he has 2 young daughters, who he likes to spend time with and take to the park. He used to be an avid trail runner, but his favorite to do is think... and to do so as often as possible.

For the last 10 years of his career, Tobi has been chasing optimized decisioning and outcomes using AI. Five months ago, he decided to join his current venture, and use AI to shift the conversation from "tooling for marketers" to using AI to build an autonomous decisioning system, that learns and improves over time.

This is Tobi's creation story at Growthloop.

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S12 E11: The Security Operations Center "Hellscape": Moving Beyond Broken Threat Feeds to Empower Overworked Cyber Analysts with Human-AI Collaboration with Brian Carbaugh, Co-Founder & CEO of Andesite

Tue, 24 Mar 2026 10:00:55 +0000

Brian Carbaugh has a non-standard path to being a CEO in the startup world. He was in the marine core for 5-6 years in active duty, before attending Georgetown for school. Eventually, he joined the CIA and spent 23 years, serving the country in multiple different roles and facets, primarily in para military and covert operations. While he was there, he also started to see areas where the agency could innovate, and got curious about how they could partner with private companies. Outside of tech, he is a father of 3 girls and a boy. He enjoys working out, skiing and riding on road bikes. He used to do triathlons in the past, but startup life has taken up any time he could dedicate to that.

Shortly after he retired from the CIA, Brian got a call from some prior folks he knew still in the industry. He started digging into the cybersecurity world, specifically into why there was so much attrition amongst the employees themselves. He was asked the question about how he could 10x this workers, and optimize these individuals using the latest tech?

This is the creation story of Andesite.

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S12 Bonus: Why Paper-Heavy Back-End Portals Fail Agents and the Rise of Client-Facing, Real-Time Transaction OS with Reannah Wyatt, Founder & CEO of The Real Time

Thu, 19 Mar 2026 10:00:46 +0000

Reannah Wyatt is from Bandera, TX, raised on a 4th generation cattle and horse ranch. Eventually, she went to West Texas for school, rodeoing for Howard University, specifically barrel racing. She eventually started selling residential real estate, and fell in love with the industry. Outside of tech and real estate, she is a mom and still loves horses and cattle. She doesn't ride anymore, but leans more into the breeding side of the animals.

Reannah was in residential real estate for over a decade, and was in the mix when Zillow was launched. The platform helped her grow her business, and she knew this was where the industry was headed. But what she couldn't understand was... why wasn't there something built to track the end to end real estate process and transaction?

This is the creation story of The Real Time.

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S12 E10: The Childhood Smartphone Epidemic: Re-Engineering Android OS to Stop Social Media Addiction and Teach Kids Digital Wellness with Dane Witbeck, Founder & CEO of Pinwheel

Tue, 17 Mar 2026 10:00:34 +0000

Dane Witbeck grew up in Georgia, and has always had an entrepreneurial spirit. He was the kid selling ripped CD's in school, along with other odds and ends. He went to Georgia Tech to study engineering, and eventually went on to join a startup called Meshify, in the iOT place - which eventually was bought by a large insurance company. Outside of tech, he is married with 4 kids. He is involved in many entrepreneurial groups around Austin, and is the proud owner of a 1969 Ford Bronco - which he enjoys getting out of town in and camping.

Post his prior startup, Dane was on the lookout for problems to solve. He observed his son's friend getting a hand-me-down iPhone, and it hit him that he was going to have to monitor this as his children got phones. As he started to dig into what was available, he realized there wasn't a good solution... and decided to build his own.

This is the creation story of Pinwheel.

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S12 Bonus: The Social Curation Revolution: Moving Beyond Messy Bookmarks to Build an Intuitive, Shareable "Stacking" Ecosystem with Martina Zrnec, Co-Founder & CTO of Stacklist

Thu, 12 Mar 2026 10:00:51 +0000

Martina Zrnec is located in Croatia and grew up playing basketball, spending every minute she could on the court. And when I say every minute, I mean it - she would even skip the last few hours of school and hit the court for some practice. Eventually, her mother decided for her that she should not pursue it professionally, and should focus on her schooling. Outside of tech, she's married with 2 kids. She notes that she is not just a coding person - she likes to socialize! She plays piano, and as a family, they spend a lot of time outside, biking, playing sports and being in nature.

Martina's co-founder, Kyle, had this idea that he wanted to create - a platform that allowed people to organize the products, services and experiences they love into stacks. He found Martina on a freelancing platform, and they instantly connected on the idea - and got to building.

This is the creation story of Stacklist.

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S12 E9: Breaking the 30-Second Video Processing Barrier to Deliver Sub-Second, Interactive Generative Media with Mitesh Agrawal, Co-Founder of Positron

Tue, 10 Mar 2026 10:00:37 +0000

Mitesh Agrawal has a background in Mechanical Engineering. He was one of the co-founders of Lambda, a company in the supercomputing space, where he spent 8.5 years working on everything under the sun. He's very grateful to be in an industry that is booming, but also aligns with his personal interests. Outside of tech, he is married to an ultra supportive wife, and is enjoying being a new father. He enjoys playing tennis, when he can find time to get to the court, and enjoys a good sci-fi book. He mentioned the Foundation series was one of his favorites, but admits it changes depending on the season.

In 2023, the officers at Mitesh's current venture noticed all of the advancements of AI - in particular, model sizes getting larger. What they realized was that when it comes to inference, memory capacity quickly became a problem... and with this, he and the team got excited about building a new architecture to make it better.

This is the creation story of Positron.

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Hosted by Noah Labhart | Technical Founder & Startup Mentor.

S12 Bonus: Why Spray-and-Pray Job Applications Are Quietly Destroying Your Tech Career Momentum with Ashwin Agrawal, Founder & CEO of MobiusEngine

Thu, 05 Mar 2026 11:00:19 +0000

Ashwin Agrawal came to the US when he was 17, to Rochester for school. He now lives in the Bay Area, and admits he misses his friends on the east coast, as they all stayed back in that area - but he does NOT miss the winters. He has been building his current venture for 3-4 years, and prior to that, he was as at Google for a decade, apart of Google Cloud's huge growth trajectory. Outside of tech, he has a family with 2 middle school sons, with whom he likes to spend a lot of time with, hiking or eating good sushi.

Ashwin was laid off from a few jobs in the past. After experiencing this, he vowed to build a solution that would help people going through this sort of experience. After the last layoff, he formed his company at 4:30 am in the morning, to help anyone in point A wanting to go to point B.

This is the creation story of MobiusEngine.ai.

Sponsors

Unblocked (https://getunblocked.com/codestory)
TECH Domains (https://get.tech/codestory)
Mezmo (https://mezmo.com/codestory)
Braingrid.ai (https://braingrid.link/code-story)

Links

Current Sponsors:

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Hosted by Noah Labhart | Technical Founder & Startup Mentor.

Developer Chats - Oleksandr Piekhota

Wed, 04 Mar 2026 11:00:42 +0000

Today, we are continuing our series, entitled Developer Chats - hearing from the large scale system builders themselves.

In this episode, we are talking with Oleksandr Piekhota, Principal Software Engineer at Teaching Strategies. Oleksandr helps to show us at what point of scale platform approaches are required, when to run experiments and when to stop, and perhaps more importantly - engineering ownership beyond the code.

Questions

You’ve moved from hands-on engineering into principal and technical leadership roles, working on architecture and platforms.At what point did you realize your work was no longer about individual features, but about the system as a whole
Across several projects, growth didn’t break functionality — it exposed architectural limits.Can you recall a moment when it became clear that shipping more features wouldn’t solve the problem, and a platform approach was required?
You’ve designed and supported APIs end-to-end, from architecture to real customers. How do you distinguish between an API that simply works and one that can truly support business scale?
Internal systems like invoicing and HR workflows began as automation, but evolved into real products.What tells you that an internal tool is worth developing seriously rather than treating as a temporary workaround?
In R&D, you explored CI/CD automation, server-less, and infrastructure experiments — not all reached production. How do you decide when an experiment should continue, and when it’s no longer worth the engineering cost?
You’ve hired teams, set standards, and shaped long-term technical direction. At what point does an engineer stop being a contributor and start owning business-level outcomes?
You contributed to open-source tools that later became part of your company’s infrastructure. Why do you see open source contributions as part of serious engineering work rather than a side activity?
Looking across your projects, how do you now recognize a truly mature engineering system? Is it code quality, process, or how teams respond when things go wrong?
If we look five to seven years into the future, which architectural assumptions we treat as “standard” today are most likely to turn out to be naive or limiting?

Sponsors

Unblocked (https://getunblocked.com/codestory)
TECH Domains (https://get.tech/codestory)
Mezmo (https://mezmo.com/codestory)
Braingrid.ai (https://braingrid.link/code-story)

Links

Current Sponsors:

Checkout our Stacklist! https://stacks.codestory.co/

Hosted by Noah Labhart | Technical Founder & Startup Mentor.

S12 E8: H1B Paperwork Nightmare: Why HR Teams Stumble on Visas and How Digital-First Frameworks Shift Ownership Back with Satya Mishra, Co-Founder & CTO of WayLit

Tue, 03 Mar 2026 11:00:06 +0000

Satya Mishra was born and raised in India, in one of the smaller tech hubs on the eastern coast. He came to the states 25 years ago on an H1B visa, working in semiconductors. In 2015, he decided he wanted to do something entrepreneurial and set out to do so. Outside of tech, he is married with 3 kids, which takes up most of his time. When he lived in CO, he did lots of skiing and hiking, including snowshoe hiking. Once he went to California, he switched to beaches. Finally, when he moved to St. Louis, he took up improv, enjoying connecting with people and thinking on your feet.

Satya and his co-founder, Raj, both when through the immigration process in all of its forms. They realized that no one group owns the process, as it's highly specialized, and usually fell onto the employee to keep track of. One day, they set out to solve this problem, to assist business teams to take ownership of the entire process.

This is the creation story of WayLit.

Sponsors

Unblocked (https://getunblocked.com/codestory)
TECH Domains (https://get.tech/codestory)
Mezmo (https://mezmo.com/codestory)
Braingrid.ai (https://braingrid.link/code-story)

Links

Current Sponsors:

Checkout our Stacklist! https://stacks.codestory.co/

Hosted by Noah Labhart | Technical Founder & Startup Mentor.

Founder Chats - Max Denevich

Mon, 02 Mar 2026 11:00:26 +0000

Today, we are dropping another episode in our "chats" series, but expanding the audience set to include more folks. This episode is Founder Chats - hearing from those scaling the companies themselves.

In this episode, we are talking with Max Denevich, Co-founder and CRO of LoyaltyPlant. Max is going to share with us to road he travelled, entering into this industry, his go to market strategies, scaling across geographic region - and much, much more.

Questions

Before we talk about products and scale, tell us a bit about your path to this point. What experiences shaped the way you think about business and leadership before LoyaltyPlant?
At what point did you realise you wanted to work with complex, traditional industries rather than consumer apps or “easy” tech?
Why foodtech, and specifically Quick Service Restaurants? What made you believe this industry had deep structural problems worth solving with technology?
What made you decide to join LoyaltyPlant, and what potential did you see that others might have missed?
You’re often referred to as a co-founder today. How did the transition happen from an executive role to shaping the company’s future at that level?
LoyaltyPlant was close to running out of investment at one point. What were the first decisions that fundamentally changed the company’s trajectory?
What were the key milestones that turned LoyaltyPlant from a struggling company into a global enterprise business, from the first major client to scaling across 30 countries?
You’ve worked across the US, UK, MENA, Europe, and CIS. What did you learn about scaling the same product across very different markets, and what absolutely doesn’t translate?
You built new go-to-market strategies that now generate over 90% of new sales. What did you change compared to a classic SaaS sales playbook, and why did it work in enterprise QSR?
Margins are shrinking, aggregators dominate, and costs are rising. What’s actually happening on the ground right now in QSR and foodtech, and how should companies adapt?
Tell us about a decision you got wrong. What did it cost the business, and what did it teach you as a leader?
What advice would you give founders building B2B products for traditional industries today, especially around scale, partnerships, and staying relevant?

Sponsors

Unblocked (https://getunblocked.com/codestory)
TECH Domains (https://get.tech/codestory)
Mezmo (https://mezmo.com/codestory)
Braingrid.ai (https://braingrid.link/code-story)

Links

Current Sponsors:

Checkout our Stacklist! https://stacks.codestory.co/

Hosted by Noah Labhart | Technical Founder & Startup Mentor.

S12 Bonus: Pioneering Female-Led Logistics: How to Build and Fund a High-Density Micromobility Platform in Rapidly Growing Markets with Nouran Farouk, Founder & CEO of Dosy

Thu, 26 Feb 2026 11:00:57 +0000

Nouran Farouk grew up in Egypt, which she notes the culture has a deep root in family. She and her sister have always been drawn to social entrepreneurship, being drawn to building but also positively impacting the world. In addition, Nouran has a medical background, which taught her that good intentions are not enough - you need good systems. Outside of tech, she loves to travel and visit cities. She frequently observes how people move throughout the world, and how systems influence their daily life.

Nouran and her sister wanted to learn to drive scooters. In doing so, they were immediately greeted with inequitable opportunities for women in this arena. They wanted to change this situation, and deployed a back of the napkin idea into a fully operational platform.

This is the creation story of Dosy.

Sponsors

Unblocked (https://getunblocked.com/codestory)
TECH Domains (https://get.tech/codestory)
Mezmo (https://mezmo.com/codestory)
Braingrid.ai (https://braingrid.link/code-story)

Links

Current Sponsors:

Checkout our Stacklist! https://stacks.codestory.co/

Hosted by Noah Labhart | Technical Founder & Startup Mentor.

S12 E7: Fusing Bring-Your-Own-AI Logic with Governed Orchestration to Bridge Enterprise System Gaps Without the Migration Risk with James Davies, CEO of Kinetic Data

Tue, 24 Feb 2026 11:00:53 +0000

James Davies lives in the Maryland area, and started his career at the crossroads of tech and the auto industry. His first girlfriend's father owned some car lots - so he went to work there, wrote some software, and propelled his success at those dealerships. He notes that the auto industry was fun and has a lot of moving parts, but was pretty taxing personally. Outside of tech, he is married with 2 kids. He grew up around construction, so he enjoys getting his hands dirty and building things. In fact, he is fixing up the barn of the recent home he bought - framing, doing the plumbing, and making it livable.

James was working for the state department as a consultant, and was a customer of his current venture. He was chosen to implement the solution, which turned out to be a successful project. Post that project, he was approached by the company to lead projects on the east coast and eventually landed in the CEO role.

This is James' creation story at Kinetic Data.

Sponsors

Unblocked (https://getunblocked.com/codestory)
TECH Domains (https://get.tech/codestory)
Mezmo (https://mezmo.com/codestory)
Braingrid.ai (https://braingrid.link/code-story)

Links

Current Sponsors:

Checkout our Stacklist! https://stacks.codestory.co/

Hosted by Noah Labhart | Technical Founder & Startup Mentor.

S12 Bonus: Deliverability Death Trap: Why Your Cold Outreach is Hitting the Spam Folder and the AI Engine Keeping Domains Out of Gmail Jail with Daniel Shnaider, Co-Founder & CEO of Warmy.io

Thu, 19 Feb 2026 11:00:03 +0000

Daniel Shnaider came from a family that worked 9 to 5 jobs - engineers, doctors, etc. He was a military officer in Isreal, and while he was there, he met the son of the founder of Waze. After learning about that journey, he knew he wanted to build something meaningful, and started building businesses. Outside of technology, he loves pushing himself to the limits. But to relax, interestingly enough he does adrenaline activities - sky diving and racing cars.

As I mentioned, Daniel started and ran many businesses in the past. One of them was centered around physical products, and led him to send emails to the mom and pop' shops they wanted to work with. To fight the spam trap, he and his team built a solution to solve the problem for themselves... and then took the next step.

This is the creation story of Warmy.io.

Sponsors

Unblocked (https://getunblocked.com/codestory)
TECH Domains (https://get.tech/codestory)
Mezmo (https://mezmo.com/codestory)
Braingrid.ai (https://braingrid.link/code-story)

Links

Current Sponsors:

Checkout our Stacklist! https://stacks.codestory.co/

Hosted by Noah Labhart | Technical Founder & Startup Mentor.

S12 E6: Moving Beyond Simple Chatbots to Run end-to-end B2C Support and Operations via Agentic AI Layers with Michael Fester, Co-Founder of 14.ai

Tue, 17 Feb 2026 11:00:45 +0000

Michael Fester grew up in Denmark, the son of a French mother and a Danish father. He was always interested in tech, math and the arts, initially wanting to go into design. However, he did research in number theory at Cambridge, and founded his first startup in Paris, which eventually was acquired by Sonos. Outside of tech, he enjoys reading, in particular the classics - like Dostoyevsky - and biographies - like that of Einstein. He enjoys eating and living healthy, and promotes this lifestyle at his current venture.

Michael and his team noticed that despite the continual improvement of models, the process of maintaining systems using AI was tedious. Not only did this impact support operations, and building software for this area of a business, but negatively impacted the customers themselves. He and his wife wanted to build the new standard for how support operations are run.

This is the creation story of 14.ai.

Sponsors

Unblocked (https://getunblocked.com/codestory)
TECH Domains (https://get.tech/codestory)
Mezmo (https://mezmo.com/codestory)
Braingrid.ai (https://braingrid.link/code-story)
Alcor (https://alcor.com)
Equitybee (https://codestory.co/equitybee)
Terms and conditions: Equitybee executes private financing contracts (PFCs) allowing investors a certain claim to ESO upon liquidation event; Could limit your profits. Funding in not guaranteed. PFCs brokered by EquityBee Securities, member FINRA.

Links

Current Sponsors:

Checkout our Stacklist! https://stacks.codestory.co/

Hosted by Noah Labhart | Technical Founder & Startup Mentor.

S12 Bonus: The Accountability Economy: Why "Buying Developer Capacity" is a Scam and the Blueprint for 400% Faster Engineering Velocity with Prashanth Tondapu, Founder & CEO of Innostax

Thu, 12 Feb 2026 11:00:54 +0000

Prashanth Tondapu was born and raised in India, now living in New Delhi, the capital there. He claims to be a textbook nerd, loving technology and information. He reads a lot, primarily eastern philosophy and stuff on being enlightened, basically pointing him to skills in accepting reality. He's married with two girls, 9 and 4 years old, along with a Labrador and a German shepherd. He says that having 3 girls in the house means he has 3 supreme leaders.

Prashanth has worked for companies in the past focused on products - companies like McAffee and the Advisor Board Company. Outside of that, he started to build product after product, but no one wanted to buy his product. Eventually, he was tasked to advise a company in product delivery, which then changed everything.

This is the creation story of Innostax.

Sponsors

Unblocked (https://getunblocked.com/codestory)
TECH Domains (https://get.tech/codestory)
Mezmo (https://mezmo.com/codestory)
Braingrid.ai (https://braingrid.link/code-story)
Alcor (https://alcor-bpo.com/)
Equitybee (http://codestory.co/equitybee)
Terms and conditions: Equitybee executes private financing contracts (PFCs) allowing investors a certain claim to ESO upon liquidation event; Could limit your profits. Funding in not guaranteed. PFCs brokered by EquityBee Securities, member FINRA.

Links

Current Sponsors:

Checkout our Stacklist! https://stacks.codestory.co/

Hosted by Noah Labhart | Technical Founder & Startup Mentor.

The Gene Simmons of Data Protection - AI Inference-time Guardrails

Wed, 11 Feb 2026 11:00:09 +0000

The Gene Simmons of Data Protection: Protegrity's KISS Method

Today, we are releasing our final FINAL episode from our series, entitled The Gene Simmons of Data Protection - the KISS Method, brought to you by none other than Protegrity. Protegrity is AI-powered data security for data consumption, offering fine grain data protection solutions, so you can enable your data security, compliance, sharing and analytics.

Episode Title: Navigating the Future of Data Management: Type Systems, Quantum Computing, and Protegrity's Innovations

In our final-FINAL episode, we are speaking with Ave Gatton, Director of Generative AI. We talk about how AI safety doesn't end with training, it begins with inference. We explore the overlooked frontier of AI security, from prompt-injection, data leakage, and model manipulation. Ave helps to understand how you can build guardrails that operate in real time, and adapt to evolving threats.

Questions

What are inference-time threats and why are they becoming a critical focus in AI security?
How do inference-time risks differ from training-time risks?
Why is inference-time protection critical for safe, scalable AI adoption?
How do inference-time threats vary across industries? Is there any industry where these attacks are most prevalent?
Why are traditional security models insufficient at inference?
What is the impact of inference-time breaches on AI adoption?
What role does compliance play in shaping inference-time guardrails?
What practical steps can organizations take to secure inference today?
How can businesses balance performance with security when adding guardrails?

Links

Current Sponsors:

Checkout our Stacklist! https://stacks.codestory.co/

Hosted by Noah Labhart | Technical Founder & Startup Mentor.

S12 E5: The Flying Drone Fallacy: Why Forklift Computer Vision Beats Full Automation and the Rise of the Autonomous Warehouse AI Agent with Marc Gyöngyösi, Founder & CEO of OneTrack

Tue, 10 Feb 2026 11:00:15 +0000

Marc Gyöngyösi has had a lifelong passion for building and technology, shaped early on by time spent crafting wooden projects and tinkering with remote-controlled vehicles... before progressing to constructing a full 737 flight-simulator cockpit in their parents’ basement as a young teen. His interests have consistently centered on blending the physical and digital worlds, from open-source flight-simulator development to modern explorations in AI, which now occupies most of his free time. Outside of tech, he enjoys running, skiing, golf, and staying active, and although he has spent time flying, he's stepped back from it due to time constraints. He's especially fond of a well-made Austrian Wiener Schnitzel — an elusive treasure in the U.S., but one they happily track down whenever possible.

In 2017, Marc launched his company Intelligent Flying Machines, which was a college project focused on building autonomous drones for warehouses. After dealing with crashes, and 12 stitches from said crashes, Marc shifted his focus from flying robots to a broader, computer vision platform capturing real world data.

This is the creation story of OneTrack.

Sponsors

Unblocked (https://getunblocked.com/codestory)
TECH Domains (https://get.tech/codestory)
Mezmo (https://mezmo.com/codestory)
Braingrid.ai (https://braingrid.link/code-story)
Alcor (https://alcor-bpo.com/)
Equitybee (http://codestory.co/equitybee)
Terms and conditions: Equitybee executes private financing contracts (PFCs) allowing investors a certain claim to ESO upon liquidation event; Could limit your profits. Funding in not guaranteed. PFCs brokered by EquityBee Securities, member FINRA.

Links

Current Sponsors:

Checkout our Stacklist! https://stacks.codestory.co/

Hosted by Noah Labhart | Technical Founder & Startup Mentor.

S12 Bonus: Why Traditional Nearshore IT Outsourcing is Broken (And How "Own It, Prove It" Dev Stacks Fix It) with Johnny Halife, Partner & CTO of SOUTHWORKS

Mon, 09 Feb 2026 11:00:34 +0000

Johnny Halife was born and raised in Argentina. As such, he takes soccer very seriously. He is a die hard fan of Boca, and has taken his family to live games in Miami and Nashville. He is the father of 2 young boys, which he notes completely changed his life. He has been slowly introducing them to soccer, as an Argentina after would do, and they love the roar of the stadium during a game. He also claims to be a really bad golfer, which I can relate to.

Twenty one years ago, Johnny started working for Microsoft Engineering behind the scenes, helping them shape products. Eventually, he and his team started asking the question - if we are helping Microsoft, why don't we help other companies?

This is Johnny's creation story at Southworks.

Sponsors

Unblocked (https://getunblocked.com/codestory)
TECH Domains (https://get.tech/codestory)
Mezmo (https://mezmo.com/codestory)
Braingrid.ai (https://braingrid.link/code-story)

Links

Current Sponsors:

Checkout our Stacklist! https://stacks.codestory.co/

Hosted by Noah Labhart | Technical Founder & Startup Mentor.

Impact: How to Inspire, Align and Amplify Innovative Teams with Keith Lucas

Thu, 05 Feb 2026 11:00:13 +0000

Today, we have a special guest on the podcast, Keith Lucas, a startup advisor specializing in product, growth, people and culture. Keith led product and engineering at Roblox, helping scale its infrastructure, product offerings, team and business. Most recently, Keith published a book entitled Impact: How to Inspire, Align, and Amplify Innovative Teams. All book proceeds go to charities to help young entrepreneurs, so make sure you check the link in the notes and grab the book today.

In our chat, Keith is going to walk us through key concepts in the book, surrounding centering your team around the vision and mission of what you are driving towards, from recruiting to execution to "coaching out".

Questions:

What was your goal in writing this book? What were you hoping to accomplish?
In Chapter 1, you mention purpose inspiring action. How does aligning to purpose drive urgency, without resulting in burnout or being an "antiquated mandate", like you mention in Chapter 2?
You state "Culture is what you do, not what you say"... How does a leader's daily behavior - especially around micromanagement or decision-making speed - define the team's realized values, overriding the company's codified ones?
I found the idea of The Cascade (Chapter 5) interesting, mapping core beliefs to execution alignment. In terms of feedback, what is the difference between "belief busting" and "hypothesis busting" feedback? How should leaders respond to each in order to maintain trust and agility?
How often should entrepreneurial teams deliberately challenge and re-org autonomous pods to optimize for agility and opportunity, over long term stability?
Now this is interesting - the "okay contributor", you define as a person who meets standards in all areas but shows no exceptionalism. Why is this person more damaging to a culture of mastery, than the high talent disrupter?
What is a Mission Athlete? When recruiting, how does preparing a vision doc for a role shift the recruiting conversation from transactional to one focused on strategic alignment and ownership?
You mention in Chapter 8 that compensation can be a distraction. What core mistakes do scaling startups make with compensation that turn it from a non-issue into an energy-sapping problem that erodes retention?
You define Coaching Out as the intentional process of protecting the productive from the disruptive, treating an exit as a non-personal assessment that maintains decency and clarity. Can you describe the GYOR continuum?
Why should leaders avoid formal PIP's when dealing with a struggling team member? What must replace it to ensure accountability and decency?

Sponsors

Unblocked (https://getunblocked.com/codestory)
TECH Domains (https://get.tech/codestory)
Mezmo (https://mezmo.com/codestory)
Braingrid.ai (https://braingrid.link/code-story)
Alcor (https://alcor.com/podcast)
Equitybee (http://codestory.co/equitybee)
Terms and conditions: Equitybee executes private financing contracts (PFCs) allowing investors a certain claim to ESO upon liquidation event; Could limit your profits. Funding in not guaranteed. PFCs brokered by EquityBee Securities, member FINRA.

Links

Current Sponsors:

Checkout our Stacklist! https://stacks.codestory.co/

Hosted by Noah Labhart | Technical Founder & Startup Mentor.

S12 Bonus: Stripping Away Platitudes, Defining Clear Categories, and Storytelling for AI-Search Discovery with Marlena Sarunac, Co-Founder & Fractional CMO at The Company Advice

Wed, 04 Feb 2026 11:00:17 +0000

Marlena Sarunac is a first generation American, her family being from Croatia. She started her career at Mastercard, left to travel around Europe (before it was cool to do so), and then came back to join her first startup. During her travels, she figured out that she was truly an American, as she prefers the entrepreneurial pace of life. Her path has been in marketing, but she also has an engineering degree, which gives her a unique edge. Outside of tech, she is married to a chef, with a 2 year old daughter and a rescue dog. They live in Rhode Island, in the Bristol area.

Marlena and her now co-founder met at a prior company, and worked well together promoting that brand. The built a playbook, and always dreamed of starting their own thing to push those playbooks. The stars aligned later in life, and they decided to give it a go.

This is the creation story of The Company Advice.

Sponsors

Unblocked (https://getunblocked.com/codestory)
TECH Domains (https://get.tech/codestory)
Mezmo (https://mezmo.com/codestory)
Braingrid.ai (https://braingrid.link/code-story)
Alcor (https://alcor.com/podcast)
Equitybee (http://codestory.co/equitybee)
Terms and conditions: Equitybee executes private financing contracts (PFCs) allowing investors a certain claim to ESO upon liquidation event; Could limit your profits. Funding in not guaranteed. PFCs brokered by EquityBee Securities, member FINRA.

Links

Current Sponsors:

Checkout our Stacklist! https://stacks.codestory.co/

Hosted by Noah Labhart | Technical Founder & Startup Mentor.

S12 E4: The Accent-Biased Workplace: Shifting from Extractive Transcripts to Local, On-Device "Listener-Side" Phoneme Translation with Arto Minasyan, Co-Founder & President of Krisp.ai

Tue, 03 Feb 2026 11:00:41 +0000

Arto Minasyan is originally from Armenia. He's a serial entrepreneur, having started 7 companies, selling 4 of them. He used to be into the sciences, having his PhD in Mathematics and Machine Learning. But outside of tech, he's married with 2 kids. He loves to read novels, and in fact writes books himself (mainly his memoirs). He loves to ski, and aligned with his Armenian heritage, he loves to spend time with his big family.

Arto and his colleague got breakfast together, and started talking through an idea around clean audio for conferencing and beyond. They built a prototype, and then COVID hit - which made their tool very popular.

This is the creation story of Krisp.ai.

Sponsors

Unblocked (https://getunblocked.com/codestory)
TECH Domains (https://get.tech/codestory)
Mezmo (https://mezmo.com/codestory)
Braingrid.ai (https://braingrid.link/code-story)
Alcor (https://alcor.com/podcast)
Equitybee (http://codestory.co/equitybee)
Terms and conditions: Equitybee executes private financing contracts (PFCs) allowing investors a certain claim to ESO upon liquidation event; Could limit your profits. Funding in not guaranteed. PFCs brokered by EquityBee Securities, member FINRA.

Links

Current Sponsors:

Checkout our Stacklist! https://stacks.codestory.co/

Hosted by Noah Labhart | Technical Founder & Startup Mentor.

S12 Bonus: Why Staff Augmentation is Quietly Starving Your Product Innovation: Dmytro Ovcharenko, Founder & CEO of Alcor

Thu, 29 Jan 2026 11:00:55 +0000

Dmytro Ovcharenko lives in Palo Alto, CA. He graduated from Berkeley in 2015 - not as an engineer, but as a lawyer. His first connection to tech was in his first role, as an attorney at a tech company. But outside of technology, he loves good sushi and burgers. In addition, he does a bit of hiking - some for fun, but also some for business. He's been known to take a meeting or two on the hiking trail.

Dmytro very much enjoyed working at his prior company. But he noticed the large gap between what his business was charging, and what the engineers themselves received. He thought he could close this gap, to provide a better wage for the workers while saving businesses money.

This is the creation story of Alcor.

Sponsors

Unblocked (https://getunblocked.com/codestory)
TECH Domains (https://get.tech/codestory)
Mezmo (https://mezmo.com/codestory)
Braingrid.ai (https://braingrid.link/code-story)
Alcor (https://alcor.com/podcast)
Equitybee (http://codestory.co/equitybee)
Terms and conditions: Equitybee executes private financing contracts (PFCs) allowing investors a certain claim to ESO upon liquidation event; Could limit your profits. Funding in not guaranteed. PFCs brokered by EquityBee Securities, member FINRA.

Links

Current Sponsors:

Checkout our Stacklist! https://stacks.codestory.co/

Hosted by Noah Labhart | Technical Founder & Startup Mentor.

S12 Bonus: Dismantling Legacy HR Silos to Automate Onboarding, Scheduling, and Compliance for the Deskless Economy with Arjun Vora & Tito Goldstein, Co-Founders of Teambridge

Wed, 28 Jan 2026 11:00:17 +0000

Arjun Vora was born and raised in Mumbai. He grew up in a family that wasn't financially stable, which drove him to come to the states for new opportunities. He came for school, landing in Ann Arbor, Michigan, and immediately loved the environment. Post school, he worked for MicroStrategy and Salesforce, eventually landing at Uber - where he met Tito. Outside of tech, he's married to his girlfriend from 9th grade with 2 kids.

Tito Goldstein was introduced to technology when he was 8 years old, building simple games in Q basic. Since then, he ha s been tinkering and creating things. He graduated from USC, and continuing tinkering in web design and building products around the messaging world. Eventually, he came to Uber and met Arjun on day one. Outside of tech, he enjoys projects where he finds something scary and then digs in to become a true expert.

While Tito and Arjun were at Uber, they quickly understood that the reason people drove for the company was not the pay, but the flexibility and self service aspect of the platform. With this, they started to wonder... why can't we give this to everyone else?

This is the creation story of Teambridge.

Sponsors

Unblocked (https://getunblocked.com/codestory)
TECH Domains (https://get.tech/codestory)
Mezmo (https://mezmo.com/codestory)
Braingrid.ai (https://braingrid.link/code-story)
Alcor (https://alcor.com/podcast)
Equitybee (http://codestory.co/equitybee)
Terms and conditions: Equitybee executes private financing contracts (PFCs) allowing investors a certain claim to ESO upon liquidation event; Could limit your profits. Funding in not guaranteed. PFCs brokered by EquityBee Securities, member FINRA.

Links

Current Sponsors:

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Hosted by Noah Labhart | Technical Founder & Startup Mentor.

S12 E3: Overhauling Enterprise Deal-Making via Real-Time Dynamic Deal Rooms and Autonomous Investor Analytics with Arsham Ghahramani, Founder & CEO of Ribbon

Tue, 27 Jan 2026 11:00:39 +0000

Arsham Ghahramani lives in Toronto, but grew up in rural countryside of UK, out in the middle of nowhere on a farm. He was surrounded by tractors, chickens, and other animals. Over time, he moved to bigger and bigger cities, until 6 years ago, he jumped across the pond to Canada. Outside of tech, he loves team sports, playing a lot of soccer and starting to get into hockey. When he transitioned to hockey, he immediately enjoyed how fast paced it was, and how many tactics carried over from soccer.

In the past, Arsham was the head of machine learning at a prior company. His now co-founder and he worked closely together, and they were both pressured to hire good people quickly. They started to notice some patterns in how they were hiring... including the regular submission of AI generated resumes.

This is the creation story of Ribbon.

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S12 Bonus: Overcoming Broken Right-Sizing Models to Automate Real-Time, Non-Disruptive Cloud Cost Optimization with Sharad Kumar & Harshit Omar, Co-Founders of FluidCloud

Thu, 22 Jan 2026 11:00:32 +0000

A fun fact about both of these gentlemen: this is their third company to work together in, their second startup, and their wives are sisters. So they are connected by wives, and united by startups.

This is the creation story of Fluidcloud.

Sponsors

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Terms and conditions: Equitybee executes private financing contracts (PFCs) allowing investors a certain claim to ESO upon liquidation event; Could limit your profits. Funding in not guaranteed. PFCs brokered by EquityBee Securities, member FINRA.

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S12 Bonus: Decoupling Compute and Storage to Solve the Petabyte-Scale Log Cost Crisis and Power Real-Time AI SRE Engines with David Sztykman, Chief Architect & VP of Product at Hydrolix

Wed, 21 Jan 2026 11:00:10 +0000

David Sztykman lives in Paris, but used to live in New York for a time. He has always been into video, streaming and photography. For the latter, as a kid, his Dad had a film developing lab in their basement, so he spent many hours doing that before digital changed it all. As a student, he used to tinker with open source video streaming libraries, and eventually worked for Alkamai, responsible for the streaming media for Europe (think the Olympics or Super Bowl). Outside of tech, he has 2 kids and they like to do a lot of legos together. But in general, they are outside kids so usually, they like to get out of the house and do active things.

In his prior role, David was consistently alerted about poor performance on the video streaming. He started to dig into the data streaming portion of, to be alerted on shifts in the stream itself. After a few other opportunities, he was approached to build real time CDN observability, for distributed infrastructure.

This is the creation story of Hydrolix.

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Terms and conditions: Equitybee executes private financing contracts (PFCs) allowing investors a certain claim to ESO upon liquidation event; Could limit your profits. Funding in not guaranteed. PFCs brokered by EquityBee Securities, member FINRA.

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S12 E2: Why Pure AI Automation Fails Enterprise Procurement and How "Customer Assurance" Unlocks Hidden Deal Velocity with Pukar Hamal, Founder & CEO of SecurityPal AI

Tue, 20 Jan 2026 11:00:56 +0000

Pukar Hamal was born in 1991, and is originally from Katmandu, Nepal. He grew up with no plumbing and no electricity, prior to moving to the states to grow up in Queens. Eventually, he moved to the Bay Area to attend Stanford, and fell in love with the area and the forward thinking culture. Outside of tech, he's been married for a few years. He enjoys listening to podcast about tech, finance, and economics, along with playing tennis every now and again.

In his past venture, Pukar was on the one yard line for making a deal on his company. Before it could close, his team was hit with a security due diligence questionnaire that halted the process. Having that experience drove him to build something to speed up the execution and experience of customer assurance.

This is the creation story of SecurityPal AI.

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S12 Bonus: Why Your Favorite Luxury Hotel Is Quietly Replacing Front-Desk Forms with AI Agents with Harman Singh Narula, Co-Founder & CEO of Canary Technologies

Thu, 15 Jan 2026 11:00:12 +0000

Harman Narula lives in NYC with his wife and 2 young kids. He was born in the states, from parents who immigrated to the country from India. The "immigrant household" was one that focused on hard work and ethics - and it was fueled by the lore of his grandfather's entrepreneurial adventures. He's a big Knicks fan, and likes to take in a game when he can. And prior to NYC, he lived in San Francisco for 10 years or so, and picked up bike riding. Though he hasn't picked it back up just yet, he hopes to eventually.

Harman spent a lot of his early career in hospitality. His now co-founder worked in this space as well, but primarily on the technology size. So all the conversations he and his friend were having were referencing this eco-system. Eventually, they landed on a thesis that the "hotel tech stack" or operating system - should be customer facing.

This is the creation story of Canary Technologies.

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Terms and conditions: Equitybee executes private financing contracts (PFCs) allowing investors a certain claim to ESO upon liquidation event; Could limit your profits. Funding in not guaranteed. PFCs brokered by EquityBee Securities, member FINRA.

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S12 Bonus: The Death of the Black Box POS: Solving the Menu API Nightmare and Scaling Unified Commerce Across 2,000+ Locations with Niko Papademetriou, Co-Founder & EVP of Qu

Wed, 14 Jan 2026 11:00:59 +0000

Niko Papademetriou lives in Washington, DC, with his wife and son. He has had an interesting background professionally. He got into finance, and experienced all the downside that 2008 had to offer. Post all of that, he started a restaurant at the age of 26 with some folks, and quickly realized how difficult it was. After 4 years, he met some guys and wanted to start a new thing. Outside of tech, he and his wife spends a lot of time watching his son play hockey, and engaging with the team at the hockey rink.

Niko has observed the restaurant business change, moving towards many different ordering methods - mobile, web, in person, etc. At the end of whatever method, the order needed to land inside the black box of the POS system. He wanted to create the plumbing, better yet the ultimate system to connect it all.

This is the creation story of Qu.

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Terms and conditions: Equitybee executes private financing contracts (PFCs) allowing investors a certain claim to ESO upon liquidation event; Could limit your profits. Funding in not guaranteed. PFCs brokered by EquityBee Securities, member FINRA.

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S12 E1: The Blast Radius Nightmare: Shifting from Blind Static Terraform Plans to Real-Time Predictive Change Intelligence with Dylan Ratcliffe, Founder & CEO of Overmind

Tue, 13 Jan 2026 11:00:05 +0000

Dylan Ratcliffe lives in San Francisco (for less than a year), but grew up on a farm in the bush in Australia, riding motorbikes and playing video games. He fondly remembers the days whenever you could get a free version of Age of Empires from a cereal box. He was always into computers, and earned a scholarship to head into Melbourne for University. He left his first job as an auditor with KPMG to join a startup called Puppet. Outside of tech, he still rides motorbikes, and has a super small one now (it's actually meant for kids). He loves all food, but prefers Asian and Indian cuisine.

Dylan was deploying Puppet at a financial services company, and was pushing to get a win. When a late Friday afternoon deployment went haywire, he decided to leave his company and set out to build something to automatically discover dependencies on a network, to prevent deployment outages.

This is the creation story of Overmind.

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Alcor (https://alcor.com/podcast)
Equitybee (http://codestory.co/equitybee)
Terms and conditions: Equitybee executes private financing contracts (PFCs) allowing investors a certain claim to ESO upon liquidation event; Could limit your profits. Funding in not guaranteed. PFCs brokered by EquityBee Securities, member FINRA.

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S11 Favorite: The Agent Authentication Crisis: Moving Past Prompt Engineering to Build Zero-Trust Tool Execution and Secure zkTLS/MCP Actions Planes with Sam Partee, Co-Founder & CTO of Arcade.dev

Tue, 06 Jan 2026 11:00:24 +0000

Sam Partee started out his love for tech/engineering by working on cars. After many y ears of working on cars, and even starting his own car stereo installation business, he decided that cards were finite and moved onto computers. He fell in love with the space, and the rest is history, filled with super computers, AI, distributed training, Redis and the lot. Outside of tech, he loves to take long hikes with his snowy husky.

Sam and his team built a prior solution, an agent to solve bugs for you. They ran into a litany of problems, but eventually figured out that there was a dire need for an authorization for the activities that agents wanted to do on your behalf. Fast forward, and they are working with Anthropic to define these auth protocols.

This is the creation story of Arcade.

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S11 Favorite: The API Sprawl Cure: Moving Beyond GraphQL Federation to Composable, Type-Safe API Gateways for the Agentic Era with Jens Neuse, Founder of WunderGraph

Tue, 30 Dec 2025 11:00:56 +0000

Jens Neuse grew up in Germany, originally planning to be a carpenter. In his 2nd year as an apprentice, he was in a motorcycle wreck that thrust him into a process of surgery and healing. Eventually, he decided he wouldn't be doing carpentry, and got into sysadmin work. Once he got bored with this, he moved into startups, learned how to code, and starting digging into programming, API's and eventually - GraphQL federation. Outside of tech, he is married with 3 young kids. He loves to sit ski on the mountain - which is the coolest carbon fiber chair on a ski, where you steer with your knees and hips.

After chasing building a better Apollo, Jens and his team ran into a point where their prior product and company was doomed to go under. When they accepted this fact, they started to think about what people actually wanted - and started to dig into the federation of GraphQL.

This is the creation story of Wundergraph.

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S11 E30: The $20 Trillion Paper Trail: Why Contracts Are Financial Assets (Not Just Legal Documents) and How Multi-Agent AI Slashes Enterprise Procurement Waste with Brandon Card, Co-Founder & CEO of Terzo

Tue, 23 Dec 2025 11:00:14 +0000

Brandon Card has always been involved in sports. In High School, he was a 3 sport athlete and still plays today, along side working out, doing yoga and pilates. He's heavily interested in holistic healing and alternative medicine, mentioning a big interest in quantum frequency healing, using the sun and ocean to add voltage to the body. He has also started a foundation around mental health, as sadly, he lost his co-founder to suicide, and wishes to remove the stigma from the mental health conversation.

Brandon and his co-founder realized that all software platforms around contracts were directed towards lawyers - not towards finance. This was mind blowing, as negotiations are mostly finance driven, not based on the paragraphs of legal jargon. Brandon wanted to build something to serve this need.

This is the creation story of Terzo.

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S11 Bonus: The Myth of "Sales as an Art": Transitioning from Gut-Based Forecasts to Algorithmic CRM Forensics and Pipeline Cadence with Juan DeAngulo, Co-Founder of Inselligence

Thu, 18 Dec 2025 11:00:28 +0000

Juan DeAngulo was born and raised in South America - then eventually, came to the status in 2017 for college to play Tennis. He kept playing throughout college and into his 40's, at which point he switched to golf and never picked up a racket again. He's been married for 25 years, with 2 older kids - one in law school, and one studying software development. As a family, they enjoy comedy, which funny enough was an acquired taste for Juan. They also love being outdoors, anywhere they can get out and about.

At a prior company, Juan and his team created proprietary algorithms to intelligently predict and tie revenue. These models were based on tried and true processes. While Juan was obtaining an advanced degree at Harvard, his current venture was incubated around predictive revenue, and these algorithms.

This is the creation story of Inselligence.

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Developer Chats - Petr Petrenko

Wed, 17 Dec 2025 11:00:15 +0000

Today, we are continuing our series, entitled Developer Chats - hearing from the large scale system builders themselves.

In this episode, we are talking with Petr Petrenko, Senior PHP Backend Engineer. Petr will take us through his developer journey, in working on large scale backends, managing the tension between stability and innovation, and designing systems to interact with culturally different economies.

Questions

You’ve worked on large-scale backends that serve millions of users. At what point do systems start to outgrow the teams that built them?
At some point, every mature backend reaches a stage where rewriting is no longer realistic. How do you recognize when a system has crossed that line, and what’s the right way to handle it?
There’s always this tension between stability and innovation. How do you decide when a system needs refactoring versus when you just need to live with the technical debt?
Let’s talk about the human side of legacy systems — what have you learned about culture, documentation, and knowledge transfer that keeps old systems alive and reliable?
You’ve also built and maintained complex payment systems for global users. What’s something most engineers underestimate about cross-border transactions?
When you’re designing systems that deal with different currencies, laws, and tax regulations, how do you balance the technical with the ethical — for example, user privacy or data sovereignty?
For engineers listening who want to build something durable — not just fast — what advice would you give about writing code that will still make sense years from now?
One of your most impressive projects is a high-performance image-matching system you built yourself, capable of scanning tens of millions of images with sub-second results. Can you walk us through the moment you realized you needed to redesign the system — and what engineering choices made that level of performance possible?
You’ve also worked on billing systems and fraud mitigation at scale. Was there ever a moment when you had to choose between a technically “clean” solution and a solution that better protected users or the business? How did you make that call?

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https://www.linkedin.com/in/petr-petrenko-006534150/

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Hosted by Noah Labhart | Technical Founder & Startup Mentor.

S11 E29: The 60-Second Behavioral Blueprint: Why "Great-on-Paper" Candidates Fail and How Voice AI Biomarkers Predict Real-World Team Chemistry with Sarah Lucena, Founder & CEO of Mappa

Tue, 16 Dec 2025 11:00:08 +0000

Sarah Lucena lives in San Francisco, and starts here day at 4:30 am to lead her LATAM team. She's originally from Brazil, born and raised on the north east side of the country. She studied in South Paulo, and spent 5 years in Uruguay, which was a huge influence in her career today. Outside of tech, she is a big cat lover, having 2 at her home. When it comes to Brazil, she recommends people visiting Rio, which condenses everything good about Brazil into one city.

In the past, Sarah felt empty at her job. In other words, she was not happy with the legacy she was leaving. She built her team many times over, but was not able to create a team with the chemistry she was looking for. And the solutions for recruiting were supremely focused on the wrong signals for these types of connections.

This is the creation story of Mappa.

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S11 Bonus: Headless Observability: Why Dashboards Are Disappearing and How "Context Engineering" Achieves a 90% Drop in AI SRE Costs with Tucker Callaway, CEO of Mezmo

Thu, 11 Dec 2025 11:00:14 +0000

Tucker Calloway grew up in Alamo, California, in the Easy Bay Area. And has returned to that area to raise his family - 25-30 minutes outside of the San Francisco area. He studied computer science at Cal, but eventually moved into sales engineering - and then sales. But outside of tech, he is married with 2 kids - one in college, and one in the latter years of high school. There is lots of change going on his family's life right now, but Tucker finds time to do woodworking and build his own cabinets.

Ten years ago, a couple of co-founders built a solution to make log management easier for developers. Tucker joined that company in the past, and observed the dynamics of the industry and the company. They all decided that to take the business of the next level, they needed to change the physics of observability.

This is the creation story of Mezmo.

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S11 E28: The Temporal Correctness Crisis: Why Static RAG Context Leads to Broken AI Agent Actions and How to Engine-Unify Real-Time Streaming Data with Hojjat Jafarpour, Founder & CEO of DeltaStream

Tue, 09 Dec 2025 11:00:17 +0000

Hojjat Jafarpour lives with his family in California. He got his PhD in databases and data streaming, back when the landscape was different and data streaming wasn't "cool" yet. He was an early member at Confluent, but also spent time at Quantcast, Informatica, and NEC Labs. Outside of tech, he has a family with young kids. He enjoys traveling, and can't wait until the kids are old enough to take on big trips.

Hojjat joined Confluent in their early days. He was on a project that built out kSQL, which was a key cornerstone of Confluent. As these were the early days of stream processing, he started to think about ways to make it easier - to make this sort of tech available without all the infrastructure.

This is the creation story of DeltaStream.

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Developer Chats - Svyatoslav Babinets of Meta

Mon, 08 Dec 2025 11:00:49 +0000

Today, we are kicking off a new series, entitled Developer Chats - hearing from the large scale system builders themselves.

In this episode, we are talking with Svyatoslav Babinets, Engineering Manager at Meta. Svyatoslav helps to illuminate teh approaches he takes when building larger scale systems, connecting millions of users, and motivating users and developers alike.

Questions

You’ve worked on everything from large-scale multiplayer worlds to social technologies that power digital presence — how did that journey shape the way you think about engineering today?
You’ve worked on systems that connect millions of users across different platforms and products. How do you design architecture that supports high development velocity in large teams while still delivering experiences that delight users?
In your experience, what helps large companies move faster without sacrificing quality? Can you share how approaches like Virtual mission squad enable cross-functional collaboration across different disciplines and tech stacks?
As systems and teams grow, platform solutions often become the glue that holds everything together. How do you approach designing and implementing platform architecture that supports autonomy while keeping the whole ecosystem consistent?
From your experience, where do culture and infrastructure intersect? What kinds of engineering decisions are really decisions about trust, not technology?
You’ve worked both in games and in metaverse projects. What do these worlds teach us about building systems that feel alive — where motion, identity, and emotion all need to synchronize?
Large-scale systems evolve constantly. How do you design for long-term adaptability — ensuring that architecture remains flexible and scalable as product and user demands grow?
Looking ahead, how do you see the future of human–digital interaction? What should the next generation of engineers focus on — performance, presence, or empathy?

