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

Kimeshan Naidoo grew up in a small sugar can farming town, on the east coast of South Africa. At 12 years old, he found an old python book, installed Python... and started to teach himself how to code. Five years ago, he moved to London to study for his masters in Computer Science at UCL. He is a triathlete, completing his first triathlon last year - and is planning to complete an olympic triathlon and eventually, an iron man race. He and his co-founder both moved from different countries to London, but didn't really know what to expect. They met up for a coffee to discuss an idea, which immediately spoke to Kimeshan - as he lived out the problem they were trying to solve when he moved to London. They decided to move forward and build a platform that embeds chat capabilities for high school or prospective university students to chat with current students at a particular school. In fact, Naidoo built the first version as his dissertation project. This is the creation story of Unibuddy.

Links

• https://unibuddy.com/
• https://www.linkedin.com/in/kimeshan/

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Amazing tools we use:

• If you want the best publishing platform for your podcast, with amazing support & people - use Transistor.fm
• Want to record your remote interviews with class? Then, you need to use Squadcast.
• Code Story uses the 1-click product ClipGain, sign up now to get 3hrs of podcast processing time FREE

Credits: Code Story is hosted and produced by Noah Labhart. Be sure to subscribe on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Pocket Casts, Google Play, Breaker, Youtube, or the podcasting app of your choice.

Recently, I had an awesome chat with Rob of the Coffee & Coding podcast - the App Developer's Handbook. In this episode we discuss:

• How I got started in software engineering
• How I founded his own a Mobile Development Studio
• Co-founding a successful startup
• The role networking has played in my success
• What makes a good technical test
• How to hire & manage a fully remote team
• What Being CTO actually involves
• What Code Story has taught me

Check out the show and links to the episode here: https://robj.me/coffeeandcoding/

Leave us a review on Apple Podcasts!

Amazing tools we use:

• If you want the best publishing platform for your podcast, with amazing support & people - use Transistor.fm.
• Want to record your remote interviews with class? Then, you need to use Squadcast.
• Code Story uses the 1-click product ClipGain, sign up now to get 3hrs of podcast processing time FREE!

Credits: Season 3 of Code Story is hosted and produced by Noah Labhart. Be sure to subscribe on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Pocket Casts, Google Play, Breaker, YouTube, or the podcasting app of your choice.

A first generation LatinX immigrant, Elias Torres was born in Nicaragua. Growing up in a communist country, he had little resources, even food. Thirty years ago, he came to the US, and hasn't looked back, living the American dream and graduating from Harvard with an MS in Computer Science. He's married with 3 teenagers, and is currently learning a new stage of parenthood. When he's not being Dad or CTO, he enjoys disconnecting while he is kite surfing or sailing. Torres strives to find balance in building a successful company as an entrepreneur with not forgetting his roots, and increasing opportunities for people of color in the US. Five years ago, He and his co-founder figured out that teams needed to increase the effectiveness of their go to market strategy. Today, everyone wants to do things in real time... not during the 9 to 5. So he set out to build a revenue acceleration platform, and did so quickly, given that this was the 4th company the founders built together. This is the creation story of Drift.

Links

• https://www.drift.com/
• https://www.linkedin.com/in/eliast/

Leave us a review on Apple Podcasts

Amazing tools we use:

• If you want the best publishing platform for your podcast, with amazing support & people - use Transistor.fm
• Want to record your remote interviews with class? Then, you need to use Squadcast.
• Code Story uses the 1-click product ClipGain, sign up now to get 3hrs of podcast processing time FREE

Credits: Code Story is hosted and produced by Noah Labhart. Be sure to subscribe on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Pocket Casts, Google Play, Breaker, Youtube, or the podcasting app of your choice.

Peter Voss fell in love with software after starting a hardware design company. He moved to America 25 years ago, and rapidly connected with interesting people - leaders in the field of nano technology, AI, longevity, futurism... in face, he got very involved with futurism, following tech that could repair damage in your body and truly conquer aging. His target is to live long enough to take benefit from these life extending technologies, so he practices calorie restriction and is exploring cryonics. For fun, he rides motorcycles, specifically his 1000CC BMW racing bike. Not too long ago, he found himself struck by how "dumb" software is, or better put, how narrow. So his mission for the last 25 years has been to make software smarter. This led him to dig into the current definitions for what is knowledge, and our relationship with psychology, etc - to deeply understand cognition and intelligence to understand what we knew. He came up with a design for an AI, centering around the phrase AGI - artificial general intelligence. This is the creation story of AIGO.

