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 FoundersS7 Favorite: Bypassing Data Brokers: Generating Real-Time Phantom Phone Numbers, Emails, and Credit Cards with Arjun Bhatnagar of Cloaked
Arjun Bhatnager has been coding since he was 10 years old, and in general, his family is full of entrepreneurs, running their own businesses. In fact, his…
Code Story | Startup Podcast for CTOs, CEOs and Technical FoundersS7 Favorite: The Blueprint for a $1B Product Launch: Automating GTM Silos with Derek Osgood, Founder of Ignition
Derek Osgood comes from a family of entrepreneurs, and has always known he wanted to start something himself. Prior to that, he worked for other companies…
Code Story | Startup Podcast for CTOs, CEOs and Technical FoundersS7 Favorite: The Low-Code Boom: Bringing DevOps and Git to Enterprise Data Pipelines with Raj Bains of Prophecy
Raj Bains grew up in India, North of Delhi, and comes from a family who, as he says, does "whatever is best to do" at the time. They moved around quite…
Code Story | Startup Podcast for CTOs, CEOs and Technical FoundersS7 Favorite: Killing the Feature Factory: Rebuilding a Legacy Giant from Scratch with Ian Small, Former CEO of Evernote
Ian Small is a Canadian, and claims that is the most important thing about him. Tech started for him when he was 12 years old, when he got a bad grade on a…
Code Story | Startup Podcast for CTOs, CEOs and Technical FoundersS7 Bonus: The Algorithmic Rollup: Engineering a $970M Automated E-Commerce Engine with Jeremy Wood, Co-Founder of OpenStore
Jeremy Wood grew up in Portland, and has been heavily influenced by that upbringing. He enjoyed really strong maker communities, supporting local craft artists…
Code Story | Startup Podcast for CTOs, CEOs and Technical FoundersS7 Bonus: The Death of Data Sampling: Shifting Observability Left to Catch Anomalies at the Source with Max Lukichev of Telmai
Max Lukichev is a deeply technical guy, which means his hobbies have been related to tech since the early days. He is a PhD in computer science, and has always…
Code Story | Startup Podcast for CTOs, CEOs and Technical FoundersS7 E18: The 99% Speedup: Architecting Real-Time Disability Underwriting for the Gig Economy with Hadi Radwan of Asteya
Hadi Radwan is an amateur biohacker, which was a new term for me, and means trying to DIY your own biology. He is a family man, and enjoys playing fantasy…
Code Story | Startup Podcast for CTOs, CEOs and Technical FoundersS7 Bonus: Hacking the Platform: Building a Global No-Code Extension for Squarespace with Nick Ippolito & Rowan Findlay of SquareKicker
Nick Ippolito has been involved with youth work for many years, and stumbled into web design and taught himself how to code. He's been married for 15 years…
Code Story | Startup Podcast for CTOs, CEOs and Technical FoundersS7 Bonus: The AWS of FinTech: Engineering a Multi-Processor Payment Orchestration Layer with Casey Kipfer, Co-Founder of JustiFi
Casey Kipfer is a family man. He's married with 3 kids, and there is a lot of excitement and noise at his house - which is says is wonderful. He enjoys golfing…
Code Story | Startup Podcast for CTOs, CEOs and Technical FoundersS7 E17: The Human Side of System Failure: Engineering Sociotechnical Resilience with Nora Jones, Founder of Jeli.io
Nora Jones has been in tech her entire career. She originally thought she was going to get into hardware, but was always focused on reliability and safety. She…
Code Story | Startup Podcast for CTOs, CEOs and Technical FoundersS7 Bonus: The Algorithmic Recruiter: Automating Global Tech Vetting and Remote Scaling with Alex Svinov, Co-Founder & CEO of Insquad
Alex Svinov has very few things to talk about outside of the business world. He likes to jog, play tennis, and has a family with three kids at home. He likes…
Code Story | Startup Podcast for CTOs, CEOs and Technical FoundersS7 Bonus: Return to Komodor - Andrey Pohkilko
You might remember in Season 6, episode 15, I interviewed Itiel, the Co-founder of Komodor. Today I have a special episode of the Code Story podcast, bringing…
