Code Story: Insights from Startup Tech Leaders

Today, we are continuing our series, entitled Developer Chats - hearing from the large scale system builders themselves. In this episode, we are talking with Oleksandr Piekhota, Principal Software Engineer at Teaching Strategies. Oleksandr helps to show us at what point of scale platform approaches are required, when to run experiments and when to stop, and perhaps more importantly - engineering ownership beyond the code. Support this podcast at — https://redcircle.com/codestory/donations Advertising Inquiries: https://redcircle.com/brands Privacy & Opt-Out: https://redcircle.com/privacy

Today, we are dropping another episode in our "chats" series, but expanding the audience set to include more folks. This episode is Founder Chats - hearing from those scaling the companies themselves. In this episode, we are talking with Max Denevich, Co-founder and CRO of LoyaltyPlant. Max is going to share with us to road he travelled, entering into this industry, his go to market strategies, scaling across geographic region - and much, much more. Support this podcast at — https://redcircle.com/codestory/donations Advertising Inquiries: https://redcircle.com/brands Privacy & Opt-Out: https://redcircle.com/privacy

Nouran Farouk grew up in Egypt, which she notes the culture has a deep root in family. She and her sister have always been drawn to social entrepreneurship, being drawn to building but also positively impacting the world. In addition, Nouran has a medical background, which taught her that good intentions are not enough - you need good systems. Outside of tech, she loves to travel and visit cities. She frequently observes how people move throughout the world, and how systems influence their daily life. Nouran and her sister wanted to learn to drive scooters. In doing so, they were immediately greeted with inequitable opportunities for women in this arena. They wanted to change this situation, and deployed a back of the napkin idea into a fully operational platform. This is the creation story of Dosy. Support this podcast at — https://redcircle.com/codestory/donations Advertising Inquiries: https://redcircle.com/brands Privacy & Opt-Out: https://redcircle.com/privacy

James Davies lives in the Maryland area, and started his career at the crossroads of tech and the auto industry. His first girlfriend's father owned some car lots - so he went to work there, wrote some software, and propelled his success at those dealerships. He notes that the auto industry was fun and has a lot of moving parts, but was pretty taxing personally. Outside of tech, he is married with 2 kids. He grew up around construction, so he enjoys getting his hands dirty and building things. In fact, he is fixing up the barn of the recent home he bought - framing, doing the plumbing, and making it livable. James was working for the state department as a consultant, and was a customer of his current venture. He was chosen to implement the solution, which turned out to be a successful project. Post that project, he was approached by the company to lead projects on the east coast and eventually landed in the CEO role. This is James' creation story at Kinetic Data. Support this podcast at — https://redcircle.com/codestory/donations Advertising Inquiries: https://redcircle.com/brands Privacy & Opt-Out: https://redcircle.com/privacy

Daniel Shnaider came from a family that worked 9 to 5 jobs - engineers, doctors, etc. He was a military officer in Isreal, and while he was there, he met the son of the founder of Waze. After learning about that journey, he knew he wanted to build something meaningful, and started building businesses. Outside of technology, he loves pushing himself to the limits. But to relax, interestingly enough he does adrenaline activities - sky diving and racing cars. As I mentioned, Daniel started and ran many businesses in the past. One of them was centered around physical products, and led him to send emails to the mom and pop' shops they wanted to work with. To fight the spam trap, he and his team built a solution to solve the problem for themselves... and then took the next step. This is the creation story of Warmy.io. Support this podcast at — https://redcircle.com/codestory/donations Advertising Inquiries: https://redcircle.com/brands Privacy & Opt-Out: https://redcircle.com/privacy

