Code Story: Insights from Startup Tech Leaders

Noah Labhart - Startup Founder & CTO
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Code Story is a podcast featuring startup founders, tech leaders, CTO's, CEO's, and software architects, reflecting on their human story in creating world changing innovation, disruptive digital products - Their tech. Their products. Their stories.

  1. S12 Bonus: Harman Narula, Canary Technologies

    1H AGO · BONUS

    S12 Bonus: Harman Narula, Canary Technologies

    Harman Narula lives in NYC with his wife and 2 young kids. He was born in the states, from parents who immigrated to the country from India. The "immigrant household" was one that focused on hard work and ethics - and it was fueled by the lore of his grandfather's entrepreneurial adventures. He's a big Knicks fan, and likes to take in a game when he can. And prior to NYC, he lived in San Francisco for 10 years or so, and picked up bike riding. Though he hasn't picked it back up just yet, he hopes to eventually. Harman spent a lot of his early career in hospitality. His now co-founder worked in this space as well, but primarily on the technology size. So all the conversations he and his friend were having were referencing this eco-system. Eventually, they landed on a thesis that the "hotel tech stack" or operating system - should be customer facing. This is the creation story of Canary Technologies. Sponsors TECH 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. LInks https://www.canarytechnologies.com/https://www.linkedin.com/in/harmansn/ Support this podcast at — https://redcircle.com/code-story-insights-from-startup-tech-leaders/donations Advertising Inquiries: https://redcircle.com/brands Privacy & Opt-Out: https://redcircle.com/privacy

    20 min
  2. S12 Bonus: Niko Papademetriou, Qu

    1D AGO · BONUS

    S12 Bonus: Niko Papademetriou, Qu

    Niko Papademetriou lives in Washington, DC, with his wife and son. He has had an interesting background professionally. He got into finance, and experienced all the downside that 2008 had to offer. Post all of that, he started a restaurant at the age of 26 with some folks, and quickly realized how difficult it was. After 4 years, he met some guys and wanted to start a new thing. Outside of tech, he and his wife spends a lot of time watching his son play hockey, and engaging with the team at the hockey rink. Niko has observed the restaurant business change, moving towards many different ordering methods - mobile, web, in person, etc. At the end of whatever method, the order needed to land inside the black box of the POS system. He wanted to create the plumbing, better yet the ultimate system to connect it all. This is the creation story of Qu. Sponsors TECH 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. LInks https://www.qubeyond.com/https://www.linkedin.com/in/nikopapademetriou Support this podcast at — https://redcircle.com/code-story-insights-from-startup-tech-leaders/donations Advertising Inquiries: https://redcircle.com/brands Privacy & Opt-Out: https://redcircle.com/privacy

    34 min
  3. S12 E1: Dylan Ratcliffe, Overmind

    2D AGO

    S12 E1: Dylan Ratcliffe, Overmind

    Dylan Ratcliffe lives in San Francisco (for less than a year), but grew up on a farm in the bush in Australia, riding motorbikes and playing video games. He fondly remembers the days whenever you could get a free version of Age of Empires from a cereal box. He was always into computers, and earned a scholarship to head into Melbourne for University. He left his first job as an auditor with KPMG to join a startup called Puppet. Outside of tech, he still rides motorbikes, and has a super small one now (it's actually meant for kids). He loves all food, but prefers Asian and Indian cuisine. Dylan was deploying Puppet at a financial services company, and was pushing to get a win. When a late Friday afternoon deployment went haywire, he decided to leave his company and set out to build something to automatically discover dependencies on a network, to prevent deployment outages. This is the creation story of Overmind. Sponsors TECH 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.Links https://overmind.tech/https://www.linkedin.com/in/dylanratcliffe/ Support this podcast at — https://redcircle.com/code-story-insights-from-startup-tech-leaders/donations Advertising Inquiries: https://redcircle.com/brands Privacy & Opt-Out: https://redcircle.com/privacy

