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/

Current Sponsors:

• Tiger Data

• Protected Harbor

• Render

• Fitnexa

• Perplexity

• Entelligence

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/

Current Sponsors:

• Tiger Data

• Protected Harbor

• Render

• Fitnexa

• Perplexity

• Entelligence

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/

Current Sponsors:

• Tiger Data

• Protected Harbor

• Render

• Fitnexa

• Perplexity

• Entelligence

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/

Current Sponsors:

• Tiger Data

• Protected Harbor

• Render

• Fitnexa

• Perplexity

• Entelligence

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/

Current Sponsors:

• Tiger Data

• Protected Harbor

• Render

• Fitnexa

• Perplexity

• Entelligence

https://www.codestory.co/episodes/s13-e3-architecting-frictionless-creator-infrastructure-social-commerce-with-dumi-mabhena-ceo-of-hilite/

Dumi 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 has been a podcast host and producer for several years, as well as starting businesses and taking part in the startup world in multiple different places. Outside of tech, he married to his wife, who he met while in South Africa. They love to travel, especially Europe in the summer, and are big into fitness and running.

Previously, Dumi started a podcast, to tell about positive experiences in Zimbabwe. As he went through the process of recording, editing, and publishing a podcast - he realized that the tools and platforms were incredibly fragmented... so much so, that it created friction in the process of telling stories. Dumi wanted to figure out a way to remove this friction from the entire process.

This is the creation story of Hilite.

Links

https://www.hellohilite.com/

https://www.linkedin.com/in/dumi-mabhena

Current Sponsors:

• Tiger Data

• Protected Harbor

• Render

• Fitnexa

• Perplexity

• Entelligence

The five most instructive startup mistakes from founder interviews on the Code Story podcast are: (1) building a product for a year and selling only one license, (2) losing $45,000 outsourcing development overseas, (3) building an incident-response process that assumed the product itself would never fail, (4) spending four months trying to force AI to do a job it couldn’t do, and (5) letting a bad team fit linger while over-promising features to customers. Each mistake points to a broader, repeatable lesson: validate before you build, trust your instincts over borrowed advice, and simplicity beats “more.”

Every founder makes mistakes. What separates the ones who recover is whether they can name the mistake precisely enough to avoid repeating it. Below are five real startup mistakes, pulled from founder interviews on the Code Story podcast, along with the specific lesson each one teaches.

Check out the original post, with episode snippets, to learn the full stories around these mistakes and response.

https://www.codestory.co/episodes/e13-bonus-from-airbnbs-chronon-engine-to-enterprise-real-time-feature-compute-with-varant-zanoyan-co-founder-ceo-of-zipline-ai/

Varant 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 Technologies, as well as a stint building ML tech at AirBnB. But outside of tech, he loves the outdoors, tending to his garden of plants and vegetables. After taking a good hike, he’s been digging a good uni pizza for dinner.

Prior to his current venture, Varant was working at AirBnB, developing Chronon - an open source data management engine, used to power AI/ML infrastructure. It was then that he and his team realized that building and managing data pipelines was a bottleneck for AI dev, and decided to spin into a standalone platform.

This is the creation story of Zipline AI.

Links

https://zipline.ai/

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

Current Sponsors:

• Tiger Data

• Protected Harbor

• Render

• Fitnexa

• Perplexity

• Entelligence

https://www.codestory.co/episodes/s13-bonus-the-ai-dba-shift-automating-database-reliability-performance-with-itamar-syn-hershko-founder-ceo-of-neverblink/

Itamar 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 through playing games back in the day. Back in the day he was one of the original developers on a document based database, as well as building a consulting company. Outside of tech, he is the father of 5 kids, all of them 7 and under... so his hands are quite full. That said, he does enjoy learning new things and traveling, when he has the time.

Itamar founded a boutique consulting agency, helping businesses succeed in data related projects. Like most smart agencies, they built tools to help them to do their jobs better. One of these tools became highly popular, and after 1.5 years of selling this tool to customers, they hit a $1m in annual recurring revenue.

This is the creation story of NeverBlink AI.

Links

https://neverblink.ai/

https://bigdataboutique.com/

https://www.linkedin.com/in/itamar-syn-hershko

Current Sponsors:

• Tiger Data

• Protected Harbor

• Render

• Fitnexa

• Perplexity

• Entelligence

Steven 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 entrepreneurs - for example, his Dad was a tech guy who did his thing and had success in Silicon Valley. Outside of tech he is a family man, married with kids. He enjoys doing anything he can with them, as they are his “why”. He plays hockey, coaches hockey, and rides dirt bikes and mountain bikes.

