Gaurav Oberoi, CEO & Co-founder @ Lexion shares about the research / EIR path from the Allen Institute for AI to founding Lexion. We talk about finding ideas in areas with poor implementation, how to actually shape “cool tech” into products, and tactical actions you can use to measure progress. Plus how to go from idea to action & optimize for fast time to value. Gaurav also shares how he defines “done” for products, creating a culture of velocity and strategic thinking & why happy customers are engaged customers.

Gaurav Oberoi is the CEO and co-founder of Lexion. He started his career as an engineer at Amazon, before moving on to found and sell two startups (BillMonk, and Precision Polling), and build a $20M+ ARR business from $0 as a VP of Product at SurveyMonkey. Gaurav co-founded Lexion as the first EIR at the Allen Institute for Artificial Intelligence. He thrives on building products that customers love, with diverse teams that enjoy working together.

"We met with a team and when we asked them what intake forms they need, they had really long meetings and it slowed down the whole process and we're like, 'Gosh, we need to kill the intake form. You don't need an intake form.' Like, that shouldn't be a blocker to them getting value. That kind of narrow focus on "time to value needs to be really fast" is something that we've imbued across the whole company. So it's not just product and engineering, but it's also customer success. It's also sales. It's also our marketing materials right up front so that the value of the whole product ties in, all the way to pricing.”

- Gaurav Oberoi   

Lexion is a powerfully simple operations workflow and contracting platform that helps teams get deals done faster. Lexion streamlines and centralizes the end-to-end contract lifecycle with intuitive email-driven intake and workflows, simple no-code automation, best-in-class AI, and more. Lexion was one of the first AI companies to leverage LLMs in building production-quality applications. The company was founded in 2018 at the Allen Institute for Artificial Intelligence, is backed by an iconic Silicon Valley law firm, and recently raised a $20M Series B with support from top-tier VC firms. Learn more about the company at https://www.lexion.ai/

ELCs Peer Groups provide a virtual, curated, and ongoing peer learning opportunity to help you navigate the unknown, uncover solutions and accelerate your learning with a small group of trusted peers.

Apply to join a peer group HERE: sfelc.com/peerGroups

• Gaurav’s experience @ the Allen Institute for AI & how it kickstarted his founder journey w/ Lexion (2:06)
• Research process strategies that helps founders identify business insights (5:50)
• The iterations that led to Lexion’s current product offering (8:23)
• What gave Gaurav the insight to say “no” to ideas (10:39)
• Lessons learned that Gaurav infused into the strategy for developing Lexion (12:56)
• Small, tactical actions to help founders measure progress (15:55)
• Navigating the transition to actually building an idea & taking action (16:48)
• Understand the accolades your product can help customers receive (19:24)
• Designing your org to think strategically & drive insights like a founder (23:59)
• Determining which features to build first in order to achieve PMF (26:20)
• Strategies for identifying / confirming the next big feature opportunity (29:33)
• How to synthesize your learnings & research (32:19)
• Implementing metric tools to analyze insights / confirm hypotheses (34:37)
• What it means for a product or feature to be “done” (36:33)
• Why a happy customer equals an engaged customer (39:24)
• Creating a culture of velocity within elements of your organization (42:32)
• Encourage empathy for customers within your org to fuel velocity (46:43)
• Rapid fire questions (48:45)

• Organizing eng by strategic themes / complete units of value & consensus building to drive velocity w/ Emad Elwany #159 - Our episode with Gaurav’s co-founder Emad Elwany!
• goberoi.com - Gaurav Oberoi’s essays on technology and startups.
• The Moon Is a Harsh Mistress - Robert A. Heinlein’s tale of the rebellion of a former penal colony on the Moon against its masters on the Earth.

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/

How do you know if you’re actually solving a problem or building a product people actually want? Varun Mohan, CEO & Co-Founder @ Codeium, joins us to share the journey behind Codeium. We talk about determining the right problem / product to pursue. He shares his best frameworks for decision making, determining if it’s time to pivot, and ultimately testing your hypotheses. He also discusses the three main types of risks founders face & strategies to compete on “execution-risk.” Plus Varun shares tips for building your product with the future in mind, even if the technological capabilities aren’t there yet.

