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

Chris Wexler had a crazy path to get where he is today. By his count, he is on his 6th career. His first job was on Capital Hill, followed up with a stint in Wall Street. After that, he produced independent theater, and then got into marketing and advertising, being one of the early adopters of ad tech.

He's married with two daughters, and is a huge baseball fan (the Minnesota Twins specifically). He reads a lot of non fiction books, interestingly about public projects and how it portrays power distribution in the United States.

All along his career, he was involved in the prevention of human trafficking. He has family members running organizations focused on this specific philanthropic pursuit. The opportunity came about for Chris to utilize all the different skill sets he'd obtained over his career, plus his advocacy for fighting human trafficking... and with that, it was a no brainer for him to start his current venture.

This is the creation story of Krunam.

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://krunam.co/
• LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/chriswexler/

Brendan Wood lives in New Brunswick, Canada, with his wife and 3 kids. They live in an old house, and from his per-view, he has done way to many projects on it. In fact, shortly after they moved into the house, they discovered foundation problems and had to re-pour a new foundation (which is a massive undertaking). They have a cabin a half hour drive out of town, which is is Brandan's happy place. There is a beach, land, hammocks - and its a place where the whole family can run free. He grew up in New Finland, and in college, studied mechanical engineering. This focus led him into robotics - specifically the kinematics side - and software development. All in all, he chose the latter, cause it was easier to start a career.

One day, he found he had a personal itch to solve a problem, while managing his personal stock portfolio. As his account grew, his risk tolerance changed, and general shifts happened in the market, he found that keeping on top of his portfolio was particularly time consuming and tedious. He got bored of doing this manually, and built a script out of frustration for having to manage this manually.

This is the creation story of Passiv.

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://passiv.com/
• LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/brendancalebwood

Alexander Alimovs was born in a country that no longer exists. It was the USSR (or the Soviet Union), but today it's an independent country called Latvia. In 2008 when he was 18, he moved to the United Kingdom for school, and he has been there ever since. He studied business and medicine in school. Early on, he was given the recommendation that in order to make a big impact, he should start a business. Paired with this, he has been passionate about tech since he was a young kid, using tools like Dreamweaver to make simple websites.

Outside of work, he likes to stay active. He loves sports, and he used to do martial arts as a kid. Though he hasn't played much since the pandemic hit, he loves to play American Football in the UK, strapping on his helmet and pads and playing defensive cornerback.

In the past, he held several senior positions with companies having small tech teams. During these times, he would quickly spot inefficiencies in processes - a manual step here, a spot of friction there, etc. He decided to build a product to enable non-engineers to automate processes.

This is the creation story of Automations.io.

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://automations.io/
• LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/aalimovs/

Colin Chartier started making video games when he was young. He used to played Warcraft 3, which had a powerful map editor for its users. He recalls that one game map was called goblet exploration, where you were stuck in the middle of nowhere and you had to make civilization (think a precursor to Minecraft). He found that this was really good for learning how to make things that people wanted... which ultimately, led him into entrepreneurship and programming He also played minecraft, which involved his first exposure to a real programming language, as map editing was done in Java. He lives in Toronto, and is a 20 minute bike ride from the water front. Many days, he will head down to the beach and work from there. He enjoys getting outdoors when he doesn't have too many calls scheduled that day.

In his prior startup, he found that he and his team were very sensitive to breaking changes, as it was critical to deliver information in a timely manner. So much so, that his customers would churn if anything broke in the critical chain. He created something to fill this gap at his prior venture, which he was offering up to friends and colleagues via open source.

This is the creation story of Webapp.io, formerly Layer CI.

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://webapp.io/
• LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/colinchartier

Slater Victoroff has had some pretty cool hobbies over his life. Though he claims to be a weird guy, he has a well rounded set activities. He is a vegan baker, which is half mad science, requiring the breakdown of recipes to the fundamentals of their elements. He is also a fiction writer, halfway through his second book (which he started during the pandemic). Along with that, he has pursued mastery in blacksmithing at one point in his life.

He had a short MMA career too, believe it or not - and has studied Yoshukai Karate for quite some time. Post high school, he was burnt out on academics... so he jumped head first into martial arts - spent time in Japan studying the craft, and did some MMA fights in LA. He has learned over the years that most tech people are typically afraid of being punched in the face.

He and his co-founders fell in love with the technology centered around intelligent process automation, which enables organizations to automate processes involving structured, semi-structured and unstructured document formats. Since 2014, they have been at the forefront of innovation in enterprise AI.

This is the creation story of Indico.

