Shows / Code Story | Startup Podcast for CTOs, CEOs and Technical Founders
Code Story | Startup Podcast for CTOs, CEOs and Technical Founders
Code Story is a startup podcast for technical founders building and scaling software products. Each episode features SaaS founders, engineers, and product leaders sharing how they built their product, found product market fit, and navigated early-stage growth.
We explore:
Early engineering decisions and MVP development
Landing the first customers
Pricing and go-to-market experiments
Scaling challenges and infrastructure bottlenecks
Hiring the first team
Lessons learned from growing a startup…
Episodes
Code Story | Startup Podcast for CTOs, CEOs and Technical FoundersThe Railsware Way - Mistakes & Lessons in Product Evolution, with Oleksii Ianchuk
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…
Code Story | Startup Podcast for CTOs, CEOs and Technical FoundersS11 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
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…
Code Story | Startup Podcast for CTOs, CEOs and Technical FoundersS11 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
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…
Code Story | Startup Podcast for CTOs, CEOs and Technical FoundersUnbreakable: How to Thrive Under Fear-Based Leaders with Kate Lowry
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…
Code Story | Startup Podcast for CTOs, CEOs and Technical FoundersThe Railsware Way - How an MBA Helps (or doesn't) Product Mgmt, with Julia Starun
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…
Code Story | Startup Podcast for CTOs, CEOs and Technical FoundersS11 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
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…
Code Story | Startup Podcast for CTOs, CEOs and Technical FoundersFraud Awareness Week - How SEON is your Fraud & AML Command Center with Husnain Bajwa
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…
Code Story | Startup Podcast for CTOs, CEOs and Technical FoundersS11 Bonus: Why "Babysitting" Your Dev Team is Killing Momentum with Praveen Ghanta, Founder & CEO of Fraction & DevHawk
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…
Code Story | Startup Podcast for CTOs, CEOs and Technical FoundersThe Railsware Way – Conversational Analytics & Data Focused Products, with Nika Tamayo Flores
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…
Code Story | Startup Podcast for CTOs, CEOs and Technical FoundersS11 E25: The $13m Bootstrapped Shield: Moving Past Broken Point Scanners to Unified, Continuous Exposure Management with Chris Wallis, Founder & CEO of Intruder
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…
Code Story | Startup Podcast for CTOs, CEOs and Technical FoundersS11 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
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…
Code Story | Startup Podcast for CTOs, CEOs and Technical FoundersThe Railsware Way - Delivering Value through BRIDGeS, with Sergiy Korolov
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…
Code Story | Startup Podcast for CTOs, CEOs and Technical FoundersS11 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
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…
Code Story | Startup Podcast for CTOs, CEOs and Technical FoundersS11 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
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…
Code Story | Startup Podcast for CTOs, CEOs and Technical FoundersThe Railsware Way - Vibe Coding vs. Traditional SDLC, with Sergiy Korolov
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…
Code Story | Startup Podcast for CTOs, CEOs and Technical FoundersS11 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
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…
Code Story | Startup Podcast for CTOs, CEOs and Technical FoundersS11 Bonus: Moving Past Semantic Layers to Eliminate Hallucinations and Build Dependable Enterprise Data Agents with Tanmai Gopal, Co-Founder & CEO of PromptQL
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…
Code Story | Startup Podcast for CTOs, CEOs and Technical FoundersS11 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
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…
Code Story | Startup Podcast for CTOs, CEOs and Technical FoundersS11 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
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…
Code Story | Startup Podcast for CTOs, CEOs and Technical FoundersS11 E21: Synopsys, The Future of AI & How We Are Building It with Raja Tabet, SVP at Synopsys
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…
Code Story | Startup Podcast for CTOs, CEOs and Technical FoundersA Startup Field Guide in the Age of Robots & AI - with Oliver Mitchell
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…
Code Story | Startup Podcast for CTOs, CEOs and Technical FoundersS11 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
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…
Code Story | Startup Podcast for CTOs, CEOs and Technical FoundersS11 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
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…
Code Story | Startup Podcast for CTOs, CEOs and Technical FoundersS11 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
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…
Code Story | Startup Podcast for CTOs, CEOs and Technical FoundersS11 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
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…
Code Story | Startup Podcast for CTOs, CEOs and Technical FoundersS11 E18: The Evolution of Enterprise Automations: Moving Beyond Fragile RPA to Natural Language Self-Healing Workflows with Theodore Bergqvist, Co-Founder & CEO of Turbotic
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…
Code Story | Startup Podcast for CTOs, CEOs and Technical FoundersS11 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
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…
Code Story | Startup Podcast for CTOs, CEOs and Technical FoundersS11 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
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…
Code Story | Startup Podcast for CTOs, CEOs and Technical FoundersS11 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
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 -…
