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

Phillipe Kwiatkowski has been addicted to gaming since he was a teenager. He played games like Microsoft Flight Simulator, and Grand Theft Auto. In the process, he discovered multiplayer mods, that allowed you to play online - which was his first introduction to coding. When he was 16, he got his first freelancing gig building websites. Eventually, he studied computer science at University, and interestingly, he joined an accelerator. There were a ton of smart people, working on very interesting problems. For fun, he enjoys playing soccer, and has played ever since high school. He also enjoys running, and in fact, is sorta prepping for a marathon. Eventually he would love to do a spartan race as well.

During the days when he was involved in the accelerator, Phil started noticing that many founder problems were centered around distribution - or how to get their products in front of customers. He decided to build a better cold email tool, one that solved these problems. And it worked.

This is the creation story of Ubico.

Sponsors

• Courier
• Img.ly
• Routable
• CTO.ai
• Cloudways offers peace of mind and flexibility so you can focus on growing your business instead of dealing with server management. With Cloudways, you get an optimized stack, managed servers, backups, staging environment, integrated Git, pre-configured, Composer, 24/7 support, and a choice of five cloud providers: AWS, DigitalOcean, Linode, Google Cloud, and Vultr. Get up to 2 Month Free Hosting by using code "CODE30" and get $30 free hosting credit.

Links

• Website: https://www.ubico.io/
• LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/philkwiatkowski/

Joshua Whole was born in the Netherlands. Before he was 13, he actually went to 5 different schools. Afterwards, he moved to Switzerland and went into the public school system - which was all in French (which he didn't speak). In his younger years, he started building websites and ultimately started a company, with 35 other high school students building these sites.

Eventually, he moved to London, initially to shape up his computer science background, given he was a self taught developer. He attended a 3 year Computer Science program at King's College, and the last year of University, he attempted to try to start another business. He and his co-founders declined an investment, and never got another one... so the business was out.

After University, he started a company called SuperAwesome - providing tools for safe digital engagement to almost half a billion kids every month, while also ensuring that parental consent was baked in. Seven years after starting the company, he eventually sold this to Epic games, the makers of Fortnite, and at the time of acquisition, the company was 170 people with offices all over the world.

For fun he is a whiskey lover, and has been collecting them for over 10 years now. In fact, once a week, he does a (fully remote) whisky tasting with a friend of his. His favorite is The Ileach, with his backup being a 10 year Laphroaig.

After many self learning adventures in his life, Joshua set out to create a product that would allow people to go through self directed learning online, but in specific learning pathways... and allow them to learn faster in the process. Self taught developer? Be able to prove you went through the appropriate material that you acquired the skills necessary.

This is the creation story of Mindstone.

Sponsors

• Courier
• Img.ly
• Routable
• CTO.ai
• Cloudways offers peace of mind and flexibility so you can focus on growing your business instead of dealing with server management. With Cloudways, you get an optimized stack, managed servers, backups, staging environment, integrated Git, pre-configured, Composer, 24/7 support, and a choice of five cloud providers: AWS, DigitalOcean, Linode, Google Cloud, and Vultr. Get up to 2 Month Free Hosting by using code "CODE30" and get $30 free hosting credit.

Links

• Website: https://mindstone.com/
• LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/joshuawohle/

Mahmoud Abdelkader immigrated to the United States from Egypt, from a city 100 km east of Cairo, on the Suez Canal. He was 8 years old when he moved to New York City, and later in life, he moved to Maryland, which is where he really started to get into gaming... er... computers. He used to play World of Warcraft and Age of Empires a lot, and through his gameplay, he was led down a path of reverse engineering hacks to aid him in winning.

Eventually, he started learning high level languages, all in the pursuit of building game hacking systems. He got into real programming when he was 16, slinging some C++ and deciding that he wanted to be a computer engineer. Post college, he worked on Wall Street, which in his eyes, was where he really became an engineer. After working for a startup, he joined Y Combinator and built Balanced, a payments marketplace system, which eventually transitioned to Stripe.

Outside of tech, he plays basketball, and used to weight lift and do long distance running. He likes to set goals, crush them - and then move on to the next thing, keeping a well rounded life. He used to ride motorcycles, but his wife put a stop to that... especially given they are expecting their 2nd child soon.

Post his exit from Balanced, Mahmoud began listening to customer needs. What he heard people say was that they really wanted everything that he built in his former startup, minus the payments. Companies wanted the heavy lifting of data security taken off their plate, so they could focus on building their differentiated products.

This is the creation story of Very Good Security, or VGS.

