Craig is the CEO and co-founder of Stacklok, where his team is working to tip AI code generation on its side, from vertical, closed solutions to horizontal, aligned systems. Craig was previously CEO and co-founder of Heptio, which was acquired by VMware in 2018; he has also led product and engineering teams at Google and Microsoft. Craig is a co-creator of Kubernetes and he bootstrapped and chaired the Cloud Native Computing Foundation.

Stacklok is working to tip AI code generation on its side — transforming vertically integrated (and closed) solutions into horizontal, open systems. Their CodeGate.ai project is an important step in this direction; it's a bridge between AI assistants and LLMs that gives developers control of their privacy and delivers richer results.

ElevenLabs is the leading Voice AI platform for developers with thousands of ultra-realistic, human-like voices across 32 languages.

Developers use ElevenLabs to build life-like, conversational AI voice agents to handle customer support queries, appointment scheduling, and even offer personalized 1-1 tutoring.

• Why this moment is “the epoch of the startup” (2:03)
• How AI shifts startup economics: from cost structures to value capture (4:18)
• Why incumbents struggle during disruption—and how startups can win (8:17)
• The origin story behind Stacklok & lessons from Craig’s pivot (11:04)
• Frameworks for identifying asymmetric advantages as a founder (14:48)
• How to map your unique asymmetric advantages to new opportunities and secure stakeholder buy-in (16:34)
• Rethinking defensibility & value capture in the AI era (16:29)
• How Craig applied cost, GTM & product perspectives to strategic pivots @ Stacklok (18:07)
• Building investment theses: Aligning cultural strengths & asymmetric advantages with evolving opportunities (20:05)
• Determining your startup’s investment themes (22:53)
• Structuring experiments & validating opportunities (24:15)
• Defensibility & building community-driven moats in early ideation phases (26:54)
• Signals of early community-product alignment (31:24)
• Conversation frameworks to assess asymmetric advantages (32:22)
• Societal implications of AI disruption & the “startup epoch” (35:14)
• Rapid fire questions (38:12)

Patrick Gallagher - Producer & Co-Host

Jerry Li - Co-Host

Noah Olberding - Associate Producer, Audio & Video Editor https://www.linkedin.com/in/noah-olberding/

Dan Overheim - Audio Engineer, Dan’s also an avid 3D printer - https://www.bnd3d.com/

Ellie Coggins Angus - Copywriter, Check out her other work at https://elliecoggins.com/about/

Eliot Horowitz is the Founder and CEO of Viam, an engineering platform unlocking AI, automation, and data for devices in the physical world. With a deep commitment to advancing technology, Eliot leads Viam in helping companies build solutions across robotics, food and beverage, climate, marine, industrial manufacturing, and more.

A career software developer and technology leader, Eliot co-founded MongoDB in 2007, writing the core code base for the pioneering database and leading the engineering and product teams for 13 years as CTO. MongoDB, which went public in 2017, has since reached a market cap of over $20 billion. Before MongoDB, he co-founded the ecommerce company ShopWiki and served as CTO, and he began his career in software development in the R&D group of adtech firm DoubleClick.

Eliot is passionate about using technology to address pressing societal issues, including working with WAVS to protect marine life in the North Atlantic and supporting Billion Oyster Project’s work to help restore New York Harbor’s ecosystem.

• The origin story of founding Viam (2:07)
• How Viam can be a game-changing platform, accelerating robotics software & hardware 10x to 100x (3:43)
• The ideation journey behind Viam: Building a platform that simplifies the integration of hardware and software development (5:22)
• Solving challenges with seamless APIs, a modular system, the right abstraction layers, and a comprehensive platform (9:04)
• Key questions for identifying the right abstraction layers at Viam (10:42)
• Optimizing your platform for flexibility and ease of use (12:42)
• The evolution of product building, from first-hand experience to customer-driven (15:43)
• How Eliot’s MongoDB Experience shaped Viam’s user-centric approach, open-source strategy, business model & ecosystem approach (17:58)
• Cultivating developer communities & leveraging community insights at MongoDB & Viam (22:11)
• Frameworks for deciding on your business model & pricing (24:02)
• Eliot’s approach to building developer tools & products used by engineers (25:34)
• Aligning your eng team & stakeholders on the product vision (29:01)
• What it means to deeply understand engineers and how they interact with your product (30:20)
• Strategies for eng leaders to better connect with customers (33:48)
• Viam’s real-world applications & what’s next (35:41)
• Rapid fire questions (38:31)