After graduating from MIT and working at companies like LinkedIn and Databricks, Varun became a Tech Lead Manager at Nuro leading AI Infrastructure before co-founding Exafunction to run large AI workloads. After hitting 7 figure ARR in the first year, Varun and team decided to drop everything and run their own AI platform with Codeium, first tackling the acceleration of Software Development.

"It's much better for us to invest in things that can give us compounding 10 percent wins. In other words, it gives us a win today, we work very hard and we work on things that can compound rather than them being one off features, we have like a good shot of doing something that that will succeed. We should be cognizant of where the technology is and only build things that build capabilities that we know will provide value today and if we continue doing that, we will be the fastest moving in the space.”

- Varun Mohan   

Codeium is the modern coding superpower, a code acceleration toolkit built on cutting edge AI technology. Get free forever access at codeium.com

• Varun’s leadership journey & founding Codeium (2:22)
• How to decide what to focus on next vs. moving forward with current focus (6:29)
• Determine what problem / product to pursue based on your team’s passions (8:39)
• Process for synthesizing insights to develop the rationale for moving forward (10:26)
• Varun’s assessment framework for making the decision to pivot (12:50)
• Traps to avoid when testing a hypothesis & addressing potential risks (14:10)
• How speed of execution sets a company up for success (17:35)
• Analyzing Varun’s differentiation moment & identifying next steps (21:16)
• Strategies for building / optimizing for an execution mode (25:28)
• Using data to capture user intent (27:42)
• Frameworks for identifying a product’s compounding elements (30:22)
• Determining what capabilities to invest in building early on (33:15)
• Building for future success when the technology isn’t there yet (35:19)
• Rapid fire questions (37:25)

• Chip War: The Fight for the World's Most Critical Technology - Chris Miller’s epic account of the decades-long battle to control what has emerged as the world's most critical resource—microchip technology—with the United States and China increasingly in conflict

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 Engineering Founders episode, we sit down with James Campbell, CTO & Co-Founder @ Great Expectations, to discuss his founding journey, considerations for starting open source, making community-driven decisions, and navigating the tension between your product vision & product roadmap. We also cover the phases that Great Expectations has cycled through, balancing the role of personal biases when making product / business decisions, how making an open-source product impacts marketing decisions, and James’ best recommendations for building out the product function as a product-involved founder.

James Campbell is the co-founder and CTO at Great Expectations, the leading open-source data quality product. Prior to his life at a startup, James spent nearly 15 years working across a variety of quantitative and qualitative analytic roles in the US intelligence community, ultimately serving as Chief Data Scientist at CIA. He studied Math and Philosophy at Yale, and international security at Georgetown. He is passionate about creating tools that help communicate uncertainty and build intuition about complex systems.

"We had different perspectives and then we found that there were, similarly for every three perspectives that the two of us had, there were three perspectives for every two other people in the community. The process becomes one of developing rigorous ways to capture and synthesize the insights that you're getting from yourself and the community. It means committing to capturing your own perspectives similarly to the way that you would capture those from your users, taking that time to do the analytic process of critically thinking through what that means is the right choice.”

- James Campbell   

We’re livestreaming the most popular sessions from the ELC Annual 2023 conference + hosting virtual roundtable discussions to connect you with eng leaders around the globe AND in your city.

Our first topic covers Generative AI & engineering leadership with Wade Chambers… no this isn’t about the tech - it’s about the leadership skills and competencies you need to evolve and adapt to lead in this next generation!

Europe

West Coast & MidWest

East Coast

• The origin story of Great Expectations & James’ founding journey (2:18)
• Pitching / validating your idea through community (5:14)
• Transitioning from federal government to co-founder of a company (8:11)
• Recommendations when considering the founder / collaboration path (10:20)
• James’ experience starting with open source & getting 10k stars on GitHub (12:05)
• Engaging with your audience to drive growth & share your product’s message (14:07)
• How open source impacts Great Expectations’ marketing / communication (15:49)
• Navigating the tension between product vision & product roadmap (18:11)
• Where that tension showed up in Great Expectations’ early days (21:01)
• Capturing & synthesizing insights from your users (22:44)
• Strategies for removing biases from product-related decisions (24:28)
• Finding the balance between your perspective & community insights (26:03)
• James’ perspective on different levels of product analysis (28:44)
• Lessons learned from Great Expectations’ phase changes (30:13)
• Takeaways from the org’s latest experience / transition (33:42)
• Defining the “Heilmeier Catechism” & how it impacts James’ leadership style (35:57)
• Rapid fire questions (39:30)

