Today, we have two amazing people behind the widely successful early stage venture capital firm, Initialized. Today, they discuss the power of coaching, the cryptocurrency space, building teams and community, and some tech trends to watch out for. Dubbed as "Mayor of the Internet," Alexis Ohanian is the Co-Founder of Reddit, Breadpig. He was a former partner at Y Combinator before co-founding Initialized. Garry Tan is also a Co-Founder of Initialized, Posterous.com, and Posthaven.com. Also a for...
Aug 17, 2018•53 min
It all started when Jacob Hsu immigrated from Taiwan at an early age! Fast forward to now, Jacob spends his time between San Mateo and Baltimore while he’s building and managing his team as the CEO of Catalyte. An ex-banker, Jacob went on to create two startups, one of which is Symbio, a product development and R&D outsourcing services company. In just less than 11 years, the company has grown from $10 million to over $600 million in revenue. In 2016, Symbio got acquired for over a billion dolla...
Aug 10, 2018•47 min
A melting pot of different cultures, Miami is now seeing a dramatic shift in its career ecosystem geared towards technology and startups. But a little more work is needed for the educational landscape to align with the rapidly growing tech space. Raul Moas is currently the Miami Program Director for the Knight Foundation, a national foundation with strong local roots, specifically focused on entrepreneurship. Formerly, he was the Managing Director for Miami Angels, a local angel group with more ...
Jul 26, 2018•41 min
Miami-native Saif Ishoof is the VP of Engagement at Florida International University and a leader in the Future of Work. He started up a nonprofit called City Year Miami and has run family business prior to it. He got his JD from the University of Miami. We wanted to highlight the importance of radio, part of the reason this podcast got started. Undoubtedly, radio is still the strongest way to reach people in the community you want to reach. Alice McLaughlin also joins in as she throws out some ...
Jul 15, 2018•1 hr 7 min
Marlon Nichols is the Co-Founder & Managing Partner of Cross Culture Ventures, along with co-founder Troy Carter. Marlon previously served as a Partner at Intel Capital. He has worked with several startups, invested in companies like Mayvenn, Gimlet Media, Blavity, Airspace Technologies, Codeverse, and many others. Marlon is huge on CULTURE when it comes to uncovering hidden opportunities. Today, he talks about the power of culture and diversity, the value of mentorship, and how to assemble a wi...
Jul 04, 2018•51 min
From economic development to a career in tech, Laurence Bradford is a software engineer and she’s now working as a product manager at EdTech startup Teachable, which is an online course platform. Aside from being a contributor at Forbes, she also runs a podcast called, Learn to Code With Me, which now has over a million downloads. She runs a blog with over 40,000 subscribers and she has a community of over 14,000 people on Facebook where she's helping them learn how to code. Laurence has travele...
Jun 24, 2018•39 min
Daniel Barragan was the first sales rep at Zoom that was able to rise all the way up to the top of the ranks on the Enterprise team. He helped the company grow to over 700,000 accounts in six years, reach a billion dollar valuation, get into 90% of the top universities, and expand into different verticals. What started out as just being a beta product with only one customer supporting 25 people, Zoom now supports hundreds to thousands people on a single call serving a wide range of customers ran...
Jun 14, 2018•29 min
A lot of times in startups, roles are not defined. And although we wear many hats, sometimes it never gets solidified. Today, Evan talks about his humble beginnings. Born in Alaska, he sold his cream puff and shaved ice business that he put up in high school. He then studied Philosophy and Business in Seattle, until finally moving to SF to hustle his way through, living in a hostel while looking for a job. Evan is employee #1 at Checkr, a startup that offers background check and screening soluti...
Jun 05, 2018•53 min
After the recording of the podcast, Erika joined the Impact Team at Amazon Cloud Services. Prior to that, at the time of the episode recording, Erika was the Head of Strategic Initiatives at Twilio.org. Before that, she also worked for TaskRabbit. Erika has not only in tech for a long time, she served on several boards and she also has deep experience in the nonprofit industry. Under the Impact Fund at Twilio, they've given away about a $1.5 million in investments and grants where they take a pl...
May 28, 2018•1 hr
Aline Lerner is the CEO and Co-Founder of interviewing.io, a platform for engineers that practice technical interviews and land jobs at the top tech companies. Millions of people have read her writing and thousands of engineers sign to work with her platform each month. You can easily check her out in TechCrunch, Bloomberg, and other publications. From being a chef to breaking into startups, Aline is now the founder of one of the largest platforms in the game focused on getting people to tech co...
