Season 3
He raised $1.3M, hit $100K ARR—but failed. Here's the lesson every fo…
Tolga stumbled upon a problem in the security monitoring space. Motion cameras generated way too many false alerts. So he decided to solve it using AI. He raised over a million dollars and got several customers. But he always...
24 ways to get your first customers—based on real examples from the l…
There are a few things harder when building startups than getting your first few customers. When you're on a standstill, getting momentum is incredibly hard. Going from zero to one takes an incredible amount of effort—you have absolutely no credibility, no proof points. So to help you out I went th…
He bet on voice AI when no one else did. Now he has $1M+ customers & …
Ankit left his job as a VC to launch a Voice AI platform—back in 2018! It wasn't the voice AI of today. The first demo sounded like a robot. But still, he convinced large enterprise customers in the healthcare space to try it out. He found a highly manual, call intensive workflow in the back office…
YC said his idea "would never work". So he lived in his office for mo…
Marty and his co-founders lived full-time in their office for several months. They worked on their startup 24/7. To come up with the idea, they messaged 120 potential customers every day for 3 months. Originally, when they pi...
He built a $4B unicorn & crossed $100M ARR—here's why it took 10 year…
I interviewed Martin on the keynote stage at the SaaS North conference. Here is the audio version. Martin built Applyboard into a $4B unicorn doing $100M+ in ARR. He left and started a new startup called Passage— and raised a...
His sports betting app went from $0 to $10M ARR in a year—& to $150M …
Jon started a sports betting app 4 years ago-- now he does $150M in revenue and $1B in betting volume. AND he's profitable. In his first year alone , he did $10 million in revenue. He took a year to build the app and as soon ...
He grew to $90M ARR, was about to exit for $1.5B—and then, it all fel…
Yanni started building in crypto back in 2013, when you could buy one Bitcoin for $20. At one point, he was playing poker games and betting 1 bitcoin each round! He built an extension that let people use bitcoin to buy anythi...
How to build great products—lessons from Amazon, Facebook, Twitter & …
Aaron was Director of Product at Amazon, VP Product at Twilio, PM at Facebook and Twitter. Now he’s head of product at Deel where he reports directly to the CEO. Deel was founded in 2019— now, just 5 years later, it’s worth $...
He made his first loan at 16. Now his fintech startup does $50M+ ARR—…
Description Tate started doing commercial fishing at 16. He took that money and started lending it— on Craigslist! By 23 years old, he’d lent out $250,000. Then he found out about cash advances, and decided to start ZayZoon, a platform to help employers pay their employees faster. Tate was one of t…
After I passed, this startup grew 30x in 3 years to $10M+ ARR. Here's…
Zeffy is one of my biggest misses so far. I met Francois 3 years ago when he was raising his $3M seed round. But I passed. They were at ~$500K in revenue at that point. In the last 3 years, they've grown 30x. Clearly, I misse...
He hit $40M ARR, exited for over $100M—& raised only $1.5M. Here's ho…
In 2014, Ian launched a simple product: it let social media marketers buffer Instagram posts. It was originally a hackathon project. But it quickly gained users. So he and his co-founders went all in. They raised just one sma...
He raised $16M, hit $1M ARR—& failed. Here are the top 3 lessons he l…
David's startup failed. But he had everything going for him: a solid thesis, $16M in funding across 3 rounds, $1.5M in ARR. At a high-level it seemed like everything was going the right way. And yet, it didn't work out. This is what happens to 95% of startups. On thhis show, we mainly speak with th…
He sold his 1st startup for 8 figures, grew his 2nd to $3M in a year—…
Justin sold his first bootstrapped startup for over $10M. He raised $2M out of the gate for his second and then grew from $250K to $3M ARR in one year. He raised $40M in total, including a Series B from Bessemer. And yet, jus...
He raised $1.5M, hit $400K ARR in 9 months— but had to Exit Early. He…
Rob founded Outpoint in 2020 to help marketers optimize their ad spend. He was a growth marketer and his founder a data scientist. He had team-market fit, a solid thesis, and paying customers. But when the recession hit and a...
His startup Cameo was a unicorn—until it crashed 90%. Here's how he w…
Cameo is one of the best-known recent consumer startups. You've either used it or know someone who's used it to get famous people to create personalized videos. And, for a while, they were a total rocket ship. Year 1: $300K GMV Year 2: $4M Year 3: $20M Year 4: $100M They were backed by Jeremy Liew,…
VC funding is not popping back. THIS is the new normal—here's how to …
Q3 startup data just dropped. We chat with Peter Walker, Head of Insights at Carta about valuations at pre-seed, seed and Series A. Why the current fundraising environment is the new normal and not about to get much better. W...
His robotics startup raised $400M, his VC fund over $4B—& he ran both…
Lior is the Elon Musk of VC. In just 8 years, his venture fund went from 0 to $4B under management. And while doing that, he founded Bright Machines, which to date has raised over $400M. He's both the CEO of Bright Machines a...
This 1st-time founder raised $4M, kept the team to 5 people—& just ra…
Parker quit his job as VP Finance at a late-stage startup in mid 2021. He raised $4M out of the gate because, well, it was 2021. But he didn't ramp up sales, he didn't hire 15 developers. He kept the team to 5 people for the ...
In 2004, they "almost bankrupted themselves". In 2024, they hit $500M…
Mike started selling SaaS before SaaS was a thing. PointClickCare is the Salesforce of healthcare. For the first 7 years, they raised just $600K from friends and family. With that funding, they grew to $50M in ARR. Through th...
The top 3 reasons why Zuck is killing Apple in the Mixed Reality race.
Apple sold only 370,000 VisionPro headsets-- much fewer than it expected. Meanwhile, Meta Ray-Bans are the top-selling product in 60% of Ray-Ban stores. The outcome of their AR/VR products couldn't be more different, even tho...
His influencer marketplace hit $150M in revenue—& just exited for $50…
Piotr met his co-founders at a party in Coachella. He built them an app for influencers to post online. That simple idea evolved into one of the world's first influencer marketplaces. While so many other tried and failed, Pio...
Your odds of raising a Series A just dropped from 30% to 15%—here's w…
New Carta data shows that 30% of seed-stage startups used to raise a Series A within 2 years of their seed. Now, only 15% do. The bar for Series As is as high as it's ever been. And the number of seed extensions that I see is...
His 1st startup failed—but his 2nd one hit $100M ARR & a $1.6B valuat…
Liran quit a cozy job at IBM to launch Fusic, a TikTok-like app back in 2011. He raised over $10M, acquired tens of thousands of users, and failed. So he went back to what he knew: deep tech and enterprise. He launched WEKA i...
He quit Google with no startup idea, raised $50M from Sequoia with no…
This episode is going to piss you off. Most founders struggle to raise their first few million. Many have to bootstrap for years. Even once there's revenue, many get rejected because they're "too early". Dan had dozens of VCs...