Founders Talk: Startups, CEOs, Leadership

Latest Episodes:

Building an investment platform for everyone Feb 12, 2022

Show notes

This week Adam is joined by Joe Percoco — the Co-CEO of Titan, a premier investment manager for everyone. Titan is an investment company, a media, and a tech company, all rolled into one. Mid last year, they closed a $58 million Series B round led by Andreessen Horowitz (a16z) at a $450 million valuation. They currently have $750 million in assets managed and more than 35,000 clients.

Why should Titan exist? In Joe’s words, “Wall Street ignores everyday investors, and caters only to the ultra wealthy. This divide doesn’t sit well with us. So, we built Titan.” On today’s show Joe shares the journey, the why’s, the how’s, and the sequencing it might take to get to a $1 trillion of assets managed.

Join the discussion

Changelog++ members save 5 minutes on this episode because they made the ads disappear. Join today!

Sponsors:

FireHydrant – The reliability platform for every developer. Incidents impact everyone, not just SREs. FireHydrant gives teams the tools to maintain service catalogs, respond to incidents, communicate through status pages, and learn with retrospectives. Try FireHydrant free for 14 days at firehydrant.io
PlanetScale – PlanetScale is the only serverless database platform you can start in an instant and scale indefinitely with unlimited connections. Never think about database servers again. Everything you want to control is available through the beautifully designed PlanetScale CLI. Learn more and start your database in seconds at planetscale.com
Rewatch – Rewatch gives product and engineering teams async superpowers and helps them move faster with greater clarity. Imagine all of your team’s videos, all in one place. Record, organize, and share the videos that your team needs to ship great work. Get started for free with 14-day trial at rewatch.com.
Gitpod – Spin up fresh, ephemeral automated dev environments, in the cloud, in seconds. Their free tier is open to every developer with a GitLab, GitHub, and/or Bitbucket account. Learn more at gitpod.io

Featuring:

Joe Percoco – Website, X
Adam Stacoviak – Website, GitHub, LinkedIn, Mastodon, X

Show Notes:

Adam’s referral link to Titan (because he’s a client)

Something missing or broken? PRs welcome!

Bringing observability superpowers to all Jan 28, 2022

Show notes

This week Adam is joined by Christine Yen, co-founder and CEO of Honeycomb. Christine and Adam recorded this show late last year, just after their Series C funding round. They talk about the superpower of observability for developers, how she and Charity Majors got to the place to found Honeycomb, the state of their platform today, what exactly observability is, and their goals for the future of Honeycomb.

Join the discussion

Changelog++ members save 6 minutes on this episode because they made the ads disappear. Join today!

Sponsors:

WorkOS – A platform that gives developers a set of building blocks for quickly adding enterprise-ready features to their application. Add Single Sign-On (Okta, Azure, Google, Microsoft OAuth), sync users from any SCIM directory, HRIS integration, audit trails (SIEM), free magic link sign-in. WorkOS is designed for developers and offers a single, elegant interface that abstracts dozens of enterprise integrations. Learn more and get started at WorkOS.com
Rewatch – Rewatch gives product and engineering teams async superpowers and helps them move faster with greater clarity. Imagine all of your team’s videos, all in one place. Record, organize, and share the videos that your team needs to ship great work. Get started for free with 14-day trial at rewatch.com.
FireHydrant – The reliability platform for every developer. Incidents impact everyone, not just SREs. FireHydrant gives teams the tools to maintain service catalogs, respond to incidents, communicate through status pages, and learn with retrospectives. Try FireHydrant free for 14 days at firehydrant.io
Gitpod – Spin up fresh, ephemeral automated dev environments, in the cloud, in seconds. Their free tier is open to every developer with a GitLab, GitHub, and/or Bitbucket account. Learn more at gitpod.io

Featuring:

Christine Yen – Website, GitHub, X
Adam Stacoviak – Website, GitHub, LinkedIn, Mastodon, X

Show Notes:

Something missing or broken? PRs welcome!

Making the last database you’ll ever need Jan 14, 2022

Show notes

This week Adam is joined by Sam Lambert, CEO of PlanetScale. Now that PlanetScale is in general availability, Adam had to get Sam on the show to talk about the behind the scenes of building this database platform, how this is the last database you’ll ever need and what that means for developers, why serverless, its open source underpinnings with Vitess, and a preview of what’s to come.

Join the discussion

Changelog++ members save 4 minutes on this episode because they made the ads disappear. Join today!

