Hacktostart

Erica Brescia is the Co-founder and COO of Bitnami. With over 1 million apps deployed per month, Bitnami makes it incredibly easy to deploy apps with native installers, as virtual machines, or in the cloud. Erica had lead operations for Bitnami since they started. She’s also been responsible for all their partnerships with big brands like Amazon Web Services, Google Cloud Platform and VMWare. She’s also led their sales efforts - which has enabled them to remain mostly bootstrapped all these years. Erica joins us to share her story, how she got into tech and startups, what it’s been like building Bitnami, some of the challenges they’ve had to overcome, what it was like going through Y Combinator with a more established company, and much more!

Khoi Vinh is the Director of Product Design, Mobile at Adobe. With a background in graphic design, Khoi really got into his career as a product designer with the New York Times after several successful years as the co-founder of his own design firm. He then left and launched Mixel, a new type of creative app for the iPad. However, without as much traction as they needed to keep operating independently, Khoi and his co-founder managed to get the app and team acquired by Etsy. After the acquisition, Khoi left Etsy after a few months to continue learning and experimenting with technology - specifically around how people create on different devices and on the go. He’s now helping to lead the creation of a new generation of creative apps, for new technologies and hardware like the iPad pro at Adobe. Khoi joins us to share his story, some of the challenges around running your own company, what it’s like working at Adobe, how he thinks about the intersection of tech, design and creativity, how he’s approaching bring

Avery Swartz is the founder & CEO of Camp Tech, a workshop company for non-technical people. With a background in theater, Avery was drawn to both graphic design and the freelancing lifestyle, and decided to made a change. She launched her own design firm to enable her to follow this passion while still being able to contribute to innovative projects like the Art Canada Institute. Through freelancing, Avery saw a need for in-person workshops on a variety of subjects. Shortly after, Camp Tech was born. Since launching in 2012, it has grown to more than 250 workshops across several major Canadian cities. Avery also shares her experience by teaching the business of interactive design and how to work with clients at Humber College in Toronto and is also the co-host of a new conference called Gather North - which is a retreat for women who make the web. Avery joins us to share her story, how she started her freelancing business and some of the biggest lessons she’s learnt along the way, what some of her favori

Shane Mac is the co-founder & CEO of Assist, bring the best services to your favorite messaging apps. Shane got into startups and tech through music with gigs as a DJ. This lead him to building sites, widgets and more for himself and his friends. He’s worked on products within startups like Gist (acquired by Blackberry), Zaarly, and is now in the super hot messaging space with Assist. Shane joins us to share his story, what motivated him to get into tech & startups, why he’s always been curious about innovation, creativity & building lasting companies, how he approaches raising funding, what he thinks is most exciting about the messaging space right now, and much more!

Leslie Bradshaw is the managing partner at Made By Many, a product innovation studio. Leslie has won several awards and accolades for her work, including Fast Company’s Most Influential Women in Tech, 100 Most Creative People In Business, Inc’s 30 Under 30, and AdAge’s Small Agency of The Year among many more. She writes a series on Forbes called “More (Power) Seats”, about issues facing women in a corporate environment and often speaks or writes about professional leadership. Leslie joins us to share her story, what motivated to get into tech & startups, why she helped launch Jess3, a creative and very successful agency at the age of 23, how she’s managed to execute so many amazing projects for partners, the true cost of success that most people don’t talk about, why having a good team matters, and so much more!

Meng To is the author of Design + Code. Meng started off his career as a self-taught graphic designer who transitioned to digital work. Wanting to move to San Francisco to learn from some of the best designers in the world - designers who were passionate about solving problems - Meng managed to stay for a year until his visa expired and he could no longer continue to work. His dreams were crushed. With nothing left to lose, and at a crossroad in his career, he set out to travel the world. He soon decided to launch a product while on his adventure. Having started to blog about a new app called Sketch, Meng quickly settled on teaching others how to design with it, and then how to bring those same designs to life through quick prototypes using xcode. Design + Code was born. Two year later, Meng is still just as passionate about helping people learn how to implement their designs as real products and continuing to build & grow Design + Code as a full time job. He’s created several products and libraries since

Brittany Gorevic is the General Manager at Union Square Ventures, a venture capital firm based in New York City. After working with AMEX for a few years, Brittany left to start her own company, gtrot, which was later acquired by Groupon. Brittany has also travelled a ton - reaching two pretty incredible milestones: visiting all 7 continents before turning 25 and then Visiting 50 countries before the age of 30. She joins us to share her story, how she got into startups, advice for entrepreneurs who are looking to raise funding, the importance of community within the VC industry, and much more!

Marc Gingras is an angel investor and the CEO of Foko, a private photo sharing app for retail teams. Marc has started and sold several companies over the years, including Tungle, a calendar sharing & scheduling application which was acquired by Research in Motion in 2011. Marc has also been a venture capitalist and angel investor in several companies - including Foko, which he later joined as CEO. Marc joins us to share his story, how he got into startups, advice for entrepreneurs who are looking to raise angel funding, how to build products in the B2B industry, and much more!

Cristina Cordova is the first Business Development hire at Stripe, the payments infrastructure for the internet. Cristina was previously the first employee at Pulse, where she lead partnerships with brands like The Wall Street Journal, USA Today and more. Today, Cristina is focused on building and managing the Business Development team at Stripe, which focuses on user-facing product partnerships, strategic growth partnerships with brands like Twitter, Pinterest, Kickstarter and much more!

