Ganesh Datta
HostCTO & Co-founder of Cortex
Anish Dhar
CEO & Co-founder of Cortex
November 6, 2025
In This Episode
In the first episode of the Cortex podcast, co-founders Anish Dhar and Ganesh Datta pull back the curtain on the journey of building an internal developer portal from the ground up. They share the story of the early days, when the unproven market required moving at maximum velocity to find product-market fit and win critical first deals.
The conversation explores the key moments that forced a fundamental mindset shift from prioritizing speed to engineering for enterprise-grade reliability and scale. Anish and Ganesh discuss the cultural and architectural decisions that defined this transition and offer a playbook for engineering leaders navigating today's AI-driven landscape, where the pressure to move fast is greater than ever.
You’ll learn
In the beginning, shipping features overnight was essential to learn about customers, build loyalty, and to just survive. Ganesh and Anish discuss why this was the right strategy, even though it meant accumulating significant technical debt.
Learn about the turning point when Cortex became indispensable infrastructure for its customers. This moment fundamentally changed the culture, forcing a new level of engineering discipline where downtime could cost customers millions.
Anish and Ganesh explore how investing in platform foundations and reliability evolved from a defensive necessity to a key differentiator. This focus on scale is what allows Cortex to support customers in a way competitors can’t.
The conversation covers non-obvious early choices that created long-term advantages. This includes the decisions to write tests as a three-person team and support on-prem customers from the very beginning.
Balancing speed and quality in the age of AI.
The episode closes with practical advice for engineering leaders on how to work effectively with founders. They discuss how to balance the constant push for speed with the strategic need to see around corners, manage risk, and build for the future.
Quotes
"As a startup, speed is the only thing you have. When you have nothing to your name and you're just trying to figure out what customers want, speed is what gets you loyalty. It drives urgency, and that's been the cultural ethos of our company from the beginning."
Ganesh Datta
CTO & Co-founder of Cortex
"Eventually, quality and reliability become your moat. If you're trying one product and it works, and the other product crashes, which one are you going to choose? Today, our ability to be reliable is one of the main reasons people choose Cortex."
Ganesh Datta
CTO & Co-founder of Cortex
"With AI, you have entire parts of a code base written by a coding assistant. It's faster, yes, but organizations aren't doing the second-level analysis: What happens to your MTTR? How does your reliability and security posture change? That's the biggest thing SRE and platform teams are stressed about right now."
Anish Dhar
CEO & Co-founder of Cortex
"The move to the cloud didn't replace the need for engineers; if anything, it increased the demand because more companies could be founded. More companies could take an idea and push it to the cloud. I think we're going to see the exact same thing happen with AI."
Ganesh Datta
CTO & Co-founder of Cortex
"Founders will always push for speed. A great engineering leader helps us see around corners. They’re the one who can say, 'Sure, we can ship this thing really fast. But I need you to give me room to fix this other thing, because that's going to break next.'"
Anish Dhar
CEO & Co-founder of Cortex
Timestamps
- 00:20
The founding journey: from zero to one hundred customers
- 01:13
Day one: Building the first version of the service catalog
- 04:25
Why speed is a startup's only superpower
- 09:54
The mindset shift to enterprise-grade reliability and scale
- 13:06
How quality becomes a competitive advantage
- 14:46
High-leverage early decisions: writing tests and supporting on-prem
- 17:38
Balancing speed and quality in the age of AI
- 21:21
How AI will shift, not replace, engineering roles
- 26:53
Advice for engineering leaders working with founders
Other episodes
Canva's strategic approach to internal developer tools and why they should spark joy
In this episode of the Cortex podcast, Cortex co-founder and CTO Ganesh Datta sits down with Tyler Davis, a software engineer at Canva, for a deep dive into the often-overlooked world of internal tooling. They also unpack how Canva connects developer joy to business outcomes, measures ROI, and treats its internal platform as a product.
The discussion follows Canva’s multi-year journey of building out its internal developer platform. Tyler shares firsthand experience from the front lines, including the team's evolution from a homegrown catalog on Backstage to adopting Cortex. Ganesh and Tyler also have a candid chat about the build-versus-buy debate, the psychology of sunken costs, and how to decide when to invest in custom solutions versus buying off-the-shelf.
November 20, 2025
Tyler Davis
Software Engineer
