#founder-advice

Founder Interviews: Todd Olson of Pendo
▻https://hackernoon.com/founder-interviews-todd-olson-of-pendo-4d0f1030d4ca?source=rss----3a8144

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Learn how Todd Olson created Pendo, a product experience platform that helps software product teams deliver software users love.What’s your background?Before I started Pendo in 2013, I had a long career building companies and products. I had a passion for programming and entrepreneurship from the beginning. I was writing code as an intern at a large commercial bank when I was 14, and in my senior year at Carnegie Mellon, I became a part-time student in order to start a software company with a friend. It was called Cerebellum Software, and we raised more than $20 million in venture capital. I went on to found another company called 6th Sense Analytics which was acquired by Rally, where I became VP of product and contributed to a successful IPO.At Rally, I experienced the need that would (...)

#founder-interview #founders #davis-baer #founder-stories #founder-advice

Founder Interviews: Jim Rose of CircleCI
▻https://hackernoon.com/founder-interviews-jim-rose-of-circleci-edd76bea3c65?source=rss----3a814

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Six-time founder and CircleCI CEO Jim Rose is on a mission to give everyone the ability to build and deliver software at the speed of imagination.Davis Baer: What’s your background, and what are you working on?Jim Rose: I’m originally from Wisconsin and went to Duke for undergrad. After I graduated, I spent some time in China as an analyst working on the copy machine supply chain. There are lots of stories there, but we’ll save those for another time. After a while I came back to the States and spent some time working in Seattle, and then for WPP. It was just at the start of the first tech boom, and I started a company called MobShop. We wanted to give consumers the ability to get discounts when they bought goods at volume — this was way before Groupon, who had a similar idea and ended up (...)

#davis-baer #founder-interview #founder-stories #founder-advice #founders

Founder Interviews : Kyle Killion of Suiteness
▻https://hackernoon.com/founder-interviews-kyle-killion-of-suiteness-6c8887327d88?source=rss----

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Kyle and the Suiteness team have built a platform that allows larger groups to book connecting hotel rooms and hotel suites that aren’t normally listed on booking websites.What’s your background, and what are you working on?I’m Kyle Killion, founder of Suiteness, a travel company with a simple goal: increase the number of vacations people take by making them better, more affordable, and easier to plan. I have built products at companies including Apartment List, Coupa, Yelp, and Apple, and I have founded companies such as maccontrol.Suiteness started out as Flights With Friends, an app I built for real-time trip planning and collaboration between travelers. We eventually pivoted to the current version of Suiteness when we learned that travel is actually a dictatorship, not a democracy (...)

#davis-baer #founders #founder-advice #ycombinator #founder-stories

Founder Interviews : Oege De Moor of Semmle
▻https://hackernoon.com/founder-interviews-oege-de-moor-of-semmle-dc72e7888bd6?source=rss----3a8

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A former Oxford professor and author of several books on coding, Oege de Moor is on a mission to secure the world’s software as co-founder and CEO of Semmle.Davis Baer: What’s your background, and what are you working on?Oege de Moor: At Semmle, we are focused on securing software, together. We’re creating technology to scale security expertise through automation and provide a platform for sharing community-driven security. The biggest security challenge we face in software development today is a chronic shortage of security experts — even leading technology companies struggle to staff one security engineer for every 100 software engineers. Our products help automate variant analysis — the process of finding all instances of a coding mistake that caused a security incident — allowing (...)

#founders #davis-baer #startup #founder-advice #founder-stories

Founder Interviews: Liana Herrera of Bottomless
▻https://hackernoon.com/founder-interviews-liana-herrera-of-bottomless-5fac1f9caaf7?source=rss--

Liana and her co-founder/husband Michael have created the first coffee delivery service that uses a smart scale to figure out the perfect time to automatically reorder.What’s your background, and what are you working on?I’m Liana Herrera, co-founder of Bottomless, a coffee delivery service that uses a smart scale to figure out the perfect time to ship a re-order.It’s simple, customers get the scale when they buy the first bag of coffee. Coffee is roasted to order and shipped directly to customers. Since the coffee never sits on a shelf, it’s much fresher than can be bought anywhere else.We founded Bottomless in 2016 and bootstrapped it until 2018. We’ve hand-built hundreds of prototypes. On the coffee front, we’ve partnered with 15 of the top roasters on the West Coast. Some of the more well (...)

