The Friday Sponge

Viet Anh — or V, as everyone calls her — was running operations inside major hospitals in Vietnam. Then she moved to Canada as an international student and watched every credential she had earned get dismissed overnight. Not transferable. Start over. So she did. Alone. No co-founder, no family nearby, no safety net. Just a love of spicy food, a commercial kitchen she had to book by the hour, and e...

Description: Sammy grew up on a farm in Ecuador — stepping on passion fruit, breathing in fresh grass, eating real food straight from the ground. Then she moved to New York. Her body told her something was wrong before her mind caught up. That dissonance became the seed of Moosa Nature — a fruit tea company built around a simple but radical idea: give Americans access to the quality of fruit they&...

Somya Gupta didn't come to New York to build a startup ecosystem. He came to go to class, pass his exams, and live a comfortable life. Two and a half years later, he's thrown 75+ founder events, shut down his own company in the most painful way possible, and somehow walked away calling it the best thing that ever happened to him. In this episode, Somya and I unpack the full arc — from co-f...

Most people wait until they have time to start a business. Mike and Jimmy never had time. Full-time police officers, fathers, husbands — and somehow, owners of a thriving martial arts franchise in Short Hills, NJ. In this episode of The Friday Sponge, Jack sits down with Chief of Police Mike and UFC fighter-turned-instructor Jimmy to talk about what building a business actually looks like when you...

She moved from Belarus, got a computer science degree in her second language, and watched doctors get crushed by insurance chaos from the inside. So she built an AI company to fix it. Stefaniya Barabanava is the co-founder of Sphere — a startup rebuilding how healthcare providers handle insurance communication. "Many of the times they really don't know whether they're getting paid for...

What started as a dinner party conversation is now one of Canada’s fastest-growing butter brands. Akshay, co-founder of Whipdd Butter out of Toronto, joins us this week to share how a single evening with his co-founder and their spouses sparked a business that would go from zero to over 100 retail locations in under two years — including a landmark deal with Whole Foods Toronto and nearly $500K in...

Most arts organizations with their funding model would have closed by year five. Mile Square Theater just hit year 23. This week, we sit down with Elizabeth DiCandillo and Chris Cragin-Day — two leaders who could have taken the corporate path and didn’t. Instead, they built something Hoboken didn’t know it needed: an award-winning theater running on operational brilliance, deep community roots, an...

John Maguire didn’t pick an easy time to start a business. Launching the day before 9/11, he built International Voyager from a basement in Montclair, NJ — credit cards maxed, employees sleeping under his roof, and a travel industry in freefall. What followed was 25 years of surviving things that shouldn’t be survivable. A terrorist attack. A global recession. A pandemic that wiped out the entire...

From Oracle and Microsoft to building a thriving services company - Khurram Khalimi’s journey is anything but ordinary. In this episode, we sit down with Khurram, co-founder and COO of Vinn Corp, a full-service digital agency doing everything from app development and UI/UX design to video and social media creation. What started as a bold leap of faith in Pakistan has evolved into a multi-million d...

Nick Morgan Jones couldn't find a hearing aid he wasn't embarrassed to wear — so he built Overtone, a designer hearing aid brand doing to audiology what Warby Parker did to glasses. In this week's episode, Nick opens up about the founder journey behind one of the most unexpected product categories getting a complete reinvention. Real stories. Real business.

Alex Jeremijenko grew up in Australia where wellness was a way of life - accessible, communal, and built into the culture. When he moved to New York City, he found the opposite: saunas, cold plunges, and recovery spaces reserved for those who could afford them. So he built Kove Studio to change that. In this episode, Alex shares his journey from college rower at Yale to co-founding one of NYC'...