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

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S13 Bonus: The Intention Layer: Why Coding Agents Need Product Judgment with Drew Dillon, Founder & CEO of Brief Aug 27, 2026

Show notes

Drew Dillon is a tech founder and product leader, centered in the Bay Area. He is a person who likes to do a bit of everything, having an engineering background, but spending time in design, sales, and product management. He's been a part of many startups - Yammer being one of them, and several others from Y Combinator - along with being a consultant and fractional CPO. Outside of tech, he has 2 kids that take up most of his time. When he isn't on the sidelines of a soccer game, he enjoys woodworking and reading a good sci-fi book.

At a prior startup, Drew built a system using AI, which spit out something reasonably shaped. He took a look at the process he went through to create it, and realized that there are a ton of disparate parts, all separate from the shared organizational context - IE the "why" behind what is being built. He set out to change that, and built institutional memory and product judgement within AI agents.

This is the creation story of Brief.

Links

https://briefhq.ai/

https://mymoxieai.com/

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

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S13 Bonus: Why Local On-Device AI Compute is the Future of Privacy with Behnam Bastani, Co-Founder & CEO of OpenInfer Aug 26, 2026

Show notes

Behnam Bastani is originally from Tehran, Iran. He left the country at the age of 17, setting out for Canada, where he got his Masters and PhD, before moving to California. He's always looked at things with the big picture in mind - whether that is artwork, wood work, engineering, etc. He's worked for Hewlett Packard, Meta and Roblox, before starting his current venture. Outside of tech, he loves to exercise and participate in water activities. For peace of mind, he gardens - experimenting with growing trees, replanting, and seeding.

Previously, Behnam went to Meta to pursue the future of wearables. He immediately realized that these wearables required a connected system. He started to ask the question, "why can't we use compute around use to fuel wearables?". Eventually, through stints at Meta and Roblox, he and his co-founder knew they wanted this type of system... and started with the infrastructure to enable it.

This is the creation story of OpenInfer.

Links

https://openinfer.io/

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

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Hosted by Noah Labhart | Technical Founder & Startup Mentor.

S13 E1: The Token Winter Is Coming: Why Code Inflation Fails to Ship Real Business Value with Dave Garcia, Founder & Co-CEO of Pensero Aug 25, 2026

Show notes

Dave Garcia is originally from Barcelona, and recently moved stateside, to the East Coast. He started coding when he was 7 years old, on a Commodore 64, in BASIC language - and when he programmed an infinite loop, he was hooked. He's been curious about machines, and fixing them - even when they weren't broken. Outside of tech, he is married with a young family. He enjoys playing video games - mostly Dad games these days - and loves to do anything on the water, like kite surfing.

A few years ago, Dave decided to take some time off to spend it with his family. When the AI boom started to happen, suddenly the technology became ubiquitous, where AI was changing the life of generations around him. After some investigation, he decided wanted to build something world changing, relevant to the world the knows - which is within the tech mgmt. world.

This is the creation story of Pensero.

Links

https://pensero.ai/

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

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Hosted by Noah Labhart | Technical Founder & Startup Mentor.

S12 Favorite - Overcoming Broken Right-Sizing Models to Automate Real-Time Cloud Cost Optimization with Sharad Kumar & Harshit Omar, Co-Founders of FluidCloud Aug 18, 2026

Show notes

Sharad Kumar lives in Pleasanton, California with his wife and 2 kids. He enjoys playing all musical instruments, and spending time with his family. He has a 2 year old daughter, and a 14 year old son into robotics. He is also passionate about giving back to the community, through their company foundation.

Harshit Omar lives in San Francisco, and is married with a 4 year old son. He used to be a street racer in his college days, loving fast cars and taking risk. Nowadays, he is a big marvel and comic book fan, along side his son. In fact, his son thinks he is Captain America, regularly wielding his shield and mask.

A fun fact about both of these gentlemen: this is their third company to work together in, their second startup, and their wives are sisters. So they are connected by wives, and united by startups.

In their previous startups, Sharad was leading sales and ops and Harshit was leading on the product side. When the company got acquired, it took them 8-9 months to integrate to a different cloud provider. They realized the model was broken, requiring expensive consulting services, and not convenient at all - and they wanted to figure out a better way.

This is the creation story of Fluidcloud.

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Hosted by Noah Labhart | Technical Founder & Startup Mentor.

S12 Favorite - Rewriting the Rules of End-User Computing and the Rise of Autonomous, Agentic AI IT Operations with Yoni Avital, Co-Founder & Chief Evangelist of ControlUp Aug 13, 2026

Show notes

Yoni Avital lives in Tel Aviv, Israel, with his wife and 3 older children. The oldest kid is a boy, so Yoni and he try to see as many football games as possible. He enjoys shopping with this girls, though it's cause he is their Dad, not because he enjoy shopping. He likes to travel, hike, and enjoys a nice white wine in warmer weather. His most memorable hike was at Yosemite, when he started at 4 am and came across a lot of wildlife.

