Code Story Podcast: Season 5 Founder Creation Stories

Nick Clayton has been into tech most of his life. Outside of tech, he loves a good strategy game or board game - in fact, he met his fiancé playing these.

Anthony Castrio, a freelance full-stack web developer and digital nomad, shares the creation story of Indie Worldwide on the Code Story podcast, explaining how he turned local indie hackers meetups into a virtual community after repeatedly losing friend groups when moving cities.

Valerie Coffman, co-founder of Swayable and former CTO of Xometry, discusses her journey from a PhD in Theoretical Condensed Matter Physics at Cornell to building a platform that tests which messages are most effective at communicating scientifically backed facts.

Guillermo Rauch, founder of Vercel and Next.js, shares his journey from open-source Linux tooling in Argentina to building a frontend framework and developer ecosystem focused on developing, previewing, and shipping web applications.

In this bonus episode, Kyle Bernhardy discusses his experiences working with data availability, reliability, and infrastructure in large data processing. He shares insights on finding better solutions in the data aggregation industry.

In 2012, the projects Abhinav was involved in has the same point - how to work with the API's that connected the front and backends of the application. And the tools he had to use never helped him develop efficiently. He thought - what would make the better?

Hazel Savage, co-founder of Musiio, shares her journey from studying politics and playing in a punk band to building an AI-powered music technology startup.

A bit a go, LaKeisha was approached by her founder, Ronnie Green, about utilizing her tech expertise to build out his vision for automated, algorithmic trading and portfolio management. This is the creation story of AlgoPear.

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.

Lydia Davies, a UK-born entrepreneur and former music industry professional, shares the creation story of Teemates, a golf social app inspired by dating app mechanics that helps golfers find playing partners worldwide.

In college, Nate was very interested and connected to the real estate industry, as urban planning works closely with realtors. He figured out that lead follow up was a huge pain point for realtors, which peaked his interest. And led him to build some tech to solve the problem.

Ken Gavranovic's creation story at Unqork is featured in this Code Story podcast bonus episode, tracing his career from childhood computer fascination in Galveston, TX through building web.com, leading product and engineering at New Relic, and ultimately joining Unqork.

Ulf Schwekendiek, founder of Centered.app, shares his journey from engineering and UX roles at Siri, Groupon, Descript, and Postmates to building a productivity tool inspired by flow states and the Pomodoro method.

Shaun Cooley, CEO and co-founder of Mapped, shares his journey from building internal websites at Symantec at age 15 to spending 18 years there, then moving to Cisco where he identified data fragmentation in industrial IoT environments.

Sophy Lee, CTO of HopSkipDrive, shares her journey from growing up across multiple countries to leading technology and information security at a child transportation company.

This episode features Brian Singer, who previously founded Orbiterra and sold it to Google in 2016. He discusses his transition to Google, the migration of products to GCP, and the inception of his current venture focused on SLOs.

In this episode, Bruno Demuro shares his personal journey and the inspiration behind Armor Bionics, a company focused on innovative solutions in the medical field. He reflects on a life-changing experience with his mother's brain surgery that shaped his perspective on healthcare and technology.

Code Story podcast host Noah Labhart recommends the Compiler podcast from Red Hat, highlighting its first episode "Should Managers Code?" which explores whether technical leaders should continue coding.

Jody Shapiro, founder of Productiv, shares his journey from childhood curiosity about engineering and coding to working at Microsoft, Silicon Graphics, and Google before founding a SaaS management company.

Mitchell Hashimoto, founder of HashiCorp, shares his origin story on the Code Story podcast, describing how he taught himself programming through open source and developed ideas for better infrastructure tooling while studying at the University of Washington.

Code Story shares a recast of Red Hat's Compiler podcast Episode 8, which discusses the importance of writing technical documentation for both open-source projects and internal business use.

Code Story podcast features a bonus episode with John Kodumal, co-founder of LaunchDarkly, discussing his journey from a computer-obsessed childhood to building a feature flag platform after connecting with co-founder Edith Harbaugh.

