While Tim Metzner’s college classmates were landing work-study opportunities with fortune 500s, he found himself as one of five employees at a tech startup. When he experienced first hand the ambition, the drive, the scrappiness, the innovation, he was hooked. 

This set him on an entrepreneurial journey that eventually led him to become the co-founder and CSO of Coterie Insurance, a company that uses data-driven automation to provide small businesses, contractors, and gig workers fast, simplified access to the best insurance plans. 

On this edition of Founders Journey, Tim talks more about his life in the tech-startup world and how it taught him to appreciate the power of data.

Managing people is a complicated affair. People aren’t software—they don’t live in the cloud, you can’t check their code or query their database. But understanding the people in your company, their needs, and what you can do to bring out their best on a daily basis, is crucial to running a successful business. 

Adam Berke experienced this problem personally at his last company, where he went from being one of three employees to one of seven hundred. Now he’s the co-founder and CEO of WorkPatterns, a company that offers a simplified people management app to help managers organize, motivate, and engage their teams.

If you’ve needed support through a live chat, you’ve probably wondered how much of the person on the other end is actually a person. If it’s not a full-on bot you’re talking to, it’s probably someone pushing out prepackaged responses. The results can often be flat and frustrating. 

Etie Hertz didn’t initially set out to solve this problem, but a nonprofit that helped improve crisis hotlines had inadvertently stumbled on a technology solution the private sector badly wanted. 

Loris was born—a tech startup that pairs machine learning and empathetic responses to help guide support engines toward more satisfying interactions and better results.

Sometimes you have to be deep into a specialized industry to truly understand the areas needing solutions. As a teenager, Arjun Patel was racing forklifts at his dad’s factory. In college, he was a plant manager focusing on quality, safety, and production optimization. After college, he became a manufacturing consultant. 

Growing up on a factory floor and learning its myriad intricacies gave Arjun the realization that there were no software solutions to track production lines. “Everything was manual,” Arjun says. “There’s huge binders tracking logs of what was being done.” 

This eventually led him to co-found WorkClout, a tech startup that offers a software solution for automotive engineering teams to improve quality.

We may be fascinated by fortune 500s, but small businesses are still the lifeblood of America. In the past, B2B services for the mom-and-pops were a challenge to navigate, but more and more tech startups are aiming to give them the power of their larger competitors. And there’s no greater need than protecting assets. 

Tim Metzner is the co-founder and Chief Strategy Officer of Coterie Insurance, a company that uses data-driven automation to provide small businesses, contractors, and gig workers fast, simplified access to the best insurance plans.

Property management is a complicated affair. You must maintain facilities with elaborate HVAC, plumbing, and electrical systems, you must manage tenants, staff and payroll—not to mention insurance and other contracts. As an R&D company working with a large developer in the Middle East, Urbanise recognized the problem and developed a comprehensive property management SaaS solution. 

Today they help clients across the globe manage infrastructure, buildings, residential and commercial properties, as well as apartment buildings, strata commercial towers, and large housing communities. 

On this edition of UpTech Report, Urbanise CEO Ashley Austin explains how Urbanise entered this space and tech behind their solutions.

Ignorance of the law is no excuse—but when you’re running a company, knowledge of the law can be extraordinarily challenging. If you’re in the BFSI industry, you must pore over hundreds of pages of regulatory documents per week to determine their relevance and assess compliancies, obligations, required actions, and deadlines. 

This is why Kayvan Alikhan started Compliance.ai, a company that uses artificial intelligence to automate the regulatory enforcement process. On this edition of UpTech Report, Kayvan discusses the scope of the regulatory challenges in the BFSI sector and explains the technology behind his solution.

Through most of human history, agriculture has remained largely unchanged, but in the last seventy years, it’s undergone a dramatic transformation. And we’re struggling to keep up with the transition. 

“There has been quite a bit of degradation, not only to the environment, but to our bodies as we keep up with shifting needs to more convenient foods,” says Riana Lynn, founder and CEO of Journey Foods. 

On this edition of UpTech Report, Riana explains how Journey Foods uses advanced data analysis to help food companies incorporate new ingredients into their products and improve supply chains in order to facilitate better nutrition and sustainability.

A hurricane is gathering strength in the Carribean. The Turkish military attempts a coup. Wildfires rage in Australia. A beached vessel is blocking the Suez canal. What do these events have in common? They all pose risks to supply chains. 

Until recently, little could be done to understand and assess these risks, but riskmethods is pioneering the field with the use of artificial intelligence. 

On this edition of UpTech Report, riskmethods Senior Solutions Marketing Manager Matthew York discusses how they’re leveraging this new technology to help companies across the globe gain visibility into the potential dangers posed to their supply chains.

The internet was pioneered by independent enthusiasts and inspired by the possibility of connecting people and enhancing culture. Though much of its promise came to fruition, it’s fair to say a great deal of it has been corrupted. Central to these issues is how our personal information is traded, sold, and utilized for marketing purposes. 

This matters a great deal to Mark Weinstein, who founded one of the first social media platforms, Supergroups, in 1998. Today he’s trying to take the internet back from the data miners with his new social media platform, MeWe. 

On this edition of Founders Journey, Mark discusses what motivated him to reenter the social media space, and why he believes his work is so crucial for this moment in history.