Welcome back to How I Launched This! This week, Stephanie Wong (@stephr_wong) and Jenny Brown (@jbrojbrojbro) are joined by Justin Behar, the CEO of Trax. Trax is a cloud-based analytics software company that uses the power of machine learning and proprietary technologies to digitize retail for enhanced customer experiences and more effective goods management.

Justin is no stranger to tech, having spent the last 25 years in Silicon Valley founding and expanding various companies. At Trax, Justin has held various leadership roles and recently was named CEO. Trax technology is able to help stores analyze inventory, product placement, some shopping behaviors, and more to make recommendations for how a company could maximize sales and customer satisfaction. Images of store interiors are uploaded and analyzed, providing tons of data from more than a million retail outlets. Justin walks us through an example of this process of shelf monitoring and data analysis, explaining how the system can help measure things like advertising campaign effectiveness, stock issues, and more. From manufacturing to the retail shelf, Trax offers important product feedback via the Trax dashboard to help companies operate more efficiently. 

All companies face challenges, and Justin details some of the obstacles Trax has overcome. Situations like new packaging may seem benign but can lead to bad data if not handled properly. Trax's sophisticated machine learning system compensates for this and other stock issues. 

Later, Justin offers insights into Trax data management now and into the future. We hear more about his journey to the CEO position and how he hopes to continue the positive trajectory Trax has been on. 

Episode Links:
Trax
Trax Video

This week on How I Launched This: A SaaS Story, Carter Morgan (@carterthecomic) is joined by Instana co-founder, Mirko Novakovic. Instana helps companies build thoughtful cloud-native applications and services with their powerful observability and application performance monitoring solutions.

Mirko is no stranger to the founder's chair. Previously, he started and grew several companies and his passion for solving difficult technological issues led to Instana. Instana optimizes cloud native applications and identifies problems and other areas that could be adjusted for better performance. The fullay automated solution can analyze and help adjust applications for any size project.

We talk about the Instana journey from it’s German roots to sales around the world. Including how Mirko discovered this pain point in development and the growth of Instana to what it is today. He details their work with Dick's Sporting Goods, monitoring billions of live requests. We touch on 2020's effects on Instana and how the established company culture created a safe space for continued company growth and workforce diversity. It's the people you hire that decide the success of your company, Mirko tells us, offering advice for creating a positive company environment.

Instana will continue to harness the power of AI, Mirko says, explaining why it's important for companies to take advantage of this technology and how Instana has begun to do so. We wrap up the show with a look at the Google-Instana partnership and Mirko offers advice to other company CEOs.

Episode Links:
Instana
Play with Instana
Try Instana

Carter Morgan (@carterthecomic) and Jenny Brown (@jbrojbrojbro) host this week's episode of How I Launched This: A SaaS Story! They're talking with Scott Radner, VP of Advanced Technology at MEDITECH, an Electronic Healthcare Records (EHR) company improving the healthcare of patients since 1969.

In his 30 years with MEDITECH, Scott has seen technology develop from magnetic tapes to advanced cloud-based software capable of securely storing and managing health records. MEDITECH now also offers other software support that empowers care providers to do their jobs effectively. In rural areas this can be especially important, and Scott gives us examples of how MEDITECH's hybrid cloud system is making lives better. 

Later, Scott details the technology behind running such mission critical software. With a company culture that supports education and learning, MEDITECH's employees were able to easily overcome obstacles as they first built and now expand MEDITECH, Scott tells us. We talk about how COVID-19 has affected the company and how he sees the healthcare space changing in the future.

Scott describes the iterations of MEDITECH and the advantages of moving to a mostly cloud-based system and offers advice for other companies looking to join the cloud.

Episode Links:
MEDITECH Website
MEDITECH Blog

Stephanie Wong (@stephr_wong) and co-host Jenny Brown (@jbrojbrojbro) are back this week for an exciting interview with Tiffanie Stanard of Stimulus. Using extensive data, analytics, and integrations with supplier systems, CRM’s, social feeds and more, Stimulus helps companies make better purchasing decisions.

