Code Story Podcast Season 9: Founder Stories

David Boskovic, founder of Flatfile, shares his journey from building websites on a Canadian farm at age 12 to creating a company that productizes CSV file imports.

In the past, Adam realized that there were not great tools out there for QA testing. He noticed a lot of people were using Excel and Word, along with manual testing through the industry. Given his experience as a project manager and architect, he saw an opportunity in the market - and set out to build a solution.

Previously, Adam was the creator of Chef, and has spent many years building a successful platform, extending DevOops value with automated security and compliance. He and his now cofounder reached the limits of what could be achieved using conventional approaches in the space - and decided to build a new tool, to enable engineers to tackle complex infra and app management without compromising control.

Erin and Jesus are stationed in Denver, Colorado. During the pandemic, they were hanging out at the back yard picnic table, with wine and smokes. They were ideating over building a digital strip mall, to help local businesses build their platforms. Eventually, they started up a platform engineering company and when Lionsgate called, their pandemic picnic table idea started to grow.

Code Story podcast episode 7 (Season 9) features Naomi Chopra, founder of Hatica, discussing how he identified the problem of developers depending on dozens of SaaS tools and built a platform to collect signals from those tools to drive velocity, alignment, and well-being.

What if you had a window into the digital startup world? What if you could ask the tech veterans what it feels like to create a world class product?...how to recover from critical mistakes......how to scale your solution to the masses? How do you get from an idea on the back of a napkin, to a fully functioning product? What if you could hear the human stories about how they delivered technology?

Ayal and his co-founders noticed the trends of automation in continuous integration and development processes (or CI/CD). They also noticed that over time, this has created a lot of clutter and bloat in the ecosystem. They wanted to filter out bad practices, and build a platform to reduce feedback time and redefine CI/CD.

Linus Hakansson, co-founder at Gravitee, shares his creation story of building an open-source API management platform on the Code Story podcast (Episode 19, Season 9).

Healthbird co-founders Ariel Dominguez and Irena Tigranyan share their creation story on the Code Story podcast, describing how they invested their wedding money to build the "Expedia for healthcare" — simplifying healthcare insurance with a swipe-based approach.

Jason has been a podcaster for many years, interviewing founders and creators of new startup and tech solutions. When COVID hit, he was struck with how difficult it was to connect with individuals via audio call, leading him to validate an idea and build a solution with his team.

Alex Gallego, founder of Redpanda Data, shares his journey from Colombia to building a Kafka-alternative streaming platform, driven by his passion for squeezing maximum compute out of hardware and optimizing storage.

Code Story podcast episode 8 features Roger Light of Cedalo, who shares how attending a 2009 IoT conference on MQTT led him to create an open-source management software project that became Cedalo.

Post looking for his next gig, Mike and his co-founders started to realize that the bar is very low for painting companies. It is a business that has not caught up to modern tech, so they started to think - how do we make a business thats like DoorDash for your home painting needs?

This episode features Matt Levine discussing his journey in the tech industry, particularly his experience with CacheFly and the challenges of starting a CDN. Listeners will gain insights into the evolution of content delivery networks and the strategic decisions involved in building one.

Code Story podcast episode 31 features Konrad Niemiec, co-founder of Lekko, discussing his journey from coding at age 11 to working on Uber's self-driving team and eventually founding a dynamic configuration platform.

Code Story podcast episode 9 features Ryo Koyama, co-founder of Remote.it, discussing his unconventional path from fluid dynamics and graphics card product management to creating a connectivity-as-code networking platform.

In the past, Sahil was a client of his current venture. In leading ER Express, he saw great value in a tool to predict conversion. He liked it so much, that after he sold his company and moved on, he wanted to join the team - and take it to the next level.

Craig Sellars, creator of Tether stablecoin and the first NFT platform (now Vatom.com), discusses his journey from Georgia Tech to blockchain and his latest venture, Self, focused on building the standard of internet identity.

At Instacart, JJ started to build a tool for infrastructure monitoring. When he realized that building it was cumbersome, and nothing existed in the market, he decided to take one of the companies best SRE and start a company, building this very product.

