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.

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.