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

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Making AI Deterministic for Developers and their Agents, with Patrick Vuong of Moderne May 07, 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.

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S12 Bonus: The AI Tribunal: Turning the Gawker Playbook into an Automated, Crowd-Sourced Jury for Media Accountability with Aron D’Souza, Founder & CEO of Objection AI Apr 30, 2026

Show notes

Aron D'Souza is originally from Australia, the son of a Chinese mother and an Indian-Portuguese father. He is a graduate of Oxford, and got his PhD from the University of Melbourne. A lawyer by training, he has built 12 companies and has had 5 exits - working with folks like Peter Thiel, the New York Stock Exchange and the Enhanced Games. In general, he's a problem solver, and turns all of his fun into work.

Aron made the stark realization that we are a divided society, and do not have a trusted, unbiased media source. He attempted to build a rudimentary version of a solution for a tribunal of truth 20 years ago, but the tech wasn't ready for it. That is, until the most recent advances in AI.

This is the creation story of Objection AI.

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Hosted by Noah Labhart | Technical Founder & Startup Mentor.

S12 E16: The LLM Wild West: Moving Beyond Fragile Notebook Prompts to Build a Multi-Model Enterprise AI Control Plane with Nikunj Bajaj, Co-Founder & CEO of TrueFoundry Apr 28, 2026

Show notes

Nikunj Bajaj was born in India, and completed his undergraduate studies there. The intrigue of Silcon Valley in 2013 brought him to the Bay Area, where he got his masters degree from Berkeley. His studies and his time after school supremely informed what he is building now, at his current venture. But outside of tech, he is an outdoorsey person, enjoying running, biking and scuba diving, with his favorite place to dive being Bali. He enjoys playing board games with his friends, and listens to a lot of audiobooks from a wide range of genres.

After joining Meta, Nikunj realized that building machine learning models for the company is different than using public ecosystems. The realized early on that machine learning models will hit an inflection point, where the stacks will need to change and adapt. He and his team decided to take on this challenge ahead of that inflection point.

This is the creation story of True Foundry.

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S12 Bonus: Why Your Enterprise AI Pilots Are Stalling and the Unsexy Data Pipeline Fix for 10x Engineering Velocity with Tyler Hochman, Founder & CEO of FORE Enterprise Apr 23, 2026

Show notes

Tyler Hochman got started early in the world of entrepreneurship. In Middle School, he got into Gemology, fascinated by the formation of gems, becoming a young GIA certifier. This taught him to get out of his comfort zone, from which he started his first business as a junior at Stanford. Past that, it's been a similar process of identifying a problem and looking at how to build a solution. Outside of tech, he is married with a 1 year old son, and another child on the way. He loves spending time with his son, enjoying all of the things parenthood throw at you.

Tyler built a workforce turnover solution half a decade ago, in the space of predicting employee turnover in a business. It got a lot of solid traction, but what he and his team noticed was that though people wanted to use the solution, they didn't have the infrastructure necessary to provide data to the tool. This led he and his team to swim a bit downstream to build that data pipeline for customers.

This is the creation story of FORE Enterprise.

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S12 E15: The Copilot Fallacy: Why Pure Automation Fails the Real World and the Rise of the Hybrid AI-Human Lifestyle OS with Meghan Joyce, Co-Founder & CEO of Duckbill Apr 21, 2026

Show notes

Meghan Joyce comes from a long line of people living life to the fullest. She takes a lot of influence from her grandmother, who was an entrepreneur, making and selling dresses in the early 1900's, influencing her to take a hold of every moment in life and capitalize on the time you have. She's led groups at Uber and Oscar, prior to starting her current venture. But outside of tech, she is the mother of 3 children. Her favorite hobby is to spend time with the people she loves, meeting them where they are. But when she has spare time to herself, she enjoys being in nature, hiking or walking on a beach, and staying active.

Meghan was sitting on a bed in Amsterdam, and experienced a problem with parental technology (IE a breast pump) that was keeping her from running things at Uber. While sitting on hold with the company, trying to get another one available, she started to wish she had a solution that would help her with this, while she attended her meetings at Uber.

This is the creation story of Duckbill.

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The AI Ultimatum: Preparing for a World of Intelligent Machines and Radical Transformation with Steve Brown Apr 16, 2026

Show notes

Today we have a special guest and author on the Code Story podcast, Steve Brown. Steve is a former DeepMind futurist, and recently published a book called The AI Ultimatum: Preparing for a World of Intelligent Machines and Radical Transformation. In the book, he provides a step by step framework to guide leaders in identifying use cases for AI, turning it into business value, and obtaining buy in from employees.

In our conversation, Steve is going to elaborate on why AI is a teammate (not a threat), the top AI rollout mistakes, leadership and management tactics that need to go, and much more.

