Code Story: Insights from Startup Tech Leaders

Slater Victoroff has had some pretty cool hobbies over his life. Though he claims to be a weird guy, he has a well rounded set activities. He is a vegan baker, which is half mad science, requiring the breakdown of recipes to the fundamentals of their elements. He is also a fiction writer, halfway through his second book (which he started during the pandemic). Along with that, he has pursued mastery in blacksmithing at one point in his life.He had a short MMA career too, believe it or not - and has studied Yoshukai Karate for quite some time. Post high school, he was burnt out on academics... so he jumped head first into martial arts - spent time in Japan studying the craft, and did some MMA fights in LA. He has learned over the years that most tech people are typically afraid of being punched in the face.He and his co-founders fell in love with the technology centered around intelligent process automation, which enables organizations to automate processes involving structured, semi-structured and unstructured document formats. Since 2014, they have been at the forefront of innovation in enterprise AI.This is the creation story of Indico.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://indico.com/LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/slatervictoroff/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

Jody Shapiro was fortunate enough to know he was going to be an engineer from a young age. He did the typical kid things, liked played with legos, and built things, with deep curiosity around how things worked. He was introduced to coding when he was 9 years old - and it clicked. He also found himself interested in the business world. The same curiosity around gears and levers was also extended into business... and he was fascinated by the systems in place that enabled intelligent decisions around pricing, stocking, etc.He's had the opportunity to indulge in his curiosities, studying computer engineering in his undergrad, and working on incredible problems in the industry. He has worked for Microsoft, video conferencing software, Silicon Graphics, and Google (for 9 years). He finds it's easy to fall in love with tech, but it's important to remember that there are users on the other side of solutions.When he left Google, he set out to build... a business. He wasn't sure what type of business he was going to build. But he wanted to go work on a big problem, one that everyone had. After spending some time researching, he figured out that everyone has more SaaS than ever before, and companies were having a hard time managing their portfolios. He thought there must be a way to solve this problem, and solve it driven by data.This is the creation story of Productiv.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://productiv.com/LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/jodyshapiro/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

Ken Gavranovic lives in the northern suburbs of Atlanta - namely Alpharetta - with his wife Heather, and two teenage daughters. As a kid, he was fascinated by the movie war games... but what excited him was not the war aspect, but the fact that kid could sit in front of a computer and build anything with their mind. That... got Ken excited.While living in Galveston, TX, he dove into computers as a 10 year old, reading books and learning assembly. His first computer job was working on the Pick operating system, where he built a way for people to send faxes from their desk. The year after, his solution was a 2 million dollar business.Post that, he moved to NY to write software, and then to Florida. While in Florida, the internet started booming (about the same time as AOL). He figured out everyone was going to run their business on the internet... so he moved to Atlanta to be in a place with the highest density of bandwidth, and built what is known as web.com today.Ken was a part of many transformational things throughout his career. Prior to his current venture, he ran product and engineering at New Relic. He got excited about three things that attracted him to his new role, which was purposeful culture, a world changing goal, and the size of an opportunity in front of him. It was these three things that brought him to the company.This is Ken's creation story at Unqork.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.unqork.com/LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/gavranovic/War Games: https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0086567/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

Valerie Coffman has a family in San Francisco, with 2 cats - both 18 pounds each - and 2 kids, the oldest being 3 and a half. So you could say she has a lot to juggle, even outside of a startup. Her family spends time outside, in parks, the zoo, museums, etc - as much as she can since they are opening up again post pandemic.She graduated from Cornell, with her PhD in Theoretical Condensed Matter Physics - which I had to google to understand. Prior to her current venture, she was the CTO and Chief Science Officer at Xometry, an on demand marketplace for custom manufacturing - building their software team from scratch.She and her co-founder started their current venture by exploring why people resist believing scientifically backed, factual information. She wanted to figure out which messages and stories were more effective at communicating these true facts.This is the creation story of Swayable.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.swayable.com/LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/valeriecoffmanSupport 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

Jay Haynes has always been interested in tech, just like his Dad. In 1979, his Dad bought and brought home an apple II plus. Though he was using it for his business to do spreadsheets, Jay began writing code so he could play video games for free, slinging code in BASIC. It's worth noting that this was back when you had to pay a quarter to play a video game.His Dad was a navy pilot, and a hobbyist sail plane flyer, which Jay flew as well, even up to 30,000 feet in the air! As he says, he got grounded as soon as he got married and had 4 kids.Early in his career, Jay got into finance and quickly became familiar with using debt to get equity returns. However, he was always interested in the core innovation problem - of why customers buy new products, and why they switch. Throughout his career, time at Microsoft, schooling, startup life, etc. - he found out that no one really had a secret sauce to innovation. He started evaluating new ways to do it, and came across the Jobs to Be Done theory, which became the foundation to what he has built today.This is the creation story of THRV.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.thrv.com/LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/jayhaynes/https://jobs-to-be-done.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

