The Sean and Thomas Show is produced by Devscale.com On this episode we chat with our friend Elliott Garms, the founder of Human Predictions. We dive deep into tech recruiting, raising money, and how to successfully hire your first sales team; something Thomas and I are about to go through ourselves. 

Hey everyone! I’m Sean, co-founder of the Chicago software development agency, Devscale and welcome to The Sean and Thomas show…this is episode number 005 of FounderSpotlight — a series where Thomas and I talk with early stage startup founders here in Chicago.  Today’s episode is a special one for us, our guests are Jonny and Jeff Immerman who are two really good friends of ours as well as our client. Jonny and Jeff have a crazy inspiring story and path that they’ve taken in life so it was great to sit down with them. Jonny started his career in tech when he launched a non-profit called Immerman Angels that connecst cancer patients with cancer survivors for 1:1 mentorship. That organization blew up and is all over the world now helping thousands and thousands of those affected by cancer each year.  Jeff and Jonny teamed up to launch their new venture ClozTalk - a company that lets you shop for quality charity-branded apparel. It’s a great mission with two fo the great humans as founders — hope you enjoy!

Hey everyone! I’m Sean, co-founder of the Chicago software development agency, Devscale and welcome to The Sean and Thomas show…this is episode number 10 of ScaleTalk — a series where Thomas and I talk with successful, Chicago-Based founders, CEOs, and CTOs that have scaled up their businesses tech teams. The hope is for us learn something from them that we can all apply to our lives and businesses. On Today’s show we have Kristi Zuhlke - the CEO and cofounder of KnowledgeHound. Kristi has an incredibly inspiring story going from Fortune 500 employee to starting a company that now has companies like Google as their client. Her story as a founder is also very interesting because she is a non-technical founder. So for those of you that may want to start a company or side project but have little technical skills, she’s going to tell us exactly how she started a tech company not once, but twice as a non-technical founder.

Welcome to The Sean and Thomas show…this is episode number 009 ScaleTalk — a series where Thomas and I talk with successful, Chicago-Based founders, CEOs, and CTOs that have scaled up their businesses tech teams. The hope is for us learn something from them that we can all apply to our lives and businesses.  We’ve been looking forward to today’s episode for a really long time. Our guest is Jason VandeBoom, the CEO and founder of ActiveCampaign. Now if you don’t know ActiveCampaign, they are a marketing automation company for small businesses and they have an incredible story. They have over 60,000 customers worldwide doing about $60mil+ / year in revenue and have more than 350 employees Jason famously bootstrapped the company for almost 15 years and then a few years ago raised $20 mil…we get into a good discussion here about that decision to raise so much money even though they didn’t particularly need it. 

Today’s episode is a conversation we had with Alida Miranda-Wolff, the founder of Ethos which is a consulting company that helps growing and growth-stage businesses build incredible and incredibly diverse company cultures to fuel success. Alida share some incredible insights, we seriously learned so much from her on this call about time management, team management, and how to read 2 books a week like she does. That sounds like a joke, but she literally read 105 books last year…which is amazing. 

On today's show we have the co-founders of LoveLeigh Loops, Jillian and Jordan. They are both good friends of ours from school when we were all at Miami University, it was super fun catching up with them. Two years ago they both quit their full-time jobs and are now teaching calligraphy online to thousands of students! This is a great story for anybody thinking about starting a side project or trying to turn their passion into a business. Have a great weekend everyone!!

Super pumped to get this episode out to everyone. We had a really great conversation with Dave about his new business HalfDay CBD. This is one of Chicago's first truly Chicago-based CBD companies. Dave left his successful career in technology sales to jump headfirst into the world of CBD and hemp farming. It's a booming industry that Thomas and I didn't know much about so Dave got to teach us all of the ins and the outs of THC, CBD, Hemp, Cannabis, extraction, and so much more. You're going to love this one!

Hey!! We're Sean & Thomas, the co-founders of Devscale, a boutique software agency and staffing firm. This is the first installment of our new series, Founder Spotlight! On this series, we’ll talk with the founders of small/medium sized businesses and talk about the early days of their businesses and how they got to where they are today. Some of the most inspiring stories come from founders like today’s guest Matt Gornick who is running a very successful small business (OrangeQC) in a very niche industry. We get into bootstrapping vs fund raising, what it’s like to make your first hire, why OrangeQC is a remote-first culture, and much more!

Hey!! We're Sean & Thomas, the co-founders of Devscale, a boutique software agency and staffing firm. This week we talked with Francois Toubol, the Sn. Director of Engineering at Reputation.com. We covered a ton of topics with him since he is such a source of wisdom and knowledge. Topics included managing a remote dev team, what it's like being a leader of a large tech team, the importance of EQ in business, books, podcasts, and much more. Hope you all enjoy!!

Hey!! We're Sean & Thomas, the co-founders of Devscale, a boutique software agency and staffing firm. This week we talked with Candice Savino, the VP of Engineering at Trunk Club. We talked about what it was like working at Groupon during their explosive growth and IPO, to navigating her career path as an engineer, and what it has been like leading up Trunk Club's engineering team.  Hope you all enjoy!!