Founder Chats

About Claus Enevoldsen: Claus Enevoldsen is the founder of Elsie AI, an AI-powered business partner built for solo e-commerce founders, operating out of 1848 Ventures, a B2B SaaS venture studio focused on SMBs. Before building Elsie, Claus spent years at Flipboard, where the platform scaled to 145 million active users and became the fourth-largest referral traffic source for publishers ahead of Go...

About Walid Amarir: Walid Amarir is the Co-founder and CEO of WaLead.ai, a LinkedIn automation tool built to solve the scalability problems he experienced firsthand running a LinkedIn marketing agency. At just 23, Walid has an unconventional background—he was a professional eSports player earning his parents' salaries by age 18, then studied Physics and Mathematics in the UK before realizing he pr...

About Sachin Jain: Sachin Jain is the Co-founder and CEO of Requestly, the browser-based API mocking and testing platform used by over 300,000 developers worldwide. After transforming a weekend Chrome extension project into a Y Combinator-backed company (one of 414 accepted from 17,000 applications), Sachin led Requestly through a successful acquisition by BrowserStack earlier this year. His journ...

About David Zitoun: David Zitoun is the Co-founder and CEO of Submagic, the AI-powered video editing platform that helps content creators generate viral shorts in seconds. Starting from his own frustration editing YouTube content, David bootstrapped Submagic to over $8M in revenue with an ultra-lean team of just 10 people—no sales team, fully self-serve, and 100% remote. Known for his obsessive fo...

About Thomas Griffin: Thomas Griffin is the Co-founder of OptinMonster and Gro-Rite Garden. His software powers over 25 million websites globally, and he pioneered the lead capture space by coining and trademarking the term "exit intent." Thomas built OptinMonster during the early days of modern marketing automation, positioning the company at exactly the right place and time as MailChimp, HubSpot...

About Chase Taake: Chase Taake is the Co-founder of KAT Custom Rings, a bootstrapped e-commerce business disrupting the traditional jewelry industry with custom engagement rings at thousands less than retail prices. With an entrepreneurial journey spanning mini-golf course ownership at 16, a failed axe-throwing business, and multiple startup SDR roles, Chase brings a unique experimental mindset to...

About Stevee Danielle: Stevee Danielle is the CEO of FiveCRM and BeePurple, leading transformation in addiction recovery technology after a remarkable journey from cosmetology through enterprise SaaS sales. Having experienced every level from individual contributor to C-suite across multiple industries, Stevee brings unique empathy and adaptability to her leadership role, where she's leading a mis...

About Justin Hammond: Justin Hammond is a B2B SaaS growth strategist specializing in actionable, checklist-driven playbooks that help founders transform trial users into loyal customers. With over a decade of experience scaling high-growth companies including Book Like a Boss, Justin has become a trusted voice on data-driven onboarding, sustainable growth strategies, and practical frameworks that...

About Jonni Lundy: Jonni Lundy is the Co-founder and COO of Resend, the developer-first email infrastructure platform that's revolutionizing how companies handle transactional emails. After helping scale Resend from inception to an $18M Series A round led by Andreessen Horowitz, Jonni has become a thoughtful voice on sustainable growth, remote team management, and the psychological transitions fou...

About Bijan Moallemi: A graduate of UCSD, Bijan Moallemi has nearly a decade of experience building and leading finance functions at companies like Qualcomm and Palantir. He knew CFOs deserved access to better tools, so he co-founded Mosaic Finance to build the next generation of finance software for CFOs and their teams. Today, Mosaic has achieved a 3.5x increase in customer base, raised $18.5 mi...

About Will Peng: Will Peng is the CEO and Co-Founder of Northstar, a financial wellness and benefits platform. Prior to founding Northstar, Will worked in Venture Capital and his firm was an early investor in Coinbase, Guideline, Even, and Oscar. Inspired by the positive change fintech can have on people’s lives, Will set out to solve the inequality of financial guidance. About Northstar: Northsta...

About Jon Penland: With 6+ years of experience working remotely in the technology space, and 10+ years working with customer-facing teams across multiple industries, Jon stepped into the role of Chief Operating Officer at Kinsta, where his responsibilities include hiring and onboarding as Kinsta has grown from a team of 4 to a team of more than 250 worldwide. While he didn't write his first line o...

