AZ Tech Podcast

Busy week for Arizona tech news. eVisit and Nextiva raise big. Axosoft makes an acquisition and a few other announcements too.

Plus we talk about national tech news from Apple, SpaceX, VW and more.

Phoenix Mayor Kate Gallego made the decision to run for mayor at a time when, she says, her life was falling apart. As it turns out, she won. Now, she's the mayor of the country's 5th largest city and also the youngest mayor of a major city. Kate got into politics to make a difference in current affairs, but she stays in politics to help build a better future for her 4-year-old son.

Hamid talks with Kate about why she decided to run for mayor, her experiences at Harvard and how building a campaign is a lot like building a startup.

Watch the interview on YouTube: https://youtu.be/qOtTlKqYl8Q

Hamid talks to AZ Tech Podcast producer Adrienne about their favorite parts of Season 1 and what can be expected this summer before the podcast returns with Season 2 later this year. 

One day, Chris Ronzio was running a highly-profitable consulting business. The next, he launched Trainual, one of the fastest growing companies in Arizona that streamlines businesses’ training processes. 

Watching his mom start her own esthetician business and his dad work and travel often for his corporate job influenced Chris on his path to business. Living with Type 1 Diabetes also taught him how to adapt to tough situations, and to be resilient and transparent, all traits he uses now while growing Trainual. 

In this episode, Chris and Hamid talk all about the start of Trainual, the Phoenix Suns, meditation, and Type 1 Diabetes.

Watch the interview on YouTube: https://youtu.be/Dl1bxqEptjc

Tuft & Needle co-founder JT Marino could be the poster child of how to bootstrap your way to success.  When he was first exploring ideas for the type of startup he wanted to build, he and his friend and co-founder Daehee Park made a very specific set of constraints that included never raising capital. 

The two decided to design a way to make buying a mattress as painless as possible. They knew nothing about mattresses, but JT did everything he could to transform what was once a miserable experience into  something as easy as shopping on Amazon. 

From there, they completely disrupted the entire mattress industry  and built a company that now is seeing revenue of half a billion dollars. 

Listen as JT tells Hamid the wild story of building Tuft & Needle from scratch and his recent dive into skydiving and psychedelics. 

Watch the interview on YouTube: https://youtu.be/a7qZGVN9BZA

Dr. Grant McFadden is trying to find out if a virus fatal only to rabbits might also destroy cancer cells. He became interested in the myxoma virus in grad school. The virus was first released in Australia in the 1950s to try to control a massive rabbit population . Since then, Grant has turned his interest into a lifelong pursuit of understanding viruses. Now, as a virologist and researcher at ASU's Biodesign Institute, he's altering viruses and learning how these viruses could treat cancer. 

In this episode, Dr. McFadden tells Hamid about his research and discusses the importance of the FDA and the development and safety of the Covid-19 vaccines.

Watch the interview on YouTube: https://youtu.be/jOYnyjPsF-U

Greg Head is one of the biggest champions of Arizona's tech scene. Even though he's now based out of Dallas, he runs Gregslist in Phoenix, one of the best resources for entrepreneurs, investors and founders in the valley. Not only that, but he has the experience of marketing major startups and helping them scale to multimillion dollar companies. 

In this episode, Greg tells Hamid some of his best tips for scaling, marketing and getting your company's name and product out in the world. 

Watch the interview on YouTube: https://youtu.be/ejEoSBecpN0

Chris Cardinal has a lot to say, and he proved as much on our latest podcast episode. The co-founder of Synapse Studios and CarbonQA shared his philosophy on balancing big deadlines, while also building positive culture at new companies. He talked about how CEOs of the Big 5 companies, like Elon Musk or the late Steve Jobs, aren't exactly who he looks up to while building a business.

Hamid and Chris explore both sides of many of the hottest debates in tech right now, like Bitcoin vs. Dogecoin, retail investors vs. Wall Street, the Epic vs. Apple battle, and what it takes to change the world.

Watch the interview on YouTube: https://youtu.be/4rL20JF3OAM

Ibrahim Mesbah is building the Amazon of buying and selling car parts. It's a very specific market, but that's what's made his company RevolutionParts so successful. It addresses a major inefficiencies and unnecessary costs in the retail car parts market which, as it turns out, is pretty big.  

Ibrahim talks to Hamid about growing up in Zambia, his hiring mistakes and how he uses ride share apps to move product. 

Watch the interview on YouTube: https://youtu.be/f62fTESJJB0

Dr. Danny Jacobs is, in a way, a space explorer. As part of his research at ASU's School of Earth and Space Exploration, he's trying to understand how the universe began. Danny's whole goal is to answer some of life's biggest and most basic questions, like where did we come from and how did we get here? Not only that, but he's also building satellites the size of cereal boxes to launch into space.

So where did we come from? In this episode, Danny and Hamid talk about that and more, like Elon Musk, the colonization of Mars and the future of space exploration.

Watch the interview on YouTube: https://youtu.be/apGmxDUoPjE