Code Story: Insights from Startup Tech Leaders

Maria Meier grew up bilingual, as her Mom was from Poland and her Dad was from Germany. In her free time, she participates Olympic weight lifting (which she clarified does not mean she participates in the olympics). The difference with Olympic weight lifting is in how you do the actual lifts. She finds this is a great way to blow off steam. Outside of this, she is a bit of a foodie and loves to tr...

Notifications North Star, sponsored by Courier ! Guest: Stephanie Griffith is an email and SMS marketing expert, and a marketing strategy consultant. She is a startup founder, and has been involved with big names like Drip, Thinkful, Bath & Body Works and more. She is also the host of the Conversational Commerce podcast. Questions: What is the primary goal for someone in your role, which you m...

Matt Young claims to have been born with a tech spoon in his mouth, having his Dad work for IBM and providing early access to computers. In the 80's, he was interested in music and video games, which carried on through the rest of his life. He is very interested in the intersection of tech and how it can improve real life. Fun fact about Matt.. he loves pinball! He restores and works on the ma...

In his words, Tyler Rohrer is best described through his spirit animal, Curious George. He likes to write and try new things. He has 3 grown children, one who is getting married. He has found that his expectations of his kids were actually met, which was welcome and surprising to them. He enjoys golf, and used to do Rally Racing, though he claims he wasn't very good at it. He had more fun buil...

Andrew Salvadore is a father of 2 young boys, and when he is not working, they fill up his schedule. He and his boys live half an hour from the forest, so they spent lots of time there, swimming, and jumping in muddy puddles when possible. He enjoys sports, nutrition, and personal optimization. Though he tends to lean towards reading about self improvement, he had drifted into educating himself on...

Notifications North Star, sponsored by Courier ! Guest: Troy Goode is the Co-founder & CEO of Courier. He is a multi startup veteran, a Y Combinator veteran, and was a prior guest on the Code Story podcast, in Season 4 . Questions: Tell me about the recent fundraise with Google Ventures. Considering the success of Courier, it seems like you are in a place where you can choose your investors. W...

Franzi Low doesn't have the usual CTO path. She studied economics, and was doing her PhD in econometrics, prior to her current venture, and was a teaching assistant. She loves to play sports, and can't go a day without playing some sort of sport. She is passionate about triathlons, which is something she can do with her recently injured knees. Living in Hamburg, Germany, she and her husban...

Shaunak Roy spent 10 years in the tech industry before deciding to be a tech entrepreneur. In undergraduate, he studied mechanical engineering and eventually came to the states for his masters. Outside of running a company, he has 2 daughters and enjoys playing games and observing their patterns of learning, which applies to his current venture. Throughout his life, Shaunak has always been fascina...

Notifications North Star, sponsored by Courier ! Guest: Vatasha White is a Senior Software Engineer at Courier. Previously, she built software at Lacework, LaunchDarkly and GE Digital. She is a graduate of Smith College in 2015. Questions: Having been a prior customer of Courier, what excited you about the solution? What is your favorite use case for the tool? So now that you work at Courier... wh...

Matt Provo has been married for 16 years and has three kids. So between the Provo household and his startup, there is never a dull moment. He is originally from the West Coast, until he came to Boston for grad school. He was influenced through his love of sports, specifically playing soccer through college. Early in life, he had the opportunity to help start a non-profit organization, based around...

Temilola Adebayo is in tech, but her background is in film production. She grew up most other life in Nigeria, but then moved to Canada. She has been producing films for 10 years, and still does. She takes large influence from her family, who happen to all be entrepreneurs. Beyond professional things, she has a 2 year old son who keeps her on her toes, and she enjoys watching films and traveling w...

According to Christine Spang, she is secretly Canadian, being born in Toronto. She moved to Upstate New York when she was 3, and grew up there. She came from a family of engineers and entrepreneurs. After getting into an RPG game based on Lord of the Rings, she had to learn to code, run linux, and fell in love with software. In High School, she was a band geek, and was super into fantasy reading....

