Code Story: Insights from Startup Tech Leaders

Einat Sitbon has always been intrigued by nature, and all of its parts. She studied biology in school, all the way through getting her PhD in Computational Biology. This field also introduced her to computation in general, and programming. Outside of tech, she is married with 2 kids, and loves to hike. Her and her family share a love of fiction and fantasy books, and made mention her love of NK Jemision and JRR Tolkien.Einat's and her sister are very close, and at one point, her sister mentioned that her son was ADHD. They found it difficult to understand how there wasn't a tool to help measure the concentration of a person with this diagnosis. They both started digging into how to solve this problem.This is the creation story of iFocus Health.SponsorsCipherstashTreblleCAST AI FireflyTursoMemberstackLinksWebsite: https://ifocustest.com/LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/%F0%9F%87%BA%F0%9F%87%A6-einat-sitbon-b70a7b/Support this podcast at — https://redcircle.com/code-story-insights-from-startup-tech-leaders/donationsAdvertising Inquiries: https://redcircle.com/brandsPrivacy & Opt-Out: https://redcircle.com/privacy

Sharekh Shaikh has an interesting background, having grown up (almost) on a farm in India, within a small town. He spent most of his time with animals and pets, more than people, and followed his father around as he travelled for work. He is big into motorbikes and reading philosophy, specifically stoics, and tends to read the older books over newer podcast or material. He's also trying to learn piano, but admits he's struggling in that arena.When Sharekh was working for Gartner, he faced a problem around fraud, using online services for research. When he thought more about this, he decided he wanted to build a platform fueling market research... built on transparency and trust.This is the creation story of CleverX.SponsorsCipherstashTreblleCAST AI FireflyTursoMemberstackLinksWebsite: https://cleverx.com/LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/sharekh-shaikh-4591874/Support this podcast at — https://redcircle.com/code-story-insights-from-startup-tech-leaders/donationsAdvertising Inquiries: https://redcircle.com/brandsPrivacy & Opt-Out: https://redcircle.com/privacy

Colleen Schnettler was a stay at home Mom for many years, taking care of her 3 children. When she was looking to return to work, she was looking for remote - and it seemed that programming was the best avenue. She taught herself rails development, with the goal of starting her own company. Outside of tech, she spends time with her family outdoors, and claims she is a meat and potatoes kinda gal, with some bark thins for desert.Recently, Colleen and her co-founder did a pivot of their previous offering, which was a package to solve reporting problems by embed them into your application. They are now focused on a SaaS tool, to provide this functionality for you.This is the creation story of HelloQuery.SponsorsCipherstashTreblleCAST AI FireflyTursoMemberstackLinksWebsite: https://helloquery.com/Website: https://hammerstone.dev/LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/colleen-schnettler/Support this podcast at — https://redcircle.com/code-story-insights-from-startup-tech-leaders/donationsAdvertising Inquiries: https://redcircle.com/brandsPrivacy & Opt-Out: https://redcircle.com/privacy

Eduardo Abeliuk is originally from Santiago, Chile, where he spent the first few decades of his life. From early days, he had a deep curiosity to understand the world around him, which led him to study physics and electrical engineering. Post school, he joined an MIT startup, prior to obtaining his PhD from Stanford. Outside of tech, he likes to read books about longetivit, and listen to the Lex Friedman podcast. He also walks for at least an hour a day, and enjoys hiking, biking and time with family and friends.Together with some colleagues from Stanford, Eduardo felt the pains of planning research projects. This process contained several processes that could have been automated through software. So, they decided to set out and build an enterprise solution for R&D projects.This is the creation story of Teselegen.SponsorsCipherstashTreblleCAST AI FireflyTursoMemberstackLinksWebsite: https://teselagen.com/LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/eduardoabeliuk/Support this podcast at — https://redcircle.com/code-story-insights-from-startup-tech-leaders/donationsAdvertising Inquiries: https://redcircle.com/brandsPrivacy & Opt-Out: https://redcircle.com/privacy

Today we are kicking off a special and new series entailed Beyond Bots: the REAL impact of AI on financial services, brought to you by our friends at Ntropy. As a reminder, Ntropy is the most accurate financial data standardization and enrichment API. They can take in any data source, any geography, and understand / enrich a financial transition in milliseconds. Made for developers, for fast, easy implementation. Check out their product at Ntropy.com.Guest: Naré Vardanyan, CEO & Co-founder of NtropyQuestions:Tell me what a large language model is. Is there any difference between this and deep learning models?What is the difference between language models and LLM's?What sort of data sets were your models pre-trained on? How long does that take?How does the cost of training these models factor into your offering?Can you talk about latency as a key factor in this process?You've told me Ntropy has been doing this since the beginning, but give me a little more - how does this fit into Ntropy's approach?What is in the future for Ntropy in this space, specifically as it relates to LLM's and financial services?LinksWebsite: https://www.ntropy.com/LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/narevardanyan/Support this podcast at — https://redcircle.com/code-story-insights-from-startup-tech-leaders/donationsAdvertising Inquiries: https://redcircle.com/brandsPrivacy & Opt-Out: https://redcircle.com/privacy

