Engineering Founders

Stephen Whitworth (Co-Founder & CEO @ incident.io) joins us to discuss strategically differentiating your product based on responsiveness / customer support and the shift from founder-led sales to repeatable / scaleable GTM. You’ll learn how they landed major logo companies like Netflix, Airbnb & Etsy and how you can apply that to your early enterprise customers. Plus the story behind their co-founder team transition from part-time to full-time, a product-market-fit “cheat code” that helped them decide on incident.io, how they generated 750 demo requests on launch, key qualities when hiring your first AEs to help scale yourself out of sales activities, and Stephen’s perspectives on the art vs. science of product building.

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.

ELC Annual is the premier event for engineering leaders. This is our biggest event of the year: 1,000+ CTOs, VPs & Directors in San Francisco @ ELC Annual 2025 for two days of leadership breakthroughs, tactical peer learning & curated connections!

• 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/

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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/

Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

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/

Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

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/

Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

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/

Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

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/

Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

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/

Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

Mariane Bekker, Founder & CEO @ Founders Bay, joins us to discuss the power of building your distribution channel and network within the startup community. She shares best practices for community building based on her own experiences developing Upward Recruiting and Founders Bay & why being able to articulate / communicate your company’s mission (the “why” of it all) is instrumental. Mariane shares her favorite networking conversation starters, tools for staying organized as your community expands, and pitfalls to avoid. She also dissects strategies for building an MVP in eight weeks and the role of distribution/community in accelerating that process.

Mariane is a tech executive and the founder & CEO of Founders Bay, a venture studio in Silicon Valley, where she works closely with early-stage founders to build their products from the ground up with her team of engineers and designers. She also runs the most active community of female tech founders in the Bay Area on a mission to increase funding for women founders.

"Do you have an audience or do you have a channel where when you have a product, you can easily reach out to and convince them to use your product? When I started my community, I already had the audience. I already had the distribution channel. So all I had to do was send a few messages and within a month, I had already a hundred startups in my community. So that's when distribution comes to play, when you have the audience and the channels where you can distribute your product effectively.”

- Mariane Bekker   

Founder’s Bay is a leading venture studio dedicated to empowering women-founded startups in Silicon Valley by providing them with the engineering resources to build their product.

Recognizing that only 1.9% of funding goes to women-led startups, they are committed to bridging this significant gender and funding gap in the tech industry. As part of this commitment, Founder’s Bay runs the largest and most active community of female founders in the Bay Area providing resources, mentorship, and support.

ELC Annual is our 2 day conference bringing together engineering leaders from around the world for a unique experience help you expand your network and empower your leadership & career growth.

Don't miss out on this incredible opportunity to expand your network, gain actionable insights, ignite new ideas, recharge, and accelerate your leadership journey!

And use the exclusive discount code "podcast10" (all lowercase) for a 10% discount

• Mariane’s founder origin story with Upward Recruiting (2:52)
• Transitioning from Upward Recruiting to Founders Bay & recent milestone events (5:09)
• Strategies for articulating your mission & avoiding common pitfalls (7:48)
• How knowing & communicating your “why” impacts early hiring decisions (11:13)
• Becoming good at hiring functions outside of engineering (13:12)
• Defining distribution & what this means for startups (16:13)
• Tactics for building your initial audience & testing what content works (18:04)
• Distribution’s impact on community, sales, marketing, etc. (22:44)
• Common networking / community building challenges while starting your own org (26:04)
• Mariane’s favorite networking questions & conversation topics (28:03)
• How Mariane’s technical background benefits community building activities (30:50)
• Tools for staying organized as you expand your network (32:55)
• What building an MVP in eight weeks typically looks like (35:15)
• Leveraging your distribution network to accelerate your MVP’s launch (37:01)
• How your distribution & community can provide access to traction capital (40:07)
• Rapid fire questions (41:46)

• Holly - Holly Gibney, one of Stephen King’s most compelling and ingeniously resourceful characters, returns in this thrilling novel to solve the gruesome truth behind multiple disappearances in a midwestern town.

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/

Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

In this episode, we cover bootstrapping & transitioning from side gig to full-time, featuring Darian Shimy, Founder @ FutureFund. He shares the origin story of FutureFund and how his children’s school experience inspired the company’s mission & product goals. He shares valuable tips on dealing with anxiety, betting on yourself, setting expectations, and making decisions as a founder. We also dissect how to iterate on your core marketing message & test pricing strategies throughout the different phases of FutureFund. Plus, considerations for scaling, fractional work engagements, hiring, and organization structure.

Darian Shimy is the visionary founder and CEO of FutureFund Technology, an innovative platform designed to streamline fundraising and sales for K-12 school groups. With a robust background of over 25 years in web technologies and engineering team management, Darian has held key leadership roles at notable companies including Square, Weebly, and eHarmony.com. He holds an MS in Computer Science from The University of Southern California and maintains a passion for coding in his free time. Outside of his tech career, he dedicates time to coaching youth sports, in both recreational and competitive teams.

