Angelneers: Insights From Startup Builders

What does it take to succeed at the top? In this episode, we sat down to talk about what transforms ordinary people into world-class leaders with Jay Rudman, CEO of Topstep, a financial technology firm based in Chicago, that evaluates day traders’ performance in real-time simulated accounts. Jay is an experienced and successful leader of 5 businesses – 4 of which exited. He specializes in scaling businesses, team development, change management and go-to-market strategies; and is a CEO Mentor at The Junto Institute where startup leaders grow faster than their companies are growing. Twitter: JayRudman  

In this episode, we are talking about bringing better communication to remote working with Raj Singh, the CEO and co-founder of Pulse. Pulse (formerly known as Loop Team), is a startup that is building a better way for distributed teams to connect, communicate and collaborate.  Most recently, Raj co-founded Tempo AI (acquired by Salesforce), co-founded AllTheCooks (acquired by Cookpad), was the founding BD person at Skyfire (acquired by Opera), co-founded Veeker (acquired by WMG) and others.  In the last two decades, he's been involved with numerous startups as a consultant, advisor, and investor. He's also been running a blog writing about his mostly tech thoughts.   Personal website: rajansingh.com Twitter: mobileraj

Nodle is a citizen-powered decentralized IoT network of Polkadot, providing secure, low-cost connectivity and data liquidity to billions of IoT devices.  Anyone with a smartphone can earn crypto for free with the Nodle Cash app.  Nodle is easy to use with no hardware to buy.  In this episode we sat down with Micha Benoliel, the CEO and Co-Founder of Nodle, to talk about the finer points of connecting what was never connected before in the world that is gearing to become hyperconnected.  Micha has been a pioneer in VoIP and launched several telecommunications services in the past decade.  Back in 2011, Micha co-founded Open Garden, the creator of FireChat, the first off-the-grid messaging app, leveraging peer-to-peer mesh networking. To learn more about Nodle check out these links: https://telegram.me/nodlecommunity https://twitter.com/nodlenetwork https://www.linkedin.com/company/nodle/  

We are excited to open our 3rd season with an interview with Ashish Bhatia about his journey working inside the big companies and then transitioning to work with startups. Ashish has diverse experience building software at mobile-first DeFi platform Celo, Facebook & WhatsApp, and as a founding engineer on Google's Android app scanning product Google Bouncer. He currently holds technically advisory roles at 5 startups and is an investor in over 40 startups. For more information please visit his blog https://ashishb.net/

Reverse ETL is the hot, popular trend within the modern tech stack. ETL tools like Fivetran, Stitch, and Matillion make it easy to set up and send data to a warehouse with the click of a button. As software firms of all sizes generate more data than ever, their data warehouses are becoming more and more important in facilitating the rise of operational analytics in various internal organizations. Hightouch is a data platform that helps users to sync their customer data in their data warehouse to their SaaS sales and marketing tools such as Hubspot, Salesforce, Marketo, Zendesk, Gainsight and others. We wrap up Season 2 of our podcast with an interview with Kashish Gupta, a co-founder and co-CEO of Hightouch, discussing the main key innovation in data warehouse technology that facilitated empowering business teams with operational analytics.   https://hightouch.io/blog/ kashgupta.com/

Account-based marketing is like personalized marketing on steroids. But is ABM right for your company? While “account-based marketing” is a buzzworthy phrase, it isn’t an optimal strategy for every business. In this episode, Gil Allouche, a co-founder and CEO of Metadata, talks about the finer points of giving marketing teams the tools to build out the right targeted audiences and allowing them to use those audiences to serve up ads platforms that perform best. https://metadata.io/resources/blog/ https://metadata.io/resources/podcasts/ https://gilallouche.com/  

In a global economy with an estimated 1 billion so-called knowledge workers, and with freelancers accounting for some 35% of the world’s workforce, it’s a pretty gigantic market, which you could alternately look at as a major opportunity, but also a ripe field for many players with multiple permutations of the marketplace concept. Braintrust is a new player in the world of freelance marketplaces and it stands out for a number of reasons.   In this episode, we talk about a better future for remote work with Adam Jackson, a co-founder of Braintrust, a blockchain-powered nonprofit decentralized marketplace that connects skilled tech freelancers with enterprise clients like Goldman Sachs, Porsche, Under Armour and Wayfair. Braintrust is disrupting incumbent hiring platforms by transferring ownership into the hands of freelancers and finding a new way to align the incentives of workers and the companies that employ them.  Adam is a serial entrepreneur and an active technology investor. Back in 2012 he co-founded and was a CEO at Doctor On Demand.   Podcast: usebraintrust.com/podcast Twitter: adamjacksonsf Blog: jacksonfound.com

