Bytes Over Bagels

Leaders in the field of People Operations join us as we explore how the realm of Human Resources has evolved to rise to the needs of new generations, to leverage new technology, and to keep the field innovative. Kelli Koschmann, VP of Talent at Sitter City, shares her popular process for improving company culture through effective feedback tools and proper follow-through. Jared Olsen, an entrepreneur in the HR space and currently at Motivosity, helps us understand the evolution of People Operations from a compliance-focused department to a whole-person-focused support system. Our very own Samantha Strube, People and Operations Manager, joins us throughout to share her trajectory and insight to the ever-changing role of managing people. Struggling to gather, wrangle, or share your own People Ops data? Or want to build a system to help your business do People Ops better? Let’s chat! or info@eightbitstudios.com

We cover diversity and inclusion with interviews from, Bhatki Patel, 3D Artist at Facebook who did work on Marvel’s Black Panther among others, and Amanda Lannert, CEO at Jellyvision here in Chicago. In the latest segment of “Marry Mary” we continue to guide Mary’s life journey to find true love. Rockstar 3d designer and animator Bhatki Patel, offers insight on better inclusion at meetups to lead to more connections, advice for how design teams can add more diversity to their networks, and more. Our feature interview is with friend of the show, Amanda Lannert. She shares her perspective on diversity and inclusion, how Jellyvision became a 50% female workforce, and how they leverage diversity and inclusion statistics to lead to employee satisfaction in the workplace. This week's music feature is Chicago's own Wade Andersen Today's show is brought to you by: Brad’s Deals Brad’s Deals is more than just online shopping, they're a diverse community of techies, fashionistas, comic artists, yoga teachers, and bagel

Premiering in 2013, Bytes Over Bagels quickly became a favorite weekly podcast for the Chicago Tech scene. Debuting February 20th and broadcasting for 40 straight weeks, the group interviewed some of Chicago Tech's most coveted personalities and opened the doors for many in the blossoming start-up industry. Season 2.0 will bring some tasty surprises and awkward format changes as our colorful hosts open the time capsule from Season 1 to catch up with previous guests to find out what they've been doing for the last 5 years, how their careers and the industry has changed, and also how to get one Mary Brown married off to a fellow Chicago Techie. Highlighting new local music and touching on the tech industries hottest topics, season two kicks off with the original hosts welcoming you back, four year highlights, introducing Marry Mary Brown, and the spooky tale of the Loch Ness monster. You won't want to miss it! And if you do, its always online, so you can basically listen anytime. Listen to Season 1: http://byte

Today's interview is with Eddie Lou, CEO and Co-Founder, Shiftgig.  Shiftgig is the (yeah we italicized "the") online community for the service and hospitality industries. Eddie started out slanging burgers at a Jack-in-the-Box, so he knows about workin' the shifts. He and his co-founder wanted to create a proactive platform for potential employees and hiring managers to court each other. The result is a database of over 100K jobs  and workers nationwide. And while Eddie knows the service and hospitality industry, he's also crazy versed in VC and fundraising, having spent some time working at OCA Ventures before blowing out Shiftgig. This week's music feature is Chicago's own The Symposium.

Today's interview is with Andrew Howard, Co-Founder and Sara Trice, Lead Developer, Wowzers. Wowzers is a complete cloud-based solution for 3-8th grade math studies.  The Wowzers platform gives teachers a platform to help them curate learning for a student and spend less time grading papers and creating worksheets.  The platform provides students with creative and immersive ways to understand math concepts at a level customized to the students' abilities. This week's music feature is Chicago's own Falldown.

Perk up Chicago Start-ups, tuck in your shirts, today we interview Jason Heltzer, General Partner, OCA Ventures. OCA is a venture capital firm that focuses on seed and traditional venture capital investments...primarily investing in technology companies. 

This week's featured interview is with Greg Jaros, Founder and Gint Rudis, Co-Founder of Spare to Share, a hyper local-sharing platform on web and mobile for things you own or things you need. When they say "hyper local" sharing they mean building a sharing community in your condo building or office building to allow you to share and borrow things you need occasionally but wouldn't necessarily buy - like a chainsaw.   Greg and Gint built this platform to solve their own problem of buying too many one-time use products.  They quickly realized that the best way to scale the platform was using hyper-local networks to leverage the pre-existing trust of those people that live and work in your building.  They are continuously iterating on the product and recently released a feature that lets you send in a photo of a shelf of products and their Spare to Share "elves" will identify and add your products to your personal inventory to share out to your neighbors.  Their goal is to make it easy and not let the technolog

This week's featured interview is with Michael Anthony Salvatore, Owner Heritage Bicycles. Mike knows bikes - he's been building them for years in NYC and now at his shop here in Chicago.  He also knows a thing or two about tech and building a Lifestyle Brand.  The latter has provided him with a platform to dominate across numerous streams of media in the social web space, physical retail, and online commerce. This week's music feature is Chicago's own Best Witches.

