Startups Icon

Startups

Stories from the trenches about tech startups and businesses.
81 episodes
All Topics

Practical AI Practical AI #260

Generating the future of art & entertainment

Play
2024-03-12T17:00:00Z #ai +3 🎧 17,331

Runway is an applied AI research company shaping the next era of art, entertainment & human creativity. Chris sat down with Runway co-founder / CTO, Anastasis Germanidis, to discuss their rise and how it’s defining the future of the creative landscape with its text & image to video models. We hope you find Anastasis’s founder story as inspiring as Chris did.

Changelog Interviews Changelog Interviews #577

Taking on Goliath

Play
2024-02-08T22:00:00Z #startups +1 🎧 15,664

This week on The Changelog we’re talking with Nadia Odunayo, founder of StoryGraph. Nadia started out as a one woman dev and product team — she’s had to adjust and maneuver along way to becoming the Amazon-free alternative to Goodreads.

We talk about the importance of customer research, the iterative nature of customer research and what it takes to synthesize and analyze the findings to guide product development, the technical challenges and learnings she faced while building StoryGraph, for example at several points they’ve faced challenges in handling an influx of users and had to re-architect the system. We also talk about the business model of StoryGraph and how they generate revenue through Plus subscriptions, and partnerships with publishers for book giveaways.

JS Party JS Party #301

Building something new

Play
2023-11-16T17:45:00Z #design +2 🎧 13,722

Amal & Nick are joined by Saron Yitbarek (developer, podcaster, community leader & serial entrepreneur) to catch up and discuss her latest project: Not A Designer

We discuss all the ins & outs of tech entrepreneurship & the challenges of building something new in today’s saturated market. Tune in for a behind-the-scenes look at how she does it & get a sneak peek on what’s possibly next! (Spoiler Alert: we brain stormed it here)

Changelog Interviews Changelog Interviews #551

DX on DX

Play
2023-08-03T21:00:00Z #dx +2 🎧 28,932

This week Adam is joined by Abi Noda, founder and CEO of DX to talk about DX AKA DevEx (or the long-form Developer Experience). Since the dawn of software development there has been this push to understand what makes software teams efficient, but more importantly what does it take to understand developer productivity? That’s what Abi has been focused on for the better part of the last 8 years of his career. He started a company called Pull Panda that was acquired by GitHub, spent a few years there on this problem before going out on his own to start DX which helps startups to the fortune 500 companies gather real insights that leads to real improvement.

Changelog Interviews Changelog Interviews #550

From Docker to Dagger

Play
2023-07-28T17:00:00Z #docker +2 🎧 28,295

This week we’re joined by Solomon Hykes, the creator of Docker. Now he’s back with his next big thing called Dagger — CI/CD as code that runs anywhere. We’re users of Dagger so check out our codebase if you want to see how it works. On today’s show Solomon takes us back to the days of Docker, what it was like on that 10 year journey, his transition from Docker to Dagger, Dagger’s community-led growth model, their focus on open source and community, how it works, and even a cameo from Kelsey Hightower to explain how Dagger works.

Founders Talk Founders Talk #97

Refocusing Docker on developer-first and growth

Play
2023-06-02T20:00:00Z #startups 🎧 12,463

This week Adam is joined by Scott Johnston, CEO of Docker. Scott shares his journey to the CEO role, how he’s leading the company to not only grow revenue, but to also invest in developer facing features, their shift from a enterprise sales focus to a PLG driven model, and we even talk about Docker Desktop, the competition it faces, and the struggle they face when considering making it open source.

Changelog Interviews Changelog Interviews #531

Goodbye Atom. Hello Zed.

Play
2023-03-15T14:00:00Z #tooling +1 🎧 33,077

This week we’re talking with Nathan Sobo about his next big thing. Nathan is known for his work on the Atom editor while at GitHub. But his work wasn’t finished when he left, so…he started Zed, a high-performance multiplayer editor that’s engineered for performance. And today, Nathan talks us through all the details.

Changelog Interviews Changelog Interviews #514

Beyond Heroku to Muse

Play
2022-11-11T22:00:00Z #startups +3 🎧 32,497

This week we’re back for part 2 with Adam Wiggins — going beyond Heroku and the story of Muse (listen to part 1). After a six-year adrenaline high on Heroku, Adam needed time to recover and refill the creative well. So, he moved to Berlin, did some gig work with companies…dabbled in investing and advising. But he wasn’t satisfied. Adam likes to build things.

Ultimately, he was just waiting for the right time to reconnect with James Lindenbaum and Orion Henry — the same fellas he created Heroku with. Eventually they founded Ink & Switch, an independent research lab which led to innovations that made Muse possible. Muse is a tool for deep work and thinking on iPad and Mac. Today’s show is all about that journey and the details in-between.

