Engineering Founders

In this episode of Engineering Founders, we discuss something we’ve never covered before – why you SHOULDN’T be a founder! Travis McPeak (CEO & Co-Founder @ Resourcely) joins the pod to share his founder story and questions to ask yourself to truly validate if the founder lifestyle is right for you. We also address how to de-risk your org & understanding the two main kinds of risks; things to consider when raising capital, like going bootstrap vs. VC; balancing the wedge vs. long-term vision; and how to create a lifestyle that supports you as a founder.

Mariane Bekker, Founder & CEO @ Founders Bay, joins us to discuss the power of building your distribution channel and network within the startup community. She shares best practices for community building based on her own experiences developing Upward Recruiting and Founders Bay & why being able to articulate / communicate your company’s mission (the “why” of it all) is instrumental. Mariane shares her favorite networking conversation starters, tools for staying organized as your community expands, and pitfalls to avoid. She also dissects strategies for building an MVP in eight weeks and the role of distribution/community in accelerating that process.

In this episode, we cover bootstrapping & transitioning from side gig to full-time, featuring Darian Shimy, Founder @ FutureFund. He shares the origin story of FutureFund and how his children’s school experience inspired the company’s mission & product goals. He shares valuable tips on dealing with anxiety, betting on yourself, setting expectations, and making decisions as a founder. We also dissect how to iterate on your core marketing message & test pricing strategies throughout the different phases of FutureFund. Plus, considerations for scaling, fractional work engagements, hiring, and organization structure.

Today, we’re talking about the intersection between the software eng & hardware eng communities with Jessie Frazelle, Co-founder & CEO @ Zoo. She shares her founder story with us, along with what the early days of building a hardware and hardware-adjacent company looked like. Jessie dissects the differences between building in software & hard tech and what those differences mean when it comes to VC fundraising, identifying building models, and more. Additionally, we speculate on what the future of this world looks like, tips for selling a product in a sector you’re unfamiliar with, and how to identify / address unexpected areas of toil for your customers.

Lee Edwards, General Partner @ Root Ventures, shares insights on identifying your competitive edge, recommendations for differentiation, and how to make sure your business is venture-aligned. He discusses his transition from eng leadership into the venture capital world, sharing advice on ideation for early-stage founders who are still developing their product & deciding which version of an idea to pursue. Lee also shares how to navigate risks as a founder, tips for expanding your product’s niches, how generative AI growth will impact DevTool development, and how to maintain conviction when faced with discouragement head on.

Vidya Raman, Partner @ Sorensen Ventures, shares her best practices for developing a strong enterprise GTM strategy & why this is such a challenging thing to do as a new founder. We also dive into blindspots that highly technical founders may possess, balancing the technical aspects of founding with the anthropological side, product considerations when building for enterprise, timing new product releases, developing & articulating your product roadmap. Plus how to identify and build your “wedge,” & avoid becoming simply a point solution. We also cover how to tackle a common founder concern – honing your sales skills – and when to know it’s time to bring in a non-technical co-founder.

James Everingham, co-founder and former VP of Engineering @ Lightspark, joins our podcast to share his best tools for scaling yourself down – not up – as an engineering leader. He discusses his latest career move shifting down in scale and how that impacts your risk tolerance as a leader. We also cover some of James’ favorite leadership methods, including the Socratic method, principle-based decision-making, and creating narratives as a product / eng org goal-setting tool, plus how he’s employed those tools effectively throughout his career. We also address navigating the balance between process & anti-process, approaches to product planning & finding PMF, and adapting your communication style to work within a smaller vs. large org.

Scott Woody, co-founder and CTO @ Metronome, shares the story of how Metronome, a small startup, made the transition to quickly operate at a global scale while working with complex, public companies. He shares the origin story of Metronome and the roadmap of how they went from early-stage engineering to creating highly specialized teams & in-house experts. Additionally, we cover how to navigate the tension between infrastructure & product eng teams, creating a healthy relationship between finance & eng orgs, and recommendations for strategically considering pivoting business models.

Quinn Jacobson, Director of the Technical Entrepreneur Coaching Hub (TECH) @ Carnegie Mellon University, joins us to share best practices for implementing a successful execution strategy at deep tech startups. He draws from his own experience as a serial founder & former VPE, sharing strategies for building on technical expertise; driving product evolution from early concept results; finding your “ledge” & thinking of value creation in smaller, incremental steps. Plus we talk about the pitfalls new founders should avoid and the importance of listening! Quinn also shares how & why he transitioned into academia & why these recommendations will help new founders create disruptive, exciting products.

