Bytes Over Bagels

18 Coffees (https://18coffees.com/) is building the backbone of the mission economy through consulting, content, and community. Caleb Gardner joins us from his walk-in closet to discuss how his team is helping pair creatives and business leaders with clients to provide mission-driven companies a stronger strategic footing. Caleb’s career has spanned from consulting with Fortune 100 CEOs to running President Obama’s Twitter account, including respected companies such as Bain & Company, Edelman, and OFA. As a thought leader in digital innovation, Caleb has been a featured speaker at Social Innovation Summit, SXSW, INBOUND Marketing Summit, among others, and he has been quoted in WIRED, Strategy Magazine, NBC News, BBC Radio, and others.

Joining us from Cyprus, Dr Theano Kalavana is an author and professional development and leadership coach. She discusses the differences between cognitive and affective empathy and how they apply to leadership and team communication. To learn more about Dr Kalavana check out her website at http://mindthreading.com.

Author of The Empathy Edge and Founder at Red Slice, Maria Ross join us to talk about her 3-year journey in researching the data behind making empathy actionable. "If we want to create a more empathetic world, why not start in the place where we spend the bulk of our time: our work.” She talks about how to build an empathetic brand, leadership, culture and how to effectively start delivering it. 

"Organizations that champion empathy will be the leaders in every category". We kick off season 3 of Bytes Over Bagels introducing this season's theme: Empathy. Don Bora, John Ostler, and Steve Polacek join us from Eight Bit Studios to discuss how their 10-year journey in the website and mobile consulting space went from why they started: to create a great studio for collaboration and work-life balance, to today, why does Eight Bit exist? They discuss their team's approach to empathy, the different approaches to the research, and the reasons behind pivoting this very podcast, Bytes Over Bagels into helping to answer those and more questions. 

Who knew driving data could be so useful? Gary Hallgren shares how Arity is changing the insurance game with data. Right out of college, Gary's been in transportation, starting at the DOT of Minneapolis. Join us to hear how he's now helping Arity improve driving for all of us.

Kaben Clauson, Founder of True Public, slid right into entrepreneurship wanting to find a better way for companies to get real, accurate data. As he points out, there had to be a better way to get authentic data from a population. Join us as he shares his insights and tells us how he learned to build a power surveying tool.

Joel Pollick, Founder of Percent Pledge, shares how a simple phone call with his father turned into a solution that makes donating to charity fool-proof. Join us as we talk about how he researched the market before he even drafted a solution, how he learned as he went, and how Percent Pledge has evolved to meet user needs.

Coming to you live from the Chicago Inno State of Innovation: The Future of Cannabis event in downtown Chicago hosted at WeWork on September 25th, 2019.  In this 2-part series, you’ll get to hear from some impressive Chicago companies in the cannabis space and from Cresco Lab’s Entrepreneur in Residence, Zach Marburger. Part 1: Fireside chat with Zach Marburger, Entrepreneur in Residence at Cresco Labs Part 2: Up and Coming Companies: Tom Gavin - Vice Chairman and CEO of CannTrac Technology, Inc Kurt Akers Co-founder / CEO of Kannatopia James Yi Founder / CEO of Leaf Trade Aristotle Loumis Co-founder of Fyllo

Coming to you live from the Chicago Inno State of Innovation: The Future of Cannabis event in downtown Chicago hosted at WeWork on September 25th, 2019.  In this 2-part series, you’ll get to hear from some impressive Chicago companies in the cannabis space and from Cresco Lab’s Entrepreneur in Residence, Zach Marburger. Part 1: Fireside chat with Zach Marburger, Entrepreneur in Residence at Cresco Labs Part 2: Up and Coming Companies Tom Gavin - Vice Chairman and CEO of CannTrac Technology, Inc Kurt Akers Co-founder / CEO of Kannatopia James Yi Founder / CEO of Leaf Trade Aristotle Loumis Co-founder of Fyllo