• Viam - At Viam, we believe in the power of technology to make our world smarter, happier, and more sustainable. We're building a revolutionary engineering platform for problem-solving in the physical world, so that innovators from all disciplines can address humanity's most complex challenges with practical solutions. Together with our partners, we're committed to making a lasting positive impact on industries, communities, and the planet.

Patrick Gallagher - Producer & Co-Host

Jerry Li - Co-Host

Noah Olberding - Associate Producer, Audio & Video Editor https://www.linkedin.com/in/noah-olberding/

Dan Overheim - Audio Engineer, Dan’s also an avid 3D printer - https://www.bnd3d.com/

Ellie Coggins Angus - Copywriter, Check out her other work at https://elliecoggins.com/about/

Jon Hyman (Co-Founder and CTO @ Braze) shares the pivotal moments that shaped the company - from being the only person on call in the early years to identifying (and pivoting) product-market fit. Jon discusses how they navigated early-stage failure modes, carved out areas of product ownership, and made the shift to enterprise customers. Plus how leadership priorities evolve pre- vs. post-IPO and the next evolution of Jon’s leadership growth after almost 14 years at Braze.

Jon Hyman is the co-founder and chief technology officer of Braze, the customer engagement platform that delivers messaging experiences across push, email, in-app, and more. He leads the charge for building the platform’s technical systems and infrastructure as well as overseeing the company’s technical operations and engineering team.

Prior to Braze, Jon served as lead engineer for the Core Technology group at Bridgewater Associates, the world’s largest hedge fund. There, he managed a team that maintained 80+ software assets and was responsible for the security and stability of critical trading systems. Jon met cofounder Bill Magnuson during his time at Bridgewater, and together they won the 2011 TechCrunch Disrupt Hackathon. Jon is a recipient of the SmartCEO Executive Management Award in the CIO/CTO Category for New York. Jon holds a B.A. from Harvard University in Computer Science.

Braze is the leading customer engagement platform that empowers brands to Be Absolutely Engaging.™ Braze allows any marketer to collect and take action on any amount of data from any source, so they can creatively engage with customers in real time, across channels from one platform. From cross-channel messaging and journey orchestration to Al-powered experimentation and optimization, Braze enables companies to build and maintain absolutely engaging relationships with their customers that foster growth and loyalty. The company has been recognized as a 2024 U.S. News & World Report Best Companies to Work For, 2024 Best Small & Medium Workplaces in Europe by Great Place to Work®, 2024 Fortune Best Workplaces for Women™ by Great Place to Work® and was named a Leader by Gartner® in the 2024 Magic Quadrant™ for Multichannel Marketing Hubs and a Strong Performer in The Forrester Wave™: Email Marketing Service Providers, Q3 2024.  Braze is headquartered in New York with 15 offices across North America, Europe, and APAC. Learn more at braze.com.

Clipboard Health is looking for the next generation of exceptional software engineering leaders, not just managers. They’re a profitable unicorn, backed by top-tier investors, and they take the craft of engineering management seriously.

Clipboard Health matches highly qualified healthcare workers with nearby facilities to fulfill millions of shifts a year - revolutionizing healthcare staffing with a fast, flexible, and user-friendly platform.

