Five startup founders introduce their companies and backgrounds. Brendan Spikes built Spike Security after working for Elon Musk. Aaron Bally created Udemy through Founder Institute in 2010 and is now pursuing new ventures. Maria leads Roadgazer, an AI trip planner for cars, inspired by her time at Motorola.
I'm Brendan Spikes, founder of Spike Security. The company is solving one of the biggest problems facing enterprises in cybersecurity, and I found out about F5 through a couple of my good friends that know Adayo, and I used to work for Elon Musk, so he knows Adayo, and so through my experience working in it for Elon, I sort of got the opportunity to kind of see firsthand some of the big pain points for enterprises. And in about 2008, figured out I needed to take some of this experience and start a new enterprise of my own. And so when I asked some of my friends, hey, you know, where should I pick up some entrepreneurial skills, the answer was actually pretty clear and unanimous. They said, go talk to Adeo.
My name is Maria, and I'm the CEO of Roadgazer. RoadGeyser is artificial intelligence assistant that helps to plan and manage the car trips on the go in real time, and it's targeted for connected cars infotainment system. So I came with this idea when I worked in Motorola as an engineering director, and I always was in innovation. I was like, did a bunch of products, have multiple patents, and there I wanted to do something which I like. And I kind of found this gap with my family traveling and found this would be fantastic to have an own Jarvis inside your own car.
My name is Aaron Bally. I'm the founder and CEO of Carbon, which is a company which I started very, very recently. But I think most people would know me from as the founder of Udemy, which I started in Founder Institute in 2010. So it's been, it's been a while and I first started Udemy before I even came to United States. I started the company in Turkey in 2006 first. But although the idea was right, the timing wasn't quite right back then. And Turkey wasn't the best place to start the company. So I moved over to US to see whether in Silicon Valley I would be able to change one of these equations.
Hi, my name is Purva, and I'm the founder of OneLook. I actually came across FI through a friend who was trying to start a Founder Institute chapter in India. And he recommended, and he said that he's met Adeo, and it's a fantastic program. But he did tell me that he knew another friend who could not make it, you know, who could not finish the program because it's extremely difficult to do so.
Okay, so my name is Eric Dunn, CEO and co-founder of Revver. I'm originally from Mexico, and I've been here in the Silicon Valley area for the last year, year and a half. Through Revver, we are enabling companies to achieve breakthrough results. So imagine new revenue sources, or reducing cost, or increasing quality of the products, and so on. By actually tapping into the intelligence of the frontline workers, by enabling the frontline workers to implement the daily ideas that they have in their daily jobs.