Code Story podcast host Noah Labhart recaps Episode 4 of Red Hat's Compiler podcast, which explores the concept of technical debt—defined as the cost of delaying necessary work to hit milestones, while also noting it can stem from inferior early framework decisions.

Ilan Peleg, co-founder and CEO of Lightrun, shares his journey from being a professional middle distance runner in the Israeli Army to founding a developer observability company that helps troubleshoot live applications in production.

Code Story podcast episode 30 features Adam Wiggins, founder of Heroku and creator of Muse, discussing his journey from California to Berlin, his work simplifying developer infrastructure, and his pivot to computing interfaces through his research lab Ink & Switch.

Code Story podcast episode featuring Kirt Debique, founder of SyncFloor, who shares his journey from Trinidad to studying computer engineering at the University of Miami, spending 20 years at Microsoft, and ultimately founding a music technology startup.

Derrick Reimer shares his journey from childhood coding tinkerer to founding SavvyCal, a calendar scheduling tool born from his frustration with existing products.

Brandon White, founder of File Finder, shares his entrepreneurial journey from building the largest social networking and eCommerce site for sport fishermen to creating a cloud-based document search tool inspired by his wife's struggle transferring files between accountants.

Code Story podcast announces the end of Season 4 and previews the upcoming Season 5, encouraging listeners to subscribe and leave reviews.

Code Story podcast episode 18 features Tigran Nazaryan, CEO of 10Web, discussing his journey from studying astrophysics to co-founding a WordPress hosting and automation platform.

Slater Victoroff, co-founder of Indico, shares his creation story on the Code Story podcast, discussing his diverse background including vegan baking, blacksmithing, MMA, and martial arts training in Japan.

Leon Kuperman, co-founder of CAST.ai, shares his immigrant background, passion for Brazilian Jiu Jitsu, and the origin story of CAST AI—born from frustrations with cloud spending visibility and optimization.

Shelby Stephens returns to the Code Story podcast to discuss pivoting from his original project Jolly to building Growth Match, a platform enabling startup experts to offer fractional, part-time knowledge and experience.

Code Story podcast features Cody Candee, founder of Bounce, discussing his extensive travel background across 60+ countries and how a friend's luggage problem in San Francisco in 2014 inspired him to create the company in 2017.

Meha Agrawal, founder of Silk & Sonder, shares her journey from studying computer science at USC and working at Goldman Sachs and Stitch Fix to creating a journaling-based mental health subscription product.

Adrian Tobey, founder of Groundhogg, shares his journey from working at his father's digital marketing agency to dropping out of university and building an affordable WordPress-based marketing automation suite.

Timur Mamedov, co-founder of VEED.io, shares his journey from growing up in Russia with a creative spirit and early programming skills to building a video editing platform after his family faced financial hardship.

Through a chance discovery in Docker's eco-system, Sergei discovered an open source test container library, and realized that they approach he was taking to test containers was out there in the wild. He was invited to be a co-maintainer to the open source library, which would eventually become their current Company today.

Laura Butler, a former 20-year Microsoft veteran and Harvard attendee, shares her journey from tech career to angel investing and co-founding Uplift, a company aimed at improving the HOA and condo-buying process.

Colin Chartier, founder of Webapp.io (formerly Layer CI), shares his journey from making video games and learning Java through Minecraft to building a CI/CD tool born out of solving breaking-change sensitivity at a prior startup.

Code Story podcast Season 5 concludes with a sign-off episode, thanking listeners and announcing the upcoming Season 6.

Andrew Childs, co-founder of Shortcut (formerly Clubhouse), shares his journey from studying painting at RISD to building a project management tool born out of frustration with existing opinionated tools during a hack day project.

Braden Stenning, co-founder of Raven.ai, shares his journey from aerospace engineering and space exploration robotics to building a machine telemetry platform focused on continuous improvement in manufacturing.