Steven and his team built an application security platform, and ended up hitting every branch on the way down from the startup tree. When they sat down to figure out what they needed to do next, they combined their deep security tooling with a multi-modal platform, to enable complete AI governance in one central hub for regulated companies.

This is the creation story of Liminal.

Sponsors

Tiger Data

Protected Harbor

Render

Links

https://www.liminal.ai/

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

Brief lets your whole team, and their coding agents, work with the judgment of a great product leader. Founder Drew Dillon built Brief after 20 years leading product orgs (and years as a fractional CPO for companies from two founders in a garage to 2,000-person late-stage startups), because he believes product judgment should scale the way code now does.

So… why should you use Brief?

An Opinionated Product Graph, Not Enterprise Search

Brief doesn't just ingest your tools and hope retrieval works. A set of opinionated agents distill what matters (personas, decisions, features, research, competitive signal) into a product graph, then link it all so the answer to "why are we building this?" is one hop away, not forty search results.

Completely Ambient. Not Another Dashboard.

Brief behaves like a peer, not a portal. Ask it in Slack or Teams, hit it from your CLI, or let your coding agents talk to it directly over MCP. Many engineers on Brief teams never open the website at all. Their agents just ask Brief and skip the meeting.

Decisions Your Agents Actually Follow

Every trade-off your team makes gets captured in a living decision ledger, with provenance. Connect Brief to Claude Code or Codex and those decisions are enforced, so nobody (human or agent) ships something the team decided against three weeks ago.

Feed Your Coding Agents Real Context

Agents are only as good as the context you give them. Brief's graph delivers just the relevant slice, which means better output and lower token spend. New research from the Brief team shows the opinionated graph beats open-ended memory systems on token utilization, execution speed, and rework.

Your Process, Enforced Automatically

Build your own agents on top of Brief: require acceptance criteria before a ticket moves, check every PRD against your template, review work as it flows through Linear or Jira. Consistency without the process police.

Trusted From Two-Person Startups to the Enterprise

Technical founders use Brief as their co-founder in product. Enterprise product orgs use it to cut the alignment tax across thousands of people. One customer account has grown from 10 to 56 seats.

Ship the Right Thing. For Free.

Your agents are already fast. Give them judgment.

Start your free trial of Brief today.

https://www.codestory.co/episodes/s13-e1-the-token-winter-is-coming-why-code-inflation-fails-to-ship-real-business-value-with-dave-garcia-founder-co-ceo-of-pensero/

Dave 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 when he programmed an infinite loop, he was hooked. He’s been curious about machines, and fixing them - even when they weren’t broken. Outside of tech, he is married with a young family. He enjoys playing video games - mostly Dad games these days - and loves to do anything on the water, like kite surfing.

A few years ago, Dave decided to take some time off to spend it with his family. When the AI boom started to happen, suddenly the technology became ubiquitous, where AI was changing the life of generations around him. After some investigation, he decided wanted to build something world changing, relevant to the world the knows - which is within the tech mgmt. world.

This is the creation story of Pensero.

Sponsors

• Tiger Data

• Protected Harbor

• Render

Links

• https://pensero.ai/

• https://www.linkedin.com/in/davebcn

Key Takeaways

• The “Token Winter” Threat: Uncontrolled AI usage, retries, agent loops, and prompt inflation create a false sense of progress while quietly exploding enterprise API budgets without driving business value.

• Activity Does Not Equal Business Impact: High model usage or sheer volume of generated code masks inefficiencies, creating “code inflation” that increases code complexity and rework costs rather than shipping features.

• The Necessity of Agentic ROI and Measurement: Engineering organizations must move beyond raw token counts to measure actual outcomes, evaluating which AI workflows reduce rework and improve delivery speed versus those that add noise.

• Model Selection as an Engineering Strategy: Companies must avoid using frontier models for simple tasks (the “Lamborghini for grocery shopping” mistake) and instead match tasks to cost-effective, specialized LLMs.

• Shifting from Uncontrolled Experimentation to Governance: Long-term success in AI adoption depends on engineering visibility and financial feedback loops that attribute token spend directly to business value.

Frequently Asked Questions

What is the “Token Winter,” and why does Dave Garcia predict it?

