Code Story: Insights from Startup Tech Leaders

Matt Provo has been married for 16 years and has three kids. So between the Provo household and his startup, there is never a dull moment. He is originally from the West Coast, until he came to Boston for grad school. He was influenced through his love of sports, specifically playing soccer through college. Early in life, he had the opportunity to help start a non-profit organization, based around documentary films of children in Africa. In doing so, he learned a lot about, and fell in love with, building a healthy, impactful organization.While building a platform surrounding HVAC software, Matt and his team ran into some challenges around the diversity of their implementations. When they lifted & shifted to Kubernetes, they unlocked the problem around resource scaling that their current solution targets today.This is the creation story of StormForge.SponsorsImmediateOrbitPostmarkStytchVerb DataWebapp.ioLinksWebsite: https://www.stormforge.io/LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/mprovo/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

Temilola Adebayo is in tech, but her background is in film production. She grew up most other life in Nigeria, but then moved to Canada. She has been producing films for 10 years, and still does. She takes large influence from her family, who happen to all be entrepreneurs. Beyond professional things, she has a 2 year old son who keeps her on her toes, and she enjoys watching films and traveling with her spouse.Temilola and her co-founder set out to create tools to not only make the immigration process easier, but to provide immigrants with the tools and people to support them through the process.This is the creation story of HumanSquad.SponsorsImmediateOrbitPostmarkStytchVerb DataWebapp.ioLinksWebsite: https://humansquad.com/LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/temilolaadebayo/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

According to Christine Spang, she is secretly Canadian, being born in Toronto. She moved to Upstate New York when she was 3, and grew up there. She came from a family of engineers and entrepreneurs. After getting into an RPG game based on Lord of the Rings, she had to learn to code, run linux, and fell in love with software. In High School, she was a band geek, and was super into fantasy reading. These days she tends to focus more on hobbies that get her out and moving in the world, specifically rock climbing and plants.Christine was working for a startup that ended up being sold to Oracle. At that point, she was considering what was next for her. The timing was fortuitous, as her friend from MIT was starting up something around extracting information from email.This is the creation story of Nylas.SponsorsImmediateOrbitPostmarkStytchVerb DataWebapp.ioLinksWebsite: https://www.nylas.com/LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/christinespang/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

Notifications North Star, sponsored by Courier!Guest: Patrick Malatack is a partner at Matrix Partners, early stage investment firm. Prior to that, he spent 7 years at Twilio, leading product and launching messaging. He also spent 4 years at Microsoft, managing the MS Project program.Questions:What things did you build, or attempt to build, at Twilio around the messaging problem?Why does notifications as infrastructure make sense?Tell about your perspective on Notifications being a layer of user experience.What did you see in Troy based on your experiences, to indicate he gets it?How strongly do you advise your portfolio companies to use a solution like Courier?Linkshttps://matrixpartners.com/https://www.courier.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

Douwe Maan started programming when he was 9 years old, and grew up with his Dad pushing Linux on him over Windows. He was raised in the Netherlands, outside of Amsterdam. How he recharges outside of technology is traveling to new places. Prior to his current venture, he joined, as employee number 10, for Gitlab. The company is the largest all remote company, which allowed for him to be a digital nomad, which roundabout, led him to meet his wife, get married, and live in Mexico City.Since 2018, there was a team inside of Gitlab working on a project to bring the same principles and methodologies from software development, into designing and maintaining data architecture. By that time, Douwe was craving the early stage startup feel. Through some changes in Gitlab, he was tasked to lead the team of reviving the project, which eventually led to it becoming its own thing.This is the creation story of Meltano.SponsorsImmediateOrbitPostmarkStytchVerb DataWebapp.ioLinksWebsite: https://meltano.com/LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/douwem/https://douwe.me/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 Dahl was a philosophy major in college, and eventually, obtained a graduate degree studying theology. He thought he would go into academia, but he quickly figured out that he needed to make money as well. So he started a dev shop and taught himself to code. He is married with 2 kids in their teens, and a 21 year old cat who believe or not... is not playful. They like to read and travel, and watch shows together.While he was running his dev shop, Jon took on a project that required him to build a video transcoder. Although this was a hard problem to solve, he learned a lot and this served as the catalyst for him to pursue building the product that he wished he could have bought while dev'ing this project.This is the creation story of Mux.SponsorsImmediateOrbitPostmarkStytchVerb DataWebapp.ioLinksWebsite: https://www.mux.com/LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/zencoder/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

Notification North Star, sponsored by Courier!Guest: Eric Koslow is the Co-founder of Lattice, the people success platform. Prior to Lattice, he spent time engineering at TeeSpring, and now he is building a new venture called VStream.Questions:What impact does user communication have in the HR SaaS space?What infrastructure issues arose that caused you to look for a notification infrastructure vendor at Lattice?Tell me about your new venture Vstream, and how important will your communication strategy be?Have you experienced particular preferences from your user base, as far as how and when they are notified?How does Courier fit into your overall messaging strategy?Linkshttps://lattice.com/https://www.courier.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

Izzy Azeri has been in the tech industry for 20 years, starting out at places like EMC and VMWare. He's married with three kids, living in Franklin, Massachusetts, outside of Boston. He loves soccer and CrossFit, which helps him destress from his tech work. The family has a place in Maine, where they can be outside, swim, etc. - whatever they can do to keep active and stay healthy Post the Google acquisition of his prior startup, Stack Driver, Izzy and his co-founder were looking to get back into early stage. After interviewing a number of engineering leaders, they noticed a trend - while software development was speeding up, QA was becoming a bottleneck in the SDLC.This is the creation story of Mabl.SponsorsImmediateOrbitPostmarkStytchVerb DataWebapp.ioLinksWebsite: https://www.mabl.com/LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/izzyazeri/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

George Georgallides is originally from a small island in Europe called Cypress. He grew up there, joined the army, and competed in Track & Field and Triatholons. He came to Los Angeles in 2005 for his studies, and has been stateside ever since. He is a passionate polymath, speaking quite a few languages, and regularly takes on new challenges. In learning these languages, he finds that he is able to breakdown barriers in connecting with people.George has been in the health tech space for some time. When he started working on a pace maker, he interviewed surgeons who were working on patient with metabolic illnesses. Seeing these illnesses, which are lifestyle driven, was very formative for his mission to automate a healthy lifestyle.This is the creation story of Basis Health.SponsorsImmediateOrbitPostmarkStytchVerb DataWebapp.ioLinksWebsite: https://www.basishealth.io/LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/george-georgallides/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

Savarth Misra didn't start out in tech. In fact, he was a lawyer, working as a corporate commercial lawyer in Asia and the UK. During this time, he noticed how little tech adoption was being done, and how much opportunity was available for solutions to make an impact. He is married, with 2 girls - who, in his words, keep him out of mischief. One of his daughters is totally extroverted, and coming from two introverted parents, they are still trying to figure out where she got it from.In his prior profession as a lawyer, Savarth thoroughly understood how contracts were done. He also noticed how little tech adoption was present, which directly impacted the effectiveness of contract management in general. He figured it was only a matter of time before this industry - his industry, was disrupted by tech.This is the creation story of ContractPodAI.SponsorsImmediateOrbitPostmarkStytchVerb DataWebapp.ioLinksWebsite: https://contractpodai.com/LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/sarvarth-misra-69869953/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