Code Story: Insights from Startup Tech Leaders

Tom Medema is Dutch, and grew up in a small village in the Netherlands. This allowed him to explore what else was out there, which led to him living in 5 different countries. Alongside that, he loves to travel and reads a lot of fantasy novels. We had a good chat about Tolkien books, Dune, and he recommended that I check out the Cradle series. We both highly recommend the Licanus Trilogy, for anyone who is interested in their next read.Prior to his current venture, Tom was the CTO at a startup and found himself having to hire people fast, while maintaining that the people he hired were a good fit for the company. Hiring at their current geo only was not going to work, so they had to look remote - and he quickly felt the pains of ineffective tools and methods for doing so.This is the creation story of Bubbles.SponsorsAirbyteDopplerHost.ioIPInfomablLinksWebsite: https://www.usebubbles.com/LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/tommedema/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

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.ioIPInfomablLinksWebsite: https://www.prophecy.io/LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/raj-bains-b837a46/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

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/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

Justin Clegg grew up all around the world, living in countries like Puerto Rico, Mexico City and Brazil. He spent 2 years on mission in Africa, and 5 years in India as well. Through these experiences, he has learned empathy, gratitude, and how to be a better listener, which helps him in his business ventures. He is multi-lingual, and interestingly, he mentioned that selling religion helped him to be better at sales. Outside of tech, he digs the mountains and playing sports, specifically tennis and indoor soccer.Justin had a pivotal experience with a handyman helping him at his home. When it came time to pay this person, he was unable to do so because the handyman didn't accept forms of payment Justin had available to him. He decided to build something to fix this, and onboarded said handyman, as his first merchant customer.This is the creation story of Allset.SponsorsAirbyteDopplerHost.ioIPInfomablLinksWebsite: https://www.tryallset.com/LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/justindclegg/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

Will Falcon did not have a traditional path to tech. He is originally from South America, and moved to the US when he was a teenager. Later in life, he went through Navy Seal training and served the country for 6 years, doing primarily special reconnaissance. After leaving the military, he taught himself how to code and "fell into" the world of AI. He finds the dynamic of uncertainty in the military translates over to the tech startup world. Outside of tech, he likes to try random things, but digs surfing, swimming, and doing art.In his undergrad program, Will created a toolset to help you scale code within the deep learning, AI world. Prior to joining Facebook, he open sourced his tooling and shared it with the world. He noticed that many large enterprises were adopting his toolset, and in doing so, they were running into the same problems - problems that this current iteration could fix.This is the creation story of Lightning AI.SponsorsAirbyteDopplerHost.ioIPInfomablLinksWebsite: https://lightning.ai/LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/wfalcon/https://www.williamfalcon.com/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

Conor Carmody lives just outside of Dublin with his wife and has 3 lads - aka boys. Professionally, he worked in Eastern Europe around the time of the Berlin Wall, through some dramatic change in society. He learned a ton about setting up businesses in a society that was rebuilding itself. Today, he does a lot of advising and consulting around establishing and growing a business. Outside of his current venture, he likes to garden - and claims he is the guy that counts down the minutes until he can cut the grass again.Conor joined his current organization is helping to build the Ireland entrepreneur and startup culture. With the arrival of big tech companies helping to accelerate that, his group is ensuring that entrepreneurs are being strategic in forming their businesses, meeting the right people, raising money, and... building community.This is the creation story of the Furthr Festival.SponsorsAirbyteDopplerHost.ioIPInfomablLinksWebsite: https://furthr.ie/LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/conorcarmodySupport 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

Mark Stouse was a CCO and CMO in large companies like Honeywell Aerospace. He claims that he is not a data scientist, but can play one on TV. He got to a high degree of organizational maturity, and could understand and speak to the needs of a data scientist. If he wasn't pursuing his current venture, he would likely be a history professor, as he is seriously passionate about 15th century innovation and the pre renaissance era. He is also a parent of 2 teenage boys, so outside of tech and history, he spends time doing what they want to do.As a communications and marketing leader, Mark was frustrated with the lack of recognition for his marketing teams to the bottom line. In addition, he solved major analytics problems at his prior companies, but had massive budgets to do so. He saw that software and automation was the way forward.This is the creation story of Proof Analytics.SponsorsAirbyteDopplerHost.ioIPInfomablLinksWebsite: https://www.proofanalytics.ai/LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/markstouse/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

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