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 FoundersMinting Unicorns - Blockchain, AI and Dubai, with Raakin Iqbal, Nucleus AI
Today, we are kicking off a new series entitled Minting Unicorns - Blockchain, AI and Dubai, sponsored by the City of Dubai. Dubai is the new global center of…
Code Story | Startup Podcast for CTOs, CEOs and Technical FoundersS10 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
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…
Code Story | Startup Podcast for CTOs, CEOs and Technical FoundersS10 Favorite: Scaling EdTech Infrastructure: De-Siloing the Digital Classroom with Shaunak Roy, CEO of Yellowdig
Shaunak Roy spent 10 years in the tech industry before deciding to be a tech entrepreneur. In undergraduate, he studied mechanical engineering and eventually…
Code Story | Startup Podcast for CTOs, CEOs and Technical FoundersS10 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
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…
Code Story | Startup Podcast for CTOs, CEOs and Technical FoundersS10 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
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…
Code Story | Startup Podcast for CTOs, CEOs and Technical FoundersS10 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
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…
Code Story | Startup Podcast for CTOs, CEOs and Technical FoundersS10 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
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…
Code Story | Startup Podcast for CTOs, CEOs and Technical FoundersS10 E10: The Universal Cart Breakthrough: Overcoming Retail Fragmentation to Build the Ultimate Cross-Platform Online Shopping Wishlist with William Neill, Co-Founder of Basket
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…
Code Story | Startup Podcast for CTOs, CEOs and Technical FoundersS10 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
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…
Code Story | Startup Podcast for CTOs, CEOs and Technical FoundersS10 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
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…
Code Story | Startup Podcast for CTOs, CEOs and Technical FoundersThe Haunted House of APIs - A Portal to the Beyond with Allison Averill
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…
Code Story | Startup Podcast for CTOs, CEOs and Technical FoundersThe Haunted House of APIs - Phantom Threats with Adam Arellano
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…
Code Story | Startup Podcast for CTOs, CEOs and Technical FoundersS10 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
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…
Code Story | Startup Podcast for CTOs, CEOs and Technical FoundersThe Haunted House of APIs - The Haunted Web of APIs with Richard Bird
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…
Code Story | Startup Podcast for CTOs, CEOs and Technical FoundersThe Haunted House of APIs - The Dark Corners of APIs with Katie Paxton-Fear
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…
Code Story | Startup Podcast for CTOs, CEOs and Technical FoundersThe Haunted House of APIs - The Witch’s Brew with Jayesh Ahire
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…
Code Story | Startup Podcast for CTOs, CEOs and Technical FoundersS10 Bonus: Overcoming the 75% Failure Rate with Rigid Process Mapping and Strategic Co-Sourcing Architecture with Elkhan Shabanov, CEO of Digicode Americas
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…
Code Story | Startup Podcast for CTOs, CEOs and Technical FoundersS10 E7: The Tablet Graveyard: Consolidating Third-Party Delivery Chaos into a Unified POS Architecture with Vishal Agarwal, Founder & CEO of Checkmate
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…
Code Story | Startup Podcast for CTOs, CEOs and Technical FoundersS10 Bonus: The Real-Time Language Breakthrough: Eliminating Call Center Friction and Building Future-Proof LLM Infrastructure with Heiki Riesenkampf, Founder of Commonbase
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…
Code Story | Startup Podcast for CTOs, CEOs and Technical FoundersS10 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
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…
Code Story | Startup Podcast for CTOs, CEOs and Technical FoundersS10 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
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…
Code Story | Startup Podcast for CTOs, CEOs and Technical FoundersS10 E5: Eliminating Emotion-Driven Retail Losses with Data-Reprocessing Algorithmic Trading Engines with Sebastian Raffaele, Co-Founder & CTO of Minotaur
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…
Code Story | Startup Podcast for CTOs, CEOs and Technical FoundersS10 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
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…
Code Story | Startup Podcast for CTOs, CEOs and Technical FoundersS10 Bonus: Whats New with SWOB, with Alex Florio
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…
Code Story | Startup Podcast for CTOs, CEOs and Technical FoundersS10 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
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…
Code Story | Startup Podcast for CTOs, CEOs and Technical FoundersS10 Bonus: What's New with Turso, with Pekka Enberg
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…
Code Story | Startup Podcast for CTOs, CEOs and Technical FoundersS10 E2: Securing Intellectual Property, Minimizing Exit Risks, and Navigating Regulatory Scrutiny in the SDLC with Matt Van Itallie, Founder & CEO of Sema
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…
Code Story | Startup Podcast for CTOs, CEOs and Technical FoundersS10 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
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…
Code Story | Startup Podcast for CTOs, CEOs and Technical FoundersS10 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
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…
Code Story | Startup Podcast for CTOs, CEOs and Technical FoundersTrailer
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…
Code Story | Startup Podcast for CTOs, CEOs and Technical FoundersS9 Favorite: From Oracle & AWS Aurora to CTO of MongoDB: Scaling Document Databases with Mark Porter
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…
