Meghan Joyce comes from a long line of people living life to the fullest. She takes a lot of influence from her grandmother, who was an entrepreneur, making and selling dresses in the early 1900's, influencing her to take a hold of every moment in life and capitalize on the time you have. She's led groups at Uber and Oscar, prior to starting her current venture. But outside of tech, she is the mother of 3 children. Her favorite hobby is to spend time with the people she loves, meeting them where they are. But when she has spare time to herself, she enjoys being in nature, hiking or walking on a beach, and staying active.

Meghan was sitting on a bed in Amsterdam, and experienced a problem with parental technology (IE a breast pump) that was keeping her from running things at Uber. While sitting on hold with the company, trying to get another one available, she started to wish she had a solution that would help her with this, while she attended her meetings at Uber.

This is the creation story of Duckbill.

Sponsors

• Unblocked
• TECH Domains
• Mezmo
• Braingrid.ai

Links

• https://getduckbill.com/
• https://www.linkedin.com/in/meghanvjoyce/

Today we have a special guest and author on the Code Story podcast, Steve Brown. Steve is a former DeepMind futurist, and recently published a book called The AI Ultimatum: Preparing for a World of Intelligent Machines and Radical Transformation. In the book, he provides a step by step framework to guide leaders in identifying use cases for AI, turning it into business value, and obtaining buy in from employees.

In our conversation, Steve is going to elaborate on why AI is a teammate (not a threat), the top AI rollout mistakes, leadership and management tactics that need to go, and much more.

Questions:

• What led you to write this book? Ultimately, what were you trying to accomplish?
• We often hear that AI is coming for our jobs, but you argue it’s actually our newest teammate. Can you elaborate on this more?
• Let's double back on something you said, around the flavors of agents. What are those 3 different flavors of agents?
• Over time, leaders can fall into operating out of their experience - IE assumptions about a particular endeavor. With the advent of AI, what assumptions need to be retired, and what needs to replace them?
• In the same vane as the last question, you mention that old-school management fails in the age of AI. What do you mean by this, why does it fail and what needs to be changed?
• In the book, you talk about the AI wins you can use today, effectively pointing at immediate impact teams can feel from using AI. Can you talk to 2-3 of the most important ones?
• Can you explain why reinvention beats reduction? If this is the case, how can leaders and employees move into this way of thinking?
• Today, people are trying to rollout AI and getting it wrong - from the startup to the enterprise. What are the top AI rollout mistakes for companies to avoid?

Sponsors

• Unblocked
• TECH Domains
• Mezmo
• Braingrid.ai

Links

• The AI Ultimatum: Preparing for a World of Intelligent Machines and Radical Transformation
• https://beacons.ai/aifuturist
• https://www.stevebrown.ai/
• https://www.linkedin.com/in/futuresteve/
• https://www.linkedin.com/company/aitransformation/
• https://www.youtube.com/@futureofai

Catalina Turlea is originally from Romania, growing up in the countryside there. Post getting her bachelors, she moved to Austria for her masters, and landed in Germany for 13 years. She is married with a 3 year old daughter and many, many pets. She loves to spend time with her family, in nature and the mountains. She used to do a lot of sports, but being a startup founder doesn't really allow for as much running or hiking. She also is into calligraphy, which she calls her hidden superpower.

Catalina has been building products for 14 years, and recently was running a small tech consultancy for startups. What she observed was that a lot of products contained an AI feature, but the "feature" was based on a prompt, didn't work well, and wasn't a good fit for the users. Eventually, she and her co-founder realized they saw the same problem, and built a platform to support products teams in building valuable AI features.

This is the creation story of Lovelaice.

Sponsors

• Unblocked (https://getunblocked.com/codestory)
• TECH Domains (https://get.tech/codestory)
• Mezmo (https://mezmo.com/codestory)
• Braingrid.ai (https://braingrid.link/code-story)

Links

• https://lovelaice.com/
• https://www.linkedin.com/in/catalinaturlea/

Dr. Aqib Rashid was born and raised in London. He spent a lot of time around computers and tech growing up, and his parents pushed him towards becoming an expert in a discipline, being a positive influence on society. But he maintained his balance in life by playing sports, which inspired him to want to lead a team in the future. But outside of tech, he is a Dad to a one year old boy. He enjoys spending time with him outdoors, and finds that the real beauty in life is watching him grow up.

In Sept 2023, Aqib had completed his PhD around the subject of using AI to detect malware. His current venture was looking at how to implement this sort of approach into their products. Quickly, he got to work building a new product to detect malware in your files.

This is Dr. Rashid's the creation story of Glasswall.

Sponsors

• Unblocked
• TECH Domains
• Mezmo
• Braingrid.ai

Links

• https://www.glasswall.com/
• https://www.linkedin.com/in/aqibrashid/

David Matalon grew up in Great Neck, outside of New York City. He's always been interested in tech, way back in the early days of PCs, DOS, Windows and even Novell. In fact, he was the high school kid with an IT Consulting business on the side (yes, he wore a beeper to school). He graduated from NYU, and started his first company Offyx. Outside of tech, he is married with 4 kids. When asked about what he does for fun, he says that enjoys the all compassing nature of work and family life.

