In today's episode, Markus Lorenz speaks to Björn Dröschel, the Product & Technology Managing Director at fulfillmenttools. The platform merges eCommerce with their client's store network, supporting processes like order entry, shipping, click and collect, returns while offering a perfect omnichannel shopping experience for retail customers. In this conversation, Markus and Björn discuss the birth of fulfillmenttools, the unpredictable reality of setting up a company during the breakout of a global pandemic, creating technology that will be adaptable to increasingly rapid changes of the market, and building flexible eCommerce tools that can be used and customized by people without developer assistance. Tune in!

Brink Commerce is a high performing, serverless, headless e-commerce SaaS platform for medium to large enterprise customers. Today Piotr speaks to Kristian Tysander, who has helped build the business from the ground up, but has had a huge impact on the architecture behind it. Krystian shares with the listeners the 3 main principles that Brink Commerce follow in the way they have designed their ecom architecture that makes their system so reliable and unique at the same time. Krystian also shares his view on microservices vs monolithic architecture in terms of global scale, speed and efficiency and reveals why subscription management and adding marketing features to their offer is Brink Commerce's direction for the future. 

In today’s episode, Piotr Karwatka speaks to Brad Buda, the co-founder of Census - an operational analytics platform. Census boasts that it's the easiest way to sync your customer data in all of the available tools and claims to be the best app to get your sales & marketing teams on the same page. Today Piotr speaks to Brad about how joining Amazon, and the cloud web services team in the era of the early days of AWS in Seattle proved to be a formative experience for his entire career. They also talk about the early days of Census, its unique qualities, its impressive growth, and the dynamic role changes for a technical founder that naturally come during the process. Tune in!

Julien Lemoine, the Co-founder & CTO at Algolia, an Enterprise Search Software company, is an entrepreneur passionate about software development, product development, and algorithmics. In this episode, Markus Lorenz speaks to Julien about building a development team at a huge scale, the development of the role of the CTO in a fast-growing company, leadership struggles, as well as Algolia's search technology, and how the search engine positions itself against its competition. Julien also gives his view on how Algolia's technology helps businesses grow, generate profit, and increase conversion rates by helping customers find exactly what they're looking for, very quickly.

Planet Heroes is the world's first ecological crowdfunding platform. This start-up was established in Poland and has already been recognized by the United Nations. The platform collects funds for pro-ecological activities by allowing you to sponsor each other in exchange for cleaning different public spaces like parks or beaches. So how does the platform work? It is enough to first clean up the area, document it well - then enter the goal of your collection and wait for the payment. Today, Agata speaks to Przemek about the spontaneous beginnings of this initiative, plans for the future, the green startup landscape in Poland, and much more. 

Michael Vax has over 20 years of leadership experience across the Digital Commerce landscape. He has led the development of eCommerce platforms at Hybris, Spryker, and Elasticpath. With this extensive experience, he is currently helping customers up-skill their teams in Digital Commerce, develop innovative roadmaps and boost their market growth in his new consulting company CommerceIsDigital. Today, Piotr speaks to Michael about the digital commerce landscape, which keeps broadening into markets previously unheard of in the digital sphere. They also talk about the pros and cons of a feature-driven vs. industry-driven vs. architecture-driven approach, the lessons B2C can learn from the B2B business, and what would be the best first steps if you want your company to go through a digital transformation.

Mytheresa is one of the leading global luxury fashion e-commerce platforms shipping to over 130 countries. Founded as a boutique in 1987, Mytheresa launched online in 2006 and offers a highly curated edit of over 200 luxury brands with ready-to-wear, shoes, bags and accessories for womenswear, menswear and kidswear. Today Markus Lorenz and Philipp Barthold, the Chief Technology Officer at mytheresa.com talk about building vs buying, efficiency at a scale, building a reliable team and having technology serve the business it is designed for. If you're a developer looking for career opportunities, don't miss out on the ending, where we will announce Mytheresa's job openings for developers. 

In this week's Catch the Tornado episode Piotr speaks to Humberto Ayres Pereira, CEO of Rows.com. Rows is not just another spreadhseet. It's a revamped, and tailored to fit the needs of increasingly tech savvy users, no code/low code platform that lets people populate and analyze web apps using a spreadsheet interface. It offers many extended functionalities and integrations such as Lead Generation and Marketing Automation Tools. During this conversatin Piotr and Humberto discuss how the tool differs from products we all know like Google Spreadsheets and Airtable, as well as the rise of Open Source and Low Code products. Let's begin!

Urban Stalk is a Canadian company using leading technology in vertical farming such as precision-based agriculture, micro-controlled environmental production, circularity, IoT and automation to improve people's access to nutritious food and reduce the environmental impact of food production. Urban Stalk has incorporated food production processes from over 16 countries spanning over four continents to produce a world leading food production system. Today, I speak to Brent Downey about the impressive academic foundation that Urban Stalk was built on, the three pillars of its business model, the myths and misconceptions surrounding food technology and much more. Tune in!

BigCommerce is an eCommerce platform that provides SaaS services to retailers, including online store creation, search engine optimization, hosting, marketing and security for small and medium-sized businesses. In today's episode, Piotr speaks to Nate Stewart, Head of Strategy at BigCommerce. Some of the topics they discuss include the advantages of functioning in the Austin, Texas startup ecosystem, the importance of Open Source philosophy in BigCommerce's approach to providing SaaS services, and what it takes to build a great API when it's so easy to commoditize. They also discuss BigCommerce and Next.js cooperation and future plans regarding their products. Tune in!