Jon Perl & Scott Wilson share the origin story of QA Wolf & deconstruct their best practices (and what to avoid) for early-stage cold outreach, how to add value to your cold email communications, and why experimenting with your cold outreach is important to early sales! We also dive into the story behind QA Wolf’s strategic move to incorporate services into their business strategy & tangible ways to add accountability measures that will help drive growth in the early days of your company.

Jorge Torres, CEO & Co-founder @ MindsDB, shares how his lifelong entrepreneurial spirit helped encourage him to pursue engineering & why an engineering background is an amazing asset for founders. He also shares valuable insights he has learned along the way, including why it’s important for founders to make plans in order to execute well, tips for creating alignment within your org, and strategically building a community approach within your product strategy.

Gaurav Oberoi, CEO & Co-founder @ Lexion shares about the research / EIR path from the Allen Institute for AI to founding Lexion. We talk about finding ideas in areas with poor implementation, how to actually shape “cool tech” into products, and tactical actions you can use to measure progress. Plus how to go from idea to action & optimize for fast time to value. Gaurav also shares how he defines “done” for products, creating a culture of velocity and strategic thinking & why happy customers are engaged customers.

How do you know if you’re actually solving a problem or building a product people actually want? Varun Mohan, CEO & Co-Founder @ Codeium, joins us to share the journey behind Codeium. We talk about determining the right problem / product to pursue. He shares his best frameworks for decision making, determining if it’s time to pivot, and ultimately testing your hypotheses. He also discusses the three main types of risks founders face & strategies to compete on “execution-risk.” Plus Varun shares tips for building your product with the future in mind, even if the technological capabilities aren’t there yet.

In this Engineering Founders episode, we sit down with James Campbell, CTO & Co-Founder @ Great Expectations, to discuss his founding journey, considerations for starting open source, making community-driven decisions, and navigating the tension between your product vision & product roadmap. We also cover the phases that Great Expectations has cycled through, balancing the role of personal biases when making product / business decisions, how making an open-source product impacts marketing decisions, and James’ best recommendations for building out the product function as a product-involved founder.

In this episode, Karan Talati (Co-founder & CEO @ First Resonance) joins us to discuss strategies for identifying a market opportunity and some of his favorite perspectives on product building. We cover what it’s like identifying something that may not be necessary now but will be in the future; how to assess / validate a hypothesis; frameworks for assessing emerging trends & pain points in order to develop a product; and navigating the balance between offering your customers breadth vs. depth with your product offering. Additionally, Karan shares how he approached building First Resonance’s product and recommendations for closing on customers who work in a mission-critical space.

Ramiro Berrelleza, Founder and CEO @ Okteto, shares how his company transitioned from an open-source project to a category-creating commercial product and repeatable sales model. He reveals the benefits & opportunities of open source and the potential for community buy-in. Plus strategies for creating a repeatable sales model, how open source projects can guide early-stage decisions, when to begin identifying / building customer personas, prioritization strategies for engineering resources, and recommendations for early-stage hiring, especially for your first marketing hire.

In this episode, Roni Dover, CTO @ Digma, shares the customer communication models and user interview tactics that can help shape your product, how to minimize biases from entering these conversations, the advantages of incorporating critical feedback alongside positive feedback, and how to leverage in-person conversations with your product’s audience. Roni also shares his experience as an introverted eng leader who needed to develop more extroverted traits as CTO and the frameworks that helped him find his voice. Additionally, we address how to grow your product for a specific audience, gaining more users, expanding your product, and more.

Paul Dix, Founder & CTO @ InfluxData, joins us to discuss how to handle the emotional aspects of the founding experience, strategies for engaging with developers & using community tools to build a dev-tool company, and recommendations for approaching open-source & licensable business strategies. Additionally, Paul shares advice based on his experience transitioning from the bootstrapping dream to seeking external funding.

In this episode, Jessica McKellar, CTO & Founder @ Pilot, shares her story as a serial founder and the lessons that can help you become a more impactful, strategic business contributor & eng leader. She reveals strategies for identifying your company’s ideal end state & the steps needed to achieve product-market fit, daily practices that help measure important metrics, business-building disciplines that need to be prioritized long term, and steps for creating positive collaboration between product, eng & design teams.

