HackToStart

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 look for when hiring and building a team, and tons more insights on building startups.

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 Olabot. They’ve since launched several more bots including the “Messina Bot” and a bot for Redfoo. She’s now part of Betawork’s bot accelerator, Botcamp. Esther’s bots have been featured in Fast Company, Lifehacker, Venture Beat and more. Throughout her nine year career as a product marketer, she’s worn several different hats, helping to define and execute on go-to-market strategies, product launches, messaging, marketing campaigns and more! Esther joins us to share her story, how she got into tech and startups, what attracted her to the bots and messaging space, what it’s been like iterating on EstherBot and building the Olabot platform, and much more!

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 between talented individuals, and work experiences with substantial responsibilities. Victoria also recently spoke at TEDxUCLA, acted as a mentor at RECESS, and frequently speaks at events on marketing, entrepreneurship, diversity, and technology. She’s also a frequent blogger on her site. She joins us to share her story, what it was like getting selected as a KPCB Fellow, how’s she’s approached building such an amazing career, what it’s like working at Uber, some of the common growth/product mistakes she sees other entrepreneurs and organizations making, and much more!

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 by 2025, while providing adventure, purpose, and community to their community of millennial participants. Taylor is also a sought after speaker who has presented around the world to over 100,000 people. He regularly presents at the United Nations in NY, and has lectured on social entrepreneurship at Harvard, Princeton, NYU, Cornell, and Stanford. He has studied meditation with Zen monks in Japan, surfed the longest wave in the world in Peru, filmed documentaries in Cambodia, Uganda, and Ecuador, become a yoga teacher in Costa Rica, run with the bulls in Spain, travelled to 35 countries, and explored every continent on earth. Taylor joins us to share his story, what motivated him to launch socially minded startups, some of the impact his organizations have had so far, some of the challenges he’s had to overcome in the social enterprise space, how he’s worked with corporate partners like Disney and DHL, and much more!

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 technologies could mean for business, and much more!

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!

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 bringing startup energy to the team, much more!

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 favorite projects have been, how Camp Tech has grown so quickly, why she decided to help launch Gather North and how they sold out the event in their first year, and much more!

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!