Code Story: Insights from Startup Tech Leaders

Hello listeners! Today have Nick Donorio on the show today.Nick Donorio is a second generation American. His grandparents were poor, Italian immigrants - and his family was hard working, focused on value creation. They were poor, but never thought of themselves as poor - they always had food to eat, and always sat down at the table for dinner at night. Nick spent 44 years of his life at IBM, as an electrical engineer and then as a technology leader. In 2008, he "graduated" from IBM, and now holds board seats for dozens of companies.Nick is the co-author of the book "If Nothing Changes, Nothing Changes". The book is a powerful testimony to our ability as human beings to drive transformation - not just within tech, but across generations. With heart and candor, Nick explains how he led IBM's global technical team to embrace market centric, focus redefining innovation and sparking worldwide collaboration.Get the book on Amazon, or learn more at nickdonofrio.com.SponsorsAirbyteDopplerHost.ioIPInfomablSupportZebraLinksWebsite: https://www.nickdonofriobook.com/Book: https://www.amazon.com/If-Nothing-Changes-Donofrio-Story/dp/1544531338/ref=tmm_hrd_swatch_0LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/nicholas-donofrio-7588609/ 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

Michael Zuercher has been in tech since he was young, starting his first company when he was 19 years old. A lot of his path to his current place is through that prior company. He is married with 3 kids, living in South Dakota, and is a pilot. Beyond these things, he is a machinist as a hobby - in fact, he created logos for his current team as they shipped their MVP.In his prior company, Michael built numerous amount of productized integrations across his platform and thousands of customers. No matter their state of growth, these integrations were always a significant challenge. After selling the company in 2018, he decided to build the thing he wished he had back then.This is the creation story of Prismatic.SponsorsAirbyteDopplerHost.ioIPInfomablSupportZebraLinksWebsite: https://prismatic.io/LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/michael-zuercher/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

Krish Ramineni grew up in Silicon Valley, observing tech all around him. But really excited him was the innovation happening the in the last 5 years. He used to play sports as a kid - tennis, baseball, etc. - and he was always excited about filming his games or practice, and utilizing software to analyze how he executed the craft. He brings his analytical mainframe into his current venture, and still plays some sports, lifts weights, and tracks his nutrition.Krish went through meetings like we all do - conducting a meeting with expensive team members, and then forgetting most of the conversation afterwards. He decided he wanted to figure out a way to remember every conversation he had, and unlock the hidden metrics behind meetings.This is the creation story of Fireflies.ai.SponsorsAirbyteDopplerHost.ioIPInfomablLinksWebsite: https://fireflies.ai/LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/krishramineni/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

Shawn Ramirez spent a decade as a political science professor, studying terrorism and strategic negotiations. Five years ago, she switched into tech, in order to make a positive impact, joining startups with great missions. She has created training programs, worked in AI, scaled teams, and dug into the data science world. Outside of tech, she lives in Seattle with her family, and loves all the outdoors things you can do in the Pacific Northwest.Shawn tells the story of how her current venture started out as a dating service, but pivoted when the pandemic hit to positive events for remote teams. Being on one of those remote teams and consuming the events, she fell in love with the idea and joined the team, to build and deliver shared experiences with powerful insights.This is the creation story of Mystery.SponsorsAirbyteDopplerHost.ioIPInfomablLinksWebsite: https://www.trymystery.com/LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/slramz/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

Shaheeb Roshan is a family man. He's been married 16 years and has a 10 year old daughter. It's his family that drives how he looks at the world - teaching his daughter how to swim and be safe in the water, and learning how to do new things. For example, he got into baking, which ended up into 13 cakes on his counter table (yes, I'm wondering my invite was too). The pattern for him is getting deeply interested in something, as there is always a system behind it.Collectively, Shaheed and his co-founders had 10 years of experience supporting the employee benefits insurance space. On a regular basis, they observed the manual creation, editing and lack observability in the processes - aka, the lack of modern tooling to support the industry. They made the decision and committed to changing the face of the industry.This is the creation story of ThreeFlow.SponsorsAirbyteDopplerHost.ioIPInfomablLinksWebsite: https://www.threeflow.com/LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/shaheebroshan/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