Learn more & browse their open roles at clipboardhealth.com/engineering

• What Jon learned from being the only person on call for his company’s first four years (2:18)
• Knowing when it’s time to get help managing your servers, ops, scaling, etc. (5:05)
• Establishing areas of product ownership & other scaling lessons from the early days (8:48)
• Frameworks for conversations on splitting of products across teams (11:22)
• The challenges, complexities & strategies behind assigning ownership in the early days (14:02)
• Founding Braze (17:23)
• Why Braze? The story & insights behind the original vision for Braze (19:30)
• Identifying Braze’s product market fit (21:56)
• Early-stage PMF challenges faced by Jon & his co-founders (25:03)
• Pivoting to focus on enterprise customers (27:10)
• “Let’s integrate the SDK right now” - founder-led sales ideas to validate your product (28:45)
• Behind the decision to hire a chief revenue officer for the first time (33:25)
• The evolution of enterprise & its impact on Braze’s product offering (36:04)
• Growing out of your early-stage failure modes (38:22)
• Why it’s important to make personnel decisions quickly (40:44)
• Setting & maintaining a vision pre IPO vs. post IPO (43:43)
• Jon’s next leadership evolution & growth areas he is focusing on (49:13)
• Rapid fire questions (50:44)

• When We Cease to Understand the World - Benjamín Labatut’s fictional examination of the lives of real-life scientists and thinkers whose discoveries resulted in moral consequences beyond their imagining. At a breakneck pace and with a wealth of disturbing detail, Labatut uses the imaginative resources of fiction to tell the stories of Fritz Haber, Alexander Grothendieck, Werner Heisenberg, and Erwin Schrödinger, the scientists and mathematicians who expanded our notions of the possible.

Patrick Gallagher - Producer & Co-Host

Jerry Li - Co-Host

Noah Olberding - Associate Producer, Audio & Video Editor https://www.linkedin.com/in/noah-olberding/

Dan Overheim - Audio Engineer, Dan’s also an avid 3D printer - https://www.bnd3d.com/

Ellie Coggins Angus - Copywriter, Check out her other work at https://elliecoggins.com/about/

Stephen is the co-founder and CEO of incident.io, where they're building incident management tooling that's so good, people will break things on purpose. A software engineer by training, he previously led engineering teams at Monzo, and co-founded Ravelin, a fraud detection startup.

Incident.io provides a platform to help you better respond to and learn from incidents. Helping you seamlessly orchestrate incident response from start to finish.

Clipboard Health is looking for the next generation of exceptional software engineering leaders, not just managers. They’re a profitable unicorn, backed by top-tier investors, and they take the craft of engineering management seriously.

Clipboard Health matches highly qualified healthcare workers with nearby facilities to fulfill millions of shifts a year - revolutionizing healthcare staffing with a fast, flexible, and user-friendly platform.

Learn more & browse their open roles at clipboardhealth.com/engineering

• The early days of incident.io (2:45)
• Transitioning from working on incident.io part-time to full-time (5:32)
• Tactics that helped the co-founder team decide on incident.io over other ideas (8:21)
• How incident.io received 750 demo requests right away (11:07)
• incident.io’s product-market fit cheat code & identifying internal PMF (12:24)
• How incident.io landed major logo companies like Netflix, Airbnb & Etsy (14:32)
• Strategies to differentiate yourself from competitors in the B2B space & why execution and responsiveness can beat technological advantage (17:30)
• Stephen’s perspective on “inflicting software” on people & how that changes your product, org & GTM strategy downstream (21:14)
• Enterprise sales insights that surprised Stephen (23:56)
• Why GTM is infinitely harder than product & how founders can start to scale themselves out of sales activities (27:21)
• What incident.io’s GTM team looks like now (32:12)
• Differentiating in B2B enterprise on customer support & the strategic role of support at incident.io (34:20)
• Why a culture of responsiveness and support can be your hidden advantage (37:03)
• Rapid fire questions (39:26)

• Billion Dollar Whale - Tom Wright and Bradley Hope’s epic tale of white-collar crime on a global scale revealing how a young social climber from Malaysia pulled off one of the biggest heists in history.

