Code Story: Insights from Startup Tech Leaders

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/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

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/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

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/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

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/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

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/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

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/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

Kirk Marple has been a family man for 20+ years now. His kids are older now, in their 20's, which he finds amazing. He's been in tech for most of his whole career, but when he started out professionally, he wanted to be a chef. When he was 13, he wanted to attend culinary school - but then things changed, obviously, but he still cooks often, dabbling in stir fry and barbecue.After selling his prior company, which was heavy in the broadcast media space, Kirk ended up at General Motors. He started to learn about media data, and the value of getting the media data into computer vision algorithms. Five years later, he realized that no one had created a platform to do this yet... and he got started building it, on nights and weekends, first for podcast discovery.This is the creation story of Unstruk Data.SponsorsImmediateOrbitPostmarkStytchVerb DataWebapp.ioLinksWebsite: https://www.unstruk.com/LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/kirkmarple/ 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

Beier Cai has been in the tech space for 16 years, almost exclusively in early stage startups. The third startup he worked at did pretty well, which was HootSuite. He was the first engineer writing the first line of code for the social sharing platform. Towards the latter years at the company, he fell in love with helping engineers grow their careers, and managing teams. Passionate about community, he started organizing meetup groups outside of the company. Outside of tech, he is married with two boys. He finds that being a father helps him to be a better business owner, thinking towards building something for the long term. Being based in Vancouver, he loves to ski during the winter, and be outdoors hiking and camping in the summer.After Beier left Hootsuite, he was interested in getting back into the startup life and solving a new problem. He got together with his now co-founder, and a particular problem stood out to him - the difficulty in building a successful career within the startup ecosystem. He was puzzled to see great talent leaving the startup eco-system, and he wanted to fix it, through a private, professional network.This is the creation story of Commit.SponsorsImmediateOrbitPostmarkStytchVerb DataWebapp.ioLinksWebsite: https://commit.dev/LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/beiercaiOur 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

Patrick Bryant lives in Charleston, South Carolina, and splits time in Washington, DC. He loves entrepreneurship, and believes it is the number one change agent in the world. He is involved in multiple communities around the topic - Startup Grind, EO, and he founded the Harbor Entrepreneur Center. Scuba diving is the thing that takes his mind off all things though, given you are 100 feet under the water, and have to focus. He is excited to go dive with the sharks soon, and he also enjoys the beaches and being in the sunshine.Prior to his current ventures formation, Patrick and the other three partners had two software products and other companies they were building. Between them all, there were two dev teams... and in the interest of making a bigger impact in their space, they decided to join forces, and form one team.This is the creation story of Code & Trust.SponsorsImmediateOrbitPostmarkStytchVerb DataWebapp.ioLinksWebsite: https://codeandtrust.com/LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/patrickbryant/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

Or Weis has been a programmer or engineer since the age of 5. He started playing with DOS commands super early in his life. He made a significant leap in his professional skills when he was joined the IDF, as a reverse engineer. Post that, he worked for a startup to build containers (before they were commonplace), followed by co-founding Rookout, a company who defined the production debugging space. You might recognize that name, as I interviewed his co-founder, Liran, on a recent episode. Outside of tech, he is married to another software engineer, and dabbles in writing science fiction. He hopes to publish one day soon. Or hopes to eventually write a book that overlaps with his professional interests as well, kind of like the Phoenix Project.While he was building his startups, Or quickly found himself annoyed with having to build and rebuild permission sets, or authorization, into every solution he made. Since he couldn't find someone doing it, he decided to create a permissions solution... for the last time.This is the creation story of Permit.SponsorsImmediateOrbitPostmarkStytchVerb DataWebapp.ioLinksWebsite: https://www.permit.io/LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/orweis 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