May 19, 2018•1 hr 2 min
In May 2015, the Congressional Black Caucus launched CBC TECH 2020 to bring together the best minds in the tech, non-profit, education and public sectors to chart a path forward to increase African American inclusion at all levels of the technology industry. Since the launch of CBC TECH 2020 in May of 2015, the following companies have added African Americans to their board of directors: AirBNB – (Kenneth I. Chenault Former Chairman & CEO, American Express), Apple, Inc. (James A. Bell, Former Ex...
May 10, 2018•2 hr 49 min
Michael Ellison is currently the Chief Operating Officer of CodePath where he leads product, operations, and business development. CodePath is an education technology startup that has a reputation for excellence in training engineers with the skills that they need for cutting-edge tech jobs. Running for four years now, CodePath has worked with over 850 of the top tech companies. Not to mention, they're the most popular Android resource on the Internet with over 20,000 startups and over 500,000 d...
May 04, 2018•1 hr 2 min
Joe Musselman was spending his time in the military working with Navy SEALs and upon finishing his service, he started The Honor Foundation to help special operation forces who have left service to transition and find jobs in tech. Joe has supported over thousands of people with over 200 employee partners who have raised funding from people all over Silicon Valley including Marc Andreessen, and other organizations. Part of their vision is to grow their special operations community to 65,000 by 2...
Apr 21, 2018•56 min
John Maeda is the Global Head of Computational Design and Inclusion at Automattic. Previously, he was a Partner at Kleiner Perkins where he founded the design and tech report that's read by people all over the world. Fascinated with the idea of remote working, John is an inspiration in the design world currently serving on the boards of Sonos and Wieden+Kennedy. He recently created a site called Design From Anywhere, that tells you more about remote work, inclusion, and how you can get into thes...
Apr 15, 2018•48 min
If you're a mom or you know some moms who want to know what it takes to break back into tech after you've been out of work for several years, this is a must-listen episode. Today's guest is Wendy Padua who has been out of work for 16 years and is not part of the marketing team at Zendesk. We also have Tami Forman on the show today. She's the Director of Path Forward, a nonprofit organization that creates mid-career returnship programs to ease the transition back to work for women and men after t...
Apr 08, 2018•1 hr 1 min
Melissa has been teaching negotiation tactics for the last 22 years. Today, Melissa Hereford is going to teach us how to negotiate, not only in terms of salary, but life in general - deadlines, relationships, friendships, etc. She's going to give you actionable strategies you can use to negotiate a higher salary with your manager. Previously, Melissa worked for BayGroup International, the biggest negotiations consulting company in the world. She's worked with huge clients like Cisco, At&T, Oracl...
Apr 02, 2018•1 hr 28 min
Jason is widely known as a global brand director for the Jordan Brand at Nike, where he led and contributed to the creation of several shoes for athletes and cultural icons including Carmelo Anthony, Chris Paul, Russell Westbrook, Derek Jeter, and Michael Jordan. Following his 13+-year stint at Nike, he started several things in tech at Accel and as an advisor for Stanford’s Design School. He then co-founded a startup with Stephen Curry and eventually creating his very own startup called Super H...
Mar 22, 2018•1 hr 1 min
Ghazal Asif is the heading Channels Sales at App Dynamics and she shares her path into tech!
Mar 07, 2018•1 hr 10 min
Ana Díaz-Hernández is the Head of Sales at interviewing.io, a platform for engineers that set technical interviews and land jobs at top tech companies. Sacramento-born, Ana talks about how she leveraged online communities to get into Stanford, break into startups, how she went through an acquisition process, hustled her way into venture capital at Kapor Capital. In addition to that, she also led business development and online education platforms like Udacity. She founded the Women of Color in T...
Mar 03, 2018•1 hr 5 min
Prior to her current role as a rockstar product designer at Headspace, Vicki Tan holds an impressive portfolio having worked previously at Lyft and interned at Google. She has worked in the HR and also used to be a research intern and research coordinator at Stanford University School of Medicine, doing studies in Pediatric Oncology. Find out more about Vicki’s transition from the academic realm to the tech space, along with some nuggets of wisdom along the way.
