In August of 2021, we interviewed Brendan Wood on the podcast to tell the creation story of Passiv. After the recording, the company decided to pivot into a new market, focusing on solving their biggest pain point for other platforms. They were running into the problems surrounding integrations into brokers. In fact, they were spending 80% of engineering time on integrations. People started to reach out to his team to ask if they could use the integrations... and they started ideating about making this its own product.

This is the creation story of SnapTrade.

Sponsors

• P0 Security
• Speakeasy
• QA Wolf

Links

• https://snaptrade.com/
• https://www.linkedin.com/in/brendancalebwood/
• https://codestory.co/podcast/bonus-brendan-wood-passiv/

Matt Cowell didn't start out in tech. In fact, he studied the chemical world heavily in school, getting his Bachelors in Chemistry and Masters in Chemical Engineering. So - by trade, he was clearly a chemist. However, when he joined Accenture, he started in with programming and establishing the SDLC methodology for the company. Matt is married with 2 kids, loves sports - specifically Illinois basketball - loves to play music and golf. He likes to travel with his wife to see family, and make frequent visits to their lakehouse.

In his professional past, Matt had held several roles in SaaS companies and startups. He met a company that was an artificial intelligence consultancy, which had a POC around assessments. They wanted to start up a separate company to support launch this POC and take it to market. This is when Matt got involved.

This is the creation story of QuantHub.

Links

• Website: https://quanthub.com/
• LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/mattcowell/

Max Howell did well in school, and was presented with the problem that - he didn't know what to do with himself. At that time, software wasn't cool, so he studied chemistry and started out a job in that industry. After he mastered his work environment within 3 months, he was disenchanted with the career path, and decided to stop going to work. Post installing Linux on his home computer, he started coding - and fell in love with it. Outside of tech, he is married with a young son. He enjoys a good beer, cooking a steak, and seeing how new everything is interpreted through his son's eyes.

Max is the creator of Homebrew, the widely used package manager which is probably installed on your computer right now. After the success of the tool, he wanted to figure out a way to continue to bring value to open source, and power digital money in the web3 space.

This is the creation story of Tea.

Sponsors

• Cipherstash
• Treblle
• CAST AI 
• Firefly
• Turso
• Memberstack

Links

• Website: https://tea.xyz/
• LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/mxcl/

Shirshanka Das grew up on the eastern side of India, near Calcutta. He did well in school, and got into IIT, choosing Computer Science as his major. Post undergrad, he got his PhD at UCLA, eventually working at PayPal and Yahoo on massive architectural systems. Outside of tech, he's married with 2 kids, he's an accomplished Indian vocalist, and has a passion for swimming, which he states is his therapy.

After spending over a decade at LinkedIn, Shirshanka had led the teams supporting all things data. He created a unified approach to data discovery, governance, and observability - while he was at the company. He open sourced the product, called DataHub, and eventually created a managed version.

This is the creation story of Acryl Data.

Sponsors

• Cipherstash
• Treblle
• CAST AI 
• Firefly
• Turso
• Memberstack

Links

• Website: https://www.acryldata.io/
• Website: https://datahubproject.io/
• LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/shirshankadas/

Jon Ricketts lives in Knoxville, TN with his wife and kids. He notes that he has had an unconventional route to being a tech startup founder. He has an MBA and JD, but knew during law school he didn't want to practice. Throughout his career, he has continually fallen in love with building. Outside of tech, he enjoys spending time on the beach, staying physically fit, golfing, and working on his private pilots license.

Jon observed the maturation of AI, in the creation of tooling like ChatGPT and generative AI. He envisioned building an application to extend the progression of natural language processing to enable work productivity.

This is the creation story of Writerly.

Sponsors

• Cipherstash
• Treblle
• CAST AI 
• Firefly
• Turso
• Memberstack

Links

• Website: https://writerly.ai/
• LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/jon-ricketts-639187267/

Tim Tutt grew up in the military, and travelled around following his father. An interesting fact he shared was that he attended three different schools in the 1st grade. He learned how to make friends and fit in quickly. Outside of tech, he loves the marvel cinematic universe, from which he states that Tony Spark is his spirit animal. He also loves to play poker, which he got into during college. He actually got to play in a smaller event within the World Series of poker this past year.

In the past, Tim played the role of the middle man between the data and those who needed answers from the data. Like a good engineer, he always automated the repeat things he was asked to do. He asked his co-founder one day... wouldn't it be nice if we could just get out of the way?

This is the creation story of ClearQuery.

Sponsors

• Cipherstash
• Treblle
• CAST AI 
• Firefly
• Turso
• Memberstack

Links

• Website: https://www.clearquery.io/
• Website: https://www.nightshiftdevelopment.com/
• LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/timtutt/

Alfredo Ramirez is the son of Ecuadorian immigrants, which instilled in him positive beliefs around faith, family, community and hard work. Way back, his father bought him an Apple 2 computer, which started him on his software development journey. Outside of tech, he is married with kids, and loves spending time outdoors with them - hiking, water sports, snow skiing and shooting trap. All of these things allow him to relax, recharge and clear his head.

