S6 Bonus: Bypassing the Gatekeepers: Building a 60-Second Video Pitch Marketplace with Mike Cruz of Protégé

Mike Cruz grew up in Guam, near Japan. He spent 18 years before moving to the US for college. He has always been in tech - everywhere from the Discovery Channel to startups like Trunk Club, and always in building tech products. He has a young family with 2 boys, and his oldest is getting into programming from the lens of gaming. He reflects on how far games have come these days, as they were much simpler and easier to code in the past.

In 2011, Mike & his co-founder has witnessed the proliferation of bootcamps for practical entry and exposure into the tech industry. Given their own backgrounds in struggling to plug into the music and startup scenes, they thought they could replicate this type of model and help people be discovered.

This is the creation story of Protégé.