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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 area great for hiking and community, which is a bit different than what he grew up with in Texas.  In his prior role, which was more of an old school company, Brian was referred to an opportunity by one of his mentors in college. The founders of his current venture had proven market fit for their product, but needed talented engineers to create a repeatable platform, built on top of a playbook for what works, to deploy in manufacturing plants across the US.  This is the creation story of Harmony AI.  Links https://www.tryharmony.ai/ https://www.linkedin.com/in/brian-mckeown-49b225229 Current Sponsors: Tiger Data Protected Harbor Render Fitnexa Perplexity Entelligence Checkout our Stacklist! https://stacks.codestory.co/ Check out our Patreon! Hosted by Noah Labhart | Technical Founder & Startup Mentor. Our Sponsors: * Check out Granola and use my code granola.ai/CODESTORY for a great deal: https://granola.ai * Check out Perplexity and use my code pplx.ai/codestory for a great deal: https://www.perplexity.ai Advertising Inquiries: https://redcircle.com/brands Privacy & Opt-Out: https://redcircle.com/privacy

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.  Years ago, Jeff invested $11k of his own money into a property. As it turned out, the investment opportunity had hidden foundation and structural defects. It was this experience that led him to look for a solution that analyzed hidden risks, appraisals, and property data - to be the Carfax for real estate.  This is the creation story of InvestFusion.  Links https://www.investfusion.co/ https://www.linkedin.com/in/jeff-emalaba/ Current Sponsors: Tiger Data Protected Harbor Render Fitnexa Perplexity Entelligence Checkout our Stacklist! https://stacks.codestory.co/ Check out our Patreon! Hosted by Noah Labhart | Technical Founder & Startup Mentor. Our Sponsors: * Check out Granola and use my code granola.ai/CODESTORY for a great deal: https://granola.ai * Check out Perplexity and use my code pplx.ai/codestory for a great deal: https://www.perplexity.ai Advertising Inquiries: https://redcircle.com/brands Privacy & Opt-Out: https://redcircle.com/privacy

NEWS: Mogul Secures Oversubscribed $15.5M Series A Led by Draper Associates to Scale Its AI-Driven Real Estate Investing Platform 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 business books and science fiction. He notes that he can't do e-readers - he has to have the physical book in his hand, which helps his attention and retention.  In 2021, Alex bought his first single family rental after getting his real estate license. He notes that the process of buying this was pretty terrible, with 10+ different people scraping fees from the process. During his "garden time" - IE month off from investment banking - he put together a thesis and pitched his now co-founder, on a fractional ownership platform for real estate.  This is the creation story of Mogul.  Links https://www.mogul.club/ https://www.linkedin.com/in/alex-blackwood-a3996a135/ Current Sponsors: Tiger Data Protected Harbor Render Fitnexa Perplexity Entelligence Checkout our Stacklist! https://stacks.codestory.co/ Check out our Patreon! Hosted by Noah Labhart | Technical Founder & Startup Mentor. Our Sponsors: * Check out Granola and use my code granola.ai/CODESTORY for a great deal: https://granola.ai * Check out Perplexity and use my code pplx.ai/codestory for a great deal: https://www.perplexity.ai Advertising Inquiries: https://redcircle.com/brands Privacy & Opt-Out: https://redcircle.com/privacy

