S5 E14: Derrick Reimer, SavvyCal

09/14/21 • 36 min

1 Listener

Code Story: Insights from Startup Tech Leaders

Derrick Reimer got his first computer in kindergarten. His Dad was a mechanical engineer, but at home, tinkered with code.. and Derrick was always interested in the projects he was working on. In junior high, he learned Dos basics, and started to make games. He found it really fun to write utilities and tools for people, and funny enough, he even tinkered with accounting software - and tried to replicate Quicken.

Even still, he ignored coding as a career path. He majored in math in college, and wasn't sure how he wanted to apply it. He needed more creativity than most math jobs offered at the time. After college, he discovered the Basecamp team and their perspective on building software. It was at that moment that his interest in tech and entrepreneurship merged together.

For fun, he loves to do a lot of things. He lives in Minneapolis, and is outdoors a lot - hiking, road cycling, and playing a bit of tennis here and there. He also enjoys cooking, and coffee - but not just drinking coffee. He has gotten into hobbyist coffee roasting - with a popcorn popper. He likes to play around with the beans, the equipment, and overall, tinkering with making the perfect cup.

After collecting dust in his idea notebook, in the list of markets which he knew well, he decided to venture forward to make a better calendar scheduling work tool... based on his anxiety using this type of product, and his desire to level up the status quo.

This is the creation story of SavvyCal.

Sponsors

Courier
Img.ly
Routable
CTO.ai
Cloudways offers peace of mind and flexibility so you can focus on growing your business instead of dealing with server management. With Cloudways, you get an optimized stack, managed servers, backups, staging environment, integrated Git, pre-configured, Composer, 24/7 support, and a choice of five cloud providers: AWS, DigitalOcean, Linode, Google Cloud, and Vultr. Get up to 2 Month Free Hosting by using code "CODE30" and get $30 free hosting credit.

Links

Website: https://savvycal.com/
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/derrick-reimer-93916020/
https://www.derrickreimer.com/

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This is the creation story of SavvyCal.

Sponsors

Courier
Img.ly
Routable
CTO.ai
Cloudways offers peace of mind and flexibility so you can focus on growing your business instead of dealing with server management. With Cloudways, you get an optimized stack, managed servers, backups, staging environment, integrated Git, pre-configured, Composer, 24/7 support, and a choice of five cloud providers: AWS, DigitalOcean, Linode, Google Cloud, and Vultr. Get up to 2 Month Free Hosting by using code "CODE30" and get $30 free hosting credit.

Links

Website: https://savvycal.com/
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/derrick-reimer-93916020/
https://www.derrickreimer.com/

Previous Episode

S5 Bonus: Greg Ratner, Troops

Greg Rather comes from a family of artists, so he always envisioned himself going in to art. From an early age, he was drawing and creating comics (funny enough, centered around his favorite animal - pigs). And back then, he was also a budding entrepreneur. In fact, in grade school, he would Xerox his comics and sell them at school for a buck a piece.

In High School, he got into animation and game development, which was the catalyst for his interest in programming. He started out for doing animation by hand, drawing each cell and each frame by itself, which was super tedious. The tools he switched to was Director and Flash, allowing him to create stop animation, eventually layering programming into the mix as well. Outside of tech, he is a purple belt in jiu-jitsu. He also enjoys cycling and cooking, which both were handy hobbies during the pandemic.

After feeling the pain of having to log into a myriad of tools day to day to get their jobs done, Greg and his co-founders decided to build a connected application, to drive revenue communications.

This is the creation story of Troops.

Sponsors

Courier
Img.ly
Routable
CTO.ai
Cloudways offers peace of mind and flexibility so you can focus on growing your business instead of dealing with server management. With Cloudways, you get an optimized stack, managed servers, backups, staging environment, integrated Git, pre-configured, Composer, 24/7 support, and a choice of five cloud providers: AWS, DigitalOcean, Linode, Google Cloud, and Vultr. Get up to 2 Month Free Hosting by using code "CODE30" and get $30 free hosting credit.

Links

Website: http://troops.ai/
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/gratner/

Next Episode

S5 Bonus: Andrew Childs, Shortcut (formerly Clubhouse.io)

Andrew Childs doesn't have a computer science background. He grew up in Philly, and is currently based in NYC with his wife and 6 year old. His first computer experience was in 1984, with a Macintosh plus. He was immediately hooked on this extraordinary machine, that felt like it was made by humans. With no internet, it was just a playground in the beginning, but on it, he was able to explore design and learn pascal. He attended RISD, an arts school in providence, and studied painting. His goal was to go into contemporary art, but he quickly realized he didn't know anything about how to approach the art world. Throughout the program, he did learn a lot about how to think, how to look at things, and how to be creative. Post that, he ran a few web design and development agencies, before being pulled into the startup world.

At a prior startup, the opinionated nature of project tools his team was using started to get in the way of their productivity... not to mention, it was not possible to get a birds eye view of direction, progress, etc. across multiple projects. During a hack day project, Andrew built a way to aggregate their tool into one single view. It was then that it clicked, and he and his co-founder thought maybe they were on to something.

This is the creation story of Shortcut (formerly Clubhouse).

Sponsors

Courier
Img.ly
Routable
CTO.ai
Cloudways offers peace of mind and flexibility so you can focus on growing your business instead of dealing with server management. With Cloudways, you get an optimized stack, managed servers, backups, staging environment, integrated Git, pre-configured, Composer, 24/7 support, and a choice of five cloud providers: AWS, DigitalOcean, Linode, Google Cloud, and Vultr. Get up to 2 Month Free Hosting by using code "CODE30" and get $30 free hosting credit.

Links