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

Ben Turner's grandfathers were both an entreprenuer. One grandfather went to Cornell, but ended up buying a fishing boat and then eventually, a hardware store. His other grandfather started a grain elevator after WWII, followed by going into real estate. He learned to be blind to risk, which is important in starting something new. Outside of tech, he likes to do outdoor activities, like kayaking, mountain biking and trail running.

Ben was apart of a company called Network Solutions, and when they started that company, there wasn't the concept of a payment gateway. To make a solution work, you had many technical hurdles that existed. Two years ago, Ben started looking into how you solve this problem.

This is the creation story of Verituity.

Sponsors

• Immediate
• Orbit
• Postmark
• Stytch
• Verb Data
• Webapp.io

Links

• Website: https://verituity.com/
• LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/turnerb/

Tutelage of Treehouse, sponsored by Treehouse!

Guest: Jason Gilmore is the CEO of Treehouse. He is also a principal at Xenon Partners, along with a startup advisor. He has spend many years as an engineer, consultant, and conference leader, along with making significant content contributions to prominent tech sites and writing several books on programming.

Questions:

• How to you come to land in this position with Treehouse?
• What are the future plans for Treehouse? What's the strategy?
• How many people do you hire who have graduated from your program?
• Why would someone choose Treehouse over other online training providers?

Links

https://teamtreehouse.com/

For Tom Hacohen, coding started when he was 9 years old. He took after school robotics classes which required coding... and once he stepped into the programming aspect, he realized he didn't really care about robots anymore. Outside of tech, he surfs, cycles, and longboards - when the conditions are right. When asked where he likes to longboard, he prefers the roads on a sunny day for long distance long boarding in Tel Aviv.

When a friend asked Tom a question about webhooks, he dug deeper into the problem and realized that for her solution, she just wanted an easy way to send hooks from her service. After she agreed to pay him to build it, along with several others, he found the validation to step into building a platform.

This is the creation story of Svix.

Sponsors

• Immediate
• Orbit
• Postmark
• Stytch
• Verb Data
• Webapp.io

Links

• Website: https://www.svix.com/
• LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/tomhacohen/

Mark Porter has always been fascinated with puzzles, so tech just fit for him and a great journey for him. He got his first 4k computer in middle school, and then moved into doing programming for the Department of Education. His big learning from this was that you can use tech to do social good. He's married with 5 kids, and as he puts it, they put up with his deep tech obsession.

Mark joined the board of MongoDB in 2019. What got him excited about the company was the world changing nature of the product. So much so, that he asked to step off the board to be CTO - and carry the banner to the developer community about the power of their doc based, distributed system performing DB transactions.

This is Mark's story with MongoDB.

Sponsors

• Immediate
• Orbit
• Postmark
• Stytch
• Verb Data
• Webapp.io

Links

• Website: https://www.mongodb.com/
• LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/marklovestech/

Maria Meier grew up bilingual, as her Mom was from Poland and her Dad was from Germany. In her free time, she participates Olympic weight lifting (which she clarified does not mean she participates in the olympics). The difference with Olympic weight lifting is in how you do the actual lifts. She finds this is a great way to blow off steam. Outside of this, she is a bit of a foodie and loves to travel and try different restaurants.

In her words, the way she started her current venture is kind of unusual. Formerly a backend engineer, she got restless and figured she was as intelligent as other founders she was observing. Through an accelerator, she met her co-founder and built learning models to illustrate how pedestrians act in traffic.

This is the creation story of Phantasma Labs.

Sponsors

• Immediate
• Orbit
• Postmark
• Stytch
• Verb Data
• Webapp.io

Links

• Website: https://www.phantasma.global/
• LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/mariameier

Notifications North Star, sponsored by Courier!

Guest: Stephanie Griffith is an email and SMS marketing expert, and a marketing strategy consultant. She is a startup founder, and has been involved with big names like Drip, Thinkful, Bath & Body Works and more. She is also the host of the Conversational Commerce podcast.

