Hacktostart

Adam Michalski is focused on Partner Growth at Branch Metrics, a deep linking platform for mobile apps. Adam is an incredible entrepreneur based out of New York. After studying finance, Adam began a career in banking and started working with larger corporate clients. Through this experience, he began to understand business operations and financing. He then started to immerse himself in the local startup scene and taught himself more about tech startups. He launched a side project called DormChat. After growing it to 15 campuses and raising a seed round, Adam went in full time. One year later, he realized there was too much competition and made the difficult decision to shut it down. But mobile and startups were still a passion for Adam and he found his way onto the GoButler team as they had just closed a massive Series A round and were setting up operations in the US, where he became the Director of Business Development and Operations. Following his time with GoButler, Adam came across the opportunity to join

Chris Messina is the Developer Experience Lead at Uber Chris Messina is the Developer Experience Lead at Uber, and pretty much an internet celebrity. From literally inventing the hashtag, to being a top Product Hunt user, to blogging on Medium, to his very own chatbot - The MessinaBot, we’re super excited to have him join us for this episode. Chris started his career with an interest for both art and technology. As a champion of the open web, Chris started off his career as a consultant before joining the Mozilla Foundation and helping them get their first 100 million downloads for Firefox. Afterwards, he launched some of his own startups and side projects before eventually joining Google to work on their social products (Buzz & later Google +) as well as building their developer brand. Today, Chris is the Developer Experience Lead at Uber - where he works with many different teams to help make it easier for developers to leverage Uber’s logistics platform. Chris also coined the term “conversational comme

Jeremy Goldberg is a Product Designer at Facebook - working on building Business, Platform, and AI on Messenger. Jeremy’s had a passion for and interest in design from an early age. He was part of a touring band as a teen and would often put his design skills to use for designing merch, poster, or other things the band needed. Following his time as a performer, Jeremy started to team up with product minded entrepreneurs in around his home town in Arizona. He launched a few side projects of his own before ending up working at Google on their search product for iOS. Today, Jeremy is part of the team at Facebook Messenger where he spends a lot of his time thinking about how people and businesses want to use Messenger to have conversations and get things done. Jeremy joins us to share his story, how he got into design and later tech startups, what it was like launching some of his own projects and the biggest lessons learnt from that, what it was like applying to Facebook, what it’s like working on the Messenger

Mada Seghete is the co-founder of Branch, the deep linking tool for app growth & attribution. Mada is originally from Romania and grew up under communism. She then moved to the US for university. While taking some business classes, one professor helped her realize that the next wave of companies would be started by people like her. After starting her first company and learning lots of valuable lessons first hand, Mada and her co-founders started Branch after realizing that their biggest challenge was user acquisition and referral tracking. Branch has now raised over $53M in funding and has customers like: Pinterest, Mint, Foursquare, Buzzfeed and many more! Mada joins us to share her story, how she got into tech and startups, what motivated her to start Branch, how they did things that didn’t scale to get their first customers, how she sees the future of mobile evolving, and much more!

Matt Schlicht is the founder and editor of Chatbots Magazine, the #1 place to learn about chatbots. Matt is a YC Alum, a Forbes 30 Under 30 winner and was also previously a product manager at Ustream as well as an advisor to several other startups. Several months ago, Matt decided to launch a community dedicated to messaging and bots. Chatbots Magazine was born and now reaches over 200,000+ people per month. Matt joins us to share his story, how he got into startups and tech, how he created the opportunity to join the team at uStream, how he approaches building products, why he’s so passionate about bots and messaging, what’s next for Chatbots Magazine, and much more!

Bri Connelly is an associate product manager at Google. She studied computer science at the University of Texas. While in school, she interned with IBM, Apple and Google. Bri was also part of a class project powered by IBM’s Watson called Celebri AI. The project was quick validated turned into a startup that got accepted into the Capitol Factory accelerator in Austin. Bri then joined Google as an Associate Product Manager where she got to work on the gboard, Google iOS keyboard. Bri joins us to share her story, how she help launch Celebri AI, what it was like being at the Capitol Factory Accelerator in Austin, how she joined Google, what it’s like being a product manager there, what it was like launching a search driven keyboard, and much more!

Ardi Iranmanesh is the co-founder and chief-of-staff at Affinio, an advanced marketing intelligence platform that leverages the interest graph to understand today’s consumers. Ardi is originally from Iran and moved here to study engineering. Having Always had a passion for business and how businesses are started, he quickly discovered the beginnings of the work that would become the Lean Startup framework by Steve Blank and Eric Ries. Ardi was eventually connected with a few local founders and joined them in building a lean product lab called 26ones. Affinio was born from a constant challenge they would inevitably face when trying to identify potential groups of customers online and through social media. Ardi joins us to share more about his story, how Affinio approached getting their first customers, why and how it’s so important to test everything, what he’s currently focused on, and much more!

