Engineering Founders

The Engineering Leadership Community (ELC)
  • 5.0 (3)
  • Entrepreneurship
  • Updated Semiweekly

The show for engineering leaders making the leap to start their own company! We dive into the stories, pivotal moments and critical insights from former eng leaders turned founders, that helped them take those early leaps to launch their own company!

  1. 10h ago

    Scaling TensorFlow, Navigating Startup Pivots, ML Edge Infrastructure and AI Inference Strategy w/ Rajat Monga

    Rajat Monga joins the podcast to discuss his leadership and founder journey, from Google Brain / Tensorflow to inference.io and back to Microsoft. He dissects what it means to refound vs. start from scratch, the value of the open source community, and strategies for discovering what problem to solve when going the startup route. We also cover how to determine your users’ hidden incentives and what that means for both product development & marketing, along with navigating the balance between a product’s usefulness and consumers’ willingness to pay for it. Additionally, Rajat shares about what he’s currently up to at Microsoft and the emerging ML / AI technologies he’s most excited about.   ABOUT RAJAT MONGA Rajat Monga is responsible for enabling an efficient AI stack at Microsoft from cloud to the edge. Before joining Microsoft, Rajat was founder and CEO of Inference.io, a smart analytics platform powered by AI. During his decade-long tenure at Google, he co-founded and led TensorFlow, and was a founding member of Google Brain. He’s built out and led many engineering teams, and designed large scale distributed systems including web scale crawling and eBay’s search engine. Rajat is a graduate of IIT Delhi.   SHOW NOTES: Rajat’s journey with Google Brain: Scaling deep learning from single PCs to thousands of machines with Jeff Dean & Andrew Ng (2:41) Moving from Google Brain to TensorFlow: Why new hardware and architectures required a total system rebuild (5:46) The "refounding" question: Choosing between starting from scratch or evolving an existing system (8:17) Why Google open-sourced TensorFlow to set industry standards and avoid supporting external copies (10:00) How open-source enabled global innovation, from Japanese cucumber sorting to African plant health (11:46) Transitioning as a leader: Why Rajat left Google during the height of TensorFlow to found a company (13:40) The discovery phase at inference.io: Navigating the pivot from IoT into solving data analytics gaps (15:15) Lessons on PMF: Moving beyond a "useful" product to one that solves a truly critical customer pain point (16:36) Why habits are harder to change than technology and the challenge of competing with established workflows (20:46) Marketing strategies: Tailoring personas for top-down prestige versus bottom-up personal efficiency (23:02) Deciding when to stop: A founder’s framework for re-evaluating bets based on current knowledge (24:41) Rajat’s new role at Microsoft: Overseeing Edge infrastructure and large-scale Cloud AI inference (27:30) Dissecting ML edge strategy: Using ONNX Runtime to unify AI performance across Windows, iOS, and Android (29:46) Edge AI trends: Shifting from experimental models to production models optimized for cost and privacy (31:04) The future of Edge: How on-device processing will power AI in robotics, smart glasses, and wearables (33:07) Scaling inference: Treating multi-GPU clusters like a distributed operating system for AI models (34:09) Rapid fire questions (37:29)   LINKS AND RESOURCES Epic Disruptions: 11 Innovations That Shaped Our Modern World - Innovation expert Scott Anthony masterfully weaves together the fascinating stories behind history's most transformative disruptions—from ninth-century China to twenty-first-century Silicon Valley. Through eleven pivotal innovations, including the printing press, mass-produced automobiles, the McDonald's revolutionary food system, and the iPhone, Anthony reveals the hidden patterns behind world-changing breakthroughs.   This episode wouldn’t have been possible without the help of our incredible production team: Patrick Gallagher - Producer & Co-Host Jerry Li - Co-Host Noah Olberding - Associate Producer, Audio & Video Editor https://www.linkedin.com/in/noah-olberding/ Dan Overheim - Audio Engineer, Dan’s also an avid 3D printer - https://www.bnd3d.com/ Ellie Coggins Angus - Copywriter, Check out her other work at https://elliecoggins.com/about/ Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

  2. 6d ago

    Hiring top-tier talent, leveraging open source models, and staying competitive in the age of AI w/ Benny Chen @ Fireworks AI