Links

• https://www.aigo.ai/
• https://www.linkedin.com/in/vosspeter/
• https://medium.com/@petervoss

Leave us a review on Apple Podcasts!

Amazing tools we use:

• If you want the best publishing platform for your podcast, with amazing support & people - use Transistor.fm.
• Want to record your remote interviews with class? Then, you need to use Squadcast.
• Code Story uses the 1-click product ClipGain, sign up now to get 3hrs of podcast processing time FREE!

Credits: Season 3 of Code Story is hosted and produced by Noah Labhart. Be sure to subscribe on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Pocket Casts, Google Play, Breaker, YouTube, or the podcasting app of your choice.

Tech and entrepreneurship has always been super intertwined in Dan Burcaw's life - through his family, and starting to tinker with computers in the 90's. He played Baseball when he was younger, along with playing video games and interestingly enough.. keeping up with foreign policy (is that a hobby?). Currently, Dan studies Brazilian Jujitsu and its endless progress of growth and evolvement, while taking care of his 2 pets (and their 3 eyes... you'll have to ask him). His prior company was in the push notifications world, which became a mission critical system for notifications, ultimately bought by Oracle. Afterwards, he and his co-founder started looking at the way people monetize their apps, specifically diving into subscriptions. In doing so, they found out that there weren't many app millionaires in existence - so, they set out to build a better way to sell subscriptions inside app experiences, not only by abstracting the tech bits, but by using machine learning to prompt users at just the right time. This is the story of Nami ML.

Links

• http://namiml.com/
• https://www.danburcaw.com/

Leave us a review on Apple Podcasts

Amazing tools we use:

• If you want the best publishing platform for your podcast, with amazing support & people - use Transistor.fm
• Want to record your remote interviews with class? Then, you need to use Squadcast.
• Code Story uses the 1-click product ClipGain, sign up now to get 3hrs of podcast processing time FREE

Credits: Code Story is hosted and produced by Noah Labhart. Be sure to subscribe on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Pocket Casts, Google Play, Breaker, Youtube, or the podcasting app of your choice.

I recently had the opportunity to chat with Arsalan on the Mentoring Developers podcast, to talk about wearing many hats, transitioning from developer to CTO and much much more. Check out the episode, and Arsalan's podcast at the link below.

http://mentoringdevelopers.com/episode-76-noah-wears-many-hats-how-does-he-do-it/

Leave us a review on Apple Podcasts!

Amazing tools we use:

• If you want the best publishing platform for your podcast, with amazing support & people - use Transistor.fm.
• Want to record your remote interviews with class? Then, you need to use Squadcast.
• Code Story uses the 1-click product ClipGain, sign up now to get 3hrs of podcast processing time FREE!

Credits: Season 3 of Code Story is hosted and produced by Noah Labhart. Be sure to subscribe on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Pocket Casts, Google Play, Breaker, YouTube, or the podcasting app of your choice.

Born and raised in Japan, Yoshi Yokokawa started his career at Leimen Brothers in the US. In doing so, he was exposed to the fragility of the economies, yet saw how all things were connected and potential for areas of automation - IE, where things didn't need a human hand. A marathon runner, triathlete and yoga teacher, he attempts to understand himself physically, spiritually and mentally. When he set out on a venture of his own, he originally started building deep neural net prediction models for trading funds and hedge funds. In doing so, he quickly figured out that in order to scale this quickly, his solution would need to work with existing brokerage firms and banks. It was at this pain point that he decided to pivot and build Alpaca, the best way for developers to trade US stocks through an API.

Links

• https://alpaca.markets/
• https://www.linkedin.com/in/yoshiyokokawa/
• https://www.crunchbase.com/person/yoshi-yokokawa
• https://twitter.com/iyoshyoshi?lang=en

Leave us a review on Apple Podcasts

Amazing tools we use:

• If you want the best publishing platform for your podcast, with amazing support & people - use Transistor.fm
• Want to record your remote interviews with class? Then, you need to use Squadcast.
• Code Story uses the 1-click product ClipGain, sign up now to get 3hrs of podcast processing time FREE

Credits: Code Story is hosted and produced by Noah Labhart. Be sure to subscribe on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Pocket Casts, Google Play, Breaker, Youtube, or the podcasting app of your choice.