#davis-baer #founder-advice #founders #founder-stories #hardware

Founder Interviews : Viral Thakker of eBZaar
▻https://hackernoon.com/founder-interviews-viral-thakker-of-ebzaar-8f6f39f3d57d?source=rss----3a

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Viral and the eBZaar team are on a mission to give Indian brick and mortar retail stores with no digital presence an easy way to sell goods online.Davis Baer: What’s your name, and what are you working on?My name is Viral Thakker, and I run eBZaar.com as the CEO & Co-founder. At eBZaar, we are on a mission to bring Indian brick & mortar retail stores online by giving them a zero cost digital store, with the idea that technology should be easily accessible to this segment of the society. We want to enable the local retailer to sell more and sell better by better-leveraging technology and the power of digital; without having to worry about creating websites, mobile apps, hosting, cataloging or digital marketing. On the demand side, we aim to make the customers’ favorite stores (...)

#founder-advice #davis-baer #startup #founders #founder-stories

Founder Interviews: Ryder Pearce of YoGov
▻https://hackernoon.com/founder-interviews-ryder-pearce-of-yogov-2d8e50790b4e?source=rss----3a81

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After a number of frustrating experiences at the DMV in 2016, Ryder saw an opportunity to provide better DMV information and faster appointments online. By February 2018, YoGov was doing $40K in monthly revenue without yet having written a single line of code.Davis Baer: What’s your background, and what are you working on?I’m Ryder, the founder of YoGov. I started my career in urban planning, working for the cities of New York and Vancouver, before founding my first venture-backed #startup, SherpaShare, which offers financial management tools to rideshare drivers and other gig workers.At YoGov, we’re building the consumer layer on top of government services. Our initial target is the DMV (the Department of Motor Vehicles, for those of you outside the US), where we’ve proven that even the (...)

#founders #founder-advice #founder-stories #davis-baer

Founder Interviews: Ayush Jaiswal of Pesto
▻https://hackernoon.com/founder-interviews-ayush-jaiswal-of-pesto-bd3144f42e9a?source=rss----3a8

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After seeing how little the average software engineer in India makes compared to their peers in the US, Ayush created a bootcamp that teaches coders how to be effective remote employees, then helps them get full-time remote jobs at US tech companies, making up to 10x more than they were making before.Davis Baer: What’s your background, and what are you working on?I’m Ayush from New Delhi. I dropped out of college after a year to work fulltime on the startup I wanted to build. I was disappointed looking at the broken education system. I decided to self-study.A couple of years ago, I found venture capital very cool. I made a TV show (Shark tank of India) as an associate producer and invested in a few startups as a scout for another firm- Project Guerrilla.I’ve been working on different (...)

#davis-baer #remote-working #founder-stories #founder-advice #founders

Founder Interviews: Mikko Kenttälä of SensorFu
▻https://hackernoon.com/founder-interviews-mikko-kentt%C3%A4l%C3%A4-of-sensorfu-4c384b5df87d?sou

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Learn how Mikko and the SensorFu team built a product that detects network and system leaks for mission-critical production networks.Davis Baer: What’s your background, and what are you working on?My name is Mikko Kenttälä and I am CEO and one of the SensorFu’s #founders. SensorFu builds a cybersecurity product that continuously seeks new network and system leak paths and alerts IT-ops when they are found. These leaks can be a result of human error or malice and they may violate #security policies or contractual obligations. Making sure that planned network segmentation or containment holds is crucial for keeping things safe and private.I have always loved to hack devices and software to find out how they work, learn new tricks and build something new. I have been curious about what makes (...)

#founder-advice #founder-stories #davis-baer

Founder Interviews: Ted O’Neill of Social Strata and Narrative
▻https://hackernoon.com/founder-interviews-ted-oneill-of-social-strata-and-narrative-3e5f87dca63

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After serving as CEO of a successful software company for over 20 years, Ted has recently raised $5 million via token sales to create a user-generated content network where the members rule and are rewarded.Davis Baer: What’s your background, and what are you working on?My name is Ted O’Neill and I am currently CEO of Social Strata and co-CEO of Narrative.I started Social Strata over 20 years ago when I created a message board application called the Ultimate Bulletin Board (“UBB”). It was the most popular way for sites in the mid to late 1990s to build communities. We transitioned from a downloadable software product to a SaaS solution over the years and our current community platform is called Hoop.la. Social Strata is unusual in that we bootstrapped from Day One and have never taken any (...)

#token-sale #founder-stories #founder-advice #davis-baer #startup

Founder Interviews: Kyrylo Taranenko of Y-Productive
▻https://hackernoon.com/founder-interviews-kyrylo-taranenko-of-y-productive-f3c103d0ce7b?source=

For anyone who has ever found themselves watching too many YouTube videos, or endlessly scrolling through Twitter, Y-Productive might be for you.Davis Baer: What’s your background, and what are you building now?Kyrylo Taranenko: I joined the Y-Productive team at the early stage as the “all-the-things-marketing” guy. We quickly found the common language and I ended up jumping on board as the co-founder. Best thing that happened in my life — besides having my son born, of course :DBefore Y-Productive, I worked at TemplateMonster — they make website templates in a large volume. I worked in the affiliate marketing team: collaborated with bloggers, managed giveaways, promoted special projects like the Certification Center. Thanks to connecting with people who make their living off writing valuable (...)

