Code Story: Insights from Startup Tech Leaders
Noah Labhart - Startup Founder & CTO
Code Story is a startup podcast for technical founders building and scaling software products.Each episode features SaaS founders, engineers, and product leaders sharing how they built their product, found product-market fit, and navigated early-stage growth.We explore:Early engineering decisions and MVP developmentLanding the first customersPricing and go-to-market experimentsScaling challenges and infrastructure bottlenecksHiring the first teamLessons learned from growing a startupFrom first commit to first scale, Code Story focuses on the critical transition from building software to building a scalable business.If you’re a founder, engineer, or product leader interested in SaaS, startups, and scaling technology companies, this podcast breaks down how great products are built — and how they grow.
Episodes
Mentioned books
Mar 4, 2026 • 28min
Developer Chats - Oleksandr Piekhota
Oleksandr Piekhota, a principal software engineer and platform-focused architect, shares career stories from PHP and Go systems. He talks about when teams must shift from features to system ownership. He explains triggers for platform overhauls, when internal tools become real products, and how to judge R&D experiments. He also reflects on API maturity, open source as serious work, and what makes engineering systems truly mature.
Mar 3, 2026 • 17min
S12 E8: Satya Mishra, Waylit
Satya Mishra, Co-founder and CTO of WayLit, built the platform after navigating the U.S. immigration lifecycle himself. He talks about founding WayLit to help lean HR teams own immigration workflows. He recounts building the first MVP, choosing Django, hiring lessons, scaling complex workflows, and selectively adopting LLMs to speed internal reviews.
Mar 2, 2026 • 36min
Founder Chats - Max Denevich
Max Denevich, Co-founder and CRO at LoyaltyPlant, who builds B2B SaaS for quick-service restaurants and scales via partner-led strategies. He discusses choosing traditional industries over consumer apps. He explains why foodtech and QSR have deep structural issues. He recounts the turnaround that made him a founder and how partner distribution and new go-to-market tactics drove global scale.
Feb 26, 2026 • 16min
S12 Bonus: Nouran Farouk, Dosy
Nouran Farouk, an Egyptian medical-trained social entrepreneur and CEO of Dosy, built a women-only scooter mobility platform. She tells the origin story from personal frustration to a trust-first MVP. Conversations cover building mission-driven products, scaling trust vs tech, hiring for ownership, expanding across MENA and Africa, and creating job opportunities for women.
Feb 24, 2026 • 22min
S12 E7: James Davies, Kinetic Data
James Davies, CEO of Kinetic Data, built a human-centered workflow orchestration platform after implementing it at the U.S. State Department. He shares his path from auto shops to tech leadership. Conversations cover building starter templates to speed customer value, integrating AI and agents, organizing teams for scale, and positioning Kinetic Data as an agility layer in composable enterprise architectures.
Feb 19, 2026 • 19min
S12 Bonus: Daniel Shnaider, Warmy.io
Daniel Shnaider, founder and CEO of Warmy.io who built an email deliverability product after fixing his own e-commerce outreach, shares his startup journey. He talks about building an MVP, early sales tactics, guerrilla growth and hiring via Upwork. He also covers product mistakes, team loyalty, and plans to use AI for smarter deliverability diagnostics.
4 snips
Feb 17, 2026 • 22min
S12 E6: Michael Fester, 14.ai
Michael Fester, Co-founder and CTO of 14AI and former startup founder with a math research background. He explains building an AI-native BPO that pairs AI agents with ops and software. Talks MVP tech choices, intense dogfooding and rapid iteration. Covers hiring for AI fluency, keeping systems simple with composable primitives, and the push to scale human operations.
Feb 12, 2026 • 17min
S12 Bonus: Prashanth Tondapu, Innostax
Prashanth Tondapu, founder and CEO of Innostax and former product engineer at McAfee, builds predictable, trust-first software delivery. He tells the origin story of turning failed products into a consulting company. Conversations cover rapid trust-building as the real MVP, saying no to protect quality, hiring for alignment over skill, and a vision to make software development boring and reliable.
Feb 11, 2026 • 27min
The Gene Simmons of Data Protection - AI Inference-time Guardrails
Ave Gatton, Director of Generative AI at Protegrity and former atomic and optical physicist, discusses inference-time AI risks. She outlines prompt injection, data exfiltration, and agent misuse. She compares training vs inference threats. She walks through industry differences and practical secure-by-design guardrails for real-time protection.
Feb 10, 2026 • 25min
S12 E5: Marc Gyöngyösi, OneTrack
Marc Gyöngyösi, founder and CEO of OneTrack and ex-autonomous drone builder, turned to computer vision to capture physical‑world data. He talks about pivoting from drones to camera platforms. He explores why warehouses still use legacy systems. He outlines MVP iteration, scaling billions of images, and integrating agentic AI to automate operations.