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://indico.com/
• LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/slatervictoroff/

Jody Shapiro was fortunate enough to know he was going to be an engineer from a young age. He did the typical kid things, liked played with legos, and built things, with deep curiosity around how things worked. He was introduced to coding when he was 9 years old - and it clicked. He also found himself interested in the business world. The same curiosity around gears and levers was also extended into business... and he was fascinated by the systems in place that enabled intelligent decisions around pricing, stocking, etc.

He's had the opportunity to indulge in his curiosities, studying computer engineering in his undergrad, and working on incredible problems in the industry. He has worked for Microsoft, video conferencing software, Silicon Graphics, and Google (for 9 years). He finds it's easy to fall in love with tech, but it's important to remember that there are users on the other side of solutions.

When he left Google, he set out to build... a business. He wasn't sure what type of business he was going to build. But he wanted to go work on a big problem, one that everyone had. After spending some time researching, he figured out that everyone has more SaaS than ever before, and companies were having a hard time managing their portfolios. He thought there must be a way to solve this problem, and solve it driven by data.

This is the creation story of Productiv.

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://productiv.com/
• LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/jodyshapiro/

Ken Gavranovic lives in the northern suburbs of Atlanta - namely Alpharetta - with his wife Heather, and two teenage daughters. As a kid, he was fascinated by the movie war games... but what excited him was not the war aspect, but the fact that kid could sit in front of a computer and build anything with their mind. That... got Ken excited.

While living in Galveston, TX, he dove into computers as a 10 year old, reading books and learning assembly. His first computer job was working on the Pick operating system, where he built a way for people to send faxes from their desk. The year after, his solution was a 2 million dollar business.

Post that, he moved to NY to write software, and then to Florida. While in Florida, the internet started booming (about the same time as AOL). He figured out everyone was going to run their business on the internet... so he moved to Atlanta to be in a place with the highest density of bandwidth, and built what is known as web.com today.

Ken was a part of many transformational things throughout his career. Prior to his current venture, he ran product and engineering at New Relic. He got excited about three things that attracted him to his new role, which was purposeful culture, a world changing goal, and the size of an opportunity in front of him. It was these three things that brought him to the company.

This is Ken's creation story at Unqork.

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.unqork.com/
• LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/gavranovic/
• War Games: https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0086567/

Valerie Coffman has a family in San Francisco, with 2 cats - both 18 pounds each - and 2 kids, the oldest being 3 and a half. So you could say she has a lot to juggle, even outside of a startup. Her family spends time outside, in parks, the zoo, museums, etc - as much as she can since they are opening up again post pandemic.

She graduated from Cornell, with her PhD in Theoretical Condensed Matter Physics - which I had to google to understand. Prior to her current venture, she was the CTO and Chief Science Officer at Xometry, an on demand marketplace for custom manufacturing - building their software team from scratch.

She and her co-founder started their current venture by exploring why people resist believing scientifically backed, factual information. She wanted to figure out which messages and stories were more effective at communicating these true facts.

This is the creation story of Swayable.

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.swayable.com/
• LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/valeriecoffman

Jay Haynes has always been interested in tech, just like his Dad. In 1979, his Dad bought and brought home an apple II plus. Though he was using it for his business to do spreadsheets, Jay began writing code so he could play video games for free, slinging code in BASIC. It's worth noting that this was back when you had to pay a quarter to play a video game.

His Dad was a navy pilot, and a hobbyist sail plane flyer, which Jay flew as well, even up to 30,000 feet in the air! As he says, he got grounded as soon as he got married and had 4 kids.

Early in his career, Jay got into finance and quickly became familiar with using debt to get equity returns. However, he was always interested in the core innovation problem - of why customers buy new products, and why they switch. Throughout his career, time at Microsoft, schooling, startup life, etc. - he found out that no one really had a secret sauce to innovation. He started evaluating new ways to do it, and came across the Jobs to Be Done theory, which became the foundation to what he has built today.

This is the creation story of THRV.

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.thrv.com/
• LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/jayhaynes/
• https://jobs-to-be-done.com/

Marko Anastasov has been working with computers for a long time. He grew up in former Yugoslavia in the 90's, when there was civil war, hyper inflation, and the economy was taken back 20 years. His father was an electronics guy, so there was always a computer around in the house. He found himself fascinated with information and the things you could conjure up on the "magic screens"... and, he found that computers were a place you could build things that were not influenced by the outside world.

As a kid he played sports, mainly volleyball. He recalls that even at the age of 15, he and his friends were already being measured for spots on the national team. He has taken many lessons from his time playing volleyball, where a group of people have a shared sense of purpose, driving towards a goal.

While building applications under the guise of his web development agency, Rendered Text, he and his fellow builders saw a need to have a way of automating processes of building, testing and integrating... and doing so fast.

This is the creation story of Semaphore.

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://semaphoreci.com/
• LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/markoa/