Tech on the Rocks

In this episode, we sit down with Hannes Mühleisen, co-founder and CEO of Duck Labs and co-creator of DuckDB, for a wide-ranging conversation about how a self-described outsider ended up reshaping the analytics database world. Hannes shares how he accidentally fell into databases after moving to Amsterdam, why that outsider perspective helped him spot the “warts” everyone else had accepted, and hi...

In this episode, Nitay and Kostas sit down with Guillaume Binet, founder of Copper Robotics, to dig into one of the most overlooked problems in modern robotics: the software stack that runs the robots. Guillaume traces his journey from tinkering with old computers in the 80s and 90s, to telecommunications, to the dot-com era, and finally into more than a decade in robotics, including roles at Tril...

In this episode, Nitay and Kostas sit down with Sergey Arkhangelskiy, founder of Positronic, to dig into the state of physical AI and what it will really take to bring general-purpose robotics into the real world. Sergey shares his journey from a decade at Google Search, where he worked on ranking and helped build the "Tetris" layer that unified web, image, and map results, to co-founding Wanna (a...

In this episode of Tech on the Rocks, Nitay and Kostas sit down with Shubham Baldava, co-founder of DataZip and creator of OLake, to trace the evolution of the modern open lakehouse — from the early days of Apache Hudi to today's Iceberg-centric world. Shubham shares stories from a decade of data engineering at scale, including building near real-time pipelines at Japanese fintech giant PayPay, sc...

In this episode, we sit down with Rohan Katyal and Raghav Sethi, co-founders of Milana , to discuss the shift from passive analytics to the world’s first AI Product Engineer . Rather than just providing another dashboard to monitor, Rohan and Raghav are building an agentic partner that you add to your product to bridge the gap between discovery and deployment. Drawing on their experience at Meta,...

Jamie, a seasoned startup founder and former Dropbox engineer, shares insights on building distributed systems, scaling storage solutions, and the impact of AI on infrastructure and application development. Discover practical lessons from scaling Dropbox, the evolution of data storage, and how Convex is shaping the future of app development.

In this episode, we sit down with the full founding team of Wild Moose — CEO Yasmin Dunsky, CTO Roei, and VP R&D Tom Tytunovich — to explore how they’re transforming production debugging from an art into a science using AI. The trio shares their unconventional founding story — from meeting across three different cities to living together for three months in a California Airbnb to stress-test b...

In this episode, Hussain shares the story behind xorq : a “lockfile for ML pipelines” that makes notebook work easier to reproduce, debug, and ship. We talk about why the research→production path is still so manual, how schemas (and Arrow) become the contract between systems, and what it takes to run the same pipeline across engines like Snowflake and Databricks. We also dig into escape hatches fo...

Summary In this episode of Tech on the Rocks , Kostas and Nitay sit down with Wes McKinney the creator of pandas and co-creator of Apache Arrow and Ibis , and long-time leader in the Python data ecosystem. Wes walks us through his journey from building pandas in 2008 to rethinking how we represent and move columnar data with Arrow, and why Arrow is fundamentally different from file formats like Pa...

Summary In this conversation, the founders of Bauplan, Jacopo and Ciro, share their extensive backgrounds in AI and data infrastructure, discussing the evolution of NLP and the challenges faced in the industry. They highlight the importance of data pipelines in AI effectiveness and the complexities of building data infrastructure. The discussion also covers lessons learned from previous ventures,...

Summary Brett — founder & CEO of Micro — joins Nitay and Kostas to share how he’s turning email into a knowledge graph and rebuilding CRM right inside the inbox. He traces a path from Google’s M&A and Allo product team to Clearbit and Launch House, then digs into why most “inbox zero” workflows fail, how interoperability and AI agents shift power to the interface, and what it takes to desi...

Summary Steve Klabnik has spent the last 15 years shaping how developers write code—from teaching Ruby on Rails to stewarding Rust’s explosive growth. In this wide-ranging conversation, Steve joins Kostas and Nitay to unpack the forces behind Rust’s rise and the blueprint for developer-first tooling. From Rails to Rust: How a web-framework luminary fell for a brand-new systems language and helped...

