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Code Story: Insights from Startup Tech Leaders

S5 Bonus: Leon Kuperman, CAST.ai

Code Story: Insights from Startup Tech Leaders

Noah Labhart - Startup Founder & CTO

Tech News, News, Business, Technology, Entrepreneurship, Careers

4.6216 Ratings

🗓️ 28 October 2021

⏱️ 46 minutes

🧾️ Download transcript

Summary

Leon Kuperman comes from an immigrant family, who migrated to North America in the late 70's. He was born in a city that is not part of the Ukraine, but grew up in Canada. So he was brought up in western society, but closely observed his parents and their immigrant background, grinding as entrepreneurs throughout Leon's life. He's a brown belt in Brazilian Jui Jitsu, and has been training for over 15 years. This consumes a lot of his time outside of tech. Funny enough though, when he was living in Seattle, he was a part of a group of people from Oracle, Amazon, Microsoft, etc., who all did martial arts. He finds that there is a correlation between Jui Jitsu specifically, and tech. He's married with 3 kids, and of course, likes to spend time with his kids in different ways. His older son actually trains with him in martial arts, and also does tech - building raspberry pi's and engineering different things. Leon also plays piano, as coming from a Russian family, it wasn't an option not to. At his prior startup, Leon and his CEO would get into conversations about - you guessed - his cloud spending bill. He knew that the usage was justified, but could not point to why each piece of infrastructure was allocated. And further, he could not automatically optimize it, and reduce the bill. This is the creation story of Cast AI. Our Sponsors: * Check out Kinsta: https://kinsta.com * Check out Red Hat: https://www.redhat.com * Check out Vanta: https://vanta.com/CODESTORY Support this podcast at — https://redcircle.com/code-story/donations Advertising Inquiries: https://redcircle.com/brands Privacy & Opt-Out: https://redcircle.com/privacy

Transcript

Click on a timestamp to play from that location

0:00.0

If you ask customers what they want, they will ask you for a better mousetrap.

0:06.0

In other words, they only know what they know.

0:09.0

They don't know what that leap is yet until they have it in their hands.

0:14.0

We didn't start the product management process by going and interviewing a bunch of customers and saying,

0:19.0

okay, we think that cost is a problem.

0:21.3

Tell us about all of the pain points you have in your distinct cost tooling.

0:25.4

There needed to be some kind of radical shift in thinking that would create a 10x benefit.

0:31.5

And that takes a leap of faith that takes sometimes months to validate.

0:35.7

Month.

0:37.0

My name is Leon Cooperman.

0:38.9

I am the co-founder and CTO at cac.AI.

0:47.6

This is Code Story, the podcast bringing you interviews with tech visionaries

0:53.1

who share in the critical moments of what it takes to change in industry

0:57.3

and build and lead a team that has your back.

1:02.4

I'm your host, Noah Lapart,

1:04.6

and today how Leon Cooperman created a way to optimize your Kubernetes

1:09.2

and cut your cloud bill in half.

1:13.5

All this and more.

1:15.1

On Coat Story.

1:20.6

Leon Cooperman comes from an immigrant family who migrated to North America in the late 70s.

1:26.8

He was born in a city that is now part of the Ukraine, but grew up in Canada.

1:31.3

So he was brought up in Western society, but closely observed his parents in their immigrant background,

...

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