Fifteen years ago, Alfredo and his co-founders started their current venture during the 2008 financial crisis. After relying on the services side of their business, they headed towards building a single platform around digital collaboration, one that is reliable, a better user experience, and the analytics to go with it.

This is the creation story of Vyopta.

Sponsors

• Cipherstash
• Treblle
• CAST AI 
• Firefly
• Turso
• Memberstack

Links

• Website: https://www.vyopta.com/
• LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/alfredo-ramirez-7131175/

Will Gaviria was born and raised in Columbia, immigrating to Florida at 11 years old. His family seta off in a single bedroom together, and worked hard for their life and successes. He got a full ride to MIT, and funny enough, he had to convince his mother that it was a legit school. Through all of his studies, he got to see the rise of AI and focused on neo-morphic computing. Outside of tech, he is married with a cat named Chipotle. He lives in the Bay Area, and loves playing Magic the Gathering and doing Crossfit.

Will and his co-founder observed first hand the explosion of visual content. At the same time, artificial intelligence had reached a mature state, such that you could use it to learn from unstructured data. They set out to build the next big thing, specifically in context of unstructured visual data.

This is the creation story of Coactive.

Sponsors

• Cipherstash
• Treblle
• CAST AI 
• Firefly
• Turso
• Memberstack

Links

• Website: https://coactive.ai/
• LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/williamgaviria/

Andrew Kahl has spent 30 years in tech, and has had many wonderful experiences. He graduated in 1992, and actually accidentally entered the industry, when he came across a job ad for Compaq. He's been in tech ever since, all around the building of things. Outside of tech, he is marred with 2 daughters - one of which he just sent to college, and one in high school. Along side of that, they have 3 overly energetic German shepherds.

Andrew was part of a private equity group, which acquired BackBox in late 2021. He stepped in as CEO, maintaining the technology team in Israel and bringing the GTM team to the US. Taking over a fantastic product, Andrew set his sights on growing the company.

This is the creation story of BackBox.

Sponsors

• Cipherstash
• Treblle
• CAST AI 
• Firefly
• Turso
• Memberstack

Links

• Website: https://backbox.com/
• LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/andrewkahl/

Pete Hunt grew up in NE Massachusetts, which he mentions was culturally New Hampshire. He wasn't into Hockey, but did a lot of swimming, in particular the 200m butterfly. He has a 2 year old daughter, and loves to play guitar in his cover band.

Pete was one of the founding team members of React, and his friend and colleague, Nick, was one of the creators of GraphQL. Post Facebook, they wanted to figure out what was next, and wanted to build something impactful. After interviewing some folks, he realized that managing data and data pipelines was a challenge that needed to be solved.

This is the creation story of Dagster.

Sponsors

• Cipherstash
• Treblle
• CAST AI 
• Firefly
• Turso
• Memberstack

Links

• Website: https://dagster.io/
• LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/pwhunt/

Eric Olden grew up in the Bay Area, as one of the few local natives, but enjoys the mountains of Colorado now, outside of Boulder. He and his family love to ski, mountain bike, and even visit the reservoir to do some surfing. Outside of these things, he is passionate ab out landscape architecture, and does it for fun on the side.

Prior to his current venture, Eric was running a large division at Oracle, surrounding identity. He saw that most cloud customers were utilizing multiple clouds, but most tooling didn't allow for those cloud identities to play nice together. He saw this opportunity sitting in plain sight, and decided to step out and attack it.

This is the creation story of Strata.

Sponsors

• Cipherstash
• Treblle
• CAST AI 
• Firefly
• Turso
• Memberstack

Links

• Website: https://www.strata.io/
• LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/boughtnotsold/

Barak Glanz is 26 years old, and has done quite a few things in his life. He served in the Israeli Navy prior to jumping into the professional world. He worked for Meta as a student, and has has a few impressive startup failures in different sectors. Outside of tech, he is a rock climber, weight lifter, and likes to play chess. He mentioned that he beat someone in 10 moves before, but attributed it to mistakes of his competitor.

A year and a half ago, Barak and his childhood friends shared the personal struggle of learning how to code online. What they noticed was that the current solutions didn't offer helpful ways to practice building real world projects. So they built their own.

This is the creation story of Coddy.tech.

Sponsors

• Cipherstash
• Treblle
• CAST AI 
• Firefly
• Turso
• Memberstack

Links

• Website: https://coddy.tech/
• LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/barak-glanz

Prince Ghosh was born in Bangalore, India, and moved around a lot during his life - to the US, then to Europe, then back to the US. But he spent his formative years in Princeton, New Jersey. He majored in Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering, as he wanted to build planes and engines. Eventually, he fell out of love with building planes, and because obsessed with supply chain tech. Outside of tech, he is a tennis player, occasional basketball player, and is an avid reader. He is enthusiastic about tech, the economy, and of course, the supply chain.

Prior to his current venture, Prince started Workbench while his co-founders created an agency, which was more like an operations company in a box. When they started working together, they realized there was a large opportunity to combine forces and simplify quality control.

This is the creation story of Factored Quality.