    Benny Chen, Co-Founder@ Fireworks AI, joins the EF pod to discuss his founder journey and share valuable insights on navigating common founder / product dev challenges in today’s agent-first landscape. He and Jerry cover strategies for creating effective messaging, staying competitive in a crowded market space, hiring top-tier talent / what qualities to look for in high-performing engineers, navigating the cultural shift to managing agents, creating data flywheels & how this can help your customers, and more.   ABOUT BENNY CHEN As co-founder and early product architect, Benny Chen shaped Fireworks AI’s infrastructure strategy, spearheading the design of scalable systems to support high-throughput AI model serving. Benny’s contributions established the technical foundation for Fireworks AI’s robust and cloud-native architecture, which underpins its ability to meet enterprise demands. Formerly Meta’s Ads Infrastructure Lead, Benny optimized large-scale ad-serving pipelines and developed significant expertise in distributed systems and cloud infrastructure. He holds a B.S. in Computer Science from Stanford University, bringing both leadership and technical depth to the Fireworks AI management team.   SHOW NOTES: Moving from an early idea to a rocket ship (1:13) Insights on developing / communicating your core message as an early founder (2:40) Role of open source & inference @ Fireworks AI (4:24) How Firework AI’s company messaging evolved over time (6:07) Popular customization features today (7:25) Strategies for staying competitive in a crowded market (9:11) Defining the customer data flywheel & how it helps users (11:25) Common types of data that companies can collect to train their AI models (13:53) The customer’s next steps after creating a data flywheel (15:53) Benny’s perspective on acquiring engineering talent as a founder (16:43) Common traits shared by high-performing engineers @ Fireworks (19:05) How AI has altered which traits founders prioritize when hiring (20:45) Navigating the shift from engineering work to managing agents (22:40) Frameworks to ensure agents are doing the right thing (25:23) Aligning your metrics with the outcome you’re trying to follow (27:37) What a typical day looks like for Benny as a founder (28:31) Advice for founders / eng leaders looking to embrace AI adoption (29:19) Rapid fire questions (31:15)   LINKS AND RESOURCES Fireworks AI - Fireworks’ SoTA training and inference take you beyond the frontier, transforming open models into your specialized intelligence.   This episode wouldn’t have been possible without the help of our incredible production team: Patrick Gallagher - Producer & Co-Host Jerry Li - Co-Host Noah Olberding - Associate Producer, Audio & Video Editor https://www.linkedin.com/in/noah-olberding/ Dan Overheim - Audio Engineer, Dan’s also an avid 3D printer - https://www.bnd3d.com/ Ellie Coggins Angus - Copywriter, Check out her other work at https://elliecoggins.com/about/ Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

  3. Jul 16

    Community-driven product roadmaps and why engineering leaders have a unique founder advantage w/ Lenny Pruss @ Amplify

    Lenny Pruss, General Partner @ Amplify Partners, joins the pod to share insights with Jerry on why engineering leaders have a unique founder advantage & how to capitalize on that by using their lived experiences to solve important problems. Lenny discusses how to build an effective go-to-market narrative and how to use community insights to both shape the product roadmap and market your product. He offers his perspective on the role of AI in the software development cycle – and what skills and features are impossible for AI to automate. Lastly, Jerry and Lenny highlight strategies for scaling, identifying opportunities, and navigating AI fatigue.   ABOUT LENNY PRUSS Lenny Pruss is a General Partner at Amplify, where he focuses on the intersection of AI with cloud and data infrastructure, developer tools, and security. Lenny is an early investor in Temporal, Chainguard, Hightouch, dbt, Antithesis, Datadog, Hashicorp, and many more.   SHOW NOTES: Introducing Lenny Pruss & his work @ Amplify Partners (0:52) Signals that engineering leaders are ready to pursue becoming a founder (3:54) Advantages that eng leaders in particular have as founders (6:13) Approach company building as an engineering problem (7:42) Why lived experiences offer a greater advantage than market research (8:54) How to turn your lived experiences into an effective go-to-market narrative (11:56) Examples of highly effective product marketing (14:43) Dissecting the impact of community on go-to-market (17:00) Strategies for building trust & using your community to shape product roadmap (19:39) Best practices for building community in person (21:39) How AI has influenced bottlenecks in the software development cycle (23:36) Lenny’s perspective on what parts of a company are most difficult to automate (25:56) AI fatigue & why it’s creating chaos in the industry (28:21) What eng leaders / founders must do today to build a successful company (30:31) Lenny’s advice to founders on finding opportunities (32:45) Insights for founders ready to scale (34:12) Rapid fire questions (35:55)   LINKS AND RESOURCES Amplify - Amplify invests in technical founders building the next generation of applications, models, tools, and infrastructure. For almost 15 years they’ve been the first investor and partner for the world’s best engineers, researchers, and scientists.   This episode wouldn’t have been possible without the help of our incredible production team: Patrick Gallagher - Producer & Co-Host Jerry Li - Co-Host Noah Olberding - Associate Producer, Audio & Video Editor https://www.linkedin.com/in/noah-olberding/ Dan Overheim - Audio Engineer, Dan’s also an avid 3D printer - https://www.bnd3d.com/ Ellie Coggins Angus - Copywriter, Check out her other work at https://elliecoggins.com/about/ Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

