Code Story | Startup Podcast for CTOs, CEOs and Technical Founders

Jon Ricketts lives in Knoxville, TN with his wife and kids. He notes that he has had an unconventional route to being a tech startup founder. He has an MBA and JD, but knew during law school he didn't want to practice. Throughout his career, he has continually fallen in love with building. Outside of tech, he enjoys spending time on the beach, staying physically fit, golfing, and working on his private pilots license.

Jon observed the maturation of AI, in the creation of tooling like ChatGPT and generative AI. He envisioned building an application to extend the progression of natural language processing to enable work productivity.

This is the creation story of Writerly.

Sponsors

• Cipherstash
• Treblle
• CAST AI 
• Firefly
• Turso
• Memberstack

Links

• Website: https://writerly.ai/
• LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/jon-ricketts-639187267/

Tim Tutt grew up in the military, and travelled around following his father. An interesting fact he shared was that he attended three different schools in the 1st grade. He learned how to make friends and fit in quickly. Outside of tech, he loves the marvel cinematic universe, from which he states that Tony Spark is his spirit animal. He also loves to play poker, which he got into during college. He actually got to play in a smaller event within the World Series of poker this past year.

In the past, Tim played the role of the middle man between the data and those who needed answers from the data. Like a good engineer, he always automated the repeat things he was asked to do. He asked his co-founder one day... wouldn't it be nice if we could just get out of the way?

This is the creation story of ClearQuery.

Sponsors

• Cipherstash
• Treblle
• CAST AI 
• Firefly
• Turso
• Memberstack

Links

• Website: https://www.clearquery.io/
• Website: https://www.nightshiftdevelopment.com/
• LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/timtutt/

Alfredo Ramirez is the son of Ecuadorian immigrants, which instilled in him positive beliefs around faith, family, community and hard work. Way back, his father bought him an Apple 2 computer, which started him on his software development journey. Outside of tech, he is married with kids, and loves spending time outdoors with them - hiking, water sports, snow skiing and shooting trap. All of these things allow him to relax, recharge and clear his head.

Fifteen years ago, Alfredo and his co-founders started their current venture during the 2008 financial crisis. After relying on the services side of their business, they headed towards building a single platform around digital collaboration, one that is reliable, a better user experience, and the analytics to go with it.

This is the creation story of Vyopta.

Sponsors

• Cipherstash
• Treblle
• CAST AI 
• Firefly
• Turso
• Memberstack

Links

• Website: https://www.vyopta.com/
• LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/alfredo-ramirez-7131175/

Will Gaviria was born and raised in Columbia, immigrating to Florida at 11 years old. His family seta off in a single bedroom together, and worked hard for their life and successes. He got a full ride to MIT, and funny enough, he had to convince his mother that it was a legit school. Through all of his studies, he got to see the rise of AI and focused on neo-morphic computing. Outside of tech, he is married with a cat named Chipotle. He lives in the Bay Area, and loves playing Magic the Gathering and doing Crossfit.

Will and his co-founder observed first hand the explosion of visual content. At the same time, artificial intelligence had reached a mature state, such that you could use it to learn from unstructured data. They set out to build the next big thing, specifically in context of unstructured visual data.

This is the creation story of Coactive.

Sponsors

• Cipherstash
• Treblle
• CAST AI 
• Firefly
• Turso
• Memberstack

Links

• Website: https://coactive.ai/
• LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/williamgaviria/

Andrew Kahl has spent 30 years in tech, and has had many wonderful experiences. He graduated in 1992, and actually accidentally entered the industry, when he came across a job ad for Compaq. He's been in tech ever since, all around the building of things. Outside of tech, he is marred with 2 daughters - one of which he just sent to college, and one in high school. Along side of that, they have 3 overly energetic German shepherds.

Andrew was part of a private equity group, which acquired BackBox in late 2021. He stepped in as CEO, maintaining the technology team in Israel and bringing the GTM team to the US. Taking over a fantastic product, Andrew set his sights on growing the company.

This is the creation story of BackBox.

