Ben Jabbawy is the Founder of Privy, a suite of tools designed to help marketers and ecommerce businesses increase their marketing conversions. Ben has a background in Industrial Engineering, but moved into a few technical roles, before really diving into startups. Ben joins us to share his story, how he got into startups, his advice for raising capital, how Privy has approached growing to over 250,000 users, and much more.
Kimberly Kalb is the Head of Marketing & Growth at Houseparty, an app that takes the group chat to the next level with group video chat. Kimberly has a background in entertainment media technology, having worked with brands like NBCUniversal, HBO, Tumblr Entertainment and now Houseparty. There her role has really grown from partnership, to leading more aspects of growth, marketing and customer support. The Houseparty brand and some of their early learning, have really catapulted their app into...more
Josh Brewer is the Co-founder & CEO of Abstract, a platform for modern design teams to work together. Josh’s career in design started off with teaching - but quickly lead to him diving into the emerging web and mobile product design industry. He eventually joined Twitter where he became a Principal Designer. Josh joins us to share his story, how he got into design, what it’s was like working as a Principal Designer at Twitter, what led him to starting Abstract, his advice on raising funding, h...more
Ben Pines is the CMO of Elementor, the most advanced Drag & Drop page builder for WordPress. Design beautiful professional websites faster and without code. Ben shares what it’s been like building an open source, visual, drag & drop theme editor for Wordpress - and the challenges in scaling it to over 800,000 active installs worldwide - all in less than 2 years! Ben joins us to share his story, how he got into startups, what it’s been like growing Elementor from 0 to over 800,000 active instal...more
Waqas Ali is the co-founder of Atoms, one & only shoe for every day. Waqas started building a startups and businesses after discovering the internet and realizing you could sell products online. While there were a ton of insurmountable challenges, Waqas and his co founder Sidra persevered - launching a custom dress shoe company called Markhor. They eventually made it to the US, ran a massive kickstarter campaign and got into YC on their second attempt. Today, Waqas & Sidra are at it again, ...more
Vibhu Norby is the co-founder & CEO of B8ta, a new store designed for discovering, trying, & buying the latest tech products, as well as a new platform called “Built by B8ta”, which aims to power the future of physical retail experiences. Vibhu moved to silicon valley after college to join a startup. He was eventually fired from the job, but then joined another startup which was acquired by MySpace. From there, Vibhu joined YC with a social network startup of his own, raised some money, and w...more
Sam Mallikarjunan is an Executive Strategist at HubSpot. He hustled his way into the organization with a landing page and ads - and ended up leading the Experimental Marketing team, the Ecommerce Marketing team, the South American internationalization team, Hubspot Labs and more. Today, Sam also teaches Digital Marketing at the Harvard Division of Continuing Education and the University of South Florida's Muma College of Business. He is also the co-author of the book "How To Sell Better Than A...more
Asher Hunt is the Founder & CEO of Overnight, a platform to book homes from people you trust. Asher comes from a visual arts and music background, but got into tech through product design and is driven by a passion for learning. He was Product Designer at Chill, a viral video sharing platform, and then he launched a product of his own, Look.io, which was later acquired by LivePerson. Now he’s back at it as a founder, building a friend and community driven home-sharing platform called Overni...more
Sonja Jacob is the Content Strategy Team Lead at Drift. Sonja kicked off her career in marketing by blogging years back. She quickly realized the power of content and decided to launch her own business as a copywriter and marketing freelancer. Over the years, Sonja helped create or lead marketing and content efforts for companies like Hubspot, KISSmetrics, Zenefits, and DocSend - and now heads up Content Strategy at Drift. Sonja joins us to share her story, how she got into startups, her appr...more
Mari Sheibley is a Product Designer at Instagram. Mari has a background in fine arts, before she transition into graphic design. When she first moved to New York, she took a bunch of odd jobs to make ends meet. She eventually met Denis Crowley and Naveen, who were working on an idea that would become Foursquare. Mari was super passionate about the idea and started by designing all the badges for the app. Once Foursquare raised money, Mari became their first designer. Over several years there...more
Hannah Donovan is the CEO & Co-founder of Trash, a new startup that’s currently building a predictive video editing platform for creators. Hannah’s passion for media and design in all forms goes back to her early childhood. She eventually moved to New York before using the remainder of her savings to fly to the UK to interview with Last.fm where she was the first designer and woman hired on the team. Following the $280M acquisition of Last.fm by CBS, Hannah moved back to New York to push her ...more
Matt Hollingshead is the CEO of Hifyre, a web & mobile app developer based on Hamilton, Canada. Back in 1999, Matt and some friends launched their first agency called factor[e] which ended up generation $1M in sales within its first 24 months. Today Matt is the CEO of Hifyre, a web & mobile development shop that’s working with Fortune 500 and fast growth startups. Matt joins us to share his story, how he got into business, what it was like building various consumer agencies over the last 19 ...more
Casey Winters is the Growth Advisor in Residence at Greylock Partners. Casey got interested in growth via his background in marketing and his holistic approach to helping Apartments.com achieve quick growth from 2005-2008. He then joined GrubHub around the 15 person mark, and helped the company scale from 40,000 users up to 3M when it went public. In 2013, Pinterest reached out and Casey ended up joining the team to help lead growth and later overcome challenges associated with international ...more
Joei Chan is a Content Marketing Manager, at Mention, a platform for real-time media monitoring. Joei is originally from Hong Kong and moved to Paris, France for a summer to study French. She ended up staying and building a career as a Content Marketer. After starting her career in the agency world, Joei moved over to the startup side with Mention. She joined the team when they were about 30 people and beginning to transition from a small business to the enterprise market. Joei joins us to sh...more
Gessica Bicego is the Head of Performance Marketing, at Blinkist, the platform for bite-sized insights in audio or text. Gessica is originally from Italy and has a background in computer science, as well as a passion for marketing. She then wanted to accelerate her career and moved to Berlin to join Kayak as a Programmatic Marketing Manager. Over the last few years, Gessica has been building a Performance Marketing team at Blinkist, an app that enables busy people to listen or read bite-sized...more
Jordan Scheltgen is the co-founder and Managing Partner at CaveSocial, a marketing agency that he started during University and that now spans across 3 major North American cities. Originally from Surrey, BC, Jordan moved to Toronto for school and football. Through that experience, Jordan started a blog which would later become Cave Social the agency. Jordan joins us to share his story, how he got into business and marketing, he shares his keys to a great story, as well as how brands should ap...more
Jonah Lupton is the founder of SoundGuard, the world’s first sound proof paint. Jonah has spent the better part of the last 10 years launching several brands across completely different industries. From social media software, to non-profit funding platforms, to white labeled supplement companies, to industrial manufacturing with SoundGuard, Jonah has prototyped, built, and launched ideas he’s been passionate about and learnt a ton along the way. Jonah joins us to share his story, how he got ...more
Jess Brown is the Director of UX at Vice Media. She’s spent the past couple of years building the team that’s lead the company’s efforts on re-designing Vice’s brand from the ground up - across the web and all mobile properties. But before joining Vice, Jess was based in San Francisco working on a fashion startup of her own called Threadflip, she was introduced to the team at Rent The Runway in New York. Jess ended up joining the team there for several years. There she helped create and deliv...more
Tom Levesque is the Co-founder at Rey.ai. Tom is a Software Developer turned Product Manager. After graduating and working with a local startup in Waterloo, Tom decided to move to the valley where he ended up joining Wildfire before it was acquired by Google. Before he’d even graduated as a Software Developer from the University of Waterloo, Tom had found an interest in Product Management. He then joined a series of startups in Canada, Silicon Valley and the UK, including Wildfire (which was ...more
Oscar Falmer is the Founder and developer behind the world’s first augmented reality Twitter client - TweetReality. Oscar is only a few months away from graduating from the University of Eastern-Paris Marne-La-Vallee with a degree in Computer Science and Mathematics. TweetReality is the 7th app he’s released to the Apple App Store - and it’s the biggest challenge he’s undertaken. TweetReality has gotten over 20,000 downloads, 500+ upvotes on Product Hunt, been featured in over 150+ articles in...more
Amir Shevat is the Director of Developer Relations at Slack. Amir originally fell into Developer Relations by mistake, volunteering to work with a community of developers early on in his career. He’s since led Developer Groups at Microsoft & Google for many years before joining Slack to focus on driving growth around the Slack Developers Platform. Amir is particularly passionate about bots. He joined Slack before bots were as popular as they are today and has seen many of them launch on that p...more
Brian Balfour is the Founder & CEO of Reforge, an organization that offers selective growth-focused programs for experienced professionals in marketing, product, data, and engineering. Brian was previously the VP of Growth at Hubspot and an EIR at Trinity Ventures before that. Brian has raised over $30M in venture funding for various startups he launched or joined. Brian also has extensive experience building growth teams and strategies. He’s one of the leading experts on user acquisition and r...more
Lydia White is a Design Lead at Beme, an independent, and wildly ambitious technology+media company bringing a wider range of perspectives to the news that was cofounded by YouTuber Casey Neistat & Matt Hackett. Lydia started her design career with an academic background in fine art and photography, but growing up she had the chance to learn a lot from her dad. Later Lydia started her career as a developer at agencies, before moving into a dedicated design role. After moving to the East coast ...more
Michael Karnjanaprakorn is the Co-founder and Executive Chairman at Skillshare. Michael has always had a passion and love for education and learning. His career in tech began as an outsider looking to prove himself. And so he ended up taking a pay cut to move to New York and join Scott Belsky at Behance with two things in mind: do whatever the team needed and learn as much as he could. While product/market fit was already found at Behance, Michael later dove into product at Hot Potato, both d...more
Stephanie Engle is a Product Designer at Cruise. Before joining the team there, Stephanie had a background in social products, starting her career off as an intern for the anonymous messaging app Secret, before joining Facebook to work on the Profile, and later joining the VR team. Stephanie recently joined Cruise as a Product Designer, helping to create and design solutions around the emerging self-driving cars industry. Stephanie joins us to share her story, how she got into design, how she...more
Jason Stoff is a Principal Digital Product Designer at Starbucks. Before joining the team at Starbucks, Jason had built a career as an Art Director and Senior Designer with various agencies. One day he shared a rebound of a Starbucks logo design on Dribbble, that eventually caught the eye of Starbucks. One year later, he had the chance to interview for a design role and moved his family across the country to join the team in Seattle. He and his team have helped to create international design...more
Andy Carvell is the author of the Mobile Growth Stack and a Partner at Phiture, a mobile growth consultancy. Andy began his career as a mobile game developer with Nokia, where he created several games like Space Impact which was preloaded onto 150M+ devices. He then later led several different teams at Soundcloud as they transitioned from a web only application to mobile platforms. While leading growth and retention, Andy developed the Mobile Growth Stack as a framework for thinking about al...more
