Code Story: Insights from Startup Tech Leaders

Harish Chandramowli grew up in a small town in India. The goal was simple early on - study well, go to university, and get a job. After undergrad, he realized he can do so much more, eventually coming stateside to get his masters, and meet a ton of really smart people over the last 10 years. Outside of tech, he is a broadway show fanatic, seeing 1-2 on a regular basis. He also follows Manchester U...

Madhavan "Maddy" Malonan has always been in - and around - technology, and fell in love with building things early on. He got a video game console early on, and found it a little boring. BUT, when his Dad got a computer and he played Age of Empires, he got excited about all the possibilities, trying to tinker with building things that mimicked these computer games. Even these days, he writ...

Chris Kline grew up in Aurora, Colorado, and went to school in Boulder to study finance and leadership. He has lived through several significant events that led him to take a risk, and spend some time in small business and entrepreneurship. And eventually, he took a leap of faith, sold everything he had, and flew to California. Outside of tech, he is married with a 12 year old daughter. He is fasc...

Theo Bergqvist is an entrepreneur who enjoys working a lot. He started his first venture in 1999 in the gaming industry, building Paradox, which is now listed on the Nasdaq. Of all his ventures, the common core to them all was technology. Outside of tech, he lives a life dedicated to Japanese martial arts. He practices 5-6 times a week, and have made several trips to Japan with his Sensei, focusin...

Jens Neuse grew up in Germany, originally planning to be a carpenter. In his 2nd year as an apprentice, he was in a motorcycle wreck that thrust him into a process of surgery and healing. Eventually, he decided he wouldn't be doing carpentry, and got into sysadmin work. Once he got bored with this, he moved into startups, learned how to code, and starting digging into programming, API's an...

Simon Ritter has been in the IT industry for 40 years. He went from university to work on Unix in the early days, employed by AT&T and programming in the C language. In 1996, he switched gears to join Sun Microsystems, programming in Java. Years later, after the Oracle transition, he started to dig into what might be next. Outside of tech, he is married with an older son. He is a complete petr...

Adam Cohen grew up in Toronto, in North York. He showed early signs of entrepreneurship by putting his lemonade stand on a wagon, and taking it door to door - or hustling his friends to buy souvenirs on a school field trip. His Dad was in VC, and was a big influence on his life, pushing him to succeed. Outside of professional life, he is big into sports, specifically basketball. In the past, he lo...

Alan Fisher started his career as a computer programmer. Early on, he was hired by the 1st or 2nd largest freight railroad in the world, Union Pacific. He describes their technology group as having a punk rock spirit, leaning towards building their own solutions over buying them, which he found great value in. Outside of tech, he has been married for 30 years, and has 3 kids. He is an avid runner,...

We are bringing you a special episode, as our friends at Strata return to the podcast. You might remember our interview from Season 8 with Eric Olden , Co-founder & CEO of the company. Eric took us through the creation story of the company. Today, we will be talking with Granville Schmidt , Chief Architect at Strata, who has been instrumental in architecting and building identity orchestration...

Derek Ting grew up in Canada-land, enjoying all the things of the area but especially hockey. He mentioned he has a bit of ADD, which made it hard for him to make it through a chapter in school. Nowadays, he has 2 kids. His oldest son plays hockey, and he and his family enjoys rooting on the Toronto Maple Leafs. When asked about food, he claimed to be one of lives to eat, as he loves food. In fact...

Alex Kihm just turned 40, and has been into computers for 36 years. He was given his first hand me down computer at the age of 4 by his parents, and also grew up with lego bricks and building things. He is an engineer by training, but eventually switched to econometrics on the big data side. Outside of his professional life, he is married and describes himself as water affectionate. He enjoys swim...

Today, I'm talking with Dan Eyman , the Managing Director at Meld Valuation , specializing in independent, audit ready valuations for VC backed startups and VC firms. He is an expert in the valuation of complex instruments such as convertible debt and SAFEs. Dan is going to illuminate the common mistakes of founders, how valuations differ, and what founders should understand about dilution and...