Notifications North Star, sponsored by Courier ! Guest: Patrick Malatack is a partner at Matrix Partners, early stage investment firm. Prior to that, he spent 7 years at Twilio, leading product and launching messaging. He also spent 4 years at Microsoft, managing the MS Project program. Questions: What things did you build, or attempt to build, at Twilio around the messaging problem? Why does noti...

Douwe Maan started programming when he was 9 years old, and grew up with his Dad pushing Linux on him over Windows. He was raised in the Netherlands, outside of Amsterdam. How he recharges outside of technology is traveling to new places. Prior to his current venture, he joined, as employee number 10, for Gitlab. The company is the largest all remote company, which allowed for him to be a digital...

Jon Dahl was a philosophy major in college, and eventually, obtained a graduate degree studying theology. He thought he would go into academia, but he quickly figured out that he needed to make money as well. So he started a dev shop and taught himself to code. He is married with 2 kids in their teens, and a 21 year old cat who believe or not... is not playful. They like to read and travel, and wa...

Notification North Star, sponsored by Courier ! Guest: Eric Koslow is the Co-founder of Lattice, the people success platform. Prior to Lattice, he spent time engineering at TeeSpring, and now he is building a new venture called VStream. Questions: What impact does user communication have in the HR SaaS space? What infrastructure issues arose that caused you to look for a notification infrastructur...

Izzy Azeri has been in the tech industry for 20 years, starting out at places like EMC and VMWare. He's married with three kids, living in Franklin, Massachusetts, outside of Boston. He loves soccer and CrossFit, which helps him destress from his tech work. The family has a place in Maine, where they can be outside, swim, etc. - whatever they can do to keep active and stay healthy Post the Goo...

George Georgallides is originally from a small island in Europe called Cypress. He grew up there, joined the army, and competed in Track & Field and Triatholons. He came to Los Angeles in 2005 for his studies, and has been stateside ever since. He is a passionate polymath, speaking quite a few languages, and regularly takes on new challenges. In learning these languages, he finds that he is ab...

Savarth Misra didn't start out in tech. In fact, he was a lawyer, working as a corporate commercial lawyer in Asia and the UK. During this time, he noticed how little tech adoption was being done, and how much opportunity was available for solutions to make an impact. He is married, with 2 girls - who, in his words, keep him out of mischief. One of his daughters is totally extroverted, and com...

Kirk Marple has been a family man for 20+ years now. His kids are older now, in their 20's, which he finds amazing. He's been in tech for most of his whole career, but when he started out professionally, he wanted to be a chef. When he was 13, he wanted to attend culinary school - but then things changed, obviously, but he still cooks often, dabbling in stir fry and barbecue. After selling...

Beier Cai has been in the tech space for 16 years, almost exclusively in early stage startups. The third startup he worked at did pretty well, which was HootSuite. He was the first engineer writing the first line of code for the social sharing platform. Towards the latter years at the company, he fell in love with helping engineers grow their careers, and managing teams. Passionate about community...

Patrick Bryant lives in Charleston, South Carolina, and splits time in Washington, DC. He loves entrepreneurship, and believes it is the number one change agent in the world. He is involved in multiple communities around the topic - Startup Grind, EO, and he founded the Harbor Entrepreneur Center. Scuba diving is the thing that takes his mind off all things though, given you are 100 feet under the...

Or Weis has been a programmer or engineer since the age of 5. He started playing with DOS commands super early in his life. He made a significant leap in his professional skills when he was joined the IDF, as a reverse engineer. Post that, he worked for a startup to build containers (before they were commonplace), followed by co-founding Rookout, a company who defined the production debugging spac...

Stephanie Florio's journey to tech started in the world of advertising. She always knew that she wanted to be an entrepreneur, but didn't really know what it was. Outside of tech, she has a young family. In fact, when recording the episode, she was near her due date for her second child. For fun, she loves to go out for dinner and hang out with her friends and family. Pasta and pizza are t...

If you would have told Girish Redekar while he was in college that he would eventually be writing software, he would have been shocked. His studies focused on electrical engineering, and post school, he was a hard core analyst. After some time, he and his friend decided to do the whole start up thing - they tried a bunch of ideas, and taught themselves to code. He remembers in his previous company...