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, illuminating how the team supports local entrepreneurs through opportunity and community.  Questions: TechFW operates on a 100% equity-free model for founders. In an incubator landscape where equity stakes are standard, why is retaining equity so vital for early-stage tech founders, and how does that alter the relationship between TechFW and its entrepreneurs?TechFW has been fostering innovation in North Texas since 1998. Looking back over more than two decades, how has the Fort Worth startup landscape evolved, and what core principles have allowed TechFW to remain a constant anchor for local founders?People talk about 'entrepreneurial ecosystems' all the time, but what does a thriving ecosystem actually look like on the ground in a city like Fort Worth, and what is its most fragile component?TechFW recently partnered with Texas Woman’s University to launch ThinkLab OnDemand, alongside close ties with local institutions like UNT Health Science Center and Texas A&M Fort Worth. How do university partnerships feed the innovation pipeline, and what advice do you have for regions trying to bridge academia and entrepreneurship?Through Cowtown Angels, TechFW bridges early-stage founders with local angel investors. How do you cultivate an angel investor community that is willing to back early-stage, high-risk tech ventures right here in North Texas?Through ThinkLab, you help founders test viability early. What is the single biggest misconception first-time founders have when transitioning an idea into a validated business model?Startups often move fast and break things, but scaling on top of weak processes can be fatal. In the FastForward program, how do you help founders balance aggressive growth with operational rigor?Founder isolation is real. How does TechFW build peer-to-peer community so founders don't feel like they're navigating the journey entirely alone?Your career spans finance, sales enablement, HR systems, and operations consulting before stepping into the Executive Director role at TechFW. How does having that 360-degree operational background shape how you diagnose what a startup actually needs versus what they think they need?Running an innovation hub requires balancing the needs of founders, community donors, corporate sponsors, and board members. How do you keep 'founder-first' as the North Star while managing those stakeholder dynamics?Fort Worth and the broader DFW metroplex are seeing massive economic growth. What unique advantages does Fort Worth offer tech startups compared to traditional hubs like Silicon Valley or Austin?As technology evolves rapidly—from AI to biotech and manufacturing—how is TechFW expanding access so underrepresented founders and non-traditional entrepreneurs can participate in the tech economy?If an ecosystem builder or civic leader in another mid-sized city was listening today and wanted to spark a tech community from scratch, what is the very first step they should take? Links https://www.techfortworth.org/ https://www.linkedin.com/in/caitlin-mcminn/ Current Sponsors: Tiger Data Protected Harbor Render Fitnexa Perplexity Entelligence Checkout our Stacklist! https://stacks.codestory.co/ Check out our Patreon! Hosted by Noah Labhart | Technical Founder & Startup Mentor. Our Sponsors: * Check out Granola and use my code granola.ai/CODESTORY for a great deal: https://granola.ai * Check out Perplexity and use my code pplx.ai/codestory for a great deal: https://www.perplexity.ai Advertising Inquiries: https://redcircle.com/brands Privacy & Opt-Out: https://redcircle.com/privacy

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 classical music. He has a lazy French bulldog, enjoys Italian food, and finds himself either reading Octavian literature, or - his bible.  David got into a sales job for a friend of his, and in doing so, build some tools using AI to help in the business. When he shared these ideas, and eventually was replaced by an offshore resource, he and his brother took off to build their own thing - a solution to help your business score leads.  This is the creation story of Stalex.  Links https://stalex.ai/ https://www.linkedin.com/in/stalexai/ Current Sponsors: Tiger Data Protected Harbor Render Fitnexa Perplexity Entelligence Checkout our Stacklist! https://stacks.codestory.co/ Check out our Patreon! Hosted by Noah Labhart | Technical Founder & Startup Mentor. Our Sponsors: * Check out Granola and use my code granola.ai/CODESTORY for a great deal: https://granola.ai * Check out Perplexity and use my code pplx.ai/codestory for a great deal: https://www.perplexity.ai Advertising Inquiries: https://redcircle.com/brands Privacy & Opt-Out: https://redcircle.com/privacy

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 that legal AI tools were built for massive law forms. SMB's or boutiques were forced to retrofit expensive, enterprise heavy software to their workflows (and of course, budgets). Alongside their third co-founder, Vivienne, they set out to build an AI-powered legal OS designed for firms with 1 to 200 lawyers.  This is the creation story of Parachute.  Links https://goparachute.ai/ https://www.linkedin.com/in/daveberner Current Sponsors: Tiger Data Protected Harbor Render Fitnexa Perplexity Entelligence Checkout our Stacklist! https://stacks.codestory.co/ Check out our Patreon! Hosted by Noah Labhart | Technical Founder & Startup Mentor. Our Sponsors: * Check out Granola and use my code granola.ai/CODESTORY for a great deal: https://granola.ai * Check out Perplexity and use my code pplx.ai/codestory for a great deal: https://www.perplexity.ai Advertising Inquiries: https://redcircle.com/brands Privacy & Opt-Out: https://redcircle.com/privacy