• CIA Guide to Analytic Tradecraft - Primer published by the CIA to assist analysts in dealing with the perennial problems of intelligence.
• American Prometheus - Kai Bird and Martin J. Sherwin’s definitive biography of J. Robert Oppenheimer, one of the iconic figures of the twentieth century, a brilliant physicist who led the effort to build the atomic bomb for his country in a time of war, and who later found himself confronting the moral consequences of scientific progress.

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, Karan Talati (Co-founder & CEO @ First Resonance) joins us to discuss strategies for identifying a market opportunity and some of his favorite perspectives on product building. We cover what it’s like identifying something that may not be necessary now but will be in the future; how to assess / validate a hypothesis; frameworks for assessing emerging trends & pain points in order to develop a product; and navigating the balance between offering your customers breadth vs. depth with your product offering. Additionally, Karan shares how he approached building First Resonance’s product and recommendations for closing on customers who work in a mission-critical space.

Karan Talati is Co-founder & CEO @ First Resonance. Previously he built data and automation systems to enable rocket reusability at SpaceX and engineering consumer electronics at Motorola. At First Resonance, they’re solving manufacturing’s biggest challenges. Organizations use their factory operating system, ION, to accelerate and optimize their production processes from prototyping to production.

"If people are going to be equally ambitious on the next generation of whatever needs to be solved in the world, let's say next generation satellites. Well, then how are they going to do it? The following our gut was like, 'Hey, what would the world have looked like or what would our experience have been like if the kind of that digital connectivity layer that we had to build was actually available for us? And what could it look like if we bring something out to market that does that? Does that actually allow for new types of hardware to be created, new types of companies to be formed, so on and so forth?'”

- Karan Talati   

• Karan’s Friday & Sunday cadences as a founder (2:02)
• The origin story of Karan founding First Resonance (4:49)
• Karan’s time @ SpaceX & experiencing his first rocket launch / landing (8:14)
• How First Resonance celebrates its customers & successes (10:36)
• The moment when Karan saw a market opportunity for First Resonance (12:10)
• Understanding that something may not be necessary yet, but will be in the future (15:47)
• Questions that helped form Karan’s early hypotheses & how to validate a hypothesis (19:10)
• Strategies for assessing emerging trends & validating pain points (22:47)
• Ideating data / software solutions for the manufacturing space (25:48)
• Karan’s framework for first approaching the First Resonance product (28:15)
• Navigating the balance between offering 10x vertically vs. 10x breadth (30:35)
• An example of when Karan had to make an inclusion vs. exclusion decision (32:33)
• Customer relationship considerations & gaining your first customer (37:04)
• Recommendations for closing on the first customer in a mission-critical industry (39:54)
• Rapid fire questions (41:10)

• The Qualified Sales Leader: Proven Lessons from a Five Time CRO - John McMahon provides enterprise software sales leaders and their sales reps proven methods to sell more by quantifying business value for the customer and selling major company solutions to C level executives. No tricks, no shortcuts, just simple ways in which sales leaders can help their sales reps sell more software by closing more deals.
• Team of Rivals: The Political Genius of Abraham Lincoln - Esteemed presidential historian Doris Kearns Goodwin’s modern classic about the political genius of Abraham Lincoln, his unlikely presidency, and his cabinet of former political foes.

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/

Ramiro Berrelleza, Founder and CEO @ Okteto, shares how his company transitioned from an open-source project to a category-creating commercial product and repeatable sales model. He reveals the benefits & opportunities of open source and the potential for community buy-in. Plus strategies for creating a repeatable sales model, how open source projects can guide early-stage decisions, when to begin identifying / building customer personas, prioritization strategies for engineering resources, and recommendations for early-stage hiring, especially for your first marketing hire.

Ramiro Berrelleza is the CEO and Co-founder of Okteto, the leading platform for Development Experience Automation. With over 20 years of experience in engineering, Ramiro is a seasoned professional with a passion for building developer tooling.