Code Story | Startup Podcast for CTOs, CEOs and Technical FoundersS11 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
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…
Code Story | Startup Podcast for CTOs, CEOs and Technical FoundersBuilding Identity Orchestration for AI Agents with Granville Schmidt of Strata
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…
Code Story | Startup Podcast for CTOs, CEOs and Technical FoundersS11 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
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…
Code Story | Startup Podcast for CTOs, CEOs and Technical FoundersS11 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
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…
Code Story | Startup Podcast for CTOs, CEOs and Technical FoundersWhat Founders Need to Know - with Dan Eyman of Meld Valuation
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…
Code Story | Startup Podcast for CTOs, CEOs and Technical FoundersS11 E14: Dismantling the "Data Team Bottleneck" with Watsonx-Powered Generative Business Intelligence (GenBI) with Avi Perez, Co-Founder & CTO of Pyramid Analytics
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…
Code Story | Startup Podcast for CTOs, CEOs and Technical FoundersS11 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
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…
Code Story | Startup Podcast for CTOs, CEOs and Technical FoundersS11 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
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…
Code Story | Startup Podcast for CTOs, CEOs and Technical FoundersS11 Bonus: Why Your Corporate AI Pilots are Yielding Zero ROI with Greg Shove, CEO of Section
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…
Code Story | Startup Podcast for CTOs, CEOs and Technical FoundersS11 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
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…
Code Story | Startup Podcast for CTOs, CEOs and Technical FoundersS11 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
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…
Code Story | Startup Podcast for CTOs, CEOs and Technical FoundersS11 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
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…
Code Story | Startup Podcast for CTOs, CEOs and Technical FoundersS11 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
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…
Code Story | Startup Podcast for CTOs, CEOs and Technical FoundersThe Gene Simmons of Data Protection – Navigating the Future of Data Management
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…
Code Story | Startup Podcast for CTOs, CEOs and Technical FoundersS11 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
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…
Code Story | Startup Podcast for CTOs, CEOs and Technical FoundersS11 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
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…
Code Story | Startup Podcast for CTOs, CEOs and Technical FoundersThe Next Iteration of Gremlin – with Kolton Andrus, CEO
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…
Code Story | Startup Podcast for CTOs, CEOs and Technical FoundersS11 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
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…
Code Story | Startup Podcast for CTOs, CEOs and Technical FoundersS11 Bonus: Twitter’s 1st Employee Talks About Agentic Programming and its Impact on Team-Building – with Rabble of Rabble Labs
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…
Code Story | Startup Podcast for CTOs, CEOs and Technical FoundersS11 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
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…
Code Story | Startup Podcast for CTOs, CEOs and Technical FoundersS11 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
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…
Code Story | Startup Podcast for CTOs, CEOs and Technical FoundersS11 E7: The 90-Minute Daily Engagement Phenomenon: Redefining Multimodal Conversational AI to Cure the Loneliness Epidemic with Artem Rodichev, Founder & CEO of Ex-Human
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…
Code Story | Startup Podcast for CTOs, CEOs and Technical FoundersS11 Bonus: The Autonomous Retail Bottleneck: Removing Machine Friction and Deploying Smart Sensor Fusion for Loss-Free Unattended Operations with Keren Fanan, CEO of MyOp
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…
Code Story | Startup Podcast for CTOs, CEOs and Technical FoundersS11 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
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…
Code Story | Startup Podcast for CTOs, CEOs and Technical FoundersS11 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
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…
Code Story | Startup Podcast for CTOs, CEOs and Technical FoundersS11 E5: The Public Internet Bottleneck: Rebuilding the Physical Routing Layer for High-Performance Blockchains with Austin Federa, Co-Founder of DoubleZero
Austin Federa has a non-traditional path into the blockchain world. In college, he studied political & environmental science, and economics. Interestingly…
Code Story | Startup Podcast for CTOs, CEOs and Technical FoundersS11 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
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…
Code Story | Startup Podcast for CTOs, CEOs and Technical FoundersS11 E4: Transforming Dormant Media Libraries into Rights-Aware, Fact-Checked AI Intelligence with Brooke Hartley Moy, Co-Founder & CEO of Infactory AI
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…
Code Story | Startup Podcast for CTOs, CEOs and Technical FoundersS11 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
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 Story | Startup Podcast for CTOs, CEOs and Technical FoundersS11 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
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 Story | Startup Podcast for CTOs, CEOs and Technical FoundersS11 E3: The 4 Rs Framework: Moving AI Demos Into Production to Cure Legacy Healthcare Payer Inefficiencies with Rob Duffy, CTO of HealthEdge
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…