About Douwe Mann: Born and raised in the Netherlands, Douwe Maan was introduced to computers early by his father, and picked up programming at the age of nine. While studying at Utrecht University, Douwe co-founded a SaaS startup that grew to $150k in ARR, which led to him joining GitLab in 2015 as employee number 10 after landing the parents of its CEO as customers. After graduating summa cum lau...

About Bryan Clayton: Bryan is CEO and co-founder of GreenPal, an online marketplace that connects homeowners with local lawn care professionals. GreenPal has been called the “Uber for lawn care” by Entrepreneur magazine and has over 200,000 active users completing thousands of transactions per day. Before starting GreenPal, Bryan Clayton founded Peachtree Inc. which had a $10 million annual revenu...

About Aran: Aran Khanna has been labeled many things. Thought leader. Innovator. And (at times) troublemaker. Now, in his search to give technological control back to developers and business leaders, he’s added cloud management entrepreneur to that list as the Co-Founder & CEO of Archera, a company that helps organizations find cloud solutions that fit their companies.   About Archera: Archera use...

Show Notes: 00:46 Starting your first business 03:30 As a company, how do you provide value to your employees? Is offering high commissions sustainable? 06:30 Losing a business isn’t the end of the world, there’s no shame in taking a job while you regroup 09:20 Outsourcing labor in the days before Upwork etc 11:25 Getting the mojo back: starting a second business after the first one failed 13:30 D...

About Matija Kovač: Matija Kovač is the co-founder and head of development at Taia Translations, a company that bridges the gap between language barriers with the help of Artificial Intelligence and machine learning. About Taia Translations: Taia Translations is a modern translation platform, where we help companies translate their documents, websites, and other content with AI-assisted, human-per...

About Reed-McGinley-Stempel: Reed is the Co-Founder and CEO of Stytch, a platform for passwordless authentication that makes it simple for apps and websites to retire the password. Before founding Stytch, Reed joined Plaid as one of their first 100 employees. He remained with them until they grew to a $5B+ valuation. With a selection of new products about to hit the market, Stytch is prepped to sp...

About Benn Stancil: Benn Stancil is co­founder and Chief Analyst at Mode Analytics , a company building collaborative tools for data scientists and analysts. Benn is responsible for overseeing Mode's internal analytics efforts, and is also an active contributor to the data science community. In addition, Benn provides strategic oversight and guidance to Mode's product direction as a member of the...

About Mike Potter: Mike Potter is the co-founder and CEO of Rewind , the leading data backup and recovery provider for cloud and SaaS data. While studying Mechanical Engineering at McMaster University, Mike began his start-up career as the founder of InTheHack.com, one of the most popular sporting websites in Canada. Since founding Rewind in 2015, Mike has focused on building a company culture tha...

About Jeff Solomon: Jeff is a 6x founder and has been in the startup scene for most of his career. He has done just about every role from CEO to Chief Janitor, Head of Product to Marketing Lead. He has deep expertise in Saas, Content Marketing, SEO, Mobile Apps, Startup Accelerators, Lead Generation, UX, Angel & Seed Funding, B2B Software, Enterprise Sales and Bootstrapping. And he's been writing...

About Jeroen Corthout: Jeroen is the co-founder and CEO of Salesflare, a simply powerful CRM that automates data to build better relationships and make more sales. It's a fast, visual and easy-to-use sales machine. Salesflare is the most popular CRM ever on both Product Hunt and AppSumo. It also got featured on TechCrunch and Entrepreneur.com. Prior to Salesflare, Jeroen was helping companies to i...

About André Monteiro: André is the co-founder and CTO of Verb Energy .  He's a NY-based entrepreneur that leads the tech team at Verb Energy, one of the fastest growing food and beverage brands in the country. André and his team have built a suite of internal tools like a CRM and workflow orchestrator that enable their team to personalize and manage an SMS-based customer journey at scale.   About...

About Rand Fishkin:  Rand Fishkin is cofounder and CEO of audience research software startup, SparkToro . He’s dedicated his professional life to helping people do better marketing through his writing, videos , speaking, and his book, Lost and Founder . When Rand’s not working, he’s usually cooking a fancy meal for the love of his life, author Geraldine DeRuiter . If you bribe him with great pasta...

In this episode, we talk about Spencer's start in investment banking, his decision to leave banking & start a SaaS, and how he pivoted multiple times to find product market fit.