Code Story: Insights from Startup Tech Leaders

Erez Druk, Co-founder and CEO of Freed, is on a mission to revolutionize healthcare with an AI clinician assistant. He shares his journey from Israel to the Bay Area and how witnessing the challenges faced by medical professionals inspired him to create a solution that reduces their administrative burden. The conversation highlights the importance of HIPAA compliance, evolving product features based on user feedback, and the impact of personalized hiring practices. Erez emphasizes the significance of deep user care and a long-term approach to entrepreneurship.

Sergiy Korolov, Co-CEO of Railsware and co-founder of Mailtrap, shares insights on value-focused product development. He emphasizes the crucial distinction between shipping features and genuinely delivering value, urging teams to prioritize user problems over mere feature lists. Sergiy introduces the BRIDGeS framework, which helps clarify problems before solutions and guides effective strategy pivots. He discusses the importance of user research and validation, demonstrating how real-world examples like Mailtrap highlight demand before feature development.

Mrinal Wadhwa, CTO and co-founder of Autonomy and creator of the Ockam Rust toolkit, shares insights from his tech journey. He reveals how customer feedback inspired the creation of Autonomy, a platform for scalable AI products. Mrinal discusses the architectural benefits of using an actor model for efficient agent management and lessons learned from early mistakes with LLMs. He emphasizes the importance of perseverance for aspiring entrepreneurs and reflects on personal influences that shape his innovative mindset.

Shamba Chowdhury, Co-founder and CTO of DeForge, has a passion for tech that began in childhood. He discusses his innovative no-code platform designed to simplify AI agent creation. Shamba shares how user feedback and market trends shape their development process. He highlights the importance of modular design for scaling and details the proprietary engine that enhances functionality. Shamba also offers wisdom for aspiring founders, emphasizing the joy of solving problems and the importance of marketing.

Sergiy Korolov, Co-CEO of Railsware and co-founder of Mailtrap, explores the emerging trend of vibe-coding versus traditional software development approaches. He defines vibe-coding, discussing its potential influence and limitations. The conversation delves into why vibe-coding has surfaced, the role of AI tools in enhancing development, and engineers' reactions to this innovate method. Sergiy also shares best use cases, highlighting that while vibe-coding can help with prototypes, it struggles to scale for complex products.

Zohar Bronfman spends most of his time in Tel Aviv, Israel these days. He has a focused academic background, specifically in philosophy and neuroscience. He was always intrigued by the question - how do we know what we know? - which led him to get a PhD in Philosophy. While doing that, he also became fascinated with he human mind and empirical decision making, which took him down the road of obtaining another PhD in AI & Neuroscience, essentially emulating brain processes. Outside of tech, he has 3 kids and a startup. He loves a good book in the philosophy or neuroscience space, and is a big fan of sports. Specifically, he loves the NBA and claims to be a Knicks fan.Zohar and his now co-founder were digging into predictive models, as an extension of their academic studies. They were curious as to why companies, though they were running predictive models, were not making accurate predictions. They soon realized that this was because the AI modeling expertise was centralized at couple of well known companies.This is the creation story of Pecan AI.SponsorsVentionCodeCrafters helps you become a better engineer by building real-world, production-grade projects. Learn hands-on by creating your own Git, Redis, HTTP server, SQLite, or DNS server from scratch. Sign up for free today using this link and enjoy 40% off.Full ScalePaddle.comSema SoftwarePropelAuthPostmanMeilisearchLinkshttps://www.pecan.ai/https://www.linkedin.com/in/zohar-bronfman/https://demandforecast.ai/Support this podcast at — https://redcircle.com/code-story-insights-from-startup-tech-leaders/donationsAdvertising Inquiries: https://redcircle.com/brandsPrivacy & Opt-Out: https://redcircle.com/privacy