Kyle Carberry, founder of Coder.com, shares his journey from modding Xboxes and Minecraft servers in small-town Saskatchewan to building an enterprise cloud development environment in New York.

In this episode, Alon Arvatz discusses his experiences in the military and cybersecurity that led him to write about cloud cost management. He emphasizes the importance of efficiency and how businesses can benefit from a minimum integrate-able product to manage their cloud expenses effectively.

This episode features Alexander Deeb discussing his journey with Classhook, a platform aimed at making educational videos more searchable and engaging for students. The conversation delves into innovative ideas for enhancing student engagement through popular media in schools.

Shalin Madan, co-founder of Formidium, shares his journey from immigrating to the US at age 6 to spending 20 years in financial markets before founding a fund administration company powered by cutting-edge technology.

Nic started his first payments business a decade ago, which lived under the shadow of the bank. After many years of negotiation, he convinced the powers that be to let his company become its own payment processor.

Ruslan Zaripov, co-owner of KRIT, shares the creation story of RiskHunter, a safety-focused software product built for large enterprises in heavy energy and metallurgy plants.

Code Story podcast features a return guest, Rene Morkos, Founder & CEO of Alice Technologies, discussing updates to Alice Pro and Alice Core, which boast a 100X reduction in setup time for construction project optioneering.

Saravana Kumar, founder of Document360, shares the origin story of his knowledge base product on the Code Story podcast.

As a data scientist, Fabiana realized that there were several pain points that led to her not being fulfilled in her role. After meeting her now co-founder, who felt the same pains, they decided to set out and solve the problem by building a developer platform for data science.

Gilad Shriki, co-founder of Descope, shares his journey from Israel to building an authentication and identity platform after his previous company was acquired by Palo Alto Networks.

Rick Caccia, a lifelong Silicon Valley entrepreneur, discusses the founding of WitnessAI on the Code Story podcast, explaining how conversations with security officers revealed that enterprises struggle to enable AI tooling while maintaining data security and control.

Code Story podcast episode 26 features Sanjay Nagaraj of Traceable AI discussing his journey from India to co-founding a company focused on real-time API security, building on his experience at AppDynamics.

Code Story podcast episode 20 features Michael Hummel, founder of Establish, discussing how his marketing background led him to build a company that helps startups raise capital through three key pillars rooted in public relations.

Dennis Pilarinos, founder of Unblocked, discusses his journey from tinkering as a child to building solutions that help developers navigate codebases by surfacing contextual company information.

Zach Goldberg, author of The Startup CTO's Handbook, shares his journey from computer camp to joining Gruntwork, where he leads conversations around DevOps and the future of the industry.

Code Story podcast episode featuring Juan Barroso, founder of Salsa, who shares his journey from growing up in Venezuela to building a payroll framework that allows developers to create their own payroll engines.

Anish Dhar, founder of Cortex, shares his journey from growing up in the Bay Area and working at Uber to identifying the widespread problem of microservices mismanagement and poor service cataloguing.

Jonathan Norris, co-founder and CTO, shares the creation story of DevCycle, a feature flagging platform spun out of Taplytics after nearly 10 years when the team noticed developers were most passionate about feature flags over the core product.

Neil Patel, founder of Axiom, shares his journey from pharmacology to tech, explaining how his team pivoted from building event analytics tooling to solving the underlying data store problem.

Code Story podcast episode 21 features Matt Hocking of WellSaid Labs, discussing his journey from graphic design in Australia to co-founding an AI-powered voiceover generation startup.

David Hartmann, a German-born New Zealander and former Bayer employee, shares the origin story of Helio Additive on the Code Story podcast, explaining how a 2014 sabbatical and conversations about 3D printing's unfulfilled potential led to the company's founding.

Code Story podcast episode 16 features James Perkins discussing his non-traditional path into technology and the creation of Unkey, an API authentication company born from a side project that received overwhelming community response.

Avi Freedman, founder of Kentik, shares his journey from childhood tech obsession to building a networking observability platform after realizing the problem wasn't solved during his time at Akamai.

Code Story podcast episode 35 features Prince Ghosh, founder of Factored Quality, discussing his journey from mechanical and aerospace engineering to supply chain tech and the creation of his quality control startup.

