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

Neil Patel has always been a hacker - electronics boards, radios, etc. - being interested in how things work, mechanically or digitally. He learned hard work at his Father's convenience store, while also reading every computer magazine on the rack. He is a pharmacologist by study, but landed in tech cause he is passionate about it. Outside of tech, he loves architecture and design. He also loves to read, in particular sci fi, and enjoys eating Gujarati food, which is purely vegetarian food with tons of flavors.

Prior to 2020, Neil and his team was attempting to build tooling around understanding data around events. After a while, they realized that no matter what was done on top of an event store, you couldn't realize value without storing all events. So they pivoted, and focused on fixing the data store problem first.

This is the creation story of Axiom.

Sponsors

• Permit
• CacheFly
• ClearQuery
• Kiteworks

Links

• https://axiom.co/
• https://www.linkedin.com/in/njpatel/

Sanjay Nagaraj started his journey in India, where he was born and raised. He earliest influences started at home, as his father taught him honesty and integrity and his mother heavily influenced his growth as an individual. Though he spends most of his time in tech, anytime outside of work is dedicated to time with family, where he gets to see the world through his wife and kids - along with fueling his passion for singing and following his favorite sports team.

For Sanjay, one thing that was clear to him was that application builders exposing APIs, you are responsible for making sure those API's are secure. Prior to his current venture, he and his co-founder built AppDynamics, and they saw the growth of API's first hand. As such, businesses were looking for products to help understand API's and protect them - in real time.

This is the creation story of Traceable.

Sponsors

• Permit
• CacheFly
• ClearQuery
• Kiteworks

Links

• https://traceable.ai/
• https://www.linkedin.com/in/sanjaynagaraj/

Nic Beique was born in Odessa, Texas, but moved when he was very young to Montreal. Later in his teens, he moved to Alberta, which he describes as the "Denver of Canada". He loves his work, and spends most of his time thinking about how to expand his new venture - but outside of this, he lives in a beautiful city, with tons of hiking, skiing and snowboarding. He also enjoys a lego set here and there, keeping close to his building roots.

Nic started his first payments business a decade ago, which lived under the shadow of the bank. After many years of negotiation, he convinced the powers that be to let his company become its own payment processor. And after 3 years, he built a giant MVP to build the Square for grown-ups

This is the creation story of Helcim.

Sponsors

• Permit
• CacheFly
• ClearQuery
• Kiteworks

Links

• https://www.helcim.com/
• https://www.linkedin.com/in/nicbeique/

JJ Tang grew up in mainland China, though eventually he came to the US for University and stayed. He found a job, started working and eventually, moved to Canada, as the entrepreneur ecosystem was quite friendly. He has worked for companies like Instacart, IBM and Cisco, gaining vast experience in a myriad of roles. But outside of tech, he is engaged to be married in 2025, and is big into road cycling. In addition, he has a dog named Nova, which his current venture centers their merch design around.

At Instacart, JJ started to build a tool for infrastructure monitoring. When he realized that building it was cumbersome, and nothing existed in the market, he decided to take one of the companies best SRE and start a company, building this very product.

This is the creation story of Rootly.

Sponsors

• Permit
• CacheFly
• ClearQuery
• Kiteworks

Links

• https://rootly.com/
• https://www.linkedin.com/in/jjrichardtang/

Alex Gallego was born and raised in Colombia. He has always identified as a builder, and as a kid, he would help his Uncle re-build dirt bike engines, and was the kid that would take apart his friend's computer when they weren't looking. Once he arrived in the US, his Dad got a computer, which started his love for tech and cryptography. Outside of tech, he is married with three boys, so his time is consumed with being present with his boys, to which he stated he loves being a Dad. Beyond that, he enjoys mentally reseting by doing mountain biking and road cycling.

Alex was working with a large dataset in ad tech. After this startup did well, he was hooked, he went on to build a computing framework, which eventually sold to Alkamai. During his time at that company, he started playing with squeezing every bit of compute out of hardware - and decided to combine this in order to optimize storage.

This is the creation story of Redpanda.