#startup #founder-advice #founder-stories #interview #productivity

Founder Interviews: Justin Jackson of Transistor.fm
▻https://hackernoon.com/founder-interviews-justin-jackson-of-transistor-fm-1e9003e27cd?source=rs

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Justin Jackson does a lot of things. He is a founder, author, blogger, podcaster, dad, community builder, and is now working on Transistor.fm.Davis Baer: What’s your background, and what are you working on?Justin Jackson: Professionally, I’ve been working with SaaS companies since 2008. I was the Product Manager at Sprintly and Mailout, and then I did consulting for a while. In 2015 I wrote Marketing for Developers, and it started selling really well. So in 2016 I quit consulting to start MegaMaker.co — online training for indie entrepreneurs.Now, I’m working on Transistor.fm and Spots.fm with my buddy Jon Buda.What motivated you to get started with TransistorFM?Last year I got depressed. For the first time in my life, I was dealing with intense mental health issues. There were weeks where I (...)

#podcasting #founder-stories #founder-advice #podcasting-tips #podcast

Founder Interviews: Emmanuel Straschnov of Bubble
▻https://hackernoon.com/founder-interviews-emmanuel-straschnov-of-bubble-a794f542c41e?source=rss

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Please welcome Emmanuel Straschnov, co-founder of Bubble, the easiest way to build software with no code.Davis Baer: What’s your background, and what are you working on?Emmanuel Straschnov: I’m originally from France, and I worked for a few years before getting into technology. I studied math in France before moving to China to work as a management consultant for a few years. I came to the US for business school and met Josh Haas through mutual friends. He had started a company a few months before (it wasn’t called Bubble at the time) and was looking for a co-founder. We actually decided to partner after our first coffee!Bubble is a visual programming platform that lets users build web apps without typing any code, and then let’s them run their app on Bubble’s cloud platform without having (...)

#founder-advice #startup #founders #founder-stories #no-code

Founder Interviews: Steve Newman of Scalyr
▻https://hackernoon.com/founder-interviews-steve-newman-of-scalyr-67ac861aac63?source=rss----3a8

Please welcome Steve Newman, the man who created Google Docs, and the current founder of Scalyr.Davis Baer: What’s your background, and what are you working on?Steve Newman: I’m an engineer and, I guess I’m supposed to say “serial entrepreneur” but I’m more comfortable with “startup guy.” I’ve co-founded six startups, including Writely, “The Web Word Processor.” We were acquired by Google in 2006 and relaunched as Google Docs. The original motivation for Writely was to help people collaborate to create a document — or as we thought about it, “solving the problem of having to email Word files back and forth.” And of course people do use Google Docs to collaborate, but a lot of the value turned out to be in having access from anywhere.Currently I’m CEO of Scalyr, where we’re attacking the problem of (...)

#founder-stories #startup #founders #google-docs #founder-advice

Founder Interviews: Justin Powell of Miniature Mail
▻https://hackernoon.com/founder-interviews-justin-powell-of-miniature-mail-6fe890245a99?source=r

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Miniature Mail is a service that allows you to send tiny letters to friends and family. It has received over 1000 upvotes on Product Hunt.Davis Baer: What’s your background, and what are you working on?Justin Powell: I am a self-taught programmer who’s dabbled in a lot of different languages and markets over the years. I’ve done web development, Android apps, hybrid apps, and more. My current day job is building project management software for power utility companies. I started Miniature Mail on the side, and somehow find time to fulfill orders and make enhancements to it around my full-time schedule.What motivated you to get started with Miniature Mail?My wife was recovering from a recent surgery and wasn’t having a great day, so I decided to handcraft a little letter to cheer her up. I’d (...)

#startup #founders #product-hunt #founder-advice #founder-stories

Simple Advice for a Technical Founder
▻https://hackernoon.com/simple-advice-for-a-technical-founder-1723f27e4a72?source=rss----3a8144e

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Please welcome our weekly sponsor GetStream.io to Hacker Noon! Stream builds scalable news feeds & activity streams in a few hours instead of weeks and is based in Boulder & Amsterdam. Today, we’re going to catch up with their CEO, Thierry Schellenbach about what advice he shares with other technical founders.For previously sections of this interview, please visit:“How Stream Started Building News Feeds”“What to Learn From Facebook’s News Feed Struggles, and Who Will Power the News Feed of the Future?”“Market By Building on Your API”“Comparing the Amsterdam and Boulder #startup Scenes”David: Is there any advice that you want to pass on about how you think technical startup founders should approach their business differently, or more of your own philosophy in that area? What are some of the (...)

#founder-advice #simple-founder-advice #weekly-sponsor #technical-founder