ScaleApp Podcasts with Prof Dan Isenberg

HBS's Bill Kerr and I have collectively and jointly written dozens of HBS cases on scaling companies, and taught hundreds of classes. For this discussion, we AI- analyzed the transcripts of 38 ScaleApp episodes for scale up insights and dilemmas. Here are some of the questions we explore in Episode 39: What really is scaling? Which is key, debt or equity ? Why, when, how? Are unicorns real or...

I have been writing cases about entrepreneurs since 2005 - close to 50 HBS cases published. None is so interesting as the three cases I (some with my HBS colleague, Bill Kerr) I have written on Robert Wessman, 57, Icelandic, founder of SEVERAL multi-billion dollar companies - Actavis (formerly ACT) is now one of the top three generics companies IN THE WORLD. Alvotech (ALVO) is one of the leading b...

In Episode #37 of ScaleApp Podcasts, I sit down with Rupesh Kumar, founder & CEO of ARIQT Global Technologies. Rupesh left a top-1%-earning developer job in India to move to the Netherlands out of what he simply calls “curiosity,” founded ARIQT in June 2020 and has scaled it to 130 colleagues across India, the Netherlands, Australia, and Ireland, breaking $5M in revenue. In Scalerator we used...

What if the robots are already there — but nobody can get them to actually work, inexpensively and at scale? In this episode, Ashish Kapoor, founder of General Robotics and former head of the Microsoft Research robotics initiative, discuss how General Robotics is powering the usefulness of robots, immediately and at scale. Ashish has spent his career at the intersection of frontier AI and real-wor...

What does it take to build a global fintech platform from a small Greek city — and end up powering banks and fintechs across Europe and the Middle East? Enter Natech, headquartered in Ioannina, Greece. Founded in 2003, Natech builds core banking systems, digital channels, and regulatory technology for financial institutions — primarily smaller, agile banks that need to move fast. Their front-to-ba...

Jay Rogers is a serial entrepreneur who doesn't just learn from failure — he codifies it. His previous venture, Local Motors, 3D printed autonomous vehicles and deployed 150 of them across 29 cities and three continents. The technology worked. The pricing worked. They raised $100 mm or so in capital. Regulation slowed everything down and they never learned how to sell.  The company failed as...

In Episode 33 of ScaleApp Podcasts, Kevin Kilty and I unpack the messy, honest reality of building a cross-border payments platform from the UAE — one of the world’s fastest-growing trading hubs. HubPay is now approaching $10 million ARR (already at a $10mm run rate), profitable, with 58 people across Dubai and London, and a Series B in motion.  Kevin launched HubPay in 2019 with a clear vision: a...

In Episode 32 of ScaleApp Podcasts, Sam Smith and I unpack her 24-year scale journey: building FinnCap from an in-house corporate finance desk into an IPO-listed £50 million revenue financial services firm, staying profitable throughout. At 24 – “I literally had no clue what I was doing” after painstakingly building to £3 million revenue, a step change along with a management buyout created real o...

Christina LaMontagne on Scaling Healthcare with Conviction Scaling in healthcare is never just about growth—it’s about trust, discipline, and conviction. In this 31st episode of ScaleApp Podcasts , I sat down with Christina to unpack what it really takes to build and scale a healthcare business that works for patients, parents, providers, and payers alike. Christina’s journey is grounded in first...

From Immigrant Teen to Scale Up Pioneer: The Sahar Hashemi Story What does it take to build one of the UK’s fastest-growing retail brands, lose it, rebuild yourself, and then reinvent entrepreneurship for an entire generation of women founders? In this episode, I sit down with Sahar Hashemi OBE, co-founder of Coffee Republic and Skinny Candy, and founder of the movement Buy Women Built. Sahar’s jo...

Jorge Rodriguez, founder of Paciv, built a world‑class industrial automation and computer systems validation company from a small warehouse in Puerto Rico to a global player serving Eli Lilly, Johnson & Johnson, and other pharma giants. The son of Spanish immigrants who arrived on the island with nothing but work ethic and discipline, Jorge translated family lessons about integrity, paying sup...

Eben Upton, co-founder and CEO of Raspberry Pi, turned a Cambridge lab experiment into an intriguing scale-up stories. What began as a mission to create more programmers in the world by empowering kids to program, became a $250 million public company that has shipped over 70 million units worldwide and helped redefine accessible computing.    At its heart, Raspberry Pi is a simple but revolutionar...

Reshma Advani Rojas, CEO of Advanced Commercial Equipment (ACEL), has turned a family legacy into the Caribbean’s most respected restaurant supply companies. Based in Trinidad & Tobago, ACEL serves 14 countries across the region and generates approximately $30 million in revenue. In this episode of ScaleApp Podcasts, Reshma shares how leadership, culture, and clarity drive scale—not just capit...

