Category: 3-SometimeTechTalk

Marlena Sarunac is a first generation American, her family being from Croatia. She started her career at Mastercard, left to travel around Europe (before it was cool to do so), and then came back to join her first startup. During her travels, she figured out that she was truly an American, as she prefers the entrepreneurial pace of life. Her path has been in marketing, but she also has an engineering degree, which gives her a unique edge. Outside of tech, she is married to a chef, with a 2 year old daughter and a rescue dog. They live in Rhode Island, in the Bristol area.

Marlena and her now co-founder met at a prior company, and worked well together promoting that brand. The built a playbook, and always dreamed of starting their own thing to push those playbooks. The stars aligned later in life, and they decided to give it a go.

This is the creation story of The Company Advice.

Sponsors

• Equitybee
• Alcor

Links

• https://www.thecompanyadvice.com/
• https://www.linkedin.com/in/marlenasarunac/

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Today, we are another episode in our 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 chatting with Julia Starun, Product Director at Railsware with over 17 years of experience in product management, business process automation and optimization. Julia will share her insights into where an MBA helps you manage a product team - and where it doesn't.

Questions:

• What was your story before MBA, and what motivated your decision to pursue it?
• What real-world gaps between MBA theory and product management practices did you discover at Railsware?
• Does MBA training help with the "people management" side of leading product teams?
• How can the tools and frameworks you learned during your MBA help with uncertainty – or overcomplicate things – when creating products?
• How does understanding "business stuff" – like P&L, unit economics, financial modeling, etc. – change how you approach product decisions?
• Does MBA business strategy training help product managers think beyond features to market positioning?
• For someone already managing product teams, when does pursuing an MBA make sense versus other learning paths?
• What's your biggest surprise about how MBA education did (or didn't) change the way you approach the realities of product team leadership?

Links

• https://railsware.com/
• https://www.linkedin.com/in/julia-starun/

Our Sponsors:
* Check out Incogni: https://incogni.com/codestory
* Check out NordVPN: https://nordprotect.com/codestory


Support this podcast at — https://redcircle.com/code-story-insights-from-startup-tech-leaders/donations

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

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Nick Clegg is the former president of Global Affairs at Meta and deputy prime minister of the UK. Clegg joins Big Technology Podcast for a discussion about whether Silicon Valley should be trusted with superintelligence and the risks it will navigate on the way there. In the second half, we also talk about how Silicon Valley uses money to buy influence and wield power in Washington. Tune in for a frank discussion about the economic, business, and political realities facing the tech industry as it pursues its most expensive and ambitious project.

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Marco Rodrigues was born and raised in Canada, but now lives in the Bay Area. His tech genesis was around the time when the internet came out, when he spent an entire summer indoors, worrying his mother. He eventually attended university in Toronto, and went to work for Juniper Networks. Past that, he went towards the startup world - running product teams, and taking part in the ownership and selling of solutions and service offerings. Outside of tech, he is married with twin girls in the Naval Cadet Core. He is a big hockey nut, rooting for the Edmonton Oilers, and enjoys taking his kids to hockey rinks all over the world.

Marco spent many years watching his teams drown in data and tooling. The situations were more complex, but the outcomes weren't getting better. He started to consider the advent of AI, and asked the question - how do we solve these sorts of problems with an agentic SOC platform?

This is the creation story of Exaforce.

Sponsors

• Incogni
• NordProtect
• Vention
• CodeCrafters helps you become a better engineer by building real-world, production-grade projects. Learn hands-on by creating your own Git, Redis, HTTP server, SQLite, or DNS server from scratch. Sign up for free today using this link and enjoy 40% off.
• Full Scale
• Paddle.com
• Sema Software
• PropelAuth
• Postman
• Meilisearch

Links

• https://www.exaforce.com/
• https://www.linkedin.com/in/marcorodrigues1/

Our Sponsors:
* Check out Incogni: https://incogni.com/codestory
* Check out NordVPN: https://nordprotect.com/codestory


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Ryan welcomes Assaf Elovic, head of AI at monday.com, to discuss creating AI tools that users will actually adopt, how they created their Monday Sidekick agent with the user experience in mind, and the opportunities that AI creates for better productivity and more efficiency.

Episode notes:

monday.com is a work management platform that allows you to plan and execute work across departments with a unified, AI-first product suite.

Connect with Assaf on LinkedIn and Twitter.  

Congrats to Populist badge winner Vilx-, who received the badge for their answer to How do you provide a default type for generics?.

See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

Today, we have a special episode correlated with Fraud awareness week, and brought to you by our friends at SEON - the command center for fraud prevention and AML compliance. SEON connects first party data signals to show you what other solutions can't - by enriching data, understanding context, and taking action from one place... to prevent fraud.

In this episode, we are talking with Husnain "HB" Bajwa, SVP of Product & Risk Solutions. He has been a fraud and risk leader for 30+ years, and leads innovation in fraud prevention and compliance at SEON. HB is going to touch on important topics in the fraud detection and prevention space, such as AI, regulatory pressures, and the perspectives of startups that can get them into trouble.

