Code Story: Insights from Startup Tech Leaders

The tech career of Meetesh Karia started early, as his father was an electrical engineer bringing home a TRS80 with a tape drive. Computers just clicked, as he dialed into BBS systems, built computers installed with Slackware & Linux. Early on, he also dabbled in AI (is that even a thing?), building neural networks to predict weather patterns. He has played competitive sports for years - in fa...

Jason Riedel was drawn to technology as a 9 year old. He knew what he wanted to do with his life, falling into the tech world - and as such, he didn't attend college. Music was his first love (or second, he debates which came first), though he is not a musician. He has produced music in the past, creating beats for artists. Interesting fact about Jason - he ran a hip hop label for 8 years on t...

Beerud Sheth grew up in Mumbai, India, and attended undergrad in Bombay. For graduate school, he came to the states to study at MIT, and then did a short stint in Wall Street before moving into the entrepreneurial world. He lives in the Bay Area, and enjoys hiking, working out and spending time with his family. He loves the Bay Area for these things, but also because of the community of ideation....

Greg Schier grew up in a small town, without a lot of opportunity. He rode BMX bikes and skate boards, and spent a lot of time building ramps and jumps for them both. At that time... he had no idea what programming entailed. He went to university and it was at that point that he learned about programming, after spending some time in mechanical engineering and then moving over to coding. He recentl...

Bryon Jacob is a family man with 4 kids, from ages 11 down. With a young startup and family, his hobbies has suffered some, but during the pandemic, he was able to pick back up music, specifically playing the keyboard. He's an avid reader, mostly sci-fi and loves to play strategy board games. His family and he tend to play games like Puerto Rico and Ticket to Ride, which is simple enough for h...

Original episode: https://the-yield.simplecast.com/episodes/reinventing-the-wheel-trends-challenges-in-fintech Episode Notes The evolution of FinTech has come an impressively long way in a short period of time, but the transformation is far from over. In today’s episode, Yieldstreet’s CTO Hrishi Dixit and Noah Labhart, Co-Founder and CTO at Veryable, discuss the evolution of finance through techno...

Troy Goode is based in San Francisco, with his family of 3 kids. They are 10, 8 and 2... so they are back in diapers. He finds family life super rewarding, and loves to go outside, to the park, and spend time with his family. His parents had a boat when he was growing up, and they lived in a rural area. He used to sail down (as a spectator, not a sailor) a nearby river in Virginia. As he got older...

Rens ter Weijde lives in Amsterdam with his 3 month old daughter, who he enjoys very much. And, he considers himself quite lucky cause his girlfriend does most of the work. He's an avid kitesurfer, and he likes to be outdoors on the water. He started wave surfing and did it for 8 years, but found it incredibly difficult. He switched to kite surfing 6 years ago, and finds it much more enjoyable...

Richard Barkley is a big traveller, and has been all around the world. The first business he started doing was doing non profit work in Uganda. He is a family man. Adopted several children from China, so he's been there. A few times. In total, he has 6 kids - 3 biological and 3 adopted. He graduated with a finance degree, then taught himself how to code. After having a few engineering jobs, he...

Cameron Moreau grew up in DFW, more on the Dallas side of Texas. Early on in life, he thought he was going to have a career in music cause he loved it. Eventually though, he discovered programming and went to school at the University of Texas at Arlington, studying computer science. He spends a lot of time with his dog Twix, bike riding, rock climbing, and staying outdoors when he can. Note... he...

Arjun Narayan grew up in India, programming as a kid. He came to America for college, thrown into the scene cold but really liked it. He studied computer science at Williams College in Massachusetts, and did his PHD at Penn, focusing on distributed systems, security, privacy and scalability. His doctorate taught him how to write at length, but out of the norm, he knew early on he didn't want t...

Steve Caldwell lives in Louisville, Kentucky - but grew up in South Louisiana, in cajun country. In the 90's he loved seeing things he typed on the screen come to life, as he built website in Frontpage 95. As he got into his 20's, he wanted to jump into professional dev. He's got 3 kids in elementary school - so with the pandemic, its been quite interesting having everybody at home. He...