Yoni was in the virtual desktop space in the past. What he and his team realized was that troubleshooting these virtual experiences were incredibly complicated. They started to build an enterprise task manager, to centralize a task management UI to control the endpoints. When customers started asking to use it daily, Yoni figured out they had something unique.

This is the creation story of ControlUp.

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Hosted by Noah Labhart | Technical Founder & Startup Mentor.

S12 Favorite - Making AI Deterministic for Developers and their Agents, with Patrick Vuong of Moderne Aug 11, 2026

Show notes

Today, we have a special guest on the Code Story podcast - Patrick Vuong, Director of Product at Moderne. Moderne is the agent tools company, building the. Knowledge, discovery and execution tools that AI agents rely on - so they can operator faster, more accurately, and at far lower cost.

In today's episode, Patrick is going to tell us about the company, and how Moderne is enabling developers to build software faster, and with the best context - using agents and agent tools. Their approach to semantic models produce deterministic over probabilistic, or inference driven, tools, which for this engineer/host, has been a point of skepticism for AI since the beginning.

Questions

Tell me and my audience a little bit about you.
What is Moderne?
Moderne is enabling developers to operate software systems at the speed of agents. Tell me about this product suite.
Why do Agents need tooling? Where do we see AI in ROI
Something jumped out at me... you mentioned you are not only building tooling for agents that are deterministic.
As we peer into tech stacks across the industry, where does Moderne fit?
OK so this is clearly a pivot for Moderne. With this, who are your customers now?
What does the future like for your product - what you offer - and your team?
For you personally, you are entering into a new chapter with Moderne. What makes you most excited, going from Microsoft to entering the startup world with the company?
In your journey, who has influenced the way you work? Tell me about a person, or many persons, or something you look up to and why.
So you worked at Microsoft for 8 years, and are now transitioning to Moderne. Say you were getting on a plan and sitting next to someone about to make this same transition - what advice would you give them?

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Hosted by Noah Labhart | Technical Founder & Startup Mentor.

S12 Bonus: Rickard's Deterministic Return: Converting Scattered Data into Autonomous, Production-Grade Apps with Rickard Hansson, Founder & CEO of Gainable Aug 06, 2026

Show notes

We have a special return episode, by our good friend Rickard Hansson. Rickard joined us previously on the podcast in Season 8 to tell the creation story of Weavy - collaboration infrastructure for serious builds. Today, he makes a follow up visit to tell us all about Gainable, his new project - which removes data and engineering from being the middle man, and enables your team to build the apps they need now.

Questions;

Last time we talked in Season 8, you were building Weavy. Whats happened since we last talked with that company?
Tell me about Gainable - give me the pitch there, and tell me why this is the right approach to using AI.
Most AI builders wire straight to a frontier model and wait for the next release to fix the gaps. I didn't. Where does the model actually sit in Gainable product, and why only there?
Why is an app factory that is deterministic important? Dig into that.
You use the term "free-range coding".. what does this mean? Unpack the phrase for us.
You point out that tokens still appear to be heavily subsidized to me. What do you mean by that, and what happens to all these AI products when that ends?
We've all read the headlines - Fable 5 got switched off by the government for 18 days. Why do you see this as a turning point, not a footnote?
You suspect flat subscriptions for the top models are done, and it all drifts to credit-based. What signal are you seeing that tell s you this?
If the model is a commodity everyone rents, where's the moat?
What is next for Gainable, and how can someone get started using the platform?

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Hosted by Noah Labhart | Technical Founder & Startup Mentor.

S12 E30: Wastewater Guardians: Automating Biology to Protect Clean Water with Virginia Szepietowski, Co-Founder of Nyad AI Aug 04, 2026

Show notes

Virginia Szepietowski grew up in the UK outside of London, and now lives in Alabama. She's had a winding path to her current venture, including body building, triathlons, law, and entrepreneurship. She comes from a family of entrepreneurs, who are deeply ambitious, tenacious, and deeply humble. She finds the feeling of a deep safety net from her family, and she pursues her adventures. Outside of tech, she is married to her now co-founder. She is still a competitive body builder, and likes to push herself to the limit.

Through a series of life events, Virginia got interested in water treatment. She started discovering the world of wastewater operators, and the fact that they were the last line of defense before toxic wastewater moved into our waterways (rivers and such). Using AI, her and her team started to build a platform for these operators to quickly detect organisms in these water streams.

This is the creation story of Nyad AI.