Tracy Chou is a software engineer and was most recently at Pinterest, where she worked on the home feed and recommendations team, ads and web teams, API, growth and much more! Before Pinterest, Tracy worked at Quora, also as one of the first engineering hires there. Tracy is well-known for her work pushing for diversity in tech. In 2013, she helped kick off the wave of tech companies that began to disclose their data about the diversity within their companies through a Github repository. Tracy is now a founding member of Project Include and is focused on driving solutions in the space. She was named Forbes Tech 30 under 30 in 2014 and has been profiled in Vogue and WIRED for her advocacy. Tracy is also an advisor to Homebrew VC and on reserve with the U.S. Digital Service. She joins us to share more about her story, how she got into tech and startups, some of the amazing things she’s been able to accomplish as part of Quora and Pinterest, how she’s been challenging the status quo and championing for diversity

Corey Pollock is the co-founder of Leet, where gamers share and discover the best gameplay highlights. Corey is a product manager at Tiny Hearts in Toronto. He’s also built and launched several side projects over the years, including his latest startup Leet. Corey joins us to share his story, how he got into tech and startups, how he approaches working on side projects, how he approaches building communities, what motivated him to launch Leet, and much more!

Laura Roeder is the Founder & CEO of Edgar, an application that automates social media scheduling and marketing. Edgar is a cutting-edge service, and one of the fastest-growing competitors to HootSuite. Laura was still in junior high school when she taught herself to build websites. She then launched her first consulting business at the age 22. After consulting and running various online and offline classes on how to drive traffic and increase social engagement, Laura developed a process that would become the basis of her next software company. Within 11 months of launching Edgar, Laura grew it to over $100,000 in monthly recurring revenue, serving almost 3,000 customers - all while remaining bootstrapped. Laura joins us to share her story, how she got into consulting and then startups, how she got her first customers, how they’ve managed to keep growing while staying bootstrapped, how she approaches managing and building a remote team, and much more!

John Gleeson is the VP of Customer Success at Affinio, an advanced marketing intelligence platform that leverages the interest graph to understand today’s consumers. Affinio won Gartner’s “Cool Vendor” in Data-Driven Marketing Award for 2016. While building an adult hockey skills company during university, John decided to pursue his MBA in Eastern Canada. He then decided to take a break from school and build his business remotely while traveling the world to surf. Returning to school after a year away, John quickly found himself as hire #1 with a new startup called Affinio. Two and a half years later - and following their Series A funding - Affinio has now grown to a team of over 40 people based in New York, Toronto, Halifax and Ireland. John is now the VP of Customer Success and joins us to share more about his story, how Affinio approached getting their first customers, why he’s now focusing on customer success, how he’s building that part of the organization and what metrics matter, and much more!

Michael Katchen is the Founder and CEO of Wealthsimple, a platform that make smart investing simple and affordable. After starting his career off as a business analyst with one of the largest consulting firms in the world, Michael got a call in 2011 from a friend who was building a new YC company, 1000memories, where he was a VP of product & growth. After being acquired by Ancestry.com, some of his close friends approached him about advice on how to invest some of the money they got during the acquisition. Michael then created an excel sheet to help his friends learn how to invest. This was the MVP for Wealthsimple. Since launching in 2013, Michael and Wealthsimple have since raised over 30 million dollars in vc funding and grown to over 20,000 users, winning numerous awards along the way. Michael joins us to share his story, how he got into tech and startups, how he approaches building products, how they overcame early challenges when launching Wealthsimple, how they’ve built such a cool brand, what they

Esther Crawford is the CEO of Olabot, a platform that makes it fun, simple to build personal bots. You can learn more about Esther by chatting with her personal bot: m.me/estherbot With a background in Philosophy and an interest in Middle Eastern politics, Esther began to explore different online tools and communities like blogging and YouTube. Pairing this with her passion for storytelling and design, Esther began her career as a social media consultant to some large brands, before launching her own startup called Glmps. Glmps was unfortunately not as popular as it’s closest competitor Vine and Esther ended up continued on her startup journey by diving into mobile product marketing and growth at several other startups including Coach.me. In 2015, Esther began to explore the emerging bot trend and built her own resume bot. She open sourced the project which was quickly used by hundreds of people looking to build bots of their own. Continuing to experiment with personal bots, Esther launched a platform called

Todd Garland is the founder and CEO of BuySellAds. Todd started diving into tech during college and got into startups shortly after. He join HubSpot as an early employee and quickly got inspired to start his own company. Buy Sell Ads is now flipping the Ad Tech industry around with their unique, transparent and simple approach. Completely bootstrapped and acting as a marketplace between advertisers and publishers, they now work with over 1200 publishers to strategically place ads that don’t invade the consumer’s privacy and online rights. Todd joins us to share his story, how he managed to build the first version of the service, why BuySellAds is a completely different advertising model, how they’ve managed to remain bootstrapped and scale to selling more than 6 billion ad impressions each month, how they’ve approached acquisitions to fuel growth, and much more!