A visionary, Ramiro is always looking for ways to improve the software development process. He firmly believes that building modern applications is a team sport and understands the importance of removing friction from the development process. He is also a passionate advocate for building a more inclusive tech industry. With Ramiro at the helm, Okteto is well-positioned to continue to grow and shape the way companies architect development experience for their teams.

"Once you're building something commercial, the person that buys your product is not the same person that's gonna use your product and is not the same person that's gonna approve the purchase for your product. So that's already something that when it comes to distribution, when it comes to how you price it, when it comes to like how you talk about the product, that's one of the earliest things that you have to understand because if you don't understand this then you're going to start hitting all these walls.”

- Ramiro Berrelleza   

• Ramiro’s founder journey & the origins of Okteto (1:49)
• Why Okteto’s founders started it as an open-source project (4:06)
• The benefits & opportunities of starting as Okteto open source project (6:19)
• Transitioning from open-source to commercial (8:39)
• Embrace the community aspect of open-source (11:30)
• How the open-source community can guide early-day founder decisions (13:17)
• Ramiro’s method for identifying Okteto’s personas & its impact on GTM strategy (16:08)
• Using personas to determine what your product is lacking & how to package it (19:04)
• Building a product with the developer persona in mind (21:32)
• Which stage of the founder journey is best for identifying personas (24:30)
• How to prioritize engineering resources in the org’s early days (27:08)
• The importance of shipping a complete experience (29:39)
• Ramiro’s thoughts on the sequence of early-stage hiring (31:58)
• Qualities to look for in your first marketing hire (34:46)
• Tips for hiring someone who is transitioning from big tech to a startup (37:15)
• Why it’s worth hiring folks who can pull their own weight (39:28)
• Rapid fire questions (41:59)

• The Founders' Paradox - Aishwarya Khan Bhaduri’s book that shines a light on the illusion of progressiveness, the daunting challenges of exploitation, and the cutthroat competition that defines the start-up landscape.

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, Roni Dover, CTO @ Digma, shares the customer communication models and user interview tactics that can help shape your product, how to minimize biases from entering these conversations, the advantages of incorporating critical feedback alongside positive feedback, and how to leverage in-person conversations with your product’s audience. Roni also shares his experience as an introverted eng leader who needed to develop more extroverted traits as CTO and the frameworks that helped him find his voice. Additionally, we address how to grow your product for a specific audience, gaining more users, expanding your product, and more.

Holistic developer and builder with a passion for development processes and practices. Afflicted by an acute Product Manager/Developer split personality disorder that was never treated. Currently, CTO and co-founder of Digma (digma.ai), an IDE plugin for code runtime AI analysis to help accelerate development in complex codebases. A big believer in evidence-based development, and a proponent of Continuous Feedback in all aspects of Software Engineering.

"Get your first 10 users. That's the first thing you need to do. Why? Because if you don't have currently, right now, a user on your platform, you have no feedback. You don't know anything. You did your idea validation. You created a product. Until a user uses that product and tells you, 'Oh my God, this is crap.' or 'Oh my God, this is the best thing since sliced bread.', you don't have any real perspective on what you've done.

- Roni Dover   

• The origin story of Digma AI & Roni’s journey as a developer (1:49)
• How Digma tackles a gap in the DevOps cycle (3:33)
• Approaches for introverted eng leaders who need to develop extroverted qualities (6:29)
• Roni’s process for finding his voice through writing (8:25)
• Tactics for communicating with your audience (10:52)
• What Roni’s customer conversation model looks like (13:29)
• Use an external party to minimize biases from entering conversations (16:25)
• Frameworks for overcoming biases / preconceptions about your product (18:32)
• The importance of balancing positive & critical feedback (21:06)
• Taking advantage of conferences for face-to-face conversations (23:04)
• Avoid making a product for a general audience & embrace specificity (26:04)
• Best practices for growing your user base & gathering initial feedback (30:17)
• Strategies for expanding your product & getting more users (32:54)
• How building community interacts with PLG strategy (36:09)
• Navigating good customer communication w/ the fear of being too pushy (38:43)
• Rapid fire questions (41:38)

• How to talk to customers & learn if your business is a good idea when everyone is lying to you. - 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.
• CI/CD/CF? — The Devops Toolchain’s “Missing-Link” - Roni’s blog post about continuous feedback.

