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

Latest Episodes:

S9 E31: The Dynamic Configuration Era: Overthrowing Feature Flag Tech Debt and Replicating FAANG-Class Release Agility with Konrad Niemiec, Founder of Lekko Jul 11, 2024

Show notes

Konrad Niemiec lives in San Francisco. He is very close to his family, of which his parents are polish immigrants. He started coding when he was 11, while working for his Dad. His core values are curiosity and community, which drives a lot of what he does outside of tech. He likes to learn things, and his current hobby set includes surfing and spike ball, of which he is working on perfecting his spin serve.

Konrad worked at Uber, on the self driving team. After a few years, he wanted to be less of a cog in the machine and joined a small startup. He introduced a feature flagging platform, and realized how quickly configuration bloat appeared on the platform. He also realized how dynamic configuration could take the platform beyond the limits of feature flags.

This is the creation story of Lekko.

Sponsors

Links

Current Sponsors:

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

Hosted by Noah Labhart | Technical Founder & Startup Mentor.

Our Sponsors:
* Check out Granola and use my code granola.ai/CODESTORY for a great deal: https://granola.ai
* Check out Perplexity and use my code CODESTORY for a great deal: https://www.perplexity.ai
Advertising Inquiries: https://redcircle.com/brands
Privacy & Opt-Out: https://redcircle.com/privacy

S9 Bonus: Overthrowing DM Spam and Engineering Frictionless, Real-Time Paid Audio Consulting with Jason R. Hill, Founder of Owwll Jul 05, 2024

Show notes

Jason Hill was born and raised in New York, and post college, went back to New York and joined the financial services - though, he was always into technology. Eventually, he moved to South Florida because every time he was in New York, he couldn't wait to leave. He enjoys playing poker, pickleball, and spending time with his two kids.

Jason has been a podcaster for many years, interviewing founders and creators of new startup and tech solutions. When COVID hit, he was struck with how difficult it was to connect with individuals via audio call. He validated an idea he had, and combining his ambition and a little bit of boredom, he got a crew building a solution.

This is the creation story of Owwlll App.

Sponsors

Links

Current Sponsors:

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

Hosted by Noah Labhart | Technical Founder & Startup Mentor.

S9 E30: The Infrastructure-as-Code Rebellion: Overthrowing Terraform Blockades and Launching Figma-Style DevOps Models with Adam Jacob, Creator of Chef and Founder & CEO of System Initiative Jun 25, 2024

Show notes

Adam Jacob grew up in Vancouver, but now lives North of San Francisco. He's married with a teenage daughter, and grew up in the era of the internet that was bulletin based. He likes music, specifically heavy metal. He was raised on 80's hair metal, but also enjoys modern and Swedish metal, of which your host is very familiar. He also loves cats, and at one point, had a bengal, which is a cross between a tiger and a domestic cat.

Previously, Adam was the creator of Chef, and has spent many years building a successful platform, extending DevOops value with automated security and compliance. He and his now cofounder reached the limits of what could be achieved using conventional approaches in the space - and decided build a new tool, to enable engineers to tackle complex infra and app management without compromising control.

This is the creation story of System Initiative.

Sponsors

Links

Current Sponsors:

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

Hosted by Noah Labhart | Technical Founder & Startup Mentor.

S9 Bonus: Implementing Automated Subtitle Alignments, Cross-Lingual Vocal Emotion Synthesis, and Cloud-Native Collaborative Editing Suites with Berkay Atatop, Co-Founder & CEO of Maestra Jun 20, 2024

Show notes

Berkay Atatop is originally from Turkey, but now lives in Germany. He loves to travel, and living in Germany allows him to be close to family, but enable him to live a nomadic life. He split his college time in Turkey and America, and while he was stateside, he discovered hackathons - which is the origin spot for his current venture. Outside of tech, he played water polo for 10 years, and enjoys playing the guitar. He finds inspiration in bands like Pearl Jam, who is coming to Europe soon, which Berkay is excited about.

After getting into hackathons, Berkay and his co-founder built a prototype of their current company solution - an automatic transcription solution for voiceovers. Once they graduated, they decided to start a company and move into subtitles and beyond.

This is the creation story of Maestra.

Sponsors

Links

Current Sponsors:

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

Hosted by Noah Labhart | Technical Founder & Startup Mentor.

S9 E29: Overthrowing Shelf-Ware IGA and Engineering Engineering-Led Least-Privilege Frameworks with Umaimah Khan, Co-Founder & CEO of Opal Security Jun 18, 2024

Show notes

Umaimah Khan grew up in San Diego, but now lives in the Bay Area. A fun fact about her - she was home schooled until college, and growing up, loved puzzles and math. She planned to be a math professor until she eventually got into startups and tech. She is a curious person, with many hobbies and interests. In fact, she loves to cook and was a chef at two different Michelin star restaurants. She also likes to garden, growing food and also interesting plants.

In the past, UK found herself drawn towards real world problems in real time. What she found herself noticing was that access management was incredibly messy - and that people weren't willing to look behind the curtain to fix the problem. After she noticed that this problem kept surfacing , and decided to solve it.

