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/

Current Sponsors:

• Tiger Data

• Protected Harbor

• Render

• Fitnexa

• Perplexity

• Entelligence

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

Current Sponsors:

• Tiger Data

• Protected Harbor

• Render

• Fitnexa

• Perplexity

• Entelligence

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/

Current Sponsors:

• Tiger Data

• Protected Harbor

• Render

• Fitnexa

• Perplexity

• Entelligence

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/

Current Sponsors:

• Tiger Data

• Protected Harbor

• Render

• Fitnexa

• Perplexity

• Entelligence

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/

Current Sponsors:

• Tiger Data

• Protected Harbor

• Render

• Fitnexa

• Perplexity

• Entelligence

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/

Current Sponsors:

• Tiger Data

• Protected Harbor

• Render

• Fitnexa

• Perplexity

• Entelligence

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/

Current Sponsors:

• Tiger Data

• Protected Harbor

• Render

• Fitnexa

• Perplexity

• Entelligence

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.