AZ Tech Podcast
AZ Tech Podcast is hosted by Hamid Shojaee, an Arizona tech entrepreneur and investor who's been involved in the community for more than 20 years. The show features unscripted conversations with doers, from founders and investors to scientists and government officials, who are working to make a dent in the universe. Find out more about what's going on in the Arizona tech community by following AZ Tech Beat. Watch the full episodes on our YouTube channel: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCVfeM31UQqCCATyKlK8NNKg
Episodes
39 episodes
LIVE with Bob La Loggia, Mike Roberts and Chris Cardinal
For this episode, we partnered with Startup Grind Phoenix to put together a podcast recording in front of a LIVE audience. It's been a long time since we've hosted -- and attended -- in person events, and it was so great to meet some of our lis...
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Season 2
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Episode 36
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1:01:18
Aly Saxe, VP of Communications, CampusLogic - Failure, Redemption and ROFL
Aly Saxe knows how to succeed, but she also knows how to fail. More importantly, she knows how to get back up. She's weathered the challenges of raising money to make payroll to sexual harassment to calling it quits. Even after having a s...
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Season 2
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Episode 35
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1:23:55
News RECAP - Week ending Oct. 22
This week, AirGarage, a startup founded in Tempe that's designed to improve the public parking experience, announced a $12.5 million raise led by Andreesen Horowitz. MediaKits, a startup that provides "digital resumes" for influencers, raised $...
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Season 2
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Episode 34
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22:06
Alexis Krisay & Melissa DiGianfilippo, Co-founders, Serendipit - Brands, BFFs and big ideas
Alexis Krisay and Melissa DiGianfilippo started their brand marketing agency as basically strangers, but after running a company together for 12 years, they've become BFFs. They've got a pretty good "marriage" (as they call it) because they com...
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Season 2
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Episode 33
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1:05:07
Saeed Eslami, Founder, VisualLive - Augmented reality, bootstrapping and starting from scratch
Saeed Eslami wanted to start fresh after he moved to the United States from Iran. He'd built a successful company in his home country, but he wanted to get an education and find a good job in America. He was willing to work hard and do what it ...
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Season 2
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Episode 32
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1:08:25
News RECAP - Week ending Oct. 8
This week was Invest Southwest's Venture Madness, where up to 25 startups pitch to an audience for the chance to win $10,000. Hamid was at the conference and on this week's news recap, he tells me all about this year's finalists and winners. We...
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Season 2
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Episode 31
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43:57
Alexi Venneri, Co-founder & CEO, Digital Air Strike - Company culture, car dealerships and Richard Branson's islands
When you ask Alexi Venneri about the challenges she's had while building Digital Air Strike, a multimillion dollar tech company, she answers with an iteration of one of the quintessential interview answers: "Our challenges have become our stren...
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Season 2
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Episode 30
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51:54
News RECAP - Week ending Oct. 1
This week in Arizona we saw a merger between two drone data collection companies. The first is Skynetwest, which was based here in Chandler, joined forces with Mississippi-based Soaring Eagle Imaging to create Soaring Eagle Technologies. Anothe...
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Season 2
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Episode 29
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28:09
Matthew Pittinsky, CEO, Parchment - Education, college admissions and Atari
Before Matthew Pittinsky was CEO of the EdTech company Parchment, he was co-founder and CEO of Blackboard, Inc., a software used by universities across the country. If you went to college in the aughts, you likely used Blackboard to submit assi...
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Season 2
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Episode 28
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1:13:06
Josh Snow (Elizetxe), Snow Founder & CEO - Consumer products, SaaS and navigating success
Josh Snow (formerly Josh Elizetxe) didn't have much as a kid. He grew up in a dangerous part of Phoenix and could've easily joined a gang. Instead, he spent his afternoons in the Phoenix Public Library reading all the "For Dummies" books he cou...
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Season 2
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Episode 27
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1:19:05
NEWS RECAP - Week ending Sept. 24
Busy week for Arizona tech news. eVisit and Nextiva raise big. Axosoft makes an acquisition and a few other announcements too.Plus we talk about national tech news from Apple, SpaceX, VW and more.
