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

Roy Ng moved to LA from Hong Kong when he was 10 years old, first with his Mother, with his Father following on a year later. His family moved to the stats to build a future for him, with education and opportunity. He is a graduate of UC Berkeley, doing into finance with Goldman Sachs. He eventually made his way back to Hong Kong, to help Goldman with cool deals (like taking Baidu public). Post Goldman, he stepped into the startup world. His first startup sold to SAP, and he then went on to help Twilio grow and go public, followed by maturing the developer platform at MapBox.

Roy connected with his a college friend, and now co-founder, to discuss his experience at SoFi. What they realized was that developers are having to build the "plumbing" of financial products over and over again, because there isn't a developer platform to enable them to focus on their end products. After some market validation at the Money 2020 conference, they set out to build this foundational platform.

This is the creation story of Bond.

Sponsors

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

Links

• Website: https://bond.tech/
• LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/royandrewng/

Alexander Luksidadi came to Canada in 2002 as an immigrant, with a dream to work for IBM. However, during his time in school, he had a friend that went to San Francisco, and came back "changed", as Alexander as he put it. That same friend asked Alexander to join him in his garage, and build his startup. He started to build things around analytics and AB testing, and saw the revenue impact of his work. It was this point that startups became his life. He quickly found out the power of being a developer, but also the need to have a partner on the business side of the journey.

Aside from tech, he is a musician - in fact, he got into programming because his Dad wouldn't let him become a musician. He decided to do programming, because he thought building software was going to be his way back to music. He loves blues, jazz, and recording in his studio.

Alexander and his co-founder attempted to build a business in the freight and logistics space, which ultimately failed. But they saw a lot more opportunity in the space, and set some goals for themselves to get funding, or get into Y Combinator. They started by building strictly broker software.

This is the creation story of Rose Rocket.

Sponsors

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

Links

• Website: https://www.roserocket.com/
• LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/luksidadi/

Liran Haimovitch is 34 years old, and recently married. He and his wife enjoy traveling and eating delicious foods together, and of course, taking care of their awesome dog. Although it has been a while, Liran loves to scuba dive, and enjoys a great whisky, scotch or fancy cocktail now and again. He has recently gotten into trying to make them at home, or seeking out the latest bar to try something new.

Just over 5 years ago, Liran and his co-founder realized that everytime you need to change the way you observe or log your application, you have to fully release that application. They applied their cyber security way of thinking, and built a platform to enable the instant change to logging and observability.

This is the creation story of Rookout.

Sponsors

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

Links

• Website: https://www.rookout.com/
• LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/liran-haimovitch/

Perry Zheng graduated in 2010 from Duke University. He became a software engineer, working for big name companies like Amazon, Twitter and Lyft. During his time at Lyft, he started tinkering with Real Estate investment, buying single family dwellings here and there. Outside of tech and real estate, he likes to travel a lot, and find the best food around. When asked what was the best restaurant he'd been to, he promptly noted that Le Bernardin in New York City was top notch.

Once he had a few single family dwellings in his portfolio, he decided to syndicate a deal for a multi family complex. In doing this, he quickly realized how complicated the process was to get this done. He decided to apply his tech knowledge and create something to solve his problem.

This is the creation story of Cash Flow Portal.

Sponsors

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

Links

• Website: https://www.cashflowportal.com/
• LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/perryzheng/

Bobby Gruenewald is a lifelong learner, and an activator. He majored in Finance, but was always interested in entrepreneurship. In 1995, he built a website for a car dealership for $100, and then went on to build hondaparts.com. The dealer he worked for committed to investing in his future projects right then and there. Post that, he built several companies and sold them, creating a successful track record. He has been married for 26 years, and has 4 children. His 16 year old just started driving, but he claims she is a great driver... way better than the self driving mode on his Tesla.

As a hobby - or addiction, as he confesses - he is a pilot but didn't stop with his pilots license. He can fly helicopters, seas planes, jets - over the past few years, he had flown 44 different types of planes. He's found it was very therapeutic to be up in the air... a great way to clear his head of all the things that occupy his thoughts.

In spite of being on staff at a church, Bobby found himself not reading the bible regularly. While standing in the security line in the airport, he thought up an idea to use technology to help him read the Bible more, and grow spiritually.

This is the creation story of the YouVersion Bible App.