Summary Josh Howard, Senior Engineering Manager at Cloudflare, joins Kostas and Nitay to discuss Cloudflare's innovative serverless platform, Durable Objects, and Workers.  Learn how Cloudflare enables developers to build stateful applications with global scale, consistency, and simplicity at the network edge. Chapters 00:00 Introduction and Background 02:01 Journey into Storage Systems 04:24 Clou...

Summary In this episode, Erik reflects on his long and storied tech career—from the days of punch cards to founding multiple startups, including a stint at Splunk. At 61, he offers a unique perspective on how the industry has evolved and shares candid insights into what it takes to build a successful company. He discusses the evolution from building simple tools to creating comprehensive solutions...

Summary In this episode, Gilad Kleinman, co-founder of Epsio, shares his unique journey from PHP development to low-level kernel programming and how that evolution led him to build an innovative incremental views engine.  Gilad explains that Epsio tackles a common challenge in databases: making heavy, complex queries faster and more efficient through incremental materialization. He describes how t...

Summary In this episode, Viktor Kessler shares his journey and insights from his extensive experience in data management—from building risk management systems and data warehouses to working as a solutions architect at MongoDB and Dremio, and now co-founding a startup. Initially exploring data mesh concepts, Viktor explains how real-world challenges—such as the disconnect between technical data mod...

Summary In this episode, Apurva Mehta, co-founder and CEO of Responsive, recounts his extensive journey in stream processing—from his early work at LinkedIn and Confluent to his current venture at Responsive. He explains how stream processing evolved from simple event ingestion and graph indexing to powering complex, stateful applications such as search indexing, inventory management, and trade se...

In this episode, we chat with David Jayatillake, VP of AI at Cube, about semantic layers and their crucial role in making AI work reliably with data.  We explore how semantic layers act as a bridge between raw data and business meaning, and why they're more practical than pure knowledge graphs.  David shares insights from his experience at Delphi Labs, where they achieved 100% accuracy in natural...

In this episode, we chat with Yaron Hadad, a fascinating individual who transitioned from theoretical physics to entrepreneurship. We explore his groundbreaking work on black holes and gravitational waves, and learn about the Ramanujan Machine - an algorithmic system he helped develop that discovers new mathematical formulas and democratizes mathematical research. We'll hear about the scientific c...

In this episode, we chat with Philippe Noël, founder of ParadeDB, about building an Elasticsearch alternative natively on PostgreSQL.  We explore the challenges and benefits of extending PostgreSQL versus building a separate system, diving into topics like full-text search, faceted analytics, and why organizations need these capabilities.  We discuss the emerging bring-your-own-cloud deployment mo...

In this episode, we chat with Ben, founder of Espresso AI, about his journey from building Excel Python integrations to optimizing data warehouse compute costs.  We explore his experience at companies like Uber and Google, where he worked on everything from distributed systems to ML and storage infrastructure.  We learn about the evolution of his latest venture, which started as a C++ compiler opt...

In this episode, we chat with David Mytton, founder and CEO of Arcjet and creator of console.dev.  We explore his journey from building a cloud monitoring startup to founding a security-as-code company. David shares fascinating insights about bot detection, the challenges of securing modern applications, and why traditional security approaches often fail to meet developers' needs.  We discuss the...

In this episode, we chat with Ivan, co-founder and CEO of Daytona, about the evolution of developer environments and tooling. We explore his journey from founding CodeAnywhere in 2009, one of the first browser-based IDEs, to creating the popular Shift developer conference, and now building Daytona's dev environment automation platform. We discuss the changing landscape of development environments,...

In this episode, we chat with Roy Ben-Alta, co-founder of Oakminer AI and former director at Meta AI Research, about his fascinating journey through the evolution of data infrastructure and AI. We explore his early days at AWS when cloud adoption was still controversial, his experience building large language models at Meta, and the challenges of training and deploying AI systems at scale. Roy sha...

In this episode, we chat with Nitzan Shapira, co-founder and former CEO of Epsagon, which was acquired by Cisco in 2021. We explore Nitzan's journey from working in cybersecurity to building an observability platform for cloud applications, particularly focused on serverless architectures. We learn about the early days of serverless adoption, the challenges in making observability tools developer-...