HackToStart

Paul Canetti is the Founder & CEO of MAZ, a platform that empowers leaders in media to become pioneers in OTT and mobile technology. Growing up, Paul was exposed to design and technology through his father’s work and hobbies. Paul taught himself digital design and although he studied philosophy in college, he continued to maintain an interest in technology. After working in corporate environments and then consulting, Paul started building websites and then iPhone apps with a high school friend. Their passion for building products led them to creating MAZ, raising $2M, and then continuing to build and scale the business in a sustainable way. Paul is also an Associate Professor at Columbia University in New York, where he teaches a class on user experience and product management for the MBA program. He is also a podcaster and the host of Wizardest, a podcast that features startup founders, VCs, and other interesting personalities to learn about their past experiences and views on the future. Paul joins us to share his story, how he got into startups, what it was like growing MAZ in the early days, how he approaches fundraising, why he got into podcasting, and much more.

Rei Wang is the Director of First Round Capital’s Dorm Room Fund, the largest student-run venture firm in the nation. They’ve invested in over 150 startups, who’ve gone on to raise more than $300 million from investors like: Andreessen Horowitz, Google Ventures, Sequoia Capital, and Y Combinator. Before joining First Round Capital, Rei help build products and community as a Product Manager and Global Community Lead at General Assembly. Rei joins us to share her story, how she got into startups, how she approaches building online and offline communities, what it’s like growing the Dorm Room Fund, and much more.

Kevin Thau, a General Partner at Spark Capital, focusing on early-stage investments in companies like Lola, Medium, Haven, and Aura. Kevin has spent over 20 years building startups that defined new markets in graphical computing, messaging, mobile technology and social media. Before Spark, Kevin spent two decades building startups like Twitter, where he was the Director of Mobile Products, as well as VP of Business and Corporate Development. He was also then the COO of Jelly Industries, a search-engine Q+A platform created by Biz Stone. Kevin joins us to share his story, how he got into startups by cold calling his first job, what it was like building Twitter from 2008 through its IPO, what it was like building Jelly, how he transitioned to being a VC, and much more.

Jesse Middleton is a startup founder and one of the early executives at WeWork who tackled a bunch of growth and operations challenges before launching WeWork Labs, their own global startup incubator, investment fund, business and digital product development lab. But before jumping into the world of venture capital, Jesse launched and sold a few companies of his own and then spent 5 years as part of the early team at WeWork, growing the company from a few buildings to a worldwide network and pioneer of the coworking and remote work industries. Jesse joins us to share his story, what it was like building WeWork and WeWork Labs, what it was like transitioning into venture capital, his two investment rules at Flybridge, and much more.

Giuseppe Stuto is the co-founder and CEO of Fam, a group video chat app for iMessage that quickly grew to over 1 million users in just 10 days! But Fam almost didn’t happen. Fam is a pivot off another social app that Giuseppe and his team built - SmackHigh - which started off as a bit of a joke for high school students to exchange smack talk between sports teams. But it quickly showed some promise and Giuseppe and his team began to iterate. Houseparty and Facebook live had just launched, but the team at Fam wanted to put the product where teens would use it the most - iMessage. Giuseppe joins us to share his story, what it was like building a career in consumer tech, what it was like launching his first company, how they created Fam, what it’s been like growing this iMessage app, what it was like raising money, and much more.

Drew Strojny is a retired NFL player turned tech entrepreneur. He is the founder of Memberful, super easy to use membership software. Growing up, Drew had a passion for tech and computers. During the NFL offseason, Drew continued to teach himself how to code and build websites. When his career in professional sports came to an end after a few years, Drew decided to launch his own company. But the original model never succeeded. After several years of building Wordpress sites and selling premium themes online, Drew noticed that there was no simple way of selling and managing online memberships. 4 years ago, he launched Memberful and has been growing the software ever since. Drew joins us to share his story, what it was like transitioning from a career in professional sports to tech startups, what it was like launching his first company, how he’s bootstrapped both Theme Foundry and Memberful, how he approaches building small teams, and much more.

John Doherty is the founder of Credo, a platform for connecting great businesses with the best vetted digital marketing consultants and agencies. He took a side project that started as a spreadsheet from a $50 dollar referral commission to a SaaS marketplace that has tripled its annual run rate. Before diving into a startup of his own, John worked at Distilled in NYC, and later joined Zillow. There he focused on growing Hotpads into their #2 brand. Starting off with a team of 1 - John quickly grew his organization to 8 people in just 12 months, increasing their listings’ visibility by 200%. John joins us to share his story, what it was like running a nimble team inside a larger real estate company, some challenges to rapidly growing a team, how he took Credo from a spreadsheet to a full time company, some of the biggest challenges he had to face over the last 3 years as the business model evolved, and much more.

Mike Williams is the founder of Thinkbox, a startup studio in Santa Monica, California, and the company that’s behind several successful startups including StudioTime and Yoroomie - an app which was built in less than 30 days and sold in less than 6 months, after getting a ton of press for being listed on eBay. While in high school, Mike was a pretty good wrestler. But he knew his sport had limits. So he decided to pursue his passion for flying instead. While in college, he was exposed to the world of cycling and that led him to becoming both a semi-pro in the sport, and an e-commerce entrepreneur, selling high quality bike parts to other cyclists in the early days of the web. Mike joins us to share his story, how he built and sold his first company Codeity, how he approaches building MVPs, what it was like launching Yoroomie and having it acquired in less than 6 months, how he built a chatbot in a weekend, the biggest mistakes most entrepreneurs make when building an MVP, and much more.

