From Academia to Startup Founder and Successful Exit with Jean Yang

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