Code Story: Insights from Startup Tech Leaders

A Maryland native, Rob Moore quickly found himself in the UK studying game theory and behavioral economics. A lover of travel, he has been able to live the digital nomad life and see a number of amazing places. Post-graduation he started doing data visualization work for several different companies. He noticed the difficulty of going from a core product to a sellable SaaS platform. Internalizing d...

Andrew Overton is a finance grad from Howard University. He spent 3 years after graduation, in investment banking. After a while, he desired to work in tech and joined Graphiq in Santa Barbara to learn the ropes. During that time, he obtained his masters in CS from Johns Hopkins, and fulfilled his life long dream of working for Apple – specifically, on Apple Music data pipelines. Married to his wi...

Adrienne Bolger grew up in the midwest, and moved up to Boston to attend MIT. She is a lover of running, and was a jujitsu martial arts coach at the institute. Growing up, she loved art and math, and found her way into computer science, trying to find the intersection of both. Bolger interned at Pixar, and tinkered in robotics and medical devices. Eventually, she founded Bloc Health, which aims to...

Jack Rhysider is a veteran of the security world. He likes to explore, rather it be through street cycling, empty buildings, alleyways – or just getting outdoors. He grew up with conspiracy theories, but found himself drawn more to a truthful scandal over the former. Having watched some of the biggest events in history come and go – dot.com bubble, bitcoin boom, etc. – he felt the increasing prese...

Jason Tan started his love of tech back in middle school, when his Dad showed in the wonders 0f connectivity through dial up internet. After taking some beginner programming classes in high school, and graduating with a CS degree from the University of Washington, he found himself drawn to crating powerful abstractions within software, to produce outcomes for users. Though previously a hardcore vi...

Steven Naimark started out his professional career as a clarinet performer. Through his passion for performing, he grew not only as a musician, but as a person, finding joy in the discipline required for his craft. After not enjoying the teaching aspect of music, he began looking for something different, to help separate him from music… to provide clarity. Along the way, he fell in love with web d...

Thane Brimhall has been passionately building tech for over 15 years. He started by programming his graphing calculator in High School. He has built solutions for prominent startups, such as Weave Communications, Divvy Pay and Simple Citizen. A long time gamer, frequenting platforms like Dota, he made efforts to create his own games. Through these passions – tech and gaming – he created a treasure...

Erin Karam was a kid interested in everything. She played music, she was into sports, and… into computers and programming. She continues to have well rounded interests today, running marathons, coaching her kids sports teams and teaching them to play music. Being from a healthcare family, she was always looking for purpose, and doing a job that meant something.. and 5 years ago, she jumped onboard...

Early on in his life, Ryan Graciano aspired to be many things – law, writing… and eventually coding, of course. Fun fact, he is an accomplished dog trainer. focusing on animal behavior modification – and more recently, has gotten into powerlifting. Despite his love of analog activities, he got started coding right after college, and tried to avoid joining IBM… yet, still did, through an acquisitio...

Born in Monroe, Louisiana, Dennis Cail has been involved in the tech world since he started in the Navy. After serving in the Navy, he obtained his CS degree and an MBA in Finance. A family man and father, he realized he was having limited success in getting money returned to him, that he lent to friends and family. Ten years later, he set out to solve that problem, to hold people accountable to r...

Matt Senter grew up on a small farm in rural North Carolina, dreaming of being a game programmer. A Dad, a husband and musician, he keeps extra busy besides being a startup founder. After selling his prior company CosmicCart, he and his co-founder wanted to make it easier for people to get into cryptocurrency. Having experience with products like Ebates, they decided to build Lolli, which is a rew...

Growing up in the bay area, George Deglin has always been in the middle of the Silicon Valley action. Having both parents being engineers, he was influenced to study Computer Science at Berkley. During that team, he co-founded a startup in the education space. After building this company up, he parted ways to start his next venture. This next venture led to the discovery of the vision for OneSigna...

