In today's episode, Markus Lorenz speaks to Björn Dröschel, the Product & Technology Managing Director at fulfillmenttools. The platform merges eCommerce with their client's store network, supporting processes like order entry, shipping, click and collect, returns while offering a perfect omnichannel shopping experience for retail customers. In this conversation, Markus and Björn discuss the birth of fulfillmenttools, the unpredictable reality of setting up a company during the breakout of a global pandemic, creating technology that will be adaptable to increasingly rapid changes of the market, and building flexible eCommerce tools that can be used and customized by people without developer assistance. Tune in!
Brink Commerce is a high performing, serverless, headless e-commerce SaaS platform for medium to large enterprise customers. Today Piotr speaks to Kristian Tysander, who has helped build the business from the ground up, but has had a huge impact on the architecture behind it. Krystian shares with the listeners the 3 main principles that Brink Commerce follow in the way they have designed their ecom architecture that makes their system so reliable and unique at the same time. Krystian also shares his view on microservices vs monolithic architecture in terms of global scale, speed and efficiency and reveals why subscription management and adding marketing features to their offer is Brink Commerce's direction for the future.
In today’s episode, Piotr Karwatka speaks to Brad Buda, the co-founder of Census - an operational analytics platform. Census boasts that it's the easiest way to sync your customer data in all of the available tools and claims to be the best app to get your sales & marketing teams on the same page. Today Piotr speaks to Brad about how joining Amazon, and the cloud web services team in the era of the early days of AWS in Seattle proved to be a formative experience for his entire career. They also talk about the early days of Census, its unique qualities, its impressive growth, and the dynamic role changes for a technical founder that naturally come during the process. Tune in!
Julien Lemoine, the Co-founder & CTO at Algolia, an Enterprise Search Software company, is an entrepreneur passionate about software development, product development, and algorithmics. In this episode, Markus Lorenz speaks to Julien about building a development team at a huge scale, the development of the role of the CTO in a fast-growing company, leadership struggles, as well as Algolia's search technology, and how the search engine positions itself against its competition. Julien also gives his view on how Algolia's technology helps businesses grow, generate profit, and increase conversion rates by helping customers find exactly what they're looking for, very quickly.
Planet Heroes is the world's first ecological crowdfunding platform. This start-up was established in Poland and has already been recognized by the United Nations. The platform collects funds for pro-ecological activities by allowing you to sponsor each other in exchange for cleaning different public spaces like parks or beaches. So how does the platform work? It is enough to first clean up the area, document it well - then enter the goal of your collection and wait for the payment. Today, Agata speaks to Przemek about the spontaneous beginnings of this initiative, plans for the future, the green startup landscape in Poland, and much more.
Michael Vax has over 20 years of leadership experience across the Digital Commerce landscape. He has led the development of eCommerce platforms at Hybris, Spryker, and Elasticpath. With this extensive experience, he is currently helping customers up-skill their teams in Digital Commerce, develop innovative roadmaps and boost their market growth in his new consulting company CommerceIsDigital. Today, Piotr speaks to Michael about the digital commerce landscape, which keeps broadening into markets previously unheard of in the digital sphere. They also talk about the pros and cons of a feature-driven vs. industry-driven vs. architecture-driven approach, the lessons B2C can learn from the B2B business, and what would be the best first steps if you want your company to go through a digital transformation.
Mytheresa is one of the leading global luxury fashion e-commerce platforms shipping to over 130 countries. Founded as a boutique in 1987, Mytheresa launched online in 2006 and offers a highly curated edit of over 200 luxury brands with ready-to-wear, shoes, bags and accessories for womenswear, menswear and kidswear. Today Markus Lorenz and Philipp Barthold, the Chief Technology Officer at mytheresa.com talk about building vs buying, efficiency at a scale, building a reliable team and having technology serve the business it is designed for. If you're a developer looking for career opportunities, don't miss out on the ending, where we will announce Mytheresa's job openings for developers.
In this week's Catch the Tornado episode Piotr speaks to Humberto Ayres Pereira, CEO of Rows.com. Rows is not just another spreadhseet. It's a revamped, and tailored to fit the needs of increasingly tech savvy users, no code/low code platform that lets people populate and analyze web apps using a spreadsheet interface. It offers many extended functionalities and integrations such as Lead Generation and Marketing Automation Tools. During this conversatin Piotr and Humberto discuss how the tool differs from products we all know like Google Spreadsheets and Airtable, as well as the rise of Open Source and Low Code products. Let's begin!
Urban Stalk is a Canadian company using leading technology in vertical farming such as precision-based agriculture, micro-controlled environmental production, circularity, IoT and automation to improve people's access to nutritious food and reduce the environmental impact of food production. Urban Stalk has incorporated food production processes from over 16 countries spanning over four continents to produce a world leading food production system. Today, I speak to Brent Downey about the impressive academic foundation that Urban Stalk was built on, the three pillars of its business model, the myths and misconceptions surrounding food technology and much more. Tune in!
BigCommerce is an eCommerce platform that provides SaaS services to retailers, including online store creation, search engine optimization, hosting, marketing and security for small and medium-sized businesses. In today's episode, Piotr speaks to Nate Stewart, Head of Strategy at BigCommerce. Some of the topics they discuss include the advantages of functioning in the Austin, Texas startup ecosystem, the importance of Open Source philosophy in BigCommerce's approach to providing SaaS services, and what it takes to build a great API when it's so easy to commoditize. They also discuss BigCommerce and Next.js cooperation and future plans regarding their products. Tune in!
