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

Latest Episodes:

S6 E15: Mastering Day 2 Kubernetes Chaos: Building Autonomous AI SREs and Raising $67M with Itiel Schwartz of Komodor Apr 26, 2022

Show notes

For Itiel Schwartz, it's hard to remember life before his current venture. He studied computer science and psychology in school, and during that time he started working for Ebay. He's 32 years old (he thinks), and is married with a young family. Outside of hiking and binge watching TV, he is a big fan of coffee and bakeries.

In spending a lot of time in the infrastructure world, he found out that in the world of DevOps troubleshooting, there is a lot of chaos to sift through. He thought it would be amazing to build a tool to impact Kubernetes, and the entire infra ecosystem.

This is the creation story of Komodor.

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Links

Website: https://komodor.com/
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/itiel-shwartz-18542853

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

Hosted by Noah Labhart | Technical Founder & Startup Mentor.

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S6 Bonus: Scaling the Technical Mindset: From Self-Taught Dev to Engineering Leadership with Todd Larsen of Tech Leaders Apr 22, 2022

Show notes

From the time he was very young, Todd Larsen was always interested in technology. However, he ended up studying audio engineering so found his way to tech through teaching himself how to code. He gained a ton of experience at companies like Groupon and Digit.co. Outside of tech, he is a father to a 5 year old daughter, and musician, which both things occupy his time outside of business.

Having gained fantastic experience in advertising space, at Groupon, and then at Digit, he learned how to execute on longer term initiatives, but balanced with fast delivery on top of a strong foundation. All of this experience was hard fought, and as he started consulting, he thought... how can I scale myself?

This is the creation story of Tech Leaders.

Sponsors

Links

Website: https://www.technical-leaders.com/
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/salesandsoftware/

Current Sponsors:

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

Hosted by Noah Labhart | Technical Founder & Startup Mentor.

S6 Bonus: From AWS S3 to Multimodal AI: Engineering the Search-for-Everything Engine with Marin Smiljanic of Omnisearch Apr 21, 2022

Show notes

Marin Smiljanic was born and raised in Croatia. He attended a local math school, which actually got him into tech. Post attending college, his first experiences of the industry were through internships and startup involvement. Outside of tech, he likes to hike, swim, winter sports, being outdoors, etc. - and he lives in Vancouver now, which gives him great access to all of the above. He says the main difference between Vancouver and Croatia comes down to food. Croatia contains a bit more traditional cuisine - seafood close to the water, and meat based dishes inland.

During his Amazon years, Marin was hitting a few problems on a regular basis, having to sift through dense training content on a daily basis. And the training format was all over the map - video, audio, text, etc. After brainstorming with his now cofounder, they decided to build an MVP, starting with an API.

This is the creation story of Omnisearch.

Sponsors

Links

Website: https://omnisearch.ai/
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/marin-smiljanic

Current Sponsors:

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

Hosted by Noah Labhart | Technical Founder & Startup Mentor.

S6 Bonus: Hacking the Brainwave: Building Closed-Loop Sleep Hardware and Raising $20M+ with Aaron Bromberg of StimScience Apr 20, 2022

Show notes

Aaron Bromberg is living the Dad life outside of tech. His kids are 11 and 13, so he wants to spend as much time with them before they get too cool to hangout with their parents. He likes to cook, and during the pandemic, he got really into pizza making, even to the point of calculating dough hydration ratios. Previously, he was working as a management consultant, but spending his time reading about electronics. He took that as a sign that he was more of a gadget guy, and joined Bose. Post that he, worked on the product lines at Amazon, like tablets and smart speakers.

Aaron put together a dream team of Neuroscientists to execute a sleep study lab for 3 years. After that time, what they realized was that with a short brain stimulation session before bedtime, they can drastically improve the time it takes to go to sleep, and the entire sleep time itself. They charged ahead to build a product to make this happen, and do so in a personalized way.

This is the creation story of StimScience, and Somnee.

Sponsors

Links

Website: https://www.stimscience.com/
Website: https://trysomnee.com/
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/aaronbromberg/

Current Sponsors:

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

Hosted by Noah Labhart | Technical Founder & Startup Mentor.

S6 E14: The Real-Time Ledger: How Banked Scaled Global Account-to-Account Infrastructure with Joe Pettersson Apr 19, 2022

Show notes

Joe Pettersson is quite the renaissance man, with many interests and ventures he is a part of. He's also had an interesting path to tech. He was originally a lawyer many years go... funny enough, because he thought that after the dot com bubble burst, he didn't think people were going to make money writing software again. He hated it though, and left the legal profession as soon as he could.

He is a collector by nature, with over 100 pairs of sneakers (most of which are Jordans), and several mechanical keyboards. Along side these hobbies, he has started a few non profit organizations - one around equipping young men, and another around educating people in the digital world. Finally, he is writing a book, around scaling engineering teams, which is actually going to be given away free. It should be published in June or July of this year, 2022.

In January 2020, Joe joined his current venture prior to raising a seed round. Having gotten regulated in the UK, they were ready to deploy the first product and find their market fit. And in doing so, he went about optimizing team, process, and built a platform strategically ready for change - in the payment space.

This is the creation story of Banked.

Sponsors

Links

Website: https://banked.com/
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/joe8bit/

Current Sponsors:

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

Hosted by Noah Labhart | Technical Founder & Startup Mentor.

