Hardened Runtimes, the CEO Job, and Raising as an All-Woman Founding Team, with Emily Long
Episode 122 · April 23rd, 2026 · 1 hr 7 mins
About this Episode
Whitney and Coté talk with Emily Long, CEO and co-founder of Edera, about building a hardened container runtime that secures infrastructure foundations instead of chasing detect-and-respond alerts. Emily describes how Edera lets teams swap in a new container runtime without re-platforming or adopting yet another zero-trust migration, and why the "zero days as the new hotness" landscape makes that kind of structural change worth doing.
The conversation also covers her jump from COO to CEO - the ambiguity of the COO title, what actually changes when you're the one absorbing every decision - and what it's like raising a deep-tech Series A as an all-woman founding team, including the downside-vs.-upside question pattern VCs fall into and the now-classic "I just Googled Kubernetes and I know more than you do" pitch moment.
They open with a long detour on to-do lists, Claude Code, and whether AI tooling just keeps expanding the list of things you feel obligated to do.
You can watch the video version of this episode as well, if you prefer that kind of thing.
- Edera.
- Emily Long on LinkedIn.
- Rachel Chalmers, an Edera investor, was on the show a few episodes back.