Category: 3-SometimeTechTalk

Today, we are kicking off a new series entitled Minting Unicorns - Blockchain, AI and Dubai, sponsored by the City of Dubai. 

Dubai is the new global center of gravity, connecting the world in a way few places can. As a hub for trade, tourism, innovation, and finance, Dubai offers the ideal environment for startups and scale-ups to thrive. Entrepreneurs find a home here, whether in health-tech, fintech, AI, or renewable energy, supported by SME-focused programs that empower high-potential companies to scale globally. From flexible regulations to tax incentives, world-class infrastructure to access to global investors managing $1 trillion, Dubai understands what businesses need to scale fast. 

In today’s episode, we are speaking with Sonia Gokhale, Co-founder at VentureSouq, to understand how venture capital is thriving within all that Dubai has to offer.

• Questions: 

1. Tell me and my audience a little bit about you.
2. What is VentureSouq? What is your thesis as a venture fund?
3. Why focus on Fintech and ClimateTech?
4. How would you describe the tech and startup environment in Dubai?
5. You are a MENA based venture fund, what drove you to start here? Is this where you are physically based as well?
6. Dubai is increasingly being seen as a global fintech and ClimateTech hub. Can you explain how Dubai's startup ecosystem supports these sectors, and what advantages this offers for US-based investors looking to expand into the MENA region?
7. How does the DIFC, the AI Campus or the Blockchain center contributing to success of the startups you invest in? 
8. What percentage of your portfolio is based in MENA?
9. Can you give me an example or tell me a story of success coming out of VentureSouq? How did VentureSouq fuel that success?
10. What advice would you give to the U.S.-based startups considering Dubai for expansion?

Links

• https://www.venturesouq.com/
• https://www.linkedin.com/in/sonia-seth-gokhale-b0906014/
• https://blockchaincenter.ae/
• https://dubaiaicampus.com/
• https://www.difc.ae/ 
• https://www.investindubai.gov.ae/en/why-dubai/d33-agenda

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Alexandr Wang is the CEO and co-founder of Scale AI. He joins Big Technology Podcast to share his predictions for AI in 2025, including insights about emerging geopolitical drama in the AI field, AI agents for consumers, why data may matter more than computing power, and how militaries worldwide are preparing to deploy AI in warfare. We also cover quantum computing and why Wang believes we're approaching the current limits of what massive GPU clusters can achieve. Hit play for a mind-expanding conversation about where artificial intelligence is headed and how it will transform our world in the coming year.

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Josh Levine lives in Brooklyn, NY. He started programming when he was 6 years old, when his Dad brought home an Apple 2. He realized that though there wasn't enough legos in the world to support his creativity, he could get enough RAM. Growing up, he had a deep relationship with chess, setting up his own chess program. In fact, he states that he learned everything he knows about programming - by programming chess. Outside of tech, he is married with 2 kids. He loves karaoke, and is a musician, with his music online under the name Heavy Pennies.

In 2011, Josh joined an amazing online game website, when they started supporting his favorite game variant. Ten years later, he researched this company and their technology to see how it worked. He applied for one of the jobs, got rejected, but then quickly got a call from the CEO, who liked his application.

This is Josh's creation story at Chess.com.

Sponsors

• PropelAuth
• Speakeasy
• QA Wolf
• SnapTrade

Links

• https://www.chess.com/
• https://www.linkedin.com/in/levinester/

Our Sponsors:
* Check out Vanta: https://vanta.com/CODESTORY


Support this podcast at — https://redcircle.com/code-story/donations

Advertising Inquiries: https://redcircle.com/brands

Privacy & Opt-Out: https://redcircle.com/privacy

NightVision offers web and API security testing tools built to integrate with developers’ established workflows. NightVision identifies issues by precise area(s) of code, so devs don’t have to chase down and validate vulnerability reports, a process that eats up precious engineering resources. Get started with their docs.

Connect with Kinnaird on LinkedIn. 

Stack Overflow user Cecil Curry earned a Populist badge with their exceptionally thoughtful answer to In Python how can one tell if a module comes from a C extension?.

Some great excerpts from this episode:

“From the program side, I would say if you're running a security program or you're starting from day one, there's a danger with security people and being the security person who's out of touch or doesn't know what the life of a developer is like. And you don't want to be that person. And that's not how you have actual business impact, right? So you got to embed with teams, threat model, and then do some preventative security testing, right? Testing things before it gets into production, not just relying on having a bug bounty program.”

“With code scanning, you're looking for potentially insecure patterns in the code, but with dynamic testing, you're actually testing the live application. So we're sending HTTP traffic to the application, sending malicious payloads in forms or in query parameters, et cetera, to try to elicit a response or to send something to an attacker controlled server. And so using this, we're able to. Not just have theoretical vulnerabilities, but exploitable vulnerabilities. I mean, how many times have you looked at something in GitHub security alerts and thought, yeah, that's not real. That's not exploitable. Right. So we're trying to avoid that and have higher quality touch points with developers. So when they look at something, they say, okay, that's exploitable. You showed me how. And you traced it back to code.”

