https://www.codestory.co/episodes/e13-bonus-storage-to-inference-powering-high-speed-ai-nvme-infrastructure-with-eran-kirzner-ceo-of-lightbits/

Eran 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 matter how far he looks. He’s spent 20+ years in compute storage and networking, building things to help scale data centers - IE deep tech. Outside of work, he is married with 3 kids, a cat, and a dog. His startup and family life blend together in a beautiful way, and there is no real border as his family provides him tremendous support. For hobbies, he enjoys mountain biking and running 10-20 kilometers at a time.

In 2016, Eran was approached by one of his co-founders, Avigdor Willenz, to start something new together. They realized that connecting drives across a network was flawed, built off top of an old model - so they invented a new standard. After successfully pioneering this technology across the globe, they started to lean into AI inference, and how to break the GPU memory wall.

This is the creation story of Lightbits.

Links

https://www.lightbitslabs.com/

https://www.linkedin.com/in/erankirzner

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https://www.codestory.co/episodes/e13-bonus-the-edge-vision-shift-privacy-first-computer-ai-for-smart-security-eldercare-with-mike-link-vp-of-kami-vision/

Mike 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 brain absolutely fascinating. As he looked into western medicine, he figured out that it wasn’t that attractive to him, nor the life style he wanted. He got into building his won things, including a trip to India and a return into sales. Outside of professional life, he lives in San Diego and loves to travel, visiting Mexico City often. He’s a huge fan of cooking as well, and when he travels, he enjoys experiencing different cultures through the actual people living there.

Mike was found by his current venture, as he had past experience in elder care. He joined the team to help with the go to market planning, sales, etc. - to be the Swiss Army knife at the company. When they started digging into senior care and the problem around fall detection, he led the group in how they took on this market.

This is Mike’s creation story at KamiVision.

Links

https://kamivision.com/en-us

https://kamivision.com/en-us/fall-detection/assisted-living-kamicare

https://www.linkedin.com/in/mikelink1/

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https://www.codestory.co/episodes/s13-e10-decoupling-authorization-scalable-policy-as-code-for-enterprise-apps-with-alex-olivier-co-founder-cpto-of-cerbos/

Alex 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 years after he deployed said website, his site was getting 3 million visitors a month, and gained him success and access to red carpet events and interviewing the cast. He studied computer science, eventually going to work for Microsoft, before getting into the startup world. Outside of tech, he is a Dad to a 2 year old daughter - so he doesn’t have much free time. But when he does, he enjoys cycling and skiing.

In several prior companies, Alex built, and built, and re-built, solutions around application permissions. Each time he did so, he found himself annoyed that he had to create this type of solution again. He and his co-founders decided to set out and create a company around an authorization management platform.

This is the creation story of Cerbos.

Links

https://www.cerbos.dev/

https://www.linkedin.com/in/alexolivier/

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https://www.codestory.co/episodes/s13-bonus-the-99-reliability-shift-foundation-models-for-robotic-manipulation-with-yash-sinha-founder-of-intelligence-factory/

Yash 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 been intellectually curious, always looking to the next step - which both of these things led him into entrepreneurship, of which he has started several businesses. Outside of tech, he likes to read fantasy and science fiction, as he enjoys the world building of this genre.

Yash and his co-founders realized that in order for robotics to work, foundational models needed to exist for robotic manipulation. Since hardware was no longer a bottleneck, he and his team focused on building models and deploying bots centered around human level dexterity.

This is the creation story of Intelligence Factory.

Links

https://www.intelligence-factory.com/

https://www.linkedin.com/in/yash-sinha-556b411b3/

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https://www.codestory.co/episodes/s13-e9-forward-deployed-ai-moving-enterprise-pilots-into-real-production-with-pooja-brown-cto-at-tribe-ai/

Pooja 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 real consequences when a batch didn’t ship. She grew up learning that a product was not done until it was in the customers hands. She came stateside for university, and never left San Francisco. She’s held leadership positions in many companies, some notable names being Stitch Fix and Docusign. Outside of tech, she is married with 2 daughters. She notes that in all her years in tech, home is the one place she can’t automate.

In 2019, Tribe made a bet that every company would become an AI company. In the summer of 2026, Pooja joined the company during the point of hyper growth, when AI is booming but businesses are still trying to catch up and implement. She stepped in to help lead the charge and build transformational AI systems for the enterprise.

This is Pooja’s creation story at Tribe AI.

