Author: Noah Labhart - Startup Founder & CTO

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Code Story: Insights from Startup Tech Leaders - The Railsware Way – Vibe Coding vs. Traditional SDLC, with Sergiy Korolov

Today, we are kicking off a new series, sponsored by our good friends at Railsware. Railsware is a leading product studio with two main focuses - services and products. They have created amazing products like Mailtrap, Coupler and TitanApps, while also partnering with teams like Calendly and Bright Bytes. They deliver amazing products, and have happy customers to prove it.

In this series, we are digging into the company's methods around product engineering and development. In particular, we will cover relevant topics to not only highlight their expertise, but to educate you on industry trends alongside their experience.

In today's episode, we are talking with Sergiy Korolov, Co-CEO of Railsware and Co-founder of Mailtrap. In this conversation, we are bringing up a popular - but somewhat controversial topic - vibe-coding vs. traditional software development approaches.

Questions:

  • You’ve been in tech for over two decades, and have definitely seen many trends come and go. How would you define "vibe-coding" and how does it differ from traditional software development approaches?
  • What drove the emergence of vibe-coding? Could it be a response to overly rigid development processes that many companies have? Or it’s a fundamental shift in engineering?
  • What do engineers on your team think about vibe-coding? Have you practiced this approach on some of your products?
  • What types of products or development contexts are best suited for vibe-coding?
  • Is it possible to create successful and scalable products through vibe-coding? For instance, can people balance vibe-coding with business requirements, deadlines, and stakeholder expectations?
  • To wrap up, is vibe-coding actually sustainable long-term, or is it just a trendy reaction to over-engineering?

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Code Story: Insights from Startup Tech Leaders - S11 E23: Dr. Zohar Bronfman, Pecan AI

Zohar Bronfman spends most of his time in Tel Aviv, Israel these days. He has a focused academic background, specifically in philosophy and neuroscience. He was always intrigued by the question - how do we know what we know? - which led him to get a PhD in Philosophy. While doing that, he also became fascinated with he human mind and empirical decision making, which took him down the road of obtaining another PhD in AI & Neuroscience, essentially emulating brain processes. Outside of tech, he has 3 kids and a startup. He loves a good book in the philosophy or neuroscience space, and is a big fan of sports. Specifically, he loves the NBA and claims to be a Knicks fan.

Zohar and his now co-founder were digging into predictive models, as an extension of their academic studies. They were curious as to why companies, though they were running predictive models, were not making accurate predictions. They soon realized that this was because the AI modeling expertise was centralized at couple of well known companies.

This is the creation story of Pecan AI.

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Code Story: Insights from Startup Tech Leaders - S11 Bonus: Tanmai Gopal, PromptQL

Tanmai Gopal is a repeat guest on the podcast. Back in Season 7, he came on to tell the creation story of Hasura, which is a universal data access layer for next generations apps. He talked through he and his colleagues frustration with building API after API, and taking steps to ensure people wanted to not do that work anymore.

As Hasura started to take off, Tanmai started to ask the question around what was the right method for developers, in particular their applications, to access data. With the advent of AI, he and his team dug into what the right problems were to solve - and they identified the main problem with this type of tech was accuracy and trust.

This is the creation story of PromptQL.

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Code Story: Insights from Startup Tech Leaders - S11 E22: Ryan Wang, Assembled

Ryan Wang has had a winding set of paths to get to where he is today. He studied economics and statistics, with the intent of going to grad school and becoming a professor. After talking with his boss at the time, Steven Levitt (also one of the authors of Freakonomics), he was convinced that was not the best path. Eventually, he joined stripe via nepotism, and became a software developer via data science. Outside of tech, he loves to read about different topics. Right now, he is reading about owls, and also loves to read fiction and poetry. In fact, he drops poetry occasionally at his current venture.

While at Stripe, back when it was an 80 person company, Ryan noticed people doing support tickets on their own. After he spent some time there, he and his now co-founder started to tinker in machine learning for support. As he made progress, a leader pointed out that the real problem was around workforce management.

This is the creation story of Assembled.

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Code Story: Insights from Startup Tech Leaders - S11 Bonus: Sam Partee, Arcade.dev

Sam Partee started out his love for tech/engineering by working on cars. After many y ears of working on cars, and even starting his own car stereo installation business, he decided that cards were finite and moved onto computers. He fell in love with the space, and the rest is history, filled with super computers, AI, distributed training, Redis and the lot. Outside of tech, he loves to take long hikes with his snowy husky.

Sam and his team built a prior solution, an agent to solve bugs for you. They ran into a litany of problems, but eventually figured out that there was a dire need for an authorization for the activities that agents wanted to do on your behalf. Fast forward, and they are working with Anthropic to define these auth protocols.