Katie Zhu is an Engineer turned Product Manager at Medium. Medium is a social publishing platform that allows anyone to share ideas and perspectives that matter. Medium now reaches over 30M readers a month, has explored new formats like Series, audio posts, and more. After internships with both NPR and the New York Times, Katie decided to make a big decision and join Medium over other tech companies. At Medium, Katie’s had a chance to work on several parts of the platform and continue to help creators and storytellers push the limits of their craft. Katie joins us to share her story, how she optimized her career for learning, what it’s been like working on developing new tools for writers and storytellers on Medium, how she approaches product management, and more.

Hunter Walk is a partner at Homebrew Ventures, a seed stage venture fund. Over a decade ago, while Hunter was a Product Manager at Google, working on the newly acquired YouTube platform, Apple had approached them before Steve Jobs had even announced the world's first iPhone. There was no public App Store at that time and no third party apps. Apple wanted to have complete control over the experience and built the first video app for the iPhone that would pull YouTube content. It was a risky move, but the alternative to working with Apple was - at that time - going directly to a carrier and paying them large sums of money to include you app on all their devices. It was an exciting but challenging time as Hunter recounts - because there were so many moving pieces and not everyone saw that smartphone were going to play such a huge role in our daily lives in just a few more years. So if you’re a Product Manager yourself, love YouTube, or are just curious about how a startup like YouTube sold to Google for $1.65B in 2006 (the largest consumer tech acquisition at the time) and then went on to work with Apple to ensure they’d make the jump to smartphones - get ready, cause Hunter is going to share his insights and experiences into all this and more.

Kelly Nyland is the Director of Marketing for Spectacles - a pair of video-recording sunglasses created by Snap Inc. the parent company of the massively popular disappearing photo app, Snapchat. While this is the first hardware product from Snap Inc., Kelly’s personal history into architecting massive marketing campaigns for innovative & emerging consumer hardware products goes way back. Kelly worked with Parrot as well as Sphero, helping the latter company go global through a partnership with Apple; putting them in their stores in more than 70 countries in less than 14 months. Kelly was also involved in the launch of the Star Wars: The Force Awakens’ BB8 product. So if you’re a hardware aficionado, love marketing campaigns, or are just curious about how startups conceive, launch, and scale hardware products - get ready, cause Kelly is going to share insights into all this and more!

Adii Pienaar is the Founder of Conversio, an all-in one marketing dashboard. Adii is based in Cape Town, South Africa and previously co-founded WooThemes - an e-commerce platform for Wordpress - which bootstrapped their way to over 150,000 customers. Today, Adii is continuing to help e-commerce entrepreneurs worldwide build stronger businesses through his latest startup Conversio, an all-in one marketing dashboard that helps you sell more. Adii joins us to share his story, how he started his career in entrepreneurship, what it was like transitioning wordpress templates into a full e-commerce platform, what it was like bootstrapping a company, how he’s approached building his latest company Conversio, and much more!

Tom Emrich is a Partner at Super Ventures and a co-producer of Augmented World Expo. After the release of the first feature phone, Tom began to see how immersive new technologies would transform the world around us and began building his career in the space. He’s consulted on how these technologies can improve the workplace & covered the industry for media publications like CanadaAM, ReadWrite, Betakit and more. Tom has also created and helped to foster communities around emerging technologies all over the world through groups like: We Are Wearables, Augmented Reality Bay Meetup, and most recently Augmented World Expo. He’s also now investing with 3 other partners through Super Ventures, a $10 Million dollar fund that’s helping to back startups building AR/VR & wearable products worldwide. Tom joins us to share his story, how he started his career in tech, why he’s so passionate about emerging technologies like AR/VR & wearables, what motivated him to help launch Super Ventures, what he and his partners look for in their investments, how he approaches building communities around emerging technologies, and much more!

Jeff Morris Jr. is the Director of Product Management & Revenue at Tinder. Jeff got into tech after seeing a tweet late one night for a position with Zaarly. The next day, he had to move from California to Kansas City, Missouri - if he wanted the job. Jeff quickly made a name for himself and became one of the first few city managers. Following his time building the marketplace, Jeff began consulting, before working on several of his own projects - like Slack Chats, a directory of popular slack channels that grew to over 80,000 users. Jeff then joined the team at Tinder to work on increasing retention and engagement through the product and marketing channels. Today, Jeff also works with the team of engineers, designers, and marketers to create, build and launch new, paid features for the platform. Jeff joins us to share his story, how he started his career in tech, what it was like growing a massive marketplace at Zaarly, what it was like joining the team at Tinder, how he approached Product Management, how he’s approaches working on monetization over the last year, and much more!

Huda Idrees is the founder and CEO of Dot Health, a platform that enables secure and easy access to your personal health data. Huda began her career as a developer and designer by building websites as a teenager. She then attended the University of Toronto and studied Industrial Engineering before diving into startups. Huda has been a part of several successful Canadian consumer tech startups, including Wattpad where she joined as one of the first employees and really dove into product design. She also helped develop and grow several products at Wave. She then joined Wealthsimple as one of the earliest team members and served as the Chief Product Officer - scaling the company though a major brand shift and launching its mobile presence on both Android and iOS. Today, Huda is the founder of Dot Health, an innovative healthcare platform that makes personal health data accessible and actionable. Huda joins us to share her story, how she started her career in tech, some of the biggest lessons she’s learnt building consumer technology startups, what it’s been like building Dot Health, and much more!