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

Franzi Low doesn't have the usual CTO path. She studied economics, and was doing her PhD in econometrics, prior to her current venture, and was a teaching assistant. She loves to play sports, and can't go a day without playing some sort of sport. She is passionate about triathlons, which is something she can do with her recently injured knees. Living in Hamburg, Germany, she and her husband always enjoy hiking and being outside.

When COVID hit the world, and the topic of global mobility was pushed into view. Franzi, along with her co-founders, used to live abroad, and experienced the lack of support when moving to a new area and settling in. They wanted to come up with a solution to help people during this relocation process.

This is the creation story of Localyze.

Sponsors

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

Links

• Website: https://www.localyzeapp.com/
• LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/franzi-l%C3%B6w-80b8b562/

Shaunak Roy spent 10 years in the tech industry before deciding to be a tech entrepreneur. In undergraduate, he studied mechanical engineering and eventually came to the states for his masters. Outside of running a company, he has 2 daughters and enjoys playing games and observing their patterns of learning, which applies to his current venture.

Throughout his life, Shaunak has always been fascinated by learning. When looking into building his own startup, he noticed that there wasn't a learning platform built around the mechanics of social media, and community.

This is the creation story of Yellowdig.

Sponsors

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

Links

• Website: https://www.yellowdig.co/
• LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/shaunak-roy-65231b/

Notifications North Star, sponsored by Courier!

Guest: Vatasha White is a Senior Software Engineer at Courier. Previously, she built software at Lacework, LaunchDarkly and GE Digital. She is a graduate of Smith College in 2015.

Questions:

• Having been a prior customer of Courier, what excited you about the solution?
• What is your favorite use case for the tool?
• So now that you work at Courier... what impact do they have that really motivates you?
• What are you working on now, that really excites you about the product?

Links

• https://www.courier.com/

Matt Provo has been married for 16 years and has three kids. So between the Provo household and his startup, there is never a dull moment. He is originally from the West Coast, until he came to Boston for grad school. He was influenced through his love of sports, specifically playing soccer through college. Early in life, he had the opportunity to help start a non-profit organization, based around documentary films of children in Africa. In doing so, he learned a lot about, and fell in love with, building a healthy, impactful organization.

While building a platform surrounding HVAC software, Matt and his team ran into some challenges around the diversity of their implementations. When they lifted & shifted to Kubernetes, they unlocked the problem around resource scaling that their current solution targets today.

This is the creation story of StormForge.

Sponsors

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

Links

• Website: https://www.stormforge.io/
• LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/mprovo/

Temilola Adebayo is in tech, but her background is in film production. She grew up most other life in Nigeria, but then moved to Canada. She has been producing films for 10 years, and still does. She takes large influence from her family, who happen to all be entrepreneurs. Beyond professional things, she has a 2 year old son who keeps her on her toes, and she enjoys watching films and traveling with her spouse.

Temilola and her co-founder set out to create tools to not only make the immigration process easier, but to provide immigrants with the tools and people to support them through the process.

This is the creation story of HumanSquad.

Sponsors

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

Links

• Website: https://humansquad.com/
• LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/temilolaadebayo/

According to Christine Spang, she is secretly Canadian, being born in Toronto. She moved to Upstate New York when she was 3, and grew up there. She came from a family of engineers and entrepreneurs. After getting into an RPG game based on Lord of the Rings, she had to learn to code, run linux, and fell in love with software. In High School, she was a band geek, and was super into fantasy reading. These days she tends to focus more on hobbies that get her out and moving in the world, specifically rock climbing and plants.

Christine was working for a startup that ended up being sold to Oracle. At that point, she was considering what was next for her. The timing was fortuitous, as her friend from MIT was starting up something around extracting information from email.

This is the creation story of Nylas.

Sponsors

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

Links

• Website: https://www.nylas.com/
• LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/christinespang/

Notifications North Star, sponsored by Courier!

Guest: Patrick Malatack is a partner at Matrix Partners, early stage investment firm. Prior to that, he spent 7 years at Twilio, leading product and launching messaging. He also spent 4 years at Microsoft, managing the MS Project program.

Questions:

• What things did you build, or attempt to build, at Twilio around the messaging problem?
• Why does notifications as infrastructure make sense?
• Tell about your perspective on Notifications being a layer of user experience.
• What did you see in Troy based on your experiences, to indicate he gets it?
• How strongly do you advise your portfolio companies to use a solution like Courier?

Links

• https://matrixpartners.com/
• https://www.courier.com/

Douwe Maan started programming when he was 9 years old, and grew up with his Dad pushing Linux on him over Windows. He was raised in the Netherlands, outside of Amsterdam. How he recharges outside of technology is traveling to new places. Prior to his current venture, he joined, as employee number 10, for Gitlab. The company is the largest all remote company, which allowed for him to be a digital nomad, which roundabout, led him to meet his wife, get married, and live in Mexico City.

Since 2018, there was a team inside of Gitlab working on a project to bring the same principles and methodologies from software development, into designing and maintaining data architecture. By that time, Douwe was craving the early stage startup feel. Through some changes in Gitlab, he was tasked to lead the team of reviving the project, which eventually led to it becoming its own thing.

This is the creation story of Meltano.

Sponsors

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

Links

• Website: https://meltano.com/
• LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/douwem/
• https://douwe.me/

Jon Dahl was a philosophy major in college, and eventually, obtained a graduate degree studying theology. He thought he would go into academia, but he quickly figured out that he needed to make money as well. So he started a dev shop and taught himself to code. He is married with 2 kids in their teens, and a 21 year old cat who believe or not... is not playful. They like to read and travel, and watch shows together.

While he was running his dev shop, Jon took on a project that required him to build a video transcoder. Although this was a hard problem to solve, he learned a lot and this served as the catalyst for him to pursue building the product that he wished he could have bought while dev'ing this project.

This is the creation story of Mux.

Sponsors

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

Links

• Website: https://www.mux.com/
• LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/zencoder/

Notification North Star, sponsored by Courier!

Guest: Eric Koslow is the Co-founder of Lattice, the people success platform. Prior to Lattice, he spent time engineering at TeeSpring, and now he is building a new venture called VStream.

Questions:

• What impact does user communication have in the HR SaaS space?
• What infrastructure issues arose that caused you to look for a notification infrastructure vendor at Lattice?
• Tell me about your new venture Vstream, and how important will your communication strategy be?
• Have you experienced particular preferences from your user base, as far as how and when they are notified?
• How does Courier fit into your overall messaging strategy?

Links

• https://lattice.com/
• https://www.courier.com/