On Freund, Co-founder & CEO @ Wilco, shares how the value of practice influenced the idea behind Wilco. We also cover what it’s like finding product-market fit within a new category, how to scale seemingly “unscalable” elements in your product, challenges faced while building out human-centric elements, and surprises you may encounter while scaling. On also shares his strategies for pivoting your go-to-market strategy based on evolving market factors or customers and why being able to adapt is one of the most important skills you can hone as a founder.

On Freund (@onfreund) is the co-founder and CEO of Wilco, a startup dedicated to empowering developers to unlock their full potential. Throughout his career, On has managed development teams, most notably as VP Engineering at Handy and WeWork. He is also a proud angel investor and a humble former VC. On is married to an immunologist and is a father of 3. Outside of work, you'll most likely see him playing drums or tinkering with home automation.

"The other lesson that I've learned is that in many cases the barrier to scale is going to come out of left field. So you think you'll know what's the next thing to break, but it's actually going to surprise you.”

- On Freund   

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 stories behind Wilco & its three founders (2:02)
• How On’s value of practice influenced the idea of Wilco (4:56)
• Challenges of scaling “unscalable” elements in an ed tech start-up (7:03)
• Using AI to create and scale community experiences (9:32)
• Lessons learned from scaling out human-centric product elements (10:47)
• Barriers to scaling will come from where you least expect it (13:20)
• Sometimes the time/mental/emotional overhead savings is worth the $10k cost to your cloud provider (15:06)
• Questions to filter which fires to prioritize and which to ignore and accept the trade-offs (17:29)
• Finding product-market fit when you’re inventing a new category (18:37)
• Unique elements of marketing to university / boot camp personas (21:23)
• Questions that On uses during the discovery phase of sales (25:05)
• How Wilco’s go-to-market strategy has evolved & what caused the pivot (27:21)
• Master the ability to pivot your market strategy as a founder (31:38)
• Tips for marketing to your customers on an individual level (33:20)
• Rapid fire questions (35:22)

• Rick Beato - an American YouTube personality, multi-instrumentalist, music producer and educator. Since the early 1980s, he has worked variously as a musician, songwriter, audio engineer, and record producer, and has lectured on music at several universities.
• Stratechery - Recommended by The New York Times as “one of the most interesting sources of analysis on any subject”, Stratechery provides analysis of the strategy and business side of technology and media, and the impact of technology on society.

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/

Buchi Reddy Busi Reddy, Co-Founder & CEO @ Levo.ai, joins us to reveal how lessons learned as an eng leader at AppDynamics and other Silicon Valley experiences provided him with the skills & inspiration to co-found Levo.ai. We cover considerations for building security-focused products as a start-up; finding product-market fit & securing your first customers; identifying your product’s champion & finding the data / narratives that support your product; and pricing strategies. Additionally, Buchi shares his personal story of navigating the personal & logistical considerations of attaining an H1-B visa, providing valuable insight for any immigrant founders.

Buchi is the CEO and co-founder of Levo.ai, which is on a mission to protect all the APIs and apps in the world to make the digital world more secure. Buchi is a domain expert in APM (Application Performance Management), Observability, distributed tracing and API security areas. He has built multiple enterprise SaaS products in his career. Buchi lives with his wife and son in Bay Area. Loves hiking and dad time.

"Listen to the customers, listen to the companies and that champion will probably make it a bit easier for you to sell to that company. The champion by definition is bought into the concept of they know this problem exists and they can tell inside the company that this problem is there and we need a solution and they also bought into the fact that they like your solution and they would like to buy it. The biggest thing is finding the champion. If you do that, your life becomes a lot more easy.”

- Buchi Reddy Busi Reddy   

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

• Buchi’s leadership journey throughout Silicon Valley w/ AppDynamics & more (1:41)
• What inspired Buchi to transition from eng leadership to founding (5:13)
• The role of commitment in overcoming founder challenges & building resiliency (7:43)
• Strategies for filtering & focusing your ideas (9:42)
• Consider the personal risks of the H1-B visa journey (12:02)
• Navigating the logistical side of the H1-B visa process (14:05)
• Eng leadership lessons from past experiences that Buchi is manifesting @ Levo (15:57)
• Buchi’s experience releasing Levo & securing its first customers (19:57)
• Insights on identifying & motivating your champion (22:10)
• Data / stories that Buchi provided to support the product (24:28)
• How & why Buchi determined Levo’s pricing models (28:06)
• Questions to help evaluate / organize the pricing model thought process (30:42)
• Tactics for communicating as a founder without technical language & buzzwords (33:51)
• Rapid fire questions (36:17)

• The Best One Yet - Feel brighter every day with our 20-minute pop-biz podcast. The 3 business news stories you need, with fresh takes you can pretend you came up with — Pairs perfectly with your morning oatmeal ritual.
• The Tim Ferriss Show - Tim Ferriss deconstructs world-class performers from eclectic areas (investing, chess, pro sports, etc.), digging deep to find the tools, tactics, and tricks that listeners can use.
• All-In with Chamath, Jason, Sacks & Friedberg - Industry veterans, degenerate gamblers & besties Chamath Palihapitiya, Jason Calacanis, David Sacks & David Friedberg cover all things economic, tech, political, social & poker.

