product-engineering
(17)
Peter Kuhar Still Makes the Thing Himself
Long after co-founding a mobile software company, Peter Kuhar is still soldering, printing, coding and packing. His career is a case study in what happens when an engineer never outsources curiosity.
Kishore Pallamreddy Spent 18 Years Making Travel Software Behave. Now He Wants AI to Earn Its Boarding Pass.
The Zapcom founder built his career inside the invisible machinery of travel. His next wager is that enterprise AI needs the same discipline: product judgment, durable architecture, and an unforgiving eye for the customer.
Seb Poole Is Teaching the Help Desk to Finish the Job
After a decade inside startups, Seb Poole has developed a particular dislike for software that records a problem and leaves a human to solve it. His new company, Modern, is an attempt to make enterprise IT software do the work hiding behind the ticket.
Pradeep Elankumaran Keeps Building the Errand Away
Three YC companies, one enduring habit: find the recurring annoyance, test it in public, then engineer the repetition out of everyday life.
Andrew Chung Is Building an AI That Starts With Your Voice
He left Seoul National University to build, entered Y Combinator after a run of LLM experiments, and turned a founder's recurring blank-page problem into Typa. His wager is simple: the future of AI-assisted content begins with a conversation, not a prompt box.
The $1 doorway Norman Wanto built into Wall Street
A scholarship student became a software builder, then turned a three-person coding sprint into a cross-border investing platform. His quiet advantage was never finance theatre - it was systems thinking.
Raj Velagapudi Keeps Building for the Moment After the Pitch
Across three decades, Raj Velagapudi has returned to the same operating idea: make technology answer to outcomes, then build the team that can carry the promise across borders.
Punkaj Jain Has Spent Four Decades Turning New Technology Into Useful Work
Before AI became every company’s favorite noun, Punkaj Jain had already spent decades doing the less glamorous work: turning new technology into products, teams and businesses that could survive contact with customers.
Eleazar Vega-Gonzalez Keeps Changing the Layer
He started with a wearable memory machine, helped rethink the clock inside a chip, challenged the credit card, and now builds choose-your-own-adventure AI. The industries changed; his obsession with invisible complexity did not.
Ashraf Karim
Ashraf Karim is Senior Vice President of Connected Customer Experiences & Technology at ServiceNow, where he leads the charge on transforming how enterprises engage customers through AI-powered digital workflows. With over two decades spanning engineering, product management, and executive leadership at Google, PayPal, Affirm, and Cisco, Karim bridges the gap between deep technical fluency and strategic business thinking. He is known for championing simplicity-first design, advocating that reducing cognitive load at every customer touchpoint is the defining discipline of great product leadership.
Divakar Tantravahi
Divakar Tantravahi is the Founder, Chairman, and CEO of Innominds, a San Jose-based AI-first digital product engineering company with 1,400 employees and $80M in annual revenue. Starting his career at Visakhapatnam Steel Plant in 1987, he moved through Informix and a startup called Everypath before founding Innominds in 2003. Under his leadership, Innominds has become a full-cycle product engineering partner helping technology companies build products that land in the Gartner Magic Quadrant. Recognized for his employee-centric leadership style, Tantravahi was named one of India's Best Leaders in Times of Crisis 2021 by Great Place to Work India and received ET Now's 'CEO with HR Orientation' Award in 2019.
Deepak Nagpal
Deepak Nagpal is the CEO of Audax Labs, a Bothell, Washington-based technology innovation company he has led since 2016. With a career spanning over two decades across NTT DATA, Capital One, and Interra Information Technologies, and an MBA from Oxford's Said Business School, he has built Audax Labs into a multi-practice consultancy operating across AR/VR/MR, AI, IoT, cloud migration, and data analytics - serving industries from automotive and healthcare to BFSI and government, with partnerships spanning Microsoft, Google, Amazon AWS, Hitachi Vantara, Oracle, and Rocket Software.
Neschae Fernando
Neschae Fernando is the CEO of Zone24x7, a 22-year-old technology engineering company headquartered in San Jose, California, with a major hub in Sri Lanka. With a dual background in electrical engineering (MS and BS from UCLA) and enterprise IT delivery at Cisco, Fernando leads a 270-person team that sits at a rare intersection: companies capable of integrating hardware and software end-to-end. Under his leadership since June 2022, Zone24x7 has won seven industry awards in 2025 alone, including Gold at NBQSA and the IoT Technology of the Year Award, while expanding its AI, RFID, and cognitive vision platforms across 50+ enterprise clients globally.
Nilesh Jadhav
Nilesh Jadhav is the CEO and Co-Founder of AMISEQ Inc., a Milpitas, California-based cybersecurity and intelligent automation company he co-founded in 2017. With over 18 years in IT — more than 12 of them in Silicon Valley — he has built AMISEQ into a globally recognized firm serving Fortune 500 clients across cybersecurity, RPA, product engineering, and UX design. In 2025, AMISEQ launched Z-Deploy, a zero-touch automation platform that compresses multi-day security deployments into under two hours, and expanded aggressively into the Middle East.
Samir Deolikar
Samir Deolikar is the Chief Executive Officer of BayRock Labs, a Silicon Valley product-engineering firm in San Jose that ships AI-first software for startups and enterprises. He moved into the CEO seat in February 2024 after two years as advisor, and twenty-plus years across Zensar Technologies and Reliance Industries before that.
Karthik Srinivasan
Karthik Srinivasan is the CTO of Studio at Forum Ventures, the AI venture studio co-building the next generation of B2B companies from concept to company. With 20+ years of product engineering across Travelocity, Getty Images, and his own startup Pixibo, Karthik brings a rare hybrid of hands-on builder instinct and startup architect thinking to a studio that has already launched 17 companies - helping domain experts turn ideas into fundable businesses at sprint speed without the usual technical debt hangover.
Luca Rossi
Luca Rossi is an Italian software engineer, entrepreneur, and writer based in Rome who turned a side project into one of the world's most-read engineering leadership newsletters. After co-founding and scaling travel startup Wanderio to 25M+ customers over eight years, he launched Refactoring in 2020 - a newsletter covering engineering management, software teams, and tech leadership. It now reaches 172,000+ subscribers, ranks in the top 10 Substack business newsletters, and generates approximately $300K/year in revenue, all operated solo. He also hosts the Refactoring Podcast, featuring guests like DHH, Kent Beck, and Camille Fournier, and in 2025 released Tolaria, a free open-source macOS knowledge base app built entirely with AI coding tools.