Questions:

What led you to write this book? Ultimately, what were you trying to accomplish?
We often hear that AI is coming for our jobs, but you argue it’s actually our newest teammate. Can you elaborate on this more?
Let's double back on something you said, around the flavors of agents. What are those 3 different flavors of agents?
Over time, leaders can fall into operating out of their experience - IE assumptions about a particular endeavor. With the advent of AI, what assumptions need to be retired, and what needs to replace them?
In the same vane as the last question, you mention that old-school management fails in the age of AI. What do you mean by this, why does it fail and what needs to be changed?
In the book, you talk about the AI wins you can use today, effectively pointing at immediate impact teams can feel from using AI. Can you talk to 2-3 of the most important ones?
Can you explain why reinvention beats reduction? If this is the case, how can leaders and employees move into this way of thinking?
Today, people are trying to rollout AI and getting it wrong - from the startup to the enterprise. What are the top AI rollout mistakes for companies to avoid?

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S12 E14: The "Ship and Pray" AI Trap: Moving Beyond Vibe Checks to Give Product Managers a Code-Free Validation Engine with Catalina Turlea, Co-Founder & CEO of Lovelaice Apr 14, 2026

Show notes

Catalina Turlea is originally from Romania, growing up in the countryside there. Post getting her bachelors, she moved to Austria for her masters, and landed in Germany for 13 years. She is married with a 3 year old daughter and many, many pets. She loves to spend time with her family, in nature and the mountains. She used to do a lot of sports, but being a startup founder doesn't really allow for as much running or hiking. She also is into calligraphy, which she calls her hidden superpower.

Catalina has been building products for 14 years, and recently was running a small tech consultancy for startups. What she observed was that a lot of products contained an AI feature, but the "feature" was based on a prompt, didn't work well, and wasn't a good fit for the users. Eventually, she and her co-founder realized they saw the same problem, and built a platform to support products teams in building valuable AI features.

This is the creation story of Lovelaice.

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S12 Bonus: Fusing AI-Powered Predictive Malware Inference with Content Disarmament and Reconstruction (CDR) to Neutralize Silent File Attacks with Dr. Aqib Rashid, Applied AI Lead at Glasswall Apr 09, 2026

Show notes

Dr. Aqib Rashid was born and raised in London. He spent a lot of time around computers and tech growing up, and his parents pushed him towards becoming an expert in a discipline, being a positive influence on society. But he maintained his balance in life by playing sports, which inspired him to want to lead a team in the future. But outside of tech, he is a Dad to a one year old boy. He enjoys spending time with him outdoors, and finds that the real beauty in life is watching him grow up.

In Sept 2023, Aqib had completed his PhD around the subject of using AI to detect malware. His current venture was looking at how to implement this sort of approach into their products. Quickly, he got to work building a new product to detect malware in your files.

This is Dr. Rashid's the creation story of Glasswall.

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Hosted by Noah Labhart | Technical Founder & Startup Mentor.

S12 E13: The Death of Legacy VDI: Ditching Costly Virtual Desktops to Secure Enterprise BYOD Laptops Locally with David Matalon, Founder & CEO of Venn Apr 07, 2026

Show notes

David Matalon grew up in Great Neck, outside of New York City. He's always been interested in tech, way back in the early days of PCs, DOS, Windows and even Novell. In fact, he was the high school kid with an IT Consulting business on the side (yes, he wore a beeper to school). He graduated from NYU, and started his first company Offyx. Outside of tech, he is married with 4 kids. When asked about what he does for fun, he says that enjoys the all compassing nature of work and family life.

David's whole career has been centered around helping companies deliver distributed applications. In most of recent history, virtual desktops or VDI has been the de facto solution for businesses, with lots of issues and pains baked in. David and his team heard the cries of their customers, and decided to build a better solution - one, with a blue border.

This is the creation story of Venn.

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Founder Chats - Vadim Dedov Apr 03, 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 Vadim Dedov, CEO at Catchers. Vadim is going to walk us through what problem he wanted to solve with Catchers, and how his product development journey took him through architectural decisions, product optimization, team building and more.

Questions

Before we talk about Catchers, I’d love to understand you a bit better.
What experiences or responsibilities earlier in your life shaped how you think about work, systems, and accountability today?
What problem were you dealing with before Catchers existed? Not as a product idea yet, but as a real operational pain you kept running into.
At what point did you realise this couldn’t be solved with people, spreadsheets, or manual coordination anymore and that technology was the only way forward?
How did Catchers actually start taking shape as a product? What was the very first version you built, and what did “good enough” mean in a business where mistakes affect people’s income and compliance?
How long did it take to get to something usable, and what constraints defined your MVP?
Looking back, what were the most important trade-offs you made early on?
Things you consciously postponed or simplified, knowing they might come back later.
Let’s zoom in on the product itself. What is the core product insight behind Catchers — the thing you believe differentiates it from a typical HR or staffing platform?
How did your thinking about architecture evolve as scale increased? Was there a moment when you had to stop moving fast and redesign parts of the system properly?
How did you approach building your core team around such a complex, operations-heavy product? What qualities mattered most in the people you trusted with this system?
Can you share a decision that didn’t go as planned and how you and your team dealt with the consequences?
When you step back and look at what you’ve built today, what are you most proud of not in terms of features, but in terms of reliability, impact, or how the system holds under pressure?
As you look ahead, how do automation and AI change the way you think about workforce platforms — and what advice would you give to someone building infrastructure-heavy products today?

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