Engineering Founders

In this episode, Sergiy Nesterenko (CEO @ Quilter) joins the pod to share how he turned a personal technical challenge into his own company, even before the market caught up. He shares his unique journey from SpaceX to Quilter and addresses common eng leader / founder challenges, including taking critical feedback to solve tough technical problems, knowing when your most important role is educatin...

Matt Moore (CTO & Co-Founder @ Chainguard ) joins us to share his founder journey and dissect how potential founders can take their technical problems and identify if they have a real product on their hands. Matt shares his founder journey and lessons learned along the way, including having conviction in your product before the market catches up, bringing together your founder team, identifying yo...

Rajat Monga joins the podcast to discuss his leadership and founder journey, from Google Brain / Tensorflow to inference.io and back to Microsoft. He dissects what it means to refound vs. start from scratch, the value of the open source community, and strategies for discovering what problem to solve when going the startup route. We also cover how to determine your users’ hidden incentives and what...

Benny Chen, Co-Founder@ Fireworks AI, joins the EF pod to discuss his founder journey and share valuable insights on navigating common founder / product dev challenges in today’s agent-first landscape. He and Jerry cover strategies for creating effective messaging, staying competitive in a crowded market space, hiring top-tier talent / what qualities to look for in high-performing engineers, navig...

Lenny Pruss, General Partner @ Amplify Partners, joins the pod to share insights with Jerry on why engineering leaders have a unique founder advantage & how to capitalize on that by using their lived experiences to solve important problems. Lenny discusses how to build an effective go-to-market narrative and how to use community insights to both shape the product roadmap and market your product. H...

Anhang Zhu, CEO & Co-Founder @ TierZero, joins Jerry to share his background as a founder of two different companies! They discuss his transition from Facebook, and how he used his time within a large, successful org to learn how to build from zero to one successfully – and how he applied those lessons to becoming a founder, along with his time working on building infrastructure @ Niantic. Anhang...

In this special Engineering Founders episode, we’re featuring a live panel of some of the ELC community’s longstanding members who share insights from their founder journeys: Pete Nichols (Co-Founder @ Lightfield), Lizzie Matusov (Co-Founder / CEO @ Quotient), and Tony Dong (Founder & CEO @ Propel Code AI). They dive into what it was like exploring their first big ideas and then strategies for ide...

Tomas Reimers, Co-Founder & CPO @ Graphite, reveals his journey to becoming a founder and some of the major moments from Graphite’s product development story. He dissects frameworks for determining when it’s time to quit your full-time job to pursue becoming a founder and analyzing the costs vs. benefits of that decision. We cover how to decide what customer problems to solve, understanding how so...

In this episode of Engineering Founders, Pooja Brown (Founder @ Inventry.ai ) shares her founder journey and insights on balancing being a founder & technologist, especially within the mid-market manufacturing industry. We cover why founders need to lead with curiosity as they seek out customer problems to solve, strategies for solving complex problems related to supply chain, and strategies for s...

Russ d’Sa (CEO & Co-founder @ LiveKit) joins the show to deconstruct the "Product Paradigm Shift" toward voice-driven interfaces and agent-centric UX . We dive into LiveKit’s high-stakes scaling lessons: from powering OpenAI and Character AI’s voice mode, how they navigated real time bottlenecks to hit the next level of scale, the architectural necessity of a multi-cloud strategy, and the foundati...

Gil Feig (Co-Founder @ Merge) deconstructs the high-speed, tactical playbook for building a category-defining API company in the middle of the AI "space race." We discuss finding resilient co-founders who can handle the “trough of sorrow,” reimagining the Lean Startup Methodology through demo-led validation, and why charging for products from day one is the ultimate validation signal. Gil also sha...

After two years and eight pivots, Ryo Chikazawa (CEO & Co-founder @ Autify) realized his original product would never reach venture scale. In this episode, Ryo reveals how he scrapped everything to find his customers' "burning need," eventually securing contracts before writing a single line of code for his new idea. Ryo shares his playbook for radical pivots, navigating different market segments...

Sha Ma (CEO & Founder @ Topogy) deconstructs the concept of CEO as the “chief experiment officer” / “chief everything officer,” detailing how she personally tests, onboards and scales out AI tools to accelerate her team. Plus we cover how they identified the right customer personas, found design partners, and navigated a full startup rebrand.   ABOUT SHA MA & TOPOGY Topogy is an AI-native cost opt...

