Author: Noah Labhart - Startup Founder & CTO

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Code Story: Insights from Startup Tech Leaders - S6 Bonus: Adam Newman, Pyrl

Adam Newman grew up in the suburbs of New York and Brooklyn. Now, he lives in the DC / Maryland area. His grandparents were immigrants, and owned a bakery and were Taylors. So the entrepreneur and self starter characteristics found in Adam are deeply rooted. He's married with 4 kids, and loves to spend lots of time outdoors and living vicariously through his childrens sports activities. He spends a lot of time helping his wife grow her education business, and she spends a lot of time supporting and encouraging him with his ventures.

Through his life experiences, including losing his Father to cancer, an idea originated in him around consumers owning their purchase data, while benefitting companies who cooperate with data privacy best practices. When a few things caught up in the world - data privacy rules, the industry, and Adam himself - he was able to step into creating a win-win solution around data.

This is the creation story of Pyrl.

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Code Story: Insights from Startup Tech Leaders - S6 Bonus: Matt Cowell, Quanthub

Matt Cowell didn't start out in tech. In fact, he studied the chemical world heavily in school, getting his Bachelors in Chemistry and Masters in Chemical Engineering. So - by trade, he was clearly a chemist. However, when he joined Accenture, he started in with programming and establishing the SDLC methodology for the company. Matt is married with 2 kids, loves sports - specifically Illinois basketball - loves to play music and golf. He likes to travel with his wife to see family, and make frequent visits to their lakehouse.

In his professional past, Matt had held several roles in SaaS companies and startups. He met a company that was an artificial intelligence consultancy, which had a POC around assessments. They wanted to start up a separate company to support launch this POC and take it to market. This is when Matt got involved.

This is the creation story of QuantHub.

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Code Story: Insights from Startup Tech Leaders - S6 E2: Trevor Marshall, Current

Trevor Marshall grew up in NY, and has been living in the state his whole life. His path into technology was not a direct one. Prior to school, he was on the road to becoming a professional musician, studying at Juilliard. However, early on in his schooling, he found the same sort of joy he got from music in other areas, initially through economics and combinatorics - and he was hooked on math and computer science.

Early on in life, Trevor's grandfather took him to the horse tracks, teaching him about the odds of a race. Fast forward several years post graduation from Columbia, he joined Morgan Stanley and got really excited about Bitcoin. He even went to his boss and asked if he could trade it... which he was promptly denied. However, that bold interaction solidified a match made in heaven for future working relationship.

In fact, when his now co-founder left, Trevor followed him to continue working together. Being really into Crypto, they both wanted to figure out how to introduce these new value streams to the masses. In order to do so, they needed to build a banking product that made sense for everyone... not just the wealthy.

This is the creation story of Current.

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Code Story: Insights from Startup Tech Leaders - S6 Bonus: Alexander Deeb, Classhook

Alex Deeb was influenced by the education space early on. He had many teachers who inspired him through his life, and his parents pushed him to do well in school on order to obtain better opportunities. Along side of that, he is interested in equitable opportunities, which is a big driver for him in his professional ventures. He is passionate about helping learn about new opportunities. He grew up in Long Island, NY - so of course, he loves pizza. He frequents the local pizza house, which in his opinion is Stellas'. He gets 2 slices of regular cheese, with a coke - which is the only time he drinks soda.

One day, he and his friends got together to have a business brainstorming question. One of the questions that came up was how can you make videos searchable? Also, how can you improve engagement within schools, perhaps with popular media?

This is the creation story of Classhook.

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Code Story: Insights from Startup Tech Leaders - S6 Bonus: Reed McGinley-Stempel, Stytch

Reed McGinley-Stempel grew up in Las Vegas, but went to school on the East Coast. Frankly, he didn't know what he wanted to do and "stumbled" into management consulting. When I dug into how someone stumbles into this profession, he mentioned that early on he got some sage advice from his older brother about not rushing to law school because... being a lawyer isn't that fun. So, he followed some friends to Bain & Company.

The more projects he was involved in, the more he got interested in technology. Candidly, one of his motivations for going in tech was the fact that his was moving out to San Francisco to support his wife through law school at Stanford. He considered continuing to do consulting with Bain, but decided tech was the best route and eventually, joined Plaid. Outside of his professional career, he is into the outdoors, loving hiking and taking his very active dog outside. He mentions that living in San Francisco makes the outdoors super accessible.