Jordan Kretchmer is the Founder & CEO of LiveFyre, which was acquired by Adobe in 2016, where he is now a Senior Director continuing to scale the Livefyre solution within the Adobe Marketing Cloud. Before starting Livefyre, Jordan worked for a few agencies as a Creative Director. He then joined Current.TV - a media platform backed by Al Gore - and saw the coming rise of user generated content. In 2009, he left Current to start LiveFyre. As a designer, Jordan created highly realistic mockups o...more
Leah Culver is the co-founder & CTO of Breaker - the best app for listening to podcasts. Leah has been building startups and products for over 10 years. She helped launch an early version and competitor to Twitter called Pownce with Kevin Rose and Daniel Burka in 2007. In 2011, she was working on a B2B chatting and instant messaging application that was accepted into Y Combinator, and has been also part of companies like Sincerely and Dropbox. Since 2016, she’s been focused on building Break...more
Ajay Yadav is the Founder & CEO of Roomie, the leading marketplace for shared housing and apartments. Ajay has built several companies before Roomi, which was bootstrapped for the first 2 years and has raised over $6M to date. Ajay shares how he approached building the platform in the early days, from a Tumblr + Google forms MVP to building the first version of the mobile app himself. Today, Roomi has acquired a few other startups in the same industry and has a remote team of over 40 people...more
Paul Canetti is the Founder & CEO of MAZ, a platform that empowers leaders in media to become pioneers in OTT and mobile technology. Growing up, Paul was exposed to design and technology through his father’s work and hobbies. Paul taught himself digital design and although he studied philosophy in college, he continued to maintain an interest in technology. After working in corporate environments and then consulting, Paul started building websites and then iPhone apps with a high school friend...more
Rei Wang is the Director of First Round Capital’s Dorm Room Fund, the largest student-run venture firm in the nation. They’ve invested in over 150 startups, who’ve gone on to raise more than $300 million from investors like: Andreessen Horowitz, Google Ventures, Sequoia Capital, and Y Combinator. Before joining First Round Capital, Rei help build products and community as a Product Manager and Global Community Lead at General Assembly. Rei joins us to share her story, how she got into startu...more
Kevin Thau, a General Partner at Spark Capital, focusing on early-stage investments in companies like Lola, Medium, Haven, and Aura. Kevin has spent over 20 years building startups that defined new markets in graphical computing, messaging, mobile technology and social media. Before Spark, Kevin spent two decades building startups like Twitter, where he was the Director of Mobile Products, as well as VP of Business and Corporate Development. He was also then the COO of Jelly Industries, a sea...more
Jesse Middleton is a startup founder and one of the early executives at WeWork who tackled a bunch of growth and operations challenges before launching WeWork Labs, their own global startup incubator, investment fund, business and digital product development lab. But before jumping into the world of venture capital, Jesse launched and sold a few companies of his own and then spent 5 years as part of the early team at WeWork, growing the company from a few buildings to a worldwide network and pi...more
Giuseppe Stuto is the co-founder and CEO of Fam, a group video chat app for iMessage that quickly grew to over 1 million users in just 10 days! But Fam almost didn’t happen. Fam is a pivot off another social app that Giuseppe and his team built - SmackHigh - which started off as a bit of a joke for high school students to exchange smack talk between sports teams. But it quickly showed some promise and Giuseppe and his team began to iterate. Houseparty and Facebook live had just launched, bu...more
Drew Strojny is a retired NFL player turned tech entrepreneur. He is the founder of Memberful, super easy to use membership software. Growing up, Drew had a passion for tech and computers. During the NFL offseason, Drew continued to teach himself how to code and build websites. When his career in professional sports came to an end after a few years, Drew decided to launch his own company. But the original model never succeeded. After several years of building Wordpress sites and selling premi...more
John Doherty is the founder of Credo, a platform for connecting great businesses with the best vetted digital marketing consultants and agencies. He took a side project that started as a spreadsheet from a $50 dollar referral commission to a SaaS marketplace that has tripled its annual run rate. Before diving into a startup of his own, John worked at Distilled in NYC, and later joined Zillow. There he focused on growing Hotpads into their #2 brand. Starting off with a team of 1 - John quickly ...more
Mike Williams is the founder of Thinkbox, a startup studio in Santa Monica, California, and the company that’s behind several successful startups including StudioTime and Yoroomie - an app which was built in less than 30 days and sold in less than 6 months, after getting a ton of press for being listed on eBay. While in high school, Mike was a pretty good wrestler. But he knew his sport had limits. So he decided to pursue his passion for flying instead. While in college, he was exposed to the...more
Katie Zhu is an Engineer turned Product Manager at Medium. Medium is a social publishing platform that allows anyone to share ideas and perspectives that matter. Medium now reaches over 30M readers a month, has explored new formats like Series, audio posts, and more. After internships with both NPR and the New York Times, Katie decided to make a big decision and join Medium over other tech companies. At Medium, Katie’s had a chance to work on several parts of the platform and continue to help...more
Hunter Walk is a partner at Homebrew Ventures, a seed stage venture fund. Over a decade ago, while Hunter was a Product Manager at Google, working on the newly acquired YouTube platform, Apple had approached them before Steve Jobs had even announced the world's first iPhone. There was no public App Store at that time and no third party apps. Apple wanted to have complete control over the experience and built the first video app for the iPhone that would pull YouTube content. It was a risky mo...more
Kelly Nyland is the Director of Marketing for Spectacles - a pair of video-recording sunglasses created by Snap Inc. the parent company of the massively popular disappearing photo app, Snapchat. While this is the first hardware product from Snap Inc., Kelly’s personal history into architecting massive marketing campaigns for innovative & emerging consumer hardware products goes way back. Kelly worked with Parrot as well as Sphero, helping the latter company go global through a partnership with...more
Adii Pienaar is the Founder of Conversio, an all-in one marketing dashboard. Adii is based in Cape Town, South Africa and previously co-founded WooThemes - an e-commerce platform for Wordpress - which bootstrapped their way to over 150,000 customers. Today, Adii is continuing to help e-commerce entrepreneurs worldwide build stronger businesses through his latest startup Conversio, an all-in one marketing dashboard that helps you sell more. Adii joins us to share his story, how he started his...more
Tom Emrich is a Partner at Super Ventures and a co-producer of Augmented World Expo. After the release of the first feature phone, Tom began to see how immersive new technologies would transform the world around us and began building his career in the space. He’s consulted on how these technologies can improve the workplace & covered the industry for media publications like CanadaAM, ReadWrite, Betakit and more. Tom has also created and helped to foster communities around emerging technologi...more
Jeff Morris Jr. is the Director of Product Management & Revenue at Tinder. Jeff got into tech after seeing a tweet late one night for a position with Zaarly. The next day, he had to move from California to Kansas City, Missouri - if he wanted the job. Jeff quickly made a name for himself and became one of the first few city managers. Following his time building the marketplace, Jeff began consulting, before working on several of his own projects - like Slack Chats, a directory of popular slac...more
Huda Idrees is the founder and CEO of Dot Health, a platform that enables secure and easy access to your personal health data. Huda began her career as a developer and designer by building websites as a teenager. She then attended the University of Toronto and studied Industrial Engineering before diving into startups. Huda has been a part of several successful Canadian consumer tech startups, including Wattpad where she joined as one of the first employees and really dove into product design. ...more
Mubashar Iqbal aka Mubs is the co-founder of Botlist - and several other startups and side projects. Mubs is originally from Pakistan, but spent most of his early years living in England before moving to the US. Mubs has created a successful career in technology, working in several different industries. He’s also built several side projects over the last few years, winning Product Hunt’s Maker of the year in 2016. Mubs joins us to share his story, how he started his career in tech, why he wor...more
Nathaniel Harley, the Co-founder & CEO of Mantl. Nathaniel was previously an analyst with Goldman Sachs before jumping into tech with a Techstars backed startup called Spoon University. Nathaniel then got accepted into Techstars (again), this time as the CEO of his own Fintech startup. Nathaniel joins us to share his story, how he started his career in tech, what it was like going through Techstars - twice, what it’s been like build a fintech startup, why he’s so passionate about the future ...more
Nathan Bashaw is the Co-founder & CEO of Hardbound. After discovering the world of startups during college, and driven by the desire to build things and implement his own ideas, Nathan became a self-taught developer. He knew pretty early on, that he wanted to leverage technology to create new forms of education and storytelling that was native to new devices like smartphones. After joining Olark as an intern and then working in San Francisco as a full time developer, Nathan decided to pursue h...more
David Heimann is the Co-founder & CTO of Purple. David is originally from Gothenburg, Sweden but came to the US for school. Having always been more technical, he focused on the business side of things. After graduation, he took on several sales roles to deepen his skills before joining a development studio called InfiniOne. There David really learnt the in-and-outs of product management and operating as a lean startup. David is now working on his own company, Purple, which he helped launch b...more
Sançar Şahin is the Director of Marketing at Typeform. With a background in radio and media, Sançar has become a self-taught marketer. Through several side projects and products built around content and education, Sançar has seen the shift towards new forms of online marketing and brand building. Currently based in Barcelona, Spain, Sançar is leading the Marketing team at Typeform, and leveraging these tactics to continue to build and develop the experience that visitors and users feel when u...more
Sean Ellis is the CEO of GrowthHackers.com and the co-author of the new book Hacking Growth. Sean began his career in tech back in 1995 after he invested all his money in a friend’s company. There he helped the young startup overcome lots of challenges related to growth and monetization. This experience led him to realize the potential for growth that could be unlocked through cross-discipline collaboration. Sean then took on more growth roles at startups like LogMeIn, Dropbox, Eventbrite an...more
Maya Prohovnik is the Head of Operations at Anchor, a whole new way to experience audio. Maya studies psychology and linguistics before joining a startup called Aviary. There she learnt all about startups taking on several roles and helping the team grow from 8 to more than 30 before it was acquired by Adobe. Maya then ended up joining Betaworks in New York where she helped organize the first (official) Hackers in Residence program. She also helped launch a product called Glitter while she was...more
Anthony Pompliano is the co-founder and Managing Partner of Full Tilt Capital, an early stage venture capital firm. Anthony served as a Sergeant in the US military and is an Operation Iraqi Freedom veteran. After his service in the military, Anthony launched two startups of his own in North Carolina - which were both later acquired. Anthony then decided to move to San Francisco and learn from larger startups. He worked on growth at both Facebook (with the Pages team) and later with Snapchat. ...more
Gina Gotthilf is the VP of Growth and Marketing at Duolingo, a platform for free language education for the world. Gina is originally from Brazil, but has spent much of her career in New York. After a few years of working at social media agencies, Gina joined Tumblr to help lead their internationalization efforts in Brazil and South America. She then launched her own consulting company to help other US bases companies navigate these complexities. Today Gina is the VP of Growth & Marketing ...more
Andrew Pelling, an award winning Scientist, Professor, TED Senior Fellow and entrepreneur. His work and innovations have been featured in Wired, Motherboard, Scientific American, Popular Science, BBC and more. Andrew directs and manages the Pelling Research Lab, out of the University of Ottawa. The lab uses low-cost, open source materials and methods to explore new technologies and ideas. He has, for instance, created human body parts made from plants and grown living skins on LEGOs – innovati...more
