Code Story: Insights from Startup Tech Leaders

Adrian Tobey lives in Canada. He got started in his tech career right out of high school, working for his father's digital marketing agency. In high school, he was interested in computer science, and developed video games and useful UI for his school. Prior to digital marketing, his father was a jazz musician, and Adrian followed in those footsteps to play the trumpet. For University, he had two options - go to school for computer science or for music... and chose the latter. During school, he was working full time for his Dad's agency, building websites, email campaigns and such. While he was doing this, he built his first product called Form Lift, which is a Wordpress form builder for Infusion Soft.Around 3 years into school, he failed his first university course - a discrete computer science course around computer runtimes, big O notation, etc. He had invested a ton of money into the his degree already, but he started doing the math, and estimated he wouldn't complete school until 2025 because he was part time.With that in mind, he dropped out of University school, and thought - what next? He didn't want to do agency work forever. He took a look at how expensive, convoluted and clunky marketing technology tools can be. He vowed to create the ultimate suite of tools, and to do it on Wordpress.This is the creation story of Groundhogg.SponsorsCourierImg.lyRoutableCTO.aiCloudways offers peace of mind and flexibility so you can focus on growing your business instead of dealing with server management. With Cloudways, you get an optimized stack, managed servers, backups, staging environment, integrated Git, pre-configured, Composer, 24/7 support, and a choice of five cloud providers: AWS, DigitalOcean, Linode, Google Cloud, and Vultr. Get up to 2 Month Free Hosting by using code "CODE30" and get $30 free hosting credit.LinksWebsite: https://www.groundhogg.io/LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/adriantobeySupport 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

Hello listeners... it's time to embark upon yet another season of the Code Story podcast.As we dive into another journey together, in fact our 6th journey together, you an expect to hear more (even more!) amazing stories about MVP's, trade offs, determining feature importance, building teams - and scaling, or fighting scale, as you grow.Our guest list this Season is truly epic, with appearances from Stephen Blum of Pubnub, Matt Pierce of Immediate, Reed McGinley-Stempel of Stytch, Mike Bouffard of Greenhouse... to mention just a few.Season 6 starts on January 18th, so subscribe today to ensure you don't miss an episode.And a big shout out and thank you to our Season 6 sponsorsSponsorsImmediateOrbitPostmarkStytchVerb DataWebapp.ioSupport 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

This is Season 5, signing off....Thank you for listening!Season 6 of the Code Story podcast will be starting SOON, so stay tuned.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

Back in 2019, we had Shelby Stephens on the show to talk about his project then, called Jolly. Since that time, the COVID pandemic shut down events and crippled their progress at the time. They pivoted the product a bit, to be a sort of eCommerce like site for freelancers to offer services. While they let their Jolly pivot grow, he and his co-founder started building a new product... one which allows startup experts to offer their knowledge and experience - in a fractional, part time manner.This is the creation story of Growth Match.SponsorsCourierImg.lyRoutableCTO.aiCloudways offers peace of mind and flexibility so you can focus on growing your business instead of dealing with server management. With Cloudways, you get an optimized stack, managed servers, backups, staging environment, integrated Git, pre-configured, Composer, 24/7 support, and a choice of five cloud providers: AWS, DigitalOcean, Linode, Google Cloud, and Vultr. Get up to 2 Month Free Hosting by using code "CODE30" and get $30 free hosting credit.LinksWebsite: https://www.growthmatch.com/LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/shelbystephens/https://www.jollyhq.com/https://codestory.co/podcast/e10-shelby-stephens-jolly/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

Adam Wiggins was from California originally, but has lived in Berlin for the last decade. Earlier in his life, he did burning man art installations and was a DJ. Now, he is a middle aged family man, so he focuses on his family, his daughter, his adorable dog and his career/software projects. His partner is also an immigrant, whom he met while in Berlin.Adam loves Berlin, and in fact, loves European cities in general, for their focus on quality of life. He mentions that in the states, there is a large amount of economic freedom but some inequality and more highs and lows to speak of. The culture in Berlin specifically is full of history, culture, and a bohemian element which is very attractive to music and art.Adam is most well known for starting Heroku, which completely simplified the way developers think, interact and use infrastructure. Post its acquisition by Salesforce, he found himself thinking about the future of computing, and started a research lab called Ink & Switch. The area they landed on was computing interfaces, and usage around screen touch. After a few prototypes, they landed on something that they though was a solid combination of desktop precision with touch screen mobility.This is the creation story of Muse.SponsorsCourierImg.lyRoutableCTO.aiCloudways offers peace of mind and flexibility so you can focus on growing your business instead of dealing with server management. With Cloudways, you get an optimized stack, managed servers, backups, staging environment, integrated Git, pre-configured, Composer, 24/7 support, and a choice of five cloud providers: AWS, DigitalOcean, Linode, Google Cloud, and Vultr. Get up to 2 Month Free Hosting by using code "CODE30" and get $30 free hosting credit.LinksWebsite: https://museapp.com/LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/adam-wiggins-a7623845/https://adamwiggins.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

Lydia Davies is from the UK originally, but she has lived all over the world. She was Born in Thailand, and has lived in Southeast Asia, Singapore, Alaska, the Middle East and now in Houston. She has always been into sports - playing, supporting, etc. When she was 16 years old, she signed on to a music label as a singer and pianist, traveling around the world to perform. When she left the music industry, she got really into technology. As she opened a performing arts academy, she ended up building her own website and app for the business.During COVID in 2020, she starting creating a framework for a golf app, for her and her husband to find people to play golf with. She wanted the app to have mechanics like a dating app, with a social aspect to see who was down to play some golf... worldwide.This is the creation story of Teemates.SponsorsCourierImg.lyRoutableCTO.aiCloudways offers peace of mind and flexibility so you can focus on growing your business instead of dealing with server management. With Cloudways, you get an optimized stack, managed servers, backups, staging environment, integrated Git, pre-configured, Composer, 24/7 support, and a choice of five cloud providers: AWS, DigitalOcean, Linode, Google Cloud, and Vultr. Get up to 2 Month Free Hosting by using code "CODE30" and get $30 free hosting credit.LinksWebsite: https://teematesgolf.com/LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/lydia-davies-57b7001/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