  4. Jun 18

    Determining when to leave to start your own company, making strategic bets, and selling to enterprise customers w/ Anhang Zhu @ TierZero

    Anhang Zhu, CEO & Co-Founder @ TierZero, joins Jerry to share his background as a founder of two different companies! They discuss his transition from Facebook, and how he used his time within a large, successful org to learn how to build from zero to one successfully – and how he applied those lessons to becoming a founder, along with his time working on building infrastructure @ Niantic. Anhang also shares insights on finding a co-founder you trust & why that is so important to navigating tough times, how people management skills also help you with managing AI tools, fundraising strategies, selling to enterprise-scale customers, and developing software product problem-solving tools.   ABOUT ANHANG ZHU Anhang Zhu is the co-founder and CEO of TierZero, the AI agent that operates your code in production. Before TierZero, he spent six years at Facebook on the early ads team, then founded a gaming company acquired by Niantic/Pokémon Go, where he led platform engineering teams at GCP's largest customer.   SHOW NOTES: AZ’s transition from eng leader to founder (0:24) What drew AZ to becoming a founder (1:20) Building from zero to one @ Facebook & preparing to be a founder (3:44) AZ’s experience working on Facebook ads (4:58) The fundraising process for AZ’s esport coaching platform (9:32) Strategies for finding users / building a community (12:14) Convincing investors to back you & your product (14:38) Takeaways from Facebook that helped develop AZ as a founder (19:00) Learn to break down tasks for both people & agentic tools (21:35) The transition from nearly shutting down to catching Fortnite & Niantic’s attention (25:10) Focus on your customers & their problems (31:11) Lessons learned from navigating challenging times as a founder (33:58) The story behind AZ starting his second company (36:36) AZ’s bet that AI models would continue to become more agentic (38:37) Why AZ transitioned his product’s audience from startups to enterprises (39:05) Identifying which enterprise deals are most likely to be successful (42:36) Insights for selling to enterprise / optimizing your resources (45:55) Tactics for competing against much larger companies (48:40) Using agentic tools to synthesize & prioritize customer needs (50:17) AZ’s eng org structure & how AI fits into it (54:35) Quality control insights (57:13) What the future looks like for addressing software production issues (59:00) Tips for building AI-native teams / startups (1:01:13)   LINKS AND RESOURCES TierZero - TierZero isn't a traditional software company that bolted AI onto an existing product. We're AI-native: we use AI agents to build, ship, and operate our own infrastructure.   This episode wouldn’t have been possible without the help of our incredible production team: Patrick Gallagher - Producer & Co-Host Jerry Li - Co-Host Noah Olberding - Associate Producer, Audio & Video Editor https://www.linkedin.com/in/noah-olberding/ Dan Overheim - Audio Engineer, Dan’s also an avid 3D printer - https://www.bnd3d.com/ Ellie Coggins Angus - Copywriter, Check out her other work at https://elliecoggins.com/about/ Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

  5. Jun 4

    How to know when your company needs to pivot and the signals/principles that will help guide you through pivoting w/ Pete Nichols, Lizzie Matusov, and Tony Dong