The “Token Winter” refers to an impending financial reckoning for engineering teams as unmanaged, subsidized token spend explodes into a major enterprise cost center—mirroring the runaway cloud bills of a decade ago.

What is Pensero, and what problem does it solve for engineering leaders?

Pensero provides delivery intelligence and AI performance analytics, giving CTOs, CEOs, and engineering managers objective visibility into how AI usage translates into real business value, code quality, and ROI.

What is “code inflation,” and how does AI usage contribute to it?

Code inflation occurs when developers use AI to generate massive volumes of code without proper architecture, leading to overly complex, unmaintainable repositories that require significant human review and rework to fix.

How can companies prevent “the illusion of cheap AI” in production?

Organizations must establish clear attribution models and operational feedback loops, treating token consumption as an investment decision tied to key performance indicators like PR merge rates and cycle time reduction.

How should engineering managers evaluate whether an AI workflow adds real value?

Managers should measure outcomes rather than activity—focusing on whether an AI agent reduces cycle time, eliminates technical debt, or improves delivery quality, rather than tracking how many prompts or API calls a team uses.

What role does model selection play in controlling enterprise AI costs?

Instead of defaulting to top-tier frontier LLMs for every query, teams should strategically route prompts—reserving expensive, highly capable models for complex reasoning and deploying lightweight, cheaper models for routine tasks.

Code Story Ambassadors

We’ve officially launched our Code Story Ambassador Program, giving you a direct way to help us expand our community. By sharing your unique referral link with colleagues, friends, and fellow tech enthusiasts to get them subscribed, you can play a vital role in our growth while unlocking exclusive perks along the way.

To show our immense appreciation for spreading the word, we’ve put together four reward tiers based on the number of new subscribers you bring in:

• Tier 1 (5 referrals): Receive a direct Personal Thank You from me for stepping up to support the show.

• Tier 2 (15 referrals): Get a public Episode Thank You shoutout credited right in an upcoming podcast episode.

• Tier 3 (30 referrals): Represent the show in style with an exclusive Code Story T-shirt.

• Tier 4 (50 referrals): Level up your wardrobe with our premium Code Story Hoodie.

Share the Show

https://www.codestory.co/episodes/s12-bonus-rickards-deterministic-return-converting-scattered-data-into-autonomous-production-grade-apps-with-rickard-hansson-founder-ceo-of-gainable/

We have a special return episode, by our good friend Rickard Hansson. Rickard joined us previously on the podcast in Season 8to tell the creation story of Weavy - collaboration infrastructure for serious builds. Today, he makes a follow up visit to tell us all about Gainable, his new project - which removes data and engineering from being the middle man, and enables your team to build the apps they need now.

Questions;

• Last time we talked in Season 8, you were building Weavy. Whats happened since we last talked with that company?

• Tell me about Gainable - give me the pitch there, and tell me why this is the right approach to using AI.

• Most AI builders wire straight to a frontier model and wait for the next release to fix the gaps. I didn’t. Where does the model actually sit in Gainable product, and why only there?

• Why is an app factory that is deterministic important? Dig into that.

• You use the term “free-range coding”.. what does this mean? Unpack the phrase for us.

• You point out that tokens still appear to be heavily subsidized to me. What do you mean by that, and what happens to all these AI products when that ends?

• We’ve all read the headlines - Fable 5 got switched off by the government for 18 days. Why do you see this as a turning point, not a footnote?

• You suspect flat subscriptions for the top models are done, and it all drifts to credit-based. What signal are you seeing that tell s you this?

• If the model is a commodity everyone rents, where’s the moat?

• What is next for Gainable, and how can someone get started using the platform?

Sponsors

• Unblocked

• TECH Domains

• Mezmo

• Braingrid.ai

Links

• https://www.gainable.dev/

• https://www.weavy.com/

• https://www.linkedin.com/in/rickardh/

https://www.codestory.co/episodes/s12-e30-wastewater-guardians-automating-biology-to-protect-clean-water-with-virginia-szepietowski-co-founder-of-nyad-ai/

Virginia 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, and entrepreneurship. She comes from a family of entrepreneurs, who are deeply ambitious, tenacious, and deeply humble. She finds the feeling of a deep safety net from her family, and she pursues her adventures. Outside of tech, she is married to her now co-founder. She is still a competitive body builder, and likes to push herself to the limit.