Code Story | Startup Podcast for CTOs, CEOs and Technical FoundersS7 E16: The OpenTable for Creative Spaces: Engineering a SaaS-Enabled Marketplace with Gabriel Isserlis of Tutti
Gabriel Isserlis grew up in London with an artistic background in the creative industries. His Dad is a professional cellist, which is the instrument that he…
Code Story | Startup Podcast for CTOs, CEOs and Technical FoundersS7 Bonus: From Importing Coconut Water to Running a Global 500-Agent Support Engine with Nathan Yap of SupportZebra
Nathan Yap has a tight knit family, that he spends a lot of time with. So traveling and enjoying good food with his family is winning to him. Outside of that…
Code Story | Startup Podcast for CTOs, CEOs and Technical FoundersS7 Bonus: The Metadata-Driven Warehouse: Engineering 10x Faster Data Transformations with Satish Jayanthi, Co-Founder & CTO of Coalesce
Satish Jayanthi was born in India, and attended school there. When he was growing up, his Mom was a teacher and his Dad was dabbling in different businesses…
Code Story | Startup Podcast for CTOs, CEOs and Technical FoundersS7 E15: From Dot-Com Exits to Celebrity-Backed Logistics: The Future of Corporate Food Tech & Ghost Kitchens with Jeff Grass of Hungry
Jeff Grass had his career start more traditionally, as a bond underwriter, graduating from Wharton, and then being a serial entrepreneur. Outside of his…
Code Story | Startup Podcast for CTOs, CEOs and Technical FoundersS7 Bonus: The Offboarding Architecture: Weaponizing Cancellation Flows to Save SaaS Revenue with Rob Moore, Co-Founder & CTO of Churnkey
Rob Moore was previously on the Code Story podcast back in Season 2, when he was building Floom - a marketplace built to make monetizing SaaS products easier…
Code Story | Startup Podcast for CTOs, CEOs and Technical FoundersS7 Bonus: From Commodore 128 Self-Taught Coder to Building an AI Map Engine with Juan Soberanis of Beacon
Back in 1986, Juan Soberanis and his family got a personal computer for the house - a Commodore 128. He asked his mother if he could take it to his room, and…
Code Story | Startup Podcast for CTOs, CEOs and Technical FoundersS7 E14: The Royalties Exchange: Engineering a Fractionalized Music Investment Engine with Olga Stern, CTO of Tangy Market
Olga Stern considers herself an onion, with a lot of different layers. She loves to try out new things, which has produced a lot of different hobbies in her…
Code Story | Startup Podcast for CTOs, CEOs and Technical FoundersS7 Bonus: Author Nick Donofrio - If Nothing Changes, Nothing Changes
Hello listeners! Today have Nick Donorio on the show today. Nick Donorio is a second generation American. His grandparents were poor, Italian immigrants - and…
Code Story | Startup Podcast for CTOs, CEOs and Technical FoundersS7 Bonus: The Integration Bottleneck: Reclaiming 50% of R&D Capacity with Michael Zuercher, Co-Founder & CEO of Prismatic
Michael Zuercher has been in tech since he was young, starting his first company when he was 19 years old. A lot of his path to his current place is through…
Code Story | Startup Podcast for CTOs, CEOs and Technical FoundersS7 E13: From Fake AI to 60,000+ Organizations: Unlocking Product-Market Fit with Krish Ramineni of Fireflies.ai
Krish Ramineni grew up in Silicon Valley, observing tech all around him. But really excited him was the innovation happening the in the last 5 years. He used…
Code Story | Startup Podcast for CTOs, CEOs and Technical FoundersS7 Bonus: From Counter-Terrorism Network Analysis to Mapping Workplace Connection with Shawn Ramirez of Mystery
Shawn Ramirez spent a decade as a political science professor, studying terrorism and strategic negotiations. Five years ago, she switched into tech, in order…
Code Story | Startup Podcast for CTOs, CEOs and Technical FoundersS7 Bonus: The First Benefits Placement System: Engineering a Shared Architecture for a $150B Industry with Shaheeb Roshan, Co-Founder & CTO of ThreeFlow
Shaheeb Roshan is a family man. He's been married 16 years and has a 10 year old daughter. It's his family that drives how he looks at the world - teaching his…