Michael Fester grew up in Denmark, the son of a French mother and a Danish father. He was always interested in tech, math and the arts, initially wanting to go into design. However, he did research in number theory at Cambridge, and founded his first startup in Paris, which eventually was acquired by Sonos. Outside of tech, he enjoys reading, in particular the classics - like Dostoyevsky - and biographies - like that of Einstein. He enjoys eating and living healthy, and promotes this lifestyle at his current venture. Michael and his team noticed that despite the continual improvement of models, the process of maintaining systems using AI was tedious. Not only did this impact support operations, and building software for this area of a business, but negatively impacted the customers themselves. He and his wife wanted to build the new standard for how support operations are run. This is the creation story of 14.ai. Support this podcast at — https://redcircle.com/codestory/donations Advertising Inquiries: https://redcircle.com/brands Privacy & Opt-Out: https://redcircle.com/privacy

Prashanth Tondapu was born and raised in India, now living in New Delhi, the capital there. He claims to be a textbook nerd, loving technology and information. He reads a lot, primarily eastern philosophy and stuff on being enlightened, basically pointing him to skills in accepting reality. He's married with two girls, 9 and 4 years old, along with a Labrador and a German shepherd. He says that having 3 girls in the house means he has 3 supreme leaders. Prashanth has worked for companies in the past focused on products - companies like McAffee and the Advisor Board Company. Outside of that, he started to build product after product, but no one wanted to buy his product. Eventually, he was tasked to advise a company in product delivery, which then changed everything. This is the creation story of Innostax. Support this podcast at — https://redcircle.com/codestory/donations Advertising Inquiries: https://redcircle.com/brands Privacy & Opt-Out: https://redcircle.com/privacy

The Gene Simmons of Data Protection: Protegrity's KISS Method Today, we are releasing our final FINAL episode from our series, entitled The Gene Simmons of Data Protection - the KISS Method, brought to you by none other than Protegrity. Protegrity is AI-powered data security for data consumption, offering fine grain data protection solutions, so you can enable your data security, compliance, sharing and analytics. Episode Title: Navigating the Future of Data Management: Type Systems, Quantum Computing, and Protegrity's Innovations In our final-FINAL episode, we are speaking with Ave Gatton, Director of Generative AI. We talk about how AI safety doesn't end with training, it begins with inference. We explore the overlooked frontier of AI security, from prompt-injection, data leakage, and model manipulation. Ave helps to understand how you can build guardrails that operate in real time, and adapt to evolving threats. Support this podcast at — https://redcircle.com/codestory/donations Advertising Inquiries: https://redcircle.com/brands Privacy & Opt-Out: https://redcircle.com/privacy

Marc Gyöngyösi has had a lifelong passion for building and technology, shaped early on by time spent crafting wooden projects and tinkering with remote-controlled vehicles... before progressing to constructing a full 737 flight-simulator cockpit in their parents’ basement as a young teen. His interests have consistently centered on blending the physical and digital worlds, from open-source flight-simulator development to modern explorations in AI, which now occupies most of his free time. Outside of tech, he enjoys running, skiing, golf, and staying active, and although he has spent time flying, he's stepped back from it due to time constraints. He's especially fond of a well-made Austrian Wiener Schnitzel — an elusive treasure in the U.S., but one they happily track down whenever possible. In 2017, Marc launched his company Intelligent Flying Machines, which was a college project focused on building autonomous drones for warehouses. After dealing with crashes, and 12 stitches from said crashes, Marc shifted his focus from flying robots to a broader, computer vision platform capturing real world data. This is the creation story of OneTrack. Support this podcast at — https://redcircle.com/codestory/donations Advertising Inquiries: https://redcircle.com/brands Privacy & Opt-Out: https://redcircle.com/privacy

Johnny Halife was born and raised in Argentina. As such, he takes soccer very seriously. He is a die hard fan of Boca, and has taken his family to live games in Miami and Nashville. He is the father of 2 young boys, which he notes completely changed his life. He has been slowly introducing them to soccer, as an Argentina after would do, and they love the roar of the stadium during a game. He also claims to be a really bad golfer, which I can relate to. Twenty one years ago, Johnny started working for Microsoft Engineering behind the scenes, helping them shape products. Eventually, he and his team started asking the question - if we are helping Microsoft, why don't we help other companies? This is Johnny's creation story at Southworks. Support this podcast at — https://redcircle.com/codestory/donations Advertising Inquiries: https://redcircle.com/brands Privacy & Opt-Out: https://redcircle.com/privacy

