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

Latest Episodes:

S5 Bonus: The Two-Suitcase Minimalist Who Built a Global Storage Empire, with Cody Candee of Bounce Sep 16, 2021

Show notes

Travel is a huge part of Code Candee's life, even prior to his current venture. He has lived in a dozen different cities, travelled to over 60 countries, and has been to 49 of the 50 US states. Out of all of them, his favorite place to live was India, specifically in Bangalore. While he was there, he tried to experience all the cultures, food and people, and quite enjoyed his time.

He is a minimalist.. to the tune of owning a couple of suitcases. He loves the idea of not being held down by things, and being able to move around at the drop of a hat. He reads a lot of books, his favorite one being the Alchemist, and enjoys rock climbing. But to be honest, he likes the all consuming, work centric lifestyle he leads.

In 2014, he was working in San Francisco and planned to have some drinks with his friends. One of them had to go all the way home to drop off some luggage, before heading to happy hour. He took the ideas he wrote down that night, and in 2017, he set out to solve this complex problem... by just getting started.

This is the creation story of Bounce.

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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://usebounce.com/
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/codycandee/

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

Hosted by Noah Labhart | Technical Founder & Startup Mentor.

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S5 Bonus: Fixing Broken Developer Workflows: How a Hack Day Built Shortcut (formerly Clubhouse) with Andrew Childs Sep 15, 2021

Show notes

Andrew Childs doesn't have a computer science background. He grew up in Philly, and is currently based in NYC with his wife and 6 year old. His first computer experience was in 1984, with a Macintosh plus. He was immediately hooked on this extraordinary machine, that felt like it was made by humans. With no internet, it was just a playground in the beginning, but on it, he was able to explore design and learn pascal. He attended RISD, an arts school in providence, and studied painting. His goal was to go into contemporary art, but he quickly realized he didn't know anything about how to approach the art world. Throughout the program, he did learn a lot about how to think, how to look at things, and how to be creative. Post that, he ran a few web design and development agencies, before being pulled into the startup world.

At a prior startup, the opinionated nature of project tools his team was using started to get in the way of their productivity... not to mention, it was not possible to get a birds eye view of direction, progress, etc. across multiple projects. During a hack day project, Andrew built a way to aggregate their tool into one single view. It was then that it clicked, and he and his co-founder thought maybe they were on to something.

This is the creation story of Shortcut (formerly Clubhouse).

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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://shortcut.com/
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/andrew-childs-9887552/

Current Sponsors:

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

Hosted by Noah Labhart | Technical Founder & Startup Mentor.

S5 E14: Taking on Calendly: How Derrick Reimer Built SavvyCal to Win an Indescribably Crowded Market Sep 14, 2021

Show notes

Derrick Reimer got his first computer in kindergarten. His Dad was a mechanical engineer, but at home, tinkered with code.. and Derrick was always interested in the projects he was working on. In junior high, he learned Dos basics, and started to make games. He found it really fun to write utilities and tools for people, and funny enough, he even tinkered with accounting software - and tried to replicate Quicken.

Even still, he ignored coding as a career path. He majored in math in college, and wasn't sure how he wanted to apply it. He needed more creativity than most math jobs offered at the time. After college, he discovered the Basecamp team and their perspective on building software. It was at that moment that his interest in tech and entrepreneurship merged together.

For fun, he loves to do a lot of things. He lives in Minneapolis, and is outdoors a lot - hiking, road cycling, and playing a bit of tennis here and there. He also enjoys cooking, and coffee - but not just drinking coffee. He has gotten into hobbyist coffee roasting - with a popcorn popper. He likes to play around with the beans, the equipment, and overall, tinkering with making the perfect cup.

After collecting dust in his idea notebook, in the list of markets which he knew well, he decided to venture forward to make a better calendar scheduling work tool... based on his anxiety using this type of product, and his desire to level up the status quo.

This is the creation story of SavvyCal.

