Shawn Price’s journey from coding to leadership, scaling a SaaS startup, and navigating the challenges of COVID-19.

In this episode of Project Gamma, Warner Moore sits down with Shawn Price, Co-Founder & CTO at Healthy Roster, to talk about the real-life journey from corporate careers to startup leadership.

Together, they explore what it takes to pivot, survive, and grow a SaaS company in challenging times—including how Healthy Roster navigated the COVID-19 crisis when team sports came to a halt. Shawn shares his personal transition from being a full-stack engineer to leading a team as a CTO, the mindset shifts needed to move into leadership, and how to build the right product capabilities at the right time.

We also dive into:

• Leaving corporate life for the startup grind

• Identifying a market problem before building product

• Managing spikey scale and scaling tech in SaaS

• Transitioning from engineering to management without losing the technical edge

• Solving the right problems without over-engineering
  

Books mentioned in this episode: 

📚 The Hard Thing About Hard Things by Ben Horowitz📚 Trillion Dollar Coach by Eric Schmidt📚 Escaping the Build Trap by Melissa Perri

Tune in for an honest and insightful conversation on leadership, resilience, and building smarter tech companies.

In this episode, James Campbell—technologist, cryptolinguist, and SaaS innovator—joins us for a deep dive into AI, cybersecurity, and the dark web. From his early days as a military cryptolinguist to building AI solutions before they were mainstream, James shares insights on quantum computing, encryption, remote work strategies, and transitioning from employee to Co-Founder.

We also discussed about the dark web and building a tech product to search it, his book recommendations (Four Agreements & Human Compatible by Stewart Russell), and the innovative startups he’s helping grow: getyogen.com, smartstay.ai, fandemicapp.com, foundation.sh, antibionic.io

🚀 Tune in for a fascinating conversation on the future of tech, security, and entrepreneurship!

BIO: James Campbell is a technology leader, startup advisor, and two-time CTO with over 20 years of expertise in large-scale data collection, processing, and AI algorithm development, as well as software architecture and DevSecOps. Recognized for building and deploying a system for identifying bots on Twitter (botrnot.com) and web analysis for government and commercial clients, he's been the main architect behind solutions like Obskura (2015-2016 acquired), a dark and deep web search engine. He continues to build zero-to-one companies and application stacks that make the world a better place. Ex-Anduril & Ex-PrimerAI.

Join host Warner Moore on Project Gamma as he chats with tech veteran Jason Montgomery about how GenAI is revolutionizing engineering and cybersecurity. Discover how GenAI accelerates development, builds applications from scratch, and creates AI agents to tackle technical debt. We also explore strategies for introducing GenAI into your engineering team, modern security practices, and the essentials of DevSecOps.

Podcast topics:

• Using GenAI to accelerate engineering

• Building an application from scratch using GenAI

• Creating AI agents to tackle technical debt

• Introducing GenAI to your engineering organization

• Security in modern companies

• DevSecOps - security in building software

Jason shares his top book picks—Co-Intelligence by Ethan Mullick, The Coming Wave with Mustafa Suleyman, and AI Snake Oil by Arvind Narayanan—plus insights on Applied LLMs and the OWASP Top 10 for LLM.

Tune in for a concise, impactful conversation at the intersection of AI, cybersecurity, and entrepreneurship!

About Jason Montgomery

Jason Montgomery began his journey in tech as a young coder and hobbyist hacker before starting his professional career as a software dev and sysadmin during the internet's early days. That experience  eventually led him to transition into a full-time cybersecurity role focusing on Security Engineering and AppSec in the corporate world. He moved to the startup world as a security researcher at Veracode. In 2015, he co-founded Nexosis, an AI/ML company, which was later successfully acquired. Building on this experience, he went on to co-found Mantium, an early-stage generative AI company.

Now, he’s serving as an independent consultant and a technical trainer with ReynCon Security with a focus in cybersecurity and GenAI.

In this episode of Project Gamma, host Warner Moore sits down with Jean Bredeche, a technology leader with deep experience in growing FinTech startups and scaling teams. Together, they explore the journey from founding a business to building, growing, maintaining, and even selling it.

Jean shares his insights on key topics like effective delegation, fostering a DevOps culture, and aligning team efforts with clear business goals. He also discusses practical strategies for scaling technology teams and staying focused on long-term objectives while navigating the challenges of startup life.

Whether you're building your first startup or scaling your FinTech business to the next level, this episode is full of actionable advice and inspiration to help you succeed.

Jean recommended the book World for Sale by Javier Blas and Jack Farchy.

Bio: Jean Bredeche is a technology leader with a background in scaling startups and developing innovative products. He has held key roles at HubSpot, Quantopian (cofounder and CTO), Robinhood (acquired Quantopian), and Patch. He is now the CTO of a startup focusing on the intersection of AI and investment management tools.

Solving FinTech Business Problems with GenAI

In this episode, we talk with Grant Schneider, the Vice President of Machine Learning at Upstart Network, and Founder of Banco, Inc.

Grant shares how generative AI (GenAI) is changing the way businesses solve their biggest challenges. With over 10 years of experience in machine learning and statistics, he explains how companies can adopt GenAI and stay flexible by swapping out AI models as soon as better ones are available. This approach helps businesses save costs, improve security, and keep up with rapid advancements in AI.

Grant also discusses the importance of avoiding reliance on a single AI provider. He suggests designing systems that can easily integrate new models when they outperform existing ones. He shares insights on the hands-on experience needed to understand how different models, like Claude and GPT, handle tasks and data formats.

We explore how GenAI is transforming fintech, making decision-making smarter and operations more efficient. Grant shares his thoughts on Bitcoin and how it's reshaping the financial landscape.

During our conversation, we also mention some great books:

Project Gamma is a podcast where technology meets leadership. Hosted by Warner Moore, vCISO and Founder of Gamma Force.

We dive into:

Don’t miss Joe’s insights on tech origins, customer focus, and scalable growth!

Welcome to the Project Gamma Podcast! In this exciting conversation, Warner Moore, Founder of Gamma Force, sits down with Dan Manges, Co-Founder & CTO of RWX, to share the secrets behind scaling tech companies into billion-dollar unicorns, leading successful teams, and strengthening cybersecurity in fast-growing startups.

Together, we explore Dan’s remarkable journey with Root Insurance and Braintree, uncovering must-know strategies for scaling, leadership, developer tools, and innovative security models like zero trust. Plus, we discuss everything from CI/CD processes to practical tips for SOC 2 compliance.

𝐖𝐚𝐧𝐭 𝐭𝐨 𝐠𝐫𝐨𝐰 𝐲𝐨𝐮𝐫 𝐬𝐭𝐚𝐫𝐭𝐮𝐩 𝐚𝐧𝐝 𝐥𝐞𝐯𝐞𝐥 𝐮𝐩 𝐲𝐨𝐮𝐫 𝐬𝐞𝐜𝐮𝐫𝐢𝐭𝐲 𝐠𝐚𝐦𝐞?

Watch the full episode for invaluable insights, and be sure to connect with us:

𝐃𝐚𝐧 𝐌𝐚𝐧𝐠𝐞𝐬: [email protected]

𝐖𝐚𝐫𝐧𝐞𝐫 𝐌𝐨𝐨𝐫𝐞: [email protected]