This week's featured interview is with Chris Brown, Group Vice President of Mobile at Orbitz Worldwide.  Chris shares intriguing stats on mobile adoption for booking travel and Orbitz's mobile growth over the last 3 years.  Chris led his team to build Apple's editor's choice app allowing users to book a flight in as little as 3 minutes and travel packages in the neighborhood of $1,200...that's a $1,200 purchase on your phone. Creating large behavioral shifts in purchasing travel, introducing localized, real time travel planning once you reach your location and managing a happy crew of coders and designers is Chris' passion.  And he makes it sound easy... This week's music feature is Chicago's own Pink Frost.

This week's featured interview is with the Divvy duo, Elliot Greenberger, Deputy General Manager at Divvy, and Scott Kubly, Commissioner, Chicago Department of Transportation. If you haven't seen Divvy bikes somewhere around the city in your peripherals...you are a hermit...and probably need to get out of the house, in general. Divvy is the newest form of city supported public transportation that lets users pick up one of over 4,000 bikes from over 400 stations around town and drop them off at a station near their destination. There are 24 hour passes as well as annual passes, which provide access to all the bikes in 30 minute increments between stops. Elliot and Scott talk to us about expansion of Divvy, Divvy mobile apps, bike safety (including new bike lanes), and putting Divvy in the same sentence with the El or Bus when you are trying to figure out how to arrive at point B.

This week's featured interview is with Chicago's very own, Jeff Hyman, CEO of Retrofit. Retrofit is a web-based weight loss program that combines wearables (think Fitbit), wireless scales and regular skype calls with your personal registered dietitian, exercise physiologist and behavior coach. Jeff himself, has been around the block, worth $51 million dollars before the bubble - and $51 after it burst. Jeff didn't fall easily and went on to build 2 more successful businesses (selling 2 of them) until he landed on a passion project - Retrofit. He started the business manually tracking people's weight loss using a handful of Fitbit's, a weight loss support team and no web or mobile app.  Let's just say people liked it...and Weight Watchers is scared.

This week's featured interview is with Tracey Wiedmeyer, CTO and Co-Founder of InContext Solutions. InContext Solutions creates simulated shopping experiences for manufacturers and brands to test their product and retail experiences in a virtual 3D environment. Its like a video game but its not. Challenges for users testing package recognition and shopping experiences may need to charge down a simulated store aisle with a mission to find a specific product in a specific time. The platform has revolutionized the business of product and retail testing, which was previously required a building an actual physical environment. Tracey talks about getting checks from gramps and signing early contracts with the likes of Wrigley. It ain't easy...

This week's featured interview is with Shrada Agarwal, Chief Strategy Officer, Co-Founder and Head of Media at Context Media. Context Media is a booming bootstrapped biz that delivers relative and engaging waiting room video content based on specific medical conditions. 

Craig Ulliott, CTO, Co-Founder and Head of Product at Belly, the World's best and most entertaining loyalty program (or "experiential rewards" in Craig's words).  Belly basically rewards you for being a good customer, but the way you go about getting these rewards is anything but the old tired punchcard.  Craig talks us through the grinding long hours and continuous iterations that took Belly from an idea to a recent round of VC funding to the tune of $10 million. 

Tom Sosnoff is Founder of TastyTrade. Tastytrade is a live, video-based Financial "Network" (like CNN Money but not at all - these guys actually can help you invest).  Five days a week Tom and his entourage host a number of different Finance and Investor shows, including Bootstrapping in America, which has featured a number of Chicago Tech Startups. 

Ravi Bhatt is Co-Founder and CEO of Branchfire. Branchfire is responsible for a little used (only a million+ users) iPad App called iAnnotate. iAnnotate allows you to read, markup and share documents on the go.  Its used widely in education but also adopted by Hollywood for reading and editing scripts among actors, pro sports teams sharing out playbooks and all sorts of other smart folks.

Andy Crestodina is Web Strategist and Co-Founder of Orbit Media. Orbit Media is a wildly successful Web Design and Web marketing firm in Chicago, working with local legends like Lou Malnati's, Vienna Beef and heading up the NATO Summit 2012 web efforts. Besides running a company, and being one of the pimpin'est content marketers around,

John Roa, Founder and CEO, AKTA. AKTA is one of Chicago's premier Experience Design Shops. John Roa has had his hands in a number of digital projects since he was 17 and brings a real honest perspective on failure and why this new wave of "entrepreneurial education" is a waste of your time.

David Vinca is Founder, eSpark Learning and Luke Shepard, CTO. eSpark Learning is harnessing the power of educational 3rd party apps to build a platform for customized learning experiences in the classroom. Alongside him in this interview is Luke Shepard, a past Facebook Developer, and an iterative machine (they push every single frickin day).

Mark Lawrence, Co-Founder at Spot Hero. Mark spins the tale of how he grew SpotHero early on to 10,000 users, with a horrific 42 step form to reserve a parking space. Since then its been fame and glory for Mark's team, crushing it in major markets across the country. How did he and his blue tshirt posse do it?