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

Latest Episodes:

S10 Bonus: The High-Concurrency Crisis: Why Page Caching Fails Modern Membership Sites and Crushing the WordPress "Success Wall" with Wes Tatters, Managing Director of Rapyd Cloud Jan 20, 2025

Show notes

Wes Tatters has had a crazy, diverse career history. He is been in IT for around 40 years, and started in the days before the internet. He has had two paths - multimedia and information technology, of which both merged early in his career. He has been writing books since the early days of the internet. But outside of tech, he is married with kids, and in their downtime, they enjoy being together and sharing the world with one another.

Ten years ago, Wes started in on the Wordpress space. He immediately saw that most experiences utilized shared hosting, and he also had customers wanting to build community environments. The problem was most hosting providers didn't perform well enough to support the components needed for these types of sites.

This is the creation story of Rapyd Cloud.

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S10 Bonus: The Data-Driven GTM Engine: Transitioning from Traditional Sales to Product-Led Growth and Agentic Analytics with Thomas Hansen, President of Amplitude Jan 16, 2025

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Thomas Hansen was born and raised in Denmark. He's also lived in South Africa, Thailand, Turkey and then Seattle. He is married to his wife Ingrid, with 3 older kids. His real passion is wind surfing, which he started when he was 14 years old. He even engaged in the support at the semi professional level as a teenager. His favorite spot is in Maui, which includes all the wind surfing options you could want. He also spends an hour in the gym every morning to start the day with endorphins.

Thomas was introduced to his current venture through an early investor in the company. He met with the co-founder, Spenser, and sparks flew. There was a great fit and chemistry between them, and he was invited on board to push the company forward to new heights.

This is Thomas's creation story at Amplitude.

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Hosted by Noah Labhart | Technical Founder & Startup Mentor.

S10 Bonus: Moving Beyond Scratch-Built Apps and Using AI to Assemble Enterprise Software from Pre-Validated Modules with Anand Kulkarni, Founder & CEO of Crowdbotics Jan 15, 2025

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Anand Kulkarni started his career in the dark ages of AI, as a Computer Science researcher at UC Berkeley. He published papers on human intelligence inside of software products, and eventually founded LeadGenius, which was AI for sales and was supported by Andreessen Horowitz and Sam Altman. Outside of tech, he is married with 2 kids, and used to be an avid rock climber. He also loves to eat tofu, and has been picking up a lot more science fiction lately.

Though the AI space is crowded today, Anand and his team have been working in the space since 2016. They observed the need to modernize legacy software and digitally transform organizations. They wanted to utilize an intelligent approach to this, and started down the path of building a large dataset, building software to learn from it, and use that to modernize software.

This is the creation story of Crowdbotics.

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Hosted by Noah Labhart | Technical Founder & Startup Mentor.

S10 E15: Merging Code-First End-to-End Testing with Modern Synthetics and Agentic Root-Cause Analysis with Hannes Lenke, Co-Founder & CEO of Checkly Jan 14, 2025

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Hannes Lenke was born in East Germany. He started tinkering with computers at an early age, and became interested in making games at the age of 10. Once the browsers came out, he quickly dove into the world of web development. He also has a background in trading stocks, which he started when he was 14, along with software development consulting for enterprise. Outside of tech, he's married with 2 daughters. He lives in a small town close to Berlin, and enjoys running, rowing, and cooking out on his grill.

In 2010, Hannes founded a startup centered around testing. Post exit, he noticed that more and more businesses were using end to end testing... AND, the world was changing toward devops and observability. He decided that a new tool needed to be made along the lines of synthetic monitoring.

This is the creation story of Checkly.

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Hosted by Noah Labhart | Technical Founder & Startup Mentor.

S10 Favorite: The Open-Source LaunchDarkly Killer: Engineering Privacy-First Edge Evaluation with Egil Østhus, Co-Founder & CEO of Unleash Jan 07, 2025

Show notes

Egil Østhus is based out of Norway - which obviously means he loves skiing. But outside of this, he loves to run outdoors, through the woods and on the streets. He has not done a full marathon yet, but dreams of doing the New York marathon someday. He's a family man, married, with 2 boys - none of which like to run with him, but they all enjoy being active and hiking.

In a past role, Egil's co-founder (and brother, FYI) was looking for a tool that would help him release code into the wild, in a rapid - yet safe - manner. He couldn't find anything to meet his high standards - so he built his own. When the open source version started to get a lot of attention, Egil joined his brother to bring the solution to the enterprise.

This is the creation story of Unleash.

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Hosted by Noah Labhart | Technical Founder & Startup Mentor.

S10 Favorite: Streaming the Paycheck: Building Real-Time Earned Wage Access with Matt Pierce of Immediate Dec 31, 2024

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Matt Pierce has been a tech guy for his entire 17 year career. Coming out of grad school, he started out in healthcare tech for a decade or so. Eventually, he started down the path of being an entrepreneur. He is married with 3 daughters - 2 in third grade and one that is a 2 year old. He mentioned the entrepreneurial dilemma of picking 3 of the 5 life choices - family, business, sleep, exercise and friendships - and notes that his three are family, business, and sleep.

