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

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S12 E22: The Million-Token Context Mirage: Why RAG is Far From Dead in High-Stakes, Zero-Error Global Tax Compliance with Alex Bowcut, Head of Engineering at Sphere Jun 09, 2026

Show notes

Alex Bowcut is from Salt Lake City, Utah originally, but has been in the Bay Area for the last 4 years. He's always been interested in computers, and was in middle school when smartphones were blooming. He took part in jailbreaking gadgets and such, and all of these things led to a natural interest in CS, mathematics - and eventually, startups. Outside of tech, he is married with 2 Australian shepherds. He and his wife enjoy hiking with the dogs, and skiing - unfortunately, without the dogs.

Alex was approached by the founder of his current venture. He was approached while he was working at another startup, to tackle the creation of AI control and scaling within the company internally. When he joined, he immediately started changing the game in creating the initial version of their assessment model, TRAM.

This is Alex's creation story at Sphere.

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S12 Bonus: The Context Window Mirage: Why Generic Prompt Engineering Fails Enterprise Workflows and the Rise of Dynamic, Task-Specific RAG Orchestration with Ankit Dheendsa, Co-Founder & CEO of Morphos AI Jun 04, 2026

Show notes

Ankit Dheendsa is a Canadian, born and raised, living outside of Toronto today. He claims he is fortunate to have a great ecosystem of professionals and mentor sin his area, to help advise him through thick and thin. When he was younger, he was inspired to pursue building things after he watched Iron Man for the first time. Outside of tech, he is an avid boxer and kickboxer. He loves to work out and train, but when he's away from the mat, he likes to read lots of books.

Ankit and his team quickly realized that although the advent of AI was exciting, hallucinations within LLMs area a big problem. They started to dig into how to lower and/or eliminate hallucinations, and ensure that the LLMs only hold onto the most important data. And they landed on a powerful approach to vector size reduction.

This is the creation story of Morphos AI.

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S12 E21: Why Your Health App is Drowning in Wearable Noise (And Missing Real Insights) with Marco Benitez, Co-Founder & CEO of ROOK Jun 02, 2026

Show notes

Marco Benitez lives in Naples, Florida. In the past he lived in Miami, but found Naples much more family friendly. He is originally from Mexico, along with many of his family members and businesses. Outside of tech, he is married with 2 kids. As a family, they love to go outside, be outdoors and visit the great beaches around Florida. In addition, Marco is a black belt in Taekwondo, and also does Jiu Jitsu.

Marco and his team was building a wearable in the past, centered around fitness. They figured out that the real value was around feeding data into these types of wearables. When they were approached by a company who was excited about this type of solution, they started to accelerate.

This is the creation story of ROOK.

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Founder Chats - Daulet Amirkhanov May 29, 2026

Show notes

Today, we are dropping another episode in our "chats" series, specifically on the founder side - hearing from those scaling the companies themselves.

In this episode, we are talking with Daulet Amirkhanov, Founding Engineer of Bead AI. Daulet is going to take us through his years at Meta and Cognee, leading into how he is building Bead AI, to take on compliance audits and AI automation.

Questions

Tell me and my audience a little bit about you. You've gone from three years on high-throughput reliability infrastructure at Meta, to engineering the GraphRAG engine and semantic memory systems at Cognee, and you're now Founding Engineer at Bead AI — an a16z-backed startup building autonomous agent infrastructure for compliance audits. How did that journey shape the way you think about engineering for the age of autonomous systems?
Let's zoom into the Meta years. For listeners who haven't worked at that scale — what was the exact piece of logging and reliability infrastructure you owned, what does "high-throughput" actually mean in numbers there, and what's one specific architectural decision from those years that still shapes how you build today?
A lot of infra engineers stay in infra. You made a deliberate move from human-scale systems at Meta to agent-scale systems at Cognee. What did you see in that moment that convinced you AI agent infrastructure was the next distributed systems frontier — and not just the current hype cycle?
Cognee is a GraphRAG and semantic memory company, and your work there was on the agent infrastructure side. Your biggest design call was decoupling the MCP architecture so multiple agentic systems can share unified memory through a standalone process, rather than each one coupling to its own Python runtime. Walk us through what problem that was solving and the key design decision you made.
Give us a concrete example: an agent task that breaks when each agent has its own vector store, but works once they share unified state through the decoupled MCP architecture you built. What's the actual mechanism that makes the difference?
Most engineers in this space come from an ML or applications background. You're coming at agent infrastructure from a pure distributed systems lens. What does that lens let you see that the ML-native crowd is missing?
Bead is a16z-backed and going after compliance audits, which isn't the obvious first market for autonomous agents. You joined as Founding Engineer in January and are shaping the technical core now. From your seat: what makes compliance audits the right wedge for agent infrastructure, and what are the foundational decisions you're making today that will define what the product can do two years from now?
Make a technical claim about agent infrastructure that most people in this space would push back on — and defend it. Where are you the dissenting voice?
Without breaking anything confidential — what's the hardest unsolved problem on your plate at Bead AI right now, and how are you approaching it?
Two years from now, what's the piece of agent infrastructure that we'll consider "obviously necessary" but doesn't exist yet? Who builds it, and what does it look like?