20 years ago, i.c.stars formed to transform individuals and communities through a program that combined hard skills training with a broader perspective on community impact. The program gives under-served individuals the necessary skills and habits to find success in the tech field. The program continues today with their “bigger than you” sense of accountability for the adults in their program, providing companies and communities with skilled employees both in soft and hard skills. Join us as Miguel Guerrero, a recent grad and now at Discover Financial, shares how he leveraged this opportunity to redirect his life and provide real value to companies and his community. Also with us is Amanda Moore, Director of Corporate Partnerships to share some insight on how the program works and what makes it so successful for both grads and the employers who hire them. Oh, and hear about the upcoming Techie Prom being held by i.c.stars. https://www.icstars.org/event/20th-anniversary-gala-the-tech-prom/

Jeff Meredith, President and COO of Chamberlain, jumped from a standard IT field and into garage doors with a clear focus: smart access solutions that provide convenience and security for a seamless, uninterrupted life. Chamberlain has spent the past few years identifying common pain points when it comes to the most common entryway we have: our garages. Listen in as he shares the importance of solving everyday problems, the power of shifting a business from product to problem-solver, and what his favorite bagel is.

Scott’s seen firsthand how the state of Chicago tech scene grew from a niche area to a key player. Join us as he explains why east and west coast investors are now putting their money into Chicago companies, what Mayor Lightfoot can to do to ensure the tech scene continues to thrive, and how you can get involved. Bonus footage: Scott shares the cost of using f-bombs on-air, apologies to the people of Minnesota, and shares what Technori is up to next.

Travel out with us to Whiskey Acres in DeKalb, IL, where we did a live episode recording with leaders in Agricultural Tech at the AGTech Nexus conference. Philippe de Laperouse shares what he sees is the direction of robotics in farming. CEO of RowBot, Kent Cavender-Bares, discusses how technology can increase the versatility of crops in a single field and decrease the percentage of crop failure. Jonah Kolb from Moore & Warner sets us city-slickers straight and helps us understand the management aspects of farming. As the AgTech space continues to grow, learn why collaboration between investors, entrepreneurs, and farmers is important. Spoiler alert: the lack of broadband is a serious threat to farms.

Today's episode is brought to you by Eight Bit Studios, an award winning mobile app design and development located in CHicago.

Co-founder and CEO Steven Galanis shares how he turned the idea of personalized shoutouts into Cameo, a site where thousands of celebrities make themselves available for these more human interactions with their fans. Named by Time Magazine as one of "50 Genius Companies of 2018" , Cameo is a marketplace where fans can book personalized video shoutouts from their favorite people. Cameo partners with over 10,000 of the world's top actors, athletes, and influencers to create the most authentic and personalized fan experiences in the world.

Rod Levy, Executive Director of Code Platoon joins the Bytes Over Bagels crew to discuss the dev bootcamp he founded for veterans and military spouses. Listen in to learn how Call of Duty shaped the future of Code Platoon, and how the program develops skills that these veterans and spouses already have to drive success in the software development field.

Aaron Sawyer from Redline VR discusses how he is stretching VR technology to enhance everyday interactions, create new engagement opportunities, and extend our ability to connect to each other. Tune into this episode about how VR is no longer just about games, but a more human-centered experience. Today's episode is brought to you by Eight Bit Studios, shaping and shipping digital products that advance people and organizations.

Leaders in the field of People Operations join us as we explore how the realm of Human Resources has evolved to rise to the needs of new generations, to leverage new technology, and to keep the field innovative. Kelli Koschmann, VP of Talent at Sitter City, shares her popular process for improving company culture through effective feedback tools and proper follow-through. Jared Olsen, an entrepreneur in the HR space and currently at Motivosity, helps us understand the evolution of People Operations from a compliance-focused department to a whole-person-focused support system. Our very own Samantha Strube, People and Operations Manager, joins us throughout to share her trajectory and insight to the ever-changing role of managing people. Struggling to gather, wrangle, or share your own People Ops data? Or want to build a system to help your business do People Ops better? Let’s chat! or info@eightbitstudios.com

