Michael Louis grew up in South Africa, spending the first 25 years of his life there. From a young age, and being surrounded by an entrepreneurial family, he was always curious. He got into robotics and coding early, and stayed competitive and active as he grew up. Outside of tech, he loves to play squash, workout in CrossFit, run, and do anything where he has an opponent. Also, per South Africa culture, he enjoys spending time with friends at any social event involving drinking.

Michael built a successful eCommerce company, where you could order different items from stores and have them delivered. Because the margins in eCommerce are low, he and his team wanted to figure out how they could optimize their operation using machine learning. The tools out there weren't ideal, and the process was hard - but they did revolutionize their operation. Post exit, he decided to build a solution that made this optimization process easier.

This is the creation story of Cerebrium.

Sponsors

• Speakeasy
• QA Wolf
• SnapTrade

Links

• https://www.cerebrium.ai/
• https://www.linkedin.com/in/michael-louis-94104a113/

Pablo Ruiz-Múzquiz has a background in physics and computer science. At some point, he decided to ditch the science and pursue open source, which is what got him started on his 20 year passion for tech. Outside of tech, he longs to feel like a useful member of society and engages in extracurricular projects to support this. He also is into traditional archery - IE wood bow and arrows - and finds joy in connecting with the old way of doing things. He also enjoys gardening and reading, of which, fantasy is one of his favorite genres.

Pablo built a company called Kaleidos, which aids in the creation of software solutions. They hold a core belief that there should be a close connection between designers and developers. What they found in the tooling to support these disciplines is that they weren't built to embrace this concept. So, they decided to incubate a product, and make it open source.

This is the creation story of Penpot.

Sponsors

• Speakeasy
• QA Wolf
• SnapTrade

Links

• https://penpot.app/
• https://www.linkedin.com/in/pruizmuzquiz/
• https://elenya.net/
• https://kaleidos.net/

William Neill had an interesting childhood in New Zealand, rooted in being an entrepreneur. As a kid, he helped write business plans with his parents, or build makery stuff for projects. Living this type of childhood, combined with the creativity of music, it started a lifelong trend of building businesses and products. Rooted in his love for being an entrepreneur, he has always longed for a flexible life, to keep him present for his young family, and to allow for the option to travel. He loves spending time with his kids on the beach, and exploring the country as a family.

William and his co-founder met in a coffee shop in London. As they were chatting about prior projects, they figure out there was a lot of overlap in the things they were interested in. Eventually, they returned and built some solutions together - and off the back of a prior wishlist project, they decided to make an online shopping cart to end all others.

This is the creation story of Basket.

Sponsors

• Speakeasy
• QA Wolf
• SnapTrade

Links

• https://www.trybasket.com/
• https://www.linkedin.com/in/willneill/