Code Story: Insights from Startup Tech Leaders

Brian McKeown is 24 years old, and was born and raised in Dallas, TX. He attended Texas A&M University in College Station, and was heavily involved in rec athletics. Post college, he worked a year or so before getting invited on the rocket ship he has been apart of in manufacturing, and moving to Chattanooga. Outside of tech, he loves being outdoors and in the mountains. He finds the Tennessee...

Jeff Emalaba has a background that has morphed into risk mitigation over the years. He has a professional background in options trading, risk management and auditing, along with over two decades of real estate investment. Jeff is also a licensed agent in North Carolina. Outside of tech and professional life, he enjoys reading and spending time with his family, taking vacations when time allows.  Y...

Alex Blackwood grew up in different areas of New Jersey and Connecticut. He had a transformational experience at boarding school in South Jersey, and eventually went to Georgetown on a rowing scholarship. Post college, he went to Goldman Sachs doing conventional investment banking, and eventually private equity. Outside of tech, he is married and loves to play and watch golf. He enjoys reading bus...

Today, we have a special episode of the Code Story podcast. Joining us today is Caitlinn McMinn , Executive Director at TechFW . TechFW is a nonprofit startup incubator in Fort Worth, TX. The group is here to prove that the next generation of world-changing companies begins right in the heart of Cowtown. In our conversation today, Caitlinn is going to elaborate on the incubators story and model, i...

David Moore started day trading when he was 16, along with his brother. By the age of 19, he had a 7 figure portfolio, indicating some solid success. He did some angel investing, and then moved into entrepreneurship, starting a few companies. But eventually, got into a sales role that led to his current venture. Outside of tech, he loves music, and in particular, is really enjoying 15th century cl...

Back in August of 2025, Dave Berner joined the podcast previously in Season 11, episode 11, as the co-founder and CTO of Kinde. A past musician, he took up web development to make his bands websites and his friend's myspace profiles. Fast forward, he has started multiple startups, been the host of several podcasts, and is married with 3 kids.  Dave's co-founder Ryan experienced firsthand t...

Christian Monberg is originally from a small town in central Maine. His mother was a mathematician, which meant he got into engineering fairly young. This lead him to attend school for engineering, and pursue a career in tech and become a true technologist. Outside of tech, he is married with 2 kids and lives in San Francisco with his family. He likes to re-build old engines, and loves to fly. In...

Alaa Abdulridha is from souther Iraq, but now lives in Austin, TX. Post wars in Iraq, the country had poor infrastructure, which got him interested in building and creating things to better and secure his life. He left the country to study, and ended up in Germany as a security engineer. Outside of tech, he enjoys playing RPG video games. In particular, he likes to play World of Warcraft, and enjo...

Santiago Castineira has quite the background in international living. He was born in Argentina, but grew up in Spain, then moved to Sweden, San Francisco, and now llives in Germany. He did his grade school and university in Spain, but his masters program across Sweden, San Francisco, and Germany. He's worked in startups, bigger companies, and eventually founding and is leading his own. Outside...

Yaniv Tal grew up in the Bay Area in the 90's with parents who were engineers. They were both in electrical engineering, specifically digital/signal processing. He really saw the internet sport up into a massive thing. He studied the hard sciences (electrical engineering, math and physics), and his first job out of college was at HP, doing board b ring up for printers. Outside of tech, he is r...

Today, we welcome a special guest to the podcast, Vasanth Mohan , Head of Developer Relations and Product Marking at SambaNova . SambaNova is transforming AI with efficiency, security and sovereignty, driven by their relentless pursuit of intelligence, and running the largest models by maximizing dataflow efficiency. Vasanth and I dig into some fun - and heavy - topics at the backbone of where the...

Peter Morelli was born and raised in San Francisco, one of the few natives of the area. He was front and center, watching the tech scene explode in front of him (and also blow up). He's lived all over - like New York, San Diego, Texas, London - but always ends up returning to the Bay Area. Outside of tech, he is married with 3 kids - one in college, and the other 2 in high school. He is a food...