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S11 Bonus: The New AI Engineering Reality: Decoupling Testing and Orchestrating the Next-Gen Software Factory with Spriha Baruah Tucker, Field CTO / Executive Leader at Buildkite

Fri, 05 Dec 2025 11:00:41 +0000

Spriha Baruah Tucker has spent time in a number of places - growing up in India, attending boarding school in Singapore, and now living in San Francisco. She spent many years at Google, before founding her own startup called Aviator. Outside of tech, she really likes music, having a soft spot in her heart for Bollywood, but really digging into the jazz world these days. She enjoys the guilty pleasure of trashy romance TV, and tends to travel to get the best food - her favorite being Nashville.

Spriha was a founder at Aviator, and was made aware of her current company while serving her customers. He noticed that all of her customers who used this platform absolutely adored it, to the tune of making infomercials for the platform. She reached out to the founder to let him know... and the rest is history.

This is Spriha's creation story at Buildkite.

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S11 Bonus: Dismantling the "Upwork Middleman Tax" and Scaling a Global Freelance Network Without Percentage Slices with Gajus Kuizinas, Co-Founder & CTO of Contra

Thu, 04 Dec 2025 11:00:20 +0000

Gajus Kuizinas lives in Mexico City, and travels between there, New York and San Francisco. He had a non-traditional upbringing for an engineer, as all of his family were into the arts - so he had to make his own way. He started in Lithuania, and eventually was recruiting to setup computers and networks for dating platforms. Eventually, he got into freelancing, and started his first startup in the UK. Outside of tech, he has a garden, which doubles as an ecosystem for his free roaming hedgehog and bunny.

Gajus started to think about the arc of becoming a freelancer. He realized that everyone who goes through a journey as a freelancer feels like a cog in the machine, and falls off the marketplaces out there. He realized that there was a massive vacuum and gap in the internet for these folks that needed to be filled.

This is the creation story of Contra.

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The Railsware Way - Mistakes & Lessons in Product Evolution, with Oleksii Ianchuk

Wed, 03 Dec 2025 11:00:41 +0000

Today, we are dropping our final episode in the series "The Railsware Way", sponsored by our good friends at Railsware. Railsware is a leading product studio with two main focuses - services and products. They have created amazing products like Mailtrap, Coupler and TitanApps, while also partnering with teams like Calendly and Bright Bytes. They deliver amazing products, and have happy customers to prove it.

In this series, we are digging into the company's methods around product engineering and development. In particular, we will cover relevant topics to not only highlight their expertise, but to educate you on industry trends alongside their experience.

In today's episode, we are speaking with Oleksii Ianchuk, Product Lead at Railsware, specifically for Mailtrap. Thought he doesn't like to limit his activities to product development, Oleksii has spent six years in product and project management, and is keen on searching for insights and putting them to work, as well as gauging the effects of his input.

Questions:

The story of Mailtrap starts with accidentally sending test emails to real users in 2011. How did Mailtrap evolve from an internal "fail" to a platform serving hundreds of thousands of users? How did that mistake spark the creation of Mailtrap, and what lessons did you learn about turning problems into opportunities?
What made you decide to expand from email testing into Email API/SMTP delivery - and why was it harder than expected? What specific challenges around deliverability, spam fighting, and infrastructure caught you off guard?
Can you walk us through the "splitting the product" mistake and its long-term consequences? Your team decided to separate testing and sending into different repositories and isolated VPC projects. What seemed like a good engineering decision at the time - how did this create problems as you scaled, and what would you do differently?
You spent a year struggling with Redshift before switching to Elasticsearch - what did that teach you about technology decisions? You ran tests, evaluated alternatives, and still picked the wrong database for your use case. How do you balance thorough research with the reality that you can't always predict what will work until you're in production?
When do you buy external expertise versus rely on your internal team? How do you decide when to hire outside knowledge, and how do you find the right consultants for niche problems?
Why didn't existing Mailtrap users immediately adopt the Email API/SMTP feature, and what did that teach you?
You expected current users to quickly transition to the new sending functionality. What did you learn about switching costs, user perception, and the challenge of changing how people think about your product?
What business insights around deliverability, spam prevention, and compliance surprised you most?
Email delivery isn't just about infrastructure - there's a whole ecosystem of postmasters, anti-spam systems, and compliance requirements. What aspects of this business were most unexpected, and how did they shape your product strategy?
Looking at Mailtrap's 13-year journey, what's your philosophy on "failing fast" versus "building solid foundations"?

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Hosted by Noah Labhart | Technical Founder & Startup Mentor.

S11 E27: Why Conventional SaaS Billing Fails the Agentic Era and How to Protect Margins on Non-Deterministic Actions with Raj Dosanjh, Co-Founder & Engineering Lead at Paid

Tue, 02 Dec 2025 11:00:00 +0000

Raj Dosanjh grew up in Coventry, which he calls the Detroit of the UK. He still enjoys following the football team, and hopes they rejuvenate the city some. He eventually left for University and moved to London. He likes to dig into how people think and how things are built. Outside of tech, he is engaged to be married in 2026. As such, he has recently taking up physical training - which results in a lot of working out, and meals filled with chicken.

In the past, Raj's now co-founder reached out to him, post shutting the doors on his prior startup. After they had felt out the market to see if a solution for billing could fit, they moved forward and eventually started enabling revenue streams for AI agents.

This is the creation of Paid.

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S11 Favorite: Why "Vibe Coding" Fails at Scale and How No-Code Ecosystems Unlocked $1B in User Revenue with Emmanuel Straschnov, Co-Founder & CEO of Bubble

Tue, 25 Nov 2025 11:00:57 +0000

Emmanuel Straschnov grew up in rural France, which is interestingly enough where he started doing computer stuff (he mentioned there wasn't much else to do in the 90's). He grew up sailing, as he lived next to the shore in Normandy. He never really thought he would end up coding, but after obtaining his MBA, he ended up doing just that. Outside of tech, he is married with 2 children. He mentions that most of his hobby time is devoted to them, but on occasion, he likes to travel, continue sailing, and to sing.

Many years ago, Emmanuel noticed that there were a lot of people searching for technical founders, and using services to find technical founders. He thought this to be wrong, as many people have product ideas and just need a product to help them build it... so, he created something just for them.

This is the creation story of Bubble.

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Unbreakable: How to Thrive Under Fear-Based Leaders with Kate Lowry

Thu, 20 Nov 2025 11:00:04 +0000

Today, we have a special guest on the podcast, Kate Lowry, CEO coach, author and comedian. She is a long time startup founder, spent time in VC, is leading a values driven coaching and advising firm called Scaleheart, and recently, just published a book. The title of the book is Unbreakable: How to Thrive Under Fear-Based Leaders, and is a tactical guide to help smart, caring people get unstuck to they thrive under fear based leadership.

In our conversation today, Kate is going to enlighten us on what fear based leadership is, how to use the predictability of fear based leaders to your advantage, and why its having (another) moment in the tech ecosystem today.

Questions:

Tell me about your startup journey as a serial founder.
You've been around the block in the tech industry. From your vantage point in startups, big tech, and VC, why is this new leadership style hitting now?
How does this type of culture show up in startups, versus larger companies like Meta?
How does it manifest in investing?
Why is fear-based leadership antithetical to innovation?
If it's so bad for innovation, why do people keep choosing it anyway?
What makes leaders like this so predictable?
How can people use that predictability to their advantage?
How has the type of issues you work on with your CEOs changed as this leadership style comes into vogue?
What are the most common ways that you help founders in your coaching practice?
What are three ways CEOs can make sure fear-based leadership doesn't take root in their corner of the tech ecosystem?
How has the AI boom affected all of this?

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The Railsware Way - How an MBA Helps (or doesn't) Product Mgmt, with Julia Starun

Wed, 19 Nov 2025 11:00:21 +0000

Today, we are another episode in our series, sponsored by our good friends at Railsware. Railsware is a leading product studio with two main focuses - services and products. They have created amazing products like Mailtrap, Coupler and TitanApps, while also partnering with teams like Calendly and Bright Bytes. They deliver amazing products, and have happy customers to prove it.

In today's episode, we are chatting with Julia Starun, Product Director at Railsware with over 17 years of experience in product management, business process automation and optimization. Julia will share her insights into where an MBA helps you manage a product team - and where it doesn't.

Questions:

What was your story before MBA, and what motivated your decision to pursue it?
What real-world gaps between MBA theory and product management practices did you discover at Railsware?
Does MBA training help with the "people management" side of leading product teams?
How can the tools and frameworks you learned during your MBA help with uncertainty – or overcomplicate things – when creating products?
How does understanding "business stuff" – like P&L, unit economics, financial modeling, etc. – change how you approach product decisions?
Does MBA business strategy training help product managers think beyond features to market positioning?
For someone already managing product teams, when does pursuing an MBA make sense versus other learning paths?
What's your biggest surprise about how MBA education did (or didn't) change the way you approach the realities of product team leadership?

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S11 E26: Fusing Statistical Modeling with Agentic AI to Silence False Positives and Dominate SaaS Attack Surfaces with Marco Rodrigues, Co-Founder & Head of Customer Engineering at Exaforce

Tue, 18 Nov 2025 11:00:46 +0000

Marco Rodrigues was born and raised in Canada, but now lives in the Bay Area. His tech genesis was around the time when the internet came out, when he spent an entire summer indoors, worrying his mother. He eventually attended university in Toronto, and went to work for Juniper Networks. Past that, he went towards the startup world - running product teams, and taking part in the ownership and selling of solutions and service offerings. Outside of tech, he is married with twin girls in the Naval Cadet Core. He is a big hockey nut, rooting for the Edmonton Oilers, and enjoys taking his kids to hockey rinks all over the world.

Marco spent many years watching his teams drown in data and tooling. The situations were more complex, but the outcomes weren't getting better. He started to consider the advent of AI, and asked the question - how do we solve these sorts of problems with an agentic SOC platform?

This is the creation story of Exaforce.

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Fraud Awareness Week - How SEON is your Fraud & AML Command Center with Husnain Bajwa

Mon, 17 Nov 2025 15:00:03 +0000

Today, we have a special episode correlated with Fraud awareness week, and brought to you by our friends at SEON - the command center for fraud prevention and AML compliance. SEON connects first party data signals to show you what other solutions can't - by enriching data, understanding context, and taking action from one place... to prevent fraud.

In this episode, we are talking with Husnain "HB" Bajwa, SVP of Product & Risk Solutions. He has been a fraud and risk leader for 30+ years, and leads innovation in fraud prevention and compliance at SEON. HB is going to touch on important topics in the fraud detection and prevention space, such as AI, regulatory pressures, and the perspectives of startups that can get them into trouble.

Questions:

You’ve spent a lot of time in the world of fraud and compliance. What first drew you to solving these kinds of problems?
Startups often focus on growth first and worry about fraud later. What’s the hidden risk in that mindset?
Why do you believe fraud prevention and AML compliance are converging, and what are the benefits of them living in the same system?
AI gets talked about a lot, but in your view, what are the real, practical ways it’s improving fraud and AML work today?
We’re seeing more regulatory pressure globally. How can organizations prepare for 2026 to ensure they are taking a risk-based approach to compliance?
I know your team’s been working on some big innovations, including a new compliance suite built on top of your fraud prevention stack and new AI-driven tools. How are these helping investigators connect the dots faster and uncover hidden relationships, especially when it comes to complex cases?
What advice would you give to early-stage startups that might think they’re ‘too small’ to be targeted by fraudsters?

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S11 Bonus: Why "Babysitting" Your Dev Team is Killing Momentum with Praveen Ghanta, Founder & CEO of Fraction & DevHawk

Thu, 13 Nov 2025 11:00:22 +0000

Praveen Ghanta recently turned 47 and started to look at the things he wanted to do - but potentially couldn't do in the future. He's married with 3 teenage kids, and has been into running for quite some time. So much so, that he attempted to run a 5 minute mile... and almost made it. Also, he recently signed up for soccer classes, after having been beat by some eighth grade kids, who helped him realize he needed training in his ball handling skills.

In his prior startup, Praveen and his team stumbled upon a new approach to hiring that fueled the building of this startup, all the way through exit. After that success, he decided to make this approach available to others, and form a business around this very thing - fractional talent for your startup.

This is the creation story of Fraction and DevHawk.

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The Railsware Way – Conversational Analytics & Data Focused Products, with Nika Tamayo Flores

Wed, 12 Nov 2025 11:00:19 +0000

In today's episode, we are speaking with Nika Tamayo Flores, Product Lead at Railsware, specifically for the Coupler product. She's been leading complex data-driven products for over eight years, and will enlighten us on conversational analytics, and how they can change a data focused product.

Questions:

Before we jump to the topic, let’s define what exactly conversational analytics is. How does it differ from traditional dashboard-based data analysis?
You’ve been integrating AI capacities into Coupler, Railsware’s product focused on data analytics. How would you describe data analytics in pre-AI and AI era?
What were the key challenges to embedding conversational analytics into Coupler?
And what’s the result? You’ve already released AI Insights – how do they transform user experience for data exploration?
How do you ensure conversational analytics provides accurate and reliable insights?
How does conversational analytics change who can be a "data user" in an organization?
What's the learning curve like for organizations adopting conversational analytics?
Where do you see conversational analytics heading - will it eventually replace traditional BI tools, or complement them?

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S11 E25: The $13m Bootstrapped Shield: Moving Past Broken Point Scanners to Unified, Continuous Exposure Management with Chris Wallis, Founder & CEO of Intruder

Tue, 11 Nov 2025 11:00:05 +0000

Chris Wallis lives in London, and grew up on a farm in the UK. He was the kid running around the countryside climbing trees - until his parents bought a computer when he was 15. Past that point, he didn't leave the house much, learning to code and digging into ethical hacking. Outside of tech, he is into tennis, swimming, alpine skiing and surfing. He finds himself in phases with these sports, and rotates them often.

In the past, Chris was an ethical hacker, and spent a long time busting into big name systems. Eventually, he moved into one of those companies - and he realized that the tooling out there to discover attack surface weaknesses were lagging. He decided to build a platform that got the job done.

This is the creation story of Intruder.

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S11 Bonus: How He Bypassed Enterprise Hospital Bureaucracy to Build an Ambient AI Scribe for 26,000 Independent Clinicians with Erez Druk, Co-Founder & CEO of Freed

Thu, 06 Nov 2025 11:00:42 +0000

Erez Druk grew up in Israel, but has been in the Bay Area for many years. He has a common theme in his life of obsessing over his current thing. In the 4th grade it was the saxophone, and later on it was being Israel's board game champion, and then - he became obsessed with startups. Outside of tech, he is married and expecting his first child. He's into exercising, reading and coffee. His favorite is going to a coffee shop with his wife, and having a cappuccino and a pastry - but at home, he leans towards his aeropress.

Eight years ago, Erez met his wife who was heading into medical school. He got to see first hand how folks in the healthcare system work, and how hard their jobs are. After wrapping up his prior startup, he started down the path of building a solution that improved the lives of these clinicians.

This is the creation story of Freed.

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The Railsware Way - Delivering Value through BRIDGeS, with Sergiy Korolov

Wed, 05 Nov 2025 11:00:53 +0000

In today's episode, we are talking again with Sergiy Korolov, Co-CEO of Railsware and Co-founder of Mailtrap. In my conversation with Sergiy, we dive into how Railsware delivers value - not just features - by following their BRIDGeS framework, enabling their team to focus on value delivery.

Questions:

Railsware is proud of its product development approaches, so let’s pave the way to our topic through one of your prominent cases. In its early days, Calendly reached out to you to deliver their product – with a tight budget and a large set of requirements. You’ve said earlier that several of those initial expected features remained unfulfilled. This leads me to the question: to you, what's the difference between shipping features and delivering value, and why do so many product teams get this wrong?
You’ve been working on several client products, as well as on Railsware’s own. How do you identify what "value" actually means for different stakeholders?
Railsware is known for its BRIDGeS framework, a useful tool to bring the team on the same page and set the product process straight. Can you walk us through the BRIDGeS framework and how it helps teams focus on value delivery?
What role does user research and validation play in the BRIDGeS approach?
Can you share a specific example where applying BRIDGeS helped a team pivot from building the wrong features to delivering real value?
What's the biggest challenge teams face when transitioning from feature delivery to value delivery?

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S11 E24: The Agent Swarm Architecture: Moving Beyond Single-Prompt Bots to Orchestrate 5,000 Parallel AI Agents Safely in Production with Mrinal Wadhwa, Founder & CTO of Autonomy

Tue, 04 Nov 2025 11:00:27 +0000

Mrinal Wadhwa grew up in India with a Dad in the Armed Forces, so he moved around a lot. His mother was a teacher for 40+ years, and greatly influenced his love for teaching. In addition to this, he grew up loving to build things. He was introduced to computers and the internet by his cousin - and at that point he was hooked. Outside of tech, he is married and enjoys attending concerts in the Bay Area. He plays pool, very seriously. In fact, he is the guy carrying the little bag into a party with his own pool stick.

Mrinal is one of the minds behind Okham, a popular open source Rust toolkit to build secure communications between applications. Late last year, he observed people desiring to build the layer between agent communications... and decided to build something to do it the right way.

This is the creation story of Autonomy.

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S11 Bonus: The "Canva for AI Agents": Demolishing the Code Barrier to Build, Connect, and Deploy Autonomous Multi-Model Workflows with Shamba Chowdhury, Co-Founder & CTO of DeForge

Thu, 30 Oct 2025 10:00:54 +0000

Shamba Chowdhury got his first computer at an early age. He was the kid that explored every button and every setting, trying to figure out how it all worked. His curiosity exploded when he was 15 and the internet came around. Post that, his first foray into programming came from his love of playing video games. Outside of tech, he loves to read, in particular crime thrillers. He noted that his favorite is A Minute to Midnight by David Baldacci.

Shamba and his co-founder have participated in many hackathons, and they noticed how difficult it was to stitch together ideas, utilizing AI technology. It was at that point they decided to build a no code builder to wire up AI agents together.

This is the creation story of DeForge.

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The Railsware Way - Vibe Coding vs. Traditional SDLC, with Sergiy Korolov

Wed, 29 Oct 2025 10:00:24 +0000

Today, we are kicking off a new series, sponsored by our good friends at Railsware. Railsware is a leading product studio with two main focuses - services and products. They have created amazing products like Mailtrap, Coupler and TitanApps, while also partnering with teams like Calendly and Bright Bytes. They deliver amazing products, and have happy customers to prove it.

In today's episode, we are talking with Sergiy Korolov, Co-CEO of Railsware and Co-founder of Mailtrap. In this conversation, we are bringing up a popular - but somewhat controversial topic - vibe-coding vs. traditional software development approaches.

Questions:

You’ve been in tech for over two decades, and have definitely seen many trends come and go. How would you define "vibe-coding" and how does it differ from traditional software development approaches?
What drove the emergence of vibe-coding? Could it be a response to overly rigid development processes that many companies have? Or it’s a fundamental shift in engineering?
What do engineers on your team think about vibe-coding? Have you practiced this approach on some of your products?
What types of products or development contexts are best suited for vibe-coding?
Is it possible to create successful and scalable products through vibe-coding? For instance, can people balance vibe-coding with business requirements, deadlines, and stakeholder expectations?
To wrap up, is vibe-coding actually sustainable long-term, or is it just a trendy reaction to over-engineering?

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S11 E23: Why Generative Hype Fails Business ROI and How Predictive AI Agents Solve the Trillion-Dollar Forecasting Gap with Dr. Zohar Bronfman, Co-Founder & CEO of Pecan AI

Tue, 28 Oct 2025 10:00:47 +0000

Zohar Bronfman spends most of his time in Tel Aviv, Israel these days. He has a focused academic background, specifically in philosophy and neuroscience. He was always intrigued by the question - how do we know what we know? - which led him to get a PhD in Philosophy. While doing that, he also became fascinated with he human mind and empirical decision making, which took him down the road of obtaining another PhD in AI & Neuroscience, essentially emulating brain processes. Outside of tech, he has 3 kids and a startup. He loves a good book in the philosophy or neuroscience space, and is a big fan of sports. Specifically, he loves the NBA and claims to be a Knicks fan.

Zohar and his now co-founder were digging into predictive models, as an extension of their academic studies. They were curious as to why companies, though they were running predictive models, were not making accurate predictions. They soon realized that this was because the AI modeling expertise was centralized at couple of well known companies.

This is the creation story of Pecan AI.

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S11 Bonus: Moving Past Semantic Layers to Eliminate Hallucinations and Build Dependable Enterprise Data Agents with Tanmai Gopal, Co-Founder & CEO of PromptQL

Thu, 23 Oct 2025 10:00:47 +0000

Tanmai Gopal is a repeat guest on the podcast. Back in Season 7, he came on to tell the creation story of Hasura, which is a universal data access layer for next generations apps. He talked through he and his colleagues frustration with building API after API, and taking steps to ensure people wanted to not do that work anymore.

As Hasura started to take off, Tanmai started to ask the question around what was the right method for developers, in particular their applications, to access data. With the advent of AI, he and his team dug into what the right problems were to solve - and they identified the main problem with this type of tech was accuracy and trust.

This is the creation story of PromptQL.

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S11 E22: The Support Capacity Paradox: Managing the Tri-Border Workforce of Humans, BPOs, and AI Agents Without Metric Depravation with Ryan Wang, Co-Founder & CEO of Assembled

Tue, 21 Oct 2025 10:00:18 +0000

Ryan Wang has had a winding set of paths to get to where he is today. He studied economics and statistics, with the intent of going to grad school and becoming a professor. After talking with his boss at the time, Steven Levitt (also one of the authors of Freakonomics), he was convinced that was not the best path. Eventually, he joined stripe via nepotism, and became a software developer via data science. Outside of tech, he loves to read about different topics. Right now, he is reading about owls, and also loves to read fiction and poetry. In fact, he drops poetry occasionally at his current venture.

While at Stripe, back when it was an 80 person company, Ryan noticed people doing support tickets on their own. After he spent some time there, he and his now co-founder started to tinker in machine learning for support. As he made progress, a leader pointed out that the real problem was around workforce management.

This is the creation story of Assembled.

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S11 Bonus: The Agent Authentication Crisis: Moving Past Prompt Engineering to Build Zero-Trust Tool Execution and Secure zkTLS/MCP Actions Planes with Sam Partee, Co-Founder & CTO of Arcade.dev

Thu, 16 Oct 2025 10:00:16 +0000

This is the creation story of Arcade.

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S11 E21: Synopsys, The Future of AI & How We Are Building It with Raja Tabet, SVP at Synopsys

Tue, 14 Oct 2025 10:00:17 +0000

Raja Tabet lives in Austin, TX, but grew up overseas in Lebanon. When he migrated to the states for his education, he did not speak English, and had to go through the process of learning the language to fully integrate. He studied computer science for undergrad, and computer engineering for graduate school. And eventually, went to work for companies like IBM, Freescale, and others, prior to landing in his current role. Outside of tech, he has been married for 35 years, and has 3 kids. He and his wife are empty nesters, so they love to travel, hike and explore new areas.

In 2019, Raja joined Synopsys, specifically in their custom design and manufacturing group. A few years ago, and alongside the advent of AI, he changed roles and began building an AI powered solution for electronic design automation, or EDA.

This is Raja's creation story at Synopsys.

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A Startup Field Guide in the Age of Robots & AI - with Oliver Mitchell

Thu, 09 Oct 2025 10:00:21 +0000

Today, we are talking with Oliver Mitchell, Partner at ff Venture Capital, the most engaged technology venture capital firm in New York City since 2008. They have an extensive portfolio, and have created billions of dollars in market cap value.

Recently, Oliver has released a book titled A Startup Field Guide in the Age of Robots and AI. In the book, he sets the stage to mentor - and provide mentors - around building a hardware startup in modern day times. The book is full of advice, real life stories from the trenches, and practical information to help you succeed.

Questions:

Tell me about the book - what was the main goal of you writing it, what were you trying to accomplish?
In the book, you discuss what it takes to launch a business in this industry. What are the five essential rules for launching a successful automation company?
How do you attract investors, given their visceral reaction to hardware sensors and robots? How do you prepare, circumvent or comfort these investors when they spot the red flags?
Hardware startups require the right people, the right R&D, etc. - just to get to MVP. What are some strategies for validating product-market fit in hardware startups?
At times, the government creates roadblocks through over-regulating and slow pace of play. But how can these partnerships be used for funding and even potentially customer acquisition channels?
In your book, you've interviewed some of the most respected luminaries in the space. Can you elaborate on these real world case studies? What were the significant challenges they overcame?
If you could give one piece of advice to someone heading down this path, what would it be?

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S11 E20: The Death of the Black-Box Algorithm: Transitioning from Rigid Rules to Fully Autonomous, "Glass-Box" Contextual AI Pricing with Alex Halkin, Founder & CEO of Competera AI

Tue, 07 Oct 2025 10:00:46 +0000

Alex Halkin can't remember a time where he wasn't doing tech. Funny enough, he does remember a time before internet was common place. In 6th or 7th grade, he got a computer and immediately disassembled it. And eventually, he built an internet service provider for his community, eventually dropped out of university, and sold his internet provider. Outside of tech, he has always been into sports - cycling, motorcycles, etc. And though he doesn't have much time for it anymore, he is big into Brazilian Jujitsu.

At his old role, Alex started to pitch subscription pricing for their products. The timing wasn't right for deep machine learning for pricing, so his boss turned him down. Several years later, he and his team are leveraging the power of Contextual AI to calculate and optimize price combinations.

This is the creation story of Competera AI.

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S11 Bonus:The Spreadsheet Trap: Why Custom E-Commerce Workflows Crash in the Back-Office and the Rise of Lightweight Fashion ERP Architecture with Harish Chandramowli, Co-Founder & CTO of Flaire

Thu, 02 Oct 2025 10:00:45 +0000

Harish Chandramowli grew up in a small town in India. The goal was simple early on - study well, go to university, and get a job. After undergrad, he realized he can do so much more, eventually coming stateside to get his masters, and meet a ton of really smart people over the last 10 years. Outside of tech, he is a broadway show fanatic, seeing 1-2 on a regular basis. He also follows Manchester United, which can be difficult watching the lose on the regular.

Harish used to work for MongoDB, and spent some time on call and in the weeds. At that time, he realized how much data is used by a business. When he eventually supported the fashion industry, specifically the back office, he wanted to build a solution to make the lives of those back office individuals as easy as possible.

This is the creation story of Flaire.

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S11 E19: The GenAI Fraud Wave: Why Doc Uploads and PDFs Are Dead and How zkTLS Generates Cryptographic Proof with Madhavan "Maddy" Malolan, Co-Founder & CEO of Reclaim Protocol

Tue, 30 Sep 2025 10:00:28 +0000

Madhavan "Maddy" Malonan has always been in - and around - technology, and fell in love with building things early on. He got a video game console early on, and found it a little boring. BUT, when his Dad got a computer and he played Age of Empires, he got excited about all the possibilities, trying to tinker with building things that mimicked these computer games. Even these days, he writes a lot of code, building side projects with Claude Code. When he's not coding, he's playing sports, primarily tennis.

Maddy and his team identified that verification of age, credentials, employment history, etc. was a big, big problem. So much so, that it was difficult to do so in a tamper proof, zero knowledge proof manner. They set out to create a solution - and protocol - to solve this problem.

This is the creation story of Reclaim Protocol.

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S11 Bonus: The $100M Retirement Mistake: Why Crypto Staking, Regulatory Shifts, and Old 401(k) Rollovers Are Rescuing the Next Generation of Wealth with Chris Kline, Co-Founder & COO of BitcoinIRA

Thu, 25 Sep 2025 10:00:13 +0000

Chris Kline grew up in Aurora, Colorado, and went to school in Boulder to study finance and leadership. He has lived through several significant events that led him to take a risk, and spend some time in small business and entrepreneurship. And eventually, he took a leap of faith, sold everything he had, and flew to California. Outside of tech, he is married with a 12 year old daughter. He is fascinated by macro economics, and loves to dig into alternative assets like real estate and gold.

Chris started to get into crypto back when it was still in the fringes, and people didn't really know what Bitcoin was. Ten years later, his company is solving the retirement process with alternative, crypto assets.

This is the creation story of BitcoinIRA.

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S11 E18: The Evolution of Enterprise Automations: Moving Beyond Fragile RPA to Natural Language Self-Healing Workflows with Theodore Bergqvist, Co-Founder & CEO of Turbotic

Tue, 23 Sep 2025 10:00:08 +0000

Theo Bergqvist is an entrepreneur who enjoys working a lot. He started his first venture in 1999 in the gaming industry, building Paradox, which is now listed on the Nasdaq. Of all his ventures, the common core to them all was technology. Outside of tech, he lives a life dedicated to Japanese martial arts. He practices 5-6 times a week, and have made several trips to Japan with his Sensei, focusing on the art 10 hours a day.

At one point during his career, Theo was working for Ericson around their transformation. He noticed how difficult it was for enterprises to adopt AI tooling and automation. He decided to raise some funds and get started trying to create something to help... and started the build and pivot game.

This is the creation story of Turbotic.

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S11 E17: The API Sprawl Cure: Moving Beyond GraphQL Federation to Composable, Type-Safe API Gateways for the Agentic Era with Jens Neuse, Founder of WunderGraph

Tue, 16 Sep 2025 10:00:08 +0000

This is the creation story of Wundergraph.

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S11 Bonus: The Cloud Tax & The 10,000 JVM Milestone: Why Performance Optimization is the Only Way to Scale Enterprise AI Without Blowing Your Budget with Simon Ritter, Deputy CTO of Azul

Thu, 11 Sep 2025 10:00:06 +0000

Simon Ritter has been in the IT industry for 40 years. He went from university to work on Unix in the early days, employed by AT&T and programming in the C language. In 1996, he switched gears to join Sun Microsystems, programming in Java. Years later, after the Oracle transition, he started to dig into what might be next. Outside of tech, he is married with an older son. He is a complete petro-head - meaning, he is really into cars. In fact, in the last few years, he and his son re-built a classic mini from the ground up.

While Simon was at Oracle, he started to crave a different opportunity, but still in the Java space. He stumbled upon a company digging into powering the Java platform, to make it the most secure, efficient and trusted platform on the planet - and he, and the company, found a great fit.

This is Simon's creation story at Azul.

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S11 E16: The Vanity Metric Deception: Why Counting Lines of Code Fails the Cursor Era and How to Calculate True "Weave Hours" with Adam Cohen, Co-Founder & CEO of Weave

Tue, 09 Sep 2025 10:00:59 +0000

Adam Cohen grew up in Toronto, in North York. He showed early signs of entrepreneurship by putting his lemonade stand on a wagon, and taking it door to door - or hustling his friends to buy souvenirs on a school field trip. His Dad was in VC, and was a big influence on his life, pushing him to succeed. Outside of professional life, he is big into sports, specifically basketball. In the past, he loved playing fantasy sports, which also influence how he built his business ventures.

Adam and his team went through several iterations of AI tooling - summarizing AI, integrating git and JIRA, etc. While they were doing this, they realized that the best way to make a difference, was to first focus on the data itself.

This is the creation story of Weave.

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S11 Bonus: The Autonomous Railroad Revolution: Replacing Time-Consuming Visual Audits with Computer Vision Wayside Tracks at 120 km/h via KinetiX with Alan Fisher, Group VP at Wabtec Corporation

Thu, 04 Sep 2025 10:00:21 +0000

Alan Fisher started his career as a computer programmer. Early on, he was hired by the 1st or 2nd largest freight railroad in the world, Union Pacific. He describes their technology group as having a punk rock spirit, leaning towards building their own solutions over buying them, which he found great value in. Outside of tech, he has been married for 30 years, and has 3 kids. He is an avid runner, landing someplace between a marathon runner and a mile in the morning kinda guy. He also loves to read the classics, drawing inspiration from them, along with restoring old homes.

Given his rich history in the rail industry, Alan has led the charge in growth, innovation, and most recently, logistics, analytics, and digital mine. As his company started to look to the future in how to solve the industry's most pressing problems, his team executed the acquisition of a portfolio of companies and products - driving by automated inspection.

This is a creation story of KinetiX at Wabtec Corporation.

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Building Identity Orchestration for AI Agents with Granville Schmidt of Strata

Wed, 03 Sep 2025 10:00:31 +0000

We are bringing you a special episode, as our friends at Strata return to the podcast. You might remember our interview from Season 8 with Eric Olden, Co-founder & CEO of the company. Eric took us through the creation story of the company. Today, we will be talking with Granville Schmidt, Chief Architect at Strata, who has been instrumental in architecting and building identity orchestration for AI agents from the ground up. In our chat, we are going to be discussing how the enterprises need to take advantage of identify for agents, and can do so seamlessly, no matter their level of tech debt, disconnection, or complex migration path.

Questions

Let's break down Identity Orchestration for our audience. Can you explain what it is and walk us through a real customer scenario where it made a huge difference
Enterprises have accumulated decades of identity tech debt. What are the main problems identity orchestration solves for companies trying to modernize?
I noticed you work with customers in what you call DDIL environments - disconnected, disrupted, intermittent, and limited bandwidth scenarios. Can you help us understand what these environments look like in practice and why identity becomes such a critical challenge there?
You've pioneered Identity Orchestration for AI Agents. What was the moment when you realized AI agents needed a fundamentally different approach to identity management?
Imagine a company with 1,000 employees but 50,000 AI agents running autonomously. How does your platform handle identity for all these agents differently than traditional systems?

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S11 E15: Passing Telco Infrastructure Costs to Advertisers and Scaling an All-IP Wireless Carrier to 300M+ Downloads with Derek Ting, Co-Founder & CEO of TextNow

Tue, 02 Sep 2025 10:00:13 +0000

Derek Ting grew up in Canada-land, enjoying all the things of the area but especially hockey. He mentioned he has a bit of ADD, which made it hard for him to make it through a chapter in school. Nowadays, he has 2 kids. His oldest son plays hockey, and he and his family enjoys rooting on the Toronto Maple Leafs. When asked about food, he claimed to be one of lives to eat, as he loves food. In fact, the more exotic food the better - but not as far as insects or something.

When Derek figured out that carriers wanted to charge for texting, on top of the fees he was already paying for his phone and associated services. He found this atrocious, and he wanted to figure out a way to text for free - and eventually, all phone service.

This is the creation story of TextNow.

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S11 Bonus: The 77% Token Tax: Why Fixed-Token Chunking is Poisoning Your Enterprise RAG Pipelines and How to Fix the Ingestion Layer with Dr. Alex Kihm, Founder & CEO of POMA AI

Thu, 28 Aug 2025 10:00:40 +0000

Alex Kihm just turned 40, and has been into computers for 36 years. He was given his first hand me down computer at the age of 4 by his parents, and also grew up with lego bricks and building things. He is an engineer by training, but eventually switched to econometrics on the big data side. Outside of his professional life, he is married and describes himself as water affectionate. He enjoys swimming, diving - and free diving. In fact, he studied diving during his semester abroad. His free diving is mainly a hobby, but he has deep respect for the professional free divers of the world.

At his original startup, Alex started to dive into LLMs and immediately ran into RAG (Retrieval Augmented Generation). When he observed the wrong information being returned, along with a ton of resource consumption in the process - IE cost - he set out to solve the problem, and figured out the solution was in the chunks.

This is the creation story of POMA AI.

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What Founders Need to Know - with Dan Eyman of Meld Valuation

Wed, 27 Aug 2025 10:00:16 +0000

Today, I'm talking with Dan Eyman, the Managing Director at Meld Valuation, specializing in independent, audit ready valuations for VC backed startups and VC firms. He is an expert in the valuation of complex instruments such as convertible debt and SAFEs. Dan is going to illuminate the common mistakes of founders, how valuations differ, and what founders should understand about dilution and how fundraising affects their cap table.

Questions

What are the most common mistakes you see founders make when it comes to valuations or equity structuring?
Can you break down how SAFEs and convertible debt actually work—and how do they impact ownership over time?
At what point should a startup bring in a valuation firm, and what are the risks of waiting too long?
How do 409A and ASC 820 valuations differ, and why do they matter for venture-backed companies?
What should founders understand about dilution and how fundraising rounds affect their cap table long-term?
What are your general observations around venture capital investing, and the market for investment right now?
You’ve worked with thousands of startups—what separates those who scale successfully from those who stall?

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S11 E14: Dismantling the "Data Team Bottleneck" with Watsonx-Powered Generative Business Intelligence (GenBI) with Avi Perez, Co-Founder & CTO of Pyramid Analytics

Tue, 26 Aug 2025 10:00:25 +0000

Avi Perez has been in the data and analytics space for more than 25 years. He began his career in banking and finance in Australia, but quickly grew tired of crunching numbers for the big wigs, wanting to find a better way to calculate this information. Outside of tech, he enjoys a wide array of music, from classical to modern trance. He's a big science fiction nut, enjoying shows like Aliens and the Matrix, and cooks up some exquisite cuisine on occasion.

Within his prior startup, Avi and his co-founders built out a way to make intelligent decisions for their business using data. After they exited the business, they wanted to continue their data stint, but in particular, commercialize the analytics solution they built.

This is the creation story of Pyramid Analytics.

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S11 Bonus: The On-Call Burnout Cure: Moving Past Noise-Heavy Dashboards to Autonomous Agentic SRE Triage with Goutham "Gou" Rao, Co-Founder & CEO of NeuBird

Thu, 21 Aug 2025 10:00:16 +0000

Goutham Rao grew up in Brooklyn, a nerd all his life. Back in the day, his Dad bought him a Commodore 64, from which he started to learn to write code in BASIC. Eventually, he attended the University of Pennsylvania to get his Masters in Computer Science. Outside of tech, he is married with 2 kids. He likes to travel, and likes to run. He used to compete in half marathons, but nowadays, he does his running as more of a mental exercise.

Goutham saw that IT telemetry logs have a lot of complexity within their data. Fast forward to today, he and his co-founders noticed the way that LLMs were processing data. They thought they could build something to interpret this data, and "clone" themselves to create something that mimics issue triage.

This is the creation story of Neubird.

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S11 E13: From Frictionless SaaS Auth to Eliminating the 1:1 Drone Pilot Bottleneck at the Tactical Edge with Matt Hamann, Co-Founder & CTO of Rownd

Tue, 19 Aug 2025 10:00:52 +0000

Matt Hamann knew he was going to be in tech way back in his younger days. His Dad worked for IBM, so there were always fun things to talk about and play with. He got his first family computer when he was 4 years old, and started programming BASIC when he was 8. Eventually, they got dialup through AOL - and he took off building websites with PHP & MySQL. Outside of tech, he is married with 3 kids. He loves to travel and spend time with his family. He also plays several instruments, including the piano and pipe organ, and enjoys tinkering with smart home devices.

Right around the time of the pandemic, Matt and his co-founder were pitching a new company idea in Y Combinator, around data privacy. After receiving the feedback that there wasn't a big market for the original idea, they started to jam on ideas on how to pivot - and quickly landed on how cool it would be to have password-less authentication.

This is the creation story of Rownd.

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S11 Bonus: Why Your Corporate AI Pilots are Yielding Zero ROI with Greg Shove, CEO of Section

Thu, 14 Aug 2025 10:00:47 +0000

Greg Shove was born in Canada, raised in Britain, and eventually moved to the United States. Through all of these places he lived, he learned to believe in equal access for people, never to quit, and to work hard and win - all of this, respectively. When he moved to California, he was told to visit the local grocery store to meet more tech people than he would in a year in Canada. After business school, he worked for Apple and has launched or participated in 7 startups. Outside of tech, he loves to BBQ Argentinian style, inspired by the chef Francis Mallman.

Six years ago, Greg started a company to teach people skills and how to become the best manager and executive they could be. The business did well, but mainly it was because of the pandemic. In 2023, he started playing with GPT, and he realized that he needed to pivot himself, and his business as well.

This is the creation story of Section.

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S11 E12: The Agentic Auth Crisis: Why AI Agents Are Forcing SaaS to Shift from User Directories to Short-Lived Scoped Token Planes with Ravi Madabhushi, Co-Founder & CTO of ScaleKit

Tue, 12 Aug 2025 10:00:12 +0000

Ravi Madabhushi finds that all of the stops along his professional journey were accidental. He grew up in a tiny village in the south of India - so small, it would take you 10 minutes to sprint across it, end to end. His goals back then were common - get a job, get married, etc. - but after he moved to Bangalore post school, he got acquainted with startups... and was hooked. Outside of tech, he is married with 2 kids. He enjoys playing tennis, badminton, and squash. He got introduced to squash when he was playing tennis, it started raining, and they were forced inside to play "inside tennis"... IE squash.

Ravi and his team had a successful exit from their prior company, and decided to give startups another go. They wanted to solve the authentication problem for builders wanting to focus on their product - not building auth. What they found was a new arena in the world of AI, agents, and authentication of everything in between.

This is the creation story of ScaleKit.

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S11 Bonus: The Modern Playbook for Pioneering 'Feature Flags as a Measurement Layer' with Trevor Stuart, Co-Founder of Split & GM/SVP of Feature Management at Harness

Thu, 07 Aug 2025 10:00:49 +0000

Trevor Stuart was born in Florida, but raised in Seattle. He was the son of a tech CFO and an Episcopalian minister - so he learned life at many different angles. He graduated from Boston College, and went into investment banking at Morgan Stanley. Beyond that, he worked at RelateIQ prior to being acquired by Salesforce, which then led him to start his own thing. Outside of tech, he's married and expecting his first child soon. He lives in Sonoma, and loves wine - which type depends on his mood and the time of year.

At RelateIQ, Trevor and his team had a core problem - pushing more code, and looking to move faster, but limiting the amount of quality issues. His co-founder built the early workings of a system he had seen at LinkedIn, around gate keeping features. Eventually, post acquisition of this company, they decided to start building this solution on their own... which led them toward their own acquisition.

This is the creation story of Split andHarness.

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S11 E11: The Auth-to-Growth Pipeline: Eliminating Legacy CIAM Friction and Building Customer-Facing Infrastructure for the Product-Led Growth Era with Dave Berner, VP of Product at Kinde

Tue, 05 Aug 2025 10:00:23 +0000

Dave Berner grew up in London, and got into coding through music. He used to be the lead singer in metal and hardcore bands. His bands couldn't afford a webmaster, so he learned how to code in order to launch his band's website, along with setting up friend's custom MySpace profiles. Beyond that, he partook in many startups and side projects, loving to build on the internet. Outside of tech, he's married with 3 kids. He mentions his family is a "low tech" family, teaching their kids fundamental education without a screen. The live in Australia, in a sleepy surfer town, though he admits he hasn't learned to surf just yet.

Dave has always been building side hustles, but none of them really got off the ground. What he noticed about the process was that the process of building the infra of an app - the auth, the billing, support, etc. - always took too long. Eventually, he thought that maybe the best product would be something combining these things.

This is the creation story of Kinde.

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S11 Bonus: Redefining the Merchant Lifecycle, Reducing Integration Friction, and Capitalizing on the Gen Z Tap-to-Mobile Shift with Tiffany Johnson, Chief Product Officer at NMI

Thu, 31 Jul 2025 10:00:03 +0000

Tiffany Johnson is originally from Texas, but grew up in California. At a young age, she was a bit of an adrenaline junkie, partaking in skydiving, snowboarding, wakeboarding and gymnastics. In school, she fell in love with Econ, Mgmt, and Statistics - and eventually, fell into the payment industry by accident. Outside of tech, she has been married for 20 years with 3 kids. Her kids are all snow skiers, though she doesn't hold that against them as a snowboarder.

A few years ago, Tiffany was contacted about a new opportunity at a decades old company in the payments space. This company wanted to bring to market a solution around embedded finance, specifically for SaaS solutions - and Tiffany was the perfect product leader for the role.

This is Tiffany's creation story at NMI.

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The Gene Simmons of Data Protection – Navigating the Future of Data Management

Wed, 30 Jul 2025 10:00:22 +0000

The Gene Simmons of Data Protection: Protegrity's KISS Method

Today, we are releasing another episode from our series, entitled The Gene Simmons of Data Protection - the KISS Method, brought to you by none other than Protegrity. Protegrity is AI-powered data security for data consumption, offering fine grain data protection solutions, so you can enable your data security, compliance, sharing and analytics.

Episode Title: Navigating the Future of Data Management: Type Systems, Quantum Computing, and Protegrity's Innovations

In our final episode, we are speaking with Michael Howard, CEO of Protegrity. We talk about how traditional type systems often fail short in modern data management, as well as potential threats posed by quantum computing to current encryption methods, as well as how Protegrity's product embeds context and security into the data itself, in order to repel any threat.

Questions

Tell me and my audience a little bit about you.
I know that you’ve referred to type systems as “lame.” Can you explain the concept of type systems in databases, why they’re lame, and why they pose challenges for modern data management?
How is quantum computing poised to impact the current landscape of data security and encryption?
What are some of the limitations of traditional type systems in databases, and how can they be improved to handle modern data challenges?
Can you share insights on how Protegrity's approach to data classification and protection differs from traditional methods?
Looking ahead, how do you envision the role of type systems evolving with the advent of quantum computing and other emerging technologies?
One of Protegrity’s talking points has been how far behind legislation for data privacy and security is compared to today’s rapidly accelerating data landscape. What do you think needs to happen – in quantum and AI – for conversations to turn into action?

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S11 E10: The Berkshire Hathaway of AI Services: Re-Architecting a $17M Holdco to Disrupt the $6 Trillion Professional Services Market with Brennan Pothetes, Co-Founder & CEO of Infinity Constellation

Tue, 29 Jul 2025 10:00:14 +0000

Brennan Pothetes grew up in Louisiana, but went to High School in Portland, Oregon - two very different places. He started his career in internal audit, before he eventually helped launch Simple, the first bank on the iPhone. He has built a lot of companies since, and continues to do so. Outside of business and tech, he likes food and enjoys whipping up some cajun or greek cuisine. Recently, he picked up surfing, but also likes to sit down with real time strategy games like Civilization.

Brennan was one of the first customers of Invisible, which was one of the biggest trainers of LLMs. After he sold his last company, he was approached by the board to help then spin businesses out, but in a strategic way with a hold co, allowing them to work together with them zero to one, and beyond.

This is the creation story of Infinity Constellation.

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S11 Bonus: The Data Warehouse Tax: Using Neural Compute Optimizers to Slash Snowflake and Databricks Bills by 70% on Autopilot with Ben Lerner, Co-Founder & CEO of Espresso AI

Thu, 24 Jul 2025 10:00:29 +0000

Ben Lerner was a fan of tech growing up, along side being into math and science. Right out of school, he joined a startup called Data Nitro, which attempted to integrate python into excel. Ever since then, he has been jamming in the tech and startup world. Outside of tech, he married to a computational biologist. He enjoys padel, which is kind of like Pickleball meets Tennis, and of course ping pong. Though, with his full time job as a CEO, he often finds his hobby is going home to write code.

Ben realized that LLMs are really good at understanding code, leaps and bounds better than prior ML models. While he was at Google, he was also digging into how to apply LLMs to coding in general. Applying both of these things, he and his co-founders are seeing where this can be applied to the real world, starting with Snowflake compute.

This is the creation story of Espresso AI.

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The Next Iteration of Gremlin – with Kolton Andrus, CEO

Wed, 23 Jul 2025 10:00:11 +0000

Today, I'm talking with Kolton Andrus, CEO and Founder of Gremlin. You may remember previously when we spoke with Matt, the prior CTO of the company. Since that time frame, a lot has changed at the company, going through several arcs and foundational changes that are leading to not only assessing weaknesses in your infrastructure, but walking you through how to fix it (and eventually, fixing it for you).

Questions:

Tell us a little bit of an overview about you.
Your time at Amazon & Netflix were big influences on the importance of chaos engineering and reliability testing. Can you tell me what was so foundational about your time there?
What is next iteration of Gremlin? What has changed in the platform primarily? Tell me about the arcs of the company here.
In 2022, there was a leadership transition and you increased your focus on the product. What are some of the most exciting developments that came from these last 3 years?
Where does AI fit into Chaos Engineering? And where does it not fit? Can you unpack your viewpoint here?
What are you most excited about in the next chapter for Gremlin, and for the broader SRE space?
What advice would you give a founder just getting started?

I couldn't be more excited about the future of Gremlin. Given the arcs the company has gone through, it's evident that Kolton has built foundational layers into the platform, and is steering the ship towards responsible chaos engineering, reliability, automation and much more.

Thank you for listening to today's episode. If you'd like to learn more about Gremlin, please visit gremlin.com.

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S11 E9: The AppSec Illusion: Demolishing Blind Spots and Transitioning from Legacy API Monitors to Unified, Runtime AI Security Planes with Buchi Reddy, Founder & CEO of Levo.ai

Tue, 22 Jul 2025 10:00:31 +0000

Buchi Reddy lives in North Austin, having recently moved there with his family. He is originally from south India, and grew up in a farming family before moving to the metro and studying engineering. Post college, he spent many years building high frequency trading systems, before moving to Silicon Valley and joining companies there, just as Cisco and Traceable, which you as the audience are very familiar with. Outside of tech, he is married with a 7 year old son. He and his family enjoy hiking, overnight camping, and living just far enough away from the craziness of downtown Austin to still enjoy it.

While he was interviewing customers at a prior company, Buchi spotted a wide gap for enterprises, where API's were not tested properly before going to production. Baffled by this, he wanted to go bridge the gap, and build something to automate this testing.

This is the creation story of Levo.

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S11 Bonus: Twitter’s 1st Employee Talks About Agentic Programming and its Impact on Team-Building – with Rabble of Rabble Labs

Thu, 17 Jul 2025 10:00:26 +0000

Evan Henshaw-Plath, also known as Rabble, was born in Berkeley while his Mom was a student. His parents were hippies, and he grew up near Silicon Valley, which gave him access to work with startups as early as High School. He founded Odeo, which eventually became Twitter. He got the name Rabble cause it was founded by three Evan's, which didn't work - so he went with his online nickname. He has a cool track record of working not only on Twitter, but Flickr, Palm, and other big names. He lives in New Zealand, enjoying all the outdoor activities, and participates in activism in digital rights and environmentalism. Being a Vegetarian, he admits that his comfort food is Mexican cuisine, which he doesn't get a lot of in the land of the Kiwis.