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/

Paul Dix, Founder & CTO @ InfluxData, joins us to discuss how to handle the emotional aspects of the founding experience, strategies for engaging with developers & using community tools to build a dev-tool company, and recommendations for approaching open-source & licensable business strategies. Additionally, Paul shares advice based on his experience transitioning from the bootstrapping dream to seeking external funding.

Paul (@pauldix) is the creator of InfluxDB. He has helped build software for startups, large companies, and organizations like Microsoft, Google, McAfee, Thomson Reuters, and Air Force Space Command. He is the series editor for Addison Wesley’s Data & Analytics book and video series. In 2010 Paul wrote the book Service Oriented Design with Ruby and Rails. In 2009 he started the NYC Machine Learning Meetup. Paul holds a degree in computer science from Columbia University.

"Having resources, having capital to hire people and do things and iterate gives you time to potentially come to something that is valuable, right? If you don't actually get that time to iterate, you don't even get to play the game.”

- Paul Dix   

ELC Annual is our flagship conference for engineering leaders. You’ll learn from experts in engineering and leadership, gain mentorship and support from like-minded professionals, expand your perspectives, build relationships across the tech industry, and leave with practical proven strategies.

Join us this August 30-31 at the Fort Mason Center in San Francisco

• Paul’s feelings about InfluxData’s 3.0 release (2:15)
• Strategies for handling the emotional aspects of the founding experience (4:38)
• InfluxData’s origin story & what went into Paul’s decision to start the company (8:44)
• Frameworks for navigating early-day founding / funding decisions (11:03)
• What gave Paul the conviction to seek greater funding (16:05)
• Comparing & contrasting the thought process behind Market IO and InfluxData (18:10)
• Perspectives on deciding what is a good idea (21:24)
• How deep technical motivation helps drive innovation as a founder (23:45)
• Gaining interest from developers as your target market (26:17)
• Use community tools as a strategy for building dev-tool specific companies (28:51)
• Lessons learned when designing InfluxData's open-source & licensable approach (32:02)
• InfluxData’s 2016 inflection point (35:34)
• Paul’s advice for deciding on open source or not & how to structure eng teams (39:20)
• Rapid fire questions (44:11)

• I Feel Love: MDMA and the Quest for Connection in a Fractured World - Rachel Love Nuwer tells the unlikely story of how the psychedelic drug MDMA emerged from the shadows to the forefront of a medical revolution -- and the potential it may hold to help us thrive.
• Giannis Antetokounmpo post-game interview

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, Jessica McKellar, CTO & Founder @ Pilot, shares her story as a serial founder and the lessons that can help you become a more impactful, strategic business contributor & eng leader. She reveals strategies for identifying your company’s ideal end state & the steps needed to achieve product-market fit, daily practices that help measure important metrics, business-building disciplines that need to be prioritized long term, and steps for creating positive collaboration between product, eng & design teams.

Jessica McKellar (@jessicamckellar) is a repeat founder and the CTO of fintech unicorn Pilot, an accounting firm powered by software.

Previously, she was a founder and the VP of Engineering for Zulip, a real-time collaboration startup acquired by Dropbox, where she then served as a Director of Engineering. Before that, she was a computer nerd at MIT who joined her friends at Ksplice, a company building a service for rebootless kernel updates on Linux that was acquired by Oracle.

Jessica is a former Director for the Python Software Foundation and PyCon North America Diversity Outreach Chair. For her outreach efforts in the Python community, she was awarded the O'Reilly Open Source Award.

Open source meets criminal justice reform in Jessica’s work with The Last Mile, a job training and re-entry program that has implemented the first computer programming curriculum inside US prisons. She teaches Python at San Quentin State Prison in California, hires formerly incarcerated software engineers, and uses that bridge between the tech industry and prisons to get people activated and acting for decarceration.

"You need to be able to think about the business in a way where you have ideas that inflect the business. What is a gap in the product that needs to be addressed? What's an idea for a way to achieve a step function improvement in margin? How can we save the company money that it is spending via an engineering investment?

- Jessica McKellar  

ELC Annual is our flagship conference for engineering leaders. You’ll learn from experts in engineering and leadership, gain mentorship and support from like-minded professionals, expand your perspectives, build relationships across the tech industry, and leave with practical prove strategies.

