S5 Bonus: From Art to a Salesforce Acquisition: The Troops Story with Greg Ratner

Greg Rather comes from a family of artists, so he always envisioned himself going in to art. From an early age, he was drawing and creating comics (funny enough, centered around his favorite animal - pigs). And back then, he was also a budding entrepreneur. In fact, in grade school, he would Xerox his comics and sell them at school for a buck a piece.In High School, he got into animation and game development, which was the catalyst for his interest in programming. He started out for doing animation by hand, drawing each cell and each frame by itself, which was super tedious. The tools he switched to was Director and Flash, allowing him to create stop animation, eventually layering programming into the mix as well. Outside of tech, he is a purple belt in jiu-jitsu. He also enjoys cycling and cooking, which both were handy hobbies during the pandemic.After feeling the pain of having to log into a myriad of tools day to day to get their jobs done, Greg and his co-founders decided to build a connected application, to drive revenue communications.This is the creation story of Troops.SponsorsCourierImg.lyRoutableCTO.aiCloudways offers peace of mind and flexibility so you can focus on growing your business instead of dealing with server management. With Cloudways, you get an optimized stack, managed servers, backups, staging environment, integrated Git, pre-configured, Composer, 24/7 support, and a choice of five cloud providers: AWS, DigitalOcean, Linode, Google Cloud, and Vultr. Get up to 2 Month Free Hosting by using code "CODE30" and get $30 free hosting credit.LinksWebsite: http://troops.ai/LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/gratner/Our Sponsors:* Check out Cash App and use my code CASHAPP10 for a great deal: https://click.cash.app/ui6m/mt82fpxl #CashAppPod. Cash App is a financial services platform, not a bank. Banking services provided by Cash App’s bank partner(s). Prepaid debit cards issued by Sutton Bank, Member FDIC. See terms and conditions at https://cash.app/legal/us/en-us/card-agreement. Cash App Green, overdraft coverage, borrow, cash back offers and promotions provided by Cash App, a Block, Inc. brand. Visit http://cash.app/legal/podcast for full disclosures.* Check out Plaud AI and use my code CODESTORY for a great deal: https://plaud.aiAdvertising Inquiries: https://redcircle.com/brandsPrivacy & Opt-Out: https://redcircle.com/privacy