Startup veteran Wil Schroter is a family man, and now amateur carpenter. He spends a lot of his spare time, covered in sawdust and enjoying a balance of analog activities, away from digital life. He has spend 25 years as a startup CEO, and during that team, he learned that what he was best at was teaching people how to go through the startup process. For his 9th startup, he built Startups.com – a...

Zach Moreno is quite the renaissance man, being an artist, designer, author, developer… and a loving husband. He has interned on the Chrome team at Google, building extensions of DevTools and as a big believer in AngularJS, he wrote a book about deployment essentials of the language. After attempting to record a sci-fi drama, he found that the conventional remote audio recording tools didn’t produ...

Courtland Allen grew up totally opposite of his twin brother, Channing, but influenced by him nevertheless. His family was rooted in entrepreneurship, and as such, Courtland was heavily inspired to build and run his own thing. After going through Y Combinator and trying out different startups, he landed on the idea for Indie Hackers – and it checked all the boxes for what he wanted to work on. He...

Next week, we will release Season 2 of the Code Story podcast. We’ve taken all of our learnings, paired with your feedback and our expanded network of tech guests, to expose you to more product journeys of the tech you know, love and use. And we dig deeper into he minds of those who built them, to uncover more about their tech, their products… their stories. Leave us a  review on Apple Podcasts !...

A few weeks ago, I sat down with Paolo on the Milestone Hackers podcast, and had a great chat about startup life, co-founding partners, balancing family & startup life and how to avoid fear. Enjoy todays bonus episode on the Milestone Hackers podcast. https://milestonehackers.com/ https://veryableops.com https://touchtap.com https://noahlabhart.com Leave us a  review on Apple Podcasts ! Amazin...

I had the opportunity to chat with Noah and Ben on the  Product Journey  podcast. Every week they get together and talk about building online businesses, what’s been going on and where they struggling at the moment. On the show, we talked about the startup I co-founded,  Veryable , which is a marketplace of on-demand labor for manufacturing and warehouse work. We talked through the early days of V...

Early in his career, Brandon Hilkert shifted from a mechanical engineering focus to tech support for a school district. Through his exposure to IT operations, he drifted towards software and becoming acquainted with building startup solutions. While considering the purpose, legacy and impact of his work, he was approached by his co-founder to create something to alert parents of potential online d...

A tech and science minded individual, Chris Slowe has spent 9 years with Reddit. Beyond being a tech executive with the company, he is a Dad and likes to work with his hands in the machine shop. When he put roots into the product as the first employee, he and the co-founders wanted to build a place to discuss interesting topics. Fast forward many years, Reddit is now the premier place for news agg...

For Bill Eager, his interest in tech paralleled his desire to play music. After attending music school, he became disillusioned with music as a day job and pursued tech – still moonlighting as a performing musician. As he pursued a role with a startup, he was introduced to the founders of Nomad Health – and instantly connected with the idea. He jumped in on the ground floor, and created a marketpl...

Throwback to one of our favorites from Season 1! Original released August 2019. Through a chance internship in LA, Jonathan Perichon made his way from France to the United States. In doing so, he fell in love with the culture and opportunity. After working for a startup requiring background checks for its users, he saw first hand how antiquated and slow the process can be. Within 6 months, he and...

Throwback to our very first interview! Originally released, June 2019.  For some builders, there is a moment where technical creativity is catalyzed. For others… it starts much earlier. Rylan Barnes has been working with technology since childhood, starting out by programming his legos to move, and all the way through college, where he built early marketplaces for trading textbooks and built physi...

Coming from a supportive, entrepreneurial home, Blake Miller was introduced to the internet at a very young age – building websites for friends, and flipping digital businesses the same way people flip houses. Outside of tech, he is a competitive barbecuer, with a team of long time friends who create award winning BBQ. Highly involved in the Kansas City Smart City initiative, he created an award w...

Tech has always been a part of Aalok Shah’s life. His father and mother influenced his tech interests and biomedical education. After working in nuclear medicine and supporting the special needs community, he found himself always drifting back towards tech and software development, hacking together websites and doing web consulting. Several years later, he was onboarded by the founders of EnergyFu...