Code Story: Insights from Startup Tech Leaders

S5 E23: Ulf Schwekendiek, Centered.app

Nov 16, 2021

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Ulf Schwekendiek was brought up in Germany, but spent most of his life in the US. He speaks German with an American accent, and English with a German accent... so he claims to not speak any language properly anymore. Personally, he loves to para glide (not para sail, different thing). In fact, he is a tandem instructor. In this particular activity, you inflate a giant parachute and jump off of a mountain or cliff. From there, you use drafts or thermals to stay in the air, and can drift for around 100 miles sometimes. Ulf finds this super beautiful, relaxing, and a great way to get into a flow state.

Ulf's background is two fold - engineering and UX. He has worked on many popular proudest, and with well known startups in the past. He was an iOS engineer at Siri, before it was bought by Apple. He started up a company and ended up selling it to Groupon... and ended up doing a couple more companies with the Groupon founder, one being Descript which it still going strong today. Finally, he spent some time at Postmates.

He enjoys building software that invokes an emotion from its user. While he was at Postmates, he got really interested in the way people work, specifically around flow states. He studied the Pomodoro method, and its associated 25 minute cycle. This became the first building block into creating his current venture.

This is the creation story of Centered.