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/

We cover founder conviction & tips for engaging with investors with Mahima Chawla, Co-Founder & CEO @ Cocoon, who shares the origin story of her company, tips for creating clarity around the type of company you want to build, and how it’s addressing the problem of employee leave. Additionally, Mahima reveals the process behind early research, how she gained early design partners after user interviews, frameworks for collaborating between design & legal, identifying the ideal customer profile, and her method for delegating & determining where to invest her time as CEO & co-founder.

Mahima Chawla (@mahimachawlaa) is the CEO & Co-founder of Cocoon. Before starting Cocoon, Mahima worked at Square building lending products for Square Capital. Prior to Square, she was at Bond Street (acquired by Goldman) and Morgan Stanley. Mahima grew up in Singapore, Thailand, Australia, and the UAE and studied Math & Economics at Brown University. She is based in the Bay Area.

"We did reach out to some of our strongest sort of supporters during the research period and just asked like, 'Hey, would you be willing to pilot this? It's totally new. Like we know we're not an established company, but we do have a vision for how this can be better.' And I think like kind of positioning it as a design partner where truly we were getting their feedback so frequently and they could almost help inform what this product was gonna look like in the future, I think that's a pretty unique position to be in as a customer and so I think a lot of people were actually quite excited to take us up on that.”

- Mahima Chawla   

Cocoon is a leave management platform that simplifies the complexities of compliance, claims, and payroll for a seamless, more empathetic employee leave experience.

Whether employees are starting a family, recovering from an injury, or caring for a loved one, they can plan their leave in minutes and trust Cocoon to make the rest easy. Cocoon automates the heavy lifting of compliance, claims, and payroll so People teams can focus on what they do best—caring for employees.

Send a link to the show to your marketing team! https://sfelc.com/podcasts

If your company is looking to gain exposure to thousands of engineering leaders and key decision-makers, we have sponsorship opportunities available.

• What inspired Mahima to start Cocoon (1:48)
• Inside Mahima’s intentional decision to start her company (5:19)
• Mahima & her co-founders’ approach to researching employee leave (7:17)
• Tips for keeping users engaged beyond the initial conversation (10:15)
• How to convert initial user conversations into your first customers (11:31)
• Lessons learned from early user research (12:47)
• Staying committed during your early research phase (14:06)
• An overview of the post-research / early mock ups stage of Cocoon (16:08)
• Strategies for gaining early design partners (17:14)
• Mahima’s approach to finding the right investors & nurturing those relationships (18:44)
• Frameworks for aligning your company with your values (19:59)
• Recommendations for creating clarity around the type of company you want to build (21:31)
• Cocoon’s four core values (23:34)
• How to personalize, achieve & act upon values (25:47)
• Navigating the challenges of building in a highly regulated space (27:31)
• Framework for collaboration between design partners & the legal team (29:55)
• Mahima’s process for identifying the ideal customer profile (31:58)
• Factors for identifying the right customers for the given time (34:11)
• Designing Cocoon’s go-to-market motion now that the ICP is clear (35:23)
• The story behind Cocoon manually stop gapping its product (36:55)
• Mahima’s method for default delegating & identifying where to invest your time as CEO / co-founder (39:29)
• Rapid fire questions (40:48)

• Attached. - psychiatrist and neuroscientist Dr. Amir Levine and Rachel Heller reveal how an understanding of adult attachment—the most advanced relationship science in existence today—can help us find and sustain love.
• First Round - a venture capital firm that specializes in providing seed-stage funding to technology companies.

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/

Charley Ho (Co-Founder & CTO) & Alexander Embiricos (Co-Founder & CEO) @ Remotion share their co-founder story, along with how they found, lost, and rediscovered product-market fit throughout their journey with Remotion. We cover what it’s like building in public & their decision to be transparent with their co-founder ups and downs. Additionally, Charley & Alexander share strategies for pivoting / iterating and communicating with stakeholders, while keeping your team up-to-date and engaged with pivots. We caught up 4x months after our interview to learn the results of their big pivots and PMF experiments - so this is one you want to listen to all the way to the end.