Victoria Young is a product marketing lead at Uber. Victoria likes to think about the intersection of culture and technology - working with emerging startups and new media platforms to creatively apply technology and new strategies to solve complex problems. At Uber, Victoria is currently focused on one of Uber’s fastest expanding products, uberPOOL. There she spearheaded the launch of go-to-market campaigns for new product features and defined the strategy for marketing programs that drive acquisition and growth of users, leading cross-functional teams from ideation through execution. She also led the marketing campaign for a national uberPOOL partnership with CapitalOne, which resulted in triple digit sustained growth. Victoria was also selected as one of eight KPCB Product Fellows, through a process that included over 2,500 applications from over 200 universities and over 600 interviews. KPCB Product Fellows is a program that provides top-quality mentorship, opportunities to create meaningful relationships

Taylor Conroy is the co-founder & CEO of two social enterprise startups: Change Heroes and Journey333. Before diving into social enterprise, Taylor was running a successful real estate business. After a life changing trip to Uganda in 2009, Taylor came back to Canada, sold his business and launched Change Heroes, a SaaS company serving the world's most innovative and dedicated nonprofits to engage people in giving through personal video. Change Heroes has since helped thousands of people to bring friends together from over 80 countries to fund projects including schools, libraries, girls scholarships, anti-trafficking work, and more in 14 countries for over 200,000 people. Seeing the growing desire millennials have for wanting to affect change and travel, Taylor saw a huge need and recently launched Journey333, an experiential impact travel company that exists to shift humanity by systematically shifting 1% of the North American millennial generation to become truly empathetic, altruistic, and connected b

Ruby Lee is a Product Partner at KPCB Edge, a team of builders, investing in seed stage founders working on emerging areas of technology. While studying at Stanford, Ruby got more into startups through entrepreneurship and business groups. She was also part of the founding team of the Dorm Room Fund - a student run investment group backed by First Round Capital. After school, Ruby joined Google as an associate product manager through their APM program started over 10 years ago by Marissa Mayer. While at Google, Ruby worked with the Chrome team, then decided to join a less established team and worked on Project Fi. Ruby was then approached by a friend to come help launch a new seed investment group out of KPCB. It’s been just over a year since KPCB Edge launched. Ruby joins us to share her story, some of the initiatives they’ve launched over the last year, advice she has for new product managers and entrepreneurs looking to create new products, what they look for when investing, and much more!

SC Moatti is the Founder & CEO of Products That Count and a best selling author of Mobilized: An Insider's Guide to the Business and Future of Connected Technology. She is a mobile expert with tons of insights to share from her first hand experience gained over the past 15 years of working in mobile. While visiting Silicon Valley from Paris, France at that time, SC felt like she was on another planet and knew that’s where she had to be. From her time with EA building mobile games, to moving to Nokia, to launching a precursor to Tinder and being acquired by Facebook to help their mobile efforts and running several teams there, to launching her new #1 best selling book Mobilized, SC delivers a ton of invaluable insights for anyone working on products or who’s interested in the mobile space. SC joins us to share her story, how she got into mobile, how to approach building mobile products, what simple frameworks to keep in mind, what skills product managers should focus on, what emerging connected technologie

Ajay Rajani is the Founder of The Inevitable Collective, an investment vehicle that helps build and invest in companies that push the world forward. Ajay has been a part of Grovo as a product manager, the founding CMO of Inventure, and is now launching new experiments including: Nextt, the first accelerator for ideas & The Inevitable Collective, a new investment vehicle that’s investing in companies with products that are primarily aimed at developing markets. Ajay joins us to share his story, how he got into startups, what he looks for when investing, how to get product/market fit, and much more!

Mahdi Yusuf is the CTO of Gyroscope, an app that let’s you sync your data to track your health & everything about your life. Mahdi moved around a lot as a kid, spending time in Saudi Arabia, Ottawa, and Thailand, among other countries - all the while, exploring new technologies and learning about computers. After university, Mahdi started working for a mergers security company before jumping into startups. He is also the co-founder of Pycoder’s Weekly and a large part of the Python community through that newsletter that attracts over 30,000 subscribers. Mahdi’s also given several talks on personal branding & how to build communities around projects. He joins us to share his story, how he got into startups, why focusing on your health is so critical, how to develop your own brand (especially as a developer), what it’s like to be CTO at Gyroscope, and much more!