Code Story | Startup Podcast for CTOs, CEOs and Technical Founders

Johnny Halife was born and raised in Argentina. As such, he takes soccer very seriously. He is a die hard fan of Boca, and has taken his family to live games in Miami and Nashville. He is the father of 2 young boys, which he notes completely changed his life. He has been slowly introducing them to soccer, as an Argentina after would do, and they love the roar of the stadium during a game. He also claims to be a really bad golfer, which I can relate to.

Twenty one years ago, Johnny started working for Microsoft Engineering behind the scenes, helping them shape products. Eventually, he and his team started asking the question - if we are helping Microsoft, why don't we help other companies?

This is Johnny's creation story at Southworks.

Sponsors

• Unblocked (https://getunblocked.com/codestory)
• TECH Domains (https://get.tech/codestory)
• Mezmo (https://mezmo.com/codestory)
• Braingrid.ai (https://braingrid.link/code-story)

Links

• https://www.southworks.com/
• https://www.linkedin.com/in/johnnyhalife-engineering/

Today, we have a special guest on the podcast, Keith Lucas, a startup advisor specializing in product, growth, people and culture. Keith led product and engineering at Roblox, helping scale its infrastructure, product offerings, team and business. Most recently, Keith published a book entitled Impact: How to Inspire, Align, and Amplify Innovative Teams. All book proceeds go to charities to help young entrepreneurs, so make sure you check the link in the notes and grab the book today.

In our chat, Keith is going to walk us through key concepts in the book, surrounding centering your team around the vision and mission of what you are driving towards, from recruiting to execution to "coaching out".

Questions:

• What was your goal in writing this book? What were you hoping to accomplish?
• In Chapter 1, you mention purpose inspiring action. How does aligning to purpose drive urgency, without resulting in burnout or being an "antiquated mandate", like you mention in Chapter 2?
• You state "Culture is what you do, not what you say"... How does a leader's daily behavior - especially around micromanagement or decision-making speed - define the team's realized values, overriding the company's codified ones?
• I found the idea of The Cascade (Chapter 5) interesting, mapping core beliefs to execution alignment. In terms of feedback, what is the difference between "belief busting" and "hypothesis busting" feedback? How should leaders respond to each in order to maintain trust and agility?
• How often should entrepreneurial teams deliberately challenge and re-org autonomous pods to optimize for agility and opportunity, over long term stability?
• Now this is interesting - the "okay contributor", you define as a person who meets standards in all areas but shows no exceptionalism. Why is this person more damaging to a culture of mastery, than the high talent disrupter?
• What is a Mission Athlete? When recruiting, how does preparing a vision doc for a role shift the recruiting conversation from transactional to one focused on strategic alignment and ownership?
• You mention in Chapter 8 that compensation can be a distraction. What core mistakes do scaling startups make with compensation that turn it from a non-issue into an energy-sapping problem that erodes retention?
• You define Coaching Out as the intentional process of protecting the productive from the disruptive, treating an exit as a non-personal assessment that maintains decency and clarity. Can you describe the GYOR continuum?
• Why should leaders avoid formal PIP's when dealing with a struggling team member? What must replace it to ensure accountability and decency?

Sponsors

• Unblocked (https://getunblocked.com/codestory)
• TECH Domains (https://get.tech/codestory)
• Mezmo (https://mezmo.com/codestory)
• Braingrid.ai (https://braingrid.link/code-story)
• Alcor (https://alcor.com/podcast)
• Equitybee (http://codestory.co/equitybee)
• Terms and conditions: Equitybee executes private financing contracts (PFCs) allowing investors a certain claim to ESO upon liquidation event; Could limit your profits. Funding in not guaranteed. PFCs brokered by EquityBee Securities, member FINRA.

Links

• https://keithvlucas.com/
• https://a.co/d/fYjiHmh
• https://www.linkedin.com/in/kvlucas/

Marlena Sarunac is a first generation American, her family being from Croatia. She started her career at Mastercard, left to travel around Europe (before it was cool to do so), and then came back to join her first startup. During her travels, she figured out that she was truly an American, as she prefers the entrepreneurial pace of life. Her path has been in marketing, but she also has an engineering degree, which gives her a unique edge. Outside of tech, she is married to a chef, with a 2 year old daughter and a rescue dog. They live in Rhode Island, in the Bristol area.

Marlena and her now co-founder met at a prior company, and worked well together promoting that brand. The built a playbook, and always dreamed of starting their own thing to push those playbooks. The stars aligned later in life, and they decided to give it a go.

This is the creation story of The Company Advice.

Sponsors

• Unblocked (https://getunblocked.com/codestory)
• TECH Domains (https://get.tech/codestory)
• Mezmo (https://mezmo.com/codestory)
• Braingrid.ai (https://braingrid.link/code-story)
• Alcor (https://alcor.com/podcast)
• Equitybee (http://codestory.co/equitybee)
• Terms and conditions: Equitybee executes private financing contracts (PFCs) allowing investors a certain claim to ESO upon liquidation event; Could limit your profits. Funding in not guaranteed. PFCs brokered by EquityBee Securities, member FINRA.

