Technori Podcast

When gyms big and small closed down over the past year, most people are confined to continuing their exercise routines with body weight workouts and name-your-stationary-bike routines. But finding a place to exercise with all the standard gear and weights you could rely on at your local gym are basically impossible to find or sold out. This sparked and an idea for Jake Goldstein, a Chicago-local e...

When David McFarland got a job as an actuary out of college, he was working at an insurance firm where he first saw how data wasn't being optimized. Later after working alongside Kyle Nakatsuji at auto insurtech company ClearCover, he saw how Kyle's model could apply to all of small businesses and more importantly, saw how small businesses were overlooked. David joins the show to talk to Scott abo...

It's said these days that the pandemic moved the world forward five years in five minutes, and companies like CASHDROP are the ones leading the charge by rapidly adapting to people's needs. CASHDROP helps you create custom, shareable store links that link to your store and can create "drops" by revealing new products, foods, courses etc without paying commission fees. Ruben wants to democratize sm...

Quevos co-founder Nick Hamburger has taken his company he started out of his college class and kitchen to the stage of Shark Tank in a few short years. And won! Nick comes back on the show to talk about what's changed with Quevos, leadership lessons that no one prepares you for, how he got a guest Shark to say yes and the challenges of running your own company.

Label Insight co-founder Dagan Xavier joins the show to talk with Scott about the how his company is providing better, clearer information to consumers to find products that match what they need (or eliminate what they can't have) while also empowering brands with better data on their customers. Dagan shares how he initially came up with the idea helping his dad sort through different foods and pa...

Darren Rovell was always pushing into business when sports coverage was focused the other way. Now after a career working the sports business beat, he runs a passion project of his own: acquiring and selling collectibles. Game tickets, space ship parts, the largest Warren Buffet signature - anything goes for Darren as long as it has an interesting story. Darren joins the show to talk with Scott ab...

Emergency podcast with CoinDesk's managing editor Zack Seward back on the show to dig in on just what the heck a NFT is, why is it so popular all of a sudden and what's the broader use case for them? These non-fungible tokens are a special token that is what Zack says makes a piece of the internet ownable. Protected by blockchain, a lot of NFTs that have gone popular like the Nyan cat and Zion Wil...

WHOOP is not like any wearable you've had before, in fact on its face it doesn't tell you anything. But the technology behind it collects some of the most accurate health monitoring data on the market, including daily personalized fitness, sleep, and recovery data delivered to you in real timet's what differentiates from any other watch (Apple anyone?) and why real athletes like LeBron James and M...

Ron "Boss" Everline is best known for his intensive workout style training celebrities such as Kevin Hart. But he wants you to know he's so much more than a coach. That training is the thing that gets him to the thing - a process we like to call entrepreneurship. Boss, the CEO and founder of Just Train and a partner with Nutra Bolt's C4, has built his brand around authenticity and showing people h...

Robinhood may have taken center stage in the GameStop/WallStreetBets bonanza, but plenty of finance apps like M1 Finance were impacted by the freeze on certain stocks because of clearing firms. M1's founder and CEO Brian Barnes comes back on the show to discuss the the $GME fall out, why the situation was handled so poorly, why Apex Clearing prevented stock buys on M1's platform and how the fast-p...

Anthony Scaramucci is name that rings a lot of different bells to a lot of different people. But a lot has changed for The Mooch since his brief stint in Trump's White House back in 2017, and he's quick to admit letting his ego get in the way of his life, marriage and business. Today, he's on a mission to right the wrongs of the Republican Party and getting back to his bread and butter: investing...

Zack Seward, Managing Editor of Coindesk joins the show to talk about covering cryptocurrencies over the long haul and what the latest Bitcoin surge in the $30-40k range means for valuing the currency as an asset and what that means for the other cryptocurrencies. They also talk about cutting through the noise, what's fake and what's real in the crypto world and running Coindesk.