Reed and his Co-founder both came from Plaid, and worked on the adaptive authentication team. There, they explored how to secure bank authentication to maintain security, but also do it in such a way that reduced friction and created an amazing experience. They found that the biggest problem to be solved was the combination of security issues with passwords, and the low conversion rate of sign up / sign in forms requiring passwords. They wanted to fix this.

This is the creation story of Stytch.

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Code Story: Insights from Startup Tech Leaders - S6 E1: Stephen Blum, Pubnub

Stephen Blum finds that his life outside of tech is tricky to define, given we are surrounded by tech everywhere. He was inspired to be a game developer at an early age, and he found it fun and exciting. In the gaming days, he really enjoyed the Legend of Zelda, Metroid - those adventures and the animation was fascinating to him. After a while, he found more excitement within the business world, and using technology to solve problems and profit. In fact, he finds it so much fun, that what he loves to do outside of work and business... is just chill. He likes it when there is no plans.

Stephen likes to support and invest in earlier stage AI and API companies. He has 18 different companies he has invested in, and he wants to continue expanding that portfolio, and into crypto as well - specifically arbitrage through API's, which he finds particularly fun and lucrative. One of the tricks he found is to make all trades simultaneously within the same wallet.

In their inception, they were trying to solve a problem... by simply creating a button to order a taxi. In the process of building that, they figured out they needed tech to allow more than one party to participate. And their product vision clicked.

This is the creation story of Pubnub.

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Code Story: Insights from Startup Tech Leaders - S5 Bonus: Guillermo Rauch, Vercel & Next.js (Replay)

Guillermo Rauch is originally from Argentina. He has always been involved in the open source world, starting out working in Linux and native tooling. After a while, he feel in love with the web and the front end web system, working in the early days of AJAX, JS Animation and jQuery competition. When I asked him what he does for fun, he laughed - because he really enjoys what is does professionally on the web .

On a personal level though, he has three kiddos so he stays pretty busu. He is into fitness, and does calisthenics and gymnastics. Beyond that, he is into coffee - though I don't know many tech people who aren't into coffee.

Having been a JS person, he saw an opportunity to build out the frontend layer of the web. To put that in context, think about what Stripe, Twilio, etc. have done for the industry with their foundational, developer first API's. He decided to create a framework that had no opinion about how you got your data. Along side of this, he created the optimal ecosystem for developers to build very fast - specifically, to develop, preview, and ship.

This is the creation story of Next.js and Vercel.

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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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Code Story: Insights from Startup Tech Leaders - S5 Bonus: Adrian Tobey, Groundhogg (Replay)

Adrian Tobey lives in Canada. He got started in his tech career right out of high school, working for his father's digital marketing agency. In high school, he was interested in computer science, and developed video games and useful UI for his school. Prior to digital marketing, his father was a jazz musician, and Adrian followed in those footsteps to play the trumpet. For University, he had two options - go to school for computer science or for music... and chose the latter. During school, he was working full time for his Dad's agency, building websites, email campaigns and such. While he was doing this, he built his first product called Form Lift, which is a Wordpress form builder for Infusion Soft.

Around 3 years into school, he failed his first university course - a discrete computer science course around computer runtimes, big O notation, etc. He had invested a ton of money into the his degree already, but he started doing the math, and estimated he wouldn't complete school until 2025 because he was part time.

With that in mind, he dropped out of University school, and thought - what next? He didn't want to do agency work forever. He took a look at how expensive, convoluted and clunky marketing technology tools can be. He vowed to create the ultimate suite of tools, and to do it on Wordpress.

This is the creation story of Groundhogg.

Sponsors

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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.

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Code Story: Insights from Startup Tech Leaders - Season 6 Trailer

Hello listeners... it's time to embark upon yet another season of the Code Story podcast.

As we dive into another journey together, in fact our 6th journey together, you an expect to hear more (even more!) amazing stories about MVP's, trade offs, determining feature importance, building teams - and scaling, or fighting scale, as you grow.

Our guest list this Season is truly epic, with appearances from Stephen Blum of Pubnub, Matt Pierce of Immediate, Reed McGinley-Stempel of Stytch, Mike Bouffard of Greenhouse... to mention just a few.

Season 6 starts on January 18th, so subscribe today to ensure you don't miss an episode.

And a big shout out and thank you to our Season 6 sponsors

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