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

Tobi Konitzer was born in Germany, and studied cultural studies as an undergraduate student. Eventually, he went to Duke to get a PhD in political science. And that eventually changed to be a PhD in computational social science at Stanford - which is basically writing code to answer social science questions. After graduating in 2017, he joined Facebook Research for a year, then founded two AI startups. Outside of tech, he has 2 young daughters, who he likes to spend time with and take to the park. He used to be an avid trail runner, but his favorite to do is think... and to do so as often as possible.

For the last 10 years of his career, Tobi has been chasing optimized decisioning and outcomes using AI. Five months ago, he decided to join his current venture, and use AI to shift the conversation from "tooling for marketers" to using AI to build an autonomous decisioning system, that learns and improves over time.

This is Tobi's creation story at Growthloop.

Sponsors

• Unblocked
• TECH Domains
• Mezmo
• Braingrid.ai

Links

• https://www.growthloop.com/
• https://www.linkedin.com/in/tobias-konitzer-phd-65984454/

Brian Carbaugh has a non-standard path to being a CEO in the startup world. He was in the marine core for 5-6 years in active duty, before attending Georgetown for school. Eventually, he joined the CIA and spent 23 years, serving the country in multiple different roles and facets, primarily in para military and covert operations. While he was there, he also started to see areas where the agency could innovate, and got curious about how they could partner with private companies. Outside of tech, he is a father of 3 girls and a boy. He enjoys working out, skiing and riding on road bikes. He used to do triathlons in the past, but startup life has taken up any time he could dedicate to that.

Shortly after he retired from the CIA, Brian got a call from some prior folks he knew still in the industry. He started digging into the cybersecurity world, specifically into why there was so much attrition amongst the employees themselves. He was asked the question about how he could 10x this workers, and optimize these individuals using the latest tech?

This is the creation story of Andesite.

Sponsors

• Unblocked
• TECH Domains
• Mezmo
• Braingrid.ai

Links

• https://andesite.ai/
• https://www.linkedin.com/in/brian-carbaugh-38b339243/

Reannah Wyatt is from Bandera, TX, raised on a 4th generation cattle and horse ranch. Eventually, she went to West Texas for school, rodeoing for Howard University, specifically barrel racing. She eventually started selling residential real estate, and fell in love with the industry. Outside of tech and real estate, she is a mom and still loves horses and cattle. She doesn't ride anymore, but leans more into the breeding side of the animals.

Reannah was in residential real estate for over a decade, and was in the mix when Zillow was launched. The platform helped her grow her business, and she knew this was where the industry was headed. But what she couldn't understand was... why wasn't there something built to track the end to end real estate process and transaction?

This is the creation story of The Real Time.

Sponsors

• Unblocked
• TECH Domains
• Mezmo
• Braingrid.ai

Links

• https://therealtimeapp.com/
• https://www.linkedin.com/in/reannahwyatt/

Dane Witbeck grew up in Georgia, and has always had an entrepreneurial spirit. He was the kid selling ripped CD's in school, along with other odds and ends. He went to Georgia Tech to study engineering, and eventually went on to join a startup called Meshify, in the iOT place - which eventually was bought by a large insurance company. Outside of tech, he is married with 4 kids. He is involved in many entrepreneurial groups around Austin, and is the proud owner of a 1969 Ford Bronco - which he enjoys getting out of town in and camping.

Post his prior startup, Dane was on the lookout for problems to solve. He observed his son's friend getting a hand-me-down iPhone, and it hit him that he was going to have to monitor this as his children got phones. As he started to dig into what was available, he realized there wasn't a good solution... and decided to build his own.

This is the creation story of Pinwheel.

Sponsors

• Unblocked
• TECH Domains
• Mezmo
• Braingrid.ai

Links

• https://www.pinwheel.com/
• https://www.linkedin.com/in/danewitbeck/

Martina Zrnec is located in Croatia and grew up playing basketball, spending every minute she could on the court. And when I say every minute, I mean it - she would even skip the last few hours of school and hit the court for some practice. Eventually, her mother decided for her that she should not pursue it professionally, and should focus on her schooling. Outside of tech, she's married with 2 kids. She notes that she is not just a coding person - she likes to socialize! She plays piano, and as a family, they spend a lot of time outside, biking, playing sports and being in nature.

Martina's co-founder, Kyle, had this idea that he wanted to create - a platform that allowed people to organize the products, services and experiences they love into stacks. He found Martina on a freelancing platform, and they instantly connected on the idea - and got to building.

This is the creation story of Stacklist.

Sponsors

• Unblocked
• TECH Domains
• Mezmo
• Braingrid.ai

Links

• https://stacklist.app/
• https://www.linkedin.com/in/martina-zrnec/

Mitesh Agrawal has a background in Mechanical Engineering. He was one of the co-founders of Lambda, a company in the supercomputing space, where he spent 8.5 years working on everything under the sun. He's very grateful to be in an industry that is booming, but also aligns with his personal interests. Outside of tech, he is married to an ultra supportive wife, and is enjoying being a new father. He enjoys playing tennis, when he can find time to get to the court, and enjoys a good sci-fi book. He mentioned the Foundation series was one of his favorites, but admits it changes depending on the season.

In 2023, the officers at Mitesh's current venture noticed all of the advancements of AI - in particular, model sizes getting larger. What they realized was that when it comes to inference, memory capacity quickly became a problem... and with this, he and the team got excited about building a new architecture to make it better.

This is the creation story of Positron.