Sponsors

• Courier
• Img.ly
• Routable
• CTO.ai
• Cloudways offers peace of mind and flexibility so you can focus on growing your business instead of dealing with server management. With Cloudways, you get an optimized stack, managed servers, backups, staging environment, integrated Git, pre-configured, Composer, 24/7 support, and a choice of five cloud providers: AWS, DigitalOcean, Linode, Google Cloud, and Vultr. Get up to 2 Month Free Hosting by using code "CODE30" and get $30 free hosting credit.

Links

• Website: https://www.verygoodsecurity.com/
• LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/mabdelkader/

Sergei Egorov grew up in a small city of only 100,000 citizens (which is huge compared to some cities). He grew up in Siberia, in the cold part of the country. His personal record for how cold it was during his time there was -53 Degrees Celsius. And a funny story, on that same day, he had to go to the post office to pay his internet bill.. so he could play video games at 16 years old. His favorite game at the time was Might and Magic, which was also 50% of Russia's favorite game as well. The cold weather was partially the reason he got into tech... cause he could do it at home indoors. Other than that, he was a regular kid, who liked to skateboard, and play guitar in his band.

Through a chance discovery in Docker's eco-system, Sergei discovered an open source test container library, and realized that they approach he was taking to test containers was out there in the wild. He was invited to be a co-maintainer to the open source library, which would eventually become their current Company today.

This is the creation story of AtomicJar.

Sponsors

• Courier
• Img.ly
• Routable
• CTO.ai
• Cloudways offers peace of mind and flexibility so you can focus on growing your business instead of dealing with server management. With Cloudways, you get an optimized stack, managed servers, backups, staging environment, integrated Git, pre-configured, Composer, 24/7 support, and a choice of five cloud providers: AWS, DigitalOcean, Linode, Google Cloud, and Vultr. Get up to 2 Month Free Hosting by using code "CODE30" and get $30 free hosting credit.

Links

• Website: https://www.atomicjar.com/
• LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/bsideup

Tigran Nazaryan started out doing science in University. In fact, he was studying physics, and then went on to do his PhD in Astronomy in Astro Physics. He never imagined he would eventually become a CEO of a company. He's a research guy, and introvert naturally, who likes to read, hike, and do nothing... and by do nothing, he means watch a sunset or the waves of the ocean.

After school, he joined a company with his friends creating Wordpress plugins. At first, he though engineering wasn't that interesting. But, as it turns out, he decided it was not less interesting than science and research.

Eventually, he and his business partners decided that they could do more than plugins... by hosting and automating the entire ecosystem. He saw great potential that this type of opportunity could grow big.

This is the creation story of 10Web.

Sponsors

• Courier
• Img.ly
• Routable
• CTO.ai
• Cloudways offers peace of mind and flexibility so you can focus on growing your business instead of dealing with server management. With Cloudways, you get an optimized stack, managed servers, backups, staging environment, integrated Git, pre-configured, Composer, 24/7 support, and a choice of five cloud providers: AWS, DigitalOcean, Linode, Google Cloud, and Vultr. Get up to 2 Month Free Hosting by using code "CODE30" and get $30 free hosting credit.

Links

• Website: https://10web.io/
• LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/tnazaryan/

John Kodumal grew up really into computers. And, he is old enough that during his childhood, it was abnormal to be so into computers. To illustrate just how much he was into computers, he told me a story about how he taught himself to touch type in grade school.. using the DVORAK keyboard layout. He is a family man, with 2 children - a 7 year old daughter and 5 year old son. Outside of family, he has a ton of hobbies and interests, including climbing. In fact, his last trip before COVID hit, he took a bunch of friends and co-workers to ice climb in Colorado.

Over his entire career, John has been thinking about ways to deliver software better. He did a PhD in programming languages, and he worked at Atlassian for a number of years. When he got connected with his co-founder, Edith Harbaugh, they started to explore just how big of an opportunity they had around feature flags.

This is the creation story of LaunchDarkly.

Sponsors

• Courier
• Img.ly
• Routable
• CTO.ai
• Cloudways offers peace of mind and flexibility so you can focus on growing your business instead of dealing with server management. With Cloudways, you get an optimized stack, managed servers, backups, staging environment, integrated Git, pre-configured, Composer, 24/7 support, and a choice of five cloud providers: AWS, DigitalOcean, Linode, Google Cloud, and Vultr. Get up to 2 Month Free Hosting by using code "CODE30" and get $30 free hosting credit.

Links

• Website: https://launchdarkly.com/
• LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/jkodumal/

Brian Singer has always been interested in computers. He into gaming in high school, which he claims is what led him to an engineering degree in college. He got his start in the industry with low level stuff, designing ASIC chips. Post that, he branched into product development, got his MBA, and funny enough, starting working in marketing for the software industry.

