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

Kevin Hurley grew up in a multi-kid house, which is where he got his competitive nature. He used to play 2 on 2 with his Dad and siblings at home. He went to school for electrical engineering, and funny enough, interviewed for a computer science job by accident, effectively stumbling into the trade. Outside of tech, he spends his free time with his fiancé, planning for the wedding, and visiting Manhattan beach for a good walk .

Kevin was part of the team that attempted to launch crypto at Facebook. Although that didn't work out, they realized that the backbone of the system needed to be built on something more common - and something that was lightning fast.

This is the creation story of Lightspark.

Sponsors

• P0 Security
• Speakeasy
• QA Wolf

Links

• https://www.lightspark.com/
• https://www.linkedin.com/in/kevin-p-hurley/

Hello listeners.

Today, I have an incredible follow episode from our friends at Turso. You may remember our episode with Glauber Costa in Season 8, where he told us the creation story of the platform. Today, I'm speaking with his co-founder, Pekka, to hear the update on Turso and what the team has been building over the past year.

Now with Turso, you can not only have embedded replicas on your device or browser, with multi-tenancy and syncing to Turbo's edge network - but now the tool powers vector search from on the device itself, leading to natively server less, low latency sql lite production loads. Turso continues to push the envelope with their product, and expanding use cases for developers.

If you would like to learn more about Turso, go to turso.tech. If you'd like to learn more specifically about vector search, go to turso.tech/vector.

Sponsors

• Speakeasy

Links

• https://turso.tech/
• https://turso.tech/vector
• https://codestory.co/podcast/bonus-glauber-costa-turso/
• https://codestory.co/podcast/bonus-dor-laor-scylladb/

Matt Van Itallie is the son of a math teacher and a coder - so this explains why he now uses code as data. He is a proud Boy Scout, making it of course to Eagle Scout and beyond. After being a management consultant, he found his way to ed tech, and fell in love with improving code. Outside of technology, he is married with 3 amazing kids. He likes to run, play ultimate frisbee, and has a wicked cool collection of minor league baseball hats.

Sitting a room with the head of Sales, Matt noticed that there were systems like Salesforce that were built to assess the state and future opportunity for business. He then thought, where are these systems for the code itself?

This is the creation story of Sema.

Sponsors

• Speakeasy

Links

• https://www.semasoftware.com/
• https://www.linkedin.com/in/mvi/

Anurag Goel grew up in New Delhi, but moved to Boston after college for his first job. He worked at Stripe, as the 8th employee, before eventually moving on and launching his current venture. Outside of tech, he is married, living in San Francisco. He likes to read science fiction, especially prior to bedtime. He also enjoys eating Thai food on the regular, though he mentioned he could eat pizza every day.

Post leaving Stripe, Anurag decided to work on an ambitious problem, and he started doing this by building a bunch of stuff in many different domains. After noticing a common problem in building out Kubernetes, he decided to start a new business to abstract these problems, and allow builders to focus on the differentiating factors to their solutions.

This is the creation story of Render.

Sponsors

• Speakeasy

Links

• https://render.com/
• https://www.linkedin.com/in/anuragoel/

Sagar Batchu was born in Sacramento, but moved to Bangalore after a decade. He has always been interested in how things work, and majored in Physic at his University. Towards the end of his studies, he crammed in a ton of CS classes and fell in love with the craft. He's worked on firmware, enterprise software, and eventually went to LiveRamp, building new experiences for them. Outside of tech, he loves pickleball, enjoys growing coffee and loves readying about historical events.

In his past, Sagar and his team took on API initiative to invest in internal API experience. Through this project, he spent a lot of time thinking about how to make this happen. He immediately saw the need across the industry, with the absence of time and money to fill the need. He decided to take it on and start a company.

This is the creation story of Speakeasy.

Sponsors

• Speakeasy

Links

• https://www.speakeasy.com/
• https://www.linkedin.com/in/sagar-batchu-981b3738/

What if you had a window into the digital startup world? What if you could ask the tech veterans what it feels like to create a world class product? How to recover from critical mistakes... how to scale your solution to the masses... How do you get from an idea on the back of a napkin, to a fully functioning product? What if you could hear the human stories about how they delivered technology? What if there was a show where you could hear those stories?

Mark Porter has always been fascinated with puzzles, so tech just fit for him and a great journey for him. He got his first 4k computer in middle school, and then moved into doing programming for the Department of Education. His big learning from this was that you can use tech to do social good. He's married with 5 kids, and as he puts it, they put up with his deep tech obsession.

Mark joined the board of MongoDB in 2019. What got him excited about the company was the world changing nature of the product. So much so, that he asked to step off the board to be CTO - and carry the banner to the developer community about the power of their doc based, distributed system performing DB transactions.

This is Mark's story with MongoDB.

Links

• Website: https://www.mongodb.com/
• LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/marklovestech/

Egil Østhus is based out of Norway - which obviously means he loves skiing. But outside of this, he loves to run outdoors, through the woods and on the streets. He has not done a full marathon yet, but dreams of doing the New York marathon someday. He's a family man, married, with 2 boys - none of which like to run with him, but they all enjoy being active and hiking.

In a past role, Egil's co-founder (and brother, FYI) was looking for a tool that would help him release code into the wild, in a rapid - yet safe - manner. He couldn't find anything to meet his high standards - so he built his own. When the open source version started to get a lot of attention, Egil joined his brother to bring the solution to the enterprise.

This is the creation story of Unleash.

Links

• Website: https://www.getunleash.io/
• LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/egilconr/

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/

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/