Ambition Today, Startup Stories with Kevin Siskar

Join the A-list backchannel to get  "Single greatest piece of advice ever received" :  https://siskar.me/best-advice-ever   Starting out young, today's guest, Matt Mandell, created his first company at the age of 12. Matt grew up with a supportive family full of entrepreneurs, so Matt was very comfortable with entrepreneurship from the start. He attended college in DC, where he spent the next seve...

Join the A-list backchannel to get  "Single greatest piece of advice ever received" :  https://siskar.me/best-advice-ever   Entrepreneur, investor, public speaker and author are a few titles that Dr. Dileep Rao is known for. He came from India to America in 1973 for his education, and has been a success ever since. While obtaining his PhD, he started working for an Adventure Capital firm one summe...

Join the A-list backchannel to get  "Single greatest piece of advice ever received" :  https://siskar.me/best-advice-ever     Today's guest grew up with Entrepreneurial spirit surrounding him. All of the men in Greg Alterman's family for generations owned and operated one of the largest grocery stores chains in the South since the early 1900's. With all the entrepreneurial passion within him, he s...

Join the A-list backchannel to get  "Single greatest piece of advice ever received" :  https://siskar.me/best-advice-ever   NASA made history on August 12, 2018, launching the Parker Solar Probe; their first ever mission to touch the sun. Luckily, I was invited by NASA to come down to Cape Canaveral to have a front row seat to the rocket launch! This was definitely a once in a lifetime opportunity...

Did you know that only 17% of all startups have a female founder? Well, we are lucky enough to have a female founder on our show today, Alex Batdorf. Alex is a business coach, co-founder of Zip Fit, a company that delivers a perfect fit denim for every body and now the creator of a YouTube series called Get Sh!t Done. This series focuses on helping female entrepreneurs maintain a balance between p...

We are exploring the marketing world on today's episode, with our special guest, Mitch Wainer. He is the creative marketing leader with many accomplishments such as Co-Founding Digital Ocean and being the Chief Marketing Officer at Clubhouse, a project management platform for software teams that provide the perfect balance of simplicity and structure. Mitch is an active advisor and speaker on entr...

Growing up in an immigrant family, Brian Pasalich lived in Chicago, Croatia and even a small town in Montana all by the age of 13, which allowed him to have a deeper understanding of the different walks of life that people face. This combined with a passion for helping people led him to his career in financial planning. He is now the founder of Foundational, a consumer-mindset driven platform for...

As a serial entrepreneur, Matt Britton has successfully acquired and sold many companies at the perfect time. He is most known for his important role in creating MRY (Mr. Youth) and Suzy. MRY is a digital and social media marketing agency that helps companies market to the youth, which is tomorrow's future leaders. His latest venture, Suzy, is a consumer intelligence platform which helps bring the...

Do you have to be an expert on a product in order to become a successful entrepreneur? Let's ask today's guest, Adam Tishman. Tishman is a New Yorker through and through, growing up in Manhattan helped his independence from a young age. He received his Bachelors Degree at Princeton in History before he decided to pursue an MBA where he met his co-founders of Helix Sleep. Tishman knew he wanted to...

We are proud to have Allen Saakyan on our show today. Not only do I get the pleasure of interviewing him, but I also had the privilege of being interviewed for his podcast, Simulation, as well! This episode will be a little different as we go back and forth asking questions for both of our podcasts, you won't want to miss it! Growing up, Allen knew he was destined to take a different path. He was...

A successful entrepreneur, TED speaker, and father of seven, Wes Schaeffer is the person you seek when you want to generate more sales. Wes Schaeffer is a marketing strategist and is best known as The Sales Whisperer. He grew up in Houston, TX, served in the Air Force, graduated from A&M and became a successful salesman. Although he had the income and personal life he wanted, he wasn't happy with...

Author, public speaker, and entrepreneur are just a few great titles for today's guest, Gabe Zichermann. He is the CEO and Founder of Onward, a company that helps you achieve tech-life balance. Gabe is also known for his expertise on the topic of Gamification. Having written three books, "The Gamification Revolution", "Gamification by Design" and "Game-Based Marketing".  Gabe grew up in Toronto wi...

From a small town in Western Kentucky to becoming an entrepreneur on Madison Ave, Terry Young joins us on this episode of Ambition Today. Terry is a successful advertising entrepreneur and the CEO of Sparks & Honey, a company identifying and mapping emerging cultural waves through the use of machine learning systems, algorithms, and human insight. After earning his Master's Degree in advertising,...

