Varant Zanoyan was born in Washington DC, and grew up there and in Switzerland as well. He now lives in the Bay Area, specifically San Mateo. He's spent time at Palantir Technologies, as well as a stint building ML tech at AirBnB. But outside of tech, he loves the outdoors, tending to his garden of plants and vegetables. After taking a good hike, he's been digging a good uni pizza for dinner.

Prior to his current venture, Varant was working at AirBnB, developing Chronon - an open source data management engine, used to power AI/ML infrastructure. It was then that he and his team realized that building and managing data pipelines was a bottleneck for AI dev, and decided to spin into a standalone platform.

This is the creation story of Zipline AI.

Links

https://zipline.ai/

https://www.linkedin.com/in/vzanoyan

Current Sponsors:

• Tiger Data
• Protected Harbor
• Render
• Fitnexa
• Perplexity
• Entelligence

Checkout our Stacklist! https://stacks.codestory.co/

Hosted by Noah Labhart | Technical Founder & Startup Mentor.

Itamar Syn-Hershko has been a tech guy since he was a wee lad - IE he was teaching his kindergarten teachers how to use their computers. He learned how to "do stuff" tech wise through playing games back in the day. Back in the day he was one of the original developers on a document based database, as well as building a consulting company. Outside of tech, he is the father of 5 kids, all of them 7 and under... so his hands are quite full. That said, he does enjoy learning new things and traveling, when he has the time.

Itamar founded a boutique consulting agency, helping businesses succeed in data related projects. Like most smart agencies, they built tools to help them to do their jobs better. One of these tools became highly popular, and after 1.5 years of selling this tool to customers, they hit a $1m in annual recurring revenue.

This is the creation story of NeverBlink AI.

Sponsors

Tiger Data

Protected Harbor

Render

Links

https://neverblink.ai/

https://bigdataboutique.com/

https://www.linkedin.com/in/itamar-syn-hershko

Steven Walchek is originally from the Bay Area in California, but lives in Denver now. He's been there for 8 years with his family. He comes from a family of risk takers and entrepreneurs - for example, his Dad was a tech guy who did his thing and had success in Silicon Valley. Outside of tech he is a family man, married with kids. He enjoys doing anything he can with them, as they are his "why". He plays hockey, coaches hockey, and rides dirt bikes and mountain bikes.

Steven and his team built an application security platform, and ended up hitting every branch on the way down from the startup tree. When they sat down to figure out what they needed to do next, they combined their deep security tooling with a multi-modal platform, to enable complete AI governance in one central hub for regulated companies.

This is the creation story of Liminal.

Links

https://www.liminal.ai/

https://www.linkedin.com/in/swalchek/

Current Sponsors:

• Tiger Data
• Protected Harbor
• Render
• Fitnexa
• Perplexity
• Entelligence

Checkout our Stacklist! https://stacks.codestory.co/

Hosted by Noah Labhart | Technical Founder & Startup Mentor.

Drew Dillon is a tech founder and product leader, centered in the Bay Area. He is a person who likes to do a bit of everything, having an engineering background, but spending time in design, sales, and product management. He's been a part of many startups - Yammer being one of them, and several others from Y Combinator - along with being a consultant and fractional CPO. Outside of tech, he has 2 kids that take up most of his time. When he isn't on the sidelines of a soccer game, he enjoys woodworking and reading a good sci-fi book.

At a prior startup, Drew built a system using AI, which spit out something reasonably shaped. He took a look at the process he went through to create it, and realized that there are a ton of disparate parts, all separate from the shared organizational context - IE the "why" behind what is being built. He set out to change that, and built institutional memory and product judgement within AI agents.

This is the creation story of Brief.

Links

https://briefhq.ai/

https://mymoxieai.com/

https://www.linkedin.com/in/drewdil/

Current Sponsors:

• Tiger Data
• Protected Harbor
• Render
• Fitnexa
• Perplexity
• Entelligence

Checkout our Stacklist! https://stacks.codestory.co/

Hosted by Noah Labhart | Technical Founder & Startup Mentor.

Behnam Bastani is originally from Tehran, Iran. He left the country at the age of 17, setting out for Canada, where he got his Masters and PhD, before moving to California. He's always looked at things with the big picture in mind - whether that is artwork, wood work, engineering, etc. He's worked for Hewlett Packard, Meta and Roblox, before starting his current venture. Outside of tech, he loves to exercise and participate in water activities. For peace of mind, he gardens - experimenting with growing trees, replanting, and seeding.

