when i joined the nfactorial podcast, i expected to learn how to produce a podcast. what i didn’t expect was how much i’d learn about the technology industry itself.
every week i got to spend hours listening to founders, engineers, researchers, and investors talk about how they built companies from the ground up. we had guests from fintech, edtech, ai, entertainment tech, cybersecurity, venture capital, and many other parts of the industry. some conversations lasted four or five hours, and after a while i realized i wasn’t just helping produce interviews anymore. i was getting an education i couldn’t have found in a classroom.
one of the biggest influences on me was working alongside arman suleimenov, whose vision for growing the central asian tech ecosystem shaped the way i think about technology, leadership, and community. i also had the opportunity to work with founders like prasanna sankar (rippling), yerzat dulat (higgsfield ai), and many other entrepreneurs and engineers building products used by millions of people around the world. seeing people from my own region building companies at that level made everything feel much more possible.
on the technical side, i worked across different parts of production whenever the team needed it. i learned adobe premiere to edit short-form videos, built an ai voice workflow with elevenlabs for one of our episodes, researched guests, prepared interview materials, designed merchandise, and experimented with different ways of turning long-form conversations into content people actually wanted to watch. one of the first reels i edited became the most-viewed piece of content the podcast had ever published.
during my time on the team, we released more than 20 podcast episodes and two documentaries featuring central asian founders building in silicon valley. across platforms, that work reached more than 15 million views and helped grow the podcast to over 50,000 subscribers.
looking back, this experience is what convinced me that i wanted to build technology for a living. before this, i mostly thought of tech as software engineering. after spending a year talking to founders and engineers across fintech, edtech, ai, entertainment tech, and startups, i realized how many different ways there are to build technology. that curiosity is still one of the biggest reasons i enjoy working in tech today. it also introduced me to a community of people who genuinely loved what they were building, and that excitement was contagious. i left the podcast with a much clearer picture of the kind of engineer i wanted to become.