Join us this August 30-31 at the Fort Mason Center in San Francisco

• Jessica’s founder story @ Pilot (3:04)
• How founding Pilot is different from past experiences w/ Zulip & Ksplice (4:07)
• The story behind Pilot’s “power team” of founders (6:44)
• Distinctions between Jessica’s focus as CTO / founder & eng roles (11:14)
• How eng functions can help the exec team hit important metrics (14:18)
• Daily actions that help optimize & monitor metrics like margin (16:11)
• Frameworks for identifying business trajectory (19:24)
• What parts of business-building discipline need to be prioritized long-term (21:07)
• Use market fit & size of market to determine your company’s goal end state (22:26)
• Past lessons the founding team applied while starting Pilot (24:23)
• Things Jessica thinks she & her co-founders do right (25:01)
• Recommendations for exploring potential paths & aligning on the final decision (28:58)
• Steps for becoming a more impactful, strategic business contributor (30:33)
• How eng leaders can identify ideal end state & achieve product-market fit (35:15)
• Create collaboration between product, eng & design teams (37:06)
• Rapid fire questions (39:00)

• Cool People Who Did Cool Stuff - This weekly podcast dives into history to drag up the wildest rebels, the most beautiful revolts, and all the people who long to be—and fight to be—free. It explores complex stories of resistance that offer lessons and inspiration for us today, focusing on the ensemble casts that make up each act of history.
• And Away… - Bob Mortimer’s life was trundling along happily until suddenly in 2015 he was diagnosed with a heart condition that required immediate surgery and forced him to cancel an upcoming tour. The episode unnerved him, but forced him to reflect on his life so far. This is the framework for his hilarious and moving memoir, And Away…

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/

Rick Song, Co-founder & CEO @ Persona, shares the origin story of Persona & what it’s like founding a business in a highly competitive, ultra-regulated environment. He shares early-stage challenges of building an identity-based product, how his company sought to achieve micro goals alongside long-term goals, navigating the logical & emotional factors that influence taking a leap of faith, and building universality within Persona’s user network. Additionally, Rick reveals his best practices for building a scalable business, identifying what’s wrong quickly & pivoting, and how to be an execution-driven founder.

Rick Song is the CEO and co-founder of Persona, the identity infrastructure company offering businesses the building blocks to create a personalized identity verification experience for any use case. Earlier in his career, Rick noticed a fundamental problem with identity verification: providers were taking a one-size-fits-all approach that did not meet businesses' needs and consumers' expectations. In 2018, Rick co-founded Persona with CTO Charles Yeh to tackle this problem with the mission to be the identity layer of the internet. Rick and his team are working toward making the internet a safer place by providing a customized solution that takes into account user base, regulatory requirements, appetite for risk, and unique verification requirements. Persona is backed by Index Ventures and Coatue and serves a wide range of industries with customers including Square, Sonder, Brex, Gusto, Coursera, and Toast.

"The hardest thing in a startup is connecting the dots between a product and a business. There are a tremendous number of products out there. A product solves a problem and everyone has problems, but just solving a problem doesn't necessarily mean building a business and connecting the dots between these two is the most difficult thing.”

- Rick Song   

ELC Annual is our flagship conference for engineering leaders. You’ll learn from experts in engineering and leadership, gain mentorship and support from like-minded professionals, expand your perspectives, build relationships across the tech industry, and leave with practical prove strategies.

Join us this August 30-31 at the Fort Mason Center in San Francisco

• The origin story of Persona & how it addresses identity (2:01)
• How Rick came together with his co-founder, Charles (4:56)
• Rick’s advice for future founders on sticking with an idea & the right people (6:24)
• Early-stage challenges of building an identity-based business (8:45)
• Balancing the rational & emotional aspects behind taking a leap of faith (12:30)
• The benefit of creating / achieving micro goals (15:13)
• Navigating “the valley of death” as a moat in a highly regulated industry (17:10)
• Why Persona went universal with its client base to create a general product (19:53)
• Rick’s advice for building a scalable business & identifying what’s wrong quickly (22:51)
• Recommendations for starting a business in a hyper-competitive market (25:13)
• What it looks like for a founder to be execution driven (29:21)
• Knowing someone is ready to “out-execute” their competitors (31:38)
• How to get top-tier investors in a competitive environment (34:26)
• Rapid fire questions (37:59)

