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

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/

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/

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

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

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

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. 

Links

https://www.liminal.ai/

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

Drew Dillon is a tech founder and product leader, centered in the Bay Area. He is a person who likes to do a bit of everything, having an engineering background, but spending time in design, sales, and product management. He's been a part of many startups - Yammer being one of them, and several others from Y Combinator - along with being a consultant and fractional CPO. Outside of tech, he has 2 kids that take up most of his time. When he isn't on the sidelines of a soccer game, he enjoys woodworking and reading a good sci-fi book. 

At a prior startup, Drew built a system using AI, which spit out something reasonably shaped. He took a look at the process he went through to create it, and realized that there are a ton of disparate parts, all separate from the shared organizational context - IE the "why" behind what is being built. He set out to change that, and built institutional memory and product judgement within AI agents. 

This is the creation story of Brief. 

Links

https://briefhq.ai/

https://mymoxieai.com/

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

Behnam Bastani is originally from Tehran, Iran. He left the country at the age of 17, setting out for Canada, where he got his Masters and PhD, before moving to California. He's always looked at things with the big picture in mind - whether that is artwork, wood work, engineering, etc. He's worked for Hewlett Packard, Meta and Roblox, before starting his current venture. Outside of tech, he loves to exercise and participate in water activities. For peace of mind, he gardens - experimenting with growing trees, replanting, and seeding. 

Previously, Behnam went to Meta to pursue the future of wearables. He immediately realized that these wearables required a connected system. He started to ask the question, "why can't we use compute around use to fuel wearables?". Eventually, through stints at Meta and Roblox, he and his co-founder knew they wanted this type of system... and started with the infrastructure to enable it. 

This is the creation story of OpenInfer. 

Links

https://openinfer.io/

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