Construction is a massive complex $1.3 trillion industry in the United States. As one of the least digitized sectors of our economy, construction is ripe for technology disruption. Upcodes is a construction tech startup that develops building-code compliance tools to help the AEC (architecture, engineering and construction) industry deliver code-compliant buildings. We sat down with Scott Reynolds, a co-founder and CEO of Upcodes to talk about how technology can address some of the AEC challenges.   https://up.codes/ https://twitter.com/upcodes https://www.linkedin.com/company/upcodes    

Polytomic makes internal data accessible to business teams. Data within companies is fragmented. Sales, Marketing, Support, Finance, and Operations teams spend enormous amounts of time repeatedly hunting for data that lives outside of their home systems. Polytomic reduces this time to zero. In this episode, we spoke with Ghalib Suleiman, a co-founder and CEO of Polytomic, about the nuances of moving the business data where it's needed. Website: https://www.polytomic.com/ Twitter: @polytomic

Our guest in this episode is Siavash Mahmoudian, a co-founder and CEO of Tribe, a platform to build online communities based on a collection of social media best practices. Tribe is popular for its ability to deeply integrate into products and websites via a suite of customizable widgets and comprehensive API. Today we are talking with Siavash about what it takes to build a successful online community. Twitter Linkedin Glassdoor

KD Deshpande is a co-founder and CEO of Simplified, the all-in-one design platform where freelancers, entrepreneurs and teams can collaborate, scale, and grow their content. KD is an entrepreneurial product leader who founded two SaaS companies, built teams & products from the ground up, raised venture capital, and successfully sold the business through an M&A exit. In this episode, we sat down with KD to talk about the evolution of the design space over the past several years, and new design tools that meet the demands of a new generation of designers and design-oriented organizations.

Jeff Solomon is a 6x founder with 3 exits, most notably selling his SaaS CRM company Velocify in 2017 for $128M. He co-founded the accelerator Amplify.la in Los Angeles (with 100+ investments across 5 funds). For the last 6 years he's been teaching high school entrepreneurship and is one of the top advisors on Clarity.fm. In this episode, we are talking with Jeff about the art of customer development. Jeff Solomon Personal Site: https://bak.me Customer Development Course on Udemy: https://www.udemy.com/course/startup-customer-development-finding-product-market-fit/?referralCode=799B301D2B1854B56CEA Email Jeff (see his personal website) if you want a coupon code. Markup Hero: https://markuphero.com Here is a coupon code for 6 months of a year plan: HERO6FREEYR Mike Fishbein's list of customer development questions: https://mfishbein.com/the-ultimate-list-of-customer-development-questions/

Today’s malicious actors are more sophisticated than ever. First-gen products only identify software vulnerabilities and license issues. Technology has evolved beyond Software Composition Analysis. It requires a new breed of defense. Phylum, a Colorado-based startup helps developers identify and mitigate all major risk classes across the entire open-source software supply chain. We sat down with its co-founder and CEO Aaron Bray to talk about the future of software supply chain security.

Tom Mohr is the founder and CEO of CEO Quest, a Silicon Valley-headquartered forum for CEOs of venture-backed technology companies. Tom is the author of 5 books about startups including "In The Loop" which is centered on building the digital enterprise. We sat down with Tom to talk about fit systems for various stages of enterprise and the new leadership paradigm that makes it happen (in other words: how to build and scale startups). https://medium.com/ceoquest https://twitter.com/ceo_quest https://www.facebook.com/CEOQuestLLC/    

Our guest today is Sergio Aguirre, the founder and CEO of Echopixel, a software platform that enables physicians to use a digital twin of a patient using standard medical images to create a 4D interactive hologram. In this episode, we sat down with Sergio to talk about developing technology that transforms the delivery of patient care and enables precision health. Website: https://echopixeltech.com/ Twitter: https://twitter.com/echopixel_inc