Matthew Hartman is the Director of Seed Investments at Betaworks, an internet startup studio based in New York. Matt has been building products since he was a teen. After working for a real estate company, Matt left to join a social consumer app call Hot Potato - which was later acquired by Facebook. Matt then founded his own startup Referboost which he bootstrapped and then licensed to Apartments.com. He joins us to share his story, what he looks for in investments at Betaworks, what technologies he’s most interested in, why he started podcasting, and much more!

Elise Ramsay is the Head of Community at Eyegroove, an app for creating high quality short videos with next level effects to express your true self. Elise was previously the community manager at Wistia, a video marketing platform for businesses, where she grew their community section to over 20,000 members and increased their social following by 5x. Her passion for video and enabling individuals to express themselves creatively lead her to joining the team at Eyegroove. Elise joins us to share her story, how she got involved in startups, what she loves most about video, what she does as Head of Community at Eyegroove, and much more!

Robleh Jama is the Founder & CEO of Tiny Hearts, a six year old design studio in the heart of Toronto, Canada. Robleh began his journey into entrepreneurship while in university, building and selling his first startup. He then quickly began to explore creating mobile products, mixing design consultancy and experimental product creation in-house. Six years later, Tiny Hearts has created several award-winning apps - @WakeAlarm (#1 utilities), Quick Fit (featured in Apple TV ad) + @Nextkeyboard (#2 overall App) - used by millions of people around the world. Robleh joins us to share his story, how he got into startups, how Tiny Hearts is different, the tactics they leverage to gain traction & be featured by Apple, and much more!

Kim Pham is the Head of Platform at Frontline Ventures, Europe's first community-focused fund. Kim has always had a passion for entrepreneurship and startups, landing her first job within a startup at the age of 16. Kim joins us to share her story, how she got involved in startups & hustled her way into various opportunities with companies like Onswipe, Blue Apron and more, how she helped launch Dorm Room Fund in NYC, how she got into VC, what she does as Head of Platform at Frontline Ventures in Dublin, and much more!

Sarah Adler is the co-founder & CTO of Spoon University, a food community and website for college students. Growing up, Sarah loved graphic design and during university ended up co-founding a startup that would become Spoon University, a worldwide food community and website for college students that is in over 150 campuses. Sarah joins us to share her story, how Spoon University came to be, how she taught herself to design & code, how they got into TechStars, what it was like raising a seed round, and much more!

Wells Riley is a product designer at Envoy, the new standard for visitor registration. Wells began building websites with his friends back in high school and took up design. He then started to notice that design wasn’t taken as seriously when it came to startups and great products, so he created a few online resources to inspire others. “Startups, This Is How Design Works” and Hack Design - which saw over 150,000 signups, are both still active and helping others. Wells joins us to share his story, why he got into product design, how he grew the community around both his design resources, what he’s doing at Envoy, and much more!

Michael Lachapelle is the founder of Business Model Fulcrum, a consulting agency focussed on assisting organizations and their leaders to create change, accelerate growth and improve business results through understanding and innovation in their business model. Michael has helped organizations from all industries including the Red Cross, the World Bank Institute, the Canadian Federal Government, FedEx and more. He’s been working with Alexander Osterwalder’s Business Model Canvas since 2008, and is the only certified trainer and coach in Canada; and one of thirty world-wide. Michael joins us to share his story, why entrepreneurs and founders should understand various frameworks and tools like the business model canvas, common mistakes to avoid, how to get started with the business model canvas, and much more!

Andreas Kambanis is the founder of Nibble Apps, a studio that creates award winning food apps for iPhone and iPad and has gotten several apps to the top (paid) spots in the App Store while being featured in publications like Mashable, Time, Men’s Health, and more. Andreas got his start with tech and startups while in school when he built a site called London Cyclists after finding a gap in the market. He then began working with publishers, entrepreneurs, and other influencers to build great apps while traveling. He shares his story, the tactics and resources that helped him rank his apps in the top paid spots in the App Store, how he builds his business while travelling, what it’s like to visit Antarctica, and much more!

Timo Rein is the co-founder and President of Pipedrive, a simple and visual sales pipeline tool that teams love to use. Timo had a background in sales but always found that existing sales management tools weren’t very helpful. So he and his co-founders set out to build Pipedrive. Timo shares how they got into AngelPad, raised angel and seed funding, acquired their first customers, grew the team, and much more!

Jeff Needles is a Business Intelligence Analyst at Meerkat. Jeff previously worked at This Week in Tech - a podcasting network - through a variety of roles. He's a self taught developer who started building more products in 2015 and is now helping develop innovative analytics solutions at Meerkat. Jeff shares how he got into startups, how he started learning how to code, his approach to landing a job, how to get more out of your data, and much more!

Ben Brown is the co-founder & CEO, of Howdy, a friendly, trainable bot that super powers teams by automating common tasks. Ben has built several startups and products, including XOXCO, a software and product design studio that he ran for more than seven years with his wife Katie. Ben is going to share what got him into tech, why he's excited about chat bots, his thoughts on the future of the industry, and much more!