Richard Luna grew up in New York, never living more than 35 from where he grew up. He is a self proclaimed super nerd, and has been one since he was 13 - at which point, he started coding on an HP calculator. He's always been fascinated to know how things work, and how patterns repeat - which he has observed in the industry throughout the years. Outside of tech, he has 2 kids, one of which is in the business with him. He's an avid cyclist, traveling on average, 120 miles a week.

Richard has been a life long technologist, doing everything from desktops, to coding, to hosting. When he and his team saw the limits of what hosting can do, they dove into developer operations (DevOps), and found where they could add the most value - through SaaS infrastructure.

This is the creation story of Protected Harbor.

Sponsors

• Unblocked
• TECH Domains
• Mezmo
• Braingrid.ai

Links

• https://protectedharbor.com/
• https://www.linkedin.com/in/richardluna/

Danny Gal was born and raised in the UK, and now lives outside of London. He attended University in Nottingham... yep, the same one from Robin Hood. He LOVES challenges, and not just any challenges - the hard ones. He is done Iron Man competitions, ultra marathons, climbed Mount Kilimanjaro, and jumped out of a perfectly good plane, to name a few. He loves doing them once... and then never again. He's got 2 small kids, and believes in work hard, play hard.

Danny has worked in many roles in the past, across enterprises and the like. What he found most difficult was scaling himself. He got to talking with his now co-founder about building something around the idea of scaling oneself, and took it to some businesses to validate it. Once he saw them get excited about it, he figured they were onto something.

This is the creation story of Proteams.

Sponsors

• Unblocked
• TECH Domains
• Mezmo
• Braingrid.ai

Links

• https://proteams.com/
• https://www.linkedin.com/in/dannygal/

Timestamps

1:49 Guest introduction: Danny Gal's background, endurance challenges, and career journey

2:50 The core problem: Why traditional freelance marketplaces fail enterprise workflows

4:10 Origin story: Solving the bottleneck of "scaling oneself" in leadership

5:45 Validating the managed fractional team model with early enterprise clients

7:20 Self-serve bidding vs. managed delivery teams: Understanding the structural shift

9:30 Building a software-enabled harness for global engineering talent

12:15 How Chief Procurement Officers should structure external workforce strategies

15:00 Overcoming compliance, IP, and security hurdles in enterprise talent integration

18:10 Balancing speed, quality, and accountability in remote team management

20:30 Closing thoughts and where to connect with Danny Gal and Proteams

Sid Dixit is originally from central India, and came to the states for college. He is a technologist and builder at heart, serving in leadership roles across major companies. He has built and managed a fleet of satellites, built robots at Amazon, worked at Microsoft on surface tablets, and finally, at Google working on Android. Outside of tech in lives in the Bay Area with his wife and kids. He loves water sports, especially sailing. He spent 10 years in San Diego, and stumbled on the sport.

Sid's current company started in 1999, and was acquired in 2010. A few years ago, Sid joined the company, at a time when the company was wanting to rebuild its network from the ground up - starting with a powerful index.

This is Sid's creation story at iTradeNetwork.

Sponsors

• Unblocked
• TECH Domains
• Mezmo
• Braingrid.ai

Links

• https://www.itradenetwork.com/
• https://www.linkedin.com/in/siddharthdixit/

Timestamps

1:49 Guest introduction: Sid Dixit's career background across satellites, Amazon, and Google

2:42 Overview of iTradeNetwork and its reach across North America's perishable supply chain

4:04 The origin story of iTradeNetwork and why generic ERPs fail fresh food logistics

5:45 Upgrading legacy software from Systems of Record to Systems of Intelligence

6:37 The role of specialized AI agents: Forecasting, pricing, RFQs, and negotiations

7:23 Solving outdated market data: Building a real-time produce commodity index

8:55 Strategic MVP trade-offs: Narrowing focus to key commodities like strawberries and apples

10:19 Using AI to harmonize unstructured vendor product descriptions

15:00 Streamlining complex order intake workflows across buyers and sellers

22:00 Quantifying the macroeconomic impact of supply chain speed on global food waste

28:00 Future vision for AI agents in global supply chain management

31:30 Closing thoughts and where to learn more about iTradeNetwork

Emilie Schario grew up in New Jersey, outside of Newark, and attended college in the state. Currently, she lives in Columbus, Georgia, outside of Atlanta. She mentions she got into technology so she could easily follow her husband's career geographically, and has much success in the industry. Outside of tech, she is married with 3 boys (all 5 and under)... so there is a lot of wrestling in her household. She admits she is often quoted staying she does three things in her life - work, parenting, and if she is lucky, attends CrossFit 3 times a week. In fact, she finds a great sense of community in that world, and brings her kids with her to cheer her on.

A year and a half ago, Emilie's current venture was started, to build the open source orchestrator (or "harness") for AI coding agents. Through some shuffle in the early team, Emilie joined and started in building the fastest AI coding app on the market.