Charley Ho (@potatoarecool) is the Co-Founder and CTO of Remotion, a virtual office that puts your hybrid-remote team right on your desktop. Before Remotion, Charley was an early engineer at Bebop, a startup that was acquired by Google. Charley has a BS & MS in Electrical Engineering from Stanford University.

"There's like a really intoxicating idea of just one more bug fix, just one more critical blocking feature and suddenly everything's gonna change because we know our users love it so much. We fell into that pattern a little like super easily, probably because we're such heavy dog fooders."

- Charley Ho  

Alexander Embiricos is cofounder and CEO at Remotion. Prior to starting Remotion with Charley, he fell in love with desktop software while working as a PM at Dropbox. He studied Computer Science and Mechanical Engineering at Stanford, where he met Charley. Alexander lives in Brooklyn, New York where you might find him exploring new foods or on the badminton courts. He swears by charging your phone outside the bedroom.

"There was this growing dissonance between how we felt about what we were building and how we felt about the progress of the product. There was this tension between stay the course and keep going versus, ‘Hey, the metrics don't lie and they're not good. We're not going quickly enough. One more iteration isn't gonna help it. We need to make bigger changes.

- Alexander Embiricos   

Remotion is a fresh take on Zoom that makes any app collaborative like Figma. It's great for pair coding or debugging, but why stop there? Remotion improves all your engineering team's internal calls, with support for 40 participants on Zoom's video infrastructure. 

Here's a short video of their updated product vision

Check out their change log for the latest core feature releases

If you're interested in joining their closed beta - send us a message at [email protected] and we'll connect you!

Send a link to the show to your marketing team! https://sfelc.com/podcasts

If your company is looking to gain exposure to thousands of engineering leaders and key decision-makers, we have sponsorship opportunities available.

• Charley & Alexander’s co-founder story (2:59)
• The discovery process behind & what inspired Remotion (4:45)
• Why they chose to invest in Remotion versus the automation route (7:42)
• How Charley & Alexander identified areas of alignment & misalignment (8:17)
• Frameworks for identifying product-market fit (11:09)
• Iterating your product by incorporating user feedback / honesty (15:09)
• The difference between power users & the rest of your customers (17:34)
• How Remotion pivoted product-market fit to meet its engineering customers (19:18)
• Why Charley & Alexander decided to build in public (22:18)
• Strategies for communicating with stakeholders when making pivots (24:14)
• Being transparent regarding your thought process strategies with your team (26:44)
• Exercises to keep your team engaged in strategy & pivots (28:55)
• How early co-founder work set the foundation for tough commitment / pivot conversations (32:20)
• The latest way Alexander & Charley are structuring the way they build (35:41)
• Tips for refocusing your team when making a pivot (36:46)
• 4 months later (39:55)
• Rapid fire questions (46:50)

• One Year Wiser - Tyler Swartz, former Reddit PM, interviews founders and product makers one year after their product launch to learn how their products and businesses have evolved, their ups and downs journey along the way, and what their experiences over the past year have taught them.
• The Expanse - A series of science fiction novels by James S. A. Corey, the joint pen name of authors Daniel Abraham and Ty Franck.
• Why We're Polarized - reveals the structural and psychological forces behind America’s descent into division and dysfunction. Neither a polemic nor a lament, this book offers a clear framework for understanding everything from Trump’s rise to the Democratic Party’s leftward shift to the politicization of everyday culture.
• Top of the Rock: Inside The Rise And Fall Of Must-See TV - an absorbing insiders’ account of an incredible time and place in television history: the years when Must See TV—led by Cheers, Seinfeld, Friends, ER, and _Law & Order_—made NBC an unstoppable success.
• Slimed: An Oral History Of Nickelodeon’s Golden Age - tells the surprisingly complex, wonderfully nostalgic, and impressively compelling story of how Nickelodeon began as a DIY startup in the late 70s, and forged ahead through the early eighties with a tiny band of young artists and filmmakers who would go on to change everything about cable television, television in general, animation, and children’s entertainment, proving just what can be done if the indie spirit is kept alive in the corporate world.

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/

The trio of co-founders from Sleuth – Dylan Etkin, Founder & CEO; Don Brown, Co-Founder & CTO; and Michael Knighten, Co-Founder & COO share their unique experience founding a company with three co-founders & navigating the division of responsibilities with mutual trust / respect. We also cover the challenges & opportunities of moving to a small startup from a large, high-growth org; what Sleuth’s early-day decision-making process looked like; frameworks for avoiding the “at bat” trap while iterating; hidden work elements; paradigm shifts regarding deployment tracking; and more.