Tiffanie's varied and accomplished background in everything from payroll to coding helped her learn to take risks and see opportunity even in less than ideal situations. During the 2008 recession, she spun off on her own to add entrepreneurship to her list of talents and went full-time on one of her first ventures. In her years of selling experience, she saw first hand how difficult and impersonal searching for suppliers and making purchases was for businesses. She developed Stimulus to aggregate and analyze real-time data from sources all over the internet to allow buyers to see a full picture of a supplier, find goods/services they need and build partnerships.

Later in the show, Tiffanie describes Stimulus' multiple offerings, including relationship mapping to strengthen ties between buyers and sellers. She describes the process of developing such a powerful tool, taking it from simple search capabilities to a network benefiting both buyers and sellers, fostering meaningful B2B relationships, and even helping small businesses. As the business has grown, Tiffanie and her team have looked to Google Cloud to help them expand, and she tells us all about the technology stack and Google tools they use to keep Stimulus up and running. 

Support from The Black Founders Fund, Founders Academy, American Underground and partnerships with companies like Google has been a driving force in the expansion of Stimulus. Relationships with their customers have been important as well, and Tiffanie gives us real-world examples of Stimulus in action. 

Tiffanie wraps up our interview with news about the future of Stimulus and some advice for future entrepreneurs willing to take a risk.

Episode Links:
Stimulus
Google for Startups and American Underground
Google For Startups: Black Founders Fund
Google for Startups Founders Academy
Tiffanie Stanard

Stephanie Wong (@stephr_wong) and Carter Morgan (@carterthecomic) welcome Demetrius Gray, Founder and CEO of WeatherCheck, to this week's show. WeatherCheck employs advanced AI, meteorological data, and top class scientists and developers to provide homeowners and claims consultants with specific hail and weather damage data to safeguard one of life’s biggest investments: your home.

When Demetrius began running operations for a roofing company, he saw the pain and confusion weather damage can inflict on structures and people. WeatherCheck seeks to alleviate some of this stress by alerting homeowners of severe weather and helping them pinpointing exact damage that may have occurred. If property is damaged, WeatherCheck gives users tools that help them; work with their insurance on filing a claim, finding a contractor and funding repairs while awaiting insurance money.

Demetrius details the technology behind such a huge undertaking and describes how specific meteorological and other microservices have advanced the success of WeatherCheck. Their team of atmospheric physicists and data scientists perform analyses on weather instances every single day, and have built a multi-cloud system to manage this information and share it with users.

The WeatherCheck system has successfully helped clients identify damage minutes after a disaster, even if the client is miles from their home. Demetrius also discusses the company culture and what values and ethos are pervasive throughout. In that vein, Demetrius offers up advice for future company founders to create an efficient and comfortable workplace.

Episode Links:
WeatherCheck
Jupyter
BigQuery
First Street Foundation

This week on How I Launched This A SaaS Story, Carter Morgan (@carterthecomic) has an insightful chat with Gal Zabib, Co-Founder and CEO of Altostra. Altostra provides individual developers and engineering teams a no-code platform to create and manage cloud infrastructure based projects.

As a software engineer from a young age, Gal’s previous experiences with the Israeli Military Intelligence force and working for a startup as the R&D leader, really carved out who Gal is as an entrepreneur. With Altostra, Gal and her team use their varied engineering skills to accelerate and automate software delivery for their clients. She details the struggles faced as the company began with a small group of developers working tirelessly to get Altostra off the ground. We hear how they overcame these obstacles and became a company bridging the learning gap for developers and empowering them to adapt and use new tools with minimal time investment. In the fast-paced world of infrastructure development, engineers are constantly struggling to keep up with new and changing technologies. Altostra helps remove some of the learning burden by doing the research and updating pieces automatically so developers can focus their time where it’s better suited.

