Going Deep with Aaron Watson

Charlie Dolan is the founder of Sequoia Waste Solutions, a technology company aimed at modernizing waste management.   When Charlie first looked at the waste management industry, he saw business still being run on paper with enormous inefficiencies needing to be addressed. So, he started building.   Today, the firm employs more than a dozen people and offers a suite of software and hardware soluti...

John Feghali’s technology startup blends augmented reality, digital media, and animation to enable a new style of storytelling.   Most animated videos take thousands of hours of work and come with hefty price tags. For example, Frozen 2 cost $150 million and Toy Story 4 cost $200 million.   John’s company, Toaster Pets Cartoons, allows children and adults to make their own animated cartoons by rec...

Luke Glass is building a digital marketplace for land rights in the US. That means that any property owner can list their property’s rights to timber, solar, wind, or oil & gas for sale.   Luke’s company, RealX is aiming to unleash the trends of digitization, globalization, and virtualization on a marketplace that still operates on postcards and paper contracts.   As vice president and general man...

Luke Skurman is the CEO and Founder of Niche.com. Niche is an informative website that provides insight and analysis from experts and neighbors to help people choose colleges, K-12 schools, and places to live.    Niche, formerly College Prowler, was founded in 2002 and recently raised $35 Million to expand its client base and grow its team. This Series C funding was led by the New York-based Radia...

Keith Hamon has over 30 years of operational restaurant experience, with 10 years in active financial management and 7 years of direct experience owning, operating, growing, and stewarding a small group of restaurants.    His firm, Alchemy Financial, serves as a bookkeeper, financial planner, and CFO for clients in the hospitality space.   Keith is committed to helping small restaurants and bars s...

Ben Hunt is the creator of Epsilon Theory and co-founder of Second Foundation Partners.    Epsilon Theory is a newsletter and website that studies markets using game theory and history. It is read by over 100,000 professional investors and allocators across 180 countries.   Ben is the founder of two technology companies, a past professor of political science, and a successful investor. He’s worked...

Flori Marquez is the cofounder of BlockFi, a fintech firm that provides wealth management products to investors in cryptocurrency.   BlockFi currently offers interest-bearing crypto accounts, crypto trading, and crypto-backed loans.   In the last year, BlockFi has raised an $18.3 million Series A and a $30 million Series B from investors like Morgan Creek Digital, Fidelity, the Winklevoss twins, a...

The Coronavirus (rightfully) gets most of the headlines. However, we are also living through an oil price war between Saudi Arabia and Russia that has worldwide ramifications.   Matt Wieszczyk is the Managing Member of Par City Holdings, a land services company that specializes in the acquisition of oil and gas mineral and royalty rights. At PCH, he has placed $15mm for various investors in SW App...

LBRY is a place where they can find great videos, music, ebooks, and more. How? LBRY started as a new protocol that allows anyone to build apps that interact with digital content on the LBRY network.    Apps built using the protocol allow creators to upload their work to the LBRY network of hosts (like BitTorrent), to set a price per stream or download (like iTunes) or give it away for free (like...

Two years ago, Ian Rosenberger and his company took a leap forward by launching a backpack. It was made from Thread International’s first product, fabric made from plastic waste that had been recycled.   The backpack raised $571,000 on Kickstarter and represented an important new chapter for the business.   At the beginning of 2020, they launched two specific brands; Day Owl (for consumers) and Fi...

Anthony Pompliano is a co-founder & Partner at Morgan Creek Digital. He leads investments in early-stage startups and cryptocurrency.   He was formerly a product manager at Facebook.   He writes a daily letter analyzing crypto news for institutional investors and a prolific podcast with other top thinkers in finance and crypto.   In this conversation, Pomp and Aaron discuss the Bitcoin halving, ec...

Kyshira Moffett is a digital brand strategist, entrepreneur, and author. She’s built a business as a coach helping other businesses and entrepreneurs market themselves effectively.   Kyshira also launched Life of a Bombshell Cosmetics in 2017, offering premium makeup products at an affordable price to businesswomen.    Her experiences in marketing a wide variety of businesses, running a conference...