Dylan Etkin (@detkin) is CEO & Co-Founder of Sleuth, the leading DORA metrics tracker. As one of the first 20 employees at Atlassian, Dylan was a founding engineer and the first Architect of Jira. He has led engineering for products at scale in Bitbucket and Statuspage. He has a masters in computer science from ASU. He’s a bit of a space nut and has been seen climbing around inside of a life-size replica of the Mir space station in Star City Russia.

Don lives and breathe software - wearing developer, architect, and manager hats for over 20 years. He was an early Atlassian architect for over 10 years working on products including Confluence, HipChat, and Atlassian Cloud. Don is currently the co-founder and CTO of Sleuth, a DORA metrics tracker. He has spoken at conferences including DevOps World, JavaOne, and Devoxx.

Michael built Atlassian’s cloud offerings from the ground up, following stints at Apple and PGP, eventually running company-wide strategy and operations, and helped take the company public in 2015. With a deep background in product and finance, he now runs go-to-market and finance at Sleuth.

Sleuth is an Engineering Efficiency platform that provides a complete and accurate view of your DORA metrics - giving you visibility into bottlenecks and tools to automate workflows. Sleuth works by integrating with your entire toolchain - from issue tracker, source control, CI/CD, feature flag, incident tracker, to observability tools - to provide the baselines, context, and insights you need to improve efficiency.

Send a link to the show to your marketing team! https://sfelc.com/podcasts

If your company is looking to gain exposure to thousands of engineering leaders and key decision-makers, we have sponsorship opportunities available.

• The story of Michael connecting with Don & Dylan @ Atlassian (3:21)
• Background behind Sleuth & connecting as three co-founders (6:46)
• How Michael, Don, & Dylan identified that they were working on the same problem but from different angles (8:59)
• Don’s key considerations for joining Michael & Dylan (11:48)
• The dynamic of having three co-founders while building Sleuth (14:16)
• How they delineated roles / responsibilities (16:10)
• Why respect is a foundational tenet that avoids overstepping roles (17:18)
• Strategies for navigating the product hand-off to new team members (20:01)
• Hidden work elements Michael identified while clearing the decks (23:03)
• What the early building process / decision making was like (25:50)
• Frameworks for avoiding the “at bat” trap while iterating (29:45)
• Sleuth’s paradigm shift around deployment tracking (32:38)
• Surprising insights / feedback that led to Sleuth’s new direction (34:41)
• How they established a repeatable channel that gets more customers (36:11)
• Mindset shifts when moving from a large, successful company to founding a startup (38:50)
• Rapid fire questions (40:20)

• Game of Thrones - A series of epic fantasy novels by the American novelist and screenwriter George R. R. Martin that chronicles the power struggle for the Iron Throne among the great Houses of Westeros following the death of King Robert.
• The Books of Earthsea - Ursula K. Le Guin’s series of fantasy books set in the fictional archipelago of Earthsea and centers on a young mage named Ged, born in a village on the island of Gont.

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/

This episode features Lizzie Matusov, CEO & Co-Founder @ Quotient, who shares her unique founder journey – from Harvard’s dual-degree grad program & Innovation Lab to founding Quotient! She also reveals strategies for fundraising, including utilizing your relationship pipeline, incorporating story arcs into your pitch, overcoming pattern-matching bias, and how fundraising today is different than it used to be. We also cover Quotient’s major pivots, tips for not becoming too attached to your first idea & making space for new ideas, defining idea-mazing & its impact on your product, and developing clarity as a founder.

Lizzie Matusov (@lizziematusov) is the co-founder and CEO of Quotient - a toolkit to supercharge engineering teams. Today, their first tool is an onboarding platform that leverages behavioral research best practices to ramp up engineers more effectively. Quotient’s mission is to democratize access to the best engineering cultures.

Previously, Lizzie built software to improve access to medical-grade genetic testing at Invitae. She was also a software engineering consultant at Red Hat, where she built software applications for companies across various industries, including fintech and biotech. She holds a bachelor of science from UCLA, and an MBA and Masters of Engineering Sciences from Harvard.

"Let's say in a four-month period, you check in with investors or founders that you're working with two or three times. Now what they have is not just one call to base their opinion on, but an entire story arc that they can use to say, 'All right, in August they were doing this and by October they already did this, and then by December they were here. I'm now seeing sort of a preview of what I'm backing.' I think that that really helps founders sort of help investors make decisions, right? You are de-risking for them, you are sharing more of the milestones as you're doing them.”

