How to know when your company needs to pivot and the signals/principles that will help guide you through pivoting w/ Pete Nichols, Lizzie Matusov, and Tony Dong

How to know when your company needs to pivot and the signals/principles that will help guide you through pivoting w/ Pete Nichols, Lizzie Matusov, and Tony Dong

In this special Engineering Founders episode, we’re featuring a live panel of some of the ELC community’s longstanding members who share insights from their founder journeys: Pete Nichols (Co-Founder @ Lightfield), Lizzie Matusov (Co-Founder / CEO @ Quotient), and Tony Dong (Founder & CEO @ Propel Code AI). They dive into what it was like exploring their first big ideas and then strategies for identifying when it’s time to pivot. They cover validating if you’re working on the right problem and using customer research to determine product road map. They also share go-to-market and selling insights, finding your first customers, and getting users willing to pay for your product. This ep also features an audience Q&A from fellow ELC community members!   ABOUT PETE NICHOLS [https://www.linkedin.com/in/petenichols/] Pete Nichols is the Head of Core Product Engineering at Pinterest, where he leads the development of inspiring product experiences and Android/iOS/Web/API platform technology. Prior to Pinterest, Pete spent 15 years at Electronic Arts in development leadership roles for The Sims and SimCity. Pete holds a BS in Computer Science from Stanford University.   ABOUT LIZZIE MATUSOV [https://www.linkedin.com/in/lizzie-matusov/] Lizzie Matusov is the co-founder and CEO of Quotient, a developer tool that surfaces the friction slowing down engineering teams and resolves it directly. Her team also co-authors Research Driven Engineering Leadership, a newsletter that uses research to answer interesting questions on engineering leadership and strategy. She previously worked in various engineering roles at Red Hat and Invitae, and has an MS in Engineering Sciences and MBA from Harvard.   ABOUT TONY DONG [https://www.linkedin.com/in/tonydong3/] Tony is the Founder & CEO of Propel, an AI engineering agent that integrates into your team’s workflows to automate engineering tasks and elevate developer productivity. Before Propel, Tony served as the VP of Engineering at Rippling, where he led the development of the company's Platform and HR products. As a seasoned entrepreneur, Tony was also the founder and CTO of a YC-backed startup and held key engineering roles at Periscope, TellApart, and Twitter.   SHOW NOTES: * Tony and Lizzie’s first big ideas / what they’ve pivoted to today (6:39) * Pete describes his first idea then major pivot (8:49) * How the panelists view pivots as founders (10:35) * Identifying signs of friction that signal it’s time to pivot (13:48) * Tony explains the code review / rediscovery process post-pivot (16:16) * Follow insights derived from customer problems & what they’re willing to pay for (18:16) * Pete’s advice to address pain points & work on what is scalable (21:17) * Navigating the balance between true signals of success / trusting your gut (22:50) * Frameworks for validating the right product, market & customer segment (24:25) * Insights on selling to enterprise / eng leader customers (26:54) * Finding early adopters to demonstrate the product in real time (28:29) * Lizzie’s validation method @ Quotient (31:38) * How a newsletter became an inbound discovery channel (34:01) * Benefits of building in public (36:05) * Understanding the principle of speed to value (37:47) * Identify your product’s hardest use & build an intentional process for it (40:59) * Getting your first customer / when go to market is working (44:46) * Knowing when you have the wrong product or founder fit (47:52) * Q&A: Identifying when not to pivot (52:13) * Getting customers through a customer residency program (55:04) * What doesn’t work when it comes to getting your first customers (58:56) * Tips for finding a partner you trust (1:02:16) * Tony’s path to finding his co-founder (1:04:12) * The co-founder journey @ Lightfield (1:06:00) * Navigating “Wizard of Oz-ing” challenges in startups (1:08:39) * Lizzie’s process for identifying / addressing customer “paper cuts” (1:10:04) * Incorporating secret prototypes within your product (1:12:21)   LINKS AND RESOURCES * The Mom Test [https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/52283963-the-mom-test] - Rob Fitzpatrick’s quick, practical guide that will save you time, money, and heartbreak. * 50 Co-Founder Dating Questions [https://proof-assets.s3.amazonaws.com/firstround/50%20Questions%20for%20Co-Founders.pdf]   THIS EPISODE WOULDN’T HAVE BEEN POSSIBLE WITHOUT THE HELP OF OUR INCREDIBLE PRODUCTION TEAM: Patrick Gallagher - Producer & Co-Host Jerry Li - Co-Host Noah Olberding - Associate Producer, Audio & Video Editor https://www.linkedin.com/in/noah-olberding/ [https://www.linkedin.com/in/noah-olberding/] Dan Overheim - Audio Engineer, Dan’s also an avid 3D printer - https://www.bnd3d.com/ [https://www.bnd3d.com/] Ellie Coggins Angus - Copywriter, Check out her other work at https://elliecoggins.com/about/ [https://elliecoggins.com/about/] Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com [https://pcm.adswizz.com] for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

