Code Story: Insights from Startup Tech Leaders

Prasad Kawthekar grew up in India, and eventually came stateside to school in Wisconsin. He took a java coding class, and was immediately hooked - which led to him pursuing computer science, focusing on artificial intelligence. He met his tribe during school, and stayed on for further academic experiences. Outside of tech, he lives in the Bay Area and enjoys being outside in nature.There was a time in his previous role that he was searching for info related to his role. After 7 email threads and 8 weeks passing, he finally located the document. This experience blew him away, and seeded the problem he now seeks to solve.This is the creation story of Dashworks.SponsorsCipherstashTreblleCAST AI FireflyTursoMemberstackLinksWebsite: https://www.dashworks.ai/LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/prasadkawthekar/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

Kwindla Kramer has always been interested in building things, and his parents gave him lots of opportunity. He spent his early days learning to program on the Commodore 64, and playing old games like Loadrunner. He was super interested in the internet while in College, and in 1996, he got the opportunity to be apart of the MIT Media lab. Outside of tech, he is a quasi vegan, and enjoys the foggy beach living on the western edge of San Francisco.After exiting his last startup, Kwin took some time to figure out what he wanted to do next. During that time, he just started coding on projects, and came across WebRTC, which allowed real time communication for the web. This tech catalyzed a tipping point in his mind, and led him to build video experiments on top of it.This is the creation story of Daily.SponsorsCipherstashTreblleCAST AI FireflyTursoMemberstackLinksWebsite: https://daily.coLinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/kwkramer/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

Gilad Uziely is married with 2 daughters. He told me he met his wife on a taxi in Thailand, but that the story there was for a different podcast. He has always been an entrepreneur, along with his wife. They have built 2 small hotels in Italy, where his wife is from. Outside of tech and these things, he lives by the beach in Tel Aviv, and loves to surf.Recently, Gilad and his team built a product called Lance (you might remember his co-founder Oona from Season 5). This was a Neo-bank for the self employed, which was built on the idea of stacks. When they figured out they needed to pivot, they moved towards focusing on financial routing.This is the creation story of Sequence.SponsorsCipherstashTreblleCAST AI FireflyTursoMemberstackLinksWebsite: https://www.getsequence.io/LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/giladuzielySupport 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

Nooshin Alibhai has a background in sales, event planning, and entrepreneurship. Outside of her professional life, she enjoys latin dancing, which is actually where she met her co-founder Eric. Eric Klimuk has also been in entrepreneurial roles throughout his life, starting companies early on in his life. Eventually, he dove into enterprise customer support, which led him to his current venture today. He attributes his love for salsa dancing as a major part of his professional successes, and has danced on ESPN. Both Nooshin and Eric enjoy spending time with family and friends, to help decompress from startup life.Erik spent many years in Customer Support, and found it incredibly difficult to deploy a new platform into his support group. He set out and built a toolset for the company he was at to use - and it went viral. When he figured out nothing existed in the market like this, he decided build something to the worldThis is the creation story of SupportBench.SponsorsCipherstashTreblleCAST AI FireflyTursoMemberstackLinksWebsite: https://www.supportbench.com/LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/nooshin-alibhai-2a0795177/LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/ericklimuk/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

Hikari Senju grew up in Westchester, NY, and was exposed to tech early on, as his family worked at IBM. His Dad is also a painter, so he has been driven through the intersection of art and tech. He studied Computer Science at Harvard, and was cross registered at MIT. It was at MIT that his passions united, and he knew that his life goals would be aligned between art and technology. He started his first couple of businesses while still in college,Matt Swalley graduated from Indiana University business school, and was influenced by his Dad and Mom, who were both business people. Post school, he joined a leadership development program at AT&T, and led sales teams in several different locations. Post getting his MBA, he got deep into data to analyze the big trends in the business world.In one of his earliest ventures, Hikari was leading marketing efforts across multiple digital channels. He saw an opportunity to use generative AI and omni-channel marketing to optimize how content is generated, and how well it performs. At the same time, Matt was researching great folks building companies around data - and found Hikari.This is the creation story of Omneky.SponsorsCipherstashTreblleCAST AI FireflyTursoMemberstackLinksWebsite: https://www.omneky.comLinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/matt-swalley-59249533/LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/hikari-senju-63780199/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