Jeff Sheldon is the designer and founder of Ugmonk. Jeff started Ugmonk as a side project to serve as his creative outlet from his day job as junior graphic designer. Several years in, Jeff reached a tipping point and decided to go all-in and make Ugmonk his full time focus - growing the product line from t-shirts to other new items with a unique sense of style and minimalistic design. 10 years later, Jeff has shipped his products to over 67 countries, has spoken at conferences like 99u, been...more
Nick Patrick is the co-founder & CEO of Radar, the location platform for mobile apps. Nick has a background in computer science, but has coupled that with an MBA from Harvard and extensive experience as a Product Manager at Microsoft and later at Foursquare and a startup called Handy. Even though smartphones have been around for the past decade, location is still relatively new and often under used. That’s because it’s always been a challenge to add location into apps effectively. Nick and h...more
Hanna Kulin is a Product Designer at Facebook. She is originally from Sweden where she hustled to become a designer and ended up joining Spotify through an internship. While there, an opportunity presented itself for Hanna to become one of the first Product Managers to work on what would become Spotify Business. While backed by Spotify, Hanna and her colleagues built this side of the business from scratch, very much like a startup of their own. Though this process and to help meet her own need...more
Swish Goswami is the CEO & co-founder of Technotronics, a recipient of Canada’s Top 20 Under 20 and TEDx Speaker. Swish is originally from Singapore and moved to Canada at a young age. He began his career as a social entrepreneur launching several initiatives including the World Youth Fund, which has helped to support over 70 projects created by young entrepreneurs all over the world. Today, Swish is studying at the University of Toronto while working on his wearables startups - Technotronics,...more
Stephen Ufford is the Founder & CEO of Trulioo. Stephen decided to become an entrepreneur after high school in order to pursue his idea of enabling online credit reports - after seeing first hand how out-of-date the process was. He launched iQuiri in 2000 and within 3 years it was acquired. Following his mantra of creating impact, Stephen went on to create 2 more companies following his early success, both within very similar markets. These startups were also acquired. Today, Stephen is worki...more
Sophia Dominguez is the CEO & Cofounder of SVRF, the best way to search and discover VR content on the web. Sophia learnt how to be a front end developer after asking for an internship with a local company. From there, she developed a passion for product and startups. After graduating, Sophia went to San Francisco and fell in love with VR. Wanting to spend more time around this emerging technology, Sophia ended up helping to organize one of the first conferences for wearable technologies. Af...more
Emma Nemtin is the Senior Marketing Manager at Headspace, an app that makes meditation simple. In school, Emma studied psychology before shifting to International Media and Communication in Sweden. After school, Emma started her own consulting company after school, getting her own clients through word of mouth. Emma then moved to Toronto and ended up joining the team at Hubba as one of the first 5 employees. There she continued to deepen her skillset as a full stack marketer and helped the co...more
Mike Singleton is the co-founder of Iterate, a product that helps you get the feedback you need to build better products and make better decisions. Mike started off his career as a developer working for a small startup in NYC before joining the early stage team at Foursquare. He later became the VP of Engineering and help build the team that focused on the web services part of the platform. After several years with Foursquare, Mike’s back at it with a startup of his own called Iterate. Mike an...more
Allison Esposito is the founder of Tech Ladies, a community that connects women with best jobs and opportunities in tech; as well as companies with the best women techmakers. Allison is a New Yorker through and through - loving the fast pace of the city and all it has to offer. Graduating with a masters in Journalism in 2008, Allison had to find other ways to build a career. She put her writing skills to work as a consultant and copywriter / marketer with startups like Foursquare. Allison lat...more
Mike Schmidt is the co-founder and CEO of Dovetale. Mike grew up outside Toronto, Canada and later attended Queen’s University, studying Chemical Engineering. While at Queen’s, he quickly developed an affinity for tech startups and was accepted into the Next 36 (an exclusive program in which he’s still involved to this day). After graduating from both programs, Mike launched Listn from a dorm room at the university. As the CEO, Mike helped raise money, create the vision for the product, sign m...more
Morgan DeBaun is the co-founder and CEO of Blavity. Morgan initially wanted to be a teacher before learning more about startups. She then started to explore some of her own ideas for startups before diving into a career as a Product Manager. After a few years at Intuit, Morgan later joined a much smaller startup in San Francisco called Demandforce. She then started to think about launching a company of her own. Today, with a team of 17, Blavity reaches more than 20M readers per month, runs 2 ...more
Michael Sacca is the President at Crew and co-host of Rocketship.fm. Michael started his career with a moved to LA in order to pursue a career in the music industry. However, he quickly had to turn to other options. After teaching himself a bit of code and making a few websites, he ended up launching his own agency - Tiny Factory. While running that company, the team began to build some of their first products. Michael then joined a startup called Crew to help establish partnerships. He has r...more
Terri Burns is an associate product manager at Twitter. After being bored with general classed when she first got to college, Terri applied for a student program with Google and discovered the world of startups and development. She started to teach herself how to code online before changing her major to computer science. Terri was also the President and is currently the Chair for Tech@NYU. Terri has since taken on new challenges - like being a Developer Evangelist for Venmo, the co-host of th...more
Seth Louey is the co-founder of Botlist and the Creative Director at SimplyTapp. As many entrepreneurs do, Seth started his career by saying he could code websites and then spent a week straight learning how to do it. He later met a fellow developer named Mubashar (aka Mubs), and they quickly became friends. They’re among the most prolific makers on Product Hunt both being nominated for Makers of the Year in 2016. Seth, Mubs and Ben Tossell then launched a site called Botlist. Now, just over...more
Daniel Beauchamp is the Head of Virtual Reality at Shopify. Daniel has been passionate about technology and developing video games since his early teens. While taking an entrepreneurship class in university and realizing that he could build a company of his own, Daniel worked with classmates to build their first startup. After working on their startup for a bit, they eventually joined Shopify. Over the past 7 years, Daniel has been leading all kinds of projects and initiatives within the comp...more
Jake Cohn is the Founder & CEO of And Chill, a friendly bot that gives you amazing movie recommendations! Jake was introduced to the world of startups through university and various groups afterward graduation. He then left his law office job for a contact with Google. Jake’s career continued to push him down the startup path and saw him develop an affinity for putting the customer first and championing for their needs. He then decided to go all in and launched And Chill, a recommendation app...more
Chris Gimmer is the co-founder and CEO of Snappa, the fastest way to create graphics. Chris joined the government after school, but quickly found himself wanting to explore other career paths - eventually stumbling on to tech startups. He and his co-founder, Marc, began working nights, weekends, and even the occasional lunch hour at work to launch some of their first online projects. Their second bootstrapped startup - Snappa - first launched just over 12 months ago and has seen over 40,000 s...more
Adelyn Zhou is the cofounder and Head of Marketing at Topbots. Adelyn is a seasoned technology leader with experience at Nextdoor, Eventbrite and Amazon. She has spoken at SXSW, Harvard Business School, Launch Festival, Growth Marketing Conference, 500 Startups, and more. She is a frequent contributor to VentureBeat, Forbes, Wired and other publications. Adelyn began her startup career by joining an up and coming company called Diapers.com which was later acquired by Amazon. Following that exp...more
Orrett Davis is the Head of Growth at Abe, a company that builds conversational banking solutions for progressive community banks. Orrett is originally from Jamaica and moved to Florida as a kid. After studying Biotechnology, Orrett was exposed to the world of startups and marketing and jumped right in - loving the fast pace at which (almost anything) is possible. Orrett is also deeply connected in the Orlando startup community, having organized several startup weekend events, meetups, and eve...more
Hailley Griffis is a communications specialist at Buffer. Hailley started building her personal brand as a communication strategist while in school. She then launched her own consulting business while travelling before joining Getaround in San Francisco. Hailley then found her dream job at Buffer and has since also helped grow their new podcast - The Science of Social Media. Hailley joins us to share her story, how she approached building her brand, how she launched her own social media consu...more
Justin Brooke is the founder & CEO of the Digital Media Buying Institute. Justin is a high school dropout who got into construction, but he’s always had a passion for marketing. Now, after more than 10 years in the business, building and growing his own agency, managing over $10M in ad budgets, and travelling the world, he’s now building his own platform startup. Justin launched The Digital Media Buying Institute or DMBI earlier this year. He’s already broken six figures in revenue - twice. ...more
Joel Flory is the co-founder & CEO of VSCO. Joel turned his passion for travel and seeing the world through photographs into a career as a professional photographer. After more than 10 years of running his own business, he and his co-founder Greg set out to build something that would fill-in the many gaps they saw in the industry. Visual Supply Company was then born in 2011. The company has evolved from a series of photography workshops, to a film emulation plugin for photoshop and illustrat...more
Una Kravets is a blogger, podcaster, speaker, and UI engineer at Digital Ocean. In high school, Una started to explore new technologies like Flash and the Wacom Tablet. After a few internships, Una found a way to combine art and computer science into a career. She then joined IBM where she worked along a team making Watson more accessible and is now part of the team at Digital Ocean. Una also regularly speaks at conferences across the world and co-hosts her own podcast called Toolsday. Una j...more
Aydin Mirzaee is the co-founder & co-CEO of Fluidware (which was recently acquired by SurveyMonkey). Aydin has been an entrepreneur since a young age - working with his brother to find different ways to earn their own allowance. He then moved from New York City to Ottawa, Canada for school. After finding work in the tech field Aydin began to explore starting another business. He quickly left his stable job and dedicated himself to building a product and growing a company. In August of 2014, t...more
Kathleen Warner is the Executive Vice President & Managing Director of the New York City Economic Development Corporation’s Centre for Economic Transformation. Kathleen is a lawyer by training, but following the start of her career in both the private and public sectors, she took a risk and decided to help launch Startup America where she was the founding COO. There Kathleen did everything from building the Startup America brand, to executing a growth strategy, and working with their foundi...more
Adam Michalski is focused on Partner Growth at Branch Metrics, a deep linking platform for mobile apps. Adam is an incredible entrepreneur based out of New York. After studying finance, Adam began a career in banking and started working with larger corporate clients. Through this experience, he began to understand business operations and financing. He then started to immerse himself in the local startup scene and taught himself more about tech startups. He launched a side project called DormCh...more
Chris Messina is the Developer Experience Lead at Uber Chris Messina is the Developer Experience Lead at Uber, and pretty much an internet celebrity. From literally inventing the hashtag, to being a top Product Hunt user, to blogging on Medium, to his very own chatbot - The MessinaBot, we’re super excited to have him join us for this episode. Chris started his career with an interest for both art and technology. As a champion of the open web, Chris started off his career as a consultant befor...more