"I feel like I'm doing an experiment and the experiment is this, what if you can get a fraction of time from the best people you've ever worked with in your entire life? Some could be 10 hours, some could be 30 hours, some could be 20, whatever it is, but like the best designer, the best product, the best engineer, the best salesperson, the best whomever, and pull them in to help out on a short amount of time. It has allowed us to grow at a pace that I think is sustainable for us and allows us to focus on quality.”

- Darian Shimy   

FutureFund streamlines fundraising and selling for school groups! FutureFund is a digital platform that provides powerful tools for K-12 school groups and PTAs for fundraising, growing membership, financial reporting, and communicating with volunteers—all in one clean, user-friendly interface.

ELC Annual is our 2 day conference bringing together engineering leaders from around the world for a unique experience help you expand your network and empower your leadership & career growth.

Don't miss out on this incredible opportunity to expand your network, gain actionable insights, ignite new ideas, recharge, and accelerate your leadership journey!

And use the exclusive discount code "podcast10" (all lowercase) for a 10% discount

• Staying customer-focused while working toward the future @ Samsara (3:22)
• Merging forward-looking technology & customer-problem-focused product-building conversations (5:54)
• Defining customer success & working backwards from winning (8:38)
• How stage gates can confirm / assess feature accuracy & maturity (10:58)
• What the approval moment looks like while moving from stage to stage (15:29)
• Understanding what stages offer the greatest opportunity for risk / friction (17:11)
• Signals to watch for that allow you to move forward with confidence (19:30)
• Best practices for anticipating & preparing for future possibilities (21:13)
• Using smaller-scale projects to inform future direction of larger-scale products (23:12)
• Communication strategies for working with less technical stakeholders (25:22)
• Methods for effectively communicating complex, technical information (27:59)
• AI / ML team composition at Samsara (30:04)
• Frameworks for aligning & motivating folks to focus on customer needs (32:59)
• Strategies for introducing new technologies & scientific research into your teams (35:06)
• Introducing AI into mission-critical internal tools (36:34)
• Rapid fire questions (39:17)

• Holly - Holly Gibney, one of Stephen King’s most compelling and ingeniously resourceful characters, returns in this thrilling novel to solve the gruesome truth behind multiple disappearances in a midwestern town.

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/

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Today, we’re talking about the intersection between the software eng & hardware eng communities with Jessie Frazelle, Co-founder & CEO @ Zoo. She shares her founder story with us, along with what the early days of building a hardware and hardware-adjacent company looked like. Jessie dissects the differences between building in software & hard tech and what those differences mean when it comes to VC fundraising, identifying building models, and more. Additionally, we speculate on what the future of this world looks like, tips for selling a product in a sector you’re unfamiliar with, and how to identify / address unexpected areas of toil for your customers.

Jessie Frazelle (@jessfraz) is the Co-Founder and CEO at Zoo, the world's only company to develop advanced tools for hardware design Frazelle acts as lead engineer and architect for the Zoo ecosystem alongside other co-founders Jordan Noone and Jenna Bryant.

With an impressive background including over ten years in the tech industry, Frazelle is also a software engineer and advisor to Embedded Ventures – a next-generation venture capital firm investing in early-stage deep tech startups. With a thesis that takes a commercial-first approach to investing in early-stage startups with applications that can serve the Department of Defense, Embedded has a first-of-its-kind partnership with the United States Space Force.

Previously, Frazelle was co-founder and Chief Product Officer at Oxide Computer Company and has also held roles at Google, Docker, and Microsoft, among others, and has spoken at many conferences including CERN, QCon, and LinuxConf AU.

"Chips today aren't optimized for a single-thread. They are optimized for multi-thread. So every time you upgrade your computer, you're going in the opposite direction. You want a computer from 30 years ago to run this thing. I was like, 'This is so messed up. If no one cleans this up, we will be stuck with the coolest technology in 10 years, but still these shitty old computers have to run CAD and it makes no sense.’”

- Jessie Frazelle   

• Why Jessie made the transition from GitHub to Oxide (1:49)
• Experiences that prepared Jessie to start her first company (4:47)
• The origin story of Zoo & differences between building the two orgs (7:05)
• Strategies for deciding which pathway to pursue when you’re between options (8:55)
• Differences between building a company in software vs. hardware space (11:20)
• Building the first product at Zoo vs. Oxide (13:06)
• How to accelerate when you get stuck in the process during early dev stages (16:09)
• Addressing CADkernel from a first principles approach (17:07)
• Gaining conviction that they could build & ship a product on a faster timeline (20:46)
• Why Jessie wanted to begin with CADkernel as the first product area (22:44)
• Jessie’s perspective on business models in software vs. hardware (25:03)
• Lessons learned while building for / selling to a sector you’re less familiar with (26:55)
• Using the discovery process to identify unexpected areas of toil (30:29)
• Fundraising in the hardware & hardware-adjacent space (31:34)
• Key elements of a pitch to hardware VCs that result in a yes (33:47)
• Emerging opportunities at the intersection of hardware & software (35:50)
• Rapid fire questions (37:54)

• Chip War: The Fight for the World's Most Critical Technology - Economic historian Chris Miller explains how the semiconductor came to play a critical role in modern life, how the U.S. became dominant in chip design, how its global military dominance stems from its ability to harness computing power more effectively than any other power, and how China is catching up.

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/

Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.