Rising Tide Startups

Your next big deal could be hiding in a relationship you already have. In our most recent podcast episode, we chat with Olivier Roth, the Co-Founder and Chief Growth Officer at The Swarm, the leader in relationship intelligence and network-driven growth. A LinkedIn Top Voice, he has generated over $10M in pipeline, including three deals sourced from warm introductions. Olivier spent his early year...

You don’t always need to beat the biggest players. Sometimes the smarter move is finding the space they don’t own, and OWNING IT. Darren Gallop is the CEO of Carbide, a cybersecurity company helping organizations build stronger, more resilient security from the top down. His entrepreneurial path started far outside cybersecurity, from running a record label during the Napster era to later building...

Scaling three companies as a solo founder sounds impossible until you see what Eric Levine has built with AI. Eric is the founder of Strategy Engine AI, ScubaZen, and Venice Threads Company. Before entrepreneurship, he worked at Meta, leading global strategy across Facebook and Instagram while helping improve operational efficiency. After four years, he left corporate life without a clear next ste...

The most fulfilling kind of success has less to do with what you build for yourself and more to do with what you’re able to give to others. Our guest today is Joe Daly, founder of Daly Goods, a custom leather goods company rooted in Waco, Texas. Born in Minnesota, Joe met his wife in Missouri before eventually putting down roots in the Lone Star State. Behind his craftsmanship is a deep commitment...

Most businesses do not have a lead problem. They have a follow-up problem hiding in plain sight. For Aly Samaha, follow-up is not a desperate sales tactic. It is a system for recovering money that businesses have already earned but failed to capture. Over the last two years, his approach has helped bring in $2.37 million in cash from silent opportunities while working just one to two calls a day....

A layoff isn't always a setback. Sometimes it's the boost you need! After being laid off from a strategic advisory firm, Madilyn pulled her existing LLC off the shelf and made the decision to stop climbing the corporate ladder. With a master’s in marketing and years of experience working alongside business creators, she stepped into entrepreneurship with a clear focus: helping agency owners finall...

What if your customers like your software, but don’t have the time to use it? Farzad Rashidi learned this the hard way. Back in college, he cold emailed the founder of Visme, offered to work for free, and eventually became the company’s first marketing hire. He helped grow the bootstrapped platform to eight figures and learned one major lesson along the way: backlinks could drive serious organic g...

Escaping the cubicle starts with a simple shift: stop building someone else’s dream and start building your own. Julia Hurley is a top real estate broker, investor, NIL and business consultant, and founder of Just Homes Group Brokerage. She helps professionals move beyond the 9-to-5 grind by building smarter systems, stronger operations, and businesses designed for real freedom. Her own leap into...

Building a successful business doesn’t always mean starting from scratch. Sometimes, the better path is choosing a proven operating model, like a franchise.   Giuseppe Grammatico, founder of GG the Franchise Guide, helps professionals move from employee to business owner through honest self-reflection and strategic franchise selection. He pushes past the usual fast-food stereotypes and guides cand...

If your pipeline feels stuck, you don't need more leads. You need to stop the bleeding first. Apryl Syed is the CEO of ApertureCodex and a fractional marketing executive known as the "messaging maven." She specializes in transforming underperforming revenue engines for B2B SaaS companies, pinpointing the leaks and breaks in their customer journey that quietly kill growth. In the past she's worked...

What if the most effective content system isn't more AI, but just one human conversation? Gal Ko is a seasoned marketing expert who serves as a marketing lecturer at Google AI Tech School and is the founder of BoldPMM and Podstar. His mission is to help founders escape the "content hamster wheel" of generic, AI-generated posts by leveraging strategic podcast guesting. By moving away from automated...

Sometimes an AI can out-reason a senior analyst in the time it takes to brew coffee. Giuseppe Sette is President and Co-Founder of Reflexivity, an AI-driven investment platform built to bring institutional-grade reasoning to every investor. After managing billions as Co-CIO of Global Macro at Lombard Odier and holding senior roles at Brevan Howard and Davidson Kempner, he saw a structural problem...