Rabble was disappointed when Twitter shut down its open app capabilities. He wanted something like Twitter, but built to where someone couldn't take away his access. He started to dig into protocols, and eventually landed in San Francisco to tell his friends that he was going to make social media work like email and messaging.

This is the creation story of Rabble Labs & Verse.

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S11 E8: The $10B L2 Juggernaut: Re-Architecting Coinbase Wallet, Embracing Token Decentralization, and Scaling Ethereum for One Billion Users with Jesse Pollak, Creator of Base & Head of Protocols at Coinbase

Tue, 15 Jul 2025 10:00:15 +0000

Jesse Pollak grew up in Washington, DC, attending a Quaker school through graduating in high school. He played competitive soccer, which was a huge part of his life. Eventually, he moved to SoCal to attend school at Berkley. He got the bug to start a company, and only lasted 2 years at school - before he ventured out on his own. Eventually, his company got acquired by Coinbase, which opened up a whole new world for him. Outside of tech, he is married with a 4 month old boy. He doesn't drink caffeine, but daily, enjoys a decaf cappuccino.

In December 2021, Jesse and his team were wondering in the desert for a while, trying to figure out what was next on-chain. After considering what AWS and Heroic was for Web 2.0, they figured out that in order to go build the apps that companies like Coinbase had, they needed a foundational layer in the ecosystem to fuel that development.

This is the creation story of Base.

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S11 Bonus: Slashing Patient Recruitment Cycles from Years to Weeks with Federated Data Architectures and Generative AI Trials with Gaurav Bhattacharya, Founder & CEO of Jeeva AI

Thu, 10 Jul 2025 10:00:07 +0000

Gaurav Bhattacharya grew up in New Delhi, in a blue collar family. He lost his Dad early in his life. He took influence from his older brother and his love for programming, getting hooked on C/C++. He loves building things, including video games, of which he built his first one at the age of 12. In High School, he pursued a startup idea that led him to skip college, and eventually exit. Outside of tech, he lives in San Francisco and continues his love for gaming. He also enjoys watching live sports - the Dodgers, Lakers and Warriors.

At his prior startup, Gaurav and his team were working in the healthcare space. They became learners of go-to market strategies, how to do sales, and how to do marketing. They enjoyed it so much that they grew to want to start their next company in that space.

This is the creation story of Jeeva AI.

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S11 E7: The 90-Minute Daily Engagement Phenomenon: Redefining Multimodal Conversational AI to Cure the Loneliness Epidemic with Artem Rodichev, Founder & CEO of Ex-Human

Tue, 08 Jul 2025 10:00:05 +0000

Artem Rodichev was born and raised in Kazakhstan, surrounded by the mountains. He loves hiking, and pretty much all outdoor activities. He jokes that he was raised by computers, as he was always playing games, trying to learn hacking, and more. He has always be interested in stories, in particular science fiction. He read a lot of books and watched movies, being fascinated with plots around empathetic AI like Blade Runner and Joy. These movies sparked his motivation to move forward to bringing this world to life.

Artem spent several years building a Core AI stack at Replica. What he noticed was that people really enjoyed connecting with their digital friends - and, he noticed the limitations of this experience. He aimed to correct that limitation, in starting a new venture focused on boarder empathetic AI.

This is the creation story of Ex-Human.

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S11 Bonus: The Autonomous Retail Bottleneck: Removing Machine Friction and Deploying Smart Sensor Fusion for Loss-Free Unattended Operations with Keren Fanan, CEO of MyOp

Thu, 03 Jul 2025 10:00:00 +0000

Keren Fanan doesn't come from a tech based family, yet has worked in tech for the last 15 years. She's not a developer herself, but has always been drawn to software in general, as in her words, software runs the world. She studied Industrial Engineering, but quickly moved into product roles, working for AT&T, Gett and Moon Active in the past. Deep down, she always wanted to found a company of her own. Outside of tech, she lives near Tel Aviv in Israel, and has lived there her whole life. Her and her 3 kids like to travel, go camping, and be in nature as much as possible.

Keren and her co-founders felt similar pains in the industry, all from different angles. No matter how good their ideas were, no matter the initiative, there is always a long process in software dev to bring it to life. This was especially true for non technical founders. They wanted a way to bring their ideas straight to production, without having to wait on the full life cycle.

This is the creation story of MyOp.

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S11 E6: The Death of the Legacy Landing Page: Rebuilding a No-Code Pioneer for the Agentic AI and Multi-Armed Bandit Era with Michael Sacca, CEO of Leadpages

Tue, 01 Jul 2025 10:00:00 +0000

Michael Sacca didn't start out coding - he started out as a musician. In college, he studied music business and wanted to go into that world. Eventually, he figured out that people didn't care that you had a music business degree, and he ended up waiting tables for a few years. After watching his roommate write software and get paid well to do it, he decided to learn to code himself. Outside of tech, he lives in Vancouver with his wife and 2 kids, coaching soccer and flag football. He mentioned it can be a pain to go out to eat with him cause he has celiac, and avoids gluten.

Prior to his current role, Michael was the Chief Product Officer at Dribbble. After he left that company and dabbled in some other ventures, he was approached about a CEO role at a well known darling company in Minneapolis.

This is Michael's creation story at Leadpages.

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S11 Bonus: The Real-Time Generative Video Race: Breaking the Speed Barrier and Shipping LTX Foundation Models to Millions of Creators with Ofir Bibi, VP of Research at Lightricks

Thu, 26 Jun 2025 10:00:00 +0000

Ofir Bibi grew up in Jerusalem, and is where he is today because of his love for photography. He has always been a tinkerer, taking apart of radios and such, and was drawn to the early days of training neural networks and computational photography. He spent a number of years in academia, but eventually was drawn outside of that world. Outside of tech, he is married with 3 boys who play sports. His family is surrounded by nature, so they enjoy biking and walking as much as they can.

In 2012, a company was formed around bridging the gap between imagination and creation, through video, apps, and studio grade tools. Ofir recently celebrated 10 years with the company, and came in with the title "Neural Networks" guy.

This is Ofir's creation story of Lightricks.

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S11 E5: The Public Internet Bottleneck: Rebuilding the Physical Routing Layer for High-Performance Blockchains with Austin Federa, Co-Founder of DoubleZero

Tue, 24 Jun 2025 10:00:00 +0000

Austin Federa has a non-traditional path into the blockchain world. In college, he studied political & environmental science, and economics. Interestingly enough, those studies map a lot to the blockchain first principles. He was seriously looking to do his PhD, but fell out of love with that space, and joined NPR as a journalist for a while. Then, of course, he got bit by the startup bug. Outside of tech, he enjoys living in Brooklyn, photography, and engaging in some form of learning at all times. He enjoys reading, mention the Children of Time series, as though it was fiction, it had a lot of interwoven psychology and communal themes.

Austin acknowledges that though we all love the internet, it's actually not very good... for high performant systems. And though companies are trying to build dedicated networks in the world, there hasn't been one created for blockchain - IE, not centralized around single party.

This is the creation story of DoubleZero.

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S11 Bonus: The Forgotten Password Paradox: Why Service Accounts, NTLM Flaws, and Over-Privileged AI Agents Are the Real Ground Zero for Nation-State Breaches with Tim Eades, Co-Founder & CEO of Anetac

Thu, 19 Jun 2025 10:00:00 +0000

Tim Eades grew up poor, but forced himself into college. He is a 4 time CEO, an investor, and on the boards of several different companies - but more interestingly, he is an old punk. He saw the Sex Pistols live back in the day, which he mentioned had great sound quality. He's been married for 25 years, and is on the board of a charity that his wife runs. That charity delivery 20,000 birthday cakes to underprivileged children a year.

Being a multi-time CEO, Tim has some experience around starting companies. He interviewed many cybersecurity leaders, asking about identity and why vulnerabilities around it was still a problem. During a Liverpool game, he downloaded a powerpoint template and put together a pitch to build a company and solve this problem.

This is the creation story of Anetac.

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S11 E4: Transforming Dormant Media Libraries into Rights-Aware, Fact-Checked AI Intelligence with Brooke Hartley Moy, Co-Founder & CEO of Infactory AI

Tue, 17 Jun 2025 10:00:00 +0000

Brooke Hartley May lives in Oakland, California, on the East Bay, claiming to get more sunshine than her neighbors in San Francisco. She was a history major in college, which makes her path to technology a bit different. She still enjoys writing and reading in long form to this day. Outside of tech, she is married with a 4 year old son - and a pug. She enjoys life as a parent, startup founder, but was sad that the Oakland A's left Oakland, amongst other teams.

A few years ago, Brooke and her now co-founder observed that people were viewing AI as this end-all-be-all solution. But what quickly happened was that the data needed to make AI effective was not in quite the same state.

This is the creation story of Infactory.

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S11 Bonus P2: The Radical Transparency Framework: Eliminating Middle Management and Running an 18-Year Product Studio as a Pure Meritocracy with Yaroslav Lazor & Sergiy Korolyov, Co-Founders of Railsware

Thu, 12 Jun 2025 10:00:00 +0000

Yaroslav Lazor started writing code when he was 10 years old. It took him a while to understand that making a difference in the world wasn't just about writing code - but he has arrived there these days. He is the father of 4 daughters, 2 of which are artists and a couple who are digging into their entrepreneurial roots with running their own lemonade stand. He lives in Los Angeles, and has learned to be a better person through pushing himself as a founder.

Sergiy Korolov also started coding when he was young, though 4 years later than Yaroslav. He went to a technical university, and as his career in leadership grew, the number of lines of code he contributed to decreased. He is located in Poland, and loves to snowboard in the winter, and bike in the summer. He has 3 kids, and recently started teaching coding to his oldest son.

Yaroslav & Sergiy were building software for clients, the typical Ukrainian software route. Over time, they realized that building their own products was the best way to make an impact - so much so, that they decided to start building their own.

This is the creation story of Railsware.

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S11 Bonus P1: The Radical Transparency Framework: Eliminating Middle Management and Running an 18-Year Product Studio as a Pure Meritocracy with Yaroslav Lazor & Sergiy Korolyov, Co-Founders of Railsware

Wed, 11 Jun 2025 10:00:00 +0000

This is the creation story of Railsware.

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S11 E3: The 4 Rs Framework: Moving AI Demos Into Production to Cure Legacy Healthcare Payer Inefficiencies with Rob Duffy, CTO of HealthEdge

Tue, 10 Jun 2025 10:00:00 +0000

Rob Duffy lives in New York with his family. He moved to the states to go work for a small online bookstore that we know today as Amazon. He's married with 2 kids, and enjoys to cook. But, his main passion is flying, as he has is pilots license and enjoys flying small planes. He recalls training on a simulator with a rendering of the Seattle space needle, which he got to fly next to in the real world once he got his license. He admits his wife has a love/hate relationship with his flying - IE she prefers when the flight is over.

Rob's has a track record of successfully building platforms - IE figuring out how to do things once instead of multiple times. His current company was growing through acquisitions, and Rob was brought on to unify these and create a converged platform for what the company had to offer.

This is Rob's creation story at HealthEdge.

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S11 Bonus: Why "Vibe Coding" Fails at Scale and How No-Code Ecosystems Unlocked $1B in User Revenue with Emmanuel Straschnov, Co-Founder & CEO of Bubble

Fri, 06 Jun 2025 10:00:00 +0000

This is the creation story of Bubble.

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S11 Bonus: The Epistemic Podcast Shift: Destroying Dashboard Fragmentation and Injecting Multi-Platform Orchestration with Clayton Gentry, Co-Founder & CTO of Podstock

Thu, 05 Jun 2025 10:00:00 +0000

Clayton Gentry has been digitally oriented his whole life. When he was younger, he was into photography and making videos with his friends and for school - either highlight videos for school events or promotional videos for businesses. He's always liked making things look good on a screen, and was attracted to the art of it - which, he attributes to his mother's genes. These days, he lives in Brooklyn, plays guitar, and likes to run in Prospect Park near his home.

Toward the end of 2022, Clayton and his co-founder, Michael, re-connected on starting something new. Given Michael had extensive industry knowledge in the podcast world, Clayton and he combined their super powers to take on the multi-platform nature of podcasting.

This is the creation story of Podstock.

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S11 Bonus: The Weekend Prototype Pivot: Transitioning from FinTech DevOps to Advancing AI Research Infrastructure with David Asamu, Co-Founder of Nesla

Wed, 04 Jun 2025 10:00:00 +0000

David Asamu grew up in Nigeria and got into technology early, through serving his community. He attended University, and continued his community efforts there, and was introduced to the joys of Python programming. Outside of tech, he spends time with his significant other and family. He enjoys soccer, whether it is watching over playing. When asked about food, he mentioned loving Nigerian delicacies, such as Jollof rice.

Previously, David was working at a fintech company. While he was there, he and his friends were observing the trends around AI - and they wanted to get more involved. So they got together and built something over the weekend... and eventually decided to advance AI through research.

This is the creation story of Nesla.

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S11 E2: The 4x Faster Indexer: Scaling Rust-Based Search to Millions of Documents Without Infrastructure Bloat with Clément "Kero" Renault, Co-Founder & CTO of Meilisearch

Tue, 03 Jun 2025 10:00:00 +0000

Clément "Kero" Renault wanted to be an architect when he was younger. During that time, he also learned about computers and built his first website - and he never stopped building. Funny story, he lost that first website cause it wasn't on Git. Outside of his professional life, he likes to draw, craft and to cook. He also enjoys video games, and mentioned Hidden Reign was his favorite game of all time, alongside the likes of Cyberpunk.

Seven years ago, Kero was in school, and he wanted to build a solid search experience, but not just a general search - one that indexed your data, and allowed you to have a "Google" just for your info. After winning a school hackathon, Kero and his mates wanted to take it to the next level.

This is the creation story of Meilisearch.

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S11 Bonus: The Ephemeral App Revolution: Replacing App Store Bloat with Single-Use, Frictionless Browser Workflows with Arnab Deka, Co-Founder of Metacast

Thu, 29 May 2025 10:00:00 +0000

Arnab Deka lives in Vancouver and loves the Pacific Northwest. He was never formally educated in computer science or software engineering - in fact, while he was studying civil engineering, he fell in love with building things and eventually, building software. Outside of tech, he is a family man and loves to sup with them and his dog. He also enjoys astronomy, and is known to attend a star party or 2, with his telescope in hand.

Arnab took a sabbatical from work, and on this journey, he realized that he liked deep work and interacting with customers directly - as opposed to high level strategy and planning. He met with his now co-founder in 2022, walking then Seattle lake front, and realized what podcast junkies they both were - and they decided to build something for it.

This is the creation story of Metacast.

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S11 E1: The 7-Year Revenue Drought: Surviving Near-Zero Growth to Build a $1.5B Cloud Analytics Juggernaut with Rob Woollen, Co-Founder & CTO of Sigma Computing

Tue, 27 May 2025 10:00:00 +0000

Rob Woollen lives in the San Francisco Bay Area. He grew up with a Father in IT and management, and his Mother as an English teacher. He has been programming for a long time, since the early days on his Apple 2E (yes, the green screen one). Outside of tech, he is married with 3 boys, all teenagers. He also has a 1 year old golden retriever, and spends a lot of time ensuring he lives his best life. In addition to this, he and his wife enjoy hiking around the Marin area, as they have the best hiking trials.

Rob spent many years at Salesforce, and it struck him that many of the company operations were still done on spreadsheets. When he left the company, he started exploring how to create something to support large scale data sets, within the familiar UI of spreadsheets.

This is the creation story of Sigma Computing.

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S10 Favorite: Securing Intellectual Property, Minimizing Exit Risks, and Navigating Regulatory Scrutiny in the SDLC with Matt Van Itallie, Founder & CEO of Sema

Tue, 20 May 2025 10:00:00 +0000

Matt Van Itallie is the son of a math teacher and a coder - so this explains why he now uses code as data. He is a proud Boy Scout, making it of course to Eagle Scout and beyond. After being a management consultant, he found his way to ed tech, and fell in love with improving code. Outside of technology, he is married with 3 amazing kids. He likes to run, play ultimate frisbee, and has a wicked cool collection of minor league baseball hats.

Sitting a room with the head of Sales, Matt noticed that there were systems like Salesforce that were built to assess the state and future opportunity for business. He then thought, where are these systems for the code itself?

This is the creation story of Sema.

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S10 Favorite: The Trillion-User Scalability Crisis: Re-Architecting Bitcoin’s Layer 2 for Instant, Enterprise-Grade Global Liquidity with Kevin Hurley, Co-Founder & CTO of Lightspark

Tue, 13 May 2025 10:00:00 +0000

Kevin Hurley grew up in a multi-kid house, which is where he got his competitive nature. He used to play 2 on 2 with his Dad and siblings at home. He went to school for electrical engineering, and funny enough, interviewed for a computer science job by accident, effectively stumbling into the trade. Outside of tech, he spends his free time with his fiancé, planning for the wedding, and visiting Manhattan beach for a good walk .

Kevin was part of the team that attempted to launch crypto at Facebook. Although that didn't work out, they realized that the backbone of the system needed to be built on something more common - and something that was lightning fast.

This is the creation story of Lightspark.

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S10 Favorite: From Employee #8 at Stripe to Challenging the Triopoly of AWS, Azure, and GCP: Fixing the Broken Cloud-Native Developer Experience with Anurag Goel, Founder & CEO of Render

Tue, 06 May 2025 10:00:00 +0000

Anurag Goel grew up in New Delhi, but moved to Boston after college for his first job. He worked at Stripe, as the 8th employee, before eventually moving on and launching his current venture. Outside of tech, he is married, living in San Francisco. He likes to read science fiction, especially prior to bedtime. He also enjoys eating Thai food on the regular, though he mentioned he could eat pizza every day.

Post leaving Stripe, Anurag decided to work on an ambitious problem, and he started doing this by building a bunch of stuff in many different domains. After noticing a common problem in building out Kubernetes, he decided to start a new business to abstract these problems, and allow builders to focus on the differentiating factors to their solutions.

This is the creation story of Render.

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S10 Bonus: Optimizing Remote Workplace Engagement: Replacing Flat Video Grids and Enhancing Virtual Collaboration with Real-Time Spatial Audio Ecosystems with Erik Braund, Founder & CEO of Katmai Tech

Thu, 01 May 2025 10:00:00 +0000

Erik Braund was born and raised in Alaska. Growing up, he played competitive hockey and built computers for his Dad's company and eventually others. He grew up with a gameboy, an electric guitar, and a love for Nirvana. He eventually upgraded his setup to a computer - which led him to setup a recording studio. He was internet obsessed from a young age, partially because it was the door to a bigger world outside of Alaska. He played in bands, started a recording studio, which eventually turned into a production company in NYC and LA, delivering AV projects for numerous clients.

Erik was running his production company when COVID hit. Given people weren't doing in person projects, he started consulting and opening up his mind on how to do these types of projects remotely. He started to see a new problem, where video conferencing was not solving high connection, collaborative work.

This is the creation story of Katmai.

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S10 E30: The QR Code Data Shift: Connecting Physical Interactions with Digital Marketing Fabrics and Scaling Contactless Engagement with Ravi Pratap Maddimsetty, Co-Founder & CTO of Uniqode

Tue, 29 Apr 2025 10:00:00 +0000

Ravi Pratap Maddimsetty lives in Bangalore with his family. Early on, he joined startups where his friends worked, in order to get to know the landscape of how they functioned. He fell in love with the tech, team and early innings of building a business - so much so, that he eventually started his own. He has been an entrepreneur for 15 years - or in the woods, as he says. But outside of tech, he's married with 2 girls. He loves spending time with his family, playing tennis, being outdoors or skiing.

Ten years ago, Ravi was riding the wave of smartphones, tinkering with numerous technological solutions to connect users to their world via their smartphone. After moving through beacons, NFC, GPS and others - they started to think about how they could use the camera, which was on every device, to read QR codes.

This is the creation story of Uniqode.

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S10 Bonus: The Continuous Security Framework: Integrating Open-Source DevSecOps Controls into CI/CD Pipelines with Shai Horovitz, Co-Founder & CEO of Jit.io

Thu, 24 Apr 2025 10:00:00 +0000

Shai Horovitz grew up on a farm in Israel, 1.5 hours north of Tel Aviv. He was drafted into the army, in a unit that focused on technology - and in 2013, he moved to the states and joined a startup. And - he loved it, eventually leading the team in building the business in Japan. Outside of tech, he loves to travel with his family and 3 kids. He is also a self proclaimed foodie, and enjoys sports - spending 11 years in Boston rooting on the Celtics.

The team at Shai's current venture was attempting to shift left the solving of security issues in production. Now, they are entering into a new era - in building the agentic cybersecurity team of the future. Two years ago, he joined to lead the charge.

This is the creation story of Jit.

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The Gene Simmons of Data Protection - Are You Ready For the GenAI Data Frontier?

Wed, 23 Apr 2025 10:00:00 +0000

The Gene Simmons of Data Protection: Protegrity's KISS Method

Episode Title: Are You Ready For the GenAI Data Frontier? Exploring GenAI Security

In this episode, we talk with Anthony Cammarano, CTO & VP of Engineering, as he breaks down and simplifies GenAI for companies struggling in the new frontier. There is a flood of unstructured data pouring into workflows - thanks to GenAI - and traditional security methods aren't prepared to cover this expanded attack surface. The good news is that companies already have what they need to fix this, and it's a simple mindset shift.

Questions

What are some of the most common misconceptions or trends about GenAI, as it relates to data protection and privacy, that organizations face today?
What are the primary business challenges facing the adoption of GenAI today?
How do modern GenAI systems create data security vulnerabilities and what are the potential risks?
What is crucial in the implementation of GenAI-security solutions, and how can it accelerate AI adoption?
Can you provide examples of how attackers are targeting data during its use and the importance of securing this data?
What are some best practices for robust data governance and how can organizations stay ahead in the rapidly evolving GenAI landscape?

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S10 E29: The Merchant of Record Shift: Scaling Global SaaS Revenue and Simplifying International Tax Compliance with Lucas Lovell, VP of Engineering at Paddle

Tue, 22 Apr 2025 10:00:00 +0000

Lucas Lovell grew up in Adelaide, Australia, before eventually landing where resides now, in London. He studied law, but he eventually decided that he didn't want to become a lawyer. During his time in law school, he and his crew built an app - and he was hooked on the wild ride that tech is. Prior to London, he spent 4 years in Paris, and indeed loves to travel. He also enjoys skiing, and when asked about snowboarding, he said he tried - but eventually reverted back.

Four and a half years ago, Lucas joined a company solving end to end payments, while being the merchant of record. What was missing from the platform was some function around invoicing - which started him on his journey of product creation.

This is Lucas' creation story at Paddle.

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S10 Bonus: The De-Googled Workspace Movement: Decentralizing Enterprise Tech with Private, Open-Source Productivity Suites with David Young, Founder & CEO of Federated Computer

Thu, 17 Apr 2025 10:00:00 +0000

David Young spent many years in California, but lives in Colorado Springs now. He mentioned that things outside of work are very important to him, as they are the soil from which he brings fruit to bear in his work. He's married and loving living in the Rockies. He and his wife love to ski hike and camp - but most interesting, they are both endurance athletes. They run marathons, bike rides, and triathlons - in fact, David himself has run 10, which includes a 2.4 mile swim, 112 mile bike ride, then a marathon - all in succession. All in one day.

David noticed that that problem with SaaS today is that it's expensive, and adds up as you compile solutions. Right alongside that, open source software is free - but requires more setup and maintenance to keep it up and running. He decided that there must be a better way to purchase software, while getting the best price on a bundle of solutions.

This is the creation story of Federated Computer.

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The Gene Simmons of Data Protection – Are Your Systems Smarter Than a Threat Actor?

Wed, 16 Apr 2025 10:00:00 +0000

The Gene Simmons of Data Protection: Protegrity's KISS Method

Episode Title: Are You Smarter Than a Threat Actor? Maybe Your Current Methods Are Obsolete

In today's episode, we are talking with Eve Rajca, Senior Solutions Engineer, as she dives into the ever-evolving landscape of cybersecurity. As threat actors become more sophisticated, its critical to reassess and simplify security strategies. She will explore outdated methods, which can leave your data vulnerable, and discuss the importance of adopting straightforward security methods.

Questions

What are some common signs that an organization's current cybersecurity methods might be outdated?
How have threat actors evolved in their tactics over the past few years?
Can you explain the concept of "security through simplicity" and why it's important?
How can organizations balance the need for robust security with the need for simplicity?
What role does employee training play in maintaining effective data security?

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S10 E28: Replacing Legacy LMS Silos and Driving Student Engagement with Institutional Communication Networks with Kavitta Ghai, Co-Founder & CEO of Nectir

Tue, 15 Apr 2025 10:00:00 +0000

Kavitta Ghai realized at an early age that she thought different than everyone else. She grew up neurodivergent, with autism and ADHD but was a lucky kid, having parents that helped her see the silver lining in her learning challenges, making sure she had outlets in extracurricular activities. She is a creative person always looking to build something that doesn't exist. In her off time, she enjoys turning off all the tech, learning a new language, and reconnecting with the real, analog world.

Kavitta and her co-founder found themselves frustrated with the classroom in college. For paying such an exorbitant amount of money, they were confused why the educational classroom was so ineffective. It came to a head - to the point, where Kavitta was going to change it or drop out of school.

This is the creation story of Nectir.

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S10 Bonus: The CI/CD Performance Shift: Accelerating Build Pipelines and Eliminating Developer Idle Time with Darko Fabijan, Co-Founder & CTO of Semaphore

Thu, 10 Apr 2025 10:00:00 +0000

Darko Fabijan is originally from Serbia, and splits his time between their and the US. He got is first computer in 1994, and eventually started tinkering and playing with Linus. He went to university in 2003, and then started a company with a college friend, which was a rails consultancy. Outside of tech, he is married, with 2 kids - ages 3 and 9. The older one is into athletics, and the younger one is more into art. He enjoys spending time in nature with his family, and got into trail running a few years ago - recently running a 64km trail. He enjoys business books because he likes to see how other people "did it", when it comes to their successes and failures.

In 2011, Darko was running his consulting shop with 7 or 8 people. As they were developing applications, they couldn't find anything for continuous integration where you just "signed up" and it worked. That was enough for them to get out there and build it on their own.

This is the creation story of Semaphore.

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The Gene Simmons of Data Protection - Fortifying Your Data Defenses

Wed, 09 Apr 2025 10:00:00 +0000

The Gene Simmons of Data Protection: Protegrity's KISS Method

Episode Title: Fortifying Your Data Defenses: The Conversation that Should have Happened Yesterday with Clyde Williamson

In this episode, we will be talking with Clyde Williamson, Senior Product Security Architect. Clyde is going to help us see how we've created a broken systems - and it's OK, we are willing to take the necessary steps to fix it. Business face immense pressure to safeguard data, ensure compliance, follow regulation, and make data easily available when needed. This is the conversation we should have heard yesterday, when it comes to our data.

Questions

Why is consumer privacy more critical than ever in today's digital world, and what role do businesses play in protecting and consuming data?
How that concern translates to regulatory requirements and changes for businesses. What does it mean to “future-proof” consumer data in terms of regulatory compliance, and why should businesses care?
How can businesses effectively balance the need for data accessibility with the need to protect consumer privacy?
What role does data de-identification play in helping businesses secure sensitive data while minimizing risk, and what are the tangible benefits?
What are some common pitfalls businesses face when implementing privacy measures, and how can they avoid them?
Can you provide an example of a company that improved consumer trust by adopting stronger data protection strategies?
What are some emerging technologies in data protection and cybersecurity that are making, or will make, a significant impact?
Can you share any real-world examples of data breaches that could have been prevented with better security practices?

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S10 E27: The Nearshore Engineering Era: Sourcing Elite Latin American Tech Talent and Eliminating Time-Zone Fragmentation with Gino Ferrand, Founder & CEO of Tecla.io

Tue, 08 Apr 2025 10:00:00 +0000

Gino Ferrand is originally from Peru, and moved to the United States when he was 12 years old. Now, he lives in Seattle, and is enjoying all that the Northwest has to offer. He's very much into sports, specifically soccer, and plays in an indoor league with a great community. He loves to travel, and gets to often with the world he does. And when it comes to food, he is very evangelistic about Peruvian food, and encourages people to try every chance he gets.

Gino attend the University of San Diego, and was really into startups. He was building mobile games for the iPhone in 2012, while living back in Peru for a short time. He hired a few engineers from back home, and this started him on the journey of understanding the great talent in South America.

This is the creation story of Tecla.

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S10 E26 P2: The Physical AI Revolution: Translating Complex Sensor Telemetry into Real-World Insights with Ivan Poupyrev & Nick Gillian, Co-Founders of Archetype AI

Thu, 03 Apr 2025 10:00:00 +0000

Ivan Poupyrev grew up in the Soviet Union, studying rocket science. He moved to the US in 2013 to pursue the early days of VR. He has worked at Disney and Google, and has been focused on merging the physical and digital world for many years. Prior to this latest revolution, Ivan was one of the skeptics towards the idea of AI. But at Google, he was convinced by one of his now co-founders, the value in this tech.

Nick Gillian has been working in real time Machine learning for nearly 2 decades - but path here was a bit different. His background is in music and audio engineering - think the math behind amps, studios, mixers, etc. During his masters studies, he fell in love with sensors, and participated in early development and advancement of this tech alongside machine learning. He built a toolkit, which eventually got the attention of Ivan.

Ivan was working at Google, and one of his team members began utilizing the toolkit built by Nick. Upon discovering this, Ivan reached out to Nick to see if he wanted to join the top secret team - and eventually, Nick convinced Ivan of the power of machine learning and AI.

This is the creation story of Archetype AI.

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The Gene Simmons of Data Protection – KISS (Keep It Simple, Stupid): A Data Security Dilemma

Wed, 02 Apr 2025 10:00:00 +0000

The Gene Simmons of Data P rotection: Protegrity's KISS Method

Today, we are kicking off a new series on the podcast, entitled The Gene Simmons of Data Protection - the KISS Method, brought to you by none other than Protegrity. Protegrity is AI-powered data security for data consumption, offering fine grain data protection solutions, so you can enable your data security, compliance, sharing and analytics.

Episode Title: KISS (Keep It Simple, Stupid): A Data Security Dilemma with James Rice

In this episode, we are talking with James Rice, VP at Protegrity. He is going to help us strip away the nonsense, when it comes to securing data, and help us understand why we don't need a fortress... just a kill switch. While companies throw billions at firewalls, AI driven threat detection, and fortress like defenses - attackers still find their way in. James reminds us to keep it simple, with Protegrity's KISS Method which stands for Keep It Simple Stupid - and how when data is useless to attackers, breaches become mere inconveniences instead of existential threats.

Questions:

What exactly is the KISS method, and how does it apply to cybersecurity?
Why are traditional cybersecurity approaches failing to stop breaches?
What are some of the biggest myths about security that lead businesses to waste money on ineffective defenses?
How do encryption, tokenization, and de-identification work together to make stolen data useless?
Can you share an example where a company’s focus on complex security backfired, and how a simpler approach could have helped?
What’s the biggest pushback you hear from companies hesitant to adopt a simpler, data-first security model?
If a company wanted to implement the KISS method tomorrow, what are the first three steps they should take?

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S10 E26 P1: The Physical AI Revolution: Translating Complex Sensor Telemetry into Real-World Insights with Ivan Poupyrev & Nick Gillian, Co-Founders of Archetype AI

Tue, 01 Apr 2025 10:00:00 +0000

This is the creation story of Archetype AI.

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S10 Bonus: The Workplace Play Shift: Combating Hybrid Remote Loneliness and Engineering High-Engagement Slack Game Networks with Quinn Li O’Shea, Founder & CEO of Braid

Thu, 27 Mar 2025 10:00:00 +0000

Quinn Li started into tech well before college. In High School, she was into fashion and would take pictures of herself and her friends. She wanted to share these pictures, and found her way to Squarespace - which ultimately, led her getting into HTML and CSS - and the rest is history. Outside of tech, she plays a lot of tennis, and teaches Aerial. I had to ask what this was, and she explained it was the art form that you see in the circus, when people are climbing the sheets in the air, acrobatically.

Quinn Li has been focused on productivity throughout her career. As she started to swing her focus to building connections at work through play. One of the games she and her team built went viral on TikTok - and they knew they were on to something.

This is the creation story of Braid.

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S10 E25: Modernizing Blue-Chip Alternative Assets and Scaling Digital Portfolio Management with Alberto Simon, Co-Founder & Chief Product Officer of Masterworks

Tue, 25 Mar 2025 10:00:00 +0000

Alberto Simon is an immigrant from Mexico, moving to Florida with his small family when he was very young. At a young age, he got interested in computers, through gaming and building his own computers. In college, he briefly studied mechanical engineering, but quickly switched over to MIS. Post that, he joined an adtech startup, caught hold of the rocket, and built the professional skills he still utilizes today. Outside of tech, he enjoys dancing, specifically salsa and machata, and participates in CrossFit. For both things, he enjoys the challenge, working hard towards goals, and seeing progress.

Alberto and his co-founders had worked in the startup world for quite some time. They noticed the trends of platforms leading the charge on portfolio management, without advisors, alongside the democratization of investments in things like real estate, crypto, etc. They decided to move forward in removing the opaqueness from investment in art.

This is the creation story of Masterworks.

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S10 Bonus: The Decentralized Data Engine: Monetizing Enterprise AI Datasets and Regulating Model Training Access with Don Gossen, Co-Founder & CEO of Nevermined

Thu, 20 Mar 2025 10:00:00 +0000

Don Gossen is Canadian, but at this point, in name only. He lives in Portugal with his wife and 2 daughters. He grew up all over the world, and his career has afforded him to travel the globe. He's been in the machine learning space for 20 years, but spent his early days in statistical modeling - which was fun to setup, but boring to operate. For fun, he enjoys traveling and skiing, in particular off trail - and anywhere in Japan during the winter.

In 2016, Don caught the crypto bug, but not from the speculative component. He was fascinated with the providential integrity that is found in the blockchain. This culminated with 20 years of experience in deep tech, and led him down the path of AI agent payments.

This is the creation story of Nevermined.

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S10 E24: The Causal AI Shift: Providing Deterministic Context to AI Agents and Automating Cloud Reliability with Shmuel Kliger, Founder of Causely

Tue, 18 Mar 2025 10:00:00 +0000

Shmuel Kliger is a self proclaimed old man. He was born in Israel, and served in the army for 6 years. It was in the army where he obtained his passion for the space, from which he got his bachelors, masters and eventually, his PhD. Outside of tech, he is married with 4 kids and 2 grandchildren. He met his wife during grad school, and they now live in New York. When asked what he did for fun, he laughed and said that he enjoyed living in the "best city in the world", with everything at his fingertips.

When his past venture winded down, Schmuel found himself at the center of an idea that was the culmination of all his years in technology. To build something that could not only process large amounts of observability data - but could make sense of it, and take appropriate action.

This is the creation story of Causely.

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Podcasthon & the American Cancer Society

Mon, 17 Mar 2025 10:00:00 +0000

Hello Listeners.

Today is going to be a special episode, a bit out of the ordinary to our normal programming. I'm participating in Podcasthon, which gives Code Story the opportunity to dedicate one episode to a charity of choice. Hundreds of podcasts are participating in this, releasing their episodes simultaneously in a coordinate effort, with the goal of creating a massive and international wave of inspiring audio content.

Whats the point? The point is to raise awareness for a huge number of charities worldwide.

The charity I've chosen is the American Cancer Society.The American Cancer Society is fighting cancer through research into cures and support for existing patients in their family. This not for profit organization, and is enabled to do its work through donations, grants and other sources.

If you feel led to help fight cancer and support patients, go to the cancer.org website and click Donate. You can even give in Honor & Memorial of someone who's life has been impacted by cancer.

If you want to learn more, go to cancer.org. That C A N C E R.org.

Big thanks to the American Cancer Society for the work they do, and to Podcasthon, for coordinated this effort for charity.

And thanks again for listening.

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S10 Bonus: The Agentic PM Shift: Replacing Product Requirements Documents with Code-Ready Task Architectures with Tyler Wells, Co-Founder & CTO of BrainGrid

Thu, 13 Mar 2025 10:00:00 +0000

Tyler Wells lives outside of Austin, TX. He moved there 4 years ago, but spent most of this time in the Bay Area and Silicon Valley. Outside of tech, he is married with a family. His 3 kids are heavily involved in sports and extracurricular activities, which keeps them all pretty busy. But, when he has time, he is into cooking. He thinks of it as a nerdy endeavor, eating at a fancy restaurant and going home to try to recreate the dish.

At the sunset of his prior company, Tyler and his co-founders started digging into the AI Code Editor, Cursor, and how the agent side of things could increase the power and speed of coding. Through the shutdown, they decided to start something new.

This is the creation story of Braingrid.

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S10 E23: From the Netscape Era to the Multicloud Era: Building a 15-Year Infrastructure Moat and Designing Remote-First Culture with Anthony Eden, Founder & CEO of DNSimple

Tue, 11 Mar 2025 10:00:00 +0000

Anthony Eden is a gray beard in terms of internet time, being around when Netscape was released. He was studying music at the University of Miami, and decided to build a website to show off his music and other peoples work - and was hooked. Outside of tech, he grew up surfing, living in Hawaii, France and now Florida. He enjoys writing software for fun - when he has time - and playing board games with this kids - when they are around.

In the past, Anthony was coming off of a failed startup. At the time, he was using a different vendor to manage domains and DNS - which he did not like at all. He decided to go forward and build a better solution, and one that is - you guessed it - simple.

This is the creation story of DNSimple.

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S10 Bonus: Optimizing Software Delivery Intelligence: Integrating Signals Across Git and Jira to Audit AI Token Efficiency and DORA Metrics with Andrew Lau, Co-Founder & CEO of Jellyfish

Thu, 06 Mar 2025 11:00:00 +0000

Andrew Lau is located in Boston now, but is a California native. He grew up in Oakland, and calls himself the odd duck who went west instead of east, like most people. He went to the north east for school, and stayed to be apart of the startup world, interestingly enough with his current co-founders. Outside of tech, he's married to an AP Calculus teacher, and has two daughters. He enjoys cooking and making new cuisine with his kids. Fun fact, he is a certified barbecue judge in Kansas City, and has come to Texas a time or two to tour the Texas Monthly list.

Andrew met his current co-founders in 1999. Recently, they re-connected, recalling the successes and camaraderie they had during their startup days. They recalled that the act of leading engineering teams is hard - and they wanted to build something that makes that easier.

This is the creation story of Jellyfish.

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S10 E22: Zero Tax Liability from Day One: How to Automate Global SaaS Compliance and Sell in 220+ Countries with Ayush Agarwal, Co-Founder & CPTO of Dodo Payments

Tue, 04 Mar 2025 11:00:00 +0000

Ayush Agarwal is a techy trying to code his way out of things. He graduated with a degree in Computer Science, but more importantly, he discovered entrepreneurship in college, inspired by his successful classmates. He spent years gathering experience in different startup verticals, including fintech. But outside of tech, he loves to play badminton, cricket, and hangout with friends. He is also big into Chess, which he mentioned enjoying Chess.com, as well as our recent interview with their CTO, Josh Levine.

When Ayush met his now co-founder, they started to think through businesses and how much goes into setting up payments, taxes, etc. They started to dream about building this layer of payments, to enable builders to send and receive global payments easily, so they can focus on their core competencies.

This is the creation story of Dodo Payments.

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S10 Bonus: Moving Beyond Passive Organic Growth and Automating B2B Customer Acquisition at Scale with Josh Ho, Founder & CEO of Referral Rock

Thu, 27 Feb 2025 11:00:00 +0000

Josh Ho was into tech at a young age. In high school, which was around the time of bulletin boards and AOL online, he had to code a way to connect windows to the internet using TCP/IP. Outside of tech, he is married with a family. He notes that because he is in tech, people perceive him to be younger in age. He plays handball, and has been into the sport since he was younger.

Prior to his current venture, Josh had a SaaS product he attempted to launch that didn't work out. While he was getting his car worked on at a dealership, he noticed patrons being referred to salesmen in real time - and he started to think, who manages this sort of thing for other businesses?

This is the creation story of Referral Rock.

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S10 E21: Replacing Fragmented Agencies with Integrated High-Velocity Product Teams with Austin Vance, Co-Founder & CEO of Focused Labs (Focused.io)

Tue, 25 Feb 2025 11:00:00 +0000

Austin Vance grew up in Oklahoma, but takes residence outside of Denver, Colorado now. He is a father of 3 boys, who are also 3 in under - so he's quite busy. He loves woodworking, and teaching his oldest son how to ski. When it comes to food, he loves all of it in general - but has been drawn to asian fusion lately. And he enjoys reading business books, and sci fi - of which, Blade Runner was mentioned number one.

Austin had several experiences with consulting firms, where they operated under traditional "land and expand" models. IE, increasing the footprint of their teams. He felt passionate about building a services company that was designed to deprecate itself - starting with the wide world of DevOps.

This is the creation story of Focused.

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S10 Bonus: The Education-First Fintech Shift: Using AI Decision Engines to Simplify Investing for Everyday Earners with Jason Schappert, Co-Founder & CEO of Moola

Thu, 20 Feb 2025 11:00:00 +0000

Jason Schappert grew up in an entrepreneurial family. His Mom and Dad were always working together, and never had jobs. Jason's first job was working for his parents pest control company, where he crafted his understanding of what success looked like. Outside of tech, he is married with 3 kids, and is very into all of their sports. Fun fact, his kids enjoy doing their homeschooling in the office with their Dad, listening to calls and asking big questions - so business is actually what they do for fun.

For 16 years, Jason grew and ran a business in aviation. After a successful exit, he and his wife Magda were considering what to do next. She quickly remembered all of the things Jason did behind the scenes to setup their personal finances for success, in the midst of a chaotic startup life.

This is the creation story of Moola.

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S10 E20: Accelerating Cloud-Native Tooling and Engineering Blameless DevOps Culture with Tameem Hourani, Founder & CEO of RapDev

Tue, 18 Feb 2025 11:00:00 +0000

Tameem Hourani was born in the Middle East, on a small island. He came to the states, Boston specifically, for school in 2006. He planned on 4 years of engineering, which turned into 19 years of life. He became a citizen of the US during COVID, and spent many years of his career at Wayfair, which he throughly enjoyed. But outside of tech, he is a new father and spends a lot of time with his newborn. He loves being in the ocean, scuba diving, kite surfing and along side that, collecting vintage watches.

In the past, Tameem had been burned by consulting firms. He saw a gap in the industry, and when he left his prior role at Wayfair, he wanted to become a trusted, transparent technology partner - the one that he had longed for in his previous roles.

This is the creation story of RapDev.

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S10 Bonus: Leveraging Kernel-Level eBPF to Eliminate Sampling Blind Spots and Track AI Pipelines with Shahar Azulay, Co-Founder & CEO of Groundcover

Thu, 13 Feb 2025 11:00:00 +0000

Shahar Azulay has had many opportunities to get into tech throughout his life. He started digging into cyber security when he was 17 years old, where he learned the basics of deep tech that he still utilizes to this day. He's a startup guy, and has had the opportunity to be the first employee many times over. Outside of tech, he's married with 3 boys and a dog. He lives in the country side, and loves to spend time in nature and cook, as he was a semi professional chef at one point.

Shahar and his co-founder are veterans when it comes to using observability platforms for their systems. They wanted to build a platform that balanced the needs of the system, with a lower cost of a fully functional platform.

This is the creation story of Groundcover.

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Minting Unicorns - Blockchain, AI and Dubai, with Imad Gharazeddine, CEO of Mamo

Wed, 12 Feb 2025 11:00:00 +0000

Today, we are releasing another episode in our series entitled Minting Unicorns - Blockchain, AI and Dubai, sponsored by the City of Dubai.

Dubai is the new global center of gravity, connecting the world in a way few places can. As a hub for trade, tourism, innovation, and finance, Dubai offers the ideal environment for startups and scale-ups to thrive. Entrepreneurs find a home here, whether in health-tech, fintech, AI, or renewable energy, supported by SME-focused programs that empower high-potential companies to scale globally. From flexible regulations to tax incentives, world-class infrastructure to access to global investors managing $1 trillion, Dubai understands what businesses need to scale fast.

In this episode, we are excited to speak with Imad Gharzeddine, the visionary CEO and Co-Founder of Mamo, a pioneering fintech platform simplifying payments and empowering businesses in the MENA region.

Questions:

Tell us and our audience a little bit about yourself and the journey that led you to founding Mamo.
What is Mamo, and what specific problem are you solving in the fintech space?
Mamo is often described as a company simplifying payments for businesses and individuals in the region. What inspired this mission, and how has the journey been so far?
What fundamental principles guided the creation of the product, and how has it evolved over time?
Why did you choose Dubai as the base for Mamo? What advantages does the city offer to startups in the fintech space?
What opportunities have you capitalized on that you believe are unique to Dubai or the MENA region?
Mamo is known for promoting financial inclusion. How do your products and services cater to underserved communities in the region?"
How does Mamo incorporate cutting-edge technologies, like AI or blockchain, into its offerings to stay ahead of the curve?
As a leader, what’s your approach to building a strong and innovative team at Mamo?
What lessons have you learned as a CEO scaling a fintech startup in such a competitive and rapidly evolving market?
With Dubai emerging as a fintech hub, where do you see the industry heading in the next decade?
What advice would you give to fintech startups or entrepreneurs looking to expand into Dubai or the broader MENA region?

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S10 E19: Generative Remixes: Scaling Social Music Creation Tools and Unlocking Fair Artist Monetization with Simmi Singh, COO & Chief Product Officer of Hook Music

Tue, 11 Feb 2025 11:00:00 +0000

Simmi Singh grew up in Australia, when her parents migrated from India. She studied law and finance at university, and then went into investment banking during some tumultuous times. Eventually, she got interested in tech, and worked for teams at Intuit, Saavn, and Spotify, during the times of the Anchor acquisition and launching features around video podcasts. Outside of tech, she is married with 2 kids. She loves to travel, watch movies, and to do craft projects, as building is a key theme in her life.

While Simmi was at Spotify, a prior colleague of hers approached her about a product he was building. When she heard the details of what was being built, she felt that it was the culmination of all of our professional experiences and she had to jump on board.

This is the creation story of Hook Music.

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S10 Bonus: The Agentic Database Frontier: How AI Autonomy is Rewriting Postgres Requirements and the $1B Databricks Exit with Nikita Shamgunov, Co-Founder & CEO of Neon

Thu, 06 Feb 2025 11:00:00 +0000

Nikita Shamgunov is a native of Russia, coming to the US for grad school in 2005. Eventually he worked at Microsoft on the SQL Server product. A fun fact - Nikita quit business school on the first day, and decided to join Facebook and find his future co-founder. All of this worked out, and he and his co-founder built SingleStore, which is one of the highest valued companies at YC. Outside of tech, he was a semi-professional athlete in Ping Pong, achieving the status of Top 10 in Washington State back when he was at Microsoft.

Nikita completed his "tour of duty" at SingleStore, and post that, he joined a venture fund. He pitched incubating an idea of his at the fund, which was rolling up all Postgres instances in the world. He started to engineer an approach, the team, and the architecture - and did so in some very unique, and deliberate ways.

This is the creation story of Neon.

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Minting Unicorns - Blockchain, AI and Dubai, with Mohammad Albalooshi, CEO, DIFC Innovation Hub

Wed, 05 Feb 2025 11:00:00 +0000

Today, we are releasing another episode in our series entitled Minting Unicorns - Blockchain, AI and Dubai, sponsored by the City of Dubai.

For today’s episode, we are speaking with Mohammad Albalooshi, CEO of the DIFC Innovation Hub, a driving force behind Dubai’s innovation ecosystem and a key player in empowering startups and scaleups across the MEASA region.

Questions:

Tell me and my audience a little bit about you.
What is the DIFC Innovation Hub, and what role does it play in driving innovation in Dubai and the broader region? How did it come to be, and what vision does it fulfill?
Can you tell us more about the Dubai AI Campus? What is its mission, and how does it support the development of AI-driven innovation?
So I’m an entrepreneur looking to build the next big thing in fintech — how does the DIFC Innovation Hub support startups and scaleups in this space? Can you share some examples of companies that have benefited from your ecosystem?
Dubai is positioning itself as a global hub for fintech and innovation. How does the DIFC contribute to making this vision a reality?
Is it necessary for entrepreneurs to be physically located in Dubai or the MEASA region to join the DIFC Innovation Hub and its programs, or can global innovators participate from anywhere in the world?
What are the Dubai AI License and the DIFC License? How do these frameworks support entrepreneurs and businesses within the innovation ecosystem?
How is DIFC planning to expand its role in the innovation ecosystem over the next 5-10 years?
What new programs or initiatives can we expect to see from the DIFC Innovation Hub to attract global talent and businesses?
What advice would you give to startups and entrepreneurs, particularly those from outside the UAE, who are considering Dubai as a base for their operations?

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S10 E18: Replacing Complex IaC Plumbing with Visual Internal Developer Platforms with Cory O'Daniel, Co-Founder & CEO of Massdriver

Tue, 04 Feb 2025 11:00:00 +0000

Cory O'Daniel has had an interesting path to technology, growing his career in a number of cloud architect roles at Ripple, DealScience and The RealReal. He has rich experience in DevOps, the cloud and platform engineering. But outside of tech, he is married with 2 kids, living in Southern California. He loves driving (and destroying) RC cars - like the ones that go 65-70 miles per hour. He jumps them off a lot of ramps, his highest jump behind 20 feet upwards... which of course, he landed.