We cover diversity and inclusion with interviews from, Bhatki Patel, 3D Artist at Facebook who did work on Marvel’s Black Panther among others, and Amanda Lannert, CEO at Jellyvision here in Chicago. In the latest segment of “Marry Mary” we continue to guide Mary’s life journey to find true love. Rockstar 3d designer and animator Bhatki Patel, offers insight on better inclusion at meetups to lead to more connections, advice for how design teams can add more diversity to their networks, and more. Our feature interview is with friend of the show, Amanda Lannert. She shares her perspective on diversity and inclusion, how Jellyvision became a 50% female workforce, and how they leverage diversity and inclusion statistics to lead to employee satisfaction in the workplace. This week's music feature is Chicago's own Wade Andersen Today's show is brought to you by: Brad’s Deals Brad’s Deals is more than just online shopping, they're a diverse community of techies, fashionistas, comic artists, yoga teachers, and bagel lovers who share a common goal—give consumers the best deals and experiences every day. Run on innovation, fun, and lots of coffee, Brad’s Deal is an award-winning company passionate about bringing tech and opportunities to the community. Listen to Season 1: http://bytesoverbagels.com/shows

Premiering in 2013, Bytes Over Bagels quickly became a favorite weekly podcast for the Chicago Tech scene. Debuting February 20th and broadcasting for 40 straight weeks, the group interviewed some of Chicago Tech's most coveted personalities and opened the doors for many in the blossoming start-up industry. Season 2.0 will bring some tasty surprises and awkward format changes as our colorful hosts open the time capsule from Season 1 to catch up with previous guests to find out what they've been doing for the last 5 years, how their careers and the industry has changed, and also how to get one Mary Brown married off to a fellow Chicago Techie. Highlighting new local music and touching on the tech industries hottest topics, season two kicks off with the original hosts welcoming you back, four year highlights, introducing Marry Mary Brown, and the spooky tale of the Loch Ness monster. You won't want to miss it! And if you do, its always online, so you can basically listen anytime. Listen to Season 1: http://bytesoverbagels.com/shows

Today's interview is with Eddie Lou, CEO and Co-Founder, Shiftgig.  Shiftgig is the (yeah we italicized "the") online community for the service and hospitality industries. Eddie started out slanging burgers at a Jack-in-the-Box, so he knows about workin' the shifts. He and his co-founder wanted to create a proactive platform for potential employees and hiring managers to court each other. The result is a database of over 100K jobs  and workers nationwide. And while Eddie knows the service and hospitality industry, he's also crazy versed in VC and fundraising, having spent some time working at OCA Ventures before blowing out Shiftgig. This week's music feature is Chicago's own The Symposium.

Today's interview is with Andrew Howard, Co-Founder and Sara Trice, Lead Developer, Wowzers. Wowzers is a complete cloud-based solution for 3-8th grade math studies.  The Wowzers platform gives teachers a platform to help them curate learning for a student and spend less time grading papers and creating worksheets.  The platform provides students with creative and immersive ways to understand math concepts at a level customized to the students' abilities. This week's music feature is Chicago's own Falldown.

Perk up Chicago Start-ups, tuck in your shirts, today we interview Jason Heltzer, General Partner, OCA Ventures. OCA is a venture capital firm that focuses on seed and traditional venture capital investments...primarily investing in technology companies. 

This week's featured interview is with Greg Jaros, Founder and Gint Rudis, Co-Founder of Spare to Share, a hyper local-sharing platform on web and mobile for things you own or things you need. When they say "hyper local" sharing they mean building a sharing community in your condo building or office building to allow you to share and borrow things you need occasionally but wouldn't necessarily buy - like a chainsaw.   Greg and Gint built this platform to solve their own problem of buying too many one-time use products.  They quickly realized that the best way to scale the platform was using hyper-local networks to leverage the pre-existing trust of those people that live and work in your building.  They are continuously iterating on the product and recently released a feature that lets you send in a photo of a shelf of products and their Spare to Share "elves" will identify and add your products to your personal inventory to share out to your neighbors.  Their goal is to make it easy and not let the technology get in the way of the sharing. This week's music feature is Chicago's own The Locals.