This is the creation story of Opal Security.

Sponsors

Links

Current Sponsors:

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

Hosted by Noah Labhart | Technical Founder & Startup Mentor.

S9 E28: Overthrowing Paper Receipts, Crushing Margin Bleed, and Building the "Concur for Construction" with David Cauthron, Co-Founder & CTO of Outpave Jun 11, 2024

Show notes

David Cauthron grew up in Dallas, TX and attended UTD for undergrad. Post that, he spent 22 years at Texas Instruments - who makes a whole lot more than calculators - serving in numerous roles in IT, the latter being e-commerce. Outside of tech, he is married with 2 kids, and really enjoys spending time with his family - going to Disney, biking and running. In addition to this, he plays Minecraft with the kids, and attending gymnastics meets and Boy Scout campouts.

David was contacted by his current founder and friend, who was going through an intra-prenuership program at SAP. After winning the program, but having the program shut down, he asked David if he was available to start a company and create the Concur for small to medium businesses.

This is the creation story of Outpave.

Sponsors

Links

Current Sponsors:

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

Hosted by Noah Labhart | Technical Founder & Startup Mentor.

S9 Bonus: Riding the 36K-Star Black Swan: How an Impromptu Open-Source Fork Saved the DevOps Ecosystem from Proprietary Lock-In with Omry Hay, Co-founder & CTO of env0 Jun 06, 2024

Show notes

Omry Hay is 41 years old, married, with 3 young kids. He has lived his whole life in Israel. Unlike many founders in Israel tech, he did not serve his military service in a technology group, but as a commanding officer in the infantry. Outside of tech, he is passionate about all things sports, and loves to follow Liverpool FC. Mostly, he enjoys chilling out, catching a movie or listening to music.

Omry and his cofounder used to work together at a prior big company in Israel. They encountered problems scaling environments efficiently and fast. Back then though - there was no cloud, it was just getting started. When they started building something internally to solve this, they encountered infrastructure as a code - and the game changed.

This is the creation story env0.

Sponsors

Links

Current Sponsors:

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

Hosted by Noah Labhart | Technical Founder & Startup Mentor.

S9 E27: The Zero-Sampling Observability Shift: Bypassing Splunk Cost Traps and Archiving 100% of Event Data with Neil Jagdish Patel, Co-Founder & CEO of Axiom Jun 04, 2024

Show notes

Neil Patel has always been a hacker - electronics boards, radios, etc. - being interested in how things work, mechanically or digitally. He learned hard work at his Father's convenience store, while also reading every computer magazine on the rack. He is a pharmacologist by study, but landed in tech cause he is passionate about it. Outside of tech, he loves architecture and design. He also loves to read, in particular sci fi, and enjoys eating Gujarati food, which is purely vegetarian food with tons of flavors.

Prior to 2020, Neil and his team was attempting to build tooling around understanding data around events. After a while, they realized that no matter what was done on top of an event store, you couldn't realize value without storing all events. So they pivoted, and focused on fixing the data store problem first.

This is the creation story of Axiom.

Sponsors

Links

Current Sponsors:

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

Hosted by Noah Labhart | Technical Founder & Startup Mentor.

S9 E26: The Generative AI Attack Surface: Bypassing Prompt Injections, Securing LLM Data Flows, and Locking Down the API Layer with Sanjay Nagaraj, Co-Founder & CTO of Traceable AI May 30, 2024

Show notes

Sanjay Nagaraj started his journey in India, where he was born and raised. He earliest influences started at home, as his father taught him honesty and integrity and his mother heavily influenced his growth as an individual. Though he spends most of his time in tech, anytime outside of work is dedicated to time with family, where he gets to see the world through his wife and kids - along with fueling his passion for singing and following his favorite sports team.

For Sanjay, one thing that was clear to him was that application builders exposing APIs, you are responsible for making sure those API's are secure. Prior to his current venture, he and his co-founder built AppDynamics, and they saw the growth of API's first hand. As such, businesses were looking for products to help understand API's and protect them - in real time.

This is the creation story of Traceable.

Sponsors

Links

Current Sponsors:

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

Hosted by Noah Labhart | Technical Founder & Startup Mentor.

S9 Bonus: From 13 Years of Bootstrapping to Defying the Tech Winter: Stripping Away the Flat 2.9% Fee Monopoly by Owning the Full Payment Stack With Nic Beique of Helcim May 23, 2024

Show notes

Nic Beique was born in Odessa, Texas, but moved when he was very young to Montreal. Later in his teens, he moved to Alberta, which he describes as the "Denver of Canada". He loves his work, and spends most of his time thinking about how to expand his new venture - but outside of this, he lives in a beautiful city, with tons of hiking, skiing and snowboarding. He also enjoys a lego set here and there, keeping close to his building roots.

Nic started his first payments business a decade ago, which lived under the shadow of the bank. After many years of negotiation, he convinced the powers that be to let his company become its own payment processor. And after 3 years, he built a giant MVP to build the Square for grown-ups

This is the creation story of Helcim.

Sponsors

Links

Current Sponsors:

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

Hosted by Noah Labhart | Technical Founder & Startup Mentor.