Code Story | Startup Podcast for CTOs, CEOs and Technical FoundersS7 E12: The FinOps Revolution: Turning Cloud Chaos into Unit Economics with Roi Ravhon, Co-Founder & CEO of Finout
Roi Ravhon path to tech started in the Israeli military, like many other founders in Israel. In fact, the very first introduction he had to computers was when…
Code Story | Startup Podcast for CTOs, CEOs and Technical FoundersS7 Bonus: The Death of Static Credentials: Architecting Hardware-Attested Device Identity with Mike Malone, Founder & CEO of Smallstep
Mike Malone is a nerd from way back (his words, not mine). In the 6th grade, he bought a Borland C book and learned how to code. Back when Napster was round…
Code Story | Startup Podcast for CTOs, CEOs and Technical FoundersS7 Bonus: The Spatial Applied Math Engine: Building Geospatial AI for Franchise Growth with Kateryna Sytnyk, Co-Founder of Fract & CTO Doctor
Kateryna Sytnyk is originally from Ukraine, but moved to the states 15 years ago after winning the green card lottery. Her background is in applied…
Code Story | Startup Podcast for CTOs, CEOs and Technical FoundersS7 E11: From Chaos Monkey for Spring Boot to a $13.8M Automated Reliability Engine with Benjamin Wilms of Steadybit
Benjamin Wilms started his career in 1999 as a developer. In the little free time he has, he does mountain biking, spends time with his family, and visits the…
Code Story | Startup Podcast for CTOs, CEOs and Technical FoundersS7 Bonus: The 80% Software Problem: Eradicating Boilerplate Code with Micro-App Architectures with John Rush, Founder of MarsX
John Rush has been in tech since he was a child, so its hard for him to think of a time where it wasn't a part of his life. Since 2008, he has been building…
Code Story | Startup Podcast for CTOs, CEOs and Technical FoundersS7 Bonus: Bypassing the Zoom Fatigue: Building Threaded, On-Screen Contextual Video Pipelines with Tom Medema of Bubbles
Tom Medema is Dutch, and grew up in a small village in the Netherlands. This allowed him to explore what else was out there, which led to him living in 5…
Code Story | Startup Podcast for CTOs, CEOs and Technical FoundersS7 E10: The Low-Code Boom: Bringing DevOps and Git to Enterprise Data Pipelines with Raj Bains of Prophecy
Raj Bains grew up in India, North of Delhi, and comes from a family who, as he says, does "whatever is best to do" at the time. They moved around quite…
Code Story | Startup Podcast for CTOs, CEOs and Technical FoundersS7 Bonus: The Blueprint for a $1B Product Launch: Automating GTM Silos with Derek Osgood, Founder of Ignition
Derek Osgood comes from a family of entrepreneurs, and has always known he wanted to start something himself. Prior to that, he worked for other companies…
Code Story | Startup Podcast for CTOs, CEOs and Technical FoundersS7 Bonus: The Tipping Protocol: Normalizing Mobile Payments for Home Services with Justin Clegg, Founder & CEO of Allset
Justin Clegg grew up all around the world, living in countries like Puerto Rico, Mexico City and Brazil. He spent 2 years on mission in Africa, and 5 years in…
Code Story | Startup Podcast for CTOs, CEOs and Technical FoundersS7 E9: The Evolution of MLOps: Rebranding Grid.ai and Building Modular AI Platforms with William Falcon, CEO of Lightning AI
Will Falcon did not have a traditional path to tech. He is originally from South America, and moved to the US when he was a teenager. Later in life, he went…
Code Story | Startup Podcast for CTOs, CEOs and Technical FoundersS7 Bonus: From Post-Berlin Wall Business Architecture to Scaling Irish Tech Culture with Conor Carmody of Furthr Festival
Conor Carmody lives just outside of Dublin with his wife and has 3 lads - aka boys. Professionally, he worked in Eastern Europe around the time of the Berlin…
Code Story | Startup Podcast for CTOs, CEOs and Technical FoundersS7 Bonus: Why Correlation Lies: Engineering True GTM Accountability with Mark Stouse, Founder & CEO of Proof Analytics
Mark Stouse was a CCO and CMO in large companies like Honeywell Aerospace. He claims that he is not a data scientist, but can play one on TV. He got to a high…
Code Story | Startup Podcast for CTOs, CEOs and Technical FoundersS7 Bonus: No-Code Edits for Real Code: Solving the Developer Capacity Bottleneck with Jake Vacovec, Co-Founder of Flycode
