The Sean and Thomas Show by Devscale

016: How to hire your first sales team w/ Human Predictions Founder, Elliott Garms

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.

015: From successful non-profit, to starting e-commerce company ClozTalk w/ Jonny and Jeff Imerman

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!

014: Starting a tech company as a non-technical founder w/ Kristi Zuhlke, CEO of KnowledgeHound

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.

013: Bootstrapping to $60 mil ARR with Jason VandeBoom

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.

012: How Alida Miranda-Wolff went out on her own to launch culture consulting company, Ethos.

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.