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 FoundersS8 E25: The Synthetic Data Blueprint: Bypassing Production Privacy Risks and Scaling Data Anonymization with Andrew Colombi, Co-Founder & CTO of Tonic.ai
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…
Code Story | Startup Podcast for CTOs, CEOs and Technical FoundersDev Interrupted: Assembling & Nurturing Engineering Teams
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…
Code Story | Startup Podcast for CTOs, CEOs and Technical FoundersS8 Bonus: The Code Dependency Revolution: Solving Open-Source Burnout and Engineering the teaRank Protocol with Max Howell, Creator of Homebrew & Founder of Tea
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…
Code Story | Startup Podcast for CTOs, CEOs and Technical FoundersS8 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
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…
Code Story | Startup Podcast for CTOs, CEOs and Technical FoundersS8 E24: Bypassing the Wrapper Trap to Engineer Model-Agnostic Enterprise RAG and Compliance Guardrails with Jon Ricketts, Co-Founder & CEO of Writerly
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…
Code Story | Startup Podcast for CTOs, CEOs and Technical FoundersS8 Bonus: Engineering Conversational Natural Language Engines for Elasticsearch and Overthrowing the SQL Middleman with Tim Tutt, Co-Founder & CEO of ClearQuery
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…
Code Story | Startup Podcast for CTOs, CEOs and Technical FoundersS8 Bonus: The Multi-Vendor Telemetry Playbook: Scaling Collaboration Intelligence and the Road to an HP Acquisition with Alfredo Ramirez, Co-Founder & CEO of Vyopta
Alfredo Ramirez is the son of Ecuadorian immigrants, which instilled in him positive beliefs around faith, family, community and hard work. Way back, his…
Code Story | Startup Podcast for CTOs, CEOs and Technical FoundersS8 E23: The Multimodal Data Blueprint: Structuring the Unseen 80% of Enterprise Visual Data Without Metadata Tagging with Will Gaviria, Co-Founder of Coactive AI
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…
Code Story | Startup Podcast for CTOs, CEOs and Technical FoundersS8 Bonus: Bypassing Brittle Custom Scripts: Implementing Automated Multi-Tenant Configuration Backups and Vulnerability Patching at Scale with Andrew Kahl of BackBox
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…
Code Story | Startup Podcast for CTOs, CEOs and Technical FoundersS8 Bonus: The Data Asset Revolution: Moving Beyond Imperative Task Pipelines to Declarative Orchestration with Pete Hunt, Co-Founder of React & CEO of Dagster Labs
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…
Code Story | Startup Podcast for CTOs, CEOs and Technical FoundersS8 E22: The Identity Orchestration Blueprint: Unifying Multi-Cloud Security and Bypassing Legacy App Refactoring with Eric Olden, Co-Founder & CEO of Strata Identity
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…
Code Story | Startup Podcast for CTOs, CEOs and Technical FoundersS8 Bonus: EdTech Scale Engine: Bypassing Video Bootcamps with Live Code Execution and AI-Guided Mentorship Rails with Barak Glanz, Co-Founder of Coddy.tech
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…
Code Story | Startup Podcast for CTOs, CEOs and Technical FoundersS8 Bonus: The College Matchmaking Engine: Replacing Opaque University Rankings with Predictive Culture Analytics and David Hurwitt, Founder & CEO of Troove
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…
Code Story | Startup Podcast for CTOs, CEOs and Technical FoundersS8 E21: The HubSpot of Inventory: Overthrowing NetSuite Lock-In and Automating Multi-Channel Supply Chain Rails with Jared Ward, Founder & CEO of Luminous
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…
Code Story | Startup Podcast for CTOs, CEOs and Technical FoundersS8 Bonus: Engineering Text-to-Video AI Automation and Scaling to Millions of Users with Vikram Chalana, Co-Founder & CEO of Pictory
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…
Code Story | Startup Podcast for CTOs, CEOs and Technical FoundersS8 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
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…
Code Story | Startup Podcast for CTOs, CEOs and Technical FoundersS8 E20: Extracting Context from Chaos: Implementing Real-Time NLP Semantic Parsing and Automated Action-Item Routing with Artem Koren of Sembly AI
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…
Code Story | Startup Podcast for CTOs, CEOs and Technical FoundersFrom Tools and Weapons: Putting AI in the Hands of People Everywhere
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…
Code Story | Startup Podcast for CTOs, CEOs and Technical FoundersS8 Bonus: The $45M 'GitHub for Docs' Experiment: Engineering Git-Style Version Control for Asynchronous Business Teams with Adam Nathan, Co-Founder & CEO of Almanac