Code Story | Startup Podcast for CTOs, CEOs and Technical FoundersS9 Favorite: The Open-Source LaunchDarkly Killer: Engineering Privacy-First Edge Evaluation with Egil Østhus, Co-Founder & CEO of Unleash
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…
Code Story | Startup Podcast for CTOs, CEOs and Technical FoundersS9 Favorite: The "Duolingo for Data Literacy": Building AI Assessment Engines with Matt Cowell of QuantHub
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…
Code Story | Startup Podcast for CTOs, CEOs and Technical FoundersS9 E35: Eliminating Blind Spots in Overseas Manufacturing and Scaling Digital Quality Control with Prince Ghosh, Co-Founder & CEO of Factored Quality
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…
Code Story | Startup Podcast for CTOs, CEOs and Technical FoundersS9 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
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…
Code Story | Startup Podcast for CTOs, CEOs and Technical FoundersS9 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
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…
Code Story | Startup Podcast for CTOs, CEOs and Technical FoundersS9 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
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…
Code Story | Startup Podcast for CTOs, CEOs and Technical FoundersS9 E31: The Dynamic Configuration Era: Overthrowing Feature Flag Tech Debt and Replicating FAANG-Class Release Agility with Konrad Niemiec, Founder of Lekko
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…
Code Story | Startup Podcast for CTOs, CEOs and Technical FoundersS9 Bonus: Overthrowing DM Spam and Engineering Frictionless, Real-Time Paid Audio Consulting with Jason R. Hill, Founder of Owwll
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…
Code Story | Startup Podcast for CTOs, CEOs and Technical FoundersS9 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
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…
Code Story | Startup Podcast for CTOs, CEOs and Technical FoundersS9 Bonus: Implementing Automated Subtitle Alignments, Cross-Lingual Vocal Emotion Synthesis, and Cloud-Native Collaborative Editing Suites with Berkay Atatop, Co-Founder & CEO of Maestra
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…
Code Story | Startup Podcast for CTOs, CEOs and Technical FoundersS9 E29: Overthrowing Shelf-Ware IGA and Engineering Engineering-Led Least-Privilege Frameworks with Umaimah Khan, Co-Founder & CEO of Opal Security
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…
Code Story | Startup Podcast for CTOs, CEOs and Technical FoundersS9 E28: Overthrowing Paper Receipts, Crushing Margin Bleed, and Building the "Concur for Construction" with David Cauthron, Co-Founder & CTO of Outpave
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…
Code Story | Startup Podcast for CTOs, CEOs and Technical FoundersS9 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
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…
Code Story | Startup Podcast for CTOs, CEOs and Technical FoundersS9 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
Neil Patel has always been a hacker - electronics boards, radios, etc. - being interested in how things work, mechanically or digitally. He learned hard work…
Code Story | Startup Podcast for CTOs, CEOs and Technical FoundersS9 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
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…
Code Story | Startup Podcast for CTOs, CEOs and Technical FoundersS9 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
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…
Code Story | Startup Podcast for CTOs, CEOs and Technical FoundersS9 E25: The Incident Response Revolution: Overthrowing War-Room Chaos and Automating Slack-Native SRE Workflows with JJ Tang, Co-Founder & CEO of Rootly
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…
Code Story | Startup Podcast for CTOs, CEOs and Technical FoundersS9 E24: The Data Streaming Renaissance: Bypassing JVM Bloat and Squeezing 10x Performance From Modern Hardware Engines with Alex Gallego, Founder & CEO of Redpanda Data
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…
Code Story | Startup Podcast for CTOs, CEOs and Technical FoundersS9 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
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…
Code Story | Startup Podcast for CTOs, CEOs and Technical FoundersS9 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
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…
Code Story | Startup Podcast for CTOs, CEOs and Technical FoundersS9 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
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…
Code Story | Startup Podcast for CTOs, CEOs and Technical FoundersS9 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
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…
Code Story | Startup Podcast for CTOs, CEOs and Technical FoundersS9 Bonus: The Metadata Breakthrough: Bypassing Legacy Tree Walks and Scaling Real-Time AI Dataset Ingestion with Björn Kolbeck, Co-Founder & CEO of Quobyte
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…
Code Story | Startup Podcast for CTOs, CEOs and Technical FoundersS9 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
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…
Code Story | Startup Podcast for CTOs, CEOs and Technical FoundersS9 Bonus: Whats New with Alice Technologies - Rene Morkos, Founder & CEO
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…
Code Story | Startup Podcast for CTOs, CEOs and Technical FoundersS9 E20: Investor Attraction Blueprint: Overthrowing Legacy Outreach and Engineering Founder-First Public Relations Engine with Michael Hummel, Co-Founder & CEO of Establish
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…
Code Story | Startup Podcast for CTOs, CEOs and Technical FoundersS9 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
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…
Code Story | Startup Podcast for CTOs, CEOs and Technical FoundersS9 E19: The Event-Native API Revolution: Unifying Synchronous Rest and Asynchronous Kafka Pipelines with Linus Håkansson, Chief Product Officer at Gravitee
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…
Code Story | Startup Podcast for CTOs, CEOs and Technical FoundersS9 Bonus: Doing the Work of a Whole DevOps Team, with just two people - Erin Marie & Jesus Maria of MSquared
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…