Jeremy Goldberg is a Product Designer at Facebook - working on building Business, Platform, and AI on Messenger. Jeremy’s had a passion for and interest in design from an early age. He was part of a touring band as a teen and would often put his design skills to use for designing merch, poster, or other things the band needed. Following his time as a performer, Jeremy started to team up with product minded entrepreneurs in around his home town in Arizona. He launched a few side projects of his...more
Mada Seghete is the co-founder of Branch, the deep linking tool for app growth & attribution. Mada is originally from Romania and grew up under communism. She then moved to the US for university. While taking some business classes, one professor helped her realize that the next wave of companies would be started by people like her. After starting her first company and learning lots of valuable lessons first hand, Mada and her co-founders started Branch after realizing that their biggest challe...more
Matt Schlicht is the founder and editor of Chatbots Magazine, the #1 place to learn about chatbots. Matt is a YC Alum, a Forbes 30 Under 30 winner and was also previously a product manager at Ustream as well as an advisor to several other startups. Several months ago, Matt decided to launch a community dedicated to messaging and bots. Chatbots Magazine was born and now reaches over 200,000+ people per month. Matt joins us to share his story, how he got into startups and tech, how he created ...more
Bri Connelly is an associate product manager at Google. She studied computer science at the University of Texas. While in school, she interned with IBM, Apple and Google. Bri was also part of a class project powered by IBM’s Watson called Celebri AI. The project was quick validated turned into a startup that got accepted into the Capitol Factory accelerator in Austin. Bri then joined Google as an Associate Product Manager where she got to work on the gboard, Google iOS keyboard. Bri joins ...more
Ardi Iranmanesh is the co-founder and chief-of-staff at Affinio, an advanced marketing intelligence platform that leverages the interest graph to understand today’s consumers. Ardi is originally from Iran and moved here to study engineering. Having Always had a passion for business and how businesses are started, he quickly discovered the beginnings of the work that would become the Lean Startup framework by Steve Blank and Eric Ries. Ardi was eventually connected with a few local founders ...more
Tracy Chou is a software engineer and was most recently at Pinterest, where she worked on the home feed and recommendations team, ads and web teams, API, growth and much more! Before Pinterest, Tracy worked at Quora, also as one of the first engineering hires there. Tracy is well-known for her work pushing for diversity in tech. In 2013, she helped kick off the wave of tech companies that began to disclose their data about the diversity within their companies through a Github repository. Tra...more
Corey Pollock is the co-founder of Leet, where gamers share and discover the best gameplay highlights. Corey is a product manager at Tiny Hearts in Toronto. He’s also built and launched several side projects over the years, including his latest startup Leet. Corey joins us to share his story, how he got into tech and startups, how he approaches working on side projects, how he approaches building communities, what motivated him to launch Leet, and much more!
Laura Roeder is the Founder & CEO of Edgar, an application that automates social media scheduling and marketing. Edgar is a cutting-edge service, and one of the fastest-growing competitors to HootSuite. Laura was still in junior high school when she taught herself to build websites. She then launched her first consulting business at the age 22. After consulting and running various online and offline classes on how to drive traffic and increase social engagement, Laura developed a process that w...more
John Gleeson is the VP of Customer Success at Affinio, an advanced marketing intelligence platform that leverages the interest graph to understand today’s consumers. Affinio won Gartner’s “Cool Vendor” in Data-Driven Marketing Award for 2016. While building an adult hockey skills company during university, John decided to pursue his MBA in Eastern Canada. He then decided to take a break from school and build his business remotely while traveling the world to surf. Returning to school after a...more
Michael Katchen is the Founder and CEO of Wealthsimple, a platform that make smart investing simple and affordable. After starting his career off as a business analyst with one of the largest consulting firms in the world, Michael got a call in 2011 from a friend who was building a new YC company, 1000memories, where he was a VP of product & growth. After being acquired by Ancestry.com, some of his close friends approached him about advice on how to invest some of the money they got during t...more
Esther Crawford is the CEO of Olabot, a platform that makes it fun, simple to build personal bots. You can learn more about Esther by chatting with her personal bot: m.me/estherbot With a background in Philosophy and an interest in Middle Eastern politics, Esther began to explore different online tools and communities like blogging and YouTube. Pairing this with her passion for storytelling and design, Esther began her career as a social media consultant to some large brands, before launching h...more
Todd Garland is the founder and CEO of BuySellAds. Todd started diving into tech during college and got into startups shortly after. He join HubSpot as an early employee and quickly got inspired to start his own company. Buy Sell Ads is now flipping the Ad Tech industry around with their unique, transparent and simple approach. Completely bootstrapped and acting as a marketplace between advertisers and publishers, they now work with over 1200 publishers to strategically place ads that don’t in...more
Victoria Young is a product marketing lead at Uber. Victoria likes to think about the intersection of culture and technology - working with emerging startups and new media platforms to creatively apply technology and new strategies to solve complex problems. At Uber, Victoria is currently focused on one of Uber’s fastest expanding products, uberPOOL. There she spearheaded the launch of go-to-market campaigns for new product features and defined the strategy for marketing programs that drive a...more
Taylor Conroy is the co-founder & CEO of two social enterprise startups: Change Heroes and Journey333. Before diving into social enterprise, Taylor was running a successful real estate business. After a life changing trip to Uganda in 2009, Taylor came back to Canada, sold his business and launched Change Heroes, a SaaS company serving the world's most innovative and dedicated nonprofits to engage people in giving through personal video. Change Heroes has since helped thousands of people to b...more
Ruby Lee is a Product Partner at KPCB Edge, a team of builders, investing in seed stage founders working on emerging areas of technology. While studying at Stanford, Ruby got more into startups through entrepreneurship and business groups. She was also part of the founding team of the Dorm Room Fund - a student run investment group backed by First Round Capital. After school, Ruby joined Google as an associate product manager through their APM program started over 10 years ago by Marissa Mayer...more
SC Moatti is the Founder & CEO of Products That Count and a best selling author of Mobilized: An Insider's Guide to the Business and Future of Connected Technology. She is a mobile expert with tons of insights to share from her first hand experience gained over the past 15 years of working in mobile. While visiting Silicon Valley from Paris, France at that time, SC felt like she was on another planet and knew that’s where she had to be. From her time with EA building mobile games, to moving to...more
Ajay Rajani is the Founder of The Inevitable Collective, an investment vehicle that helps build and invest in companies that push the world forward. Ajay has been a part of Grovo as a product manager, the founding CMO of Inventure, and is now launching new experiments including: Nextt, the first accelerator for ideas & The Inevitable Collective, a new investment vehicle that’s investing in companies with products that are primarily aimed at developing markets. Ajay joins us to share his story,...more
Mahdi Yusuf is the CTO of Gyroscope, an app that let’s you sync your data to track your health & everything about your life. Mahdi moved around a lot as a kid, spending time in Saudi Arabia, Ottawa, and Thailand, among other countries - all the while, exploring new technologies and learning about computers. After university, Mahdi started working for a mergers security company before jumping into startups. He is also the co-founder of Pycoder’s Weekly and a large part of the Python community ...more
Erica Brescia is the Co-founder and COO of Bitnami. With over 1 million apps deployed per month, Bitnami makes it incredibly easy to deploy apps with native installers, as virtual machines, or in the cloud. Erica had lead operations for Bitnami since they started. She’s also been responsible for all their partnerships with big brands like Amazon Web Services, Google Cloud Platform and VMWare. She’s also led their sales efforts - which has enabled them to remain mostly bootstrapped all these ye...more
Khoi Vinh is the Director of Product Design, Mobile at Adobe. With a background in graphic design, Khoi really got into his career as a product designer with the New York Times after several successful years as the co-founder of his own design firm. He then left and launched Mixel, a new type of creative app for the iPad. However, without as much traction as they needed to keep operating independently, Khoi and his co-founder managed to get the app and team acquired by Etsy. After the acqu...more
Avery Swartz is the founder & CEO of Camp Tech, a workshop company for non-technical people. With a background in theater, Avery was drawn to both graphic design and the freelancing lifestyle, and decided to made a change. She launched her own design firm to enable her to follow this passion while still being able to contribute to innovative projects like the Art Canada Institute. Through freelancing, Avery saw a need for in-person workshops on a variety of subjects. Shortly after, Camp Tech w...more
Shane Mac is the co-founder & CEO of Assist, bring the best services to your favorite messaging apps. Shane got into startups and tech through music with gigs as a DJ. This lead him to building sites, widgets and more for himself and his friends. He’s worked on products within startups like Gist (acquired by Blackberry), Zaarly, and is now in the super hot messaging space with Assist. Shane joins us to share his story, what motivated him to get into tech & startups, why he’s always been cur...more
Leslie Bradshaw is the managing partner at Made By Many, a product innovation studio. Leslie has won several awards and accolades for her work, including Fast Company’s Most Influential Women in Tech, 100 Most Creative People In Business, Inc’s 30 Under 30, and AdAge’s Small Agency of The Year among many more. She writes a series on Forbes called “More (Power) Seats”, about issues facing women in a corporate environment and often speaks or writes about professional leadership. Leslie joins ...more
Meng To is the author of Design + Code. Meng started off his career as a self-taught graphic designer who transitioned to digital work. Wanting to move to San Francisco to learn from some of the best designers in the world - designers who were passionate about solving problems - Meng managed to stay for a year until his visa expired and he could no longer continue to work. His dreams were crushed. With nothing left to lose, and at a crossroad in his career, he set out to travel the world. H...more
Brittany Gorevic is the General Manager at Union Square Ventures, a venture capital firm based in New York City. After working with AMEX for a few years, Brittany left to start her own company, gtrot, which was later acquired by Groupon. Brittany has also travelled a ton - reaching two pretty incredible milestones: visiting all 7 continents before turning 25 and then Visiting 50 countries before the age of 30. She joins us to share her story, how she got into startups, advice for entrepreneu...more
Marc Gingras is an angel investor and the CEO of Foko, a private photo sharing app for retail teams. Marc has started and sold several companies over the years, including Tungle, a calendar sharing & scheduling application which was acquired by Research in Motion in 2011. Marc has also been a venture capitalist and angel investor in several companies - including Foko, which he later joined as CEO. Marc joins us to share his story, how he got into startups, advice for entrepreneurs who are loo...more
Cristina Cordova is the first Business Development hire at Stripe, the payments infrastructure for the internet. Cristina was previously the first employee at Pulse, where she lead partnerships with brands like The Wall Street Journal, USA Today and more. Today, Cristina is focused on building and managing the Business Development team at Stripe, which focuses on user-facing product partnerships, strategic growth partnerships with brands like Twitter, Pinterest, Kickstarter and much more!
