Code Story: Insights from Startup Tech Leaders

For Puneet Gupta, his professional work and personal hobbies collide. He has been enamored with tech since his early days, and finds coding to be quite therapeutic. He spent many years launching prominent cloud solutions, and has a track record for success there. Outside of tech, he is a family man with 2 boys, living in the Bay Area with his extended family. He is into motorcycles, and is falling in love with reading again.The story of Puneet's current venture goes back over 10 years, when he found himself in the middle of the dawn of cloud computing at AWS. During that time, he was introduced to SaaS models, and how these models can grow exponential growth. Fast forward to 3 years ago, and through observing industry progression, he decided to create a solution to aid in usage based pricing models.This is the creation story of Amberflo.Support this podcast at — https://redcircle.com/code-story/donationsAdvertising Inquiries: https://redcircle.com/brandsPrivacy & Opt-Out: https://redcircle.com/privacy

Glauber Costa is a family man, with three kids at home. So he admits, that with a startup and kids, there is not much space for anything else. He made mention that the jump from 2-3 kids was hard, and we joked that he playing zone defense now over man to man. AS of this recording, he had already seen the Mario movie 3 times with his kids, and enjoys playing video games with them. But, his game to play is Civilizations, which he is highly addicted to.Glauber comes from a heavy database and systems programming background, as does his co-founders. They noticed that the buyer persona of database tech is changing. More and more frontend developers or full stack developers were responsible for these decisions. After iterating on a few projects, they figured the pillar of their data edge solution... which was SQLLite.This is the creation story of Turso.Support this podcast at — https://redcircle.com/code-story/donationsAdvertising Inquiries: https://redcircle.com/brandsPrivacy & Opt-Out: https://redcircle.com/privacy

Sefi Genis lives in Tel Aviv, and started in with technology early on in his life, maintaining the school website when he was younger. He served in the Israeli military, specifically in the cybersecurity unit, followed by working at some interesting and successful startups. Outside of tech, he loves to travel, ninja warrior, and scuba diving. One of his favorite places to dive was Thailand, which I've added to the list for my family.Sefi understood all things related to infrastructure as code (IAC). Once he was introduced to his co-founders, they set out to build a solution that helped platform and DevOps teams manage their entire cloud footprint - and do so at scale.This is the creation story of Firefly.Support this podcast at — https://redcircle.com/code-story/donationsAdvertising Inquiries: https://redcircle.com/brandsPrivacy & Opt-Out: https://redcircle.com/privacy

Naré Vardanyan has a statistically unlikely story. She grew up in Armenia, without electricity during a war. She recalls that her parents gamified the experience, which allowed her to experience it much differently than the hardship it was. Her upbringing was very community driven, focused on caring for others. Eventually, she went to work for the United Nations, in her words, so she could save the world - though eventually she was disillusioned by how slow things moved. It was at this point, where she shifted over to tech. Outside of tech, she used to love reading, but now that she has a child, she sticks to audiobooks. And, she thoroughly enjoys art, specifically, 20th century Russian-Jewish artists.When Naré started to travel abroad, she noticed that for some folks, the ability to obtain things in life, like a Visa or Passport, was a given. Yet, others were not enabled to obtain these types of things, as the process was much more difficult or unavailable. She set out to create the great equalizer, through enriched financial data.This is the creation story of Ntropy.Support this podcast at — https://redcircle.com/code-story/donationsAdvertising Inquiries: https://redcircle.com/brandsPrivacy & Opt-Out: https://redcircle.com/privacy

Alex Yarotsky got into tech as a little kid. In fact, he remembers watching the movie Toy Story, and wanting to learn how to build the tech that drove its creation. He got into University, but eventually, dropped out, and went the standard Eastern European software route, by joining a consultancy. Post that, he joined his first tech startup, and hasn't looked back since. Outside of tech, he is married with 2 fat cats. He and his wife enjoy MMA, and traveling.Twelve years ago, the founders of Alex's current venture noticed that the demand for freelancers was growing in the market. They also noticed that very few time tracking solutions existed, and they wanted to tackle this niche. Later, Alex joined the crew to take the product to the next level, as CTO.This is the creation story of Hubstaff.SponsorsCipherstashTreblleCAST AI FireflyTursoMemberstackLinksWebsite: https://hubstaff.com/LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/ayarotsky/Support this podcast at — https://redcircle.com/code-story/donationsAdvertising Inquiries: https://redcircle.com/brandsPrivacy & Opt-Out: https://redcircle.com/privacy

