Technori Podcast

The origin story of one of the most influential businesses to emerge in the last 20 years is now available for your reading pleasure — Netflix co-founder Marc Randolph has written a new memoir, “That Will Never Work: The Birth of Netflix and the Amazing Life of an Idea." Today Netflix is a household name. But back in 1997, streaming movies directly to your TV still seemed like the stuff of sci-fi....

Be honest: are you a regular deskfast eater — grabbing breakfast while you’re settling in at the office? Jon Agay noticed this trend while doing market research for what would become joyböl, a “ready-in-seconds” granola smoothie bowl. Made to eat while you’re on the go, you simply add water or your preferred milk and get ready to enjoy. Jon, the co-founder of joyböl, was in the unique position of...

While other aspects of business, like marketing, product and UX, have been revamped and revolutionized multiple times in just the last 10 years, the technology many businesses give to their sales teams is decades-old and not up to solving modern problems. Showpad is aiming to help companies move a few evolutionary stages forward. Specifically, they’re focusing on the sales enablement side through...

A SaaS platform developed by pharmaceutical industry veterans, Kalderos combines that background knowledge with artificial intelligence and data to calculate when and where discounts should be applied. Jeremy Docken founded the company with the goal of untangling the issue of noncompliant discounts in the pharmaceutical industry. If that sentence made very little sense to you, you are far from alo...

This probably comes as no surprise, but around here, we believe that business talk doesn’t always have to be serious. It’s possible to be scaling huge companies, laser-focused on your mission while bringing in your personality, too. A serious business owner who agrees with this sentiment: John Ostler, co-founder of Eight Bit Studios. The Chicago-based creative shop designs and develops apps and we...

Technology outsourcing firms might not be the first thing that comes to mind when you think about where the next major tech innovation might come from. But increasingly, firms like Egen Solutions are helping companies — from the Fortune 500 to smaller startups — navigate the path to business growth. Raghu Potini, Egen’s CEO, came on the podcast to shed light on how the Chicago-headquartered compan...

Finding great sales talent is notoriously tough. Interviews are a poor predictor of future performance, and without the proper on-the-job support and training, even a seasoned sales pro can flounder in a new environment. Raleigh Wilkins runs his own company, Wheeler-Wilkins, which offers sales training based on the processes he developed while improving his own sales skills. He is also working on...

What the car did for transport, Superhuman does for email. But while pioneers like Henry Ford intentionally made cars available to the mass market, Superhuman has a very specific target audience. The service costs $30 a month, and new users must pass a qualification process: there’s an estimated waiting list of over 100,000. (A referral from a current user could help move things along). Once you’r...

Aside from founders telling you that their company is their baby, families don’t often figure into the mythology of the tech startup. One simple reason is that many of the people who are focusing on family life are not in the office: they’re at home with said family. And while some of them are happy with that arrangement, for many it’s less a choice than an inevitability, because the American work...

FarmTogether estimates that farmland is a more than $2.5 trillion market in the U.S. alone, and as high as $9 trillion worldwide, which makes it larger than real estate and gold. But after a little digging, CEO Artem Milinchuk realized that many potential investors found the sector too confusing, not to mention geographically disparate. Enter FarmTogether, which is helping investors of all backgro...

“Uber for ‘x’” is the most overused, maddening phrase in startup land. It’s hype-marketing shorthand for just about every business idea that leverages the sharing economy. That’s why co-founders Keithan and Quiante Hedrick were initially wary of framing their live-translator-on-demand app, Instaspeakers, as “Uber for translation” to potential investors. Translators on the platform are certified, w...

As the founder and CTO of ThreeKit, the Vancouver native spent almost 15 years creating visual effects technology that was used in the Harry Potter, Star Wars and Marvel franchises, among others. But as if that legacy wasn’t impressive enough, consider that he’s now changing the way we shop online. Ben and ThreeKit have moved their focus from the big screen to the small screen — in this case, cell...

The way to the heart may indeed be through the stomach (metaphorically speaking), but a food entrepreneur’s path to success is less easily discernible. Emily Griffith, CEO of Lil Bucks, offers fruit seed products that might not be known to many consumers. Specifically, Lil Bucks are selling sprouted buckwheat (yes, it comes from fruit!). You can sprinkle it on oatmeal for a crunchy texture, use it...

