Episodes

Feb. 13, 2025

E27: From Unix Coder to BI Pioneer: Rob Woollen's Journey Founding Si…

In this episode of Zero Prime, we sit down with Rob Woollen, co-founder and CTO of Sigma Computing, to explore the intersection of engineering and entrepreneurship. Rob shares his journey from writing Unix kernels at HP to ar...

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Dec. 5, 2024

E26: Balancing Open Source and Business with Spencer Kimball (Cockroa…

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 ...

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Aug. 5, 2024

E25 [DEEP DIVE]: How Metric Trees Are Transforming Businesses with Vi…

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...

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June 7, 2024

E24: Self-Taught to Startup Success: The Unconventional Path of Influ…

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 meetu...

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May 1, 2024

E23: Inside the Mind of an AI Pioneer: A Conversation with Alex Mashr…

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 networ...

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April 25, 2024

E22: From BigQuery to Motherduck: The Journey of Jordan Tigani

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, w...

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April 4, 2024

E21: The Power of Pricing with Alvaro Morales of Orb

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 ...

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Feb. 6, 2024

E20: Building Sustainable Businesses in the Tech Industry with Craig …

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 ....

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Dec. 28, 2023

E19: Overcoming Self-Doubt to Become a Founder with Erik Bernhardsson

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 …

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Nov. 27, 2023

E18: Data Tool Disruption: Barry McCardel on Building Hex

In this episode, I chat with Barry McCardel, Co-Founder and CEO of Hex , as he traces his journey from leading college teams to establishing Hex, a data tool startup. Barry discusses building his team with former Palantir col...

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Nov. 3, 2023

E17: The Visionary Behind Vercel with Guillermo Rauch

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 deployme...

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Oct. 5, 2023

E16: The Future of AI in the Workplace -- A Conversation with Aaron L…

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 …

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Sept. 7, 2023

E15: Developer Productivity and the Future of Software Development --…

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...

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Aug. 2, 2023

E14: From Google Engineer to Cockroach Labs Co-Founder -- a Conversat…

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 creati...

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July 3, 2023

E13: The Evolution of Data Science with DJ Patil

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...

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March 22, 2023

E12: From Vertica to Starburst - Data Processing for Analytics with M…

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, …

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March 17, 2023

E11: Streaming Data w/ Eric Sammer

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...

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March 14, 2023

E10: Josh Benamram and Data Observability

Josh Benamram is the the co-founder & CEO of Databand , a data observability company acquired by IBM. We’ll discuss Josh’s segue from an early career in venture capital, into becoming a product manager for a business intellig...

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Feb. 24, 2023

E09: The Origin Story of Datadog w/ Alexis Le-Quoc

Alexis is the co-founder and CTO of Datadog , which was founded in NYC in 2010. He shares with the Pete the origin story of the company, how & why raising capital was very different in that period, and their …

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Feb. 1, 2023

E08: Path to Becoming a Founder w/ Brad Buda

Brad is a repeat founder and is currently the co-founder of Census , an SF company that syncs customer data to go-to-market tools. Brad shares his path from initially joining a startup as an engineer and continuing on to beco...

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Jan. 11, 2023

E07: Monetizing Open Source w/ Wes McKinney

Pete chats with Wes McKinney , the inspiration behind many popular OSS data & data science tools like pandas, Apache Arrow, Ibis and others. We learn from Wes' experience in starting businesses around OSS tooling, and hear hi...

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Dec. 1, 2022

E06: Data Visualization w/ Max Beauchemin

Join us for an interview with Max Beauchemin , the original creator of both Apache Superset and Apache Airflow and the founder and CEO of Preset , the company built around Apache Superset. [1:37] Motivations for building Apac...

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Nov. 22, 2022

E05: Geo Data w/ Lindsay Pettingill

Pete interviews Lindsay Pettingill, CEO & Founder of Iggy . Iggy allows users to quickly understand physical locations to make better investment and management decisions. Lindsay gives us an overview of Iggy, how working at A...

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Nov. 7, 2022

E04: Data Catalogs w/ Shinji Kim

Join us for an interview with Shinji Kim , the CEO and founder of Select Star . She walks us through the data catalog landscape, where Select Star sits within that, how the startup thinks about data integration, and lastly …

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