Code Story
Their tech. Their products. Their stories.
Today, we have a special return episode from our friends at Backbox, who we heard the creation story of the company back in Season 8. In this episode, we talk with Rekha Shenoy, CEO of Backbox. Since Rekha took the helm as CEO in May 2024, the company has expanded beyond traditional security automation to launch its major BackBox 8.0 platform, unifying cloud and on-prem infrastructure visibility. They’ve also integrated human-in-the-loop, advisor-focused AI capabilities - and are back to let us know some even more "big things" happening with platform, around agentic .
Links
https://backbox.com/
https://www.linkedin.com/in/rekha-shenoy-950b23/
https://www.codestory.co/episodes/s8-bonus-bypassing-brittle-custom-scripts-implementing-automated-multi-tenant-configuration-backups-and-vulnerability-patching-at-scale-with-andrew-kahl-of-backbox/
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Christian Ondaatje is originally from Los Angelas, CA. He got into GPUs as an underclassmen in college, of course through gaming and VR. He ended up starting an eGPU company in his CS program @ Harvard, though it was shut down through some cease and desist from Apple. Though he learned some hard startup lessons, his love for GPUs was only fueled more. Outside of tech, he does a lot of SIM racing. In fact, he has built his own Linus VR racing simulator rig over a couple of years He finds that the formal, online competition is very fun to participate in.
As I mentioned, Christian was way into GPUs throughout many different experiences in his life. He and his team recognized that while demand door AI inference and compute was at an all-time high, setting up bare-metal GPU infra was still complex and slow... so they set out to change it.
This is the creation story of Aranya.
Links
https://aranya.tech/
https://www.linkedin.com/in/christianondaatje/
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The project-first positioning is the interesting bet. Have early users actually engaged with someone because of a project they shared, or is proving that project-based matching beats the usual profile-driven behavior still the main unknown?
Dumi Mabhena is originally from Zimbabwe, and has lived in 5 different countries. He now lives in Washington, DC, as he came to the states to attend Georgetown. Prior to that, he has been a podcast host and producer for several years, as well as starting businesses and taking part in the startup world in multiple different places. Outside of tech, he married to his wife, who he met while in South Africa. They love to travel, especially Europe in the summer, and are big into fitness and running.
Previously, Dumi started a podcast, to tell about positive experiences in Zimbabwe. As he went through the process of recording, editing, and publishing a podcast - he realized that the tools and platforms were incredibly fragmented... so much so, that it created friction in the process of telling stories. Dumi wanted to figure out a way to remove this friction from the entire process.
This is the creation story of Hilite.
Links
https://www.linkedin.com/in/dumi-mabhena
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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://www.linkedin.com/in/vzanoyan
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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.
Links
https://www.linkedin.com/in/itamar-syn-hershko
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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We have a special return episode, by our good friend Rickard Hansson. Rickard joined us previously on the podcast in Season 8to tell the creation story of Weavy - collaboration infrastructure for serious builds. Today, he makes a follow up visit to tell us all about Gainable, his new project - which removes data and engineering from being the middle man, and enables your team to build the apps they need now.
Questions;
Last time we talked in Season 8, you were building Weavy. Whats happened since we last talked with that company?
Tell me about Gainable - give me the pitch there, and tell me why this is the right approach to using AI.
Most AI builders wire straight to a frontier model and wait for the next release to fix the gaps. I didn't. Where does the model actually sit in Gainable product, and why only there?
Why is an app factory that is deterministic important? Dig into that.
You use the term "free-range coding".. what does this mean? Unpack the phrase for us.
You point out that tokens still appear to be heavily subsidized to me. What do you mean by that, and what happens to all these AI products when that ends?
We've all read the headlines - Fable 5 got switched off by the government for 18 days. Why do you see this as a turning point, not a footnote?
You suspect flat subscriptions for the top models are done, and it all drifts to credit-based. What signal are you seeing that tell s you this?
If the model is a commodity everyone rents, where's the moat?
What is next for Gainable, and how can someone get started using the platform?
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