Irina Nazarova’s route to CEO of Evil Martians ran through C++ engineering and investment banking. On the CTO Confidential segment of Strictly From Nowhere, she and Mike Rispoli get into what that background is worth now.
They cover the Rails renaissance that AI and agentic coding have set off, how Evil Martians monetize open source projects like AnyCable and imgproxy, why dynamic languages win when the job is fast experimentation, and how AI lets a smaller team take on more ambitious work. Specialization, Irina argues, becomes more valuable in that world.
