Cristina Vanko discusses her journey to building Arrow, an audio dating app. Cristina discusses (0:30) her upbringing and her early experience as a designer and advertiser on the agency side, (3:32) jumpstarting her freelancing career and how an article about handwriting her text messages went viral, (5:00)(32:20) getting picked up by Penguin Randomhouse to write books on handlettering and adulting, (5:54) getting back into product design during the pandemic and getting the idea for starting an audio dating app, (7:56) building a community for Arrow, (11:20) features on Arrow, (12:48) feedback on Arrow, (14:43) what gave her the idea to build Arrow and why she wants to fight for an audio dating app, (19:00) the landscape for dating apps, (24:24) her search for a co-founder and (30:30) finding side jobs while building Arrow.

Chris Baek discusses how he got to working to provide IoT software services for domestic electrical goods manufacturers in Japan with his company InCloud. He discusses (3:01) his beginnings and reinventing himself at USC, (8:53) his first experience at a corporate job after college and what it taught him, (12:02)starting InCloud and his relationship with his cofounder, (15:00) InCloud's IoT services and market in Japan, (17:59) the importance of empathy for business and personal growth and (24:02) his advice for aspiring entrepreneurs.

Alana Karen (@alanatkaren) discusses getting her start at Google, making a switch from sales and marketing to the engineering team, the scrappy go-getter mentality in the early days at Google and leading the Google Fiber and Search platform teams. She also discusses finding work-life balance and documenting stories of women in tech along with their successes and challenges in her book The Adventures of Women in Tech.

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Shriya Nevatia (@shriyanevatia) discusses joining On Deck with Erik Torrenberg in the early days and growing the On Deck community through the pandemic. Shriya talks welcoming the second cohort of the On Deck Catalyst program, learnings from the first cohort including hitting ceilings and growing from Build Weekend and catering to an ambitious and younger audience.

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Catherine Winfield (@winfield_c) discusses her transition from architecture to design, working in healthcare design to take care of people with chronic health conditions and creating opportunities for students to thrive in education design. She gives us the scoop on what inspires her day-to-day design work, her philosophy on design leadership, measuring success in a nonprofit plus building Along, a tool for remote learning during the pandemic.

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Julian Rachman (@julrach) discusses Two Sigma Ventures’ investment in Remote including the benefits of remote hiring in companies like managing data governance and healthcare across countries. He also touches on data-driven companies working to improve everything from autonomous vehicles to collaborative machine learning principles and open source data projects, as well as data privacy issues vs the democratization of data science.

Taylor Burton (@TBurton86) discusses creating smarter spenders through a collaborative banking app for kids. He talks over (3:05) how his experience with his first lease motivated him to create an app that increases your credit history, (15:45) creating an app that releases financial agency from parent to child, (17:58) partnering with banks to hand off teenagers in the Launch Offers Market after Till Financial, (25:15) raising a $4M seed round and launching the app, future goals and more.

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Atin Batra (@batraatin) talks about reevaluating the current education system through investing in edtech startups that cultivate different modes of learning including peer-based learning and cohort-based education; (21:50) receiving funding from the government and nonprofits to sponsor students from underserved populations; (26:52) investing in a startup that helps you learn languages through their chrome extension; (34:53) and lessons learned from working at Q Venture Partners, a venture firm based in Hong Kong investing in hardware startups.

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Sharath Kuruganty (@5harath) talks about gaining experience from building Naval Ravikant’s website, helping startups launch on ProductHunt, tips for building in public and his journey building @shoutoutso_ from inception to launch and gives tips on how to grow your customer list with Shoutoutso’s Wall of Love.

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Juan Salas (@jmzlx) of Celerative (@celerative) discusses his route to growing a distributed software team, the turbulence he has faced during Covid and an unexpected growth trajectory since 2020. Juan lays out what makes a remote team really work.

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