The Fifth Quarter Show

Steve Harward is the founder and CEO of Prime Corporate Services, a company he built to over nine figures in annual revenue. No paid advertising. No aggressive sales tactics. No cold outreach. Just relationships. In 13 years, he's gone from a barely-made-it-through-high-school kid from a trailer park to running a business that fields 400–600 one-on-one sales appointments a day — built on a philoso...

Jeremy Newsome is the founder of RealLife Trading, one of the largest trading education platforms in the world, teaching hundreds of thousands of people how to trade safely. At age seven, he watched Forrest Gump, sold blackberries door to door, saved $1,300, convinced his dad to match it, and bought Apple stock. That investment would be worth $40 million today. He turned $400K into $1.2M trading s...

Lame Kinikini is the founder and CEO of Elk Ridge Investments, an alternative investment firm managing over $75 million across real estate, short-term rentals, creative finance, and asset-backed lending. He's closed more than 200 creative finance deals, built Elk Ridge into an eight-figure company in under five years, and now mentors over 100 students through his Fearless Investors community. But...

Jess Mah built a six-figure business in middle school, dropped out of high school at 15, and at 19 became one of the youngest women accepted into Y Combinator. On paper, she was a Silicon Valley prodigy — Forbes and Inc 30 Under 30, venture-backed, scaling fast. But in 2012, the bank balance was heading toward zero, the product wasn't working, and she fired her team just to survive. She rebuilt in...

Brennan Pothetes is a fintech operator who built and sold Butter Insurance to Odeko, then got tapped to create something that's never been done before — the first AI native holding company. Infinity Constellation launched in May 2025 with $17 million, eight AI companies already post-revenue, and a thesis that the entire venture model is broken. He calls it Y Combinator meets Berkshire Hathaway. In...

Ross Hamilton is a former semi-pro BMX rider who turned a career-ending injury into a real estate empire — 50 rental properties by 24, all through creative financing with no money. He then built Connected Investors, the world's largest network of real estate investors processing $3B in monthly lending requests, and sold it to a Fortune 100 company. Now he's dedicating the next 20 years to Saving H...

Farooq Abbasi is the founder and sole GP of Preface Ventures — a seed fund with 28% net IRR, placing him in the top 5% of all venture investors tracked by Cambridge Associates. He's deployed $90M into 100+ companies now worth more than $10B, with exits to Palo Alto Networks, Cisco, and Rocket Companies. His edge: backing immigrant and outsider technical founders at day zero — sometimes nothing mor...

Renato Fabri co-founded PMU Launch, scaled it to over 1,500 med spa and salon clients, and exited for close to eight figures — all by 28. Now he's building Fabri Enterprise, rolling up home service brands with a $100 million exit in his sights. In this episode, we get into: - Why culture, not marketing or sales, was the real growth lever - The capacity mistake that sent a team member to the hospit...

How do you go from having your business card declined at Whole Foods to leading a $526M IPO? In this debut episode of The Fifth Quarter, Bilal Hanjra sits down with five-time tech founder Joe Stolte. Joe pulls back the curtain on the "not-so-obvious" habits of high achievers and why most entrepreneurs fail to scale past the $10M bottleneck. Chapters 00:00:00 The Truth Behind a $520M IPO 00:01:25 T...