Sponsors

• Permit
• CacheFly
• ClearQuery
• Kiteworks

Links

• https://redpanda.com/
• https://www.linkedin.com/in/alexandergallego/

Adam Sandman grew up in Wales, in the United Kingdom. He went to university to study physics, because he had a fascination and desire to understand how things in the world worked. It was during this time that he ended up falling in love with tech, and has been in the industry ever since. Outside of tech, he is married with older children. He mentioned he was a scout master in the past, which he really enjoyed how the Scouts were led by the Scouts themselves.

In the past, Adam realized that there were not great tools out there for QA testing. He noticed a lot of people were using Excel and Word, along with manual testing through the industry. Given his experience as a project manager and architect, he saw an opportunity in the market - and set out to build a solution.

This is the creation story of Inflectra.

Sponsors

• Permit
• CacheFly
• ClearQuery
• Kiteworks

Links

• https://www.inflectra.com/
• https://www.linkedin.com/in/adamsandman/

Vlad Sadovskiy is a first generation immigrant from the Ukraine in the early 1990's. He has been in the payments space for 30+ years, so he knows a thing or two about the space. But outside of this and tech, he is a cancer survivor, and ex professional chess player. He mentions that along with ping pong, he still plays chess as a hobby - and sometimes, to help resolve arguments with his wife.

A few years ago, Vlad acquired a number of businesses in the payment space. Having spent many years in the payment space, he decided it was time to be a founder and create something in the payment space with a twist - specifically, for the "reseller community".

This is the creation story of Netevia.

Sponsors

• Permit
• CacheFly
• ClearQuery
• Kiteworks

Links

• https://www.netevia.com/
• https://www.linkedin.com/in/vladsadovskiy/

Sasha Mitchell living in Bangkok, Thailand, but grew up in London. He stared in the creative industries, as one side of his family are architects and the other side are musicians. This inspired him to study music production, which allowed him to enjoy the intersection of tech and creativity. During his time in film tech, he discovered the blockchain and started his journey into this industry. Outside of tech, he enjoys snowboarding, skateboarding, and of course - music and film.

Being in the space for a long time, Sasha has been witnessing what he describes as the drop in the value of currency, by manipulation. He wanted to see decentralized, smart contracts create a smart economy - as part of a new internet.

This is the creation story of BeL2.

Sponsors

• Permit
• CacheFly
• ClearQuery
• Kiteworks

Links

• https://bel2.org/
• https://elastos.info/
• https://www.linkedin.com/in/sashmitchell/

Roman Sevast was born in a small city in Ukraine. When he met his girlfriend, he wanted to take her out to dinner - but he didn't have the money to do so. So he started to learn software engineering to make a little money - and his tech career started. Outside of tech, he loves to play a myriad of different video games, and enjoys DJ'ing - either for himself or for his friends. He tends to play techno or house music, but has thrown in some classical music from time to time.

Eight years ago, Roman met his co-founder Stacy on Tinder. After dating for several years, she showed him some buggy apps she had tried to create, and Roman stepped into help. After a few failed startup attempts, they set out to build a space where companies meet design talent - within the same day - and have these designer's projects managed with AI.

This is the creation story of Awesomic.

Sponsors

• CacheFly
• ClearQuery
• Kiteworks

Links

• https://www.awesomic.com/
• https://www.linkedin.com/in/roman-sevast/

When asked about his life outside of tech, Björn Kolbeck stated "Is there anything outside of tech?". He has made his hobby into his job, being exposed to his first computer at 11 and dreaming of being a programer. Outside of tech, he is a father of 2 kids. He loves going to the gym and traveling, which he mentioned was a luxury at his current venture. For personal travel, he loved visiting Costa Rica, as the people are friendly, the country is beautiful - and it's safe.

Björn started a PhD program, and was part of a large project with the goal to build a distributed version of Linux. Within this program, he met his now co-founder, and they were responsible for a package within that project, surrounding data management. Little did they know that their exciting part of the project would later turn into a separate distributed file system.

This is the creation story of Quobyte.

Sponsors

• CacheFly
• ClearQuery
• Kiteworks

Links

• https://www.quobyte.com/
• https://www.linkedin.com/in/bjorn-kolbeck-37925033/