The Foundr Podcast with Nathan Chan

After graduating from Harvard Business School alongside future tech giants like Mark Zuckerberg, Magnus Grimeland traveled the world as a consultant for McKinsey. After exploring Southeast Asia, he decided to lay down roots and leverage the region's enormous business potential. From 2013-2017, Grimeland built ZALORA into Southeast Asia's largest fashion ecommerce business. Now, he's supporting fel...

Some might say Alex Bouaziz, cofounder and CEO of Deel, was simply in the right place at the right time. Deel, an international payroll, compliance, and HR solution, launched in 2019 and, by May 2020, raised $14M in funding. Currently, they have 8000 customers worldwide, including Dropbox, Airtable, and Shopify. But good timing will only get you so far. To launch and grow a company as successful a...

At 24, Guy Pearson turned down a partnership to start an accounting firm. His early clients were digital companies, and Pearson was jealous that there wasn’t an online commerce system for his industry. So in 2013, he launched a new company called Ignition to simplify and speed up the transaction process for professionals like him. To date, Ignition helped facilitate more than 1M client engagements...

Does the word “sales” make you squeamish or intimidated? If so, then this episode is for you. AJ Cassata is a maverick B2B sales consultant who helps entrepreneurs grow their businesses fast with his straightforward, systematic, and scalable approach to sales growth. His company, Revenue Boost, helps clients create a system for lead generation instead of just winging it.    Listen to Nathan and AJ...

33 years ago, Brian Scudamore was sitting in a McDonald’s drive-thru when he saw his future–a beat-up pickup truck filled with junk. Scudamore started a junk-hauling business to pay for college, but what was supposed to fund his education ended up inspiring him to drop out. Today, Scudamore’s transformed his junk hauling side hustle, 1-800-GOT-JUNK?, into a North American franchise business worth...

Airtasker is Australia's #1 marketplace for local services. Over the past decade, they've acquired more than 4.3M registered users, built a worth of $255M, created a $1.7B value of job opportunities, and went public. But founder Tim Fung still feels the pains from the first 3 years, when everything he assumed about the business was wrong. He's learned that through the victories and failures of sca...

Davie Fogarty created Australia's fastest-growing ecommerce brand, The Oodie, which sells wearable blankets and accessories. But success didn't happen overnight. After multiple failed businesses, at 24 years old, Davie had a chip on his shoulder to prove he could succeed. So in 2017, he started 2 ecommerce businesses, and they both took off immediately. In the past 4 years, Davie has grown his com...

Jen Proctor loved being a performer. But when her dream to be a professional singer ended, she pledged to be a good person in the entertainment industry, something she knew wasn't a given. So in 2015, she launched her agency Cultivated Entertainment and works with clients like Meta, Pharrell, Drew Barrymore, the Obama Foundation, Stand Up for Cancer, and the Primetime Emmy Awards. She's built her...

Kendra Scott started her self-titled billion-dollar jewelry business out of failure. Her first business failed after 5 years, and she started selling handmade jewelry door-to-door as a side hustle. Now, Kendra Scott Jewelry is a billion-dollar business with 100 retail locations across the US. But success didn't come quickly. Through personal struggles, recessions, and rejections, Scott built a fas...

Michele Romanow joined the cast of CBC's Dragons' Den in 2014 after successfully selling her digital coupon business SnapSaves to Groupon. At 28 years old, she was the youngest "dragon" on the show, but that didn't stop her from innovating. During her second episode, Michele decided to flip the traditional Dragons' Den pitch from equity to revenue.    The decision led to the creation of the invest...

After his first startup went public in 2016, Tony Jamous took time off to align what he does with what he believes in. In his previous company, Nexmo, he saw the power of distributed hiring worldwide and how it changed people’s lives. So in January of 2020, he started Oyster, a software company that helps make it possible for companies everywhere to hire people anywhere. The timing of Oyster was p...

In 2011, Lauryn Evarts Bosstick was in college and looking for a community. When a sorority came knocking, Lauryn turned to blogging instead, asking herself the questions every entrepreneur asks: How can I create this and do it better? After 3 years of blogging 7 days a week, Lauryn built Skinny Confidential into a community and a full-time business.    Today, The Skinny Confidential brand garners...

What's the secret to sustain healthy behaviors like exercise, diet, and stress management? Coaching.    Rishi Mandal discovered this while researching the challenges of America's health crisis. So, he started Future, an online coaching platform that connects everyday people to coaches to receive custom one-on-one health training. Since 2017, Rishi and his team have raised $120M in funding and buil...

