Rocio Lopez came to the U.S. as an undocumented minor and lived on the East Side of Palo Alto. For years, she and her family have gone through so much struggle until the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals or DACA was signed by President Obama, a program granting temporary work permits to immigrants who came to the U.S. as children illegally. Recently, DACA, has been repealed by the Trump administration. And Rocio is one of the 800,000 DREAMers that are going to be affected by this decision. ...
Oct 01, 2017•55 min•Transcript available on Metacast A Missouri-native, Zac Otero is a true testament that a four-year degree isn’t always an indicator of success. High school dropout, Zac Otero describes how he worked his way up the career ladder from working a blue-collared job working at a McDonalds, a popcorn factory, a grocery warehouse and a meat packing factory before landing a Salesforce admin role. He talks about how he got into this role, what Salesforce is, and how he learned through books before the online platform Trailhead came out. ...
Sep 22, 2017•50 min•Transcript available on Metacast From New York to San Diego, Saron has launched one of the biggest coding podcasts called CodeNewbie. The show has over 1.4 million downloads and listened to over a hundred countries. With a Twitter community of over 27,000 people, Saron hosts the #CodeNewbie Twitter Chat happening every Wed @9PM EST. She organizes meetups in ATL, Philly, New York, and DC. She caters to an early audience to get people to recognize that there are multiple ways to learn how to code. Saron is also the producer of Co...
Sep 08, 2017•52 min•Transcript available on Metacast Born in Atlanta, Mandy Cole is the founder of The Cole Method, a consulting firm that helps startups that have reached $1 million revenue to start learning how to go from putting balls in the basket to playing basketball. It's very important for someone that successfully broke into a startup to understand what a high functioning sales organization looks like. Listen in to find out how a high-functioning sales organization is supposed to operate. Mandy is an expert at not just building organizati...
Aug 31, 2017•1 hr 6 min•Transcript available on Metacast Gabe Moncayo is the CEO and Founder of AlwaysHired, a three-week teaching program focused on training sales development representatives. A Bay Area-native, Gabe grew up in a family with roots to South American. He never went to college and instead got his first job in political fundraising. Gabe transitioned over from nonprofit to for-profit orgs where he did lead generation and worked at several startups. He was so passionate about the skill that he wanted to focus on teaching other people from...
Aug 20, 2017•57 min•Transcript available on Metacast Matt Tran is the Founder of Engineered Truth, a YouTube channel with over 240,000 subscribers. He initially followed the traditional path, studying Psychology and Mechanical Engineering in college. He had three jobs as a mechanical engineer but got fired from all of them until he finally started his YouTube channel where he now makes over $10,000 a month. Also, tune-in and check out how Matt did this and what are some resources you can use to help you get started if this is something you’re inte...
Aug 11, 2017•44 min•Transcript available on Metacast Dr. Carol Langlois is a lifelong educator who used to run the business program at USF. She was the Dean at Mills College and founder of Higher Education Specialists. She did a dissertation in female self-esteem development that led her to creating a book called Girl Talk where she interviewed over 200 high school women on the subject. It was later turned into a play called Girl Talk: Teen Monologue Series. It's next performance is going to be on August 24 @ Potrero Stage in SF.
Jul 30, 2017•40 min•Transcript available on Metacast #58: Tiger Shen - An 18-Year-Old Software Engineer Who Worked at Square and Braintree by Breaking Into Startups
Jul 25, 2017•1 hr 2 min•Transcript available on Metacast Kelvin Lightner is a software engineer apprentice at Intuit and a graduate of Dev Bootcamp. Prior to tech, Kelvin has a double major in Legal Studies and Economics from UC Berkeley and he worked as a consultant at Deloitte. A true lover of logic, he jumped from management consulting to tech with this strong belief that the end does not justify the means. Kevin has drawn great support from #YesWeCode, an organization that helps people from underrepresented backgrounds break into the tech space.
Jul 16, 2017•56 min•Transcript available on Metacast Mike Slagh is the Founder of Shift.org, a hiring pipeline for military veterans. Back in the military, Mike was a bomb technician and since finishing his service a little over a year ago, he started Shift.org to create new pathways for veterans into various industries that didn't exist before. There will be about a million new veterans in the next five years, which means there are 20,000 military service members leaving every month. Mike’s greater purpose is to help bridge that gap between the m...
Jun 29, 2017•48 min•Transcript available on Metacast An East Bay-local, Pavan Ravipati grew up in a family of tech people. He initially took Film and Media in college, landed some corporate sales roles, and worked his way up but he ultimately found his calling in tech. After taking some coding courses online, Pavan decided to join Hack Reactor and he eventually took part in the organization's Hacker in Residence Program. Currently, Pavan serves as a Solutions Engineer at GitHub, a leading open source software company.