Sponsors

• CacheFly
• ClearQuery
• Kiteworks

Links

• https://www.factoredquality.com/
• https://www.linkedin.com/in/princeghosh/

David Hurwitt lives in Burlington, Vermont, and is a married father of 3. And, those kids hav already grown and flown, per Dave's words. Their journey out of the nest into college was a driver behind starting his current venture. Outside of current venture, he is an avid photographer and really enjoys taking pictures, but ensuring there is people in them - cause, he states it's just better that way.

Dave spent some time in college admissions in the past. And, as his kids grew up, he started to look into the process again. He found that when visiting a school in person, there wasn't solution that utilized preferences of the graduates, helping them identify patterns to help match them to their perfect school.

This is the creation story of Troove.

Sponsors

• Cipherstash
• Treblle
• CAST AI 
• Firefly
• Turso
• Memberstack

Links

• Website: https://www.troove.me/
• LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/davehurwitt

Jared Ward grew up in a sporty family, participating in wrestling and football. His background is in supply chain and eCommerce, but outside of this and tech, he is a family man and loves spending time with his kids. With his 7 year old son, he is sharing his love of Zelda, and with his 3 year old daughter, he enjoys taking her to the park and the occasional tickle fight. For himself, he enjoys watching MMA, running marathons, and getting outside to hike.

Jared has spent a lot of time in the eCommerce world, serving numerous different roles. What he noticed is that with evolution of eCommerce companies, it is difficult for them to develop a system of record early on. Jared wanted to change all that, and take on the juggernauts head on.

This is the creation story of Luminous.

Sponsors

• Cipherstash
• Treblle
• CAST AI 
• Firefly
• Turso
• Memberstack

Links

• Website: https://www.joinluminous.com/
• LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/jared-ward-bb96a115b/

Vikram Chalana grew up in India, but has been in Seattle over 30 years. He graduated from the University of Washington, and actually met his wife in college. In fact, his kids now go to the same school, so his whole family are Huskies. Outside of tech, he loves anything outdoors - skiing, biking, and kayaking. In fact, at the recording of this episode, he just got back from climbing Mt. Kilimanjaro.

Vikram noticed that content marketing has shifted from text to images to videos. In a prior organization, they only had 1 person who was trained to create videos, though the demand for assets was high. After attempting to learn tools to make these videos, he wanted to find a better way to generate this type of content.

This is the creation story of Pictory.

Sponsors

• Cipherstash
• Treblle
• CAST AI 
• Firefly
• Turso
• Memberstack

Links

• Website: https://pictory.ai/
• LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/vikramchalana/

Dor Laor lives North of Tel Aviv, Israel, but travels 4 times out of the year to the states. He loves tech, which drives 200% of his day. Outside of tech, he is married with two teenage kids, and enjoys extreme sports. At the time, he does snowboarding and mountain biking, mentioning that the best place to mountain bike was a ski resort in France. He would love to do surfing, but hasn't found the time to hit the waves around Israel.

Dor and his co-founder met long ago at another startup. Post acquisition, they listed ideas of what to start building next. They decided to build an operating system like to Linux, and noticed that databases still didn't run faster within their system. They decided to tackle distributed NoSQL databases instead.

This is the creation story of ScyllaDB.

Sponsors

• Cipherstash
• Treblle
• CAST AI 
• Firefly
• Turso
• Memberstack

Links

• Website: https://www.scylladb.com/
• LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/dor-laor/

Artem Koren is now based in Amsterdam, and has been a techy since his early years. He was programming Q-basic and C in 5th grade, and building web applications in High School. Post school at Columbia, he started working at .COM businesses, but found himself dis-enchanted with the state of AI. Outside of tech, he loves chess, attending running club, Jui Jitsu, and cosmology - the study of space, black holes, and things like that.

Artem and his co-founder have years of experience in digital transformation. With the latest innovations in AI proving useful, they decided to make digesting, and utilizing, information from meetings easier - using said AI.

This is the creation story of Sembly AI.

Sponsors

• Cipherstash
• Treblle
• CAST AI 
• Firefly
• Turso
• Memberstack

Links

• Website: https://www.sembly.ai/
• LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/akoren

Hello Listeners. This week, we're sharing another episode of the Tools and Weapons podcast, brought to you by our friends at Microsoft.

Microsoft’s Chief Technology Officer, Kevin Scott, believes that for AI to benefit everyone, humans must be at the center of its development. His philosophy was shaped by his rural Virginia roots, where he belonged to a hardworking community that used creativity, perseverance, and curiosity to support each other and tackle practical challenges.

In this episode, you'll hear about how a culture grounded in human values can lead to safer products, how AI can increase access to critical services like education and medicine, and what Chopin’s G Minor Ballade can teach us about AI and human connection.

You can find more Tools and Weapons at codestory.co/toolsandweapons.

Links

• Website: codestory.co/toolsandweapons

Adam Nathan was born and raised in New York. His parents were small business owners, his brother is entrepreneur, so starting a business was just in his blood. He has always been interested in complex systems, working in the government and in the airline industry. Outside of tech, he is a big skier, cyclist and works out every day. He's also a big reader, and reads 60-70 books a year.

Adam found himself inundated with messages and emails, all surrounding the workflow of reviewing and approving documentation. Keying off what Github accomplished for developers, he wanted to became a centralized, beautiful place, for business users to collaborate on documents.