Today, we have a special guest on the podcast, Keith Lucas, a startup advisor specializing in product, growth, people and culture. Keith led product and engineering at Roblox, helping scale its infrastructure, product offerings, team and business. Most recently, Keith published a book entitled Impact: How to Inspire, Align, and Amplify Innovative Teams. All book proceeds go to charities to help young entrepreneurs, so make sure you check the link in the notes and grab the book today. In our chat, Keith is going to walk us through key concepts in the book, surrounding centering your team around the vision and mission of what you are driving towards, from recruiting to execution to "coaching out". Support this podcast at — https://redcircle.com/codestory/donations Advertising Inquiries: https://redcircle.com/brands Privacy & Opt-Out: https://redcircle.com/privacy

Marlena Sarunac is a first generation American, her family being from Croatia. She started her career at Mastercard, left to travel around Europe (before it was cool to do so), and then came back to join her first startup. During her travels, she figured out that she was truly an American, as she prefers the entrepreneurial pace of life. Her path has been in marketing, but she also has an engineering degree, which gives her a unique edge. Outside of tech, she is married to a chef, with a 2 year old daughter and a rescue dog. They live in Rhode Island, in the Bristol area. Marlena and her now co-founder met at a prior company, and worked well together promoting that brand. The built a playbook, and always dreamed of starting their own thing to push those playbooks. The stars aligned later in life, and they decided to give it a go. This is the creation story of The Company Advice. Support this podcast at — https://redcircle.com/codestory/donations Advertising Inquiries: https://redcircle.com/brands Privacy & Opt-Out: https://redcircle.com/privacy

Arto Minasyan is originally from Armenia. He's a serial entrepreneur, having started 7 companies, selling 4 of them. He used to be into the sciences, having his PhD in Mathematics and Machine Learning. But outside of tech, he's married with 2 kids. He loves to read novels, and in fact writes books himself (mainly his memoirs). He loves to ski, and aligned with his Armenian heritage, he loves to spend time with his big family. Arto and his colleague got breakfast together, and started talking through an idea around clean audio for conferencing and beyond. They built a prototype, and then COVID hit - which made their tool very popular. This is the creation story of Krisp.ai. Support this podcast at — https://redcircle.com/codestory/donations Advertising Inquiries: https://redcircle.com/brands Privacy & Opt-Out: https://redcircle.com/privacy

Dmytro Ovcharenko lives in Palo Alto, CA. He graduated from Berkeley in 2015 - not as an engineer, but as a lawyer. His first connection to tech was in his first role, as an attorney at a tech company. But outside of technology, he loves good sushi and burgers. In addition, he does a bit of hiking - some for fun, but also some for business. He's been known to take a meeting or two on the hiking trail. Dmytro very much enjoyed working at his prior company. But he noticed the large gap between what his business was charging, and what the engineers themselves received. He thought he could close this gap, to provide a better wage for the workers while saving businesses money. This is the creation story of Alcor. Support this podcast at — https://redcircle.com/codestory/donations Advertising Inquiries: https://redcircle.com/brands Privacy & Opt-Out: https://redcircle.com/privacy

Arjun Vora was born and raised in Mumbai. He grew up in a family that wasn't financially stable, which drove him to come to the states for new opportunities. He came for school, landing in Ann Arbor, Michigan, and immediately loved the environment. Post school, he worked for MicroStrategy and Salesforce, eventually landing at Uber - where he met Tito. Outside of tech, he's married to his girlfriend from 9th grade with 2 kids. Tito Goldstein was introduced to technology when he was 8 years old, building simple games in Q basic. Since then, he ha s been tinkering and creating things. He graduated from USC, and continuing tinkering in web design and building products around the messaging world. Eventually, he came to Uber and met Arjun on day one. Outside of tech, he enjoys projects where he finds something scary and then digs in to become a true expert. While Tito and Arjun were at Uber, they quickly understood that the reason people drove for the company was not the pay, but the flexibility and self service aspect of the platform. With this, they started to wonder... why can't we give this to everyone else? This is the creation story of Teambridge. Support this podcast at — https://redcircle.com/codestory/donations Advertising Inquiries: https://redcircle.com/brands Privacy & Opt-Out: https://redcircle.com/privacy