This week's featured interview is with Michael Anthony Salvatore, Owner Heritage Bicycles. Mike knows bikes - he's been building them for years in NYC and now at his shop here in Chicago.  He also knows a thing or two about tech and building a Lifestyle Brand.  The latter has provided him with a platform to dominate across numerous streams of media in the social web space, physical retail, and online commerce. This week's music feature is Chicago's own Best Witches.

This week's featured interview is with Chris Brown, Group Vice President of Mobile at Orbitz Worldwide.  Chris shares intriguing stats on mobile adoption for booking travel and Orbitz's mobile growth over the last 3 years.  Chris led his team to build Apple's editor's choice app allowing users to book a flight in as little as 3 minutes and travel packages in the neighborhood of $1,200...that's a $1,200 purchase on your phone. Creating large behavioral shifts in purchasing travel, introducing localized, real time travel planning once you reach your location and managing a happy crew of coders and designers is Chris' passion.  And he makes it sound easy... This week's music feature is Chicago's own Pink Frost.

This week's featured interview is with the Divvy duo, Elliot Greenberger, Deputy General Manager at Divvy, and Scott Kubly, Commissioner, Chicago Department of Transportation. If you haven't seen Divvy bikes somewhere around the city in your peripherals...you are a hermit...and probably need to get out of the house, in general. Divvy is the newest form of city supported public transportation that lets users pick up one of over 4,000 bikes from over 400 stations around town and drop them off at a station near their destination. There are 24 hour passes as well as annual passes, which provide access to all the bikes in 30 minute increments between stops. Elliot and Scott talk to us about expansion of Divvy, Divvy mobile apps, bike safety (including new bike lanes), and putting Divvy in the same sentence with the El or Bus when you are trying to figure out how to arrive at point B.

This week's featured interview is with Chicago's very own, Jeff Hyman, CEO of Retrofit. Retrofit is a web-based weight loss program that combines wearables (think Fitbit), wireless scales and regular skype calls with your personal registered dietitian, exercise physiologist and behavior coach. Jeff himself, has been around the block, worth $51 million dollars before the bubble - and $51 after it burst. Jeff didn't fall easily and went on to build 2 more successful businesses (selling 2 of them) until he landed on a passion project - Retrofit. He started the business manually tracking people's weight loss using a handful of Fitbit's, a weight loss support team and no web or mobile app.  Let's just say people liked it...and Weight Watchers is scared.

This week's featured interview is with Tracey Wiedmeyer, CTO and Co-Founder of InContext Solutions. InContext Solutions creates simulated shopping experiences for manufacturers and brands to test their product and retail experiences in a virtual 3D environment. Its like a video game but its not. Challenges for users testing package recognition and shopping experiences may need to charge down a simulated store aisle with a mission to find a specific product in a specific time. The platform has revolutionized the business of product and retail testing, which was previously required a building an actual physical environment. Tracey talks about getting checks from gramps and signing early contracts with the likes of Wrigley. It ain't easy...

This week's featured interview is with Shrada Agarwal, Chief Strategy Officer, Co-Founder and Head of Media at Context Media. Context Media is a booming bootstrapped biz that delivers relative and engaging waiting room video content based on specific medical conditions. 

Craig Ulliott, CTO, Co-Founder and Head of Product at Belly, the World's best and most entertaining loyalty program (or "experiential rewards" in Craig's words).  Belly basically rewards you for being a good customer, but the way you go about getting these rewards is anything but the old tired punchcard.  Craig talks us through the grinding long hours and continuous iterations that took Belly from an idea to a recent round of VC funding to the tune of $10 million. 

Tom Sosnoff is Founder of TastyTrade. Tastytrade is a live, video-based Financial "Network" (like CNN Money but not at all - these guys actually can help you invest).  Five days a week Tom and his entourage host a number of different Finance and Investor shows, including Bootstrapping in America, which has featured a number of Chicago Tech Startups. 

Ravi Bhatt is Co-Founder and CEO of Branchfire. Branchfire is responsible for a little used (only a million+ users) iPad App called iAnnotate. iAnnotate allows you to read, markup and share documents on the go.  Its used widely in education but also adopted by Hollywood for reading and editing scripts among actors, pro sports teams sharing out playbooks and all sorts of other smart folks.