Code Story podcast announces its Season 5 trailer, highlighting upcoming episodes featuring founders and tech leaders discussing MVPs, trade-offs, feature prioritization, team building, and scaling.

Shinji Kim, founder of Select Star, shares her journey from studying at the University of Waterloo and working at Facebook, Sun Microsystems, and Barclays to founding Concord Systems (acquired by Akamai) and ultimately creating Select Star, an automated data discovery platform.

Mahmoud Abdelkader, CEO and co-founder of Very Good Security (VGS), shares his journey from immigrating to the US from Egypt, through gaming-inspired programming, Wall Street engineering, and building Balanced (a payments marketplace via Y Combinator) before founding VGS.

Alexander Alimovs, founder of Automations.io, shares his journey from Latvia to the UK and how spotting inefficiencies in small tech teams led him to build a no-code process automation product.

Adrian Tobey, founder of Groundhogg, shares his journey from working at his father's digital marketing agency to dropping out of university and building an affordable WordPress-based marketing automation suite.

Code Story podcast bonus episode features Phill Lawson-Shanks discussing his journey into tech and the founding of Aligned, a data center company focused on addressing the industry's growing energy consumption challenges.

Code Story podcast episode 15 features Matt Schwartz, founder and CEO of Afresh, discussing his passion for food and how researching the produce industry led to the creation of his company.

Angel Munoz, a former investment banker and eSports pioneer, discusses the creation story of Beacon, an audio-video experience integrating video game aspects born from his gaming community platform GTribe.

Miriam Schwab, founder of Strattic, shares her journey from freelancing and building WordPress websites in Israel to discovering static site generation as a solution for sluggish content loading.

Thejo Kote, founder of Airbase, shares his journey from growing up in Southern India surrounded by books to co-founding Automatic (acquired by SiriusXM) and ultimately building Airbase to solve spend visibility and connectivity problems.

Code Story podcast episode 19 features Joshua Wohle, founder of Mindstone, discussing his journey from self-taught developer to building SuperAwesome (sold to Epic Games) and ultimately creating Mindstone for self-directed online learning.

Oleg Fridman, founder of Verb Data, shares his entrepreneurial journey from building e-commerce websites in high school to running a restaurant ordering platform (Onosys) that sold to LivingSocial.

Brendan Wood, founder of Passiv, shares his journey from mechanical engineering and robotics to software development, ultimately building Passiv out of frustration with manually managing his personal stock portfolio.

Code Story podcast features a bonus replay episode with Guillermo Rauch, founder of Vercel and Next.js, discussing his journey from open source and Linux tooling in Argentina to building a developer-first frontend framework and deployment platform.

Paraag Sarva, a New York City native and founder of Rhino, shares his journey from Goldman Sachs and Bloomberg's City Hall to the startup world, where he created a better alternative to traditional security deposits for renters and landlords.

Kristen Buchanan, founder of Edify, shares her journey from a non-technical museum education background to building a software solution specializing in software engineering onboarding.

Code Story podcast features Luke Hoban discussing his journey from building programming languages and tools at Microsoft to creating Pulumi, a cloud infrastructure company.

Eric Futoran, a multi-startup founder with four degrees, discusses his journey from Scopely to creating Embrace.io, a mobile-first data platform that captures all mobile session data.

Matt Dixon, founder of Front Range Systems and Code Program, shares his journey from job hopping to building his own software business over 21 years in the tech industry.

Philippe Kwiatkowski, founder of Ubico, shares his journey from teenage gaming and modding to freelance web development and eventually building a cold email tool that helps founders solve product distribution challenges.

Code Story podcast episode 12 features Chris Wexler, founder of Krunam, discussing his unconventional path through six careers—from Capitol Hill to Wall Street, theater, and ad tech—before combining his skills and passion for fighting human trafficking into his current venture.

Adam Robinson, founder of Retention.com (formerly GetEmails), shares his journey from credit default swap trading at Lehman Brothers and Barclays to building a tech startup that identifies email addresses from anonymous website traffic.

