Startup Mindsets

Ethan A. Poetic is one of the most inspirational people I've met. From a terrible life threatening car accident to successful regaining his strength again and now on the verge of publishing an autobiography, Ethan embodies the Startup Mindset. Ethan tells us how he went from "victim" to "VICTOR."

Madison Long founded Clutch in 2019 with her cofounder Simone May. Madison shares invaluable advice for new entrepreneurs. She says to embrace the chaos and uncertainty.  Sign up for Clutch and Transform the future of work by empowering the next generation of entrepreneurs to launch, market, and grow their side-hustles. Clutch is a side-hustle marketplace that  connects the next generation of crea...

Clyx was founded by Alyx while she was at Harvard during the pandemic. She saw that it was hard to hang out with friends because it felt like "having to machine gun text" everyone. Alyx also recalls a moment scrolling on social media thinking why isn't my social life as good as some peers? Their motto STOP SCROLLING START LIVING has catalyzed serendipitous meetups in Miami, Harvard, and Yale Unive...

Mike Liu started freefuse off an idea when a good friend called him about a breakup. Mike wanted to help his friend’s music career and started creating software to do so. Today we learn about how his time at UC Riverside and Texas A&M shaped his career path. Register to use FreeFuse and tell them Startup Mindsets sent you.  Connect with Mike on Linkedin

Happy 4th of July folks! Today's podcast features Rami Essaid, founder of Finmark.  Rami had a goal of helping founders have a better sense of what their company's future financial picture looks like.  Finmark integrates with your accounting software and CRMs to give a better understanding of current expenses and allows for accurate forecasts of growth.  Rami details pitching 120 investors before...

Brian Potts, partner at and named top 100 lawyers in America at Perkins & Coie, shares what it's like launching multiple products like his own keyboard for lawyers, an ETF called $DEMZ traded on the Nasdaq, writing a book called The Jobless Lawyers Handbook, and accelerating growth for his own startup, Goods Unite Us.  I stumbled upon Brian's work on Linkedin when I saw a post he wrote about havin...

We chose to vent on this episode from a personal standpoint. So much is changing we noticed with the economy that affect startups and entrepreneurs. We used this opportunity to do a solo pod to get some motivation out there and to be cognizant of what's going on in the world.  Introducing our new startup partner, Incued. If you're at a VC firm and want better investor relations, look no further. L...

Mental Health is talked about more nowadays than ever and we wanted to know why. We have the pleasure of bringing on Tamar Blue Founder/CEO of Mental Happy joins us and guest host Brandon Warren on the podcast today. Tamar talks about what led her to create Mental Happy and what truly taking care of your emotional wellness looks like using Mental Happy's platform. We hear how support groups are a...

Welcome back to another amazing episode of Startup Mindsets! Hope your year has been great so far! - Dan Investing in startups was traditinally reserved for the rich or people with access to capital such as VCs. But enter Wefunder, founded by Nick Tomarello in 2013 in an apartment in Noe Valley.  Today we sit down with Jonny Price VP of Fundraising at Wefunder and learn what it's like helping star...

Our guest today is Will Peng born in Taiwan and immigrating to the U.S. he went to Princeton University. It was at his first job out of college that he realized it was hard to understand compensation packages from his employer on top of his personal challenges around student debt. Will's worked at Red Swan Ventures an early investor in Oscar, Warby Parker, Coinbase prior to creating Northstar . &n...

Serial entrepreneur Andrew Gazdecki joins Startup Mindsets to unpack his story of founding startups and leading them to several exits.  Andrew Gazdecki provides an enlightening conversation on how he as a student at Chico State created a majority bootstrapped startup, Bizness Apps, to hit 5 million in revenue and eventually selling it in offer from a private equity firm.  We go over, MicroAcquire'...

Meet Alyona Mysko, CEO of Fuelfinance as she details her experience running a startup while leading her company in the middle of a war. It was humbling to speak to someone going through such a challenging time, we were lost for words trying to fully comprehend the tragedy in Ukraine.  Alyona describes working from a bomb shelter and managing a team while trying to move the needle forward as a foun...

Meet Greg Shepard, he's been featured on TedX talks and university lectures worldwide. Founder of BOSS Capital Partners, a boutique investment firm focused on Series Seed through Series B technology businesses. We uncover his mindset which is unique because he is neurodivergent. Not being able to land a job led him to become an entrepreneur, finding out he could make money from an early age,...

