In the first episode of the Cortex podcast, co-founders Anish Dhar and Ganesh Datta pull back the curtain on the journey of building an internal developer portal from the ground up. They share the story of the early days, when the unproven market required moving at maximum velocity to find product-market fit and win critical first deals.

The conversation explores the key moments that forced a fundamental mindset shift from prioritizing speed to engineering for enterprise-grade reliability and scale. Anish and Ganesh discuss the cultural and architectural decisions that defined this transition and offer a playbook for engineering leaders navigating today's AI-driven landscape, where the pressure to move fast is greater than ever.

How do you balance speed and quality when your customers are counting on you? What does it actually take to build a culture of reliability? And how should engineering leaders think about AI when it's changing everything about how we ship software?

On Braintrust, Ganesh Datta, CTO and Co-founder of Cortex, sits down with CTOs, VPs of Engineering, and technical leaders who've been in the trenches—the ones who've made the hard calls, shipped through the chaos, and built teams that actually work.

They talk about the real stuff: the architectural decisions that come back to haunt you, the cultural rituals that keep teams aligned, and the practices that separate high-performing teams from everyone else.

Whether you're leading a team of ten or a thousand, if you're trying to ship faster without breaking things, this podcast is for you.