Tom Lauwers is on a mission to get robots into classrooms. As the founder and chief roboticist at BirdBrain Technologies, he designs educational tools that show students the basics of coding, engineering, and collaboration.   Tom received a Ph. D in robotics in 2010 from Carnegie Mellon, where he initially designed the Finch robot and Hummingbird robotics kit.    The Finch is a small robot designe...

The Going Deep podcast returned to Fayette county for a second interview with one of the area’s top entrepreneurs. J.D. Ewing, President of COE Distributing, regained control of his company just after the Great Recession.   J.D. had to secure financing from the bank so he could buy inventory. When they asked for a business plan, J.D. estimated the firm would reach $10 million in revenue in 3 years...

Marco Marandiz is a Co-founder and Head of Marketing for Elliot, a global commerce startup based in NYC.   Prior to Elliot, Marco spent time as a strategist for high-potential DTC brands and led digital product teams at HomeAway and CapitalOne. Through building and shipping products that served hundreds of millions of users, Marco learned about what makes products work in the digital realm.   In t...

What’s a doctor to do when they become disenchanted with the healthcare system? Dr. Timothy Wong decided the answer was to start his own micro-practice.   In his office in the East Liberty neighborhood of Pittsburgh, Dr. Wong sees ~20 patients per day and only charges $35 for a visit.    This allow people without health insurance to get the care they desperately need. Dr. Wong believes that health...

Jack Welsh is the co-owner of LumberjAxes and Sliders Curling. He has successfully transitioned from a union job and bartending gig into running a business that delivers genuinely unique experiences.   He and his co-founders first came across axe throwing in Philadelphia and decided to bring the concept to Pittsburgh. It’s been a winner and has grown to multiple locations.   To keep the momentum g...

Bill Sarris has been in the candy business for more than 40 years. Upon graduating from college, Bill joined his father’s business and has overseen significant growth while building a Sarris Candies into a regional leader in chocolates.   Sarris Candies was started by his father Frank in the family’s basement. Behind Bill’s efforts, the company grew to include more than 350 employees and $16 milli...

Glen Meakem is the founder & CEO of a permanent cloud photo storage and sharing company called Forever. He previously took his first technology startup, FreeMarkets, public in late-1999.   FreeMarkets grew up during the height of the Dotcom Bubble and reached a peak valuation of over $10 billion. While the spectacular highs of the bubble could not last, underneath the market Glen was tripling reve...

Dr. Gordon Vanscoy is the founding Chairman and CEO of PANTHERx Rare, the nation’s leading rare disease and orphan drug-focused pharmacy.   PANTHERx Rare assists patients in navigating the complex process of getting orphan & precision medicines. They also help innovative biotechnology entrepreneurs get their medicines approved by insurers and healthcare providers.   Prior to PANTHERx, Dr. Vanscoy...

Jake Loosararian is the CEO and co-founder of Gecko Robotics, a Pittsburgh robotics startup. Gecko recently announced a $40 million Series B round of fundraising led by Drive Capital.   Gecko Robotics builds robots that do unassisted inspections of power plant boilers. The robots’ sensors measure key data including temperature, wall thickness, and other system failure indicators.   Jake invested h...

Kent McElhattan’s entire business career has been dedicated to the safety of workers.   In 1985, Kent co-founded Industrial Scientific and built a worldwide leader in IOT and predictive analytics for the safety industry. The company climbed to hundreds of millions in revenue and sold to Fortive.   After that success, Kent started another company, Discovery Robotics, aimed to bring robotics technol...

Anthony Gadient is co-founder and Chief Strategy Officer for Voci Technologies. Voci uses GPU-accelerated, deep machine learning speech technologies to help companies understand what their team members are saying on the phone.   Their technology helps clients mine actionable insights from their voice data. It can be applied to customer service, sales, and compliance analysis.   The company is buil...

2019 was a year of growth and learning. Thank you for being a part of it. We're planning for even more in 2020.   📈 📈  

David Levine founded NuGo Nutrition Bars in 2000 after raising a small sum of capital from friends and family.   NuGo Nutrition uses real dark chocolate to make their protein bars and have been committed to making healthy, high-caliber bars from their inception.   The company has developed a variety of SKUs developed for Kosher, gluten-free, organic, vegan, and low sugar diets.   David and Aaron d...