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…
Code Story | Startup Podcast for CTOs, CEOs and Technical FoundersS8 Bonus: Overcoming 100x AI Code Velocity and Enterprise Vulnerability Noise with Idan Plotnik, Co-Founder & CEO of Apiiro
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…
Code Story | Startup Podcast for CTOs, CEOs and Technical FoundersS8 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
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…
Code Story | Startup Podcast for CTOs, CEOs and Technical FoundersS8 Bonus: Bypassing the Excel Accounting Trap: Architecting High-Throughput Bank API Connectors and Rule Matching Engines with Danielle Shaul of Nilus
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…
Code Story | Startup Podcast for CTOs, CEOs and Technical FoundersS8 Bonus: The Mark Cuban Backed Playbook: Turning Short-Form Videos Into Interactive Games Without Code with Dan Projansky & Caroline Strzalka, Co-Founders of Overplay
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…
Code Story | Startup Podcast for CTOs, CEOs and Technical FoundersS8 E18: Bypassing the GPS Crutch: Engineering Level 4 Contextual AI and Multi-Floor Autonomous Robots with Ritukar Vijay, Co-Founder & CEO of Ottonomy
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…
Code Story | Startup Podcast for CTOs, CEOs and Technical FoundersS8 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
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…
Code Story | Startup Podcast for CTOs, CEOs and Technical FoundersS8 Bonus: The Intranet of Human Memory: Architecting Decentralized PLMs and Blockchain-Secured Memory Stacks with Suman Kanuganti, Co-Founder & CEO of Personal.ai
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…
Code Story | Startup Podcast for CTOs, CEOs and Technical FoundersS8 E17: The Science of Legal Optimization: Engineering Predictive Data and AI Engines for Law Firms with Dr. Jay Sarmaz, Co-Founder of Truve.ai
Jay Sarmaz studied operations research in college, which he describes as the science of solving problems and maximizing value with limited resources. His…
Code Story | Startup Podcast for CTOs, CEOs and Technical FoundersS8 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
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…
Code Story | Startup Podcast for CTOs, CEOs and Technical FoundersS8 Bonus: The Just-in-Time Access Playbook: Automating Identity Governance and Eliminating Enterprise Security Debt with Alex Bovee, Co-Founder & CEO of ConductorOne
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…
Code Story | Startup Podcast for CTOs, CEOs and Technical FoundersS8 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
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…
Code Story | Startup Podcast for CTOs, CEOs and Technical FoundersBeyond Bots - Daniel Jordan, Wayflyer
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…
Code Story | Startup Podcast for CTOs, CEOs and Technical FoundersS8 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
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…
Code Story | Startup Podcast for CTOs, CEOs and Technical FoundersS8 Bonus: Shattering MVP Pitfalls: Engineering Disciplined, Scalable Architectures for Early-Stage Startups with Max Walker, Co-Founder of Piton Labs
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…
Code Story | Startup Podcast for CTOs, CEOs and Technical FoundersS8 E15: The B2B Cash Collection Tech Problem: Eradicating Manual Invoice Friction and Predictably Reducing DSO with Alex Louisy, Co-Founder & CEO of Upflow
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…
Code Story | Startup Podcast for CTOs, CEOs and Technical FoundersBeyond Bots - Bryce Crawford, Meow
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…
Code Story | Startup Podcast for CTOs, CEOs and Technical FoundersS8 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
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…
Code Story | Startup Podcast for CTOs, CEOs and Technical FoundersS8 Bonus: The Fractional Real Estate Engine: Building a Liquidity Marketplace and Automated Yield Rails for Vacation Rentals with Ali Nichols, Co-Founder of Getaway
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…
Code Story | Startup Podcast for CTOs, CEOs and Technical FoundersS8 E14: Beyond Static DORA Dashboards: Deploying Real-Time Git Metadata Parsing and Policy-as-Code Engines with Dan Lines of LinearB
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…
Code Story | Startup Podcast for CTOs, CEOs and Technical FoundersBeyond Bots - Ilia Zintchenko, Ntropy
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…
Code Story | Startup Podcast for CTOs, CEOs and Technical FoundersS8 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
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…