After spending nights and weekends burning the midnight oil on a healthcare tech solution, Matt sat down with a prospective client and did the best pitch ever. The client's feedback was that it didn't solve her real problem which was turnover, which boiled down to money. After chatting with the client and a mentor, Matt uncovered the best potential solution to financial stress - on demand pay.

This is the creation story of Immediate.

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Hosted by Noah Labhart | Technical Founder & Startup Mentor.

S10 Favorite: From Plaid to a $1B Unicorn: Killing the Password with Reed McGinley-Stempel of Stytch Dec 24, 2024

Show notes

Reed McGinley-Stempel grew up in Las Vegas, but went to school on the East Coast. Frankly, he didn't know what he wanted to do and "stumbled" into management consulting. When I dug into how someone stumbles into this profession, he mentioned that early on he got some sage advice from his older brother about not rushing to law school because... being a lawyer isn't that fun. So, he followed some friends to Bain & Company.

The more projects he was involved in, the more he got interested in technology. Candidly, one of his motivations for going in tech was the fact that his was moving out to San Francisco to support his wife through law school at Stanford. He considered continuing to do consulting with Bain, but decided tech was the best route and eventually, joined Plaid. Outside of his professional career, he is into the outdoors, loving hiking and taking his very active dog outside. He mentions that living in San Francisco makes the outdoors super accessible.

Reed and his Co-founder both came from Plaid, and worked on the adaptive authentication team. There, they explored how to secure bank authentication to maintain security, but also do it in such a way that reduced friction and created an amazing experience. They found that the biggest problem to be solved was the combination of security issues with passwords, and the low conversion rate of sign up / sign in forms requiring passwords. They wanted to fix this.

This is the creation story of Stytch .

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Hosted by Noah Labhart | Technical Founder & Startup Mentor.

S10 Bonus: The Value Pricing Revolution: Overthrowing the Hourly Hamster Wheel and Maximizing Profits for Solo Consultants with Jonathan Stark, Author of "Hourly Billing Is Nuts" Dec 19, 2024

Show notes

Jonathan Stark is based in Providence, Rhode Island. He attended the Berkeley College or Music, with a dual major in song writing. He ended up going back to computers to make ends meet while he was gigging - and he figured out he really enjoyed watching people use the software he built. Outside of tech and professional life, he's married with 2 kids and 2 dogs. He is an avid martial artist, as are his kids, and got his 2nd degree black belt at age 53.

At his prior company, Jonathan was leading teams to build software. He wanted to hire senior engineers, but was told junior engineers would better fit the budget. He couldn't figure out why, but then it dawned on him - hourly billing a junior created more margin. He wanted to pivot away from hourly billing as a company and went solo to figure out how to do this. Once he did, he never looked back.

This is the creation story of Jonathan Stark and Ditching Hourly.

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Hosted by Noah Labhart | Technical Founder & Startup Mentor.

S10 E14: The Empathetic Engineering Culture: Scaling High-Performance Tech Teams and Mitigating Security Risks Without Dev Burnout with Eric Müller, VP of Engineering & CISO at Presence Dec 17, 2024

Show notes

Eric Müller lives in San Francisco, and explored many different paths before landing in tech. He looked into architecture, photography, but ultimately, he settled into the creativity, building and planning aspects of building software. Outside of tech, he's married with one kid, and a great tradeoff with his wife - he does all the cooking, while she does the cleaning. He still loves photography, and takes pictures regularly with his Olympus OM-1.

Eleven years ago, Eric joined his current venture as a consultant, taking on projects and delivering value. He was brought on board 6-7 months later, and started down the path where he would lead the engineering and security arms of your partner in creating digital products.

This is Eric's creation story at Presence.

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Hosted by Noah Labhart | Technical Founder & Startup Mentor.

S10 Bonus: Co-Sourcing Evolution: Moving Beyond Traditional Outsourcing to Build Fully Integrated, High-Velocity Engineering Squads with Andrey Kudievskiy, Founder & CEO of Distillery Dec 12, 2024

Show notes

Andrey Kudievskiy has always been fascinated by technology, and when asked about himself, he identifies as an entrepreneur. He has been a software engineer, database developer, administrator and then jumped accidentally into management. Outside of his professional life, he is marred with two daughters. He enjoys running long distance. He has officially run 5 marathons, and unofficially, he has joined many more along the way.

Right after he graduated from University, Andrey saw a fantastic level of talent in developing countries. At the same time, he noticed the amount of profitable opportunity in the United States - and decided to build a business that joined the two.

This is the creation story of Distillery.

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Current Sponsors:

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

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Hosted by Noah Labhart | Technical Founder & Startup Mentor.