Julien Verlaguet is a self proclaimed "French guy", growing up in south of France. He studied in Paris, and moved to the US when he was 27, spending 10 years in the Bay Are and 5 years in New York. He's spent many years developing software, in particular, developing programming languages. Outside of tech, he is married to a Columbian woman, and admits his Spanish isn't as good as i...

Nick Holzherr is originally from the Switzerland, but moved to UK when he was 7 years old, to the countryside. He had no real touch to computers until he was 18, when he attended university and everything picked up for him, tech wise. Eventually, he got into building businesses, and of those, he founded a coffee company, HR software company, and whisk.com, which was sold to Samsung in 2019. Outsid...

Today, we have a special return episode from our friends at Backbox, who we heard the creation story of the company back in Season 8. In this episode, we talk with Rekha Shenoy, CEO of Backbox . Since Rekha took the helm as CEO in May 2024, the company has expanded beyond traditional security automation to launch its major BackBox 8.0 platform, unifying cloud and on-prem infrastructure visibility....

Connor Heggie grew up in Southern California, digging into technical things early on his life. He played with legos, was influence by Iron Man, and painted pictures on the back of schematics his Dad brought him from Boeing. He went to school at Rice in Texas, feeling a sense of agency and confidence from the program he was in. Eventually, he went to work for startups across computer vision, self d...

Christian Ondaatje is originally from Los Angelas, CA. He got into GPUs as an underclassmen in college, of course through gaming and VR. He ended up starting an eGPU company in his CS program @ Harvard, though it was shut down through some cease and desist from Apple. Though he learned some hard startup lessons, his love for GPUs was only fueled more. Outside of tech, he does a lot of SIM racing....

Dumi Mabhena is originally from Zimbabwe, and has lived in 5 different countries. He now lives in Washington, DC, as he came to the states to attend Georgetown. Prior to that, he has been a podcast host and producer for several years, as well as starting businesses and taking part in the startup world in multiple different places. Outside of tech, he married to his wife, who he met while in South...

Varant Zanoyan was born in Washington DC, and grew up there and in Switzerland as well. He now lives in the Bay Area, specifically San Mateo. He's spent time at Palantir Technologies, as well as a stint building ML tech at AirBnB. But outside of tech, he loves the outdoors, tending to his garden of plants and vegetables. After taking a good hike, he's been digging a good uni pizza for dinn...

Itamar Syn-Hershko has been a tech guy since he was a wee lad - IE he was teaching his kindergarten teachers how to use their computers. He learned how to "do stuff" tech wise through playing games back in the day. Back in the day he was one of the original developers on a document based database, as well as building a consulting company. Outside of tech, he is the father of 5 kids, all of...

Steven Walchek is originally from the Bay Area in California, but lives in Denver now. He's been there for 8 years with his family. He comes from a family of risk takers and entrepreneurs - for example, his Dad was a tech guy who did his thing and had success in Silicon Valley. Outside of tech he is a family man, married with kids. He enjoys doing anything he can with them, as they are his &#3...

Drew Dillon is a tech founder and product leader, centered in the Bay Area. He is a person who likes to do a bit of everything, having an engineering background, but spending time in design, sales, and product management. He's been a part of many startups - Yammer being one of them, and several others from Y Combinator - along with being a consultant and fractional CPO. Outside of tech, he has...

Behnam Bastani is originally from Tehran, Iran. He left the country at the age of 17, setting out for Canada, where he got his Masters and PhD, before moving to California. He's always looked at things with the big picture in mind - whether that is artwork, wood work, engineering, etc. He's worked for Hewlett Packard, Meta and Roblox, before starting his current venture. Outside of tech, h...

Dave Garcia is originally from Barcelona, and recently moved stateside, to the East Coast. He started coding when he was 7 years old, on a Commodore 64, in BASIC language - and when he programmed an infinite loop, he was hooked. He's been curious about machines, and fixing them - even when they weren't broken. Outside of tech, he is married with a young family. He enjoys playing video game...

Sharad Kumar lives in Pleasanton, California with his wife and 2 kids. He enjoys playing all musical instruments, and spending time with his family. He has a 2 year old daughter, and a 14 year old son into robotics. He is also passionate about giving back to the community, through their company foundation. Harshit Omar lives in San Francisco, and is married with a 4 year old son. He used to be a s...