David's whole career has been centered around helping companies deliver distributed applications. In most of recent history, virtual desktops or VDI has been the de facto solution for businesses, with lots of issues and pains baked in. David and his team heard the cries of their customers, and decided to build a better solution - one, with a blue border.

This is the creation story of Venn.

Sponsors

• Unblocked
• TECH Domains
• Mezmo
• Braingrid.ai

Links

• https://www.venn.com/
• https://www.linkedin.com/in/davidmatalon/

Today, we are dropping another episode in our "chats" series, specifically on the Founder side, - hearing from those scaling the companies themselves.

In this episode, we are talking with Vadim Dedov, CEO at Catchers. Vadim is going to walk us through what problem he wanted to solve with Catchers, and how his product development journey took him through architectural decisions, product optimization, team building and more.

Questions

• Before we talk about Catchers, I’d love to understand you a bit better.
• What experiences or responsibilities earlier in your life shaped how you think about work, systems, and accountability today?
• What problem were you dealing with before Catchers existed? Not as a product idea yet, but as a real operational pain you kept running into.
• At what point did you realise this couldn’t be solved with people, spreadsheets, or manual coordination anymore and that technology was the only way forward?
• How did Catchers actually start taking shape as a product? What was the very first version you built, and what did “good enough” mean in a business where mistakes affect people’s income and compliance?
• How long did it take to get to something usable, and what constraints defined your MVP?
• Looking back, what were the most important trade-offs you made early on?
• Things you consciously postponed or simplified, knowing they might come back later.
• Let’s zoom in on the product itself. What is the core product insight behind Catchers — the thing you believe differentiates it from a typical HR or staffing platform?
• How did your thinking about architecture evolve as scale increased? Was there a moment when you had to stop moving fast and redesign parts of the system properly?
• How did you approach building your core team around such a complex, operations-heavy product? What qualities mattered most in the people you trusted with this system?
• Can you share a decision that didn’t go as planned and how you and your team dealt with the consequences?
• When you step back and look at what you’ve built today, what are you most proud of not in terms of features, but in terms of reliability, impact, or how the system holds under pressure?
• As you look ahead, how do automation and AI change the way you think about workforce platforms — and what advice would you give to someone building infrastructure-heavy products today?

Sponsors

• Unblocked (https://getunblocked.com/codestory)
• TECH Domains (https://get.tech/codestory)
• Mezmo (https://mezmo.com/codestory)
• Braingrid.ai (https://braingrid.link/code-story)

Links

• https://catchersjob.com/
• https://www.linkedin.com/in/vadim-dedov-060b8935a/

Yoav Crombie was born and raised in Israel, serving in the army for 6 years as an engineer. He's been in the tech industry of 35 years, but doesn't see this work as work. He thoroughly enjoys what he is doing, especially with what is going on with AI right now, specifically around the quick creation process. Outside of tech, he has been married for 30 years. He loves water sports - kite surfing, regular surfing and paddle boarding. In addition, he loves to cycle, and was the Israeli road champion many years ago.

Yoav realized that companies were struggling that businesses were struggling to implement and adopt AI. In particular, he noticed that there was risk in publicly sharing your data. But alongside that, other companies wanted more control to how AI functioned for their country. So his company started to build a solution to solve both of these problems.

This is the creation story Pragatix, a product of AGAT Software.

Sponsors

• Unblocked (https://getunblocked.com/codestory)
• TECH Domains (https://get.tech/codestory)
• Mezmo (https://mezmo.com/codestory)
• Braingrid.ai (https://braingrid.link/code-story)

Links

• https://agatsoftware.com/
• https://agatsoftware.com/secure-ai-platform/ai-suite/ai-agent/
• https://www.linkedin.com/in/yoavcrombie/

Robert Brennan grew up in Boston and loved it so much that he ended up calling it home again. He spent time in New York between his bookend times, but he enjoys the chill pace and great music of Boston over the fast pace of the big apple. Outside of technology, he likes to read nonfiction and fiction, specifically science fiction. He loves music, and. Has been playing guitar for 25 years now. He frequents the live music scene around Boston, and even lives near a jazz club.

Robert observed the release of the first version of Devin a few years ago, which was very exciting to see agent driven development. But he and his co-founders were concerned with who was going to govern how this software was going to get written - and they hypothesized that it should be open source and community driven.

This is the creation story of OpenHands.

Sponsors

• Unblocked (https://getunblocked.com/codestory)
• TECH Domains (https://get.tech/codestory)
• Mezmo (https://mezmo.com/codestory)
• Braingrid.ai (https://braingrid.link/code-story)

Links

• http://openhands.dev/
• https://www.linkedin.com/in/robert-a-brennan