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

Latest Episodes:

S5 Bonus: The Science of Scaling: Engineering Repeatable B2B Growth Experiments with Techstars Alum Shelby Stephens Jan 06, 2022

Show notes

Back in 2019, we had Shelby Stephens on the show to talk about his project then, called Jolly. Since that time, the COVID pandemic shut down events and crippled their progress at the time. They pivoted the product a bit, to be a sort of eCommerce like site for freelancers to offer services. While they let their Jolly pivot grow, he and his co-founder started building a new product... one which allows startup experts to offer their knowledge and experience - in a fractional, part time manner.

This is the creation story of Growth Match.

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Cloudways offers peace of mind and flexibility so you can focus on growing your business instead of dealing with server management. With Cloudways, you get an optimized stack, managed servers, backups, staging environment, integrated Git, pre-configured, Composer, 24/7 support, and a choice of five cloud providers: AWS, DigitalOcean, Linode, Google Cloud, and Vultr. Get up to 2 Month Free Hosting by using code "CODE30" and get $30 free hosting credit.

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Hosted by Noah Labhart | Technical Founder & Startup Mentor.

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S5 E30: From Heroku to Muse: Rethinking Personal Computing & Local-First Software with Adam Wiggins Jan 04, 2022

Show notes

Adam Wiggins was from California originally, but has lived in Berlin for the last decade. Earlier in his life, he did burning man art installations and was a DJ. Now, he is a middle aged family man, so he focuses on his family, his daughter, his adorable dog and his career/software projects. His partner is also an immigrant, whom he met while in Berlin.

Adam loves Berlin, and in fact, loves European cities in general, for their focus on quality of life. He mentions that in the states, there is a large amount of economic freedom but some inequality and more highs and lows to speak of. The culture in Berlin specifically is full of history, culture, and a bohemian element which is very attractive to music and art.

Adam is most well known for starting Heroku, which completely simplified the way developers think, interact and use infrastructure. Post its acquisition by Salesforce, he found himself thinking about the future of computing, and started a research lab called Ink & Switch. The area they landed on was computing interfaces, and usage around screen touch. After a few prototypes, they landed on something that they though was a solid combination of desktop precision with touch screen mobility.

This is the creation story of Muse.

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Cloudways offers peace of mind and flexibility so you can focus on growing your business instead of dealing with server management. With Cloudways, you get an optimized stack, managed servers, backups, staging environment, integrated Git, pre-configured, Composer, 24/7 support, and a choice of five cloud providers: AWS, DigitalOcean, Linode, Google Cloud, and Vultr. Get up to 2 Month Free Hosting by using code "CODE30" and get $30 free hosting credit.

Links

Website: https://museapp.com/
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/adam-wiggins-a7623845/
https://adamwiggins.com/

Current Sponsors:

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

Hosted by Noah Labhart | Technical Founder & Startup Mentor.

S5 Bonus: From Pop Charts to the App Store: Coding the "LinkedIn for Golfers" with Lydia Davies, Founder of Teemates Dec 30, 2021

Show notes

Lydia Davies is from the UK originally, but she has lived all over the world. She was Born in Thailand, and has lived in Southeast Asia, Singapore, Alaska, the Middle East and now in Houston. She has always been into sports - playing, supporting, etc. When she was 16 years old, she signed on to a music label as a singer and pianist, traveling around the world to perform. When she left the music industry, she got really into technology. As she opened a performing arts academy, she ended up building her own website and app for the business.

During COVID in 2020, she starting creating a framework for a golf app, for her and her husband to find people to play golf with. She wanted the app to have mechanics like a dating app, with a social aspect to see who was down to play some golf... worldwide.

This is the creation story of Teemates.

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Courier
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CTO.ai
Cloudways offers peace of mind and flexibility so you can focus on growing your business instead of dealing with server management. With Cloudways, you get an optimized stack, managed servers, backups, staging environment, integrated Git, pre-configured, Composer, 24/7 support, and a choice of five cloud providers: AWS, DigitalOcean, Linode, Google Cloud, and Vultr. Get up to 2 Month Free Hosting by using code "CODE30" and get $30 free hosting credit.

Links

Website: https://teematesgolf.com/
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/lydia-davies-57b7001/

Current Sponsors:

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

Hosted by Noah Labhart | Technical Founder & Startup Mentor.

S5 E29: Coding the Designer’s Brain: Reengineering Fashion with AI Alongside Nick Clayton of Savitude Dec 28, 2021

Show notes

Nick Clayton has been into tech most of life. Outside of tech, he loves a good strategy game or board game - in face, he met his fiancé playing these types of games. He is an avid Magic the Gathering player, and has been enjoying the game for over 20 years. When I asked the difference between Magic and Dungeons and Dragons, he notes that DND is a role playing game and more about telling a story, while Magic is more about strategy and mechanics. He also enjoys spending time with friends and family, and cooking a good meal with lots of flavors.