Anthony Pompliano is the Managing Partner at Full Tilt Capital, an early stage venture capital firm. Full Tilt Capital focuses exclusively on investing in world-class companies in the blockchain and crypto asset space.  "Pomp" was raised in Raleigh, NC, and is one of the first south easterners that we have had on the Ambition Today podcast. He is the oldest brother of five and during his junior ye...

This episode comes to you from the heart of New York City for our first live podcast episode discussing cryptocurrency, ICO, & blockchain law. In late January almost 100 founders gathered at the offices of McCarter & English for our January Founder Institute Meetup ! The crypto founders there heard from Joe Daniels, who is the Co-Chair of the McCarter & English's Venture Capital & Emerging Growth...

Today we have the pleasure of speaking with Brian Brault; a successful entrepreneur that has been recognized twice in his career by the Inc. 500 for building one of the fastest growing companies in America. Currently Brian is the Global Chairman of the Board at Entrepreneurs' Organization. He is also the founder of Advanced Facility Services and Pure Rooms which was deemed one of the best companie...

On this episode of Ambition Today we explore Peter Shankman's journey. Peter is the perfect example of what happens when you combine creativity with Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder (ADHD). Peter shows us how ADHD can be a gift and a strong advantage in business. He is not only an entrepreneur, but an author and a notable public speaker. Many know him for founding Help A Reporter Out, (HAR...

In 2010 Sean Ellis coined the term Growth Hacking and now he joins us on Ambition Today. Sean is the Co-author of Hacking Growth with Morgan Brown and currently the CEO of Growth Hackers. Sean has had quite an impressive career both as a marketer and as an entrepreneur. He was the first marketer at Dropbox, Lookout and Xobni and he has taken companies LogMeIn and Uproar from launch to IPO. Sean is...

Over the summer we sat down with Adeo Ressi, the CEO of the Founder Institute, a startup accelerator program that operates in nearly 200 cities worldwide. Throughout his time as a founder, Adeo has pioneered innovations in the protection of founder rights, the raising of early-stage capital and the scaling of new businesses.   Previous to the Founder Institute, Adeo has helped to create nearly $2...

On this episode Andrew Weinrich sits down with us at his offices in Brooklyn New York. Andrew is the founder of Andrews Roadmaps and the host of the new "Predicting Our Future" podcast.  As a serial entrepreneur, Andrew created the first ever social network called, Six Degrees. At its height, SixDegrees had around 3,500,000 fully registered members before being bought by YouthStream Media Networks...

From the brand new Fulton Center in downtown Manhattan we bring you Dennis Mortensen. He is founder and CEO at X.ai, an artificial intelligence driven personal assistant named Amy who schedules meetings for you. Growing up in a family of entrepreneurs in Denmark, Dennis initially strove to be a game engineer at IBM. He soon failed to resist the call to entrepreneurship though as he started and sol...

Season Two of Ambition Today is happy to welcome Niv Dror, head of social media for Product Hunt.  Niv boasts an impressive resume in both startups and finance, stemming from his education at UC Santa Barbara.  After moving to Silicon Valley at a very young age, Niv had surprisingly little involvement in the tech world.  It surrounded him entirely and thus he never noticed it, as water to a fish. ...

In keeping with last weeks' real estate theme, Episode 25 of Ambition Today finds us across the table from Joe Fairless, Real Estate Investor and Host of the Best Real Estate Investing Advice Ever Show. Joe set his roots in advertising after a bit of soul-searching during his undergrad years at Texas Tech. Fighting complacency, he left Madison Ave. for the allure of real estate investing and entre...

Any amount of research into the seemingly eternal-growing market of real estate investment will almost surely make one familiar with Matt Rodak. The 2007 John Carroll grad is the founder and CEO of Fund That Flip, a company which allows anyone to apply for fast and affordable funding in the rehabilitative real estate investment business. The New York based startup had already raised $2 million by...

Over the last 30 years Howard Love has founded 15 companies and invested in over 50 early stage startups. His new book "The Startup J Curve" organizes his experience into the 6 phases startups go through as they grow. Howard also is the Founder & CEO of LoveToKnow, a digital publishing firm with over 30 million monthly visitors. With Coal Magnates and Aviators as his ancestors, entrepreneurship ha...