Welcome to A Product Market Fit Show | Startup Podcast for Founders!

Episodes

July 21, 2025

How Mercury Hit $500M ARR—then raised $300M from Sequoia at $3.5B. | Immad Akhund, CEO & Founder of Mercury

Immad grew Mercury to $500M in annualized revenue and profitable. Mercury is one of the fastest-growing fintech startups ever. No wonder they just raised $300M from Sequoia at $3.5B. Immad breaks down exactly how he structure...
July 17, 2025

Mike Maples: Your Startup Idea Isn’t Crazy Enough—And it's holding you back | Mike Maples, Founder of Floodgate

Ever wonder why some startups follow every “right” rule and still fail, while others break every norm and dominate? Mike Maples (Floodgate, author of Pattern Breakers ) reveals how true breakthrough startups aren’t built by c...
July 14, 2025

How he grew to $100M ARR—then exited for $460M. | Zuben Matthews, Founder of Brigit

Zuben turned his personal experience with crippling overdraft fees into Brigit, a fintech he sold for $460 million after hitting $100M ARR. This episode gives early-stage founders the unfiltered truth: how Zuben discovered ma...
July 10, 2025

He Hit $3.5M ARR and Still Failed. Here’s His #1 Mistake. | Joseph Lee, Founder of Freshline

Joseph built Freshline to $3.5 million in revenue and nearly $2 million raised. It looked like a marketplace success story—until it wasn’t. In this episode, Joe shares the hidden reasons marketplaces fail, critical lessons on...
July 3, 2025

1st-time founder raises $140M with $0 revenue—grows to 800 employees & profitable. | Andrew Rubin, Founder of Illumio

Andrew Rubin raised $40M in 6 months before writing a single line of code—and another $100M before seeing his first dollar of revenue. Today, Illumio is valued at billions and counts Morgan Stanley among its earliest customer...
July 3, 2025

PMF Observations: Why it doesn't matter how fast you get to $1M ARR

Forget what you thought about early-stage growth. In this must-listen episode, you’ll hear firsthand how startup success truly happens—and spoiler alert, there’s no playbook. From companies like Carbon6 using roll-up strategi...
June 30, 2025

He went 7 years with no revenue— then grew to $100M ARR. | Rob Woollen, Co-Founder of Sigma

Rob Woollen, founder of Sigma Computing, shares the unfiltered reality of going from 0 to $100M ARR. After spending seven years grinding without product-market fit, Sigma finally hit an inflection point—tripling revenue year ...
June 26, 2025

$10M Raised, 500K Users, but she still failed—here’s what went wrong | Benedetta Lucini, Founder of Oval Money

This is the brutally honest startup story every founder needs to hear. Benedetta shares how she built a fintech app to half a million users and raised $10M—yet still failed. You’ll learn why chasing big partnerships can back...
June 23, 2025

How $100B Mercado Libre got started—& why it almost went bankrupt after 9 months. | Hernan Kazah, Co-Founder Mercado Libre

How do you build a $100B business without hypergrowth or endless funding rounds? Hernan Kazah co-founded Mercado Libre, the Latin American ecommerce giant, at the peak of the dot-com bubble. But when the market crashed, fundi...
June 19, 2025

PMF Observations: How 4 Founders Built Massive Startups Their Own Way

Four founders prove you don’t need Silicon Valley, a technical degree, or a massive seed round to build a massive company. We go through the key observations from the last 4 episodes: How Skip created a $200M business in a th...
June 16, 2025

His AI Voice Startup grew to $10M ARR in 1 Year—after 3 Years Stuck at $500K | Jordan Dearsley, Founder of Vapi

Jordan Dearsley spent 3 years building a startup stuck at $500K in revenue—then he burned it all down and moved to San Francisco. A year later, he was at $10M ARR. This episode walks through Jordan’s decision to abandon a pro...
June 12, 2025

WebSummit Panel w/ Founders of Glean ($5B) and Huntress ($2B): What it takes to hit $100M ARR

Two founders, two wildly different paths to $100M ARR: Arvind Jain, founder of Glean, walked away from a unicorn to start over—raising $15M without revenue and ignoring lean startup rules. Kyle Hanslovan, founder of Huntress,...
June 9, 2025

