The Scott Barstow Show

Our guest for this show is Mike Schneider, the CEO of First.io. First helps real estate agents identify who amongst their list of contacts is most likely to move in the next six months using publicly available data and a super-secret algorithm they’ve built from the ground up. Prior to starting First, Mike worked with a private equity firm working on pipeline deals and doing financial and market due diligence. We start our conversation with Mike taking issue with the term “non-technical founder”. I love what he has to say about this, and it changed my mind in the process. We talk a lot about his relationship with his technical co-founder, Jess Martin, including how they got together, where they’ve run into issues, and how they’ve worked through those issues. We also spend a good bit of time talking about the turning point in the company, where Mike became the product owner, and why that ended up being the right move. The thing I like about Mike is that he’s brutally honest about himself and his shortcomings, and where he wishes he would’ve done things differently. In the interest of full disclosure, the venture capital firm where I work part time, is one of the investors in First. I hope you enjoy my conversation with Mike, and thank you so much for listening

I’m really excited about our guest for this show, I think you’re going to love it. Janice Smith is the founder and CEO of Mission 100%, a practice-based teacher development platform that helps teachers and teacher coaches learn and implement best practices from the most successful classrooms in the country. As you’ll hear in our conversation, Janice cares deeply about the problems in education, so much so that she walked away from a very successful teaching career to launch Mission 100%. We talk about what it’s like to be a female tech founder in a world dominated by males, how she came to be selected for a premier west coast incubator, the challenges of hiring (and then parting ways with) a technical co founder, how she’s struggled to find product-market fit, why she’s turned down additional investment, and much much more.

In this, the first episode of the Scott Barstow Show, we talk with Jared Pelo, CEO of iScribes, about how he and his co-founders conceived of and built their product as untechnical founders. Jared is not only the CEO of iScribes, but is also a practicing ER doctor as well.

iScribes helps doctors reclaim hours of their workday by offloading the creation of medical records to iScribes team of trained medical scribes. Doctors record all patient visits using a mobile app and microphone, which is then sent off to iScribes to be processed. Jared and his co-founders, Christopher McGuire and David Meisner, have built an amazing company in just a couple of years, but it was not without it's bumps along the way.

Listen in as Jared walks through how they conceived of the idea, the trials and tribulations of getting the product built, and what they're up to next.

Enjoy my interview with Jared Pelo!