Jake Vacovec started his career in sales, and eventually moved into the product world. He loves to cook, and finds it relaxing, and a good way to unwind from…
Code Story | Startup Podcast for CTOs, CEOs and Technical FoundersS7 E8: The Tech-Enabled Empire: Scaling a 3x Founder's Financial Engine with Waseem Daher, Co-Founder & CEO of Pilot
Waseem Daher had two immigrant parents from Lebanon. He was born in the states, after the migrated to the states in the 80's. With his relatives around him, he…
Code Story | Startup Podcast for CTOs, CEOs and Technical FoundersS7 Bonus: Shattering the Data Breadline: Building the Connected Spreadsheet Layer for dbt and Snowflake with Ryan Buick, Co-Founder of Canvas
Ryan Buick grew up in San Francisco - in the actual city itself. He went to school in Oregon, but quickly back to the area. He is a very proud owner of a COVID…
Code Story | Startup Podcast for CTOs, CEOs and Technical FoundersS7 Bonus: Bypassing Confusing Vendor Proposals: Building a Mint.com-Style Portal for Vertical Transportation Assets with Ashleigh Wilson of Auditmate
Ashleigh Wilson is a self proclaimed elevator baby, being raised in the elevator industry. She grew up with an interesting mix of entrepreneurial spirit, along…
Code Story | Startup Podcast for CTOs, CEOs and Technical FoundersS7 E7: The Cost of Code Smell: Quantifying and Conquering Technical Debt from Inside the IDE with Alexandre Omeyer, Co-Founder & CEO of Stepsize
Alex Omeyer is undercover French ,despite his thick British accent. He was born and raised in Paris, and though he studied business and management, he spent…
Code Story | Startup Podcast for CTOs, CEOs and Technical FoundersS7 Bonus: From Script to Screen: Deploying AI to Automate Hollywood's Pre-Production Bottleneck with Ruslan K, Co-Founder & CTO of Filmustage
Ruslan K has been doing software development for over 10 years. He's gone from mobile development to automation and AI most recently, working with neural…
Code Story | Startup Podcast for CTOs, CEOs and Technical FoundersS7 Bonus: Distributing the Most Valuable Content through WhatsApp, with Max Koziolek of Spectrm
Max Koziolek comes from a simple background. His single mother raised he and his twin brother, outside of Berlin, with no connection to technology. When he was…
Code Story | Startup Podcast for CTOs, CEOs and Technical FoundersS7 E6: Rethinking the MVP: Spending 2.5 Years in Stealth to Build a Maximum Viable Product with Jon Darbyshire, Founder of SmartSuite
Jon Darbyshire is joined at the hip with his wife, in life and in business. They have been doing business together for 22 years, along with having 2 older…
Code Story | Startup Podcast for CTOs, CEOs and Technical FoundersS7 Bonus: The Empathy Bot: Engineering Psychological Safety and Burnout Analytics in Slack with Andrew Zhou, Co-Founder & CTO of Kona
Andrew Zhou grew up in the Bay Area, which he claims was a great place to grow up in. However, he noticed that it was sort of in authentic - as in, no one…
Code Story | Startup Podcast for CTOs, CEOs and Technical FoundersS7 E5: The Real-Time Creative Studio: Engineering Collaborative Ad Infrastructure for Distributed Teams with Vicki Duben, Co-Founder & CEO of Viewst
Vicki Duben's background is actually in physics and applied mathematics. Prior to graduation, she was a professional tennis player, having played since she was…
Code Story | Startup Podcast for CTOs, CEOs and Technical FoundersS7 Bonus: Whats New with HarperDB - Jaxon Repp, Head of Product
Today's episode Guest: Jaxon Repp is the Head of Product at HarperDB. He has 25 years of experience in architecting, designing, and developing enterprise…
Code Story | Startup Podcast for CTOs, CEOs and Technical FoundersS7 Bonus: The Software Leadership Playbook: From Engineering Director to 25,000+ Tech Subscribers with Luca Rossi, Founder of Refactoring
Luca Rossi is based in Italy, and has lived there his whole life. He has studied computer science, while being a part time musician. He left his PhD program to…
