Code Story | Startup Podcast for CTOs, CEOs and Technical Founders
by Noah Labhart | Podcast for Technical Founders & Startups
Latest episode
S13 Bonus: Reinventing Banking: Bitcoin-Native Global Financial…
S13 Bonus: Reinventing Banking: Bitcoin-Native Global Financial…
About this podcast
Code Story is a startup podcast for technical founders building and scaling software products. Each episode features SaaS founders, engineers, and product leaders sharing how they built their product, found product-market fit, and navigated early-stage growth.
We explore:
Early engineering decisions and MVP development
Landing the first customers
Pricing and go-to-market experiments
Scaling challenges and infrastructure bottlenecks
Hiring the first team
Lessons learned from growing a startup
From first commit to first scale, Code Story focuses on the critical transition from building software to building a scalable business. If you’re a founder, engineer, or product leader interested in SaaS, startups, and scaling technology companies, this podcast breaks down how great products are built — and how they grow.
Episodes
The newest 50 of 865 episodes
- S13 Bonus: Reinventing Banking: Bitcoin-Native Global Financial Services with Shah Ramezani, Founder & CEO of Noah.com · 25 min · Season 13Shah Ramezani was born and raised in Switzerland. During his formative years and beyond, he was heavily influenced in finance and banking. Ten years ago, he moved to London…
- S13 Bonus: Scaling Tech Teams: Unlocking Elite LATAM Engineering Talent with Brian Samson, Founder & CEO of Plugg Technologies · 30 min · Season 13Brian Samson grew up in Chicago and eventually... just kept going west. Though he spent plenty of his life de-icing windows and shoveling snow off his driveway, he lived in SoCal…
- S13 E12: Replacing Human Personal Trainers with Adaptive Computer Vision & AI with Anton Marchanka, Co-founder & CEO of Zing Coach · 32 min · Season 13 Episode 12Anton Marchanka is originally from Belarus in Eastern Europe, but now lives in Poland, and spends a lot of time in New York. Almost seven years ago, the birth of his first child…
- S13 Bonus: Building Generative AI Tools & Multiplayer Engines for Game Developers with Anupam Singh, Chief Platform Officer at Roblox · 25 min · Season 13Today, we have a special guest on the podcast, Anupam Singh, Chief Platform Officer at Roblox. As you all may know, Roblox is a gaming platform with millions of different games…
- S13 Bonus: Eliminating Friction in Digital Market Discovery & Deal Flow with Demetrie King, Founder & CEO of MarketMatch · 23 min · Season 13Demetrie King grew up in Forney TX, but spent most of his life in Waxahachie. He is a Texas man through and through - and an avid side hustler, owning vending machines, buying…
- S13 E11: Optimizing Deep Sleep Cycles Through Intelligent Biometric Hardware with Igor Me, Founder & CEO of Neera Sleep · 29 min · Season 13 Episode 11Igor Me is originally from Ukraine, but now lives in Portugal with deep connections to the US. He has been an entrepreneur for a long as he can remember, and tends to dig into…
- S13 Bonus: Storage to Inference: Powering High-Speed AI & NVMe Infrastructure with Eran Kirzner, CEO of Lightbits · 43 min · Season 13Eran Kirzner born and raised in south Israel, then moved to Tel Aviv to be close to the technology center of the country. He isn't able to see himself outside of technology, no…
- S13 Bonus: The Edge Vision Shift: Privacy-First Computer AI for Smart Security & Eldercare with Mike Link, VP of Kami Vision · 35 min · Season 13Mike Link grew up in Rochester, New York, and had no intention in getting into technology... but he loves it now. His educational background was in neuroscience, as he found the…
- S13 E10: Decoupling Authorization: Scalable Policy-as-Code for Enterprise Apps with Alex Olivier, Co-Founder & CPTO of Cerbos · 29 min · Season 13 Episode 10Alex Olivier lives in London, England, and has been a tech since the early days. In fact, his Dad awarded him an old linux box - from which, he built a Harry Potter website. Five…
- S13 Bonus: The 99% Reliability Shift: Foundation Models for Robotic Manipulation with Yash Sinha, Founder of Intelligence Factory · 25 min · Season 13Yash Sinha hates losing even more than he wants to win, as the saying goes. He was born and raised in India, growing up in Delhi and competing in sports like Cricket. He's always…
