Code Story | Startup Podcast for CTOs, CEOs and Technical Founders

Latest Episodes:

S6 E12: The Pivot That Made App Store History: How the YouVersion Bible App Built a Global Mobile Phenomenon with Bobby Gruenewald Apr 05, 2022

Show notes

Bobby Gruenewald is a lifelong learner, and an activator. He majored in Finance, but was always interested in entrepreneurship. In 1995, he built a website for a car dealership for $100, and then went on to build hondaparts.com. The dealer he worked for committed to investing in his future projects right then and there. Post that, he built several companies and sold them, creating a successful track record. He has been married for 26 years, and has 4 children. His 16 year old just started driving, but he claims she is a great driver... way better than the self driving mode on his Tesla.

As a hobby - or addiction, as he confesses - he is a pilot but didn't stop with his pilots license. He can fly helicopters, seas planes, jets - over the past few years, he had flown 44 different types of planes. He's found it was very therapeutic to be up in the air... a great way to clear his head of all the things that occupy his thoughts.

In spite of being on staff at a church, Bobby found himself not reading the bible regularly. While standing in the security line in the airport, he thought up an idea to use technology to help him read the Bible more, and grow spiritually.

This is the creation story of the YouVersion Bible App.

Sponsors

Links

Website: https://www.youversion.com/
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/bobbygruenewald/

Current Sponsors:

Checkout our Stacklist! https://stacks.codestory.co/

Hosted by Noah Labhart | Technical Founder & Startup Mentor.

Our Sponsors:
* Check out Granola and use my code granola.ai/CODESTORY for a great deal: https://granola.ai
* Check out Perplexity and use my code CODESTORY for a great deal: https://www.perplexity.ai
Advertising Inquiries: https://redcircle.com/brands
Privacy & Opt-Out: https://redcircle.com/privacy

S6 Bonus: Productizing the Agency: Building Automated Media Engines & Scaling Growth with Brandy & Ryan of Kitcaster (by Moburst) Mar 31, 2022

Show notes

Brandy Whalen and Ryan Estes are two different folks, joined together in a unified mission. If you look up Denver guy in the dictionary, you will see a picture of Ryan, in a flannel shirt, with a dog, a truck, and speeding off to hit up his fishing spot. He's a family guy, trains in martial arts, and previously owned an agency. Brandy is not a Denver native - in fact, she grew up in Iowa on a Turkey farm... with 30,000 turkeys. She's married with three boys, and likes to get in the mountains to hike or snowboard, during the right seasons.

In their prior roles, Brandy had pitched a client to Ryan for his podcast. As Ryan describes it, she's a great networker and "instigator". When they both had the itch to do a new project, they looked to podcasting. And after some initial validation, they confirmed that they had stumbled upon a need.

This is the creation story of Kitcaster, the podcast booking agency.

Links

Website: https://kitcaster.com/
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/brandy-whalen/
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/estesryan/
https://kitcaster.com/podcast-guest-list/
https://podcastcontent.studio/

Current Sponsors:

Checkout our Stacklist! https://stacks.codestory.co/

Hosted by Noah Labhart | Technical Founder & Startup Mentor.

Mentorcam March - Josh Campbell Mar 30, 2022

Show notes

Mentorcam - Book your mentor session with promo code CODE for 20% off!

Topic: Brand Building

Josh Campbell is the founder and CEO of protein supplement brand Human Improvement and wine brand So Gay Rose. Formerly a Starbucks Executive and President of cannabis wellness company Dosist, Josh has founded, funded, built, and exited multiple startups in the consumer packaged goods space. He is passionate about mentoring up and coming founders and entrepreneurs.

Questions:

How do you start building a brand?
Whats different about building a brand around an unconventional idea?
How did your traditional experience contribute to your entrepreneurial backbone?
What's different about packaged goods vs. digital products, when it comes to brand?
Whats different about selling to retailers, vs. selling eCommerce?

Book a call with Edvard by accessing the link below:

https://mentor.cam/joshcampbell - Use Promo Code CODE

Current Sponsors:

Checkout our Stacklist! https://stacks.codestory.co/

Hosted by Noah Labhart | Technical Founder & Startup Mentor.