Sponsors

• Unblocked
• TECH Domains
• Mezmo
• Braingrid.ai

Links

• https://www.positron.ai/
• https://www.linkedin.com/in/mitesh7/

Ashwin Agrawal came to the US when he was 17, to Rochester for school. He now lives in the Bay Area, and admits he misses his friends on the east coast, as they all stayed back in that area - but he does NOT miss the winters. He has been building his current venture for 3-4 years, and prior to that, he was as at Google for a decade, apart of Google Cloud's huge growth trajectory. Outside of tech, he has a family with 2 middle school sons, with whom he likes to spend a lot of time with, hiking or eating good sushi.

Ashwin was laid off from a few jobs in the past. After experiencing this, he vowed to build a solution that would help people going through this sort of experience. After the last layoff, he formed his company at 4:30 am in the morning, to help anyone in point A wanting to go to point B.

This is the creation story of MobiusEngine.ai.

Sponsors

• Unblocked
• TECH Domains
• Mezmo
• Braingrid.ai

Links

• https://mobiusengine.ai/
• https://www.linkedin.com/in/agrawalashwin/

Today, we are continuing our series, entitled Developer Chats - hearing from the large scale system builders themselves.

In this episode, we are talking with Oleksandr Piekhota, Principal Software Engineer at Teaching Strategies. Oleksandr helps to show us at what point of scale platform approaches are required, when to run experiments and when to stop, and perhaps more importantly - engineering ownership beyond the code.

Questions

• You’ve moved from hands-on engineering into principal and technical leadership roles, working on architecture and platforms.At what point did you realize your work was no longer about individual features, but about the system as a whole
• Across several projects, growth didn’t break functionality — it exposed architectural limits.Can you recall a moment when it became clear that shipping more features wouldn’t solve the problem, and a platform approach was required?
• You’ve designed and supported APIs end-to-end, from architecture to real customers. How do you distinguish between an API that simply works and one that can truly support business scale?
• Internal systems like invoicing and HR workflows began as automation, but evolved into real products.What tells you that an internal tool is worth developing seriously rather than treating as a temporary workaround?
• In R&D, you explored CI/CD automation, server-less, and infrastructure experiments — not all reached production. How do you decide when an experiment should continue, and when it’s no longer worth the engineering cost?
• You’ve hired teams, set standards, and shaped long-term technical direction. At what point does an engineer stop being a contributor and start owning business-level outcomes?
• You contributed to open-source tools that later became part of your company’s infrastructure. Why do you see open source contributions as part of serious engineering work rather than a side activity?
• Looking across your projects, how do you now recognize a truly mature engineering system? Is it code quality, process, or how teams respond when things go wrong?
• If we look five to seven years into the future, which architectural assumptions we treat as “standard” today are most likely to turn out to be naive or limiting?

Sponsors

• Unblocked
• TECH Domains
• Mezmo
• Braingrid.ai

Links

• https://www.linkedin.com/in/oleksandr-piekhota-b675ba53/
• https://teachingstrategies.com/

Satya Mishra was born and raised in India, in one of the smaller tech hubs on the eastern coast. He came to the states 25 years ago on an H1B visa, working in semiconductors. In 2015, he decided he wanted to do something entrepreneurial and set out to do so. Outside of tech, he is married with 3 kids, which takes up most of his time. When he lived in CO, he did lots of skiing and hiking, including snowshoe hiking. Once he went to California, he switched to beaches. Finally, when he moved to St. Louis, he took up improv, enjoying connecting with people and thinking on your feet.

Satya and his co-founder, Raj, both when through the immigration process in all of its forms. They realized that no one group owns the process, as it's highly specialized, and usually fell onto the employee to keep track of. One day, they set out to solve this problem, to assist business teams to take ownership of the entire process.

This is the creation story of WayLit.

Sponsors

• Unblocked
• TECH Domains
• Mezmo
• Braingrid.ai

Links

• https://www.waylit.com/
• https://www.linkedin.com/in/satyamishra/

Today, we are dropping another episode in our "chats" series, but expanding the audience set to include more folks. This episode is Founder Chats - hearing from those scaling the companies themselves.

In this episode, we are talking with Max Denevich, Co-founder and CRO of LoyaltyPlant. Max is going to share with us to road he travelled, entering into this industry, his go to market strategies, scaling across geographic region - and much, much more.

Questions

• Before we talk about products and scale, tell us a bit about your path to this point. What experiences shaped the way you think about business and leadership before LoyaltyPlant?
• At what point did you realise you wanted to work with complex, traditional industries rather than consumer apps or “easy” tech?
• Why foodtech, and specifically Quick Service Restaurants? What made you believe this industry had deep structural problems worth solving with technology?
• What made you decide to join LoyaltyPlant, and what potential did you see that others might have missed?
• You’re often referred to as a co-founder today. How did the transition happen from an executive role to shaping the company’s future at that level?
• LoyaltyPlant was close to running out of investment at one point. What were the first decisions that fundamentally changed the company’s trajectory?
• What were the key milestones that turned LoyaltyPlant from a struggling company into a global enterprise business, from the first major client to scaling across 30 countries?
• You’ve worked across the US, UK, MENA, Europe, and CIS. What did you learn about scaling the same product across very different markets, and what absolutely doesn’t translate?
• You built new go-to-market strategies that now generate over 90% of new sales. What did you change compared to a classic SaaS sales playbook, and why did it work in enterprise QSR?
• Margins are shrinking, aggregators dominate, and costs are rising. What’s actually happening on the ground right now in QSR and foodtech, and how should companies adapt?
• Tell us about a decision you got wrong. What did it cost the business, and what did it teach you as a leader?
• What advice would you give founders building B2B products for traditional industries today, especially around scale, partnerships, and staying relevant?

Sponsors

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

Links

• https://loyaltyplant.com/
• https://www.linkedin.com/in/denevich/