Exitwise Productions

E10: Today, I have a special guest, friend - home improvement entrepreneur, Brian Elias .  With just $5K in savings, Brian started and built 1-800 Hansons, a company selling replacement windows, siding and roofing in the Midwest. Brian built Hansons to more than $70M in sales and today Hansons is one of the top 10 home improvement companies in the US. In 2017 Brian sold the majority of his share i...

E9: Today I have a special guest, friend and prolific entrepreneur, Jay Adelson. Jay is a serial entrepreneur, having co-founded and built countless significant companies over the last 20+ years:  Founded Equinix (EQIX) in 1998, eventually helping drive to a successful IPO  Helped launch Digg, Inc. and providing initial business strategy, taking the role of CEO beginning in 2005 Co-founded Revisio...

E8: Today I have a special guest and friend who's been through an IPO and sold his last company to Microsoft. Stephen Cox created his first success as an early employee at PurchasePro, a B2B eCommerce platform, which went public in 1999. Steven followed that up by building TakeLessons, an online music lessons platform to help other musicians and educators connect with students in person and online...

E7: Brandon started in investment banking at Goldman Sachs and then jumped to private equity to learn the tricks of the trade. After graduating from Harvard Business School, Brandon not only started a company, but he also worked in strategy and in M&A roles in multiple industries. Ultimately, Brandon discovered his life changing opportunity as an independent sponsor by purchasing and rolling u...

E6: Larry is a recognized industry expert in the field of Customer Experience and the author of two books, Managing Forward and recently published Innovating Analytics. Larry founded ForeSee Results to provide multichannel customer satisfaction analytics and analysis to clients worldwide in a variety of industries including retail, government, healthcare, finance, education and more. Larry grew th...

E5: Shane Bliemaster has the interesting perspective of working for three companies that were acquired, the last of which was his own.    He went through his first M&A transaction as an employee of Peanut Labs, which was acquired by e-Rewards in 2010. Then he was part of the founding team of MoviePass, which was acquired in 2017. And finally, his last exit was as the founder of Marketing Suppl...

E4: Josh has been the founder and CEO of five tech companies, which sold for a combined value of over 200 million. He's an internationally recognized expert on innovation and the author of four books on the subject. Josh is an accomplished venture capitalist as founding partner of both Detroit Venture Partners and his latest firm, Mudita Venture Partners. In today's episode, Josh goes deep into hi...

E3: On today's episode we hear from Rick Marini .  Rick is a serial entrepreneur with 25 years of operating and investing experience in the technology space. He founded and successfully sold 3 companies (Tickle, BranchOut and Talk.co). He is an active angel investor in 50 tech start-ups including 17 unicorns (including Snapchat, Reddit, Opendoor, and AngelList).  In 2018, Rick was named a "Top 50...

E2: Today, Itai Ben-Gal joins the podcast to talk about how he took his passion for home audio and video to build, scale, and eventually sell iRule to a strategic investor.  You'll learn how he raised capital through a variety of channels - angel funding, venture capital and strategic investors, navigated a complicated sale, and how he and his business partner managed a very complex earn-out.  He...

E1: Ben Lewis has had two significant exits that we cover in Episode 1 of Cashing Out.   The first was Tapjoy, an extremely successful mobile ads platform doing more than $100M in revenue, which Ben sold to Offerpal in 2010.  There was a big internal debate of whether Ben and his co-founder should sell the business when they did, and what ultimately happened with the business. Ben's next business...