Episodes
He exited to Snap for $166M— built an AI video startup, then raised $…
Alex built the original Snapchat filters-- and sold his company to Snap for $166M. Then he left to start Higgsfield. The company just raised a $50M Series A to help brands create AI-generated video ads at scale. We go deep on...
How his AI-first services company grew $0 to $40M ARR in one year. | …
Eric spent 30 years in cybersecurity. Built and sold an MSSP to private equity for hundreds of millions. Then he started Tenex and hit $43 million in revenue in ONE YEAR. This isn't theory. This is a founder who's done it mul...
Q3 2025 w/Carta: What you need to raise a Series A. | Peter Walker, H…
Carta's Peter Walker is back with the freshest data on what's actually happening at the early stage—and it's not what you're reading on X. While headlines scream about record-breaking rounds, the reality on the ground tells a different story. Seed deals are down. Time between rounds is stretching. …
He added AI to parking lots—then raised $3.5B. | Alex Israel, Founder…
Alex and his co-founders spent 2018 pitching parking lot owners on computer vision tech. Every meeting ended the same way: "Cute startup, come back in 30 years." So they did something else—they bought the parking operators an...
He left a $2B ARR company to build AI agents—then hit $1M ARR in < 6 …
Amit walked away from being President of 1-800-Flowers after scaling it from $500M to $2B because he saw smart people trapped in dumb systems. His insight: half of global GDP is 90% manual work—salespeople entering data inste...
He tested his idea in one weekend—then raised $120M. | Wayne Slavin, …
Wayne tested flight insurance over a single weekend with a WordPress site and Google ads. When people tried to pay, he showed a fake error message. The result: 15.9% conversion. That validation led to Sure, now powering insur...
At 21 he made his 1st million. At 23, he grew his startup to $8M ARR …
Matt sold his first company at 19 and made $100K. He sold his second at 21 and made $800K. A couple years later, he launched Clover and grew it to $8M ARR in 6 months. His secret? Insane distribution. His formula is to ignore...
He walked away from $5M ARR—then built a $50M company. | Russ Fradin,…
Russ has started and sold multiple companies over 30 years, but his Dynamic Signal journey will change how you think about product-market fit. They had $5M ARR selling influencer marketing software. Then Russ told investors t...
He made 2 key changes —then grew to $100M ARR in 2 years & exited for…
Harish spent 9 months building Deliver and could barely get 10 customers. The product worked. Merchants liked the fast delivery promise. But nobody was signing up. Then he made two changes—and scaled to $100M in revenue in 2 ...
He built a $20B public company, left—then raised a $100M Series A. | …
Dheeraj built Nutanix into a $20B public company—then walked away to start DevRev. He just raised a $100M Series A. This episode breaks down why most founders "sell and run" (chase new logos instead of delivering value), why ...
He built a new database in his bedroom—now he powers Cursor, Notion a…
Simon spent 10 years at Shopify scaling databases to millions of requests per second. Then he discovered vector databases were so expensive that companies couldn't launch AI features. So he solved it. When Cursor emailed abou...
He burned $4M to hit $100K ARR—but with 1 big change, he grew to $4.5…
Guy spent 2 years and $4M building Snyk to $100K ARR. Thousands of developers loved the product. They just wouldn't pay. Then he figured out the problem: he had product-user fit, but not product-buyer fit. Developers loved Sn...
5x founder asked Ford for a contract so large—they acquired his compa…
Amar is a 5x founder who helped birth Tinder (it was the 10th project—after the first 9 failed), then sold his next company to Ford for putting a platform in every single vehicle they make. But the wildest part? He got Ford t...
He "kind of" had PMF for 8 years—until, after a rebuild, he raised $1…
Ben Alarie spent 8 years building Blue J with "partial product market fit"—real customers, real revenue, but no real market pull. Then he made a bet that would either kill the company or 10x it: he put the existing product in maintenance mode and gave his team 6 months to rebuild everything from sc…
They failed every POC—then grew their cybersecurity platform to $100M…
Dean thought he'd have to bootstrap Axonius because no investor would fund a solution to a problem that had existed for 20 years. He was wrong—they've raised $500M. The breakthrough came when a Fortune 500 company was actively being hacked by Chinese state actors. Their first customer almost said n…
He tested his pitch on Uber drivers—then built a cybersecurity platfo…
Casey turned hackers into a marketplace and built Bugcrowd to $180M+ raised. But the real story isn't about cybersecurity—it's about how he validated a two-sided marketplace with almost no product, refined his pitch by literally testing it on Uber drivers until it clicked, and cracked the code on c…
He quit Google & his 1st startup failed—but his 2nd grows at $1M ARR …
Zach spent 8 years at Google leading engineering for Google Docs, then left to build a photo sharing app with zero go-to-market plan. Reality hit hard: "At Google, anything you launch gets millions of users. At a startup, the...
He tried to return $200K to investors 30 days in—then exited to Micro…
Alex had $2,000 in his checking account when Microsoft acquired his last company. For years, he paid himself $30K while his friends made six figures at corporate jobs. He had only 2 months of runway for 18 straight months. Th...
A drug dealer threatened to kill him—then he grew 50x in 3 Years to $…
Brett had a drug dealer's car for 13 days. By day 11, the death threats started coming. This is the reality of building ServiceUp, the "DoorDash for auto repair." Brett literally stole DoorDash's entire playbook—city launches, three-sided marketplace, everything—but discovered even if he got 90% ri…
He pitched 100 VC and spent 3 years building— then grew to $7B AUM. |…
Doug Scott and the Ethic team spent years building technology before landing real customers. While other startups were growing fast, Ethic was focused on building, and after two years had only a modest amount of AUM. Until he...
PMF Observations: Speed is the only startup moat—& why most founders …
Arnold Schwarzenegger mastered three completely different fields—bodybuilding, acting, and politics—with one simple philosophy: reps, reps, reps. This solo episode reveals why speed of execution is the only real moat for earl...
He spent 5 months working with customers before building—then grew to…
Aviv spent months walking construction sites carrying tools for managers just to understand their problems—speaking to customers is "bullsh*t"—you need to work beside them to see reality. His company Buildots had a working AI...
She cold messaged 50,000 engineers—then grew to $10M+ ARR. | Shensi D…
Shensi cold messaged 50,000 engineers to build Merge. She worked 9am-9pm every day, gave her first customers two months free to prove herself, and refused to hire anyone remote—even during peak COVID. She purposefully didn't ...
He bet his house on a startup—took 7 years to $1M, then hockey stick …
Eldon put a $150K line of credit on his house to start eSentire in 2001. No VCs would touch him—they didn't understand services businesses. He worked 12-hour days, 7 days a week for 7 years to hit $1M in revenue. His co-found...