    In this special Engineering Founders episode, we’re featuring a live panel of some of the ELC community’s longstanding members who share insights from their founder journeys: Pete Nichols (Co-Founder @ Lightfield), Lizzie Matusov (Co-Founder / CEO @ Quotient), and Tony Dong (Founder & CEO @ Propel Code AI). They dive into what it was like exploring their first big ideas and then strategies for identifying when it’s time to pivot. They cover validating if you’re working on the right problem and using customer research to determine product road map. They also share go-to-market and selling insights, finding your first customers, and getting users willing to pay for your product. This ep also features an audience Q&A from fellow ELC community members!   ABOUT PETE NICHOLS Pete Nichols is the Head of Core Product Engineering at Pinterest, where he leads the development of inspiring product experiences and Android/iOS/Web/API platform technology. Prior to Pinterest, Pete spent 15 years at Electronic Arts in development leadership roles for The Sims and SimCity. Pete holds a BS in Computer Science from Stanford University.   ABOUT LIZZIE MATUSOV Lizzie Matusov is the co-founder and CEO of Quotient, a developer tool that surfaces the friction slowing down engineering teams and resolves it directly. Her team also co-authors Research Driven Engineering Leadership, a newsletter that uses research to answer interesting questions on engineering leadership and strategy. She previously worked in various engineering roles at Red Hat and Invitae, and has an MS in Engineering Sciences and MBA from Harvard.   ABOUT TONY DONG Tony is the Founder & CEO of Propel, an AI engineering agent that integrates into your team’s workflows to automate engineering tasks and elevate developer productivity. Before Propel, Tony served as the VP of Engineering at Rippling, where he led the development of the company's Platform and HR products. As a seasoned entrepreneur, Tony was also the founder and CTO of a YC-backed startup and held key engineering roles at Periscope, TellApart, and Twitter.   SHOW NOTES: Tony and Lizzie’s first big ideas / what they’ve pivoted to today (6:39) Pete describes his first idea then major pivot (8:49) How the panelists view pivots as founders (10:35) Identifying signs of friction that signal it’s time to pivot (13:48) Tony explains the code review / rediscovery process post-pivot (16:16) Follow insights derived from customer problems & what they’re willing to pay for (18:16) Pete’s advice to address pain points & work on what is scalable (21:17) Navigating the balance between true signals of success / trusting your gut (22:50) Frameworks for validating the right product, market & customer segment (24:25) Insights on selling to enterprise / eng leader customers (26:54) Finding early adopters to demonstrate the product in real time (28:29) Lizzie’s validation method @ Quotient (31:38) How a newsletter became an inbound discovery channel (34:01) Benefits of building in public (36:05) Understanding the principle of speed to value (37:47) Identify your product’s hardest use & build an intentional process for it (40:59) Getting your first customer / when go to market is working (44:46) Knowing when you have the wrong product or founder fit (47:52) Q&A: Identifying when not to pivot (52:13) Getting customers through a customer residency program (55:04) What doesn’t work when it comes to getting your first customers (58:56) Tips for finding a partner you trust (1:02:16) Tony’s path to finding his co-founder (1:04:12) The co-founder journey @ Lightfield (1:06:00) Navigating “Wizard of Oz-ing” challenges in startups (1:08:39) Lizzie’s process for identifying / addressing customer “paper cuts” (1:10:04) Incorporating secret prototypes within your product (1:12:21)   LINKS AND RESOURCES The Mom Test - Rob Fitzpatrick’s quick, practical guide that will save you time, money, and heartbreak. 50 Co-Founder Dating Questions   This episode wouldn’t have been possible without the help of our incredible production team: Patrick Gallagher - Producer & Co-Host Jerry Li - Co-Host Noah Olberding - Associate Producer, Audio & Video Editor https://www.linkedin.com/in/noah-olberding/ Dan Overheim - Audio Engineer, Dan’s also an avid 3D printer - https://www.bnd3d.com/ Ellie Coggins Angus - Copywriter, Check out her other work at https://elliecoggins.com/about/ Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

  6. May 21

    Determining bets, using customer insights to pivot, and gaining developer buy in & trust w/ Tomas Reimers @ Graphite

