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

Latest Episodes:

S13 Bonus: Dynamic Observability: Eliminating Telemetry Waste at Scale with Peter Morelli, Co-Founder & CEO of Bitdrift Sep 23, 2026

Show notes

Peter Morelli was born and raised in San Francisco, one of the few natives of the area. He was front and center, watching the tech scene explode in front of him (and also blow up). He's lived all over - like New York, San Diego, Texas, London - but always ends up returning to the Bay Area. Outside of tech, he is married with 3 kids - one in college, and the other 2 in high school. He is a foodie, and loves cooking, enjoying the communal, connective aspect of having a meal with his family and friends.

Peter spent many years at Lyft, where he and his team became frustrated by traditional observability tools and how they waste money storing unused data. They started to building a solution based on dynamic, real time control paired with local, on-device telemetry storage. Once they realized their breakthrough, they spun off the solution into its own company.

This is the creation story of Bitdrift.

Links

https://bitdrift.io/

https://www.linkedin.com/in/peterfmorelli/

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Hosted by Noah Labhart | Technical Founder & Startup Mentor.

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S13 E5: The Dynamic Compute Revolution: Eliminating Cache Invalidation with Julien Verlaguet, Founder & CEO of SkipLabs Sep 22, 2026

Show notes

Julien Verlaguet is a self proclaimed "French guy", growing up in south of France. He studied in Paris, and moved to the US when he was 27, spending 10 years in the Bay Are and 5 years in New York. He's spent many years developing software, in particular, developing programming languages. Outside of tech, he is married to a Columbian woman, and admits his Spanish isn't as good as it should be. He loves to play Pétanque, merely needing a flat surface to play on.

Julien was a lead programming language designer at Facebook, and lead the open source release of a new programming language. Over time, he noticed that frontend dev was in a resolution with reactive paradigms, while backend architectures remained bogged down by manual steps. In 2022, he stepped out to create Meta-grade creativity usable in everyday software.

This is the creation story of Skiplabs.

Links

https://skiplabs.io/

https://www.linkedin.com/in/julien-verlaguet-b5710a20/

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Hosted by Noah Labhart | Technical Founder & Startup Mentor.

S13 Bonus: The Legal AI Shift: Automating Contract Workflows with AI Agents with Nick Holzherr, Founder & CEO of GitLaw Sep 17, 2026

Show notes

Nick Holzherr is originally from the Switzerland, but moved to UK when he was 7 years old, to the countryside. He had no real touch to computers until he was 18, when he attended university and everything picked up for him, tech wise. Eventually, he got into building businesses, and of those, he founded a coffee company, HR software company, and whisk.com, which was sold to Samsung in 2019. Outside of tech, he is the father to two young children. He enjoys skiing and snowboarding, and jokingly, he admits that running around ensuring his agents are prompted gets in the way of his family and hobby life.

Through his entrepreneurial adventures, Nick spent large sums of money on legal contracts, ensuring that the i's were dotted and the t's were crossed. While he still feels that lawyers are very important and needed for certain scenarios, Nick wanted to create a way to level the playing field for small businesses, in the legal arena.

This is the creation story of GitLaw.

Links

https://git.law/

https://nickholzherr.com/

https://www.linkedin.com/in/nickholzherr/

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Hosted by Noah Labhart | Technical Founder & Startup Mentor.

S13 Bonus: The Return of Backbox, and AI as a Trusted Advisor, with Rekha Shenoy, CEO of Backbox Sep 16, 2026

Show notes

Today, we have a special return episode from our friends at Backbox, who we heard the creation story of the company back in Season 8. In this episode, we talk with Rekha Shenoy, CEO of Backbox. Since Rekha took the helm as CEO in May 2024, the company has expanded beyond traditional security automation to launch its major BackBox 8.0 platform, unifying cloud and on-prem infrastructure visibility. They’ve also integrated human-in-the-loop, advisor-focused AI capabilities - and are back to let us know some even more "big things" happening with platform, around agentic .

