Code Story | Startup Podcast for CTOs, CEOs and Technical Founders

Latest Episodes:

S12 Bonus: The Death of the Black Box POS: Solving the Menu API Nightmare and Scaling Unified Commerce Across 2,000+ Locations with Niko Papademetriou, Co-Founder & EVP of Qu Jan 14, 2026

Show notes

Niko Papademetriou lives in Washington, DC, with his wife and son. He has had an interesting background professionally. He got into finance, and experienced all the downside that 2008 had to offer. Post all of that, he started a restaurant at the age of 26 with some folks, and quickly realized how difficult it was. After 4 years, he met some guys and wanted to start a new thing. Outside of tech, he and his wife spends a lot of time watching his son play hockey, and engaging with the team at the hockey rink.

Niko has observed the restaurant business change, moving towards many different ordering methods - mobile, web, in person, etc. At the end of whatever method, the order needed to land inside the black box of the POS system. He wanted to create the plumbing, better yet the ultimate system to connect it all.

This is the creation story of Qu.

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Terms and conditions: Equitybee executes private financing contracts (PFCs) allowing investors a certain claim to ESO upon liquidation event; Could limit your profits. Funding in not guaranteed. PFCs brokered by EquityBee Securities, member FINRA.

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S12 E1: The Blast Radius Nightmare: Shifting from Blind Static Terraform Plans to Real-Time Predictive Change Intelligence with Dylan Ratcliffe, Founder & CEO of Overmind Jan 13, 2026

Show notes

Dylan Ratcliffe lives in San Francisco (for less than a year), but grew up on a farm in the bush in Australia, riding motorbikes and playing video games. He fondly remembers the days whenever you could get a free version of Age of Empires from a cereal box. He was always into computers, and earned a scholarship to head into Melbourne for University. He left his first job as an auditor with KPMG to join a startup called Puppet. Outside of tech, he still rides motorbikes, and has a super small one now (it's actually meant for kids). He loves all food, but prefers Asian and Indian cuisine.

Dylan was deploying Puppet at a financial services company, and was pushing to get a win. When a late Friday afternoon deployment went haywire, he decided to leave his company and set out to build something to automatically discover dependencies on a network, to prevent deployment outages.

This is the creation story of Overmind.

Sponsors

Unblocked (https://getunblocked.com/codestory)
TECH Domains (https://get.tech/codestory)
Mezmo (https://mezmo.com/codestory)
Braingrid.ai (https://braingrid.link/code-story)
Alcor (https://alcor.com/podcast)
Equitybee (http://codestory.co/equitybee)
Terms and conditions: Equitybee executes private financing contracts (PFCs) allowing investors a certain claim to ESO upon liquidation event; Could limit your profits. Funding in not guaranteed. PFCs brokered by EquityBee Securities, member FINRA.

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Hosted by Noah Labhart | Technical Founder & Startup Mentor.

S11 Favorite: 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 Jan 06, 2026

Show notes

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 installation business, he decided that cards were finite and moved onto computers. He fell in love with the space, and the rest is history, filled with super computers, AI, distributed training, Redis and the lot. Outside of tech, he loves to take long hikes with his snowy husky.

Sam and his team built a prior solution, an agent to solve bugs for you. They ran into a litany of problems, but eventually figured out that there was a dire need for an authorization for the activities that agents wanted to do on your behalf. Fast forward, and they are working with Anthropic to define these auth protocols.

This is the creation story of Arcade.

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Vention
CodeCrafters helps you become a better engineer by building real-world, production-grade projects. Learn hands-on by creating your own Git, Redis, HTTP server, SQLite, or DNS server from scratch. Sign up for free today using this link and enjoy 40% off.
Full Scale
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Meilisearch

Links

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Hosted by Noah Labhart | Technical Founder & Startup Mentor.

S11 Favorite: The API Sprawl Cure: Moving Beyond GraphQL Federation to Composable, Type-Safe API Gateways for the Agentic Era with Jens Neuse, Founder of WunderGraph Dec 30, 2025

Show notes

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 process of surgery and healing. Eventually, he decided he wouldn't be doing carpentry, and got into sysadmin work. Once he got bored with this, he moved into startups, learned how to code, and starting digging into programming, API's and eventually - GraphQL federation. Outside of tech, he is married with 3 young kids. He loves to sit ski on the mountain - which is the coolest carbon fiber chair on a ski, where you steer with your knees and hips.

After chasing building a better Apollo, Jens and his team ran into a point where their prior product and company was doomed to go under. When they accepted this fact, they started to think about what people actually wanted - and started to dig into the federation of GraphQL.

This is the creation story of Wundergraph.

Sponsors

Incogni
NordProtect
Vention
CodeCrafters helps you become a better engineer by building real-world, production-grade projects. Learn hands-on by creating your own Git, Redis, HTTP server, SQLite, or DNS server from scratch. Sign up for free today using this link and enjoy 40% off.
Full Scale
Paddle.com
Sema Software
PropelAuth
Postman
Meilisearch

Links

Current Sponsors:

Checkout our Stacklist! https://stacks.codestory.co/

Check out our Patreon!

