Code Story: Insights from Startup Tech Leaders

Darshan Mehta has a degree in marketing and finance, and has typically served those disciplines. However, he has been accused of having the extra tech gene, since he was born in India. He enjoys out door activities, and is scuba diving certified. He really likes to do activities around what he is passionate about. For example, he is launching a hackathon in Bangkok called Big Mango, to help teams achieve product market fit and incubate early stage startups. And, he teaches at universities around the world, in particular around how to give presentations. He believes deeply in communicating effectively and having engaging conversations.He is also an author, and just recently released his book called "Getting to Aha". The tagline harps on the belief that today's insights become tomorrow's facts. One of the things Darshan found throughout his career was that most people want to figure out why people buy your products. Most people are comfortable with surveys, but its difficult to get to the "why" that way, and focus groups help with that. Traditionally, doing a focus group has been difficult, expensive, and concentrated to geo areas. Darshan set out to build a tool to change this for the market.This is the creation story of iResearch.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.iresearch.com/LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/darshan--mehta/https://www.connectqik.com/Getting to Aha - BookSupport 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

Ilan Peleg is 29 years old, and has been a long time middle distance runner. He previously ran the 800 meters, and served int he Israeli Army as a professional athlete. At the age of 21, he retired and started his tech career. He said that there are many who would correlate their Israeli service area of their professional success. He just recently got engaged. He proposed to his fiancé outside of Tel Aviv, on a cliff, in the same spot where they had their first kiss. Generally, he enjoys sports and athletics, and sees it has a positive effect on how he manages his team at Lighten. He also likes to travel, and stay educated on the topics he follows.Ilan and his co-founder were developers in many different types of companies - startups, enterprises, etc. It seemed to them that it was easy to debut and troubleshoot applications in development, but found it very difficult to observe applications in production. They realized that most developers were not equipped with the right tooling to troubleshoot and understand live applications in the wild.This is the creation story of Lighten.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://lightrun.com/LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/ilan-peleg-5a31396bSupport 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

Bruno Demuro is first and foremost, a father of 2 children. He says this is the single most awesome thing, and yet at the same time, the most challenging thing. He has a background in industrial engineering and design, but considers himself a generalist and a relentless problem solver (which he admits, can be hard on this wife). He loves all thing tech - hardware, software, you name it. But beyond tech, he loves working on and restoring classic cars, along with surfing on a long board.Earlier in Bruno's life, his mother had to undergo surgery to have a brain tumor removed. Though the surgery went WELL, in order to remove a tumor the size of a penny, the doctor's had to make an opening the size of a grapefruit. When Bruno asked why, the Doctor said that it was the only way they could be sure that the tumor would be accessible. Bruno found this answer to be unacceptable.This is the creation story of Armor Bionics.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.armorbionics.com/LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/brunodemuro/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

Kyle Bernhardy had a less than traditional path to the tech world. He has been in the industry since the late 90's, but it all started when he was growing up, attempting to program text adventures games on his Commodore 64. In High School, he started running and they became a major part of his life - so much so, he went to run for Penn State University. He settled into an exercise and sports science major, so he could stay close to the sport.Post college - he didn't know what to do with his degree. He worked in a few corporate fitness centers, but didn't enjoy what he was doing and didn't see a path for himself. During that time, he ended up getting a job in tech support. He grew in this role, in his knowledge of DB basics, SQL and supporting database reporting. Once this happened, he moved into the development world.Programming for Kyle is a creative outlet, but not for art... for problem solving. In 2010, he started working for a data center company and met his now co-founder. They would hang out and chat about what it would be like to build something together. While working for a large data aggregation company, he worked through a number of data availability, reliability, and infrastructure around massive data processing. Internally, he thought there must be a better way.This is the creation story of HarperDB.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://harperdb.io/LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/kylebernhardy/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

Cherish Santoshi started his professional career when he was just 18. He plays music, being a one man band through his guitar, bass and drum skills. He's even got a studio setup at home, and enjoys lo fi hip hop, especially when he is working. Cherish reads and watches a lot of content, specifically around theoretical thought experiments, which help. Him to think about things from a different angle. Along with this, he likes to travel... to get out, see the world, and experience new people and ways of thinking. He likes to interact with like minded developers, founders, and startup folks, which makes his current role as Head of Community a perfect fit.Being startup minded, he set out with his founding members to continue the growth of SaaS in India, and build a product specifically for then developer community, and building an auth product that furthers the password less revolution.This is the creation story of SAWO.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://sawolabs.com/LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/cherishsantoshi/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

Robert Ross, also known as Bobby Tables, has been into building stuff since he was 12 years old. Around that time, he Googled "how to make a website", learned from an online tutorial, and has been hooked on development ever since. He started making websites for people he knew in San Diego, which allowed him to facilitate his Xbox and Xbox Live needs. For gaming, he stuck to playing only Halo - and in fact, he already pre-ordered Halo Infinite over a year ago. But outside of gaming, he really loves to get analog - camping, being outside, and skiing.In high school he did a lot of marching band, and continued the art in drum core international after he graduated. Post competition, he started working full time with a web consultancy.Then went on to the next thing and the next, and he feels very lucky to have made the stops he made in his career, and the people he met along the way. He's grateful for his early work at an agency because it required him to move quickly, try out new things, and move on to the next project. This gave him a lot of rapid experience up front, which helped shape his skills later on.Eventually, he was an on call engineer - either by accident or intentionally - because he always wanted to help solve the problem. At one point, he set out to bridge bootcamp grads into the real world of software through a video series. As it turns out, the product he was building during the series was much more interesting - and desired - than the videos themselves.This is the creation story of FireHydrant.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://firehydrant.io/LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/bobby-tables/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

Luke Hoban has been into tech and computers for many, many years. It started off when he was a kid, but sailed with him into college as he got into languages. He spent the first part of his career at Microsoft building tools, IDE's and programming languages. His take on the frame of mind required to build a language is centered around what you want it to do, combined with how it feels for the programmer to express what they want with it to do. Bottom line... it is an art, not a science, and is much more about product and user interaction design than anything.Post Microsoft, Luke went work for Amazon on the cloud, specifically EC2. The thing he had in the back of his head for many years was how to bring the programming model into the cloud space. He eventually left Amazon, and set out to combine his love of designing programming languages, with the movement and excitement of the cloud.This is the creation story of Pulumi.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.pulumi.com/LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/lukejhoban/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

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