First Year as a Startup Founder and CEO with Nucleus's Evis Drenova

First Year as a Startup Founder and CEO with Nucleus's Evis Drenova

Author: Software Huddle October 17, 2023 Duration: 44:42
In this episode, we spoke with Evis Drenova, CEO and co-founder of Nucleus, a Y Combinator graduate from 2022 focused on making it easy to deploy, build, and manage on Kubernetes. Evis left Skyflow, where he was one of the product leads, to build Nucleus. In this conversation, we talked through his first year as CEO of a startup, how he got into Y Combinator, what that experience was like, and how he's been building the company since. This is a really interesting conversation for anyone who's ever thought about starting their own company.

Every week on Software Huddle, Alex DeBrie and Sean Falconer sit down with a different expert from across the tech landscape. The conversations are less about quick tips and more about substantive discussions, digging into the real challenges and decisions behind building software, launching products, and navigating the industry's constant shifts. You'll hear from practitioners who have been in the trenches, offering perspectives that blend deep technical knowledge with hard-won business and entrepreneurial experience. Alex brings his specialized expertise as the author of The DynamoDB Book and an AWS Data Hero, while Sean contributes a unique viewpoint shaped by over two decades as an engineer, founder, and marketing executive, recognized as a Snowflake Data Superhero. Together, they create a space where complex topics in software development and technology trends become accessible and genuinely engaging. This podcast is for anyone who wants to move beyond surface-level news and understand the "why" behind the tools and strategies shaping our digital world. Tune in for a thoughtful huddle that feels more like a candid conversation between colleagues than a formal interview.
Author: Language: en-us Episodes: 79

Software Huddle
Podcast Episodes
Building a Better C with Loris Cro from Zig Software Foundation [not-audio_url] [/not-audio_url]

Duration: 1:10:25
Zig is a new programming language with big ambitions: to be a better C. Loris Cro is the VP of Community at the Zig Software Foundation, and he takes us through the ins and outs of Zig -- how was it created, what problem…
The Real Work of Data Engineering with Joe Reis [not-audio_url] [/not-audio_url]

Duration: 59:00
Today, we have Joe Reis on the show. Joe is the co author of the book, Fundamentals of Data Engineering, probably the best and most comprehensive book on data engineering you could think to read. We talk about the cultur…
Tech layoffs, Sora by OpenAI, Gemini 1.5, Apple Vision Pro & more [not-audio_url] [/not-audio_url]

Duration: 1:01:12
Our special episode is back! Join Sean, Alex & Vino in this fun conversation. 00:00 Introduction 10:08 Sora by OpenAi 16:11 Google Gemini 1.5 22:05 Mixture-of-Experts 38:02 Nvidia’s Valuation 40:19 Apple Vision Pro 49:05…
Just use Postgres with Craig Kerstiens [not-audio_url] [/not-audio_url]

Duration: 1:16:42
Today's episode is with Craig Kerstiens, Craig has been in the Postgres space for a long time. First at Heroku, doing Heroku Postgres. Then at Citus, doing Distributed Postgres. Now at Crunchy Data, he's Chief Product Of…
From Academia to Startup Founder and Successful Exit with Jean Yang [not-audio_url] [/not-audio_url]

Duration: 59:14
Today on the show, we have the founder and CEO of Akita Software and now head of product at Postman, Dr. Professor Jean Yang. Jean has a super interesting background, a former computer science professor at Carnegie Mello…
Durable Async/Await with Stephan Ewen of Restate [not-audio_url] [/not-audio_url]

Duration: 1:04:56
Today's guest is a legend in the distributed systems community. Stephan Ewan was one of the creators of Apache Flink, a stream processing engine that took off with the rise of Apache Kafka. Stephan is now working on core…
AI Incubation and Investing with Rak Garg from Bain Capital Ventures [not-audio_url] [/not-audio_url]

Duration: 53:12
Today's guest is Bain Capital partner Rak Garg. Rak is a super smart guy that's worked as an ML researcher. Then he was in product at Atlassian before moving over to the venture capital side of the world. In this episode…
Finding Product Market Fit with Cassidy Williams of Contenda [not-audio_url] [/not-audio_url]

Duration: 55:09
Today, we have Cassidy Williams, CTO of Contenda. Contenda unbelievably started as a sticker distribution platform that pivoted into a product that converts podcasts and videos into various other forms of written content…
Holiday Special! [not-audio_url] [/not-audio_url]

Duration: 1:22:25
In this special end of the year clips episode of Software Huddle, we took some time to highlight some of our favorite clips from our interviews since we launched the show back in August. Software Huddle: https://twitter.…