Code Story: Insights from Startup Tech Leaders

Kateryna Sytnyk is originally from Ukraine, but moved to the states 15 years ago after winning the green card lottery. Her background is in applied mathematics, and she grew up surrounded with logica…

Benjamin Wilms started his career in 1999 as a developer. In the little free time he has, he does mountain biking, spends time with his family, and visits the ocean a few hours away. For mountain bik…

John Rush has been in tech since he was a child, so its hard for him to think of a time where it wasn't a part of his life. Since 2008, he has been building apps, websites, etc. and a lot of what he …

Tom Medema is Dutch, and grew up in a small village in the Netherlands. This allowed him to explore what else was out there, which led to him living in 5 different countries. Alongside that, he loves…

Raj Bains grew up in India, North of Delhi, and comes from a family who, as he says, does "whatever is best to do" at the time. They moved around quite a bit when he was a kid, and his family dabbled…

Derek Osgood comes from a family of entrepreneurs, and has always known he wanted to start something himself. Prior to that, he worked for other companies, large and small, in product and marketing r…

Justin Clegg grew up all around the world, living in countries like Puerto Rico, Mexico City and Brazil. He spent 2 years on mission in Africa, and 5 years in India as well. Through these experiences…

Will Falcon did not have a traditional path to tech. He is originally from South America, and moved to the US when he was a teenager. Later in life, he went through Navy Seal training and served the …

Conor Carmody lives just outside of Dublin with his wife and has 3 lads - aka boys. Professionally, he worked in Eastern Europe around the time of the Berlin Wall, through some dramatic change in soc…

Mark Stouse was a CCO and CMO in large companies like Honeywell Aerospace. He claims that he is not a data scientist, but can play one on TV. He got to a high degree of organizational maturity, and c…

Jake Vacovec started his career in sales, and eventually moved into the product world. He loves to cook, and finds it relaxing, and a good way to unwind from startup world. Primarily, he loves to coo…

Waseem Daher had two immigrant parents from Lebanon. He was born in the states, after the migrated to the states in the 80's. With his relatives around him, he saw that it was possible to run your ow…

Ryan Buick grew up in San Francisco - in the actual city itself. He went to school in Oregon, but quickly back to the area. He is a very proud owner of a COVID dog - IE, he got the dog during COVID -…

Ashleigh Wilson is a self proclaimed elevator baby, being raised in the elevator industry. She grew up with an interesting mix of entrepreneurial spirit, along side blue collar influence. Outside of …

Alex Omeyer is undercover French ,despite his thick British accent. He was born and raised in Paris, and though he studied business and management, he spent most of his time doing show jumping - in o…

Ruslan K has been doing software development for over 10 years. He's gone from mobile development to automation and AI most recently, working with neural networks. He is a huge horror movie fan - wit…

Max Koziolek comes from a simple background. His single mother raised he and his twin brother, outside of Berlin, with no connection to technology. When he was introduced to tech, he was really only …

Jon Darbyshire is joined at the hip with his wife, in life and in business. They have been doing business together for 22 years, along with having 2 older kids, out in the world doing their own thing…

Andrew Zhou grew up in the Bay Area, which he claims was a great place to grow up in. However, he noticed that it was sort of in authentic - as in, no one really did things for themselves. Eventually…

Vicki Duben's background is actually in physics and applied mathematics. Prior to graduation, she was a professional tennis player, having played since she was 4 years old. She loves science, and tho…