Previously, Behnam went to Meta to pursue the future of wearables. He immediately realized that these wearables required a connected system. He started to ask the question, "why can't we use compute around use to fuel wearables?". Eventually, through stints at Meta and Roblox, he and his co-founder knew they wanted this type of system... and started with the infrastructure to enable it.

This is the creation story of OpenInfer.

Links

https://openinfer.io/

https://www.linkedin.com/in/bbastani/

Current Sponsors:

• Tiger Data
• Protected Harbor
• Render
• Fitnexa
• Perplexity
• Entelligence

Checkout our Stacklist! https://stacks.codestory.co/

Hosted by Noah Labhart | Technical Founder & Startup Mentor.

Dave Garcia is originally from Barcelona, and recently moved stateside, to the East Coast. He started coding when he was 7 years old, on a Commodore 64, in BASIC language - and when he programmed an infinite loop, he was hooked. He's been curious about machines, and fixing them - even when they weren't broken. Outside of tech, he is married with a young family. He enjoys playing video games - mostly Dad games these days - and loves to do anything on the water, like kite surfing.

A few years ago, Dave decided to take some time off to spend it with his family. When the AI boom started to happen, suddenly the technology became ubiquitous, where AI was changing the life of generations around him. After some investigation, he decided wanted to build something world changing, relevant to the world the knows - which is within the tech mgmt. world.

This is the creation story of Pensero.

Links

https://pensero.ai/

https://www.linkedin.com/in/davebcn

Current Sponsors:

• Tiger Data
• Protected Harbor
• Render
• Fitnexa
• Perplexity
• Entelligence

Checkout our Stacklist! https://stacks.codestory.co/

Hosted by Noah Labhart | Technical Founder & Startup Mentor.

Sharad Kumar lives in Pleasanton, California with his wife and 2 kids. He enjoys playing all musical instruments, and spending time with his family. He has a 2 year old daughter, and a 14 year old son into robotics. He is also passionate about giving back to the community, through their company foundation.

Harshit Omar lives in San Francisco, and is married with a 4 year old son. He used to be a street racer in his college days, loving fast cars and taking risk. Nowadays, he is a big marvel and comic book fan, along side his son. In fact, his son thinks he is Captain America, regularly wielding his shield and mask.

A fun fact about both of these gentlemen: this is their third company to work together in, their second startup, and their wives are sisters. So they are connected by wives, and united by startups.

In their previous startups, Sharad was leading sales and ops and Harshit was leading on the product side. When the company got acquired, it took them 8-9 months to integrate to a different cloud provider. They realized the model was broken, requiring expensive consulting services, and not convenient at all - and they wanted to figure out a better way.

This is the creation story of Fluidcloud.

Sponsors

• Unblocked (https://getunblocked.com/codestory)
• TECH Domains (https://get.tech/codestory)
• Mezmo (https://mezmo.com/codestory)
• Braingrid.ai (https://braingrid.link/code-story)
• Alcor (https://alcor.com/podcast)
• Equitybee (http://codestory.co/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.fluidcloud.com/
• https://www.linkedin.com/in/sharadkumar123/
• https://www.linkedin.com/in/harshito/

Current Sponsors:

• Tiger Data
• Protected Harbor
• Render
• Fitnexa
• Perplexity
• Entelligence

Checkout our Stacklist! https://stacks.codestory.co/

Hosted by Noah Labhart | Technical Founder & Startup Mentor.

Yoni Avital lives in Tel Aviv, Israel, with his wife and 3 older children. The oldest kid is a boy, so Yoni and he try to see as many football games as possible. He enjoys shopping with this girls, though it's cause he is their Dad, not because he enjoy shopping. He likes to travel, hike, and enjoys a nice white wine in warmer weather. His most memorable hike was at Yosemite, when he started at 4 am and came across a lot of wildlife.

Yoni was in the virtual desktop space in the past. What he and his team realized was that troubleshooting these virtual experiences were incredibly complicated. They started to build an enterprise task manager, to centralize a task management UI to control the endpoints. When customers started asking to use it daily, Yoni figured out they had something unique.

This is the creation story of ControlUp.

Sponsors

• Unblocked
• TECH Domains
• Mezmo
• Braingrid.ai

Links

• https://www.controlup.com/
• https://www.linkedin.com/in/yoavital/

Current Sponsors:

• Tiger Data
• Protected Harbor
• Render
• Fitnexa
• Perplexity
• Entelligence

Checkout our Stacklist! https://stacks.codestory.co/

Hosted by Noah Labhart | Technical Founder & Startup Mentor.