How his $2B startup grew to $10M+ ARR with zero marketing. | Avery Pennarun, Founder of Tailscale

Avery Pennarun raised $160M for Tailscale—without even meaning to. What started as a small, simple project exploded into an unstoppable force in network connectivity and security. This episode reveals exactly how Avery turned...
June 5, 2025

May Startup News: Elizabeth Holmes Returns, Billion-Dollar Frauds, & the End of Tech Jobs w/ Jack Kuveke

Description: Jack Kuveke returns to unpack the wildest startup news this month: from billion-dollar frauds and crypto scams, to OpenAI’s secretive $6.5 billion gadget project with Apple’s design legend Jony Ive. We dig into w...
June 2, 2025

He hit $1M ARR in 10 months—after doing of a full, 180 pivot. | Merrill Lutsky, Founder of Graphite

After two pivots and nearly running out of runway, Merrill Lutsky found insane growth—scaling Graphite to tens of thousands of daily users and millions in ARR. He reveals exactly how Graphite landed its first massive enterpri...
May 29, 2025

PMF Observations: Why passion is more important than you think

Most early-stage founders get trapped in the chaos of endless tasks, there's always too much to do and not enough time. We go through the last 4 episodes to see what how the best founders prioritize. We also see why you can raise millions without real traction but can’t fake product-market fit, how…
May 26, 2025

He didn't raise VC for the first 7 years— then grew to $1B in ARR. | Dax Dasilva, Founder of Lightspeed

Dax built Lightspeed into a $1B ARR public company—even though he bootstrapped for the first 7 years. In this episode, he reveals exactly how he used a 4x pricing shift to create a global reseller machine that grew him to $10...
May 22, 2025

Q1 2025: The Seed to Series A Gap is Wider Than Ever. Here's what to do. | Peter Walker, Head of Insights at Carta

Carta just released their report for Q1 2025. Peter is Head of Insights at Carta, and the person who owns their data practice. We sit down to talk about the largest trends he saw across fundraising, industries, graduation rat...
May 19, 2025

He went from 0 to a $210M exit in 3 years—without inventing anything new. | Kazi Ahmed, Founder of Carbon6

Kazi Ahmed took a small insight—seeing friends cash out from Amazon brands—and built Carbon6, a software roll-up startup, selling it for $210M just three years later. But behind the quick success was a frantic scramble to sur...
May 15, 2025

Forecasts are overrated—great founders build one step at a time. | PMF Observations

I break down my top insights from recent conversations with four founders who won in unconventional ways. You’ll hear how Noah turned LinkedIn posts into his primary sales channel (without ever going viral), why Dan’s startup...
May 12, 2025

He took on Robinhood & built Public.com into a $1B company with $440M raised. | Jannick Malling, Founder of Public.com

Public co-founder Jannick Malling shares exactly how he grew his startup from a tiny beta to millions of users—and hundreds of millions raised. He reveals why fractional shares changed the game for user acquisition, how the c...
May 8, 2025

Adam Neumann Returns, SV Spies, AI Robots Rise | April Startup News w/ Jack Kuveke

Corporate spies stealing Slack messages. Adam Neumann raising another $100M (for WeWork 2.0?). AI startups hitting $34B valuations with zero revenue and ordering Ben & Jerry's ice cream over 15 payments with Klarna on DoorDas...
May 5, 2025

1 year in he had just 3 customers—today he’s at $100M ARR. | Forrest Zeisler, Co-Founder of Jobber | Forrest Zeisler, Co-Founder of Jobber

Forrest Zeisler spent 6 months hearing “no” from every potential customer he spoke to. One year in, Jobber had just three customers—paying $29/month. Today, Jobber generates over $100M ARR, has raised $180M in VC, and employs...
May 1, 2025

He lost 90% of his users overnight—then grew his consumer app to $10M ARR. | Koen Droste, Founder of Polarsteps

He turned a personal travel tracker into an app with 10 million users and $10 million in revenue, with almost no funding. He reveals how ignoring conventional startup advice—like launching early, chasing revenue, or partnerin...