S6 E11: Why Tech Training Fails Engineers: Building Live Micro-Coaching Engines with Hywel Carver of SkillerWhale Mar 29, 2022

Show notes

Hywel Carver has been writing code since he was 9 years old. His first language was C, which quite a language to start out in, and his first program was a "Guess the Number" program, using binary search - and of course, with an embedded Easter egg. He is married, with 2 children. Parenting has really pushed him to learn how to focus, and he regularly has to put things down to take care of other responsibilities. One of his biggest hobbies is pub quizzes, which in Britain is a big deal. In fact, he has been on a few quiz shows on TV, including Who Wants to be a Millionaire.

Hywel and his co-founders dreamed about a way to distill down the distinct learning moments for you, leading you to the point of inception for skills and wisdom. Their passion for this topic led them to build a way to develop developers, in an incremental, personalized way.

This is the creation story of Skiller Whale.

Sponsors

Links

Website: https://skillerwhale.com/
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/hywelc/

Current Sponsors:

Checkout our Stacklist! https://stacks.codestory.co/

Hosted by Noah Labhart | Technical Founder & Startup Mentor.

S6 Bonus: When Systems Crash: Engineering Facebook-Scale Incident Management & Exiting to PagerDuty with John Egan Mar 28, 2022

Show notes

John Egan is a computer and electrical engineer by training. Early on, he got disillusioned by the idea of building robots - it was too slow for him. While he was working at Harvard, he was watching the early days Y Combinator, and told his wife that there was a movement going on, and they should move to be a part of it. Startups weren't common then, so it was a risky move - but John found himself excited about being a part of it. Eventually they did make the move, created a file transfer company, and ended up getting acquired by Facebook. Outside of tech, he's married, with a 4 year old son. And for fun? He builds tools for himself, since he's not writing much code at his current venture. One of them is Postmortem.io, in addition to launching IR Conf for incident responders.

Post Facebook, John set out to ask the question to his prior colleagues that had left, about the tools they missed the most. The tool that kept coming up in conversation was a tool to manage incidents. So he decided to build this platform, named after an ancient Japanese philosophy.

This is the creation story of Kintaba.

Sponsors

Links

Website: https://www.kintaba.com/
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/john3gan/
https://postmortem.io/
https://www.irconf.io/

Current Sponsors:

Checkout our Stacklist! https://stacks.codestory.co/

Hosted by Noah Labhart | Technical Founder & Startup Mentor.

S6 Bonus: Sovereign Privacy: How Thrivacy Tokenized Identity Verification Without Data Leakage with Dr. Gordon Jones Mar 24, 2022

Show notes

Dr. Gordon Jones just turned 60 years old, but you wouldn't know it from his energetic, vibrant tone. He has his doctorate in Health Administration, but he got into Health Technology in 1997. He lives in South Carolina, with his wife and five adopted children. Dr. Jones and his wife adopted their first child 1 year after they were married, as they felt led by God before they were married to pursue this path. Their main family activity is watching movies together, but they love to throw the frisbee, travel, and ultimately being together doing new things.

While teaching at the university, Dr. Jones came across a student's idea to provide security around her identify. In addition to that, he had recently gone through a lengthy background check process, which required the re-verification of several bits of information. He decided to solve both of the problems, by creating a solution using the blockchain.

This is the creation story of Thrivacy.

Sponsors

Links

Website: https://www.thrivacy.io/
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/drgordonjones/

Current Sponsors:

Checkout our Stacklist! https://stacks.codestory.co/

Hosted by Noah Labhart | Technical Founder & Startup Mentor.

Mentorcam March - Edvard Engeseath Mar 23, 2022

Show notes

Mentorcam - Book your mentor session with promo code CODE for 20% off!

Topic: Angel Investing

Dr. Edvard "Eddie" Engeseath, MD is the Co-founder of a tele-health startup Nurx, angel investor, startup advisor, and a former family physician. He founded Nurx to make prescription birth control more accessible. The company has since grown into a full-service tele-health startup in the Rx medicine delivery space. Nurx is backed by some of the world's most prestigious VVCs such as Union Square Ventures, Kleiner Perkins, and Y Combinator, to name a few.