This is the creation story of Arcade.

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Code Story: Insights from Startup Tech Leaders - S11 E21: Raja Tabet & Synopsys: The Future of AI & How We Are Building It

Raja Tabet lives in Austin, TX, but grew up overseas in Lebanon. When he migrated to the states for his education, he did not speak English, and had to go through the process of learning the language to fully integrate. He studied computer science for undergrad, and computer engineering for graduate school. And eventually, went to work for companies like IBM, Freescale, and others, prior to landing in his current role. Outside of tech, he has been married for 35 years, and has 3 kids. He and his wife are empty nesters, so they love to travel, hike and explore new areas.

In 2019, Raja joined Synopsys, specifically in their custom design and manufacturing group. A few years ago, and alongside the advent of AI, he changed roles and began building an AI powered solution for electronic design automation, or EDA.

This is Raja's creation story at Synopsys.

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Code Story: Insights from Startup Tech Leaders - A Startup Field Guide in the Age of Robots & AI – with Olivier Mitchell

Today, we are talking with Oliver Mitchell, Partner at ff Venture Capital, the most engaged technology venture capital firm in New York City since 2008. They have an extensive portfolio, and have created billions of dollars in market cap value.

Recently, Oliver has released a book titled A Startup Field Guide in the Age of Robots and AI. In the book, he sets the stage to mentor - and provide mentors - around building a hardware startup in modern day times. The book is full of advice, real life stories from the trenches, and practical information to help you succeed.

Questions:

  • Tell me about the book - what was the main goal of you writing it, what were you trying to accomplish?
  • In the book, you discuss what it takes to launch a business in this industry. What are the five essential rules for launching a successful automation company?
  • How do you attract investors, given their visceral reaction to hardware sensors and robots? How do you prepare, circumvent or comfort these investors when they spot the red flags?
  • Hardware startups require the right people, the right R&D, etc. - just to get to MVP. What are some strategies for validating product-market fit in hardware startups?
  • At times, the government creates roadblocks through over-regulating and slow pace of play. But how can these partnerships be used for funding and even potentially customer acquisition channels?
  • In your book, you've interviewed some of the most respected luminaries in the space. Can you elaborate on these real world case studies? What were the significant challenges they overcame?
  • If you could give one piece of advice to someone heading down this path, what would it be?


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Code Story: Insights from Startup Tech Leaders - S11 E20: Alex Galkin, Competera AI

Alex Galkin can't remember a time where he wasn't doing tech. Funny enough, he does remember a time before internet was common place. In 6th or 7th grade, he got a computer and immediately disassembled it. And eventually, he built an internet service provider for his community, eventually dropped out of university, and sold his internet provider. Outside of tech, he has always been into sports - cycling, motorcycles, etc. And though he doesn't have much time for it anymore, he is big into Brazilian Jujitsu.

At his old role, Alex started to pitch subscription pricing for their products. The timing wasn't right for deep machine learning for pricing, so his boss turned him down. Several years later, he and his team are leveraging the power of Contextual AI to calculate and optimize price combinations.

This is the creation story of Competera AI.

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Code Story: Insights from Startup Tech Leaders - S11. Bonus: Harish Chandramowli, Flaire

Harish Chandramowli grew up in a small town in India. The goal was simple early on - study well, go to university, and get a job. After undergrad, he realized he can do so much more, eventually coming stateside to get his masters, and meet a ton of really smart people over the last 10 years. Outside of tech, he is a broadway show fanatic, seeing 1-2 on a regular basis. He also follows Manchester United, which can be difficult watching the lose on the regular.

Harish used to work for MongoDB, and spent some time on call and in the weeds. At that time, he realized how much data is used by a business. When he eventually supported the fashion industry, specifically the back office, he wanted to build a solution to make the lives of those back office individuals as easy as possible.

This is the creation story of Flaire.

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Code Story: Insights from Startup Tech Leaders - S11 E19: Madhavan “Maddy” Malonan, Reclaim Protocol

Madhavan "Maddy" Malonan has always been in - and around - technology, and fell in love with building things early on. He got a video game console early on, and found it a little boring. BUT, when his Dad got a computer and he played Age of Empires, he got excited about all the possibilities, trying to tinker with building things that mimicked these computer games. Even these days, he writes a lot of code, building side projects with Claude Code. When he's not coding, he's playing sports, primarily tennis.

Maddy and his team identified that verification of age, credentials, employment history, etc. was a big, big problem. So much so, that it was difficult to do so in a tamper proof, zero knowledge proof manner. They set out to create a solution - and protocol - to solve this problem.

This is the creation story of Reclaim Protocol.

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