Code Story | Startup Podcast for CTOs, CEOs and Technical FoundersS8 Bonus: Bypassing the Fragmented Panel Trap: Architecting Real-Time, Verified Expert Networks for B2B Product Research with Sharekh Shaikh of CleverX
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…
Code Story | Startup Podcast for CTOs, CEOs and Technical FoundersS8 E13: An Indie Hacker Blueprint: Engineering Secure AI-to-SQL Pipelines for Non-Technical Teams with Colleen Schnettler, Creator of HelloQuery
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 -…
Code Story | Startup Podcast for CTOs, CEOs and Technical FoundersS8 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
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…
Code Story | Startup Podcast for CTOs, CEOs and Technical FoundersBeyond Bots - Naré Vardanyan, Ntropy
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…
Code Story | Startup Podcast for CTOs, CEOs and Technical FoundersS8 Bonus: The Bootstrapped Privacy Rebellion: Engineering Cookie-Less Web Analytics Without Tracking Users with Adriaan van Rossum, Founder of Simple Analytics
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…
Code Story | Startup Podcast for CTOs, CEOs and Technical FoundersS8 E12: The $16B Escheatment Engine: Automating Financial Dormancy and Compliance Rails with Stephanie Mertz, Co-Founder of Eisen
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…
Code Story | Startup Podcast for CTOs, CEOs and Technical FoundersS8 Bonus: The RealReal CTO's Playbook: Engineering Rust-Powered GraphQL Federation at the Network Edge with Fredrik Björk, Founder & CEO of Grafbase
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…
Code Story | Startup Podcast for CTOs, CEOs and Technical FoundersS8 Bonus: Bypassing the Resume Filter Bias: Building Automated Code Assessment Engines to Uncover Elite Engineering Talent with Jaclyn Ling of Hatchways
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…
Code Story | Startup Podcast for CTOs, CEOs and Technical FoundersS8 Bonus: From Facebook and Pinterest Data Infrastructure to Building the Canva for Data, with Shawn Cao of Columns
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…
Code Story | Startup Podcast for CTOs, CEOs and Technical FoundersS8 E11: The Firebase Blueprint for SaaS Integrations: Delivering Real-Time Context to AI Agents with Lauren Long, Co-Founder & CTO of Ampersand
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…
Code Story | Startup Podcast for CTOs, CEOs and Technical FoundersS8 Bonus: The Alchemy of the Tide Pod: Engineering Global Materials Science and Strategic Partnerships with P. Scott Bening, Former CEO of MonoSol
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…
Code Story | Startup Podcast for CTOs, CEOs and Technical FoundersS8 Bonus: Bypassing the Slack Distraction Loop: Architecting Real-Time Rescheduling Algorithms and Dynamic Calendar Telemetry with Matt Martin, Co-Founder & CEO of Clockwise
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…
Code Story | Startup Podcast for CTOs, CEOs and Technical FoundersS8 E10: From Chrome Extension to a Professional Network for 500K+ Developers: Engineering Content Recommendation Pipelines with Ido Shamun, Co-Founder & CTO of daily.dev
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…
Code Story | Startup Podcast for CTOs, CEOs and Technical FoundersThe Closer: Toys R Us
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…
Code Story | Startup Podcast for CTOs, CEOs and Technical FoundersS8 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
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…
Code Story | Startup Podcast for CTOs, CEOs and Technical FoundersS8 Bonus: Pioneering Computational Entomology: Converting Wingbeat Light Disruptions Into Real-Time Pest Telemetry with Dr. Eamonn Keogh, Co-Founder of FarmSense
Dr. Eamonn Keogh is a globally renowned expert in data mining, machine learning, and information retrieval. He is pioneering the field of computational…
Code Story | Startup Podcast for CTOs, CEOs and Technical FoundersS8 Bonus: Rewriting Database Physics: Engineering a Hybrid Memory NoSQL Engine for Petabyte-Scale AI Inference with Srini Srinivasan, Co-Founder & CTO of Aerospike
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…
Code Story | Startup Podcast for CTOs, CEOs and Technical FoundersS8 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
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…
Code Story | Startup Podcast for CTOs, CEOs and Technical FoundersS8 Bonus: The RAG Playbook: Bypassing Data Warehouses to Build a Secure, Federated Enterprise AI Search Engine with Prasad Kawthekar, Co-Founder & CEO of Dashworks
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…
Code Story | Startup Podcast for CTOs, CEOs and Technical FoundersS8 Bonus: The WebRTC Blueprint: Engineering Ultra-Low Latency Video and Voice Infrastructure for AI Agents with Kwindla Kramer, Co-Founder & CEO of Daily
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…