#founder-stories

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

10 Life Lessons from 8 Startups
▻https://hackernoon.com/10-life-lessons-from-8-startups-4ab261b784d3?source=rss----3a8144eabfe3-

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Recently, I have decided to become a founder again. After 2.5 years of being employed/contractor, I just felt it was about time to venture out again.There were a couple triggers for that decision, which I will tackle in the following few paragraphs.Firstly, I am grateful for all the people who have put their trust in me in the past 2.5 years and I can honestly say that I gave it my very best every single time. But to be completely transparent, I think a part of me knew that this part of my career was always going to be temporary. I always wanted to be a founder, since I was a kid. It is something deeply embedded in how I think about life. And going forward, I can’t really see myself doing anything else than building companies.Secondly, around December my personal life started falling (...)

#founder-stories #startup-lessons #hackernoon-top-story #venture-capital #startup

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: Robert Vis of MessageBird
▻https://hackernoon.com/founder-interviews-robert-vis-of-messagebird-afd34c7dc761?source=rss----

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Robert Vis is the found of MessageBird, which has raised $60 million Series A, and currently work with customers like Uber, Telegram, and Domino’s. He was originally interviewed in the Founder Interview series here.This interview is specifically about MessageBird’s Y Combinator experience, with advice for others considering applying to YC.Let’s start off with the two questions I’m sure you get all the time. Is Y Combinator worth it? And, if you had to do it all over again, would you?Without a doubt, yes and yes. YC is the only school you never want to leave. I’d go back in a heartbeat.When it comes to the #founders that are accepted to the program, does YC have a “type”?I get this question a lot, and usually, when people ask it, they tend to have two “types” in mind. One is the 24-year-old in a (...)

#startup #davis-baer #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

#zoho Mafia: 16 Companies Founded by Former Zoho Employees
▻https://hackernoon.com/zoho-mafia-16-companies-founded-by-former-zoho-employees-eafac85ff2ea?so

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Zoho MafiaThis could be the first time you are coming across the term Zoho Mafia, but it’s an entity that creates more than 6,000 jobs in Chennai alone and earns more than $500 million in revenue.In general the new “Information age” is booming, but creating fewer jobs than what “Industrial revolution age” did. So when anyone creates new, high-skill, high-value jobs; that is extremely valuable to overall economic prosperity.From my point of view, Zoho might be a vital company for India, not only does it create more than 10,000 jobs (both directly and indirectly), it also tends to lead and inspire people to create their own companies.In fact, Zoho has created more than 8,000 jobs, indirectly.Why do I call it Zoho Mafia?You may be heard about #paypal-mafia, A group of former PayPal employees and (...)

#startup #indian-startups #founder-stories

Founder Interviews: David Kofoed Wind of Peergrade
▻https://hackernoon.com/founder-interviews-david-kofoed-wind-of-peergrade-de9dff229197?source=rs

Learn how David and the Peergrade team found their first customers by manually reaching out to potential users one by one, eventually scaling their peer grading tool to over 7000 institutions.Davis Baer: What’s your background, and what are you working on?My name is David Kofoed Wind. I have a degree in applied math and computer science from The Technical University of Denmark and a Ph.D. in machine learning and learning analytics from the same place. I taught myself programming at a very young age in order to build games and worked as a software developer up through high school.Peergrade is an educational tool that increases critical thinking and collaborative learning through peer to peer feedback. Teachers set up peer feedback sessions on Peergrade, students submit their work and then (...)

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

Founder Interviews: Asher King Abramson of Bell Curve
▻https://hackernoon.com/founder-interviews-asher-king-abramson-of-bell-curve-1f606647164?source=

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After building 20 side projects that nobody bought, Asher decided to learn the principles of growing a business, and now trains Y Combinator startups how to grow.Davis Baer: What’s your background, and what are you working on?I’m Asher King Abramson, partner at Bell Curve and head of its growth marketing training arm. We teach #founders and new marketers how to get more paying customers.Multiple startups have raised their next round directly because of us, and Y Combinator brings us in to lead sessions on growth.As far as background: before Bell Curve, I worked a software engineer for a few years. Then, I joined the leadership team at App Academy as we grew from 20 students to 80 students per cohort.As far as Bell Curve itself: we’ve been bootstrapped and profitable since day one. We’re at (...)