Josh Millet, CEO and co-founder of Criteria, shares his unconventional journey from a PhD in French medieval history to founding an HR tech company focused on using data and technology to improve the hiring process.

Code Story podcast episode 25 features Robert "Bobby Tables" Ross, founder of FireHydrant, discussing his journey from building websites as a 12-year-old in San Diego to creating an incident management platform.

Code Story podcast episode featuring Alex Yurkowski, co-founder of ClickUp, discussing his journey from growing up in New Jersey with a passion for tech and video games to building a unified workflow tool that addresses gaps in the productivity software market.

Code Story Episode 22 features Josh Dzielak of Orbit, who shares his life in Paris and how the Orbit model—a community-focused alternative to the sales funnel—inspired him and his co-founder to build a product.

Code Story podcast features Rahul Sidhu, co-founder of Spidr Tech, discussing his journey from EMT and police officer to building a startup that helps police departments solve their customer service problem.

Kordel France, founder of Seekar Technologies, shares his journey from tinkering with autonomous farming equipment to building a computer vision and AI platform for commercial use.

Veena Somareddy, founder of Neuro Rehab VR, shares her journey from India to the US, where her background in game design and medical simulation led her to co-found a virtual reality therapy company.

Code Story podcast episode featuring Marko Anastasov, co-founder of Semaphore, who shares his journey from growing up in war-torn Yugoslavia to building a CI/CD platform born out of his web development agency Rendered Text.

Cherish Santoshi, founder of SAWO Labs, shares his creation story on the Code Story podcast, discussing how he started his professional career at 18 and built a passwordless authentication product for the developer community.

Real World AI by Alyssa Simpson Rochwerger and Wilson Pang is a practical guide to deploying AI responsibly, featuring dozens of stories from startups and global enterprises with a human-first approach that achieves over three times the industry average success rate.

Ryan Johnson, originally from Saginaw, Michigan, shares his unconventional path from aspiring orthodontist to product leader at CallRail, where he built the team that expanded the company's call tracking into an omni-channel platform with form, source, and message tracking.

Code Story podcast episode 13 features Andrew Butt, co-founder of Enable, discussing how he and his co-founder identified a problem with trading agreements and incentives in the distribution industry and built a product to solve it.

Lyric Jain, founder of Logically, shares his origin story on the Code Story podcast, describing how the loss of his grandmother to health misinformation and global events like Brexit and US elections inspired him to build a platform combating online misinformation.

David Ciccarelli, co-founder and CEO of Voices.com, shares his journey from experimenting with sound and audio engineering to building a voice talent marketplace with his wife Stephanie.

Jay Haynes, founder of THRV, shares his journey from coding on an Apple II Plus in 1979 through careers in finance and tech, ultimately discovering the Jobs to Be Done theory as the foundation for his company.

Max Stoiber, co-founder of GraphCDN, shares his journey from growing up near Vienna, Austria, to building Spectrum (acquired by GitHub) and discovering edge caching to reduce traffic by up to 95%.

Code Story podcast features a bonus episode with Ben Dowling, founder of IPInfo, who built the IP information service in 2013 after experiencing the pain of manually gathering IP data across multiple side projects.

Code Story podcast recasts a Compiler (Red Hat) episode exploring the recipe for burnout, identifying key ingredients such as unending work, lack of healthy boundaries, guilt, and amplified criticism.

Ari Jacoby, founder of Deduce, discusses his journey from ad tech and mar tech identity graphs to building a cyber risk and fraud prevention company on the Code Story podcast.

Oona Rokyta, a first-generation American with Czech roots, shares her journey from a non-business background to founding Lance, a fintech tool designed to help freelancers understand and manage cash flow with variable income.

Marco Palladino, co-founder of Kong, shares the creation story of how an API marketplace with 300,000 developers pivoted to an open-source platform after the original business model failed.

Darshan is also an author, and just recently released his book called 'Getting to Aha'. He discusses the challenges of understanding consumer motivations and how his tool aims to simplify focus groups for better market insights.