Sponsors:

FireHydrant – The reliability platform for every developer. Incidents impact everyone, not just SREs. FireHydrant gives teams the tools to maintain service catalogs, respond to incidents, communicate through status pages, and learn with retrospectives. Try FireHydrant free for 14 days at firehydrant.io
Rewatch – Rewatch gives product and engineering teams async superpowers and helps them move faster with greater clarity. Imagine all of your team’s videos, all in one place. Record, organize, and share the videos that your team needs to ship great work. Get started for free with 14-day trial at rewatch.com.
Gitpod – Spin up fresh, ephemeral automated dev environments, in the cloud, in seconds. Their free tier is open to every developer with a GitLab, GitHub, and/or Bitbucket account. Learn more at gitpod.io
Fastly – Our bandwidth partner. Fastly powers fast, secure, and scalable digital experiences. Move beyond your content delivery network to their powerful edge cloud platform. Learn more at fastly.com

Featuring:

Sam Lambert – Website, GitHub, LinkedIn, X
Adam Stacoviak – Website, GitHub, LinkedIn, Mastodon, X

Show Notes:

Something missing or broken? PRs welcome!

Building on global bare metal Nov 24, 2021

Show notes

This week Adam is joined by Zac Smith, Co-Founder of Packet and now running Equinix Metal. They talk about the early days of the internet infrastructure space, the beginnings of Packet, the “why” of bare metal, transitioning Packet from startup to global company overnight when they were acquired by Equinix, and how all this for Zac is 20 years in the making.

Join the discussion

Changelog++ members save 6 minutes on this episode because they made the ads disappear. Join today!

Sponsors:

Auth0 – The for developers, by developers identity platform built for the cloud era that secures billions of logins every year. Security, compliance, and industry standards are always up-to-date, plus devs are free to provide the login options their users want with the security their application demands. Make login Auth0’s problem. Not yours. Learn more at Auth0.com
PlanetScale – PlanetScale is the only serverless database platform you can start in an instant and scale indefinitely with unlimited connections. Never think about database servers again. Everything you want to control is available through the beautifully designed PlanetScale CLI. Learn more and start your database in seconds at planetscale.com
Fastly – Compute@Edge free for 3 months — plus up to $100k a month in credit for an additional 6 months. Fastly’s Edge cloud network and modern approach to serverless computing allows you to deploy and run complex logic at the edge with unparalleled security and blazing fast computational speed. Head to fastly.com/podcast to take advantage of this limited time promotion!
Gitpod – Spin up fresh, ephemeral automated dev environments, in the cloud, in seconds. Their free tier is open to every developer with a GitLab, GitHub, and/or Bitbucket account. Learn more at gitpod.io

Featuring:

Zac Smith – Website, LinkedIn, X
Adam Stacoviak – Website, GitHub, LinkedIn, Mastodon, X

Show Notes:

Something missing or broken? PRs welcome!

Making the Web. Faster. Nov 05, 2021

Show notes

Today Adam is joined by Guillermo Rauch, founder and CEO of Vercel. They talk about building the platform that’s making the web faster and lets front-enders do their best work, his framework for leading as a CEO, what’s next for Next.js and Next.js Live, and how everything for Vercel is built on “Develop. Preview. Ship.”

Join the discussion

Changelog++ members save 4 minutes on this episode because they made the ads disappear. Join today!

Sponsors:

Render – The Zero DevOps cloud that empowers you to ship faster than your competitors. Render is built for modern applications and offers everything you need out-of-the-box. Learn more at render.com/changelog or email changelog@render.com for a personal introduction and to ask questions about the Render platform.
Auth0 – The for developers, by developers identity platform built for the cloud era that secures billions of logins every year. Security, compliance, and industry standards are always up-to-date, plus devs are free to provide the login options their users want with the security their application demands. Make login Auth0’s problem. Not yours. Learn more at Auth0.com
Gitpod – Spin up fresh, ephemeral automated dev environments, in the cloud, in seconds. Their free tier is open to every developer with a GitLab, GitHub, and/or Bitbucket account. Learn more at gitpod.io
Fastly – Our bandwidth partner. Fastly powers fast, secure, and scalable digital experiences. Move beyond your content delivery network to their powerful edge cloud platform. Learn more at fastly.com

Featuring:

Guillermo Rauch – Website, GitHub, X
Adam Stacoviak – Website, GitHub, LinkedIn, Mastodon, X

Show Notes:

Something missing or broken? PRs welcome!