Nick and his co-founders followed the data, and learned that there were a large number of people in the population have a hard time finding clothes... because clothes aren't produced in their body shape. After iterating on solutions around education and recommendation engines, they decided to move upstream into the designer's process.

This is the creation story of Savitude.

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Courier
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CTO.ai
Cloudways offers peace of mind and flexibility so you can focus on growing your business instead of dealing with server management. With Cloudways, you get an optimized stack, managed servers, backups, staging environment, integrated Git, pre-configured, Composer, 24/7 support, and a choice of five cloud providers: AWS, DigitalOcean, Linode, Google Cloud, and Vultr. Get up to 2 Month Free Hosting by using code "CODE30" and get $30 free hosting credit.

Links

Website: https://www.savitude.com/
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/nicholas-clayton-b6b60815/

Current Sponsors:

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

Hosted by Noah Labhart | Technical Founder & Startup Mentor.

S5 Bonus: The Evolution of APIs: Building the AI Gateway of the Future with Marco Palladino, CTO of Kong Dec 22, 2021

Show notes

Marco Palladino migrated from Italy about 10 years ago.. and brought all of his Italian hobbies with him. He loves to cook - specifically pasta, of course - and enjoys a good glass of wine. He has a family, with 1 kid and 1 on the way. He loves sports, soccer and skiing. Beyond that, he is a self taught developer, where tech has been his side hobby and passion, but turned into his full time gig.

Marco and his co-founder came to San Francisco 10 years ago, to build an API marketplace. Over time, they amassed 300,000 developers, consuming and publishing API's. Eventually, the figured out the business model wasn't working... so they open sourced the platform.

This is the creation story of Kong.

Sponsors

Courier
Img.ly
Routable
CTO.ai
Cloudways offers peace of mind and flexibility so you can focus on growing your business instead of dealing with server management. With Cloudways, you get an optimized stack, managed servers, backups, staging environment, integrated Git, pre-configured, Composer, 24/7 support, and a choice of five cloud providers: AWS, DigitalOcean, Linode, Google Cloud, and Vultr. Get up to 2 Month Free Hosting by using code "CODE30" and get $30 free hosting credit.

Links

Website: https://konghq.com/
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/marcopalladino/

Current Sponsors:

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

Hosted by Noah Labhart | Technical Founder & Startup Mentor.

S5 E28: Putting Money on Autopilot: Building Self-Driving Banking Tech with Oona Rokyta of Lance Dec 21, 2021

Show notes

Oona Rokyta is a first generation American, which you wouldn't expect from her lack of accent. Her parents are artists from the Czech Republic, who migrated to the US 6 months before she was born. Because of her parents profession, she comes from the land of not understanding business, nor tech. Her parents are role models for her - in fact, they are her personal heroes. From this inspired place, she finds her greatest motivation in life, which is to learn as much as possible and share it with others. She spends a lot of time with her boyfriend and his kids, and has even kicked off a weekly baking challenge with his daughter, creating experimental dishes.

As a freelancer, and a part of a community of freelancers, Oona found that it was difficult to understand cash flow with variable income. Through interactions with accountants or financial systems, she saw that most systems or professionals were backwards looking. She though, well what does it look like moving forward? What does it look like to bring on additional client?

This is the creation story of Lance.

Sponsors

Courier
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Routable
CTO.ai
Cloudways offers peace of mind and flexibility so you can focus on growing your business instead of dealing with server management. With Cloudways, you get an optimized stack, managed servers, backups, staging environment, integrated Git, pre-configured, Composer, 24/7 support, and a choice of five cloud providers: AWS, DigitalOcean, Linode, Google Cloud, and Vultr. Get up to 2 Month Free Hosting by using code "CODE30" and get $30 free hosting credit.

Links

Website: https://www.lance.app/
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/orokyta/details/experience/

Current Sponsors:

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

Hosted by Noah Labhart | Technical Founder & Startup Mentor.

S5 Bonus: Stopping Account Takeovers: Fighting the AI-Driven Fraud Wave with Ari Jacoby of Deduce Dec 17, 2021

Show notes

Ari Jacoby grew up in the DC Metro Area, but has lived in New York City for the last 17 years. He's married with 2 kids at home, ages 12 and 9, and he spends a lot of time outside of his business building legos, math homework, and stem projects with his kids. The biggest hit of the stem projects has been circuitry, to see something buzz or light up at the end of the exercise. He's a big fan of international travel, and enjoys a good glass of wine with his wife.

Speaking of, Ari's biggest influence is his wife. As he puts it, she is the CFO (Chief Family Officer) of the Jacoby Household, and does a brilliant job of it. He likes to watch her works, and finds it motivating how much she gets done and takes care of in her infinitely more hard role than his.

Ari spent a lot of time around identity, specifically in ad tech and mar tech. He figured out that data was common currency in that world, but not in other spaces. Having built large identity graphs, he recognized there was an opportunity to do it again in cyber risk and fraud.

This is the creation story of Deduce.