Cory noticed that there is a huge knowledge gap regarding the cloud, especially during his time doing professional services. He would leave a project post completion, and see a major gap in how the client understood what was built. He and his co-founders had the idea to build a product to allow platform engineers to diagram their infra - and fuel developers engineering process.

This is the creation story of Massdriver.

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S10 Bonus: The Voice-Native CRM Frontier: Eliminating Cold Leads and Automating Outbound Pipelines with No-Code AI Agents with Torrey Leonard, Co-Founder & CEO of Thoughtly

Thu, 30 Jan 2025 11:00:00 +0000

Torrey Leonard lived in Maryland prior to moving to New York City. In 7th grade, his claim to fame was building the world's largest Minecraft server in the world. In early high school, he had over a million users, made 6 figures, and was fueled by open source software that still runs on most Minecraft servers today. Outside of tech and gaming, he loves to play pickleball and really enjoys skiing - though he confesses that in New York, it's harder to do these hobbies, financially and logistically.

Last summer, Torrey built a platform that allowed you to build out voice agents. After doing so, he realized that there wasn't a good way to do this through a UI, and he realized this was an obvious thing that needed to be built. He decided to leave his prior company to pursue this vision - which headed towards the Zapier for call center agents.

This is the creation story of Thoughtly.

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Minting Unicorns - Blockchain, AI and Dubai, with Dr. Marwan Al Zarouni, CEO of AI

Wed, 29 Jan 2025 11:00:00 +0000

Today, we are releasing another episode in our series entitled Minting Unicorns - Blockchain, AI and Dubai, sponsored by the City of Dubai.

Today, we are speaking with Dr. Marwan Al Zarouni, CEO of AI for the Dubai Department of Economy & Tourism. Dr. Marwan. He is going to help walk us through how Dubai is creating a foundational hub for AI, Blockchain, and the intersection of both.

Questions:

Tell me and my audience a little bit about you.
You are CEO of AI for the DET. What does that entail? What are you driving in this position, leading your department?
It feels like blockchain is still trying to find its place in the mainstream, i.e., utility, security or currency, while AI is settling in some - where are both of these areas going?
While AI is a major focus, Dubai has also exceedingly been adopting blockchain. How do you see these two technologies interacting in various sectors, especially since you're also the CEO of Dubai Blockchain Centre.
How is Dubai addressing ethical challenges in AI adoption, especially in areas like data privacy and transparency?
AI is rapidly evolving globally, but how do you see Dubai positioning itself as a leader in the AI space?What’s your outlook for the city’s AI ecosystem in the next 5-10 years, and how are you working towards it today?
What is Dubai doing to attract promising and leading AI and blockchain companies to Dubai? What does the city offer companies in this space from a competitive advantage standpoint?

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S10 E17: The Code-Aware DAST Era: Scaling Runtime Security at the Speed of AI Coding Assistants with Joni Klippert, Co-Founder & CEO of StackHawk

Tue, 28 Jan 2025 11:00:00 +0000

Joni Klippert has spent many years in startups. Post getting her MBA, she built her early career in Boulder, CO, and became very technical learning new technologies throughout the businesses she worked for, liked VictorOps and Splunk. Outside of tech, she is married with 2 dogs. Her favorite thing to do is travel with her husband to visit Michelin star restaurants. One of her favorites was called Azuermendi in Spain, as it was not only delicious, but an immersive experience.

Joni had been building software for engineers for a long time, as a product person. At one point, she started researching the last mile of DevOps, and was surprised how far this particular group was behind, in regard to tooling. She dreamt of automating the pen-testing remediation process, and stumbled upon an opportunity as it relates to DAST - dynamic application security testing.

This is the creation story of Stackhawk.

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S10 Bonus: Utilizing Group-Photo Interactivity and Visual Memory Scrapbooks to Drive Lifetime Campus Engagement with Eric Leebow, Founder & CEO of FreezeCrowd

Thu, 23 Jan 2025 11:00:00 +0000

Eric Leebow was born in New Jersey, and bounced around a few states growing up. He has always been a gadget and tech enthusiast, growing up curious. At a young age, he could be found drawing, creating new things, and tinkering with headsets. Outside of tech, he is into juggling, playing and watching basketball. He's based in New York, and has been a vegetarian since he was a kid.

When he went off to college, Eric had with him picture books. He noticed that there were key words next to each person, which indicated their interests. He thought, wouldn't it be interesting if we can use this information to connect people within school?

This is the creation story of FreezeCrowd.

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S10 E16: The Meta-Layer Workspace: Consolidation of Fragmented Tech Stacks and the Zendesk Acquisition with Mihri Minaz, Co-Founder of Beams

Tue, 21 Jan 2025 11:00:00 +0000

Mihri Minaz is originally from Turkey, and has 4 siblings in different industries. Being good at math and problem solving, he was drawn go study computer engineering, and eventually was in the industry for a while before starting her current venture. Upon reflection, she feels it was supernatural for her to live in Turkey, be a woman, and end up in software. Eventually, she moved to Berlin and continued to be a unique case in the industry. Outside of tech, she enjoys watching art movies and shows, like Turin Horse or Fargo. She is learning piano, but travels so much for work, she has picked up DJ'ing, cause she can't bring a piano with her.

In the past, Mihri's experienced problems with her team, as far as measuring and optimizing productivity. This was related to the different number of tools used, along with the lack of a unified view of these tools. She and her co-founder clicked on this problem, and decided to build a solution.

This is the creation story of Beams.

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S10 Bonus: The High-Concurrency Crisis: Why Page Caching Fails Modern Membership Sites and Crushing the WordPress "Success Wall" with Wes Tatters, Managing Director of Rapyd Cloud

Mon, 20 Jan 2025 11:00:00 +0000

Wes Tatters has had a crazy, diverse career history. He is been in IT for around 40 years, and started in the days before the internet. He has had two paths - multimedia and information technology, of which both merged early in his career. He has been writing books since the early days of the internet. But outside of tech, he is married with kids, and in their downtime, they enjoy being together and sharing the world with one another.

Ten years ago, Wes started in on the Wordpress space. He immediately saw that most experiences utilized shared hosting, and he also had customers wanting to build community environments. The problem was most hosting providers didn't perform well enough to support the components needed for these types of sites.

This is the creation story of Rapyd Cloud.

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S10 Bonus: The Data-Driven GTM Engine: Transitioning from Traditional Sales to Product-Led Growth and Agentic Analytics with Thomas Hansen, President of Amplitude

Thu, 16 Jan 2025 11:00:00 +0000

Thomas Hansen was born and raised in Denmark. He's also lived in South Africa, Thailand, Turkey and then Seattle. He is married to his wife Ingrid, with 3 older kids. His real passion is wind surfing, which he started when he was 14 years old. He even engaged in the support at the semi professional level as a teenager. His favorite spot is in Maui, which includes all the wind surfing options you could want. He also spends an hour in the gym every morning to start the day with endorphins.

Thomas was introduced to his current venture through an early investor in the company. He met with the co-founder, Spenser, and sparks flew. There was a great fit and chemistry between them, and he was invited on board to push the company forward to new heights.

This is Thomas's creation story at Amplitude.

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S10 Bonus: Moving Beyond Scratch-Built Apps and Using AI to Assemble Enterprise Software from Pre-Validated Modules with Anand Kulkarni, Founder & CEO of Crowdbotics

Wed, 15 Jan 2025 11:00:00 +0000

Anand Kulkarni started his career in the dark ages of AI, as a Computer Science researcher at UC Berkeley. He published papers on human intelligence inside of software products, and eventually founded LeadGenius, which was AI for sales and was supported by Andreessen Horowitz and Sam Altman. Outside of tech, he is married with 2 kids, and used to be an avid rock climber. He also loves to eat tofu, and has been picking up a lot more science fiction lately.

Though the AI space is crowded today, Anand and his team have been working in the space since 2016. They observed the need to modernize legacy software and digitally transform organizations. They wanted to utilize an intelligent approach to this, and started down the path of building a large dataset, building software to learn from it, and use that to modernize software.

This is the creation story of Crowdbotics.

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S10 E15: Merging Code-First End-to-End Testing with Modern Synthetics and Agentic Root-Cause Analysis with Hannes Lenke, Co-Founder & CEO of Checkly

Tue, 14 Jan 2025 11:00:00 +0000

Hannes Lenke was born in East Germany. He started tinkering with computers at an early age, and became interested in making games at the age of 10. Once the browsers came out, he quickly dove into the world of web development. He also has a background in trading stocks, which he started when he was 14, along with software development consulting for enterprise. Outside of tech, he's married with 2 daughters. He lives in a small town close to Berlin, and enjoys running, rowing, and cooking out on his grill.

In 2010, Hannes founded a startup centered around testing. Post exit, he noticed that more and more businesses were using end to end testing... AND, the world was changing toward devops and observability. He decided that a new tool needed to be made along the lines of synthetic monitoring.

This is the creation story of Checkly.

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S10 Favorite: The Open-Source LaunchDarkly Killer: Engineering Privacy-First Edge Evaluation with Egil Østhus, Co-Founder & CEO of Unleash

Tue, 07 Jan 2025 11:00:00 +0000

Egil Østhus is based out of Norway - which obviously means he loves skiing. But outside of this, he loves to run outdoors, through the woods and on the streets. He has not done a full marathon yet, but dreams of doing the New York marathon someday. He's a family man, married, with 2 boys - none of which like to run with him, but they all enjoy being active and hiking.

In a past role, Egil's co-founder (and brother, FYI) was looking for a tool that would help him release code into the wild, in a rapid - yet safe - manner. He couldn't find anything to meet his high standards - so he built his own. When the open source version started to get a lot of attention, Egil joined his brother to bring the solution to the enterprise.

This is the creation story of Unleash.

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S10 Favorite: Streaming the Paycheck: Building Real-Time Earned Wage Access with Matt Pierce of Immediate

Tue, 31 Dec 2024 11:00:00 +0000

Matt Pierce has been a tech guy for his entire 17 year career. Coming out of grad school, he started out in healthcare tech for a decade or so. Eventually, he started down the path of being an entrepreneur. He is married with 3 daughters - 2 in third grade and one that is a 2 year old. He mentioned the entrepreneurial dilemma of picking 3 of the 5 life choices - family, business, sleep, exercise and friendships - and notes that his three are family, business, and sleep.

After spending nights and weekends burning the midnight oil on a healthcare tech solution, Matt sat down with a prospective client and did the best pitch ever. The client's feedback was that it didn't solve her real problem which was turnover, which boiled down to money. After chatting with the client and a mentor, Matt uncovered the best potential solution to financial stress - on demand pay.

This is the creation story of Immediate.

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S10 Favorite: From Plaid to a $1B Unicorn: Killing the Password with Reed McGinley-Stempel of Stytch

Tue, 24 Dec 2024 11:00:00 +0000

Reed McGinley-Stempel grew up in Las Vegas, but went to school on the East Coast. Frankly, he didn't know what he wanted to do and "stumbled" into management consulting. When I dug into how someone stumbles into this profession, he mentioned that early on he got some sage advice from his older brother about not rushing to law school because... being a lawyer isn't that fun. So, he followed some friends to Bain & Company.

The more projects he was involved in, the more he got interested in technology. Candidly, one of his motivations for going in tech was the fact that his was moving out to San Francisco to support his wife through law school at Stanford. He considered continuing to do consulting with Bain, but decided tech was the best route and eventually, joined Plaid. Outside of his professional career, he is into the outdoors, loving hiking and taking his very active dog outside. He mentions that living in San Francisco makes the outdoors super accessible.

Reed and his Co-founder both came from Plaid, and worked on the adaptive authentication team. There, they explored how to secure bank authentication to maintain security, but also do it in such a way that reduced friction and created an amazing experience. They found that the biggest problem to be solved was the combination of security issues with passwords, and the low conversion rate of sign up / sign in forms requiring passwords. They wanted to fix this.

This is the creation story of Stytch .

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S10 Bonus: The Value Pricing Revolution: Overthrowing the Hourly Hamster Wheel and Maximizing Profits for Solo Consultants with Jonathan Stark, Author of "Hourly Billing Is Nuts"

Thu, 19 Dec 2024 11:00:00 +0000

Jonathan Stark is based in Providence, Rhode Island. He attended the Berkeley College or Music, with a dual major in song writing. He ended up going back to computers to make ends meet while he was gigging - and he figured out he really enjoyed watching people use the software he built. Outside of tech and professional life, he's married with 2 kids and 2 dogs. He is an avid martial artist, as are his kids, and got his 2nd degree black belt at age 53.

At his prior company, Jonathan was leading teams to build software. He wanted to hire senior engineers, but was told junior engineers would better fit the budget. He couldn't figure out why, but then it dawned on him - hourly billing a junior created more margin. He wanted to pivot away from hourly billing as a company and went solo to figure out how to do this. Once he did, he never looked back.

This is the creation story of Jonathan Stark and Ditching Hourly.

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S10 E14: The Empathetic Engineering Culture: Scaling High-Performance Tech Teams and Mitigating Security Risks Without Dev Burnout with Eric Müller, VP of Engineering & CISO at Presence

Tue, 17 Dec 2024 11:00:00 +0000

Eric Müller lives in San Francisco, and explored many different paths before landing in tech. He looked into architecture, photography, but ultimately, he settled into the creativity, building and planning aspects of building software. Outside of tech, he's married with one kid, and a great tradeoff with his wife - he does all the cooking, while she does the cleaning. He still loves photography, and takes pictures regularly with his Olympus OM-1.

Eleven years ago, Eric joined his current venture as a consultant, taking on projects and delivering value. He was brought on board 6-7 months later, and started down the path where he would lead the engineering and security arms of your partner in creating digital products.

This is Eric's creation story at Presence.

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S10 Bonus: Co-Sourcing Evolution: Moving Beyond Traditional Outsourcing to Build Fully Integrated, High-Velocity Engineering Squads with Andrey Kudievskiy, Founder & CEO of Distillery

Thu, 12 Dec 2024 11:00:00 +0000

Andrey Kudievskiy has always been fascinated by technology, and when asked about himself, he identifies as an entrepreneur. He has been a software engineer, database developer, administrator and then jumped accidentally into management. Outside of his professional life, he is marred with two daughters. He enjoys running long distance. He has officially run 5 marathons, and unofficially, he has joined many more along the way.

Right after he graduated from University, Andrey saw a fantastic level of talent in developing countries. At the same time, he noticed the amount of profitable opportunity in the United States - and decided to build a business that joined the two.

This is the creation story of Distillery.

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Minting Unicorns - Blockchain, AI and Dubai, with Sonia Gokhale, VentureSouq

Wed, 11 Dec 2024 11:00:00 +0000

Today, we are kicking off a new series entitled Minting Unicorns - Blockchain, AI and Dubai, sponsored by the City of Dubai.

In today’s episode, we are speaking with Sonia Gokhale, Co-founder at VentureSouq, to understand how venture capital is thriving within all that Dubai has to offer.

Questions:

Tell me and my audience a little bit about you.
What is VentureSouq? What is your thesis as a venture fund?
Why focus on Fintech and ClimateTech?
How would you describe the tech and startup environment in Dubai?
You are a MENA based venture fund, what drove you to start here? Is this where you are physically based as well?
Dubai is increasingly being seen as a global fintech and ClimateTech hub. Can you explain how Dubai's startup ecosystem supports these sectors, and what advantages this offers for US-based investors looking to expand into the MENA region?
How does the DIFC, the AI Campus or the Blockchain center contributing to success of the startups you invest in?
What percentage of your portfolio is based in MENA?
Can you give me an example or tell me a story of success coming out of VentureSouq? How did VentureSouq fuel that success?
What advice would you give to the U.S.-based startups considering Dubai for expansion?

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S10 E13: The Scale-to-30-Billion Era: Re-Architecting Postgres and Managing Viral Traffic Surges for the World’s Largest Gaming Community with Josh Levine, CTO of Chess.com

Tue, 10 Dec 2024 11:00:00 +0000

Josh Levine lives in Brooklyn, NY. He started programming when he was 6 years old, when his Dad brought home an Apple 2. He realized that though there wasn't enough legos in the world to support his creativity, he could get enough RAM. Growing up, he had a deep relationship with chess, setting up his own chess program. In fact, he states that he learned everything he knows about programming - by programming chess. Outside of tech, he is married with 2 kids. He loves karaoke, and is a musician, with his music online under the name Heavy Pennies.

In 2011, Josh joined an amazing online game website, when they started supporting his favorite game variant. Ten years later, he researched this company and their technology to see how it worked. He applied for one of the jobs, got rejected, but then quickly got a call from the CEO, who liked his application.

This is Josh's creation story at Chess.com.

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S10 Bonus: Eliminating "It Works on My Machine" Complexities with Open-Source Package Management and Devbox with Daniel Loreto, Founder & CEO of Jetify

Thu, 05 Dec 2024 11:00:00 +0000

Daniel Loreto grew up in Venezuela, but moved around a lot and lived in 6 different countries. He is married with 2 kids, ages 8 and 5, which keeps him busy. Being based out of Austin, TX, he and his family like to spend time outdoors, on Lake Austin and Lake Travis. When it comes to food, he enjoys good sushi and eating healthy. And nowadays, he sticks to nonfiction reading, in order to learn something.

As part of running an team, Daniel had to create a platform engineering squad to support the development process. What nagged him about this was that he felt like he was recreating the wheel, having done this many times before. He figured someone should solve these problem by building products to make cloud dev delightful.

This is the creation story of Jetify.

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Minting Unicorns - Blockchain, AI and Dubai, with Raakin Iqbal, Nucleus AI

Wed, 04 Dec 2024 11:00:00 +0000

Today, we are kicking off a new series entitled Minting Unicorns - Blockchain, AI and Dubai, sponsored by the City of Dubai.

In this episode, we are speaking with Raakin Iqbal (aka Rock N Roll), CEO & Co-founder of Nucleus AI. Raakin is not only going to tell us about how Nucleus is building pre-AGI, but also how the ecosystem in Dubai is supporting their growth and success.

Questions:

What is Nucleus AI? What do you do?
Nucleus AI is often described as a Pre-AGI platform. Could you explain how this sets you apart from other AI solutions currently available in the market?
I am interested in how your system manages to "comprehend operational intricacies" instead of simply automating tasks.
How does your company’s approach to advanced AI strategies align with organizations like OpenAI, Anthropic and DeepMind? Can you name some proof-of-concepts to illustrate to this end?
What is the difference between Generative AI and AGI in your view, and why is Nucleus AI focusing on AGI?
Talk to us about the biggest challenges and opportunities in the development of AGI, and how is Nucleus AI approaching them?
Could you share some concrete examples of how your platform has enhanced efficiency for enterprises and government bodies within Dubai?
Dr. Marwan of the Dubai Blockchain Center spoke about the convergence of blockchain and AI. How do you foresee this synergy advancing within Dubai and potentially on a global scale? What role do you see Nucleus AI playing in the broader AI and blockchain ecosystem of Dubai?
How does Nucleus AI play a role as a possible use case using advanced AI for H.H. Mohammed Bin Rashid Al Maktoum's 0 Bureaucracy Government Vision?
How would you describe Dubai’s ecosystem for artificial intelligence and machine learning innovation and product development?
With Dubai’s advanced AI initiatives like the AI Campus and other licensing programs- how has Nucleus AI benefited from this environment esp. in your pursuit of AGI?
What advice would you give to the U.S.-based AI startups considering Dubai for expansion?

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S10 E12: The 60-Layer Deep Threat: Why AI-Generated Exploits Require Agentic Supply Chain Security and Self-Healing Code with Nick Mistry, SVP & CISO of Lineaje

Tue, 03 Dec 2024 11:00:00 +0000

Nick Mistry lives in the suburbs of Maryland, outside of Washington, DC. He has always been fascinated by cyber security, but most of all, its intersection with emerging technology. Outside of tech, he enjoys reading about human nature, through biographies of past leaders. He highly recommends the book Founding Brothers, which highlights the start of the US. He also enjoys spending time with his family outdoors, especially during the fall in the Northeast.

Around the time of the log4j exploit, Nick found himself troubled by the fact that people did not know if these exploits were included in their software. He spent months diving deep into this issue and talking with people in the industry, and eventually he connected with a prior colleague, working on this very concept.

This is the creation story of Lineaje.

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S10 Favorite: Scaling EdTech Infrastructure: De-Siloing the Digital Classroom with Shaunak Roy, CEO of Yellowdig

Tue, 26 Nov 2024 11:00:00 +0000

Shaunak Roy spent 10 years in the tech industry before deciding to be a tech entrepreneur. In undergraduate, he studied mechanical engineering and eventually came to the states for his masters. Outside of running a company, he has 2 daughters and enjoys playing games and observing their patterns of learning, which applies to his current venture.

Throughout his life, Shaunak has always been fascinated by learning. When looking into building his own startup, he noticed that there wasn't a learning platform built around the mechanics of social media, and community.

This is the creation story of Yellowdig.

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S10 Bonus: The 80% Coverage Guarantee: Overcoming the Flaky Test Bottleneck and Scaling Multi-Agent AI Testing with Jon Perl, Co-Founder & CEO of QA Wolf

Thu, 21 Nov 2024 15:00:00 +0000

Jon Perl is originally from Virgina, growing up on a computer. Mom is an architect and Dad is an electrical engineer. Jon picked up programming at his first job, when he automated a companies manifest creation. He has been passionate about programming ever since. Now, he lives in Seattle with his wife, young family, and dog. He enjoys all that Seattle offers, including the touristy stuff, and finding places for his daughter to pick up leaves.

At his previous company, Jon observed a failure in systems that required his customers to fall back to manual processes. The pain of this situation led him and his current co-founders to have a strong desire - to make sure something like this never happened again.

This is the creation story of QA Wolf.

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S10 E11: The End of Data Decryption: Processing Sensitive AI and Web3 Workflows on Encrypted Data with Fully Homomorphic Encryption with Nigel Smart, Chief Academic Officer at Zama

Tue, 19 Nov 2024 11:00:00 +0000

Nigel Smart is from Britain, but currently lives in Belgium. He has a PhD in mathematics, but headed into the world of cryptography early on. He has started a few companies in the past, both of which have successfully exited, one to Coinbase. But outside of technology, he loves to cycle and attend concerts. When asked about food, he said he loves all food - as long as it doesn't include eggplant.

Very early on, Nigel got involved with one of his current ventures. As an advisor, he stated to spend more and more time with the company, supporting it through its many iterations in building next level encryption for application builders - and doing so through open source.

This is the creation story of Zama.

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S10 Bonus: The Real-Time Voice and Video Boom: Eradicating GPU Cold Starts and Serverless Latency for Interactive AI with Michael Louis, Co-Founder & CEO of Cerebrium

Thu, 14 Nov 2024 11:00:00 +0000

Michael Louis grew up in South Africa, spending the first 25 years of his life there. From a young age, and being surrounded by an entrepreneurial family, he was always curious. He got into robotics and coding early, and stayed competitive and active as he grew up. Outside of tech, he loves to play squash, workout in CrossFit, run, and do anything where he has an opponent. Also, per South Africa culture, he enjoys spending time with friends at any social event involving drinking.

Michael built a successful eCommerce company, where you could order different items from stores and have them delivered. Because the margins in eCommerce are low, he and his team wanted to figure out how they could optimize their operation using machine learning. The tools out there weren't ideal, and the process was hard - but they did revolutionize their operation. Post exit, he decided to build a solution that made this optimization process easier.

This is the creation story of Cerebrium.

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S10 Bonus: The Open-Source Design Revolution: Breaking the Figma Monopoly with Browser-Native SVG and Code-First Collaboration with Pablo Ruiz-Múzquiz, Co-Founder & CEO of Penpot

Wed, 13 Nov 2024 11:00:00 +0000

Pablo Ruiz-Múzquiz has a background in physics and computer science. At some point, he decided to ditch the science and pursue open source, which is what got him started on his 20 year passion for tech. Outside of tech, he longs to feel like a useful member of society and engages in extracurricular projects to support this. He also is into traditional archery - IE wood bow and arrows - and finds joy in connecting with the old way of doing things. He also enjoys gardening and reading, of which, fantasy is one of his favorite genres.

Pablo built a company called Kaleidos, which aids in the creation of software solutions. They hold a core belief that there should be a close connection between designers and developers. What they found in the tooling to support these disciplines is that they weren't built to embrace this concept. So, they decided to incubate a product, and make it open source.

This is the creation story of Penpot.

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S10 E10: The Universal Cart Breakthrough: Overcoming Retail Fragmentation to Build the Ultimate Cross-Platform Online Shopping Wishlist with William Neill, Co-Founder of Basket

Tue, 12 Nov 2024 11:00:00 +0000

William Neill had an interesting childhood in New Zealand, rooted in being an entrepreneur. As a kid, he helped write business plans with his parents, or build makery stuff for projects. Living this type of childhood, combined with the creativity of music, it started a lifelong trend of building businesses and products. Rooted in his love for being an entrepreneur, he has always longed for a flexible life, to keep him present for his young family, and to allow for the option to travel. He loves spending time with his kids on the beach, and exploring the country as a family.

William and his co-founder met in a coffee shop in London. As they were chatting about prior projects, they figure out there was a lot of overlap in the things they were interested in. Eventually, they returned and built some solutions together - and off the back of a prior wishlist project, they decided to make an online shopping cart to end all others.

This is the creation story of Basket.

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S10 Bonus: The Non-Deterministic Gaming Frontier: Using Generative AI to Create Endless Replayability and Walk-to-Earn Rewards with Rohith Varanasi, Co-Founder of Block Party

Thu, 07 Nov 2024 11:00:00 +0000

Rohith Varanasi grew up in Jersey and had a chill childhood, playing videos games and sports from a young age. He wanted to learn how to build a video game, and upon googling it, decided he should build a website first. At that point.. he was hooked on coding. He got into jailbreaking the playstation and writing real code to mod games. Eventually, he got into hackathons and ended up building a web browser based on SMS called Cosmos - which went viral. Outside of tech, he is into paddle, loves going to the gym, and hanging with his girlfriend and their 1 year old cat.

Ro and his co-founder have been building a bunch of different consumer products. The latest product they built allows people to earn in game rewards by walking, and do so in a non-deterministic way. Under the hood, they are using generative AI to create endless outcomes, and optimal replay-ability.

This is the creation story of Block Party.

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S10 E8: Asset-Light Logistics Strategy: Orchestrating an Independent Fulfillment Network via Multi-Carrier Software and Network APIs with Jason Harbert, Co-Founder & CTO of Flowspace

Tue, 05 Nov 2024 11:00:00 +0000

Jason Harbert grew up in the middle of nowhere, Ohio. He got into video games, which led him into programming... which led him to Linux and internet security and joining the hacking club. He studied computer science at the University of Cincinnati, but left his senior year to hit the startup scene in the Bay Area. Outside of tech, he lives in Ohio, and is married with a 13 month old son. He loves to travel, and spend time with his family, trying new restaurants.

Jason and his co-founder, Ben, were having a beer, coming out of their prior startup life. Over the beer, Ben was sharing some stories about tight warehouse space and product distribution. They started to ask the question - how can you add flexibility to warehousing? They decided to set out and build something to create this solution.

This is the creation story of Flowspace.

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The Haunted House of APIs - A Portal to the Beyond with Allison Averill

Wed, 30 Oct 2024 10:00:00 +0000

The Haunted House of API's

Today, we are releasing another episode for Cybersecurity Awareness month, in our series entitled the Haunted House of API’s, sponsored by our friends at Traceable AI. In this series, we are building awareness around API’s, their security risks – and what you can do about it. Traceable AI is building One Platform to secure every API, so you can discover, protect, and test all your API's with contextual API security, enabling organizations to minimize risk and maximize the value API's bring to their customers.

A Portal to the Beyond: Securing Gen AI and other Third-Party APIs in Your Applications

Today’s episode is titled A Portal to the Beyond: Securing Gen AI and other Third-Party APIs in Your Applications, with Allison Averill. Developers are building exciting new features with Gen AI, often leveraging 3^rd party APIs. Doing this isn’t new, but are these integrations secure? These APIs open a portal to the beyond – and introduce supply chain risk to your applications. Allison is a Generative AI and product management expert at Traceable, and she will explore the risks lurking in generative AI and other 3^rd party APIs, sharing best practices for securing these integrations, so you can ensure they don’t become the stuff of security horror stories.

How are application developers leveraging 3rd party APIs today, and how is the landscape changing?
How do third-party APIs introduce risks to applications and what are some common mistakes organizations make when integrating with third party APIs?
How are generative AI APIs different from other third party APIs? What unique risks do they introduce?
Have you encountered any 'nightmare' scenarios where an insecure third-party API caused a security incident?
What best practices should organizations follow to ensure secure integrations?
How can organizations balance the need for innovation with the necessity of maintaining strict security controls when working with external partners?

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The Haunted House of APIs - Phantom Threats with Adam Arellano

Tue, 29 Oct 2024 10:00:00 +0000

The Haunted House of API's

Phantom Threats: The Ghosts Haunting Your API Security

Today’s episode is titled Phantom Threats: The Ghosts Haunting Your API Security, with Adam Arellano. API security threats often go unnoticed, hiding like ghosts in your infrastructure. Bots, sophisticated fraud attempts, account takeovers and attackers disguising themselves within legit traffic… these all pose risk to your organization, and can bypass traditional security measures, wreaking havoc without detection – until it’s too late. Adam is a tech advisor, Global CISO at Traceable, and will guide listeners through the world of phantom threats haunting API security.

What are "phantom threats" in the context of API security, and how do they go undetected?
Can you explain how advanced botnets and fraud attempts exploit APIs while blending into legitimate traffic?
Do you have a real-world example of a phantom threat that caused significant damage to an organization?
What makes detecting these phantom threats so challenging, and why do traditional security measures often fail?
What are the best strategies or technologies organizations can adopt to detect and eliminate these hidden threats before they cause harm?

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S10 E8: From Cisco Meraki and Splunk to Fixing Privilege Sprawl: Why Treating Identity as a Static One-Time Login Invites Cloud Catastrophe with Shashwat Sehgal, Co-Founder & CEO of P0 Security

Mon, 28 Oct 2024 10:00:00 +0000

Shashwat Sehgal has been in the tech industry broadly for 15 years. He started out as an engineer, but eventually, worked his way towards product and the business side. Outside of tech, he enjoys spending time with his family. He's into sports, loves to play tennis, but admits he hasn't played pickle ball yet because the courts are always booked. He also enjoys reading, in particular historical narratives or autobiographies.

In his prior years, Shashwat noticed that developers spend a large amount of time securing business assets in the cloud. He dreamt of a world where this was just an abstraction layer on top of the cloud, making it easier for developers to complete the task.

This is the creation story of P0 Security.

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The Haunted House of APIs - The Haunted Web of APIs with Richard Bird

Thu, 24 Oct 2024 10:00:00 +0000

The Haunted House of API's

The Haunted Web: Navigating API Sprawl and Creepy Crawlers

Today’s episode is titled The Haunted Web: Navigating API Sprawl and Creepy Crawlers, with Traceable’s Chief Security Officer, Richard Bird. As organizations scale and evolve, so does the complexity of their APIs. API sprawl, the uncontrolled expansion of APIs, creates a tangled web where vulnerabilities linger in the shadows. These unseen APIs become “creepy crawlers” of your digital infrastructure, creeping through your systems and posing security risks. Richard will discuss how unmanaged and undocumented APIs contribute to blind spots in security, the risks they create for organizations and the best strategies for securing a sprawling ecosystem.

Discussion questions:

Can you explain what we mean by "unknown APIs" and the different types, like shadow, rogue, zombie, and undocumented?
Why do these APIs often go unnoticed, and how do they become security risks?
What makes these APIs such an attractive target for attackers, and can you share an example of how one has been exploited?
How can organizations begin to uncover these hidden APIs, and what tools or strategies are effective in doing so?
In your experience, what are some common mistakes organizations make that lead to these unknown APIs being created or overlooked?

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The Haunted House of APIs - The Dark Corners of APIs with Katie Paxton-Fear

Wed, 23 Oct 2024 10:00:00 +0000

The Haunted House of API's

The Dark Corners of APIs: Uncovering Unknown APIs Lurking in the Shadows

Our episode today is titled The Dark Corners of APIs: Uncovering Unknown API’s lurking in the shadows, where we speak with Katie Paxton-Fear. APIs are the gateway to your digital infrastructure, but hidden deep in the recesses of your system are unknown APIs – shadow, rogue, zombie, and undocumented API’s. Each of these present a unique threat to your organization and can be exploited by hackers. Katie is an API hacker and researcher, and today, she will take us on a journey through the API graveyards, where hidden APIs lurk, waiting to be exploited – sharing real life examples of how these API’s have been attacked, and best practices for ensuring they don’t become your companies next security nightmare.

Discussion questions:

Can you explain what we mean by "unknown APIs" and the different types, like shadow, rogue, zombie, and undocumented?
Why do these APIs often go unnoticed, and how do they become security risks?
What makes these APIs such an attractive target for attackers, and can you share an example of how one has been exploited?
How can organizations begin to uncover these hidden APIs, and what tools or strategies are effective in doing so?
In your experience, what are some common mistakes organizations make that lead to these unknown APIs being created or overlooked?

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The Haunted House of APIs - The Witch’s Brew with Jayesh Ahire

Tue, 22 Oct 2024 10:00:00 +0000

The Haunted House of API's

The Witch’s Brew: Stirring Up OWASP Vulnerabilities and API Testing

Today, we are kicking off an amazing series for Cybersecurity Awareness month, entitled the Haunted House of API’s, sponsored by our friends at Traceable AI. In this series, we are building awareness around API’s, their security risks – and what you can do about it. Traceable AI is building One Platform to secure every API, so you can discover, protect, and test all your API's with contextual API security, enabling organizations to minimize risk and maximize the value API's bring to their customers.

In today’s episode, we will be talking with Jayesh Ahire, an expert in API testing and OWASP, will guide us through the "brew" of common vulnerabilities that haunt API ecosystems, focusing on the OWASP Top 10 for APIs. He’ll share how organizations can use API security testing to spot and neutralize these vulnerabilities before they become major exploits. By emphasizing proactive security measures, Jayesh will offer insights into creating a strong API testing framework that keeps malicious actors at bay.

Discussion questions:

What are some of the most common vulnerabilities in APIs that align with the OWASP Top 10, and why are they so dangerous?
Why is API security testing crucial for detecting these vulnerabilities early, and how does it differ from traditional security testing?
Can you share an example of how an overlooked API vulnerability led to a significant security breach?
How can organizations create an effective API testing framework that addresses these vulnerabilities?
What tools or methods do you recommend for continuously testing APIs and ensuring they remain secure as they evolve?

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S10 Bonus: Overcoming the 75% Failure Rate with Rigid Process Mapping and Strategic Co-Sourcing Architecture with Elkhan Shabanov, CEO of Digicode Americas

Thu, 17 Oct 2024 10:00:00 +0000

Elkhan Shabanov was born in the Soviet Union, and started out in the tech world. He eventually left tech to try some other types of businesses, but eventually returned. He has done a few early stage startups in the past, in particular in the 3d printing space before it was cool. Six years ago, he joined his current venture. Outside of tech, he enjoys traveling, and is in a competition with his daughter to see how many countries he can visit. When he reads, he prefers to go back to the books he has read and enjoyed before, and being in Texas, he is a big fan of grilling out on his big green egg.

As I mentioned, six years ago Elkhan joined a company that wanted to be more than a software development shop. He and the founder of the company wanted to build a company that did more than throw bodies at a problem - but actually because a long term partner to their clients.

This is the creation story of Digicode.

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S10 E7: The Tablet Graveyard: Consolidating Third-Party Delivery Chaos into a Unified POS Architecture with Vishal Agarwal, Founder & CEO of Checkmate

Tue, 15 Oct 2024 10:00:00 +0000

Vishal Agarwal was born in India, and did his schooling in Darjeeling. He noted that this city exports some of the best tea in the world! Prior to his current venture, he was the chief marketing officer for Choxi. Outside of tech, he is an avid tennis lover and follows cricket and basketball closely. Though, he admits, now that he has a 2.5 year old child, his time is mostly dedicated to him.

In attempting to solve the problem of "splitting the check", Vishal discovered that restaurants had a real problem with having multiple tablets for the many order and delivery services - like GrubHub, DoorDash, etc. When he saw this problem proliferate, he validated that people were willing to pay for a solution.

This is the creation story of Checkmate.

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S10 Bonus: The Real-Time Language Breakthrough: Eliminating Call Center Friction and Building Future-Proof LLM Infrastructure with Heiki Riesenkampf, Founder of Commonbase

Thu, 10 Oct 2024 10:00:00 +0000

Heiki Riesenkampf is from a tiny country called Estonia, later studying computer science in London and doing his post grad in Zurich. He has been into machine learning since before all of the hype it has now. Outside of technology, he dreams of being a macroeconomist, and spends a ton of time reading about the topic. He lives in New York now, and frequently takes in the architecture, fashion and local art scene.

Previously, Heiki spent time working for a VC, eventually building a product in a completely different domain. After personally realizing that he didn't want to be known for the product he was building, he pivoted towards building something that impacted him personally as an immigrant.

This is the creation story of Commonbase.

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S10 E6: The Shadow Identity Crisis: Intercepting Critical SaaS Vulnerabilities and Generative AI Data Leaks at the Point of Decision with Guy Guzner, Co-Founder & CEO of Savvy Security

Tue, 08 Oct 2024 10:00:00 +0000

Guy Guzner first computer when he was 5, which was a Commodore 64, where he learned to program in BASIC. As a teed, get started getting into the internet, back with dialup and a modem. He startec hacking into places where he shouldn't be, and eventually got into trouble - but now, he has flipped that for good and works to protect systems now. Outside of tech, he plays tennis, and likes to ski. He also plays guitar, jamming Led Zeppling and 80's / 90's rock.

After selling his past company to Symantec, he stayed on to help existing and future companies. What he realized was that people were still mis-using their identities. He observed this behavior, and decided to take identity to the next level.

This is the creation story of Savvy Security.

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S10 Bonus: The "Founders-for-Hire" Evolution: Moving Past the Agencies to Build Early-Stage Products with Custom Venture Studios with Rob Grazioli, Managing Partner of Bread

Thu, 03 Oct 2024 10:00:00 +0000

Rob Grazioli started his life in Brooklyn NY, but moved to Italy for his Dad's job, and lived there from age 5 to 13. He ended up moving back to the states for High School and College, and finds that it's difficult to separate tech and work from his life. Outside of tech, he enjoys exercising, and has always been an athlete, most recently picking up basketball. He really loves to make things, learn how things work, and to munch on Oreos.

Eight years ago, Rob and his partners started a company called Density, allowing businesses to count the number of people in a room. After growing that business, Rob realized that he wanted to get back to building things. And, after working with early businesses, he found his passion in being founders for hire.

This is the creation story of Bread.

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S10 E5: Eliminating Emotion-Driven Retail Losses with Data-Reprocessing Algorithmic Trading Engines with Sebastian Raffaele, Co-Founder & CTO of Minotaur

Tue, 01 Oct 2024 10:00:00 +0000

Sebastian Raffaele grew up in a small, working class family in Australia. He had a crazy life, growing up in social housing, having to find his way. He found inspiration from his family members, who always pushed him to follow his passions. He left high school early, and jumped straight away into the work force. In 2014 he was introduced to crypto, and got hooked. Outside of tech and finance, he has always been into the creative spaces, specifically music. He likes to spend time with his fiancé, likes trying new foods, and tries to surround himself with high quality people.

Sebastian realized that the manual processes for a trader are overwhelming, along with making it difficult to be consistent. And alongside this, he saw the cycle of manual traders returning the money they made to the market - sort of like "the house always wins" in casinos. He wanted to build something close the gap for these traders, and solve this problem.

This is the creation story of Minotaur Trading Systems.

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S10 E4: Open Banking Infra: Replacing Insecure Credential-Sharing with Safe Open Brokerage APIs for Millions of Retail Accounts with Brendan Wood, Co-Founder & CEO of SnapTrade

Tue, 24 Sep 2024 10:00:00 +0000

In August of 2021, we interviewed Brendan Wood on the podcast to tell the creation story of Passiv. After the recording, the company decided to pivot into a new market, focusing on solving their biggest pain point for other platforms. They were running into the problems surrounding integrations into brokers. In fact, they were spending 80% of engineering time on integrations. People started to reach out to his team to ask if they could use the integrations... and they started ideating about making this its own product.

This is the creation story of SnapTrade.

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S10 Bonus: Whats New with SWOB, with Alex Florio

Thu, 19 Sep 2024 10:00:00 +0000

Hello listeners.

Today, I have an awesome follow episode from our friends at Swob. You may remember our episode with Stephanie Florio in Season 6 over 2 years ago, where she clued us in on the creation story of the company. Today, I'm speaking with her co-founder and brother, Alex, to hear the update on Swob and what the team has been up to since then. Have a listen now

It's very cool to hear the successful update with Swob, adding over 7 million jobs to the platform, scaling for businesses and candidates, and ensuring they have the right team in place to carry out the vision.

If you would like to learn more about Swob, go to swobapp.com.

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S10 E3: The Trillion-User Scalability Crisis: Re-Architecting Bitcoin’s Layer 2 for Instant, Enterprise-Grade Global Liquidity with Kevin Hurley, Co-Founder & CTO of Lightspark

Tue, 17 Sep 2024 10:00:00 +0000

This is the creation story of Lightspark.

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S10 Bonus: What's New with Turso, with Pekka Enberg

Thu, 12 Sep 2024 10:00:00 +0000

Hello listeners.

Today, I have an incredible follow episode from our friends at Turso. You may remember our episode with Glauber Costa in Season 8, where he told us the creation story of the platform. Today, I'm speaking with his co-founder, Pekka, to hear the update on Turso and what the team has been building over the past year.

Now with Turso, you can not only have embedded replicas on your device or browser, with multi-tenancy and syncing to Turbo's edge network - but now the tool powers vector search from on the device itself, leading to natively server less, low latency sql lite production loads. Turso continues to push the envelope with their product, and expanding use cases for developers.

If you would like to learn more about Turso, go to turso.tech. If you'd like to learn more specifically about vector search, go to turso.tech/vector.

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S10 E2: Securing Intellectual Property, Minimizing Exit Risks, and Navigating Regulatory Scrutiny in the SDLC with Matt Van Itallie, Founder & CEO of Sema

Tue, 10 Sep 2024 10:00:00 +0000

This is the creation story of Sema.

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S10 Bonus: From Employee #8 at Stripe to Challenging the Triopoly of AWS, Azure, and GCP: Fixing the Broken Cloud-Native Developer Experience with Anurag Goel, Founder & CEO of Render

Thu, 05 Sep 2024 10:00:00 +0000

This is the creation story of Render.

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S10 E1: The API-to-Agent Translation Layer: Building, Governing, and Securing MCP Servers for the AI Ecosystem with Sagar Batchu, Co-Founder & CEO of Speakeasy

Tue, 03 Sep 2024 10:00:00 +0000

Sagar Batchu was born in Sacramento, but moved to Bangalore after a decade. He has always been interested in how things work, and majored in Physic at his University. Towards the end of his studies, he crammed in a ton of CS classes and fell in love with the craft. He's worked on firmware, enterprise software, and eventually went to LiveRamp, building new experiences for them. Outside of tech, he loves pickleball, enjoys growing coffee and loves readying about historical events.

In his past, Sagar and his team took on API initiative to invest in internal API experience. Through this project, he spent a lot of time thinking about how to make this happen. He immediately saw the need across the industry, with the absence of time and money to fill the need. He decided to take it on and start a company.

This is the creation story of Speakeasy.

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Trailer

Mon, 02 Sep 2024 10:00:00 +0000

What if you had a window into the digital startup world? What if you could ask the tech veterans what it feels like to create a world class product? How to recover from critical mistakes... how to scale your solution to the masses... How do you get from an idea on the back of a napkin, to a fully functioning product? What if you could hear the human stories about how they delivered technology? What if there was a show where you could hear those stories?

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S9 Favorite: From Oracle & AWS Aurora to CTO of MongoDB: Scaling Document Databases with Mark Porter

Tue, 27 Aug 2024 10:00:00 +0000

Mark Porter has always been fascinated with puzzles, so tech just fit for him and a great journey for him. He got his first 4k computer in middle school, and then moved into doing programming for the Department of Education. His big learning from this was that you can use tech to do social good. He's married with 5 kids, and as he puts it, they put up with his deep tech obsession.

Mark joined the board of MongoDB in 2019. What got him excited about the company was the world changing nature of the product. So much so, that he asked to step off the board to be CTO - and carry the banner to the developer community about the power of their doc based, distributed system performing DB transactions.

This is Mark's story with MongoDB.

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Website: https://www.mongodb.com/
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/marklovestech/

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S9 Favorite: The Open-Source LaunchDarkly Killer: Engineering Privacy-First Edge Evaluation with Egil Østhus, Co-Founder & CEO of Unleash

Tue, 20 Aug 2024 10:00:00 +0000

This is the creation story of Unleash.

Links

Website: https://www.getunleash.io/
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/egilconr/

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S9 Favorite: The "Duolingo for Data Literacy": Building AI Assessment Engines with Matt Cowell of QuantHub

Tue, 13 Aug 2024 10:00:00 +0000

Matt Cowell didn't start out in tech. In fact, he studied the chemical world heavily in school, getting his Bachelors in Chemistry and Masters in Chemical Engineering. So - by trade, he was clearly a chemist. However, when he joined Accenture, he started in with programming and establishing the SDLC methodology for the company. Matt is married with 2 kids, loves sports - specifically Illinois basketball - loves to play music and golf. He likes to travel with his wife to see family, and make frequent visits to their lakehouse.

In his professional past, Matt had held several roles in SaaS companies and startups. He met a company that was an artificial intelligence consultancy, which had a POC around assessments. They wanted to start up a separate company to support launch this POC and take it to market. This is when Matt got involved.

This is the creation story of QuantHub.

Links

Website: https://quanthub.com/
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/mattcowell/

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S9 E35: Eliminating Blind Spots in Overseas Manufacturing and Scaling Digital Quality Control with Prince Ghosh, Co-Founder & CEO of Factored Quality

Tue, 06 Aug 2024 10:00:00 +0000

Prince Ghosh was born in Bangalore, India, and moved around a lot during his life - to the US, then to Europe, then back to the US. But he spent his formative years in Princeton, New Jersey. He majored in Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering, as he wanted to build planes and engines. Eventually, he fell out of love with building planes, and because obsessed with supply chain tech. Outside of tech, he is a tennis player, occasional basketball player, and is an avid reader. He is enthusiastic about tech, the economy, and of course, the supply chain.

Prior to his current venture, Prince started Workbench while his co-founders created an agency, which was more like an operations company in a box. When they started working together, they realized there was a large opportunity to combine forces and simplify quality control.

This is the creation story of Factored Quality.

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S9 E34: From Managing Infrastructure at Twilio to Defining the Internal Developer Portal: Driving Context-Aware Software Governance with Anish Dhar, Co-Founder & CEO of Cortex

Tue, 30 Jul 2024 10:00:00 +0000

Anish Dhar grew up in the Bay Area, but now is located in New York. He felt lucky to be surrounded by technology, being in the Bay Area and having his Dad as a software engineer. His earliest exposure to tech was hacking his Wii - and at that point he was hooked. He eventually joined Uber and experienced many of the problems he is solving today. Outside of tech, he enjoys tennis and playing piano. He loves making music and attending shows to hear other artists, in particular EDM.

While he was at Uber, Anish noticed that the company was a prime example of microservices gone wrong. Developers were going outside of standards building services, not documenting them properly. He realized that every company he talked to had the problem of service cataloguing, and he felt confident to apply to take the challenge on and apply to YC.

This is the creation story of Cortex.

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S9 E33: The Enterprise AI Guardrail Framework: Securing Corporate LLM Data Flows and Enforcing Real-Time Governance in the Generative Era with Rick Caccia, CEO of WitnessAI

Tue, 23 Jul 2024 10:00:00 +0000

Rick Caccia was born and raised in Silicon Valley - and just stayed. He is married with 2 teenage daughters, one about to go to college. Between him and his wife, they have worked in 13 different startups - so you could say they have a startup family through and through. Outside of tech, he is a cyclist in a bike club, and enjoys spending time with his family.

After speaking with a number of security officers at companies, Rick realized the enterprise situation with AI - most companies are stuck, trying to figure out how to enable their employees to use new tooling, while still maintaining the level of security and control they have over data. Rick was asked to join a founding team to solve this problem.

This is the creation story of WitnessAI.

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S9 E32: The Fund Administration Shift: Replacing Legacy Accounting Delays and Scaling Multi-Asset Shadow Ledger Systems with Shalin Madan, Co-Founder & Co-CEO of Formidium

Tue, 16 Jul 2024 10:00:00 +0000

Shalin Madan immigrated to the US when he was 6 years old. He spent 20 years in the financial markets, of which he got into when he was a teenager. HIs first and best memory of the industry is when Netspace IPO's, and the stock went up 300% in the first day. Outside of finance and tech, he enjoys cooking, frequents the gym, and loves to travel. He's also a learner, studying philosophy, relationships, and of course, the macro economy.

Shalin found himself frustrated with working for others, which drove him into entrepreneurship. When he came across his current venture, he invested in the firm, became a part of it, and eventually, became the last co-founder, in a company administrating funds with cutting edge technology.

This is the creation story of Formidium.

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S9 E31: The Dynamic Configuration Era: Overthrowing Feature Flag Tech Debt and Replicating FAANG-Class Release Agility with Konrad Niemiec, Founder of Lekko

Thu, 11 Jul 2024 10:00:00 +0000

Konrad Niemiec lives in San Francisco. He is very close to his family, of which his parents are polish immigrants. He started coding when he was 11, while working for his Dad. His core values are curiosity and community, which drives a lot of what he does outside of tech. He likes to learn things, and his current hobby set includes surfing and spike ball, of which he is working on perfecting his spin serve.