Sponsors

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

Links

• Website: https://www.youversion.com/
• LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/bobbygruenewald/

Brandy Whalen and Ryan Estes are two different folks, joined together in a unified mission. If you look up Denver guy in the dictionary, you will see a picture of Ryan, in a flannel shirt, with a dog, a truck, and speeding off to hit up his fishing spot. He's a family guy, trains in martial arts, and previously owned an agency. Brandy is not a Denver native - in fact, she grew up in Iowa on a Turkey farm... with 30,000 turkeys. She's married with three boys, and likes to get in the mountains to hike or snowboard, during the right seasons.

In their prior roles, Brandy had pitched a client to Ryan for his podcast. As Ryan describes it, she's a great networker and "instigator". When they both had the itch to do a new project, they looked to podcasting. And after some initial validation, they confirmed that they had stumbled upon a need.

This is the creation story of Kitcaster, the podcast booking agency.

Links

• Website: https://kitcaster.com/
• LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/brandy-whalen/
• LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/estesryan/
• https://kitcaster.com/podcast-guest-list/
• https://podcastcontent.studio/

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Topic: Brand Building

Josh Campbell is the founder and CEO of protein supplement brand Human Improvement and wine brand So Gay Rose. Formerly a Starbucks Executive and President of cannabis wellness company Dosist, Josh has founded, funded, built, and exited multiple startups in the consumer packaged goods space. He is passionate about mentoring up and coming founders and entrepreneurs.

Questions:

• How do you start building a brand?
• Whats different about building a brand around an unconventional idea?
• How did your traditional experience contribute to your entrepreneurial backbone?
• What's different about packaged goods vs. digital products, when it comes to brand?
• Whats different about selling to retailers, vs. selling eCommerce?

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Hywel Carver has been writing code since he was 9 years old. His first language was C, which quite a language to start out in, and his first program was a "Guess the Number" program, using binary search - and of course, with an embedded Easter egg. He is married, with 2 children. Parenting has really pushed him to learn how to focus, and he regularly has to put things down to take care of other responsibilities. One of his biggest hobbies is pub quizzes, which in Britain is a big deal. In fact, he has been on a few quiz shows on TV, including Who Wants to be a Millionaire.

Hywel and his co-founders dreamed about a way to distill down the distinct learning moments for you, leading you to the point of inception for skills and wisdom. Their passion for this topic led them to build a way to develop developers, in an incremental, personalized way.

This is the creation story of Skiller Whale.

Sponsors

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

Links

• Website: https://skillerwhale.com/
• LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/hywelc/

John Egan is a computer and electrical engineer by training. Early on, he got disillusioned by the idea of building robots - it was too slow for him. While he was working at Harvard, he was watching the early days Y Combinator, and told his wife that there was a movement going on, and they should move to be a part of it. Startups weren't common then, so it was a risky move - but John found himself excited about being a part of it. Eventually they did make the move, created a file transfer company, and ended up getting acquired by Facebook. Outside of tech, he's married, with a 4 year old son. And for fun? He builds tools for himself, since he's not writing much code at his current venture. One of them is Postmortem.io, in addition to launching IR Conf for incident responders.

Post Facebook, John set out to ask the question to his prior colleagues that had left, about the tools they missed the most. The tool that kept coming up in conversation was a tool to manage incidents. So he decided to build this platform, named after an ancient Japanese philosophy.

This is the creation story of Kintaba.

Sponsors

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

Links

• Website: https://www.kintaba.com/
• LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/john3gan/
• https://postmortem.io/
• https://www.irconf.io/

Dr. Gordon Jones just turned 60 years old, but you wouldn't know it from his energetic, vibrant tone. He has his doctorate in Health Administration, but he got into Health Technology in 1997. He lives in South Carolina, with his wife and five adopted children. Dr. Jones and his wife adopted their first child 1 year after they were married, as they felt led by God before they were married to pursue this path. Their main family activity is watching movies together, but they love to throw the frisbee, travel, and ultimately being together doing new things.

While teaching at the university, Dr. Jones came across a student's idea to provide security around her identify. In addition to that, he had recently gone through a lengthy background check process, which required the re-verification of several bits of information. He decided to solve both of the problems, by creating a solution using the blockchain.

This is the creation story of Thrivacy.

Sponsors

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

Links

• Website: https://www.thrivacy.io/
• LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/drgordonjones/