Determining bets, using customer insights to pivot, and gaining developer buy in & trust w/ Tomas Reimers @ Graphite

Tomas Reimers, Co-Founder & CPO @ Graphite, reveals his journey to becoming a founder and some of the major moments from Graphite’s product development story. He dissects frameworks for determining when it’s time to quit your full-time job to pursue becoming a founder and analyzing the costs vs. benefits of that decision. We cover how to decide what customer problems to solve, understanding how software development trends impact what you’re building, and product market fit and selling considerations. Lastly, Tomas shares valuable strategies when it comes to selling to developers.   ABOUT TOMAS REIMERS [https://www.linkedin.com/in/tomasreimers/] Tomas Reimers is the CPO and co-founder of Graphite, the a16z and Anthropic-backed AI code review platform that Cursor acquired in December 2025. Previously, he was an engineer at Facebook. Passionate about advancing developer velocity, Tomas holds a BS in Computer Science from Harvard University.   UNBLOCKED: [http://getunblocked.com/elc] THE CONTEXT ENGINE YOUR CODING AGENTS ARE MISSING. Give your coding agents the context your best engineers have. Your agents can read code, but they don’t know how your team works. Rules and MCPs give access to information but not understanding. That’s why you still have to tell them where to look and what to look for. Unblocked gives your agents the history, conventions, and decisions behind your code so they generate mergeable output without the back and forth. It automatically surfaces the right context for every task, so agents stay on track without the set up tax or the correction loops. GETUNBLOCKED.COM/ELC [http://getunblocked.com/elc]   SHOW NOTES: * The origin story behind Graphite (1:05) * Signs that it’s time to quit your job / found a company (4:03) * How Tomas & his co-founders knew it was time to break up with their jobs (5:40) * Understand what leaving your job will mean career-growth wise (7:33) * Embracing regret minimization (9:28) * Pros & cons of developing in blue ocean vs. red ocean areas as a founder (11:49) * Strategies for determining what software to build / how is software dev evolving (14:00) * Tomas’s framework for determining bets (15:50) * Recommendations for selling as a founder (17:52) * Identifying if sales isn’t working or if product market fit is off (20:35) * Using customer insights to experiment & make a PMF pivot (23:05) * Why developers don’t want to be sold to, they want to be taught (24:42) * How to apply teaching vs. selling into early GTM strategy (27:20) * Utilizing demonstrations to gain developer buy in & trust (29:24) * What Tomas is looking forward to in Graphite’s future / software dev in general (32:04) * Rapid fire questions (33:34) LINKS AND RESOURCES * The Mom Test [https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/52283963-the-mom-test] - Rob Fitzpatrick’s quick, practical guide that will save you time, money, and heartbreak. * Founding Sales - The Startup Sales Handbook [https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/46019973-founding-sales---the-startup-sales-handbook] - rhe distillation of Pete Kazanjy’s experience at his first software startup, TalentBin going from a founder with a product marketing and product management background to early sales guy, early sales manager, and eventual post-acquisition sales leader at Monster Worldwide in addition to his later experience founding Modern Sales, the nation’s largest sales operations, enablement, and leadership community. * Thinking in Bets: Making Smarter Decisions When You Don't Have All the Facts [https://www.goodreads.com/en/book/show/35957157-thinking-in-bets] - Annie Duke, a former World Series of Poker champion turned business consultant, draws on examples from business, sports, politics, and (of course) poker to share tools anyone can use to embrace uncertainty and make better decisions.   THIS EPISODE WOULDN’T HAVE BEEN POSSIBLE WITHOUT THE HELP OF OUR INCREDIBLE PRODUCTION TEAM: Patrick Gallagher - Producer & Co-Host Jerry Li - Co-Host Noah Olberding - Associate Producer, Audio & Video Editor https://www.linkedin.com/in/noah-olberding/ [https://www.linkedin.com/in/noah-olberding/] Dan Overheim - Audio Engineer, Dan’s also an avid 3D printer - https://www.bnd3d.com/ [https://www.bnd3d.com/] Ellie Coggins Angus - Copywriter, Check out her other work at https://elliecoggins.com/about/ [https://elliecoggins.com/about/] Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com [https://pcm.adswizz.com] for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

