S5 Bonus: Leon Kuperman, CAST.ai

Code Story: Insights from Startup Tech Leaders

Episode • Oct 28, 2021 • 44m

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.

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