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 FoundersS9 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
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…
Code Story | Startup Podcast for CTOs, CEOs and Technical FoundersS9 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
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…
Code Story | Startup Podcast for CTOs, CEOs and Technical FoundersS9 E17: Bypassing Documentation Friction: Implementing Developer Learning Engines and 30x Engagement Video Frameworks with Jake Ward, Co-founder & CEO of Data Protocol
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…
Code Story | Startup Podcast for CTOs, CEOs and Technical FoundersS9 Bonus: The Dorm Room to $20M Supply Chain Shift: Overthrowing Distribution Dinosaurs and Automating Healthcare Procurement with Luká Yancopoulos, Co-Founder & CEO of Grapevine
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…
Code Story | Startup Podcast for CTOs, CEOs and Technical FoundersS9 E16: Bypassing Kong and Azure APM: Implementing Global Edge Rate Limiting and Decentralized API Key Governance with James Perkins, Co-founder & CEO of Unkey
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…
Code Story | Startup Podcast for CTOs, CEOs and Technical FoundersS9 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
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…
Code Story | Startup Podcast for CTOs, CEOs and Technical FoundersS9 E15: Scaling From an Internal Hackathon Project to a Multi-Million Dollar Global Knowledge Layer with Saravana Kumar, Founder & CEO of Kovai.co & Document360
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…
Code Story | Startup Podcast for CTOs, CEOs and Technical FoundersS9 Bonus: From Inventing the $100B Stablecoin Tether to Formatting Internet Identity: Overthrowing Centralized Profiles with Craig Sellars, Co-Founder of Tether & CEO of Self
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…
Code Story | Startup Podcast for CTOs, CEOs and Technical FoundersS9 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
Mike Bifulco studied Mechanical Engineering and Computer Science in college. He was always good with computers, dating back to his High School Freshman CS…
Code Story | Startup Podcast for CTOs, CEOs and Technical FoundersS9 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
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…
Code Story | Startup Podcast for CTOs, CEOs and Technical FoundersS9 Bonus: From Classical Opera to Transforming Enterprise Design: Bypassing the "Agile Lip Service" with the Mary Poppins of CX, Debbie Levitt
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…
Code Story | Startup Podcast for CTOs, CEOs and Technical FoundersS9 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
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…
Code Story | Startup Podcast for CTOs, CEOs and Technical FoundersS9 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
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…
Code Story | Startup Podcast for CTOs, CEOs and Technical FoundersS9 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
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…
Code Story | Startup Podcast for CTOs, CEOs and Technical FoundersS9 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
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…
Code Story | Startup Podcast for CTOs, CEOs and Technical FoundersS9 E10: Breaking the AI Code Explosion and Democratizing Codebase Intent with Dennis Pilarinos, Founder & CEO of Unblocked
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…
Code Story | Startup Podcast for CTOs, CEOs and Technical FoundersS9 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
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…
Code Story | Startup Podcast for CTOs, CEOs and Technical FoundersS9 Bonus: The Developer Retraining Blueprint: Bypassing Rigid CS Degrees and Overthrowing Static Tech Education with Erik Gross, Co-Founder of The Tech Academy
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…
Code Story | Startup Podcast for CTOs, CEOs and Technical FoundersS9 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
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…
Code Story | Startup Podcast for CTOs, CEOs and Technical FoundersS9 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
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…
Code Story | Startup Podcast for CTOs, CEOs and Technical FoundersS9 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
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…