    33 min
  4. Season Favorite - Sam Partee, Arcade.dev

    JAN 6 · BONUS

    Season Favorite - Sam Partee, Arcade.dev

    Sam Partee started out his love for tech/engineering by working on cars. After many y ears of working on cars, and even starting his own car stereo installation business, he decided that cards were finite and moved onto computers. He fell in love with the space, and the rest is history, filled with super computers, AI, distributed training, Redis and the lot. Outside of tech, he loves to take long hikes with his snowy husky. Sam and his team built a prior solution, an agent to solve bugs for you. They ran into a litany of problems, but eventually figured out that there was a dire need for an authorization for the activities that agents wanted to do on your behalf. Fast forward, and they are working with Anthropic to define these auth protocols. This is the creation story of Arcade. Sponsors IncogniNordProtectVentionCodeCrafters helps you become a better engineer by building real-world, production-grade projects. Learn hands-on by creating your own Git, Redis, HTTP server, SQLite, or DNS server from scratch. Sign up for free today using this link and enjoy 40% off.Full ScalePaddle.comSema SoftwarePropelAuthPostmanMeilisearch Links https://www.arcade.dev/https://www.linkedin.com/in/sampartee/ Support this podcast at — https://redcircle.com/code-story-insights-from-startup-tech-leaders/donations Advertising Inquiries: https://redcircle.com/brands Privacy & Opt-Out: https://redcircle.com/privacy

    22 min
  5. Season Favorite - Jens Neuse, Wundergraph

    12/30/2025 · BONUS

    Season Favorite - Jens Neuse, Wundergraph

    Jens Neuse grew up in Germany, originally planning to be a carpenter. In his 2nd year as an apprentice, he was in a motorcycle wreck that thrust him into a process of surgery and healing. Eventually, he decided he wouldn't be doing carpentry, and got into sysadmin work. Once he got bored with this, he moved into startups, learned how to code, and starting digging into programming, API's and eventually - GraphQL federation. Outside of tech, he is married with 3 young kids. He loves to sit ski on the mountain - which is the coolest carbon fiber chair on a ski, where you steer with your knees and hips. After chasing building a better Apollo, Jens and his team ran into a point where their prior product and company was doomed to go under. When they accepted this fact, they started to think about what people actually wanted - and started to dig into the federation of GraphQL. This is the creation story of Wundergraph. Sponsors IncogniNordProtectVentionCodeCrafters helps you become a better engineer by building real-world, production-grade projects. Learn hands-on by creating your own Git, Redis, HTTP server, SQLite, or DNS server from scratch. Sign up for free today using this link and enjoy 40% off.Full ScalePaddle.comSema SoftwarePropelAuthPostmanMeilisearch Links https://wundergraph.com/https://www.linkedin.com/in/jens-neuse-706673195 Support this podcast at — https://redcircle.com/code-story-insights-from-startup-tech-leaders/donations Advertising Inquiries: https://redcircle.com/brands Privacy & Opt-Out: https://redcircle.com/privacy

    33 min
  6. S11 E30: Brandon Card, Terzo

    12/23/2025

    S11 E30: Brandon Card, Terzo

    Brandon Card has always been involved in sports. In High School, he was a 3 sport athlete and still plays today, along side working out, doing yoga and pilates. He's heavily interested in holistic healing and alternative medicine, mentioning a big interest in quantum frequency healing, using the sun and ocean to add voltage to the body. He has also started a foundation around mental health, as sadly, he lost his co-founder to suicide, and wishes to remove the stigma from the mental health conversation. Brandon and his co-founder realized that all software platforms around contracts were directed towards lawyers - not towards finance. This was mind blowing, as negotiations are mostly finance driven, not based on the paragraphs of legal jargon. Brandon wanted to build something to serve this need. This is the creation story of Terzo. Sponsors IncogniNordProtectVentionCodeCrafters helps you become a better engineer by building real-world, production-grade projects. Learn hands-on by creating your own Git, Redis, HTTP server, SQLite, or DNS server from scratch. Sign up for free today using this link and enjoy 40% off.Full ScalePaddle.comSema SoftwarePropelAuthPostmanMeilisearchLinks https://terzo.ai/https://www.linkedin.com/in/brandonrcard Support this podcast at — https://redcircle.com/code-story-insights-from-startup-tech-leaders/donations Advertising Inquiries: https://redcircle.com/brands Privacy & Opt-Out: https://redcircle.com/privacy