Arsham Ghahramani lives in Toronto, but grew up in rural countryside of UK, out in the middle of nowhere on a farm. He was surrounded by tractors, chickens, and other animals. Over time, he moved to bigger and bigger cities, until 6 years ago, he jumped across the pond to Canada. Outside of tech, he loves team sports, playing a lot of soccer and starting to get into hockey. When he transitioned to hockey, he immediately enjoyed how fast paced it was, and how many tactics carried over from soccer. In the past, Arsham was the head of machine learning at a prior company. His now co-founder and he worked closely together, and they were both pressured to hire good people quickly. They started to notice some patterns in how they were hiring... including the regular submission of AI generated resumes. This is the creation story of Ribbon. Support this podcast at — https://redcircle.com/codestory/donations Advertising Inquiries: https://redcircle.com/brands Privacy & Opt-Out: https://redcircle.com/privacy

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. Support this podcast at — https://redcircle.com/codestory/donations Advertising Inquiries: https://redcircle.com/brands Privacy & Opt-Out: https://redcircle.com/privacy

David Sztykman lives in Paris, but used to live in New York for a time. He has always been into video, streaming and photography. For the latter, as a kid, his Dad had a film developing lab in their basement, so he spent many hours doing that before digital changed it all. As a student, he used to tinker with open source video streaming libraries, and eventually worked for Alkamai, responsible for the streaming media for Europe (think the Olympics or Super Bowl). Outside of tech, he has 2 kids and they like to do a lot of legos together. But in general, they are outside kids so usually, they like to get out of the house and do active things. In his prior role, David was consistently alerted about poor performance on the video streaming. He started to dig into the data streaming portion of, to be alerted on shifts in the stream itself. After a few other opportunities, he was approached to build real time CDN observability, for distributed infrastructure. This is the creation story of Hydrolix. Support this podcast at — https://redcircle.com/codestory/donations Advertising Inquiries: https://redcircle.com/brands Privacy & Opt-Out: https://redcircle.com/privacy

Pukar Hamal was born in 1991, and is originally from Katmandu, Nepal. He grew up with no plumbing and no electricity, prior to moving to the states to grow up in Queens. Eventually, he moved to the Bay Area to attend Stanford, and fell in love with the area and the forward thinking culture. Outside of tech, he's been married for a few years. He enjoys listening to podcast about tech, finance, and economics, along with playing tennis every now and again. In his past venture, Pukar was on the one yard line for making a deal on his company. Before it could close, his team was hit with a security due diligence questionnaire that halted the process. Having that experience drove him to build something to speed up the execution and experience of customer assurance. This is the creation story of SecurityPal AI. Support this podcast at — https://redcircle.com/codestory/donations Advertising Inquiries: https://redcircle.com/brands Privacy & Opt-Out: https://redcircle.com/privacy

Harman Narula lives in NYC with his wife and 2 young kids. He was born in the states, from parents who immigrated to the country from India. The "immigrant household" was one that focused on hard work and ethics - and it was fueled by the lore of his grandfather's entrepreneurial adventures. He's a big Knicks fan, and likes to take in a game when he can. And prior to NYC, he lived in San Francisco for 10 years or so, and picked up bike riding. Though he hasn't picked it back up just yet, he hopes to eventually. Harman spent a lot of his early career in hospitality. His now co-founder worked in this space as well, but primarily on the technology size. So all the conversations he and his friend were having were referencing this eco-system. Eventually, they landed on a thesis that the "hotel tech stack" or operating system - should be customer facing. This is the creation story of Canary Technologies. Support this podcast at — https://redcircle.com/codestory/donations Advertising Inquiries: https://redcircle.com/brands Privacy & Opt-Out: https://redcircle.com/privacy