Jason Boehmig is lucky to be in tech, in his words. He wasn't sure what he wanted to do post college, and ended up at Lehman Brothers. In reflecting on what was unique about this moment in time, he decided it was tech's influence - and he wanted to be a part of it. Outside of tech, he reads a lot, and enjoys music, specifically collecting vinyl records and listening (they do sound better).Jason was working as a corporate attorney, and was fascinated with the fact that no company had a good way to handle contracts. Even Google was building their own internal version to handle this. He and his co-founder felt like the problem was pervasive, and wanted to change that.This is the creation story of Ironclad.SponsorsCipherstashTreblleCAST AI FireflyTursoMemberstackLinksWebsite: https://ironcladapp.com/LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/jboehmigSupport 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

Day to day, Adam Judelson is obsessed with complex problem sets in the product world. This has resulted in him getting more and more excited about simple, but powerful, productivity tools. He comes from Silicon Valley, joining Palantir Technologies in the early days, followed up by some VC backed startups. Outside of tech, he spends a lot of his free time with his kids, riding bikes and polishing up his Dad joke trophies. He also does ocean swimming, and loves the challenge to get out past the waves.When Adam was a Palantir, he was building great relationships with his colleagues. Then he realized that the relationships he had in his life before had moved on, or changed in natural ways. He started to wonder if there was a way to build something easy, to store information about people and prompt you to checkin with important people.This is the creation story of NetworkNerd.SponsorsCipherstashTreblleCAST AI FireflyTursoMemberstackLinksWebsite: https://www.networknerd.app/LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/adam-judelson-25441583/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

Vlad Matsiiako was born in the Ukraine, but moved to the Netherlands to study his undergrad. He was one of the first data scientists at Bunq. He eventually got his Masters at Cornell, and actually worked at Figma, around the time of their acquisition - which he mentioned was super exciting. Outside of tech, he enjoys tennis and traveling, especially to Europe, meeting people and hearing their stories... and of course trying the food. His favorite place to go has been Portugal.Vlad and his co-founder were previously working on other startup projects. And one of the problems they encountered on a regular basis was secrets management. After talking to like minded industry folks, they figured out that this was a MUCH bigger problem, and needed to be solved.This is the creation story of Infisical.SponsorsCipherstashTreblleCAST AI FireflyTursoMemberstackLinksWebsite: https://infisical.com/LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/vmatsiiako/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

Bryce Crawford had a pretty simple path into tech. He attended school at Vanderbilt, originally wanting to be a history major. But after observing his Dad's role in tech sales, he thought the industry looked like a good way to make money. He's worked for Capital One, Gemini and Facebook, specifically on Instagram shops. Outside of work - he keeps on coding, while trying to exercise, stay in shape, and travel when time permits. Fun fact - he claims to have an addiction to Indian food, and tends to eat at the same restaurant 2-3 times a week.Bryce and his co-founder wanted to start something together for a long time - but didn't have any good ideas. However, they noticed that there was a ton of disruption and advancement in fintech, and specifically, the majority of folks don't like their financial services provider. They aimed to change that... for business customers, through treasury management.This is the creation story of Meow.SponsorsCipherstashTreblleCAST AI FireflyTursoMemberstackLinksWebsite: https://meow.co/LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/bryce-crawford-32164466/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

Shai Ber is 40 years old, living in Tel Aviv. He loves to travel, hike, and eat new kinds of food. He loves to swim at the beach often, but he admits, tech consumes a large amount of his life - and he likes it that way. Elad Ben-Israel is also from Tel Aviv, and is 43 years old - and he jokingly claims that he is the responsible adult in the company. Outside of tech, he enjoys attending burning man, and making sure he gets his workout in,About year ago, Shai and Elad started a company to make using the cloud easier. As they went about thinking how best to do this, they struck gold in the thought of creating an expressive programming language.This is the creation story of Monada and Winglang.SponsorsCipherstashTreblleCAST AI FireflyTursoMemberstackLinksWebsite: https://monada.co/Website: https://www.winglang.io/LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/shai-ber-245b1226/LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/hackingonstuff/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