Pato Echague was born and raised in Argentina, and as such, is a huge soccer fan. He played soccer and tennis growing up, and enjoys following the Boca Juniors. He also admits to being influenced by the Messi effect as well, liking Barcelona and now the States. He is a father of 2 young kids - who also play soccer - so there are a lot of nets and practice tools in his backyard.At his prior startup, which was acquired by Salesforce, Pato and his co-founders observed that the faster they shipped things, they faster they broke production. After giving into his co-founders persistence, he decided to jump in and build a feature flagging to fix the problem.This is the creation story of Split.SponsorsCipherstashTreblleCAST AI FireflyTursoMemberstackLinksWebsite: https://www.split.io/LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/patricioechague/Support this podcast at — https://redcircle.com/code-story/donationsAdvertising Inquiries: https://redcircle.com/brandsPrivacy & Opt-Out: https://redcircle.com/privacy

Moti Rafalin was born and raised in Israel. He spent half of his life there, and the rest of his life in the states. He is a father of 3 kids, 2 of which are in college. His family and he lives in the Bay Area, and he likes to play tennis and travel. In fact, he has been to over 65 countries in his life, and has lived in 2 continents.After attending AWS re-invent, Moti left with the knowledge that the amount of innovation happening continued to grow and grow. At the same time, there wasn't a good way to ensure that applications weren't just "lifting and shifting" but were fully taking advantage of proper functionality during their modernization process.This is the creation story of vFunction.SponsorsCipherstashTreblleCAST AI FireflyTursoMemberstackLinksWebsite: https://vfunction.com/LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/mrafalin/Support this podcast at — https://redcircle.com/code-story/donationsAdvertising Inquiries: https://redcircle.com/brandsPrivacy & Opt-Out: https://redcircle.com/privacy

Shaun Ritchie has lived in Salt Lake City for 20 plus years. He grew up in Phoenix, but decided it was too hot to live there. He started his first company 20 years ago, and has had some major successes, selling later ventures to WeWork. Outside of tech, he is married with 4 kids. He loves the mountains and outdoors, enjoying snowboarding, skiing, and hiking.In 2022, Shaun set out to accomplish a new goal. He put together the financial resources to acquire an organization, with the goal of transforming it into a premier services company - by leading and growing people to the next level.This is Shaun's creation story at nClouds.SponsorsCipherstashTreblleCAST AI FireflyTursoMemberstackLinksWebsite: https://www.nclouds.com/LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/shaunritchie/Support this podcast at — https://redcircle.com/code-story/donationsAdvertising Inquiries: https://redcircle.com/brandsPrivacy & Opt-Out: https://redcircle.com/privacy

Arunabh Dastidar has a background in engineering, starting his coding years in his teens. In fact, he was building and selling web products even prior to college. He spends most of his free time thinking about tech and startups, but when he is not, he plays acoustic guitar and attends music festivals. He enjoys traveling and trying food across the world, mentioning that Tokyo ruined Sushi for him.Arunabh was on a very important call, and his excel sheet was crashing. He looked left and right, and couldn't find anything to support what he needed. He found some co-founders, and built the solution he wished he had for the industry.This is the creation story of RealSage.SponsorsCipherstashTreblleCAST AI FireflyTursoMemberstackLinksWebsite: https://realsage.com/LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/arunabhadastidar/Support this podcast at — https://redcircle.com/code-story/donationsAdvertising Inquiries: https://redcircle.com/brandsPrivacy & Opt-Out: https://redcircle.com/privacy

Zach Wasserman lives near Vancouver, but grew up a child of the 90's in Berkeley, California. The .COM boom was happening around him, so he found himself fascinated with this era in tech, with little understanding of the details. He was a skater kid, riding around the Bay Area, typically on a short board over long board. Nowadays, he is more into the outdoors, as a mountain biker, rock climber and back country skier. He enjoys the vast selection of Chinese food at his home near Vancouver.In 2014, Zach was working at Facebook. During that time, a team member wanted to build a platform where they could know what was going on with all of their assorted machines. They ne eded a way to ask questions without writing code, and more quickly get answers about their community of devices.This is the creation story of Fleet.SponsorsCipherstashTreblleCAST AI FireflyTursoMemberstackLinksWebsite: https://fleetdm.com/LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/zacharywasserman/Support this podcast at — https://redcircle.com/code-story/donationsAdvertising Inquiries: https://redcircle.com/brandsPrivacy & Opt-Out: https://redcircle.com/privacy