Eventually, he started his own company. From his professional journey, a big takeaway for him was its hard to start a company fresh out of school... cause you don't know anything. He has two boys at home, and is a soccer coach, avid golfer and skier. He finds that the most creative moments for him are away from the digital space, doing analog activities with other people.

His prior company was called Orbitera, which he eventually sold it to Google in 2016. He spent the first year at Google, migrating the product off of AWS, on to GCP. Once this was done, it was inquired of him about what the SLO's were for the product. This led to the spark of his current venture.

This is the creation story of Nobl9.

Sponsors

• Courier
• Img.ly
• Routable
• CTO.ai
• Cloudways offers peace of mind and flexibility so you can focus on growing your business instead of dealing with server management. With Cloudways, you get an optimized stack, managed servers, backups, staging environment, integrated Git, pre-configured, Composer, 24/7 support, and a choice of five cloud providers: AWS, DigitalOcean, Linode, Google Cloud, and Vultr. Get up to 2 Month Free Hosting by using code "CODE30" and get $30 free hosting credit.

Links

• Website: https://nobl9.com/
• LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/briantsinger/

LaKeisha Turner is a strong woman. She has her hands full, as a single mom of a 16 year old girl, and an 8 year old boy. She is a breast cancer survivor, and lover of classical music - previously playing instruments in her high school days.

She chose a tech path at a very early age, heavily influenced by her grade school computer science teacher, ultimately leading to her decision to pursue a career in technology. When she's not building technology, she likes to take trips with her kids. Each weekend she tries to plan something fun and exciting for them to do as a family.

A bit a go, LaKeisha was approached by her founder, Ronnie Green, about utilizing her tech expertise to build out his vision for automated, algorithmic trading and portfolio management.

This is the creation story of AlgoPear.

Sponsors

• Courier
• Img.ly
• Routable
• CTO.ai
• Cloudways offers peace of mind and flexibility so you can focus on growing your business instead of dealing with server management. With Cloudways, you get an optimized stack, managed servers, backups, staging environment, integrated Git, pre-configured, Composer, 24/7 support, and a choice of five cloud providers: AWS, DigitalOcean, Linode, Google Cloud, and Vultr. Get up to 2 Month Free Hosting by using code "CODE30" and get $30 free hosting credit.

Links

• Website: https://algopear.com/
• LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/lakeisharturner/

Lyric Jain comes from a family of business people, and is an engineer by training. He was born in India, and spent the first half of his life there. When he was 12, he moved to the United Kingdom. He has always been fascinated in physical engineering, mostly, which is interesting since he plays in the digital space now.

He is a huge football fan - thats European football, or soccer for us in the US). In fact, he was obsessed with it while he was attending University, playing the console games and memorizing the rosters and stats for the live sport. He specifically loves Manchester United, and typically spent around 20 hours a week watching football.

In 2015, Lyric unfortunately lost his Grandmother, to what he states as health misinformation from forwards. This combined, with the Brexit happenings, the US elections, and general world happenings, he started to see first hand the trend, that behavior was being influenced by online activity.

This is the creation story of Logically.

Sponsors

• Courier
• Img.ly
• Routable
• CTO.ai
• Cloudways offers peace of mind and flexibility so you can focus on growing your business instead of dealing with server management. With Cloudways, you get an optimized stack, managed servers, backups, staging environment, integrated Git, pre-configured, Composer, 24/7 support, and a choice of five cloud providers: AWS, DigitalOcean, Linode, Google Cloud, and Vultr. Get up to 2 Month Free Hosting by using code "CODE30" and get $30 free hosting credit.

Links

• Website: https://www.logically.ai/
• LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/lyricjain/

Hey guys, today I want to tell you about a new podcast I'm digging. It's called Compiler, an original podcast from Red Hat, who also brought you the popular show Command Line Heroes.

Anyway, the show Compiler is hosted by two tech veterans, Angela and Brent from Red Hat, and on the show, they discuss tech topics - big, strange and small. I checked out the first episode, titled “Should Managers Code?”, and I was intrigued by the discussion and the topic. There were differing opinions, but one common thread was this... managers, VP's, leaders, etc. - that came from a coding background - STILL love to code!

But... what I appreciated was the approach that these managers took to the coding they still love. My takeaway was that managers don't want to get in the way of their team from coding, solving problems, and delivering their contributions.

Though difficult, a manager should keep to an 80/20 rule - 80% management, 20% coding - and in my experience, this allows you to keep your eye on the proverbial ball... of leading your team to their success, which is ultimately, your success as well.

Have a listen to Episode 1 "Should Managers Code?" from the Compiler podcast. Be sure and subscribe on Apple Podcasts, or your favorite podcast catcher. I'll make sure and add a link to the show notes as well.

Enjoy.