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

Latest Episodes:

S11 Bonus: The Cloud Tax & The 10,000 JVM Milestone: Why Performance Optimization is the Only Way to Scale Enterprise AI Without Blowing Your Budget with Simon Ritter, Deputy CTO of Azul Sep 11, 2025

Show notes

Simon Ritter has been in the IT industry for 40 years. He went from university to work on Unix in the early days, employed by AT&T and programming in the C language. In 1996, he switched gears to join Sun Microsystems, programming in Java. Years later, after the Oracle transition, he started to dig into what might be next. Outside of tech, he is married with an older son. He is a complete petro-head - meaning, he is really into cars. In fact, in the last few years, he and his son re-built a classic mini from the ground up.

While Simon was at Oracle, he started to crave a different opportunity, but still in the Java space. He stumbled upon a company digging into powering the Java platform, to make it the most secure, efficient and trusted platform on the planet - and he, and the company, found a great fit.

This is Simon's creation story at Azul.

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S11 E16: The Vanity Metric Deception: Why Counting Lines of Code Fails the Cursor Era and How to Calculate True "Weave Hours" with Adam Cohen, Co-Founder & CEO of Weave Sep 09, 2025

Show notes

Adam Cohen grew up in Toronto, in North York. He showed early signs of entrepreneurship by putting his lemonade stand on a wagon, and taking it door to door - or hustling his friends to buy souvenirs on a school field trip. His Dad was in VC, and was a big influence on his life, pushing him to succeed. Outside of professional life, he is big into sports, specifically basketball. In the past, he loved playing fantasy sports, which also influence how he built his business ventures.

Adam and his team went through several iterations of AI tooling - summarizing AI, integrating git and JIRA, etc. While they were doing this, they realized that the best way to make a difference, was to first focus on the data itself.

This is the creation story of Weave.

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Hosted by Noah Labhart | Technical Founder & Startup Mentor.

S11 Bonus: The Autonomous Railroad Revolution: Replacing Time-Consuming Visual Audits with Computer Vision Wayside Tracks at 120 km/h via KinetiX with Alan Fisher, Group VP at Wabtec Corporation Sep 04, 2025

Show notes

Alan Fisher started his career as a computer programmer. Early on, he was hired by the 1st or 2nd largest freight railroad in the world, Union Pacific. He describes their technology group as having a punk rock spirit, leaning towards building their own solutions over buying them, which he found great value in. Outside of tech, he has been married for 30 years, and has 3 kids. He is an avid runner, landing someplace between a marathon runner and a mile in the morning kinda guy. He also loves to read the classics, drawing inspiration from them, along with restoring old homes.

Given his rich history in the rail industry, Alan has led the charge in growth, innovation, and most recently, logistics, analytics, and digital mine. As his company started to look to the future in how to solve the industry's most pressing problems, his team executed the acquisition of a portfolio of companies and products - driving by automated inspection.

This is a creation story of KinetiX at Wabtec Corporation.

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Building Identity Orchestration for AI Agents with Granville Schmidt of Strata Sep 03, 2025

Show notes

We are bringing you a special episode, as our friends at Strata return to the podcast. You might remember our interview from Season 8 with Eric Olden, Co-founder & CEO of the company. Eric took us through the creation story of the company. Today, we will be talking with Granville Schmidt, Chief Architect at Strata, who has been instrumental in architecting and building identity orchestration for AI agents from the ground up. In our chat, we are going to be discussing how the enterprises need to take advantage of identify for agents, and can do so seamlessly, no matter their level of tech debt, disconnection, or complex migration path.

Questions

Let's break down Identity Orchestration for our audience. Can you explain what it is and walk us through a real customer scenario where it made a huge difference
Enterprises have accumulated decades of identity tech debt. What are the main problems identity orchestration solves for companies trying to modernize?
I noticed you work with customers in what you call DDIL environments - disconnected, disrupted, intermittent, and limited bandwidth scenarios. Can you help us understand what these environments look like in practice and why identity becomes such a critical challenge there?
You've pioneered Identity Orchestration for AI Agents. What was the moment when you realized AI agents needed a fundamentally different approach to identity management?
Imagine a company with 1,000 employees but 50,000 AI agents running autonomously. How does your platform handle identity for all these agents differently than traditional systems?

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S11 E15: Passing Telco Infrastructure Costs to Advertisers and Scaling an All-IP Wireless Carrier to 300M+ Downloads with Derek Ting, Co-Founder & CEO of TextNow Sep 02, 2025

Show notes

Derek Ting grew up in Canada-land, enjoying all the things of the area but especially hockey. He mentioned he has a bit of ADD, which made it hard for him to make it through a chapter in school. Nowadays, he has 2 kids. His oldest son plays hockey, and he and his family enjoys rooting on the Toronto Maple Leafs. When asked about food, he claimed to be one of lives to eat, as he loves food. In fact, the more exotic food the better - but not as far as insects or something.

