• S12 Bonus: David Sztykman, Hydrolix
    Jan 21 2026

    David Sztykman lives in Paris, but used to live in New York for a time. He has always been into video, streaming and photography. For the latter, as a kid, his Dad had a film developing lab in their basement, so he spent many hours doing that before digital changed it all. As a student, he used to tinker with open source video streaming libraries, and eventually worked for Alkamai, responsible for the streaming media for Europe (think the Olympics or Super Bowl). Outside of tech, he has 2 kids and they like to do a lot of legos together. But in general, they are outside kids so usually, they like to get out of the house and do active things.

    In his prior role, David was consistently alerted about poor performance on the video streaming. He started to dig into the data streaming portion of, to be alerted on shifts in the stream itself. After a few other opportunities, he was approached to build real time CDN observability, for distributed infrastructure.

    This is the creation story of Hydrolix.

    Sponsors

    • TECH Domains
    • Mezmo
    • Braingrid.ai
    • Alcor
    • Equitybee
    • Terms 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://hydrolix.io/
    • https://www.linkedin.com/in/davidsztykman/


    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
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    30 minutos
  • S12 E2: Pukar Hamal, SecurityPal AI
    Jan 20 2026

    Pukar Hamal was born in 1991, and is originally from Katmandu, Nepal. He grew up with no plumbing and no electricity, prior to moving to the states to grow up in Queens. Eventually, he moved to the Bay Area to attend Stanford, and fell in love with the area and the forward thinking culture. Outside of tech, he's been married for a few years. He enjoys listening to podcast about tech, finance, and economics, along with playing tennis every now and again.

    In his past venture, Pukar was on the one yard line for making a deal on his company. Before it could close, his team was hit with a security due diligence questionnaire that halted the process. Having that experience drove him to build something to speed up the execution and experience of customer assurance.

    This is the creation story of SecurityPal AI.

    Sponsors

    • TECH Domains
    • Mezmo
    • Braingrid.ai
    • Alcor
    • Equitybee
    • Terms 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.securitypalhq.com/
    • https://www.linkedin.com/in/pukarhamal


    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
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    26 minutos
  • S12 Bonus: Harman Narula, Canary Technologies
    Jan 15 2026

    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 Domains
    • Mezmo
    • Braingrid.ai
    • Alcor
    • Equitybee
    • Terms 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
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    20 minutos
  • S12 Bonus: Niko Papademetriou, Qu
    Jan 14 2026

    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 Domains
    • Mezmo
    • Braingrid.ai
    • Alcor
    • Equitybee
    • Terms 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
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    34 minutos
  • S12 E1: Dylan Ratcliffe, Overmind
    Jan 13 2026

    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 Domains
    • Mezmo
    • Braingrid.ai
    • Alcor
    • Equitybee
    • Terms 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
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    33 minutos
  • Season Favorite - Sam Partee, Arcade.dev
    Jan 6 2026

    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

    • Incogni
    • NordProtect
    • Vention
    • CodeCrafters 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 Scale
    • Paddle.com
    • Sema Software
    • PropelAuth
    • Postman
    • Meilisearch


    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
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    22 minutos
  • Season Favorite - Jens Neuse, Wundergraph
    Dec 30 2025

    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

    • Incogni
    • NordProtect
    • Vention
    • CodeCrafters 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 Scale
    • Paddle.com
    • Sema Software
    • PropelAuth
    • Postman
    • Meilisearch


    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
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    33 minutos
  • S11 E30: Brandon Card, Terzo
    Dec 23 2025

    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

    • Incogni
    • NordProtect
    • Vention
    • CodeCrafters 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 Scale
    • Paddle.com
    • Sema Software
    • PropelAuth
    • Postman
    • Meilisearch

    Links

    • 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
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    22 minutos