Code Story: Insights from Startup Tech Leaders

Max Walker lives in Eastern Upstate NY (or Vermont light, as he calls it), with his grumpy, elderly cat. He comes from a tech background, graduating with a computer science degree, and working as a software engineer. Along the way, he fell in love with entrepreneurship, and dove into the startup world. Outside of tech, he is an avid rock climber, hiker, and loves super spicy food as a vegetarian....

Alex Louisy is 37 years old, and came from a non tech family. In the past, he worked in investment banking, and then a small telco company. But, he was always drawn to tech entrepreneurship and eventually, he stepped into the possibilities in this world. Outside of tech, he is married with two kids, and enjoys being outside, gardening, and hiking through the forest outside of his small house. Alex...

Today we are dropping another special episode of the Code Story podcast, as part of our series entailed Beyond Bots: the REAL impact of AI on financial services, brought to you by our friends at Ntropy . As a reminder, Ntropy is the most accurate financial data standardization and enrichment API. They can take in any data source, any geography, and understand / enrich a financial transition in mil...

Matthew O'Riordan is originally from South Africa. He left school and sort of fell into engineering, cause he just loved it. In fact, the craft brought him to the UK, where he saw more opportunity. Outside of tech, he likes adrenaline sports. He was a competitively skydiver, participating in free style routines, free-fly and vertical formation. He pointed out that it's a great way to clear...

Ali Nichols has been obsessed with real estate since she was a little kid. She has always wanted to marry whatever she was doing with real estate, and is pretty stoked to have achieved that. Outside of tech, she loves to spend time with her family and friends, hiking, golfing or boating. In fact, when she and her significant other were living in San Fransisco, they boat a sailboat and were obsesse...

Dan Lines is married, with a 3 year old daughter and a baby on the way. He has lived all over the US - 7 years in Boston, 5 years in LA, and he now lives in Upstate New York. He has always been into the creation of things, being the kid in high school burning and selling CD's, building computers on the side, or creating an early sports streaming platform, before streaming was a thing. Before D...

Today we are dropping another special episode of the Code Story podcast, as part of our series entailed Beyond Bots: the REAL impact of AI on financial services, brought to you by our friends at Ntropy . As a reminder, Ntropy is the most accurate financial data standardization and enrichment API. They can take in any data source, any geography, and understand / enrich a financial transition in mil...

Einat Sitbon has always been intrigued by nature, and all of its parts. She studied biology in school, all the way through getting her PhD in Computational Biology. This field also introduced her to computation in general, and programming. Outside of tech, she is married with 2 kids, and loves to hike. Her and her family share a love of fiction and fantasy books, and made mention her love of NK Je...

Sharekh Shaikh has an interesting background, having grown up (almost) on a farm in India, within a small town. He spent most of his time with animals and pets, more than people, and followed his father around as he travelled for work. He is big into motorbikes and reading philosophy, specifically stoics, and tends to read the older books over newer podcast or material. He's also trying to lea...

Colleen Schnettler was a stay at home Mom for many years, taking care of her 3 children. When she was looking to return to work, she was looking for remote - and it seemed that programming was the best avenue. She taught herself rails development, with the goal of starting her own company. Outside of tech, she spends time with her family outdoors, and claims she is a meat and potatoes kinda gal, w...

Eduardo Abeliuk is originally from Santiago, Chile, where he spent the first few decades of his life. From early days, he had a deep curiosity to understand the world around him, which led him to study physics and electrical engineering. Post school, he joined an MIT startup, prior to obtaining his PhD from Stanford. Outside of tech, he likes to read books about longetivit, and listen to the Lex F...

Today we are kicking off a special and new series entailed Beyond Bots: the REAL impact of AI on financial services, brought to you by our friends at Ntropy . As a reminder, Ntropy is the most accurate financial data standardization and enrichment API. They can take in any data source, any geography, and understand / enrich a financial transition in milliseconds. Made for developers, for fast, eas...