Links

https://www.tribe.ai/

https://www.linkedin.com/in/pgarg/

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https://www.codestory.co/episodes/s13-bonus-eliminating-paperwork-manual-data-entry-in-manufacturing-with-brian-mckeown-ceo-of-harmony-ai/

Brian 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 college, he worked a year or so before getting invited on the rocket ship he has been apart of in manufacturing, and moving to Chattanooga. Outside of tech, he loves being outdoors and in the mountains. He finds the Tennessee area great for hiking and community, which is a bit different than what he grew up with in Texas.

In his prior role, which was more of an old school company, Brian was referred to an opportunity by one of his mentors in college. The founders of his current venture had proven market fit for their product, but needed talented engineers to create a repeatable platform, built on top of a playbook for what works, to deploy in manufacturing plants across the US.

This is the creation story of Harmony AI.

Links

https://www.tryharmony.ai/

https://www.linkedin.com/in/brian-mckeown-49b225229

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https://www.codestory.co/episodes/s13-e8-democratizing-real-estate-fractional-wealth-building-for-modern-investors-with-alex-blackwood-ceo-of-mogul/

Alex 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 Georgetown on a rowing scholarship. Post college, he went to Goldman Sachs doing conventional investment banking, and eventually private equity. Outside of tech, he is married and loves to play and watch golf. He enjoys reading business books and science fiction. He notes that he can’t do e-readers - he has to have the physical book in his hand, which helps his attention and retention.

In 2021, Alex bought his first single family rental after getting his real estate license. He notes that the process of buying this was pretty terrible, with 10+ different people scraping fees from the process. During his “garden time” - IE month off from investment banking - he put together a thesis and pitched his now co-founder, on a fractional ownership platform for real estate.

This is the creation story of Mogul.

Links

https://www.mogul.club/

https://www.linkedin.com/in/alex-blackwood-a3996a135/

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https://www.codestory.co/episodes/s13-bonus-from-lab-to-market-scaling-high-growth-tech-startups-with-caitlinn-mcminn-programs-director-at-techfw/

Today, 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 Worth, TX. The group is here to prove that the next generation of world-changing companies begins right in the heart of Cowtown. In our conversation today, Caitlinn is going to elaborate on the incubators story and model, illuminating how the team supports local entrepreneurs through opportunity and community.

Links

https://www.techfortworth.org/

https://www.linkedin.com/in/caitlin-mcminn/

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https://www.codestory.co/episodes/s13-e7-the-ai-legal-shift-giving-sme-law-firms-biglaw-leverage-with-dave-berner-co-founder-ceo-of-parachute/

Back 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 make his bands websites and his friend’s myspace profiles. Fast forward, he has started multiple startups, been the host of several podcasts, and is married with 3 kids.

Dave’s co-founder Ryan experienced firsthand that legal AI tools were built for massive law forms. SMB’s or boutiques were forced to retrofit expensive, enterprise heavy software to their workflows (and of course, budgets). Alongside their third co-founder, Vivienne, they set out to build an AI-powered legal OS designed for firms with 1 to 200 lawyers.

This is the creation story of Parachute.

Links

https://goparachute.ai/

https://www.linkedin.com/in/daveberner

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https://www.codestory.co/episodes/s13-bonus-the-ai-marketing-cloud-harnessing-predictive-intent-to-scale-growth-with-christian-monberg-cto-of-zeta-global/

Christian 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 school for engineering, and pursue a career in tech and become a true technologist. Outside of tech, he is married with 2 kids and lives in San Francisco with his family. He likes to re-build old engines, and loves to fly. In fact, some of his favorite flights were through the Grand Canyon at sunset, or seeing Vegas from a plane. In addition, he likes to sail, and is always attempting to tinker with his boat, and sail with his friends and family.

Chris prior company was focused on AI and marketing, and eventually, they were acquired by their now parent company. A lot of the hard earned lessons that he and his team learned through their journey still applied in this age of AI, so much so that it became the backbone of how Zeta built and deployed their products.

This is Chris’ creation story at Zeta Global.

Links

https://www.zetaglobal.com/

https://www.linkedin.com/in/chrismonberg/

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In a newly released Code Story episode, SerpApi’s Alaa Abdulridha shares lessons from building and securing the real-time data infrastructure that modern AI systems rely on. Alaa discusses why data quality and access are just as critical as model capabilities to building reliable AI, the hidden role of search and retrieval infrastructure, and the operational challenges that emerge as AI moves from demos to real-world deployment. He also explores how AI-assisted software development is reshaping the security landscape, including the new risks that can accompany faster code generation.

