Code Story: Insights from Startup Tech Leaders

Jake Vacovec started his career in sales, and eventually moved into the product world. He loves to cook, and finds it relaxing, and a good way to unwind from startup world. Primarily, he loves to cook steaks and likes to integrate chemistry into cooking, which aligns with the recipes he likes. Also, he loves to mountain ski, starting out when he was a 1 year old (he was the kid on the leash, he says).Jake noticed that capacity for engineering resources was scarce across the board, while the demand for experimentation in product was very high. He sought to fix the problem, by creating no code edits - for your code itself.This is the creation story of Flycode.SponsorsAirbyteDopplerHost.ioIPInfomablLinksWebsite: https://www.flycode.com/LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/jake-p-vacovec-28417869/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

Waseem Daher had two immigrant parents from Lebanon. He was born in the states, after the migrated to the states in the 80's. With his relatives around him, he saw that it was possible to run your own business, and do it well. His love for computer science really culminated when he went to MIT to complete is undergraduate studies, where he actually met his current co-founders. He is married with a 2 year old - so all additional time he has outside of work is spent with his young family.Waseem and his co-founders have done many startups together. Inevitably, with every business they started, they found the back office type processes were important to have each time, but not the area of expertise for the founders - and much less, not the focus of said business. So, they built the service they wished they had in prior ventures.This is the creation story of Pilot.SponsorsAirbyteDopplerHost.ioIPInfomablLinksWebsite: https://pilot.com/LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/wdaher/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

Ryan Buick grew up in San Francisco - in the actual city itself. He went to school in Oregon, but quickly back to the area. He is a very proud owner of a COVID dog - IE, he got the dog during COVID - and enjoys biking and just hanging out. He named the dog Jerry, in order to make his Dad and his Grateful Dead loving family laugh.Prior to their current venture, Ryan and his co-founders were working at Flexport. They were so early on the team, that while having to prove ROI on a roadmap, he had to grow new skills in data analytics just to service his job needs. This got him thinking about other folks, and what sort of tool could support a spreadsheet interface on top of data sources.This is the creation story of Canvas.SponsorsAirbyteDopplerHost.ioIPInfomablLinksWebsite: https://canvasapp.com/LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/ryanjbuick/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

Ashleigh Wilson is a self proclaimed elevator baby, being raised in the elevator industry. She grew up with an interesting mix of entrepreneurial spirit, along side blue collar influence. Outside of her current venture, she likes to reach books and is very into fashion. For books, she likes self help, spiritual type books, like Brene Brown or Glennon Doyle.At a prior company, Ashleigh did a research profit that surfaced to her how much the industry was focused solely on profits, and not the people they were serving. She left her company, and had a moment where she envisioned how she would change the industry, and shift the power back to the customer.This is the creation story of Auditmate.SponsorsAirbyteDopplerHost.ioIPInfomablLinksWebsite: https://auditmate.com/LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/ashleigh-wilson-she-her-01131285/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

Alex Omeyer is undercover French ,despite his thick British accent. He was born and raised in Paris, and though he studied business and management, he spent most of his time doing show jumping - in other wides, riding horses to jump over obstacles. He moved over to the UK to join his brother, finish his Masters, and get cracking on what they were going to build together.Alex, his brother, and their friends set off building software solutions. They noticed that there was a lot of data generated throughout the process, and they envisioned a future where this could be accessed to enable anyone to code. But.. in order to arrive at that, they realized that a tool needed to be built to access that data, in a trustworthy manner.This is the creation story of Stepsize.SponsorsAirbyteDopplerHost.ioIPInfomablLinksWebsite: https://www.stepsize.com/LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/alex-omeyer-060a0175Support 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

Ruslan K has been doing software development for over 10 years. He's gone from mobile development to automation and AI most recently, working with neural networks. He is a huge horror movie fan - with his favorite being the original Thing movie - and has always been looking for an intersection of tech and movie making. He's also a musician, and is into rockabilly and psycho-billy.Ruslan started his current venture in 2019, with his university friend who is a film maker. While his co-founder was stuck int the US, he dove deeper into the film making process. They noticed that the processes used in film making were not innovated... IE ripe for disruption.This is the creation story of Filmustage.SponsorsAirbyteDopplerHost.ioIPInfomablLinksWebsite: https://filmustage.com/LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/ruslan-khamidullin-136831a1/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

Max Koziolek comes from a simple background. His single mother raised he and his twin brother, outside of Berlin, with no connection to technology. When he was introduced to tech, he was really only interested as far as the games he could play. He was into sports, martial arts, and even politics, believe it or not. He studied law, and realized that as the world was changing to be wrapped around tech, he came back to the industry. Now a days, he is back into martial arts, and he notices - and supports - the trend of tech and martial arts being correlated.In the past, Max noticed that he was getting a ton of good content from his friends on the chat apps he used. He paired up with his co-founder to explore fixing journalism, and distribute valuable content to users... through WhatsApp.This is the creation story of Spectrm.SponsorsAirbyteDopplerHost.ioIPInfomablLinksWebsite: https://spectrm.io/LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/maxkoziolek/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

Jon Darbyshire is joined at the hip with his wife, in life and in business. They have been doing business together for 22 years, along with having 2 older kids, out in the world doing their own thing. He loves to do anything outside, and claims to be at Newport beach almost every day.After selling his prior company called Archer Technologies, he sat down with many founders of startups, investing in their ideas and working with. What he noticed was that they spent the same amount of time talking business tooling as they did on their product. He started to think there must be a way to have one operating system for all of these tools.This is the creation story of SmartSuite.SponsorsAirbyteDopplerHost.ioIPInfomablLinksWebsite: https://www.smartsuite.com/LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/jondarbyshire/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

Andrew Zhou grew up in the Bay Area, which he claims was a great place to grow up in. However, he noticed that it was sort of in authentic - as in, no one really did things for themselves. Eventually, he dropped out of college to build something based on authenticity. Outside of tech, he highly values authenticity, has been doing art for more than a decade, and he loves to ski and rock climb as well. In regards to art, he actually finds it challenging to be creative in an artistic way, because his creative brain is mixed with being highly analytical.Andrew and his co-founders were inspired to build something around workforce management. The knew something needed to change, but wasn't sure where to start. After building solutions and pivoting, they landed on their current venture, around mental health check ins.This is the creation story of Kona.SponsorsAirbyteDopplerHost.ioIPInfomablLinksWebsite: https://heykona.com/LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/andrew-zh/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

Vicki Duben's background is actually in physics and applied mathematics. Prior to graduation, she was a professional tennis player, having played since she was 4 years old. She loves science, and though it was going to be her future - but post graduation, she joined a hedge fund while waiting to start on her PhD. She found great joy at the trading desk of the hedge fund, which is how she quit science, and eventually to venture and entrepreneurship. Outside of tech, she still plays tennis and likes to ski.Prior to her current venture, Vicki and her team had built a tool around creating rich media ads. During the peak seasons for advertisements, she noticed her team having to reject requests, due to the fact that they couldn't digest the project with their limited capacity. And, there was no tool out there to support digital display ads.This is the creation story of Viewst.SponsorsAirbyteDopplerHost.ioIPInfomablLinksWebsite: https://viewst.com/LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/victoriaduben/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