Founders Table

My guest today is Julian Rowlands, founder of Cashboard, an AI-powered analytics platform built for finance teams. Julian does not have the traditional tech background, growing up the son of a writer and studying history in college before becoming a serial CFO. Julian got into finance after graduating college during the Great Recession. He applied for 100 jobs and got one interview, which resulted...

Amy Yan is the co-founder of Nowadays, an AI-powered event planning platform. She and her sister launched the startup, leveraging their shared experience in organizing large-scale events as college student body presidents. Prior to founding Nowadays, Amy worked at McKinsey as well as tech giants like Google and Meta. In today's episode, we discuss: * Getting a role as a Boba Barista during the pan...

Martin Mao is the founder of Chronosphere, a modern observability platform focused on cloud native architecture and fine grained control of observability data. Mao tried his hand at founding various startups during his college years, including an Australian facebook competitor, before joining big tech and working at companies like Microsoft, AWS, and Uber. At Uber, Mao was the manager of its in ho...

Aakash Shah is the founder of Wyndly, a startup that helps people permanently fix their allergies from home. Aakash came up with the idea as a result of suffering from allergies during covid19 lockdowns when cooped up at home with his family cats. This led him to co-found Wyndly with his cousin, Dr. Manan Shah, in 2020 as well as go through Y Combinator as part of the W21 batch. Before Wyndly, Aak...

Charity Majors is the co-founder and CTO of Honeycomb, an observability platform that helps teams solve problems faster within their distributed services. Before co-founding Honeycomb, Charity made significant contributions at companies like Linden Labs (creators of Second Life), Parse, and Meta. She has co-authored books including "Database Reliability Engineering" and "Observability Engineering"...

Jake is one of the co-founder of Crew, an AI-powered platform that recruits, vets & pays your team globally. Prior to Crew, Jake worked as a PM at microsoft and an ESPN commentator while attending college at Dartmouth. In today's episode, we talk about: * lessons from doing ESPN broadcasting and focusing on "yes and" * getting into YC with the condition that they come up with a new idea * initial...

Max Cho is the founder of Coverage Cat, a one stop shop to buy insurance for high net worth individuals. Prior to Coverage Cat, Max worked extensively in tech and finance at firms like Microsoft, Two Sigma, and Google. Max is passionate about fixing the problems in the insurance industry and believes that most people buy the wrong policies, overpaying for what they do get, and get policies that do...

Cory O'Daniel is the CEO and co-founder of Massdriver, a cloud platform and visual development environment. Massdriver aims to simplify cloud infrastructure management and DevOps processes, allowing engineering teams to focus on building products rather than managing complex cloud setups. Prior to Massdriver, Cory spent over a decade working on backend, cloud, and platform - Massdriver started out...

Artem Bugara is the founder of NewsCatcher, a service that helps organizations programmatically retrieve structured data from news articles. Prior to Newscatcher, Artem worked as a data engineer at elseco, a company that specializes in insurance underwriting for high technology risks within the aviation, energy, and space sectors. Artem left elseco to go full time on his side project which eventua...

Amrutha Gujjar is the founder of Structured, a startup focused on simplifying data integration and analytics for growth teams. Prior to structured, Amrutha interned at Meta, Microsoft, and Google before deciding to join Meta full time. She left Meta to directly work with end users and because of the possibility brought about by AI. In today's episode, we talk about: * how Structured helps growth t...

Noah Palansky is the founder of Taiv, a digital signage solution that uses AI to automatically switch between cable and custom streaming channels. Taiv is used in restaurants and other venues to serve custom ads and content during commercial breaks. Prior to Taiv, Noah worked marketing at a software company and started a foundation to help kids affected by cancer after losing his own mom to a rare...

Agni Bhattacharya is the founder of Alma, a gamified mobile banking app where people can win $1M every Wednesday. Prior to Alma, Agni was product lead at Meta, Zynga, and a late stage fintech startup. During Covid, Agni created a mobile game which he scaled to over 1M users before selling the IP to a gaming studio. In our conversation, we discuss: * Exploring wildly different career paths before d...

Daniela Miao is one of the founders of Momento, an enterprise ready real-time data platform. Momento makes it easy for engineers to add distributed caching and real time pub sub with just a few lines of code. Prior to Momento, Daniela was a tech lead at AWS DynamoDB and the Director of Platform Engineering at Lightstep. In our conversation, we discuss: * Thought process behind leaving big tech to...