This is the creation story of Almanac.

Sponsors

• Cipherstash
• Treblle
• CAST AI 
• Firefly
• Turso
• Memberstack

Links

• Website: https://almanac.io/
• LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/adampnathan/

Idan Plotnik is a half Russian and half Moroccan, which mainly shows up in the way he cooks. First and foremost though, he is a geek, having worked in computer security from his early days. Outside of tech, he is married to a professional surfer, so he and his wife surf Israel's waves regularly. He is a dad as well, and stays busy putting together lego sets, or cooking delicious fish dishes, in traditional moroccan style.

In the past, Idan sold two companies, one of which to Microsoft. At Microsoft, he felt the challenge and the pain of talking to risk management and security folks, begging them to integrate their tooling into the development process - which slowed down delivery. After spending so much time on non-value add activities, he decided to set out and optimize this process.

This is the creation story of Apiiro.

Sponsors

• Cipherstash
• Treblle
• CAST AI 
• Firefly
• Turso
• Memberstack

Links

• Website: https://apiiro.com/
• LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/idanplotnik/

Yann Ravel-Sibillot lives in France, and has a lot of hobbies. Ones that he mentioned was kayaking and rock climbing, which he has been doing for more than 10 years. He is passionate about AI, and built his first robot 15 years ago. Outside of tech, he is happily married and really enjoys Italian food. When I asked him what I should do when I come to France, he mentioned trying all the different food genres, regionally across the country.

When Yann was a CTO of a group of restaurants, he was pursued by the accounting department, to ensure he was validating invoices. Though he tried to build a system for this, it wasn't enough to alleviate the pain of the problem. Eventually, he set out to build the right solution to solve this.

This is the creation story of Flowie.

Sponsors

• Cipherstash
• Treblle
• CAST AI 
• Firefly
• Turso
• Memberstack

Links

• Website: https://www.get-flowie.com/en
• LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/yannravelsibillot/

Danielle Shaul was born and raised in Tel Aviv, as an only child with a dog she dearly loved. She has always been passionate about building and creating things, often assembling and disassembling things in her home. She loves to travel, and spent many years in Asia, Europe and in the US. Outside of tech, she likes ceramics and reading - specifically, biohacking, mindset books, or learning to become a better leader. When asked her favorite food, she says her Mom's - who can cook anything well.

Prior to her current startup, Danielle had to create home grown solutions for financial workflows - cause back then, when she was at Fundbox, software for these workflows didn't exist. Her and her co-founder clicked over the idea to build the software that she wished she had.

This is the creation story of Nilus.

Sponsors

• Cipherstash
• Treblle
• CAST AI 
• Firefly
• Turso
• Memberstack

Links

• Website: https://www.nilus.com/
• LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/danielle-shaul-735b1b92/

Anish Dhar grew up in the Bay Area, but now is located in New York. He felt lucky to be surrounded by technology, being in the Bay Area and having his Dad as a software engineer. His earliest exposure to tech was hacking his Wii - and at that point he was hooked. He eventually joined Uber and experienced many of the problems he is solving today. Outside of tech, he enjoys tennis and playing piano. He loves making music and attending shows to hear other artists, in particular EDM.

While he was at Uber, Anish noticed that the company was a prime example of microservices gone wrong. Developers were going outside of standards building services, not documenting them properly. He realized that every company he talked to had the problem of service cataloguing, and he felt confident to apply to take the challenge on and apply to YC.

This is the creation story of Cortex.

Sponsors

• CacheFly
• ClearQuery
• Kiteworks

Links

• https://www.cortex.io/
• https://www.linkedin.com/in/anishdhar/

Caroline Strzalka is a Philadelphia native, born and raised. She is a first generation American, and is grateful to be in a place where she can run her own company. Her parents are from Argentina, with a Polish heritage - so she pointed out that they speak a lot of languages in her home. Outside of tech, she loves to hike and be in the trees. And, she calls herself the MacGyver of the kitchen, meaning she can take anything from the fridge and make a stellar meal out of it.

Dan Projansky is a country boy, only moving to NYC when he was 11 years old. He is a father of a 14 year old, whom he adores, and is an avid mountain biker and motorcyclist. In fact, he has owned over 50 different motorcycles across different brands over the years. Originally, he attended to school for film, but after working at Sesame Street, he started to work in computers and development - and that is where he met Caroline.

One day, Dan was watching some videos online. He had a thought, a desire, a want - to play the video like it was a game. And eventually, this idea turned into a business, which he started with his co-founder Caroline.

This is the creation story of Overplay.

Sponsors

• Cipherstash
• Treblle
• CAST AI 
• Firefly
• Turso
• Memberstack

Links

• Website: https://overplay.com/
• LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/carolinestrzalka/
• LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/dan-projansky/

Ritukar Vijay has been in tech for around 16 years. He has always been fascinated with new things above and beyond the normal day to day grind. During his studies, he was interested in robotics - which he describes as the culmination of computer and physical sciences. Outside of tech, he is married with a 6 year old son. He mentioned that his son is inquisitive, and is requesting robot features from home, preparing to build his first robot in the future.