Later in the show, Gal explains how developers use Altostra and the ways it caters to different coding styles. We talk about why Altostra chose to offer a freemium version and what that means for clients and the evolution of the product. Partnerships are a big part of their business, and companies like GitHub have signed on with Altostra recently. Gal offers insights into why personal and business partnerships are so important for business growth. Their recent participation in the Startup Residency Program at Google has also shaped the company and we talk about how Google Cloud has helped them expand.

Just get out there and get started is the valuable advice Gal gives fellow entrepreneurs as we wrap up the show. She looks into the future and gives us insight into the next few years of Altostra and the cloud and wishes everyone a healthy 2021!

Episode Links:
Altostra
LinkedIn Altostra
Twitter Altostra
GitHub Altostra
Medium Altostra

Stephanie (@stephr_wong) and Carter (@carterthecomic) welcome Co-Founder and CPO, Val Yermakova of Warmly today on the show! Warmly helps companies leverage business contacts and streamline networking practices for more efficient lead generation: think Warm Intros to Warm Sales Leads!

Val's intellectual curiosity and flexibility mean she's had myriad job titles and hobbies, including FulBright China scholar, Stanford Melanoma researcher, Security Analyst, Interaction Designer, Krav Maga and Muay Thai fighter, Circus Aerialist, Ex-competitive wrestler and figure skater, speaks Chinese, Russian, Spanish and English. At Warmly, Val continues to expand her knowledge base, learning from the many and varied industries that join. As a networking aid, Warmly helps sales departments in all fields find and foster meaningful relationships with people, allowing them to stay in contact with their network even as those people are promoted or hired by new companies. 

To begin, Val describes the iterations of Warmly and how bringing on co-founders expanded and improved the company. Market research played a big role in refining the product as well. In the current setup, Warmly clients use the dashboard to control which contacts are monitored and how. When a network contact change is detected by Warmly, email notifications are sent to the relevant company employee along with applicable advice. Val gives us great examples of how this process can increase sales and network contacts

Later, we hear how the company will expand in the next five years. Google Cloud products have been integral in the development of Warmly, and Val explains how scaling has been made easier with Google Cloud. Val details how she incorporates positive mental health and nonviolent communication into the company culture and why emotional awareness is so important in work and private life.

Episode Links:
Warmly
Push-Pull
Val on Medium
Warmly Blog
Valy.space 

Sendur Sellakumar, CPO and SVP of Cloud at Splunk, joins our host Stephanie (@stephr_wong) on our first episode of 2021. Splunk is revolutionizing how enterprises use and act on data, making the process cheaper, faster, and more secure. Sendur's background in engineering and finance means he understands not only the importance of building great software but of running a customer-focused, profitable business efficiently and with empathy. WIth the help of Sendur, Splunk has moved more than half their software focus to hybrid and cloud solutions, enabling their powerful data tools to be used by myriad enterprise customers. 

Later in the episode, Sendur tells us the origin story of Splunk and how they started in the IT and security space. He describes what it was like advancing Splunk and it's customers into the cloud, detailing challenges of this shift and the solutions he found. Their focus on customer needs and support have been the leading factors of change along the way as they adapt and improve offerings to fit client needs. He talks about his time with the company and what it's been like leading as the company grows and changes.

Sendur details the offerings Splunk provides and how machine learning, streaming,  federated search, and other components work together to provide products usable by different types of clients at different stages of development. Through real-world examples, Sendur describes how users have discovered the power of data to solve current issues and empower employees.

We wrap up the show discussing how Google Cloud has enabled Splunk to scale with confidence. Sendur offers his insights on the future of Splunk and how Covid and a company-wide work from home policy have affected them. In his advice to other SaaS companies, Sendur says quantifying goals as much as possible is motivating for companies and their employees.

Episode Links:
Splunk
Anthos