Adriaan van Rossum is a tech guy even at home. He likes to tinker with home automation, like turning on the lights - which his girlfriend doesn't like the home automation experiments at times. Outside of tech, he does kite surfing, and travels around the world. He really enjoyed Thailand, specifically the food there, as he is a vegetarian.For several years, Adriaan was a freelancer. Each time he built an application for his clients, he did the usual song and dance with Google Analytics - he copy and pasted the script. This didn't feel right, and his girlfriend prompted him to build his own... so he did.This is the creation story of Simple Analytics.SponsorsCipherstashTreblleCAST AI FireflyTursoMemberstackLinksWebsite: https://www.simpleanalytics.com/LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/adriaanvanrossum/Support this podcast at — https://redcircle.com/code-story-insights-from-startup-tech-leaders/donationsAdvertising Inquiries: https://redcircle.com/brandsPrivacy & Opt-Out: https://redcircle.com/privacy

Stephanie Mertz is into software development because she likes to create something from nothing - IE the blank canvas nature of coding. Outside of tech, she loves to garden, grow her own vegetables, and build things out of wood. She also has as beehive, which she claimed was a fantastic way to observe the natural creative process - and decompress from a screen.Stephanie and her co-founder were drawn to solving problems for the behind the scenes processes - aka the boring business stuff. When digging into these problems, they kept running into the fact that no one really had a solid escheatment process... and eventually, they decided to tackle it.This is the creation story of Eisen.SponsorsCipherstashTreblleCAST AI FireflyTursoMemberstackLinksWebsite: https://www.witheisen.com/LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/stephmertz/Support this podcast at — https://redcircle.com/code-story-insights-from-startup-tech-leaders/donationsAdvertising Inquiries: https://redcircle.com/brandsPrivacy & Opt-Out: https://redcircle.com/privacy

Fredrik Björk is originally from Sweden, but has spent many years in San Francisco. He got started coding in BASIC on his Commodore 64 (while also playing video games, of course). Post graduating from RIT, he has been involved in many startups, like Avatars United and The Real Real. Outside of tech, he is a Dad of two kids and likes to run - specifically marathons. Beyond that, he likes wind surfing and wing foil.Fredrik noticed that the patterns of development has changed towards outsourcing over building everything in house over the past decade. Fast forward to 2021, great services exist to empower developers to ship faster. Fredrik wanted to build a service like this for the API layer, and below.This is the creation story of Grafbase.SponsorsCipherstashTreblleCAST AI FireflyTursoMemberstackLinksWebsite: https://grafbase.com/LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/fbjork/Support this podcast at — https://redcircle.com/code-story-insights-from-startup-tech-leaders/donationsAdvertising Inquiries: https://redcircle.com/brandsPrivacy & Opt-Out: https://redcircle.com/privacy

Jaclyn Ling is a super competitive person, and has been her entire life. Whether it's board games with her family, or playing sports in her younger years, she wants to win. She still plays sports today, and watches basketball, specifically the Miami Heat or Toronto Raptors. Outside of that, she is a low key person, enjoying taking walks, hanging at the local coffee shop, and thrift shopping.Jaclyn is a self proclaimed terrible interviewer, which never gave her the best foot forward when looking for jobs. When her co-founder and she wanted to solve a problem in the space of hiring, they wanted to enable people to have access to more opportunities, and get noticed better for your first job.This is the creation story of Hatchways.SponsorsCipherstashTreblleCAST AI FireflyTursoMemberstackLinksWebsite: https://hatchways.ioLinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/jaclynlingSupport this podcast at — https://redcircle.com/code-story-insights-from-startup-tech-leaders/donationsAdvertising Inquiries: https://redcircle.com/brandsPrivacy & Opt-Out: https://redcircle.com/privacy

Shawn Cao lives in Kirkland, just outside of Seattle. He immigrated to the US, and is married with 4 kids. He loves to hike and play soccer with his children, and even though Seattle can be rainy and cloudy for half the year, he admits that the summers are fantastic for being outside. He also admits he stops by Starbucks occasionally, but couldn't confirm if it tastes better at the home store in Seattle.Shawn noticed, through his time at larger companies like Pinterest and Microsoft, that the path to get data insights and analytics leans heavily on engineering, and takes a long time. He thought, there must be a way to make an easy, quick tool to enable people outside of engineering to do this themselves. So he built the Canva for Data.This is the creation story of Columns.SponsorsCipherstashTreblleCAST AI FireflyTursoMemberstackLinksWebsite: https://columns.ai/LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/caoxhua/Support this podcast at — https://redcircle.com/code-story-insights-from-startup-tech-leaders/donationsAdvertising Inquiries: https://redcircle.com/brandsPrivacy & Opt-Out: https://redcircle.com/privacy