Rick Song, Co-founder & CEO @ Persona, shares the origin story of Persona & what it’s like founding a business in a highly competitive, ultra-regulated environment. He shares early-stage challenges of building an identity-based product, how his company sought to achieve micro goals alongside long-term goals, navigating the logical & emotional factors that influence taking a leap of faith, and building universality within Persona’s user network. Additionally, Rick reveals his best practices for building a scalable business, identifying what’s wrong quickly & pivoting, and how to be an execution-driven founder.

As the CTO & Co-Founder @ OctoML, Jared Roesch shares his experience building a ML company in a rapidly changing product market space. Jared also covers shifting from an open-source organization to a more product- and enterprise-focused business. We also discuss product & market strategies for ML businesses, optimizing your product for both high- and low-sophistication users, navigating a fast-paced industry, ML market participation predictions, and strategies for recruiting co-founders from academia.

On Freund, Co-founder & CEO @ Wilco, shares how the value of practice influenced the idea behind Wilco. We also cover what it’s like finding product-market fit within a new category, how to scale seemingly “unscalable” elements in your product, challenges faced while building out human-centric elements, and surprises you may encounter while scaling. On also shares his strategies for pivoting your go-to-market strategy based on evolving market factors or customers and why being able to adapt is one of the most important skills you can hone as a founder.

Buchi Reddy Busi Reddy, Co-Founder & CEO @ Levo.ai, joins us to reveal how lessons learned as an eng leader at AppDynamics and other Silicon Valley experiences provided him with the skills & inspiration to co-found Levo.ai. We cover considerations for building security-focused products as a start-up; finding product-market fit & securing your first customers; identifying your product’s champion & finding the data / narratives that support your product; and pricing strategies. Additionally, Buchi shares his personal story of navigating the personal & logistical considerations of attaining an H1-B visa, providing valuable insight for any immigrant founders.

We cover founder conviction & tips for engaging with investors with Mahima Chawla, Co-Founder & CEO @ Cocoon, who shares the origin story of her company, tips for creating clarity around the type of company you want to build, and how it’s addressing the problem of employee leave. Additionally, Mahima reveals the process behind early research, how she gained early design partners after user interviews, frameworks for collaborating between design & legal, identifying the ideal customer profile, and her method for delegating & determining where to invest her time as CEO & co-founder.

Charley Ho (Co-Founder & CTO) & Alexander Embiricos (Co-Founder & CEO) @ Remotion share their co-founder story, along with how they found, lost, and rediscovered product-market fit throughout their journey with Remotion. We cover what it’s like building in public & their decision to be transparent with their co-founder ups and downs. Additionally, Charley & Alexander share strategies for pivoting / iterating and communicating with stakeholders, while keeping your team up-to-date and engaged with pivots. We caught up 4x months after our interview to learn the results of their big pivots and PMF experiments - so this is one you want to listen to all the way to the end.

The trio of co-founders from Sleuth – Dylan Etkin, Founder & CEO; Don Brown, Co-Founder & CTO; and Michael Knighten, Co-Founder & COO share their unique experience founding a company with three co-founders & navigating the division of responsibilities with mutual trust / respect. We also cover the challenges & opportunities of moving to a small startup from a large, high-growth org; what Sleuth’s early-day decision-making process looked like; frameworks for avoiding the “at bat” trap while iterating; hidden work elements; paradigm shifts regarding deployment tracking; and more.

This episode features Lizzie Matusov, CEO & Co-Founder @ Quotient, who shares her unique founder journey – from Harvard’s dual-degree grad program & Innovation Lab to founding Quotient! She also reveals strategies for fundraising, including utilizing your relationship pipeline, incorporating story arcs into your pitch, overcoming pattern-matching bias, and how fundraising today is different than it used to be. We also cover Quotient’s major pivots, tips for not becoming too attached to your first idea & making space for new ideas, defining idea-mazing & its impact on your product, and developing clarity as a founder.

Arya Asemanfar, Co-Founder @ Runway, joins us to share how he transitioned from eng leader to co-founder & strategies for both pre & and post-product market fit! We also cover how to determine if you and your potential co-founder are a good match, core principles & primitives that inform Runway’s product strategy, why you should pay attention to how a product makes users feel, strategies for transitioning with ease throughout your org’s evolutions, and implementing learning loops in your org.

Tri Ahmad Irfan, Co-Founder & CTO @ Lumina, discusses his journey identifying large-scale problems in the SE Asian market and how they went from a Google form MVP to 1 million+ users! Additionally, we cover how to formulate / test / prove hypotheses about product-market fit, how Maslow’s hierarchy of needs informs product strategy, determining a potential customer’s willingness to pay, resources for researching consumer acquisition strategies, and his favorite lessons for early-stage founders.