Questions:

What exactly is angel investing?
What's the financial target for angel investing? At what stage do you angel invest?
Is there an equity expectation difference between angels and VC's?
How do you find deals to invest in?
How does someone get started?

Book a call with Edvard by accessing the link below:

https://mentor.cam/edvardengesaeth - Use Promo Code CODE

Current Sponsors:

Checkout our Stacklist! https://stacks.codestory.co/

Hosted by Noah Labhart | Technical Founder & Startup Mentor.

S6 E10: Killing the Clipboard: Digitizing High-Stakes Franchise Operations with Tommy Yionoulis of OpsAnalitica Mar 22, 2022

Show notes

Tommy Yionoulis has a traditional tech founder st4ry... via hotel, restaurant and standup comedy route. But in all seriousness, his Dad was literally a rocket scientist, and his Mom was a software engineer. Tommy diverted away from tech initially, and did the restaurant thing before jumping headfirst into stand up comedy, doing it for 10 years along side several hospitality businesses. When I asked him to tell me a joke, he said his jokes weren't podcast ready. After he got tired of the lifestyle, he went back to school, got his MBA, met his wife, graduate and started working for Quiznos. He's married with kids, and they live in Colorado - so he likes to cycle, paddle boarding, and being outdoors with his family. He also likes a good cigar now and then.

Tommy worked his way up and through the Quiznos organization, specifically landing in ops services. When Quiznos took a turn for the worst, he was tasked with figuring out audit reporting. Through his time there, and through some consulting, he created a solution that got the attention of Which Wich... and validated that the market wanted his solution.

This is the creation story of OpsAnalitica.

Sponsors

Links

Website: http://opsanalitica.co/
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/tommyy/

Current Sponsors:

Checkout our Stacklist! https://stacks.codestory.co/

Hosted by Noah Labhart | Technical Founder & Startup Mentor.

S6 Bonus: Garbage In, Garbage Out: How Claravine Restructured Enterprise Data Management with Verl Allen Mar 18, 2022

Show notes

Prior to his current venture, Verl Allen spent 12 years at Adobe. During that time, he was raising 3 kids as a single Dad, so you can imagine that during that time, it took a large part of his focus. Outside of his profession and family, he loves to ride road bikes 3-4 hours a week, but in particular, long distance rides (to the tune of 200 miles in a single day). He is also a runner, which he finds takes less time to get a good workout in.

During his time at Adobe, Verl noticed a problem emerging with his exposure to acquisitions. He saw that the acquisitions were merging at the process level, but were not doing this down to the data level. When he found out about his current gig, the product was attempting to solve a specific use case of this problem, but was sorta falling over.

This is Verl's creation story of Claravine.

Sponsors

Links

Website: https://www.claravine.com/
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/verl-allen-b83175/

Current Sponsors:

Checkout our Stacklist! https://stacks.codestory.co/

Hosted by Noah Labhart | Technical Founder & Startup Mentor.

What's Your Problem? with Jacob Goldstein Mar 17, 2022

Show notes

Today, I’m excited to share with you a preview from a new podcast I’ve been enjoying and think you will, too.

You may know Jacob Goldstein as the former host of the Planet Money podcast. Now, he’s hosting a new show called What’s Your Problem? It’s a show about technology and business, where visionaries talk about the future they’re trying to build – and the problems they have to solve to get there. You’ll get to know the people who are trying to figure out how to do things no one on the planet knows how to do.

And, like Code Story, you’ll learn about the critical moments it takes to change an industry.

In this preview, Jacob talks with Keenan Wyrobek, the co-founder of a drone company called Zipline. The company has been building and deploying drones in Rwanda and Ghana for years. Now they're trying to solve a surprisingly hard problem: How do they make drone delivery work in the United States? I hope you enjoy it. You can hear Keenan’s full story, and more episodes of What’s Your Problem?, wherever you get your podcasts.

Links: