Code Story: Insights from Startup Tech Leaders

Derek Osgood comes from a family of entrepreneurs, and has always known he wanted to start something himself. Prior to that, he worked for other companies, large and small, in product and marketing roles. Some of the companies he worked for included Playstation, Rippling and BBVA. Outside of his profession, he loves to travel the world, and is a huge fantasy story nut. It's worth noting that we geeked out on fantasy novels for a good 10 minutes, as your host is a fantasy nut as well.At his previous companies, Derek has been through hundreds of product launches, of various types and sizes. In his words... every one of them was a dumpster fire, no matter the size and supposed maturity of the company. It was always a challenge, and after trying to build a robust process in every tool imaginable, he decided to set out and build it right.This is the creation story of Ignition.SponsorsAirbyteDopplerHost.ioIPInfomablLinksWebsite: https://www.haveignition.com/LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/derekosgood3/Our Sponsors:* Check out Incogni: https://incogni.com/codestory* Check out NordProtect: https://nordprotect.com/codestorySupport 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

Raj Bains grew up in India, North of Delhi, and comes from a family who, as he says, does "whatever is best to do" at the time. They moved around quite a bit when he was a kid, and his family dabbled in a number of different trades. After doing an internship in France and then, completing his undergrad, he moved stateside and has called many different states home. In fact, in those states, he got involved in outdoors activities, like kayaking, mountain biking, and the like. Also, he plays a lot of games, specifically on his phone, which makes his fingers hurt.Raj comes from a background of building powerful tools, that also happen to be really complicated and hard to use... specifically, around the data engineering space. To put it blunt, he felt that the tools were from the Stone Age. He knew that he could build something better.This is the creation story of Prophecy.SponsorsAirbyteDopplerHost.ioIPInfomablSupportZebraLinksWebsite: https://www.prophecy.io/LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/raj-bains-b837a46/Our Sponsors:* Check out Incogni: https://incogni.com/codestory* Check out NordProtect: https://nordprotect.com/codestorySupport 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

Ian Small is a Canadian, and claims that is the most important thing about him. Tech started for him when he was 12 years old, when he got a bad grade on a homework assignment, bought the manual, and became an expert on the machine. Outside of tech, he likes to do home renovation. As he says it, when there is a power tool in your hand, that could potentially cut your arm off, you tend to focus on it.Ian joined Evernote in 2018, to solve a big problem. The company was stuck behind a wall of technical debt, which was blocking its way to innovation. In order for the company to grow and thrive in current times, they had to get out from underneath these problems.This is his creation story, at Evernote.SponsorsAirbyteDopplerHost.ioIPInfomablLinksWebsite: https://evernote.com/LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/iansmall/Our Sponsors:* Check out Incogni: https://incogni.com/codestory* Check out NordProtect: https://nordprotect.com/codestorySupport 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

Jeremy Wood grew up in Portland, and has been heavily influenced by that upbringing. He enjoyed really strong maker communities, supporting local craft artists to thrive and build their business. He moved to the Bay Area for school, and was surrounding by optimism, tech focus, and sheer intelligence. I was under the impression that Portland was beautiful all year round, but Jeremy clued me in that 3 months out of the year, it's a drizzly, soggy mess.As I mentioned, Jeremy was really into the craft builder community, which also led him to be interested in eCommerce. He observed Shopify grow as a marketplace, that made things so easy to launch a store. What he figured out was that there was a need for these store owners to offload and sell their store.This is the creation story of Openstore.SponsorsAirbyteDopplerHost.ioIPInfomablSupportZebraLinksWebsite: https://open.store/LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/jemdwood/Our Sponsors:* Check out Incogni: https://incogni.com/codestory* Check out NordProtect: https://nordprotect.com/codestorySupport 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 Lukichev is a deeply technical guy, which means his hobbies have been related to tech since the early days. He is a PhD in computer science, and has always been interested in building things. In fact, and his words, he has been building drones since back before they were cool. Overall, he likes to figure out how things work. Outside of tech, he is a family man, and make sure that his kids have all kinds of STEM tools.After spending decades in the enterprise data space, Max experienced first hand the struggles around data anomaly detection. He constantly lived in escalation mode, and saw first hand that traditional rules and static dashboard based solutions were failing today's data needs. He set out to be part of the solution.This is the creation story of Telmai.SponsorsAirbyteDopplerHost.ioIPInfomablSupportZebraLinksWebsite: https://www.telm.ai/LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/maximlukichev/Our Sponsors:* Check out Incogni: https://incogni.com/codestory* Check out NordProtect: https://nordprotect.com/codestorySupport 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