Konrad worked at Uber, on the self driving team. After a few years, he wanted to be less of a cog in the machine and joined a small startup. He introduced a feature flagging platform, and realized how quickly configuration bloat appeared on the platform. He also realized how dynamic configuration could take the platform beyond the limits of feature flags.

This is the creation story of Lekko.

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S9 Bonus: Overthrowing DM Spam and Engineering Frictionless, Real-Time Paid Audio Consulting with Jason R. Hill, Founder of Owwll

Fri, 05 Jul 2024 10:00:00 +0000

Jason Hill was born and raised in New York, and post college, went back to New York and joined the financial services - though, he was always into technology. Eventually, he moved to South Florida because every time he was in New York, he couldn't wait to leave. He enjoys playing poker, pickleball, and spending time with his two kids.

Jason has been a podcaster for many years, interviewing founders and creators of new startup and tech solutions. When COVID hit, he was struck with how difficult it was to connect with individuals via audio call. He validated an idea he had, and combining his ambition and a little bit of boredom, he got a crew building a solution.

This is the creation story of Owwlll App.

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S9 E30: The Infrastructure-as-Code Rebellion: Overthrowing Terraform Blockades and Launching Figma-Style DevOps Models with Adam Jacob, Creator of Chef and Founder & CEO of System Initiative

Tue, 25 Jun 2024 10:00:00 +0000

Adam Jacob grew up in Vancouver, but now lives North of San Francisco. He's married with a teenage daughter, and grew up in the era of the internet that was bulletin based. He likes music, specifically heavy metal. He was raised on 80's hair metal, but also enjoys modern and Swedish metal, of which your host is very familiar. He also loves cats, and at one point, had a bengal, which is a cross between a tiger and a domestic cat.

Previously, Adam was the creator of Chef, and has spent many years building a successful platform, extending DevOops value with automated security and compliance. He and his now cofounder reached the limits of what could be achieved using conventional approaches in the space - and decided build a new tool, to enable engineers to tackle complex infra and app management without compromising control.

This is the creation story of System Initiative.

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S9 Bonus: Implementing Automated Subtitle Alignments, Cross-Lingual Vocal Emotion Synthesis, and Cloud-Native Collaborative Editing Suites with Berkay Atatop, Co-Founder & CEO of Maestra

Thu, 20 Jun 2024 10:00:00 +0000

Berkay Atatop is originally from Turkey, but now lives in Germany. He loves to travel, and living in Germany allows him to be close to family, but enable him to live a nomadic life. He split his college time in Turkey and America, and while he was stateside, he discovered hackathons - which is the origin spot for his current venture. Outside of tech, he played water polo for 10 years, and enjoys playing the guitar. He finds inspiration in bands like Pearl Jam, who is coming to Europe soon, which Berkay is excited about.

After getting into hackathons, Berkay and his co-founder built a prototype of their current company solution - an automatic transcription solution for voiceovers. Once they graduated, they decided to start a company and move into subtitles and beyond.

This is the creation story of Maestra.

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S9 E29: Overthrowing Shelf-Ware IGA and Engineering Engineering-Led Least-Privilege Frameworks with Umaimah Khan, Co-Founder & CEO of Opal Security

Tue, 18 Jun 2024 10:00:00 +0000

Umaimah Khan grew up in San Diego, but now lives in the Bay Area. A fun fact about her - she was home schooled until college, and growing up, loved puzzles and math. She planned to be a math professor until she eventually got into startups and tech. She is a curious person, with many hobbies and interests. In fact, she loves to cook and was a chef at two different Michelin star restaurants. She also likes to garden, growing food and also interesting plants.

In the past, UK found herself drawn towards real world problems in real time. What she found herself noticing was that access management was incredibly messy - and that people weren't willing to look behind the curtain to fix the problem. After she noticed that this problem kept surfacing , and decided to solve it.

This is the creation story of Opal Security.

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S9 E28: Overthrowing Paper Receipts, Crushing Margin Bleed, and Building the "Concur for Construction" with David Cauthron, Co-Founder & CTO of Outpave

Tue, 11 Jun 2024 10:00:00 +0000

David Cauthron grew up in Dallas, TX and attended UTD for undergrad. Post that, he spent 22 years at Texas Instruments - who makes a whole lot more than calculators - serving in numerous roles in IT, the latter being e-commerce. Outside of tech, he is married with 2 kids, and really enjoys spending time with his family - going to Disney, biking and running. In addition to this, he plays Minecraft with the kids, and attending gymnastics meets and Boy Scout campouts.

David was contacted by his current founder and friend, who was going through an intra-prenuership program at SAP. After winning the program, but having the program shut down, he asked David if he was available to start a company and create the Concur for small to medium businesses.

This is the creation story of Outpave.

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S9 Bonus: Riding the 36K-Star Black Swan: How an Impromptu Open-Source Fork Saved the DevOps Ecosystem from Proprietary Lock-In with Omry Hay, Co-founder & CTO of env0

Thu, 06 Jun 2024 10:00:00 +0000

Omry Hay is 41 years old, married, with 3 young kids. He has lived his whole life in Israel. Unlike many founders in Israel tech, he did not serve his military service in a technology group, but as a commanding officer in the infantry. Outside of tech, he is passionate about all things sports, and loves to follow Liverpool FC. Mostly, he enjoys chilling out, catching a movie or listening to music.

Omry and his cofounder used to work together at a prior big company in Israel. They encountered problems scaling environments efficiently and fast. Back then though - there was no cloud, it was just getting started. When they started building something internally to solve this, they encountered infrastructure as a code - and the game changed.

This is the creation story env0.

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S9 E27: The Zero-Sampling Observability Shift: Bypassing Splunk Cost Traps and Archiving 100% of Event Data with Neil Jagdish Patel, Co-Founder & CEO of Axiom

Tue, 04 Jun 2024 10:00:00 +0000

Neil Patel has always been a hacker - electronics boards, radios, etc. - being interested in how things work, mechanically or digitally. He learned hard work at his Father's convenience store, while also reading every computer magazine on the rack. He is a pharmacologist by study, but landed in tech cause he is passionate about it. Outside of tech, he loves architecture and design. He also loves to read, in particular sci fi, and enjoys eating Gujarati food, which is purely vegetarian food with tons of flavors.

Prior to 2020, Neil and his team was attempting to build tooling around understanding data around events. After a while, they realized that no matter what was done on top of an event store, you couldn't realize value without storing all events. So they pivoted, and focused on fixing the data store problem first.

This is the creation story of Axiom.

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S9 E26: The Generative AI Attack Surface: Bypassing Prompt Injections, Securing LLM Data Flows, and Locking Down the API Layer with Sanjay Nagaraj, Co-Founder & CTO of Traceable AI

Thu, 30 May 2024 05:01:00 +0000

Sanjay Nagaraj started his journey in India, where he was born and raised. He earliest influences started at home, as his father taught him honesty and integrity and his mother heavily influenced his growth as an individual. Though he spends most of his time in tech, anytime outside of work is dedicated to time with family, where he gets to see the world through his wife and kids - along with fueling his passion for singing and following his favorite sports team.

For Sanjay, one thing that was clear to him was that application builders exposing APIs, you are responsible for making sure those API's are secure. Prior to his current venture, he and his co-founder built AppDynamics, and they saw the growth of API's first hand. As such, businesses were looking for products to help understand API's and protect them - in real time.

This is the creation story of Traceable.

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S9 Bonus: From 13 Years of Bootstrapping to Defying the Tech Winter: Stripping Away the Flat 2.9% Fee Monopoly by Owning the Full Payment Stack With Nic Beique of Helcim

Thu, 23 May 2024 10:00:00 +0000

Nic Beique was born in Odessa, Texas, but moved when he was very young to Montreal. Later in his teens, he moved to Alberta, which he describes as the "Denver of Canada". He loves his work, and spends most of his time thinking about how to expand his new venture - but outside of this, he lives in a beautiful city, with tons of hiking, skiing and snowboarding. He also enjoys a lego set here and there, keeping close to his building roots.

Nic started his first payments business a decade ago, which lived under the shadow of the bank. After many years of negotiation, he convinced the powers that be to let his company become its own payment processor. And after 3 years, he built a giant MVP to build the Square for grown-ups

This is the creation story of Helcim.

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S9 E25: The Incident Response Revolution: Overthrowing War-Room Chaos and Automating Slack-Native SRE Workflows with JJ Tang, Co-Founder & CEO of Rootly

Tue, 21 May 2024 10:00:00 +0000

JJ Tang grew up in mainland China, though eventually he came to the US for University and stayed. He found a job, started working and eventually, moved to Canada, as the entrepreneur ecosystem was quite friendly. He has worked for companies like Instacart, IBM and Cisco, gaining vast experience in a myriad of roles. But outside of tech, he is engaged to be married in 2025, and is big into road cycling. In addition, he has a dog named Nova, which his current venture centers their merch design around.

At Instacart, JJ started to build a tool for infrastructure monitoring. When he realized that building it was cumbersome, and nothing existed in the market, he decided to take one of the companies best SRE and start a company, building this very product.

This is the creation story of Rootly.

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S9 E24: The Data Streaming Renaissance: Bypassing JVM Bloat and Squeezing 10x Performance From Modern Hardware Engines with Alex Gallego, Founder & CEO of Redpanda Data

Wed, 15 May 2024 10:00:00 +0000

Alex Gallego was born and raised in Colombia. He has always identified as a builder, and as a kid, he would help his Uncle re-build dirt bike engines, and was the kid that would take apart his friend's computer when they weren't looking. Once he arrived in the US, his Dad got a computer, which started his love for tech and cryptography. Outside of tech, he is married with three boys, so his time is consumed with being present with his boys, to which he stated he loves being a Dad. Beyond that, he enjoys mentally reseting by doing mountain biking and road cycling.

Alex was working with a large dataset in ad tech. After this startup did well, he was hooked, he went on to build a computing framework, which eventually sold to Alkamai. During his time at that company, he started playing with squeezing every bit of compute out of hardware - and decided to combine this in order to optimize storage.

This is the creation story of Redpanda.

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S9 Bonus: The Bootstrapped ALM Blueprint: Reaching $20M ARR With Zero Venture Capital and Automating Risk-Aware Quality Assurance with Adam Sandman, Founder & CEO of Inflectra

Thu, 09 May 2024 10:00:00 +0000

Adam Sandman grew up in Wales, in the United Kingdom. He went to university to study physics, because he had a fascination and desire to understand how things in the world worked. It was during this time that he ended up falling in love with tech, and has been in the industry ever since. Outside of tech, he is married with older children. He mentioned he was a scout master in the past, which he really enjoyed how the Scouts were led by the Scouts themselves.

In the past, Adam realized that there were not great tools out there for QA testing. He noticed a lot of people were using Excel and Word, along with manual testing through the industry. Given his experience as a project manager and architect, he saw an opportunity in the market - and set out to build a solution.

This is the creation story of Inflectra.

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S9 E23: The $120M War Chest Shift: Overthrowing Legacy Payment Bottlenecks and Accelerating the Path to Fintech Unicorn Status with Vlad Sadovskiy, Founder & CEO of Netevia

Tue, 07 May 2024 10:00:00 +0000

Vlad Sadovskiy is a first generation immigrant from the Ukraine in the early 1990's. He has been in the payments space for 30+ years, so he knows a thing or two about the space. But outside of this and tech, he is a cancer survivor, and ex professional chess player. He mentions that along with ping pong, he still plays chess as a hobby - and sometimes, to help resolve arguments with his wife.

A few years ago, Vlad acquired a number of businesses in the payment space. Having spent many years in the payment space, he decided it was time to be a founder and create something in the payment space with a twist - specifically, for the "reseller community".

This is the creation story of Netevia.

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S9 Bonus: From Film Tech to Architecting a Bitcoin-Backed Bretton Woods System: Overthrowing Custodial Bridging Risks with Sasha Mitchell, Head of BeL2 & Founder of Elacity

Thu, 02 May 2024 10:00:00 +0000

Sasha Mitchell living in Bangkok, Thailand, but grew up in London. He stared in the creative industries, as one side of his family are architects and the other side are musicians. This inspired him to study music production, which allowed him to enjoy the intersection of tech and creativity. During his time in film tech, he discovered the blockchain and started his journey into this industry. Outside of tech, he enjoys snowboarding, skateboarding, and of course - music and film.

Being in the space for a long time, Sasha has been witnessing what he describes as the drop in the value of currency, by manipulation. He wanted to see decentralized, smart contracts create a smart economy - as part of a new internet.

This is the creation story of BeL2.

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S9 E22: From Meeting His Co-Founder on Tinder to Leading a YC Startup in a War Zone: Scaling an On-Demand Creative Marketplace Under Fire with Roman Sevast, Co-founder & President of Awesomic

Tue, 30 Apr 2024 10:00:00 +0000

Roman Sevast was born in a small city in Ukraine. When he met his girlfriend, he wanted to take her out to dinner - but he didn't have the money to do so. So he started to learn software engineering to make a little money - and his tech career started. Outside of tech, he loves to play a myriad of different video games, and enjoys DJ'ing - either for himself or for his friends. He tends to play techno or house music, but has thrown in some classical music from time to time.

Eight years ago, Roman met his co-founder Stacy on Tinder. After dating for several years, she showed him some buggy apps she had tried to create, and Roman stepped into help. After a few failed startup attempts, they set out to build a space where companies meet design talent - within the same day - and have these designer's projects managed with AI.

This is the creation story of Awesomic.

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S9 Bonus: The Metadata Breakthrough: Bypassing Legacy Tree Walks and Scaling Real-Time AI Dataset Ingestion with Björn Kolbeck, Co-Founder & CEO of Quobyte

Thu, 25 Apr 2024 10:00:00 +0000

When asked about his life outside of tech, Björn Kolbeck stated "Is there anything outside of tech?". He has made his hobby into his job, being exposed to his first computer at 11 and dreaming of being a programer. Outside of tech, he is a father of 2 kids. He loves going to the gym and traveling, which he mentioned was a luxury at his current venture. For personal travel, he loved visiting Costa Rica, as the people are friendly, the country is beautiful - and it's safe.

Björn started a PhD program, and was part of a large project with the goal to build a distributed version of Linux. Within this program, he met his now co-founder, and they were responsible for a package within that project, surrounding data management. Little did they know that their exciting part of the project would later turn into a separate distributed file system.

This is the creation story of Quobyte.

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S9 E21: The Synthetic Audio Frontier: Overthrowing the "Uncanny Valley" and Engineering Ethical, Human-Parity AI Voices with Matt Hocking, Co-Founder & Executive Chairman of WellSaid Labs

Tue, 23 Apr 2024 10:00:00 +0000

Matt Hocking has a background in design, and started off as a graphic designer in Australia. He moved into lecturing while running a design school, which led him to New York and the startup community. He is a multi founder, which led him to his current venture. Outside of tech and startups, he is a family man, and loves to spend time with his kids - which he calls his startup outside of his startup. He enjoys building and drawing with his son, and doing the best he can to support his young daughter in becoming a princess one day.

In 2018, Matt met his co-founder when joining AI2. While he was working on deep learning projects, Matt was working on a user centered, voice based experience in healthcare. When they put both things together, they figured out they could really help people and save hours of studio time by generating voiceovers with AI.

This is the creation story of WellSaid Labs.

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S9 Bonus: Whats New with Alice Technologies - Rene Morkos, Founder & CEO

Thu, 18 Apr 2024 10:00:00 +0000

Welcome back listeners.

Today we have a return guest on the podcast, Rene Morkos, the Founder & CEO of Alice Technologies. If you recall our conversation with Rene from Season 7, April 6th 2023, he and his team are building algorithms to disrupt the construction industry, through project optioneering and construction optmization. Today, he returns to the show to update us on Alice Pro and Alice Core, their latest innovation to the sector, which boasts a 100X reduction in setup time. Listen in now.

In any industry, if you can build something that reduces setup time 100X - you have achieved something great. Rene and his team are changing the game, when it comes to project optioneering, bringing the solution into the backyard of the construction industry, while making it faster and easier to manage your scheduling.

You can learn more about Alice Tecnnologies, Alice Pro, and Alice Core - by visiting https://www.alicetechnologies.com/.

And thanks again for listening.

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S9 E20: Investor Attraction Blueprint: Overthrowing Legacy Outreach and Engineering Founder-First Public Relations Engine with Michael Hummel, Co-Founder & CEO of Establish

Tue, 16 Apr 2024 10:00:00 +0000

Michael Hummel has a different perspective on tech and startups than most people in this realm. His background dis in marketing, and prior to his current venture, he was running a lead gen marketing firm. Outside of his professional life, he is married, living in Puerto Rico, and has a miniature husky. He has picked up spearfishing - which sounds wicked fun. When I asked what was the biggest fish he caught, he laughed - and mentioned that he sticks to the reefs and the smaller fish.

Starting out, Michael founded his current venture focused on PR - IE public relations - and they did this because it was aligned with his background. Fast forward, his company is aiding startups raise capital, by focusing on three key pillars.

This is the creation story of Establish.

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S9 Bonus: Demystifying Unit 8200’s Cyber Warfare Dominance and Launching a New Cloud Efficiency Engine with Alon Arvatz, Author of The Battle for Your Computer & CEO of PointFive

Thu, 11 Apr 2024 10:00:00 +0000

Alon Arvatz has been in tech for a long time. Fun fact, he loved technology but hated computer science. After getting introduced to the industry by his father, he discovered that tech is not just computer science - which was a big relief. He is the author of a book called The Battle for your Computer, which highlights Israel and the growth of the global cybersecurity industry. Outside of tech and cybersecurity, he is married with 4 kids, and highlights that all things in life - family, startup, etc. - is a partnership between he and his wife. Their family is a big fan of history, and looks to learn the stories of the places they visit.

Through his time in the military, Alon was exposed to the difficulties of managing cloud cost. Alongside his 15 years in cybersecurity, and writing his book on the topic, he figured out that a focus on efficiency could help businesses with their cloud costs - starting with a minimum integrate-able product.

This is the creation story of Pointfive.

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S9 E19: The Event-Native API Revolution: Unifying Synchronous Rest and Asynchronous Kafka Pipelines with Linus Håkansson, Chief Product Officer at Gravitee

Tue, 09 Apr 2024 10:00:00 +0000

Linus Hakansson finds that he has been in the tech industry so long, that it is difficult to separate himself from what he does professionally. He's a family man, with a 2.5 year old son, and enjoys spending time with them and raising is kid. Outside of that, he enjoys soccer, sports, and cooking Italian food. In fact, recently he bought a pizza oven and started making his own dough and pie.

Linus has been working with API's since he started in the industry. In 2019, he was introduced to his current venture, as they wanted to create an open source API management software. After a couple of years, he partnered with the team, and then eventually - joined the company, to build something good.

This is Linus' creation story at Gravitee.

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S9 Bonus: Doing the Work of a Whole DevOps Team, with just two people - Erin Marie & Jesus Maria of MSquared

Thu, 04 Apr 2024 14:46:40 +0000

Erin Marie has been in tech for 20 years. Prior to tech, she was a history major but became more passionate about building websites and technology. She went from web developer to programmer analyst to cloud engineering, and met her current business partner at Boeing. Outside of tech, she is into amateur photography, capturing landscapes and portraits. She is also passionate about passion and film, with her favorite grind core film titled "They call her one eye".

Jesus Maria comes from the Caribbean, and enjoys beaches and being near the water. When he is not coding or coming up with crazy tech ideas, he describes the amount of heavy metal he listens to as obscene. He has 6 guitars, all tuned differently, and loves to take breaks from his tech and throw down a new riff. He's also passionate about art, and into doing illustrations. He shares the same favorite film as Erin Marie.

Erin and Jesus are stationed in Denver, Colorado. During the pandemic, they were hanging out at the back yard picnic table, with wine and smokes. They were ideating over building a digital strip mall, to help local businesses build their platforms. Eventually, they started up a platform engineering company and when Lionsgate called, their pandemic picnic table idea started to grow.

This is the creation story of MSquared.

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S9 E18: The Era of Physical AI: Engineering Deep-Learning Computer Vision and Real-Time Risk Action at Scale with Jai Ranganathan, Chief Product Officer at Motive

Tue, 02 Apr 2024 10:00:00 +0000

Jai Ranganathan is a typically middle aged man, living in Austin, TX with a couple of kids and a Tesla. He moved to the US when he was 17, to attend the University of Texas. Post that, he spent 25 years in California at different tech businesses. Outside of tech, he enjoys doing activities with his daughters, rock climbing, and playing sports.

In 2013, Jai's current CEO saw a huge opportunity for the millions of heavy freight vehicles on the road. He built an app to track service hours, around the time that Jai joined - but, they didn't plan on stopping there.

This is the creation story of Motive.

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S9 Bonus: From Wall Street Institutional Research to Coaching Top-Tier Fortune 100 Executives: Mastering the S-Curve of Growth with Amy Frame and Whitney Johnson, Co-founders of Disruption Advisors

Thu, 28 Mar 2024 10:00:00 +0000

Whitney Johnson graduated college with a degree in Music, minoring in English. Of course, she needed a job, and became the secretary to a broker on Wall Street. After taking business courses at night and building confidence from a boss who believed in her, she moved into picking stocks. In 2005, she had an "aha!" moment leading her towards entrepreneurship, and starting a fund with Clayton Christensen, author of the Innovators Dilemma. She's the author of the many books, including Disrupt Yourself, which you can find a link in the show notes. Outside of these things, she is married, loves to play tennis, and enjoys a good Korean drama.

Amy Humble grew up in a rural part of Colorado called Rifle. Her mother was a principal, her father was a psychologist, and she studied political science during undergrad, while working in the Senate. She explored how to develop young people, and has always been rooted in her desire to develop people. In the past, she worked with Jim Collins - the author of Good to Great, who baptized and indoctrinated her into leadership development. Outside of her professional life, she is married with a young family. She enjoys skiing, hiking, biking, and playing in the water.

Amy was researching women who had become though leaders, and stumbled upon the work that Whitney was doing. They started out doing a small project together in 2015, and discovered that not only do they like working together, their strengths complimented each other - which led to the forming of a partnership.

This is the creation story of Disruption Advisors.

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S9 E17: Bypassing Documentation Friction: Implementing Developer Learning Engines and 30x Engagement Video Frameworks with Jake Ward, Co-founder & CEO of Data Protocol

Tue, 26 Mar 2024 10:00:00 +0000

Jake Ward originally from a small town in Maine, and claims to be running away from the snow by living in South Carolina now. He worked in politics for a while - in the House, the Senate, and Public Affairs before starting the Application Developers Alliance. That spurred on the next chapter of his life. Outside of tech, he has 3 kids and enjoys golf. He loves to cook and spend time with his kids, playing basketball or exploring life sciences. He also mentioned that every 5 years, he tends to buy another house, have another kid, and start a new business.

Jake figured out that 85% of developers want their content through video, over documentation or other means of info comms. He believes that developers are building the world around us - and the world is underperforming in how those people are supported. He decided to change this, and set out to build docs and guidance learnings into one video content platform.

This is the creation story of Data Protocol.

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S9 Bonus: The Dorm Room to $20M Supply Chain Shift: Overthrowing Distribution Dinosaurs and Automating Healthcare Procurement with Luká Yancopoulos, Co-Founder & CEO of Grapevine

Thu, 21 Mar 2024 10:00:00 +0000

Luka Yancopoulos lives in New York City, and believes whole heartedly in doing well by doing good. He grew up in the early 2000's, where the focal point was environmentalism and doing good in the world. He is an active botanist, and though there isn't much "soil to toil" in NYC, he spends his weekends filling the planter boxes with plants, on his block and around the neighborhood.

For Luka, COVID caused immediate awareness of supply chain issues. He and his buddies kicked over stones around these problems, specifically into the medical supply chain, and discovered a whole list of things needing to be addressed to support medical professionals in their buying.

This is the creation story of Grapevine.

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S9 E16: Bypassing Kong and Azure APM: Implementing Global Edge Rate Limiting and Decentralized API Key Governance with James Perkins, Co-founder & CEO of Unkey

Tue, 19 Mar 2024 10:00:00 +0000

James Perkins did not have a traditional journey to technology, but has been in the space for 16 years. He had planned to be a special education teacher prior to switching to technology. He's worked in pre-seed startups all the way to big corporations. But outside of tech, he has a wide variety of hobbies - in particular, running and training for half marathons. This process requires about 6 weeks of training, primarily mental training over physical.

James and his co-founder were friends and colleagues before their current venture. They had an idea around building a small version of API authentication. After building and releasing this version, they wanted to see how people received it. They were overwhelmed with the response, and figured they should push harder on this to be a company.

This is the creation story of Unkey.

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S9 Bonus: The Scale-Stage Architecture Blueprint: Overthrowing Devops Debt and Scaling High-Velocity Engineering Organizations with Zach Goldberg, Author of The Startup CTO's Handbook

Thu, 14 Mar 2024 10:00:00 +0000

Zach Goldberg was sent to computer camp when he was 12 years old. An interesting part of the story is that the prior year, he went to sports camp - and it didn't go so well. At the camp, he fell in love with tech, and eventually became a counselor. He finds the most joy and impact at the intersection of business and technology. Outside of tech, he is married, and a private pilot in California. He also admits to being a total geek, getting very excited about installing a solar panel on his roof (up to code of course, and with the permission of his wife).

A few months ago, Zach was introduced to the founders of his current company, through the executive coaching and consulting he does. They all had great conversation around approaches to DevOps and what the future of the industry is - so much so, that he decided to join the team and lead the conversation.

This is Zach's creation story at Gruntwork.

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S9 E15: Scaling From an Internal Hackathon Project to a Multi-Million Dollar Global Knowledge Layer with Saravana Kumar, Founder & CEO of Kovai.co & Document360

Tue, 12 Mar 2024 10:00:00 +0000

Saravana Kumar is from India, near Chennai, but moved to London 23 years ago. He loves to play badminton, and is very into high quality cars. One of his favorite things to do is to engage in interesting conversations on social media, which there are ample opportunities to do. Outside of Indian food, he enjoys Chinese and Mexican, of which all three he cited having good options in London.

In past projects, Saravana encountered the need to build a knowledge base for a different product - and one that had the flexibility to serve his unique needs. After he couldn't find it, he encourage his team to build something during a hackathon - which validated the product idea, and led him to want to take this further.

This is the creation story of Document360.

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S9 Bonus: From Inventing the $100B Stablecoin Tether to Formatting Internet Identity: Overthrowing Centralized Profiles with Craig Sellars, Co-Founder of Tether & CEO of Self

Thu, 07 Mar 2024 11:00:00 +0000

Craig Sellars grew up near Atlanta, Georgia, and was interested in technology at an early age. He went to Georgia Tech to get his degree, and after spending many years in industry, he jumped into the blockchain in 2013. Outside of tech, he used to do competitive, 4 way formation sky diving. He mentioned this was like synchronized swimming - but in the air. Nowadays, he enjoys long road trips into the sunset.

Craig has created well known solutions in the blockchain space, notably the Tether stable-coin and the first ever NFT platform, now known as Vatom.com. Throughout his tenure in this space, he has learned that you – the user – are the most valuable asset in the world.. And in learning that, he wanted to pursue building the standard of internet identity.

This is the creation story of Self.

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S9 E14: The DoorDash for Home Services: Overthrowing Legacy Service Friction and Engineering On-Demand Residential Maintenance Infrastructure with Mike Bifulco, Co-Founder & CTO of Craftwork

Tue, 05 Mar 2024 11:00:00 +0000

Mike Bifulco studied Mechanical Engineering and Computer Science in college. He was always good with computers, dating back to his High School Freshman CS classs. Coming out of school, he applied to 300 entry level jobs, interviewed for 15 of them, received offers for 3 - and turned them all down to start his own company. Outside of tech, he is into road cycling and enjoys the ritual, science and community around making - and enjoying - a good cup of coffee or espresso. He's also a musician, adding to the growing list of successful tech entrepreneurs who also are talented musicians.

Post looking for his next gig, Mike and his co-founders started to realize that the bar is very low for painting companies. It is a business that has not caught up to modern tech, so they started to think - how do we make a business thats like DoorDash for your home painting needs?

This is the creation story of Craftwork.

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S9 E13: Bypassing the Monolithic ETL Importer: Implementing Open-Source Plugins, Multi-Sheet Relationships, and Real-Time Flatfile Workbooks with David Boskovic, Founder & CEO of Flatfile

Tue, 27 Feb 2024 11:00:00 +0000

David Boskovic grew up on a farm, in a small town in Canada. He grew up milking cows, not building technology. However, when he was 12 years old, he built a website for his Dad. And after he built and rebuilt it several times, he was hooked on technology. Outside of tech and software, he enjoys playing poker with friends, gambling, and working on his new house. When asked what his favorite type of food, he said it is always something that he hasn't tried before - cause it's always better when you haven't had it yet.

In the past, David had built CSV imports into websites many, many times - even back to the site he built for his Dad at 12 years old. After being presented the need to build it again, he asked the question... when does it make sense to build this as a product, and launch a company?

This is the creation story of Flatfile.

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S9 Bonus: From Classical Opera to Transforming Enterprise Design: Bypassing the "Agile Lip Service" with the Mary Poppins of CX, Debbie Levitt

Thu, 22 Feb 2024 11:00:00 +0000

Debbie Levitt is an American living in Italy, with her Italian husband, and their 5 dogs. Many years ago, she obtained a degree in Music, but now focuses on customer experience online - of which, she has been called the Mary Poppins of Customer Experience. Outside of this, she and her husband bought a used camper and quickly became camper people. Her favorite place to take their camper to is Laces, Italy - but she noted that of her 5 dogs, zero of them are allowed in the camper.

In the 90's, Debbie was helping businesses get on the web, strategizing with them around how to deploy their website and build an online presence. Fast forward many years, she has shifted into doing work and leading projects, centered around customer experience online.

This is the creation story of Delta CX.

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S9 E12: Bypassing NextJS/Nuxt Boilerplate: Implementing Serverless WYSIWYG Code Syncing and Nation-Scale Pandemic App Frameworks with Yoav Abrahami, Chief Architect & Head of Velo by Wix

Tue, 20 Feb 2024 07:00:00 +0000

Yoav Abrahami was born and raised in Israel, never living in another country. Currently he lives in Tel Aviv, and has spent 30 years in technology. He studied High Energy Physics in college, and today, he finds similarities in how you solve problems in building products and physic. Outside of tech, he is the father of 2 children, and enjoys hiking and mountain biking in the diverse climates and terrains that Israel has to offer.

In 2006, Yoav helped his brothers get Wix started up and build it to what it is today. Fast forward to today, Wix has collected infrastructure and application partners, allowing them to offer these integrations to Wix users. What they figured out next was that people wanted it done for them, turn key, without having to learn how to spin up a server.

This is the creation story of Velo by Wix.

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S9 Bonus: The Open-Source Security Fabric: Blasting Through Kubernetes Alert Noise and Engineering eBPF Runtime Protection with Shauli Rozen, Co-Founder & CEO of ARMO Security

Thu, 15 Feb 2024 11:00:00 +0000

Shauli Rozen grew up in Israel, and besides a 5 year stint stateside, he has spent his whole life there. He is married with 3 boys, and is 45 years old. Shauli loves the beach, and the ocean, spending time surfing, scuba diving and free diving. Free diving peaked my interest, and he described it as diving with fins without scuba gear, holding your breath. He has made it 26m deep, which requires him to hold his breath for 60 seconds.

In the past, Shauli noticed that the world was not actually ready for Kubernetes. The adoption curve proved to them that businesses had different problems outside of security. After spending 2 years of discovery and intimately learning Kubernetes, they spent 2 weeks to change the game in security - using open source.

This is the creation story of ARMO Security.

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S9 E11: The Digital Nervous System of Healthcare: Eliminating Critical Medical Waste and Automating Real-Time Asset Tracking with Srikar "Sam" Yeruva, Founder & CEO of Pycube

Tue, 13 Feb 2024 11:00:00 +0000

Srikar Sam Yeruva comes from an immigrant family from India. He had a humble background, which shaped his path forward and how he approaches life with hunger. He comes from a family of engineers, and his current venture is his 3rd startup. He loves learning, believing whole heartedly in constant learning. In fact, he mentioned that education was nothing but exposure, which I found insightful. He believes in being a person that tries to understand things, and people, without judgement.

Srikar started working with hospitals in many different capacities to understand how things worked. This gave them a lot of perspective on how to help them best - administrators, doctors, nurses, etc. Once they learned how to serve them best, they pivoted to building software solutions to help them lower cost.

This is the creation story of Pycube.

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S9 Bonus: From a 17-Year Corporate Career to the Slicer Engine Core: Eliminating Industrial 3D Printing Defect Loops with David Hartmann, Founder & CEO of Helio Additive

Thu, 08 Feb 2024 11:00:00 +0000

David Hartmann is a German born New Zealander, where he still lives today. His first job was to spend 17 years at Bayer, getting deep in the materials world, which triggered his passion for 3d printing. Outside of tech, he is raising 2 kids in New Zealand, which he notes is a great place to do so. He also travels a lot, which he loves, and mentioned that traditional cooking for New Zealand is something that doesn't happen often, and his cooking with hot stones under the earth.

In 2014, David took a sabbatical from his Corporate job. He started to dig into 3d printing, and ended up meeting the founder of Polymer. They started talking about why the industry hadn't accomplished much of the things they had hoped, and they realized that software was generally, the answer.

This is the creation story of Helio Additive.

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S9 E10: Breaking the AI Code Explosion and Democratizing Codebase Intent with Dennis Pilarinos, Founder & CEO of Unblocked

Tue, 06 Feb 2024 11:00:00 +0000

Dennis Pilarinos was tinkerer at an early age. He always found himself wanting to understand how things were put together - and as such, he would take them apart and try to reassemble them. He grew up in Canada, and is currently based in Vancouver. He is professional driven by tech curiosity and attention to detail. Previously, he founded and sold BuddyBuild, which went from inception to acquisition within 3 years. Outside of tech, he has his private pilots license, which allows him to fly a lot and take his mind off startup life.

Dennis is a self proclaimed impatient person, and a mediocre developer - which drives his building of solutions. In context of a company, there is a lot of information that exists in the context of a company, which is necessary to know when getting familiar with a codebase. When you can't find that info, you are essentially... well, blocked. So, Dennis decided to help people solve that problem.

This is the creation story of Unblocked.

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S9 Bonus: Bypassing Paper-Based Safety Forms: Implementing Real-Time Risk Profiling and Algorithmic Employee Safety Guardrails with Ruslan Zaripov, Co-Owner of KRIT & Creator of RiskHunter

Thu, 01 Feb 2024 11:00:00 +0000

Ruslan Zaripov has been interested in computers since the early days. He started his career as a database developer, and eventually became a project manager. Essentially, he has been serving in information technology his whole life. Outside of tech, he is married with 2 kids and a dog. In the winter, he enjoys cross country skiing, and tries to keep a work life balance.

Eight years ago, Ruslan bought into the company KRIT, becoming a co-owner. KRIT builds software products for large enterprises, in the heavy energy and metallurgy plants. He and his team wanted to create a product that brought safety to the forefront each employees mind.

This is the creation story of RiskHunter, built by the team at KRIT.

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S9 Bonus: The Developer Retraining Blueprint: Bypassing Rigid CS Degrees and Overthrowing Static Tech Education with Erik Gross, Co-Founder of The Tech Academy

Wed, 31 Jan 2024 11:00:00 +0000

Erik Gross had an odd journey into tech. He grew up in the redwoods of California, off the grid with no running water in a tee pee. However, there was a pivotal moment in his life when his Dad brought home an old school computer, and taught him about the internals, hardware, binary, and removed all mystery from computers. He had a career in the Navy as a nuclear reactor operator, and gained a lot from the training methods of the Navy. Outside of tech, he is married with kids, and recently moved to Louisiana. He enjoys cigars, and tasting whiskey on occasion.

Erik has a background in training, while being a working engineer. He continuously took on side gigs, where he would need to have a junior engineer join him - and he couldn't find them. He decided to build a program that created this engineers for him, and was affirmed when he found a competitor doing the same thing.

This is the creation story of The Tech Academy.

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S9 E9: The Connectivity-as-Code Paradigm: Bypassing Legacy VPN Subnet Chaos and Eliminating Public Attack Surfaces with Ryo Koyama, Co-Founder & CEO of Remote.it

Tue, 30 Jan 2024 19:30:00 +0000

Ryo Koyama never thought he would be in technology. In the past, and in current days, he is very much into art, photography and woodworking. However, as he says it, he did was a good Asian son does and got a fluid dynamics degree. Eventually, he went on to be a product manager for graphics cards and has been in tech since. He has two adult daughters, and at one point, coached high school basketball in Palo Alto.

Ryo and his co-founder have both been in networking for a very long time. They notice that the internet was going to make this part of the industry - IE networking - invisible. They decided to encore some of the prior work to create connectivity as code.

This is the creation story of Remote.it.

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S9 E8: The IoT Data Backbone: Engineering Ultra-Lightweight MQTT Architectures and Scaling Critical Edge Infrastructure with Roger Light, Creator of Eclipse Mosquitto & Co-Founder of Cedalo

Tue, 23 Jan 2024 11:00:00 +0000

Roger Light lives in the midlands of the UK. He has his PhD in Electrical Engineering, and post graduating, he did research, then taught. But in parallel, he worked on hobby projects that eventually led him to a new venture. Outside of tech, he is married with 4 young boys and a dog - so he mentioned things get a little loud and crazy at home. He loves spicy food, but has been enjoying the visit to the local carvery lately.

In 2009, Roger attended a conference on iOT, MQTT, and how it was being used to track electricity monitoring. What he realized was that an open source version of management software didn't exist. He happened to be looking for a project at the time, and thought "this should only take a couple of months".

This is the creation story of Cedalo.

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S9 Bonus: From an SAP Innovation Lab Concept to a 4-Time Inc. 5000 Heavyweight: Bypassing the Flat Paper Instruction Manual with Nate Henderson, Co-founder & CEO of BILT

Thu, 18 Jan 2024 11:00:00 +0000

Nathan Henderson grew up in Saudi Arabia, where he actually met his now co-founder, back when he was 5 years old. His wife grew up in Mexico, and as such, they love to travel internationally. They are married with 3 college age kids, two at BYU and one on a church mission in Chile. His hobbies center around his family, but on his own, he loves to scuba dive, hike and stay physically fit.

While he was at SAP, Nate worked on a concept to eliminate the paper instructions we are all familiar with today, and replace them with 3D graphical instructions. The idea was conceived, but to really bring it to life, he and his co-founder needed to take it outside the 4 walls.

This is the creation story of BILT.

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S9 Bonus: The Open-Source Supply Chain Shield: Eliminating Malicious Dependencies and Automating Repository Governance with Craig McLuckie, Co-Creator of Kubernetes & CEO of Stacklok

Wed, 17 Jan 2024 11:00:00 +0000

Craig McLuckie is a self proclaimed boring guy - monochromatic, as he put it. At one point, he tried retiring from his professional ventures - IE building technology - but... it didn't work. So he is now back into building tech. Outside of tech, he is father to four children - two younger, two older - and enjoys spending time outside with them, hiking and building things. When he comes to food, he mentioned that there is no type of food he doesn't like - as long as it is well prepared and made with love.

Craig has been passionate about the supply chain security space for a long time. And in the past, he had built several open source projects - one being Kubernetes. He found himself intrigued at the intersection of these worlds, and wanted to build a solution, enabling developers to secure their open source.

This is the creation story of Stacklok.

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S9 E7: Aggregating Distributed Git Telemetry and Eliminating Developer Burnout Without Micro-Management with Naomi Chopra, Co-Founder & CEO of Hatica

Tue, 16 Jan 2024 11:00:00 +0000

Naomi Chopra grew up in Delhi, India, but attended Grad school in the US, specifically in Atlanta. He worked in the valley for several companies, including Uber, but eventually left to start his own thing. Outside of tech, he enjoys spending time with family and friends and loves to play tennis, which he has been playing since he was young. He mostly plays doubles because there are more people and less courts these days.

Naomi noticed that people were depending on dozen's of SaaS tools to get their work done. He and his team started to ask the right questions, around why don't we build something to collect the signals from these tools, and present information to help drive velocity, alignment, and well-being.

This is the creation story of Hatica.

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S9 E6: Engineering Proactive Cash Flow Frameworks and Overthrowing Reactive Budgeting Anxiety with Melissa Pancoast, Founder & CEO of The Beans

Wed, 10 Jan 2024 11:00:00 +0000

Melissa Pancoast is originally from Miami, but now lives in California. She still loves Florida, being outside skiing or rowing. The latter was a huge part of her life from middle school through grad school, and she is hoping to get back into it soon. She's married, and runs outside as much as possible. In fact, she has completed several half and full marathons, including the Boston Marathon.

Prior to her current venture, Melissa was a part of the group called "caring professionals", as a teacher in New York City. She studied how people feel about money at Oxford, and took her learnings, created a program, and decided to build a software company around it.

This is the creation story of The Beans.

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S9 Bonus: The Edge-Computing Architecture Blueprint: Breaking Server Latency and Scaling Developer-First Feature Flags with Jonathan Norris, Co-Founder & CTO of DevCycle & Taplytics

Thu, 04 Jan 2024 11:00:00 +0000

Jonathan Norris lives in Toronto, and has a passion for tech that started early in his life. He has participated in the First Robotics competition, which got him into mechanical engineering, building robots, and leading teams to world championships. He still actively volunteers and mentors people in the program today. Outside of tech, he is a new Dad, and stays quite busy parenting his kid, when he's not riding an eBike to work.

In Winter 2014, Jonathan and his founding team did Y-combinator and formed Taplytics. After doing this for nearly 10 years, what his team noticed was the most passionate users were developers using feature flagging over the core offering of the product. So - they decided to spin out a new brand, to focus on just that.

This is the creation story of DevCycle.

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S9 E5: The Identity Workflow Revolution: Engineering Drag-and-Drop Authentication and Shattering the Build-vs-Buy Tax with Gilad Shriki, Co-Founder of Descope

Tue, 02 Jan 2024 12:00:00 +0000

Gilad Shriki was born and raised in Israel. He loves the outdoors, and loves to travel. Skiing in a passion of his, and he loves to explore new places in the winter, mentioning that Whistler was his most recent favorite. He started digging tech very early, and his hobbies center around it as well. He loves building things in home automation, like building micro controllers that detect temperature or relay that turn the lights on and off.

Gilad has known his current founding team for many, many years, and their last product was bought by Palo Alto Networks. When looking at what was the next big problem to solve, they dug into authentication and figured out - that this was still a major problem in the ecosystem, for developers and from the standpoint of cybersecurity.

This is the creation story of Descope.

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S9 Favorite: The Pop-Culture Video Engine: Bootstrapping & Scaling ClassHook to Acquisition with Alexander Deeb

Thu, 28 Dec 2023 11:00:00 +0000

Alex Deeb was influenced by the education space early on. He had many teachers who inspired him through his life, and his parents pushed him to do well in school on order to obtain better opportunities. Along side of that, he is interested in equitable opportunities, which is a big driver for him in his professional ventures. He is passionate about helping learn about new opportunities. He grew up in Long Island, NY - so of course, he loves pizza. He frequents the local pizza house, which in his opinion is Stellas'. He gets 2 slices of regular cheese, with a coke - which is the only time he drinks soda.

One day, he and his friends got together to have a business brainstorming question. One of the questions that came up was how can you make videos searchable? Also, how can you improve engagement within schools, perhaps with popular media?

This is the creation story of Classhook.

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S9 Bonus: Squeezing Maximum Conversion from 130,000 A/B Tests and Killing the Competitor-Copying Fallacy with Sahil Patel, CEO of Spiralyze

Thu, 21 Dec 2023 11:00:00 +0000

Sahil Patel has lived in Atlanta for 12 years now, but has made a lifetime of leaving Atlanta... and the coming back. He attended undergrad in ATL, and in 2011, started a company called ER Express, which centered around patient scheduling. After building the company, he sold it for a successful outcome for him, for his team, and for the buyer. Outside of tech, he is married with 2 daughters, and loves to play music and play socer. He plays guitar in a rush cover band called the Atlanta Rush Hour, and used to play soccer competitively.

In the past, Sahil was a client of his current venture. In leading ER Express, he saw great value in a tool to predict conversion. He liked it so much, that after he sold his company and moved on, he wanted to join the team - and take it to the next level.

This is the creation story of Spiralyze.

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S9 Bonus: The Expedia of InsurTech: Overthrowing Health Insurance Jargon and Engineering AI-Powered Personalized Enrollment Rails with Ariel Dominguez & Irena Tigranyan, Co-Founders of HealthBird

Wed, 20 Dec 2023 11:00:00 +0000

Ariel Dominguez has been an entrepreneur for most of his life. He started his first company at age 15, selling websites in Miami, hiring family members before he could drive. He continued his career later, in finance, then consumer product goods, then healthcare insurance. He loves to build things, and has started 13 - 15 businesses in his lifetime. Outside of tech, he is an avid drummer, and has been playing since he was 10 years old.

Irena Tigranyan was born in Armenia, and moved to the US in 2014. She never dreamed of being a founder, cause in the world she was raised in, youalways worked for someone else. She has diverse professional experience in retail and operations, but outside of work, she likes to explore, kayaking, tennis and being outdoors.

Fun fact - Ariel and Irena are married, IE partners in life and in business. They Met on Bumble, live in Miami, and invested their "wedding money" to found a company.

Ariel and Irena wanted to build the Expedia for healthcare - to make it simple, and abstract away all the loopholes and jargon. They wanted to innovate in a non-innovative space, and to bring the swipe right or left mentality to healthcare insurance.

This is the creation story of Healthbird.

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S9 E4: The CI/CD Optimization Blueprint: Bypassing Bloated Dev Pipelines and Slashing Cloud Expenses with Predictive Test Selection with Ayal Regev, Co-Founder & CTO of Redefine.dev

Tue, 19 Dec 2023 11:00:00 +0000

Ayal Regev lives in Tel Aviv, and continues working hard on his startup, despite the hostage conflict in the country at the time of this recording. Prior to his current venture, he was in tech for 10 years, doing consulting in cybersecurity, healthcare, and gaming. Being a gamer for a long time, he enjoyed the technical challenges in brining a game to market. Outside of tech, he likes to write raps - and forecasts that he will perform them one day. He also likes to do rock climbing and play board games with friends.

Ayal and his co-founders noticed the trends of automation in continuous integration and development processes (or CI/CD). They also noticed that over time, this has created a lot of clutter and bloat in the ecosystem. They wanted to filter out bad practices, and build a platform to reduce feedback time and redefine CI/CD.

This is the creation story of Redefine.

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S9 Bonus: The Immigration Risk Fabric: Bypassing Legal Friction with Data-Driven Onboarding Maps and Global Mobility Engines with Leonardo Shapiro, Founder & CEO of Not Alien

Thu, 14 Dec 2023 11:00:00 +0000

Leonardo Shapiro is originally from Mexico City. His family was from Russia and Poland, but ended up being in Mexico City after being denied from the US. He is an outdoorsy person, and loves to walk and hike. And in fact, he used to be a scuba diving instructor in college, and he loves to spend time in spaces like the underwater. He's also a foodie, and loves coffee and wine.

For Leonardo, the immigration process into the US was a very hard process. He went on the search for a product that would make this process easier, and he couldn't find it. He wanted to fix this, and provide something for his fellow "not" alien's.

This is the creation story of Not Alien.

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S9 Bonus: The DataOps Democratization Blueprint: Overthrowing Airflow Infrastructure Overhead and Scaling Serverless Data Orchestration with Blake Burch, Founder & CEO of Shipyard

Wed, 13 Dec 2023 11:00:00 +0000

Black Burch grew up in Fort Worth, attending college at TCU. Prior to his current venture, he wasn't actually a tech person. He wanted to be a music professor, specifically in percussion. But eventually, he moved over to the tech world. But, outside of tech, he plays board games, in the strategy realm, and named one that I hadn't heard of called Terra Mystica.

Previously at PMG, Blake and his company had built an internal tool called forklift, moving data between data warehouses. As it started to grow, he and his co-founder saw lots of opportunities to expand the offering - and make it a product of its own.

This is the creation story of Shipyard.

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S9 E3: Embedded Lending Infrastructure and Navigating Emerging Market API Scaling with Reinis Simanovskis, Co-Founder & CPO of Finfra

Tue, 12 Dec 2023 11:00:00 +0000

Reinis Simanovskis was born in Latvia. He comes from a family of exact sciences - physic, math, tech, etc. - which gave him a clear path of where to go professionally. He started coding classes in middle school, but quit to purse road cycling, of which he was very successful. He still rides today, nearly 200-300 kilometers per ride. He has worked in London, Africa, and eventually landed in Jakarta - and aligned with his travels, he is an adventurous foodie.

In the past, Reinis and his co-founders noticed that no one was approaching embedded finance in Indonesia. At the same time, he was seeing other companies be successful at this very thing in the US and other countries, and they started to realize the magnitude of the opportunity.

This is the creation story of Finfra.

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S9 Bonus: Programmatic Venture Finance and Algorithmic Cash Management with Raven Jiang, Co-Founder & CTO of Arc

Thu, 07 Dec 2023 11:00:00 +0000

Raven Jiang grew up in Singapore before heading over to the states for college. He came to the US for undergrad because he grew up reading science fiction, and liked the idea of working with technology. He plays multiplayer video games, which helped to shape how he viewed technology and the advancements in that ecosystem. He enjoys Japanese food, and in fact, traveled to Japan regularly while living in Singapore.

Raven and his co-founders met in business school, and observed an interesting opportunity in the market. They wanted to apply consumer finance technology to create a seamless revenue financing experience. Over time, they added to create a fintech platform to accelerate your startup.

This is the creation story of Arc.