Avi Perez has been in the data and analytics space for more than 25 years. He began his career in banking and finance in Australia, but quickly grew tired of crunching numbers for the big wigs, wanting to find a better way to calculate this information. Outside of tech, he enjoys a wide array of music, from classical to modern trance. He's a big science fiction nut, enjoying shows like Aliens...

Goutham Rao grew up in Brooklyn, a nerd all his life. Back in the day, his Dad bought him a Commodore 64, from which he started to learn to write code in BASIC. Eventually, he attended the University of Pennsylvania to get his Masters in Computer Science. Outside of tech, he is married with 2 kids. He likes to travel, and likes to run. He used to compete in half marathons, but nowadays, he does hi...

Matt Hamann knew he was going to be in tech way back in his younger days. His Dad worked for IBM, so there were always fun things to talk about and play with. He got his first family computer when he was 4 years old, and started programming BASIC when he was 8. Eventually, they got dialup through AOL - and he took off building websites with PHP & MySQL. Outside of tech, he is married with 3 ki...

Greg Shove was born in Canada, raised in Britain, and eventually moved to the United States. Through all of these places he lived, he learned to believe in equal access for people, never to quit, and to work hard and win - all of this, respectively. When he moved to California, he was told to visit the local grocery store to meet more tech people than he would in a year in Canada. After business s...

Ravi Madabhushi finds that all of the stops along his professional journey were accidental. He grew up in a tiny village in the south of India - so small, it would take you 10 minutes to sprint across it, end to end. His goals back then were common - get a job, get married, etc. - but after he moved to Bangalore post school, he got acquainted with startups... and was hooked. Outside of tech, he is...

Trevor Stuart was born in Florida, but raised in Seattle. He was the son of a tech CFO and an Episcopalian minister - so he learned life at many different angles. He graduated from Boston College, and went into investment banking at Morgan Stanley. Beyond that, he worked at RelateIQ prior to being acquired by Salesforce, which then led him to start his own thing. Outside of tech, he's married...

Dave Berner grew up in London, and got into coding through music. He used to be the lead singer in metal and hardcore bands. His bands couldn't afford a webmaster, so he learned how to code in order to launch his band's website, along with setting up friend's custom MySpace profiles. Beyond that, he partook in many startups and side projects, loving to build on the internet. Outside of...

Tiffany Johnson is originally from Texas, but grew up in California. At a young age, she was a bit of an adrenaline junkie, partaking in skydiving, snowboarding, wakeboarding and gymnastics. In school, she fell in love with Econ, Mgmt, and Statistics - and eventually, fell into the payment industry by accident. Outside of tech, she has been married for 20 years with 3 kids. Her kids are all snow s...

The Gene Simmons of Data Protection: Protegrity's KISS Method Today, we are releasing another episode from our series, entitled The Gene Simmons of Data Protection - the KISS Method, brought to you by none other than Protegrity . Protegrity is AI-powered data security for data consumption, offering fine grain data protection solutions, so you can enable your data security, compliance, sharing...

Brennan Pothetes grew up in Louisiana, but went to High School in Portland, Oregon - two very different places. He started his career in internal audit, before he eventually helped launch Simple, the first bank on the iPhone. He has built a lot of companies since, and continues to do so. Outside of business and tech, he likes food and enjoys whipping up some cajun or greek cuisine. Recently, he pi...

Ben Lerner was a fan of tech growing up, along side being into math and science. Right out of school, he joined a startup called Data Nitro, which attempted to integrate python into excel. Ever since then, he has been jamming in the tech and startup world. Outside of tech, he married to a computational biologist. He enjoys padel, which is kind of like Pickleball meets Tennis, and of course ping po...

Today, I'm talking with Kolton Andrus, CEO and Founder of Gremlin. You may remember previously when we spoke with Matt, the prior CTO of the company . Since that time frame, a lot has changed at the company, going through several arcs and foundational changes that are leading to not only assessing weaknesses in your infrastructure, but walking you through how to fix it (and eventually, fixing...

Buchi Reddy lives in North Austin, having recently moved there with his family. He is originally from south India, and grew up in a farming family before moving to the metro and studying engineering. Post college, he spent many years building high frequency trading systems, before moving to Silicon Valley and joining companies there, just as Cisco and Traceable, which you as the audience are very...