- Lizzie Matusov   

Quotient is a toolkit to supercharge engineering teams. Their mission is to democratize access to the best engineering cultures.

Today, their first tool is an onboarding platform that leverages behavioral research best practices to ramp up engineers more effectively. With Quotient you can build and deliver a high-quality, research-backed onboarding experience, and get data-driven insights into how your team changes and grows together.

Send a link to the show to your marketing team! https://sfelc.com/podcasts

If your company is looking to gain exposure to thousands of engineering leaders and key decision-makers, we have sponsorship opportunities available.

• The backstory behind Quotient (2:47)
• Why the atomic unit is the team, not the individual & how that impacts Quotient (3:50)
• Lizzie’s leadership journey before Quotient (5:11)
• Why Lizzie chose Harvard’s dual-degree grad program as part of her founder’s journey (8:29)
• How Harvard’s program helped Lizzie accelerate founding Quotient (12:29)
• The community aspect of entrepreneurship & Harvard’s Innovation Lab (15:34)
• Lizzie’s favorite grad school hacks (17:45)
• Frameworks behind Quotient’s key pivots (19:58)
• How Quotient pivoted to better support companies & the onboarding process (22:48)
• Tips for making space for new ideas (25:46)
• Defining idea-mazing & how it impacts your product / solution (28:00)
• Where Quotient is in terms of fundraising (30:49)
• How assumptions & expectations around fundraising have changed (32:30)
• Collect data points that show your ability to execute, lead, & grow (33:52)
• Strategies to help overcome pattern matching bias (35:56)
• How Lizzie utilized story arcs while fundraising for Quotient (38:19)
• Why clarity as a founder is vital & frameworks for developing clarity (40:51)
• The renaming process & unveiling the new name “Quotient” (44:38)
• Rapid fire questions (46:24)

• Shantaram - Gregory David Roberts’ novel following an escaped convict with a false passport who flees maximum security prison in Australia for the teeming streets of Bombay, where he can disappear. Accompanied by his guide and faithful friend, the two enter the city’s hidden society of beggars and gangsters, prostitutes and holy men, soldiers and actors, and Indians and exiles from other countries, who seek in this remarkable place what they cannot find elsewhere.
• The Big Short: Inside the Doomsday Machine - Michael Lewis documents the real story of the crash that began in bizarre feeder markets where the sun doesn't shine and the SEC doesn't dare, or bother, to tread: the bond and real estate derivative markets where geeks invent impenetrable securities to profit from the misery of lower- and middle-class Americans who can't pay their debts. The smart people who understood what was or might be happening were paralyzed by hope and fear; in any case, they weren't talking.
• The Long Way To A Small, Angry Planet - Becky Chambers’ novel following a motley crew on an exciting journey through space—and one adventurous young explorer who discovers the meaning of family in the far reaches of the universe.

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/

Arya Asemanfar, Co-Founder @ Runway, joins us to share how he transitioned from eng leader to co-founder & strategies for both pre & and post-product market fit! We also cover how to determine if you and your potential co-founder are a good match, core principles & primitives that inform Runway’s product strategy, why you should pay attention to how a product makes users feel, strategies for transitioning with ease throughout your org’s evolutions, and implementing learning loops in your org.

Arya is co-founder and CTO of Runway, a modern, beautiful product funded by a16z to help business and finance leaders truly understand and collaborate together for the first time. Prior to Runway, Arya was Head of Product at Lightstep, Tech Lead at Mixpanel, and was one of 3 Principal Engineers at Twitter where he led engineering efforts on the main Timeline product.

"I discovered this book, The Extended Mind, and this concept of offloading. She describes it as being able to take your thoughts or your ideas and offload them out of your head onto something like paper or a whiteboard. What that does is it actually reduces the cognitive load that you have as a person solving a problem or doing some work.

You offload it onto the products or onto the too and it actually frees your mind to do more. It can be faster, it can come up with new ideas, it can make more connections. The tool or the product can be an extension of your mind and so I was like, ‘Hey Siqi, you should listen to this and see if this is what you meant.’ 

And it was like a light bulb moment. ‘Yes, this is it!’”

- Arya Asemanfar   

Business financials got stuck in the 15th century so Runway is showing them today’s computers 🖥- Runway is a SaaS product that helps you and your team understand your business so you can make better decisions together. Unlike other financial software, Runway is designed to be a consumer-grade product for normal people who aren't accountants, and is fast, intuitive, and social.

Runway reinvents how business financials are presented through modern design and engineering. By bringing clarity, power, and speed to financial data, they help every team become more aligned on the entire business so they can collaborate to make better decisions, faster.