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S12 Bonus: The Human In the Loop Bottleneck: Moving Beyond Static Models to Unleash Autonomous, Recursive Self-Improving AI with Kunal Bhatia, Co-Founder & CEO of Hexo Labs May 28, 2026

Show notes

Kunal Bhatia is originally from India, but moved to the Bay Area to start building his company. He admits there is quite a contrast between the two places, but originally he was from Bangalore, which is like the Silicon Valley of India - so the professional transition felt familiar. He's worked in AI For 12 years, and is on his 3rd company in the AI space. Outside of tech, he is married with a 3 year old daughter. He and his family love to go on hikes and be outdoors.

Kunal and his team have been researching AI technologies within their current venture. In particular, they were focused on building self improving AI. Beyond that, they have started building and thinking about how to build the AI platform that builds all other technology.

This is the creation story of Hexo Labs.

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S12 E20: The Agentic Privileged Access Crisis: Why Making AI Agents "Well-Behaved" Fails and How to Structuralize Their Blast Radius with Ofir Stein, Co-Founder & CTO of Apono May 26, 2026

Show notes

Ofir Stein is based in Tel Aviv, Israel, born and raised in Jerusalem. He spent many years in the Israeli air force, in infrastructure and security, before he moved to Tel Aviv. He's a tech guy through and through, bragging about his raspberry pi setup at home, which adjust the AC settings based on the temp outside. Outside of tech, he is married with a daughter and a dog. He's connected and close to his family, which he notes is how he refreshes and reloads as a founder, alongside playing tennis from time to time.

Ofir and his cofounder started interviewing CISO's and security professionals on how they feel about access management. The found out that this was the first line of attack for bad actors, but from a business standpoint, access management is a slow to value feature. They decided to build a platform that was based on just in time access, over the slow to value setup plaguing the industry.

This is the creation story of Apono.

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S12 Bonus: The Bearer Token Trap: Why API Secrets are Leaking and the Rise of Dynamic, Zero-Trust Machine Identity Providers with Anusha Iyer, Founder & CEO of Corsha May 21, 2026

Show notes

Anusha Iyer is a first generation immigrant, born in India. She moved to the states with her family, when her Dad was going grad school at Ohio State. She fondly remembers sitting on her Dad's shoulders for Buckeyes football games, as he was fan enough for the whole family. Outside of her professional life, she has 2 kids in college who were coding since they could walk - but neither of which ended up in computer science. She loves to cook, and notes that she is not a recipe follower - she likes to use whatever is at her fingertips.

Anusha has been in the cybersecurity space for quite some time, starting off in naval research in DC. Further down here career, she had a friend reach out to pitch an idea to build a platform for dynamic machine identification.

This is the creation story of Corsha.

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S12 E19: The Real Estate Draw Nightmare: Automating Underwriting and Risk Mitigation Across $3T in Real Estate Finance Data with Thomas Schlegel, Principal Software Engineer at Built May 19, 2026

Show notes

Thomas Schlegel lives in Nashville, TN, but grew up in rural Virginia. He didn't have the internet for a large portion of his childhood - but, his friends did! So that meant he was spending more time at his friends place, and eventually when MySpace came around, he was the guy to build everyone's custom site. He's always been the wild idea guy amongst his friends, always the tinkerer. Today, he's married with twins on the way. He loves to run, either on the road or the trails. And when he gets the chance, he enjoys a good conversation with good people, contemplating or pondering the bigger things in life.

In the past, Thomas was a lead engineer at a professional services organization in Tennessee. While at a conference, he met the CEO of his current venture, and they hit it off. He was intrigued by their company, and several years later, he started working for the company as an individual contributor - and quickly activated his entrepreneur DNA to solve ALL the problems.

This is the creation story of Built.

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S12 Bonus: 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 May 14, 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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S12 E18: Legacy Planning Gaps: Why Static Legal Paperwork Fails Modern Families and the Rise of the Continuous, Compassionate Estate OS with Brooke Hipps, Founder of Weekend Will May 12, 2026

Show notes

Brooke Hipps currently lives in Fort Worth, TX but grew up down the road in DeSoto. She is entrepreneur through and through, from the early years of learning from her parents, to starting three businesses of her own, in fashion, construction and estate planning. Outside of tech, she has three kids - one out of college and 2 still in college. Brooke is an outdoorsy person, enjoying spending time in nature, hiking, camping and playing a round of golf every now and again.

Recently, Brooke's sister passed away. Obviously, this was a difficult moment for her and her family, but what made it more difficult was that her sister didn't have a will. Brooke started asking the question "why bit?", and exploring building something to help Texan's with writing a love letter to your surviving loved ones.

This is the creation story of Weekend Will.

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