#davis-baer #founder-stories #startup #ycombinator

Founder Interviews: Rob Walling of MicroConf, Drip, and TinySeed
▻https://hackernoon.com/founder-interviews-rob-walling-of-microconf-drip-and-tinyseed-974469d574

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Rob Walling has bootstrapped multiple startups to exit, most recently Drip. These days he’s working on TinySeed, the first #startup accelerator designed for bootstrappers. He also founded and runs MicroConf and Startups for the Rest of Us.Davis Baer: What’s your background, and what are you working on?I’m a software developer by training and feel like I officially became an entrepreneur in 2005 when I acquired a software product that was in its alpha release. Since then I’ve started or acquired a few dozen products, most notably SaaS applications HitTail and Drip, both of which were acquired.In addition I’ve been spearheading a community for bootstrapped #founders through my essays, podcast, conference, and now TinySeed, the first startup accelerator designed for folks who would traditionally (...)

#founder-stories #bootstrap #davis-baer

Jimmy Wales of #wikipedia
▻https://hackernoon.com/jimmy-wales-of-wikipedia-2335c43f1204?source=rss----3a8144eabfe3---4

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Jimmy Wales, founder of Wikipedia, tells us why his initial attempt at creating an online encyclopedia failed and what he learned from that venture which allowed Wikipedia to succeed. Along the way, he also shares with us his approach to building a successful business in today’s digital world.This #interview was originally written by Justin Runyon from ProwritingserviceLessons Learned from NupediaWales’ first attempt at building a free online encyclopedia started with the creation of Nupedia in March 2000. Inspired by the growth of the free software movement and the new models of collaboration that were sprouting online, Wales set about working on a project he felt would be greatly beneficial to the world — something others would be passionate about and would be willing to give up their time (...)

#jimmy-wales #founder-stories

Founder Interviews : Victoria Repa of BetterMe
▻https://hackernoon.com/founder-interviews-victoria-repa-of-betterme-9dbea654b264?source=rss----

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Learn how Victoria and the BetterMe team leveraged social media to go from 0 to 15 million downloads of their health & #fitness apps in under 2 years.Davis Baer: What’s your background, and what are you working on?I’m the CEO of BetterMe, an ecosystem of health and fitness apps I co-founded in 2016 which currently offers guided workouts, meditation, yoga and walking.Our apps are used by millions of people who try to lead healthier and happier lives, and we specifically focus on “entry-level users,” helping them ease into the fitness world.We are already one of the largest and fastest-growing health & fitness app publishers in the US, and are planning to take the top spot within the next three years. Our goal is to have a family of apps that would alleviate all major pains for anyone (...)

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

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 : Sid Sijbrandij of #gitlab
▻https://hackernoon.com/founder-interviews-sid-sijbrandij-of-gitlab-862c391a3929?source=rss----3

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Learn how Sid Sijbrandij and the GitLab team went from launching on HackerNews to a $100M Series D in 6 years.Davis Baer: What’s your background, and what are you working on?I’m originally from the Netherlands but have lived in San Francisco for nearly four years now. I’ve been involved in a number of different ventures — from selling programmable infrared receivers to starting a recreational submarine company — but seeing the first Ruby code in 2007 changed everything. I loved it so much I learned to program and made it my profession.This was a natural stepping stone to GitLab, which I co-founded. The first single application for the entire DevOps lifecycle, GitLab is built on open source, leveraging the community contributions of thousands of developers and millions of users to continuously (...)

#startup #founders #davis-baer #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: John Lee Dumas of #entrepreneur On Fire
▻https://hackernoon.com/founder-interviews-john-lee-dumas-of-entrepreneur-on-fire-9edcf0d35ad4?s

JLD is the founder of the award winning #podcast Entrepreneur On Fire, which has done over $13 million in revenue since launching in 2012.Davis Baer: What’s your background, and what are you working on?​John Lee Dumas: I have my entire story on my About page :) ▻https://www.eofire.com/aboutThe short version is that I graduated college and was commissioned as an officer in the US Army. I spent 18 months in Iraq during my 4 years active, then spent 4 years in the reserves. After that I tried Corporate Finance, tried Law School — but wasn’t happy. I knew there had to be more out there.I started listening to podcasts and fell in love with the free, actionable, inspiring content they provided — especially the ones that interviewed entrepreneurs who had created their own lifestyle freedom through doing (...)

#podcasting-tips #podcasting #founder-stories

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