Matthew Hartman is the Director of Seed Investments at Betaworks, an internet startup studio based in New York. Matt has been building products since he was a teen. After working for a real estate company, Matt left to join a social consumer app call Hot Potato - which was later acquired by Facebook. Matt then founded his own startup Referboost which he bootstrapped and then licensed to Apartments.com. He joins us to share his story, what he looks for in investments at Betaworks, what techno...more
Elise Ramsay is the Head of Community at Eyegroove, an app for creating high quality short videos with next level effects to express your true self. Elise was previously the community manager at Wistia, a video marketing platform for businesses, where she grew their community section to over 20,000 members and increased their social following by 5x. Her passion for video and enabling individuals to express themselves creatively lead her to joining the team at Eyegroove. Elise joins us to share...more
Robleh Jama is the Founder & CEO of Tiny Hearts, a six year old design studio in the heart of Toronto, Canada. Robleh began his journey into entrepreneurship while in university, building and selling his first startup. He then quickly began to explore creating mobile products, mixing design consultancy and experimental product creation in-house. Six years later, Tiny Hearts has created several award-winning apps - @WakeAlarm (#1 utilities), Quick Fit (featured in Apple TV ad) + @Nextkeyboard (...more
Kim Pham is the Head of Platform at Frontline Ventures, Europe's first community-focused fund. Kim has always had a passion for entrepreneurship and startups, landing her first job within a startup at the age of 16. Kim joins us to share her story, how she got involved in startups & hustled her way into various opportunities with companies like Onswipe, Blue Apron and more, how she helped launch Dorm Room Fund in NYC, how she got into VC, what she does as Head of Platform at Frontline Ventures...more
Sarah Adler is the co-founder & CTO of Spoon University, a food community and website for college students. Growing up, Sarah loved graphic design and during university ended up co-founding a startup that would become Spoon University, a worldwide food community and website for college students that is in over 150 campuses. Sarah joins us to share her story, how Spoon University came to be, how she taught herself to design & code, how they got into TechStars, what it was like raising a seed ro...more
Wells Riley is a product designer at Envoy, the new standard for visitor registration. Wells began building websites with his friends back in high school and took up design. He then started to notice that design wasn’t taken as seriously when it came to startups and great products, so he created a few online resources to inspire others. “Startups, This Is How Design Works” and Hack Design - which saw over 150,000 signups, are both still active and helping others. Wells joins us to share his st...more
Michael Lachapelle is the founder of Business Model Fulcrum, a consulting agency focussed on assisting organizations and their leaders to create change, accelerate growth and improve business results through understanding and innovation in their business model. Michael has helped organizations from all industries including the Red Cross, the World Bank Institute, the Canadian Federal Government, FedEx and more. He’s been working with Alexander Osterwalder’s Business Model Canvas since 2008, and...more
Andreas Kambanis is the founder of Nibble Apps, a studio that creates award winning food apps for iPhone and iPad and has gotten several apps to the top (paid) spots in the App Store while being featured in publications like Mashable, Time, Men’s Health, and more. Andreas got his start with tech and startups while in school when he built a site called London Cyclists after finding a gap in the market. He then began working with publishers, entrepreneurs, and other influencers to build great app...more
Timo Rein is the co-founder and President of Pipedrive, a simple and visual sales pipeline tool that teams love to use. Timo had a background in sales but always found that existing sales management tools weren’t very helpful. So he and his co-founders set out to build Pipedrive. Timo shares how they got into AngelPad, raised angel and seed funding, acquired their first customers, grew the team, and much more!
Jeff Needles is a Business Intelligence Analyst at Meerkat. Jeff previously worked at This Week in Tech - a podcasting network - through a variety of roles. He's a self taught developer who started building more products in 2015 and is now helping develop innovative analytics solutions at Meerkat. Jeff shares how he got into startups, how he started learning how to code, his approach to landing a job, how to get more out of your data, and much more!
Ben Brown is the co-founder & CEO, of Howdy, a friendly, trainable bot that super powers teams by automating common tasks. Ben has built several startups and products, including XOXCO, a software and product design studio that he ran for more than seven years with his wife Katie. Ben is going to share what got him into tech, why he's excited about chat bots, his thoughts on the future of the industry, and much more!
Niv Dror is a part of the community team at Product Hunt, a place for product-loving enthusiasts to share and geek out about the latest mobile apps, websites, hardware projects, and tech creations. He was previously the first community manager at Meerkat. Niv joins us to share his story, how he got involved in startups after completing his degree in accounting and getting a CPA, how to build communities, how to leverage your community for innovation, and much more!
Amy Muller is the co-founder of GetSatisfaction & Yes And Yes Yes. Amy is also currently the VP of Customer Care & Community at Automatic, a platform that enables you to connect your car to your life. Amy joins us to share her story, why she got into tech and helped start GetSatisfaction, how she approaches building community at Automatic, what motivated her to help start YxYY, and much more!
Nancy Hua is the Co-founder & CEO of Apptimize, a platform for creating the best mobile experience for each user and context through targeted A/B testing. Previously a mathematics and computer science student at MIT, Nancy became an algorithmic trader out of school before launching Apptimize. In 2013, Nancy and her team were accepted into Y Combinator. Today, Apptimize is used by companies like Strava, Hotel Tonight and more. Nancy joins us to share her story, what it was like going through ...more
Fred Dixon is the CEO of Blindside Networks and the Product Manager at BigBlueButton, an open source web conferencing platform for online learning. Fred had previously worked for Bell Northern Research which merged with Nortel before starting his own tech startups. In 2007, Fred met Richard Alam, a student at Carleton University who started working on an open source web conferencing software that was trying to solve the problem of distance education. A year later Richard & Fred officially lau...more
Liam Martin is the co-founder & CMO of TimeDoctor & Staff.com. As a teenager, Liam was a competitive ice dancer, training 8-12 hours per day. Unfortunately a knee injury forced him to look for a plan B and he pursued academia until he found out he didn’t like teaching. Liam began building a web based tutoring business and gradually got more involved in tech companies. He’s now the co-founder of TimeDoctor & Staff.com - which is now tracking more than 1,000,000 hours per month. Liam joins us t...more
Steli Efti is the founder & CEO of Close.io, a platform for closing more deals and making more sales. Originally from Greece, Steli began his career there bootstrapping several business before deciding to build a tech company. With no experience, background or clear idea where to start, he moved to Silicon Valley. After a few failed ideas, he launched a services company and developed an internal tool that would become Close.io. He and his team were accepted into Y Combinator and are now growin...more
Jorge Soto is the founder of SotoVentures, and has been involved in sales and business development for over 12 years with experiences ranging from door-to-door, to enterprise software, to mobile advertising, and finally startup sales. Jorge has worked with several startups and large enterprises over his career - including MoPub - which was later acquired by Twitter. He also founded Sales4Startups (which was later acquired by SalesHacker). Jorge joins us to share his story, tactics, and insigh...more
Andres Izquieta is the co-founder, creative director, and CEO of FiveFour, the first subscription-based service for men's clothing. Andres helped start FiveFour over 10 years ago as a school project with a very different business model. Through ups-and-downs, Andres and FiveFour eventually pivoted into an e-commerce subscription model. Andres joins us to share more about how they helped pioneer this model, what makes it so successful, how they grew to over 60,000 subscribers in less than 3 yea...more
Kyle Braatz is the co-founder & CEO of Fullscript, a smarter way to recommend & sell professional-grade natural health products. In 2008, he started the Typically Canadian Group - a not for profit dedicated to inspiring Canadians who are battling cancer - and cycled across Canada raising $150,000 in the process. He then dove into tech startups with his co-founder Brad, launching Netgen, and later Fullscript emerged as an opportunity they were passionate about building. Kyle joins us to share...more
This is the sixty-ninth episode of Hack To Start. Your hosts, Franco Varriano (on Twitter @ FrancoVarriano) and Tyler Copeland (on Twitter @ TylerCopeland), speak with Kim Bost (on Twitter @KimBost), a Product Designer at Dropbox. Kim is an incredible designer who started her career off with agencies before moving into the physical side of newspaper design at the New York Times. There she transitioned more into digital design while taking on new challenges through freelancing. Kim moved into ...more
This is the sixty-eighth episode of Hack To Start. Your hosts, Franco Varriano (on Twitter @ FrancoVarriano) and Tyler Copeland (on Twitter @ TylerCopeland), speak with Anne-Catherine Goulby, the Sales Manager at Quaid Media, a TV advertising platform for mobile apps. She was previously the marketing project manager at SwiftKey, a top third party keyboard for iOS and Android. She joins us to share her story, what motivated her to build a career in tech, how SwiftKey became a top app on Androi...more
This is the sixty-seventh episode of Hack To Start. Your hosts, Franco Varriano (on Twitter @ FrancoVarriano) and Tyler Copeland (on Twitter @ TylerCopeland), speak with Poornima Vijayashanker (on Twitter @ Poornima), the founder of Femgineer, an education platform for professionals. Poornima was previously the founding engineer of Mint.com and then transitioned to a founding role with her first startup BizeeBee. She was then an Entrepreneur-In-Residence at 500 Startups. Poornima joins us to...more
This is the sixty-sixth episode of Hack To Start. Your hosts, Franco Varriano (on Twitter @ FrancoVarriano) and Tyler Copeland (on Twitter @ TylerCopeland), speak with Martin (on Twitter @ Smarty), the co-founder and CEO of nvite, the ticketing experience re-imagined. Martin is an award-winning product designer focused on marketing and business development. He’s launched his own agencies and startups, one of them being acquired by Twitter where he joined as their first Design Manager. Mart...more
This is the sixty-fifth episode of Hack To Start. Your hosts, Franco Varriano (on Twitter @ FrancoVarriano) and Tyler Copeland (on Twitter @ TylerCopeland), speak with Cindy (on Twitter @ CindyWu), the co-founder of Experiement, a crowdfunding platform for scientific research. Cindy has a bachelor of science in cellular, molecular and developmental biology and she’s written several peer-reviewed articles. But when she started to look for funding to take a new drug to market she quickly realiz...more
This is the sixty-fourth episode of Hack To Start. Your hosts, Franco Varriano (on Twitter @ FrancoVarriano) and Tyler Copeland (on Twitter @ TylerCopeland), speak with Jon Gold (on Twitter @JonGold), website creation powered by artificial intelligence. Jon joins us to share his story as a designer and entrepreneur, the differences between working at agencies, freelancing and startups, why it's important to pursue projects that you're passionate about, and much more!