Tanmai Gopal is a repeat guest on the podcast. Back in Season 7, he came on to tell the creation story of Hasura, which is a universal data access layer for next generations apps. He talked through he and his colleagues frustration with building API after API, and taking steps to ensure people wanted to not do that work anymore.As Hasura started to take off, Tanmai started to ask the question around what was the right method for developers, in particular their applications, to access data. With the advent of AI, he and his team dug into what the right problems were to solve - and they identified the main problem with this type of tech was accuracy and trust.This is the creation story of PromptQL.SponsorsVentionCodeCrafters helps you become a better engineer by building real-world, production-grade projects. Learn hands-on by creating your own Git, Redis, HTTP server, SQLite, or DNS server from scratch. Sign up for free today using this link and enjoy 40% off.Full ScalePaddle.comSema SoftwarePropelAuthPostmanMeilisearchLinkshttps://promptql.io/https://www.linkedin.com/in/tanmaig/https://codestory.co/podcast/e20-tanmai-gopal-hasura-graph-ql/Support this podcast at — https://redcircle.com/code-story-insights-from-startup-tech-leaders/donationsAdvertising Inquiries: https://redcircle.com/brandsPrivacy & Opt-Out: https://redcircle.com/privacy

Ryan Wang has had a winding set of paths to get to where he is today. He studied economics and statistics, with the intent of going to grad school and becoming a professor. After talking with his boss at the time, Steven Levitt (also one of the authors of Freakonomics), he was convinced that was not the best path. Eventually, he joined stripe via nepotism, and became a software developer via data science. Outside of tech, he loves to read about different topics. Right now, he is reading about owls, and also loves to read fiction and poetry. In fact, he drops poetry occasionally at his current venture.While at Stripe, back when it was an 80 person company, Ryan noticed people doing support tickets on their own. After he spent some time there, he and his now co-founder started to tinker in machine learning for support. As he made progress, a leader pointed out that the real problem was around workforce management.This is the creation story of Assembled.SponsorsVentionCodeCrafters helps you become a better engineer by building real-world, production-grade projects. Learn hands-on by creating your own Git, Redis, HTTP server, SQLite, or DNS server from scratch. Sign up for free today using this link and enjoy 40% off.Full ScalePaddle.comSema SoftwarePropelAuthPostmanMeilisearchLinkshttps://www.assembled.com/https://www.linkedin.com/in/ryanywang/Support this podcast at — https://redcircle.com/code-story-insights-from-startup-tech-leaders/donationsAdvertising Inquiries: https://redcircle.com/brandsPrivacy & Opt-Out: https://redcircle.com/privacy

Sam Partee started out his love for tech/engineering by working on cars. After many y ears of working on cars, and even starting his own car stereo installation business, he decided that cards were finite and moved onto computers. He fell in love with the space, and the rest is history, filled with super computers, AI, distributed training, Redis and the lot. Outside of tech, he loves to take long hikes with his snowy husky.Sam and his team built a prior solution, an agent to solve bugs for you. They ran into a litany of problems, but eventually figured out that there was a dire need for an authorization for the activities that agents wanted to do on your behalf. Fast forward, and they are working with Anthropic to define these auth protocols.This is the creation story of Arcade.SponsorsVentionCodeCrafters helps you become a better engineer by building real-world, production-grade projects. Learn hands-on by creating your own Git, Redis, HTTP server, SQLite, or DNS server from scratch. Sign up for free today using this link and enjoy 40% off.Full ScalePaddle.comSema SoftwarePropelAuthPostmanMeilisearchLinkshttps://www.arcade.dev/https://www.linkedin.com/in/sampartee/Support this podcast at — https://redcircle.com/code-story-insights-from-startup-tech-leaders/donationsAdvertising Inquiries: https://redcircle.com/brandsPrivacy & Opt-Out: https://redcircle.com/privacy

Raja Tabet, Senior VP at Synopsys, leads the charge in integrating AI into electronic design automation. He shares the journey of transforming traditional chip design with generative and agentic AI, highlighting the challenges from rising chip complexity to engineer shortages. Raja discusses building the DSO.AI optimization tool and evolving it into intelligent assistant roles. He envisions a future with agent engineers revolutionizing workflows and emphasizes the importance of continuous learning and agility in tech. A must-listen for aspiring entrepreneurs!