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S9 Bonus: Shattering the Network Telemetry Silo, with Avi Freedman of Kentik

Wed, 06 Dec 2023 11:00:00 +0000

Avi Freedman became obsessed with tech at age 8. He was given a BASIC programming book by his Uncle in 1978, and at that point - he was hooked. Outside of tech, he has been married for 30 years, and likes to play Pot Limit Omaha (which is Poker) and to Taekwondo to keep his body healthy.

Avi ran the network group at Akamai, and thought that networking observability was a solved problem. After he left, he noticed that in fact, it wasn't. He moved to the Bay Area and got started building a solution for just that.

This is the creation story of Kentik.

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S9 E2: The Embedded Payroll Fabric: Bypassing Legacy Monoliths with Developer-First Fintech APIs and Multi-State Compliance Rails with Juan Barroso, Co-Founder & CTO of Salsa

Tue, 05 Dec 2023 11:00:00 +0000

Juan Barroso lives in the Bay Area but was born in Venezuela. He didn't grow up with technology around him, as his father was a farmer, and his mother was a seamstress. Neither went to University, but they made sure to push Juan to attend university and focus hard on his studies. It was during University that he fell in love with programming. Outside of tech, he likes to try new things, and doesn't stick with one hobby for too long (other than traveling). Right now, he is into mountain biking and snowboarding.

Juan has been in payroll for many years, and during his tenure, he got the opportunity to build many engines and solutions for the industry. He realized that though one engine worked for one customer, others wouldn't be happy with it. He wondered if a payroll framework could be built, to allow developers to build their own.

This is the creation story of Salsa.

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S9 Bonus: Data-Centric AI Blueprint: Bypassing Privacy Walls and Scaling High-Fidelity Synthetic Data Pipelines with Fabiana Clemente, Co-Founder & CDO of YData

Thu, 30 Nov 2023 11:00:00 +0000

Fabiana Clemente was born and raised in Portugal, and lived in Lisbon until 2 years ago, when she moved to Seattle. She is passionate about the arts, having a creative mind. She finds great joy and relaxation in water color painting, while also spending time with her family over fantastic Portuguese dinners. Outside of this, she enjoys traveling, learning about other cultures and cuisines across the world.

As a data scientist, Fabiana realized that there were several pain points that led to her not being fulfilled in her role. After meeting her now co-founder, who felt the same paints, they decided to set out and solve the problem by building a developer platform for data science.

This is the creation story of YData.

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S9 Bonus: The Death of Localhost: Engineering Dev Container Orchestration and Terraform-Powered Cloud Workspaces with Kyle Carberry, Co-Founder & CTO of Coder

Wed, 29 Nov 2023 11:00:00 +0000

Kyle Carberry grew up in a very small town in Saskatchewan, Canada. He was always into tech, but mainly the pirating side of things on his dial up internet connection. He got into pogromming when he got is first Xbox, and started modding it - followed by Minecraft servers and building tools for the internet. Outside of tech, he just moved to New York and prefers the hustle and bustle over the small town quiet.

Kyle and his co-founder had the abstract idea that eventually, people won't be coding on their laptops. Sort of by accident, they started in by building a consumer friendly version, but quickly pivoted to the enterprise - and took off.

This is the creation story of Coder.com.

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S9 E1: From Turning Down a Competitor to Powering Roblox and GameStop: Scaling a Global Edge Network Without Wall Street Capital with Matt Levine of CacheFly

Tue, 28 Nov 2023 11:00:00 +0000

Matt Levine grew up in Toronto, and played sports as a baseball catcher. During his teens, he got injured and had to sit out during the season. And during that time, he started to dig into computers, and became hooked. He started several businesses in High School, and later founded eFront. Outside of tech, he is married with a couple of kids, and likes top lay golf.

While working in Arizona, Matt was approached by a now competitor called LimeLight. He knew the founders, and he was approached to become a team member - specifically to help start a network. He felt that it wasn't a good time to do that - BUT, it was a good time to start and build a CDN.

This is the creation story of CacheFly.

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Season 9 Trailer

Fri, 24 Nov 2023 11:00:00 +0000

What if you had a window into the digital startup world?

What if you could ask the tech veterans what it feels like to create a world class product?

...how to recover from critical mistakes...

...how to scale your solution to the masses?

How do you get from an idea on the back of a napkin, to a fully functioning product?

What if you could hear the human stories about how they delivered technology?

What if there was a show where you could hear those stories?

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S8 Favorite: The AWS Blueprint for Consumption: Decoupling Cloud Metering from Billing Architecture with Puneet Gupta, Co-Founder & CEO of Amberflo

Thu, 23 Nov 2023 11:00:00 +0000

For Puneet Gupta, his professional work and personal hobbies collide. He has been enamored with tech since his early days, and finds coding to be quite therapeutic. He spent many years launching prominent cloud solutions, and has a track record for success there. Outside of tech, he is a family man with 2 boys, living in the Bay Area with his extended family. He is into motorcycles, and is falling in love with reading again.

The story of Puneet's current venture goes back over 10 years, when he found himself in the middle of the dawn of cloud computing at AWS. During that time, he was introduced to SaaS models, and how these models can grow exponential growth. Fast forward to 3 years ago, and through observing industry progression, he decided to create a solution to aid in usage based pricing models.

This is the creation story of Amberflo.

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S8 Favorite: The Linux Kernel Maverick Rewriting SQLite in Rust: Scaling Micro-Databases for AI Agents with Glauber Costa, Co-Founder & CEO of Turso

Tue, 21 Nov 2023 11:00:00 +0000

Glauber Costa is a family man, with three kids at home. So he admits, that with a startup and kids, there is not much space for anything else. He made mention that the jump from 2-3 kids was hard, and we joked that he playing zone defense now over man to man. AS of this recording, he had already seen the Mario movie 3 times with his kids, and enjoys playing video games with them. But, his game to play is Civilizations, which he is highly addicted to.

Glauber comes from a heavy database and systems programming background, as does his co-founders. They noticed that the buyer persona of database tech is changing. More and more frontend developers or full stack developers were responsible for these decisions. After iterating on a few projects, they figured the pillar of their data edge solution... which was SQLLite.

This is the creation story of Turso.

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S8 Favorite: The ClickOps Cure: Automating Multi-Cloud Infrastructure Discovery and Code Drift with Sefi Genis, Co-Founder & Late CTO of Firefly

Thu, 16 Nov 2023 11:00:00 +0000

Sefi Genis lives in Tel Aviv, and started in with technology early on in his life, maintaining the school website when he was younger. He served in the Israeli military, specifically in the cybersecurity unit, followed by working at some interesting and successful startups. Outside of tech, he loves to travel, ninja warrior, and scuba diving. One of his favorite places to dive was Thailand, which I've added to the list for my family.

Sefi understood all things related to infrastructure as code (IAC). Once he was introduced to his co-founders, they set out to build a solution that helped platform and DevOps teams manage their entire cloud footprint - and do so at scale.

This is the creation story of Firefly.

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S8 Favorite: The Language of Money: Re-Engineering Messy Transaction Data for the Era of AI Agents with Naré Vardanyan, Co-Founder & CEO of Ntropy

Tue, 14 Nov 2023 11:00:00 +0000

Naré Vardanyan has a statistically unlikely story. She grew up in Armenia, without electricity during a war. She recalls that her parents gamified the experience, which allowed her to experience it much differently than the hardship it was. Her upbringing was very community driven, focused on caring for others. Eventually, she went to work for the United Nations, in her words, so she could save the world - though eventually she was disillusioned by how slow things moved. It was at this point, where she shifted over to tech. Outside of tech, she used to love reading, but now that she has a child, she sticks to audiobooks. And, she thoroughly enjoys art, specifically, 20th century Russian-Jewish artists.

When Naré started to travel abroad, she noticed that for some folks, the ability to obtain things in life, like a Visa or Passport, was a given. Yet, others were not enabled to obtain these types of things, as the process was much more difficult or unavailable. She set out to create the great equalizer, through enriched financial data.

This is the creation story of Ntropy.

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S8 Bonus: From the Tech Behind 'Toy Story' to a Global Workforce OS: Overcoming Engineering Bottlenecks and Flatlining Infra Costs with Alex Yarotsky of Hubstaff

Thu, 09 Nov 2023 11:00:00 +0000

Alex Yarotsky got into tech as a little kid. In fact, he remembers watching the movie Toy Story, and wanting to learn how to build the tech that drove its creation. He got into University, but eventually, dropped out, and went the standard Eastern European software route, by joining a consultancy. Post that, he joined his first tech startup, and hasn't looked back since. Outside of tech, he is married with 2 fat cats. He and his wife enjoy MMA, and traveling.

Twelve years ago, the founders of Alex's current venture noticed that the demand for freelancers was growing in the market. They also noticed that very few time tracking solutions existed, and they wanted to tackle this niche. Later, Alex joined the crew to take the product to the next level, as CTO.

This is the creation story of Hubstaff.

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S8 Bonus: The 1 Trillion Flag Architecture: Decoupling Deployments from Releases and Mastering In-Memory Edge Evaluation with Pato Echagüe, Co-Founder & CTO of Split.io

Wed, 08 Nov 2023 11:00:00 +0000

Pato Echague was born and raised in Argentina, and as such, is a huge soccer fan. He played soccer and tennis growing up, and enjoys following the Boca Juniors. He also admits to being influenced by the Messi effect as well, liking Barcelona and now the States. He is a father of 2 young kids - who also play soccer - so there are a lot of nets and practice tools in his backyard.

At his prior startup, which was acquired by Salesforce, Pato and his co-founders observed that the faster they shipped things, they faster they broke production. After giving into his co-founders persistence, he decided to jump in and build a feature flagging to fix the problem.

This is the creation story of Split.

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S8 E30: The Modernization Factory: Overcoming a $1.5 Trillion Technical Debt and Automating Monolith-to-Microservice Extraction with Moti Rafalin, Co-Founder & CEO of vFunction

Tue, 07 Nov 2023 11:00:00 +0000

Moti Rafalin was born and raised in Israel. He spent half of his life there, and the rest of his life in the states. He is a father of 3 kids, 2 of which are in college. His family and he lives in the Bay Area, and he likes to play tennis and travel. In fact, he has been to over 65 countries in his life, and has lived in 2 continents.

After attending AWS re-invent, Moti left with the knowledge that the amount of innovation happening continued to grow and grow. At the same time, there wasn't a good way to ensure that applications weren't just "lifting and shifting" but were fully taking advantage of proper functionality during their modernization process.

This is the creation story of vFunction.

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S8 Bonus: The Acquisition Playbook: Productizing DevOps Infrastructure and Scaling a 24/7 Cloud Operations Engine with Shaun Ritchie, CEO of nClouds

Thu, 02 Nov 2023 10:00:00 +0000

Shaun Ritchie has lived in Salt Lake City for 20 plus years. He grew up in Phoenix, but decided it was too hot to live there. He started his first company 20 years ago, and has had some major successes, selling later ventures to WeWork. Outside of tech, he is married with 4 kids. He loves the mountains and outdoors, enjoying snowboarding, skiing, and hiking.

In 2022, Shaun set out to accomplish a new goal. He put together the financial resources to acquire an organization, with the goal of transforming it into a premier services company - by leading and growing people to the next level.

This is Shaun's creation story at nClouds.

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S8 Bonus: The Death of the Crashing Spreadsheet: Engineering Predictive AI Ingestion and Asset Intelligence Rails with Arunabh Dastidar, Co-Founder & CEO of RealSage

Wed, 01 Nov 2023 10:00:00 +0000

Arunabh Dastidar has a background in engineering, starting his coding years in his teens. In fact, he was building and selling web products even prior to college. He spends most of his free time thinking about tech and startups, but when he is not, he plays acoustic guitar and attends music festivals. He enjoys traveling and trying food across the world, mentioning that Tokyo ruined Sushi for him.

Arunabh was on a very important call, and his excel sheet was crashing. He looked left and right, and couldn't find anything to support what he needed. He found some co-founders, and built the solution he wished he had for the industry.

This is the creation story of RealSage.

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S8 E29: The 1.6 Million Host Blueprint: Treating Operating Systems Like SQL Tables and Engineering Open-Source Endpoint Security with Zach Wasserman, Co-Founder & CTO of Fleet

Tue, 31 Oct 2023 10:00:00 +0000

Zach Wasserman lives near Vancouver, but grew up a child of the 90's in Berkeley, California. The .COM boom was happening around him, so he found himself fascinated with this era in tech, with little understanding of the details. He was a skater kid, riding around the Bay Area, typically on a short board over long board. Nowadays, he is more into the outdoors, as a mountain biker, rock climber and back country skier. He enjoys the vast selection of Chinese food at his home near Vancouver.

In 2014, Zach was working at Facebook. During that time, a team member wanted to build a platform where they could know what was going on with all of their assorted machines. They ne eded a way to ask questions without writing code, and more quickly get answers about their community of devices.

This is the creation story of Fleet.

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S8 Bonus: The Game Engine Blueprint for Web Dev: Bridging the Figma-to-Code Chasm with AST-Aware Visual Injection and Steven Schkolne, Founder & CEO of MightyMeld

Thu, 26 Oct 2023 10:00:00 +0000

Steven Schkolne has a standard tech story. He was good at math, and loved computers - so, he got into programming. What sets him apart in the industry though, is his passion for design, art and creativity. He is a self taught designer, but really jams when his right and left brains are firing at the same time. Outside of tech, he is married and enjoys gaming and digging into YouTube.

Steven was working on a VR project in the past, and a component required some web development. What he immediately noticed was that although Unity Game Engine development was visual, but web development required you to build visually in the realm of code. He started to wonder if there was a way to bring this sort of thing to web dev.

This is the creation story of MightyMeld.

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S8 Bonus: Financing Secondary-City Tech and Weaponizing Vertical AI for Under-Ventured Industries with Somak Chattopadhyay, Founder & Managing Partner of Armory Square Ventures

Wed, 25 Oct 2023 10:00:00 +0000

Somak Chattopadhyay lives 30 minutes outside of Syracuse, NY, where he enjoys the great outdoors vibe of the area. He studied engineering at MIT, but spent the bulk of his career in investing. He has been in venture capital for nearly 18 years, spending time at Edison and Tribeca. Outside of tech, he is married and passionate about food and music. He's actually a classically trained violinist, and enjoys cooking or consuming Tandoor cuisine.

In 2013, a group of professors and business people noticed that early stage companies in Syracuse were required to move to NYC - primarily because there was lack of capital and access to talent. A year later, Somak and his team stepped out to solve this problem in New York regions... and beyond.

This is the creation story of Armory Square Ventures.

Sponsors

Links

Website: https://www.armorysv.com
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/somak-chattopadhyay-7662a/

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S8 E28: From Co-Creating AWS SWF and Uber Cadence to a $1.5B Tech Backbone: Building Fault-Tolerant Application State Rails with Maxim Fateev of Temporal

Tue, 24 Oct 2023 10:00:00 +0000

Maxim Fateev grew up in the Soviet Union, and witnessed its collapse. He left in 1995, and moved to Brazil, where he got his Masters in Computer Science. In the late 90's, he moved to the US, eventually landing in Seattle, which loves. He's been married for 27 years, with 3 boys, and loves to hike, play ice hockey, and snowboard. He mentioned there were a number of choices, but he prefers Whistler in Canada, when he can make the 5 hour drive.

During the development of open source services at Amazon, Maxim came across the idea of durable execution. Eventually, at Uber, he launched an open source library that eventually would become the basis of his current venture.

This is the creation story of Temporal.

Sponsors

Links

Website: https://temporal.io/
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/fateev/

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S8 Bonus: Building High-Performance Metadata Processing Engines and Drag-and-Drop Mapping with Ibrahim Surani & Jay Mishra of Astera

Thu, 19 Oct 2023 10:00:00 +0000

Ibrahim Surani grew up in Pakistan, dropped out of high school and in his words, stumbled around for a while. Eventually, he stumbled onto an IBM mainframe, taught himself to code, and has been in tech ever since. He moved to the states in 1988 and has been here ever since. Outside of tech, he is an avid hiker, and enjoys a good fantasy read, like Lord of the Rings.

Jay Mishra studied mathematics and computer science. He started out at his current venture right out of college, post his masters program. Outside of tech, he is a Dad of two boys who love sports. He enjoys playing chess and golf, and likes to hike and travel. His favorite book is the Fountainhead by Ayn Rand.

Going back several years, Ibrahim started a consultancy in 2005 or so, and mentions working on successful products in the area of mortgage banking. In 2008, the financial meltdown happened, and all of their customers (save 1) went out of business. After struggling for while, they decided take a foundational utility they had built and bridge the gap to 2.0 of their business.

This is the creation story of Astera.

Sponsors

Links

Website: https://www.astera.com/
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/ibrahimsurani/
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/jaymishra/

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S8 Bonus: From Uber Launcher and a $1B Unicorn Exit to 700K Front-Line Workers: Automating Workforce Orchestration with Jason Radisson of Movo

Wed, 18 Oct 2023 10:00:00 +0000

Jason Radisson had a tough childhood, being born to a 16 year old single mom. He grew up on a rural place, and his journey required him to work jobs to get ahead and figure the world out at a young age. He was always interested in math and sports, which led him down the path to study economics and applied mathematics, eventually working for McKinsey. Today, he is married with small kids, and enjoys an active, outdoor life, specifically participating in distance sports (IE biking or running).

Through his career, Jason gained great experience in the gig economy, through his time at Uber and other ventures in Latin America. He saw many shifts run the market through his time, and throughout the pandemic, and he saw that people were looking to maximize the productivity of the workforce they currently had.

This is the creation story of Movo.

Sponsors

Links

Website: https://movo.co/
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/jason-radisson/

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S8 E27: Engineering Data Normalization Rails and Automated Candidate Sourcing to Kill Hiring Friction with Valeriy Bykanov, Co-Founder of Prodigy

Tue, 17 Oct 2023 10:00:00 +0000

Valeriy Bykanov studied computer science in the Ukraine, and eventually in 2009, decided to start his own software development agency. After doing this for some time, he wanted to expand his horizons and moved to Berlin to join a startup. Outside of tech, he is married, and loves to be active outdoors - hiking, snowboarding and cycling. In fact, one of his favorite things to do is listen to a podcast or audiobook while hitting a biking trail.

Valeriy had some past experience in recruitment, having had run his own agency. He found great reward in placing people, but eventually wanted to build a solution for the process. After he met his co-founder, they both decided to attack the creation of a new kind of recruiting tool.

This is the creation story of Prodigy.

Sponsors

Links

Website: https://prodi.gg/
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/valeriybykanov/

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S8 Bonus: The Death of Threaded Noise: Engineering Object Messaging Models and AI-Fused Workflow Architecture with Massoud Alibakhsh, Co-Founder & CEO of Omadeus

Thu, 12 Oct 2023 10:00:00 +0000

Massoud Alibakhsh was born in Iran, but grew up in the states. He has always been curious about machines, computers, robots - and as such, studied electrical engineering and computer science. He built his career on hardware and software, and witnessed all the tech changes throughout the past decades - from mainframes to GUI's to pcs to distributed systems to the cloud. Outside of tech, he used to be a competitive soccer player, but after he hurt his knees, he switched to swimming daily. He swears by intermittent fasting, but makes sure to carry walnuts and dates on him when he travels.

Massoud held a strong desire to find a solution to the complex communication problem between people and systems. He decided to approach this with deep AI integration, smart objects, and an object messaging model. And in doing so, he put AI in project management, and discovered the next development paradigm.

This is the creation story of Omadeus.

Sponsors

Links

Website: https://omadeus.com/
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/massoud-alibakhsh-7b139753/

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S8 E26: The Intranet Evolution: Engineering Block-Based No-Code Workflows and Scaling to 4,000+ Enterprise Clients with Josh Purvis, Co-Founder & CPO of Assembly

Tue, 10 Oct 2023 10:00:00 +0000

Josh Purvis grew up in Missouri, on a lake in the Ozarks. He spent most of his time outdoors, and became a professional wakeboarder. Eventually, an injury took him out of the circuit and he went to entertainment school. During his time there, he and his roommate built a website - and he has been into tech ever since. Outside of tech, he reads a ton, owning about 400-500 books, and enjoys street tacos, wings, and a good plate of pasta.

In the past, Josh and his current co-founder started to discuss employment engagement. They also noticed that sharing information across a large company was, well - inefficient, with many points of failure. On the side, they started building something that would improve both of these areas together.

This is the creation story of Assembly.

Sponsors

Links

Website: https://www.joinassembly.com/
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/joshuapurvis/

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S8 Bonus: Clicks, Not Code: Architecting Automated Reference Data Versioning and Low-Code Release Management at Scale with Max Rudman of Prodly

Thu, 05 Oct 2023 10:00:00 +0000

Max Rudman grew up in Soviet, Moscow - then moved from Russia when he was 16 years old. He spent his early years programming and exploring engineering, and it just continued on as he got older. He got the entrepreneurial bug in early 2000's when he was hired at a marketplace .COM startup. Outside of tech, he is married with 3 kids. He loves to travel and considers himself a foodie, stating that his favorite restaurants were in the wine country and in Spain.

Within his last startup, Max discovered that deploying configuration rules on Salesforce was clunky and took a long time to do so, even for a seasoned engineer. Eventually, he decided to build a tool to focus on this process alone.

This is the creation story of Prodly.

Sponsors

Links

Website: https://prodly.co/
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/maxrudman/

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S8 Bonus: Democratizing Human Capital Analytics and Engineering Multi-Tenant Transcript Ingestion with Kaj Pedersen, Co-Founder & CTO of AstrumU

Wed, 04 Oct 2023 10:00:00 +0000

Kaj Pedersen was born in Zambia, Africa, and has travelled all throughout his life - through Africa, Europe, but has now landed in the United States. He has had tons of exposure to cultures and countries, which he is fond of. Outside of tech, he married with a family, and loves climbing, being a proclaimed mountaineer. When he isn't climbing he likes to read a broad array of books, and scuba dive - of which, he mentioned Fiji was the coolest dive.

In 2017, the founders of AstrumU kicked off the idea to build a company focused on creating equity to the value of education for everyone, by tracking hard and soft skills at the individual level. Though he couldn't join the company at that time, Kaj eventually joined in 2019 to take the initial idea to 1.0 conception.

This is the creation story of AstrumU.

Sponsors

Links

Website: https://astrumu.com/
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/kajpedersen/

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S8 E25: The Synthetic Data Blueprint: Bypassing Production Privacy Risks and Scaling Data Anonymization with Andrew Colombi, Co-Founder & CTO of Tonic.ai

Tue, 03 Oct 2023 10:00:00 +0000

Andrew Colombi is a 38 year old tech guy from way back. At 12 years old, he wanted to play a computer game, but lacked the RAM to load it. After digging into the internal configuration to delay the load of peripherals, he was hooked on computers and eventually, coding. Outside of tech, he is picking back up learning piano, and really enjoys biking. He mentioned he just got a new gravel bike, which is a street bike with a front suspension.

In the past, Andrew frequently worked with data that was private, with other users not having access. So, he had to create fake data, for multiple different projects. When he tried to do this, it took him much longer than anticipated, and it was incredibly valuable for multiple uses (stress testing and demos to name a few). This was key to eventually building a real tool for this, and starting a new adventure.

This is the creation story of Tonic.

Sponsors

Links

Website: https://www.tonic.ai/
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/andrew-colombi-9a52aa5/

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Dev Interrupted: Assembling & Nurturing Engineering Teams

Fri, 29 Sep 2023 10:00:00 +0000

Our host, Noah Labhart, couldn't be more excited about being featured on Dev Interrupted, whom we have followed for a long time, and have learned a ton from. Check out the post below, and subscribe to Dev Interrupted!

Check out the original post here:

https://linearb.io/dev-interrupted/podcast/career-journey-3-assembling-and-nurturing-engineering-teams

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S8 Bonus: The Code Dependency Revolution: Solving Open-Source Burnout and Engineering the teaRank Protocol with Max Howell, Creator of Homebrew & Founder of Tea

Thu, 28 Sep 2023 10:00:00 +0000

Max Howell did well in school, and was presented with the problem that - he didn't know what to do with himself. At that time, software wasn't cool, so he studied chemistry and started out a job in that industry. After he mastered his work environment within 3 months, he was disenchanted with the career path, and decided to stop going to work. Post installing Linux on his home computer, he started coding - and fell in love with it. Outside of tech, he is married with a young son. He enjoys a good beer, cooking a steak, and seeing how new everything is interpreted through his son's eyes.

Max is the creator of Homebrew, the widely used package manager which is probably installed on your computer right now. After the success of the tool, he wanted to figure out a way to continue to bring value to open source, and power digital money in the web3 space.

This is the creation story of Tea.

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Links

Website: https://tea.xyz/
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/mxcl/

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S8 Bonus: The Real-Time Metadata Graph: Moving Beyond Passive Data Catalogs to Automated, Event-Driven Governance with Shirshanka Das, Co-Founder of DataHub & CEO of Acryl Data

Wed, 27 Sep 2023 10:00:00 +0000

Shirshanka Das grew up on the eastern side of India, near Calcutta. He did well in school, and got into IIT, choosing Computer Science as his major. Post undergrad, he got his PhD at UCLA, eventually working at PayPal and Yahoo on massive architectural systems. Outside of tech, he's married with 2 kids, he's an accomplished Indian vocalist, and has a passion for swimming, which he states is his therapy.

After spending over a decade at LinkedIn, Shirshanka had led the teams supporting all things data. He created a unified approach to data discovery, governance, and observability - while he was at the company. He open sourced the product, called DataHub, and eventually created a managed version.

This is the creation story of Acryl Data.

Sponsors

Links

Website: https://www.acryldata.io/
Website: https://datahubproject.io/
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/shirshankadas/

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S8 E24: Bypassing the Wrapper Trap to Engineer Model-Agnostic Enterprise RAG and Compliance Guardrails with Jon Ricketts, Co-Founder & CEO of Writerly

Tue, 26 Sep 2023 10:00:00 +0000

Jon Ricketts lives in Knoxville, TN with his wife and kids. He notes that he has had an unconventional route to being a tech startup founder. He has an MBA and JD, but knew during law school he didn't want to practice. Throughout his career, he has continually fallen in love with building. Outside of tech, he enjoys spending time on the beach, staying physically fit, golfing, and working on his private pilots license.

Jon observed the maturation of AI, in the creation of tooling like ChatGPT and generative AI. He envisioned building an application to extend the progression of natural language processing to enable work productivity.

This is the creation story of Writerly.

Sponsors

Links

Website: https://writerly.ai/
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/jon-ricketts-639187267/

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S8 Bonus: Engineering Conversational Natural Language Engines for Elasticsearch and Overthrowing the SQL Middleman with Tim Tutt, Co-Founder & CEO of ClearQuery

Thu, 21 Sep 2023 10:00:00 +0000

Tim Tutt grew up in the military, and travelled around following his father. An interesting fact he shared was that he attended three different schools in the 1st grade. He learned how to make friends and fit in quickly. Outside of tech, he loves the marvel cinematic universe, from which he states that Tony Spark is his spirit animal. He also loves to play poker, which he got into during college. He actually got to play in a smaller event within the World Series of poker this past year.

In the past, Tim played the role of the middle man between the data and those who needed answers from the data. Like a good engineer, he always automated the repeat things he was asked to do. He asked his co-founder one day... wouldn't it be nice if we could just get out of the way?

This is the creation story of ClearQuery.

Sponsors

Links

Website: https://www.clearquery.io/
Website: https://www.nightshiftdevelopment.com/
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/timtutt/

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S8 Bonus: The Multi-Vendor Telemetry Playbook: Scaling Collaboration Intelligence and the Road to an HP Acquisition with Alfredo Ramirez, Co-Founder & CEO of Vyopta

Wed, 20 Sep 2023 10:00:00 +0000

Alfredo Ramirez is the son of Ecuadorian immigrants, which instilled in him positive beliefs around faith, family, community and hard work. Way back, his father bought him an Apple 2 computer, which started him on his software development journey. Outside of tech, he is married with kids, and loves spending time outdoors with them - hiking, water sports, snow skiing and shooting trap. All of these things allow him to relax, recharge and clear his head.

Fifteen years ago, Alfredo and his co-founders started their current venture during the 2008 financial crisis. After relying on the services side of their business, they headed towards building a single platform around digital collaboration, one that is reliable, a better user experience, and the analytics to go with it.

This is the creation story of Vyopta.

Sponsors

Links

Website: https://www.vyopta.com/
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/alfredo-ramirez-7131175/

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S8 E23: The Multimodal Data Blueprint: Structuring the Unseen 80% of Enterprise Visual Data Without Metadata Tagging with Will Gaviria, Co-Founder of Coactive AI

Tue, 19 Sep 2023 10:00:00 +0000

Will Gaviria was born and raised in Columbia, immigrating to Florida at 11 years old. His family seta off in a single bedroom together, and worked hard for their life and successes. He got a full ride to MIT, and funny enough, he had to convince his mother that it was a legit school. Through all of his studies, he got to see the rise of AI and focused on neo-morphic computing. Outside of tech, he is married with a cat named Chipotle. He lives in the Bay Area, and loves playing Magic the Gathering and doing Crossfit.

Will and his co-founder observed first hand the explosion of visual content. At the same time, artificial intelligence had reached a mature state, such that you could use it to learn from unstructured data. They set out to build the next big thing, specifically in context of unstructured visual data.

This is the creation story of Coactive.

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Links

Website: https://coactive.ai/
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/williamgaviria/

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S8 Bonus: Bypassing Brittle Custom Scripts: Implementing Automated Multi-Tenant Configuration Backups and Vulnerability Patching at Scale with Andrew Kahl of BackBox

Thu, 14 Sep 2023 10:00:00 +0000

Andrew Kahl has spent 30 years in tech, and has had many wonderful experiences. He graduated in 1992, and actually accidentally entered the industry, when he came across a job ad for Compaq. He's been in tech ever since, all around the building of things. Outside of tech, he is marred with 2 daughters - one of which he just sent to college, and one in high school. Along side of that, they have 3 overly energetic German shepherds.

Andrew was part of a private equity group, which acquired BackBox in late 2021. He stepped in as CEO, maintaining the technology team in Israel and bringing the GTM team to the US. Taking over a fantastic product, Andrew set his sights on growing the company.

This is the creation story of BackBox.

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Website: https://backbox.com/
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/andrewkahl/

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S8 Bonus: The Data Asset Revolution: Moving Beyond Imperative Task Pipelines to Declarative Orchestration with Pete Hunt, Co-Founder of React & CEO of Dagster Labs

Wed, 13 Sep 2023 10:00:00 +0000

Pete Hunt grew up in NE Massachusetts, which he mentions was culturally New Hampshire. He wasn't into Hockey, but did a lot of swimming, in particular the 200m butterfly. He has a 2 year old daughter, and loves to play guitar in his cover band.

Pete was one of the founding team members of React, and his friend and colleague, Nick, was one of the creators of GraphQL. Post Facebook, they wanted to figure out what was next, and wanted to build something impactful. After interviewing some folks, he realized that managing data and data pipelines was a challenge that needed to be solved.

This is the creation story of Dagster.

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Website: https://dagster.io/
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/pwhunt/

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S8 E22: The Identity Orchestration Blueprint: Unifying Multi-Cloud Security and Bypassing Legacy App Refactoring with Eric Olden, Co-Founder & CEO of Strata Identity

Tue, 12 Sep 2023 10:00:00 +0000

Eric Olden grew up in the Bay Area, as one of the few local natives, but enjoys the mountains of Colorado now, outside of Boulder. He and his family love to ski, mountain bike, and even visit the reservoir to do some surfing. Outside of these things, he is passionate ab out landscape architecture, and does it for fun on the side.

Prior to his current venture, Eric was running a large division at Oracle, surrounding identity. He saw that most cloud customers were utilizing multiple clouds, but most tooling didn't allow for those cloud identities to play nice together. He saw this opportunity sitting in plain sight, and decided to step out and attack it.

This is the creation story of Strata.

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Links

Website: https://www.strata.io/
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/boughtnotsold/

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S8 Bonus: EdTech Scale Engine: Bypassing Video Bootcamps with Live Code Execution and AI-Guided Mentorship Rails with Barak Glanz, Co-Founder of Coddy.tech

Thu, 07 Sep 2023 10:00:00 +0000

Barak Glanz is 26 years old, and has done quite a few things in his life. He served in the Israeli Navy prior to jumping into the professional world. He worked for Meta as a student, and has has a few impressive startup failures in different sectors. Outside of tech, he is a rock climber, weight lifter, and likes to play chess. He mentioned that he beat someone in 10 moves before, but attributed it to mistakes of his competitor.

A year and a half ago, Barak and his childhood friends shared the personal struggle of learning how to code online. What they noticed was that the current solutions didn't offer helpful ways to practice building real world projects. So they built their own.

This is the creation story of Coddy.tech.

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Links

Website: https://coddy.tech/
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/barak-glanz

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S8 Bonus: The College Matchmaking Engine: Replacing Opaque University Rankings with Predictive Culture Analytics and David Hurwitt, Founder & CEO of Troove

Wed, 06 Sep 2023 10:00:00 +0000

David Hurwitt lives in Burlington, Vermont, and is a married father of 3. And, those kids hav already grown and flown, per Dave's words. Their journey out of the nest into college was a driver behind starting his current venture. Outside of current venture, he is an avid photographer and really enjoys taking pictures, but ensuring there is people in them - cause, he states it's just better that way.

Dave spent some time in college admissions in the past. And, as his kids grew up, he started to look into the process again. He found that when visiting a school in person, there wasn't solution that utilized preferences of the graduates, helping them identify patterns to help match them to their perfect school.

This is the creation story of Troove.

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Links

Website: https://www.troove.me/
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/davehurwitt

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S8 E21: The HubSpot of Inventory: Overthrowing NetSuite Lock-In and Automating Multi-Channel Supply Chain Rails with Jared Ward, Founder & CEO of Luminous

Tue, 05 Sep 2023 10:00:00 +0000

Jared Ward grew up in a sporty family, participating in wrestling and football. His background is in supply chain and eCommerce, but outside of this and tech, he is a family man and loves spending time with his kids. With his 7 year old son, he is sharing his love of Zelda, and with his 3 year old daughter, he enjoys taking her to the park and the occasional tickle fight. For himself, he enjoys watching MMA, running marathons, and getting outside to hike.

Jared has spent a lot of time in the eCommerce world, serving numerous different roles. What he noticed is that with evolution of eCommerce companies, it is difficult for them to develop a system of record early on. Jared wanted to change all that, and take on the juggernauts head on.

This is the creation story of Luminous.

Sponsors

Links

Website: https://www.joinluminous.com/
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/jared-ward-bb96a115b/

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S8 Bonus: Engineering Text-to-Video AI Automation and Scaling to Millions of Users with Vikram Chalana, Co-Founder & CEO of Pictory

Thu, 31 Aug 2023 10:00:00 +0000

Vikram Chalana grew up in India, but has been in Seattle over 30 years. He graduated from the University of Washington, and actually met his wife in college. In fact, his kids now go to the same school, so his whole family are Huskies. Outside of tech, he loves anything outdoors - skiing, biking, and kayaking. In fact, at the recording of this episode, he just got back from climbing Mt. Kilimanjaro.

Vikram noticed that content marketing has shifted from text to images to videos. In a prior organization, they only had 1 person who was trained to create videos, though the demand for assets was high. After attempting to learn tools to make these videos, he wanted to find a better way to generate this type of content.

This is the creation story of Pictory.

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Links

Website: https://pictory.ai/
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/vikramchalana/

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S8 Bonus: The Bare-Metal Database Revolution: Engineering C++ Thread-Per-Core Systems and Overthrowing the JVM with Dor Laor, Co-Creator of KVM & CEO of ScyllaDB

Wed, 30 Aug 2023 10:00:00 +0000

Dor Laor lives North of Tel Aviv, Israel, but travels 4 times out of the year to the states. He loves tech, which drives 200% of his day. Outside of tech, he is married with two teenage kids, and enjoys extreme sports. At the time, he does snowboarding and mountain biking, mentioning that the best place to mountain bike was a ski resort in France. He would love to do surfing, but hasn't found the time to hit the waves around Israel.

Dor and his co-founder met long ago at another startup. Post acquisition, they listed ideas of what to start building next. They decided to build an operating system like to Linux, and noticed that databases still didn't run faster within their system. They decided to tackle distributed NoSQL databases instead.

This is the creation story of ScyllaDB.

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Website: https://www.scylladb.com/
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/dor-laor/

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S8 E20: Extracting Context from Chaos: Implementing Real-Time NLP Semantic Parsing and Automated Action-Item Routing with Artem Koren of Sembly AI

Tue, 29 Aug 2023 10:00:00 +0000

Artem Koren is now based in Amsterdam, and has been a techy since his early years. He was programming Q-basic and C in 5th grade, and building web applications in High School. Post school at Columbia, he started working at .COM businesses, but found himself dis-enchanted with the state of AI. Outside of tech, he loves chess, attending running club, Jui Jitsu, and cosmology - the study of space, black holes, and things like that.

Artem and his co-founder have years of experience in digital transformation. With the latest innovations in AI proving useful, they decided to make digesting, and utilizing, information from meetings easier - using said AI.

This is the creation story of Sembly AI.

Sponsors

Links

Website: https://www.sembly.ai/
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/akoren

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From Tools and Weapons: Putting AI in the Hands of People Everywhere

Mon, 28 Aug 2023 10:00:00 +0000

Hello Listeners. This week, we're sharing another episode of the Tools and Weapons podcast, brought to you by our friends at Microsoft.

Microsoft’s Chief Technology Officer, Kevin Scott, believes that for AI to benefit everyone, humans must be at the center of its development. His philosophy was shaped by his rural Virginia roots, where he belonged to a hardworking community that used creativity, perseverance, and curiosity to support each other and tackle practical challenges.

In this episode, you'll hear about how a culture grounded in human values can lead to safer products, how AI can increase access to critical services like education and medicine, and what Chopin’s G Minor Ballade can teach us about AI and human connection.

You can find more Tools and Weapons at codestory.co/toolsandweapons.

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S8 Bonus: The $45M 'GitHub for Docs' Experiment: Engineering Git-Style Version Control for Asynchronous Business Teams with Adam Nathan, Co-Founder & CEO of Almanac

Thu, 24 Aug 2023 10:00:00 +0000

Adam Nathan was born and raised in New York. His parents were small business owners, his brother is entrepreneur, so starting a business was just in his blood. He has always been interested in complex systems, working in the government and in the airline industry. Outside of tech, he is a big skier, cyclist and works out every day. He's also a big reader, and reads 60-70 books a year.

Adam found himself inundated with messages and emails, all surrounding the workflow of reviewing and approving documentation. Keying off what Github accomplished for developers, he wanted to became a centralized, beautiful place, for business users to collaborate on documents.

This is the creation story of Almanac.

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Links

Website: https://almanac.io/
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/adampnathan/

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S8 Bonus: Overcoming 100x AI Code Velocity and Enterprise Vulnerability Noise with Idan Plotnik, Co-Founder & CEO of Apiiro

Wed, 23 Aug 2023 10:00:00 +0000

Idan Plotnik is a half Russian and half Moroccan, which mainly shows up in the way he cooks. First and foremost though, he is a geek, having worked in computer security from his early days. Outside of tech, he is married to a professional surfer, so he and his wife surf Israel's waves regularly. He is a dad as well, and stays busy putting together lego sets, or cooking delicious fish dishes, in traditional moroccan style.

In the past, Idan sold two companies, one of which to Microsoft. At Microsoft, he felt the challenge and the pain of talking to risk management and security folks, begging them to integrate their tooling into the development process - which slowed down delivery. After spending so much time on non-value add activities, he decided to set out and optimize this process.

This is the creation story of Apiiro.

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Links

Website: https://apiiro.com/
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/idanplotnik/

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S8 E19: The $124M Scale-Up Playbook: Engineering Contextual AI and B2B Invoice Orchestration Engines to Kill Procurement Friction with Yann Ravel-Sibillot, Co-Founder & CEO of Flowie

Tue, 22 Aug 2023 10:00:00 +0000

Yann Ravel-Sibillot lives in France, and has a lot of hobbies. Ones that he mentioned was kayaking and rock climbing, which he has been doing for more than 10 years. He is passionate about AI, and built his first robot 15 years ago. Outside of tech, he is happily married and really enjoys Italian food. When I asked him what I should do when I come to France, he mentioned trying all the different food genres, regionally across the country.

When Yann was a CTO of a group of restaurants, he was pursued by the accounting department, to ensure he was validating invoices. Though he tried to build a system for this, it wasn't enough to alleviate the pain of the problem. Eventually, he set out to build the right solution to solve this.

This is the creation story of Flowie.

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Links

Website: https://www.get-flowie.com/en
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/yannravelsibillot/

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S8 Bonus: Bypassing the Excel Accounting Trap: Architecting High-Throughput Bank API Connectors and Rule Matching Engines with Danielle Shaul of Nilus

Fri, 18 Aug 2023 10:00:00 +0000

Danielle Shaul was born and raised in Tel Aviv, as an only child with a dog she dearly loved. She has always been passionate about building and creating things, often assembling and disassembling things in her home. She loves to travel, and spent many years in Asia, Europe and in the US. Outside of tech, she likes ceramics and reading - specifically, biohacking, mindset books, or learning to become a better leader. When asked her favorite food, she says her Mom's - who can cook anything well.

Prior to her current startup, Danielle had to create home grown solutions for financial workflows - cause back then, when she was at Fundbox, software for these workflows didn't exist. Her and her co-founder clicked over the idea to build the software that she wished she had.

This is the creation story of Nilus.

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Links

Website: https://www.nilus.com/
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/danielle-shaul-735b1b92/

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S8 Bonus: The Mark Cuban Backed Playbook: Turning Short-Form Videos Into Interactive Games Without Code with Dan Projansky & Caroline Strzalka, Co-Founders of Overplay

Wed, 16 Aug 2023 10:00:00 +0000

Caroline Strzalka is a Philadelphia native, born and raised. She is a first generation American, and is grateful to be in a place where she can run her own company. Her parents are from Argentina, with a Polish heritage - so she pointed out that they speak a lot of languages in her home. Outside of tech, she loves to hike and be in the trees. And, she calls herself the MacGyver of the kitchen, meaning she can take anything from the fridge and make a stellar meal out of it.

Dan Projansky is a country boy, only moving to NYC when he was 11 years old. He is a father of a 14 year old, whom he adores, and is an avid mountain biker and motorcyclist. In fact, he has owned over 50 different motorcycles across different brands over the years. Originally, he attended to school for film, but after working at Sesame Street, he started to work in computers and development - and that is where he met Caroline.

One day, Dan was watching some videos online. He had a thought, a desire, a want - to play the video like it was a game. And eventually, this idea turned into a business, which he started with his co-founder Caroline.

This is the creation story of Overplay.

Sponsors

Links

Website: https://overplay.com/
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/carolinestrzalka/
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/dan-projansky/

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S8 E18: Bypassing the GPS Crutch: Engineering Level 4 Contextual AI and Multi-Floor Autonomous Robots with Ritukar Vijay, Co-Founder & CEO of Ottonomy

Tue, 15 Aug 2023 10:00:00 +0000

Ritukar Vijay has been in tech for around 16 years. He has always been fascinated with new things above and beyond the normal day to day grind. During his studies, he was interested in robotics - which he describes as the culmination of computer and physical sciences. Outside of tech, he is married with a 6 year old son. He mentioned that his son is inquisitive, and is requesting robot features from home, preparing to build his first robot in the future.

Prior to COVID and during lockdowns, Ritukar started ideating about the autonomous delivery for an industry that was overlooked for automation. They started to created robots to service the industry, and did so - from their guest rooms.

This is the creation story of Ottonomy.

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S8 Bonus: Shattering the Compliance Audit Toil: Engineering an Automated DevOps System of Record and Binary Provenance Engine with Mike Long, Co-Founder & CEO of Kosli

Thu, 10 Aug 2023 10:00:00 +0000

Mike Long describes himself as near really sitting still. He was born in Australia, but when he was 9 years old, he moved to Scotland. Post school, he worked in England, then Norway, then China... and now back to Norway. Early on his career, he worked in the Oil & Gas building larger robots for the industry. Outside of tech, he enjoys spending time with his family and taking long walks in the forest with his dog.

At his previous company, Mike was the CTO of a DevOps consultancy company. He realized that they would see the same problem over and over again in regulated environments - businesses needed a process to follow to ensure changes were tracked, and they could in turn, "keep the receipts" for proof of changes.

This is the creation story of Kosli.

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Links

Website: https://www.kosli.com/
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/mikelongoslo/

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S8 Bonus: The Intranet of Human Memory: Architecting Decentralized PLMs and Blockchain-Secured Memory Stacks with Suman Kanuganti, Co-Founder & CEO of Personal.ai

Wed, 09 Aug 2023 10:00:00 +0000

Suman Kanuganti is married with a 5 year old daughter, which he greatly enjoys. He loves robots, as a robotics major, but describes himself as a human oriented person - one who wants to elevate the experience of people. Outside of tech, he enjoys playing volleyball and is a foodie with his wife. They enjoy yellow tail sashimi and modern Mexican fusion, but at home, they enjoy remixing cuisines with different spices.

In his previous company, Suman built solutions around augmenting the human experience for blind people. Moving forward, he wanted to expand this to allow people to use AI to create long term memory, personally for you and your loved ones.

This is the creation story of Personal AI.

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Links

Website: http://www.personal.ai/
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S8 E17: The Science of Legal Optimization: Engineering Predictive Data and AI Engines for Law Firms with Dr. Jay Sarmaz, Co-Founder of Truve.ai

Tue, 08 Aug 2023 10:00:00 +0000

Jay Sarmaz studied operations research in college, which he describes as the science of solving problems and maximizing value with limited resources. His studies led him to learn computer science to utilize in solving this problems, and eventually, he got his PhD from Georgia Tech. He is driven by curiosity to solve big problems, but outside of tech, he is a soccer fan, plays musical instruments, and spends time with his wife and 5 year old son.

Jay and his team were doing consulting, prior to launching their current startup. During COVID, law firms were going through significant digital transformation, and didn't know what to do with all of their data. Wanting to scale their consultancy, they wanted to find a better way to provide analysis at scale.

This is the creation story of Truve.

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Links

Website: https://truve.ai/
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/jaysarmaz/

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S8 Bonus: The Remote Analytics Pivot: Engineering Behavior Telemetry to Fight Developer Burnout and the YC-to-Acquisition Playbook with Reza Farahani, Co-Founder of WFHomie

Thu, 03 Aug 2023 10:00:00 +0000

Reza Farahani has a background in engineering, and was heavily influenced by his family. In particular, his Uncle was a fighter jet engineer, which he thought was the coolest job in the world. He graduated from Waterloo, and became a data scientist - but eventually moved towards entrepreneurship. Outside of tech, he lives in Ontario and loves to rock climb and boulder. He enjoys the community aspect of the sport, and has access to gyms and outdoor boulders where he lives. He also passionate about food, enjoying Greek and Turkish food in Greek Town where he lives.

Reza and his co-founder wanted to engage workers who were working remote - productivity, mental health, etc. And they believed that these parameters were vectors in measuring the performance of remote teams.

This is the creation story of WFHomie.

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Website: https://www.wfhomie.com/
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/reza-farahani-/

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S8 Bonus: The Just-in-Time Access Playbook: Automating Identity Governance and Eliminating Enterprise Security Debt with Alex Bovee, Co-Founder & CEO of ConductorOne

Wed, 02 Aug 2023 10:00:00 +0000

Alex Bovee is first and foremost a family man. Time outside of his life as a founder is dictated by his family. He's married with 2 kids, and can be found shuttling kids to soccer or dance practices in his spare time. During COVID, he was able to pickup guitar, using YouTube to teach himself. His family got him a super nice Taylor acoustic that he plays on today.

Alex spent some time at Okta, and what he noticed was cloud forward companies struggled with managing identify access and governance. This left companies wasting money on users, and in an insecure state. He saw a big opportunity in this space, and with his co-founder, decided to tackle this problem head on.

This is the creation story of ConductorOne.

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Website: https://www.conductorone.com/
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/alexbovee/

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S8 E16: The Death of Static API Docs: Engineering Interactive, Real-Data Code Walkthroughs to Kill Developer Churn with Job Rietbergen, Co-Founder & Former CEO of Alphadoc

Tue, 01 Aug 2023 10:00:00 +0000

Job Rietbergen lives in Amsterdam, which he says is awesome because there are so many types of amazing cuisine. He has always been a creator of things - art, photography, product and technology, to name a few. He finds its an odd trait to create art and be in tech, as there are not a lot of people who lead from a designers mind. He has been supporting early stage startups for the last 13 years. Outside of tech, he loves to do anything boarding, and mentioned he loves to snowboard in Austria every year.

In his last role, Job was in charge of marketing and growth, of an integrations platform in healthcare tech. He dreamt of a way to enable developers and users of this platform to easy understand and implement their system. Once he met up with his co-founder, who was passionate about solving the same thing, they set out to solve this problem.

This is the creation story of Alphadoc.

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LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/developer-experience/

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Beyond Bots - Daniel Jordan, Wayflyer

Fri, 28 Jul 2023 10:00:00 +0000

Today we are dropping another special episode of the Code Story podcast, as part of our series entailed Beyond Bots: the REAL impact of AI on financial services, brought to you by our friends at Ntropy. As a reminder, Ntropy is the most accurate financial data standardization and enrichment API. They can take in any data source, any geography, and understand / enrich a financial transition in milliseconds. Made for developers, for fast, easy implementation. Check out their product at Ntropy.com.

Guest: Daniel Jordan, Product & Data at Wayflyer

Questions:

Tell me and the audience what Wayflyer is.
How long have you been a customer of Ntropy? When did this come into play?
You mention on your website that you exist to provide funding and insights, essentially helping eCommerce companies grow faster and achieve their potential. Why focus on eCommerce?
Is the “software layer” - IE fintech - on top of finance going to make this better? How?
Generative AI and LLMs are the talk of the town, are you using these approaches within Wayflyer? How?
How do you prioritize what is important to your eCommerce business customers?
What matters to your customers.... do eCommerce businesses expect the funding process to be easy and like magic?
What is the real impact of AI on finance going to be?