This is the sixty-third episode of Hack To Start. Your hosts, Franco Varriano (on Twitter @ FrancoVarriano) and Tyler Copeland (on Twitter @ TylerCopeland), speak with Atlee Clark (on Twitter @AtleeClark), the Head of App Store and Third Party Development at Shopify, a platform to help you sell online, in-store, and everywhere in between. Atlee joins us to share her story as an entrepreneur, why doing complete 180s is more helpful to your career, how she lead the C100 for over 4 years, what h...more
This is the sixty-second episode of Hack To Start. Your hosts, Franco Varriano (on Twitter @ FrancoVarriano) and Tyler Copeland (on Twitter @ TylerCopeland), chat about the first year of Hack To Start, the past 35 episodes, the top moments and lessons, our favorite tools, books, and app, what's next and more!
This is the sixty-first episode of Hack To Start. Your hosts, Franco Varriano (on Twitter @ FrancoVarriano) and Tyler Copeland (on Twitter @ TylerCopeland), speak with Andrew Hyde (on Twitter @ AndrewHyde), the founder of Startup Weekend, a 54 hour event to create communities and build companies. Andrew joins us to share his story, how he got into startups, how he built a worldwide startup movement, how Startup Weekend grew so quickly, what it's been like returning to TechStars, and much mor...more
This is the sixtieth episode of Hack To Start. Your hosts, Franco Varriano (on Twitter @ FrancoVarriano) and Tyler Copeland (on Twitter @ TylerCopeland), speak with Zack Onisko (on Twitter @ Zack415), the Head of Growth and Marketing at Creative Market, a marketplace for ready-to-use design assets from independent creators. Zack graduated as a graphic designer but always wanted to run something for himself. He helped launch and grow BranchOut to over 30 million users, raising $49M in the pro...more
This is the fifty-ninth episode of Hack To Start. Your hosts, Franco Varriano (on Twitter @ FrancoVarriano) and Tyler Copeland (on Twitter @ TylerCopeland), speak with Travis Truett (on Twitter @ TDTruett), the co-founder and CEO of Ambition, a more effective way to manage employee ramp, productivity, and retention. Travis joins us to share his story, what lead him to becoming an entrepreneur, how Ambition got into Y Combinator, and much more!
This is the fifty-eighth episode of Hack To Start. Your hosts, Franco Varriano (on Twitter @ FrancoVarriano) and Tyler Copeland (on Twitter @ TylerCopeland), speak with Jeff Goldenberg (on Twitter @ Jeff_Goldenberg), the co-author of The Growth Hacker's Guide To The Galaxy & Head of Growth at Borrowell. Jeff has an unmatched talent for marketing & growth. He’s launched some impressive businesses ranging from fantasy poker camps, to a Top Chef cooking university and more. He’s also the co-auth...more
This is the fifty-seventh episode of Hack To Start. Your hosts, Franco Varriano (on Twitter @ FrancoVarriano) and Tyler Copeland (on Twitter @ TylerCopeland), speak with Grace Garey (on Twitter @ GraceGarey), the co-founder of Watsi, a platform for funding healthcare for people around the world. Grace has a background in global and international studies. After living in Ghana and interning at the International Rescue Committee, Grace joined Kiva to help them grow their platform. While there ...more
This is the fifty-sixth episode of Hack To Start. Your hosts, Franco Varriano (on Twitter @ FrancoVarriano) and Tyler Copeland (on Twitter @ TylerCopeland), speak with Guy Gunaratne (on Twitter @ GuyGunaratne), the co-founder of Storygami, an interactive video tool to add interactive overlays like articles, image galleries, call to action buttons, social feeds & more. Guy was previously an award winning, video journalist who created several documentaries on human rights subjects. However, th...more
This is the fifty-fifth episode of Hack To Start. Your hosts, Franco Varriano (on Twitter @ FrancoVarriano) and Tyler Copeland (on Twitter @ TylerCopeland), speak with Mustefa Jo'Shen (on Twitter @ MustefaJ), the founder & CEO of Design Cofounders, a Toronto-based company that provides design education via DC Edu, business & design consulting via the DC Studio, and drive impact and innovation through Design Makes Change initiatives. Mustafa has grown Design Cofounders from a freelancing bus...more
This is the fifty-fourth episode of Hack To Start. Your hosts, Franco Varriano (on Twitter @ FrancoVarriano) and Tyler Copeland (on Twitter @ TylerCopeland), speak with Pouyan Salehi (on Twitter @ PSalehi), the Co-founder & CEO of PersistIQ,the complete outbound platform engineered from the ground up for sales. Pouyan has built 3 startups, has extensive experience in the SaaS space, was an entrepreneur in residence at Redpoint Ventures, and was accepted into YC14. He joins us to share his insi...more
This is the fifty-third episode of Hack To Start. Your hosts, Franco Varriano (on Twitter @ FrancoVarriano) and Tyler Copeland (on Twitter @ TylerCopeland), speak with Ross Simmonds (on Twitter @ TheCoolestCool), the founder & CEO of Foundation, Hustle & Grind, and Crate. Ross has been into startups for as long as he can remember. While running an football fantasy blog in college, he began to understand the power of content and social platforms. He joins us to share how he's managed to build...more
This is the fifty-second episode of Hack To Start. Your hosts, Franco Varriano (on Twitter @ FrancoVarriano) and Tyler Copeland (on Twitter @ TylerCopeland), speak with Sandi MacPherson (on Twitter @ SandiMac), the founder & CEO of Quibb, share what you're reading for work. Sandi has a background in science and non-profit organizations, but realized that she wanted to be in tech. She joins us to share her insights on starting a company, building communities and social platforms for professio...more
This is the fifty-first episode of Hack To Start. Your hosts, Franco Varriano (on Twitter @ FrancoVarriano) and Tyler Copeland (on Twitter @ TylerCopeland), speak with Matt Fiedler (on Twitter @ IAmMattFiedler), the co-founder & CEO of Vinyl Me Please, the best damn record club out there! Matt grew up with a passion for music that he inherited from his dad. Always wanting to start his own thing, Matt and his co-founder Tyler launched Vinyl Me Please as a passion project. Today they ship t...more
This is the fiftieth episode of Hack To Start. Your hosts, Franco Varriano (on Twitter @ FrancoVarriano) and Tyler Copeland (on Twitter @ TylerCopeland), speak with Sarah Stockdate (on Twitter @ Skstock), the growth manager at Tilt, the easy way to collect money from a group for free. She's also the Director of Speakers for TedXDistilleryDistrictWomen. With a background in the financial tech industry, Sarah shares why she decided to start her career in the tech industry, how she approaches g...more
This is the forty-ninth episode of Hack To Start. Your hosts, Franco Varriano (on Twitter @ FrancoVarriano) and Tyler Copeland (on Twitter @ TylerCopeland), speak with Phil Freo (on Twitter @ PhilFreo), the lead on product and engineering at Close.io. Phil has been developing and building websites since he was a teenager. As a full stack developer, he's worked on several products for companies like Yahoo, Google and for startups. Phil joins us to share his insights on building startups, fin...more
This is the forty-eighth episode of Hack To Start. Your hosts, Franco Varriano (on Twitter @ FrancoVarriano) and Tyler Copeland (on Twitter @ TylerCopeland), speak with Megan Berry (on Twitter @ MeganBerry), the Head of Product Development at RebelMouse. Megan had previously led community at several startups including Klout. Now at RebelMouse, she joins us to share her insights on product development, growth, raising money, and much more!
