Code Story | Startup Podcast for CTOs, CEOs and Technical Founders

Noah Labhart | Podcast for Technical Founders & Startups
  • 5.0 (213)
  • Entrepreneurship
  • Updated Weekly

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 startup From 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.

  1. 17h ago

    S13 E7: The AI Legal Shift: Giving SME Law Firms BigLaw Leverage with Dave Berner, Co-Founder & CEO of Parachute

    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/ 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

    S13 E7: The AI Legal Shift: Giving SME Law Firms BigLaw Leverage with Dave Berner, Co-Founder & CEO of Parachute

  2. 1d ago ·  Bonus

    S13 Bonus: The AI Marketing Cloud: Harnessing Predictive Intent to Scale Growth with Christian Monberg, CTO of Zeta Global

    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/ 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

    S13 Bonus: The AI Marketing Cloud: Harnessing Predictive Intent to Scale Growth with Christian Monberg, CTO of Zeta Global

  3. 5d ago ·  Bonus

    S13 Bonus: Scaling Real-Time Search Data: Secure APIs for AI Infrastructure with Alaa Abdulridha, Engineering Director at SerpApi

    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/ 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

    S13 Bonus: Scaling Real-Time Search Data: Secure APIs for AI Infrastructure with Alaa Abdulridha, Engineering Director at SerpApi

  4. 6d ago ·  Bonus

    E13 Bonus: The AI SAST Shift: Eliminating Vulnerability Backlogs with Santiago Castiñeira, Co-Founder & CTO of Maze

    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/ 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

    E13 Bonus: The AI SAST Shift: Eliminating Vulnerability Backlogs with Santiago Castiñeira, Co-Founder & CTO of Maze

  5. Sep 29

    E13 E6: The Spatial Web Shift: Building Decentralized AI Knowledge Graphs with Yaniv Tal, Co-Founder & CEO of Geo

    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/ 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

    E13 E6: The Spatial Web Shift: Building Decentralized AI Knowledge Graphs with Yaniv Tal, Co-Founder & CEO of Geo

  6. Sep 24 ·  Bonus

    S13 Bonus: The Enterprise AI Chip War: Rethinking LLM Silicon & Inference with Vasanth Mohan, Director of Product at SambaNova

    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/ 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

    S13 Bonus: The Enterprise AI Chip War: Rethinking LLM Silicon & Inference with Vasanth Mohan, Director of Product at SambaNova

  7. Sep 23 ·  Bonus

    S13 Bonus: Dynamic Observability: Eliminating Telemetry Waste at Scale with Peter Morelli, Co-Founder & CEO of Bitdrift

    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/ 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

    S13 Bonus: Dynamic Observability: Eliminating Telemetry Waste at Scale with Peter Morelli, Co-Founder & CEO of Bitdrift

  8. Sep 22

    S13 E5: The Dynamic Compute Revolution: Eliminating Cache Invalidation with Julien Verlaguet, Founder & CEO of SkipLabs

    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/ 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

    S13 E5: The Dynamic Compute Revolution: Eliminating Cache Invalidation with Julien Verlaguet, Founder & CEO of SkipLabs
See All (848)

Trailers

5
out of 5
213 Ratings

About

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 startup From 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.

Information

You Might Also Like