Jon Perl is originally from Virgina, growing up on a computer. Mom is an architect and Dad is an electrical engineer. Jon picked up programming at his first job, when he automated a companies manifest creation. He has been passionate about programming ever since. Now, he lives in Seattle with his wife, young family, and dog. He enjoys all that Seattle offers, including the touristy stuff, and finding places for his daughter to pick up leaves.

At his previous company, Jon observed a failure in systems that required his customers to fall back to manual processes. The pain of this situation led him and his current co-founders to have a strong desire - to make sure something like this never happened again.

This is the creation story of QA Wolf.

Sponsors

• Speakeasy
• QA Wolf
• SnapTrade

Links

• https://www.qawolf.com/
• https://www.linkedin.com/in/perljon/

Nigel Smart is from Britain, but currently lives in Belgium. He has a PhD in mathematics, but headed into the world of cryptography early on. He has started a few companies in the past, both of which have successfully exited, one to Coinbase. But outside of technology, he loves to cycle and attend concerts. When asked about food, he said he loves all food - as long as it doesn't include eggplant.

Very early on, Nigel got involved with one of his current ventures. As an advisor, he stated to spend more and more time with the company, supporting it through its many iterations in building next level encryption for application builders - and doing so through open source.

This is the creation story of Zama.

Sponsors

• Speakeasy
• QA Wolf
• SnapTrade

Links

• https://www.zama.ai/
• https://www.linkedin.com/in/nigel-smart-3196b85/

Michael Louis grew up in South Africa, spending the first 25 years of his life there. From a young age, and being surrounded by an entrepreneurial family, he was always curious. He got into robotics and coding early, and stayed competitive and active as he grew up. Outside of tech, he loves to play squash, workout in CrossFit, run, and do anything where he has an opponent. Also, per South Africa culture, he enjoys spending time with friends at any social event involving drinking.

Michael built a successful eCommerce company, where you could order different items from stores and have them delivered. Because the margins in eCommerce are low, he and his team wanted to figure out how they could optimize their operation using machine learning. The tools out there weren't ideal, and the process was hard - but they did revolutionize their operation. Post exit, he decided to build a solution that made this optimization process easier.

This is the creation story of Cerebrium.

Sponsors

• Speakeasy
• QA Wolf
• SnapTrade

Links

• https://www.cerebrium.ai/
• https://www.linkedin.com/in/michael-louis-94104a113/

Pablo Ruiz-Múzquiz has a background in physics and computer science. At some point, he decided to ditch the science and pursue open source, which is what got him started on his 20 year passion for tech. Outside of tech, he longs to feel like a useful member of society and engages in extracurricular projects to support this. He also is into traditional archery - IE wood bow and arrows - and finds joy in connecting with the old way of doing things. He also enjoys gardening and reading, of which, fantasy is one of his favorite genres.

Pablo built a company called Kaleidos, which aids in the creation of software solutions. They hold a core belief that there should be a close connection between designers and developers. What they found in the tooling to support these disciplines is that they weren't built to embrace this concept. So, they decided to incubate a product, and make it open source.

This is the creation story of Penpot.

Sponsors

• Speakeasy
• QA Wolf
• SnapTrade

Links

• https://penpot.app/
• https://www.linkedin.com/in/pruizmuzquiz/
• https://elenya.net/
• https://kaleidos.net/

William Neill had an interesting childhood in New Zealand, rooted in being an entrepreneur. As a kid, he helped write business plans with his parents, or build makery stuff for projects. Living this type of childhood, combined with the creativity of music, it started a lifelong trend of building businesses and products. Rooted in his love for being an entrepreneur, he has always longed for a flexible life, to keep him present for his young family, and to allow for the option to travel. He loves spending time with his kids on the beach, and exploring the country as a family.

William and his co-founder met in a coffee shop in London. As they were chatting about prior projects, they figure out there was a lot of overlap in the things they were interested in. Eventually, they returned and built some solutions together - and off the back of a prior wishlist project, they decided to make an online shopping cart to end all others.

This is the creation story of Basket.

Sponsors

• Speakeasy
• QA Wolf
• SnapTrade

Links

• https://www.trybasket.com/
• https://www.linkedin.com/in/willneill/

Rohith Varanasi grew up in Jersey and had a chill childhood, playing videos games and sports from a young age. He wanted to learn how to build a video game, and upon googling it, decided he should build a website first. At that point.. he was hooked on coding. He got into jailbreaking the playstation and writing real code to mod games. Eventually, he got into hackathons and ended up building a web browser based on SMS called Cosmos - which went viral. Outside of tech, he is into paddle, loves going to the gym, and hanging with his girlfriend and their 1 year old cat.

Ro and his co-founder have been building a bunch of different consumer products. The latest product they built allows people to earn in game rewards by walking, and do so in a non-deterministic way. Under the hood, they are using generative AI to create endless outcomes, and optimal replay-ability.

This is the creation story of Block Party.

Sponsors

• Speakeasy
• QA Wolf
• SnapTrade

Links

• https://blockparty.game
• https://www.linkedin.com/in/brohith/

Jason Harbert grew up in the middle of nowhere, Ohio. He got into video games, which led him into programming... which led him to Linux and internet security and joining the hacking club. He studied computer science at the University of Cincinnati, but left his senior year to hit the startup scene in the Bay Area. Outside of tech, he lives in Ohio, and is married with a 13 month old son. He loves to travel, and spend time with his family, trying new restaurants.

Jason and his co-founder, Ben, were having a beer, coming out of their prior startup life. Over the beer, Ben was sharing some stories about tight warehouse space and product distribution. They started to ask the question - how can you add flexibility to warehousing? They decided to set out and build something to create this solution.

This is the creation story of Flowspace.

Sponsors

• Speakeasy
• QA Wolf
• SnapTrade

Links

• https://flow.space/
• https://www.linkedin.com/in/jason-harbert/

Today, we are releasing another episode for Cybersecurity Awareness month, in our series entitled the Haunted House of API’s, sponsored by our friends at Traceable AI. In this series, we are building awareness around API’s, their security risks – and what you can do about it. Traceable AI is building One Platform to secure every API, so you can discover, protect, and test all your API's with contextual API security, enabling organizations to minimize risk and maximize the value API's bring to their customers.

Today’s episode is titled A Portal to the Beyond: Securing Gen AI and other Third-Party APIs in Your Applications, with Allison Averill. Developers are building exciting new features with Gen AI, often leveraging 3rd party APIs. Doing this isn’t new, but are these integrations secure? These APIs open a portal to the beyond – and introduce supply chain risk to your applications. Allison is a Generative AI and product management expert at Traceable, and she will explore the risks lurking in generative AI and other 3rd party APIs, sharing best practices for securing these integrations, so you can ensure they don’t become the stuff of security horror stories.

1. How are application developers leveraging 3rd party APIs today, and how is the landscape changing?
2. How do third-party APIs introduce risks to applications and what are some common mistakes organizations make when integrating with third party APIs?
3. How are generative AI APIs different from other third party APIs? What unique risks do they introduce?
4. Have you encountered any 'nightmare' scenarios where an insecure third-party API caused a security incident?
5. What best practices should organizations follow to ensure secure integrations?
6. How can organizations balance the need for innovation with the necessity of maintaining strict security controls when working with external partners?

Sponsors

• Traceable

Links

• https://www.traceable.ai/
• https://www.linkedin.com/in/allisonaverill/