Prior to COVID and during lockdowns, Ritukar started ideating about the autonomous delivery for an industry that was overlooked for automation. They started to created robots to service the industry, and did so - from their guest rooms.

This is the creation story of Ottonomy.

Sponsors

• Cipherstash
• Treblle
• CAST AI 
• Firefly
• Turso
• Memberstack

Links

• Website: https://ottonomy.io/
• LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/ritukarvijay/

Mike Long describes himself as near really sitting still. He was born in Australia, but when he was 9 years old, he moved to Scotland. Post school, he worked in England, then Norway, then China... and now back to Norway. Early on his career, he worked in the Oil & Gas building larger robots for the industry. Outside of tech, he enjoys spending time with his family and taking long walks in the forest with his dog.

At his previous company, Mike was the CTO of a DevOps consultancy company. He realized that they would see the same problem over and over again in regulated environments - businesses needed a process to follow to ensure changes were tracked, and they could in turn, "keep the receipts" for proof of changes.

This is the creation story of Kosli.

Sponsors

• Cipherstash
• Treblle
• CAST AI 
• Firefly
• Turso
• Memberstack

Links

• Website: https://www.kosli.com/
• LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/mikelongoslo/

Suman Kanuganti is married with a 5 year old daughter, which he greatly enjoys. He loves robots, as a robotics major, but describes himself as a human oriented person - one who wants to elevate the experience of people. Outside of tech, he enjoys playing volleyball and is a foodie with his wife. They enjoy yellow tail sashimi and modern Mexican fusion, but at home, they enjoy remixing cuisines with different spices.

In his previous company, Suman built solutions around augmenting the human experience for blind people. Moving forward, he wanted to expand this to allow people to use AI to create long term memory, personally for you and your loved ones.

This is the creation story of Personal AI.

Sponsors

• Cipherstash
• Treblle
• CAST AI 
• Firefly
• Turso
• Memberstack

Links

• Website: http://www.personal.ai/
• LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/kanugantisuman/

Jay Sarmaz studied operations research in college, which he describes as the science of solving problems and maximizing value with limited resources. His studies led him to learn computer science to utilize in solving this problems, and eventually, he got his PhD from Georgia Tech. He is driven by curiosity to solve big problems, but outside of tech, he is a soccer fan, plays musical instruments, and spends time with his wife and 5 year old son.

Jay and his team were doing consulting, prior to launching their current startup. During COVID, law firms were going through significant digital transformation, and didn't know what to do with all of their data. Wanting to scale their consultancy, they wanted to find a better way to provide analysis at scale.

This is the creation story of Truve.

Sponsors

• Cipherstash
• Treblle
• CAST AI 
• Firefly
• Turso
• Memberstack

Links

• Website: https://truve.ai/
• LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/jaysarmaz/

Reza Farahani has a background in engineering, and was heavily influenced by his family. In particular, his Uncle was a fighter jet engineer, which he thought was the coolest job in the world. He graduated from Waterloo, and became a data scientist - but eventually moved towards entrepreneurship. Outside of tech, he lives in Ontario and loves to rock climb and boulder. He enjoys the community aspect of the sport, and has access to gyms and outdoor boulders where he lives. He also passionate about food, enjoying Greek and Turkish food in Greek Town where he lives.

Reza and his co-founder wanted to engage workers who were working remote - productivity, mental health, etc. And they believed that these parameters were vectors in measuring the performance of remote teams.

This is the creation story of WFHomie.

Sponsors

• Cipherstash
• Treblle
• CAST AI 
• Firefly
• Turso
• Memberstack

Links

• Website: https://www.wfhomie.com/
• LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/reza-farahani-/

Alex Bovee is first and foremost a family man. Time outside of his life as a founder is dictated by his family. He's married with 2 kids, and can be found shuttling kids to soccer or dance practices in his spare time. During COVID, he was able to pickup guitar, using YouTube to teach himself. His family got him a super nice Taylor acoustic that he plays on today.

Alex spent some time at Okta, and what he noticed was cloud forward companies struggled with managing identify access and governance. This left companies wasting money on users, and in an insecure state. He saw a big opportunity in this space, and with his co-founder, decided to tackle this problem head on.

This is the creation story of ConductorOne.

Sponsors

• Cipherstash
• Treblle
• CAST AI 
• Firefly
• Turso
• Memberstack

Links

• Website: https://www.conductorone.com/
• LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/alexbovee/

Job Rietbergen lives in Amsterdam, which he says is awesome because there are so many types of amazing cuisine. He has always been a creator of things - art, photography, product and technology, to name a few. He finds its an odd trait to create art and be in tech, as there are not a lot of people who lead from a designers mind. He has been supporting early stage startups for the last 13 years. Outside of tech, he loves to do anything boarding, and mentioned he loves to snowboard in Austria every year.

In his last role, Job was in charge of marketing and growth, of an integrations platform in healthcare tech. He dreamt of a way to enable developers and users of this platform to easy understand and implement their system. Once he met up with his co-founder, who was passionate about solving the same thing, they set out to solve this problem.

This is the creation story of Alphadoc.

