Code Story: Insights from Startup Tech Leaders

Thejo Kote grew up in Southern India. He came from an academic, intellectual family. Both of his grandfathers were authors, and in the house, they had built up a library. But not just a few books here in there... Thejo grew up in with 3500 books in his house. These were a combination of everything, but with a lot of reference and historical books. If he's honest, Thejo didn't appreciate it really until he got older - however, no one appreciated it when it was time to move.He was influenced a lot by what he was reading and watching, which he noted allowed him to learn from the experiences of others. Ultimately, his path took him down he road of tech and entrepreneurship. He's always been fascinated with how impactful tech can be on the world... you sit at home, write some code, and make an impact. Currently, he resides in San Francisco with his wife, and has been there for the last 10 years or so.Prior to his current venture, he co-founded Automatic, connecting cars to the internet. This eventually sold to SiriusXM for several million dollars. Looking into another problem, he saw that the way people spend money lacked true visibility and connectivity between systems. He asked some questions, got some feedback, and set out to capitalize on the opportunity to build a better solution.This is the creation story of Airbase.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.airbase.com/LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/thejo/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

Shinji Kim was born in Korea. Her family moved to Canada when she was 13 years old. She likes to hang out with her friends, watch movies and likes to be outdoors, skiing, hiking or doing yoga. She recently tore her ACL, though, which has put a damper on her physical activity. While she studied at the University of Waterloo, she was able to work with many different well known companies - Facebook, Sun Microsystems and Barclays. In 2014, she started her first company called Concord Systems, focusing on distributed stream processing. This was eventually acquired by Akamai, the largest CDN network in the world. We joked about the day it went down, cause it fell like the digital world went dark.At Akamai, she worked with large enterprises and saw that there was a problem around data discovery, and that it was growing in the middle market, as more companies migrated to the cloud. She decided to build an automated way for users to discovery and understand their data.This is the creation story of Select Star.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://selectstar.com/LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/shinjikim/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

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

Brandon White started his career from his passion for fishing. In doing so, he wound up building the largest social networking and eCommerce site for sport fisherman. He got to travel around the world, fish all over, and do some amazing things with this company. But honestly, he got burned out on the sports and doesn't fish much anymore. He tells people today to be careful today when people are following their passion, because romanticizing a career doesn't work out for everyone. And, just because people aren't overly passionate about something - but are good at it - they should go after anyway, to help them to buy their time for their passions.The genesis of his current venture started with his wife, who manages a family office. At one point, she was switching accountants, which required the transfer of a massive amount of documents... the bulk of which was in email. He thought that there had to be a better way to find these documents, across accounts in the cloud.This is the creation story of File Finder.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://filefinder.io/LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/brandonwhite/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

Original episode: https://www.redhat.com/en/compiler-write-technical-documentationHey guys, getting close to Thanksgiving in the states. For today, I'm sharing another fantastic episode of the Compiler podcast, from Red Hat. As a reminder Compiler is a show hosted by tech veterans, discussing tech topics - big, strange and small.On this particular episode - which is episode 8 - the topic of technical documentation is discussed. This is a fitting topic, given that the show is brought to you by Red Hat, which is the largest open source company in the world. The use cases for technical documentation for open source software seem pretty straight forward and obvious - if a developer or user needs to download a free, open source program, they will also need the correlated documentation so they can educate themselves on how to use the program.In my experience, the need for technical documentation goes way beyond the boundaries of open source. Within the walls of a business, the need to share technical documentation around product architecture, entity relationships, DevOps workflow and even product strategy are absolutely critical in ensuring that everyone is on the same p age to move forward.At the root, both types of technical documentation have the same goal - to inform the reader on how things should work. This episode was a great discussion on the topic, and I hope you enjoy Episode 8 of the Compiler podcast.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

