Code Story: Insights from Startup Tech Leaders

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.

Johnny Halife, founder and CEO of Southworks, built rapid-response engineering teams after starting his career at Microsoft. He talks about the navy-seal style FIRE teams and specialist dev squads. He explains applying startup product experimentation to legacy industries. He shares hiring values like curiosity and the future of human and AI collaboration in hybrid teams.

Keith Lucas, startup advisor and former product and engineering leader at Roblox, discusses centering teams on vision, mission and culture. He explores how leader behavior shapes real values. He outlines the Cascade from beliefs to execution and when to reorganize for mission. He contrasts 'okay' contributors with mission athletes and explains vision docs, compensation pitfalls and coaching out.

Marlena Sarunac, Co-founder and Head of Marketing at The Company Advice, shares her inspiring journey from a Mastercard career to startup life. With a unique blend of engineering and marketing skills, she created a playbook for startups in health tech. Marlena discusses the evolution of their scorecard dashboard into a comprehensive tool, the importance of listening to clients, and challenges in hiring. She highlights the pride in helping startups achieve funding and offers practical advice for founders to align their visions with reality.

Arto Minasyan, a serial entrepreneur and machine learning PhD who co-founded Krisp.ai, tells the creation story of AI noise cancellation. He recounts building the first prototype over breakfast and rapid COVID-driven adoption. He discusses technical challenges training on-device models, hiring PhDs in Armenia, and focusing roadmap and distribution to scale.

Dmytro Ovcharenko, Founder and CEO of Alcor, built a transparent employer-of-record and recruiting firm to pay engineers more and cut hidden fees. He tells the origin story, how a 50-engineer MVP proved the model, and why Alcor doubled down on recruiting to scale to 600 engineers. Expansion plans across Eastern Europe, LATAM and Asia and the focus on hiring top performers round out the conversation.

Arjun Vora, co-founder of TeamBridge and ex-Uber product leader from Mumbai, builds tools to improve hourly workers' lives. Tito Goldstein, co-founder and former Uber product designer, focuses on bringing simple, scalable web products to frontline teams. They discuss why flexibility matters for hourly workers. They cover validating an MVP, evolving from scheduling to automation, hiring with frontline empathy, and plans for AI and financial products.

Arsham Ghahramani, founder and CEO of Ribbon and former head of machine learning, built an AI voice interviewer to scale candidate screening. He talks about using off-the-shelf voice models for an MVP, then building low-latency real-time models. He discusses team hiring traits, scalability testing to millions of interviews, and a vision for a 48-hour hiring cycle.

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 street racer in his college days, loving fast cars and taking risk. Nowadays, he is a big marvel and comic book fan, along side his son. In fact, his son thinks he is Captain America, regularly wielding his shield and mask.A fun fact about both of these gentlemen: this is their third company to work together in, their second startup, and their wives are sisters. So they are connected by wives, and united by startups.In their previous startups, Sharad was leading sales and ops and Harshit was leading on the product side. When the company got acquired, it took them 8-9 months to integrate to a different cloud provider. They realized the model was broken, requiring expensive consulting services, and not convenient at all - and they wanted to figure out a better way.This is the creation story of Fluidcloud.SponsorsUnblockedTECH DomainsMezmoBraingrid.aiAlcorEquitybeeTerms and conditions: Equitybee executes private financing contracts (PFCs) allowing investors a certain claim to ESO upon liquidation event; Could limit your profits. Funding in not guaranteed. PFCs brokered by EquityBee Securities, member FINRA.Linkshttps://www.fluidcloud.com/https://www.linkedin.com/in/sharadkumar123/https://www.linkedin.com/in/harshito/Advertising Inquiries: https://redcircle.com/brandsPrivacy & Opt-Out: https://redcircle.com/privacy

David Sztykman, Chief Architect at Hydrolix, shares his journey from streaming media at Akamai to creating a stateless data platform. He discusses how live-event telemetry shaped Hydrolix's mission for real-time data observability. Sztykman highlights the challenges of scaling and the intricacies of moving to multi-cloud Kubernetes. He emphasizes the importance of curiosity in hiring and reflects on delivering a terabyte-per-minute support during the Super Bowl. Looking ahead, he envisions extending into security and AI user experiences.