Zero Prime Podcast

E08: Path to Becoming a Founder w/ Brad Buda

Data Council Season 1 Episode 8

Brad is a repeat founder and is currently the co-founder of Census, an SF company that syncs customer data to go-to-market tools. Brad shares his path from initially joining a startup as an engineer and continuing on to become a co-founder himself.

Highlights:
[1:20]: on choosing Ruby for early stage product hacking & data integration
[5:01]: Brad’s path from AWS engineer to startup engineer to becoming a founder himself
[7:44]: insights on how to listen to customers and figure out the right product to build
[11:10]: how they handled customer discovery w/ multiple co-founders
[13:25]: on moving from prototype to product
[17:10]: perspective on what Brad is excited to be building at Census
[22:05]: on developing founder instincts + team building

--

Mark your calendars for May 12-14, 2026 and join us for Data Council AI, the technical conference built by engineers for engineers. It's the only event where you'll be able to connect with 2,000+ practitioners for 3 full days of technical deep dives, battle-tested architectures and production insights in San Francisco, the heart of the AI world.

Visit us at https://www.datacouncil.ai/ for the latest updates or subscribe to the newsletter as we release more details about the 2026 event!