Links

• https://www.thecompanyadvice.com/
• https://www.linkedin.com/in/marlenasarunac/

Arto Minasyan is originally from Armenia. He's a serial entrepreneur, having started 7 companies, selling 4 of them. He used to be into the sciences, having his PhD in Mathematics and Machine Learning. But outside of tech, he's married with 2 kids. He loves to read novels, and in fact writes books himself (mainly his memoirs). He loves to ski, and aligned with his Armenian heritage, he loves to spend time with his big family.

Arto and his colleague got breakfast together, and started talking through an idea around clean audio for conferencing and beyond. They built a prototype, and then COVID hit - which made their tool very popular.

This is the creation story of Krisp.ai.

Sponsors

• Unblocked (https://getunblocked.com/codestory)
• TECH Domains (https://get.tech/codestory)
• Mezmo (https://mezmo.com/codestory)
• Braingrid.ai (https://braingrid.link/code-story)
• Alcor (https://alcor.com/podcast)
• Equitybee (http://codestory.co/equitybee)
• Terms and conditions: Equitybee executes private financing contracts (PFCs) allowing investors a certain claim to ESO upon liquidation event; Could limit your profits. Funding in not guaranteed. PFCs brokered by EquityBee Securities, member FINRA.

Links

• https://krisp.ai/
• https://www.linkedin.com/in/artominasyan/

Dmytro Ovcharenko lives in Palo Alto, CA. He graduated from Berkeley in 2015 - not as an engineer, but as a lawyer. His first connection to tech was in his first role, as an attorney at a tech company. But outside of technology, he loves good sushi and burgers. In addition, he does a bit of hiking - some for fun, but also some for business. He's been known to take a meeting or two on the hiking trail.

Dmytro very much enjoyed working at his prior company. But he noticed the large gap between what his business was charging, and what the engineers themselves received. He thought he could close this gap, to provide a better wage for the workers while saving businesses money.

This is the creation story of Alcor.

Sponsors

• Unblocked (https://getunblocked.com/codestory)
• TECH Domains (https://get.tech/codestory)
• Mezmo (https://mezmo.com/codestory)
• Braingrid.ai (https://braingrid.link/code-story)
• Alcor (https://alcor.com/podcast)
• Equitybee (http://codestory.co/equitybee)
• Terms and conditions: Equitybee executes private financing contracts (PFCs) allowing investors a certain claim to ESO upon liquidation event; Could limit your profits. Funding in not guaranteed. PFCs brokered by EquityBee Securities, member FINRA.

Links

• http://alcor.com/
• https://www.linkedin.com/in/dmitryovcharenko

Arjun Vora was born and raised in Mumbai. He grew up in a family that wasn't financially stable, which drove him to come to the states for new opportunities. He came for school, landing in Ann Arbor, Michigan, and immediately loved the environment. Post school, he worked for MicroStrategy and Salesforce, eventually landing at Uber - where he met Tito. Outside of tech, he's married to his girlfriend from 9th grade with 2 kids.

Tito Goldstein was introduced to technology when he was 8 years old, building simple games in Q basic. Since then, he ha s been tinkering and creating things. He graduated from USC, and continuing tinkering in web design and building products around the messaging world. Eventually, he came to Uber and met Arjun on day one. Outside of tech, he enjoys projects where he finds something scary and then digs in to become a true expert.

While Tito and Arjun were at Uber, they quickly understood that the reason people drove for the company was not the pay, but the flexibility and self service aspect of the platform. With this, they started to wonder... why can't we give this to everyone else?

This is the creation story of Teambridge.

Sponsors

• Unblocked (https://getunblocked.com/codestory)
• TECH Domains (https://get.tech/codestory)
• Mezmo (https://mezmo.com/codestory)
• Braingrid.ai (https://braingrid.link/code-story)
• Alcor (https://alcor.com/podcast)
• Equitybee (http://codestory.co/equitybee)
• Terms and conditions: Equitybee executes private financing contracts (PFCs) allowing investors a certain claim to ESO upon liquidation event; Could limit your profits. Funding in not guaranteed. PFCs brokered by EquityBee Securities, member FINRA.

Links

• https://www.teambridge.com/
• https://www.linkedin.com/in/arjunvora/
• https://www.linkedin.com/in/titogoldstein/

Arsham Ghahramani lives in Toronto, but grew up in rural countryside of UK, out in the middle of nowhere on a farm. He was surrounded by tractors, chickens, and other animals. Over time, he moved to bigger and bigger cities, until 6 years ago, he jumped across the pond to Canada. Outside of tech, he loves team sports, playing a lot of soccer and starting to get into hockey. When he transitioned to hockey, he immediately enjoyed how fast paced it was, and how many tactics carried over from soccer.

In the past, Arsham was the head of machine learning at a prior company. His now co-founder and he worked closely together, and they were both pressured to hire good people quickly. They started to notice some patterns in how they were hiring... including the regular submission of AI generated resumes.

This is the creation story of Ribbon.