Questions:

Tell me about yourself—your path into tech and what shapes how you lead (background, influences, hobbies, family).
Tell me about BackBox. What does the company do, and what drew you in to take the CEO seat in 2024?
How has the product matured? How do you build your roadmap?
Zoom out — what are you most proud of in shaping BackBox?
What does the future look like for your product and team?
BackBox describes AI as a "trusted advisor, not an autonomous agent" — four principles: protecting infrastructure, repeatable/verifiable results, supporting (not replacing) engineers, and transparency about how AI reaches conclusions. Where did that philosophy come from, and why hold that line while competitors race toward full autonomy?
What does "responsible AI" actually look like in the product — not as a value statement, but as a design constraint that shaped the engineering decision?
Tell us about your recent launch and what it enables a network team to do that they couldn't before?
How does the launch extend or test that responsible-AI philosophy?
At what point does "AI as advisor" start to feel like a limitation rather than a safeguard?

Links

https://backbox.com/

https://www.linkedin.com/in/rekha-shenoy-950b23/

https://www.codestory.co/episodes/s8-bonus-bypassing-brittle-custom-scripts-implementing-automated-multi-tenant-configuration-backups-and-vulnerability-patching-at-scale-with-andrew-kahl-of-backbox/

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Hosted by Noah Labhart | Technical Founder & Startup Mentor.

S13 E4: The AI GTM Engine: Turning Intent Signals into Warm Outbound Pipeline with Connor Heggie, Co-Founder & CTO of Unify Sep 15, 2026

Show notes

Connor Heggie grew up in Southern California, digging into technical things early on his life. He played with legos, was influence by Iron Man, and painted pictures on the back of schematics his Dad brought him from Boeing. He went to school at Rice in Texas, feeling a sense of agency and confidence from the program he was in. Eventually, he went to work for startups across computer vision, self driving cars, and AI. Outside of tech, he has a large black Labrador named Captain. He enjoys hiking, being outside, and playing fetch with Captain until he drops in exhaustion.

Post ChatGPT, Connor was working on a side project, creating listicles around products. As he built it, he fell in love with the space of mining information from unstructured data. Once he met up with his co-founder, they started to recognize they could build multi-agent systems that could re-think how Go-To-Market teams operate.

This is the creation story of Unify.

Links

https://www.unifygtm.com/

https://www.linkedin.com/in/connor-heggie/

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Hosted by Noah Labhart | Technical Founder & Startup Mentor.

S13 Bonus: The GPU Bottleneck: Democratizing AI Compute Pipelines with Christian Ondaatje, Founder & CEO of Aranya.tech Sep 10, 2026

Show notes

Christian Ondaatje is originally from Los Angelas, CA. He got into GPUs as an underclassmen in college, of course through gaming and VR. He ended up starting an eGPU company in his CS program @ Harvard, though it was shut down through some cease and desist from Apple. Though he learned some hard startup lessons, his love for GPUs was only fueled more. Outside of tech, he does a lot of SIM racing. In fact, he has built his own Linus VR racing simulator rig over a couple of years He finds that the formal, online competition is very fun to participate in.

As I mentioned, Christian was way into GPUs throughout many different experiences in his life. He and his team recognized that while demand door AI inference and compute was at an all-time high, setting up bare-metal GPU infra was still complex and slow... so they set out to change it.

This is the creation story of Aranya.

Links

https://aranya.tech/

https://www.linkedin.com/in/christianondaatje/

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Hosted by Noah Labhart | Technical Founder & Startup Mentor.

S13 E3: Architecting Frictionless Creator Infrastructure & Social Commerce with Dumi Mabhena, CEO of Hilite Sep 08, 2026

Show notes

Dumi Mabhena is originally from Zimbabwe, and has lived in 5 different countries. He now lives in Washington, DC, as he came to the states to attend Georgetown. Prior to that, he has been a podcast host and producer for several years, as well as starting businesses and taking part in the startup world in multiple different places. Outside of tech, he married to his wife, who he met while in South Africa. They love to travel, especially Europe in the summer, and are big into fitness and running.

