Nathan Bashaw, Co-founder & CEO, Hardbound | EP 151

Nathan Bashaw is the Co-founder & CEO of Hardbound. After discovering the world of startups during college, and driven by the desire to build things and implement his own ideas, Nathan became a self-taught developer. He knew pretty early on, that he wanted to leverage technology to create new forms of education and storytelling that was native to new devices like smartphones. After joining Olark as an intern and then working in San Francisco as a full time developer, Nathan decided to pursue his own project - Scratchpad. It was later acquired by General Assembly, where Nathan worked as a Product Manager. While in San Francisco, Nathan met Ryan Hoover and helped him create the first version of what would become Product Hunt. Nathan then decided to focus on pursuing his vision for what would become Hardbound. He and the team recently completed the Techstars Boulder program, raised some funding, and have released a completely new version of the app. Nathan joins us to share his story, some of the biggest challenges he faced in becoming a Product Manager, why he’s so passionate about new forms of education and storytelling, what it’s been like building Hardbound, some of the biggest challenges they had to overcome, what it’s like raising money, what it was like going through Techstars in Boulder, and much more.