For this week’s episode, I bring on my cousin, Jim Narvios founder and attorney at Narvios Law Firm. Find out what inspired the leap from performing on stage as Rocko Stedy to fighting for clients’ cases in court. Be sure to follow @filipinoattorney to keep up with Jim’s journey or hit up Narvios Law Firm. We discover that motivation can come from failure and that your distinct creativity sometime...

Meet Girish Redekar , he founded Sprinto to ensure software companies meet information security compliance requirements like GDPR, HIPPA, SOC2 without having to hire a consultant. Sprinto’s software does most of the work. We find out how security can be a sales asset in that it can allow deals to be approved faster and enhance a product's overall performance.   We hear about Sprinto raising f...

My guest today is Stefanie Pinsley, now known for her TikToks around marketing and entrepreneur mindset hacks. She's scaled her following on TikTok to 70k. Stef left Google to be a content creator (TikToker) and entrepreneur mindset coach.  Currently Stef is an personal branding coach for her own company Roadmap to Rise and you can check it here. We have thought filled discussion on the content cr...

On International Women's Day, 3/8, we welcome Senofer Mendoza to the podcast! Senofer and Adrian Mendoza started Mendoza Ventures to address the funding gap in the pre-seed investment stage for underrepresented founders. Senofer founded the first LatinX venture capital firm on the East Coast in 2016 and has since been leading the charge for investing in more diverse founders ever since! She is a f...

Ahmed Elsamidisi founded Narrator.ai when he experienced the problem of not knowing how to answer/taking too long to answer data queries at WeWork as a Data Engineer. He realized that he had to be the one to solve this problem after talking to companies who might be solving this but weren't. In the episode we discuss Ahmed's "Ah ha" moment💡, Getting into YCombinator , Living with your co-founders...

Freddie Van Huynh has an incredible story, you've got to hear about. Born in Sweden as the son of Cambodian immigrants Freddie had a unique upbringing. Combining his love for travel and providing others opportunities led him to found Absolute Internship.  Fred has been to 50+ countries, speaks 7 languages,and practices Jiu Jitsu regularly.   He details his experience founding Absolute Internship,...

Arjun founded Solid in 2019 with the idea that they could enable every company to offer their own suite of fintech services. With every company thinking about how to create their own experiences powered by fintech, Arjun and team saw an opportunity to build the layer that powers this.  On today's show, we discuss (5:29) Fintech as a service, the value of companies owning the fintech experience for...

How Hard Can It Be author, Arnaud Henneville Wedholm, joins startup mindsets to talk about his new book, How Hard Can It Be, Lessons From Trying to Take Down Facebook. Inspired from his efforts to build a startup that would be better than Facebook. Arnaud tells his story on how his startup, InternalDesk, became a "Broken Unicorn." We hear about what it's like to struggle as an entrepreneur and why...

Earl met David when he was in high school in the Philippines starting YouthHack , an international nonprofit helping students learn how to code in the Philippines. We discover the success a simple cold email to Huffington Post could have where he ended up becoming a contributing writer in college. David’s also been a part of Dorm Room Fund , First Round Capital’s fund for university entrepren...

For this episode, we bring on Rene Morkos founder of ALICE an AI construction simulation and optimization software.  The value Alice brings to construction planners is how they are able to simulate over a million ways to build a building.  We talk in depth about Rene attaining a PhD in construction management at Stanford, creating Alice from his thesis, and life as a professor at Stanfor...

Selling and buying a car tends to be a hassle nowadays especially when you're trying to get the best bargain. Enter TopMarq a new way to compare the top car websites (Carvana, Carmax etc.) while listing or shopping. CEO of TopMarq, Quinn Osha, joins us on today's podcast to talk about what he's building as a solo founder.  Quinn takes us through his experience graduating CalTech and learning how t...

Matt Spettel cofounded CoPilot while he was in undergrad at Carnegie Mellon. In this episode, we hear how it was balancing college and running a startup, how Matt met his cofounder Gabe, overcoming age bias, and building the company to what it is today.  We learn about his route to entrepreneurship as a kid who would make his own video games and sell them at school to pretending to be a personal t...