In this episode, Ihar Mahaniok (Managing Partner @ Geek Ventures) lends his expertise from the venture capital / tech startup world to help demystify some of the early fundraising experience. Ihar shares his leadership journey and why he decided to go the VC route over an eng leader or founder path, deconstructs his unique investing angle, what qualities he looks for in founders, tips for transitioning to the pre-seed fundraising round, formulas for implementing SAFE caps when seeking investments, and much more.

Sean Stavropoulos, Co-Founder & CTO @ Boulevard, shares his founder journey and Boulevard’s unique role as a vertically integrated SaaS product! He reveals how he navigated the problem discovery phase early on & decided which features the company should prioritize based on financial impact. We also cover navigating company milestones, strategies for convincing investors to buy-in to your vertically integrated SaaS product, and the impact of COVID on Boulevard.

Chris Pruett, Co-Founder @ Jam, shares his leadership journey – transitioning from VPE @ LinkedIn to going all-in on Jam’s mission of entertaining curious minds. We also cover marketing & pitching lessons learned while introducing Jam at ComicCon, how audio storytelling creates an authentic, intimate experience for listeners; strategies for building consumer-based products vs. enterprise-based products; and more.

We talk with Sagar Batchu (Co-Founder @ Speakeasy) about his transition from engineering leader to founder, what it means to be a devex company, how he navigated finding a co-founder, and more! Co-hosted by Emma Tang & Roger Luo @ ELC Angels, we also cover shipping a product before funding and the ensuing pivots, building a developer-led startup, and attracting top talent for early-day hires.

Should I build B2C or B2B? Should we implement top-down or a bottoms-up sales strategy? How do we think about pricing? These are many of the dilemmas early founders face in the early stages. We sit down with Abi Noda to explore his experiences co-founding DX and Pull Panda and examine the differences, trade-offs, and considerations behind building for consumer vs. B2B, pricing, early sales, and product adoption strategies!

In this episode, we explore the story of Adam Oliner, CEO & Founder @ Graft and discuss his perspectives on building business models, considerations around early business strategy, best practices for activating your network (if you’re anti-networking), and lessons from their recent pre-seed round & product-building bias toward ease of use! Plus, we dive into what it's like to be a founder with young kids, the impact of family on day-to-day operations and company values!

We deconstruct the recently closed pre-seed fundraising experience of our friends Brian Guthrie & Aaron Erickson (co-founders of Orgspace). Brian & Aaron share their experience finding a co-founder and making the decision to leave their engineering leadership positions at big companies. Plus they share great advice on navigating the fundraising experience and dealing with rejection! Learn more about [Orgspace](http://orgspace.io/elc) and sign up for their JUST launched beta - [http://orgspace.io/elc](http://orgspace.io/elc)

What do you do when your idea is simply too early to market? Bradley Rothenberg (Founder/CEO @ nTopology) shares his journey from watching 3D printing’s potential go unutilized to attracting some of the biggest customers in the world. Plus, how to make customers care about your product, and why you should treat the market like a co-founder.

How do co-founders know when it’s time to pivot? And how do you make sure your team is on board with the new direction? Daniela Miao and Khawaja Shams (Co-Founders @ Momento) join us to talk about their experience pivoting from a consumer Social Fitness app to a B2B SaaS company. The technical co-founders share their story of starting with a team and not a product, establishing open communication, and getting feedback from the market.

How do you know when—or if—you’re ready to start a company? Michel Tricot (Co-Founder & CEO @ Airbyte) talks with us about how he found the confidence to make the leap from engineering leader to launching his own company. Michel provides insight on screening ideas, finding founder-market fit, the most important success factors for early startups, and building trust in an open-source data community.

This is the first episode of our new series “Engineering Founders” featuring software pioneer Anna Patterson (Founder & Managing Partner @ Gradient Ventures) who shares with us emerging trends & opportunities in AI/ML! We cover how to spot emerging trends, typical mistakes AI/ML companies & founders make, how product market fit/scaling is different vs. traditional software companies AND how to test and validate ideas in the early stages. Plus long-time listener Theo Gervet (ML Lead @ Relyance AI) joins us as a guest co-host!

This is 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! The leap from engineering leader to founder can be intimidating, filled with unknowns & requires almost a completely different mental model & skill set… But you don't have to do it alone! Thanks for climbing aboard our engineering founder's pirate ship!