Code Story | Startup Podcast for CTOs, CEOs and Technical FoundersS7 Bonus: Securing the Software Supply Chain: Fixing Open-Source Trust After Log4j with Dan Lorenc, Co-Founder & CEO of Chainguard
Dan Lorenc got into tech in a roundabout way. Most of his time in school was dedicated to the study of Mechanical Engineering, building in the world of atoms…
Code Story | Startup Podcast for CTOs, CEOs and Technical FoundersS7 E4: Building in a Crisis: Launching a Zero-Access Data Observability Engine with Yuliia Tkachova, Co-Founder & CEO of Masthead Data
Yuliia Tkachova grew up in the Ukraine, but lives in Canada now. She has a family with 2 kids, and a masters in statistics. And, she acknowledges that the war…
Code Story | Startup Podcast for CTOs, CEOs and Technical FoundersS7 Bonus: The Twilio for PDFs: Converting Messy Business Documents into Developer APIs with Josh Lewis, Co-Founder & CEO of Sensible
Josh Lewis was fascinated by computers in the late 80's / early 90's. In the early days, he was neighborhood tech support, fixing people's computers around the…
Code Story | Startup Podcast for CTOs, CEOs and Technical FoundersS7 Bonus: From NASA Supercomputers to a $47M Corporate Spend Ecosystem: Bridging Slack and Corporate Credit Cards with Andrew Hoag of Teampay
Andrew Hoag remembers a time before he started his own company where there were other things outside the company. What keeps him sane is spending time…
Code Story | Startup Podcast for CTOs, CEOs and Technical FoundersS7 E3: The Supplier Data Blueprint: Fixing the Fragmented Vendor Master and Scaling to Acquisition with Stephany LaPierre, Founder of TealBook
Stephany LaPierre is originally from Quebec, so English is her second language. She was a ski instructor in Whistler, and followed up going to university…
Code Story | Startup Podcast for CTOs, CEOs and Technical FoundersS7 Bonus: The Family Operating System: Engineering Zero-Trust Cloud Architecture for Life's Vital Data with Nat Robinson, Founder & CEO of Trustworthy
Nat Robinson is from New Zealand, and grew up there the first half of his life. He finds that growing up in a small island nation gives him a unique…
Code Story | Startup Podcast for CTOs, CEOs and Technical FoundersS7 Bonus: From Fractional CTO to Seed-Backed Cybersecurity Founder: Implementing Practical Searchable Encryption with Dan Draper of CipherStash
Dan Draper is from South Australia, specifically Adelaide, but his family now lives in Sydney. Interestingly, he does not drink Fosters beer (which is not…
Code Story | Startup Podcast for CTOs, CEOs and Technical FoundersS7 E2: From Learning to Code to 700+ Paying Customers: Scaling a Timeboxing Product via Twitter with Marie Ng of Llama Life
Marie Ng was born in Malaysia but grew up in Australia. She has lived and worked in London and New York City, so you could say she has been all over. At one…
Code Story | Startup Podcast for CTOs, CEOs and Technical FoundersS7 Bonus: The GitHub Integration Playbook: Breaking Down the Wall Between Devs and Executives with Aaron Upright, Co-Founder of Zenhub
Aaron Upright used to get a ton of energy staying up late and strategizing about his startup, but now that he is 8 years in, he gets the most energy from what…
Code Story | Startup Podcast for CTOs, CEOs and Technical FoundersS7 Bonus: Bypassing Data Brokers: Generating Real-Time Phantom Phone Numbers, Emails, and Credit Cards with Arjun Bhatnagar of Cloaked
Arjun Bhatnager has been coding since he was 10 years old, and in general, his family is full of entrepreneurs, running their own businesses. In fact, his…
Code Story | Startup Podcast for CTOs, CEOs and Technical FoundersS7 E1: Killing the Feature Factory: Rebuilding a Legacy Giant from Scratch with Ian Small, Former CEO of Evernote
Ian Small is a Canadian, and claims that is the most important thing about him. Tech started for him when he was 12 years old, when he got a bad grade on a…
Code Story | Startup Podcast for CTOs, CEOs and Technical FoundersSeason 7 Trailer
Hello listeners. Believe it or not, Season 6 has come to a close, and tomorrow, we are kicking off yet another Season of the Code Story podcast. With 6 seasons…