Sponsors

• Cipherstash
• Treblle
• CAST AI 
• Firefly
• Turso
• Memberstack

Links

• Website: https://backbox.com/
• LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/andrewkahl/

Pete Hunt grew up in NE Massachusetts, which he mentions was culturally New Hampshire. He wasn't into Hockey, but did a lot of swimming, in particular the 200m butterfly. He has a 2 year old daughter, and loves to play guitar in his cover band.

Pete was one of the founding team members of React, and his friend and colleague, Nick, was one of the creators of GraphQL. Post Facebook, they wanted to figure out what was next, and wanted to build something impactful. After interviewing some folks, he realized that managing data and data pipelines was a challenge that needed to be solved.

This is the creation story of Dagster.

Sponsors

• Cipherstash
• Treblle
• CAST AI 
• Firefly
• Turso
• Memberstack

Links

• Website: https://dagster.io/
• LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/pwhunt/

Eric Olden grew up in the Bay Area, as one of the few local natives, but enjoys the mountains of Colorado now, outside of Boulder. He and his family love to ski, mountain bike, and even visit the reservoir to do some surfing. Outside of these things, he is passionate ab out landscape architecture, and does it for fun on the side.

Prior to his current venture, Eric was running a large division at Oracle, surrounding identity. He saw that most cloud customers were utilizing multiple clouds, but most tooling didn't allow for those cloud identities to play nice together. He saw this opportunity sitting in plain sight, and decided to step out and attack it.

This is the creation story of Strata.

Sponsors

• Cipherstash
• Treblle
• CAST AI 
• Firefly
• Turso
• Memberstack

Links

• Website: https://www.strata.io/
• LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/boughtnotsold/

Barak Glanz is 26 years old, and has done quite a few things in his life. He served in the Israeli Navy prior to jumping into the professional world. He worked for Meta as a student, and has has a few impressive startup failures in different sectors. Outside of tech, he is a rock climber, weight lifter, and likes to play chess. He mentioned that he beat someone in 10 moves before, but attributed it to mistakes of his competitor.

A year and a half ago, Barak and his childhood friends shared the personal struggle of learning how to code online. What they noticed was that the current solutions didn't offer helpful ways to practice building real world projects. So they built their own.

This is the creation story of Coddy.tech.

Sponsors

• Cipherstash
• Treblle
• CAST AI 
• Firefly
• Turso
• Memberstack

Links

• Website: https://coddy.tech/
• LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/barak-glanz

David Hurwitt lives in Burlington, Vermont, and is a married father of 3. And, those kids hav already grown and flown, per Dave's words. Their journey out of the nest into college was a driver behind starting his current venture. Outside of current venture, he is an avid photographer and really enjoys taking pictures, but ensuring there is people in them - cause, he states it's just better that way.

Dave spent some time in college admissions in the past. And, as his kids grew up, he started to look into the process again. He found that when visiting a school in person, there wasn't solution that utilized preferences of the graduates, helping them identify patterns to help match them to their perfect school.

This is the creation story of Troove.

Sponsors

• Cipherstash
• Treblle
• CAST AI 
• Firefly
• Turso
• Memberstack

Links

• Website: https://www.troove.me/
• LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/davehurwitt

Jared Ward grew up in a sporty family, participating in wrestling and football. His background is in supply chain and eCommerce, but outside of this and tech, he is a family man and loves spending time with his kids. With his 7 year old son, he is sharing his love of Zelda, and with his 3 year old daughter, he enjoys taking her to the park and the occasional tickle fight. For himself, he enjoys watching MMA, running marathons, and getting outside to hike.

Jared has spent a lot of time in the eCommerce world, serving numerous different roles. What he noticed is that with evolution of eCommerce companies, it is difficult for them to develop a system of record early on. Jared wanted to change all that, and take on the juggernauts head on.

This is the creation story of Luminous.

Sponsors

• Cipherstash
• Treblle
• CAST AI 
• Firefly
• Turso
• Memberstack

Links

• Website: https://www.joinluminous.com/
• LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/jared-ward-bb96a115b/