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

Mentorcam - Book your mentor session with promo code CODE for 20% off! 

Topic: Funding your startup

For the first installment of Mentorcam March, we chat with Rune Hauge, the Founder and CEO of Mentorcam. Rune is an expert in funding your startup, and is a multi time founder. Prior to Mentorcam, he founded three startups and had one successful exit. He has raised millions of dollars in venture capital from top tier Silicon Valley VCs and high-profile angel investors, and also took Mentorcam through Y Combinator.

Questions:

• How do you build a fundraising strategy?
• What would make one investor a better fit than another?
• How do you identify the right investors to go after?
• How do you create the best Y Combinator application?
• How do you find seed investors?
• How important is the MVP in the fundraising process?
• 
  

Book a call with Rune by accessing the link below:

https://mentor.cam/runehauge - Use Promo Code CODE

Brian Vallelunga loves to build things - products, companies, or silly things on the side. In Elementary school, he was asked by one of his friends, "why can't you put a movie on your phone?". This got Brian's mind racing, and he went home, ripped a movie into the specific format for his flip phone, and shared it immediately with his friend. Post that, he competed in science fairs, even at the state level. One of the projects, he built a craft that was lighter than a fingernail, and flew without wings or engines.

Brian led a portion of the engineering team at Uber, after inserting himself as an intern into the right meetings, which awarded him interesting projects. At the same time, he was building a crypto marketplace on the side, but struggling to get it launched. After taking a trip to reset, his mind kept coming back to a problem he faced while attempting to launch the marketplace - and it was surrounding managing environment variables and secrets. And his community of developers confirmed the need.

This is the creation story of Doppler.

Sponsors

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

Links

• Website: https://www.doppler.com/
• LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/vallelungabrian/

Raghav was a product developer, starting a young age. He was creating interesting products for science exhibitions as a kid. Once, this professor asked him to do a cancer research project, which introduced him to the story of Steve Jobs and his entrepreneurial journey. He was highly influenced by this story, and still is today. In the early days, he focused more on the hardware side of computers. But, slowly over time, he was introduced to the coding side of things and found it a much more thriving ecosystem in India. Outside of tech, Raghav likes to watch movies... so much so, that he reviews movies for his friends, and tells them what to see or not see. His favorite movies of all time is Troy, but he did admit he saw Inception twice (mostly, so he could understand all of it). One day, Raghav found himself fed up with the lack of tools out there, when it came to videos, animations, etc. He got so fed up that he'd decided to build something to solve his problem... and for 14 million others.

This is the creation story of Animaker.

Sponsors

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

Links

• Website: https://www.animaker.com/
• LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/rsraghavan/

Happy Wednesday to all of you listeners.

First and foremost, thank you for being just that - a faithful listener. Thank you for tuning in to the show each week, I hope you are enjoying the amazing stories from the builders, founder and leader we have on the show.

As a thank you, we are doing something special in March. We are partnering with a new friend of ours, the folks over at Mentorcam. Mentorcam gives you access to high-profile advisors and experts for 1:1 advice on topics related to startups, tech and professional growth. These people are top-tier venture capitalists, founders that have raised hundreds of millions of dollars, and tech industry leaders that can help you in the areas of startups, fundraising, sales, growing your career and much more.

Because we appreciate our listeners so much, we are declaring that March is Mentorcam March on the Code Story podcast. Along side our regular release schedule, each Wednesday, we are going to be interviewing some of the top advisors on the platform, about the topics you know, you love, and you'd love to know more about.

What do you have to hear these amazing conversations? Other than stay tuned during the month of March, I would love it if you would check out Mentorcam today, by going to codestory.co/mentorcam and browse their list of experts.

Again, go to codestory.co/mentorcam, and check them out. And of course, stay tuned to the Code Story podcast each week, and especially on Wednesday's, to hear from some of the top mentors on the platform.

John Myers comes from a big military family. He was convinced he was going to be a pilot his whole life. When he was a junior in High School, he started doing C++ programing and he got hooked. After graduation, he got accepted to RPI in update New York, and started suiting computer science. He eventually joined the Air Force, and focused on information systems. Through an interesting turn of events, John got accepted to the NSA, while a good friend of his took his deployment spot to Iraq. This job launched him into the world of cyber security, which took him to Afghanistan doing engineering for the military. When he came back to the states, he jumped head first into the startup world. John is married, and just bought a fixer upper house with his wife. He is into exercise, likes to bike in the summer and ski in the winter. Mostly, he likes to do simple things and decompress with his friends and family.

Post acquisition of his first startup, John stared working on a bunch of projects, one of them requiring him to aggregate a large amount of data and anonymize it. This took a lot of work, and there wasn't anything out on the market that provided this type of functionality.

