Today, we are dropping another episode in our "chats" series, specifically on the Founder side, - hearing from those scaling the companies themselves.

In this episode, we are talking with Vadim Dedov, CEO at Catchers. Vadim is going to walk us through what problem he wanted to solve with Catchers, and how his product development journey took him through architectural decisions, product optimization, team building and more.

Questions

• Before we talk about Catchers, I’d love to understand you a bit better.
• What experiences or responsibilities earlier in your life shaped how you think about work, systems, and accountability today?
• What problem were you dealing with before Catchers existed? Not as a product idea yet, but as a real operational pain you kept running into.
• At what point did you realise this couldn’t be solved with people, spreadsheets, or manual coordination anymore and that technology was the only way forward?
• How did Catchers actually start taking shape as a product? What was the very first version you built, and what did “good enough” mean in a business where mistakes affect people’s income and compliance?
• How long did it take to get to something usable, and what constraints defined your MVP?
• Looking back, what were the most important trade-offs you made early on?
• Things you consciously postponed or simplified, knowing they might come back later.
• Let’s zoom in on the product itself. What is the core product insight behind Catchers — the thing you believe differentiates it from a typical HR or staffing platform?
• How did your thinking about architecture evolve as scale increased? Was there a moment when you had to stop moving fast and redesign parts of the system properly?
• How did you approach building your core team around such a complex, operations-heavy product? What qualities mattered most in the people you trusted with this system?
• Can you share a decision that didn’t go as planned and how you and your team dealt with the consequences?
• When you step back and look at what you’ve built today, what are you most proud of not in terms of features, but in terms of reliability, impact, or how the system holds under pressure?
• As you look ahead, how do automation and AI change the way you think about workforce platforms — and what advice would you give to someone building infrastructure-heavy products today?

Sponsors

• Unblocked
• Braingrid.ai
• .TECH Domains
• Mezmo

Links

• https://catchersjob.com/
• https://www.linkedin.com/in/vadim-dedov-060b8935a/

Yoav Crombie was born and raised in Israel, serving in the army for 6 years as an engineer. He's been in the tech industry of 35 years, but doesn't see this work as work. He thoroughly enjoys what he is doing, especially with what is going on with AI right now, specifically around the quick creation process. Outside of tech, he has been married for 30 years. He loves water sports - kite surfing, regular surfing and paddle boarding. In addition, he loves to cycle, and was the Israeli road champion many years ago.

Yoav realized that companies were struggling that businesses were struggling to implement and adopt AI. In particular, he noticed that there was risk in publicly sharing your data. But alongside that, other companies wanted more control to how AI functioned for their country. So his company started to build a solution to solve both of these problems.

This is the creation story Pragatix, a product of AGAT Software.

Sponsors

• Unblocked
• TECH Domains
• Mezmo
• Braingrid.ai

Links

• https://agatsoftware.com/
• https://agatsoftware.com/secure-ai-platform/ai-suite/ai-agent/
• https://www.linkedin.com/in/yoavcrombie/

Robert Brennan grew up in Boston and loved it so much that he ended up calling it home again. He spent time in New York between his bookend times, but he enjoys the chill pace and great music of Boston over the fast pace of the big apple. Outside of technology, he likes to read nonfiction and fiction, specifically science fiction. He loves music, and. Has been playing guitar for 25 years now. He frequents the live music scene around Boston, and even lives near a jazz club.

Robert observed the release of the first version of Devin a few years ago, which was very exciting to see agent driven development. But he and his co-founders were concerned with who was going to govern how this software was going to get written - and they hypothesized that it should be open source and community driven.

This is the creation story of OpenHands.

Sponsors

• Unblocked
• TECH Domains
• Mezmo
• Braingrid.ai

Links

• http://openhands.dev/
• https://www.linkedin.com/in/robert-a-brennan