Jun 14, 2017•34 min•Transcript available on Metacast Erica Prenga is currently an Experience Developer at Adobe. Aware that she had a different learning style, she decided to quit college after her fourth year of studying graphic design until she ultimately figured that going to a coding bootcamp was what she wanted to do and how she wanted to learn. Erica is a Dev Bootcamp graduate and in this episode, she shares how she approached her job hunt differently as well as a couple of negotiating techniques, which people wouldn’t have normally done. Er...
Jun 02, 2017•1 hr 7 min•Transcript available on Metacast With Dominican roots, Ysiad Ferreiras grew up in the Bronx where fear was not unusual thing and where hard life would be an understatement. He has made some bad decisions in his early life but he managed to pivot his way into right path doing well academically, learning how to code, and breaking into the tech space. Currently, he serves as the VP of Sales at Hustle, a text messaging platform which is now being used by major politicians and people in nonprofit and labor organizations including th...
May 30, 2017•1 hr 25 min•Transcript available on Metacast Kristin Parke is a hacker aka a security consultant at the NCC Group. She shares her journey into tech and how she transitioned from music to science until ultimately she becoming an engineer. In this episode, you can find out how she went from learning how to code and following that path until breaking into the security industry. She also discusses the parallels of reading music and coding and biology and hacking as well as what you can do to protect yourself from imminent cyber attacks.
May 23, 2017•47 min•Transcript available on Metacast From a chef to restaurateur to Math teacher to software engineer, Mannah Kallon has a pretty crazy and nontraditional background. That makes him an asset on anyone's team. He earned degrees in Psychology and Philosophy from the University of Michigan and got his Master's in Education from Fordham University. Mannah was teaching kids in Harlem when he decided to move to the West Coast and learn how to code through Dev Bootcamp. Today, Mannah’s shares a handful of insights that you too can apply t...
May 19, 2017•46 min•Transcript available on Metacast A self-confessed nerd and Sailor Moon enthusiast, Jessica Uelmen built her first HTML/CSS website at 13 years old and got involved with theater during college until she ultimately decided to major in electrical engineering during Sophomore year. She ended up working as an electrical engineer for a few years after finishing school until she decided to pursue her passion for education and worked as a program manager at Udacity, an education company that offers free online classes where she specifi...
May 14, 2017•37 min•Transcript available on Metacast Based in San Francisco, Hackbright Academy is focused on teaching women how to code. We're recording several interviews with Hackbright graduates including our guest today, Chloe Condon. Growing up in a family of artists in the Bay Area, Chloe ended up working at startups by day and performing as a theater actress by night. Prior to her current role as a Developer Evangelist at Codefresh, Chloe held a number of jobs including an Account Executive at Yelp and an office manager role at another sta...
May 09, 2017•52 min•Transcript available on Metacast Wayne Neale is the Co-Founder of GrowthX Academy, a 12-week, onsite, immersive, full-time educational experience program focusing on careers in Sales, Growth Marketing, and UX Design. The academy was born out of the need for more non-technical roles in the tech space. Prior to this, Wayne was an operator at several companies. He started his own design consultancy and got several degrees including a Doctorate in UX Design. Originally from Ohio, Wayne currently lives in Phoenix and today, he share...
May 05, 2017•50 min•Transcript available on Metacast Niv Dror currently runs social at Product Hunt and does their daily newsletter featuring the latest and coolest products. Prior to tech, Niv shifted from soccer to academics, majored in Finance, and worked for some of top hedge funds and VC firms. It wasn’t until witnessing the power of Twitter and getting inspired by the investor Chris Sacca, did Niv decide to get off the finance path and break into tech. In this episode, Niv talks about how he leveraged blog posts to meet the Who's Who of Sili...
Apr 29, 2017•59 min•Transcript available on Metacast Kenny Tran is a passionate writer and coder. He chose to forego college and instead pursued his personal projects and his love of writing. After reading a post on Hacker News about App Academy, he decided to apply and learn how to code, joining the first Ruby on Rails cohort. He also attended Hack Reactor and built a cool project, PurifyCSS, that went viral on GitHub and Hacker News. He eventually joined Mesosphere, an infrastructure startup, serving as a front end engineer but is soon leaving t...