Previously, Dumi started a podcast, to tell about positive experiences in Zimbabwe. As he went through the process of recording, editing, and publishing a podcast - he realized that the tools and platforms were incredibly fragmented... so much so, that it created friction in the process of telling stories. Dumi wanted to figure out a way to remove this friction from the entire process.

This is the creation story of Hilite.

Links

https://www.hellohilite.com/

https://www.linkedin.com/in/dumi-mabhena

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Hosted by Noah Labhart | Technical Founder & Startup Mentor.

S13 Bonus: From Airbnb's Chronon Engine to Enterprise Real-Time Feature Compute with Varant Zanoyan, Co-Founder & CEO of Zipline AI Sep 03, 2026

Show notes

Varant Zanoyan was born in Washington DC, and grew up there and in Switzerland as well. He now lives in the Bay Area, specifically San Mateo. He's spent time at Palantir Technologies, as well as a stint building ML tech at AirBnB. But outside of tech, he loves the outdoors, tending to his garden of plants and vegetables. After taking a good hike, he's been digging a good uni pizza for dinner.

Prior to his current venture, Varant was working at AirBnB, developing Chronon - an open source data management engine, used to power AI/ML infrastructure. It was then that he and his team realized that building and managing data pipelines was a bottleneck for AI dev, and decided to spin into a standalone platform.

This is the creation story of Zipline AI.

Links

https://zipline.ai/

https://www.linkedin.com/in/vzanoyan

Current Sponsors:

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

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Hosted by Noah Labhart | Technical Founder & Startup Mentor.

S13 Bonus: The AI DBA Shift: Automating Database Reliability & Performance with Itamar Syn-Hershko, Founder & CEO of NeverBlink Sep 02, 2026

Show notes

Itamar Syn-Hershko has been a tech guy since he was a wee lad - IE he was teaching his kindergarten teachers how to use their computers. He learned how to "do stuff" tech wise through playing games back in the day. Back in the day he was one of the original developers on a document based database, as well as building a consulting company. Outside of tech, he is the father of 5 kids, all of them 7 and under... so his hands are quite full. That said, he does enjoy learning new things and traveling, when he has the time.

Itamar founded a boutique consulting agency, helping businesses succeed in data related projects. Like most smart agencies, they built tools to help them to do their jobs better. One of these tools became highly popular, and after 1.5 years of selling this tool to customers, they hit a $1m in annual recurring revenue.

This is the creation story of NeverBlink AI.

Links

https://neverblink.ai/

https://bigdataboutique.com/

https://www.linkedin.com/in/itamar-syn-hershko

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Hosted by Noah Labhart | Technical Founder & Startup Mentor.

S13 E2: Securing Enterprise GenAI: Data Privacy & Security Guardrails with Steven Walchek, Founder & CEO of Liminal Sep 01, 2026

Show notes

Steven Walchek is originally from the Bay Area in California, but lives in Denver now. He's been there for 8 years with his family. He comes from a family of risk takers and entrepreneurs - for example, his Dad was a tech guy who did his thing and had success in Silicon Valley. Outside of tech he is a family man, married with kids. He enjoys doing anything he can with them, as they are his "why". He plays hockey, coaches hockey, and rides dirt bikes and mountain bikes.

Steven and his team built an application security platform, and ended up hitting every branch on the way down from the startup tree. When they sat down to figure out what they needed to do next, they combined their deep security tooling with a multi-modal platform, to enable complete AI governance in one central hub for regulated companies.

This is the creation story of Liminal.

Links

https://www.liminal.ai/

https://www.linkedin.com/in/swalchek/

Current Sponsors:

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

Check out our Patreon!

Hosted by Noah Labhart | Technical Founder & Startup Mentor.