Code Story - January 2022

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Episodes

Through Adam's 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.

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.

When his now co-founder left Morgan Stanley, 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.

One day, Alex 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?

Reed and his Co-founder both came from Plaid, and worked on the adaptive authentication team. 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.

In their inception, Stephen and his co-founder 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.

Hello listeners... its time to embark upon Season 5 of the Code Story podcast. As we step into this journey together, you an expect to hear amazing stories about MVP's, trade offs, determining feature importance, building teams - and scaling, or fighting scale, as you grow. Our guest list continues to impress, with appearances from Abhinav Asthana of Postman, Derrick Reimer of SavvyCal, Hazel Savage of Musiio... and so many more.

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.

Adrian 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 Season 4, signing off.... Thank you for listening! Season 5 of the Code Story podcast will be starting in the next couple of weeks. 

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. 

Post Heroku's 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 a solid combination of desktop precision with touch screen mobility.