Catch the Tornado Podcast Catch the Tornado Podcast

In today's episode, Markus Lorenz speaks to Björn Dröschel, the Product & Technology Managing Director at fulfillmenttools. The platform merges eCommerce with their client's store network, supporting processes like order entry, shipping, click and collect, returns while offering a perfect omnichannel shopping experience for retail customers. In this conversation, Markus and Björn discuss the birth of fulfillmenttools, the unpredictable reality of setting up a company during the breakout of a global pandemic, creating technology that will be adaptable to increasingly rapid changes of the market, and building flexible eCommerce tools that can be used and customized by people without developer assistance. Tune in!

Brink Commerce is a high performing, serverless, headless e-commerce SaaS platform for medium to large enterprise customers. Today Piotr speaks to Kristian Tysander, who has helped build the business from the ground up, but has had a huge impact on the architecture behind it. Krystian shares with the listeners the 3 main principles that Brink Commerce follow in the way they have designed their ecom architecture that makes their system so reliable and unique at the same time. Krystian also shares his view on microservices vs monolithic architecture in terms of global scale, speed and efficiency and reveals why subscription management and adding marketing features to their offer is Brink Commerce's direction for the future. 

In today’s episode, Piotr Karwatka speaks to Brad Buda, the co-founder of Census - an operational analytics platform. Census boasts that it's the easiest way to sync your customer data in all of the available tools and claims to be the best app to get your sales & marketing teams on the same page. Today Piotr speaks to Brad about how joining Amazon, and the cloud web services team in the era of the early days of AWS in Seattle proved to be a formative experience for his entire career. They also talk about the early days of Census, its unique qualities, its impressive growth, and the dynamic role changes for a technical founder that naturally come during the process. Tune in!

Julien Lemoine, the Co-founder & CTO at Algolia, an Enterprise Search Software company, is an entrepreneur passionate about software development, product development, and algorithmics. In this episode, Markus Lorenz speaks to Julien about building a development team at a huge scale, the development of the role of the CTO in a fast-growing company, leadership struggles, as well as Algolia's search technology, and how the search engine positions itself against its competition. Julien also gives his view on how Algolia's technology helps businesses grow, generate profit, and increase conversion rates by helping customers find exactly what they're looking for, very quickly.

Planet Heroes is the world's first ecological crowdfunding platform. This start-up was established in Poland and has already been recognized by the United Nations. The platform collects funds for pro-ecological activities by allowing you to sponsor each other in exchange for cleaning different public spaces like parks or beaches. So how does the platform work? It is enough to first clean up the area, document it well - then enter the goal of your collection and wait for the payment. Today, Agata speaks to Przemek about the spontaneous beginnings of this initiative, plans for the future, the green startup landscape in Poland, and much more. 

Michael Vax has over 20 years of leadership experience across the Digital Commerce landscape. He has led the development of eCommerce platforms at Hybris, Spryker, and Elasticpath. With this extensive experience, he is currently helping customers up-skill their teams in Digital Commerce, develop innovative roadmaps and boost their market growth in his new consulting company CommerceIsDigital. Today, Piotr speaks to Michael about the digital commerce landscape, which keeps broadening into markets previously unheard of in the digital sphere. They also talk about the pros and cons of a feature-driven vs. industry-driven vs. architecture-driven approach, the lessons B2C can learn from the B2B business, and what would be the best first steps if you want your company to go through a digital transformation.