Language learning doesn't have to be intensive or cumbersome! What if you could learn by simply browsing the web? Toucan does this with a browser extension that lets you read whatever site you're and pick up words in another language - using context clues - to learn over time. Taylor Nieman, founder and CEO of Toucan joins the show to talk with Scott about the lessons she learned from Headspace to...

Erik Young, founder and CEO of Audios joins the show to talk with Scott about transforming live events with cable-less speakers that speak to each other reliably over their own network instead of Bluetooth. Audios speakers save 80% set up time and thousands a year in costs for DJs and event companies. Saving time, money, a series of patents and with backing from the likes of the co-creator of Guit...

Longtime tech journo Eric Newcomer, formerly of The Information and Bloomberg and now writes his own Substack newsletter (aptly named Newcomer) joins the show. Eric and Scott talk about the a16z's (VC firm Andreesson Horowitz) foray into growing its media presence by hiring a large editorial staff to cover stories about crypto, fintech, etc with a "pro-tech" angle, why it matters and how it matche...

Life's gone full digital, and the race is on to capture the world's attention in new and exciting ways. On this special episode of the Technori podcast, we catch up with a couple media-forward founders that placed first and second in the recent Sava360 & NAMIC "Startup Pitch" competition that showcases disruptive companies in tech, sports and entertainment. First place: FutureStream - a streaming...

Newsletters have taken on new life in recent years, with incredible growth particularly in the tech and business sectors. Chief among them is Morning Brew, an all-encompassing business newsletter (among other things) that was recently acquired by Business Insider at a reported valuation of $75 million. Co-founder Austin Rief joins the show to talk about the their development, seamless transition w...

Scott Kitun talks to self-made hedge fun manager, Emmet Peppers. The founder of the firm Good Soil Investment, Emmet grew his money from investing $30,000 including a massive bet on Tesla - into $70 million. Emmet talks about jumping from the mail room into investing without day trading experience, how buying a Tesla got him down the hedge fund path and why he believes anyone can build wealth with...

The Internet of Things, or IoT, is often trotted out without much explanation much like "AI" or "machine learning". But if you take IoT as the the ability for your devices or your company's devices to communicate with each other - Hologram is the SIM card that allows that connectivity to occur efficiently. Hologram.io uses cellular connectivity to power up almost any kind of hardware with the abil...

Ever grappled with the lack of financial literacy in this country? Or are tired of wasting money on toys that your kid or someone else's kid will use for 5 minutes? EarlyBird lets you accomplish it all by essentially being the Acorns for kids. You start an account, put in a set amount of money to invest (others can contribute gifts of money to the portfolio as well) and can grow that money for yea...

When we think cybersecurity, we tend to think big data breaches like Target or your parents setting their passwords as "password". We skip over the the prime target for many attacks - small businesses. Attacks against SMBs make up almost half of all cyber crime, and has seen gigantic spikes with the pandemic in 2020. These attacks, successful or not, can lead to exorbitant costs on small companies...

Beer delivery is its infancy, which is to say it's often expensive and lacks selection. Enter TapRm, an ecommerce platform and marketplace to find and purchase your favorite brews delivered right to your door. By cutting out the costs of middlemen, TapRm is able to save money that doesn't get passed onto the customer while also taking bigger margins than some competitors. CEO Jason Sherman joins t...

Frankly Apparel's appeal is as straightforward as it gets: stylish, comfortable clothing for women to wear without the need for a bra. CEO Heather Eaton and her co-founder Jane Dong bonded over discussing their very different body types (Heather large-chested, Jane- tall, small-chested) and lack of clothing options that truly fit them. The idea of Frankly was born and after a successful Kickstarte...

1World Online founder and CEO Alex Fedosseev joins Scott on the show to talk about the state of digital advertising, why no one wants to see old practices like pop-up ads and auto-play videos, and how to do digital ads, smarter and natively.

When Noah Berkson and Raul Henriquez started their business together helping young companies with tech development and resources, they quickly realized how many issues founders were commonly facing, particularly prioritizing decisions on what aspects of the core product to focus on and building the core team. They launched Candor Ventures to invest in companies with their own capital and tech asse...