Matt Forniciari started his career at Amazon. First gig was on the availability team, but then he was tasked with emailing Jeff Bezo's directly about what was working & not working, which he rightfully so, says was stressful. He spends a lot of time outdoors, reading, and mostly just away from tech. He is so immersed in tech during the day, that in his free time he prefers to do analog act...

Originally from Ghana, Richard Mensah was born into an IT family. From an early age, Richard was the one fixing all of the family tech problems. He could see the potential in technology, to help aid in solving the problems his community was experiencing in Ghana. He loves his country, but he also realized that the US has more resources for innovation than his home country. He is a huge music fan -...

Brendan Falk is originally from Australia. Growing up, he was always into computers, sports, extra curricular activities - he was the kid who always had a side hustle going on. Once he got to college, he built a currency converting startup to help him pay his tuition fees... and he has been toying around with startup ideas ever since. His partner, Matt Schrage, is from San Fran originally - and he...

Jeff Meisner is an electrical engineering grad from Waterloo in Canada. Post college, he settled in to the DFW area, and worked for several tech companies, mostly on the business development side. He loves to travel with his family - his wife of 34 years, 2 daughters & sons in laws, and a couple of grand dogs in the dachshund, beagle and black lab family. In addition to this, he enjoys watchin...

At 18 years old, Dan Robinson was 100% convinced that he was going to be a mathematician. He went to college at Stanford, and when he got there, he realized that math beyond high school was very different.. and as such, he didn't want to make that his day job. He always enjoyed making stuff, specifically with computers, and he started leaning into computer science and deep learning projects. H...

Mitchell Hashimoto started programming in middle school, teaching himself how to code through open source libraries and zip files he could download on the internet. He is a pilot, and owns his own plane, which happens to be a Cirrus. He spends an hour a day studying or practicing flying, and even takes his wife and dog up every now and again, when there is something worth flying to and they can ma...

Natalie Nagele came to the states in 1989 as a Jewish refugee from Russia. She watched her parents go from nothing and utilizing furniture from trash, to building big businesses and supporting their family. She met Chris, her husband when she was 18. And they have been working together ever since, as he is the co-founder of their business. They have 2 kids together, and love to travel - specifical...

Daniel Hauschildt lives in Germany, in a town called Bochum. He comes from a family of craftsmen, which means that he wasn't involved in tech at an early age. He stayed busy with friends and sports, more specifically archery, where he learned about patience, concentration and competition. In his younger years, he clung to a long bow, but steadily moved towards using a higher tech, compound bow...

Hrishi Dixit was born and raised in India. He wrote his first program when he was 13 years old... and he was hooked on computers from that point forward. He comes from a family of teachers and book store owners, so he was kind of an outlier - and, as a kid, having a computer was a luxury that his family couldn't afford. In his undergrad, he studied mechanical engineering, as computer science w...

 Davit Buniatyan is originally from Armenia. He completed his high school years there, until he was 17, when he started to pursue his undergrad in the UK at UCL. He entered into his college years, excited about animation from seeing Pixar movies. He learned all about 3d models, graphics and rendering - but then found out there was no course or curriculum specially for animation. So he switched to...

Charlie Depman grew up in Connecticut, then went to college in Canada - pursuing environmental studies. His first job out of college was to be the Asia regional coordinator for an environment NGO, or non-government organization. He writes short sci-fi stories, and as he was learning to code, he discovered that he could now create these future stories with code, rather than just write them. He'...

Veryable is a marketplace for on-demand labor for manufacturing and distribution, which provides businesses with higher productivity and fewer administrative burdens and workers with flexible work arrangements. Noah Labhar is a startup founder, CTO, and podcast host. Noah shares his startup story and personal experience building an engineering team of non-CS grads. In a tech startup, how do you ge...

Sophy Lee was born in China, but grew up in a lot of countries and places. She grew up in Australia, lived all over Texas, and went to Harvard for undergrad, studying economics. She is an avid bike racer, mainly on the road, and a triathlete. The combination of living in difference places, school, and racing lead her into the tech world. In fact, she moved to San Francisco to race - though he had...