Questions:

• What is the primary goal for someone in your role, which you mention required you to be sending millions of emails a day?
• So there was a viral HackerNews thread recently, titled "I only like the important notifications, not promotional ones." What does this mean to someone who advises to send promotional messaging for a living?
• Should we stop sending promotional messages?
• In the world of messaging, what would the perfect world look like? Do we need to go to detailed preferences for all?
• As applications evolve and become more complex, notifications become a secondary UX layer that often lives on users devices. How do we keep users from opting out of this critical user experience?
• What impresses you about Courier, and how they are approaching notifications as a UX layer?

Links

• https://www.courier.com/
• https://twitter.com/QueenDTC
• https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/conversational-commerce/id1606214549

Matt Young claims to have been born with a tech spoon in his mouth, having his Dad work for IBM and providing early access to computers. In the 80's, he was interested in music and video games, which carried on through the rest of his life. He is very interested in the intersection of tech and how it can improve real life. Fun fact about Matt.. he loves pinball! He restores and works on the machines themselves, which combines everything he loves. Some other fun facts are that Matt was (and still is) a club DJ, and he loves to travel to ride roller coasters.

In 2015, Matt joined his current venture as the VP of Engineering. At the time he was hired, the company was trying to press into the enterprise space, and in order to do that, the company needed some organization and some process put into place.

This is Matt's creation story of UserVoice.

Sponsors

• Immediate
• Orbit
• Postmark
• Stytch
• Verb Data
• Webapp.io

Links

• Website: https://uservoice.com/
• LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/mattcyoung/

In his words, Tyler Rohrer is best described through his spirit animal, Curious George. He likes to write and try new things. He has 3 grown children, one who is getting married. He has found that his expectations of his kids were actually met, which was welcome and surprising to them. He enjoys golf, and used to do Rally Racing, though he claims he wasn't very good at it. He had more fun building the engines, and less fun crashing the cars.

With the onslaught of the pandemic and the rise of remote work, Tyler reached out to a former customer to run an idea by them. His idea was around a cloud platform to support remote users. The blunt feedback from the customer was that the idea was terrible... if the users couldn't be secured.

This is the creation story of Remotely.

Sponsors

• Immediate
• Orbit
• Postmark
• Stytch
• Verb Data
• Webapp.io

Links

• Website: https://www.remotelyrmm.com/
• LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/jtylerrohrer/

Andrew Salvadore is a father of 2 young boys, and when he is not working, they fill up his schedule. He and his boys live half an hour from the forest, so they spent lots of time there, swimming, and jumping in muddy puddles when possible. He enjoys sports, nutrition, and personal optimization. Though he tends to lean towards reading about self improvement, he had drifted into educating himself on startups, crypto, and trading (which is important for his current venture).

Andrew's founders began to realize the impact of the fact that the crypto market is a 24/7 market, and most days, they would wake up in the morning and wish they wouldn't have been asleep when crypto events occurred. They wanted to build something to do it for them - and Andrew was recruited to move the company and the product forward.

This is the creation story of Coinrule.

Sponsors

• Immediate
• Orbit
• Postmark
• Stytch
• Verb Data
• Webapp.io

Links

• Website: https://coinrule.com/
• LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/asalvadore/

Notifications North Star, sponsored by Courier!

Guest: Troy Goode is the Co-founder & CEO of Courier. He is a multi startup veteran, a Y Combinator veteran, and was a prior guest on the Code Story podcast, in Season 4.

Questions:

• Tell me about the recent fundraise with Google Ventures.
• Considering the success of Courier, it seems like you are in a place where you can choose your investors. Why Google Ventures?
• Enhanced mobile functionality is a new focus - what is planned on the roadmap?
• Earlier we talked to Eric from Lattice, who mentioned notifications support 50% of their engagement. We spoke with Pat at Matrix who mentioned you being a significant piece of layer 2 infrastructure. And, we spoke to Vatasha, one of your Sr. Engineers, who spoke of how empowering the app was to use as a customer. Keep the movie playing forward - where do you see this going?
• How are you educating your customers on treating your notifications as a part of your user experience?

Links

• https://www.courier.com/