Engineering Founders Podcast Por The Engineering Leadership Community (ELC) arte de portada

Engineering Founders

Engineering Founders

De: The Engineering Leadership Community (ELC)
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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! Economía Gestión Gestión y Liderazgo Liderazgo
Episodios
  • Demo-led validation, charging from day 1, selling to AI-native companies, and finding resilient co-founders w/ Gil Feig @ Merge

    Demo-led validation, charging from day 1, selling to AI-native companies, and finding resilient co-founders w/ Gil Feig @ Merge
    Mar 19 2026
    Gil Feig (Co-Founder @ Merge) deconstructs the high-speed, tactical playbook for building a category-defining API company in the middle of the AI "space race." We discuss finding resilient co-founders who can handle the “trough of sorrow,” reimagining the Lean Startup Methodology through demo-led validation, and why charging for products from day one is the ultimate validation signal. Gil also shares frameworks for selling to AI-native companies, mental models for roadmap tradeoffs, and how to stay relevant as model capabilities shift. Plus, why you should skip avoid “brilliant jerks” and focus on hiring company builders instead. ABOUT GIL FEIG Gil Feig is the Co-Founder and CTO of Merge, which helps companies like Mistral, Ramp, and Perplexity integrate thousands of external apps into their products & AI agents. Previously, Gil was the Head of Engineering at Untapped and worked as a software engineer at Wealthfront and LinkedIn. A graduate of Columbia University, he now lives and works in San Francisco. ABOUT MERGE Merge is the leading provider of agentic tools and customer-facing integrations for frontier LLMs, Fortune 500 organizations, and B2B SaaS companies. To date, Merge has raised over $75 million in funding from Accel, NEA, and Addition. This episode is brought to you by xMatters! xMatters automates the entire incident lifecycle with their purpose-built AI powered workflow, giving your team the context they need to stop disruptions before they start and minimize resolution times. Head over to xmatters.com to learn more! SHOW NOTES: The "acute pain" of integrations: How blocking sales and cybersecurity struggles led Gil and Shensi to realize the massive B2B need for unified APIs (1:55)The co-founder pressure test: Why surviving a senior event on a $2,000 budget for 600 people proved they could weather the startup storm together (3:02)Signals of a resilient partnership: How to identify a co-founder who can handle the "trough of sorrow" and high-stakes decision-making (7:52)Hacking the trial period: Why you should prioritize "passion and steam" over pure technical skill and how weekend hackathons act as a "marriage" simulation (10:08)Engineering leader to founder: Navigating the shift from IC-style work to the "insane pressure" of ownership (12:12)Why walking is a founder's best stress-management tool (13:32)Aligning on the premise of Merge: The intentional process of moving from a broad problem space to a category-defining API company (14:39)Demo-led validation: Reimaging the lean startup methodology with vibe-coded prototypes (17:05)Charging from day one: Using payment as signal to distinguish between polite beta-testers and customers with a genuine, validated need (19:36)Leveraging AI agents and plug-and-play prompts to bypass the "12-month engineering backlog" and make onboarding instant (21:08)How to win the "build vs. buy" argument by solving problems too complex for a 10-minute vibe-coding session (23:31)Signs of true category fit: How to recognize customer “pull” vs. “push” (24:07)Applying Mark Benioff’s mantra: "If we were founding the company today, what would we build?" to stay relevant as model capabilities shift (26:50)Selling to AI-Native companies: Why selling to AI companies requires "real services," high speed, and a willingness to ship custom features by Monday (29:05)Frameworks for roadmap trade-offs: Tactical advice for delegating engineering resources and navigating the tension between new features and core infrastructure (33:31)Hire "company builders": Avoiding "brilliant jerks" and why your first 10 hires must be optimized for 14-hour-day passion over raw resume depth (35:18).Building the "nervous system" for AI: Gil’s vision for a world where software is built for agents first, and why that requires a fundamental shift in how we think about infrastructure (37:29)The "hot takes" ritual: Maintaining a judgment-free Slack channel and weekly meeting to constantly challenge and "groundhog" your own assumptions (38:10).Filtering signal from noise: Why the best ideas are non-consensus and how to form opinions based on new model capabilities rather than Twitter FOMO (39:20).Rapid fire questions (40:50) This episode wouldn’t have been possible without the help of our incredible production team: Patrick Gallagher - Producer & Co-Host Jerry Li - Co-Host Noah Olberding - Associate Producer, Audio & Video Editor https://www.linkedin.com/in/noah-olberding/ Dan Overheim - Audio Engineer, Dan’s also an avid 3D printer - https://www.bnd3d.com/ Ellie Coggins Angus - Copywriter, Check out her other work at https://elliecoggins.com/about/ Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.
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    43 m
  • Finding your customers’ burning needs, validating ideas, expanding products & navigating new markets w/ Ryo Chikazawa @ Autify

    Finding your customers’ burning needs, validating ideas, expanding products & navigating new markets w/ Ryo Chikazawa @ Autify
    Jan 15 2026

    After two years and eight pivots, Ryo Chikazawa (CEO & Co-founder @ Autify) realized his original product would never reach venture scale. In this episode, Ryo reveals how he scrapped everything to find his customers' "burning need," eventually securing contracts before writing a single line of code for his new idea. Ryo shares his playbook for radical pivots, navigating different market segments by hacking enterprise budgets, how to delegate and scale operations, and why a founder’s job is to constantly pursue the next zero-to-one moment.

