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

Stephen Mathai-Davis grew up in a family where he was expected to go into the buy side of Wall Street. Originally, he rebelled against this, pursuing professional kickboxing and even running his own dojo in New York. Fun fact, he has 8 black belts, and has started teaching his kids how to box. In his late 20's he came back to wall street, and experienced the 2008 crash and rebound. Along his journey, Stephen realized that his friends didn't have access to the same money management tools and strategies that institutional investors had. He became inspired to offer these types of investment tools to the average person.

This is the creation story of Q.ai.

Sponsors

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

Links

• Website: https://tryq.ai/
• LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/stephen-mathai-davis-cfa-cqf/

Jimmy Jacobson grew up in Snoqualmie, about 45 minutes east of Seattle, Washington. He graduated from college in 2020, as the pandemic was breaking - but, directly correlated with the pandemic, he didn't actually get to walk and receive his diploma. His first job out of school was the startup he is building now. Outside of tech, he rides mountain bikes, digging the trails at Tiger Mountain or back home in Snoqualmie. Around Seattle, he likes to hang out at parks and throw the frisbee, or chilling on the beaches with a late night bonfire.

Post graduation, the job Jimmy had lined up got cancelled. Last minute, he joined some alumni slack channels and sent a cold message to his now co-founder. He found himself fascinated by the idea of giving cash back to people for paying their rent.

This is the creation story of Stake.

Sponsors

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

Links

• Website: https://stake.rent/
• LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/jimmy-jacobson-378563113/

Outside of technology, Lars Grønnegaard is an avid cyclist. He stats that if you've been to Copenhagen, where his from, you would know that a lot of people do cycling. He is into road or mountain biking, along with Alpine Skiing - but he does the latter outside of Denmark, in Norway or South Austria. He is a family man, with 3 kids, and he takes his kids cycling with him. Along side of this, he likes to cook for his family. He claims he has a full life, between a startup, family, children and hobbies - and he needs no more.

Prior to his current venture, Lars was primarily a product guy. And in running product, he cared deeply about the impact that strategic business moves made on the business. He also saw that claiming revenue was less empirical, creating human error and bias. After not finding a solution to solve his problem, he decided to create a platform to find out the truth around revenue data.

This is the creation story of Dreamdata.

Find out more about B2B Attribution here: https://dreamdata.io/b2b-attribution

Sponsors

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

Links

• Website: https://dreamdata.io/
• LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/larsgroennegaard/

Jack Naglieri grew up in Ohio, but moved to Virginia when he was 10. He had a normal east coast family up-bringing, but he focused on tech early on, even as a kid. Eventually, he went to George Mason to study Cyber Security. Outside of tech, he is into cooking and fitness. He focuses a lot on making sure that his body and brain are in a good state, through exercise, meditation, sleep and healthy eating.

Jack was working as an incident responder previously, and during that time, he figured out that AI based models for breach detection don't work as well as intuitive humans, as often times there isn't enough signal for them. Along with using antiquated sets of data, he decided that there must be a way to leverage the cloud and build a solution to solve the pain points within this process.

This is the creation story of Panther Labs.

Sponsors

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

Links

• Website: https://panther.com/
• LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/jacknaglieri/

For Itiel Schwartz, it's hard to remember life before his current venture. He studied computer science and psychology in school, and during that time he started working for Ebay. He's 32 years old (he thinks), and is married with a young family. Outside of hiking and binge watching TV, he is a big fan of coffee and bakeries.

In spending a lot of time in the infrastructure world, he found out that in the world of DevOps troubleshooting, there is a lot of chaos to sift through. He thought it would be amazing to build a tool to impact Kubernetes, and the entire infra ecosystem.

This is the creation story of Komodor.

Sponsors

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

Links

• Website: https://komodor.com/
• LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/itiel-shwartz-18542853

From the time he was very young, Todd Larsen was always interested in technology. However, he ended up studying audio engineering so found his way to tech through teaching himself how to code. He gained a ton of experience at companies like Groupon and Digit.co. Outside of tech, he is a father to a 5 year old daughter, and musician, which both things occupy his time outside of business.

