Naré Vardanyan has a statistically unlikely story. She grew up in Armenia, without electricity during a war. She recalls that her parents gamified the experience, which allowed her to experience it much differently than the hardship it was. Her upbringing was very community driven, focused on caring for others. Eventually, she went to work for the United Nations, in her words, so she could save the world - though eventually she was disillusioned by how slow things moved. It was at this point, where she shifted over to tech. Outside of tech, she used to love reading, but now that she has a child, she sticks to audiobooks. And, she thoroughly enjoys art, specifically, 20th century Russian-Jewish artists.

When Naré started to travel abroad, she noticed that for some folks, the ability to obtain things in life, like a Visa or Passport, was a given. Yet, others were not enabled to obtain these types of things, as the process was much more difficult or unavailable. She set out to create the great equalizer, through enriched financial data.

This is the creation story of Ntropy.

Sponsors

• Cipherstash
• Treblle
• CAST AI 
• Firefly
• Turso

Links

• Website: https://ntropy.com/
• LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/narevardanyan/

Ron Richardson studied robotics and embedded systems in Arizona, and is a former Marine - which is where he got his start in logistics. His biggest influence has been his parents. He mentioned his Mom introduced him to a personal website builder, which kicked off his learning into HTML, PHP and JavaScript. Outside of tech, he has a passion for traveling, and is big into horror games and movies. One of his favorite horror games is Amnesia, and movie is Insidious. He actually built an app to have an ongoing curated playlist for his fans.

Ron previously co-founded a startup in the eCommerce space, focusing on fulfillment in Asia. While he was building the backend for this solution, he noticed there weren't any developer tools for logistics and supply chain. He built an API solution and SDK to help implement common design features for this industry.

This is the creation story of Fleetbase.

Sponsors

• Cipherstash
• Treblle
• CAST AI 
• Firefly
• Turso

Links

• Website: https://www.fleetbase.io/
• LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/ronald-a-richardson/
• https://apps.apple.com/us/app/horror-movie-night/id1613495460

Before Sargun Kaur got into tech, she was anti-wanting to be in tech. Her Dad was an engineer, and she thought the work he did was super boring. She pursued journalism, marine biology, and found her self changing interests a lot as she got bored. Now, she came over to the dark side, and jokes that she is no longer interesting because she is so immersed in what she does. Outside of tech, she loves to travel, building community, and hosting. This boils down to loving bringing people together through multiple means. And finally, she jokes that she is a mediocre instagram poet, enjoying writing semi-deep posts on the platform.

When Sargun was applying at Google, she went through their normal engineering interview process - IE five whiteboard sessions back to back. After getting hired at Google, she struggled with the industry standard for interview questions, via algorithmic riddles, that didn't mirror the actual job. These types of interviews weren't only not fair, but left many great candidates out in the cold.

This is the creation story of Byteboard.

Sponsors

• Cipherstash
• Treblle
• CAST AI 
• Firefly
• Turso

Links

• Website: https://byteboard.dev/
• LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/sargunkaur/

What if you had a window into the digital startup world?

What if you could ask the tech veterans what it feels like to create a world class product?

...how to recover from critical mistakes...

...how to scale your solution to the masses?

How do you get from an idea on the back of a napkin, to a fully functioning product?

What if you could hear the human stories about how they delivered technology?

What if there was a show where you could hear those stories?

Sponsors

• Cipherstash
• Treblle
• CAST AI 
• Firefly
• Turso

Tools and Weapons, hosted by Microsoft Vice Chair and President Brad Smith, features conversations with leaders in government, business, and culture that explore the world’s most critical challenges at the intersection of technology and society.

This episode’s guest is Strive Masiyiwa, a pioneer of Africa’s telecoms industry and influential global tech tycoon.

He and Brad discuss Strive’s work to ensure that all 1.3 billion+ Africans get access to digital infrastructure, close the digital skills gap, and invest in the continent’s young entrepreneurs to find innovative solutions for healthcare and food insecurity.