Adriaan van Rossum is a tech guy even at home. He likes to tinker with home automation, like turning on the lights - which his girlfriend doesn't like the home automation experiments at times. Outside of tech, he does kite surfing, and travels around the world. He really enjoyed Thailand, specifically the food there, as he is a vegetarian. For several years, Adriaan was a freelancer. Each time...

Stephanie Mertz is into software development because she likes to create something from nothing - IE the blank canvas nature of coding. Outside of tech, she loves to garden, grow her own vegetables, and build things out of wood. She also has as beehive, which she claimed was a fantastic way to observe the natural creative process - and decompress from a screen. Stephanie and her co-founder were dr...

Fredrik Björk is originally from Sweden, but has spent many years in San Francisco. He got started coding in BASIC on his Commodore 64 (while also playing video games, of course). Post graduating from RIT, he has been involved in many startups, like Avatars United and The Real Real. Outside of tech, he is a Dad of two kids and likes to run - specifically marathons. Beyond that, he likes wind surfi...

Jaclyn Ling is a super competitive person, and has been her entire life. Whether it's board games with her family, or playing sports in her younger years, she wants to win. She still plays sports today, and watches basketball, specifically the Miami Heat or Toronto Raptors. Outside of that, she is a low key person, enjoying taking walks, hanging at the local coffee shop, and thrift shopping. J...

Shawn Cao lives in Kirkland, just outside of Seattle. He immigrated to the US, and is married with 4 kids. He loves to hike and play soccer with his children, and even though Seattle can be rainy and cloudy for half the year, he admits that the summers are fantastic for being outside. He also admits he stops by Starbucks occasionally, but couldn't confirm if it tastes better at the home store...

Lauren Long was originally born and raised in China, and moved to Canada when she was 10. She had to learn English for the first time, which taught her how to embrace hard things and challenges. She attended University in Canada, and started her first company there called BoxIt. Outside of tech, she is an outdoors person - post moving from China, where she was more of a city girl. She loves to hik...

Scott Bening is a 63 year old kid at heart who grew up in Buffalo, NY. He got a degree in chemistry and went into the plastics industry. Outside of his profession, he is super active - playing drums in a rock band, racing GT race cars competitively, kayaking, hiking and golfing. He has been married for 35 years, with 2 older children. Many years ago, Scott joined a small division of a company in 1...

Matt Martin has always been a computer nerd, even way back in Elementary School, learning to use a Mac and learning Hypercard. In Middle School, he discovered the internet and programming in HTML - and he was hooked. That said, he didn't grow up around tech folks and eventually got into public policy and went to law school. After being a litigator for a while, he decided to ditch the law indus...

Ido Shamunn cut his teeth on the C programming language, while studying Applied Mathematics. He was unsure while studying if he should go Computer Science, but he mentioned that his Applied Math degree helped him understand better what goes on behind the scenes. He's happily married, and enjoys playing music, since way back in Junior High with the keyboard. He has since moved into guitar, and...

I have another special episode of the Code Story podcast today, where I'm sharing another great podcast I've just been made aware of. It's called The Closer, from the team at Project Brazen, hosted by financial journalist Aimee Keane. The show focuses on pulling out the high octane emotion and exponential stakes that underscore todays biggest acquisition or investment headlines. In the...

Andy Wilson lives in Central Oregon, which he claims is an adult playground. He loves to ski, hike, and enjoy all outdoor recreation available to him. His favorite food is a medium-rare steak, which I gotta say is an excellent choice. He got his tech degree in the 90's, and fell into the world of legal tech. Previously, Andy worked for a company that printed email for legal teams - like truck...

Dr. Eamonn Keogh is a globally renowned expert in data mining, machine learning, and information retrieval. He is pioneering the field of computational entomology. Outside of tech, he is originally from Dublin, Ireland, but came to California in the 80's. He misses his family in Ireland, but he loves the cuisine in California, specifically Mexican food. I made sure to invite him to Texas thoug...

Srini Srinivasan grew up in India, during a time when you could go do whatever you wanted during the summer. So he explored and experienced many things, tech and non-tech. He was very into sports and competition, and wanted to be a cricket super star. He didn't start coding until he went off to college, and interestingly enough, there were many startups formed from his class. In the early days...