For anyone over the age of 17, contemplating not just the functions of these platforms but how people are actually using them — and how that fits in with your business — is enough to put (more) gray hairs on your head. And yet ignoring them is not an option: it’s evolve or die. Fortunately, Corbett Drummey, a long time Technori guest, has got the game manual that can help you navigate around those...

Anyone with children will appreciate exactly why Pearachute is doing the opposite of its namesake and taking off — especially in the middle of summer, when you’ve exhausted your imagination and wallet trying to keep the kids entertained. And founder Desiree Vargas Wrigley has big ideas about where she’s going to take that mounting momentum. She told us where Pearachute got its start, where it’s go...

Home Chef was founded in 2013 by Patrick Vihtelic, who was inspired to bring homemade meals to as many people as possible thanks to memories of the fresh food he grew up eating on his family’s farm. In 2014, the company did $423,207 in revenue. CTO Matt Pulley came on board the following year, and in 2017 that revenue shot up by 60,166 percent, to a spicy $255 million. By May 2018, they were acqui...

If you buy into the mainstream narrative around the U.S. tech industry, California and New York are the two gleaming lights on either end of a dark and empty tunnel that runs between the coasts. That makes Victor Gutwein the man with the flashlight, shining a glowing beam onto the hidden opportunities all around the Midwest. So far, M25 has a portfolio of 88 companies, including former Technori gu...

There are more than a few reasons why buying a car –– especially a used one –– is about as appealing as getting a root canal, being stuck on a packed airplane taxiing on a runway or using a porta-john at a burrito festival. The buying process is stuck in analog mode. So Toby Russell and his co-founder, George Arison, built an online used car marketplace that features transparent pricing, concierge...

Kim Marsh, COO of ezza nails, sits down with Scott Kitun at WGN Radio. Kim and her co-founder Ale Breuer are both products of Teach for America and the University of Chicago Booth School of Business. Their mutual obsession with the minute details has helped them gain a deep understanding of their nail salons’ customers. That means they can provide better customer care and more relevant services, w...

Listen to John Chambers, former Cisco CEO and current leader of JC2 Ventures, talk with Scott about his career, book and new venture on WGN. John has been innovating tech since the ‘80s. He spent 25-plus years serving as the CEO, chairman and chairman emeritus of the company he helped found, Cisco. Then he went on to found JC2 Ventures, the culmination of his experience honing the cutting edge of...

Edward Woodford, CEO of Seed CX, sits down with Scott at WGN Radio. At a time when cryptocurrency is rising in popularity, while also coming under scrutiny for its unregulated elements, Edward and his Seed CX co-founder Brian Liston are attempting to bring a more traditional audience into the game. After raising $25.1 million in 2015, the company said they were the first digital ass exchange with...

Dan Novaes sits down with Scott at WGN Radio. Dan’s company Current Media aims to upend how media consumption is monetized. In short, Current takes ad dollars and passes some of the value on to consumers, as an incentive to keep using the platform. On Current’s app, users do things that they already do on the internet — right now, the company is primarily focused on streaming music — and are rewar...

If there’s one thing that drives tech workers completely nuts, it’s those awful, automated recruitment emails. So many of these recruiting emails go unread, unanswered and unloved. As a long-time tech recruiter, Elliot Garms has seen this play out — which is why he’s putting the humanity back into hiring through his company humanpredictions. What makes humanpredictions smarter than your average re...

Chicago wasn’t built in a day, as the saying nearly goes, reminding us that everything worth doing takes time, patience and unwavering hard work. Stuart Frankel learned that lesson over nearly a decade of experience. In the nine years since he co-founded Narrative Science — which creates software that translates headache-inducing data into useful information — he’s watched the market slowly catch...

Craft whiskey used to be the exclusive domain of snobs. That was the perception, at least. Think of a person who nerds out on craft whiskey and you might fall asleep at the very thought of a lecture on tasting notes and aging processes. But that’s not Dannie Strable, co-founder of RackHouse Whiskey, a subscription box that promises more than just a different drink every month. Instead of getting i...