Rising Tide Startups

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...

What happens when you follow your gut, not a roadmap? For Heintze Malack—known to her friends and followers as Heinz—entrepreneurship didn’t start with a business degree or a polished pitch deck. It started with paper boats and a big imagination. Now the founder of the fashion brand The Twentieth, Heinz has built a business from scratch by turning scrolls into sales and ideas into brands. Through...

What if you could grow a business without ads or cold calls? That’s exactly what Mike Faraci set out to prove and did. Now the Founder & CEO of Red Button Media, Mike helps brands rise above the noise with authentic, story-driven video content. But his path didn’t start with a marketing budget or a polished campaign. It started with one camera, a clear message, and a commitment to post on LinkedIn...

Ken Mack doesn’t follow the traditional path of entrepreneurship—he skips the startup phase entirely. Instead of building from scratch, he focuses on acquiring and scaling existing businesses, often using little to none of his own capital. In this episode of the Rising Tide Startups podcast, we chat with Ken Mack, an investor, also known as “The Eccentric Entrepreneur” due to his unconventional ap...

This Episode - Turning an Unlikely Business into a Multi-Million Dollar Success Meet Will Milliken, president of a fast-growing dog waste removal company and founder of the President of Swoop Scoop® and founder of Poop Scoop Millionaire™. What started as a small side hustle has become a booming business with multiple locations and a thriving online community for aspiring entrepreneurs. Will shares...

How Failing Forward can become a blueprint for entrepreneurial success! Mohamed "Mo"Ahmed, founder of the Boundless Founder community and author of The Inside Out Entrepreneur, shares his journey from a corporate career at Microsoft and AWS to navigating the unpredictable world of startups. After starting his first company in 2017, Mohamed faced tough challenges—including a failed acquisition—that...