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

Adriaan van Rossum is a tech guy even at home. He likes to tinker with home automation, like turning on the lights - which his girlfriend doesn't like the home automation experiments at times. Outside of tech, he does kite surfing, and travels around the world. He really enjoyed Thailand, specifically the food there, as he is a vegetarian.

For several years, Adriaan was a freelancer. Each time he built an application for his clients, he did the usual song and dance with Google Analytics - he copy and pasted the script. This didn't feel right, and his girlfriend prompted him to build his own... so he did.

This is the creation story of Simple Analytics.

Sponsors

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

Links

• Website: https://www.simpleanalytics.com/
• LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/adriaanvanrossum/

Stephanie Mertz is into software development because she likes to create something from nothing - IE the blank canvas nature of coding. Outside of tech, she loves to garden, grow her own vegetables, and build things out of wood. She also has as beehive, which she claimed was a fantastic way to observe the natural creative process - and decompress from a screen.

Stephanie and her co-founder were drawn to solving problems for the behind the scenes processes - aka the boring business stuff. When digging into these problems, they kept running into the fact that no one really had a solid escheatment process... and eventually, they decided to tackle it.

This is the creation story of Eisen.

Sponsors

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

Links

• Website: https://www.witheisen.com/
• LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/stephmertz/

Fredrik Björk is originally from Sweden, but has spent many years in San Francisco. He got started coding in BASIC on his Commodore 64 (while also playing video games, of course). Post graduating from RIT, he has been involved in many startups, like Avatars United and The Real Real. Outside of tech, he is a Dad of two kids and likes to run - specifically marathons. Beyond that, he likes wind surfing and wing foil.

Fredrik noticed that the patterns of development has changed towards outsourcing over building everything in house over the past decade. Fast forward to 2021, great services exist to empower developers to ship faster. Fredrik wanted to build a service like this for the API layer, and below.

This is the creation story of Grafbase.

Sponsors

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

Links

• Website: https://grafbase.com/
• LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/fbjork/

Jaclyn Ling is a super competitive person, and has been her entire life. Whether it's board games with her family, or playing sports in her younger years, she wants to win. She still plays sports today, and watches basketball, specifically the Miami Heat or Toronto Raptors. Outside of that, she is a low key person, enjoying taking walks, hanging at the local coffee shop, and thrift shopping.

Jaclyn is a self proclaimed terrible interviewer, which never gave her the best foot forward when looking for jobs. When her co-founder and she wanted to solve a problem in the space of hiring, they wanted to enable people to have access to more opportunities, and get noticed better for your first job.

This is the creation story of Hatchways.

Sponsors

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

Links

• Website: https://hatchways.io
• LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/jaclynling

Shawn Cao lives in Kirkland, just outside of Seattle. He immigrated to the US, and is married with 4 kids. He loves to hike and play soccer with his children, and even though Seattle can be rainy and cloudy for half the year, he admits that the summers are fantastic for being outside. He also admits he stops by Starbucks occasionally, but couldn't confirm if it tastes better at the home store in Seattle.

Shawn noticed, through his time at larger companies like Pinterest and Microsoft, that the path to get data insights and analytics leans heavily on engineering, and takes a long time. He thought, there must be a way to make an easy, quick tool to enable people outside of engineering to do this themselves. So he built the Canva for Data.

This is the creation story of Columns.

Sponsors

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

Links

• Website: https://columns.ai/
• LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/caoxhua/

Lauren Long was originally born and raised in China, and moved to Canada when she was 10. She had to learn English for the first time, which taught her how to embrace hard things and challenges. She attended University in Canada, and started her first company there called BoxIt. Outside of tech, she is an outdoors person - post moving from China, where she was more of a city girl. She loves to hike, rock climb, and do yoga. She also loves to cook, and claimed she learned to cook a whole duck once, creating 5 meals from all the parts.

Lauren was a key developer at Firebase, and post that, she started thinking about her past experiences and what areas could be improved - and she landed on integrations. Once she met her now co-founder, they realized they both were passionate about solving this problem.

This is the creation story of Ampersand.

Sponsors

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

Links

• Website: https://www.withampersand.com/
• LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/laurenzlong/

Scott Bening is a 63 year old kid at heart who grew up in Buffalo, NY. He got a degree in chemistry and went into the plastics industry. Outside of his profession, he is super active - playing drums in a rock band, racing GT race cars competitively, kayaking, hiking and golfing. He has been married for 35 years, with 2 older children.

Many years ago, Scott joined a small division of a company in 1989. Scott took the company to new heights, developing and selling a material that you probably use every day - the film that wraps Tide Pods. Since retired from the company, he is advising other companies, and helping entrepreneurs through his book, titled Formulating Solutions.

This is Scott's creation story of Monosol.

Sponsors

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

Links

• Website: https://www.monosol.com/
• LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/p-scott-bening-a8225b14/
• https://www.formulatingsolutionsbook.com/

Matt Martin has always been a computer nerd, even way back in Elementary School, learning to use a Mac and learning Hypercard. In Middle School, he discovered the internet and programming in HTML - and he was hooked. That said, he didn't grow up around tech folks and eventually got into public policy and went to law school. After being a litigator for a while, he decided to ditch the law industry, move to the Bay Area and get into tech. Outside of tech, he is married with 2.5 year old twin girls. They live in downtown San Francisco, and they love to go on bike rides together.

Matt considers himself a productivity nerd, and is always looking for ways to improve his workflow. At a prior role, he was focusing on individual optimization to schedules. And what he realized, is that time is not an individual problem - but a team problem to be solved.

This is the creation story of Clockwise.

Sponsors

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

Links

• Website: https://www.getclockwise.com/
• LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/voxmatt/

Ido Shamunn cut his teeth on the C programming language, while studying Applied Mathematics. He was unsure while studying if he should go Computer Science, but he mentioned that his Applied Math degree helped him understand better what goes on behind the scenes. He's happily married, and enjoys playing music, since way back in Junior High with the keyboard. He has since moved into guitar, and eventually into the drums and heavier music.

Ido and his co-founders started out building a side project, building a tool to help themselves keep track of what's going on in the industry. After they built a quick tool to aggregate information, they thought that maybe other developers would be interested in this solution.

This is the creation story of Daily Dev.

Sponsors

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

Links

• Website: https://daily.dev/
• LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/ido-shamun-aa8628a3/

I have another special episode of the Code Story podcast today, where I'm sharing another great podcast I've just been made aware of. It's called The Closer, from the team at Project Brazen, hosted by financial journalist Aimee Keane. The show focuses on pulling out the high octane emotion and exponential stakes that underscore todays biggest acquisition or investment headlines.

In the episode I'm sharing today, the host takes you inside the final days of Toys R Us with Lauren Hirsch, the reporter who first revealed the iconic company's impending bankruptcy. You can expect to hear juicy tidbits around what drove the company out of business.

Check out The Closer, and subscribe today, on your favorite podcast catcher.

And thanks again for listening.

Links

• Apple: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/the-closer/id1668774101
• Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/show/7jQPWgY7Yk6J13dN3day4H?si=fa80c4d6c2644dc5