About SerpApi

Founded in 2017 by CEO Julien Khaleghy, SerpApi is an Austin-based technology company that provides developers with structured, real-time access to search engine data. The company offers more than 100 specialized APIs that gather and organize search results into usable formats, helping customers power AI training and grounding, SEO monitoring, cybersecurity intelligence, e-commerce analytics and more. This work empowers developers, researchers, individual users, Fortune 500 companies and organizations around the world to integrate live search insights into applications, analytics, and research workflows

SerpApi was built around the belief that open access to usable information is essential to innovation, knowledge and progress. By making search data accessible at scale, the company aims to give developers the tools to build new products and solutions while advancing its broader commitment to transparency and an open internet.

Try out the platform today.

https://www.codestory.co/episodes/e13-bonus-the-ai-sast-shift-eliminating-vulnerability-backlogs-with-santiago-castineira-co-founder-cto-of-maze/

Santiago 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 Germany. He did his grade school and university in Spain, but his masters program across Sweden, San Francisco, and Germany. He’s worked in startups, bigger companies, and eventually founding and is leading his own. Outside of tech, he is a Dad of 3 kids, so he stays quite busy when he isn’t working. He loves endurance sports, running half marathons and long distance biking.

Santiago and his team were well aware of the fact that tens of thousands of new vulnerabilities are published every year. While security teams were drowning, the rise of automated coding agents were starting to ship code faster and faster. He and his team realized that there needed to be an agent driven platform, designed to evaluate and secure your system like a senior security engineer.

This is the creation story of Maze.

Links

https://mazehq.com/

https://www.linkedin.com/in/santiagocastineira/

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https://www.codestory.co/episodes/e13-e6-the-spatial-web-shift-building-decentralized-ai-knowledge-graphs-with-yaniv-tal-co-founder-ceo-of-geo/

Yaniv 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 internet sport up into a massive thing. He studied the hard sciences (electrical engineering, math and physics), and his first job out of college was at HP, doing board b ring up for printers. Outside of tech, he is recently married, having a lovely wedding on a beach in Mexico. When asked “what do you do for fun?”, he can’t answer it, cause he is a bit of a workaholic and loves what he does. But, he does make sure he spends quality time with his new bride.

In 2017, Yaniv founded a protocol called The Graph, one of the core web3 protocols. After many years on this journey, he started to have a vision around the world’s broader knowledge in a decentralized, verifiable way. Eventually, he and his team set out to launch a a solution around this vision, designed to solve fragmentation of knowledge, vulnerable to centralization, silos and misinformation.

This is the creation story of Geo.

Links

https://geobrowser.io

https://thegraph.com/

https://www.linkedin.com/in/yanivtal9/

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https://www.codestory.co/episodes/s13-bonus-the-enterprise-ai-chip-war-rethinking-llm-silicon-inference-with-vasanth-mohan-director-of-product-at-sambanova/

Today, 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, security and sovereignty, driven by their relentless pursuit of intelligence, and running the largest models by maximizing dataflow efficiency. Vasanth and I dig into some fun - and heavy - topics at the backbone of where the industry is going with AI Inference, specifically at the hardware layer.

Links

https://sambanova.ai/

https://www.linkedin.com/in/v-mohan/

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https://www.codestory.co/episodes/s13-bonus-dynamic-observability-eliminating-telemetry-waste-at-scale-with-peter-morelli-co-founder-ceo-of-bitdrift/

Peter 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 up). He’s lived all over - like New York, San Diego, Texas, London - but always ends up returning to the Bay Area. Outside of tech, he is married with 3 kids - one in college, and the other 2 in high school. He is a foodie, and loves cooking, enjoying the communal, connective aspect of having a meal with his family and friends.

Peter spent many years at Lyft, where he and his team became frustrated by traditional observability tools and how they waste money storing unused data. They started to building a solution based on dynamic, real time control paired with local, on-device telemetry storage. Once they realized their breakthrough, they spun off the solution into its own company.

This is the creation story of Bitdrift.

Links

https://bitdrift.io/

https://www.linkedin.com/in/peterfmorelli/

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https://www.codestory.co/episodes/s13-e5-the-dynamic-compute-revolution-eliminating-cache-invalidation-with-julien-verlaguet-founder-ceo-of-skiplabs/

Julien 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 years in New York. He’s spent many years developing software, in particular, developing programming languages. Outside of tech, he is married to a Columbian woman, and admits his Spanish isn’t as good as it should be. He loves to play Pétanque, merely needing a flat surface to play on.

Julien was a lead programming language designer at Facebook, and lead the open source release of a new programming language. Over time, he noticed that frontend dev was in a resolution with reactive paradigms, while backend architectures remained bogged down by manual steps. In 2022, he stepped out to create Meta-grade creativity usable in everyday software.

This is the creation story of Skiplabs.