What happens when the longtime hosts steps into the spotlight himself? Kevin Prewett is the host of the Rising Tide Startups podcast and the founder of Podbrand Media. After nearly a decade behind the microphone interviewing hundreds of entrepreneurs, he is stepping into a new chapter. What once lived alongside a long career in nonprofit leadership is now becoming his primary focus, helping founde...

Consistency is Key.   Most people spend weeks overthinking their first LinkedIn post, waiting for the perfect idea or brand. Jessie Van Bruegel believes that the approach is backwards. As a content strategist and creator who’s posted daily on LinkedIn for nearly four years, he’s built a business helping experts productize their knowledge into scalable info offerings, backed by purple-branded visua...

Most employees talk about leaving the corporate world someday. Amber Goetz didn’t just talk about it, she actually did it. Her path there was anything but typical. Before building her SEO agency, she spent years as a programmer, TV host, and stunt driver, racing cars and motorcycles for commercials and television. Later, she walked away from a secure marketing job to rebuild her own agency on her...

Most 20-somethings are still figuring out their first job. Noah Tidwell dropped out of college, bought a moving company, ran it for five years, sold it, and launched a new business helping home service owners automate their operations. All before most people finish grad school. In this episode of Rising Tide Startups, Noah shares how he discovered his real passion wasn't running a moving company b...

What if equity could move as fast as code? Most founders spend thousands on lawyers, cap table management, and outdated infrastructure just to raise money and distribute equity. Joris Delanoue thinks that's ridiculous. As co-founder and CEO of Fairmint, he's building the rails to move private equity onto the blockchain, turning cap tables into smart contracts and making ownership as easy to transf...

Sometimes a setback does more than stop you; it reroutes you. Petra Zink is a Brand & Business Growth Strategist, Keynote Speaker, and Author who helps executives and founders turn their reputation into scalable revenue. She's the founder of impaCCCt and The360Talent. Co, host of the Trusted Authority™ Podcast, and author of Trusted Authority: From Unknown to Known. Originally from Austria, Petra...

What if one random podcast episode on a Tuesday completely changed your career trajectory? Agne Maria Moa is a content strategist at Notus, one of Europe's leading personal branding agencies, where she helps founders build their LinkedIn presence. Her journey started when she accidentally listened to a podcast by Rory Vaden about how personal brands impact sales. The next day, she posted her first...

What if getting laid off was actually the push you needed to build the life you wanted? Lauren Gibson is a writer and email marketing strategist who helps founders, agency owners, and coaches grow through newsletters and community-building. She's worked across human rights, tech, and entrepreneurship, including the co-founder of Ethereum on a DeFi project. After traveling to 44 countries, earning...

What if the problem isn't finding talent, but that we're all looking for it in the wrong places? Nick Petros is a serial entrepreneur who's appeared on Rising Tide Startups three times now, and for good reason. He's got that restless entrepreneurial itch that sees better ways to do things everywhere he looks, even when it's been "extremely expensive to operate this way." Nick's latest venture is F...

Sometimes the best lessons come from someone who's just one step ahead. After 300+ episodes and founders from over 30 countries, Kevin Prewett is hitting the reset button on Rising Tide Startups. Not starting over, just getting refocused on what matters most: that leap from cubicle to startup. In this episode, Kevin explains why he's shifting direction. He's learned that while successful founders...

Most people avoid cold calls. Gabe Lullo built a multi-million dollar company on them. Gabe Lullo didn’t take a traditional route to the top. He started in the trenches, working the phones as an SDR, and built his way up to CEO of Alleyoop, a global sales development firm making over 11 million cold calls a year. Along the way, he juggled rejection, resilience, and yes—actual juggling. In this epi...

What can the “Indiana Jones of Entrepreneurship” tell us about how AI is shaping the next generation of entrepreneurs? Evan Kubicek, also known as Coach K, is a social entrepreneur, educator, and business coach dedicated to helping people, businesses, and communities grow. As a senior faculty member at Eastern Illinois University, he shares strategies that drive transformation in his students, the...

The business is growing. You’re overwhelmed. Welcome to the small business black hole. For Alan Pence, founder of the Owner Institute, building a multi-million dollar company didn’t come from working more hours or saying yes to everything. It came from realizing that what got him to $1M in revenue was exactly what was keeping him from going further. Like many founders, Alan hit the wall. The point...