Apr 26, 2017•40 min•Transcript available on Metacast Anthony "Pomp" Pompliano is best known for his hustle. Since early years, he's been coming up with business ideas and today he invests in companies and helps them grow. Before he became a Venture Capitalist, Pomp served as a Sergeant in the US Army, founded and exited 2 companies and then broke into Facebook as a Product Manager. On this episode, Pomp drops a lot of gems on how he helps companies grow and what he did to get his job at Facebook.
Apr 21, 2017•1 hr 21 min•Transcript available on Metacast UK-born Soroush Mehraein moved to the United States and graduated from UC Berkeley. He studies Industrial Engineering and ended up doing consulting for biopharma companies, Soroush attended a coding bootcamp and transitioned into the software engineering roles top Silicon Valley tech companies. Prior to Google where he’s currently working as a software engineer, Soroush attended Hack Reactor to hone his coding skills and ended up landing a job at Uber. On the episode, Soroush discussed the inter...
Apr 20, 2017•31 min•Transcript available on Metacast Based in Boston, Dan Pickett founded a program called Launch Academy built around the premise of helping people become the best version of themselves. Graduating over 500 people, the school is now set to expand in Philly along with some plans to create a virtual adaptation of their on-campus experience. Starting his company at 15 years old, which is indicative of his entrepreneurial, hungry, and passionate spirit, Dan encourages people to not let age become a barrier if you’re interested in entr...
Apr 15, 2017•52 min•Transcript available on Metacast Growing up in Taiwan for 17 years, Kimberly Han moved to Seattle to go to College where she majored in Psychology while minoring in Dance. For majority of her adult life she was a professional tango dancer and a teacher as well as a voice actress for eight years. Until one day she realized she wanted to break into tech. Having been able to successfully translate her dancing and acting skill-sets in sales, Kim currently works as a Business Development Rep at Square. She is also an organizer at On...
Apr 11, 2017•1 hr 2 min•Transcript available on Metacast Coming from a nontraditional background as an educator living in China for years, Quincy combined his passion for education and technology to launch Free Code Camp, an open-source community that helps people learn how to code and practice their coding skills by building projects for nonprofits. Quincy has indeed built a massive network of “campers” with close to a million developers learning how to code around the world. Free Code Camp has helped over 5,000 people find their first engineering jo...
Apr 09, 2017•56 min•Transcript available on Metacast Realizing the need for a more rigorous and accelerated curriculum for software engineers, Nimit Maru founded Fullstack Academy. He also founded its sister school, the Grace Hopper Program, which is the world's first tuition-deferred coding academy for women. Prior to Fullstack Academy, Nimit and his co-founder, David Yang, graduated from Y Combinator. He also worked as a software engineer at Yahoo! and got his business degree from Wharton. Aside from seeing how the tech scene in the Bay Area and...
Apr 03, 2017•50 min•Transcript available on Metacast From dancing to coding, Carly Robinson left her theater career in New York and Chicago to break into tech. She attended Hackbright Academy and is now working as a software engineer at Slack. Prior to coding, Carly got involved with Freedom For All, a nonprofit organization that tackles issues related to human trafficking. She continues to do so up to this day in her commitment to make a difference. Carly’s secret sauce to success is sheer mastery of the fundamentals topped with good networking. ...
Apr 02, 2017•1 hr 6 min•Transcript available on Metacast As a teen mom, Natasha Vianna had to deal with the stereotype that society has boxed her in. But she didn’t let this break her spirit. Natasha’s goal was and is to be the best version of herself. In fact, seeing how people (who are in a situation similar to her) needed all the support they could get was what led her to break into tech activism. Currently, Natasha leads the community activities at Honor and she is also the co-founder of #NoTeenShame, a movement that works towards reproductive jus...
Mar 30, 2017•40 min•Transcript available on Metacast Austin Belcak didn’t have it all figured out when he picked a Biology major in college and landed his first sales job in the medical field, both of which he didn’t actually like. However, he used them as motivation to push harder and further. By building his knowledge and networking with the right people, Austin has now landed his dream job at Microsoft. Additionally, his brewing desire of becoming an entrepreneur eventually led him to create Cultivated Culture, a platform that allows him to sha...
Mar 27, 2017•1 hr 8 min•Transcript available on Metacast Everette Taylor is not just any 27-year-old. Don’t be fooled by his age. To date, Everette built four companies including GrowthHackers.com, which he co-founded with Sean Ellis, Millisense Marketing Consulting, and GrowthPub. He is currently the Chief Marketing Officer at Skurt, a mobility startup delivering rental cars-on-demand. Additionally, he was recently announced as the National Brand Ambassador for the NASA Startup Initiative and has been honored as a Social Influencer of the Year by Bla...
Mar 22, 2017•1 hr 26 min•Transcript available on Metacast 