Patrick Gallagher - Producer & Co-Host

Jerry Li - Co-Host

Noah Olberding - Associate Producer, Audio & Video Editor https://www.linkedin.com/in/noah-olberding/

Dan Overheim - Audio Engineer, Dan’s also an avid 3D printer - https://www.bnd3d.com/

Ellie Coggins Angus - Copywriter, Check out her other work at https://elliecoggins.com/about/

Michael is the founder and CEO of WorkOS, a developer platform that enables companies to become Enterprise Ready through features like Single Sign-On (SAML). Their customers include many of the fastest-growing startups including Webflow, Drata, Loom, and +200 others. Before WorkOS, Michael co-founded Nylas and studied CS at MIT.

Clipboard Health is looking for the next generation of exceptional software engineering leaders, not just managers. They’re a profitable unicorn, backed by top-tier investors, and they take the craft of engineering management seriously.

Clipboard Health matches highly qualified healthcare workers with nearby facilities to fulfill millions of shifts a year - revolutionizing healthcare staffing with a fast, flexible, and user-friendly platform.

Learn more & browse their open roles at clipboardhealth.com/engineering

• Michael’s first journey as a founder @ Nylas (2:21)
• Great product experience happens in the margins (6:09)
• Why prioritizing the details of the last 3% of your product is key (7:17)
• How obsession, taste, care, and the intangible wow factor impact your product experience (9:24)
• Study and design the business model like you would the product experience / system architecture (12:59)
• Designing WorkOS’s early business model & prioritizing early product decisions (16:39)
• The Philosophy of 'You Pay When We Create Value For Your Business' and Why It Works (20:04)
• ”Pricing is the API between your business model and your customer” (22:10)
• Why you should iterate on pricing the same way you iterate your product (24:18)
• How to navigate making a pricing decision - and think through options like public pricing, tiers, usage, etc. (27:21)
• Questions Michael asks to determine pricing of different WorkOS products (30:54)
• Pricing is all about considering trade-offs - start with “what’s the ideal buying experience and pricing structure for your consumer?” (32:53)
• Factors to consider when changing prices or revisiting pricing assumptions (34:00)
• Rapid fire questions (36:28)

• ACQUIRED - Every company has a story. Learn the playbooks that built the world’s greatest companies — and how you can apply them as a founder, operator, or investor.
• The Challenger Sale: Taking Control of the Customer Conversation - The need to understand what top-performing reps are doing that their average performing colleagues are not drove Matthew Dixon, Brent Adamson, and their colleagues at Corporate Executive Board to investigate the skills, behaviors, knowledge, and attitudes that matter most for high performance. And what they discovered may be the biggest shock to conventional sales wisdom in decades.
• Founder-Led Sales: Sales Simplified for Startup Founders - Founder-led sales can be challenging, as it requires expertise and charisma to sell a product or service. Potential customers may be skeptical of the founder's intentions. However, founder-led sales can also be rewarding, providing valuable feedback and insights to improve the product or service, building strong customer relationships, and leading to repeat business and positive recommendations. It's a powerful tool for business growth.

Patrick Gallagher - Producer & Co-Host

Jerry Li - Co-Host

Noah Olberding - Associate Producer, Audio & Video Editor https://www.linkedin.com/in/noah-olberding/

Dan Overheim - Audio Engineer, Dan’s also an avid 3D printer - https://www.bnd3d.com/

Ellie Coggins Angus - Copywriter, Check out her other work at https://elliecoggins.com/about/

David Mytton (CEO @ Arcjet & Co-founder @ Console) shares insights on “what makes a great DevTool company!” We unpack lessons on bootstrapping vs. seeking VC funding & why it’s important to stick with one; building prototypes; considerations for selling your company; and his founder journey with Server Density, Console & now with Arcjet. David also highlights GTM practices for finding reliable channels & distribution, why documentation can make a critical impact on dev tool sales, the impact of design, and translating the benefits of dev tools for finance teams vs. developers.

A dynamic approach to tech innovation, security, sustainability, and developer empowerment can be seen in everything David Mytton touches. As co-founder of Console and host of the Console DevTools Podcast, he delights in keeping developers ahead of the curve with the tools they need the most. As the founder of Server Density (acquired by StackPath), he created a product that helped organizations manage mission-critical IT environments. As a sustainable computing researcher at Oxford and a global green tech speaker, he’s brought much-needed attention to the impact of cloud emissions and the water and energy consumption of the data centers that fuel our online lives. Now, as founder and CEO of Arcjet, he’s helping developers and businesses protect their apps with just a few lines of code. His professional career is a direct reflection of his relentless pursuit of making tech smarter and greener. How he invests his spare time showcases his unwavering commitment to mentoring developers and building the communities they need to succeed.

