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You work out the bugs, you know, I think a failure mode is you kind of roll out the MVP to everybody

and you expect it to work and then it can give the whole initiative a bad

rep because then you have business leaders and product managers saying like hey I just want to make

this change and now I'm behind this like 60 day services cycle and you know blew up and my engineers

I'll hate it you know you want to avoid that kind of stuff.

My name's Ryan Grasiano. I'm CTO and co-founder at Credit Karma.

This is Code Story, a podcast bringing you interviews with tech visionaries who share in the critical moments of what

it takes to change in industry and build and lead a team that has your back.

I'm your host, Noah Labart, and today how Ryan Graciano built the technology behind

billions of credit scores delivered to the masses.

All this and more on Code Story.

Early on in his life, Ryan Greciano aspired to be many things.

A lawyer, a writer, and eventually a coder, of course. Fun fact, he is an accomplished dog trainer

focusing on animal behavior modification and more recently has gotten into powerlifting. Despite his

love of analog activities, he got started coding right after college and tried to avoid joining IBM, yet still did,

through an acquisition. After a few years of growth, he met a group of entrepreneurs who had an idea

to provide credit scores to millions of users for free. This idea would eventually become

Credit Karma.

We started Credit Karma in 2007, but the story really begins when I graduated college.

I was looking at all these big companies like IBM and Microsoft, and I met this really impassioned technology leader from a small company,

...