From Academia to Startup Founder and Successful Exit with Jean Yang

From Academia to Startup Founder and Successful Exit with Jean Yang

Author: Software Huddle February 6, 2024 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 Mellon University with a focus on programming language research. She then went on to found Akita Software, which was focused on solving hard problems around the API observability space. And last year, the company was acquired by Postman. And during the interview, we covered a lot of ground talking about Jean's academic experience, motivations for starting a company, and the problem Akita set out to work on. 01:05 Intro 06:40 Software as a Social Problem 12:10 Over engineering 20:44 Motivation 25:22 The problems 32:10 Existing methods to solve 36:21 Some other similar systems 36:21 Packet to Reconstruction 39:43 Aha moments for customers 41:33 Why sell to Postman 47:23 Would you do it again? 52:03 Rapid Fire

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
Deep Dive into Inference Optimization for LLMs with Philip Kiely [not-audio_url] [/not-audio_url]

Duration: 1:04:05
Today we have Philip Kiely from Baseten on the show. Baseten is a Series B startup focused on providing infrastructure for AI workloads. We go deep on Inference Optimization. We cover choosing a model, discuss the hype a…
Java and Building AI Applications with Kevin Dubois [not-audio_url] [/not-audio_url]

Duration: 56:58
Today on the show, we have Kevin Dubois. Kevin is a Senior Principal Developer Advocate at Red Hat, Java Champion, and well known open source contributor. In our conversation with Kevin, we talk about his history with Ja…
SQLite, Turso, and the State of Databases with Glauber Costa [not-audio_url] [/not-audio_url]

Duration: 1:12:07
Today we have Glauber Costa on the show, who's the CEO and founder at Turso. They provide a managed SQLite service with some really interesting capabilities that's changing some of the application patterns you can do. He…
Blocking Bots & Moving from Redis to SQLite with Mike Buckbee [not-audio_url] [/not-audio_url]

Duration: 53:00
Today, we have Mike Buckbee on the show. Mike is the co-founder of Wafris, and he wrote a really insightful article last week about moving from Redis to SQLite for an aspect of their architecture. The article was nuanced…
AI Engineer, Web Frameworks, & more with Tejas Kumar [not-audio_url] [/not-audio_url]

Duration: 1:21:58
Today we have Tejas Kumar on the show. Tejas is part of the Developer Relations team at Datastax. He's really good at frontend, got a great podcast and he has written a book called Fluent React. He spoke recently at the…
The Data Engineering Landscape with Peter Hanssens [not-audio_url] [/not-audio_url]

Duration: 54:52
Today on the show, we have Peter Hanssens, the CEO and founder of Cloud Shuttle and creator of the DataEngBytes Conference. Peter has helped build an incredible data engineering community in Australia. He runs meetups, u…
Infrastructure, AWS, AI and Jobs, HTMX & more [not-audio_url] [/not-audio_url]

Duration: 1:34:19
Today we have a special guest. We have Jeremy Daly, who’s been in the cloud space for a while. Jeremy is the co-founder of Ampt, which is building an abstraction infrastructure layer on top of AWS, just to make it simple…
Introduction to GraphRAG with Stephen Chin [not-audio_url] [/not-audio_url]

Duration: 1:03:10
Today we have Stephen Chin, VP of developer relations at Neo4j on the show. Stephen is an author, speaker, and Java expert, we’ll actually be crossing paths in person at the upcoming Infobip Shift conference in September…
Infrastructure as Code with Dax Raad [not-audio_url] [/not-audio_url]

Duration: 1:17:47
Today, we have Dax Raad on the show. Dax is a must-follow on tech Twitter, known for his blend of humor and insightful tech opinions. We talked a lot about SST, which is the infrastructure as code tool that he works on.…