Every internship said no, so Henry Jia stopped applying and built something instead. The platform he ended up engineering later booked him onto this very show. He got there with a business degree and six months of teaching himself to build, and today he is the founding engineer at PodPitch, the AI platform behind roughly 5% of podcast guest bookings worldwide.
In this conversation, we get into:
What his startup reads first on a resume, and why the school name never matters
How the customer support team ended up fixing the platform's code themselves
Why he argues most AI work needs a far cheaper model, against his own team's advice
What five background agents did to his laptop in the middle of this recording
Most AI career advice comes from people watching from the outside. Henry is inside the hiring, the building, and the tooling at once. If you are deciding what to learn next, or what to stop paying for, start here.
🟪 Timestamps
(00:00) Meet Haoxiang (Henry) Jia
(02:24) Rejected from every internship
(04:47) Why the school on your resume stopped mattering
(09:03) The one skill that gets juniors hired now
(12:00) Six months that beat four years of college
(16:25) When the support team started shipping code
(21:45) The 200 million token confession
(25:30) The cheap AI model he trusts for real work
(29:21) Five agents crashed his laptop, live on air
(31:19) Inside PodPitch that booked him on this show
(38:49) Why podcasts stick when short video doesn't
🟪 About the Guest
Henry Jia (Haoxiang Jia) is the founding engineer at PodPitch, an AI podcast booking platform at $4M ARR whose clients include Beehiiv, MyFitnessPal, and Penguin Random House. He earned a Master of Business Analytics from Fordham, taught himself to build outside the curriculum after a run of internship rejections, and shipped GPTInterviewer (261 GitHub stars) before joining PodPitch as its first engineer. He builds tools for other builders and argues that the credential barrier to writing software has quietly collapsed.
🟪 Connect with Henry Jia
- Website: https://jiatastic.com
- GitHub: https://github.com/jiatastic
- LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/haoxiang-jia
- X/Twitter: https://x.com/jiatastic520
- GPTInterviewer: https://github.com/jiatastic/GPTInterviewer
- demo.dev: https://github.com/jiatastic/demo.dev
- PodPitch: https://podpitch.com/
🟪 Connect with Gabe Marusca
- Website: https://www.gabemarusca.com
- YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/@gabemarusca
- LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/gabemarusca
- Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/gabemarusca
- X/Twitter: https://twitter.com/gabemarusca
- Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/gabemarusca
- TikTok: https://www.tiktok.com/@gabemarusca