Sponsors

• Cipherstash
• Treblle
• CAST AI 
• Firefly
• Turso
• Memberstack

Links

• Website: https://alphadoc.io/
• LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/developer-experience/

Today we are dropping another special episode of the Code Story podcast, as part of our series entailed Beyond Bots: the REAL impact of AI on financial services, brought to you by our friends at Ntropy. As a reminder, Ntropy is the most accurate financial data standardization and enrichment API. They can take in any data source, any geography, and understand / enrich a financial transition in milliseconds. Made for developers, for fast, easy implementation. Check out their product at Ntropy.com.

Guest: Daniel Jordan, Product & Data at Wayflyer

Questions:

• Tell me and the audience what Wayflyer is.
• How long have you been a customer of Ntropy? When did this come into play?
• You mention on your website that you exist to provide funding and insights, essentially helping eCommerce companies grow faster and achieve their potential. Why focus on eCommerce?
• Is the “software layer” - IE fintech - on top of finance going to make this better? How?
• Generative AI and LLMs are the talk of the town, are you using these approaches within Wayflyer? How?
• How do you prioritize what is important to your eCommerce business customers?
• What matters to your customers.... do eCommerce businesses expect the funding process to be easy and like magic?
• What is the real impact of AI on finance going to be?

Links

• Website: https://www.ntropy.com/
• Website: https://www.wayflyer.com/

David Frank grew up in Denver, CO, and as expected, he grew up loving skiing. He mentioned that Vale was his favorite mountain, and continues to love it today. He graduated from the University of Michigan, and did investment banking in San Francisco, before starting his own firm. Outside of tech, he has two kids and by the time this episode releases, he will be a married man! His family loves to ski, especially his son, who races down the mountain competitively.

From his experience in the industry and in the market, David saw a gap for small and medium size organizations to have a system to run financial businesses on. He and his team set forth to build the next generation, broker dealer platform - one that is better than they could build themselves, and better than what the large institutions have.

This is the creation story of Stonehaven.

Sponsors

• Cipherstash
• Treblle
• CAST AI 
• Firefly
• Turso
• Memberstack

Links

• Website: https://stonehaven-llc.com/
• LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/david-frank-cfa-68897a5/

Rick Caccia was born and raised in Silicon Valley - and just stayed. He is married with 2 teenage daughters, one about to go to college. Between him and his wife, they have worked in 13 different startups - so you could say they have a startup family through and through. Outside of tech, he is a cyclist in a bike club, and enjoys spending time with his family.

After speaking with a number of security officers at companies, Rick realized the enterprise situation with AI - most companies are stuck, trying to figure out how to enable their employees to use new tooling, while still maintaining the level of security and control they have over data. Rick was asked to join a founding team to solve this problem.

This is the creation story of WitnessAI.

Sponsors

• CacheFly
• ClearQuery
• Kiteworks

Links

• https://witness.ai/
• https://www.linkedin.com/in/rcaccia/

Max Walker lives in Eastern Upstate NY (or Vermont light, as he calls it), with his grumpy, elderly cat. He comes from a tech background, graduating with a computer science degree, and working as a software engineer. Along the way, he fell in love with entrepreneurship, and dove into the startup world. Outside of tech, he is an avid rock climber, hiker, and loves super spicy food as a vegetarian.

Max is a startup veteran, and given he had gone down the building and fundraising route, he wanted to do something a bit different. What he really loved was the building, messy beginning - so he built a business around that early stage.

This is the creation story of Piton Labs.

Sponsors

• Cipherstash
• Treblle
• CAST AI 
• Firefly
• Turso
• Memberstack

Links

• Website: https://pitonlabs.com/
• LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/maxwellwalkerwindrush/

Alex Louisy is 37 years old, and came from a non tech family. In the past, he worked in investment banking, and then a small telco company. But, he was always drawn to tech entrepreneurship and eventually, he stepped into the possibilities in this world. Outside of tech, he is married with two kids, and enjoys being outside, gardening, and hiking through the forest outside of his small house.

Alex spent many years in investment banking, financing large companies. He set out to try to provide B2B lending, and discovered that most people needed to borrow money because they weren't getting paid on time. He and his team decided to focus on this very simple problem, which uncovered huge opportunity.

This is the creation story of Upflow.

Sponsors

• Cipherstash
• Treblle
• CAST AI 
• Firefly
• Turso
• Memberstack

Links

• Website: https://upflow.io/
• LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/alexlouisy/

Today we are dropping another special episode of the Code Story podcast, as part of our series entailed Beyond Bots: the REAL impact of AI on financial services, brought to you by our friends at Ntropy. As a reminder, Ntropy is the most accurate financial data standardization and enrichment API. They can take in any data source, any geography, and understand / enrich a financial transition in milliseconds. Made for developers, for fast, easy implementation. Check out their product at Ntropy.com.

Guest: Bryce Crawford, CTO & Co-founder at Meow

Questions:

• Remind the audience what Meow does.
• How long have you been a customer of Ntropy? When did this come into play?
• Last we talked about passing on revenue to customers in banking. It’s hard given the tight margins. How is Meow thinking about that today?
• Is the “software layer” on top of finance going to make this better? How?
• Generative AI and LLMs are the talk of the town, are you seeing any use cases? Or, are you working on an in-house solutions?
• There are many new decisions you have to make as a CTO. How does you prioritize around what will make a difference in the market?
• What matters to your customers.... are people expecting finance to be magical or simply reliable?
• What is the real impact of AI on finance going to be in your eyes?