This is the forty-seventh episode of Hack To Start. Your hosts, Franco Varriano (on Twitter @ FrancoVarriano) and Tyler Copeland (on Twitter @ TylerCopeland), speak with Ef Rodriguez (on Twitter @ pug), the Director of Global Social at HTC. With a background in writing and journalism, Ef has always been passionate about startups, good marketing and cool technologies. He joins us to share his insights on working abroad, being curious, not being lazy, and exploring new technologies and much more...more
This is the forty-sixth episode of Hack To Start. Your hosts, Franco Varriano (on Twitter @ FrancoVarriano) and Tyler Copeland (on Twitter @ TylerCopeland), speak with Anthony Thomas (on Twitter @ ac132), the co-founder and GM of Sticker Mule, a custom sticker printing service that kicks ass. Anthony has always been a manufacturing guy, but had deep frustrations with the traditional model and not having direct relationships with the end customers. He wanted to do more and so Sticker Mule was b...more
This is the forty-fifth episode of Hack To Start. Your hosts, Franco Varriano (on Twitter @ FrancoVarriano) and Tyler Copeland (on Twitter @ TylerCopeland), speak with Dustin Henderlong (on Twitter @ DHendy), the VP of Digital at Threadless, a community-driven design platform featuring designs created by various designers, artists and general consumers. With a background in acting & photography, Dustin has always been interested in technology. He joined Threadless to lead partnerships for seve...more
This is the forty-fourth episode of Hack To Start. Your hosts, Franco Varriano (on Twitter @ FrancoVarriano) and Tyler Copeland (on Twitter @ TylerCopeland), speak with Katherine Hague (on Twitter @ KatherineHague), the co-founder of ShopLocket, an ecommerce platform for hardware entrepreneurs. Founded in May 2012, Katherine raised a $1 million seed round, led by Peter Thiel's Valar Ventures and Rho Canada. The company was acquired in early 2014 by PCH, a global leader in custom manufacturin...more
This is the forty-third episode of Hack To Start. Your hosts, Franco Varriano (on Twitter @ FrancoVarriano) and Tyler Copeland (on Twitter @ TylerCopeland), speak with Samuel Hulick (on Twitter @ SamuelHulick), the founder and user onboarding champion at UserOnboard.com. Originally a web developer, Samuel is passionate about putting users first and creating amazing users experiences. He started his blog, UserOnboard.com to showcase different onboarding experiences as it’s often the most over...more
This is the forty-second episode of Hack To Start. Your hosts, Franco Varriano (on Twitter @ FrancoVarriano) and Tyler Copeland (on Twitter @ TylerCopeland), speak with Victoria Lennox (on Twitter @ VLennox), the co-founder and CEO of Startup Canada, Canada's first-ever, entrepreneur-led, national movement. Victoria is the catalyst of a national grassroots network of local Startup Communities; PIVOTmagazine.ca, 1000startups.ca, StartupAward.ca & MentorshipChallenge.ca among other high-impact,...more
This is the forty-first episode of Hack To Start. Your hosts, Franco Varriano (on Twitter @ FrancoVarriano) and Tyler Copeland (on Twitter @ TylerCopeland), speak with Nadav Wilf (on Twitter @ NadavWilf), the VP of Possibility at HeroX, a spinoff of the XPRIZE organization founded by Peter Diamandis. Nadav has previously founded and sold many different startups including DiscoverSD which grew from $0 to $1M in 18 months. Nadav joins us to share his insights and experiences building and growin...more
This is the fortieth episode of Hack To Start. Your hosts, Franco Varriano (on Twitter @ FrancoVarriano) and Tyler Copeland (on Twitter @ TylerCopeland), speak with Susan Su (on Twitter @ Susanfsu), the growth marketer-in-residence for 500 Startups Distribution team. Susan has more than 8 years of experience going from corporate to startup in Silicon Valley, running marketing for some major media and web startups like: Google, with Ramit Sethi & IWillTeachYouToBeRich, InsideNetwork, AppSumo, a...more
This is the thirty-ninth episode of Hack To Start. Your hosts, Franco Varriano (on Twitter @ FrancoVarriano) and Tyler Copeland (on Twitter @ TylerCopeland), speak with Caneel Joyce (on Twitter @ Caneel), the CEO of Kickass Creative, her consulting practise that combines creativity with insights about human behavior to design elegant solutions to real problems. Caneel is an ideawoman, a design strategist, and a startup team builder who leverages creativity, data and psychology to design powerf...more
This is the thirty-eighth episode of Hack To Start. Your hosts, Franco Varriano (on Twitter @ FrancoVarriano) and Tyler Copeland (on Twitter @ TylerCopeland), speak with Dorothy Sanders (on Twitter @ Doro1hy), the co-founder and CEO of Maptia, a community of amazing stories told by photographers, writers, and adventurers on the the planet. As avid traveler, reader, and scientist, Dorothy and the founding team dreapt of building an ultimate map. Without any prior technical knowledge or educa...more
This is the thirty-seventh episode of Hack To Start. Your hosts, Franco Varriano (on Twitter @ FrancoVarriano) and Tyler Copeland (on Twitter @ TylerCopeland), speak with Elizabeth Wessel (on Twitter @ LizWessel), the co-founder and CEO of Campus Job. Prior to starting Campus Job, Liz launched a few startups while in college before working for Google on some major campaigns. In June 2014, Liz and her co-founder started Campus Job and raised a seed round in less then a month. They are now par...more
This is the thirty-sixth episode of Hack To Start. Your hosts, Franco Varriano (on Twitter @ FrancoVarriano) and Tyler Copeland (on Twitter @ TylerCopeland), speak with Max Altschuler (on Twitter @ MaxAlts), the founder of Sales Hacker. Max Altschuler is the founder and CEO of Sales Hacker, a high integrity community & conference for sales professionals. He's also the author of Hacking Sales: The Playbook For Building High Velocity Sales Machine. He shares his insights on building multisided ...more
This is the thirty-fifth episode of Hack To Start. Your hosts, Franco Varriano (on Twitter @ FrancoVarriano) and Tyler Copeland (on Twitter @ TylerCopeland), speak with Tom Meagher (on Twitter @ ThomasMeagher), the founder of Product Hunt Time Machine. With no real experience with programming, but a desire to work on his own side projects, Tom taught himself how to code iOS 8 apps in just 4 months. The result is Product Hunt Time Machine. Tom shares his insights, process, and struggles lear...more
This is the thirty-fourth episode of Hack To Start. Your hosts, Franco Varriano (on Twitter @ FrancoVarriano) and Tyler Copeland (on Twitter @ TylerCopeland), speak with Jenn Bane (on Twitter @ JennDangerous), the community manager at Cards Against Humanity. Jenn Bane is the community manager at Cards Against Humanity, a party game for horrible people. The game was created by 8 friends and launched through Kickstarted. Within just two weeks they met their original goal and went on to raise ov...more
This is the thirty-third episode of Hack To Start. Your hosts, Franco Varriano (on Twitter @ FrancoVarriano) and Tyler Copeland (on Twitter @ TylerCopeland), speak with Cubby Graham (on Twitter @ CubbyGraham), the community builder at Charity: Water. Cubby's passion is to help people help others. From a young age he was involved in various humanitarian efforts with his church and was deeply affected by the major issues caused by the lack of clean water in developing countries. He left a small...more
This is the thirty-second episode of Hack To Start. Your hosts, Franco Varriano (on Twitter @ FrancoVarriano) and Tyler Copeland (on Twitter @ TylerCopeland), speak with Jeremiah Gardner (on Twitter @ JeremiahGardner), the author of The Lean Brand. Jeremiah Gardner was born in the City of Sin, and raised in the City of Angels(that's Las Vegas and Los Angeles). He is passionate about helping startups (both entrepreneurs and intrapreneurs) tell their stories to real people. He authored The Lean...more
This is the thirty-first episode of Hack To Start. Your hosts, Franco Varriano (on Twitter @ FrancoVarriano) and Tyler Copeland (on Twitter @ TylerCopeland), speak with Sam Gerstenzang (on Twitter @ Gerstenzang), the director of product and growth at Imgur. Sam had a passion for computers early on and went on to study symbolic systems at Stanford. He first started working in startups with the Huffington Post, Buzzfeed and later joined the deal and research team at Andreesen Horowitz. He now l...more
This is the thirtieth episode of Hack To Start. Your hosts, Franco Varriano (on Twitter @ FrancoVarriano) and Tyler Copeland (on Twitter @ TylerCopeland), speak with Bridget Sauer (on Twitter @ BridgetCBSauer), the community manager at Teespring. Bridget studied art at Brown University and worked in Paris for the Hermes fashion house before realizing she wanted to pursue a career in startups. She shares how she got started at Teespring, how a background in design and an interest in technology...more
This is the twenty-ninth episode of Hack To Start. Your hosts, Franco Varriano (on Twitter @ FrancoVarriano) and Tyler Copeland (on Twitter @ TylerCopeland), speak with Ryan Delk (on Twitter @ Delk), growth & business development at Gumroad. Ryan's been an entrepreneur since an early age. While in college he began to get involved in the mobile and payments industries through opportunities with iHub and Square. He joins us to talk about how he approaches business development, growth, and how ...more
This is the twenty-eighth episode of Hack To Start. Your hosts, Franco Varriano (on Twitter @ FrancoVarriano) and Tyler Copeland (on Twitter @ TylerCopeland), speak with Max Lynch (on Twitter @ MaxLynch), the co-founder and CEO of Drifty, creators of the Ionic Framework. Max has been building products for the past few years, experimenting with different business models, funding styles and more. In less than 1 year, their Ionic framework has seen over 320,000 apps launched, the team raise 1 m...more
This is the twenty-seventh episode of Hack To Start. Your hosts, Franco Varriano (on Twitter @ FrancoVarriano) and Tyler Copeland (on Twitter @ TylerCopeland), speak with Marc Meszaros (on Twitter @ MarcMeszaros), the co-founder of Snapable and a software engineer at 5By. Marc shares his insights on building MVPs from a technical perspective, how he's previously done ideation, and how everyone should participate in an accelerator if they can.
This is the twenty-sixth episode of Hack To Start. Your hosts, Franco Varriano (on Twitter @ FrancoVarriano) and Tyler Copeland (on Twitter @ TylerCopeland) look back on the lessons learned in the first 25 episodes, about why Hack To Start was started, and what's next in 2015. Hack To Start began in October 2014, and through the support of our wonderful fans and community, has since featured 25 guests and achieved some incredible milestones: - More than doubled traffic month-after-month sinc...more
This is the twenty-fifth episode of Hack To Start. Your hosts, Franco Varriano (on Twitter @ FrancoVarriano) and Tyler Copeland (on Twitter @ TylerCopeland), speak with James Seymour-Lock (on Twitter @ JamesSLock), the co-founder of Simple As Milk. James shares his insights on building a business remotely, how focusing on quality over business leads to more word-of-mouth work, and how traveling impacts your perspective on work and life.
