SMV11: Branch Insurance Co-Founder Joe Emison shares how less software code drives speed to market.
In this episode, you will learn:
Why you should do 50 customer interviews before building your product.
Why Joe recommends only building software code that is differentiating.
How less code & less employees translates into faster speed to market.
Which company became a Unicorn with only 13 employees.
Why Columbus is an excellent place to build a tech company.
Where to buy Joe’s book “Serverless as a Game Changer”
Episode Summary:
Joe Emison is the Co-founder and CTO of Branch, a personal lines insurance company that is a unicorn startup company headquartered in Columbus, Ohio and one of GlassDoor’s Best Places to work in 2022 and 2023. He is also the author of one of the Top 50 books on Amazon for cloud computing entitled “Serverless as a Game Changer: How to Get the Most Out of the Cloud”.
Before Branch, Joe built five other companies as a technical co-founder, across many industries, including consumer electronics, local government, big data analysis, and commercial real estate. Joe graduated with degrees in English and Mathematics from Williams College and has a law degree from Yale Law School.
Joe has a unique perspective on building software based startups. A big part of his philosophy is that he buys most of his software components and he only builds software code for what’s differentiating.
He believes that the most effective technology leaders are the ones that are able to really focus and minimize what code they're writing into just the necessary parts. I encourage you to purchase his book and listen to this episode to learn more!
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Joe’s Book:
Companies, people & topics
mentioned in this episode:
Companies & Products that Joe has worked at/on:
Branch Insurance
DMGT (Spaceful commercial real estate app)
BuildFax (acquired by DMGT)
BUILDERadius Blue Prince Products (sold to Harris Computer)
Mutant Chicken Races (award winning!)
EphPod (sold to Wind Solutions)
People, Companies/Institutions mentioned in this episode:
Why We Chose Columbus: Joe Emison
Glassdoor
Marc Andreessen
Why Software is Eating the World
Rocket Mortgage
GitHub
Organic Online
The Apache Software Foundation
Brian Behlendorf
Kubernetes
Spotify
Andreessen Horowitz
Sam Gerstenzang
The Happy Demise of the 10X Engineer
Stripe
Google
Monktoberfest
JobsOhio
Intel
CompuServe
The Ohio State University
Book: Lean Customer Development by Cindy Alvarez
Book: From Impossible to Inevitable by Jason Lemkin & Aaron Ross
Book: Predictable Revenue by Aaron Ross
Salesforce
Amazon
Williams College
Yale Law School