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Season 2
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Episode 26
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32:16
Kate Gallego, City of Phoenix Mayor - Tech, politics and the future of Arizona
Phoenix Mayor Kate Gallego made the decision to run for mayor at a time when, she says, her life was falling apart. As it turns out, she won. Now, she's the mayor of the country's 5th largest city and also the youngest mayor of a major city. Ka...
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Season 2
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Episode 25
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51:27
BONUS: Hamid and Adrienne wrap up Season 1 of the AZ Tech Podcast
Hamid talks to AZ Tech Podcast producer Adrienne about their favorite parts of Season 1 and what can be expected this summer before the podcast returns with Season 2 later this year.
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Season 1
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Episode 24
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30:11
Chris Ronzio, Founder, Trainual
One day, Chris Ronzio was running a highly-profitable consulting business. The next, he launched Trainual, one of the fastest growing companies in Arizona that streamlines businesses’ training processes. Watching his mom start her ...
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Season 1
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Episode 23
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1:07:29
JT Marino, Co-founder, Tuft & Needle
Tuft & Needle co-founder JT Marino could be the poster child of how to bootstrap your way to success. When he was first exploring ideas for the type of startup he wanted to build, he and his friend and co-founder Daehee Park made a ve...
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Season 1
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Episode 22
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1:47:17
Grant McFadden, Researcher, ASU Biodesign Institute
Dr. Grant McFadden is trying to find out if a virus fatal only to rabbits might also destroy cancer cells. He became interested in the myxoma virus in grad school. The virus was first released in Australia in the 1950s to try to control a massi...
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Season 1
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Episode 21
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1:11:47
Greg Head, Founder & CEO, Scaling Point & Gregslist
Greg Head is one of the biggest champions of Arizona's tech scene. Even though he's now based out of Dallas, he runs Gregslist in Phoenix, one of the best resources for entrepreneurs, investors and founders in the valley. Not only that, but he ...
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Season 1
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Episode 20
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1:09:55
Chris Cardinal, Co-founder, Synapse Studios & CarbonQA
Chris Cardinal has a lot to say, and he proved as much on our latest podcast episode. The co-founder of Synapse Studios and CarbonQA shared his philosophy on balancing big deadlines, while also building positive culture at new companies. He tal...
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Season 1
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Episode 19
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1:40:44
Ibrahim Mesbah, Co-founder & CEO, RevolutionParts
Ibrahim Mesbah is building the Amazon of buying and selling car parts. It's a very specific market, but that's what's made his company RevolutionParts so successful. It addresses a major inefficiencies and unnecessary costs in the retail car pa...
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Season 1
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Episode 18
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1:06:33
Danny Jacobs, Researcher, ASU's School of Earth and Space Exploration
Dr. Danny Jacobs is, in a way, a space explorer. As part of his research at ASU's School of Earth and Space Exploration, he's trying to understand how the universe began. Danny's whole goal is to answer some of life's biggest and most basic que...
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Season 1
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Episode 17
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1:19:59
Pat Sullivan, Founder & CEO, Defendry
Pat Sullivan has built several successful companies in his almost 40-year career as an entrepreneur. One of his biggest successes was ACT, the very first CRM software. With his newest venture Defendry, Pat is trying to literally save lives by u...
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Season 1
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Episode 16
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1:06:54
Clate Mask, Co-founder & CEO, Keap
Keap, formerly known as Infusionsoft, is one of Arizona’s most successful software companies, but the company's had really high highs and really low lows. In this episode of AZ Tech Podcast, Keap co-founder Clate Mask shares the intimate and em...
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Season 1
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Episode 15
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1:15:37
BONUS: Hamid and Adrienne talk startups, challenges, fundraising and more
This week, Hamid talks to AZ Tech producer Adrienne St. Clair about what it takes to build, lead and exit a startup.
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Season 1
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1:15:50
Mike Roberts and Bob La Loggia Return
We're trying something a little different this week. Hamid invites Mike Roberts and Bob LaLoggia back on the podcast to "shoot the shit." They discuss the nature of a founder, how to be happy and they actually do end up talking about shit.<...
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Season 1
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Episode 14
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1:53:01
Jamie Baxter, Co-founder & CEO, Qwick
Jamie Baxter's company Qwick was almost a casualty of the pandemic. As an on-demand staffing startup for food and beverage contract employees, the shutdown of the food and beverage industry was nearly a death sentence. But Jamie and his team go...
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Season 1
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Episode 13
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1:05:41