Follow or subscribe to Tools and Weapons with Brad Smith wherever you get your podcasts.

Links

• Website: https://news.microsoft.com/tools-and-weapons-podcast/

Rene Morkos is a builder. When he was younger, his Dad told him that he could study anything he wanted, as long as it wasn't Civil Engineering. So... that is exactly what he did. He has built amazing things all over the world, and also, obtained his PhD at Stanford. Outside of technology, he likes to alternate hobbies, and has currently settled into Mountaineering, after spending some time doing Kite Surfing.

Rene was in Afghanistan working on a project, trying to repair the runway that had been struck by RPG's. He was struck by how hard it was to find the optimal way to do a simple project. While he was studying his PhD, he also noticed that constructions sites were under utilized... so he and his team invented a simple algorithm that knew how to build.

This is the reaction story of Alice Technologies.

Sponsors

• Airbyte
• Doppler
• Host.io
• IPInfo
• mabl
• SupportZebra

Links

• Website: https://alicetechnologies.com/
• LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/renemorkos/

Valentin Vasilyev has always been interested in the open source world. His Github account was created way back in 2008 when they started. He always dreamt about contributing to Ruby on Rails, since he developed with it in the past. Outside of tech, he loves cycling - road and mountain, and enjoys good coffee and online shooting games. He's married with 2 kids, and loves living in the midwest, specifically Chicago.

Post getting his green card, Valentin wanted to experiment with the open source library he created, which its worth noting, was starred 6000 times. He decided to keep his library, but spin off a pro version which included a backend. Then he followed up with some landing pages, and payment mechanisms. And then began his focus on accuracy.

This is the creation story of Fingerprint.com.

Sponsors

• Airbyte
• Doppler
• Host.io
• IPInfo
• mabl
• SupportZebra

Links

• Website: https://fingerprint.com/
• LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/valentin-vasilyev/

Sam Lambert is originally from the UK, and has lived quite a few places during his life. He went to school in India, but now resides in San Francisco. He finds software to be a creative, playful process, and sees people trying to build that away from the process. He feels very lucky to building something that provides fruit and solves problems. Outside of tech, he is married with a 4 year old, and is into cooking and art. I asked about NFT's, given his tech background, but he's not super into that form of art at this time.

Sam spent time working at Github as a VP of Engineering, specifically focusing on infrastructure. He and his team came across Vitess, the backend that ran YouTube, and he took this amazing framework into his current venture to remix their approach of design and scalability.

This is the creation story of PlanetScale.

Sponsors

• Airbyte
• Doppler
• Host.io
• IPInfo
• mabl
• SupportZebra

Links

• Website: https://planetscale.com/
• LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/isamlambert/

Ruben Izmailyan grew up in Armenia originally, then moved to Russia when he was 12. When he was 14, he and his family came to the US, eventually attending school at Brown in Rhode Island. He's an avid BBQer, which fits perfectly now that he is living in Texas with his young family. However, he let me know that he even was into this style of cooking when he was living in Brooklyn - against the wishes of his landlord at the time.

In a previous role, Ruben was made aware that although financial institutions and brokers had access to useful data, normal consumers did not. Starting out with a budgeting app, he and his team ended up pivoting to creating the tooling and infrastructure needed to interact with financial data sets. And this abstraction started to gain traction.

This is the creation story of Quiltt.

Sponsors

• Airbyte
• Doppler
• Host.io
• IPInfo
• mabl
• SupportZebra

Links

• Website: https://www.quiltt.io/
• LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/rubenizmailyan/

Welcome back listeners, today we are dropping episode in our series entitled The New Notification Stack for Developers, brought to you by our long time friends and sponsors of the Code Story podcast, Courier. As a reminder, Courier is developer infrastructure for product notifications, making it easier to deliver the notification experience that your customers expect. Check out their product to learn more at Courier.com

Guest: Drew Youngwerth, Software Manager at Courier

Links

• Website: https://courier.com/codestory
• LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/drew-youngwerth/