Giant Robots Smashing Into Other Giant Robots
About the show
A podcast about the design, development, and business of great software. Each week thoughtbot is joined by the people who build and nurture the products we love.
Episodes
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435: Numerated with Adam Kenney
August 11th, 2022 | Season 11 | 34 mins 49 secs
Adam Kenney is Chief Product Officer at Numerated, which helps banks and credit unions transform how they lend to businesses.
Chad talks with Adam about what institutional banks and credit unions are like as a market and customers and what sales cycles look like, going from 17 to more than 130 customers quickly, and the scaling challenges they faced, and how the pandemic affected them as a company.
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434: SOS with Susanna Twarog
August 4th, 2022 | Season 11 | 29 mins 59 secs
Susanna Twarog is Co-Founder and Co-CEO of SOS, which is transforming wellness on the go through a network of smart vending machines that deliver just-in-time necessities where and when you need the most.
Chad talks with Susanna about wellness on the go, the unique business that they're building and what SOS can offer brands, and the biggest hurdles to overcome to get 10,000 machines up and running.
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433: Techie Staffing with Anna Spearman
July 28th, 2022 | Season 11 | 50 mins 53 secs
Anna Spearman is the Founder of Techie Staffing, which connects high-quality technology talent with high-caliber clients.
Chad talks with Anna about founding and growing the company, immediately after graduating college, during a pandemic, reputation building, and facing skepticism around her lack of track record in recruiting, and finding and providing talent for clients as a white-glove service.
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432: MustWatch with Chelinde Edouard
July 21st, 2022 | Season 11 | 28 mins 20 secs
Chelinde Edouard is Co-Founder and CEO of MustWatch, which connects people through television.
Chad talks with Che about creating a social and user engagement platform that allows people to come back and constantly use an app without interrupting TV-watching experiences, how they use data to improve user experience, and fundraising and giving investors opportunities to help build out the app, increase marketing, and potentially build an Android version.
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431: DEI at thoughtbot with Geronda Wollack-Spiller
July 14th, 2022 | Season 11 | 37 mins 29 secs
Geronda Wollack-Spiller is the DEI Program Manager at thoughtbot.
Chad talks with Geronda about implementing a successful Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion program at the company by providing a culture of belonging, the challenges, in particular, the tech industry faces, and acknowledging that many of us work in spaces where when we're bringing someone onto a team who has underrepresented identities, they might be the only one. How do we create a space that's as inclusive as possible?
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430: LearnWorlds with Panos Siozos
July 7th, 2022 | Season 11 | 37 mins 55 secs
Panos Siozos is Co-Founder and CEO of LearnWorlds, an online course platform for creating, selling, and promoting online courses.
Chad talks with Panos about building e-learning platforms dating back to 1999, providing rich feature sets and catering to customers located in lots of different places, and deciding to stop bootstrapping and take investor money.
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429: 5x with Tarush Aggarwal
June 30th, 2022 | Season 11 | 31 mins 59 secs
Tarush Aggarwal is the Founder and CEO of 5X, the modern data stack as a managed service that enables companies to answer business questions without having to worry about building data infrastructure or bringing in the right data engineering team.
Chad talks with Tarush about the modern data stack movement, choosing things that make sense on behalf of their customers, and building a team culture at a company with a fairly large time zone distribution.
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428: LGBT YouthLink of CenterLink with Deborah Levine
June 23rd, 2022 | Season 11 | 25 mins
Deborah Levine is the Director of LGBT YouthLink at CenterLink, which supports, strengthens, and connects LGBT centers.
Chad talks with Deborah about working on something new called imi: a free digital research-backed mental health tool intended to support and help LGBTQ+ teens explore and affirm their identity and learn practical ways to cope with their sexual and gender minority stress, founding Q Chat Space, a digital LGBTQ+ center where teens join live-chat, professionally facilitated, online support groups, and how over the time that she's been doing work in LGBTQ+ spaces products and online interaction have changed and evolved.
