Zero Prime Podcast

In this episode we talk to Sudarshan Lakshminaraseemhan – a founding engineer at e6data who cut his teeth during the formative years at global technology consultancy ThoughtWorks. Hear from Sudarshan as he dissects the evolution of software development from early waterfall processes to today's rapid iteration cycles – pulling no punches when discussing the cost crisis in data analytics.

Sudarshan offers candid perspectives on t...

In this episode of the Zero Prime podcast, we chat with Charity Majors, Co-Founder and CTO of Honeycomb, who traded piano keys for keyboard commands on their journey from classically trained pianist to a systems firefighter.

Tune in to get Charity's unfiltered thoughts on why engineers should toggle between coding and management, challenging the "three pillars" monitoring model and insights on how AI introduces non-de...

In this episode of the Zero Prime podcast, engineer-turned-founder Rob Woollen gives a refreshingly honest take on the founder journey. Rob shares his path from Unix coder to BEA Systems architect to Salesforce CTO, and finally to pioneering data analytics at Sigma.

Get Rob's reflections on turning deep tech into market wins and navigating the AI revolution from an engineer who's built it all.

1. 00:00 - Introduction and Ea...

In this new episode of the 0P podcast, we welcome back Spencer Kimball, co-founder and CEO of Cockroach Labs, to discuss the evolving landscape of software licensing in the cloud era. Spencer shares insights on how companies are innovating with new licensing models to bridge the gap between open source ideals and sustainable business growth.

Drawing from his experience leading Cockroach Labs, a distributed database company, he offer...

In this episode, we introduce a new format for the podcast—a deep dive into a technical topic with an engineer-founder who is an expert on the subject. For our first Deep Dive, I sit down with Vijay Subramanian, the visionary behind Trace, to explore the evolution and future of metric layers in business metrics and cross-functional alignment.

Vijay demystifies the concept of metrics layers, metric trees and semantic layer...

In this episode, I sit down with Paul Dix, the founder and CTO of InfluxData to explore his journey from a self-taught programmer to a leader in database systems. We discuss his role in building the NYC Machine Learning meetup, the creation of InfluxDB and the strategic move to make it open source. He shares insights into the decision to rewrite InfluxDB in 2020 and the power of community in tech development. We also touch on his t...

In this episode, I sit down with Alex Mashrabov, the visionary CEO of Higgsfield AI. We journey through Alex's impressive career, beginning with his time at Yandex where he witnessed the early implementations of neural networks. We explore what ignited his entrepreneurial spirit and delve into the stark contrasts between the Russian and American educational landscapes.

Our discussion then moves to Alex's experiences in bui...

In this episode, I chat with Jordan Tigani, the dynamic engineer-founder of MotherDuck who previously led Google's BigQuery team and headed up product at SingleStore.  Jordan shares the inspiring origin story of MotherDuck, which emerged from the overlooked analytics' long tail, focusing on serving small users in data analytics. Our conversation delves into thought-provoking topics such as the conundrum of big data, bridg...

In this episode, Pete speaks with Alvaro Morales, the co-founder and CEO of Orb, who shares his journey from being an engineer to becoming the founder of a flexible billing engine for modern software pricing. 

Alvaro traces his path from Lima, Peru to San Francisco, discussing the rise of startups in his home city as well as his early engineering experiences at Yahoo, Palantir and Asana.  His early days founding Orb were not without...

In this enlightening episode, I have the privilege of hosting Craig McLuckie, a tech industry veteran who has made significant contributions to the cloud computing industry and is currently the Co-founder & CEO of stacklok. We begin by exploring his journey from Microsoft to Google, where he co-authored Kubernetes, a pivotal project that has shaped the industry.  We also delve into his post-Google venture, Heptio, and the strat...

In this episode, I chat with Erik Bernhardsson, co-founder and CEO of Modal, about his journey from Spotify engineer to startup CTO to startup founder. Erik takes us back to his early days as a software engineer and shares how his transformative years at Spotify ignited his startup mindset. We discuss the challenges he faced during his transition from engineer to founder, including overcoming self-doubt and stepping into a leadersh...

In this episode, we chat with Barry McCardel, Co-Founder and CEO of Hex, as he shares how honing his leadership skills in college paved the way for his journey to becoming a founder. Barry discusses building his team with former Palantir colleagues and Hex's emphasis on design from its inception. He shares insights on Hex's rapid feature development, scaling challenges and his vision for the future of data tooling. The ep...

In this episode, we explore Guillermo Rauch's path from a teen hacker in Argentina to the founder of Vercel. We touch on his engineering roots, the role of open-source in his success and Vercel's creation to simplify deployments with Next.js. We compare Vercel's innovations to the evolution of electric cars, discuss the significance of speed in edge computing and peek into the future of building data-intensive applic...

In this episode, Aaron Lee, Founder & CEO of Smith.ai joins me to discuss a variety of topics. First, we delve into the innovative strategies of tech giants like Google, and explore the future of AI in business. Then we journey back to the early days at Smith.ai, where AI was used to enhance productivity. Aaron shares a multitude of learnings from his time founding RedBeacon and then serving as CTO of Home Depot following its a...

In this episode, we debut a new format where engineer-founders discuss key tech topics. Joined by Graham Thompson of Privacy Dynamics and Debo Ray of DevZero, we dive into modern software development. Topics include the role of developer productivity, challenges of new productivity tools and the problems that arise around data access. We also discuss the evolving role of database administrators, the shift to cloud-hosted dev enviro...

In this episode, I have the pleasure of hosting Spencer Kimball, a former Google engineer turned tech entrepreneur, and now the Co-Founder & CEO of Cockroach Labs. Spencer shares his journey from working at Google to creating his project, Viewfinder, which eventually led to the birth of CockroachDB. Spencer discusses his advice for founders as they approach the challenge of starting a company, finding co-founders, and more. We ...

Today on the podcast, I interview DJ Patil, an entrepreneur, investor, scientist and leader in public policy. The former (and first) U.S. Chief Data Scientist, DJ wrote the book on being Data Driven (literally: O'Reilly Data Driven) and now puts his knowledge to work as General Partner of Great Point Ventures.

Highlights
00:29 - Intro
[1:50] - A discussion of the “Sexiest Job in History: Data Scientist” HBR a...

Today on the podcast, I interview Matt Fuller, the co-founder of Starburst. Matt has worked in data for years ....

Highlights
[1:00] - How Matt got into data & the C-Store paper which led to him joining Vertica, an early columnar database prior to technologies like Hadoop, HDFS or Parquet
[3:45] - The increasing adoption of OSS data storage tools and the growth of the Hadoop ecosystem that ultimately led up to ...

In this episode, I interview Eric Sammer, the founder & CEO of Decodable. Eric was previously an engineering manager at Cloudera, and before that the founder of Rocana, an early observability company that was sold to Splunk. Eric has an amazing perspective on the architecture of data systems based on his years of experience in the field. We chat about his thoughts on the opportunities and challenges specifically around streamin...