Links

• Website: https://www.ntropy.com/
• LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/bryce-crawford-32164466/
• https://codestory.co/podcast/e6-bryce-crawford-meow-treasury-management/

Matthew O'Riordan is originally from South Africa. He left school and sort of fell into engineering, cause he just loved it. In fact, the craft brought him to the UK, where he saw more opportunity. Outside of tech, he likes adrenaline sports. He was a competitively skydiver, participating in free style routines, free-fly and vertical formation. He pointed out that it's a great way to clear your head, cause you can't think about anything else when you're skydiving.

Matt unearthed interesting things as he was building prototype after prototype to solve real time experiences. He wanted to build a new generation of real time communication developer tools, that provide collaboration opportunity... and that just work.

This is the creation story of Ably.

Sponsors

• Cipherstash
• Treblle
• CAST AI 
• Firefly
• Turso
• Memberstack

Links

• Website: https://ably.com/
• LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/mattoriordan/

Ali Nichols has been obsessed with real estate since she was a little kid. She has always wanted to marry whatever she was doing with real estate, and is pretty stoked to have achieved that. Outside of tech, she loves to spend time with her family and friends, hiking, golfing or boating. In fact, when she and her significant other were living in San Fransisco, they boat a sailboat and were obsessed with the craft. But now that the live in Miami, they've switched over to power boating, to better enjoy all that Florida water has to offer.

Ali and her Co-founder previously worked together at a real estate startup, specifically in the single family rental space. They both really struggled with the idea that their friends were priced out of the market, and wanted to make opportunities available to more people.

This is the creation story of Getaway.

Sponsors

• Cipherstash
• Treblle
• CAST AI 
• Firefly
• Turso
• Memberstack

Links

• Website: https://www.getaway.co/
• LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/alicnichols/

Dan Lines is married, with a 3 year old daughter and a baby on the way. He has lived all over the US - 7 years in Boston, 5 years in LA, and he now lives in Upstate New York. He has always been into the creation of things, being the kid in high school burning and selling CD's, building computers on the side, or creating an early sports streaming platform, before streaming was a thing.

Before Dan founded his current company with his co-founder Ori, he was an engineering leader, with 100 engineers reporting to him. During that journey, he catalogued all of the pains he felt as a VP of Engineering. Post acquisition of his prior company, he decided to build a system to solve those pains.

This is the creation story of LinearB.

Sponsors

• Cipherstash
• Treblle
• CAST AI 
• Firefly
• Turso
• Memberstack

Links

• Website: https://linearb.io/
• LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/dan-lines/

Today we are dropping another special episode of the Code Story podcast, as part of our series entailed Beyond Bots: the REAL impact of AI on financial services, brought to you by our friends at Ntropy. As a reminder, Ntropy is the most accurate financial data standardization and enrichment API. They can take in any data source, any geography, and understand / enrich a financial transition in milliseconds. Made for developers, for fast, easy implementation. Check out their product at Ntropy.com.

Guest: Ilia Zintchenko, CTO & Co-founder of Ntropy

Questions:

• We talked with Nare about Ntropy and LLM's. But let's dig in more.... what is your LLM stack? How did you choose it, what were the considerations?
• What are the system costs in doing this?
• How do you optimize on reliability - what sort of lever are you pulling to ensure reliability?'
• How are you thinking about predictive vs generative learning?
• You guys have been using small and large LM's since the beginning - why is this significant?
• What data sources have you been using, and are there some that are better than others?'
• Have you had to scrub these data sources in any way to prep them for your LM?
• What is the major benefit that Ntropy is providing by using LLM?
• What would you go back and change if you could?

Links

• Website: https://www.ntropy.com/
• LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/iliazintchenko/

Einat Sitbon has always been intrigued by nature, and all of its parts. She studied biology in school, all the way through getting her PhD in Computational Biology. This field also introduced her to computation in general, and programming. Outside of tech, she is married with 2 kids, and loves to hike. Her and her family share a love of fiction and fantasy books, and made mention her love of NK Jemision and JRR Tolkien.

Einat's and her sister are very close, and at one point, her sister mentioned that her son was ADHD. They found it difficult to understand how there wasn't a tool to help measure the concentration of a person with this diagnosis. They both started digging into how to solve this problem.

This is the creation story of iFocus Health.

Sponsors

• Cipherstash
• Treblle
• CAST AI 
• Firefly
• Turso
• Memberstack

Links

• Website: https://ifocustest.com/
• LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/%F0%9F%87%BA%F0%9F%87%A6-einat-sitbon-b70a7b/

Sharekh Shaikh has an interesting background, having grown up (almost) on a farm in India, within a small town. He spent most of his time with animals and pets, more than people, and followed his father around as he travelled for work. He is big into motorbikes and reading philosophy, specifically stoics, and tends to read the older books over newer podcast or material. He's also trying to learn piano, but admits he's struggling in that arena.

When Sharekh was working for Gartner, he faced a problem around fraud, using online services for research. When he thought more about this, he decided he wanted to build a platform fueling market research... built on transparency and trust.