That's right! We're hosting in-person community events in San Francisco, New York City, Seattle, and Chicago! Break out of your comfort zone and join us in a casual environment to connect, problem-solve, and support each other in our engineering leadership journeys.

Don't see your city on the list? No problem!

Reach out to Tim at [email protected] and let's bring ELC to you - and make it happen!

• Arya’s background & the early days at Runway (2:24)
• How Arya & Siqi reconnected to co-found Runway (5:18)
• Determining if you’re a good match as co-founders (6:37)
• What made hiring in the early stages of Runway easy (8:38)
• Why Arya made the jump from eng leader @ LightStep to co-founder (9:52)
• Core principles & primitives that inform Runway’s product strategy (12:01)
• Pay attention to how a product makes you feel (15:14)
• Examples of how Runway imbues feeling into its product (18:23)
• Tips for instilling this paradigm in your team in the early product-building phase (20:03)
• Lessons learned throughout Runway’s product evolutions (21:42)
• How working/building the Runway product has evolved over time (25:32)
• What Arya’s learning process between Runway’s iterations looked like (27:48)
• Arya’s strategies for building out your engineering org (30:43)
• Frameworks for determining pre- & post-product market fit (32:46)
• Runway’s current learning loops (34:40)
• Rapid fire questions (37:16)

• First Round Capital Co-founder Questionnaire - 50 questions spanning across six categories designed to test compatibility with a potential co-founder.
• The Extended Mind: The Power of Thinking Outside the Brain - Anne Murphy Paul’s book that reveals how we can tap the intelligence that exists beyond our brains—in our bodies, our surroundings, and our relationships.
• Ezra Klein Interviews Anne Murphy Paul on The Extended Mind
• No Stupid Questions - Stephen J. Dubner ****and research psychologist Angela Duckworth really like to ask people questions, and came to believe there’s no such thing as a stupid one. So they made a podcast where they can ask each other as many “stupid questions” as they want.
• The Scout Mindset: Why Some People See Things Clearly And Others Don’t - Julia Galef’s book that shows that what makes scouts better at getting things right isn’t that they’re smarter or more knowledgeable than everyone else. It’s a handful of emotional skills, habits, and ways of looking at the world that anyone can learn.

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/

Tri Ahmad Irfan, Co-Founder & CTO @ Lumina, discusses his journey identifying large-scale problems in the SE Asian market and how they went from a Google form MVP to 1 million+ users! Additionally, we cover how to formulate / test / prove hypotheses about product-market fit, how Maslow’s hierarchy of needs informs product strategy, determining a potential customer’s willingness to pay, resources for researching consumer acquisition strategies, and his favorite lessons for early-stage founders.

Tri Ahmad Irfan (@irfan3) is the co-founder and CTO of Lumina, a community platform that helps underserved workers in Southeast Asia to upskill and secure better jobs. Launched in early 2022, Lumina has served over a million job seekers and is funded by Y Combinator, and Monk's Hill Ventures.

Before Lumina, Irfan built out the engineering teams at fast-growth startups in Southeast Asia such as GudangAda, a wholesale marketplace, and STOQO, a B2B platform for food and beverage businesses. In college, Irfan interned at Twitter in San Francisco and spent some time doing competitive programming.

"I started with building a Google form and sending it out to a lot of people I know and I met and in return, I received like 10,000 profiles into this Google form. That's when I realized, ‘Okay, this can be something big.’ The app itself only launched six months ago and we have around 1 million users now.”

- Tri Ahmad Irfan   

To learn more about Jellyfish and how they can help you increase engineering satisfaction and create happier, higher-performing engineering teams.

That's right! We're hosting in-person community events in San Francisco, New York City, Seattle, and Chicago! Break out of your comfort zone and join us in a casual environment to connect, problem-solve, and support each other in our engineering leadership journeys.

Don't see your city on the list? No problem!

Reach out to Tim at [email protected] and let's bring ELC to you - and make it happen!

• How Tri’s background inspired him to start Lumina (2:03)
• The motivation behind jumping into Lumina full-time (3:17)
• Challenges faced building the product up from an MVP (7:36)
• Using Maslow’s hierarchy of needs to inform product strategy (10:16)
• Frameworks as a founder for identifying a large-scale problem & creating a solution (12:46)
• How Tri formulated & tested his hypotheses about product-market fit (14:00)
• Questions to determine a potential customer’s willingness to pay (17:18)
• How Lumina transitioned from a Google form MVP to its current platform (19:54)
• The market strategy to reach 1 million users & how it shifts to attract the next phase of the business (22:24)
• Tri’s favorite resources for researching consumer acquisition strategies (26:21)
• What happens when you discover a hypothesis isn’t true (27:29)
• Lessons for early-stage founders that Tri learned from past experiences (28:57)
• Who were Lumina’s early key hires to scale up operations (30:59)
• Rapid fire questions (32:33)