Founders often delay leadership coaching until a major crisis hits, leading to significant costs in productivity, team churn, and poor decisions. In this episode, James Birchler (Technical Advisor & Executive Leadership Coach) argues that early coaching is a game-changer for a startup's success. We explore the hidden costs of waiting and the benefits of intentionally installing leadership and comm...

In this episode, we cover some of the most important founder challenges, including engineering management, prioritization / time management principles, analyzing the market, and making the decision to sell to enterprise early on with Sumeet Vaidya, Co-founder & CEO @ Crafting. He unpacks the story behind Crafting & the decision to found it along with how he knew he was the right person to lead thi...

Tony Dong (Founder & CEO @ Propel ) shares how he navigated the early days of solo founding, hired eight engineers in a month, and rapidly built early momentum. We explore how he leveraged existing relationships, storytelling, and competitive advantage analysis to pivot Propel’s focus, providing value quickly in your product, and building credibility for early sales. Plus, support systems for earl...

How do you build an AI product that engineers actually enjoy? ****Aiswarya Sankar, co-founder of Entelligence. AI , reveals how her team is creating an AI-powered “insight engine” that supports (and celebrates) the work of engineering teams. We explore how Entelligence. AI evolved from code search to a full-stack insight engine that reduces merge times, improves code quality, and makes teams more...

AI is reshaping the fundamental economics of startups—lowering product development costs, compressing GTM cycles, and rewriting the rules of competition. In this episode, Craig McLuckie (Co-Founder & CEO @ Stacklok, co-creator of Kubernetes) unpacks “the epoch of the startup,” a moment of massive disruption where fast-moving founders have a unique edge over incumbents. We explore how Craig is navi...

How do you build a platform that accelerates innovation by 10x-100x? Eliot Horowitz (CEO & Founder @ Viam) shares how insights from building MongoDB are shaping Viam’s approach to platform ecosystem development, user-centricity and open-source strategy. We explore the origin story behind Viam, principles for platform design for hardware/software development, modular systems, seamless APIs, and fin...

Jon Hyman (Co-Founder and CTO @ Braze) shares the pivotal moments that shaped the company - from being the only person on call in the early years to identifying (and pivoting) product-market fit. Jon discusses how they navigated early-stage failure modes, carved out areas of product ownership, and made the shift to enterprise customers. Plus how leadership priorities evolve pre- vs. post-IPO and t...

Stephen Whitworth (Co-Founder & CEO @ incident.io ) joins us to discuss strategically differentiating your product based on responsiveness / customer support and the shift from founder-led sales to repeatable / scaleable GTM. You’ll learn how they landed major logo companies like Netflix, Airbnb & Etsy and how you can apply that to your early enterprise customers. Plus the story behind their co-fo...

ABOUT MICHAEL GRINICH Michael is the founder and CEO of WorkOS, a developer platform that enables companies to become Enterprise Ready through features like Single Sign-On (SAML). Their customers include many of the fastest-growing startups including Webflow, Drata, Loom, and +200 others. Before WorkOS, Michael co-founded Nylas and studied CS at MIT. This episode is brought to you by Clipboard Hea...

David Mytton (CEO @ Arcjet & Co-founder @ Console) shares insights on “what makes a great DevTool company!” We unpack lessons on bootstrapping vs. seeking VC funding & why it’s important to stick with one; building prototypes; considerations for selling your company; and his founder journey with Server Density, Console & now with Arcjet. David also highlights GTM practices for finding reliable cha...

In this episode of Engineering Founders, Archetype AI ’s Ivan Poupyrev, Ph. D. (CEO & CTO), and Jaime Lien, Ph. D. (Head of Hardware & Signal Processing), join us to discuss insights on transitioning as a larger-scale founder team, inspiring big ideas / questions, communicating your product’s thesis as a founder, and how to ensure your actions are tracking toward your ultimate goals & questions. J...

Jake Schwartz (Co-Founder @ Endorsed) joins us to talk about de-risking the co-founder relationship! We cover how they built in stress-tests to validate co-founder fit, how to host a hackathon to stress-test your partnership, and why reference calls are an important component of finding a co-founder. Plus the story behind Jakes's transition from Life360 to co-founding Endorsed, prioritizing which...