Code Story: Insights from Startup Tech Leaders

Panos Siozos and his co-founders go back 25 years or more. They all studied Computer Science together in Greece and did their post graduate studies on educational tech. His hobbies have been on pause for the past few years, given the growth of his business, but his main passion is his family, and his 8 year old daughter. They are building a 3d printer together, and tend to create using lots and lots of legos, including lego animation. His family helps him to see the power of learning something, and recites that learning is something that no one can ever take away from you.During their post graduate studies, Panos and his co-founders built many products in the learning space, as they were crafty and could implement the things they were imagining. During their time, they shared the passion to create products that impacted the masses, and enabled them to learn better.This is the creation story of LearnWorlds.SponsorsImmediateOrbitPostmarkStytchVerb DataWebapp.ioLinksWebsite: https://www.learnworlds.com/LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/siozos/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

Barak Schoster claims he's generally a boring guy. What he does professionally, he also loves to do in his free time - which is coding. He contributes regularly to open source projects. Outside of this, he loves sea kayaking, and equates the ups and downs of the sport to software engineering. He is married with 2 sons, both under 5 years old. They are into building puzzles together and playing ball, as they are sporty kids. Barak and his wife like to visit restaurants, watch movies together, and thoroughly enjoys going to rock concerts. His favorite rock band is Guns and Roses, but his favorite concerts have been U2 and Imagine Dragons.In February 2019, Barak and his co-founders started their companies journey by asking the question - how do you secure your cloud environment? What they found was their experience with fixing these environments were similar to the market, and no solution had been created for streamlining this process, much less optimizing and automating it where possible.This is the creation story of Bridgecrew.SponsorsImmediateOrbitPostmarkStytchVerb DataWebapp.ioLinksWebsite: https://bridgecrew.io/LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/barakschosterSupport 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

Mentorcam - Book your mentor session with promo code CODE for 20% off! Topic: How VC's see your startupMax Samuel is a venture capitalist and lawyer. He formerly worked at Thiel Capital, Wilson Sonsini and Credit Suisse. A graduate of Yale, Penn Law School and Wharton, Max is passionate about mentoring both startup founders and people looking to break into the VC industry.Questions:What is different about early stage VC vs. just VC?How do venture capital firms evaluate startups?What's important at the early stage? What should a pitch deck include?How do you start a career in venture capital?If you were just starting again, what would you do different?Book a call with Max by accessing the link below:https://mentor.cam/maxsamuel - Use Promo Code CODESupport 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

Ev Kontsevoy wanted to be an engineer when he grew up, and this was directly influenced by his engineering parents. When he was younger, computers were relatively uncool still. But as they grew in popularity, he started to explore how to make computers do what he wanted them to do, specifically to interact with hardware. He recalls burning up a monitor once, because he was tinkering with changing the refresh rate, typing up assembly in DOS, and playing early games like Doom. Eventually, he got into infrastructure so he could serve engineers and stay close to the hardware. Fun fact about him - Ev enjoys to watch computers boot. Outside of tech, he likes to tinker with photography, but not digitally - he likes the old cameras, where you have to develop the pictures yourself.Prior to his current venture, Ev created Mailgun - one of the top transactional email platforms out there - which he eventually sold to Rackspace. During his time scaling Mailgun, and working for Rackspace, he started to feel the pain of logging into multiple cloud services - so much so, that he decided to consolidate these connections into a single platform.This is the creation story of Teleport.SponsorsImmediateOrbitPostmarkStytchVerb DataWebapp.ioLinksWebsite: https://goteleport.com/LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/kontsevoy/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

Prabhjot Singh has been in enterprise software for the last 22 years - so he has seen a thing or 2. He joined Citibank out of school, and did a leadership program there for 10 months. Post that, he progressed into the startup world... and never left. He got to be apart of early stage growth, acquisitions, and scaling businesses over a short period of time. He's married, and the father of a four year old - which he notes keeps him sane during his startup life. He mentions that a huge blessing from the pandemic has been the time he's been able to spend with his wife and daughter, working on a fully remote team. They started hiking during the pandemic, to balance the lack of activity, and of course to use all of their daughter's energy so she will sleep at night.He started out his current venture, he started out in the B2C space. When they weren't seeing the user growth they needed, they pivoted their capabilities fit the enterprise, over the average Joe consumer... with the mission of making enterprises successful. In doing so, they realized that it wasn't just the application - it was the process.This is the creation of Pyze.SponsorsImmediateOrbitPostmarkStytchVerb DataWebapp.ioLinksWebsite: https://www.pyze.com/LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/psinghsf/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