Hosted by Noah Labhart | Technical Founder & Startup Mentor.

S11 E30: The $20 Trillion Paper Trail: Why Contracts Are Financial Assets (Not Just Legal Documents) and How Multi-Agent AI Slashes Enterprise Procurement Waste with Brandon Card, Co-Founder & CEO of Terzo Dec 23, 2025

Show notes

Brandon Card has always been involved in sports. In High School, he was a 3 sport athlete and still plays today, along side working out, doing yoga and pilates. He's heavily interested in holistic healing and alternative medicine, mentioning a big interest in quantum frequency healing, using the sun and ocean to add voltage to the body. He has also started a foundation around mental health, as sadly, he lost his co-founder to suicide, and wishes to remove the stigma from the mental health conversation.

Brandon and his co-founder realized that all software platforms around contracts were directed towards lawyers - not towards finance. This was mind blowing, as negotiations are mostly finance driven, not based on the paragraphs of legal jargon. Brandon wanted to build something to serve this need.

This is the creation story of Terzo.

Sponsors

Incogni
NordProtect
Vention
CodeCrafters helps you become a better engineer by building real-world, production-grade projects. Learn hands-on by creating your own Git, Redis, HTTP server, SQLite, or DNS server from scratch. Sign up for free today using this link and enjoy 40% off.
Full Scale
Paddle.com
Sema Software
PropelAuth
Postman
Meilisearch

Links

Current Sponsors:

Checkout our Stacklist! https://stacks.codestory.co/

Check out our Patreon!

Hosted by Noah Labhart | Technical Founder & Startup Mentor.

S11 Bonus: The Myth of "Sales as an Art": Transitioning from Gut-Based Forecasts to Algorithmic CRM Forensics and Pipeline Cadence with Juan DeAngulo, Co-Founder of Inselligence Dec 18, 2025

Show notes

Juan DeAngulo was born and raised in South America - then eventually, came to the status in 2017 for college to play Tennis. He kept playing throughout college and into his 40's, at which point he switched to golf and never picked up a racket again. He's been married for 25 years, with 2 older kids - one in law school, and one studying software development. As a family, they enjoy comedy, which funny enough was an acquired taste for Juan. They also love being outdoors, anywhere they can get out and about.

At a prior company, Juan and his team created proprietary algorithms to intelligently predict and tie revenue. These models were based on tried and true processes. While Juan was obtaining an advanced degree at Harvard, his current venture was incubated around predictive revenue, and these algorithms.

This is the creation story of Inselligence.

Sponsors

Incogni
NordProtect
Vention
CodeCrafters helps you become a better engineer by building real-world, production-grade projects. Learn hands-on by creating your own Git, Redis, HTTP server, SQLite, or DNS server from scratch. Sign up for free today using this link and enjoy 40% off.
Full Scale
Paddle.com
Sema Software
PropelAuth
Postman
Meilisearch

Links

Current Sponsors:

Checkout our Stacklist! https://stacks.codestory.co/

Check out our Patreon!

Hosted by Noah Labhart | Technical Founder & Startup Mentor.

Developer Chats - Petr Petrenko Dec 17, 2025

Show notes

Today, we are continuing our series, entitled Developer Chats - hearing from the large scale system builders themselves.

In this episode, we are talking with Petr Petrenko, Senior PHP Backend Engineer. Petr will take us through his developer journey, in working on large scale backends, managing the tension between stability and innovation, and designing systems to interact with culturally different economies.

Questions

You’ve worked on large-scale backends that serve millions of users. At what point do systems start to outgrow the teams that built them?
At some point, every mature backend reaches a stage where rewriting is no longer realistic. How do you recognize when a system has crossed that line, and what’s the right way to handle it?
There’s always this tension between stability and innovation. How do you decide when a system needs refactoring versus when you just need to live with the technical debt?
Let’s talk about the human side of legacy systems — what have you learned about culture, documentation, and knowledge transfer that keeps old systems alive and reliable?
You’ve also built and maintained complex payment systems for global users. What’s something most engineers underestimate about cross-border transactions?
When you’re designing systems that deal with different currencies, laws, and tax regulations, how do you balance the technical with the ethical — for example, user privacy or data sovereignty?
For engineers listening who want to build something durable — not just fast — what advice would you give about writing code that will still make sense years from now?
One of your most impressive projects is a high-performance image-matching system you built yourself, capable of scanning tens of millions of images with sub-second results. Can you walk us through the moment you realized you needed to redesign the system — and what engineering choices made that level of performance possible?
You’ve also worked on billing systems and fraud mitigation at scale. Was there ever a moment when you had to choose between a technically “clean” solution and a solution that better protected users or the business? How did you make that call?