• David’s founder journey, starting with Server Density (2:31)
• Behind the early decision to start a company & start building a product (4:00)
• Key lessons from bootstrapping, raising funding, and being acquired (7:40)
• How those early lessons shaped Arcjet & Console (9:39)
• Why VC money can make finding experienced engineers easier (12:24)
• Strategies to help early teams build their first product / prototype (14:02)
• Considering company outcomes: Should you build a company just to sell it? (15:17)
• Signals that it’s the right time for a sale / acquisition (17:02)
• The story behind Arcjet (18:54)
• “What makes a great DevTool company” & strategic insights that shaped Arcjet (22:11)
• Key practices that helped shape Arcjet’s GTM plan (24:09)
• David’s approach to experimentation and discovery (26:09)
• The impact of documentation on dev tool companies (30:03)
• How discovery pathways for dev tools impact sales (31:55)
• Making the decision-making process easier for users & buyers (33:30)
• Translating dev tool benefits for finance teams vs. developers (38:18)
• The impact of design on dev tool companies (40:55)
• Rapid fire questions (44:21)

• David’s reading list
• a16z Blog
• The Hard Thing About Hard Things - Ben Horowitz, a leading venture capitalist, modern management expert, and New York Times bestselling author, combines lessons both from history and from modern organizational practice with practical and often surprising advice to help executives build cultures that can weather both good and bad times.
• The Ascent of Money: A Financial History of the World - Niall Ferguson follows the money to tell the human story behind the evolution of finance, from its origins in ancient Mesopotamia to the latest upheavals on what he calls Planet Finance.
• The Lessons of History - In this illuminating and thoughtful book, Will and Ariel Durant have succeeded in distilling for the reader the accumulated store of knowledge and experience from their four decades of work on the ten monumental volumes of "The Story of Civilization." The result is a survey of human history, full of dazzling insights into the nature of human experience, the evolution of civilization, the culture of man.

Patrick Gallagher - Producer & Co-Host

Jerry Li - Co-Host

Noah Olberding - Associate Producer, Audio & Video Editor https://www.linkedin.com/in/noah-olberding/

Dan Overheim - Audio Engineer, Dan’s also an avid 3D printer - https://www.bnd3d.com/

Ellie Coggins Angus - Copywriter, Check out her other work at https://elliecoggins.com/about/

In this episode of Engineering Founders, Archetype AI’s Ivan Poupyrev, Ph.D. (CEO & CTO), and Jaime Lien, Ph.D. (Head of Hardware & Signal Processing), join us to discuss insights on transitioning as a larger-scale founder team, inspiring big ideas / questions, communicating your product’s thesis as a founder, and how to ensure your actions are tracking toward your ultimate goals & questions. Jaime and Ivan also break down smaller steps founders can take toward answering the big question, how to adapt your product’s narrative as you iterate, communicating complicated theses in a way people can easily digest them, and what the next big ideas at Archetype AI look like.

Chief Executive Officer and Chief Technology Officer of Archetype AI where he leads the team in developing a physical world foundational AI model, a direction known as 'Physical AI.' An award-winning inventor, engineer, and technical leader, he has 20+ years of experience in research and product development, as well as interaction design, advanced sensors and natural interaction, mobile and wearable devices.

Prior to Archetype AI, Ivan spearheaded technology development for Google’s Advanced Technology and Projects, Walt Disney Imagineering, Sony, and others. He holds over 100 US patents, has over 100 scientific publications, and has been recognized with the National Design Award, Cannes Lion Grand Prix, and SXSW Innovation Award. Ivan was named 'one of the best interaction designers in the world' by Fast Company, and his work has been enshrined in the permanent collection of the Smithsonian Cooper-Hewitt Design Museum.