• https://irfan.blog/ - Tri’s personal website
• Talent - Renowned economist Tyler Cowen and venture capitalist and entrepreneur Daniel Gross set out to study the art and science of finding talent at the highest level: the people with the creativity, drive, and insight to transform an organization and make everyone around them better.
• The Witcher - In the Witcher saga, Andrzej Sapkowski introduces his hero, Geralt of Rivia, a witcher. He’s an itinerant mercenary. He kills monsters for money. His strange physique, with white hair and cat-like eyes, distinguishes him from other people, who reject him because of it. He’s an exceptionally powerful mutant who occasionally resorts to magic. Both feared and scorned by the powerless as well as the powerful, who see him as someone dangerous and impossible to retain. His honor code forbids him from killing if he can avoid it, and not to attack monsters unless they pose a real threat. He’s got a strong character, but he still has a human side: he doesn't always emerge from battle unscathed. Set in an imaginary medieval world enhanced with magic and monsters, the Witcher saga will surprise you: the monster isn’t always who you think it is!
• Y Combinator - One of Tri’s favorite founder resources that works intensively with companies for three months, to get them into the best possible shape and refine their pitch to investors.

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, Ihar Mahaniok (Managing Partner @ Geek Ventures) lends his expertise from the venture capital / tech startup world to help demystify some of the early fundraising experience. Ihar shares his leadership journey and why he decided to go the VC route over an eng leader or founder path, deconstructs his unique investing angle, what qualities he looks for in founders, tips for transitioning to the pre-seed fundraising round, formulas for implementing SAFE caps when seeking investments, and much more.

Ihar (@mahaniok) is the Founder & Managing Partner of Geek Ventures, an NYC-based VC firm investing in early-stage startups by immigrant founders. Ihar is an experienced engineering leader and investor with 20+ years of experience. Ihar has invested in 100+ early-stage startups with exceptional returns, including 5 seed-to-unicorn. His portfolio includes Instacart, Slack, Flexport, Jeeves, PandaDoc, People.ai, Founderpath and more. As an engineering leader, Ihar led teams at Google, Facebook & WeWork; he led engineering at Lightning AI.

A lot of founders try to get all the commits before they start signing papers and wire which means they don't have money in the bank which means they cannot hire people but if you get safes and get wires right away, you get money in the bank and you can hire people.

Obviously, the more you spend on R and D, the more hopefully you can achieve your milestones and show. Right? So it's better to give away kind of 5% of the company at $3 million cap for $150k, but then raised later at higher cap after you have achieved milestones and why you achieved milestones? Because you hire some people!

- Ihar Mahaniok  

Geek Ventures is a tech venture fund investing in immigrant founders building amazing, scalable products.

• How Ihar became a venture capitalist within the tech startup world (2:14)
• Ihar’s unique angle as a VC (4:11)
• The early-day challenges faced by immigrant founders (6:58)
• Why Ihar chose the investor path over eng management or founding (10:02)
• Criteria Ihar considers before investing in a company (14:36)
• Ideal qualities / characteristics Ihar likes to see in a founder (17:59)
• Ihar’s recommendation for what a successful funding process looks like (20:32)
• Strategies for transitioning into the pre-seed round (23:43)
• Implementing SAFE caps for pre-seed investing, weighing the benefits and risks (28:11)
• Using structural FOMO to encourage VCs to invest before it’s too late (32:47)
• Seek investors’ help beyond simply investing (35:39)
• How to build trust with investors through regular, honest updates (38:00)
• Rapid fire questions (40:29)

(book) A DANCE WITH DRAGONS (A SONG OF ICE AND FIRE, BOOK FIVE) by George R. R. Martin - In the aftermath of a colossal battle, the future of the Seven Kingdoms hangs in the balance once again–beset by newly emerging threats from every direction. In the east, Daenerys Targaryen, the last scion of House Targaryen, rules with her three dragons as queen of a city built on dust and death. But Daenerys has three times three thousand enemies, and many have set out to find her. Yet, as they gather, one young man embarks upon his own quest for the queen, with an entirely different goal in mind.

To the north lies the mammoth Wall of ice and stone–a structure only as strong as those guarding it. There, Jon Snow, 998th Lord Commander of the Night’s Watch, will face his greatest challenge yet. For he has powerful foes not only within the Watch but also beyond, in the land of the creatures of ice.