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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://savvycal.com/
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/derrick-reimer-93916020/
https://www.derrickreimer.com/

Current Sponsors:

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

Hosted by Noah Labhart | Technical Founder & Startup Mentor.

S5 Bonus: From Art to a Salesforce Acquisition: The Troops Story with Greg Ratner Sep 09, 2021

Show notes

Greg Rather comes from a family of artists, so he always envisioned himself going in to art. From an early age, he was drawing and creating comics (funny enough, centered around his favorite animal - pigs). And back then, he was also a budding entrepreneur. In fact, in grade school, he would Xerox his comics and sell them at school for a buck a piece.

In High School, he got into animation and game development, which was the catalyst for his interest in programming. He started out for doing animation by hand, drawing each cell and each frame by itself, which was super tedious. The tools he switched to was Director and Flash, allowing him to create stop animation, eventually layering programming into the mix as well. Outside of tech, he is a purple belt in jiu-jitsu. He also enjoys cycling and cooking, which both were handy hobbies during the pandemic.

After feeling the pain of having to log into a myriad of tools day to day to get their jobs done, Greg and his co-founders decided to build a connected application, to drive revenue communications.

This is the creation story of Troops.

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: http://troops.ai/
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/gratner/

Current Sponsors:

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

Hosted by Noah Labhart | Technical Founder & Startup Mentor.

S5 E13: Building a $1B SaaS Unicorn from a 'Boring' Niche with Andrew Butt of Enable Sep 07, 2021

Show notes

Andrew Butt always dreamed of being an airline pilot, and his passion outside of tech is flying. He has spent more time in helicopters over planes, and he enjoys that more. His family relocated to San Francisco 18 months ago, and they have been pretty much under lock down since that time. He and his wife have been doing the normal things during lock down - surfing the web, hiking, etc... but mostly keeping to themselves.

In flying school, he met his co-founder growing a distribution company. They discovered a problem first hand, around trading agreements and incentives between companies. So much so, that they found a need in the industry and set off to build a product to solve the problem.

This is the creation story of Enable.

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://enable.com/
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/awbutt/

Current Sponsors:

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

Hosted by Noah Labhart | Technical Founder & Startup Mentor.

S5 Bonus: From Police Officer to Tech Founder: How SPIDR Tech Revolutionized Public Safety Communication with Rahul Sidhu Sep 02, 2021

Show notes

Rahul Sidhu was one of those kids who was always fiddling with computers. He even had a small tech startup in high school, to help him pay his way through college. Out of High School, he was an EMT, and studied emergency medicine at the University of Pittsburgh. Post that, he became a paramedic crew chief, overseeing an assigned rescue crew and shift. In 2013, he became a police officer full time.

He is a regular at the gym, which obviously shows that fitness is important to him, along with hanging out with his family and friends. He's a golfer, and is recently trying to get better at it. And, he likes to travel through food, as he says it, planning his trips around the best places to eat.

In 2015, within the Techstars program in New York, Rahul and his co-founders were running out of cash, unable to deliver on what they were intending. After some helpful words from a friendly former Chief, he and his team decided to keep it simple, and attempt to help police departments solve the "customer service" problem.

This is the creation story of Spidr Tech.

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.spidrtech.com/
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/rahulsidhu/

Current Sponsors:

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

Hosted by Noah Labhart | Technical Founder & Startup Mentor.

S5 E12: Building Tech for What Matters Most with Chris Wexler of Krunam Aug 31, 2021

Show notes

Chris Wexler had a crazy path to get where he is today. By his count, he is on his 6th career. His first job was on Capital Hill, followed up with a stint in Wall Street. After that, he produced independent theater, and then got into marketing and advertising, being one of the early adopters of ad tech.

He's married with two daughters, and is a huge baseball fan (the Minnesota Twins specifically). He reads a lot of non fiction books, interestingly about public projects and how it portrays power distribution in the United States.