Andy Crestodina is Web Strategist and Co-Founder of Orbit Media. Orbit Media is a wildly successful Web Design and Web marketing firm in Chicago, working with local legends like Lou Malnati's, Vienna Beef and heading up the NATO Summit 2012 web efforts. Besides running a company, and being one of the pimpin'est content marketers around,

John Roa, Founder and CEO, AKTA. AKTA is one of Chicago's premier Experience Design Shops. John Roa has had his hands in a number of digital projects since he was 17 and brings a real honest perspective on failure and why this new wave of "entrepreneurial education" is a waste of your time.

David Vinca is Founder, eSpark Learning and Luke Shepard, CTO. eSpark Learning is harnessing the power of educational 3rd party apps to build a platform for customized learning experiences in the classroom. Alongside him in this interview is Luke Shepard, a past Facebook Developer, and an iterative machine (they push every single frickin day).

Mark Lawrence, Co-Founder at Spot Hero. Mark spins the tale of how he grew SpotHero early on to 10,000 users, with a horrific 42 step form to reserve a parking space. Since then its been fame and glory for Mark's team, crushing it in major markets across the country. How did he and his blue tshirt posse do it?

Brian Spaly, Founder and CEO, at Trunk Club. Brian talks about fundraising and ground-up growth of both Trunk Club, and Bonobos, his new men's clothing line and online retail shop. Other bits include Brian's take on staffing 130 employees in-house, managing a 35,000 subscriber base and the resurrection of Hammer Pants.

Mike McGee is Co-Founder at The Starter League. Mike talks about the Starter League's new 9-month program and partnering with CPS to educate the teachers how to teach code in their classroom. What's the Starter League? Seriously? It's where students and professionals from all over the world come to learn how to code, design, and ship web apps.

John Pletz, Tech reporter, blogger at Crain's Chicago Business. John talks about his transition from the Austin tech scene to Chicago, how to get noticed on Crains, Andrew Mason and Groupon's future and more! It's a fun interview. You gotta check it out! This week's music feature is Chicago's own Wild Belle.

Jake Nickell, Founder and CEO at Threadless. Did you know that Threadless was a hobby then a side project of Jake's website consulting firm? Jake talks about the history and growth of the company, new partnerships, Chicago, and what the future is for Threadless (including sweatpants). This week's music feature is Chicago's own Fort Frances.

Nick Rosa is Managing Director at Sandbox Industries. Sandbox Industries is redefining the way great ideas are generated and transformed into successful companies.

Chuck Templeton is Managing Director at the Impact Engine, an incubator serving for-profit companies addressing societal and environmental challenges. If you're thinking about applying for the Impact Engine, listen up as Chuck tells us what kind of projects get him all green and bothered...by the way apps are due by June 30th!

Justyn Howard, Founder and CEO of SproutSocial. Sprout Social puts powerful social metric tools in the hands of businesses at any stage. Listen up as Justin walks us through the evolution of the Sprout platform, why you should be using it and his team's lightening fast roll-out of new features to stay at the forefront of the metrics game.

Michael Timpone is Co-Founder and CMO of Kapow Events. Michael talks about how Kapow is helping brands make year-long memories for their customers by putting together unique events with great food, drinks, photography, and fanfare.

Emerson Spartz is Founder and CEO of Spartz. Emerson kicks things off by telling us how he dropped out of the traditional school system to homeschool HIMSELF at age 12 and build one of the most successful blogs of all time, www.mugglenet.com. From here he's launched a wave of profitable websites based on his homegrown formula for Virality. At 26 years old today, he's just getting started...listen in. We also feature (Chicago) music from the band JC Brooks and The Uptown Sound.

John Tolva, CTO of the City of Chicago. John talks about how he became CTO of Chicago, their Open Data initiatives, what's in store for the future of Chicago technology and more.

Phil Tadros is Founder and CEO of Doejo. Phil talks through his humble beginnings, dropping out of college to open his first of 13 coffee shops, leading him to sit at the the helm of the interactive shop Doejo, Bow Truss Coffee, the Galaist and a bunch more.