Code Story | Startup Podcast for CTOs, CEOs and Technical FoundersS9 Bonus: The Open-Source Supply Chain Shield: Eliminating Malicious Dependencies and Automating Repository Governance with Craig McLuckie, Co-Creator of Kubernetes & CEO of Stacklok
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…
Code Story | Startup Podcast for CTOs, CEOs and Technical FoundersS9 E7: Aggregating Distributed Git Telemetry and Eliminating Developer Burnout Without Micro-Management with Naomi Chopra, Co-Founder & CEO of Hatica
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…
Code Story | Startup Podcast for CTOs, CEOs and Technical FoundersS9 E6: Engineering Proactive Cash Flow Frameworks and Overthrowing Reactive Budgeting Anxiety with Melissa Pancoast, Founder & CEO of The Beans
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…
Code Story | Startup Podcast for CTOs, CEOs and Technical FoundersS9 Bonus: The Edge-Computing Architecture Blueprint: Breaking Server Latency and Scaling Developer-First Feature Flags with Jonathan Norris, Co-Founder & CTO of DevCycle & Taplytics
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…
Code Story | Startup Podcast for CTOs, CEOs and Technical FoundersS9 E5: The Identity Workflow Revolution: Engineering Drag-and-Drop Authentication and Shattering the Build-vs-Buy Tax with Gilad Shriki, Co-Founder of Descope
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…
Code Story | Startup Podcast for CTOs, CEOs and Technical FoundersS9 Favorite: The Pop-Culture Video Engine: Bootstrapping & Scaling ClassHook to Acquisition with Alexander Deeb
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…
Code Story | Startup Podcast for CTOs, CEOs and Technical FoundersS9 Bonus: Squeezing Maximum Conversion from 130,000 A/B Tests and Killing the Competitor-Copying Fallacy with Sahil Patel, CEO of Spiralyze
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…
Code Story | Startup Podcast for CTOs, CEOs and Technical FoundersS9 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
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…
Code Story | Startup Podcast for CTOs, CEOs and Technical FoundersS9 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
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…
Code Story | Startup Podcast for CTOs, CEOs and Technical FoundersS9 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
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…
Code Story | Startup Podcast for CTOs, CEOs and Technical FoundersS9 Bonus: The DataOps Democratization Blueprint: Overthrowing Airflow Infrastructure Overhead and Scaling Serverless Data Orchestration with Blake Burch, Founder & CEO of Shipyard
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…
Code Story | Startup Podcast for CTOs, CEOs and Technical FoundersS9 E3: Embedded Lending Infrastructure and Navigating Emerging Market API Scaling with Reinis Simanovskis, Co-Founder & CPO of Finfra
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…
Code Story | Startup Podcast for CTOs, CEOs and Technical FoundersS9 Bonus: Programmatic Venture Finance and Algorithmic Cash Management with Raven Jiang, Co-Founder & CTO of Arc
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…
Code Story | Startup Podcast for CTOs, CEOs and Technical FoundersS9 Bonus: Shattering the Network Telemetry Silo, with Avi Freedman of Kentik
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…
Code Story | Startup Podcast for CTOs, CEOs and Technical FoundersS9 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
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…
Code Story | Startup Podcast for CTOs, CEOs and Technical FoundersS9 Bonus: Data-Centric AI Blueprint: Bypassing Privacy Walls and Scaling High-Fidelity Synthetic Data Pipelines with Fabiana Clemente, Co-Founder & CDO of YData
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…
Code Story | Startup Podcast for CTOs, CEOs and Technical FoundersS9 Bonus: The Death of Localhost: Engineering Dev Container Orchestration and Terraform-Powered Cloud Workspaces with Kyle Carberry, Co-Founder & CTO of Coder
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…
Code Story | Startup Podcast for CTOs, CEOs and Technical FoundersS9 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
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…
Code Story | Startup Podcast for CTOs, CEOs and Technical FoundersSeason 9 Trailer
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 FoundersS8 Favorite: The AWS Blueprint for Consumption: Decoupling Cloud Metering from Billing Architecture with Puneet Gupta, Co-Founder & CEO of Amberflo
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…
