Episode 34 – How Angelo Mandato, a PHP developer, founded a podcast hosting startup

Angelo went from software developing to becoming a founder and CIO of a podcasting technology and community. After spending some time working with C++ and discovering the many benefits that PHP has to offer, Angelo changed gears and the rest soon became history. As with most of our podcasts, Arsalan and Angelo discuss how he entered the field, his training, and many experiences and revelations along the way.  Listen in to Mentoring Developers episode 32 for more information.
Angelo’s Bio:
Angelo is the founder and CIO of Raw Voice, an Internet media company including subsidiaries blubrry.com podcasting community, techpodcasts.com technology podcast network, and subscribeonandroid.com, simple One Click subscribe links for all Android podcast applications to utilize. He is passionate about WordPress theme and plugin development and has created many themes and plugins for clients and wordpress.org, including the PowerPress podcasting plugin. Angelo is a seasoned developer experienced with PHP, MySQL, HTML5/CSS/bootstrap/jQuery, Android, iOS, Roku and other SmartTV development, and Ubuntu Apache/Nginx web server administration. His free time is spent with family, friends and restoring a 1981 Trans Am.
Episode Highlights and Show Notes:
Arsalan: Today we have a special guest, Angelo Mandato. How are you?
Angelo: Great.
Arsalan: I know a little bit about you. I’ve known you for a little while and I know that you’re doing some really cool stuff. So tell us about it. How do you see yourself?
Angelo: Today I see myself as an expert in the podcasting development space. It’s kind of been a long road to get there. I kind of just fell into it by being exposed to a lot of the web type technology throughout the year 2000.
Arsalan: I know that your developer and that you’re involved in developing podcast hosting. Are you a founder of Raw Voice or are you one of the early employees?
Angelo: Yes, I’m one of the co-founders. There were five of us that created the company, virtually, and everyone was just spread out throughout the country. So we just used tools of the time to create the company with Skype, GoToMeeting, phone calls, chat, and you name it.
Arsalan: What does the company do again?
Angelo: We provide podcasting services.
Arsalan: All right. Well, I’m a customer. I wanted everybody to know that it’s a good service.
Angelo: When we first started we were originally focused on the monetizing in podcasting with advertising. We started our first network which was Podcaster News. The idea was a podcast. This could create up to five-minute audio recordings of whatever news topics they preferred and give their new show their own name all on our website. Then, we could do a 70/30 with them. They would get 70% of the revenue and we would get 30%. Within the first few months, we quickly discovered there was a bigger market to do more than just news. We launched the Blueberry in the summer of 2006 to be an all-encompassing network for podcasts, not just limited to news. That became our mainstay and our original business model fell off the wayside for just specifically focusing on news for podcasting. Now we’re here today strictly doing services, mainly.
Arsalan: You have been coding for a while, right? How long have you been coding?
Angelo: As a career, since 2000.
Arsalan: Okay, so that’s been 15 to 16 years. Do you remember how you encountered programming for the first time?
Angelo: Yes. I had a roommate who was studying mechanical engineering during my college years and another roommate who is taking computer engineering and he was doing some coding back in about 1996. He was doing some coding to solve some problems with Perl. He was also real big on setting up servers and, I don’t want to call it hacking, but, getting computers to do things they weren’t intended to do. That was kind of the cool thing back in the 90s.

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