Marko Anastasov has been working with computers for a long time. He grew up in former Yugoslavia in the 90's, when there was civil war, hyper inflation, and the economy was taken back 20 years. His father was an electronics guy, so there was always a computer around in the house. He found himself fascinated with information and the things you could conjure up on the "magic screens"... and, he found that computers were a place you could build things that were not influenced by the outside world.As a kid he played sports, mainly volleyball. He recalls that even at the age of 15, he and his friends were already being measured for spots on the national team. He has taken many lessons from his time playing volleyball, where a group of people have a shared sense of purpose, driving towards a goal.While building applications under the guise of his web development agency, Rendered Text, he and his fellow builders saw a need to have a way of automating processes of building, testing and integrating... and doing so fast.This is the creation story of Semaphore.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://semaphoreci.com/LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/markoa/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

Josh Millet's journey to tech was quite circuitous. He spent most of his 20's doing a PhD in French medieval history, with his plan being a professor in college. His specific time period was the era around Joan of Arc. Upon graduating, he realized that the job market for French medieval history professors wasn't super hot... and he ended up doing a startup with some of his friends from school - a small test prep company, which ended up being sold with 5 employees onboard.He's married with 2 boys, living in Los Angeles. With two boys, he mentioned that there is a lot of referring... and he feels like an adjudicator and mediator most of the time. After getting involved in the hiring process at his prior company, he felt the pain of knowing when an interview was over early on. He thought, there has to be a way to use data and tech to make the process more efficient.This is the creation story of Criteria.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.criteriacorp.com/LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/josh-millet-23ba192/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

Kristen Buchanan live in Portland, Oregon with her husband, cats and dog. She went to school for museum education, with a minor in art history - note the non-technical background. She was a kid who loved archeology and anthropology, and though she was going to be spending her time in museums. Personally, she loves teaching and sharing new things with people - yet, never wanted to be a teacher.Her hobbies center around learning new things and being outside, She loves to read, and used to dig into the relics in the library stacks at her school. An interesting fact, when studying the art of wax painting in an old latin book, she found a note that someone had passed their friend in latin class - from the 1950's. She is also a big DIY'er and gardener, enjoying the engineering in both of those things. In fact, she highlighted that there is a lot of math and engineering within the world of creating clothing.In 2015, she started her own business to offer learning & development services, and specializing in software engineering onboarding. She was challenged by a mentor to turn this into a software solution, and after some reflection time, she decided to do just that.This is the creation story of Edify.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.getedify.co/LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/kristenmg/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

In his early career, Angel Munoz was an investment banker, specializing in technology. He was fortunate enough to invest in the development of MP3's in the 80's. In addition to this, he is well known for being the spearhead of what is known as eSports today.He is a father of 2 kids, and has been married for 36 years. His passion centers around interactive entertainment, specifically in the world of gaming. He tends to lean towards first person shooters - abbreviated FPS - because they have a real sense of immersion. He loves post apocalyptic games, where you have to survive in a world where our systems and infrastructure have been completely removed.After launching a successful, social media platform around the gaming community - called GTribe, he started to create experiences inside the community. So much so, he and his team attempted to integrate video game aspects into an audio video experience.This is the creation story of Beacon.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://beaconx.com/https://www.amazon.com/Being-Digital-Nicholas-Negroponte/dp/0679762906Support 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

Braden Stenning has always been interested in tech. His earliest memories include the desire to be an aerospace engineer - to be the guy to build the spaceships. He spent a lot of time exploring computers, being interested in math & science - and even founded a high school robotics team. This really opened his eyes to software development as a career, and lit up something inside of him.He is a curious person who often has a plan, and keeps his eyes open for what is happening around him. He did his undergrad at Carlton university, studying aerospace engineering - and he realized he really loved school. So much so, that he got his PhD from the University of Toronto, around the topic of space exploration robots. In Toronto, met his wife, and they decided to stick around Ottawa. They love to spend time outside in the "green space", as he puts it, getting their 2 boys outside or walking the dog.Through some projects he was working on, and networking in the tech space of Ottawa, he was introduced to his Co-founder, Martin Cloake. Together, the combined ideas around machine telemetry and the next level of insight into continuous improvement.This is the creation story of Raven.ai.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://raven.ai/LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/braden-stenning-ba849487/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