Mentorcam - Book your mentor session with promo code CODE for 20% off! Topic: Funding your startupFor the first installment of Mentorcam March, we chat with Rune Hauge, the Founder and CEO of Mentorcam. Rune is an expert in funding your startup, and is a multi time founder. Prior to Mentorcam, he founded three startups and had one successful exit. He has raised millions of dollars in venture capital from top tier Silicon Valley VCs and high-profile angel investors, and also took Mentorcam through Y Combinator.Questions:How do you build a fundraising strategy?What would make one investor a better fit than another?How do you identify the right investors to go after?How do you create the best Y Combinator application?How do you find seed investors?How important is the MVP in the fundraising process?Book a call with Rune by accessing the link below:https://mentor.cam/runehauge - Use Promo Code CODESupport 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

Brian Vallelunga loves to build things - products, companies, or silly things on the side. In Elementary school, he was asked by one of his friends, "why can't you put a movie on your phone?". This got Brian's mind racing, and he went home, ripped a movie into the specific format for his flip phone, and shared it immediately with his friend. Post that, he competed in science fairs, even at the state level. One of the projects, he built a craft that was lighter than a fingernail, and flew without wings or engines. Brian led a portion of the engineering team at Uber, after inserting himself as an intern into the right meetings, which awarded him interesting projects. At the same time, he was building a crypto marketplace on the side, but struggling to get it launched. After taking a trip to reset, his mind kept coming back to a problem he faced while attempting to launch the marketplace - and it was surrounding managing environment variables and secrets. And his community of developers confirmed the need.This is the creation story of Doppler.SponsorsImmediateOrbitPostmarkStytchVerb DataWebapp.ioLinksWebsite: https://www.doppler.com/LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/vallelungabrian/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

Raghav was a product developer, starting a young age. He was creating interesting products for science exhibitions as a kid. Once, this professor asked him to do a cancer research project, which introduced him to the story of Steve Jobs and his entrepreneurial journey. He was highly influenced by this story, and still is today. In the early days, he focused more on the hardware side of computers. But, slowly over time, he was introduced to the coding side of things and found it a much more thriving ecosystem in India. Outside of tech, Raghav likes to watch movies... so much so, that he reviews movies for his friends, and tells them what to see or not see. His favorite movies of all time is Troy, but he did admit he saw Inception twice (mostly, so he could understand all of it). One day, Raghav found himself fed up with the lack of tools out there, when it came to videos, animations, etc. He got so fed up that he'd decided to build something to solve his problem... and for 14 million others.This is the creation story of Animaker.SponsorsImmediateOrbitPostmarkStytchVerb DataWebapp.ioLinksWebsite: https://www.animaker.com/LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/rsraghavan/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

Happy Wednesday to all of you listeners.First and foremost, thank you for being just that - a faithful listener. Thank you for tuning in to the show each week, I hope you are enjoying the amazing stories from the builders, founder and leader we have on the show.As a thank you, we are doing something special in March. We are partnering with a new friend of ours, the folks over at Mentorcam. Mentorcam gives you access to high-profile advisors and experts for 1:1 advice on topics related to startups, tech and professional growth. These people are top-tier venture capitalists, founders that have raised hundreds of millions of dollars, and tech industry leaders that can help you in the areas of startups, fundraising, sales, growing your career and much more.Because we appreciate our listeners so much, we are declaring that March is Mentorcam March on the Code Story podcast. Along side our regular release schedule, each Wednesday, we are going to be interviewing some of the top advisors on the platform, about the topics you know, you love, and you'd love to know more about.What do you have to hear these amazing conversations? Other than stay tuned during the month of March, I would love it if you would check out Mentorcam today, by going to codestory.co/mentorcam and browse their list of experts.Again, go to codestory.co/mentorcam, and check them out. And of course, stay tuned to the Code Story podcast each week, and especially on Wednesday's, to hear from some of the top mentors on the platform.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

John Myers comes from a big military family. He was convinced he was going to be a pilot his whole life. When he was a junior in High School, he started doing C++ programing and he got hooked. After graduation, he got accepted to RPI in update New York, and started suiting computer science. He eventually joined the Air Force, and focused on information systems. Through an interesting turn of events, John got accepted to the NSA, while a good friend of his took his deployment spot to Iraq. This job launched him into the world of cyber security, which took him to Afghanistan doing engineering for the military. When he came back to the states, he jumped head first into the startup world. John is married, and just bought a fixer upper house with his wife. He is into exercise, likes to bike in the summer and ski in the winter. Mostly, he likes to do simple things and decompress with his friends and family.Post acquisition of his first startup, John stared working on a bunch of projects, one of them requiring him to aggregate a large amount of data and anonymize it. This took a lot of work, and there wasn't anything out on the market that provided this type of functionality.This is the creation story of Gretel.SponsorsImmediateOrbitPostmarkStytchVerb DataWebapp.ioLinksWebsite: https://gretel.ai/LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/john-myers-98b07b7/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