Sponsors

Incogni
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Vention
CodeCrafters helps you become a better engineer by building real-world, production-grade projects. Learn hands-on by creating your own Git, Redis, HTTP server, SQLite, or DNS server from scratch. Sign up for free today using this link and enjoy 40% off.
Full Scale
Paddle.com
Sema Software
PropelAuth
Postman
Meilisearch

Links

https://www.linkedin.com/in/petr-petrenko-006534150/

Current Sponsors:

Checkout our Stacklist! https://stacks.codestory.co/

Check out our Patreon!

Hosted by Noah Labhart | Technical Founder & Startup Mentor.

S11 E29: The 60-Second Behavioral Blueprint: Why "Great-on-Paper" Candidates Fail and How Voice AI Biomarkers Predict Real-World Team Chemistry with Sarah Lucena, Founder & CEO of Mappa Dec 16, 2025

Show notes

Sarah Lucena lives in San Francisco, and starts here day at 4:30 am to lead her LATAM team. She's originally from Brazil, born and raised on the north east side of the country. She studied in South Paulo, and spent 5 years in Uruguay, which was a huge influence in her career today. Outside of tech, she is a big cat lover, having 2 at her home. When it comes to Brazil, she recommends people visiting Rio, which condenses everything good about Brazil into one city.

In the past, Sarah felt empty at her job. In other words, she was not happy with the legacy she was leaving. She built her team many times over, but was not able to create a team with the chemistry she was looking for. And the solutions for recruiting were supremely focused on the wrong signals for these types of connections.

This is the creation story of Mappa.

Sponsors

Incogni
NordProtect
Vention
CodeCrafters helps you become a better engineer by building real-world, production-grade projects. Learn hands-on by creating your own Git, Redis, HTTP server, SQLite, or DNS server from scratch. Sign up for free today using this link and enjoy 40% off.
Full Scale
Paddle.com
Sema Software
PropelAuth
Postman
Meilisearch

Links

Current Sponsors:

Checkout our Stacklist! https://stacks.codestory.co/

Check out our Patreon!

Hosted by Noah Labhart | Technical Founder & Startup Mentor.

S11 Bonus: Headless Observability: Why Dashboards Are Disappearing and How "Context Engineering" Achieves a 90% Drop in AI SRE Costs with Tucker Callaway, CEO of Mezmo Dec 11, 2025

Show notes

Tucker Calloway grew up in Alamo, California, in the Easy Bay Area. And has returned to that area to raise his family - 25-30 minutes outside of the San Francisco area. He studied computer science at Cal, but eventually moved into sales engineering - and then sales. But outside of tech, he is married with 2 kids - one in college, and one in the latter years of high school. There is lots of change going on his family's life right now, but Tucker finds time to do woodworking and build his own cabinets.

Ten years ago, a couple of co-founders built a solution to make log management easier for developers. Tucker joined that company in the past, and observed the dynamics of the industry and the company. They all decided that to take the business of the next level, they needed to change the physics of observability.

This is the creation story of Mezmo.

Sponsors

Incogni
NordProtect
Vention
CodeCrafters helps you become a better engineer by building real-world, production-grade projects. Learn hands-on by creating your own Git, Redis, HTTP server, SQLite, or DNS server from scratch. Sign up for free today using this link and enjoy 40% off.
Full Scale
Paddle.com
Sema Software
PropelAuth
Postman
Meilisearch

Links

Current Sponsors:

Checkout our Stacklist! https://stacks.codestory.co/

Check out our Patreon!

Hosted by Noah Labhart | Technical Founder & Startup Mentor.

S11 E28: The Temporal Correctness Crisis: Why Static RAG Context Leads to Broken AI Agent Actions and How to Engine-Unify Real-Time Streaming Data with Hojjat Jafarpour, Founder & CEO of DeltaStream Dec 09, 2025

Show notes

Hojjat Jafarpour lives with his family in California. He got his PhD in databases and data streaming, back when the landscape was different and data streaming wasn't "cool" yet. He was an early member at Confluent, but also spent time at Quantcast, Informatica, and NEC Labs. Outside of tech, he has a family with young kids. He enjoys traveling, and can't wait until the kids are old enough to take on big trips.

Hojjat joined Confluent in their early days. He was on a project that built out kSQL, which was a key cornerstone of Confluent. As these were the early days of stream processing, he started to think about ways to make it easier - to make this sort of tech available without all the infrastructure.

This is the creation story of DeltaStream.

Sponsors

Incogni
NordProtect
Vention
CodeCrafters helps you become a better engineer by building real-world, production-grade projects. Learn hands-on by creating your own Git, Redis, HTTP server, SQLite, or DNS server from scratch. Sign up for free today using this link and enjoy 40% off.
Full Scale
Paddle.com
Sema Software
PropelAuth
Postman
Meilisearch

Links

Current Sponsors:

Checkout our Stacklist! https://stacks.codestory.co/

Check out our Patreon!

Hosted by Noah Labhart | Technical Founder & Startup Mentor.