    Tomas Reimers, Co-Founder & CPO @ Graphite, reveals his journey to becoming a founder and some of the major moments from Graphite’s product development story. He dissects frameworks for determining when it’s time to quit your full-time job to pursue becoming a founder and analyzing the costs vs. benefits of that decision. We cover how to decide what customer problems to solve, understanding how software development trends impact what you’re building, and product market fit and selling considerations. Lastly, Tomas shares valuable strategies when it comes to selling to developers.   ABOUT TOMAS REIMERS Tomas Reimers is the CPO and co-founder of Graphite, the a16z and Anthropic-backed AI code review platform that Cursor acquired in December 2025. Previously, he was an engineer at Facebook. Passionate about advancing developer velocity, Tomas holds a BS in Computer Science from Harvard University.   Unblocked: The context engine your coding agents are missing. Give your coding agents the context your best engineers have. Your agents can read code, but they don’t know how your team works. Rules and MCPs give access to information but not understanding. That’s why you still have to tell them where to look and what to look for. Unblocked gives your agents the history, conventions, and decisions behind your code so they generate mergeable output without the back and forth. It automatically surfaces the right context for every task, so agents stay on track without the set up tax or the correction loops. getunblocked.com/elc   SHOW NOTES: The origin story behind Graphite (1:05) Signs that it’s time to quit your job / found a company (4:03) How Tomas & his co-founders knew it was time to break up with their jobs (5:40) Understand what leaving your job will mean career-growth wise (7:33) Embracing regret minimization (9:28) Pros & cons of developing in blue ocean vs. red ocean areas as a founder (11:49) Strategies for determining what software to build / how is software dev evolving (14:00) Tomas’s framework for determining bets (15:50) Recommendations for selling as a founder (17:52) Identifying if sales isn’t working or if product market fit is off (20:35) Using customer insights to experiment & make a PMF pivot (23:05) Why developers don’t want to be sold to, they want to be taught (24:42) How to apply teaching vs. selling into early GTM strategy (27:20) Utilizing demonstrations to gain developer buy in & trust (29:24) What Tomas is looking forward to in Graphite’s future / software dev in general (32:04) Rapid fire questions (33:34) LINKS AND RESOURCES The Mom Test - Rob Fitzpatrick’s quick, practical guide that will save you time, money, and heartbreak. Founding Sales - The Startup Sales Handbook - rhe distillation of Pete Kazanjy’s experience at his first software startup, TalentBin going from a founder with a product marketing and product management background to early sales guy, early sales manager, and eventual post-acquisition sales leader at Monster Worldwide in addition to his later experience founding Modern Sales, the nation’s largest sales operations, enablement, and leadership community. Thinking in Bets: Making Smarter Decisions When You Don't Have All the Facts - Annie Duke, a former World Series of Poker champion turned business consultant, draws on examples from business, sports, politics, and (of course) poker to share tools anyone can use to embrace uncertainty and make better decisions.   This episode wouldn’t have been possible without the help of our incredible production team: Patrick Gallagher - Producer & Co-Host Jerry Li - Co-Host Noah Olberding - Associate Producer, Audio & Video Editor https://www.linkedin.com/in/noah-olberding/ Dan Overheim - Audio Engineer, Dan’s also an avid 3D printer - https://www.bnd3d.com/ Ellie Coggins Angus - Copywriter, Check out her other work at https://elliecoggins.com/about/ Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

  7. May 7

    Applying Agentic AI to the Supply Chain, Building Systems to Withstand Chaos, and Leveraging your Curiosity w/ Pooja Brown @ Inventry.ai

    In this episode of Engineering Founders, Pooja Brown (Founder @ Inventry.ai) shares her founder journey and insights on balancing being a founder & technologist, especially within the mid-market manufacturing industry. We cover why founders need to lead with curiosity as they seek out customer problems to solve, strategies for solving complex problems related to supply chain, and strategies for selling your products. Pooja also dissects important fundraising tactics, how to identify areas that AI tooling can enhance within your business, reading customer signals, and bolstering your engineering skills by leveling up business capabilities.   ABOUT POOJA BROWN Pooja Brown is a technology executive and founder focused on building AI-native platforms that power real-world operations across industries. She has led engineering at scale at companies like Stitch Fix and DocuSign, building systems that combine data, workflows, and machine learning to drive everything from personalization and supply chain to digital agreements used by hundreds of thousands of businesses.Her experience spans multiple verticals including retail, enterprise SaaS, education technology, and real estate, where she has consistently focused on embedding AI directly into core business systems rather than layering it on top. Pooja is currently the founder and CEO of Inventry.ai, where she is building autonomous AI agents that help mid-market manufacturers run procurement and supply chain operations more effectively. Across her career, she has focused on turning complex operational data into systems that don’t just generate insights, but actually drive decisions and execution.   ABOUT INVENTRY.AI Inventry.ai swiftly detects time sensitive supply chain issues, prioritizes the risk, automates resolutions, and facilitates buyer-supplier collaboration, keeping your supply chain running smoothly and your customers satisfied.   SHOW NOTES: What shaped Pooja’s entrepreneurship journey & background (3:20) Looking for the right problem & leading with curiosity (6:47) Insights on solving problems related to supply chain (10:42) Building systems for chaos / complexity (12:46) Adopting a beginner’s mindset when solving complex problems (15:40) Dissecting fundraising strategies & decision making (19:28) Emerging business patterns that eng leaders need to capitalize on (26:32) Understanding how customers make decisions on what products to adopt (29:09) Selling strategies for the mid-market manufacturing industry (37:08) Integrating AI tools to augment current business capabilities (41:03) Engineering skills that enhance sales processes (44:43) Communication frameworks when working with customers (47:21) Rapid fire questions (50:06)   This episode wouldn’t have been possible without the help of our incredible production team: Patrick Gallagher - Producer & Co-Host Jerry Li - Co-Host Noah Olberding - Associate Producer, Audio & Video Editor https://www.linkedin.com/in/noah-olberding/ Dan Overheim - Audio Engineer, Dan’s also an avid 3D printer - https://www.bnd3d.com/ Ellie Coggins Angus - Copywriter, Check out her other work at https://elliecoggins.com/about/ Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

