S5 Bonus: Jody Shapiro, Productiv

Code Story: Insights from Startup Tech Leaders

Episode • Aug 12, 2021 • 40m

Jody Shapiro was fortunate enough to know he was going to be an engineer from a young age. He did the typical kid things, liked played with legos, and built things, with deep curiosity around how things worked. He was introduced to coding when he was 9 years old - and it clicked. He also found himself interested in the business world. The same curiosity around gears and levers was also extended into business... and he was fascinated by the systems in place that enabled intelligent decisions around pricing, stocking, etc.

He's had the opportunity to indulge in his curiosities, studying computer engineering in his undergrad, and working on incredible problems in the industry. He has worked for Microsoft, video conferencing software, Silicon Graphics, and Google (for 9 years). He finds it's easy to fall in love with tech, but it's important to remember that there are users on the other side of solutions.

When he left Google, he set out to build... a business. He wasn't sure what type of business he was going to build. But he wanted to go work on a big problem, one that everyone had. After spending some time researching, he figured out that everyone has more SaaS than ever before, and companies were having a hard time managing their portfolios. He thought there must be a way to solve this problem, and solve it driven by data.

This is the creation story of Productiv.

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