Engineering Founders

Dec 12 2024 43 ep. 44 mins 5
Engineering Founders Podcast artwork

The show for engineering leaders making the leap to start their own company! We dive into the stories, pivotal moments and critical insights from former eng leaders turned founders, that helped them take those early leaps to launch their own company!

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De-risking the co-founder relationship & experiments to stress-test your partnership w/ Jake Schwartz @ Endorsed

Dec 12 2024 36 mins  
Jake Schwartz (Co-Founder @ Endorsed) joins us to talk about de-risking the co-founder relationship! We cover how they built in stress-tests to validate co-founder fit, how to host a hackathon to stress-test your partnership, and why reference calls are an important component of finding a co-founder. Plus the story behind Jakes's transition from Life360 to co-founding Endorsed, pri

Scaling costs & being enterprise ready from day 1 w/ Nancy Wang

Nov 07 2024 45 mins  
Nancy Wang, Venture Partner @ Felicis and Former GM @ AWS, joins us to discuss strategies & considerations for scaling costs, becoming enterprise ready on Day 1, maintaining business health, and more. We cover Nancy’s journey as a founding product manager at AWS and how those lessons have guided her throughout her career & how she coaches founders. We address why it’s paramount

Why you SHOULDN’T become a founder w/ Travis McPeak @ Resourcely

Oct 24 2024 44 mins  
In this episode of Engineering Founders, we discuss something we’ve never covered before – why you SHOULDN’T be a founder! Travis McPeak (CEO & Co-Founder @ Resourcely) joins the pod to share his founder story and questions to ask yourself to truly validate if the founder lifestyle is right for you. We also address how to de-risk your org & understanding the two main kinds of

Leveraging distribution & community to accelerate your startup w/ Mariane Bekker @ Founders Bay

Jun 13 2024 44 mins  
Mariane Bekker, Founder & CEO @ Founders Bay, joins us to discuss the power of building your distribution channel and network within the startup community. She shares best practices for community building based on her own experiences developing Upward Recruiting and Founders Bay & why being able to articulate / communicate your company’s mission (the “why” of it all) is instr

Building a mission-driven, bootstrapped business & transitioning from side-gig to full-time: w/ Darian Shimy @ FutureFund

May 30 2024 69 mins  
In this episode, we cover bootstrapping & transitioning from side gig to full-time, featuring Darian Shimy, Founder @ FutureFund. He shares the origin story of FutureFund and how his children’s school experience inspired the company’s mission & product goals. He shares valuable tips on dealing with anxiety, betting on yourself, setting expectations, and making decisions as a fo

Exploring the differences of hardware & software startups w/ Jessie Frazelle @ Zoo

May 16 2024 41 mins  
Today, we’re talking about the intersection between the software eng & hardware eng communities with Jessie Frazelle, Co-founder & CEO @ Zoo. She shares her founder story with us, along with what the early days of building a hardware and hardware-adjacent company looked like. Jessie dissects the differences between building in software & hard tech and what those differences mean

Testing venture-scale ideas, identifying your competitive edge & devtool trends w/ Lee Edwards @ Root Ventures

Apr 18 2024 41 mins  
Lee Edwards, General Partner @ Root Ventures, shares insights on identifying your competitive edge, recommendations for differentiation, and how to make sure your business is venture-aligned. He discusses his transition from eng leadership into the venture capital world, sharing advice on ideation for early-stage founders who are still developing their product & deciding which vers

Finding your wedge: enterprise go-to-market & product building strategy w/ Vidya Raman

Apr 04 2024 40 mins  
Vidya Raman, Partner @ Sorensen Ventures, shares her best practices for developing a strong enterprise GTM strategy & why this is such a challenging thing to do as a new founder. We also dive into blindspots that highly technical founders may possess, balancing the technical aspects of founding with the anthropological side, product considerations when building for enterprise, timi

Scaling yourself ‘down’ as an engineering leader w/ James Everingham @ Lightspark

Mar 21 2024 44 mins  
James Everingham, co-founder and former VP of Engineering @ Lightspark, joins our podcast to share his best tools for scaling yourself down – not up – as an engineering leader. He discusses his latest career move shifting down in scale and how that impacts your risk tolerance as a leader. We also cover some of James’ favorite leadership methods, including the Socratic method,

Rapidly operating early-stage engineering at global scale, mapping eng workflows to personas & pivoting pricing / business models w/ Scott Woody

Feb 29 2024 47 mins  
Scott Woody, co-founder and CTO @ Metronome, shares the story of how Metronome, a small startup, made the transition to quickly operate at a global scale while working with complex, public companies. He shares the origin story of Metronome and the roadmap of how they went from early-stage engineering to creating highly specialized teams & in-house experts. Additionally, we cover ho