Applying Agentic AI to the Supply Chain, Building Systems to Withstand Chaos, and Leveraging your Curiosity w/ Pooja Brown @ Inventry.ai

In this episode of Engineering Founders, Pooja Brown (Founder @ Inventry.ai [http://inventry.ai/]) shares her founder journey and insights on balancing being a founder & technologist, especially within the mid-market manufacturing industry. We cover why founders need to lead with curiosity as they seek out customer problems to solve, strategies for solving complex problems related to supply chain, and strategies for selling your products. Pooja also dissects important fundraising tactics, how to identify areas that AI tooling can enhance within your business, reading customer signals, and bolstering your engineering skills by leveling up business capabilities.   ABOUT POOJA BROWN [https://www.linkedin.com/in/pgarg/] Pooja Brown is a technology executive and founder focused on building AI-native platforms that power real-world operations across industries. She has led engineering at scale at companies like Stitch Fix and DocuSign, building systems that combine data, workflows, and machine learning to drive everything from personalization and supply chain to digital agreements used by hundreds of thousands of businesses.Her experience spans multiple verticals including retail, enterprise SaaS, education technology, and real estate, where she has consistently focused on embedding AI directly into core business systems rather than layering it on top. Pooja is currently the founder and CEO of Inventry.ai [http://Inventry.ai], where she is building autonomous AI agents that help mid-market manufacturers run procurement and supply chain operations more effectively. Across her career, she has focused on turning complex operational data into systems that don’t just generate insights, but actually drive decisions and execution.   ABOUT INVENTRY.AI [https://www.inventry.ai/] Inventry.ai [http://inventry.ai/] swiftly detects time sensitive supply chain issues, prioritizes the risk, automates resolutions, and facilitates buyer-supplier collaboration, keeping your supply chain running smoothly and your customers satisfied.   SHOW NOTES: * What shaped Pooja’s entrepreneurship journey & background (3:20) * Looking for the right problem & leading with curiosity (6:47) * Insights on solving problems related to supply chain (10:42) * Building systems for chaos / complexity (12:46) * Adopting a beginner’s mindset when solving complex problems (15:40) * Dissecting fundraising strategies & decision making (19:28) * Emerging business patterns that eng leaders need to capitalize on (26:32) * Understanding how customers make decisions on what products to adopt (29:09) * Selling strategies for the mid-market manufacturing industry (37:08) * Integrating AI tools to augment current business capabilities (41:03) * Engineering skills that enhance sales processes (44:43) * Communication frameworks when working with customers (47:21) * Rapid fire questions (50:06)   THIS EPISODE WOULDN’T HAVE BEEN POSSIBLE WITHOUT THE HELP OF OUR INCREDIBLE PRODUCTION TEAM: Patrick Gallagher - Producer & Co-Host Jerry Li - Co-Host Noah Olberding - Associate Producer, Audio & Video Editor https://www.linkedin.com/in/noah-olberding/ [https://www.linkedin.com/in/noah-olberding/] Dan Overheim - Audio Engineer, Dan’s also an avid 3D printer - https://www.bnd3d.com/ [https://www.bnd3d.com/] Ellie Coggins Angus - Copywriter, Check out her other work at https://elliecoggins.com/about/ [https://elliecoggins.com/about/] Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com [https://pcm.adswizz.com] for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