Giant Swarm provides an API Driven Open Source Platform that enables businesses to easily provision and scale Kubernetes clusters together with a wide set of managed services. Some of its customers include leading organizations from Fortune 500 to technology-first companies. Today, Markus Lorenz speaks to Oliver Thylmann, the co-founder and CCO of Giant Swarm. The two have a very honest conversation about customer service, understanding customer needs, collaboration, identifying real pain points, and building strong, trustworthy business partnerships. Oliver also shares plenty of insights on building a fast-growing company, as well as building lasting relationships within the company itself, even in a remote environment. Tune in!
Hi! Welcome to the 50th episode of the Catch the Tornado Podcast! On behalf of our whole team, thank you to all of the guests who have given us their time and shared what was often a lifetime's worth of knowledge. And to our listeners- thank you for sticking with us!
This week Piotr speaks to Dominik Angerer, CEO & Founder at Storyblok- one of the first headless, visual content management systems on the market. Dominik shares what makes Storyblok unique, the company's business model, their approach to marketing, and community-building techniques. He also shares a great strategy for perfecting your pitch and finding the perfect investor. Tune in!
This Catch the Tornado episode features François Lanthier Nadeau, CEO at Snipcart. Snipcart is a developer oriented solution for building shopping carts for online stores and enabling eCommerce for small to medium brands. François' journey from a regular Growth Marketer at a startup to the CEO of a successful company is one that sounds almost unreal. Through curiosity, engagement and willingness to learn he built his own career from the ground up. In this week's episode he shares his perspective on the 8 years he's spent in Snipcart, but also the company roadmap, its unique product-market fit, as well as some insights as to how a SaaS company was able to build a vibrant community many Open Source projects could be envious of. Tune in!
2020 was not an easy year for any business, but the Hospitality Industry was definitely amongst those suffering the biggest setback. Costa Coffee, a British coffeehouse chain giant was also still recovering from the Brexit when the pandemic hit, yet that did not prevent the company from implementing a very successful mobile app program and eventually becoming the number one application in the UK in 2020. In this week's Catch the Tornado episode, Piotr speaks to Gordon Lucas, the Global Head of Digital Engineering at Costa Coffee about how he and his small team made this happen, how Costa accelerated its digital transformation, both the positive and negative impact of COVID19, the challenges of implementing new technology at such a scale. Tune in!
In this episode, Agata talks to Dirk Van Nievelt about his journey to becoming the co-founder of Denda, a South American marketplace that offers only sustainable, eco-friendly products and services that aim to generate well-being in people in multiple categories ranging from healthy foods to energy efficiency. Dirk talks about his childhood dreams of becoming a monk, years spent in many Asian countries China, Tibet, India, Nepal, self-discovery, and then moves on to explain how he became a manufacturer, entrepreneur, and eventually a pioneer of sustainable products for the whole Latam region. He also divulges plans for the future, including expanding on to the global market, challenging huge players like eBay or Wallmart and becoming the number one sustainable marketplace in the world. Tune in to hear this unusual and very inspiring story.
Before co-founding Akeneo, Benoit Jacquemont was CTO of Systems Integration company Smile and worked there for over 10 years. During this conversation, Benoit uncovers the story of how Akeneo was born as a solution he and his colleagues designed while still working at Smile, and dealing with clients from all sorts of industries. After some time it turned out that all of them had very similar pain points and struggles that had to do with gathering and managing product data. From fashion brands to auto-parts companies, they all seemed to rely on Excel, and the available at the time PIM's were way too advanced for their needs and skills. Tune in to find out how Akeneo was founded and how it transformed from an on-prem-based solution to a leading PIM and PXM SaaS company.
Today, in the Challenge Accepted. episode of our podcast, we have John Surdakowski, founder at Avex, Shogun Investor. John has seen has over 20 years of experience in building the web, from Web 1.0 and Flash animation to the explosion of mobile and e-commerce. In 2015 John started growing his freelance business into a boutique digital agency, with a focus on fashion, lifestyle and premium products. Avex has partnered with many major brands such as Hugo Boss, Rocawear, HBO, Sony Music, and many more. In 2019 Avex was invited to become a Shopify Plus Partner becoming an agency specialized in helping brands navigate the e-commerce space. Tune in!
In today's Pioneers. episode of our podcast, Piotr speaks to Michael Lukaszczyk, CEO and Co-Founder at GraphCMS, one of the first GraphQL based Content Management Systems on the market. Michael talks about the journey of building a successful company from a very small startup in the B2B business. He shares his perspective on the most important aspects you need to focus on when building a new product or company and talks about the perseverance it took to pioneer a market that was not yet educated about the benefits of GraphQL. He also shares some future plans for the company and discusses current tech trends that he finds most interesting at the moment. Tune in!
In this week's Balance IT. episode, Agata speaks to Angela Ortiz, Social Impact & Sustainability Entrepreneur. Angela is the author of "8 Principles That Will Make You An Effective Leader In Social Impact" and has over 9 years of experience in CSR. Her company, Stratechist Consulting, specializes in providing savvy solutions for companies & SMEs that help them enable effective CSR strategies and social impact programs. During this week's episode Angela talks about her journey from volunteer for local communities affected by the 2011 earthquake and tsunami in the Honshu region of Japan, through CSR manager and advisor at H&M and Adidas, to building her own CSR consulting company. She discusses the most difficult obstacles both large and small companies face when building their sustainability program, employee engagement, and explains how to effectively align your impact initiatives with your line of business.
E2N is a software company founded in 2009 specializing in intelligent employee management and effective planning of personnel allocation that is known for its amazing UX. Its main premise is digitalization and food and hospitality is their main industry sector. Today, Markus Lorenz speaks to Björn Raupach, the CTO & Founder of E2N about his journey since starting the firm with only two other partners. Björn answers questions about building a SaaS business back in 2009, the tech stack, serious company growth, and even gives some crucial advice to young developers and future CTO's about building your first product and finding the perfect product-market fit. Tune in!