S6 Bonus: Unifying Broken Architecture: Building the InsurTech API Data Layer and Raising $30M+ with Dan Langevin of Vericred Apr 14, 2022

Show notes

Dan Langevin grew up in Madison, CT - east of New Haven. He had a good size family, with his Dad being an engineer and Mother being a teacher. He grew up around computers, and learned how to build websites in High School. When he went to college, he didn't think he wanted to be in tech and struck out in consulting. It was during this time that he taught himself how to code, built a portfolio, and switched careers into tech. He's married, with a 2 year old and another baby on the way. So free time doesn't really exist for him. But when he can, he likes to spend time outdoors, reading and exercising.

Dan and his co-founder started out building credentialing software, a sort of deep background check on Doctors. In creating a way to scrape & pull in accepted insurance, they recognized a broader need for data to be more fluid in the space. It became obvious that a company needed to solve this problem for the space.

This is the creation story of Vericred.

Sponsors

Links

Website: https://vericred.com/
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/dan-langevin-0636004/

Current Sponsors:

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

Hosted by Noah Labhart | Technical Founder & Startup Mentor.

S6 Bonus: The API-First Playbook: From Twilio COO to Building a $42M FinTech Engine and Exiting to FIS with Roy Ng of Bond Apr 13, 2022

Show notes

Roy Ng moved to LA from Hong Kong when he was 10 years old, first with his Mother, with his Father following on a year later. His family moved to the stats to build a future for him, with education and opportunity. He is a graduate of UC Berkeley, doing into finance with Goldman Sachs. He eventually made his way back to Hong Kong, to help Goldman with cool deals (like taking Baidu public). Post Goldman, he stepped into the startup world. His first startup sold to SAP, and he then went on to help Twilio grow and go public, followed by maturing the developer platform at MapBox.

Roy connected with his a college friend, and now co-founder, to discuss his experience at SoFi. What they realized was that developers are having to build the "plumbing" of financial products over and over again, because there isn't a developer platform to enable them to focus on their end products. After some market validation at the Money 2020 conference, they set out to build this foundational platform.

This is the creation story of Bond.

Sponsors

Links

Website: https://bond.tech/
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/royandrewng/

Current Sponsors:

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

Hosted by Noah Labhart | Technical Founder & Startup Mentor.

S6 E13: Disrupting Supply Chain Logistics: Building an API-First TMS and Raising $50M+ with Alexander Luksidadi of Rose Rocket Apr 12, 2022

Show notes

Alexander Luksidadi came to Canada in 2002 as an immigrant, with a dream to work for IBM. However, during his time in school, he had a friend that went to San Francisco, and came back "changed", as Alexander as he put it. That same friend asked Alexander to join him in his garage, and build his startup. He started to build things around analytics and AB testing, and saw the revenue impact of his work. It was this point that startups became his life. He quickly found out the power of being a developer, but also the need to have a partner on the business side of the journey.

Aside from tech, he is a musician - in fact, he got into programming because his Dad wouldn't let him become a musician. He decided to do programming, because he thought building software was going to be his way back to music. He loves blues, jazz, and recording in his studio.

Alexander and his co-founder attempted to build a business in the freight and logistics space, which ultimately failed. But they saw a lot more opportunity in the space, and set some goals for themselves to get funding, or get into Y Combinator. They started by building strictly broker software.

This is the creation story of Rose Rocket.

Sponsors

Links

Website: https://www.roserocket.com/
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/luksidadi/

Current Sponsors:

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

Hosted by Noah Labhart | Technical Founder & Startup Mentor.

S6 Bonus: Debugging Live in Production: Building Dynamic Logging and Exiting to Dynatrace with Liran Haimovitch of Rookout Apr 07, 2022

Show notes

Liran Haimovitch is 34 years old, and recently married. He and his wife enjoy traveling and eating delicious foods together, and of course, taking care of their awesome dog. Although it has been a while, Liran loves to scuba dive, and enjoys a great whisky, scotch or fancy cocktail now and again. He has recently gotten into trying to make them at home, or seeking out the latest bar to try something new.

Just over 5 years ago, Liran and his co-founder realized that everytime you need to change the way you observe or log your application, you have to fully release that application. They applied their cyber security way of thinking, and built a platform to enable the instant change to logging and observability.

This is the creation story of Rookout.

Sponsors

Links

Website: https://www.rookout.com/
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/liran-haimovitch/

Current Sponsors:

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

Hosted by Noah Labhart | Technical Founder & Startup Mentor.

S6 Bonus: Leaving Lyft to Build a $1B FinTech Engine: Real Estate Syndication Architecture with Perry Zheng of Cash Flow Portal Apr 06, 2022

Show notes

Perry Zheng graduated in 2010 from Duke University. He became a software engineer, working for big name companies like Amazon, Twitter and Lyft. During his time at Lyft, he started tinkering with Real Estate investment, buying single family dwellings here and there. Outside of tech and real estate, he likes to travel a lot, and find the best food around. When asked what was the best restaurant he'd been to, he promptly noted that Le Bernardin in New York City was top notch.

Once he had a few single family dwellings in his portfolio, he decided to syndicate a deal for a multi family complex. In doing this, he quickly realized how complicated the process was to get this done. He decided to apply his tech knowledge and create something to solve his problem.

This is the creation story of Cash Flow Portal.

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