- S13 Bonus: Accelerating Zero-Knowledge: Hardware-Driven ZK Proof Generation with Leo Fan, Co-Founder & CEO of Cysic · 27 min · Season 13Leo Fan grew up in China, performing his undergrad and masters within the country. Eventually, he came to the states to get his PhD from Cornell. Prior to his current venture…
- S13 E9: Forward-Deployed AI: Moving Enterprise Pilots into Real Production with Pooja Brown, CTO at Tribe AI · 29 min · Season 13 Episode 9Pooja Brown grew up in India, and now lives in San Francisco. Her family ran manufacturing factories that made fertilizer and medicine - IE real products, real customers, and…
- S13 Bonus: Eliminating Paperwork & Manual Data Entry in Manufacturing with Brian McKeown, Founding Engineer at Harmony AI · 29 min · Season 13Brian McKeown is 24 years old, and was born and raised in Dallas, TX. He attended Texas A&M University in College Station, and was heavily involved in rec athletics. Post…
- S13 Bonus: Spotting Property Red Flags using the "CARFAX" of Real Estate with Jeff Emalaba, Founder & CEO of InvestFusion · 31 min · Season 13Jeff Emalaba has a background that has morphed into risk mitigation over the years. He has a professional background in options trading, risk management and auditing, along with…
- S13 E8: Democratizing Real Estate: Fractional Wealth Building for Modern Investors with Alex Blackwood, CEO of Mogul · 45 min · Season 13 Episode 8Alex Blackwood grew up in different areas of New Jersey and Connecticut. He had a transformational experience at boarding school in South Jersey, and eventually went to…
- S13 Bonus: From Lab to Market: Scaling High-Growth Tech Startups with Caitlinn McMinn, Programs Director at TechFW · 25 min · Season 13Today, we have a special episode of the Code Story podcast. Joining us today is Caitlinn McMinn, Executive Director at TechFW. TechFW is a nonprofit startup incubator in Fort…
- S13 Bonus: Automating Local Lead Growth: High-Intent Prospecting & AI Verification with David Moore, Founder & CEO of Stalex.ai · 25 min · Season 13David Moore started day trading when he was 16, along with his brother. By the age of 19, he had a 7 figure portfolio, indicating some solid success. He did some angel investing…
- S13 E7: The AI Legal Shift: Giving SME Law Firms BigLaw Leverage with Dave Berner, Co-Founder & CEO of Parachute · 20 min · Season 13 Episode 7Back in August of 2025, Dave Berner joined the podcast previously in Season 11, episode 11, as the co-founder and CTO of Kinde. A past musician, he took up web development to…
- S13 Bonus: The AI Marketing Cloud: Harnessing Predictive Intent to Scale Growth with Christian Monberg, CTO of Zeta Global · 34 min · Season 13Christian Monberg is originally from a small town in central Maine. His mother was a mathematician, which meant he got into engineering fairly young. This lead him to attend…
- S13 Bonus: Scaling Real-Time Search Data: Secure APIs for AI Infrastructure with Alaa Abdulridha, Engineering Director at SerpApi · 27 min · Season 13Alaa Abdulridha is from souther Iraq, but now lives in Austin, TX. Post wars in Iraq, the country had poor infrastructure, which got him interested in building and creating…
- S13 Bonus: The AI SAST Shift: Eliminating Vulnerability Backlogs with Santiago Castiñeira, Co-Founder & CTO of Maze · 22 min · Season 13Santiago Castineira has quite the background in international living. He was born in Argentina, but grew up in Spain, then moved to Sweden, San Francisco, and now llives in…
- S13 E6: The Spatial Web Shift: Building Decentralized AI Knowledge Graphs with Yaniv Tal, Co-Founder & CEO of Geo · 29 min · Season 13 Episode 6Yaniv Tal grew up in the Bay Area in the 90's with parents who were engineers. They were both in electrical engineering, specifically digital/signal processing. He really saw the…
- S13 Bonus: The Enterprise AI Chip War: Rethinking LLM Silicon & Inference with Vasanth Mohan, Director of Product at SambaNova · 31 min · Season 13Today, we welcome a special guest to the podcast, Vasanth Mohan, Head of Developer Relations and Product Marking at SambaNova. SambaNova is transforming AI with efficiency…
