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Latest posts from Code Story | Startup Podcast for Technical Founders

Building Real-Time ML Infrastructure: How Varant Zanoyan Turned Airbnb's Internal Tools into Zipline AI

Varant Zanoyan spent years building machine learning infrastructure at Airbnb before realizing the real bottleneck wasn't the models themselves—it was the data pipelines. We dive into how he turned that insight into Zipline AI, a feature and embedding platform that's solving one of the hardest problems in modern ML infrastructure.

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From Firefighting to AI-Powered Database Reliability: How NeverBlink Hit $1M ARR in 18 Months

Itamar Syn-Hershko built NeverBlink AI by doing what many successful founders do—solving his own painful problems first. After years of emergency database calls at his consulting agency, he and his team turned their internal tools into a product that reached $1M ARR in just 18 months. Here's how he navigated the messy journey from MVP to platform.

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From Security Platform Pivot to Enterprise GenAI Governance: Steven Walchek's Journey Building Liminal

Steven Walchek's path to founding Liminal wasn't a straight line—it was more like hitting every branch on the way down from the startup tree. But that's exactly what gave him the insight to build the enterprise GenAI governance platform that regulated companies desperately need.

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Why AI's Future Isn't in the Cloud: OpenInfer's Play for Local, Sovereign Inference

Behnam Bastani built the infrastructure that powers Meta's VR ecosystem and Roblox's AI moderation at scale. Now he's tackling a bigger problem: how to bring AI inference anywhere, on any hardware, without sacrificing performance. We sat down with him to explore why the future of AI isn't in centralized cloud compute—it's distributed, local, and fundamentally different from what we're building today.

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The Token Winter Is Coming: Why AI Hype Doesn't Equal Business Value

Dave Garcia spent years chasing AI before stepping back to ask the real question: what problems are we actually solving? In this episode, the Pensero co-founder breaks down why measuring AI impact—not just adoption—is the key to building something that actually matters in the tech management space.

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Building Production-Grade Apps Without the AI Roulette: Rickard Hansson's Deterministic Approach to AI Development

Rickard Hansson is back on Code Story with a bold new vision for AI-powered app development. After building Weavy, he's now tackling the core problem with today's AI builders: they're gambling on probabilistic models to do deterministic work. With Gainable, he's flipped the script entirely—moving the LLM earlier in the pipeline and letting a compiler handle the actual coding.

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From Microscopes to AI: How Nyad AI is Automating Biology to Protect Our Water

Virginia Szepietowski discovered a hidden crisis in wastewater treatment: operators have been using the same microscope-based methods since the 1970s to protect our waterways. Now, she's building Nyad AI to automate this critical process—and her journey from law school to water tech reveals surprising lessons about MVP simplicity, customer obsession, and hiring for grit.

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The App-Aware Illusion: Why "Boring" Infrastructure Might Be Your Secret Weapon

Richard Luna, founder of Protected Harbor, challenges the tech industry's obsession with cutting-edge solutions. His unconventional take? Sometimes the most valuable infrastructure work isn't flashy—it's fundamental, application-aware, and unglamorous.

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The Freelance Marketplace Problem Nobody's Talking About: Why Enterprises Are Ditching Traditional Platforms

Traditional freelance marketplaces like Upwork and Fiverr weren't built for enterprise workflows. Danny Gal, CEO of Proteams, is solving this by creating managed engineering teams that actually scale with large global organizations—and he's doing it profitably from day one.

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The Real-Time Scaling Tax: How AnyCable Solved the WebSocket Problem That Kills Monolithic Performance

WebSockets are supposed to power interactive, real-time experiences—but they come with a hidden cost. Irina Nazarova, CEO of Evil Martians and co-founder of AnyCable, explains why traditional monolithic architectures break under WebSocket load, and how decoupling the real-time layer became the solution that changed everything.

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