Sponsors

• Unblocked (https://getunblocked.com/codestory)
• TECH Domains (https://get.tech/codestory)
• Mezmo (https://mezmo.com/codestory)
• Braingrid.ai (https://braingrid.link/code-story)
• Alcor (https://alcor.com/podcast)
• Equitybee (http://codestory.co/equitybee)
• Terms and conditions: Equitybee executes private financing contracts (PFCs) allowing investors a certain claim to ESO upon liquidation event; Could limit your profits. Funding in not guaranteed. PFCs brokered by EquityBee Securities, member FINRA.

Links

• https://www.ribbon.ai/
• https://www.linkedin.com/in/arshamg
• https://arshamg.com

Sharad Kumar lives in Pleasanton, California with his wife and 2 kids. He enjoys playing all musical instruments, and spending time with his family. He has a 2 year old daughter, and a 14 year old son into robotics. He is also passionate about giving back to the community, through their company foundation.

Harshit Omar lives in San Francisco, and is married with a 4 year old son. He used to be a street racer in his college days, loving fast cars and taking risk. Nowadays, he is a big marvel and comic book fan, along side his son. In fact, his son thinks he is Captain America, regularly wielding his shield and mask.

A fun fact about both of these gentlemen: this is their third company to work together in, their second startup, and their wives are sisters. So they are connected by wives, and united by startups.

In their previous startups, Sharad was leading sales and ops and Harshit was leading on the product side. When the company got acquired, it took them 8-9 months to integrate to a different cloud provider. They realized the model was broken, requiring expensive consulting services, and not convenient at all - and they wanted to figure out a better way.

This is the creation story of Fluidcloud.

Sponsors

• Unblocked (https://getunblocked.com/codestory)
• TECH Domains (https://get.tech/codestory)
• Mezmo (https://mezmo.com/codestory)
• Braingrid.ai (https://braingrid.link/code-story)
• Alcor (https://alcor.com/podcast)
• Equitybee (http://codestory.co/equitybee)
• Terms and conditions: Equitybee executes private financing contracts (PFCs) allowing investors a certain claim to ESO upon liquidation event; Could limit your profits. Funding in not guaranteed. PFCs brokered by EquityBee Securities, member FINRA.

Links

• https://www.fluidcloud.com/
• https://www.linkedin.com/in/sharadkumar123/
• https://www.linkedin.com/in/harshito/

David Sztykman lives in Paris, but used to live in New York for a time. He has always been into video, streaming and photography. For the latter, as a kid, his Dad had a film developing lab in their basement, so he spent many hours doing that before digital changed it all. As a student, he used to tinker with open source video streaming libraries, and eventually worked for Alkamai, responsible for the streaming media for Europe (think the Olympics or Super Bowl). Outside of tech, he has 2 kids and they like to do a lot of legos together. But in general, they are outside kids so usually, they like to get out of the house and do active things.

In his prior role, David was consistently alerted about poor performance on the video streaming. He started to dig into the data streaming portion of, to be alerted on shifts in the stream itself. After a few other opportunities, he was approached to build real time CDN observability, for distributed infrastructure.

This is the creation story of Hydrolix.

Sponsors

• Unblocked (https://getunblocked.com/codestory)
• TECH Domains (https://get.tech/codestory)
• Mezmo (https://mezmo.com/codestory)
• Braingrid.ai (https://braingrid.link/code-story)
• Alcor (https://alcor.com/podcast)
• Equitybee (http://codestory.co/equitybee)
• Terms and conditions: Equitybee executes private financing contracts (PFCs) allowing investors a certain claim to ESO upon liquidation event; Could limit your profits. Funding in not guaranteed. PFCs brokered by EquityBee Securities, member FINRA.

Links

• https://hydrolix.io/
• https://www.linkedin.com/in/davidsztykman/

Pukar Hamal was born in 1991, and is originally from Katmandu, Nepal. He grew up with no plumbing and no electricity, prior to moving to the states to grow up in Queens. Eventually, he moved to the Bay Area to attend Stanford, and fell in love with the area and the forward thinking culture. Outside of tech, he's been married for a few years. He enjoys listening to podcast about tech, finance, and economics, along with playing tennis every now and again.

In his past venture, Pukar was on the one yard line for making a deal on his company. Before it could close, his team was hit with a security due diligence questionnaire that halted the process. Having that experience drove him to build something to speed up the execution and experience of customer assurance.

This is the creation story of SecurityPal AI.

Sponsors

• Unblocked (https://getunblocked.com/codestory)
• TECH Domains (https://get.tech/codestory)
• Mezmo (https://mezmo.com/codestory)
• Braingrid.ai (https://braingrid.link/code-story)
• Alcor (https://alcor.com/podcast)
• Equitybee (http://codestory.co/equitybee)
• Terms and conditions: Equitybee executes private financing contracts (PFCs) allowing investors a certain claim to ESO upon liquidation event; Could limit your profits. Funding in not guaranteed. PFCs brokered by EquityBee Securities, member FINRA.

Links

• https://www.securitypalhq.com/
• https://www.linkedin.com/in/pukarhamal