Engineering Founders

Lee Edwards, General Partner @ Root Ventures, shares insights on identifying your competitive edge, recommendations for differentiation, and how to make sure your business is venture-aligned. He discusses his transition from eng leadership into the venture capital world, sharing advice on ideation for early-stage founders who are still developing their product & deciding which version of an idea t...

Vidya Raman, Partner @ Sorensen Ventures, shares her best practices for developing a strong enterprise GTM strategy & why this is such a challenging thing to do as a new founder. We also dive into blindspots that highly technical founders may possess, balancing the technical aspects of founding with the anthropological side, product considerations when building for enterprise, timing new product r...

James Everingham, co-founder and former VP of Engineering @ Lightspark, joins our podcast to share his best tools for scaling yourself down – not up – as an engineering leader. He discusses his latest career move shifting down in scale and how that impacts your risk tolerance as a leader. We also cover some of James’ favorite leadership methods, including the Socratic method, principle-based decis...

Scott Woody, co-founder and CTO @ Metronome, shares the story of how Metronome, a small startup, made the transition to quickly operate at a global scale while working with complex, public companies. He shares the origin story of Metronome and the roadmap of how they went from early-stage engineering to creating highly specialized teams & in-house experts. Additionally, we cover how to navigate th...

Quinn Jacobson, Director of the Technical Entrepreneur Coaching Hub (TECH) @ Carnegie Mellon University, joins us to share best practices for implementing a successful execution strategy at deep tech startups. He draws from his own experience as a serial founder & former VPE, sharing strategies for building on technical expertise; driving product evolution from early concept results; finding your...

Jon Perl & Scott Wilson share the origin story of QA Wolf & deconstruct their best practices (and what to avoid) for early-stage cold outreach, how to add value to your cold email communications, and why experimenting with your cold outreach is important to early sales! We also dive into the story behind QA Wolf’s strategic move to incorporate services into their business strategy & tangible ways...

Jorge Torres, CEO & Co-founder @ MindsDB, shares how his lifelong entrepreneurial spirit helped encourage him to pursue engineering & why an engineering background is an amazing asset for founders. He also shares valuable insights he has learned along the way, including why it’s important for founders to make plans in order to execute well, tips for creating alignment within your org, and strategi...

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...

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 thr...

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...

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...

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...

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 introve...

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...

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 discipline...

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 buil...

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-pac...

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...

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...

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 intervi...

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...

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...

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 i...

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 trans...

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 f...