Escape Velocity.

How second-time founder Wes Mathews built conviction, traction, and momentum by deliberately choosing the hard that compounds. | Wes Mathews, Co-Founder & CEO, Stealth. Wes Mathews didn’t build his second company because the first one failed. He built it because success taught him what actually breaks founders. After scaling his first company to $20M+ and exiting, Wes hit a truth many founders...

How CEO Alison Alvarez built Blastpoint to democratize innovation where every member of the team sees obstacles as design problems to be overcome | Alison Alvarez, Co-Founder & CEO, Blastpoint. In this episode of Escape Velocity , Alison Alvarez , co-founder and CEO of Blastpoint, lays out a hard truth most AI leaders avoid: sounding smart about data is killing adoption—and revenue. With a bac...

How Dan Simon refused shortcuts—earning product-market fit manually before scaling Qwoted to a two-sided marketplace with 50% ARR growth | Dan Simon, Founder & CEO, Qwoted. Dan Simon has seen the media business from the inside—and from the bottom. Before founding Qwoted, Dan was a longtime media operator, former speechwriter to some of the biggest names on Wall Street, a published author, and...

How proven CEO Trevor Sumner and i-Genie’s domain legends turned early chaos into conviction and scaled to $5M+ ARR with 180% NRR | Trevor Sumner, CEO, i-Genie From catching the first internet boom out of Princeton, to taking a company public early in his career, to founding and exiting a venture-backed business acquired by Blackstone, Trevor Sumner has lived nearly every chapter of the startup jo...

Matthew’s path to building Mav wasn’t linear—and that’s exactly why it worked. From early tech obsession to hard lessons learned the hard way, he shares how failure sharpened his instincts and fueled the creation of Mav, an AI insurance agent replacing traditional call centers through friendly, always-on texting. In this conversation, Matthew breaks down what actually drives growth: customer obses...