Shawn Frayne grew up dreaming of being an inventor. His heroes were the inventors of yore, like Thomas Edison and Tesla. Growing up, he was inspired by TV shows and movies, like Beyond 2000 and Back to the Future 2 - specifically, when Marty McFly gets eaten by the holographic shark. Believe it or not, to kick back and relax - he likes to have a cold beer and think about inventing other things... though he is fine with cheap beer, and has even been lovingly called Frugal Frayne by his team. Shawn recalls that Edison once said, All you need to invent is an imagination and a pile of junk - and he lives by that, with the added part of having his kids around in the mix. He studied physics at MIT, and post graduation, while everyone was heading to Silicon Valley, he was curious if anyone could still be an inventor. He decided to pursue this dream, and eventually cycled back to the inspiration from back to the future - the hologram. This is the creation story of Looking Glass Factory.

Sponsors

• Best Self - Use Promo Code CODESTORY for 20% off

Links

• https://lookingglassfactory.com
• https://www.linkedin.com/in/shawn-frayne-411b651
• https://www.crunchbase.com/person/shawn-frayne
• https://medium.com/@TWiStartups/shawn-frayne-co-founder-ceo-of-looking-glass-factory-2081ef3ebeb2

Leave us a review on Apple Podcasts!

Amazing tools we use:

• If you want the best publishing platform for your podcast, with amazing support & people - use Transistor.fm.
• Want to record your remote interviews with class? Then, you need to use Squadcast.
• Code Story uses the 1-click product ClipGain, sign up now to get 3hrs of podcast processing time FREE!

Credits: Season 3 of Code Story is hosted and produced by Noah Labhart. Be sure to subscribe on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Pocket Casts, Google Play, Breaker, YouTube, or the podcasting app of your choice.

Mark Hendriks has been a product designer for 11 years. His family and he love to travel, see the world and visit national parks. He currently live in Spain with his wife and son, off the grid. And by off the grid, I mean a house on 20 acres, with its own solar power system, and own rain water collection system. But don't worry... he made sure he checked the LGE network speed before buying the property. Five years ago, he started a side project, building a weather app that combined up to date weather with his wife's beautiful landscape illustrations. Shortly after - Apple started promoting their apps, and their business started to take off. Today, they have ventured into nature based mindfulness apps, through their company known as Wild Ventures.

Sponsors

• Best Self - Use Promo Code CODESTORY for 20% off

Links

• https://wildventures.nl

Leave us a review on Apple Podcasts

Amazing tools we use:

• If you want the best publishing platform for your podcast, with amazing support & people - use Transistor.fm
• Want to record your remote interviews with class? Then, you need to use Squadcast.
• Code Story uses the 1-click product ClipGain, sign up now to get 3hrs of podcast processing time FREE

Credits: Code Story is hosted and produced by Noah Labhart. Be sure to subscribe on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Pocket Casts, Google Play, Breaker, Youtube, or the podcasting app of your choice.

Dave Zohrob has been coding since before he can remember. He is among the crews where their Dad's bought TRS-80's hooked up to the TV and loaded games from tape drives. He loves music, and even ran a small record label in San Francisco. But nowadays, he focuses on his family with two little kids. While working at Angelist, he and his co-founder decided to start another thing together... the problem was, they didn't know what to build. Dave had been a podcast listener for a long time, but never really thought about what was under the hood. After considering a few different avenues, including yet another podcast app, they decided to focus on podcast analytics - some might say the App Annie for podcasting. This is the creation story of Chartable.

Today’s Sponsors:

• Tresta.com/codestory - 30 Day Free Trial

Links

• https://chartable.com/
• https://www.linkedin.com/in/dzohrob/
• https://www.crunchbase.com/person/dave-zohrob
• https://twitter.com/dzohrob

Leave us a review on Apple Podcasts

Amazing tools we use:

• If you want the best publishing platform for your podcast, with amazing support & people - use Transistor.fm
• Want to record your remote interviews with class? Then, you need to use Squadcast.
• Code Story uses the 1-click product ClipGain, sign up now to get 3hrs of podcast processing time FREE

Credits: Code Story is hosted and produced by Noah Labhart. Be sure to subscribe on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Pocket Casts, Google Play, Breaker, Youtube, or the podcasting app of your choice.