Roi Ravhon path to tech started in the Israeli military, like many other founders in Israel. In fact, the very first introduction he had to computers was when he joined the services. It was a great experience, that taught him everything he knows. This is a common story with founders in the area, as I've noticed from other interviews I've done. He lives in Tel Aviv, and he is a big fan of music, sports, and running his company.In his previous role at Logz.io, Roi and his team spent large sums of money for cloud providers and services. The finance team quickly got wind of these costs, and started asking questions, appropriately. Roi found out that he didn't have answers to the questions, and there wasn't tooling out there that helped him.This is the creation story of Finout.SponsorsAirbyteDopplerHost.ioIPInfomablLinksWebsite: https://www.finout.io/LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/roiravhon/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

Mike Malone is a nerd from way back (his words, not mine). In the 6th grade, he bought a Borland C book and learned how to code. Back when Napster was round, he hosted an open Nap server in his basement, and ran a few things on IRC. He graduated from Virginia Tech with a Business Information Systems degree, and worked for Accenture for a hot second... then joined a 3 person startup, and hasn't looked back since. He's married with 2 kids, and a dog - and he claims he collects hobbies, which is another way of saying he likes to try new things.Mike's career has tracked along side the development of the cloud. He witnessed the security problems alongside distributed systems, and felt the pains of having to manage sensitive information. He and his team saw an opportunity here, and set out to fix the problem.This is the creation story of Smallstep.SponsorsAirbyteDopplerHost.ioIPInfomablLinksWebsite: https://smallstep.com/LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/mmalone/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

Kateryna Sytnyk is originally from Ukraine, but moved to the states 15 years ago after winning the green card lottery. Her background is in applied mathematics, and she grew up surrounded with logical brains - for example, her grandparent was literally a rocket scientist. When she moved to the US, she dove right into the world of entrepreneurship. Outside of tech, she travels a lot, being a digital nomad, and likes to salsa dance. She is fascinated with psychology and what drives behavior.For her prior startup, she utilized her background in applied math, combined with her co-founder's experience in the space, to create a way to optimize territory creation - for franchises, sales teams, etc. and predict revenue for said territories. When she moved on from that gig, she started a new thing - one that would enable women founders to build technical solutions.This is the creation story of Fract... and CTO Doctor.SponsorsAirbyteDopplerHost.ioIPInfomablLinksWebsite: https://www.fract.com/Website: https://www.ctodoctor.com/LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/katerynasytnyk/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

Benjamin Wilms started his career in 1999 as a developer. In the little free time he has, he does mountain biking, spends time with his family, and visits the ocean a few hours away. For mountain biking, he finds that it helps him to keep life balanced away from a screen, and the ocean - well... he just likes to watch his kids play on the beach.Seven years go, Ben started getting into the topic of Chao's engineering, while working as a consultant. As he learned about the tools on the market, he realized that to get the tool in production, it required him to understand all the codebase test coverage, without knowledge of SRE. He released on open source project of his own creation, and his approach got picked up by big name enterprises.This is the creation story of Steadybit.SponsorsAirbyteDopplerHost.ioIPInfomablLinksWebsite: https://steadybit.com/LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/benjamin-wilms/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

John Rush has been in tech since he was a child, so its hard for him to think of a time where it wasn't a part of his life. Since 2008, he has been building apps, websites, etc. and a lot of what he was doing was client work. During this time, he noticed that a lot of his tasks were similar, repetitive, and he wanted to find ways to get repeat use out of the work he was doing. Outside of tech, he plays soccer on a semi-professional team, and is a huge part of his life. He also likes the outdoors, and even plays a little ping pong.While running his prior startup, John wanted to figure out a way to create a system that allowed him to get reuse out of the work he was building. What he ended up building was an ecosystem, for solution builders and developers, to merge the worlds of low code and no code.This is the creation story of Mars X.SponsorsAirbyteDopplerHost.ioIPInfomablLinksWebsite: https://www.marsx.dev/LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/john-rush-l/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