• Veritasium - A channel of science and engineering videos featuring experiments, expert interviews, cool demos, and discussions with the public about everything science.
• Mark Rober - Former NASA and Apple engineer. Current YouTuber and friend of science. CrunchLabs founder.
• Coffeezilla - Internet detective exposing scams. I uncover scams, fraudsters and fake gurus that are preying on desperate people with deceptive advertising. If you have to ask... it’s probably too good to be true.
• Wendover Productions - All about explaining how our world works. From travel, to economics, to geography, to marketing and more, every video will leave you with a little better understanding of our world.
• ponysmasher - David F. Sandberg’s YouTube channel where he covers the behind-the-scenes of filmmaking, animation, and much more.

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/

As the CTO & Co-Founder @ OctoML, Jared Roesch shares his experience building a ML company in a rapidly changing product market space. Jared also covers shifting from an open-source organization to a more product- and enterprise-focused business. We also discuss product & market strategies for ML businesses, optimizing your product for both high- and low-sophistication users, navigating a fast-paced industry, ML market participation predictions, and strategies for recruiting co-founders from academia.

Jared Roesch (@roeschinc) is Co-Founder and CTO of OctoML. He completed his PhD at the University of Washington as part of the PLSE and SAMPL groups. A computer scientist at heart, Jared loves taking insights from the research community and applying them to build intelligent, performant, and powerful systems. Jared's background includes experience in web development, JIT compilers, software engineering, computer architecture, functional programming, compilers, verification, databases, systems, and machine learning.

"I think there are a whole set of problems here that are just unexplored. I don't think there are that many people solving them because they're tricky, they're very user-focused. They're not as much fun as building up the hub or the platform or the ML ops tool and so I think that this is where there's gonna be a lot of room for people to innovate and not just us, but I think in the market, and I think you see some people doing things like this right now, but it's still really early days.”

- Jared Roesch   

OctoML is on a mission to make AI more accessible and sustainable so it can be used thoughtfully to improve lives. They make AI more sustainable through efficient model execution and automation to scale services and reduce engineering burden. They make AI more accessible by enabling models to run on a broad set of devices and easier to deploy without specialized skills. The OctoML platform brings DevOps-level agility and automation to Machine Learning deployment on any hardware.

Backed by leading venture capital firms, the company is headquartered in Seattle, with an office in San Francisco, CA. OctoML is founded and led by the creators Apache TVM, an open-source ML stack for performance and portability.

ELC Annual is our flagship conference for engineering leaders. You’ll learn from experts in engineering and leadership, gain mentorship and support from like-minded professionals, expand your perspectives, build relationships across the tech industry, and leave with practical prove strategies.

Join us this August 30-31 at the Fort Mason Center in San Francisco

• Jared’s transition from academia to industry (2:53)
• The origin of OctoML (5:31)
• How Jared’s time in academia informed his knowledge of ML / AI trends (8:45)
• Piecing together Jared’s interest in music composition w/ programming (11:07)
• Lessons learned from Jared’s first start-up failure in undergrad (12:05)
• Strategies for recruiting a co-founder from academia (15:03)
• Communicate from a place of intentional curiosity & intellectual honesty (18:28)
• Reviewing the trends within the ever-changing AI / ML landscape (19:52)
• How to remain nimble while navigating fast-paced changes (24:08)
• OctoML’s approach to being dynamic & navigating strategy adjustments (25:46)
• Addressing new iterations of user-encountered problems (28:59)
• Insights around serving both higher- and lower-sophistication users (32:28)
• Jared’s experience transitioning OctoML from a technology to product-focused company (36:58)
• Shifting from open-source to an enterprise- and user-focused model (43:07)
• Challenges when optimizing for various roles / user experiences (46:31)
• Product market strategy lessons learned within an ML business (50:13)
• Jared’s predictions on ML market participation & evolution (55:18)
• Rapid fire questions (58:12)

• The Complete History & Strategy of Sega - A podcast from Acquired detailing how, in a single console generation, Sega went from ~zero to 50% US market share and dethroned Nintendo’s seemingly invincible global monopoly, then, two console generations later, Sega was out of the hardware game entirely, and the company was sold off for pieces to a pachinko manufacturer.

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/