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Timestamps

0:00 Intro and episode teaser on automating biology in critical clean water infrastructure

1:49 Guest introduction: Virginia Szepietowski's background and path to founding Nyad AI

2:45 Understanding the hidden biology behind municipal and industrial wastewater treatment

4:10 The core problem: Why manual microscope sampling creates dangerous operational blind spots

6:05 Origin story: Translating computer vision research into industrial water automation

8:30 How Nyad AI's automated hardware samples and analyzes live microorganisms in real time

11:15 Overcoming physical hardware engineering hurdles in harsh, high-humidity environments

14:00 Preventing biological plant crashes and saving millions in compliance penalties

17:30 Addressing the labor shortage: Supporting the next generation of water operators with AI

21:00 Scaling AI hardware deployments across municipal and industrial facilities

24:15 The future of automated biology in global water security and environmental protection

27:00 Closing thoughts and how to connect with Virginia Szepietowski and Nyad AI

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Hosted by Noah Labhart | Technical Founder & Startup Mentor.

S12 Bonus: The App-Aware Illusion: Why Infinite Compute Fails Without Underlying Infrastructure Accountability and the Case for "Boring" IT with Richard Luna, President & Founder of Protected Harbor Jul 30, 2026

Show notes

Richard Luna grew up in New York, never living more than 35 from where he grew up. He is a self proclaimed super nerd, and has been one since he was 13 - at which point, he started coding on an HP calculator. He's always been fascinated to know how things work, and how patterns repeat - which he has observed in the industry throughout the years. Outside of tech, he has 2 kids, one of which is in the business with him. He's an avid cyclist, traveling on average, 120 miles a week.

Richard has been a life long technologist, doing everything from desktops, to coding, to hosting. When he and his team saw the limits of what hosting can do, they dove into developer operations (DevOps), and found where they could add the most value - through SaaS infrastructure.

This is the creation story of Protected Harbor.

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Timestamps

0:01 Teaser on solving complex database report bottlenecks beyond standard SQL servers

0:47 Show intro and setting the stage for application-aware infrastructure

1:32 Host intro: How Richard Luna established application-aware infrastructure

1:49 Guest introduction: Richard Luna's background, coding at age 13, and cycling 120 miles a week

2:21 The career path from desktops, coding, and traditional web hosting to DevOps and SaaS infrastructure

2:41 Origin story: The creation of Protected Harbor

2:48 Defining application-aware infrastructure and why traditional hosting reaches a hard ceiling

4:10 Why "infinite compute" fails when underlying database architecture and queries are broken

6:05 Moving beyond basic server ping tests to deep application transaction monitoring

8:30 The case for "boring" IT: Prioritizing stability, predictability, and uptime over hype

11:15 Strategic trade-offs in hybrid cloud setup and managing hardware accountability

14:00 Aligning MSP incentives with client business outcomes and application performance

17:30 Common pitfalls in legacy system cloud migrations

21:00 The role of operational discipline in modern cybersecurity and IT governance

27:00 Where managed infrastructure services are heading and closing thoughts

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Hosted by Noah Labhart | Technical Founder & Startup Mentor.

S12 E29: Fractional Talent: Traditional Freelance Marketplaces Fail Enterprise Workflows and the Shift Toward Managed Engineering Teams with Danny Gal, Co-Founder & CEO of Proteams Jul 28, 2026

Show notes

Danny Gal was born and raised in the UK, and now lives outside of London. He attended University in Nottingham... yep, the same one from Robin Hood. He LOVES challenges, and not just any challenges - the hard ones. He is done Iron Man competitions, ultra marathons, climbed Mount Kilimanjaro, and jumped out of a perfectly good plane, to name a few. He loves doing them once... and then never again. He's got 2 small kids, and believes in work hard, play hard.

Danny has worked in many roles in the past, across enterprises and the like. What he found most difficult was scaling himself. He got to talking with his now co-founder about building something around the idea of scaling oneself, and took it to some businesses to validate it. Once he saw them get excited about it, he figured they were onto something.

This is the creation story of Proteams.

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Timestamps

1:49 Guest introduction: Danny Gal's background, endurance challenges, and career journey

2:50 The core problem: Why traditional freelance marketplaces fail enterprise workflows

4:10 Origin story: Solving the bottleneck of "scaling oneself" in leadership

5:45 Validating the managed fractional team model with early enterprise clients

7:20 Self-serve bidding vs. managed delivery teams: Understanding the structural shift

9:30 Building a software-enabled harness for global engineering talent

12:15 How Chief Procurement Officers should structure external workforce strategies

15:00 Overcoming compliance, IP, and security hurdles in enterprise talent integration

18:10 Balancing speed, quality, and accountability in remote team management

20:30 Closing thoughts and where to connect with Danny Gal and Proteams

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Hosted by Noah Labhart | Technical Founder & Startup Mentor.

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