And from all corners, bitter conflicts soon reignite, intimate betrayals are perpetrated, and a grand cast of outlaws and priests, soldiers and skinchangers, nobles and slaves, will face seemingly insurmountable obstacles. Some will fail, others will grow in the strength of darkness. But in a time of rising restlessness, the tides of destiny and politics will lead inevitably to the greatest dance of all. . . .Dubbed “the American Tolkien” by Time magazine, George R. R. Martin has earned international acclaim for his monumental cycle of epic fantasy. Now the #1 New York Times bestselling author delivers the fifth book in his spellbinding landmark series–as both familiar faces and surprising new forces vie for a foothold in a fragmented empire.

Sean Stavropolous, Co-Founder & CTO @ Boulevard, shares his founder journey and Boulevard’s unique role as a vertically integrated SaaS product! He reveals how he navigated the problem discovery phase early on & decided which features the company should prioritize based on financial impact. We also cover navigating company milestones, strategies for convincing investors to buy-in to your vertically integrated SaaS product, and the impact of COVID on Boulevard.

Sean Stavropoulos (@SeanStavro) is co-founder and CTO of Boulevard, provider of the client experience platform used by more than 25,000 professionals in more than 2,000 salons, spas, and other self-care businesses across the US. In his role as CTO, Sean leads the company’s various technical teams while establishing its strategic product vision. Prior to co-founding Boulevard in 2016, Sean was vice president of engineering at Fullscreen, where he oversaw the technical design and development of the company’s core technology and payments products. His career also includes a stint as a systems engineer for Honeywell Aerospace. A resident of Los Angeles, CA, Sean holds a Bachelor of Science in Aerospace Engineering from California Polytechnic State University, San Luis Obispo.

We would need to build baseline functionality in all of these different areas to even get in the door. It's like as we started to learn more and more about what truly would be a viable product in this market... that became demotivating at times.

Because what you thought was your discipline and your very concrete idea of where you're gonna be spending your time starts to expand. And you're like, ‘Well, shoot... I'm gonna have to do a lot more than I initially thought.’

And you know, while that can be demotivating, there's still a real opportunity here. It's just gonna be a little bit bigger than we thought.

- Sean Stavropolous  

Boulevard is a business management platform developed to help streamline the operations of appointment-based businesses.

What started as an idea for a modern appointment scheduling solution for salons and spas has evolved into an innovative client experience platform, complete with seamless scheduling, intuitive business management, automated email marketing, and reliable payment processing – all in one convenient place.

Developed in collaboration with industry-leading owners and operators, their scheduling and point of sale platform-as-a-service was carefully designed to drive revenue, automate workflows, and convert customers from visitors into valuable, long-term clients. By facilitating a better, personalized experience across every transaction and interaction, Boulevard’s technology not only helps businesses survive, but thrive.

• Boulevard’s early days & why it became a vertically integrated SaaS product from the start (2:08)
• The problem discovery phase & expanding Boulevard’s feature scope (4:18)
• How Sean navigated which opportunities to pursue early on (9:49)
• Frameworks for deciding which features to prioritize while considering the financial impact (13:30)
• Tools for validating the ideal customer persona (16:51)
• Balancing between being realistic & optimistic regarding your product (17:47)
• Navigating both feature release & customer growth milestones (20:13)
• Sean’s experience fundraising as an eng leader for a vertically integrated SaaS platform (22:00)
• Strategies for convincing investors that your product is worth investing in (26:01)
• Identify & seek advice from experts who can help grow your product (29:28)
• The impact of COVID on Boulevard & how they navigated its challenges (32:11)
• Rapid fire questions (39:00)

• (book) The Last Lecture by Randy Pausch - Professors are asked to consider their demise and to ruminate on what matters most to them.When Randy Pausch, a computer science professor at Carnegie Mellon, was asked to give such a lecture, he didn't have to imagine it as his last, since he had recently been diagnosed with terminal cancer. But the lecture he gave--"Really Achieving Your Childhood Dreams"--wasn't about dying. It was about the importance of overcoming obstacles, of enabling the dreams of others, of seizing every moment (because "time is all you have...and you may find one day that you have less than you think"). It was a summation of everything Randy had come to believe. It was about living.
• (book) Project Hail Mary by Andy Weir - Ryland Grace is the sole survivor on a desperate, last-chance mission—and if he fails, humanity and the earth itself will perish. Except that right now, he doesn’t know that. He can’t even remember his own name, let alone the nature of his assignment or how to complete it. All he knows is that he’s been asleep for a very, very long time. And he’s just been awakened to find himself millions of miles from home, with nothing but two corpses for company. And with the clock ticking down and the nearest human being light-years away, he’s got to do it all alone. Or does he?