This is the creation story of Kilo.

Sponsors

• Unblocked
• TECH Domains
• Mezmo
• Braingrid.ai

Links

• https://kilo.ai/
• https://www.linkedin.com/in/emilieschario/

Timestamps

1:49 Guest introduction: Emilie Schario's background and career journey

2:51 Overview of Kilo Code as an open source agentic engineering harness

3:14 Differentiating through model freedom and supporting 500 plus AI models

3:58 Kilo Code founding story with Sid Sijbrandij and team history

4:42 Defining the evolving MVP for AI coding tools in a fast-moving market

5:25 The rapid shift from manual prompt engineering to autonomous loops

6:19 Trade-offs and resource allocation: Deprecating the Kilo App Builder

9:09 Modern AI product management: Why multi-year roadmaps no longer work

10:19 Shifting PM responsibilities from tracking engineers to setting context

13:00 The AI throughput illusion: Why expensive models don't equal shipped code

17:00 Measuring true engineering output and productivity in the AI era

21:00 Building resilient engineering cultures around AI coding platforms

23:30 Closing thoughts and where to learn more about Kilo Code

Bhaskar Sunkara grew up in Delhi, India, and moved to the states when he started working. He has lived in San Fransisco for several decades now, and has spent a lot of his professional life building systems (infrastructure, observability and now, analytics). His prior startup, AppDynamics, was eventually acquired by Cisco. In general, he stays curious about how things work, and likes to deconstruct systems to figure out how they work. Outside of tech, he is a big sports fan, enjoying football, baseball, cricket and basketball. In fact, he grew up watching Michael Jordan and the bulls.

Bhaskar noticed that business teams were drowning in dashboards, and as such, were not sure how to take the next steps in the business. He and his team realized that what people needed was not a retroactive view, but a proactive one - something more akin to a 24x7 analyst.

This is the creation story of Bicycle AI.

Sponsors

• Unblocked
• TECH Domains
• Mezmo
• Braingrid.ai

Links

• https://bicycle.ai/
• https://www.linkedin.com/in/bhaskarsunkara/

Timestamps

0:00 Intro and episode teaser on the limits of manual KPI monitoring

1:49 Guest introduction: Bhaskar Sunkara's background and AppDynamics experience

2:50 The core problem: Why revenue teams are drowning in dashboards

3:53 Origin story: Shifting from reactive dashboards to proactive AI analysts

4:36 Identifying target transactional verticals in retail, travel, and payments

6:02 Building the MVP: The 1-year journey and defining core capabilities

7:06 The three MVP pillars: Data connection, KPI definition, and dimensional search

8:33 Strategic trade-offs: Choosing vertical focus over generic horizontal BI

10:00 Harnessing LLMs and agentic AI for root-cause context

15:00 Establishing single-source-of-truth KPI definitions across departments

20:00 How AI agents integrate into existing enterprise data stacks

25:00 The future of autonomous analytics and proactive decision-making

Irina Nazarova grew up in Russia, and has lived in Portugal, Turkey, and now, San Francisco. She got a computer science degree, but felt like an imposter in the dev world. She went on to get an economics degree, and went to work for JP Morgan. Feeling little reward from her work, she read the lean startup and jumped out to build her own, and eventually joined Evil Martians. Outside of tech, she is a person who loves hiking, traveling, and old school film and photography. She enjoys working with old film, where there is high touch, and you have a limited number of takes.

Irina is the CEO of Evil Martians, a well known design and engineering consultancy. During the time of the company, she and the team noticed that websocket solutions don't guarantee delivery. They decided to build a new solution, one that does guarantee delivery, through automatic recovery of messages during connection issues.

This is the creation story of AnyCable by Evil Martians.

Sponsors

• Unblocked
• TECH Domains
• Mezmo
• Braingrid.ai

Links

• https://anycable.io/
• https://evilmartians.com/
• https://www.linkedin.com/in/nonconstant/

Ramiro Roballos grew up in Buenos Aires, and 6 or 7 years ago, moved to Miami and now lives in Buffalo, NY. His path to entrepreneurship has been different, as he started out as a musician, and then an orchestra conductor for several years. He eventually got into building how companies, starting his own music school and his own orchestra. Eventually, he got his MBA, worked for McKinsey and some startups before doing his own. Outside of tech, he is married to a cellist, and keeps playing music for fun. He also enjoys Formula 1, and watches every change he gets.

Ramiro went through the immigration process in the US, and was very disappointed in the quality of the service, given the importance of this process in determining a pillar life outcome. He felt there should be a better way, one that has excellent service and quality, and centralizes the expansive process into one platform.

This is the creation story of Tukki.

Sponsors

• Unblocked
• TECH Domains
• Mezmo
• Braingrid.ai

Links

• https://tukki.ai/
• https://www.linkedin.com/in/ramiro-roballos/