- S13 Bonus: Dynamic Observability: Eliminating Telemetry Waste at Scale with Peter Morelli, Co-Founder & CEO of Bitdrift · 26 min · Season 13Peter Morelli was born and raised in San Francisco, one of the few natives of the area. He was front and center, watching the tech scene explode in front of him (and also blow…
- S13 E5: The Dynamic Compute Revolution: Eliminating Cache Invalidation with Julien Verlaguet, Founder & CEO of SkipLabs · 29 min · Season 13 Episode 5Julien Verlaguet is a self proclaimed "French guy", growing up in south of France. He studied in Paris, and moved to the US when he was 27, spending 10 years in the Bay Are and 5…
- S13 Bonus: The Legal AI Shift: Automating Contract Workflows with AI Agents with Nick Holzherr, Founder & CEO of GitLaw · 39 min · Season 13Nick Holzherr is originally from the Switzerland, but moved to UK when he was 7 years old, to the countryside. He had no real touch to computers until he was 18, when he attended…
- S13 Bonus: The Return of Backbox, and AI as a Trusted Advisor, with Rekha Shenoy, CEO of Backbox · 28 min · Season 13Today, we have a special return episode from our friends at Backbox, who we heard the creation story of the company back in Season 8. In this episode, we talk with Rekha Shenoy…
- S13 E4: The AI GTM Engine: Turning Intent Signals into Warm Outbound Pipeline with Connor Heggie, Co-Founder & CTO of Unify · 38 min · Season 13 Episode 4Connor Heggie grew up in Southern California, digging into technical things early on his life. He played with legos, was influence by Iron Man, and painted pictures on the back…
- S13 Bonus: The GPU Bottleneck: Democratizing AI Compute Pipelines with Christian Ondaatje, Founder & CEO of Aranya.tech · 32 min · Season 13Christian Ondaatje is originally from Los Angelas, CA. He got into GPUs as an underclassmen in college, of course through gaming and VR. He ended up starting an eGPU company in…
- S13 E3: Architecting Frictionless Creator Infrastructure & Social Commerce with Dumi Mabhena, CEO of Hilite · 24 min · Season 13 Episode 3Dumi Mabhena is originally from Zimbabwe, and has lived in 5 different countries. He now lives in Washington, DC, as he came to the states to attend Georgetown. Prior to that, he…
- S13 Bonus: From Airbnb's Chronon Engine to Enterprise Real-Time Feature Compute with Varant Zanoyan, Co-Founder & CEO of Zipline AI · 24 min · Season 13Varant Zanoyan was born in Washington DC, and grew up there and in Switzerland as well. He now lives in the Bay Area, specifically San Mateo. He's spent time at Palantir…
- S13 Bonus: The AI DBA Shift: Automating Database Reliability & Performance with Itamar Syn-Hershko, Founder & CEO of NeverBlink · 24 min · Season 13Itamar Syn-Hershko has been a tech guy since he was a wee lad - IE he was teaching his kindergarten teachers how to use their computers. He learned how to "do stuff" tech wise…
- S13 E2: Securing Enterprise GenAI: Data Privacy & Security Guardrails with Steven Walchek, Founder & CEO of Liminal · 35 min · Season 13 Episode 2Steven Walchek is originally from the Bay Area in California, but lives in Denver now. He's been there for 8 years with his family. He comes from a family of risk takers and…
- S13 Bonus: The Intention Layer: Why Coding Agents Need Product Judgment with Drew Dillon, Founder & CEO of Brief · 19 min · Season 13Drew Dillon is a tech founder and product leader, centered in the Bay Area. He is a person who likes to do a bit of everything, having an engineering background, but spending…
- S13 Bonus: Why Local On-Device AI Compute is the Future of Privacy with Behnam Bastani, Co-Founder & CEO of OpenInfer · 28 min · Season 13Behnam Bastani is originally from Tehran, Iran. He left the country at the age of 17, setting out for Canada, where he got his Masters and PhD, before moving to California. He's…
- S13 E1: The Token Winter Is Coming: Why Code Inflation Fails to Ship Real Business Value with Dave Garcia, Founder & Co-CEO of Pensero · 27 min · Season 13 Episode 1Dave Garcia is originally from Barcelona, and recently moved stateside, to the East Coast. He started coding when he was 7 years old, on a Commodore 64, in BASIC language - and…
- S12 Favorite - Overcoming Broken Right-Sizing Models to Automate Real-Time Cloud Cost Optimization with Sharad Kumar & Harshit Omar, Co-Founders of FluidCloud · 37 min · Season 12Sharad 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…