The Product Paradigm Shift: How LiveKit Navigated High Stakes Scaling Challenges to Build the Future of Voice-First AI Interfaces w/ Russ d’Sa

Russ d’Sa (CEO & Co-founder @ LiveKit) joins the show to deconstruct the "Product Paradigm Shift" toward voice-driven interfaces and agent-centric UX . We dive into LiveKit’s high-stakes scaling lessons: from powering OpenAI and Character AI’s voice mode, how they navigated real time bottlenecks to hit the next level of scale, the architectural necessity of a multi-cloud strategy, and the foundations of a co-founder relationships that can effectively blend engineering & business strategy. ABOUT RUSS D’SA [https://www.linkedin.com/in/russelldsa/] Russ is a startup vet who founded his first company in the 2007 YC batch and was the 2nd frontend engineer hired at Twitter, Russ d'Sa now leads voice AI unicorn LiveKit. They're the backbone of ChatGPT Voice Mode, Salesforce Agentforce, Grok, and roughly 30% of US 911 calls. ABOUT LIVEKIT [https://livekit.com/] LiveKit is an open source framework and cloud platform for building voice, video, and physical AI agents. It provides the tools you need to build agents that interact with users in realtime over audio, video, and data streams. Agents run on the LiveKit server, which supplies the low-latency infrastructure (including transport, routing, synchronization, and session management) built on a production-grade WebRTC stack. This architecture enables reliable and performant agent workloads. SHOW NOTES: * The product paradigm shift toward voice-driven apps and natural human-computer interfaces (2:30) * Voice-apps in practice: How these trends impact the strategy of product building today (5:18) * Early adopters: Why legacy industries like healthcare use voice AI (7:41) * Reevaluating and building product experiences optimized for AI agents (12:38) * How AI trends will impact roadmaps and Go To Market ****(18:02) * The origin of LiveKit: Building real-time infra for the pandemic (20:53) * The OpenAI moment: Powering the fastest-growing consumer app (23:32) * Scaling with OpenAI: Navigating the challenges of balancing time-to-market with system design (25:23) * The Character AI outage: Solving cross-continental state sync and hitting the next level of scale (28:46) * The problem: When telemetry breaks first: Managing analytics and logging for millions of concurrent AI sessions (31:50) * Architecting for resilience: Multi-cloud from day one and why treating infra as a utility matters (33:08) * Co-founder dynamics: Blending engineering strategy with business outcomes (37:01) * Rapid Fire Questions (40:37) THIS EPISODE WOULDN’T HAVE BEEN POSSIBLE WITHOUT THE HELP OF OUR INCREDIBLE PRODUCTION TEAM: Patrick Gallagher - Producer & Co-Host Jerry Li - Co-Host Noah Olberding - Associate Producer, Audio & Video Editor https://www.linkedin.com/in/noah-olberding/ [https://www.linkedin.com/in/noah-olberding/] Dan Overheim - Audio Engineer, Dan’s also an avid 3D printer - https://www.bnd3d.com/ [https://www.bnd3d.com/] Ellie Coggins Angus - Copywriter, Check out her other work at https://elliecoggins.com/about/ [https://elliecoggins.com/about/] Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com [https://pcm.adswizz.com] for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

Demo-led validation, charging from day 1, selling to AI-native companies, and finding resilient co-founders w/ Gil Feig @ Merge