Code Story | Startup Podcast for CTOs, CEOs and Technical FoundersS8 Favorite: The Linux Kernel Maverick Rewriting SQLite in Rust: Scaling Micro-Databases for AI Agents with Glauber Costa, Co-Founder & CEO of Turso
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…
Code Story | Startup Podcast for CTOs, CEOs and Technical FoundersS8 Favorite: The ClickOps Cure: Automating Multi-Cloud Infrastructure Discovery and Code Drift with Sefi Genis, Co-Founder & Late CTO of Firefly
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…
Code Story | Startup Podcast for CTOs, CEOs and Technical FoundersS8 Favorite: The Language of Money: Re-Engineering Messy Transaction Data for the Era of AI Agents with Naré Vardanyan, Co-Founder & CEO of Ntropy
Naré Vardanyan has a statistically unlikely story. She grew up in Armenia, without electricity during a war. She recalls that her parents gamified the…
Code Story | Startup Podcast for CTOs, CEOs and Technical FoundersS8 Bonus: From the Tech Behind 'Toy Story' to a Global Workforce OS: Overcoming Engineering Bottlenecks and Flatlining Infra Costs with Alex Yarotsky of Hubstaff
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…
Code Story | Startup Podcast for CTOs, CEOs and Technical FoundersS8 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
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…
Code Story | Startup Podcast for CTOs, CEOs and Technical FoundersS8 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
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…
Code Story | Startup Podcast for CTOs, CEOs and Technical FoundersS8 Bonus: The Acquisition Playbook: Productizing DevOps Infrastructure and Scaling a 24/7 Cloud Operations Engine with Shaun Ritchie, CEO of nClouds
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…
Code Story | Startup Podcast for CTOs, CEOs and Technical FoundersS8 Bonus: The Death of the Crashing Spreadsheet: Engineering Predictive AI Ingestion and Asset Intelligence Rails with Arunabh Dastidar, Co-Founder & CEO of RealSage
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…
Code Story | Startup Podcast for CTOs, CEOs and Technical FoundersS8 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
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…
Code Story | Startup Podcast for CTOs, CEOs and Technical FoundersS8 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
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…
Code Story | Startup Podcast for CTOs, CEOs and Technical FoundersS8 Bonus: Financing Secondary-City Tech and Weaponizing Vertical AI for Under-Ventured Industries with Somak Chattopadhyay, Founder & Managing Partner of Armory Square Ventures
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…
Code Story | Startup Podcast for CTOs, CEOs and Technical FoundersS8 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
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…
Code Story | Startup Podcast for CTOs, CEOs and Technical FoundersS8 Bonus: Building High-Performance Metadata Processing Engines and Drag-and-Drop Mapping with Ibrahim Surani & Jay Mishra of Astera
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…
Code Story | Startup Podcast for CTOs, CEOs and Technical FoundersS8 Bonus: From Uber Launcher and a $1B Unicorn Exit to 700K Front-Line Workers: Automating Workforce Orchestration with Jason Radisson of Movo
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…
Code Story | Startup Podcast for CTOs, CEOs and Technical FoundersS8 E27: Engineering Data Normalization Rails and Automated Candidate Sourcing to Kill Hiring Friction with Valeriy Bykanov, Co-Founder of Prodigy
Valeriy Bykanov studied computer science in the Ukraine, and eventually in 2009, decided to start his own software development agency. After doing this for…
Code Story | Startup Podcast for CTOs, CEOs and Technical FoundersS8 Bonus: The Death of Threaded Noise: Engineering Object Messaging Models and AI-Fused Workflow Architecture with Massoud Alibakhsh, Co-Founder & CEO of Omadeus
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…
Code Story | Startup Podcast for CTOs, CEOs and Technical FoundersS8 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
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…
Code Story | Startup Podcast for CTOs, CEOs and Technical FoundersS8 Bonus: Clicks, Not Code: Architecting Automated Reference Data Versioning and Low-Code Release Management at Scale with Max Rudman of Prodly
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…
Code Story | Startup Podcast for CTOs, CEOs and Technical FoundersS8 Bonus: Democratizing Human Capital Analytics and Engineering Multi-Tenant Transcript Ingestion with Kaj Pedersen, Co-Founder & CTO of AstrumU
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…