    22 min
  7. S11 Bonus: Juan DeAngulo, Inselligence

    12/18/2025 · BONUS

    S11 Bonus: Juan DeAngulo, Inselligence

    Juan DeAngulo was born and raised in South America - then eventually, came to the status in 2017 for college to play Tennis. He kept playing throughout college and into his 40's, at which point he switched to golf and never picked up a racket again. He's been married for 25 years, with 2 older kids - one in law school, and one studying software development. As a family, they enjoy comedy, which funny enough was an acquired taste for Juan. They also love being outdoors, anywhere they can get out and about. At a prior company, Juan and his team created proprietary algorithms to intelligently predict and tie revenue. These models were based on tried and true processes. While Juan was obtaining an advanced degree at Harvard, his current venture was incubated around predictive revenue, and these algorithms. This is the creation story of Inselligence. Sponsors IncogniNordProtectVentionCodeCrafters helps you become a better engineer by building real-world, production-grade projects. Learn hands-on by creating your own Git, Redis, HTTP server, SQLite, or DNS server from scratch. Sign up for free today using this link and enjoy 40% off.Full ScalePaddle.comSema SoftwarePropelAuthPostmanMeilisearchLinks https://inselligence.com/https://www.linkedin.com/in/juandeangulo/ Support this podcast at — https://redcircle.com/code-story-insights-from-startup-tech-leaders/donations Advertising Inquiries: https://redcircle.com/brands Privacy & Opt-Out: https://redcircle.com/privacy

    28 min
  8. Developer Chats - Petr Petrenko

    12/17/2025 · BONUS

    Developer Chats - Petr Petrenko

    Today, we are continuing our series, entitled Developer Chats - hearing from the large scale system builders themselves. In this episode, we are talking with Petr Petrenko, Senior PHP Backend Engineer. Petr will take us through his developer journey, in working on large scale backends, managing the tension between stability and innovation, and designing systems to interact with culturally different economies. Questions You’ve worked on large-scale backends that serve millions of users. At what point do systems start to outgrow the teams that built them?At some point, every mature backend reaches a stage where rewriting is no longer realistic. How do you recognize when a system has crossed that line, and what’s the right way to handle it?There’s always this tension between stability and innovation. How do you decide when a system needs refactoring versus when you just need to live with the technical debt?Let’s talk about the human side of legacy systems — what have you learned about culture, documentation, and knowledge transfer that keeps old systems alive and reliable?You’ve also built and maintained complex payment systems for global users. What’s something most engineers underestimate about cross-border transactions?When you’re designing systems that deal with different currencies, laws, and tax regulations, how do you balance the technical with the ethical — for example, user privacy or data sovereignty?For engineers listening who want to build something durable — not just fast — what advice would you give about writing code that will still make sense years from now?One of your most impressive projects is a high-performance image-matching system you built yourself, capable of scanning tens of millions of images with sub-second results. Can you walk us through the moment you realized you needed to redesign the system — and what engineering choices made that level of performance possible?You’ve also worked on billing systems and fraud mitigation at scale. Was there ever a moment when you had to choose between a technically “clean” solution and a solution that better protected users or the business? How did you make that call?Sponsors IncogniNordProtectVentionCodeCrafters helps you become a better engineer by building real-world, production-grade projects. Learn hands-on by creating your own Git, Redis, HTTP server, SQLite, or DNS server from scratch. Sign up for free today using this link and enjoy 40% off.Full ScalePaddle.comSema SoftwarePropelAuthPostmanMeilisearchLinks https://www.linkedin.com/in/petr-petrenko-006534150/ Support this podcast at — https://redcircle.com/code-story-insights-from-startup-tech-leaders/donations Advertising Inquiries: https://redcircle.com/brands Privacy & Opt-Out: https://redcircle.com/privacy

    15 min
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Code Story is a podcast featuring startup founders, tech leaders, CTO's, CEO's, and software architects, reflecting on their human story in creating world changing innovation, disruptive digital products - Their tech. Their products. Their stories.

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