Head of Hardware & Signal Processing, Jaime Lien, Ph.D., holds a wealth of experience in research and hardware product engineering. A visionary leader with a proven track record in inventing, developing and shipping radio frequency sensing technology and techniques for human perception and interaction, Jaime has an extensive background in radar systems design and signal processing.

Prior to Archetype, Jaime was the Radar Research Lead of Project Soli with Google’s Advanced Technology and Projects and a Communications Engineer with NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory.

Jaime received a B.S. and M.S. in Electrical Engineering from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and her Ph.D. degree in Electrical Engineering from Stanford University, where her research focused on interferometric synthetic aperture radar theory and techniques.

• Ivan & Jaime’s co-founder story & founding Archetype AI together (3:45)
• What it was like transitioning collectively as a larger-scale team (6:56)
• How to inspire big ideas & what tackling ambitious projects looks like at Archetype AI(9:36)
• Learn how to embrace “crazy” ideas / questions without constraints (11:41)
• Creating a founder team with a diverse set of interests & experiences (13:14)
• Deconstructing Archetype AI’s early-stage big questions (14:27)
• Strategies for finding the right metaphor to describe what you’re trying to build (16:52)
• Why the iterative process is like archeology (18:52)
• The inspiration behind & conversations that led to Archetype AI (20:25)
• How to communicate the thesis of Archetype AIin a way people understand (21:45)
• Unlocking your vision around the core technologies available (24:18)
• Where to start when working toward answering the big question (26:07)
• Use prototypes to see if you idea makes sense in the real world (27:56)
• Frameworks for deconstructing & re-synthesizing your big ideas (30:10)
• What it means for AI to understand physics (32:41)
• Tracking tools for ensuring your actions align with your big question (34:17)
• Archetype AI’s next big ideas (37:29)
• Rapid fire questions (40:24)

• Normal People - Sally Rooney brings her brilliant psychological acuity and perfectly spare prose to a story that explores the subtleties of class, the electricity of first love, and the complex entanglements of family and friendship.
• The Overstory - A sweeping, impassioned work of activism and resistance that is also a stunning evocation of - and paean to - the natural world. From the roots to the crown and back to the seeds, Richard Powers’s twelfth novel unfolds in concentric rings of interlocking fables that range from antebellum New York to the late twentieth-century Timber Wars of the Pacific Northwest and beyond.
• What Is Real?: The Unfinished Quest for the Meaning of Quantum Physics - Adam Becker’s gripping book following the battle to understand the meaning behind quantum physics.

Patrick Gallagher - Producer & Co-Host

Jerry Li - Co-Host

Noah Olberding - Associate Producer, Audio & Video Editor https://www.linkedin.com/in/noah-olberding/

Dan Overheim - Audio Engineer, Dan’s also an avid 3D printer - https://www.bnd3d.com/

Ellie Coggins Angus - Copywriter, Check out her other work at https://elliecoggins.com/about/

Jake Schwartz (Co-Founder @ Endorsed) joins us to talk about de-risking the co-founder relationship! We cover how they built in stress-tests to validate co-founder fit, how to host a hackathon to stress-test your partnership, and why reference calls are an important component of finding a co-founder. Plus the story behind Jakes's transition from Life360 to co-founding Endorsed, prioritizing which projects to focus on, early-stage product strategy considerations around AI, and why you need to approach your customers with a genuine sense of curiosity.

Jake is an engineering leader, entrepreneur, and technology investor based in San Francisco. From building his first website at age 8 to shipping large-scale software at Apple and overseeing the development of the flagship Life360 app, Jake has tackled engineering challenges at every scale. At Life360, he jump-started the European engineering office, helping scale the company from 50 to 500 people and reaching an audience of 70M users worldwide. He is now the co-founder of Endorsed.com, an AI recruiting platform that helps teams hire better and faster.