Journey to CEO, again Oct 28, 2021

Show notes

Today Adam is joined by Evan Kaplan, CEO of InfluxData. Evan’s journey to become the CEO was not by way of founder, in this company. Evan has founded several companies in the past, and he’s been in a CEO position for more than 22 years. But InfluxData was founded by Paul Dix, and Paul knew years ago that his role (best role?) was to lead the technical and product direction of the company, which lead him to Evan. Today we share that story as well as a glimpse into operating the business that built the defacto platform for building time series applications with deep roots in open source.

Join the discussion

Changelog++ members save 4 minutes on this episode because they made the ads disappear. Join today!

Sponsors:

Render – The Zero DevOps cloud that empowers you to ship faster than your competitors. Render is built for modern applications and offers everything you need out-of-the-box. Learn more at render.com/changelog or email changelog@render.com for a personal introduction and to ask questions about the Render platform.
Auth0 – The for developers, by developers identity platform built for the cloud era that secures billions of logins every year. Security, compliance, and industry standards are always up-to-date, plus devs are free to provide the login options their users want with the security their application demands. Make login Auth0’s problem. Not yours. Learn more at Auth0.com
Snowplow Analytics – The behavioral data management platform powering your data journey. Capture and process high-quality behavioral data from all your platforms and products and deliver that data to your cloud destination of choice. Get started and experience Snowplow data for yourself at snowplowanalytics.com
Fastly – Our bandwidth partner. Fastly powers fast, secure, and scalable digital experiences. Move beyond your content delivery network to their powerful edge cloud platform. Learn more at fastly.com

Featuring:

Evan Kaplan – LinkedIn, X
Adam Stacoviak – Website, GitHub, LinkedIn, Mastodon, X

Show Notes:

Something missing or broken? PRs welcome!

The future of code search Oct 20, 2021

Show notes

Today Adam is joined by Quinn Slack, CEO of Sourcegraph. He’s been tracking Sourcegraph for years now and knew one day they would hit Unicorn status, and that happened this year. They’re just off a massive $125M Series D funding round led by Andreessen Horowitz at a $2.625B valuation to bring code search to every developer. The future of code search has never been more clear and we’re excited to share today’s show with you.

Join the discussion

Changelog++ members save 3 minutes on this episode because they made the ads disappear. Join today!

Sponsors:

Render – The Zero DevOps cloud that empowers you to ship faster than your competitors. Render is built for modern applications and offers everything you need out-of-the-box. Learn more at render.com/changelog or email changelog@render.com for a personal introduction and to ask questions about the Render platform.
Snowplow Analytics – The behavioral data management platform powering your data journey. Capture and process high-quality behavioral data from all your platforms and products and deliver that data to your cloud destination of choice. Get started and experience Snowplow data for yourself at snowplowanalytics.com
SignalWire – Build what’s next in communications with video, voice, and messaging APIs powered by elastic cloud infrastructure. Try it today at signalwire.com and use code FOUNDERS for $25 in developer credit.
Fastly – Our bandwidth partner. Fastly powers fast, secure, and scalable digital experiences. Move beyond your content delivery network to their powerful edge cloud platform. Learn more at fastly.com

Featuring:

Quinn Slack – Website, GitHub, LinkedIn, X
Adam Stacoviak – Website, GitHub, LinkedIn, Mastodon, X

Show Notes:

Something missing or broken? PRs welcome!

Iterating to globally distributed apps and databases Sep 03, 2021

Show notes

Today Adam is joined by Kurt Mackey, co-founder and CEO of Fly.io — a platform for running full stack apps and databases close to users. This conversation with Kurt talks through his journey as a developer and entrepreneur, fundraising, getting into Y Combinator (twice), and how they’ve iterated on the Fly platform since 2017 to get to where they are right now.

Join the discussion

Changelog++ members save 4 minutes on this episode because they made the ads disappear. Join today!