Sponsors

Courier
Img.ly
Routable
CTO.ai
Cloudways offers peace of mind and flexibility so you can focus on growing your business instead of dealing with server management. With Cloudways, you get an optimized stack, managed servers, backups, staging environment, integrated Git, pre-configured, Composer, 24/7 support, and a choice of five cloud providers: AWS, DigitalOcean, Linode, Google Cloud, and Vultr. Get up to 2 Month Free Hosting by using code "CODE30" and get $30 free hosting credit.

Links

Website: https://deduce.com/
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/arijacoby/

Current Sponsors:

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

Hosted by Noah Labhart | Technical Founder & Startup Mentor.

S5 Bonus: Scaling to 1 Trillion Requests: How IPinfo Built a Global API with Ben Dowling Dec 16, 2021

Show notes

Ben Dowling lives in Seattle, and loves it there. He is married, and a father of three kids - ages 11, 8 and 5 - so he's a busy dude. He loves to hike, and recently took his family on a weekend trip to Mount Rainer. He loves to snowboard, and get away from the screen - though he admits, that tech is also his hobby... building side projects, apps, websites, etc.

Ben was working on a bunch of different side projects in 2013. The process to get IP Info was manual, tedious, and filled with headaches across projects. After he felt this pain point multiple times, he decided to build a solution to solve it... not knowing that he would quickly start getting millions of requests in a short time.

This is the creation story of IPInfo.

Sponsors

Courier
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Routable
CTO.ai
Cloudways offers peace of mind and flexibility so you can focus on growing your business instead of dealing with server management. With Cloudways, you get an optimized stack, managed servers, backups, staging environment, integrated Git, pre-configured, Composer, 24/7 support, and a choice of five cloud providers: AWS, DigitalOcean, Linode, Google Cloud, and Vultr. Get up to 2 Month Free Hosting by using code "CODE30" and get $30 free hosting credit.

Links

Website: https://ipinfo.io/
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/bendowling/

Current Sponsors:

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

Hosted by Noah Labhart | Technical Founder & Startup Mentor.

Compiler - What is the recipe for burnout? Dec 15, 2021

Show notes

Original episode: https://www.redhat.com/en/compiler-write-technical-documentation

Hey guys, we are narrowing in on the Christmas holiday's in the states. Wishing you all a very Merry Christmas and Happy New year! For today, I'm sharing yet another fantastic episode of the Compiler podcast, from Red Hat. As a reminder Compiler is a show hosted by tech veterans, discussing tech topics - big, strange and small.

On this particular episode - which is episode 10 - the topic of burnout is chatted on. This was a great discussion, full of really good tidbits. What I really liked was how Angela, Brent and Johan break down the ingredients for burnout. In order, these are:

An unending amount of work
Not having healthy boundaries on your work
Guilt, obligation, and never doing enough
Criticism amplifying 1-3

The hosts primarily interviewed folks, and come up with this recipe from the standpoint of open source maintainers. Interestingly enough, I find that these apply to software engineers as well. I think criticism can be interchanged with pressure as well, which probably has some criticism implicit in it.

However, I also find that lack of team or company direction can lead to burnout as well as an absence of mentorship. When people don't feel like they are growing, work can become stale. Perhaps its a little bit of burnout mixed with boredom, but at any rate, it leads them to not want to work there anymore.

At any rate, I really enjoyed this episode, and think you will too. Enjoy!

Current Sponsors:

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

Hosted by Noah Labhart | Technical Founder & Startup Mentor.

S5 E27: Fixing the Edge: Dropping Traffic by 95% with Max Stoiber of GraphCDN (Stellate) Dec 14, 2021

Show notes

Max Stoiber was born and raised in a small town, just outside of Vienna, Austria. From a young age, his biggest influence was his mother, who left her job to start her own business as a medical expert in the courts. It has been inspiring for Max to watch her find her place in the world, and to box through everything life threw at her. He still finds great inspiration from that today. And, very early on, he was focused on doing something on his own.

When he's not staring at his computer screens, he likes to get outside and boulder with this friends. He got into the sport through other fellow geeks, and he feels that bouldering in Vienna is pretty much a nerd sport. He's also a trained skiing instructor, and really into coffee, as a certified barista.

Prior to his current venture, Max has had some great success in the open source world, and building a chat tool called Spectrum - which was a platform for community chat. Eventually, Github acquired the product, and opened a whole new set of problems around architecting a large scale, real time system. Through a difficult period of learning and service outages, he learned and figured out a better way to reduce traffic up to 95% with edge caching.

This is the creation story of GraphCDN.

Sponsors

Courier
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Routable
CTO.ai
Cloudways offers peace of mind and flexibility so you can focus on growing your business instead of dealing with server management. With Cloudways, you get an optimized stack, managed servers, backups, staging environment, integrated Git, pre-configured, Composer, 24/7 support, and a choice of five cloud providers: AWS, DigitalOcean, Linode, Google Cloud, and Vultr. Get up to 2 Month Free Hosting by using code "CODE30" and get $30 free hosting credit.

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