• The origin story behind Endorsed (1:59)
• What inspired Jake to dive into the world of hiring (6:05)
• The whiteboarding conversation between Jake & his co-founder (7:12)
• Jake’s transition from Life360 to starting Endorsed (9:24)
• Insights on experimentation & stress-testing the co-founder relationship (11:23)
• Deciding what experiments to pursue further or toss (13:16)
• Strategies for de-risking the co-founder relationship & transition to a startup (14:30)
• Organizing a hackathon to test the co-founder relationship (16:50)
• What Jake learned from the co-founder hackathon & tips for trying your own (18:07)
• Main objectives for co-founder reference calls (19:59)
• Dissecting Jake’s decision-making process behind the different pivots (21:27)
• Why they decided to commit to selling direct vs. building an API layer (24:38)
• Recommendations for sorting through problems & deciding which to solve (25:57)
• Approach your customers with curiosity (29:31)
• Early-stage considerations for AI in terms of product strategy (30:33)
• Rapid fire questions (33:34)

• Steve Jobs “Keeper of the Vision” quote
• The Three-Body Problem - Set against the backdrop of China's Cultural Revolution, a secret military project sends signals into space to establish contact with aliens. An alien civilization on the brink of destruction captures the signal and plans to invade Earth. Meanwhile, on Earth, different camps start forming, planning to either welcome the superior beings and help them take over a world seen as corrupt, or to fight against the invasion.

Patrick Gallagher - Producer & Co-Host

Jerry Li - Co-Host

Noah Olberding - Associate Producer, Audio & Video Editor https://www.linkedin.com/in/noah-olberding/

Dan Overheim - Audio Engineer, Dan’s also an avid 3D printer - https://www.bnd3d.com/

Ellie Coggins Angus - Copywriter, Check out her other work at https://elliecoggins.com/about/

Nancy Wang, Venture Partner @ Felicis and Former GM @ AWS, joins us to discuss strategies & considerations for scaling costs, becoming enterprise ready on Day 1, maintaining business health, and more. We cover Nancy’s journey as a founding product manager at AWS and how those lessons have guided her throughout her career & how she coaches founders. We address why it’s paramount to prioritize scaling costs early on as a founder, how to make design decisions with cost considerations in mind, and what tools you can employ to identify the features that most benefit your customers. Finally, Nancy & Patrick talk about how to land on your V1 while being enterprise-ready from the get-go and trends / growth opportunities that founders should be aware of today.

Nancy is a product & engineering executive, advisor, and investor who is passionate about creating seats at the table for women, especially within engineering and technical roles. Most recently, as General Manager of Data Protection at AWS Nancy scaled her engineering teams from 18 to 100+, all while averaging over 45% female and delivering triple-digit YoY growth businesses that delivered over $1B+ ARR including its integration into Amazon’s suite of AI products.

Previously, Nancy launched Rubrik’s (NYSE: RBRK) first Cloud SaaS business, growing their company valuation to over $4B in less than 2 years. Rubrik IPO’ed in Q22024, as one of the fastest-growing enterprise SaaS businesses. As Founder and Board Chair of the non-profit Advancing Women in Tech since 2016, Nancy helps prepare women and underrepresented minorities for leadership roles. She is currently a Venture Partner at Felicis, looking after their infrastructure and cybersecurity investments.

• Nancy’s journey as the founding product manager for AWS (2:57)
• Why AWS was launched & how it scaled (5:31)
• How to build a successful business within the confines of your org (7:41)
• Insights into the people side of scaling your business (10:25)
• Understanding the cost component of scaling / founding (13:12)
• Ensure your processes aid the overall health & mission of the company (15:43)
• Why founders need to prioritize scaling costs early (17:15)
• Breaking down different cost scenarios founders may face (20:08)
• Avoiding design decisions that create exponential cost but linear revenue (22:51)
• Considerations for being enterprise-ready from Day 1 (28:10)
• Think of hyperscalers like a T-rex (32:31)
• Nancy’s lessons learned on landing your V1 while being enterprise-ready (34:05)
• Questions founders can ask to help identify their market & where to start (39:24)
• Current trends / growth opportunities for founders to consider (40:59)
• Rapid fire questions (43:31)

• CEO Excellence - McKinsey & Company led a research effort to identify those CEOs whose companies grew demonstrably healthier during their tenures, looking across more than 20 years’ worth of data on 7,800 CEOs from 3,500 public companies across 70 countries and 24 industries to further identify those whose actions have led to breakaway success.