Code Story podcast episode 6 (Season 9) features Melissa Pancoast, founder of The Beans, discussing her journey from teaching in New York City and studying people's relationship with money at Oxford to building a financial software company.

Omry Hay, co-founder of env0, shares the creation story of his infrastructure-as-code company on the Code Story podcast, born from challenges scaling environments efficiently at a prior company in Israel.

Raven Jiang, co-founder of Arc, shares the creation story of the fintech platform designed to accelerate startups through seamless revenue financing, born from observations made during business school.

Srikar Sam Yeruva, founder of Pycube, shares his journey as an immigrant entrepreneur from India who built his third startup focused on software solutions for hospitals to lower costs.

Björn Kolbeck, co-founder of Quobyte, shares his journey from a PhD project building a distributed version of Linux to creating a standalone distributed file system company.

Code Story podcast features a bonus episode with Luka Yancopoulos, founder of Grapevine, a platform born from COVID-era awareness of medical supply chain issues to support healthcare professionals in their purchasing.

BILT co-founder Nate Henderson shares the creation story of BILT, a company that replaces traditional paper instructions with 3D graphical instructions, an idea conceived during his time at SAP.

David Cauthron, co-founder and CTO of Outpave, shares his journey from 22 years at Texas Instruments to co-founding a Concur-like expense management platform for small to medium businesses on the Code Story podcast.

Roman Sevast, co-founder of Awesomic, shares his journey from learning software engineering in Ukraine to building an AI-powered platform that connects companies with design talent within the same day.

Shauli Rozen, founder of ARMO Security, shares his journey of spending two years learning Kubernetes before pivoting to create an open-source security solution in just two weeks.

Code Story podcast episode 17 (Season 9) features Jake Ward discussing his journey from politics to founding Data Protocol, a video content platform for developer documentation and learning.

In Winter 2014, Jonathan and his founding team did Y-combinator and formed Taplytics. After nearly 10 years, they noticed that the most passionate users were developers using feature flagging, leading to the creation of a new brand focused solely on that.

Umaimah Khan, co-founder of Opal Security, shares her journey from homeschooled math enthusiast and Michelin-star chef to startup founder on the Code Story podcast.

Sasha Mitchell, founder of BeL2, discusses his journey from creative industries and music production to blockchain technology on the Code Story podcast.

Disruption Advisors co-founders Whitney Johnson and Amy Humble share their origin stories on the Code Story podcast, detailing how Whitney transitioned from Wall Street secretary to entrepreneur and how Amy's background in leadership development led them to partner together.

Debbie Levitt, founder of Delta CX and known as the Mary Poppins of Customer Experience, shares her journey from helping businesses get online in the 90s to leading customer experience projects.

Erik Gross, founder of The Tech Academy, shares his unconventional journey from growing up off-grid in California's redwoods to serving as a Navy nuclear reactor operator before creating a coding bootcamp.

Berkay Atatop, co-founder of Maestra, shares the origin story of his automatic transcription and subtitle company, which began as a hackathon prototype during his college years in America.

Code Story podcast episode 23 features Vlad Sadovskiy, a Ukrainian immigrant and cancer survivor who founded Netevia after acquiring several businesses in the payments space to serve the reseller community.

Code Story podcast episode 18 features Jai Ranganathan of Motive, discussing the creation story of the fleet tracking company that began in 2013 by building an app to track service hours for heavy freight vehicles.

Code Story podcast episode 12 features Yoav Abrahami discussing his journey co-founding Wix in 2006 and the creation of Velo by Wix, a serverless platform enabling turn-key website development.

Code Story podcast episode featuring Reinis Simanovskis, co-founder of Finfra, discussing his journey from Latvia through London and Africa to Jakarta, where he identified the opportunity for embedded finance in Indonesia.

Blake Burch, founder of Shipyard, shares his journey from aspiring music professor to tech entrepreneur, detailing how an internal data transfer tool called Forklift evolved into a standalone product.

Leonardo Shapiro, originally from Mexico City with Russian and Polish family roots, shares the creation story of Not Alien, a product designed to simplify the US immigration process after his own difficult experience.