Ben Lerner was a fan of tech growing up, along side being into math and science. Right out of school, he joined a startup called Data Nitro, which attempted to integrate python into excel. Ever since then, he has been jamming in the tech and startup world. Outside of tech, he married to a computational biologist. He enjoys padel, which is kind of like Pickleball meets Tennis, and of course ping pong. Though, with his full time job as a CEO, he often finds his hobby is going home to write code.

Ben realized that LLMs are really good at understanding code, leaps and bounds better than prior ML models. While he was at Google, he was also digging into how to apply LLMs to coding in general. Applying both of these things, he and his co-founders are seeing where this can be applied to the real world, starting with Snowflake compute.

This is the creation story of Espresso AI.

Sponsors

• Paddle.com
• Sema Software
• PropelAuth
• Postman
• Meilisearch
• Mailtrap
• .TECH Domains (https://get.tech/codestory)

Links

• https://espresso.ai/
• https://www.linkedin.com/in/espressoben/

Today, I'm talking with Kolton Andrus, CEO and Founder of Gremlin. You may remember previously when we spoke with Matt, the prior CTO of the company. Since that time frame, a lot has changed at the company, going through several arcs and foundational changes that are leading to not only assessing weaknesses in your infrastructure, but walking you through how to fix it (and eventually, fixing it for you).

Questions:

• Tell us a little bit of an overview about you.
• Your time at Amazon & Netflix were big influences on the importance of chaos engineering and reliability testing. Can you tell me what was so foundational about your time there?
• What is next iteration of Gremlin? What has changed in the platform primarily? Tell me about the arcs of the company here.
• In 2022, there was a leadership transition and you increased your focus on the product. What are some of the most exciting developments that came from these last 3 years?
• Where does AI fit into Chaos Engineering? And where does it not fit? Can you unpack your viewpoint here?
• What are you most excited about in the next chapter for Gremlin, and for the broader SRE space?
• What advice would you give a founder just getting started?

I couldn't be more excited about the future of Gremlin. Given the arcs the company has gone through, it's evident that Kolton has built foundational layers into the platform, and is steering the ship towards responsible chaos engineering, reliability, automation and much more.

Thank you for listening to today's episode. If you'd like to learn more about Gremlin, please visit gremlin.com.

Sponsors

• Paddle.com
• Sema Software
• PropelAuth
• Postman
• Meilisearch
• Mailtrap
• .TECH Domains (https://get.tech/codestory)

Links

• https://www.gremlin.com/
• https://www.linkedin.com/in/kolton-andrus-77315a2/
• https://codestory.co/podcast/e9-matt-fornaciari-gremlin/

Buchi Reddy lives in North Austin, having recently moved there with his family. He is originally from south India, and grew up in a farming family before moving to the metro and studying engineering. Post college, he spent many years building high frequency trading systems, before moving to Silicon Valley and joining companies there, just as Cisco and Traceable, which you as the audience are very familiar with. Outside of tech, he is married with a 7 year old son. He and his family enjoy hiking, overnight camping, and living just far enough away from the craziness of downtown Austin to still enjoy it.

While he was interviewing customers at a prior company, Buchi spotted a wide gap for enterprises, where API's were not tested properly before going to production. Baffled by this, he wanted to go bridge the gap, and build something to automate this testing.

This is the creation story of Levo.

Sponsors

• Paddle.com
• Sema Software
• PropelAuth
• Postman
• Meilisearch
• Mailtrap
• .TECH Domains (https://get.tech/codestory)

Links

• https://www.levo.ai/
• https://www.linkedin.com/in/buchireddy/

Evan Henshaw-Plath, also known as Rabble, was born in Berkeley while his Mom was a student. His parents were hippies, and he grew up near Silicon Valley, which gave him access to work with startups as early as High School. He founded Odeo, which eventually became Twitter. He got the name Rabble cause it was founded by three Evan's, which didn't work - so he went with his online nickname. He has a cool track record of working not only on Twitter, but Flickr, Palm, and other big names. He lives in New Zealand, enjoying all the outdoor activities, and participates in activism in digital rights and environmentalism. Being a Vegetarian, he admits that his comfort food is Mexican cuisine, which he doesn't get a lot of in the land of the Kiwis.

Rabble was disappointed when Twitter shut down its open app capabilities. He wanted something like Twitter, but built to where someone couldn't take away his access. He started to dig into protocols, and eventually landed in San Francisco to tell his friends that he was going to make social media work like email and messaging.