Patrick Gallagher - Producer & Co-Host

Jerry Li - Co-Host

Noah Olberding - Associate Producer, Audio & Video Editor https://www.linkedin.com/in/noah-olberding/

Dan Overheim - Audio Engineer, Dan’s also an avid 3D printer - https://www.bnd3d.com/

Ellie Coggins Angus - Copywriter, Check out her other work at https://elliecoggins.com/about/

In this episode of Engineering Founders, we discuss something we’ve never covered before – why you SHOULDN’T be a founder! Travis McPeak (CEO & Co-Founder @ Resourcely) joins the pod to share his founder story and questions to ask yourself to truly validate if the founder lifestyle is right for you. We also address how to de-risk your org & understanding the two main kinds of risks; things to consider when raising capital, like going bootstrap vs. VC; balancing the wedge vs. long-term vision; and how to create a lifestyle that supports you as a founder.

Travis is currently Co-Founder and CEO of Resourcely which enables platform, security, and DevOps engineering teams to offer simple self-service to their developers. Prior to Resourcely, Travis served as the Head of Product Security at Databricks. With an extensive background in application and cloud security, Travis enjoys building automated solutions to hard and critical problems. Prior to joining Databricks, Travis led the team at Netflix that automates application security including vulnerability management, asset inventory, and security reviews. During his time at Netflix Travis also built Repokid, a tool that automates least privilege at scale. Previously Travis led large security initiatives at IBM, HPE, and Symantec.

Travis is an extrovert and enjoys sharing ideas and meeting new people. In his spare time, Travis leads the OWASP Bay Area chapter, mentors people getting started in security, and loves to help startups. He is an advisor for four companies including Ermetic and Appaegis. Travis is an angel investor in startups including Temporal, Truffle Security, and AuthZed.

" The stress is going to get you anyway, and your mindset about how you approach that stress is going to make the difference. So you're the one that's like, ‘All right, it's challenge time. Let's do this.’ Or are you like, ‘I'm overwhelmed right now. This feels too hard for me and then you go like hide in your shell.’”

- Travis McPeak   

• The origins behind Resourcely & Travis’s founder journey (1:52)
• Questions to ask before starting a company (5:07)
• What it was like for Travis to answer these questions for himself (8:00)
• Processes for becoming more self aware (9:06)
• What you should do / think about before starting a company (11:12)
• Methods for de-risking the two main kinds of risks (14:28)
• Resources for better understanding de-risking business risk (16:30)
• Identifying when to go bootstrap vs. VC for funding (19:00)
• Frameworks for differentiating which investor path is the right fit (21:30)
• Presentation strategies & considerations when raising capital (22:48)
• Linking together the wedge vs. long-term vision (28:21)
• How Travis was able to have 45 conversations in the first 45 days (32:31)
• Adapting to the founder lifestyle & increasing your odds for success (34:25)
• Strategies for prioritization & developing discipline (35:39)
• Practice rigorous scheduling (40:23)
• Rapid fire questions (41:49)

• The Mom Test - Rob Fitzpatrick’s quick and easy handbook about how to get more learning and more sales out of your customer conversations. Even when everyone is lying to you.
• Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, and Tomorrow - Gabrielle Zevin's dazzling and intricately imagined novel that examines the multifarious nature of identity, disability, failure, the redemptive possibilities in play, and above all, our need to connect: to be loved and to love. Yes, it is a love story, but it is not one you have read before.

Patrick Gallagher - Producer & Co-Host

Jerry Li - Co-Host

Noah Olberding - Associate Producer, Audio & Video Editor https://www.linkedin.com/in/noah-olberding/

Dan Overheim - Audio Engineer, Dan’s also an avid 3D printer - https://www.bnd3d.com/

Ellie Coggins Angus - Copywriter, Check out her other work at https://elliecoggins.com/about/