This is the creation story of Gretel.

Sponsors

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

Links

• Website: https://gretel.ai/
• LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/john-myers-98b07b7/

Jim Fagan has had a long and winding road into the tech world. He grew up in New Jersey, and post school, started out in Finance. Slowly, through those roles, he drifted towards operations, and then eventually, towards technology. Personally, he loves to be outside, doing stuff that involves the water. He enjoys surfing, wakeboarding, skiing, you name it. Through his profession, he has travelled the world, and visited many amazing places, including spending 9 years in Hong Kong. He found great pleasure in learning the cultures - personal and business - and how to reach out across languages to make connections.

Jim found himself in an opportune position, to join a company and not only bring it back to life, but to take advantage of a massive global connectivity solution, providing managed network services for over 140 multi-national companies. The question he was hired to answer was - how do we combine infrastructure with software?

This is the pivot story of Global Cloud Exchange.

Sponsors

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

Links

• Website: https://www.globalcloudxchange.com/
• LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/jim-fagan-1691593/

Hey y'all, hope everyone is having an awesome day!

Do you ever find yourself about to put your earbuds on, or jump in the car, but don't really know which podcast to listen to. And you REALLY wish someone would give you a recommendation?

I wanted to let you in on a new, award winning podcasting app out there called Goodpods. And this app does just that. Just like you can get with books or music, you can now get with podcasts. On the Goodpods app, you can get recommendations from experts you admire, or friends you trust - or even better, you can be the one making the recommendation, and sharing your favorite episodes or shows with your friends. Its chock full of other features too, around chatting, following hosts, bookmarking episodes for later, and much more.

And guess what? Code Story is on Goodpods too.

Thats right, you can download Goodpods today, and listen to the Code Story podcast right there. In fact, my ask is this... please go pick out your favorite episode of the podcast on the app, and recommend it on the platform. It would be a huge help to Code Story, to Goodpods, and to your friends, of course.

Go to codestory.co/goodpods on your phone to download the app, follow the podcast, and recommend your favorite episode.

https://codestory.co/goodpods

Blake Garrett had the good fortunate to grow up in the Bay Area. He got to observe his father and his involvement in startups. Though none of them were massive successes, his Dad would bring him around and he got to watch him bring together teams of really smart people to solve customer problems. Blake was a sports player growing up - mainly, basketball and football. He was starting quarterback in football for a while, then transitioned to playing safety. Though, he admits that his heart was still into playing offense. He's married with a 2 year old, and one more on the way.

Blake decided he wanted to execute on one of his ideas. He taught himself several key areas to get himself started, and built a handful of mobile apps. Post this, he pitched an idea to some investor friends of his - which, ultimately turned down his idea. However, they saw potential within the focal areas of his ideas, and gave him some advice on how to proceed. Once he nailed down markets of required learning, that could be translated to a mobile experience - he was able to finally take off.

This is the creation story of Aceable.

Sponsors

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

Links

• Website: https://www.aceable.com/
• LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/blakegarrett/

Michel Tricot has been in the data space for the past 15 years. He really enjoys gathering information, and gaining insight from it. As a kid, he would gather data in analog ways, grouping together movies or internet articles in categories, and extracting info from it. Outside of tech, he is married with 2 kids, and loves a nice afternoon in the backyard cooking BBQ. He does both fire cooking, and smoking, though he admits that he not smoked a brisket yet because he doesn't want to get up in the middle of night and check the temperature.

In his prior role, Michel was a Director of Engineering and Head of Integration at LiveRamp, where he and his team were managing thousands of connectors, responsible for moving massive amounts of data everyday. His big realization was that every company needs to have a way to move data, and to do it in a dead simple way.

This is the creation story of Airbyte.

Sponsors

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

Links

• Website: https://airbyte.com/
• LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/micheltricot/

Vedran Cindrić grew up in a small town, in rural Croatia. As far back as he can remember, he has been tinkering with computers - messing around with DOS, and of course, gaming. From the very early days, computers became his passion. When he finishing college, he started his own successful design agency before building his current venture. He likes to watch movies and TV shows, and loves to barbecue. I learned that in Croatia they don't smoke meat as much as we do in the states, and stick mainly to pork over beef. One thing I loved that Vedran said was "the best way to eat a salad is when you are having barbecue - otherwise, you wouldn't eat a salad".

When business was booming, Vedran and his team built a tool to help them keep track of all the API's they were supporting. After putting it down several times, they finally figured out how to scale it properly and decided to finish building it... and share it with the world.

This is the creation story of

Treblle.

Sponsors

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

Links

• Website: https://treblle.com/
• LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/vedrancindric