Links

Website: https://www.ntropy.com/
Website: https://www.wayflyer.com/

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Hosted by Noah Labhart | Technical Founder & Startup Mentor.

S8 Bonus: The $15M Bootstrapped Pivot: Tech-ifying Private Capital Markets and Engineering a Compliance-First OS for Investment Bankers with David Frank, Founder & CEO of Stonehaven

Thu, 27 Jul 2023 10:00:00 +0000

David Frank grew up in Denver, CO, and as expected, he grew up loving skiing. He mentioned that Vale was his favorite mountain, and continues to love it today. He graduated from the University of Michigan, and did investment banking in San Francisco, before starting his own firm. Outside of tech, he has two kids and by the time this episode releases, he will be a married man! His family loves to ski, especially his son, who races down the mountain competitively.

From his experience in the industry and in the market, David saw a gap for small and medium size organizations to have a system to run financial businesses on. He and his team set forth to build the next generation, broker dealer platform - one that is better than they could build themselves, and better than what the large institutions have.

This is the creation story of Stonehaven.

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Website: https://stonehaven-llc.com/
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/david-frank-cfa-68897a5/

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S8 Bonus: Shattering MVP Pitfalls: Engineering Disciplined, Scalable Architectures for Early-Stage Startups with Max Walker, Co-Founder of Piton Labs

Wed, 26 Jul 2023 10:00:00 +0000

Max Walker lives in Eastern Upstate NY (or Vermont light, as he calls it), with his grumpy, elderly cat. He comes from a tech background, graduating with a computer science degree, and working as a software engineer. Along the way, he fell in love with entrepreneurship, and dove into the startup world. Outside of tech, he is an avid rock climber, hiker, and loves super spicy food as a vegetarian.

Max is a startup veteran, and given he had gone down the building and fundraising route, he wanted to do something a bit different. What he really loved was the building, messy beginning - so he built a business around that early stage.

This is the creation story of Piton Labs.

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Website: https://pitonlabs.com/
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/maxwellwalkerwindrush/

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S8 E15: The B2B Cash Collection Tech Problem: Eradicating Manual Invoice Friction and Predictably Reducing DSO with Alex Louisy, Co-Founder & CEO of Upflow

Tue, 25 Jul 2023 10:00:00 +0000

Alex Louisy is 37 years old, and came from a non tech family. In the past, he worked in investment banking, and then a small telco company. But, he was always drawn to tech entrepreneurship and eventually, he stepped into the possibilities in this world. Outside of tech, he is married with two kids, and enjoys being outside, gardening, and hiking through the forest outside of his small house.

Alex spent many years in investment banking, financing large companies. He set out to try to provide B2B lending, and discovered that most people needed to borrow money because they weren't getting paid on time. He and his team decided to focus on this very simple problem, which uncovered huge opportunity.

This is the creation story of Upflow.

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Links

Website: https://upflow.io/
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/alexlouisy/

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Beyond Bots - Bryce Crawford, Meow

Fri, 21 Jul 2023 10:00:00 +0000

Guest: Bryce Crawford, CTO & Co-founder at Meow

Questions:

Remind the audience what Meow does.
How long have you been a customer of Ntropy? When did this come into play?
Last we talked about passing on revenue to customers in banking. It’s hard given the tight margins. How is Meow thinking about that today?
Is the “software layer” on top of finance going to make this better? How?
Generative AI and LLMs are the talk of the town, are you seeing any use cases? Or, are you working on an in-house solutions?
There are many new decisions you have to make as a CTO. How does you prioritize around what will make a difference in the market?
What matters to your customers.... are people expecting finance to be magical or simply reliable?
What is the real impact of AI on finance going to be in your eyes?

Links

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Hosted by Noah Labhart | Technical Founder & Startup Mentor.

S8 Bonus: The Real-Time Infrastructure Masterclass: Bypassing HTTP Streaming Failures to Deliver Exactly-Once Data Sync at Global Scale with Matthew O'Riordan, Co-Founder & CEO of Ably

Thu, 20 Jul 2023 10:00:00 +0000

Matthew O'Riordan is originally from South Africa. He left school and sort of fell into engineering, cause he just loved it. In fact, the craft brought him to the UK, where he saw more opportunity. Outside of tech, he likes adrenaline sports. He was a competitively skydiver, participating in free style routines, free-fly and vertical formation. He pointed out that it's a great way to clear your head, cause you can't think about anything else when you're skydiving.

Matt unearthed interesting things as he was building prototype after prototype to solve real time experiences. He wanted to build a new generation of real time communication developer tools, that provide collaboration opportunity... and that just work.

This is the creation story of Ably.

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Links

Website: https://ably.com/
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/mattoriordan/

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S8 Bonus: The Fractional Real Estate Engine: Building a Liquidity Marketplace and Automated Yield Rails for Vacation Rentals with Ali Nichols, Co-Founder of Getaway

Wed, 19 Jul 2023 10:00:00 +0000

Ali Nichols has been obsessed with real estate since she was a little kid. She has always wanted to marry whatever she was doing with real estate, and is pretty stoked to have achieved that. Outside of tech, she loves to spend time with her family and friends, hiking, golfing or boating. In fact, when she and her significant other were living in San Fransisco, they boat a sailboat and were obsessed with the craft. But now that the live in Miami, they've switched over to power boating, to better enjoy all that Florida water has to offer.

Ali and her Co-founder previously worked together at a real estate startup, specifically in the single family rental space. They both really struggled with the idea that their friends were priced out of the market, and wanted to make opportunities available to more people.

This is the creation story of Getaway.

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Links

Website: https://www.getaway.co/
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/alicnichols/

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S8 E14: Beyond Static DORA Dashboards: Deploying Real-Time Git Metadata Parsing and Policy-as-Code Engines with Dan Lines of LinearB

Tue, 18 Jul 2023 10:00:00 +0000

Dan Lines is married, with a 3 year old daughter and a baby on the way. He has lived all over the US - 7 years in Boston, 5 years in LA, and he now lives in Upstate New York. He has always been into the creation of things, being the kid in high school burning and selling CD's, building computers on the side, or creating an early sports streaming platform, before streaming was a thing.

Before Dan founded his current company with his co-founder Ori, he was an engineering leader, with 100 engineers reporting to him. During that journey, he catalogued all of the pains he felt as a VP of Engineering. Post acquisition of his prior company, he decided to build a system to solve those pains.

This is the creation story of LinearB.

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Links

Website: https://linearb.io/
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/dan-lines/

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Beyond Bots - Ilia Zintchenko, Ntropy

Fri, 14 Jul 2023 10:00:00 +0000

Guest: Ilia Zintchenko, CTO & Co-founder of Ntropy

Questions:

We talked with Nare about Ntropy and LLM's. But let's dig in more.... what is your LLM stack? How did you choose it, what were the considerations?
What are the system costs in doing this?
How do you optimize on reliability - what sort of lever are you pulling to ensure reliability?'
How are you thinking about predictive vs generative learning?
You guys have been using small and large LM's since the beginning - why is this significant?
What data sources have you been using, and are there some that are better than others?'
Have you had to scrub these data sources in any way to prep them for your LM?
What is the major benefit that Ntropy is providing by using LLM?
What would you go back and change if you could?

Links

Website: https://www.ntropy.com/
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/iliazintchenko/

Current Sponsors:

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Hosted by Noah Labhart | Technical Founder & Startup Mentor.

S8 Bonus: The Webcam Eye-Tracker: Engineering an Objective, AI-Driven 'Lab Test' for ADHD Medication with Dr. Einat Sitbon, Co-Founder & CTO of iFocus Health

Thu, 13 Jul 2023 10:00:00 +0000

Einat Sitbon has always been intrigued by nature, and all of its parts. She studied biology in school, all the way through getting her PhD in Computational Biology. This field also introduced her to computation in general, and programming. Outside of tech, she is married with 2 kids, and loves to hike. Her and her family share a love of fiction and fantasy books, and made mention her love of NK Jemision and JRR Tolkien.

Einat's and her sister are very close, and at one point, her sister mentioned that her son was ADHD. They found it difficult to understand how there wasn't a tool to help measure the concentration of a person with this diagnosis. They both started digging into how to solve this problem.

This is the creation story of iFocus Health.

Sponsors

Links

Website: https://ifocustest.com/
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/%F0%9F%87%BA%F0%9F%87%A6-einat-sitbon-b70a7b/

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S8 Bonus: Bypassing the Fragmented Panel Trap: Architecting Real-Time, Verified Expert Networks for B2B Product Research with Sharekh Shaikh of CleverX

Wed, 12 Jul 2023 10:00:00 +0000

Sharekh Shaikh has an interesting background, having grown up (almost) on a farm in India, within a small town. He spent most of his time with animals and pets, more than people, and followed his father around as he travelled for work. He is big into motorbikes and reading philosophy, specifically stoics, and tends to read the older books over newer podcast or material. He's also trying to learn piano, but admits he's struggling in that arena.

When Sharekh was working for Gartner, he faced a problem around fraud, using online services for research. When he thought more about this, he decided he wanted to build a platform fueling market research... built on transparency and trust.

This is the creation story of CleverX.

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Links

Website: https://cleverx.com/
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/sharekh-shaikh-4591874/

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S8 E13: An Indie Hacker Blueprint: Engineering Secure AI-to-SQL Pipelines for Non-Technical Teams with Colleen Schnettler, Creator of HelloQuery

Tue, 11 Jul 2023 10:00:00 +0000

Colleen Schnettler was a stay at home Mom for many years, taking care of her 3 children. When she was looking to return to work, she was looking for remote - and it seemed that programming was the best avenue. She taught herself rails development, with the goal of starting her own company. Outside of tech, she spends time with her family outdoors, and claims she is a meat and potatoes kinda gal, with some bark thins for desert.

Recently, Colleen and her co-founder did a pivot of their previous offering, which was a package to solve reporting problems by embed them into your application. They are now focused on a SaaS tool, to provide this functionality for you.

This is the creation story of HelloQuery.

Sponsors

Links

Website: https://helloquery.com/
Website: https://hammerstone.dev/
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/colleen-schnettler/

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Hosted by Noah Labhart | Technical Founder & Startup Mentor.

S8 Bonus: The Bio-Code Revolution: Architecting Closed-Loop AI Engines and DBTL Automation for Synthetic Biology with Dr. Eduardo Abeliuk, Co-Founder & CEO of TeselaGen

Mon, 10 Jul 2023 10:00:00 +0000

Eduardo Abeliuk is originally from Santiago, Chile, where he spent the first few decades of his life. From early days, he had a deep curiosity to understand the world around him, which led him to study physics and electrical engineering. Post school, he joined an MIT startup, prior to obtaining his PhD from Stanford. Outside of tech, he likes to read books about longetivit, and listen to the Lex Friedman podcast. He also walks for at least an hour a day, and enjoys hiking, biking and time with family and friends.

Together with some colleagues from Stanford, Eduardo felt the pains of planning research projects. This process contained several processes that could have been automated through software. So, they decided to set out and build an enterprise solution for R&D projects.

This is the creation story of Teselegen.

Sponsors

Links

Website: https://teselagen.com/
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/eduardoabeliuk/

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Hosted by Noah Labhart | Technical Founder & Startup Mentor.

Beyond Bots - Naré Vardanyan, Ntropy

Fri, 07 Jul 2023 10:00:00 +0000

Today we are kicking off a special and new series entailed Beyond Bots: the REAL impact of AI on financial services, brought to you by our friends at Ntropy. As a reminder, Ntropy is the most accurate financial data standardization and enrichment API. They can take in any data source, any geography, and understand / enrich a financial transition in milliseconds. Made for developers, for fast, easy implementation. Check out their product at Ntropy.com.

Guest: Naré Vardanyan, CEO & Co-founder of Ntropy

Questions:

Tell me what a large language model is. Is there any difference between this and deep learning models?
What is the difference between language models and LLM's?
What sort of data sets were your models pre-trained on? How long does that take?
How does the cost of training these models factor into your offering?
Can you talk about latency as a key factor in this process?
You've told me Ntropy has been doing this since the beginning, but give me a little more - how does this fit into Ntropy's approach?
What is in the future for Ntropy in this space, specifically as it relates to LLM's and financial services?

Links

Website: https://www.ntropy.com/
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/narevardanyan/

Current Sponsors:

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Hosted by Noah Labhart | Technical Founder & Startup Mentor.

S8 Bonus: The Bootstrapped Privacy Rebellion: Engineering Cookie-Less Web Analytics Without Tracking Users with Adriaan van Rossum, Founder of Simple Analytics

Thu, 06 Jul 2023 10:00:00 +0000

Adriaan van Rossum is a tech guy even at home. He likes to tinker with home automation, like turning on the lights - which his girlfriend doesn't like the home automation experiments at times. Outside of tech, he does kite surfing, and travels around the world. He really enjoyed Thailand, specifically the food there, as he is a vegetarian.

For several years, Adriaan was a freelancer. Each time he built an application for his clients, he did the usual song and dance with Google Analytics - he copy and pasted the script. This didn't feel right, and his girlfriend prompted him to build his own... so he did.

This is the creation story of Simple Analytics.

Sponsors

Links

Website: https://www.simpleanalytics.com/
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/adriaanvanrossum/

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Hosted by Noah Labhart | Technical Founder & Startup Mentor.

S8 E12: The $16B Escheatment Engine: Automating Financial Dormancy and Compliance Rails with Stephanie Mertz, Co-Founder of Eisen

Wed, 05 Jul 2023 10:00:00 +0000

Stephanie Mertz is into software development because she likes to create something from nothing - IE the blank canvas nature of coding. Outside of tech, she loves to garden, grow her own vegetables, and build things out of wood. She also has as beehive, which she claimed was a fantastic way to observe the natural creative process - and decompress from a screen.

Stephanie and her co-founder were drawn to solving problems for the behind the scenes processes - aka the boring business stuff. When digging into these problems, they kept running into the fact that no one really had a solid escheatment process... and eventually, they decided to tackle it.

This is the creation story of Eisen.

Sponsors

Links

Website: https://www.witheisen.com/
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/stephmertz/

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Hosted by Noah Labhart | Technical Founder & Startup Mentor.

S8 Bonus: The RealReal CTO's Playbook: Engineering Rust-Powered GraphQL Federation at the Network Edge with Fredrik Björk, Founder & CEO of Grafbase

Fri, 30 Jun 2023 10:00:00 +0000

Fredrik Björk is originally from Sweden, but has spent many years in San Francisco. He got started coding in BASIC on his Commodore 64 (while also playing video games, of course). Post graduating from RIT, he has been involved in many startups, like Avatars United and The Real Real. Outside of tech, he is a Dad of two kids and likes to run - specifically marathons. Beyond that, he likes wind surfing and wing foil.

Fredrik noticed that the patterns of development has changed towards outsourcing over building everything in house over the past decade. Fast forward to 2021, great services exist to empower developers to ship faster. Fredrik wanted to build a service like this for the API layer, and below.

This is the creation story of Grafbase.

Sponsors

Links

Website: https://grafbase.com/
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/fbjork/

Current Sponsors:

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Hosted by Noah Labhart | Technical Founder & Startup Mentor.

S8 Bonus: Bypassing the Resume Filter Bias: Building Automated Code Assessment Engines to Uncover Elite Engineering Talent with Jaclyn Ling of Hatchways

Thu, 29 Jun 2023 10:00:00 +0000

Jaclyn Ling is a super competitive person, and has been her entire life. Whether it's board games with her family, or playing sports in her younger years, she wants to win. She still plays sports today, and watches basketball, specifically the Miami Heat or Toronto Raptors. Outside of that, she is a low key person, enjoying taking walks, hanging at the local coffee shop, and thrift shopping.

Jaclyn is a self proclaimed terrible interviewer, which never gave her the best foot forward when looking for jobs. When her co-founder and she wanted to solve a problem in the space of hiring, they wanted to enable people to have access to more opportunities, and get noticed better for your first job.

This is the creation story of Hatchways.

Sponsors

Links

Website: https://hatchways.io
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/jaclynling

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Hosted by Noah Labhart | Technical Founder & Startup Mentor.

S8 Bonus: From Facebook and Pinterest Data Infrastructure to Building the Canva for Data, with Shawn Cao of Columns

Wed, 28 Jun 2023 10:00:00 +0000

Shawn Cao lives in Kirkland, just outside of Seattle. He immigrated to the US, and is married with 4 kids. He loves to hike and play soccer with his children, and even though Seattle can be rainy and cloudy for half the year, he admits that the summers are fantastic for being outside. He also admits he stops by Starbucks occasionally, but couldn't confirm if it tastes better at the home store in Seattle.

Shawn noticed, through his time at larger companies like Pinterest and Microsoft, that the path to get data insights and analytics leans heavily on engineering, and takes a long time. He thought, there must be a way to make an easy, quick tool to enable people outside of engineering to do this themselves. So he built the Canva for Data.

This is the creation story of Columns.

Sponsors

Links

Website: https://columns.ai/
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/caoxhua/

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Hosted by Noah Labhart | Technical Founder & Startup Mentor.

S8 E11: The Firebase Blueprint for SaaS Integrations: Delivering Real-Time Context to AI Agents with Lauren Long, Co-Founder & CTO of Ampersand

Tue, 27 Jun 2023 10:00:00 +0000

Lauren Long was originally born and raised in China, and moved to Canada when she was 10. She had to learn English for the first time, which taught her how to embrace hard things and challenges. She attended University in Canada, and started her first company there called BoxIt. Outside of tech, she is an outdoors person - post moving from China, where she was more of a city girl. She loves to hike, rock climb, and do yoga. She also loves to cook, and claimed she learned to cook a whole duck once, creating 5 meals from all the parts.

Lauren was a key developer at Firebase, and post that, she started thinking about her past experiences and what areas could be improved - and she landed on integrations. Once she met her now co-founder, they realized they both were passionate about solving this problem.

This is the creation story of Ampersand.

Sponsors

Links

Website: https://www.withampersand.com/
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/laurenzlong/

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Hosted by Noah Labhart | Technical Founder & Startup Mentor.

S8 Bonus: The Alchemy of the Tide Pod: Engineering Global Materials Science and Strategic Partnerships with P. Scott Bening, Former CEO of MonoSol

Thu, 22 Jun 2023 10:00:00 +0000

Scott Bening is a 63 year old kid at heart who grew up in Buffalo, NY. He got a degree in chemistry and went into the plastics industry. Outside of his profession, he is super active - playing drums in a rock band, racing GT race cars competitively, kayaking, hiking and golfing. He has been married for 35 years, with 2 older children.

Many years ago, Scott joined a small division of a company in 1989. Scott took the company to new heights, developing and selling a material that you probably use every day - the film that wraps Tide Pods. Since retired from the company, he is advising other companies, and helping entrepreneurs through his book, titled Formulating Solutions.

This is Scott's creation story of Monosol.

Sponsors

Links

Website: https://www.monosol.com/
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/p-scott-bening-a8225b14/
https://www.formulatingsolutionsbook.com/

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Hosted by Noah Labhart | Technical Founder & Startup Mentor.

S8 Bonus: Bypassing the Slack Distraction Loop: Architecting Real-Time Rescheduling Algorithms and Dynamic Calendar Telemetry with Matt Martin, Co-Founder & CEO of Clockwise

Wed, 21 Jun 2023 10:00:00 +0000

Matt Martin has always been a computer nerd, even way back in Elementary School, learning to use a Mac and learning Hypercard. In Middle School, he discovered the internet and programming in HTML - and he was hooked. That said, he didn't grow up around tech folks and eventually got into public policy and went to law school. After being a litigator for a while, he decided to ditch the law industry, move to the Bay Area and get into tech. Outside of tech, he is married with 2.5 year old twin girls. They live in downtown San Francisco, and they love to go on bike rides together.

Matt considers himself a productivity nerd, and is always looking for ways to improve his workflow. At a prior role, he was focusing on individual optimization to schedules. And what he realized, is that time is not an individual problem - but a team problem to be solved.

This is the creation story of Clockwise.

Sponsors

Links

Website: https://www.getclockwise.com/
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/voxmatt/

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Hosted by Noah Labhart | Technical Founder & Startup Mentor.

S8 E10: From Chrome Extension to a Professional Network for 500K+ Developers: Engineering Content Recommendation Pipelines with Ido Shamun, Co-Founder & CTO of daily.dev

Tue, 20 Jun 2023 10:00:00 +0000

Ido Shamunn cut his teeth on the C programming language, while studying Applied Mathematics. He was unsure while studying if he should go Computer Science, but he mentioned that his Applied Math degree helped him understand better what goes on behind the scenes. He's happily married, and enjoys playing music, since way back in Junior High with the keyboard. He has since moved into guitar, and eventually into the drums and heavier music.

Ido and his co-founders started out building a side project, building a tool to help themselves keep track of what's going on in the industry. After they built a quick tool to aggregate information, they thought that maybe other developers would be interested in this solution.

This is the creation story of Daily Dev.

Sponsors

Links

Website: https://daily.dev/
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/ido-shamun-aa8628a3/

Current Sponsors:

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Hosted by Noah Labhart | Technical Founder & Startup Mentor.

The Closer: Toys R Us

Mon, 19 Jun 2023 10:00:00 +0000

I have another special episode of the Code Story podcast today, where I'm sharing another great podcast I've just been made aware of. It's called The Closer, from the team at Project Brazen, hosted by financial journalist Aimee Keane. The show focuses on pulling out the high octane emotion and exponential stakes that underscore todays biggest acquisition or investment headlines.

In the episode I'm sharing today, the host takes you inside the final days of Toys R Us with Lauren Hirsch, the reporter who first revealed the iconic company's impending bankruptcy. You can expect to hear juicy tidbits around what drove the company out of business.

Check out The Closer, and subscribe today, on your favorite podcast catcher.

And thanks again for listening.

Links

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Hosted by Noah Labhart | Technical Founder & Startup Mentor.

S8 Bonus: The Nine-Figure Legal Tech Exit: Turning Millions of Scattered Slack and Email Logs into Instant Legal Evidence with Andy Wilson, Co-Founder & Former CEO of Logikcull

Fri, 16 Jun 2023 10:00:00 +0000

Andy Wilson lives in Central Oregon, which he claims is an adult playground. He loves to ski, hike, and enjoy all outdoor recreation available to him. His favorite food is a medium-rare steak, which I gotta say is an excellent choice. He got his tech degree in the 90's, and fell into the world of legal tech.

Previously, Andy worked for a company that printed email for legal teams - like truck loads of email. He decided to startup a business to digitize this process, using servers in his dining room. Eventually, he moved to the cloud, and started using AI.

This is the creation story of Logikcull.

Sponsors

Links

Website: https://www.logikcull.com/
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/andylogik

Current Sponsors:

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Hosted by Noah Labhart | Technical Founder & Startup Mentor.

S8 Bonus: Pioneering Computational Entomology: Converting Wingbeat Light Disruptions Into Real-Time Pest Telemetry with Dr. Eamonn Keogh, Co-Founder of FarmSense

Thu, 15 Jun 2023 10:00:00 +0000

Dr. Eamonn Keogh is a globally renowned expert in data mining, machine learning, and information retrieval. He is pioneering the field of computational entomology. Outside of tech, he is originally from Dublin, Ireland, but came to California in the 80's. He misses his family in Ireland, but he loves the cuisine in California, specifically Mexican food. I made sure to invite him to Texas though, cause we have great Mexican food.

A perk of Dr. Keogh's job as a professor, he gets to play with toys (in his words). He picked up a science toy one day and decided to see if he could pick up sound from plant insects. When it worked, he decided to take it to the next level.

This is the creation story of FarmSense.

Sponsors

Links

Website: https://www.farmsense.io/
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/eamonn-keogh-96ab25143/

Current Sponsors:

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Hosted by Noah Labhart | Technical Founder & Startup Mentor.

S8 Bonus: Rewriting Database Physics: Engineering a Hybrid Memory NoSQL Engine for Petabyte-Scale AI Inference with Srini Srinivasan, Co-Founder & CTO of Aerospike

Wed, 14 Jun 2023 10:00:00 +0000

Srini Srinivasan grew up in India, during a time when you could go do whatever you wanted during the summer. So he explored and experienced many things, tech and non-tech. He was very into sports and competition, and wanted to be a cricket super star. He didn't start coding until he went off to college, and interestingly enough, there were many startups formed from his class. In the early days, he really loved the Assembly language (which I can attest is not the norm!).

Srini was working in a company focused on mobile and adtech related work. During this time, he discovered that all database tech existing were lacking. He and his co-founder decided that they were the right pair to build a better system.

This is the creation story of Aerospike.

Sponsors

Links

Website: https://aerospike.com/
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/drvsrini/

Current Sponsors:

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Hosted by Noah Labhart | Technical Founder & Startup Mentor.

S8 E9: The Death of the Separated Bank and Spreadsheet: Automating Solopreneur Taxes at the Swipe of a Card with Lilac Bar David, Co-Founder & CEO of Lili

Tue, 13 Jun 2023 10:00:00 +0000

Lilac Bar David has been in the banking and payments space for over 20 years. Previously, she was the Co-founder & CEO of Pepper, a banking system focused on millennials and young adults. Outside of tech, she has 3 kids, and enjoys everything to do with the sea - paddle boarding, swimming, etc. She enjoys paddle boarding because it helps her to clear her head. And when it comes to food, she is a fan of Thai, and claims that New York has the best Thai food - outside of Thailand, of course.

Lilac and her co-founders started to think about business owners, and all of the things they had to manually, and in disconnected, non-optimal ways. They wanted to build a banking solution that was tailored towards these users - starting with freelancers.

This is the creation story of Lili.

Sponsors

Links

Website: https://lili.co/
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/lilachbardavid/

Current Sponsors:

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Hosted by Noah Labhart | Technical Founder & Startup Mentor.

S8 Bonus: The RAG Playbook: Bypassing Data Warehouses to Build a Secure, Federated Enterprise AI Search Engine with Prasad Kawthekar, Co-Founder & CEO of Dashworks

Thu, 08 Jun 2023 10:00:00 +0000

Prasad Kawthekar grew up in India, and eventually came stateside to school in Wisconsin. He took a java coding class, and was immediately hooked - which led to him pursuing computer science, focusing on artificial intelligence. He met his tribe during school, and stayed on for further academic experiences. Outside of tech, he lives in the Bay Area and enjoys being outside in nature.

There was a time in his previous role that he was searching for info related to his role. After 7 email threads and 8 weeks passing, he finally located the document. This experience blew him away, and seeded the problem he now seeks to solve.

This is the creation story of Dashworks.

Sponsors

Links

Website: https://www.dashworks.ai/
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/prasadkawthekar/

Current Sponsors:

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Hosted by Noah Labhart | Technical Founder & Startup Mentor.

S8 Bonus: The WebRTC Blueprint: Engineering Ultra-Low Latency Video and Voice Infrastructure for AI Agents with Kwindla Kramer, Co-Founder & CEO of Daily

Wed, 07 Jun 2023 10:00:00 +0000

Kwindla Kramer has always been interested in building things, and his parents gave him lots of opportunity. He spent his early days learning to program on the Commodore 64, and playing old games like Loadrunner. He was super interested in the internet while in College, and in 1996, he got the opportunity to be apart of the MIT Media lab. Outside of tech, he is a quasi vegan, and enjoys the foggy beach living on the western edge of San Francisco.

After exiting his last startup, Kwin took some time to figure out what he wanted to do next. During that time, he just started coding on projects, and came across WebRTC, which allowed real time communication for the web. This tech catalyzed a tipping point in his mind, and led him to build video experiments on top of it.

This is the creation story of Daily.

Sponsors

Links

Website: https://daily.co
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/kwkramer/

Current Sponsors:

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Hosted by Noah Labhart | Technical Founder & Startup Mentor.

S8 E8: The Anatomy of a High-Stakes Pivot: Engineering a 'Zapier for Money' with Gilad Uziely, Co-Founder & CEO of Sequence

Tue, 06 Jun 2023 10:00:00 +0000

Gilad Uziely is married with 2 daughters. He told me he met his wife on a taxi in Thailand, but that the story there was for a different podcast. He has always been an entrepreneur, along with his wife. They have built 2 small hotels in Italy, where his wife is from. Outside of tech and these things, he lives by the beach in Tel Aviv, and loves to surf.

Recently, Gilad and his team built a product called Lance (you might remember his co-founder Oona from Season 5). This was a Neo-bank for the self employed, which was built on the idea of stacks. When they figured out they needed to pivot, they moved towards focusing on financial routing.

This is the creation story of Sequence.

Sponsors

Links

Website: https://www.getsequence.io/
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/giladuziely

Current Sponsors:

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Hosted by Noah Labhart | Technical Founder & Startup Mentor.

S8 Bonus: The Salsa-Dancing Founders Rewriting B2B Support: Eliminating Legacy Tool Sprawl with Embedded AI and Dynamic SLAs with Nooshin Alibhai & Eric Klimuk, Co-Founders of Supportbench

Thu, 01 Jun 2023 10:00:00 +0000

Nooshin Alibhai has a background in sales, event planning, and entrepreneurship. Outside of her professional life, she enjoys latin dancing, which is actually where she met her co-founder Eric. Eric Klimuk has also been in entrepreneurial roles throughout his life, starting companies early on in his life. Eventually, he dove into enterprise customer support, which led him to his current venture today. He attributes his love for salsa dancing as a major part of his professional successes, and has danced on ESPN. Both Nooshin and Eric enjoy spending time with family and friends, to help decompress from startup life.

Erik spent many years in Customer Support, and found it incredibly difficult to deploy a new platform into his support group. He set out and built a toolset for the company he was at to use - and it went viral. When he figured out nothing existed in the market like this, he decided build something to the world

This is the creation story of SupportBench.

Sponsors

Links

Website: https://www.supportbench.com/
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/nooshin-alibhai-2a0795177/
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/ericklimuk/

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Hosted by Noah Labhart | Technical Founder & Startup Mentor.

S8 Bonus: How an AT&T Executive and a Harvard AI Engineer Scaled an $11M Generative Ad Engine with Hikari Senju & Matt Swalley, Co-Founders of Omneky

Wed, 31 May 2023 10:00:00 +0000

Hikari Senju grew up in Westchester, NY, and was exposed to tech early on, as his family worked at IBM. His Dad is also a painter, so he has been driven through the intersection of art and tech. He studied Computer Science at Harvard, and was cross registered at MIT. It was at MIT that his passions united, and he knew that his life goals would be aligned between art and technology. He started his first couple of businesses while still in college,

Matt Swalley graduated from Indiana University business school, and was influenced by his Dad and Mom, who were both business people. Post school, he joined a leadership development program at AT&T, and led sales teams in several different locations. Post getting his MBA, he got deep into data to analyze the big trends in the business world.

In one of his earliest ventures, Hikari was leading marketing efforts across multiple digital channels. He saw an opportunity to use generative AI and omni-channel marketing to optimize how content is generated, and how well it performs. At the same time, Matt was researching great folks building companies around data - and found Hikari.

This is the creation story of Omneky.

Sponsors

Links

Website: https://www.omneky.com
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/matt-swalley-59249533/
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/hikari-senju-63780199/

Current Sponsors:

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Hosted by Noah Labhart | Technical Founder & Startup Mentor.

S8 E7: The Lawyer Who Learned to Code: Turning Unstructured Contracts Into a $3.2B Enterprise Workflow Engine with Jason Boehmig, Co-Founder of Ironclad

Tue, 30 May 2023 10:00:00 +0000

Jason Boehmig is lucky to be in tech, in his words. He wasn't sure what he wanted to do post college, and ended up at Lehman Brothers. In reflecting on what was unique about this moment in time, he decided it was tech's influence - and he wanted to be a part of it. Outside of tech, he reads a lot, and enjoys music, specifically collecting vinyl records and listening (they do sound better).

Jason was working as a corporate attorney, and was fascinated with the fact that no company had a good way to handle contracts. Even Google was building their own internal version to handle this. He and his co-founder felt like the problem was pervasive, and wanted to change that.

This is the creation story of Ironclad.

Sponsors

Links

Website: https://ironcladapp.com/
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/jboehmig

Current Sponsors:

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Hosted by Noah Labhart | Technical Founder & Startup Mentor.

S8 Bonus: Democratizing Entity Graphs and Data Fusion with Adam Judelson, Co-Founder of FirstPrinciples (NetworkNerd)

Thu, 25 May 2023 10:00:00 +0000

Day to day, Adam Judelson is obsessed with complex problem sets in the product world. This has resulted in him getting more and more excited about simple, but powerful, productivity tools. He comes from Silicon Valley, joining Palantir Technologies in the early days, followed up by some VC backed startups. Outside of tech, he spends a lot of his free time with his kids, riding bikes and polishing up his Dad joke trophies. He also does ocean swimming, and loves the challenge to get out past the waves.

When Adam was a Palantir, he was building great relationships with his colleagues. Then he realized that the relationships he had in his life before had moved on, or changed in natural ways. He started to wonder if there was a way to build something easy, to store information about people and prompt you to checkin with important people.

This is the creation story of NetworkNerd.

Sponsors

Links

Website: https://www.networknerd.app/
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/adam-judelson-25441583/

Current Sponsors:

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Hosted by Noah Labhart | Technical Founder & Startup Mentor.

S8 Bonus: The Death of Hardcoded .env Chaos: Unifying Developer Identity and Secrets Automation with Vlad Matsiiako, Co-Founder & CEO of Infisical

Wed, 24 May 2023 10:00:00 +0000

Vlad Matsiiako was born in the Ukraine, but moved to the Netherlands to study his undergrad. He was one of the first data scientists at Bunq. He eventually got his Masters at Cornell, and actually worked at Figma, around the time of their acquisition - which he mentioned was super exciting. Outside of tech, he enjoys tennis and traveling, especially to Europe, meeting people and hearing their stories... and of course trying the food. His favorite place to go has been Portugal.

Vlad and his co-founder were previously working on other startup projects. And one of the problems they encountered on a regular basis was secrets management. After talking to like minded industry folks, they figured out that this was a MUCH bigger problem, and needed to be solved.

This is the creation story of Infisical.

Sponsors

Links

Website: https://infisical.com/
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/vmatsiiako/

Current Sponsors:

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Hosted by Noah Labhart | Technical Founder & Startup Mentor.

S8 E6: The $1B Treasury Lifeboat: Engineering Compliance-First Yield and Business Banking for Startups with Bryce Crawford, Co-Founder & CTO of Meow

Tue, 23 May 2023 10:00:00 +0000

Bryce Crawford had a pretty simple path into tech. He attended school at Vanderbilt, originally wanting to be a history major. But after observing his Dad's role in tech sales, he thought the industry looked like a good way to make money. He's worked for Capital One, Gemini and Facebook, specifically on Instagram shops. Outside of work - he keeps on coding, while trying to exercise, stay in shape, and travel when time permits. Fun fact - he claims to have an addiction to Indian food, and tends to eat at the same restaurant 2-3 times a week.

Bryce and his co-founder wanted to start something together for a long time - but didn't have any good ideas. However, they noticed that there was a ton of disruption and advancement in fintech, and specifically, the majority of folks don't like their financial services provider. They aimed to change that... for business customers, through treasury management.

This is the creation story of Meow.

Sponsors

Links

Website: https://meow.co/
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/bryce-crawford-32164466/

Current Sponsors:

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Hosted by Noah Labhart | Technical Founder & Startup Mentor.

S8 Bonus: The $20M Seed Manifesto: Unifying Application Code and Infrastructure into One Language with Elad Ben-Israel & Shai Ber, Co-Founders of Wing Cloud

Thu, 18 May 2023 10:00:00 +0000

Shai Ber is 40 years old, living in Tel Aviv. He loves to travel, hike, and eat new kinds of food. He loves to swim at the beach often, but he admits, tech consumes a large amount of his life - and he likes it that way. Elad Ben-Israel is also from Tel Aviv, and is 43 years old - and he jokingly claims that he is the responsible adult in the company. Outside of tech, he enjoys attending burning man, and making sure he gets his workout in,

About year ago, Shai and Elad started a company to make using the cloud easier. As they went about thinking how best to do this, they struck gold in the thought of creating an expressive programming language.

This is the creation story of Monada and Winglang.

Sponsors

Links

Website: https://monada.co/
Website: https://www.winglang.io/
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/shai-ber-245b1226/
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/hackingonstuff/

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Hosted by Noah Labhart | Technical Founder & Startup Mentor.

S8 Bonus: Cutting Through the ChatGPT Hype: Deploying Practical, Profit-Driven AI Strategy with Andrew Louder, Founder & CEO of Louder Co.

Wed, 17 May 2023 10:00:00 +0000

Andrew Louder grew up west of Houston, TX, in a town called Katy. He got into tech during his web mastery class in High School. He's a business graduate from Texas A&M University, and he got a taste of what life would be like as an entrepreneur when he founded a social group of Latin American students. Outside of tech, he lives in Dallas, married with 3 kids, and is enjoying all that life has to offer in that space.

About 6 years ago, Andrew decided to jump out and be on his own, with the hope of making a bigger impact than what he was experiencing. He went the solo consultant right for a while, bringing big firm experience to the table and trying things out. Fast forward to now, he and his team are at the forefront of utilizing AI to help you grow your business.

This is the creation story of Louder Co.

Sponsors

Links

Website: https://www.louderco.com/
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/andrewlouder/

Current Sponsors:

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Hosted by Noah Labhart | Technical Founder & Startup Mentor.

S8 E5: The Evolution of TestOps: Unifying Manual and Automated QA Without the Archaic Tooling Sprawl with Nikita Fedorov, Founder & CEO of Qase

Tue, 16 May 2023 10:00:00 +0000

Nikita Fedorov has been a tech guy all his life. He loves physics, and eventually decided to try out being a developer, starting out with PHP and doing it for 7 years. Eventually, he moved into leadership and management of engineering teams. Outside of tech, he into his side projects and playing video games, of which is favorite is the game Dark Souls.

While he was an engineering manager, Nikita went looking for a good suite of tools to support manual testing. All of the tools he found were archaic, and looked like they came from the days of the mainframe. He decided to start building a tool that met his own need... and people liked it.

This is the creation story of Qase.

Sponsors

Links

Website: https://qase.io/
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/nifedorov/

Current Sponsors:

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Hosted by Noah Labhart | Technical Founder & Startup Mentor.

No Priors: Jensen Huang, Founder & CEO of Nvidia

Fri, 12 May 2023 10:00:00 +0000

This week, we’re sharing something special: The No Priors podcast. No Priors is your guide to the AI revolution. At this moment of inflection in technology, co-hosts Elad Gil and Sarah Guo ask the world's leading AI engineers, researchers and founders the biggest questions - people like Cristobal Valenzuela, Founder/CEO RunwayML and Kevin Scott, CTO of Microsoft.

They ask questions like: How far away is AGI? What markets are at risk for disruption? How will commerce, culture, and society change? What’s happening in state-of-the-art research? In this episode, Jensen Huang, legendary founder/CEO of Nvidia talks about how Nvidia is powering AI models, their latest chips, how he runs Nvidia, and the AI applications he's most excited about.

You can find No Priors wherever you get your podcasts.

And, thanks again for listening.

Links

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Hosted by Noah Labhart | Technical Founder & Startup Mentor.

S8 Bonus: Democratizing the Software Factory: Scaling AI-Accelerated No-Code Development with George Novik, Founder & CPO of Zerocoder

Thu, 11 May 2023 10:00:00 +0000

George Novik's life is his work, so it's strange for him to think of life outside of his startup. But outside of tech, his hobbies include swimming, surfing, and computer games. He loves to surf at the United Emirate States. He is uncertain of the wave sizes there, as the variance is high.

A few years ago, George was hired to build a marketplace for his friends company. Fast forward, he and his team are on a mission to simplify software production, and provide access to vetted, no code developers.

This is the creation story of Zerocoder.

Sponsors

Links

Website: https://zerocoder.com/
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/nov3k/

Current Sponsors:

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Hosted by Noah Labhart | Technical Founder & Startup Mentor.

S8 Bonus: Stop Reinventing the Wheel: Dropping Full-Stack Collaboration Building Blocks Into Any App with Rickard Hansson, Founder & CEO of Weavy

Wed, 10 May 2023 10:00:00 +0000

Rickard Hansson is 48 years old to date, but started tinkering with his Commodore 64 when he was young. Later in life, he fell in love with building things and distributing it - IE building for others. He built his first commercial product at 15, which was a CRM built in Pascal. Outside of tech, he is a father of 3 and is a movie buff in his spare time. His favorite movie is a story about a tree diver, called Le Grand Blue or "The Big Blue".

In the past, Rickard was running his company named Incentive, making tools for internal teams to collaborate. What they noticed was that there was a major shift towards utilizing third party tools to improve productivity, while developers of said tools had a hard time keeping up. He and his team decided to create the tooling to help them better compete.

This is the creation story of Weavy.

Sponsors

Links

Website: https://www.weavy.com/
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/rickardh/

Current Sponsors:

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Hosted by Noah Labhart | Technical Founder & Startup Mentor.

S8 E4: The Isolation of the Tech C-Suite: Eradicating CTO Burnout and Building Communities of Practice with Andy Skipper, Founder of CTO Craft

Tue, 09 May 2023 10:00:00 +0000

Andy Skipper currently resides in Belfast, Ireland, though he is from London originally. He's been knee deep in tech since he was 12 years old, as a hobby programmer. He left college early to start his first software development agency, prior to joining the startup world during the .com era. He loves tech, but loves people as well - which lead him into his current venture. Outside of tech, he is a bedroom guitarist, an amateur photographer, and a Dad - which means he plays a log of Minecraft and Roblox.

In the past, Andy was a consulting CTO, going into companies to coach leaders or temporarily fill in for leaders who had left. What he realized was that these leaders would be doing just fine, if they had mentorship and/or coaching available from seasoned veterans. So Andy branched off - and started doing just that.

This is the creation story of CTO Craft.

Sponsors

Links

Website: https://ctocraft.com/
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/andyskipper/

Current Sponsors:

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Hosted by Noah Labhart | Technical Founder & Startup Mentor.

S8 Bonus: The Open-Source LaunchDarkly Killer: Engineering Privacy-First Edge Evaluation with Egil Østhus, Co-Founder & CEO of Unleash

Thu, 04 May 2023 10:00:00 +0000

This is the creation story of Unleash.

Sponsors

Links

Website: https://www.getunleash.io/
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/egilconr/

Current Sponsors:

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Hosted by Noah Labhart | Technical Founder & Startup Mentor.

S8 Bonus: Bypassing the Staging Queue: Hooking Local Processes into Live Kubernetes Clusters with Aviram Hassan, Co-Founder & CEO of MetalBear, Creators of mirrord

Wed, 03 May 2023 10:00:00 +0000

Aviram Hassan started hacking his way into stuff at a young age, primarily from online multiplayer games. The first game was a fan based game for Pokemon, when he was 8 years old, which was helpful for him to learn English. He served in the Israeli military, prior to become a startup solution architect and backend developer. Outside of tech, he is a family man with a 6 month old, born around the same time as his startup. He also really enjoys coffee, but he admits, he is not obsessive or overly enthusiastic about it.

Given their background, Aviram and his co-founder wanted to build a product based company. In their last company, they didn't really have a developer environment, as it was hard to maintain and didn't represent real data in the production environment. They started thinking about how they could solve this sort of problem.

This is the creation story of Metalbear, and mirrord.

Sponsors

Links

Website: https://metalbear.co/, https://mirrord.dev/
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/aviram-hassan/

Current Sponsors:

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Hosted by Noah Labhart | Technical Founder & Startup Mentor.

S8 E3: The Developer Flight Simulator: Simulating Production Melt-Downs and in a Safe Sandbox with Shem Magnezi, Co-Founder & CTO of Wilco

Tue, 02 May 2023 10:00:00 +0000

Shem Magnezi is from Tel Aviv, and started his software engineering career when he was in high school. It wasn't really professional, just hacking some stuff together, which is the way he learned the typical starting tools like HTML, Javascript, and the like. Post college, he served in the Israeli Military, in intelligence, and then moved into startups, then bigger companies like Facebook, and then - into his current venture. Outside of tech, he is a family man with 2 kids, and he loves to play and watch football (or soccer for us stateside).

Throughout their time in the industry, Shem and his co-founders saw a big gap in the industry - between theoretical knowledge and what is actually done on the job in a company. They wanted to set out and build something to bridge that gap - an immersive experience, that not only prepares engineers... but takes them on a quest.

This is the creation story of Wilco.

Sponsors

Links

Website: https://www.trywilco.com/
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/shem-magnezi-45490424/

Current Sponsors:

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Hosted by Noah Labhart | Technical Founder & Startup Mentor.

S8 Bonus: The AWS Blueprint for Consumption: Decoupling Cloud Metering from Billing Architecture with Puneet Gupta, Co-Founder & CEO of Amberflo

Wed, 26 Apr 2023 21:00:00 +0000

This is the creation story of Amberflo.

Sponsors

Links

Website: https://www.amberflo.io/
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/puneetguptausa/

Current Sponsors:

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Hosted by Noah Labhart | Technical Founder & Startup Mentor.

S8 Bonus: The Linux Kernel Maverick Rewriting SQLite in Rust: Scaling Micro-Databases for AI Agents with Glauber Costa, Co-Founder & CEO of Turso

Wed, 26 Apr 2023 10:00:00 +0000

This is the creation story of Turso.

Sponsors

Links

Current Sponsors:

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Hosted by Noah Labhart | Technical Founder & Startup Mentor.

S8 E2: The ClickOps Cure: Automating Multi-Cloud Infrastructure Discovery and Code Drift with Sefi Genis, Co-Founder & Late CTO of Firefly

Tue, 25 Apr 2023 10:00:00 +0000

This is the creation story of Firefly.

Sponsors

Links

Website: https://www.gofirefly.io/
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/sefi-genis-90282185
https://www.momtestbook.com/

Current Sponsors:

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Hosted by Noah Labhart | Technical Founder & Startup Mentor.

S8 Bonus: The Language of Money: Re-Engineering Messy Transaction Data for the Era of AI Agents with Naré Vardanyan, Co-Founder & CEO of Ntropy

Thu, 20 Apr 2023 10:00:00 +0000

This is the creation story of Ntropy.

Sponsors

Links

Website: https://ntropy.com/
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/narevardanyan/

Current Sponsors:

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Hosted by Noah Labhart | Technical Founder & Startup Mentor.

S8 Bonus: Bypassing the Enterprise Black Box: Building an Extensible, Headless Supply Chain Operating System with Ronald Richardson of Fleetbase

Wed, 19 Apr 2023 10:00:00 +0000

Ron Richardson studied robotics and embedded systems in Arizona, and is a former Marine - which is where he got his start in logistics. His biggest influence has been his parents. He mentioned his Mom introduced him to a personal website builder, which kicked off his learning into HTML, PHP and JavaScript. Outside of tech, he has a passion for traveling, and is big into horror games and movies. One of his favorite horror games is Amnesia, and movie is Insidious. He actually built an app to have an ongoing curated playlist for his fans.

Ron previously co-founded a startup in the eCommerce space, focusing on fulfillment in Asia. While he was building the backend for this solution, he noticed there weren't any developer tools for logistics and supply chain. He built an API solution and SDK to help implement common design features for this industry.

This is the creation story of Fleetbase.

Sponsors

Links

Current Sponsors:

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Hosted by Noah Labhart | Technical Founder & Startup Mentor.

S8 E1: The Death of LeetCode: Eradicating Whiteboard Anxiety with Project-Based Interview Analytics with Sargun Kaur, Co-Founder & CEO of Byteboard

Tue, 18 Apr 2023 10:00:00 +0000

Before Sargun Kaur got into tech, she was anti-wanting to be in tech. Her Dad was an engineer, and she thought the work he did was super boring. She pursued journalism, marine biology, and found her self changing interests a lot as she got bored. Now, she came over to the dark side, and jokes that she is no longer interesting because she is so immersed in what she does. Outside of tech, she loves to travel, building community, and hosting. This boils down to loving bringing people together through multiple means. And finally, she jokes that she is a mediocre instagram poet, enjoying writing semi-deep posts on the platform.

When Sargun was applying at Google, she went through their normal engineering interview process - IE five whiteboard sessions back to back. After getting hired at Google, she struggled with the industry standard for interview questions, via algorithmic riddles, that didn't mirror the actual job. These types of interviews weren't only not fair, but left many great candidates out in the cold.

This is the creation story of Byteboard.

Sponsors

Links

Website: https://byteboard.dev/
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/sargunkaur/

Current Sponsors:

Checkout our Stacklist! https://stacks.codestory.co/

Hosted by Noah Labhart | Technical Founder & Startup Mentor.

Season 8 - Trailer

Wed, 12 Apr 2023 18:30:00 +0000

What if you had a window into the digital startup world?

What if you could ask the tech veterans what it feels like to create a world class product?

...how to recover from critical mistakes...

...how to scale your solution to the masses?

How do you get from an idea on the back of a napkin, to a fully functioning product?

What if you could hear the human stories about how they delivered technology?

What if there was a show where you could hear those stories?

Sponsors

Current Sponsors:

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Hosted by Noah Labhart | Technical Founder & Startup Mentor.

From Tools and Weapons: Connecting Africa’s Youth to the World

Tue, 11 Apr 2023 10:00:00 +0000

Tools and Weapons, hosted by Microsoft Vice Chair and President Brad Smith, features conversations with leaders in government, business, and culture that explore the world’s most critical challenges at the intersection of technology and society.

This episode’s guest is Strive Masiyiwa, a pioneer of Africa’s telecoms industry and influential global tech tycoon.

He and Brad discuss Strive’s work to ensure that all 1.3 billion+ Africans get access to digital infrastructure, close the digital skills gap, and invest in the continent’s young entrepreneurs to find innovative solutions for healthcare and food insecurity.

Follow or subscribe to Tools and Weapons with Brad Smith wherever you get your podcasts.