Topics covered in this episode:

• jiter
• A new home for python-build-standalone
• moka-py
• uv: An In-Depth Guide
• Extras
• Joke

See the full show notes for this episode on the website at pythonbytes.fm/413

Ranjan Roy from Margins is back for our weekly discussion of the latest tech news. We cover 1) Amazon's new Nova AI model 2) How Nova is differentiated 3) OpenAI heading to AWS in 2025? 4) OpenAI's 12 days of Shipmas 5) OpenAI's $200/month ChatGPT PRO 6) Google's new Veo video generation model 7) Will OpenAI's Sora video generation model measure up? 8) Jeff Bezos talks at Dealbook 9) OpenAI considers an ad product 10) Generative AI companies suck at advertising 10) Bitcoin $100,000 11) Hawk Tuah in trouble with $HAWK Coin 12) The Tikok ban is upheld in court, but what does it really mean? 13) Should you TikTok your layoff?

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Questions? Feedback? Write to: bigtechnologypodcast@gmail.com

James Coyle, the Chief Technology Officer for Public Sector at Lookout joins the show to share some of the biggest trends he is seeing in cybersecurity and some predictions for 2025. We also discuss the evolution of the zero trust architecture being deployed and how that has impacted the overall security posture of Federal agencies.

Instabug helps developers monitor, prioritize, and debug performance and stability issues throughout the mobile app development lifecycle. Get started with their docs.

Connect with Kenny on LinkedIn. 

Stack Overflow user itoctopus earned a Populist badge by explaining how to Break huge URLs so they don't overflow.

Some great excerpts from today’s episode: 

On why they built a lean, mean SDK: “Nowadays mobile developers spend a lot of time thinking about SDK bloat and how much they're taxing their app’s performance just from the SDKs they’re including. We spent a lot of time and a lot of effort making sure that our SDK has very minimal performance impact. You can't do this without any performance impact, but making sure that it has really minimal performance impact as an SDK itself. A lot of that has to do with the way in which, from years of experience, we capture the information and offload certain information to storage for when we have network connectivity bandwidth later so that we're not constantly eating network.”

On the future of self-fixing code and mobile app development: “Our belief is that the place where we're going to see this kind of auto fixing of code, auto healing of code, it's probably going to be mobile first. So we're invested heavily in seeing that reality. You can think of it as straightforward as crashes, for example. There's a known set of crash error codes. And so there's a known set of crash behaviors. So it's pretty easy for us. And that was what our smart resolve 1.0 was to get to, Hey, this is generally how you should solve these types of crashes. Our 1.0 version is not giving you code suggestions, but it's at least giving you known best practices from places like Stack Overflow and others that have content about how to solve these types of problems.”

On using AI models to spot UI issues: “We think that there are a lot less deterministic ways to spot a frustration signal. So the thing we're working on is, on device models for your users’ behavior that will allow our SDK to capture a frustration signal that nobody else has. Maybe today when I opened my banking app, I usually look at page one and then do a transfer, check out my balance, and now I'm doing this weird swiping behavior because something's not working well. A model could spot that. It wouldn't be reported as a bug, but a model could spot that.”

Meet Chijioke Dozie, the co-founder steering Carbon through Nigeria's increasingly noisy neobank scene. In this candid chat with Andile Masuku, Dozie makes a case for zigging while others zag—specifically, charging for value while competitors burn cash on free services. It's a stance that might raise eyebrows in Nigeria's price-sensitive market, but as you'll hear, it's backed by 12 years of hard knocks and savvy iteration. Episode Overview: Carbon spotted a massive gap in Nigeria circa 2012 - imagine a market of 180 million people where barely 200,000 had credit cards. It's the kind of statistical disparity that makes you do a double-take. The conversation reveals how this reality shaped Carbon's contrarian approach to building a licensed digital bank in Africa's largest economy. Key topics: - The distinction between neobanks across different markets - Trust-building in digital banking through institutional frameworks - The evolution from free services to value-based pricing - The impact of founder experience on investor confidence - Market size challenges in African banking Notable points: 1) Carbon achieved profitability in 2018 and 2019, having raised only $12 million in equity 2) The company has processed loans for over 5 million Nigerians across three economic cycles 3) Nigeria's credit-to-GDP ratio was only 6% compared to South Africa's 70% when Carbon started 4) The company is shifting away from digital-only to include offline touchpoints Be sure to listen out for a particularly candid moment when Dozie reflects on two key decisions made during pivotal moments in Carbon's history—choices he admits he would reconsider if given the chance.