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 fact, some of his favorite flights were through the Grand Canyon at sunset, or seeing Vegas from a plane. In addition, he likes to sail, and is always attempting to tinker with his boat, and sail with his friends and family.  Chris prior company was focused on AI and marketing, and eventually, they were acquired by their now parent company. A lot of the hard earned lessons that he and his team learned through their journey still applied in this age of AI, so much so that it became the backbone of how Zeta built and deployed their products.  This is Chris' creation story at Zeta Global.  Links https://www.zetaglobal.com/ https://www.linkedin.com/in/chrismonberg/ Current Sponsors: Tiger Data Protected Harbor Render Fitnexa Perplexity Entelligence Checkout our Stacklist! https://stacks.codestory.co/ Check out our Patreon! Hosted by Noah Labhart | Technical Founder & Startup Mentor. Our Sponsors: * Check out Granola and use my code granola.ai/CODESTORY for a great deal: https://granola.ai * Check out Perplexity and use my code pplx.ai/codestory for a great deal: https://www.perplexity.ai Advertising Inquiries: https://redcircle.com/brands Privacy & Opt-Out: https://redcircle.com/privacy

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 enjoys the open world, and character development from scratch.  Alaa's current company was built to scrape google search engines, in order to get around a blocker for a prior project. In the past, he used to participate in bug bounty hunting during University, and wrote about his exploits. His now founder's came across his articles, and invited him to joint the company.  This is Alaa's creation story at SerpApi.  Links https://serpapi.com/ https://www.linkedin.com/in/alaa0x2/ Current Sponsors: Tiger Data Protected Harbor Render Fitnexa Perplexity Entelligence Checkout our Stacklist! https://stacks.codestory.co/ Check out our Patreon! Hosted by Noah Labhart | Technical Founder & Startup Mentor. Our Sponsors: * Check out Granola and use my code granola.ai/CODESTORY for a great deal: https://granola.ai * Check out Perplexity and use my code pplx.ai/codestory for a great deal: https://www.perplexity.ai Advertising Inquiries: https://redcircle.com/brands Privacy & Opt-Out: https://redcircle.com/privacy

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 of tech, he is a Dad of 3 kids, so he stays quite busy when he isn't working. He loves endurance sports, running half marathons and long distance biking. Santiago and his team were well aware of the fact that tens of thousands of new vulnerabilities are published every year. While security teams were drowning, the rise of automated coding agents were starting to ship code faster and faster. He and his team realized that there needed to be an agent driven platform, designed to evaluate and secure your system like a senior security engineer.  This is the creation story of Maze.  Links https://mazehq.com/ https://www.linkedin.com/in/santiagocastineira/ Current Sponsors: Tiger Data Protected Harbor Render Fitnexa Perplexity Entelligence Checkout our Stacklist! https://stacks.codestory.co/ Check out our Patreon! Hosted by Noah Labhart | Technical Founder & Startup Mentor. Our Sponsors: * Check out Granola and use my code granola.ai/CODESTORY for a great deal: https://granola.ai * Check out Perplexity and use my code pplx.ai/codestory for a great deal: https://www.perplexity.ai Advertising Inquiries: https://redcircle.com/brands Privacy & Opt-Out: https://redcircle.com/privacy

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 recently married, having a lovely wedding on a beach in Mexico. When asked "what do you do for fun?", he can't answer it, cause he is a bit of a workaholic and loves what he does. But, he does make sure he spends quality time with his new bride.  In 2017, Yaniv founded a protocol called The Graph, one of the core web3 protocols. After many years on this journey, he started to have a vision around the world's broader knowledge in a decentralized, verifiable way. Eventually, he and his team set out to launch a a solution around this vision, designed to solve fragmentation of knowledge, vulnerable to centralization, silos and misinformation.  This is the creation story of Geo.  Links https://geobrowser.io https://thegraph.com/ https://www.linkedin.com/in/yanivtal9/ Current Sponsors: Tiger Data Protected Harbor Render Fitnexa Perplexity Entelligence Checkout our Stacklist! https://stacks.codestory.co/ Check out our Patreon! Hosted by Noah Labhart | Technical Founder & Startup Mentor. Our Sponsors: * Check out Granola and use my code granola.ai/CODESTORY for a great deal: https://granola.ai * Check out Perplexity and use my code pplx.ai/codestory for a great deal: https://www.perplexity.ai Advertising Inquiries: https://redcircle.com/brands Privacy & Opt-Out: https://redcircle.com/privacy