This is the creation story of CleverX.

Sponsors

• Cipherstash
• Treblle
• CAST AI 
• Firefly
• Turso
• Memberstack

Links

• Website: https://cleverx.com/
• LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/sharekh-shaikh-4591874/

Colleen Schnettler was a stay at home Mom for many years, taking care of her 3 children. When she was looking to return to work, she was looking for remote - and it seemed that programming was the best avenue. She taught herself rails development, with the goal of starting her own company. Outside of tech, she spends time with her family outdoors, and claims she is a meat and potatoes kinda gal, with some bark thins for desert.

Recently, Colleen and her co-founder did a pivot of their previous offering, which was a package to solve reporting problems by embed them into your application. They are now focused on a SaaS tool, to provide this functionality for you.

This is the creation story of HelloQuery.

Sponsors

• Cipherstash
• Treblle
• CAST AI 
• Firefly
• Turso
• Memberstack

Links

• Website: https://helloquery.com/
• Website: https://hammerstone.dev/
• LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/colleen-schnettler/

Shalin Madan immigrated to the US when he was 6 years old. He spent 20 years in the financial markets, of which he got into when he was a teenager. HIs first and best memory of the industry is when Netspace IPO's, and the stock went up 300% in the first day. Outside of finance and tech, he enjoys cooking, frequents the gym, and loves to travel. He's also a learner, studying philosophy, relationships, and of course, the macro economy.

Shalin found himself frustrated with working for others, which drove him into entrepreneurship. When he came across his current venture, he invested in the firm, became a part of it, and eventually, became the last co-founder, in a company administrating funds with cutting edge technology.

This is the creation story of Formidium.

Sponsors

• CacheFly
• ClearQuery
• Kiteworks

Links

• https://formidium.com/
• https://www.linkedin.com/in/shalin-madan-caia-b00239/

Eduardo Abeliuk is originally from Santiago, Chile, where he spent the first few decades of his life. From early days, he had a deep curiosity to understand the world around him, which led him to study physics and electrical engineering. Post school, he joined an MIT startup, prior to obtaining his PhD from Stanford. Outside of tech, he likes to read books about longetivit, and listen to the Lex Friedman podcast. He also walks for at least an hour a day, and enjoys hiking, biking and time with family and friends.

Together with some colleagues from Stanford, Eduardo felt the pains of planning research projects. This process contained several processes that could have been automated through software. So, they decided to set out and build an enterprise solution for R&D projects.

This is the creation story of Teselegen.

Sponsors

• Cipherstash
• Treblle
• CAST AI 
• Firefly
• Turso
• Memberstack

Links

• Website: https://teselagen.com/
• LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/eduardoabeliuk/

Today we are kicking off a special and new series entailed Beyond Bots: the REAL impact of AI on financial services, brought to you by our friends at Ntropy. As a reminder, Ntropy is the most accurate financial data standardization and enrichment API. They can take in any data source, any geography, and understand / enrich a financial transition in milliseconds. Made for developers, for fast, easy implementation. Check out their product at Ntropy.com.

Guest: Naré Vardanyan, CEO & Co-founder of Ntropy

Questions:

• Tell me what a large language model is. Is there any difference between this and deep learning models?
• What is the difference between language models and LLM's?
• What sort of data sets were your models pre-trained on? How long does that take?
• How does the cost of training these models factor into your offering?
• Can you talk about latency as a key factor in this process?
• You've told me Ntropy has been doing this since the beginning, but give me a little more - how does this fit into Ntropy's approach?
• What is in the future for Ntropy in this space, specifically as it relates to LLM's and financial services?

Links

• Website: https://www.ntropy.com/
• LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/narevardanyan/

Adriaan van Rossum is a tech guy even at home. He likes to tinker with home automation, like turning on the lights - which his girlfriend doesn't like the home automation experiments at times. Outside of tech, he does kite surfing, and travels around the world. He really enjoyed Thailand, specifically the food there, as he is a vegetarian.

For several years, Adriaan was a freelancer. Each time he built an application for his clients, he did the usual song and dance with Google Analytics - he copy and pasted the script. This didn't feel right, and his girlfriend prompted him to build his own... so he did.

This is the creation story of Simple Analytics.

Sponsors

• Cipherstash
• Treblle
• CAST AI 
• Firefly
• Turso
• Memberstack

Links

• Website: https://www.simpleanalytics.com/
• LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/adriaanvanrossum/

Stephanie Mertz is into software development because she likes to create something from nothing - IE the blank canvas nature of coding. Outside of tech, she loves to garden, grow her own vegetables, and build things out of wood. She also has as beehive, which she claimed was a fantastic way to observe the natural creative process - and decompress from a screen.

Stephanie and her co-founder were drawn to solving problems for the behind the scenes processes - aka the boring business stuff. When digging into these problems, they kept running into the fact that no one really had a solid escheatment process... and eventually, they decided to tackle it.

This is the creation story of Eisen.

Sponsors

• Cipherstash
• Treblle
• CAST AI 
• Firefly
• Turso
• Memberstack

Links

• Website: https://www.witheisen.com/
• LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/stephmertz/