Changelog Interviews Changelog Interviews #513

The story of Heroku

Play
2022-11-04T21:00:00Z #startups +1 🎧 35,608

This week on The Changelog we’re joined by Adam Wiggins, co-founder and former CTO of Heroku, for an exclusive trip down Heroku memory lane. Adam and Jerod are both tremendous fans of Heroku and believe (to this day) they represent the apex in developer experience for delivering code to production.

We talk through the beginnings of Heroku, the v1 most people have forgotten about, the era of web hosting back in 2008-2010, the serendipity of Silicon Vally in those days, pitching to Y Combinator, the makings of git push heroku, the Heroku style and name, the sale of Heroku to Salesforce, potential regrets — and we tee up part 2 coming next week with Adam going beyond Heroku and the story of Muse.

Changelog Interviews Changelog Interviews #503

Building Reflect at sea

Play
2022-08-27T23:00:00Z #startups 🎧 31,685

This week we’re talking with Alex MacCaw — he’s well known for his work as founder and CEO of Clearbit. In May of 2021, Alex shared a personal update with the world on his blog. After much reflection, he decided to step down as CEO of Clearbit to go back to his roots. In his words, “I love the early stages of company building. Hacking together code, setting up the Stripe account, getting the first customer. That’s my jam.”

We talk with Alex about this portion of his journey at Clearbit, the Catamaran he bought in South Africa and then sailed across the Atlantic Ocean, and the new thing he’s building called Reflect that let’s you keep track of your notes, books, and meetings.

Changelog Interviews Changelog Interviews #502

Fireside chat with Jack Dorsey ♻️

Play
2022-08-19T22:00:00Z #startups +2 🎧 33,722

This week we’re re-broadcasting a very special episode of Founders Talk. Adam was invited by our friends at Square to host a fireside chat with Jack Dorsey as the featured finale of their annual developer conference called Square Unboxed. Jack is one of the most prolific CEOs out there. He’s a hacker turned CEO, often working at the very edge of what’s to come. He’s focused on what the future has to offer and an innovator at scale. He’s also a Bitcoin maximalist and has positioned himself and Block long on Bitcoin.

Changelog Interviews Changelog Interviews #498

From WeWork to upskilling at Wilco

Play
2022-07-24T03:00:00Z #startups +1 🎧 31,921

This week we’re joined by On Freund, former VP of Engineering at WeWork and now co-founder & CEO of Wilco. WeWork you may have heard of, but Wilco maybe not (yet).

We get into the details behind the tech and scaling of WeWork, comparisons of the fictional series on Apple TV+ called WeCrashed and how much of that is true. Then we move on to Wilco which is what has On’s full attention right now. Wilco has the potential to be the next big thing for developers to acquire new skills. Wilco aims to be the ultimate simulator to gain new skills on a real-life tech stack. If you want to skip ahead, you can request access at trywilco.com/changelog — they are moving our listeners to the top of the waiting list.

Founders Talk Founders Talk #93

Building the best mountain bikes in the world

Play
2022-07-19T20:00:00Z #startups 🎧 12,911

This week Adam is taking the show off the beaten path to speak with Adam Miller, the founder and CEO of Revel Bikes. Yes that’s right, this episode features a founder of a bike brand, not a tech brand.

Adam Miller’s journey to create Revel Bikes is paved with many ups and many downs, a failed partnership, super scrappy weeks and months traveling the world to find the best manufacturing partners, the latest innovations in suspension tech and modern geometry to hit the mountain biking scene, a strong team that’s been with him every step of the way (many of which are as close as family), and truly some of the best premium bikes available on the market today.

BTW, Adam (host) is an owner of a Revel bike — he has a T1000 colorway Rascal that he’s ridden on downhill trails, all-day epics, and everything in-between. If you enjoy this episode, please us know in the comments.

Founders Talk Founders Talk #92

Enabling a world where all software is reliable

Play
2022-07-15T15:30:00Z #startups +2 🎧 7,263

This week Adam is joined by Robert Ross founder and CEO of FireHydrant — the glue layer between your tech stack and your teams to mitigate and resolve incidents at scale.

Robert shares his journey to become a software engineer, his time at DigitalOcean, this idea of incident management as a platform and how he shifted his focus from creating courses on incident management to recognizing the value of the software he was creating for the course — what is now known as FireHydrant. We also talk through his first experience in raising capital, what happens when the bar is raised on the reliability of the world’s software, and why their mantra is “Hire great people, who build, sell and market a great product, and you’ll have a great company.”

Changelog Interviews Changelog Interviews #495

Actual(ly) opening up

Play
2022-07-01T20:30:00Z #startups +1 🎧 34,659

Adam and Jerod are joined once again by James Long. He was on the podcast five years ago discussing the surprise success of Prettier, an opinionated code formatter that’s still in use to this day. This time around we’re going deep on Actual, his personal finance system James built as a business for over 4 years before recently opening it up and making it 100% free.

Has James given up on the business? Or will this move Actual(ly) breathe new life into a piece of software that’s used and beloved by many? Tune in to find out.

Player art
  0:00 / 0:00