This is the creation story of Rabble Labs & Verse.

Sponsors

• Paddle.com
• Sema Software
• PropelAuth
• Postman
• Meilisearch
• Mailtrap
• .TECH Domains (https://get.tech/codestory)

Links

• https://www.verse-pbc.org/
• https://www.linkedin.com/in/rabble/
• Rabble's New Podcast!

Jesse Pollak grew up in Washington, DC, attending a Quaker school through graduating in high school. He played competitive soccer, which was a huge part of his life. Eventually, he moved to SoCal to attend school at Berkley. He got the bug to start a company, and only lasted 2 years at school - before he ventured out on his own. Eventually, his company got acquired by Coinbase, which opened up a whole new world for him. Outside of tech, he is married with a 4 month old boy. He doesn't drink caffeine, but daily, enjoys a decaf cappuccino.

In December 2021, Jesse and his team were wondering in the desert for a while, trying to figure out what was next on-chain. After considering what AWS and Heroic was for Web 2.0, they figured out that in order to go build the apps that companies like Coinbase had, they needed a foundational layer in the ecosystem to fuel that development.

This is the creation story of Base.

Sponsors

• Paddle.com
• Sema Software
• PropelAuth
• Postman
• Meilisearch
• Mailtrap
• .TECH Domains (https://get.tech/codestory)

Links

• https://www.base.org/
• https://www.coinbase.com/
• https://www.linkedin.com/in/jessepollak/

Gaurav Bhattacharya grew up in New Delhi, in a blue collar family. He lost his Dad early in his life. He took influence from his older brother and his love for programming, getting hooked on C/C++. He loves building things, including video games, of which he built his first one at the age of 12. In High School, he pursued a startup idea that led him to skip college, and eventually exit. Outside of tech, he lives in San Francisco and continues his love for gaming. He also enjoys watching live sports - the Dodgers, Lakers and Warriors.

At his prior startup, Gaurav and his team were working in the healthcare space. They became learners of go-to market strategies, how to do sales, and how to do marketing. They enjoyed it so much that they grew to want to start their next company in that space.

This is the creation story of Jeeva AI.

Sponsors

• Paddle.com
• Sema Software
• PropelAuth
• Postman
• Meilisearch
• Mailtrap
• .TECH Domains (https://get.tech/codestory)

Links

• https://www.jeeva.ai/
• https://www.linkedin.com/in/bhattacharyagaurav/

Artem Rodichev was born and raised in Kazakhstan, surrounded by the mountains. He loves hiking, and pretty much all outdoor activities. He jokes that he was raised by computers, as he was always playing games, trying to learn hacking, and more. He has always be interested in stories, in particular science fiction. He read a lot of books and watched movies, being fascinated with plots around empathetic AI like Blade Runner and Joy. These movies sparked his motivation to move forward to bringing this world to life.

Artem spent several years building a Core AI stack at Replica. What he noticed was that people really enjoyed connecting with their digital friends - and, he noticed the limitations of this experience. He aimed to correct that limitation, in starting a new venture focused on boarder empathetic AI.

This is the creation story of Ex-Human.

Sponsors

• Paddle.com
• Sema Software
• PropelAuth
• Postman
• Meilisearch
• Mailtrap
• .TECH Domains (https://get.tech/codestory)

Links

• https://exh.ai/
• https://www.linkedin.com/in/art-rodichev/

Keren Fanan doesn't come from a tech based family, yet has worked in tech for the last 15 years. She's not a developer herself, but has always been drawn to software in general, as in her words, software runs the world. She studied Industrial Engineering, but quickly moved into product roles, working for AT&T, Gett and Moon Active in the past. Deep down, she always wanted to found a company of her own. Outside of tech, she lives near Tel Aviv in Israel, and has lived there her whole life. Her and her 3 kids like to travel, go camping, and be in nature as much as possible.

Keren and her co-founders felt similar pains in the industry, all from different angles. No matter how good their ideas were, no matter the initiative, there is always a long process in software dev to bring it to life. This was especially true for non technical founders. They wanted a way to bring their ideas straight to production, without having to wait on the full life cycle.

This is the creation story of MyOp.

Sponsors

• Paddle.com
• Sema Software
• PropelAuth
• Postman
• Meilisearch
• Mailtrap
• .TECH Domains (https://get.tech/codestory)

Links

• https://www.myop.dev/
• https://www.linkedin.com/in/keren-fanan/