All along his career, he was involved in the prevention of human trafficking. He has family members running organizations focused on this specific philanthropic pursuit. The opportunity came about for Chris to utilize all the different skill sets he'd obtained over his career, plus his advocacy for fighting human trafficking... and with that, it was a no brainer for him to start his current venture.

This is the creation story of Krunam.

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://krunam.co/
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/chriswexler/

Current Sponsors:

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

Hosted by Noah Labhart | Technical Founder & Startup Mentor.

S5 Bonus: Productizing an Engineering Nightmare: Turning Integration Debt into an API Powerhouse with Brendan Wood of Passiv Aug 26, 2021

Show notes

Brendan Wood lives in New Brunswick, Canada, with his wife and 3 kids. They live in an old house, and from his per-view, he has done way to many projects on it. In fact, shortly after they moved into the house, they discovered foundation problems and had to re-pour a new foundation (which is a massive undertaking). They have a cabin a half hour drive out of town, which is is Brandan's happy place. There is a beach, land, hammocks - and its a place where the whole family can run free. He grew up in New Finland, and in college, studied mechanical engineering. This focus led him into robotics - specifically the kinematics side - and software development. All in all, he chose the latter, cause it was easier to start a career.

One day, he found he had a personal itch to solve a problem, while managing his personal stock portfolio. As his account grew, his risk tolerance changed, and general shifts happened in the market, he found that keeping on top of his portfolio was particularly time consuming and tedious. He got bored of doing this manually, and built a script out of frustration for having to manage this manually.

This is the creation story of Passiv.

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://passiv.com/
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/brendancalebwood

Current Sponsors:

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

Hosted by Noah Labhart | Technical Founder & Startup Mentor.

S5 E11: Breaking the Integration Bottleneck: Engineering Seamless Workflow Automation with Alexander Alimovs of Automations.io Aug 24, 2021

Show notes

Alexander Alimovs was born in a country that no longer exists. It was the USSR (or the Soviet Union), but today it's an independent country called Latvia. In 2008 when he was 18, he moved to the United Kingdom for school, and he has been there ever since. He studied business and medicine in school. Early on, he was given the recommendation that in order to make a big impact, he should start a business. Paired with this, he has been passionate about tech since he was a young kid, using tools like Dreamweaver to make simple websites.

Outside of work, he likes to stay active. He loves sports, and he used to do martial arts as a kid. Though he hasn't played much since the pandemic hit, he loves to play American Football in the UK, strapping on his helmet and pads and playing defensive cornerback.

In the past, he held several senior positions with companies having small tech teams. During these times, he would quickly spot inefficiencies in processes - a manual step here, a spot of friction there, etc. He decided to build a product to enable non-engineers to automate processes.

This is the creation story of Automations.io.

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://automations.io/
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/aalimovs/

Current Sponsors:

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

Hosted by Noah Labhart | Technical Founder & Startup Mentor.

S5 Bonus: Goodbye Waiting for Builds: Engineering Instant Preview Environments with Colin Chartier of Webapp.io (Formerly Layer CI) Aug 19, 2021

Show notes

Colin Chartier started making video games when he was young. He used to played Warcraft 3, which had a powerful map editor for its users. He recalls that one game map was called goblet exploration, where you were stuck in the middle of nowhere and you had to make civilization (think a precursor to Minecraft). He found that this was really good for learning how to make things that people wanted... which ultimately, led him into entrepreneurship and programming He also played minecraft, which involved his first exposure to a real programming language, as map editing was done in Java. He lives in Toronto, and is a 20 minute bike ride from the water front. Many days, he will head down to the beach and work from there. He enjoys getting outdoors when he doesn't have too many calls scheduled that day.

In his prior startup, he found that he and his team were very sensitive to breaking changes, as it was critical to deliver information in a timely manner. So much so, that his customers would churn if anything broke in the critical chain. He created something to fill this gap at his prior venture, which he was offering up to friends and colleagues via open source.

This is the creation story of Webapp.io, formerly Layer CI.

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