- S12 Favorite - 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 · 29 min · Season 12Yoni 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…
- S12 Favorite - Making AI Deterministic for Developers and their Agents, with Patrick Vuong of Moderne · 25 min · Season 12Today, 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…
- S12 Bonus: Rickard's Deterministic Return: Converting Scattered Data into Autonomous, Production-Grade Apps with Rickard Hansson, Founder & CEO of Gainable · 24 min · Season 12We have a special return episode, by our good friend Rickard Hansson. Rickard joined us previously on the podcast in Season 8 to tell the creation story of Weavy - collaboration…
- S12 E30: Wastewater Guardians: Automating Biology to Protect Clean Water with Virginia Szepietowski, Co-Founder of Nyad AI · 28 min · Season 12 Episode 30Virginia Szepietowski grew up in the UK outside of London, and now lives in Alabama. She's had a winding path to her current venture, including body building, triathlons, law…
- S12 Bonus: The App-Aware Illusion: Why Infinite Compute Fails Without Underlying Infrastructure Accountability and the Case for "Boring" IT with Richard Luna, President & Founder of Protected Harbor · 32 min · Season 12Richard Luna grew up in New York, never living more than 35 from where he grew up. He is a self proclaimed super nerd, and has been one since he was 13 - at which point, he…
- S12 E29: Fractional Talent: Traditional Freelance Marketplaces Fail Enterprise Workflows and the Shift Toward Managed Engineering Teams with Danny Gal, Co-Founder & CEO of Proteams · 21 min · Season 12 Episode 29Danny Gal was born and raised in the UK, and now lives outside of London. He attended University in Nottingham... yep, the same one from Robin Hood. He LOVES challenges, and not…
- S12 Bonus: The Perishable Supply Chain Crisis: Why Generic ERPs Fail Fresh Food Logistics and How AI Agents Are Transforming Error-Free Order Intake with Sid Dixit, Chief Technology Officer at iTradeNetwork · 32 min · Season 12Sid Dixit is originally from central India, and came to the states for college. He is a technologist and builder at heart, serving in leadership roles across major companies. He…
- S12 E28: The AI Throughput Illusion: Why Splurging on Expensive Models Fails to Ship Code and How to Measure Real Engineering Output with Emilie Schario, Co-Founder & Head of Product & Engineering at Kilo Code · 24 min · Season 12 Episode 28Emilie Schario grew up in New Jersey, outside of Newark, and attended college in the state. Currently, she lives in Columbus, Georgia, outside of Atlanta. She mentions she got…
- S12 Bonus: The Dashboard Mirage: Why Aggregate Metrics Hide Revenue Leaks and the Rise of Autonomous, Agentic Analytics with Bhaskar Sunkara, Founder & CEO of Bicycle AI · 30 min · Season 12Bhaskar Sunkara grew up in Delhi, India, and moved to the states when he started working. He has lived in San Fransisco for several decades now, and has spent a lot of his…
- The AI Control Loop: The Enterprise AI Accountability Moment – with Shayne Higdon of Wallarm · 27 min · Season 12Today, we are dropping our final episode in our series The AI Control Loop, How enterprises govern the AI they've already deployed - sponsored by our friends at Wallarm. Wallarm…
- S12 E27: The Real-Time Scaling Tax: Why High-Volume WebSockets Kill Monolithic Performance and How AnyCable Decoupled the Real-Time Layer with Irina Nazarova, CEO of Evil Martians · 38 min · Season 12 Episode 27Irina Nazarova grew up in Russia, and has lived in Portugal, Turkey, and now, San Francisco. She got a computer science degree, but felt like an imposter in the dev world. She…
- S12 Bonus: The Global Talent Mirage: Why Rigid Immigration Frameworks Fail Elite Tech Teams and the Rise of the Global Mobility OS with Ramiro Roballos, Co-Founder & CEO of Tukki · 22 min · Season 12Ramiro Roballos grew up in Buenos Aires, and 6 or 7 years ago, moved to Miami and now lives in Buffalo, NY. His path to entrepreneurship has been different, as he started out as…
- The AI Control Loop: What's Missing in AI Security Today - with Craig Thomas of Wallarm · 20 min · Season 12Today, we are dropping another episode in our series The AI Control Loop, How enterprises govern the AI they've already deployed - sponsored by our friends at Wallarm. Wallarm…