    ABOUT RYO CHIKAZAWA

    Ryo Chikazawa is the Co-Founder and CEO of Autify. Ryo has worked in software development for over ten years. Having worked as a software engineer in Japan, Singapore, and San Francisco, he helped developed a #1 social game at DeNA, led product development as a product engineer at Viki in Singapore, and moved to San Francisco to participate in a local startup as an initial member. He founded Autify, Inc. in 2016.

    ABOUT AUTIFY

    Autify is a no-code, AI-powered software testing automation platform designed to help businesses accelerate their software release cycles and improve software quality. It allows users, including those without programming knowledge, to create, execute, and automate tests for web and mobile applications. Autify uses features like Generative AI and a natural language recorder to simplify the process of generating and maintaining test scenarios, reducing the cost and technical difficulty traditionally associated with software testing

    SHOW NOTES:
    • The origin story behind Autify & Ryo’s initial vision to solve language barriers (3:00)
    • Navigating 8+ pivots over two and a half years to find traction (5:56)
    • Knowing when to make the decision to shut down an idea & pivot (10:35)
    • Entering Alchemist Accelerator with a blank slate and the advice to find a "burning need" (12:55)
    • From "nice to have" to "how much?": The dramatic shift in customer sentiment that confirmed they found the burning need (17:44)
    • The ultimate validation signal: When customers ask for pricing before the product exists (20:56)
    • Applying the "burning need" framework to product expansion and new features (23:08)
    • US vs. Japan: Navigating the differences between product-led and sales-led markets (25:32)
    • Platform vs. Services: How to position your tool to fit the customer's available budget bucket (28:05)
    • The future of testing: Why AI agents will replace traditional automation (30:25)
    • Scaling operations: When to hire a COO to manage the "1-to-10" journey (34:01)
    • The art of delegation: How to hand off the core business to focus on the next "0-to-1" (36:23)
    • Rapid fire questions (38:01)

    This episode wouldn’t have been possible without the help of our incredible production team:

    Patrick Gallagher - Producer & Co-Host

    Jerry Li - Co-Host

    Noah Olberding - Associate Producer, Audio & Video Editor https://www.linkedin.com/in/noah-olberding/

    Dan Overheim - Audio Engineer, Dan’s also an avid 3D printer - https://www.bnd3d.com/

    Ellie Coggins Angus - Copywriter, Check out her other work at https://elliecoggins.com/about/


    Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.
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    43 m
  • CEO as Experiment Officer, Design Partner Personas & Rebranding w/ Sha Ma @ Topogy

    CEO as Experiment Officer, Design Partner Personas & Rebranding w/ Sha Ma @ Topogy
    Dec 11 2025

    Sha Ma (CEO & Founder @ Topogy) deconstructs the concept of CEO as the “chief experiment officer” / “chief everything officer,” detailing how she personally tests, onboards and scales out AI tools to accelerate her team. Plus we cover how they identified the right customer personas, found design partners, and navigated a full startup rebrand.

    ABOUT SHA MA & TOPOGY

    Topogy is an AI-native cost optimization platform designed to turn infrastructure complexity into clear, actionable insights for finance and engineering teams. Topology turns the unseen connections within your infrastructure into clear, data-driven actions — helping engineering teams optimize cloud cost, performance, and focus.

    Before founding Topogy, Sha was CTO @ Catalyst.io, an industry leading Customer Success Platform, VP of Engineering @ GitHub where she was responsible for Core Platform and Ecosystem. And was part of the leadership team that took SendGrid public.

    SHOW NOTES:
    • CEO as Chief Experiment Officer: Sha’s approach to launch and scale experiments at Topogy (1:55)
    • How to initiate and onboard successful experiments with the team (6:25)
    • Using AI as a creative partner to amplify a designer's human touch (10:27)
    • The origin story of Topogy & Sha’s transition from VPE to founder (13:51)
    • The 2023 shift: from "growth at all costs" to "efficient growth" (15:56)
    • Building an AI-first product to manage infrastructure spend (21:49)
    • The persona journey: Starting with growth-stage companies (28:19)
    • How Topogy intentionally selected three diverse design partners (34:27)
    • The story behind Topogy's rebrand (39:15)
    • Frameworks for coming up with the right brand name & when to do so (42:08)
    • The "renovating a house" analogy: Why you must "live in" your startup before branding it (48:45)
    • Rapid fire questions (49:43)

    This episode wouldn’t have been possible without the help of our incredible production team:

    Patrick Gallagher - Producer & Co-Host

    Jerry Li - Co-Host

    Noah Olberding - Associate Producer, Audio & Video Editor https://www.linkedin.com/in/noah-olberding/

    Dan Overheim - Audio Engineer, Dan’s also an avid 3D printer - https://www.bnd3d.com/

    Ellie Coggins Angus - Copywriter, Check out her other work at https://elliecoggins.com/about/


    Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.
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    54 m
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