From garage to a $250 million global aerospace supplier—and then do it again and again as an investor and mentor.    In this episode, Jerry Jendusa, founder of EMTEQ and now head of Breakthru, shares how a mix of listening to customers, discipline, and people-first leadership drove his growth journey. From bootstrapping to $100 million in sales and $250 million exit, Jerry reflects on lessons lear...

From Ghana to Czech Republic to Harvard Business School to the frontlines of Africa’s digital economy, Raphael (“Rafi”) Afaedor's career is a masterclass in vision, immersion, and execution. Having co-founded Jumia—the first African e-commerce giant to list on the NYSE—and later Kyosk, a B2B platform connecting fast-moving consumer goods producers to informal retail shops and end customers, R...

I believe that one of the biggest challenges in going from a few millions to a few tens of millions is building systems and processes that enable scaling. We have seen this challenge in the majority of the ScaleApp Podcast discussions, Giscad is just the most recent example. As Julie Brandle explains, one aspect of their scaling challenge was to bring on more specialized professional services - le...

Background In this episode, I welcome our first Trinidad & Tobago venture to ScaleApp Podcasts: Giscad, co-founded by Desmond Dougall and Sudesh Botha. What began 22 years ago as two engineers suddenly out of work has grown into a 50-person regional powerhouse operating across nearly numerous Caribbean markets. Giscad is a ScaleratorT&T alumnus. Academics in the entrepreneurship space ofte...

Do we need to re-define "Chutzpah" = "Positron?" Mitesh Agrawal, CEO and co-founder of Positron AI, is leading one of the most audacious ventures in the tech world today: building silicon to compete directly with NVIDIA. Backed by over $70 million in funding from DFJ, Valor, Atreides, Oakseed (disclosure: I am an LP) and others, and already shipping product within 18 months of...

Background / Introduction What is the biggest bottleneck keeping the stream of drugs and devices from getting to market? R&D? Capital? Maybe, but managing regulatory compliance is right up there. Safely speeding time to market for pharmaceutical and medical device makers is huge.... IF you can pull it off. 50% of time to market is in regulatory compliance. Enter Erez Kaminski and Ketryx. Manag...

Background / Intro FactoredAI was incubated in 2019 by Israel Niezen out of Andrew Ng’s AI Fund with $2.5 mio “we didn’t really need,” and today has over 300 of the top 1% of talent in LATAM solving complex data problems by building world-class AI and ML/LLM solutions. Factored went from $.7mio in 2020 to $3mio to $8mio to $13mo to $18 mio in 2024, and will break $30mio in 2025. Their plan is to b...

Introduction Rosalyn and Blair Hyslop met as teenagers Atlantic Canada in Junior Achievement and from the start dreamed of running a business together. That dream became reality when they acquired Mrs. Dunster’s, a beloved regional bakery known for its authentic donuts, garlic cheese buns, and grew it to offer hundreds of other homestyle baked goods. At the time, the business had about $7M in reve...

Background - Eyal Feder-Levy, CEO and co-founder of Zencity, joins me on the ScaleApp Podcasts to discuss the journey from his community-building nonprofit work in Tel Aviv to building the largest provider of community engagement software for local governments. Zencity operates in six countries, serving over 400 agencies and 200 million residents with sales “deep into double digit millions.” Feder...

Background Leo Bonanni is an architect-turned-entrepreneur who founded Sourcemap, a pioneering supply chain mapping platform, based on his research at the MIT Media Lab. Originally a tool for understanding the social and environmental impact of design decisions, Sourcemap evolved into a mission-critical SaaS platform used by major global brands to trace the origins of their raw materials down to t...

Background / Introduction Saar Safra, serial entrepreneur and CEO/co-founder of Beewise, joins Prof. Dan Isenberg to share the extraordinary mission of his sixth startup: saving the bees to secure global food supplies. With backing from Fortissimo Capital and others, and over $170 million raised, Beewise is pioneering robotic beehives to counter catastrophic bee colony collapse—a crisis affecting...

Meet Joey Chung, Taiwanese entrepreneur, co-founder and CEO of TNL  Mediagene (NASDAQ:TNMG). TNMG is a media content and technology group spanning SE Asia and Japan in Chinese, English and other languages (TNMG IS NOT IN CHINA!) as an apolitical media group, growth 50% organic, 50% M&A. Ten acquisitions, including a major merger with MediaGene in Japan which allowed TNMG to go public on NASDAQ...