Links

https://skiplabs.io/

https://www.linkedin.com/in/julien-verlaguet-b5710a20/

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https://www.codestory.co/episodes/s13-bonus-the-legal-ai-shift-automating-contract-workflows-with-ai-agents-with-nick-holzherr-founder-ceo-of-gitlaw/

Nick 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 university and everything picked up for him, tech wise. Eventually, he got into building businesses, and of those, he founded a coffee company, HR software company, and whisk.com, which was sold to Samsung in 2019. Outside of tech, he is the father to two young children. He enjoys skiing and snowboarding, and jokingly, he admits that running around ensuring his agents are prompted gets in the way of his family and hobby life.

Through his entrepreneurial adventures, Nick spent large sums of money on legal contracts, ensuring that the i’s were dotted and the t’s were crossed. While he still feels that lawyers are very important and needed for certain scenarios, Nick wanted to create a way to level the playing field for small businesses, in the legal arena.

This is the creation story of GitLaw.

Links

https://git.law/

https://nickholzherr.com/

https://www.linkedin.com/in/nickholzherr/

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https://www.codestory.co/episodes/e13-bonus-the-return-of-backbox-and-ai-as-a-trusted-advisor-with-rekha-shenoy-ceo-of-backbox/

Today, 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, CEO of Backbox. Since Rekha took the helm as CEO in May 2024, the company has expanded beyond traditional security automation to launch its major BackBox 8.0 platform, unifying cloud and on-prem infrastructure visibility. They’ve also integrated human-in-the-loop, advisor-focused AI capabilities - and are back to let us know some even more “big things” happening with platform, around agentic .

Questions:

• Tell me about yourself—your path into tech and what shapes how you lead (background, influences, hobbies, family).

• Tell me about BackBox. What does the company do, and what drew you in to take the CEO seat in 2024?

• How has the product matured? How do you build your roadmap?

• Zoom out — what are you most proud of in shaping BackBox?

• What does the future look like for your product and team?

• BackBox describes AI as a “trusted advisor, not an autonomous agent” — four principles: protecting infrastructure, repeatable/verifiable results, supporting (not replacing) engineers, and transparency about how AI reaches conclusions. Where did that philosophy come from, and why hold that line while competitors race toward full autonomy?

• What does “responsible AI” actually look like in the product — not as a value statement, but as a design constraint that shaped the engineering decision?

• Tell us about your recent launch and what it enables a network team to do that they couldn’t before?

• How does the launch extend or test that responsible-AI philosophy?

• At what point does “AI as advisor” start to feel like a limitation rather than a safeguard?

Links

https://backbox.com/

https://www.linkedin.com/in/rekha-shenoy-950b23/

https://www.codestory.co/episodes/s8-bonus-bypassing-brittle-custom-scripts-implementing-automated-multi-tenant-configuration-backups-and-vulnerability-patching-at-scale-with-andrew-kahl-of-backbox/

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https://www.codestory.co/episodes/s13-e4-the-ai-gtm-engine-turning-intent-signals-into-warm-outbound-pipeline-with-connor-heggie-co-founder-cto-of-unify/

Connor 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 of schematics his Dad brought him from Boeing. He went to school at Rice in Texas, feeling a sense of agency and confidence from the program he was in. Eventually, he went to work for startups across computer vision, self driving cars, and AI. Outside of tech, he has a large black Labrador named Captain. He enjoys hiking, being outside, and playing fetch with Captain until he drops in exhaustion.

Post ChatGPT, Connor was working on a side project, creating listicles around products. As he built it, he fell in love with the space of mining information from unstructured data. Once he met up with his co-founder, they started to recognize they could build multi-agent systems that could re-think how Go-To-Market teams operate.

This is the creation story of Unify.

Links

https://www.unifygtm.com/

https://www.linkedin.com/in/connor-heggie/

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https://www.codestory.co/episodes/s13-bonus-the-gpu-bottleneck-democratizing-ai-compute-pipelines-with-christian-ondaatje-founder-ceo-of-aranyatech/

Christian 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 his CS program @ Harvard, though it was shut down through some cease and desist from Apple. Though he learned some hard startup lessons, his love for GPUs was only fueled more. Outside of tech, he does a lot of SIM racing. In fact, he has built his own Linus VR racing simulator rig over a couple of years He finds that the formal, online competition is very fun to participate in.

As I mentioned, Christian was way into GPUs throughout many different experiences in his life. He and his team recognized that while demand door AI inference and compute was at an all-time high, setting up bare-metal GPU infra was still complex and slow... so they set out to change it.

This is the creation story of Aranya.

Links

https://aranya.tech/

https://www.linkedin.com/in/christianondaatje/

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