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 industry is going with AI Inference, specifically at the hardware layer.  Questions: Tell me and the audience a bit about you and SambaNova.The Shift to Autonomy: "When we shift from a user generating a single chat response to an autonomous coding agent executing dozens of background tool calls, loop checks, and file rewrites, how does the underlying inference profile change, and what metric breaks first?Latency Budgets: "Token-per-second throughput used to be a nice-to-have metric for human readability, but for multi-agent workflows running in parallel, low latency is critical to prevent system timeouts. How are developers designing prompt structures and context windows to prevent compounding latencies during multi-agent orchestration?Hardware Heterogeneity: "Hyperscalers historically standardized on monolithic hardware, but neoclouds are increasingly mixing high-memory GPUs, specialized inference ASICs, and custom interconnects. How do you decide the optimal hardware mix inside a rack when your customer demand fluctuates between massive long-context reasoning models and rapid edge-like decoding?Power and Rack Density: "With high-end inference accelerators drawing massive power per node, how are neocloud data centers re-engineering liquid cooling, rack layouts, and power distribution specifically to maximize inference density rather than training throughput?Decoupling Prefill and Decode: "Disaggregated inference splits compute-heavy prefill operations from memory-bandwidth-heavy decode operations onto distinct hardware pools. What are the biggest real-world friction points when deploying this in production—especially around KV-cache transfer overhead and inter-node networking?Dynamic Orchestration: "In a disaggregated setup, workload spikes in long-context coding prompts can saturate the prefill pool while leaving decode nodes underutilized. How are leading engineering teams building smart routing layers and dynamic auto-scaling engines to balance compute across compute-bound and memory-bound hardware?The Economic Tipping Point: "Enterprise adoption is oscillating between proprietary API-driven models and self-hosted open-weights models. At what scale—measured in inference volume, latency SLAs, or data privacy constraints—does it become economically imperative for a company to transition off closed APIs onto self-hosted open infrastructure?Links https://sambanova.ai/ https://www.linkedin.com/in/v-mohan/ Current Sponsors: Tiger Data Protected Harbor Render Fitnexa Perplexity Entelligence Checkout our Stacklist! https://stacks.codestory.co/ Check out our Patreon! Hosted by Noah Labhart | Technical Founder & Startup Mentor. Our Sponsors: * Check out Granola and use my code granola.ai/CODESTORY for a great deal: https://granola.ai * Check out Perplexity and use my code pplx.ai/codestory for a great deal: https://www.perplexity.ai Advertising Inquiries: https://redcircle.com/brands Privacy & Opt-Out: https://redcircle.com/privacy

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 foodie, and loves cooking, enjoying the communal, connective aspect of having a meal with his family and friends.  Peter spent many years at Lyft, where he and his team became frustrated by traditional observability tools and how they waste money storing unused data. They started to building a solution based on dynamic, real time control paired with local, on-device telemetry storage. Once they realized their breakthrough, they spun off the solution into its own company.  This is the creation story of Bitdrift.  Links https://bitdrift.io/ https://www.linkedin.com/in/peterfmorelli/ Current Sponsors: Tiger Data Protected Harbor Render Fitnexa Perplexity Entelligence Checkout our Stacklist! https://stacks.codestory.co/ Check out our Patreon! Hosted by Noah Labhart | Technical Founder & Startup Mentor. Our Sponsors: * Check out Granola and use my code granola.ai/CODESTORY for a great deal: https://granola.ai * Check out Perplexity and use my code pplx.ai/codestory for a great deal: https://www.perplexity.ai Advertising Inquiries: https://redcircle.com/brands Privacy & Opt-Out: https://redcircle.com/privacy