This is the twenty-fourth episode of Hack To Start. Your hosts, Franco Varriano (on Twitter @ FrancoVarriano) and Tyler Copeland (on Twitter @ TylerCopeland), speak with David Spinks (on Twitter @ DavidSpinks), the founder and CEO of CMX Media, the hub for the community industry. David has been building communities around startups and ideas his entire career, including Zaarly, LeWeb, uDemy, and SeatGeek. He also co-founded Feast, a cooking class for people who would never go to a cooking clas...more
This is the twenty-third episode of Hack To Start. Your hosts, Franco Varriano (on Twitter @ FrancoVarriano) and Tyler Copeland (on Twitter @ TylerCopeland), speak with Rafael Conde (on Twitter @ rafahari), designer at Imaginary Cloud and the co-founder of Sketchcasts. Rafael began designing in his third year of university, building his portfolio by re-designing some of his favorite apps. He co-founded Sketchcasts as a simple project to help teach others how to use Sketch. We spoke about the ...more
This is the twenty-second episode of Hack To Start. Your hosts, Franco Varriano (on Twitter @ FrancoVarriano) and Tyler Copeland (on Twitter @ TylerCopeland), speak with Steve Beauchesne (on Twitter @ BeausAllNatural), the co-founder and chief tasting officer at Beau's All Natural Brewing Company. Steve has been an entrepreneur since he was a kid. He started his own record label before opening Beau's Brewery with his dad. He shares the challenges of starting a craft brewery, how culture and v...more
This is the twenty-first episode of Hack To Start. Your hosts, Franco Varriano (on Twitter @ FrancoVarriano) and Tyler Copeland (on Twitter @ TylerCopeland), speak with Sofia Quintero (on Twitter @ Sofiaqt), an entrepreneur and the Head of Growth at Geckoboard. Sofia is from Venezuela and has launched many different startups. She was the only female skateboarded to be sponsored by Vans in Venezuela. Sofia shares with us why growth can be dangerous, but also how to leverage some of the most im...more
This is the twentieth episode of Hack To Start. Your hosts, Franco Varriano (on Twitter @ FrancoVarriano) and Tyler Copeland (on Twitter @ TylerCopeland), speak with Hana Abaza (on Twitter @ HanaAbaza), the director of marketing at Uberflip and co-founder of Wedding Republic and Snapable. Hana studied business & finance at the University of Ottawa and has always had an entrepreneurial spirit. This combination gave her a very analytical outlook on business. She shares her experience in online ...more
This is the nineteenth episode of Hack To Start. Your hosts, Franco Varriano (on Twitter @ FrancoVarriano) and Tyler Copeland (on Twitter @ TylerCopeland), speak with Wade Foster (on Twitter @ WadeFoster), the co-founder & CEO of Zapier, a platform that automates your workflow. Wade was on the path to being an industrial engineer when the economy collapsed. When he couldn't find a job, he turned to startups and marketing. A few years later, his company Zapier had been accepted to Y Combinator...more
This is the eighteenth episode of Hack To Start. Your hosts, Franco Varriano (on Twitter @ FrancoVarriano) and Tyler Copeland (on Twitter @ TylerCopeland), speak with Cat Noone(on Twitter @ ImCatNoone), the co-founder of Liberio, simple eBook creation & one-click publishing right from Google Drive, Dropbox, OneDrive, Github and more. Cat has lived and worked in both New York and San Francisco before moving to Berlin. She shares how these cities and her perspective on design has changed with e...more
This is the seventeenth episode of Hack To Start. Your hosts, Franco Varriano (on Twitter @ FrancoVarriano) and Tyler Copeland (on Twitter @ TylerCopeland), speak with Dan Shipper(on Twitter @ DanShipper), the co-founder of Firefly, a co-browsing solution for businesses. It was acquired by Pegasystems in July 2014. Dan has been building products since he was in high school. He started blogging in his freshman year of college and has since attracted more than half a million readers. His writin...more
This is the sixteenth episode of Hack To Start. Your hosts, Franco Varriano (on Twitter @ FrancoVarriano) and Tyler Copeland (on Twitter @ TylerCopeland), speak with Zach Holman(on Twitter @ Holman), the ninth employee at GitHub and the founder of speaking.io. He speaks with us about open source projects, building useful products, and how to speak effectively in public. Zach initially worked on what would become GitHub Enterprise and now mostly speaks on the subjects of building products, gro...more
This is the fifteenth episode of Hack To Start. Your hosts, Franco Varriano (on Twitter @ FrancoVarriano) and Tyler Copeland (on Twitter @ TylerCopeland), speak with Greg Isenberg(on Twitter @ GregIsenberg), the founder and CEO of 5By about building products, investing, and the value of networks and partnerships. Greg is from Montreal, Canada and has been building products since he was 13. By the age of 25, he'd already sold 3 companies and been angel investing for over a year. He'd also bui...more
This is the fourteenth episode of Hack To Start. Your hosts, Franco Varriano (on Twitter @ FrancoVarriano) and Tyler Copeland (on Twitter @ TylerCopeland), speak with John O'Nolan(on Twitter @ JohnONolan), the co-founder of Ghost about building new products, launching crowdfunding campaigns, and the importance of transparency with open source companies. John is an interactive designer specializing in digital publishing. He was formally the Deputy Head of The WordPress UI Group, where he helpe...more
This is the thirteenth episode of Hack To Start. Your hosts, Franco Varriano (on Twitter @ FrancoVarriano) and Tyler Copeland (on Twitter @ TylerCopeland), speak with Dominic Coballe(on Twitter @ DomCoballe), the co-founder of N-Product about the real challenges of building a physical product, the importance of good design, and the maker movement. Dominic is a design by trade and N-Product is practices the Slow Goods movement, where objects take time to craft, are composed of quality material...more
This is the twelfth episode of Hack To Start. Your hosts, Franco Varriano (on Twitter @ FrancoVarriano) and Tyler Copeland (on Twitter @ TylerCopeland), speak with Chris Hexton (on Twitter @ chexton), the co-founder of Vero (on Twitter @ veroapp) about how to send effective emails and building startups. Chris comes from a financial background, but as a self taught developer has always wanted to create his own product. After several years of consulting, he and his co-founder created Vero, a ser...more
This is the eleventh episode of Hack To Start. Your hosts, Franco Varriano (on Twitter @ FrancoVarriano) and Tyler Copeland (on Twitter @ TylerCopeland), speak with Zack Shapiro(on Twitter @ ZackShapiro), Founder of Silencer.io, Luna, and Built In Public, about the value of building products with transparency. Zack graduated university with a degree in journalism before taking on roles in a business capacity with The Next Big Sound, TechStars and Path, before teaching himself how to code thro...more
This is the tenth episode of Hack To Start. Your hosts, Franco Varriano (on Twitter @ FrancoVarriano) and Tyler Copeland (on Twitter @ TylerCopeland), speak with Andrew Draper(on Twitter @ AndrewDraper), designer and developer at Hootsuite Labs (on Twitter @ Hootsuite) about building startups and quickly iterating on prototypes. Andrew's been designing, developing, raising money and building startups for 14+ years. He talks about how to iterate quickly and simply products to gain initial tract...more
This is the ninth episode of Hack To Start. Your hosts, Franco Varriano (on Twitter @ FrancoVarriano) and Tyler Copeland (on Twitter @ TylerCopeland), speak with Adrian Salamunovic(on Twitter @ King_of_Canvas), Co-CEO of WorkshopX (on Twitter @ WorkshopXHQ), a team of entrepreneurs building great web based businesses. Adrian started DNA11 and CanvasPop with his friend and co-CEO Nazim Ahmed with only $2,000 and bootstrapped them both to multi-million dollar companies.
This is the eighth episode of Hack To Start. Your hosts, Franco Varriano (@FrancoVarriano) and Tyler Copeland (@TylerCopeland), speak with Heather Payne(@HeatherPayne), CEO of HackerYou (@HackerYou), part-time and full-time courses for people who want to learn to code. Heather is the co-founder of Ladies Learning Code and was recently named one of Canada's Top 100 Most Powerful Women.
This is the seventh episode of Hack To Start. Your hosts, Franco Varriano (@FrancoVarriano) and Tyler Copeland (@TylerCopeland), speak with Tomas Laurinavincious(@Tomaslau), founder at Despreneur (@Despreneur) about building blog-based businesses, mobile design and travelling. Tomas is the co-author of The Mobile Design book and has started and sold several businesses and blogs. He's currently travelling the world, working on Refe and Despreneur.
This is the sixth episode of Hack To Start. Your hosts, Franco Varriano (@FrancoVarriano) and Tyler Copeland (@TylerCopeland), speak with Andrew Dumont(@AndrewDumont), EIR at Betaworks (@Betaworks) about the importance of side projects and how business development and distribution channels can help grow your business. Previously, Andrew lead business development for Seemic (acquired by Hootsuite). He then had a similar role at Moz, growing their software sales through partners and distributio...more
This is the fifth episode of Hack To Start. Your hosts, Franco Varriano (@FrancoVarriano) and Tyler Copeland (@TylerCopeland), speak with Josh Pigford(@ShPigford), founder at Baremetrics (@Baremetrics) about creating MVP software products that create value and how to price from day 1. Josh has always been an entrepreneur and a maker of things. He previously founded PopSurvey, Temper, and was founder & editor of TheAppleBlog among others.
This is the fourth episode of Hack To Start. Your hosts, Franco Varriano (@FrancoVarriano) and Tyler Copeland (@TylerCopeland), speak with Ali Zahid(@alizhd), COO at Vanhawks (@Vanhawks) about building a complete startup (hardware + software) and how to launch your business through a crowdfunding campaign. Ali was a biomedical engineering student before he dropped out to join his co-founders at FounderFuel in Montreal. They launched their Kickstarter campaign 12 days before demo day, with the...more
This is the third episode of Hack To Start. Your hosts, Franco Varriano (@FrancoVarriano) and Tyler Copeland (@TylerCopeland), speak with Brandon Reti (@Brandonr182), VP Mobile at Breather (@Breather) about building a mobile product and how to determine what features it really needs. Brandon has worked in the mobile industry for over 10 years. He started off at Airborne Mobile, doing biz dev and closing deals like NFL, NHL, Family Guy and more. Brandon then lead a team of 45 at Manwin, one th...more
This is the second episode of Hack To Start. Your hosts, Franco Varriano (@FrancoVarriano) and Tyler Copeland (@TylerCopeland), speak with Hackster.io (@Hacksterio) Co-founder Adam Benzion(@AdamBenzion) about hardware startups and building products to serve your own needs. Adam previously worked at Microsoft, after selling them one of his first software products. He then left to build his own iPhone accessory - a battery charge case that was later acquired by OtterBox. Returning to his intere...more
This is the first episode of Hack To Start. Your hosts, Franco Varriano (@FrancoVarriano) and Tyler Copeland (@TylerCopeland), speak with Tattoo Hero (@Tattoo_Hero) CEO Brandon Waselnuk (@BrandonWaselnuk) about building a startup from idea at a Startup Weekend event, through an accelerator (FounderFuel) and all the way to seed round. Brandon previously to worked at IBM, in the Business Analytics Sector, as an Investment Lead For Business Intelligence and Predictive Analytics.