Questions:

• You’ve spent a lot of time in the world of fraud and compliance. What first drew you to solving these kinds of problems?
• Startups often focus on growth first and worry about fraud later. What’s the hidden risk in that mindset?
• Why do you believe fraud prevention and AML compliance are converging, and what are the benefits of them living in the same system?
• AI gets talked about a lot, but in your view, what are the real, practical ways it’s improving fraud and AML work today?
• We’re seeing more regulatory pressure globally. How can organizations prepare for 2026 to ensure they are taking a risk-based approach to compliance?
• I know your team’s been working on some big innovations, including a new compliance suite built on top of your fraud prevention stack and new AI-driven tools. How are these helping investigators connect the dots faster and uncover hidden relationships, especially when it comes to complex cases?
• What advice would you give to early-stage startups that might think they’re ‘too small’ to be targeted by fraudsters?

Links

• https://seon.io/
• https://www.linkedin.com/in/hbajwa/

Our Sponsors:
* Check out Incogni: https://incogni.com/codestory
* Check out NordVPN: https://nordprotect.com/codestory


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

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

Topics covered in this episode:

• Possibility of a new website for Django
• aiosqlitepool
• deptry
• browsr
• Extras
• Joke

Watch on YouTube

About the show

Sponsored by us! Support our work through:

• Our courses at Talk Python Training
• The Complete pytest Course
• Patreon Supporters

Connect with the hosts

• Michael: @mkennedy@fosstodon.org / @mkennedy.codes (bsky)
• Brian: @brianokken@fosstodon.org / @brianokken.bsky.social
• Show: @pythonbytes@fosstodon.org / @pythonbytes.fm (bsky)

Join us on YouTube at pythonbytes.fm/live to be part of the audience. Usually Monday at 10am PT. Older video versions available there too.

Finally, if you want an artisanal, hand-crafted digest of every week of the show notes in email form? Add your name and email to our friends of the show list, we'll never share it.

Brian #1: Possibility of a new website for Django

• Current Django site: djangoproject.com
• Adam Hill’s in progress redesign idea: django-homepage.adamghill.com
• Commentary in the Want to work on a homepage site redesign? discussion

Michael #2: aiosqlitepool

• 🛡️A resilient, high-performance asynchronous connection pool layer for SQLite, designed for efficient and scalable database operations.
• About 2x better than regular SQLite.
• Pairs with aiosqlite
• aiosqlitepool in three points:
  • Eliminates connection overhead: It avoids repeated database connection setup (syscalls, memory allocation) and teardown (syscalls, deallocation) by reusing long-lived connections.
  • Faster queries via "hot" cache: Long-lived connections keep SQLite's in-memory page cache "hot." This serves frequently requested data directly from memory, speeding up repetitive queries and reducing I/O operations.
  • Maximizes concurrent throughput: Allows your application to process significantly more database queries per second under heavy load.

Brian #3: deptry

• “deptry is a command line tool to check for issues with dependencies in a Python project, such as unused or missing dependencies. It supports projects using Poetry, pip, PDM, uv, and more generally any project supporting PEP 621 specification.”
• “Dependency issues are detected by scanning for imported modules within all Python files in a directory and its subdirectories, and comparing those to the dependencies listed in the project's requirements.”

• Note if you use project.optional-dependencies

  [project.optional-dependencies]
  plot = ["matplotlib"]
  test = ["pytest"]
  

• you have to set a config setting to get it to work right:

  [tool.deptry]
  pep621_dev_dependency_groups = ["test", "docs"]
  

Michael #4: browsr

• browsr 🗂️ is a pleasant file explorer in your terminal. It's a command line TUI (text-based user interface) application that empowers you to browse the contents of local and remote filesystems with your keyboard or mouse.
• You can quickly navigate through directories and peek at files whether they're hosted locally, in GitHub, over SSH, in AWS S3, Google Cloud Storage, or Azure Blob Storage.
• View code files with syntax highlighting, format JSON files, render images, convert data files to navigable datatables, and more.

Extras

Brian:

• Understanding the MICRO
• TDD chapter coming out later today or maybe tomorrow, but it’s close.

Michael:

• Peacock is excellent

Joke: I will find you

Gil Luria is the head of technology research at D.A. Davidson. Luria joins Big Technology Podcast for a special Friday edition special report digging into the AI bubble, or whatever term you'd like to use for the questionable investment decisions in AI today. We cover all the bad stuff: debt, depreciation, and losses. We talk about Michael Burry's bet against the technology and why he might be right, and how OpenAI should play this to optimize its potential. Tune in for a comprehensive edition looking at the risks of the AI trade, and what happens from here.

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Ryan welcomes Benjamin Klieger, lead engineer at Groq, to explore the infrastructure behind AI agents, how you can turn a one-minute agent into a ten-second agent, and how they used fast inference and effective evals to build their efficient and reliable Compound agent. 

Episode notes: 

Groq delivers fast, low-cost inference using their custom-designed LPU, the first chip built for inference. Check out their agent, Compound, which can search the web and run code.

Connect with Benjamin on LinkedIn and X. 

Congrats to user Bart Kiers for winning a Stellar Answer badge on their response to Regular expression to match a line that doesn't contain a word. 

See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.