  8. Apr 23

    The Product Paradigm Shift: How LiveKit Navigated High Stakes Scaling Challenges to Build the Future of Voice-First AI Interfaces w/ Russ d’Sa

    Russ d’Sa (CEO & Co-founder @ LiveKit) joins the show to deconstruct the "Product Paradigm Shift" toward voice-driven interfaces and agent-centric UX . We dive into LiveKit’s high-stakes scaling lessons: from powering OpenAI and Character AI’s voice mode, how they navigated real time bottlenecks to hit the next level of scale, the architectural necessity of a multi-cloud strategy, and the foundations of a co-founder relationships that can effectively blend engineering & business strategy. ABOUT RUSS D’SA Russ is a startup vet who founded his first company in the 2007 YC batch and was the 2nd frontend engineer hired at Twitter, Russ d'Sa now leads voice AI unicorn LiveKit. They're the backbone of ChatGPT Voice Mode, Salesforce Agentforce, Grok, and roughly 30% of US 911 calls. ABOUT LIVEKIT LiveKit is an open source framework and cloud platform for building voice, video, and physical AI agents. It provides the tools you need to build agents that interact with users in realtime over audio, video, and data streams. Agents run on the LiveKit server, which supplies the low-latency infrastructure (including transport, routing, synchronization, and session management) built on a production-grade WebRTC stack. This architecture enables reliable and performant agent workloads. SHOW NOTES: The product paradigm shift toward voice-driven apps and natural human-computer interfaces (2:30) Voice-apps in practice: How these trends impact the strategy of product building today (5:18) Early adopters: Why legacy industries like healthcare use voice AI (7:41) Reevaluating and building product experiences optimized for AI agents (12:38) How AI trends will impact roadmaps and Go To Market ****(18:02) The origin of LiveKit: Building real-time infra for the pandemic (20:53) The OpenAI moment: Powering the fastest-growing consumer app (23:32) Scaling with OpenAI: Navigating the challenges of balancing time-to-market with system design (25:23) The Character AI outage: Solving cross-continental state sync and hitting the next level of scale (28:46) The problem: When telemetry breaks first: Managing analytics and logging for millions of concurrent AI sessions (31:50) Architecting for resilience: Multi-cloud from day one and why treating infra as a utility matters (33:08) Co-founder dynamics: Blending engineering strategy with business outcomes (37:01) Rapid Fire Questions (40:37) This episode wouldn’t have been possible without the help of our incredible production team: Patrick Gallagher - Producer & Co-Host Jerry Li - Co-Host Noah Olberding - Associate Producer, Audio & Video Editor https://www.linkedin.com/in/noah-olberding/ Dan Overheim - Audio Engineer, Dan’s also an avid 3D printer - https://www.bnd3d.com/ Ellie Coggins Angus - Copywriter, Check out her other work at https://elliecoggins.com/about/ Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

See All (65)

Trailer

5
out of 5
3 Ratings

About

The show for engineering leaders making the leap to start their own company! We dive into the stories, pivotal moments and critical insights from former eng leaders turned founders, that helped them take those early leaps to launch their own company!

Information

  • Creator
    The Engineering Leadership Community (ELC)
  • Years Active
    2022 - 2026
  • Episodes
    65
  • Rating
    Clean
  • Show Website
    Engineering Founders