Shawn Price’s journey from coding to leadership, scaling a SaaS startup, and navigating the challenges of COVID-19.

In this episode of Project Gamma, Warner Moore sits down with Shawn Price, Co-Founder & CTO at Healthy Roster, to talk about the real-life journey from corporate careers to startup leadership.

Together, they explore what it takes to pivot, survive, and grow a SaaS company in challenging times—including how Healthy Roster navigated the COVID-19 crisis when team sports came to a halt. Shawn shares his personal transition from being a full-stack engineer to leading a team as a CTO, the mindset shifts needed to move into leadership, and how to build the right product capabilities at the right time.

We also dive into:

• Leaving corporate life for the startup grind

• Identifying a market problem before building product

• Managing spikey scale and scaling tech in SaaS

• Transitioning from engineering to management without losing the technical edge

• Solving the right problems without over-engineering
  

Books mentioned in this episode:

📚 The Hard Thing About Hard Things by Ben Horowitz📚 Trillion Dollar Coach by Eric Schmidt📚 Escaping the Build Trap by Melissa Perri

Tune in for an honest and insightful conversation on leadership, resilience, and building smarter tech companies.

In this episode, James Campbell—technologist, cryptolinguist, and SaaS innovator—joins us for a deep dive into AI, cybersecurity, and the dark web. From his early days as a military cryptolinguist to building AI solutions before they were mainstream, James shares insights on quantum computing, encryption, remote work strategies, and transitioning from employee to Co-Founder.

We also discussed about the dark web and building a tech product to search it, his book recommendations (Four Agreements & Human Compatible by Stewart Russell), and the innovative startups he’s helping grow: getyogen.com, smartstay.ai, fandemicapp.com, foundation.sh, antibionic.io

🚀 Tune in for a fascinating conversation on the future of tech, security, and entrepreneurship!

BIO: James Campbell is a technology leader, startup advisor, and two-time CTO with over 20 years of expertise in large-scale data collection, processing, and AI algorithm development, as well as software architecture and DevSecOps. Recognized for building and deploying a system for identifying bots on Twitter (botrnot.com) and web analysis for government and commercial clients, he's been the main architect behind solutions like Obskura (2015-2016 acquired), a dark and deep web search engine. He continues to build zero-to-one companies and application stacks that make the world a better place. Ex-Anduril & Ex-PrimerAI.

Join host Warner Moore on Project Gamma as he chats with tech veteran Jason Montgomery about how GenAI is revolutionizing engineering and cybersecurity. Discover how GenAI accelerates development, builds applications from scratch, and creates AI agents to tackle technical debt. We also explore strategies for introducing GenAI into your engineering team, modern security practices, and the essentials of DevSecOps.

Podcast topics:

• Using GenAI to accelerate engineering

• Building an application from scratch using GenAI

• Creating AI agents to tackle technical debt

• Introducing GenAI to your engineering organization

• Security in modern companies

• DevSecOps - security in building software

Jason shares his top book picks—Co-Intelligence by Ethan Mullick, The Coming Wave with Mustafa Suleyman, and AI Snake Oil by Arvind Narayanan—plus insights on Applied LLMs and the OWASP Top 10 for LLM.

Tune in for a concise, impactful conversation at the intersection of AI, cybersecurity, and entrepreneurship!

About Jason Montgomery

Jason Montgomery began his journey in tech as a young coder and hobbyist hacker before starting his professional career as a software dev and sysadmin during the internet's early days. That experience eventually led him to transition into a full-time cybersecurity role focusing on Security Engineering and AppSec in the corporate world. He moved to the startup world as a security researcher at Veracode. In 2015, he co-founded Nexosis, an AI/ML company, which was later successfully acquired. Building on this experience, he went on to co-found Mantium, an early-stage generative AI company.

Now, he’s serving as an independent consultant and a technical trainer with ReynCon Security with a focus in cybersecurity and GenAI.