Through a series of life events, Virginia got interested in water treatment. She started discovering the world of wastewater operators, and the fact that they were the last line of defense before toxic wastewater moved into our waterways (rivers and such). Using AI, her and her team started to build a platform for these operators to quickly detect organisms in these water streams.

This is the creation story of Nyad AI.

Sponsors

• Unblocked

• TECH Domains

• Mezmo

• Braingrid.ai

Links

https://nyad.ai/

• https://www.linkedin.com/in/virginia-szepietowski/

And that’s where Protected Harbor comes in.

Application-aware infrastructure, owned with accountability

Application-Aware Infrastructure (AAI) is Protected Harbor’s philosophy - that infrastructure should be designed around the way applications actually operate, not forced into a one-size-fits-all environment.

Traditional infrastructure treats every workload the same, but AAI takes a different approach. Protected Harbor begins by understanding how an application behaves and then engineer, manage, and continuously optimize the infrastructure specifically for those needs. The result is better performance, greater reliability, stronger security, and more predictable costs.

These are the five core pillars of AAI:

• Application Understanding: Protected Harbor analyze’s application behavior, database activity, workload characteristics, and usage patterns to ensure infrastructure is aligned with how the application actually runs.

• Purpose-Built Design: Every environment is right-sized and architected for optimal performance, security, resilience, and scalability — without unnecessary complexity or wasted resources.

• Unified Outcomes: One trusted, accountable partner is responsible for the entire environment, eliminating finger-pointing and ensuring faster resolution when issues arise.

• Continuous Optimization: Infrastructure is monitored 24/7 using customized dashboards, with proactive tuning and ongoing improvements to maximize uptime and efficiency.

• Cost Engineering: Costs are designed to be predictable, transparent, and aligned with actual business needs rather than fluctuating cloud consumption.

Talk with Protected Harbor

If infrastructure is becoming a larger operational or business concern, a conversation can help clarify where pressure is building and what improvements would make the biggest difference.

Request an infrastructure review to identify hidden risk and improvement opportunities.

https://www.codestory.co/episodes/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/

Sid 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 has built and managed a fleet of satellites, built robots at Amazon, worked at Microsoft on surface tablets, and finally, at Google working on Android. Outside of tech in lives in the Bay Area with his wife and kids. He loves water sports, especially sailing. He spent 10 years in San Diego, and stumbled on the sport.

Sid’s current company started in 1999, and was acquired in 2010. A few years ago, Sid joined the company, at a time when the company was wanting to rebuild its network from the ground up - starting with a powerful index.

This is Sid’s creation story at iTradeNetwork.

Sponsors

• Unblocked

• TECH Domains

• Mezmo

• Braingrid.ai

Links

https://www.itradenetwork.com/

• https://www.linkedin.com/in/siddharthdixit/

https://codestory.co/podcast/ai-throughput-illusion-expensive-models-fail-measure-real-engineering-output-emilie-schario-head-of-product-kilo/

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

Emilie 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 into technology so she could easily follow her husband’s career geographically, and has much success in the industry. Outside of tech, she is married with 3 boys (all 5 and under)… so there is a lot of wrestling in her household. She admits she is often quoted staying she does three things in her life – work, parenting, and if she is lucky, attends CrossFit 3 times a week. In fact, she finds a great sense of community in that world, and brings her kids with her to cheer her on.

A year and a half ago, Emilie’s current venture was started, to build the open source orchestrator (or “harness”) for AI coding agents. Through some shuffle in the early team, Emilie joined and started in building the fastest AI coding app on the market.

This is the creation story of Kilo.

Sponsors

Unblocked
TECH Domains
Mezmo
Braingrid.ai

Links

https://kilo.ai/
https://www.linkedin.com/in/emilieschario/

.TECH is giving founders building in AI, SaaS, devtools, and Web3 the chance to apply for premium domains — complimentary for 10 years. Names like host.tech, bot.tech, dev.tech. The kind of name that makes investors lean forward.

Your competitors are paying for theirs. You could apply for yours. → startup.tech

https://codestory.co/podcast/bonus-aggregate-metrics-hide-revenue-leaks-autonomous-agentic-analytics-bhaskar-sunkara-bicycle-ai/

Bhaskar noticed that business teams were drowning in dashboards, and as such, were not sure how to take the next steps in the business. He and his team realized that what people needed was not a retroactive view, but a proactive one – something more akin to a 24×7 analyst.