Ulf Schwekendiek was brought up in Germany, but spent most of his life in the US. He speaks German with an American accent, and English with a German accent... so he claims to not speak any language properly anymore. Personally, he loves to para glide (not para sail, different thing). In fact, he is a tandem instructor. In this particular activity, you inflate a giant parachute and jump off of a mountain or cliff. From there, you use drafts or thermals to stay in the air, and can drift for around 100 miles sometimes. Ulf finds this super beautiful, relaxing, and a great way to get into a flow state.Ulf's background is two fold - engineering and UX. He has worked on many popular proudest, and with well known startups in the past. He was an iOS engineer at Siri, before it was bought by Apple. He started up a company and ended up selling it to Groupon... and ended up doing a couple more companies with the Groupon founder, one being Descript which it still going strong today. Finally, he spent some time at Postmates.He enjoys building software that invokes an emotion from its user. While he was at Postmates, he got really interested in the way people work, specifically around flow states. He studied the Pomodoro method, and its associated 25 minute cycle. This became the first building block into creating his current venture.This is the creation story of Centered.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.centered.app/LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/sulfme/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

Guillermo Rauch is originally from Argentina. He has always been involved in the open source world, starting out working in Linux and native tooling. After a while, he feel in love with the web and the front end web system, working in the early days of AJAX, JS Animation and jQuery competition. When I asked him what he does for fun, he laughed - because he really enjoys what is does professionally on the web .On a personal level though, he has three kiddos so he stays pretty busu. He is into fitness, and does calisthenics and gymnastics. Beyond that, he is into coffee - though I don't know many tech people who aren't into coffee.Having been a JS person, he saw an opportunity to build out the frontend layer of the web. To put that in context, think about what Stripe, Twilio, etc. have done for the industry with their foundational, developer first API's. He decided to create a framework that had no opinion about how you got your data. Along side of this, he created the optimal ecosystem for developers to build very fast - specifically, to develop, preview, and ship.This is the creation story of Next.js and Vercel.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://vercel.com/LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/guillermo-rauch-b834b917b/https://nextjs.org/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

David Ciccarelli is a husband to his partner in life and business, Stephanie, and a dad to 4 kids - one boy, and three girls. He loves to be doing anything outdoors - hiking, biking, etc - and has a cottage out in the country. His most memorable hike was near his hometown, at the Provincial Park, where he climbed up to the top if the Sleeping Giant.Being a true Canadian, he was able to direct my suspicions about Poutine, which is French fries, gravy and cheese curds - aka an indulgent dish. He said that its more of a regular favorite in places like old Quebec, but most people enjoy it perhaps once a year, as you can't really have it every day.Growing up, David loved experimenting with sound - playing piano, tuning into radio stations, and tinkering with an old record player. He discovered there was an audio engineering program at school, and set out with the goal of starting a small project recording studio. He met his now wife and co-founder through their first voice recording project... which then, began to be advertised and attract more and more talent.This is the creation story of Voices.com.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.voices.com/LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/davidciccarelliSupport 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

Josh Dzielak is originally from the US, but lives in Paris now. And because of this, he likes to take advantage and walk around to take in the sights. He lives close to an area with a park, featuring gardens and lots of trees. He goes there to clear his head, have a little bit of nature, and also, to have walking meetings.Josh likes to stay active through running, cycling, and the aforementioned walking. He's married with a 13 month old daughter. He met his wife, not in Paris or the US, but in Thailand. He jokes that his young daughter is growing up faster than his company.He avidly confirms that the food in Paris is amazing. The simple things are fantastic, and he frequents the patisserie for his favorite almond croissant. His family loves to host people when the come to town, so they can ensure they try some of the exquisite foods and strong flavors.At a prior company as a developer advocate, Josh started using the Orbit model. He compared the model to being like the funnel for sales, except the Orbit model applies to community. After he left the company, he joined his now co-founder, using the Orbit model in a consulting context. Then, the aha moment occurred - what if we built a product to facilitate this?This is the creation story of Orbit.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://orbit.love/LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/dzello/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

Matt Dixon grew up job hopping, before eventually starting his own business. He is married with 5 kids - 1 daughter and 4 sons. He loves to eat, spend time with his family, mountain bike, and travel with his wife to new places. They just moved to Nashville from the Colorado Springs area. He found that starting his own business was the best way to find freedom to be present for his family. For a personal foundation, he likes to live with no regrets.Matt has been in tech industry for nearly 21 years, and started Front Range Systems, building software for bidding customers. He found that post difficult projects, he started to figure out that the best way to improve a project was to improve the team - the entire team, as a whole.This is the creation story of Code Program.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://codeprogram.io/LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/mattdixon/https://frontrangesystems.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