Sponsors:

Render – The Zero DevOps cloud that empowers you to ship faster than your competitors. Render is built for modern applications and offers everything you need out-of-the-box. Learn more at render.com/changelog or email changelog@render.com for a personal introduction and to ask questions about the Render platform.
Auth0 – The for developers, by developers identity platform built for the cloud era that secures billions of logins every year. Security, compliance, and industry standards are always up-to-date, plus devs are free to provide the login options their users want with the security their application demands. Make login Auth0’s problem. Not yours. Learn more at Auth0.com
Snowplow Analytics – The behavioral data management platform powering your data journey. Capture and process high-quality behavioral data from all your platforms and products and deliver that data to your cloud destination of choice. Get started and experience Snowplow data for yourself at snowplowanalytics.com
Fastly – Our bandwidth partner. Fastly powers fast, secure, and scalable digital experiences. Move beyond your content delivery network to their powerful edge cloud platform. Learn more at fastly.com

Featuring:

Kurt Mackey – Website, GitHub, LinkedIn, X
Adam Stacoviak – Website, GitHub, LinkedIn, Mastodon, X

Show Notes:

Something missing or broken? PRs welcome!

The acquisition of a lifetime Aug 26, 2021

Show notes

On today’s show Adam is joined by John Nunemaker (an old friend). For some of you listening you might remember John’s appearance on The Changelog #11, which was basically forever ago. Or his company Ordered List — they made Gauges, Harmony, and Speaker Deck which was quite popular in its time — so much so that they attracted the attention of Chris Wanstrath, one of the co-founders of GitHub to acquire Ordered List. The rest as they say is history. Today, John and I go back through that history to see what it was like to be acquired by GitHub and how that single choice has forever changed his life.

Join the discussion

Changelog++ members save 4 minutes on this episode because they made the ads disappear. Join today!

Sponsors:

Render – The Zero DevOps cloud that empowers you to ship faster than your competitors. Render is built for modern applications and offers everything you need out-of-the-box. Learn more at render.com/changelog or email changelog@render.com for a personal introduction and to ask questions about the Render platform.
Auth0 – The for developers, by developers identity platform built for the cloud era that secures billions of logins every year. Security, compliance, and industry standards are always up-to-date, plus devs are free to provide the login options their users want with the security their application demands. Make login Auth0’s problem. Not yours. Learn more at Auth0.com
Snowplow Analytics – The behavioral data management platform powering your data journey. Capture and process high-quality behavioral data from all your platforms and products and deliver that data to your cloud destination of choice. Get started and experience Snowplow data for yourself at snowplowanalytics.com
Sendinblue – Take your digital marketing to the next level. Head to sendinblue.com/founderstalk and use the code FOUNDERSTALK to get one month free with 100,000 emails.

Featuring:

John Nunemaker – Website, GitHub, LinkedIn, X
Adam Stacoviak – Website, GitHub, LinkedIn, Mastodon, X

Show Notes:

Something missing or broken? PRs welcome!

Leading Auth0 to a $6.5 billion acquisition Aug 13, 2021

Show notes

This week Adam is joined by Eugenio Pace, co-founder and CEO of Auth0. Auth0 is a for developers, by developers identity, access, security, and authentication platform built for the cloud that secures billions of logins every year. Mid 2020 they raised $120 million at a $1.92 billion valuation after being told no several times. Then, earlier this year in March they announced they were being acquired by Okta for $6.5 billion, in a bold and future-thinking all stock deal. This episode is full of wisdom, inspiration, and tactical advice that Eugenio has used to build Auth0.

Join the discussion

Changelog++ members get a bonus 1 minute at the end of this episode and zero ads. Join today!

Sponsors:

Render – The Zero DevOps cloud that empowers you to ship faster than your competitors. Render is built for modern applications and offers everything you need out-of-the-box. Learn more at render.com/changelog or email changelog@render.com for a personal introduction and to ask questions about the Render platform.
Snowplow Analytics – The behavioral data management platform powering your data journey. Capture and process high-quality behavioral data from all your platforms and products and deliver that data to your cloud destination of choice. Get started and experience Snowplow data for yourself at snowplowanalytics.com
Sendinblue – Take your digital marketing to the next level. Head to sendinblue.com/founderstalk and use the code FOUNDERSTALK to get one month free with 100,000 emails.
Fastly – Our bandwidth partner. Fastly powers fast, secure, and scalable digital experiences. Move beyond your content delivery network to their powerful edge cloud platform. Learn more at fastly.com.

Featuring:

Eugenio Pace – Website, GitHub, LinkedIn, X
Adam Stacoviak – Website, GitHub, LinkedIn, Mastodon, X

Show Notes:

Something missing or broken? PRs welcome!

Our TOPPODCAST Picks

Follow Us

Stay Connected

Founders Talk: Startups, CEOs, Leadership

Related Podcasts

Links

Stay Connected