Code Story: Insights from Startup Tech Leaders S11 Bonus: Tucker Callaway, Mezmo
Dec 11, 2025
Tucker Callaway, CEO of Mezmo and former sales engineer, dives into his journey from log management to revolutionizing observability. He discusses how Mezmo aims to leverage AI and real-time telemetry for better context engineering. Tucker shares insights on team-building, emphasizing curiosity over credentials, and reflects on hiring mistakes with empathy. He also talks about scalability lessons from his experience with IBM Cloud and highlights the importance of resilience and joy in leadership, drawing inspiration from athletes like Steph Curry.
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Context Engineering Beats Prompt Engineering
- Mesmo uses 'context engineering' instead of prompt engineering to deliver AI-driven observability outcomes.
- This approach yields agentic results at roughly 10% of typical AI cost with higher accuracy.
Pivot From Log Management To Real-Time
- Tucker explains Mesmo's origin from a log-management company that discovered the economics of storage made the old model unsustainable.
- They pivoted to shift compute into real-time pipelines to avoid reselling storage and control costs.
Three Pillars Power Operational AI
- Mesmo's current platform builds on three pillars: scale knowledge from LogDNA, real-time telemetry pipelines, and AI.
- Combining data handling and real-time processing unlocks operational AI outcomes the models alone cannot deliver.