Nick Clayton has been into tech most of life. Outside of tech, he loves a good strategy game or board game - in face, he met his fiancé playing these types of games. He is an avid Magic the Gathering player, and has been enjoying the game for over 20 years. When I asked the difference between Magic and Dungeons and Dragons, he notes that DND is a role playing game and more about telling a story, while Magic is more about strategy and mechanics. He also enjoys spending time with friends and family, and cooking a good meal with lots of flavors.Nick and his co-founders followed the data, and learned that there were a large number of people in the population have a hard time finding clothes... because clothes aren't produced in their body shape. After iterating on solutions around education and recommendation engines, they decided to move upstream into the designer's process.This is the creation story of Savitude.SponsorsCourierImg.lyRoutableCTO.aiCloudways offers peace of mind and flexibility so you can focus on growing your business instead of dealing with server management. With Cloudways, you get an optimized stack, managed servers, backups, staging environment, integrated Git, pre-configured, Composer, 24/7 support, and a choice of five cloud providers: AWS, DigitalOcean, Linode, Google Cloud, and Vultr. Get up to 2 Month Free Hosting by using code "CODE30" and get $30 free hosting credit.LinksWebsite: https://www.savitude.com/LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/nicholas-clayton-b6b60815/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

Marco Palladino migrated from Italy about 10 years ago.. and brought all of his Italian hobbies with him. He loves to cook - specifically pasta, of course - and enjoys a good glass of wine. He has a family, with 1 kid and 1 on the way. He loves sports, soccer and skiing. Beyond that, he is a self taught developer, where tech has been his side hobby and passion, but turned into his full time gig.Marco and his co-founder came to San Francisco 10 years ago, to build an API marketplace. Over time, they amassed 300,000 developers, consuming and publishing API's. Eventually, the figured out the business model wasn't working... so they open sourced the platform.This is the creation story of Kong.SponsorsCourierImg.lyRoutableCTO.aiCloudways offers peace of mind and flexibility so you can focus on growing your business instead of dealing with server management. With Cloudways, you get an optimized stack, managed servers, backups, staging environment, integrated Git, pre-configured, Composer, 24/7 support, and a choice of five cloud providers: AWS, DigitalOcean, Linode, Google Cloud, and Vultr. Get up to 2 Month Free Hosting by using code "CODE30" and get $30 free hosting credit.LinksWebsite: https://konghq.com/LinkedIn:  https://www.linkedin.com/in/marcopalladino/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

Oona Rokyta is a first generation American, which you wouldn't expect from her lack of accent. Her parents are artists from the Czech Republic, who migrated to the US 6 months before she was born. Because of her parents profession, she comes from the land of not understanding business, nor tech. Her parents are role models for her - in fact, they are her personal heroes. From this inspired place, she finds her greatest motivation in life, which is to learn as much as possible and share it with others. She spends a lot of time with her boyfriend and his kids, and has even kicked off a weekly baking challenge with his daughter, creating experimental dishes.As a freelancer, and a part of a community of freelancers, Oona found that it was difficult to understand cash flow with variable income. Through interactions with accountants or financial systems, she saw that most systems or professionals were backwards looking. She though, well what does it look like moving forward? What does it look like to bring on additional client?This is the creation story of Lance.SponsorsCourierImg.lyRoutableCTO.aiCloudways offers peace of mind and flexibility so you can focus on growing your business instead of dealing with server management. With Cloudways, you get an optimized stack, managed servers, backups, staging environment, integrated Git, pre-configured, Composer, 24/7 support, and a choice of five cloud providers: AWS, DigitalOcean, Linode, Google Cloud, and Vultr. Get up to 2 Month Free Hosting by using code "CODE30" and get $30 free hosting credit.LinksWebsite: https://www.lance.app/LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/orokyta/details/experience/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

Ari Jacoby grew up in the DC Metro Area, but has lived in New York City for the last 17 years. He's married with 2 kids at home, ages 12 and 9, and he spends a lot of time outside of his business building legos, math homework, and stem projects with his kids. The biggest hit of the stem projects has been circuitry, to see something buzz or light up at the end of the exercise. He's a big fan of international travel, and enjoys a good glass of wine with his wife.Speaking of, Ari's biggest influence is his wife. As he puts it, she is the CFO (Chief Family Officer) of the Jacoby Household, and does a brilliant job of it. He likes to watch her works, and finds it motivating how much she gets done and takes care of in her infinitely more hard role than his.Ari spent a lot of time around identity, specifically in ad tech and mar tech. He figured out that data was common currency in that world, but not in other spaces. Having built large identity graphs, he recognized there was an opportunity to do it again in cyber risk and fraud.This is the creation story of Deduce.SponsorsCourierImg.lyRoutableCTO.aiCloudways offers peace of mind and flexibility so you can focus on growing your business instead of dealing with server management. With Cloudways, you get an optimized stack, managed servers, backups, staging environment, integrated Git, pre-configured, Composer, 24/7 support, and a choice of five cloud providers: AWS, DigitalOcean, Linode, Google Cloud, and Vultr. Get up to 2 Month Free Hosting by using code "CODE30" and get $30 free hosting credit.LinksWebsite: https://deduce.com/LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/arijacoby/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