In 2014, Erin Deering gifted Triangl swimwear to relatively unknown legacy celebrities Hailey Bieber ( Baldwin) and Bella Hadid. Their friend, Kendall Jenner, loved the products and reached out to Erin directly to get Triangl samples. Then Jenner posted on Instagram and tagged Triangl–that’s when everything went mad.    But the success of Triangl didn’t come from just celebrity endorsements. It ca...

Are you ready to leverage the popularity of TikTok to grow your business? Gerardo Perez is the founder of Marketing&, one of the world's leading digital agencies focused on driving paid results on TikTok. Gerardo has 11.2M likes, 323,000 followers, and generated over 100M organic views. He's spent more than $2M in advertising on the platform and is ready to share his strategies with you.    Listen...

Harley Finkelstein is an entrepreneur, lawyer, and president of Shopify. Harley was store #137 when he started on Shopify as a merchant in 2009. After law school, he joined the team at Shopify and helped build it into the world’s #1 ecommerce platform. In 2021, the Shopify ecosystem generated $440B in economic value. For Harley, the success of Shopify all comes down to a belief that entrepreneursh...

Jamie Kern Lima spent 2 years pitching QVC for a segment to promote her business, IT Cosmetics. She was about to go bankrupt when she finally got her shot on the network. But moments before going on air, she went off-script. The decision changed her business and the beauty industry forever. Jamie built IT Cosmetics into a multi-billion dollar empire centered on authenticity before it was a buzzwor...

How did Ed Mylett gain 3 million social media followers without spending a dollar on ads? Authenticity. Ed is an entrepreneur, best-selling author, performance coach, and speaker. He landed on the Forbes 50 wealthiest under 50, and was recognized as one of the wealthiest self-made people in the world in his 30s. His recently published book, The Power of One More, will help you learn why you're clo...

Everyone kept telling Phil Hutcheon “that's just how it is” when it comes to the absurd processing fees for concert tickets. That's why Phil started Dice, a platform for fans to see the musicians they love in the most hassle-free way possible. Since its launch in 2013, Dice has raised over $100M in capital, has more than 380 workers, and is expanding its services globally. From testing the busines...

Brittany Stewart is the cofounder of BURST Oral Care, one of the fastest-growing ecommerce businesses in the United States. She met her cofounder, Hamish Khayat, through a mutual friend, and it was a match made in startup heaven. Hamish had a revolutionary toothbrush prototype, and Brittany had the skills to make it a business.    After 3 years of attending dental conventions across the country, B...

Bill Smith asked for a briefcase on his 5th birthday, and it’s been all business since. After dropping out of school at age 16, Bill started, built, and sold 3 companies over the past 15 years. His last business, grocery delivery service Shipt, sold to Target in 2019 for half a billion dollars. But Bill didn’t rest on his success. The same year he exited Shipt, he started Landing, a flexible and f...

After multiple near-death experiences, Zeb Evans decided to build a business that was net positive on the world. However, he didn’t realize that a custom internal productivity tool would become the business he was searching for. In 2017, Evans cofounded ClickUp, an all-in-one productivity management tool now valued at $4 billion.    Listen to Nathan and Zeb discuss:  Selling Disney DVDs from his h...

Marco Zappacosta's only professional job has been the cofounder and CEO of Thumbtack. Marco started the home services matchmaking website straight out of university with a dream to find a better solution of hiring a plumber. Since 2009, Thumbtack has raised half a billion dollars in funding and gone from 2 to 1,000 employees. But Thumbtack's success came from years of struggle to discover their pe...

Nikhil Arora and Alejandro Velez started Back to the Roots by asking the same question in their business class–how can you grow mushrooms from used coffee grounds? So instead of taking their jobs in investment baking, the 2 friends began their journey of building an organic gardening brand for the next generation.    Back to the Roots is America’s #1 organic gardening company and doubled its busin...

Toni Ko's first beauty brand, NYX Cosmetics, made $4 million in year 1, and eventually exited to L'Oréal for $500 million. Craving a new purpose, she started a sunglasses business. It failed after 3.5 years—and Ko says it's one of the best things that ever happened to her. Ko's lessons from that "failure" empowered her to launch her third and current venture: Bespoke Beauty Brands, which partners...