Having gained fantastic experience in advertising space, at Groupon, and then at Digit, he learned how to execute on longer term initiatives, but balanced with fast delivery on top of a strong foundation. All of this experience was hard fought, and as he started consulting, he thought... how can I scale myself?

This is the creation story of Tech Leaders.

Sponsors

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

Links

• Website: https://www.technical-leaders.com/
• LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/salesandsoftware/

Marin Smiljanic was born and raised in Croatia. He attended a local math school, which actually got him into tech. Post attending college, his first experiences of the industry were through internships and startup involvement. Outside of tech, he likes to hike, swim, winter sports, being outdoors, etc. - and he lives in Vancouver now, which gives him great access to all of the above. He says the main difference between Vancouver and Croatia comes down to food. Croatia contains a bit more traditional cuisine - seafood close to the water, and meat based dishes inland.

During his Amazon years, Marin was hitting a few problems on a regular basis, having to sift through dense training content on a daily basis. And the training format was all over the map - video, audio, text, etc. After brainstorming with his now cofounder, they decided to build an MVP, starting with an API.

This is the creation story of Omnisearch.

Sponsors

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

Links

• Website: https://omnisearch.ai/
• LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/marin-smiljanic

Aaron Bromberg is living the Dad life outside of tech. His kids are 11 and 13, so he wants to spend as much time with them before they get too cool to hangout with their parents. He likes to cook, and during the pandemic, he got really into pizza making, even to the point of calculating dough hydration ratios. Previously, he was working as a management consultant, but spending his time reading about electronics. He took that as a sign that he was more of a gadget guy, and joined Bose. Post that he, worked on the product lines at Amazon, like tablets and smart speakers.

Aaron put together a dream team of Neuroscientists to execute a sleep study lab for 3 years. After that time, what they realized was that with a short brain stimulation session before bedtime, they can drastically improve the time it takes to go to sleep, and the entire sleep time itself. They charged ahead to build a product to make this happen, and do so in a personalized way.

This is the creation story of StimScience, and Somnee.

Sponsors

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

Links

• Website: https://www.stimscience.com/
• Website: https://trysomnee.com/
• LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/aaronbromberg/

Joe Pettersson is quite the renaissance man, with many interests and ventures he is a part of. He's also had an interesting path to tech. He was originally a lawyer many years go... funny enough, because he thought that after the dot com bubble burst, he didn't think people were going to make money writing software again. He hated it though, and left the legal profession as soon as he could.

He is a collector by nature, with over 100 pairs of sneakers (most of which are Jordans), and several mechanical keyboards. Along side these hobbies, he has started a few non profit organizations - one around equipping young men, and another around educating people in the digital world. Finally, he is writing a book, around scaling engineering teams, which is actually going to be given away free. It should be published in June or July of this year, 2022.

In January 2020, Joe joined his current venture prior to raising a seed round. Having gotten regulated in the UK, they were ready to deploy the first product and find their market fit. And in doing so, he went about optimizing team, process, and built a platform strategically ready for change - in the payment space.

This is the creation story of Banked.

Sponsors

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

Links

• Website: https://banked.com/
• LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/joe8bit/

Dan Langevin grew up in Madison, CT - east of New Haven. He had a good size family, with his Dad being an engineer and Mother being a teacher. He grew up around computers, and learned how to build websites in High School. When he went to college, he didn't think he wanted to be in tech and struck out in consulting. It was during this time that he taught himself how to code, built a portfolio, and switched careers into tech. He's married, with a 2 year old and another baby on the way. So free time doesn't really exist for him. But when he can, he likes to spend time outdoors, reading and exercising.

Dan and his co-founder started out building credentialing software, a sort of deep background check on Doctors. In creating a way to scrape & pull in accepted insurance, they recognized a broader need for data to be more fluid in the space. It became obvious that a company needed to solve this problem for the space.

This is the creation story of Vericred.

Sponsors

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

Links

• Website: https://vericred.com/
• LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/dan-langevin-0636004/