Going Deep with Aaron Watson

Jonathan Steckbeck is the founder of Peptilogics, a biotechnology platform company that develops best-in-class novel peptide drugs for unmet medical needs. He also has a PhD in Biochemistry and Molecular Genetics from the University of Pittsburgh’s School of Medicine.   Amongst other problems, his company Peptilogics is focused on developing a new category of antibiotics. It has been 20 years sinc...

Euan Guttridge is the Director of Technical Program Management at Waymo and previously held the same position with Uber’s self-driving car division.   Between these two roles, Euan developed an angel investing syndicate under the banner Reinforced Ventures. The syndicate differentiates itself for the technical proficiency of its limited partners, bringing a fresh perspective to the companies it in...

Steve Muck is the CEO of Brayman Construction, a heavy civil and geotechnical contractor that builds bridges, dams, and other large infrastructure. Steve is also the cofounder of construction-related robotics startups TyBot and Advanced Construction Robotics.   Steve has started or acquired twenty businesses and currently operates a portfolio of entities that in construction-related endeavors alon...

Jon Pastor is the SVP for Consumer Solutions at RealPage, a leading global provider of software and data analytics to the real estate industry. RealPage was trading publicly at over $10 billion market capitalization before being taken private by Thoma Bravo.   Jon’s entrepreneurial career started when he cofounder RentJungle with previous guest Geng Wang . That company was acquired in 2014 and Jon...

Jorge Mazal is the Chief Product Officer for Duolingo. Duolingo is a free language-learning website and mobile app with over 500 million downloads, 40 million monthly active users, and a valuation of over $1 billion.   Jorge previously worked on the product for Zynga, MyFitnessPal, and Kleiner Perkins. Today he blends skills in design, gamification, and leadership to manage a product team that has...

Marko Papic leads the strategy team at Clocktower Group, an alternative investments firm. Clocktower offers long-term strategic investment strategies to their clients, investment managers and institutional allocators.   Marko brings his constraints framework, outlined in his book Geopolitical Alpha, to analyzing the geopolitical trends of the day. His ability to accurately forecast major political...

Andy Norman is a researcher focused on studying how ideologies short-circuit minds and corrupt moral understanding.   His studies have led him to develop a toolkit of methods for improving reasoning and share them in his book, Mental Immunity .   His hope is that a collection of academic research can be lassoed together to serve as the foundation of a new scientific field, Cognitive Immunology. Co...

Geng Wang is the CEO and co-founder of Civic Champs, a software startup focused on creating s seamless and rewarding volunteering experience for both volunteers and service organizations   This is Geng’s third commercial venture. He’s previously co-founded two companies; RentJungle.com, an apartment search engine that sold in 2014 to The Rainmaker Group, and Community Elf (rebranded as Cosmitto),...

Sanjiv Singh is CEO and cofounder of Near Earth Autonomy, a technology company focused on autonomous flight.    Sanjiv has 25 years of experience working on autonomous ground and air vehicles. He came to Pittsburgh 30 years ago to participate in the DARPA challenge and has spent decades exploring different applications for self-driving and self-flying robots.   Near Earth Autonomy started by devel...

Demetri Kofinas is a media entrepreneur and host of Hidden Forces, a podcast devoted to exploring the underlying forces driving the most powerful changes we see in the world.   His show covers a wide range of topics, including culture, philosophy, economics, technology, social science, and the hard sciences.   Demetri has previously co-founded Guerilla Gaming Concepts, an interactive entertainment...

Black Tech Nation Ventures is launching its first flagship venture fund in Pittsburgh, PA. The firm is founded by three managing partners, Kelauni Jasmyn, Sean Sebastian, and David Motley have come together to form an investment thesis focused on investing in black and other minority founders who have historically missed out on opportunities to raise venture capital.   As David outlines in this po...

Paul Martino is a venture capital investor and has raised 5 funds totaling over $350 million in capital. That money has been deployed into FanDuel, Grove, Ipsy, and SpotHero.   Before forming Bullpen, Paul was an active angel investor and personally invested in the first rounds of Zynga, TubeMogul, and uDemy.   Prior to his investing career, Paul founded four companies including Ahpah Software (a...

