Giant Robots Smashing Into Other Giant Robots

486: Blox with Simon Ritchie

August 3rd, 2023 | Season 11 | 46 mins

Simon Ritchie, the founder and CEO of Blox, discusses his background and journey leading up to starting the company. He began his career in finance but discovered his passion for technology and finance systems. He worked at Anaplan, a successful finance planning and analysis software company, but saw the limitations of rigid systems when COVID-19 hit. He realized there was a need for a more flexible and accessible financial modeling and planning tool, especially for small businesses and charities.

Blox aims to fill this gap by providing a powerful yet easy-to-use modeling, calculation, and planning engine that sits between spreadsheets and complex enterprise software. The company is about a year old, has raised venture funding, and launched a free tier of its product. They prioritize building a compelling product, iterating quickly, and engaging with users to understand their needs.

485: Pointz with Maggie Bachenberg and Trisha Ballakur

July 27th, 2023 | Season 11 | 38 mins 12 secs

Maggie Bachenberg, CEO, and Trisha Ballakur, CTO, are the co-founders of Pointz, a mobile mapping app that helps navigate bike and scooter riders through safe routes in cities.

Victoria talks to Maggie and Trisha about their cycling backgrounds, how they met and became co-founders, and what they feel is the differentiator for their app versus what was/is already on the market for biking-related apps.

484: Ruby On Rails: The Podcast with Brittany Martin

July 20th, 2023 | Season 11 | 50 mins 30 secs

Brittany Martin is an Engineering Manager at Shogun, where she manages a team of Ruby and React engineers and is the Co-host of The Ruby on Rails Podcast.

Victoria and Will talk to Brittany about the multitude of stuff she's interested in, including Roller Derby, and gives the story of how she found herself co-hosting the show. She says knowing what your brand is and what listeners should expect from listening to you is super important, and she gives her opinion on what it means to be in the Ruby on Rails Community.

483: Honeycomb.io with Charity Majors

July 13th, 2023 | Season 11 | 40 mins 46 secs

Charity Majors is Co-Founder and CTO of Honeycomb, which provides full-stack observability that enables engineers to deeply understand and debug production software together.

Victoria talks to Charity about observability, her technical background and decision to start Honeycomb.io, thoughts about the whole ops SRE profession, and things that surprised her along her journey of building a company around observability as a concept.

482: Evil Martians with Irina Nazarova

July 6th, 2023 | Season 11 | 33 mins 46 secs

Irina Nazarova is CEO of Evil Martians, a product development consultancy that works with startups and established businesses while creating open-source products and services.

Victoria talks to Irina about getting a sense of what people are interested in learning about or what kind of problems they have, how consulting and product development complement each other, and of course, the question on everyone's minds: Is Evil Martians really evil? 😈

481: Oscar Health with Neetu Rajpal

June 29th, 2023 | Season 11 | 31 mins 49 secs

Neetu Rajpal is the CTO of Oscar Health. Oscar aims to make a healthier life accessible and affordable for all by refactoring healthcare to make great care cost less.

Chad talks to Neetu about working for a relatively new insurance company, reorganizing its structure by getting people into the right positions, and how incorporating large language models and generative AI is an inflection point that will help move things forward.

480: klo.dev with Aaron Torres and Ala Shiban

June 22nd, 2023 | Season 11 | 39 mins 17 secs

Aaron Torres and Ala Shiban are from Klotho, which powers Infrastructure Copilot, the most advanced infrastructure design tool that understands how to define, connect, and scale your infrastructure-as-code.

Victoria talks to Aaron and Ala about the Klotho engine, Klotho the CLI tool, and InfraCopilot and how they work together to help enable developer teams to iterate on applications and features quickly.

479: Wistia with Brendan Schwartz

June 15th, 2023 | Season 11 | 38 mins 45 secs

Brendan Schwartz is the Co-Founder and CTO of Wistia, software that makes it easy to find, engage, and grow your audience with video.

Victoria talks to Brendan about the latest updates on the platform, interesting problems he found that Wistia was able to remove and help his team get to speed and velocity, and the personal value that drives his decision-making.

478: Senga with Agnes Malatinszky

June 8th, 2023 | Season 11 | 22 mins

Agnes Malatinszky is the Founder of Senga, which takes care of back-office administrative needs for freelancers, contractors, and solopreneurs.

Victoria and Will interview Agnes about the thoughtbot Incubator program and what led Agnes to choose to apply, what the demands on her time were like, how it worked, and how she feels now that she's at the end of the program.

477: 20th Anniversary Episode

June 1st, 2023 | Season 11 | 52 mins 35 secs

Chad joins cohosts Victoria and Will to talk about thoughtbot's 20th birthday! 🤖🎉

In this episode, you'll find the 411 on the thoughtbot mascot, "Ralph," taking the company fully remote, and our company values and how we believe products should be designed and built!

476: OpenSauced with Brian Douglas

May 25th, 2023 | Season 11 | 41 mins 23 secs

Brian Douglas is the CEO of OpenSauced which helps enterprises discover the best engineers in Open Source.

Victoria and Will talk to Brian about meeting as many developers as possible, setting goals, and keeping himself accountable, and what makes a successful open source project.

475: Designing Data Governance From the Ground Up with Lauren Maffeo

May 18th, 2023 | Season 11 | 48 mins 45 secs

Lauren Maffeo is the author of Designing Data Governance from the Ground Up.

Victoria talks to Lauren about human-centered design work, data stewardship and governance, and writing a book anybody can use regardless of industry or team size.

474: Freelance Producer, Podcaster, Actor, Motion Capture & Performance Capture Performer Jasper (William) Cartwright

May 11th, 2023 | Season 11 | 43 mins 42 secs

Jasper (William) Cartwright is a Freelance Producer, Podcaster, Actor, and Motion Capture & Performance Capture Performer.

Chad talks to Jasper about his podcast Three Black Halflings, which is committed to discussing diversity and inclusion within fantasy, sci-fi, and nerdy culture from the perspective of three people of color, what it's like to be in the space, and why representation is super important.

473: Noula with Noelle Acosta

May 4th, 2023 | Season 11 | 38 mins 42 secs

Noelle Acosta is Founder and CEO of Noula Health, a data-driven platform that uses personalized hormonal health data to deliver tailored care.

Victoria talks to Noelle about helping patients with uteruses to better understand their bodies by providing them with hormonal health data that's unique to them and providing them with individualized care they deserve at their fingertips through a virtual app.

472: Interlock Capital with Neal Bloom

April 27th, 2023 | Season 11 | 39 mins 36 secs

Neal Bloom is a Managing Partner at Interlock Capital, a community of founders, investors, and subject matter experts.

Victoria talks to Neal about what he finds attractive about startups and companies he's excited about, out of all the pitches he receives, how many he gets to say yes to, and when working with a team, what he uses to manage information and contacts for investors.

471: Blossm with Brian Feretic

April 20th, 2023 | Season 11 | 32 mins 57 secs

Brian Feretic is the Founder of Blossm, a community marketplace to buy, sell, and trade plants.

Victoria talks to Brian about how coming up with the concept happened, getting started in a very scrappy way and then filling in gaps, and opening up the app to have full marketplace functionality with buying, selling, and trading capabilities.