Hadi Radwan is an amateur biohacker, which was a new term for me, and means trying to DIY your own biology. He is a family man, and enjoys playing fantasy sports. He's also a podcaster, and regularly interviews founders on his podcast, the First 100, to learn how those people obtained their first 100 customers. When it comes to family, he just had a newborn, so most of his time is devoted to that.Hadi and his team took a hard look at the the market, and realized that 1 out of 4 people are disabled in their career due to an unforeseen circumstance. Strikingly, 50% of folks are living paycheck to paycheck, and don't even know disability insurance existed. They decided to build a product based on technology that fills this gap.This is the creation story of Asteya.SponsorsAirbyteDopplerHost.ioIPInfomablSupportZebraLinksWebsite: https://www.asteya.world/LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/hadiradwan/Our Sponsors:* Check out Incogni: https://incogni.com/codestory* Check out NordProtect: https://nordprotect.com/codestorySupport 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

Nick Ippolito has been involved with youth work for many years, and stumbled into web design and taught himself how to code. He's been married for 15 years, and he and his wife have 3 children - along with a budding startup the run together. They enjoy mounting biking in New Zealand and all things tech.For Rowan Findlay, tech has always been his blood, with his family members working in the industry. In his younger years, he was into technical legos, and used to mod Xbox for pocket money. He has spent a lot of time in tourism, and has done a lot of freelance work, building sites for your local technicians.During a few days off, Rowan decided to tinker with an idea and build a tool to enable custom Squarespace site tooling. When he came back, he immediately showed off what he had built to Nick and his wife - who immediately saw the value, and the future, in the product.This is the creation story of Squarekicker.cSponsorsAirbyteDopplerHost.ioIPInfomablSupportZebraLinksWebsite: https://www.squarekicker.com/LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/nick-ippolito/LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/rowan-findlay-88b8a876/Our Sponsors:* Check out Incogni: https://incogni.com/codestory* Check out NordProtect: https://nordprotect.com/codestorySupport 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

Casey Kipfer is a family man. He's married with 3 kids, and there is a lot of excitement and noise at his house - which is says is wonderful. He enjoys golfing and fishing, and tries to spend as much time outside as possible, including spending time with his brother paying some hockey in the winter. They also worked together for around 12 year at a prior venture of his brothers.Through their collective knowledge, Casey and his team have found that customers have a need for a solid in house expertise to support a payments ecosystem. And, technically speaking, customers need an orchestration layer to abstract multiple partners and services behind the scenes.This is the creation story of Justifi.SponsorsAirbyteDopplerHost.ioIPInfomablSupportZebraLinksWebsite: https://www.justifi.ai/LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/casey-kipfer/Our Sponsors:* Check out Incogni: https://incogni.com/codestory* Check out NordProtect: https://nordprotect.com/codestorySupport 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

Nora Jones has been in tech her entire career. She originally thought she was going to get into hardware, but was always focused on reliability and safety. She has quite the track record, in regards to companies she has worked for - Jet.com, Netflix, and Slack. She lives in Denver, and likes to get outside and do dangerous activities (post studying the risk of course). She loves to ski, and really digs Telluride and Steamboat when she can make the drive.Through her time at other companies, Nora realized that the industry spends little time looking back on our past mistakes. She figured out that there was a solid market for people wanting to understand their incidents better, and started building something on the side, which eventually became her focus.This is the creation story of Jeli.io.SponsorsAirbyteDopplerHost.ioIPInfomablSupportZebraLinksWebsite: https://www.jeli.io/LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/norajones1/Our Sponsors:* Check out Incogni: https://incogni.com/codestory* Check out NordProtect: https://nordprotect.com/codestorySupport 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 Svinov has very few things to talk about outside of the business world. He likes to jog, play tennis, and has a family with three kids at home. He likes to travel with his family and try new things, which he admits is complicated with the kids. Personally, he is driven each day to create something new. When it comes to food, his favorite is curry chicken, which according to him, he could eat every day.For the last several years, Alex had a huge problem finding qualified developers for his startup. Alongside of this, resources were thin in the early days, and he was losing recruiting bids to larger companies. He thought - hiring developers shouldn't be this hard... maybe he should look somewhere different.This is the creation story of Insquad.SponsorsAirbyteDopplerHost.ioIPInfomablSupportZebraLinksWebsite: https://insquad.com/LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/alex-svinov/Our Sponsors:* Check out Incogni: https://incogni.com/codestory* Check out NordProtect: https://nordprotect.com/codestorySupport 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