When Derek figured out that carriers wanted to charge for texting, on top of the fees he was already paying for his phone and associated services. He found this atrocious, and he wanted to figure out a way to text for free - and eventually, all phone service.

This is the creation story of TextNow.

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S11 Bonus: The 77% Token Tax: Why Fixed-Token Chunking is Poisoning Your Enterprise RAG Pipelines and How to Fix the Ingestion Layer with Dr. Alex Kihm, Founder & CEO of POMA AI Aug 28, 2025

Show notes

Alex Kihm just turned 40, and has been into computers for 36 years. He was given his first hand me down computer at the age of 4 by his parents, and also grew up with lego bricks and building things. He is an engineer by training, but eventually switched to econometrics on the big data side. Outside of his professional life, he is married and describes himself as water affectionate. He enjoys swimming, diving - and free diving. In fact, he studied diving during his semester abroad. His free diving is mainly a hobby, but he has deep respect for the professional free divers of the world.

At his original startup, Alex started to dive into LLMs and immediately ran into RAG (Retrieval Augmented Generation). When he observed the wrong information being returned, along with a ton of resource consumption in the process - IE cost - he set out to solve the problem, and figured out the solution was in the chunks.

This is the creation story of POMA AI.

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What Founders Need to Know - with Dan Eyman of Meld Valuation Aug 27, 2025

Show notes

Today, I'm talking with Dan Eyman, the Managing Director at Meld Valuation, specializing in independent, audit ready valuations for VC backed startups and VC firms. He is an expert in the valuation of complex instruments such as convertible debt and SAFEs. Dan is going to illuminate the common mistakes of founders, how valuations differ, and what founders should understand about dilution and how fundraising affects their cap table.

Questions

What are the most common mistakes you see founders make when it comes to valuations or equity structuring?
Can you break down how SAFEs and convertible debt actually work—and how do they impact ownership over time?
At what point should a startup bring in a valuation firm, and what are the risks of waiting too long?
How do 409A and ASC 820 valuations differ, and why do they matter for venture-backed companies?
What should founders understand about dilution and how fundraising rounds affect their cap table long-term?
What are your general observations around venture capital investing, and the market for investment right now?
You’ve worked with thousands of startups—what separates those who scale successfully from those who stall?

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S11 E14: Dismantling the "Data Team Bottleneck" with Watsonx-Powered Generative Business Intelligence (GenBI) with Avi Perez, Co-Founder & CTO of Pyramid Analytics Aug 26, 2025

Show notes

Avi Perez has been in the data and analytics space for more than 25 years. He began his career in banking and finance in Australia, but quickly grew tired of crunching numbers for the big wigs, wanting to find a better way to calculate this information. Outside of tech, he enjoys a wide array of music, from classical to modern trance. He's a big science fiction nut, enjoying shows like Aliens and the Matrix, and cooks up some exquisite cuisine on occasion.

Within his prior startup, Avi and his co-founders built out a way to make intelligent decisions for their business using data. After they exited the business, they wanted to continue their data stint, but in particular, commercialize the analytics solution they built.

This is the creation story of Pyramid Analytics.

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S11 Bonus: The On-Call Burnout Cure: Moving Past Noise-Heavy Dashboards to Autonomous Agentic SRE Triage with Goutham "Gou" Rao, Co-Founder & CEO of NeuBird Aug 21, 2025

Show notes

Goutham Rao grew up in Brooklyn, a nerd all his life. Back in the day, his Dad bought him a Commodore 64, from which he started to learn to write code in BASIC. Eventually, he attended the University of Pennsylvania to get his Masters in Computer Science. Outside of tech, he is married with 2 kids. He likes to travel, and likes to run. He used to compete in half marathons, but nowadays, he does his running as more of a mental exercise.

Goutham saw that IT telemetry logs have a lot of complexity within their data. Fast forward to today, he and his co-founders noticed the way that LLMs were processing data. They thought they could build something to interpret this data, and "clone" themselves to create something that mimics issue triage.

This is the creation story of Neubird.

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S11 E13: From Frictionless SaaS Auth to Eliminating the 1:1 Drone Pilot Bottleneck at the Tactical Edge with Matt Hamann, Co-Founder & CTO of Rownd Aug 19, 2025

Show notes

Matt Hamann knew he was going to be in tech way back in his younger days. His Dad worked for IBM, so there were always fun things to talk about and play with. He got his first family computer when he was 4 years old, and started programming BASIC when he was 8. Eventually, they got dialup through AOL - and he took off building websites with PHP & MySQL. Outside of tech, he is married with 3 kids. He loves to travel and spend time with his family. He also plays several instruments, including the piano and pipe organ, and enjoys tinkering with smart home devices.

Right around the time of the pandemic, Matt and his co-founder were pitching a new company idea in Y Combinator, around data privacy. After receiving the feedback that there wasn't a big market for the original idea, they started to jam on ideas on how to pivot - and quickly landed on how cool it would be to have password-less authentication.

This is the creation story of Rownd.

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Hosted by Noah Labhart | Technical Founder & Startup Mentor.