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427: BrainStation with Johanna Mikkola
June 16th, 2022 | Season 11 | 41 mins 22 secs
Johanna Mikkola is the Co-Founder and CEO of Wyncode Academy, recently acquired by BrainStation, whose project-based programs have helped over 100,000 professionals launch new careers in the tech industry.
Chad talks with Johanna about creating a digital skills training bootcamp, the hiring and training market and challenges, and prioritizing inclusion and diversity in the student population.
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426: Marvelous with Jeni Barcelos
June 9th, 2022 | Season 11 | 40 mins 53 secs
Jeni Barcelos is the Co-Founder and CEO of Marvelous, the world's most beautiful all-in-one teaching platform.
Chad talks with Jeni about what makes Marvelous different from other teaching platforms out there, the importance of elevating women to leadership positions, and why applying for and getting accepted into an accelerator program was the right path for the company.
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425: SweetProcess with Owen McGab Enaohwo
June 2nd, 2022 | Season 11 | 32 mins 42 secs
Owen McGab Enaohwo is the CEO and Co-Founder of SweetProcess, a business process management software that helps management teams and employees easily document procedures, implement processes, and manage tasks.
Chad talks with Owen about taking specific root issues and building software around them, overcoming resistance to the core idea of documenting processes, and the importance of having the freedom and ability to be empowered to make changes to organizational documents that outline how you do your work.
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424: Boulevard with Matt Danna
May 26th, 2022 | Season 11 | 34 mins 25 secs
Matt Danna is the Co-Founder and CEO of Boulevard, which powers next-gen salons and spas. Its mission is to modernize the technology while improving the daily lives of professionals and the clients they serve.
Chad talks with Matt about discovering a problem and then making the jump to working on it, overcoming hurdles in terms of continued growth, and deciding to invest in building their own hardware by creating Boulevard Duo: a point of sale credit card reader.
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423: Reign Ventures with Monique Idlett
May 19th, 2022 | Season 11 | 41 mins 54 secs
Monique Idlett is the Founder of Reign Ventures, a seed-stage investment firm, and previously the Co-Founder and CEO of Mosley Brands and Mosley Music Group, home to a multiplatinum roster of artists.
Chad talks with Monique about how the music industry is like the startup venture capital industry, understanding that representation matters, having a data-forward approach, and appearing on the TV show Undercover Billionaire, where entrepreneurs are given 90-days and nothing but 100 dollars to go undercover and build a thriving million-dollar business for a small town in the US.
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422: Verge HealthTech Fund with Joseph Mocanu
May 12th, 2022 | Season 11 | 36 mins 52 secs
Joseph Mocanu is Co-founder and Managing Director of Verge HealthTech Fund, which invests globally in seed-stage healthcare technology startups relevant to emerging Asia that focus on disease prevention and management, digital therapies, and health system efficiency.
Chad talks with Joseph about the healthcare landscape in different places of the world, funding criteria for companies, and how the pandemic has changed prospects for the fund and the market in general.
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421: Benchmark Labs with Carlos F. Gaitan Ospina
May 5th, 2022 | Season 11 | 34 mins 41 secs
Carlos F. Gaitan Ospina is the Founder and CEO of Benchmark Labs, which provides IoT-based weather forecasting solutions for the agriculture, energy, and insurance sectors worldwide using proprietary machine-learning software.
Chad talks with Carlos about creating the company, the hardware they're producing and what it is doing, and where the machine learning comes into play.
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420: mRelief with Dize Hacioglu
April 28th, 2022 | Season 11 | 44 mins 18 secs
Dize Hacioglu is the CTO of Chicago’s mRelief, which offers an easy-to-use platform that helps families connect to SNAP food benefits. Since it was founded in 2014, the non-profit mRelief has helped 2.8 million Americans unlock $1 billion in food stamp benefits.
Chad talks with Dize about how the platform helps people navigate the often complicated food stamp benefits system, what her role as CTO looks like as a CTO who codes, and how she hopes to help facilitate the growth of the mRelief program and team.