ScaleApp Podcasts with Prof Dan Isenberg

I have always been skeptical of conflating entrepreneurship with innovation or technology and Sgt. Clean (YES, a rapidly expanding car wash chain in Ohio)  is a great example. How many tech startups you know have more than $10 million in revenues, growing rapidly and profitably? And guess what? This is a $20 billion market in the US only. Highly fragmented, ripe for scaling if you can crack the co...

Episode 13 taped on Friday the 13th! How lucky can you get? There is so much I find exciting about Sunbit - talking with co-founders Arad Levertov and Tal Riesenfeld is like a huge smorgasboard of interesting topics. Just a few words about their strategy here but you have GOT to listen to how they explain in their own words how they have grown beyond $300 million and achieved profitability. (Discl...

Home Surplus, founded by Joe Schwartz who thought he was a PE guy and found himself as CEO and is building a national chain of specialist cabinet suppliers. What's the deal? Floor and Decor took an aisle out of Home Depot and turned it into a 250 store chain worth about $8 billion. Harbor Freight did the same with tools and has 1500 stores worth about $8 billion.  Joe thinks the brass ring ma...

Meet Thanos Papagelis and Dimitris Tsingos, co-founders of Epignosis, the global leader in online corporate training. $50 million ARR, 55% and above margins, 50% and above annual growth, profitable since 2010, bootstrapped without VC.  They were so good that when they tried to raise growth capital, no VCs (except 1) believed their story and responded with standard VC bullshit - "You haven&apo...

Jonathan Corbin, Eugene Mann, and Sami Shalabi have put together decades of combined experience in senior positions at Hubspot, Google, Adobe, Stripe, IBM - need I say more - to COMPLETELY revolutionize how companies engage with customers. I will let them explain to us in this 10th!! ScaleApp Podcasts episode but the way I see it is that they have revolutionized the customer support experience as...

Imagine a company, about 7 years old, with 250 employees around the world, revenues in the "eight figures"  (that means between $10-99 million), two thousand customers globally.  With high 2-digit annual growth. The company uses AI enabled peripheral devices (think cameras that can interpret situations and make decisions) to make the workplace safer, networked and managed on a common pla...

Vikram Sharma and Deepanshu Goel founded Wify in 2020 to solve a big e-commerce and in-store pain point facing the Ikeas and Amazons of the 1 billion plus population - Not used to self-assembling and self-installing furniture and appliances at home, Indian consumers simply bought less. Building on their experience in larger companies, Vikram and Deepanshu built a tech platform to connect consumers...

Run:ai was founded in 2018 to provide the software "operating system" for development of AI and large language models (LLMs). But the real story of run:ai is not the  acquisition price (unconfirmed) of $700 million nor its raise of $130 million in VC money, but in how run:ai scaled its customer penetration so rapidly after a year of invention and re-invention of its business model. (Disc...

Ridge Security is a pioneer in the new field of "penetration testing," using AI to generate offensive security for increasingly large enterprise customers. Founded in 2020 by Nick Mo and Lydia Zhang, Ridge is already generating "millions" in revenues. Originally from China, Nick and Lydia have extensive tech backgrounds at Cisco, and led Hillstone Networks from startup to NASDA...

Founded in 2013 by twins Amiad and Koby Soto, Guesty graduated from Y Combinator and set out to revolutionize the emerging short term rental industry. Starting out as a service to automate management, Amiad and Koby had to pivot from service to software, and eventually came to dominate the software market for managing short term rentals around the world. Seven acquisitions later, with $400 million...

UENI is more than a web-site builder - UENI is a strategic partner to small businesses wanting to grow bigger. Ten years after founding and $30 million raised, UENI is fast becoming a major player in helping SMEs increase their business activity through increased online presence and more effective digital-supported services. With 45,000 subscription customers UENI has amazing numbers - low acquisi...

Born out of a search fund, Bjoern von Siemens and Dennis Kogan set out over 12 years ago to dramatically improve surgical outcomes by becoming a platform for "complex coordination" (see Peter Thiel) in operating rooms around the globe. Although Bjoern never used this term, looking back it seems audacious for a small, thinly capitalized company to grow to orchestrate a complex, life-criti...

Vangelis Mihalopoulas and Dimitris Tsingos, two engineers in Athens now in their 40s, founded Yodeck to do a digital signage project for a customer in Greece who wanted to easily send information to numerous digital signs (think schools, government offices, sports stadiums, train stations, corporations - any place that has multiple screens conveying information that changes frequently.) In the mid...

Mitch Zlotnick founded Audimute to provide delightful sound experiences to famous drummers, restaurant-goers, churches, conference centers. With 35 or so employees in their Cleveland facility, Audimute makes and sells acoustics systems around the US and beyond and today sells "$5 to $6 million" after dumping Amazon as a customer. "We just couldn't make any money," laughs M...

Ready to unlock the secrets of successful entrepreneurship? Tune into the first episode of the ScaleApp podcast series with Dan Isenberg, where you'll gain invaluable insights from a veteran with nearly four decades of experience in growing businesses. Dan, a former professor at Harvard Business School and Columbia, and a seasoned investor and former venture capitalist, demystifies the comple...