In this episode, you will learn:

1. Why you should do 50 customer interviews before building your product.
2. Why Joe recommends only building software code that is differentiating.
3. How less code & less employees translates into faster speed to market.
4. Which company became a Unicorn with only 13 employees.
5. Why Columbus is an excellent place to build a tech company.
6. Where to buy Joe’s book “Serverless as a Game Changer”

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!