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 it should be. He loves to play Pétanque, merely needing a flat surface to play on.  Julien was a lead programming language designer at Facebook, and lead the open source release of a new programming language. Over time, he noticed that frontend dev was in a resolution with reactive paradigms, while backend architectures remained bogged down by manual steps. In 2022, he stepped out to create Meta-grade creativity usable in everyday software.  This is the creation story of Skiplabs.  Links https://skiplabs.io/ https://www.linkedin.com/in/julien-verlaguet-b5710a20/ Current Sponsors: Tiger Data Protected Harbor Render Fitnexa Perplexity Entelligence Checkout our Stacklist! https://stacks.codestory.co/ Check out our Patreon! Hosted by Noah Labhart | Technical Founder & Startup Mentor. Our Sponsors: * Check out Granola and use my code granola.ai/CODESTORY for a great deal: https://granola.ai * Check out Perplexity and use my code pplx.ai/codestory for a great deal: https://www.perplexity.ai Advertising Inquiries: https://redcircle.com/brands Privacy & Opt-Out: https://redcircle.com/privacy

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. Outside of tech, he is the father to two young children. He enjoys skiing and snowboarding, and jokingly, he admits that running around ensuring his agents are prompted gets in the way of his family and hobby life.  Through his entrepreneurial adventures, Nick spent large sums of money on legal contracts, ensuring that the i's were dotted and the t's were crossed. While he still feels that lawyers are very important and needed for certain scenarios, Nick wanted to create a way to level the playing field for small businesses, in the legal arena.  This is the creation story of GitLaw.  Links https://git.law/ https://nickholzherr.com/ https://www.linkedin.com/in/nickholzherr/ Current Sponsors: Tiger Data Protected Harbor Render Fitnexa Perplexity Entelligence Checkout our Stacklist! https://stacks.codestory.co/ Check out our Patreon! Hosted by Noah Labhart | Technical Founder & Startup Mentor. Our Sponsors: * Check out Granola and use my code granola.ai/CODESTORY for a great deal: https://granola.ai * Check out Perplexity and use my code pplx.ai/codestory for a great deal: https://www.perplexity.ai Advertising Inquiries: https://redcircle.com/brands Privacy & Opt-Out: https://redcircle.com/privacy

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. They’ve also integrated human-in-the-loop, advisor-focused AI capabilities - and are back to let us know some even more "big things" happening with platform, around agentic .  Questions: Tell me about yourself—your path into tech and what shapes how you lead (background, influences, hobbies, family).Tell me about BackBox. What does the company do, and what drew you in to take the CEO seat in 2024?How has the product matured? How do you build your roadmap?Zoom out — what are you most proud of in shaping BackBox?What does the future look like for your product and team?BackBox describes AI as a "trusted advisor, not an autonomous agent" — four principles: protecting infrastructure, repeatable/verifiable results, supporting (not replacing) engineers, and transparency about how AI reaches conclusions. Where did that philosophy come from, and why hold that line while competitors race toward full autonomy?What does "responsible AI" actually look like in the product — not as a value statement, but as a design constraint that shaped the engineering decision?Tell us about your recent launch and what it enables a network team to do that they couldn't before?How does the launch extend or test that responsible-AI philosophy?At what point does "AI as advisor" start to feel like a limitation rather than a safeguard?Links https://backbox.com/ https://www.linkedin.com/in/rekha-shenoy-950b23/ https://www.codestory.co/episodes/s8-bonus-bypassing-brittle-custom-scripts-implementing-automated-multi-tenant-configuration-backups-and-vulnerability-patching-at-scale-with-andrew-kahl-of-backbox/ Current Sponsors: Tiger Data Protected Harbor Render Fitnexa Perplexity Entelligence Checkout our Stacklist! https://stacks.codestory.co/ Check out our Patreon! Hosted by Noah Labhart | Technical Founder & Startup Mentor. Our Sponsors: * Check out Granola and use my code granola.ai/CODESTORY for a great deal: https://granola.ai * Check out Perplexity and use my code pplx.ai/codestory for a great deal: https://www.perplexity.ai Advertising Inquiries: https://redcircle.com/brands Privacy & Opt-Out: https://redcircle.com/privacy