Feb 24, 2018•1 hr 13 min
Gary Vaynerchuk does not need an introduction. For those of you who haven’t heard of him yet, he is not only a rockstar entrepreneur, he's an author and a speaker. He's a four-time New York Times bestseller. He now runs a 800-person media agency, VaynerMedia. He is also an early investor in Twitter, Snapchat, and Uber. Big on giving back and making people happy, the one legacy he wants to leave is that he has given more than what he has taken.
Feb 19, 2018•56 min
A San Jose-native, Heather Swan is the Chief Happiness Officer at Zoom, a video conferencing tool that works on any device. She started as an employee #15 and now Zoom has grown to over 700,000 clients worldwide, she has worked in every sales role within the company and has consistently hit her quotas. Heather has previous experience in the retail sales space, particularly for Tory Burch shoes and medical devices. Today, she shares the perspective of founding a startup from an employee perspecti...
Jan 31, 2018•33 min
Southern Californian-native, Ian Harriman is a rockstar salesperson. He started as a sales development representative until he rose up to the ranks of being a mid-market account executive at Checkr, a background check community that utilizes software (instead of people) to complete a majority of the parts to the process. Ian also talks about his leadership role in the Bounce Back to Work Program at Checkr, where they help both applicants and companies through their background screening process. ...
Jan 12, 2018•56 min
Today, we take a closer dive into getting internships and how you can leverage those to get full-time offers. Kyle Woumn is a fullstack engineer on the messaging experience team at Twilio, a cloud-communication platform that integrates communication into apps. A Georgia Institute of Technology graduate, Kyle did internships at GE and Twilio. He's also part of the National Society of Black Engineers and he is currently building an app that fosters an online community for Black Greeks.
Dec 30, 2017•50 min
Born in Germany, Marco Morawec is the co-founder of The Firehose Project, an online coding school that helped over a thousand people learn how to code remotely and become engineers. They also got a 1-million dollar grant from TechHire to help more people from under-represented groups to gain tech skills. Marco got his undergraduate degree and Master's in Public Policy and Management from the University of Constanz in Germany. He formerly worked as a Product Manager at an advertising firm called ...
Dec 18, 2017•53 min
Jon Deng is a mentor who has helped several people break into tech. He is widely known as a software engineer at Snap Inc. Prior to tech, he was actually a platoon leader in the U.S. Army with 40 men reporting to him. He was a captain and a field artillery officer. In this episode, Jon walks us through his transition from the military into tech, his thought process, and how he essentially prepared himself for the coding bootcamp at Hack Reactor. He also talks about how he got through his job sea...
Dec 02, 2017•52 min
Dan Burrill is not just the inside sales boss at Twilio but he's also a seasoned executive having spent time with other amazing companies including Box and Honeywell. A man who’s big on commitment and the power of listening, Dan admits coming to Twilio for one big reason - market opportunity. Twilio operates in the telecommunications industry that has been around for decades and it's fast-forwarding the space into the future. No wonder it’s his favorite among all the companies he’s worked at.
Nov 09, 2017•55 min
Adam is a co-founder of MissionU where he is building a school for the 21st century. He is also a founder of Pencils of Promise that has built over 400 schools around the world and provided over 70k kids with an opportunity to learn! At MissionU, Adam is building a school for the 21st century! Millions of people are either themselves effected by college debt or know someone in their family who is effected by it. College loans are also the only kind of debt you cannot default on. To fix that, Ada...
Nov 01, 2017•56 min
Nick Caldwell is the VP of Engineering at Reddit and has been in the game for over fifteen years. He has worked for impressive institutions including Microsoft and NASA. He is also heavily involved in the community, having worked as a facilitator for organizations like /dev/color. If you haven’t heard, Reddit is the fourth most traffic website in the United States, and seventh in the world. With about 320 million monthly active users, Reddit is home to several communities with 1.1 million active...
Oct 20, 2017•1 hr
Bangaly Kaba shares his story on how he broke into product management from a non-traditional backgrounds in Education and Finance. Originally from the East Coast, Bangaly is now considered as one of the best PMs in the Bay Area. He previously worked at Facebook's growth team until landing his current product management role at Instagram. You probably first heard of Bangaly's name back on Episode 13 when Elaina Koros mentioned his name on the show referring to him as a great mentor. From working ...
Oct 11, 2017•1 hr 3 min