Aubrey Strobel is the Head of Comms for Lolli, a free browser extension that lets users earn free bitcoin when shopping online.   The platform’s mission is to help make cryptocurrency more accessible to the average shopper. Founded in 2018, Lolli has over 1,000 retail partners including Expedia, Nike, and Glossier.   In this episode, Aubrey and Aaron discuss stacking sats, bringing women into cryp...

Mike Green is the Chief Strategist at Logica Funds and has spent nearly 30 years studying markets.   These days, he calls on that experience and his proprietary research to educate the public, the Federal Reserve, the BIS, and the IMF about the shift from actively managed portfolios and investment funds to systematic passive investment strategies.   Previously, Mike has served as the portfolio man...

Mark Kovscek is a mathematician, inventor, and entrepreneur. His company, Conservation Labs, builds and sells a smart water meter that provides consumption insights, custom conservation recommendations, and leak detection.   At the cutting edge of Internet-of-Things and conservation, Mark uses his experience from a career building products and delivering solutions to address multi-billion dollar c...

Matt Harbaugh is a co-founder and Managing Director at Mountain State Capital. The 20 million dollar fund has invested in over 16 firms in the greater Appalachia region.   Prior to founding MSC, Matt served as CEO of a machine learning-based software company that was acquired by Facebook and was the Chief Investment Officer at Innovation Works, one of the most active seed funds in the United State...

Andrew Gazdecki is the solo founder of MicroAcquire, a marketplace for buying and selling small Software-as-a-Service companies.   He has previously started two companies, Bizness Apps and Altcoin.io, which were both acquired.   MicroAcquire has reached $250,000 in annual revenue in just one year, by collecting fees from buyers in exchange for connecting with the entrepreneurs selling their busine...

Chris Anderson is the founder and Chief Technical Officer of Innotescus. He leads a multi-functional team of machine learning scientists, software architects, and engineers that are innovating in the world of image annotation software.   Prior to founding Innotescus, Mr. Anderson was the Director of Software Engineering and IT for ChemImage.  Here he oversaw the core innovative software products f...

Jeff Booth led BuildDirect, a technology company he co-founded in 1999, for nearly two decades through the dot-com meltdown, the 2008 financial crisis, and many waves of technological disruption.   BuildDirect aimed to simplify the building industry and graduated from online catalog to logistics network to artificially intelligent platform.   Last year, Jeff released his first book “ The Price of...

Stephen Tse, is founder and CEO of Harmony.one. Harmony is a blockchain-based open source development project with its own cryptocurrency.   Stephen has been obsessed with protocols and compilers since high school. He reverse-engineered ICQ and X11 protocols, coded in OCaml for more than 15 years, and graduated with a doctoral degree in security protocols and compiler verification from the Univers...

Joshua Lisec has been a ghostwriter for a decade. Public figures hire him to write compelling books, newsletters, and tweets in their voice, so that they can build their media platform.   He has helped to write best selling and critically aclaimed books and teaches the best practices publicly online. Joshua coaches his clients to offer higher-ticket services, courses, and products in conjunction w...

Patrick Colletti is the founder of Net Health a $100M+ cloud-based provider of specialized software that serves specialized medical facilities like wound centers, senior care, and occupational therapy.   When Patrick began his tenure as company president in 2001, Net Health was experiencing significant financial turmoil resulting in laying off all but 2 employees.    By utilizing a Refounder minds...

Alex Berman is an actual serial entrepreneur. Before the age of 30, he has built a 7-figure agency, completed multiple movie projects, and built a 50,000 subscriber YouTube channel.   Most folks feel content to throw that title in their bio as a way to summarize some half-finished projects.   Alex, on the other hand, builds systems in a focused and brutally efficient way. He has delegated leadersh...

When Mark Marmo took over as the CEO of Deep Well Services, the company was losing $2 million per year on $9 million in revenue. Six years later, Deep Well Services was making $30 million in net income on $110 million in revenue.   Mark accomplished this by focusing on bringing an innovative & efficient service to the market, building a healthy company culture, and trusting his data analysts to ma...

Frank Augustine is the founder of ILLEGAL apparel.   Frank and his brother created the brand, and associated company, in their parent's basement back in 2013. He has spent the last 7 years scaling production, opening a store on the South Side of Pittsburgh, and learning many lessons about entrepreneurship.   He’s gotten the business off the ground via a relentless commitment to sales and a willing...