Links

Website: https://news.microsoft.com/tools-and-weapons-podcast/

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Hosted by Noah Labhart | Technical Founder & Startup Mentor.

S7 Bonus: The Algorithmic Construction Site: Engineering a Generative Scheduling Engine with René Morkos of ALICE Technologies

Thu, 06 Apr 2023 10:00:00 +0000

Rene Morkos is a builder. When he was younger, his Dad told him that he could study anything he wanted, as long as it wasn't Civil Engineering. So... that is exactly what he did. He has built amazing things all over the world, and also, obtained his PhD at Stanford. Outside of technology, he likes to alternate hobbies, and has currently settled into Mountaineering, after spending some time doing Kite Surfing.

Rene was in Afghanistan working on a project, trying to repair the runway that had been struck by RPG's. He was struck by how hard it was to find the optimal way to do a simple project. While he was studying his PhD, he also noticed that constructions sites were under utilized... so he and his team invented a simple algorithm that knew how to build.

This is the reaction story of Alice Technologies.

Sponsors

Links

Website: https://alicetechnologies.com/
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/renemorkos/

Current Sponsors:

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Hosted by Noah Labhart | Technical Founder & Startup Mentor.

S7 Bonus: The Death of Cookies: Engineering 99.5% Accurate Device Identification with Valentin Vasilyev of Fingerprint

Wed, 05 Apr 2023 10:00:00 +0000

Valentin Vasilyev has always been interested in the open source world. His Github account was created way back in 2008 when they started. He always dreamt about contributing to Ruby on Rails, since he developed with it in the past. Outside of tech, he loves cycling - road and mountain, and enjoys good coffee and online shooting games. He's married with 2 kids, and loves living in the midwest, specifically Chicago.

Post getting his green card, Valentin wanted to experiment with the open source library he created, which its worth noting, was starred 6000 times. He decided to keep his library, but spin off a pro version which included a backend. Then he followed up with some landing pages, and payment mechanisms. And then began his focus on accuracy.

This is the creation story of Fingerprint.com.

Sponsors

Links

Website: https://fingerprint.com/
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/valentin-vasilyev/

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Hosted by Noah Labhart | Technical Founder & Startup Mentor.

S7 E30: The Architecture of Infinite Scale: Harnessing Vitess and Database Sharding with Sam Lambert of PlanetScale

Tue, 04 Apr 2023 10:00:00 +0000

Sam Lambert is originally from the UK, and has lived quite a few places during his life. He went to school in India, but now resides in San Francisco. He finds software to be a creative, playful process, and sees people trying to build that away from the process. He feels very lucky to building something that provides fruit and solves problems. Outside of tech, he is married with a 4 year old, and is into cooking and art. I asked about NFT's, given his tech background, but he's not super into that form of art at this time.

Sam spent time working at Github as a VP of Engineering, specifically focusing on infrastructure. He and his team came across Vitess, the backend that ran YouTube, and he took this amazing framework into his current venture to remix their approach of design and scalability.

This is the creation story of PlanetScale.

Sponsors

Links

Website: https://planetscale.com/
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/isamlambert/

Current Sponsors:

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Hosted by Noah Labhart | Technical Founder & Startup Mentor.

S7 Bonus: The Shopify for Fintech: Engineering Low-Code Financial Rails with Ruben Izmailyan of Quiltt

Thu, 30 Mar 2023 10:00:00 +0000

Ruben Izmailyan grew up in Armenia originally, then moved to Russia when he was 12. When he was 14, he and his family came to the US, eventually attending school at Brown in Rhode Island. He's an avid BBQer, which fits perfectly now that he is living in Texas with his young family. However, he let me know that he even was into this style of cooking when he was living in Brooklyn - against the wishes of his landlord at the time.

In a previous role, Ruben was made aware that although financial institutions and brokers had access to useful data, normal consumers did not. Starting out with a budgeting app, he and his team ended up pivoting to creating the tooling and infrastructure needed to interact with financial data sets. And this abstraction started to gain traction.

This is the creation story of Quiltt.

Sponsors

Links

Website: https://www.quiltt.io/
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/rubenizmailyan/

Current Sponsors:

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Hosted by Noah Labhart | Technical Founder & Startup Mentor.

The New Notification Stack for Developers - Drew Youngwerth

Wed, 29 Mar 2023 10:00:00 +0000

Welcome back listeners, today we are dropping episode in our series entitled The New Notification Stack for Developers, brought to you by our long time friends and sponsors of the Code Story podcast, Courier. As a reminder, Courier is developer infrastructure for product notifications, making it easier to deliver the notification experience that your customers expect. Check out their product to learn more at Courier.com

Guest: Drew Youngwerth, Software Manager at Courier

Links

Website: https://courier.com/codestory
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/drew-youngwerth/

Current Sponsors:

Checkout our Stacklist! https://stacks.codestory.co/

Hosted by Noah Labhart | Technical Founder & Startup Mentor.

S7 E29: Engineering Virtual Power Plants: Scaling AI-Driven Supply Chain Cooling with Manik Suri & Lucas Tepman of Therma

Tue, 28 Mar 2023 10:00:00 +0000

Manik Suri calls himself a jack of all trades. He went about his career doing lots of different things, and figured out most of what he didn't want to do. He started out an academic, then went into private equity investment, then did a spin in Government, then went to law school - and finally, landed in the tech world. He grew up in Fresno, and ended up back in Cali, specifically in the Bay Area. Outside of tech, he is married with a young family, and a dog named Espresso.

Lucas Tepman was originally born in Argentina, and came to the US around 5 years ago. He started out his career in public affairs and politics, working at an NGO and promoting the acceleration of sustainability. He came to study at UC Berkeley as a recipient of the Fulbright Scholarship, and eventually he explored solutions via high impact venture capital. This is where he met Manik.

Manik and Lucas stumbled into the problem they are solving today. A decade ago, Manik wanted to solve big public problems. He saw opportunities in the food industry, and created a software solution to replace the clipboard. What they figured out was most people were checking temperatures, and did need a digital clipboard - the needed the process automated.

This is the creation story of Therma.

Sponsors

Links

Website: https://www.hellotherma.com/
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/maniksuri/
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/lucas-tepman-0474783b/

Current Sponsors:

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Hosted by Noah Labhart | Technical Founder & Startup Mentor.

S7 Bonus: Architecting the Dark Warehouse: Scaling Autonomous Mobile Robots with Tapan Pattnayak of Addverb

Thu, 23 Mar 2023 10:00:00 +0000

Tapan Pattnayak life revolves around technology - his friends, professional colleagues, etc. and even his wife is an engineer, who he met at a company he was working at. He's passionate about making kids fall in love with science, and inspire a generation of young people to roll up their sleeves and dig into hardware. He believes that engineering is taught from the passion of other engineers. Outside of tech, he used to play sports, specifically cricket. When time limited the play of cricket, he started reading philosophy and history, with the goal of predicting what is happening in macro or societal trends.

While growing up in India, Tapan was contacted by his good friend in the states to join his company. At first he was hesitant, but he came to a point in his life where he felt he needed to do something different - something that was high energy, open, and impactful to the rest of the world.

This is Tapan's creation story at Addverb.

Sponsors

Links

Website: https://addverb.com/
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/tapanpattnayak/

Current Sponsors:

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Hosted by Noah Labhart | Technical Founder & Startup Mentor.

The New Notification Stack for Developers - Maria Irizarry

Wed, 22 Mar 2023 10:00:00 +0000

Guest: Maria Irizarry, Technical Lead Manager at Courier

Links

Website: https://courier.com/codestory
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/mairizar/

Current Sponsors:

Checkout our Stacklist! https://stacks.codestory.co/

Hosted by Noah Labhart | Technical Founder & Startup Mentor.

S7 E28: The Elixir Stack Behind a $5B Payments Engine: Scaling Vertical SaaS with Sean Stavropoulos of Boulevard

Tue, 21 Mar 2023 10:00:00 +0000

Sean Stavropoulos grew up in Southern California, His journey to technology started in 7th grade, when he started programming for fun in Visual Studio, breaking his friends computers along the way. He studied aerospace engineering in college, but enjoyed tech and pogromming way more and joined the LA development community 12 years ago. Outside of tech, he plays beach volleyball, hikes, and enjoys little vacations here and there.

Sean and his co-founder had an idea to build a modern appointment scheduling solution, specifically for salons and spas - so called self care businesses, traditionally underserved. They interviewed owners and built and built until they had a solution to power a 6 person salon.

This is the creation story of Boulevard.

Sponsors

Links

Website: https://www.joinblvd.com/
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/seanstavropoulos/

Current Sponsors:

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Hosted by Noah Labhart | Technical Founder & Startup Mentor.

S7 Bonus: Cutting Customer Acquisition Costs: Turning Ticketing Data into Viral Referrals with Ashley Cline of Ice Cream Social

Thu, 16 Mar 2023 10:00:00 +0000

Ashley Cline was born and raised in a small town in Ohio. Her big dreams and aspirations led her to move to California and start her career in tech and marketing. She has always really enjoyed meeting people through direct networking. She has 2 kids, and she loves to get outside and enjoy all that sunny Cali offers.

Through her other company, Ticketsocket, Ashley began interviewing her clients about how she could help them get more money out of their marketing budgets. She began to pursue trying to figure out how to gamify registration, to incentivize people to want to bring their friends and family to events.

This is the creation story of Ice Cream Social.

Sponsors

Links

Website: https://icecreamsocial.io/
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/ashcline/

Current Sponsors:

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Hosted by Noah Labhart | Technical Founder & Startup Mentor.

The New Notification Stack for Developers - Shreya Gupta

Wed, 15 Mar 2023 10:00:00 +0000

Guest: Shreya Gupta, Developer Advocate at Courier

Links

Website: https://courier.com/codestory
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/shreya-gupta-60a2b4168/

Current Sponsors:

Checkout our Stacklist! https://stacks.codestory.co/

Hosted by Noah Labhart | Technical Founder & Startup Mentor.

S7 E27: Automating the SOC2 Compliance Trap: Slack-First Identity Governance with Mathias Nestler of AccessOwl

Tue, 14 Mar 2023 10:00:00 +0000

Mathias Nestler has co-founded several startups in his career, in the insure-tech and fintech spaces. Outside of tech, he does kite surfing and diving. He claims that the calmness under the water is the best way to unwind from tech life. His favorite place he's dived before was in Thailand, where he observed his first seahorse. He often takes the train to Switzerland to see his significant other, and they like to cook at home together.

Coming from a regulated industry, Mathias wanted to build something to help him keep track and document who has access to what, which is a huge time sync and security risk. One day, he had one of his fellow CTO's ask him if he knew of a tool that could do this... and he started thinking, "Maybe I should just build it?".

This is the creation story of AccessOwl.

Sponsors

Links

Website: https://www.accessowl.io/
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/mathias-nestler-a8436044/

Current Sponsors:

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Hosted by Noah Labhart | Technical Founder & Startup Mentor.

S7 Bonus: The Architecture of PLG: Engineering Interactive Product Demos at Scale with Evan Powell & Sam Clemens of Reprise

Thu, 09 Mar 2023 11:00:00 +0000

Evan Powell had a career mostly in sales, which started in college within his acapella group. His group recorded tracks for the well known show Glee, and Evan had to manage and negotiate contracts with Fox. Outside of professional ventures, he still continues his singing and plays Dungeons and Dragons with his friends.

Sam Clemens came up on the opposite side of the house, on the build side. He was a product manager at Hubspot and Upwork, and co-founder at InsightSquared. He also teaches at business school, and gets his hands dirty on the weekends, helping his wife with her commercial farm by driving the tractor and wielding a chainsaw.

Evan, Sam, and their other co-founder, experienced a recurring problem with sales demos at their prior companies - with sales reps deleting material from production environments, or internal teams spending lots of time maintaining separate demo environments. They thought there had to be a better way.

This is the creation story of Reprise.

Sponsors

Links

Website: https://www.reprise.com/
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/evanwapowell/
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/sclemens/

Current Sponsors:

Checkout our Stacklist! https://stacks.codestory.co/

Hosted by Noah Labhart | Technical Founder & Startup Mentor.

The New Notification Stack for Developers - Seth Carney & Ben Link

Wed, 08 Mar 2023 11:00:00 +0000

Guest: Seth Carney, CTO at Courier and Ben Link, DevRel at Twilio Segment

Links

Website: https://courier.com/codestory
Website: Twilio Segment
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/sethcarney/
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/benjamindlink/

Current Sponsors:

Checkout our Stacklist! https://stacks.codestory.co/

Hosted by Noah Labhart | Technical Founder & Startup Mentor.

S7 E26: The 40 Million SKU Bottleneck: Engineering an Algorithmic Ad Bidding Engine with Liam Patterson of Bidnamic

Tue, 07 Mar 2023 11:00:00 +0000

Liam Patterson has been an entrepreneur since the early days of his life. He was the kid that was selling sweets at school, undercutting the local store. He journeyed into e-commerce as he got older, continuing his entrepreneurial journey. Outside of tech, he is a runner and is into fencing. Recently, he completed his first marathon, after training for about a year. In regards to fencing, he started when he was a kid, and did it all the way through college - which is actually where he met his now co-founder.

Liam's prior business was a print on-demand company, which allowed locally printing and shipping. As they scaled that business, they came to be hooked on Google Shopping and started using off the shelf tech to manage the campaigns. They found them to be lacking, and eventually built their own - and it became their competitive advantage.

This is the creation story of Bidnamic.

Sponsors

Links

Website: https://www.bidnamic.com/en-us/
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/liam-patterson/

Current Sponsors:

Checkout our Stacklist! https://stacks.codestory.co/

Hosted by Noah Labhart | Technical Founder & Startup Mentor.

S7 Bonus: Automating the "Save-to-Spend" Loop: Machine Learning for Smart Wallets with Roya Kachooei of Walletifai

Fri, 03 Mar 2023 11:00:00 +0000

Roya Kachooei came to Canada 9 years ago, with the aim to pursue her masters in the US. When her funding fell through, she stayed in Canada and started working. When she was younger, her mother used to speak to her about making a difference in the world around her, and as such, she always dreamed about being an entrepreneur.

In 2017, Roya wanted to start saving for a house downpayment. She discovered that it was really difficult to save up the money, and started looking into apps that would help her. When the only thing she could find to really help was Excel, she decided to step out and do something about it.

This is the creation story of Walletifai.

Sponsors

Links

Website: https://walletifai.com/
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/roya-kachooei/

Current Sponsors:

Checkout our Stacklist! https://stacks.codestory.co/

Hosted by Noah Labhart | Technical Founder & Startup Mentor.

S7 E25: From a Philosophy PhD to Creating Helm and the Next Wave of Serverless with Matt Butcher of Fermyon

Thu, 02 Mar 2023 11:00:00 +0000

Matt Butcher was always intending to be a philosopher in the early days. His Dad informed him at some point he would need to get a job though. After he interviewed at a local utility company, he was thrust into learning the World Wide Web. He continued programming his way through college, getting his PhD in philosophy, but eventually moved solely into tech. He has contributed to multiple open source projects, and was one of the original creators of Helm. Outside of tech, he's a coffee snob, with more coffee tooling in his kitchen than plates or silverware.

Matt and his team started to explore the things they couldn't do with their current tooling, and landed on the power of WebAssembly. In attempting to speed up the startup time of servers and containers, along side the rising popularity of server-less, he and his team stumbled onto something, during a post offsite dinner.

This is the creation story of Fermyon.

Sponsors

Links

Website: https://www.fermyon.com/
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/mattbutcher/

Current Sponsors:

Checkout our Stacklist! https://stacks.codestory.co/

Hosted by Noah Labhart | Technical Founder & Startup Mentor.

The New Notification Stack for Developers - Mike Miller

Wed, 01 Mar 2023 11:00:00 +0000

Welcome back listeners, today we are kicking off another special series of the Code Story podcast, entitled The New Notification Stack for Developers, brought to you by our long time friends and sponsors of the Code Story podcast, Courier. As a reminder, Courier is developer infrastructure for product notifications, making it easier to deliver the notification experience that your customers expect. Check out their product to learn more at Courier.com

Guest: Mike Miller, Lead Mobile SDK Engineer at Courier

Links

Website: https://courier.com/codestory
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/killamikemilla/

Current Sponsors:

Checkout our Stacklist! https://stacks.codestory.co/

Hosted by Noah Labhart | Technical Founder & Startup Mentor.

GrowthMode: ON - Jesse Rubenfeld, FinOptimal

Tue, 28 Feb 2023 11:00:00 +0000

Welcome back listeners, today we are dropping another episode in the series entitled Growth Mode: ON, sponsored by our good friends at GrowthMatch. GrowthMatch helps tech companies grow their audience, supercharge their sales, and activate thought leadership in their industry. They are turning entrepreneurs into thought leaders, one video at a time, by utilizing fractional growth teams. You can learn more by checking out their website, GrowthMatch.com.

Guest: Jesse Rubenfeld, Founder of FinOptimal

Links

Website: https://www.growthmatch.com/codestory/
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/jesserubenfeld/

Current Sponsors:

Checkout our Stacklist! https://stacks.codestory.co/

Hosted by Noah Labhart | Technical Founder & Startup Mentor.

S7 Bonus: From a COVID Trick-or-Treat Map to a Techstars-Backed GIS Platform with Chelsey Roney of Proxi

Thu, 23 Feb 2023 11:00:00 +0000

Chelsey Roney graduated from Texas A&M in 2011 (whoop!). She is passionate about building businesses, as her current venture is her 3rd startup. But prior to her entrepreneurial adventures, she worked for Microsoft and Boeing, gaining incredible big industry experience. Outside of tech, she has a busy home life, being married, and a Mom of 2 young kids. Her family has a number of furry friends at their house, including a husky and a few cats.

During the first Halloween during COVID, Chelsey and her co-founders experienced the need for mappable addresses, in organizing Seattle trick or treating. What was built for that holiday got media attention, and their crew decided to build it right, apply to an accelerator, and bring their solution to the world.

This is the creation story of Proxi.

Sponsors

Links

Website: https://www.proxi.co/
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/chelseyroney/

Current Sponsors:

Checkout our Stacklist! https://stacks.codestory.co/

Hosted by Noah Labhart | Technical Founder & Startup Mentor.

GrowthMode: ON - Arun Sivashankaran, FunnelEnvy

Wed, 22 Feb 2023 11:00:00 +0000

Guest: Arun Sivashankaran, Founder at FunnelEnvy

Links

Website: https://www.growthmatch.com/codestory/
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/arunsivashankaran/

Current Sponsors:

Checkout our Stacklist! https://stacks.codestory.co/

Hosted by Noah Labhart | Technical Founder & Startup Mentor.

S7 E24: From Scaling Frank And Oak to Engineering Decentralized Brand Communities with Ethan Song of RareCircles

Tue, 21 Feb 2023 11:00:00 +0000

Ethan Song is a boarder through and through - enjoying snowboarding, surfing, etc. and doing it as often as he can. He loves to read, and has moved more into non-fiction over fiction as he has gotten older. Prior to his current venture, he co-founded Frank & Oak, a successful thoughtful and ethical apparel and e-commerce company.

After the successes of his prior company, Ethan started to explore web3 as a technology, and a product offering. He noticed that most people were focusing on visual assets, but he wanted to create a tool that allows companies to depend their engagement - and revenue - with their customers.

This is the creation story of RareCircles.

Sponsors

Links

Website: https://www.rarecircles.com/
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/ethansong/

Current Sponsors:

Checkout our Stacklist! https://stacks.codestory.co/

Hosted by Noah Labhart | Technical Founder & Startup Mentor.

S7 Bonus: The Everything-as-a-Service Engine: Enterprise Managed Security at Scale with Faisal Bhutto of Calian

Thu, 16 Feb 2023 11:00:00 +0000

Faisal Bhutto is a family man, and the proud father of 2 girls and a boy. He is based out of Houston, and enjoys the outdoors - hunting, sports, and working on his off-road rig. When discussing sports, the mentioned he was lucky enough to go see the World Cup recently. And when I asked about hunting, we yammered on about white tail and pheasant, as your host is an avid hunter too.

Prior to his current role, Faisal built and grew his Computex business to serve the larger part of the United States. Calian took noticed of the business, and stepped in to acquire their footprint and expand into the US, specifically around Cloud & Cybersecurity.

This is Faisal's creation story at Calian.

Sponsors

Links

Website: https://www.calian.com/itcs/
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/fbhutto/

Current Sponsors:

Checkout our Stacklist! https://stacks.codestory.co/

Hosted by Noah Labhart | Technical Founder & Startup Mentor.

S7 E23: The 4.5-Million Combination Problem: Why Human Cognition Fails Precision Oncology and the Rise of Knowledge-Based Medical AI with Navid Alipour, Co-Founder & CEO of AI Med Global

Tue, 14 Feb 2023 11:00:00 +0000

Navid Alipour has spent many years in the world of medicine and AI, supporting and admiring doctors. He jokes that his wife and he are the black sheep of the family... because they aren't actual doctors. He's the co-founder and managing partner at Analytics Ventures, as well as serving on the board of multiple San Diego based companies. Outside of his professional ventures, he enjoys watching movies with his wife and kids.

Navid and his team explored the world of radiology, from a technology and data standpoint. After applying the same thought process and/or algorithm for predicting space weather, they processed millions of mammogram images to detect cancer in their patients. And it worked... really well.

This is the creation story of AI Med Global.

Sponsors

Links

Website: https://aimedglobal.com/
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/navid-alipour-a295777/

Current Sponsors:

Checkout our Stacklist! https://stacks.codestory.co/

Hosted by Noah Labhart | Technical Founder & Startup Mentor.

S7 Bonus: The Real-Time Arcade: Engineering Instant Leaderboard Micropayments with Joe De Pinto of Haste Arcade

Thu, 09 Feb 2023 11:00:00 +0000

Joe De Pinto was born and raised in Los Angeles, and was drafted to play professional baseball in the minors for the White Sox. He's always had an active lifestyle, and now lives at the beach and surfs regularly. In 2015, he and his current co-founder started a company called Barpay, which makes it easier to get drinks at busy bars.

In January 2021, Joe and his co-founder are sitting in their office, frustrated that no one was getting what Bitcoin - that is BSV, not BTC - was originally created for. They asked themselves, what could we build to illustrate the utility of blockchain?

This is the creation story of Haste Arcade.

Sponsors

Links

Website: https://www.hastearcade.com/
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/joe-de-pinto/

Current Sponsors:

Checkout our Stacklist! https://stacks.codestory.co/

Hosted by Noah Labhart | Technical Founder & Startup Mentor.

GrowthMode: ON - Zach Fragapane, GrowthMatch

Wed, 08 Feb 2023 11:00:00 +0000

Welcome back listeners, today we are kicking off a special series of the Code Story podcast, entitled Growth Mode: On!, sponsored by our good friends at GrowthMatch. GrowthMatch helps tech companies grow their audience, supercharge their sales, and activate thought leadership in their industry. They are turning entrepreneurs into thought leaders, one video at a time, by utilizing fractional growth teams. You can learn more by checking out their website, GrowthMatch.com.

Guest: Zach Fragapane, CEO of GrowthMatch

Links

Current Sponsors:

Checkout our Stacklist! https://stacks.codestory.co/

Hosted by Noah Labhart | Technical Founder & Startup Mentor.

S7 E22: The Instagram of Building Maintenance: Engineering a Photo-First Facilities Engine with Paul McCarthy of SnapFix

Tue, 07 Feb 2023 11:00:00 +0000

Paul McCarthy grew up in Cork, Ireland, and went to school there. He lives around the corner from the sea, and likes to dip in now again - literally, swim in the ocean. He calls it a great shock to the system, but ensured that I know he doesn't spend a full hour in the water.

Five years ago, Paul was fed up with the archaic ways that properties were managing their safety, maintenance and work orders manually, through platforms like WhatsApp. He set out to build the simplest way to manage your hotel, facilities and team - using photos.

This is the creation story of SnapFix.

Sponsors

Links

Website: https://snapfix.com/
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/paulmccarthyireland

Current Sponsors:

Checkout our Stacklist! https://stacks.codestory.co/

Hosted by Noah Labhart | Technical Founder & Startup Mentor.

S7 Bonus: Solving the Blockchain Storage Bottleneck: Building Dedicated Gateways & "Submarined" Data with Kyle Tut of Piñata

Thu, 02 Feb 2023 11:00:00 +0000

Kyle Tut started out his life wanting to be a car mechanic. His Mom affirmed his aspirations, but gave him the advice to make sure he owned the mechanic shop. He's taken interesting paths through the auto world, marketing, and eventually, into the tech world. Outside of tech, he is originally from North Dakota but now lives in Nebraska, and enjoys the practicality of the way people think in the Midwest.

Kyle knew that storing data on the blockchain was expensive. At the same time, it wasn't fast, nor was it stable. He and his co-founder set out to build an unbelievably fast content delivery network, easily accessible across the world.

This is the creation story of Piñata.

Sponsors

Links

Website: https://www.pinata.cloud/
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/kyletut/

Current Sponsors:

Checkout our Stacklist! https://stacks.codestory.co/

Hosted by Noah Labhart | Technical Founder & Startup Mentor.

S7 E21: Democratizing Enterprise Code: Engineering AI No-Code Apps for Regulated Markets with Nanxi Liu, Co-CEO of Blaze.tech

Tue, 31 Jan 2023 11:00:00 +0000

Nanxi Liu is from Colorado, and went to school at UC Berkeley. In college, she immediately started her entrepreneurial journey by starting a bio tech company, and then eventually starting tech companies. She built and sold a company called Enplug, which was the #1 open digital signage software company. Outside of tech, she has kept a full life as well - producing TV shows - them winning an Emmy, snowboarding, and playing piano & cello.

At her prior company, Nanxi experienced her non-technical team members consistently needing some sort of tool to solve a problem, and as such, waiting around for engineering resources to be freed up to build it. When their company got acquired, she and her co-founders knew exactly what they wanted to build.

This is the creation story of Blaze.

Sponsors

Links

Website: https://www.blaze.tech/
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/nanxi/

Current Sponsors:

Checkout our Stacklist! https://stacks.codestory.co/

Hosted by Noah Labhart | Technical Founder & Startup Mentor.

S7 Bonus: Making the Operating System Multiplayer: From a $13M Collaboration Engine to OpenAI with Alex Embiricos of Remotion

Thu, 26 Jan 2023 11:00:00 +0000

Alex Embiricos comes from an interesting background, having grown up all over the place - between Asia, the Caribbean, and Switzerland. He came to the states for college, and found his way into software after a stint in Aerospace. Ultimately, he found himself interested in the intersection between business and building technology. During his career, he spent a lot of time working at Dropbox, followed up by starting a company with his friends. Outside of tech, he loves to play Badminton, and when asked what his favorite food was, well... it is his Mom's food.

After his prior startup failed, Alex still had the urge to build something. He met his now co-founder, and they started to explore ways to connect people online. What they noticed was that most video chat tools were created around a presentation, but not around solving problems together.

This is the creation story of Remotion.

Sponsors

Links

Website: https://remotion.com/
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/embirico/

Current Sponsors:

Checkout our Stacklist! https://stacks.codestory.co/

Hosted by Noah Labhart | Technical Founder & Startup Mentor.

S7 Bonus: The AI CTO: Democratizing App Development for Underserved Founders with Sydney Davis of NixCode

Wed, 25 Jan 2023 11:00:00 +0000

Sydney Davis really enjoys art. She enjoys immersive exhibits and loves to paint. She's a Mom, and digs spending time with her son and traveling to different exhibits. She loves the intersection between elemental art, digital art, and art from repurposed elements. She introduced me to a new term for immersive exhibits - selfie museums, which I hadn't heard before.

When Sydney was leaving the college world, she was creating apps for customers, and validated the need for said customers to have guidance on how to build an app. After taking a development hiatus, she picked back up her platform approach in 2019, and eventually started using AI & Machine Learning to drive an easier, no code, app development experience.

This is the creation story of Nixcode.

Sponsors

Links

Website: https://nixcodeapps.com/
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/iamsydneydavis/

Current Sponsors:

Checkout our Stacklist! https://stacks.codestory.co/

Hosted by Noah Labhart | Technical Founder & Startup Mentor.

S7 E20: Engineering a $1B GraphQL Data Federation Engine: Real-Time DB Queries with Tanmai Gopal of Hasura

Tue, 24 Jan 2023 11:00:00 +0000

Tanmai Gopal studied computer science, and specialize in computer vision and machine learning. He found himself frustrated with the pace at which his research work was getting exposure, so he expedited his jump into industry, which help solidify the foundation for his current venture. Outside of tech, he reads a lot, hikes and travels. For the readers, he highly recommends N.K. Jemisin, Charlie Jane-Anders and Namoi Novak.

Tanmai and his colleagues became outright frustrated with building API's just to build products. He began wondering what it would take to not do that work anymore, and after breaking down the process to its simplest form - data mapping and security authorization - he had a bead on how to do that.

This is the creation story of Hasura.

Sponsors

Links

Website: https://hasura.io/
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/tanmaig/

Current Sponsors:

Checkout our Stacklist! https://stacks.codestory.co/

Hosted by Noah Labhart | Technical Founder & Startup Mentor.

S7 E19: From Uber Data Analytics to an HBS Dropout Scaling a $19M+ Workflow Engine with Ken Babcock, Tango

Wed, 18 Jan 2023 11:00:00 +0000

Ken Babcock grew up outside of Buffalo, and as such.. is a big Bills fan. He attended Cornell, and has spent time in NYC, San Francisco and now Chicago. He's a family man, with an 11 month old, and loves to ski. His favorite mountain was Tahoe, specifically Palisades, where he mentioned spending many hours on the slopes. He mentions that his busy life of a startup and family life is a dangerous cocktail, but one that is worth drinking.

Back in 2019, he and his current co-founders met each other at Harvard Business School. After digging into team performance, they started asking questions around the barriers to increasing team performance, specifically in replicating high performers. The dialed it into process replication, and started down the road to build a tool to make this not only possible... but easy.

This is the creation story of Tango.

Sponsors

Links

Website: https://www.tango.us/
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/kenbabcock/

Current Sponsors:

Checkout our Stacklist! https://stacks.codestory.co/

Hosted by Noah Labhart | Technical Founder & Startup Mentor.

S7 Bonus: Whats New with Materialize - Arjun Narayan, Co-founder & CEO

Wed, 11 Jan 2023 11:00:00 +0000

Hello again listeners!

Today I have yet another special return episode for you. I'm speaking with Arjun Narayan, Co-founder & CEO of Materialize. He told us the creation story of the product and company in Season 4, Episode 11, which I would encourage you to go back and listen to. Similar to yesterday's episode, Arjun is returning to the podcast since his prior appearance to give me major updates on the company and the product. As a reminder Materialize is a fast, distributed SQL database, based on streaming internals, which allows you to have data consistency, scalability and low latency. You can learn more about the product at materialize.com. Thats M A T E R I A L I Z E.com.

Sponsors

Links

Current Sponsors:

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Hosted by Noah Labhart | Technical Founder & Startup Mentor.

S7 Bonus: Whats New with Pulumi - Joe Duffy, Co-founder & CEO

Tue, 10 Jan 2023 11:00:00 +0000

Hello Listeners!

We have a treat for today's episode. On the show, I'll be interviewing Joe, the CEO of Pulumi, to get an update on all that has gone on within the company. As a reminder, Pulumi is Infrastructure as Code technology, that allows you as an engineer, developer, architect - to deliver infrastructure with high velocity and scale, through software engineering. You can learn more about their product, and get started quick, at pulumi.com. Thats P U L U M I.com.

Sponsors

Links

Website: https://www.pulumi.com/
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/joejduffy/
https://codestory.co/podcast/bonus-luke-hoban-pulumi/

Current Sponsors:

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Hosted by Noah Labhart | Technical Founder & Startup Mentor.

S7 Favorite: Bypassing Data Brokers: Generating Real-Time Phantom Phone Numbers, Emails, and Credit Cards with Arjun Bhatnagar of Cloaked

Thu, 05 Jan 2023 11:00:00 +0000

Arjun Bhatnager has been coding since he was 10 years old, and in general, his family is full of entrepreneurs, running their own businesses. In fact, his brother is his co-founder in his current business. He loves to read, write, and play tennis in his spare time, along with playing music. In fact, playing music was a large part of his life, starting out playing the trumpet. In general, he is passionate about creating, and was inspired early on by the Inkheart series of books.

Arjun decided to build a prototype system, which integrated all the data from every aspect of his life. What he figured out was that he didn't trust other companies to handle the data from these systems - and he needed a way to "cloak" his true credentials from those he utilized on other platforms.

This is the creation story of Cloaked.

Sponsors

Links

Website: https://www.cloaked.app/
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/arjunbhatnagar/

Current Sponsors:

Checkout our Stacklist! https://stacks.codestory.co/

Hosted by Noah Labhart | Technical Founder & Startup Mentor.

S7 Favorite: The Blueprint for a $1B Product Launch: Automating GTM Silos with Derek Osgood, Founder of Ignition

Tue, 03 Jan 2023 11:00:00 +0000

Derek Osgood comes from a family of entrepreneurs, and has always known he wanted to start something himself. Prior to that, he worked for other companies, large and small, in product and marketing roles. Some of the companies he worked for included Playstation, Rippling and BBVA. Outside of his profession, he loves to travel the world, and is a huge fantasy story nut. It's worth noting that we geeked out on fantasy novels for a good 10 minutes, as your host is a fantasy nut as well.

At his previous companies, Derek has been through hundreds of product launches, of various types and sizes. In his words... every one of them was a dumpster fire, no matter the size and supposed maturity of the company. It was always a challenge, and after trying to build a robust process in every tool imaginable, he decided to set out and build it right.

This is the creation story of Ignition.

Sponsors

Links

Website: https://www.haveignition.com/
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/derekosgood3/

Current Sponsors:

Checkout our Stacklist! https://stacks.codestory.co/

Hosted by Noah Labhart | Technical Founder & Startup Mentor.

S7 Favorite: The Low-Code Boom: Bringing DevOps and Git to Enterprise Data Pipelines with Raj Bains of Prophecy

Thu, 29 Dec 2022 11:00:00 +0000

Raj Bains grew up in India, North of Delhi, and comes from a family who, as he says, does "whatever is best to do" at the time. They moved around quite a bit when he was a kid, and his family dabbled in a number of different trades. After doing an internship in France and then, completing his undergrad, he moved stateside and has called many different states home. In fact, in those states, he got involved in outdoors activities, like kayaking, mountain biking, and the like. Also, he plays a lot of games, specifically on his phone, which makes his fingers hurt.

Raj comes from a background of building powerful tools, that also happen to be really complicated and hard to use... specifically, around the data engineering space. To put it blunt, he felt that the tools were from the Stone Age. He knew that he could build something better.

This is the creation story of Prophecy.

Sponsors

Links

Website: https://www.prophecy.io/
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/raj-bains-b837a46/

Current Sponsors:

Checkout our Stacklist! https://stacks.codestory.co/

Hosted by Noah Labhart | Technical Founder & Startup Mentor.

S7 Favorite: Killing the Feature Factory: Rebuilding a Legacy Giant from Scratch with Ian Small, Former CEO of Evernote

Tue, 27 Dec 2022 11:00:00 +0000

Ian Small is a Canadian, and claims that is the most important thing about him. Tech started for him when he was 12 years old, when he got a bad grade on a homework assignment, bought the manual, and became an expert on the machine. Outside of tech, he likes to do home renovation. As he says it, when there is a power tool in your hand, that could potentially cut your arm off, you tend to focus on it.

Ian joined Evernote in 2018, to solve a big problem. The company was stuck behind a wall of technical debt, which was blocking its way to innovation. In order for the company to grow and thrive in current times, they had to get out from underneath these problems.

This is his creation story, at Evernote.

Sponsors

Links

Website: https://evernote.com/
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/iansmall/

Current Sponsors:

Checkout our Stacklist! https://stacks.codestory.co/

Hosted by Noah Labhart | Technical Founder & Startup Mentor.

S7 Bonus: The Algorithmic Rollup: Engineering a $970M Automated E-Commerce Engine with Jeremy Wood, Co-Founder of OpenStore

Thu, 22 Dec 2022 11:00:00 +0000

Jeremy Wood grew up in Portland, and has been heavily influenced by that upbringing. He enjoyed really strong maker communities, supporting local craft artists to thrive and build their business. He moved to the Bay Area for school, and was surrounding by optimism, tech focus, and sheer intelligence. I was under the impression that Portland was beautiful all year round, but Jeremy clued me in that 3 months out of the year, it's a drizzly, soggy mess.

As I mentioned, Jeremy was really into the craft builder community, which also led him to be interested in eCommerce. He observed Shopify grow as a marketplace, that made things so easy to launch a store. What he figured out was that there was a need for these store owners to offload and sell their store.

This is the creation story of Openstore.

Sponsors

Links

Website: https://open.store/
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/jemdwood/

Current Sponsors:

Checkout our Stacklist! https://stacks.codestory.co/

Hosted by Noah Labhart | Technical Founder & Startup Mentor.

S7 Bonus: The Death of Data Sampling: Shifting Observability Left to Catch Anomalies at the Source with Max Lukichev of Telmai

Wed, 21 Dec 2022 11:00:00 +0000

Max Lukichev is a deeply technical guy, which means his hobbies have been related to tech since the early days. He is a PhD in computer science, and has always been interested in building things. In fact, and his words, he has been building drones since back before they were cool. Overall, he likes to figure out how things work. Outside of tech, he is a family man, and make sure that his kids have all kinds of STEM tools.

After spending decades in the enterprise data space, Max experienced first hand the struggles around data anomaly detection. He constantly lived in escalation mode, and saw first hand that traditional rules and static dashboard based solutions were failing today's data needs. He set out to be part of the solution.

This is the creation story of Telmai.

Sponsors

Links

Website: https://www.telm.ai/
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/maximlukichev/

Current Sponsors:

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Hosted by Noah Labhart | Technical Founder & Startup Mentor.

S7 E18: The 99% Speedup: Architecting Real-Time Disability Underwriting for the Gig Economy with Hadi Radwan of Asteya

Tue, 20 Dec 2022 11:00:00 +0000

Hadi Radwan is an amateur biohacker, which was a new term for me, and means trying to DIY your own biology. He is a family man, and enjoys playing fantasy sports. He's also a podcaster, and regularly interviews founders on his podcast, the First 100, to learn how those people obtained their first 100 customers. When it comes to family, he just had a newborn, so most of his time is devoted to that.

Hadi and his team took a hard look at the the market, and realized that 1 out of 4 people are disabled in their career due to an unforeseen circumstance. Strikingly, 50% of folks are living paycheck to paycheck, and don't even know disability insurance existed. They decided to build a product based on technology that fills this gap.

This is the creation story of Asteya.

Sponsors

Links

Website: https://www.asteya.world/
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/hadiradwan/

Current Sponsors:

Checkout our Stacklist! https://stacks.codestory.co/

Hosted by Noah Labhart | Technical Founder & Startup Mentor.

S7 Bonus: Hacking the Platform: Building a Global No-Code Extension for Squarespace with Nick Ippolito & Rowan Findlay of SquareKicker

Thu, 15 Dec 2022 11:00:00 +0000

Nick Ippolito has been involved with youth work for many years, and stumbled into web design and taught himself how to code. He's been married for 15 years, and he and his wife have 3 children - along with a budding startup the run together. They enjoy mounting biking in New Zealand and all things tech.

For Rowan Findlay, tech has always been his blood, with his family members working in the industry. In his younger years, he was into technical legos, and used to mod Xbox for pocket money. He has spent a lot of time in tourism, and has done a lot of freelance work, building sites for your local technicians.

During a few days off, Rowan decided to tinker with an idea and build a tool to enable custom Squarespace site tooling. When he came back, he immediately showed off what he had built to Nick and his wife - who immediately saw the value, and the future, in the product.

This is the creation story of Squarekicker.

cSponsors

Links

Website: https://www.squarekicker.com/
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/nick-ippolito/
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/rowan-findlay-88b8a876/

Current Sponsors:

Checkout our Stacklist! https://stacks.codestory.co/

Hosted by Noah Labhart | Technical Founder & Startup Mentor.

S7 Bonus: The AWS of FinTech: Engineering a Multi-Processor Payment Orchestration Layer with Casey Kipfer, Co-Founder of JustiFi

Wed, 14 Dec 2022 11:00:00 +0000

Casey Kipfer is a family man. He's married with 3 kids, and there is a lot of excitement and noise at his house - which is says is wonderful. He enjoys golfing and fishing, and tries to spend as much time outside as possible, including spending time with his brother paying some hockey in the winter. They also worked together for around 12 year at a prior venture of his brothers.

Through their collective knowledge, Casey and his team have found that customers have a need for a solid in house expertise to support a payments ecosystem. And, technically speaking, customers need an orchestration layer to abstract multiple partners and services behind the scenes.

This is the creation story of Justifi.

Sponsors

Links

Website: https://www.justifi.ai/
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/casey-kipfer/

Current Sponsors:

Checkout our Stacklist! https://stacks.codestory.co/

Hosted by Noah Labhart | Technical Founder & Startup Mentor.

S7 E17: The Human Side of System Failure: Engineering Sociotechnical Resilience with Nora Jones, Founder of Jeli.io

Tue, 13 Dec 2022 13:00:00 +0000

Nora Jones has been in tech her entire career. She originally thought she was going to get into hardware, but was always focused on reliability and safety. She has quite the track record, in regards to companies she has worked for - Jet.com, Netflix, and Slack. She lives in Denver, and likes to get outside and do dangerous activities (post studying the risk of course). She loves to ski, and really digs Telluride and Steamboat when she can make the drive.

Through her time at other companies, Nora realized that the industry spends little time looking back on our past mistakes. She figured out that there was a solid market for people wanting to understand their incidents better, and started building something on the side, which eventually became her focus.

This is the creation story of Jeli.io.

Sponsors

Links

Website: https://www.jeli.io/
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/norajones1/

Current Sponsors:

Checkout our Stacklist! https://stacks.codestory.co/

Hosted by Noah Labhart | Technical Founder & Startup Mentor.

S7 Bonus: The Algorithmic Recruiter: Automating Global Tech Vetting and Remote Scaling with Alex Svinov, Co-Founder & CEO of Insquad

Thu, 08 Dec 2022 11:00:00 +0000

Alex Svinov has very few things to talk about outside of the business world. He likes to jog, play tennis, and has a family with three kids at home. He likes to travel with his family and try new things, which he admits is complicated with the kids. Personally, he is driven each day to create something new. When it comes to food, his favorite is curry chicken, which according to him, he could eat every day.

For the last several years, Alex had a huge problem finding qualified developers for his startup. Alongside of this, resources were thin in the early days, and he was losing recruiting bids to larger companies. He thought - hiring developers shouldn't be this hard... maybe he should look somewhere different.

This is the creation story of Insquad.

Sponsors

Links

Website: https://insquad.com/
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/alex-svinov/

Current Sponsors:

Checkout our Stacklist! https://stacks.codestory.co/

Hosted by Noah Labhart | Technical Founder & Startup Mentor.

S7 Bonus: Return to Komodor - Andrey Pohkilko

Wed, 07 Dec 2022 11:00:00 +0000

You might remember in Season 6, episode 15, I interviewed Itiel, the Co-founder of Komodor. Today I have a special episode of the Code Story podcast, bringing back our friends at Komodor. I'm chatting with their Open Source Dev Leader, Andrey Pokhilko, about the latest initiatives at the company, including some exciting tooling around Helm and further advances in Kubernetes troubleshooting and expertise.

As a reminder, Komodor enables development teams to monitor their entire Kubernetes stack, identify issues, uncover root causes and get the context needed to troubleshoot their orchestration efficiently and independently.

Sponsors

Links

Website: https://komodor.io/
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/andreypohilko/

Current Sponsors:

Checkout our Stacklist! https://stacks.codestory.co/

Hosted by Noah Labhart | Technical Founder & Startup Mentor.

S7 E16: The OpenTable for Creative Spaces: Engineering a SaaS-Enabled Marketplace with Gabriel Isserlis of Tutti

Tue, 06 Dec 2022 11:00:00 +0000

Gabriel Isserlis grew up in London with an artistic background in the creative industries. His Dad is a professional cellist, which is the instrument that he chose as a young musician. As a teen, he became highly interested in making films, and decided to give it a try. He studied film in upstate New York, and realized he liked making sci-fi films about the future. Instead of films though, he decided to go make the future, and got into tech.

When Gabriel combined his technical knowledge with his experience in the creative industries, he started to see numerous opportunities to automate manual steps in these processes. He decided to set out and build these tools for people in the creative industry.

This is the creation story of Tutti.

Sponsors

Links

Website: https://www.tutti.space/
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/gmisserlis/

Current Sponsors:

Checkout our Stacklist! https://stacks.codestory.co/

Hosted by Noah Labhart | Technical Founder & Startup Mentor.

S7 Bonus: From Importing Coconut Water to Running a Global 500-Agent Support Engine with Nathan Yap of SupportZebra

Thu, 01 Dec 2022 11:00:00 +0000

Nathan Yap has a tight knit family, that he spends a lot of time with. So traveling and enjoying good food with his family is winning to him. Outside of that, he is enjoying the Pickleball craze, and he was heading into his first tournament at the time of this recording. He also loves to ski as well, and mentions really enjoying Crested Butte and Vail.

Prior to his current venture, Nathan was importing coconut water from the Philippines. At scale, the company had an office in the Philippines, handling the back office work. They eventually sold that company, but during its lifetime, they took on other customers to help with support, and found a nice formula for building these teams.

This is the creation story of SupportZebra.

Sponsors

Links

Website: https://supportzebra.com/
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/nathanyap/

Current Sponsors:

Checkout our Stacklist! https://stacks.codestory.co/

Hosted by Noah Labhart | Technical Founder & Startup Mentor.

S7 Bonus: The Metadata-Driven Warehouse: Engineering 10x Faster Data Transformations with Satish Jayanthi, Co-Founder & CTO of Coalesce

Wed, 30 Nov 2022 11:00:00 +0000

Satish Jayanthi was born in India, and attended school there. When he was growing up, his Mom was a teacher and his Dad was dabbling in different businesses. After he graduated, he started working for a software company, which ultimately sent him to Europe, and then eventually to the US 22 years ago. Outside of tech, he spends a lot of time with his family, his 2 kids, and he loves to play tennis and meet people doing so. As a father, he continually reminds his kids to be passionate about what they are doing, and to do so with 100% effort.

Prior to his current venture, Satish was building data warehouses for different businesses and firms in the industry. He saw first hand how hard it was to bring a bunch of data sources all together, and have them be compatible in a single source. He decided to set out and solve the problem, by bringing a modern approach to the space, paired with automations.

This is the creation story of Coalesce.

Sponsors

Links

Website: https://coalesce.io/
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/satish-jayanthi-32703613/

Current Sponsors:

Checkout our Stacklist! https://stacks.codestory.co/

Hosted by Noah Labhart | Technical Founder & Startup Mentor.

S7 E15: From Dot-Com Exits to Celebrity-Backed Logistics: The Future of Corporate Food Tech & Ghost Kitchens with Jeff Grass of Hungry

Tue, 29 Nov 2022 11:00:00 +0000

Jeff Grass had his career start more traditionally, as a bond underwriter, graduating from Wharton, and then being a serial entrepreneur. Outside of his business ventures, he is married with 2 kids, and used to run marathons... including one into Athens with his bare feet. When he's not running, he's spending time with his kids and their activities.

Jeff's current venture started out as a tech-enabled platform for office and event catering, which connected their users to incredible chef entrepreneurs. Fast forward, they are now a national platform for top chef-made food production and delivery services, that includes much, much more.

This is the creation story of Hungry.

Sponsors

Links

Website: https://tryhungry.com/
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/jeffgrass/

Current Sponsors:

Checkout our Stacklist! https://stacks.codestory.co/

Hosted by Noah Labhart | Technical Founder & Startup Mentor.

S7 Bonus: The Offboarding Architecture: Weaponizing Cancellation Flows to Save SaaS Revenue with Rob Moore, Co-Founder & CTO of Churnkey

Mon, 28 Nov 2022 11:00:00 +0000

Rob Moore was previously on the Code Story podcast back in Season 2, when he was building Floom - a marketplace built to make monetizing SaaS products easier. Three years ago, he moved to London with his now wife, as they got married a few months ago. Another update is he enjoys studying philosophy and how people think... and he tends to find good insight from Seneca. He applies a lot of his learnings to his personal life, but also to his startup ventures.

Rob previously built a product called Waave. When their customer acquisition couldn't keep up with churn, they started building tools to help them figure out what was going on. They focused on a cancellation flow, and spent 6 months perfecting a tool that helped them fix their churn problem.

This is the creation story of ChurnKey.

Sponsors

Links

Website: https://churnkey.co/
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/rob-moore/

Current Sponsors:

Checkout our Stacklist! https://stacks.codestory.co/

Hosted by Noah Labhart | Technical Founder & Startup Mentor.

S7 Bonus: From Commodore 128 Self-Taught Coder to Building an AI Map Engine with Juan Soberanis of Beacon

Wed, 23 Nov 2022 11:00:00 +0000

Back in 1986, Juan Soberanis and his family got a personal computer for the house - a Commodore 128. He asked his mother if he could take it to his room, and taught himself how to program, and of course, he did some gaming on it as well. This was the genesis of his career path, which picked back up in college. Outside of tech, he has kids in their 20's, and spends a lot of his free time hiking and being outdoors.

Juan has been working with startups for quite some time. At one point in his career, he became a contractor doing mobile development. Through a number of contracts with a specific investor, Juan found himself as the CTO of a startup, pitching an idea for what his current venture would become.

This is the creation story of Beacon.

Sponsors

Links

Website: https://www.beacon.site/
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/juan-soberanis-4447191/

Current Sponsors:

Checkout our Stacklist! https://stacks.codestory.co/

Hosted by Noah Labhart | Technical Founder & Startup Mentor.