Gil Feig (Co-Founder @ Merge) deconstructs the high-speed, tactical playbook for building a category-defining API company in the middle of the AI "space race." We discuss finding resilient co-founders who can handle the “trough of sorrow,” reimagining the Lean Startup Methodology through demo-led validation, and why charging for products from day one is the ultimate validation signal. Gil also shares frameworks for selling to AI-native companies, mental models for roadmap tradeoffs, and how to stay relevant as model capabilities shift. Plus, why you should skip avoid “brilliant jerks” and focus on hiring company builders instead.   ABOUT GIL FEIG [https://www.linkedin.com/in/gilfeig/] Gil Feig is the Co-Founder and CTO of Merge, which helps companies like Mistral, Ramp, and Perplexity integrate thousands of external apps into their products & AI agents. Previously, Gil was the Head of Engineering at Untapped and worked as a software engineer at Wealthfront and LinkedIn. A graduate of Columbia University, he now lives and works in San Francisco.   ABOUT MERGE [https://7162c13e.streak-link.com/Cvfga2SbW9n3kLWbEAsbNr_E/https%3A%2F%2Fwww.merge.dev%2F] Merge [https://7162c13e.streak-link.com/Cvfga2SbW9n3kLWbEAsbNr_E/https%3A%2F%2Fwww.merge.dev%2F] is the leading provider of agentic tools and customer-facing integrations for frontier LLMs, Fortune 500 organizations, and B2B SaaS companies. To date, Merge has raised over $75 million in funding from Accel, NEA, and Addition.   THIS EPISODE IS BROUGHT TO YOU BY XMATTERS! xMatters automates the entire incident lifecycle with their purpose-built AI powered workflow, giving your team the context they need to stop disruptions before they start and minimize resolution times. HEAD OVER TO XMATTERS.COM [http://xmatters.com/] TO LEARN MORE!   SHOW NOTES: * The "acute pain" of integrations: How blocking sales and cybersecurity struggles led Gil and Shensi to realize the massive B2B need for unified APIs (1:55) * The co-founder pressure test: Why surviving a senior event on a $2,000 budget for 600 people proved they could weather the startup storm together (3:02) * Signals of a resilient partnership: How to identify a co-founder who can handle the "trough of sorrow" and high-stakes decision-making (7:52) * Hacking the trial period: Why you should prioritize "passion and steam" over pure technical skill and how weekend hackathons act as a "marriage" simulation (10:08) * Engineering leader to founder: Navigating the shift from IC-style work to the "insane pressure" of ownership (12:12) * Why walking is a founder's best stress-management tool (13:32) * Aligning on the premise of Merge: The intentional process of moving from a broad problem space to a category-defining API company (14:39) * Demo-led validation: Reimaging the lean startup methodology with vibe-coded prototypes (17:05) * Charging from day one: Using payment as signal to distinguish between polite beta-testers and customers with a genuine, validated need (19:36) * Leveraging AI agents and plug-and-play prompts to bypass the "12-month engineering backlog" and make onboarding instant (21:08) * How to win the "build vs. buy" argument by solving problems too complex for a 10-minute vibe-coding session (23:31) * Signs of true category fit: How to recognize customer “pull” vs. “push” (24:07) * Applying Mark Benioff’s mantra: "If we were founding the company today, what would we build?" to stay relevant as model capabilities shift (26:50) * Selling to AI-Native companies: Why selling to AI companies requires "real services," high speed, and a willingness to ship custom features by Monday (29:05) * Frameworks for roadmap trade-offs: Tactical advice for delegating engineering resources and navigating the tension between new features and core infrastructure (33:31) * Hire "company builders": Avoiding "brilliant jerks" and why your first 10 hires must be optimized for 14-hour-day passion over raw resume depth (35:18). * Building the "nervous system" for AI: Gil’s vision for a world where software is built for agents first, and why that requires a fundamental shift in how we think about infrastructure (37:29) * The "hot takes" ritual: Maintaining a judgment-free Slack channel and weekly meeting to constantly challenge and "groundhog" your own assumptions (38:10). * Filtering signal from noise: Why the best ideas are non-consensus and how to form opinions based on new model capabilities rather than Twitter FOMO (39:20). * Rapid fire questions (40:50)   THIS EPISODE WOULDN’T HAVE BEEN POSSIBLE WITHOUT THE HELP OF OUR INCREDIBLE PRODUCTION TEAM: Patrick Gallagher - Producer & Co-Host Jerry Li - Co-Host Noah Olberding - Associate Producer, Audio & Video Editor https://www.linkedin.com/in/noah-olberding/ [https://www.linkedin.com/in/noah-olberding/] Dan Overheim - Audio Engineer, Dan’s also an avid 3D printer - https://www.bnd3d.com/ [https://www.bnd3d.com/] Ellie Coggins Angus - Copywriter, Check out her other work at https://elliecoggins.com/about/ [https://elliecoggins.com/about/] Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com [https://pcm.adswizz.com] for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.