The Peel with Turner Novak

Itai Damti is the Co-founder and CEO of Unit, the platform that helps leading tech companies store, move, and lend money. Unit has raised over $170 million from investors like Better Tomorrow Ventures, Accel, Insight, and dozens of angels. — In this episode, we discuss: The first and second wave of fintech innovation How the second wave brings financial services inside other software How Unit beat...

Kevin Liu is the Co-founder and CEO of Metronome, which enables software companies to launch, iterate, and scale their business models with billing infrastructure that works at any size and stage. Prior to Metronome, Kevin and his co-founder Scott Woody both sold their respective separate companies to Dropbox. Kevin and Scott started Metronome in 2019, and have since raised over $30 million from i...

Wade Foster is the Co-founder and CEO of Zapier, an automation platform that helps you work faster. Wade and his co-founders Mike and Bryan started the company in 2011, and have always done things a bit differently. From being a startup based in Missouri, working as a remote team since 2011, and raising very little outside capital despite being one of the fastest growing startups in the world. — B...

Gaurab Chakrabarti and Sean Hunt are the Co-founders of Solugen, which replaces petroleum based products with plant-derived substitutes without sacrificing affordability or performance. They met playing poker in college, kickstarted the company with $10k from an MIT pitch competition, and have since scaled the business to over nine-figures in revenue. Solugen has raised over $642 million from inve...

Jonathon Barkl is the Co-founder and CEO of AirGarage, a full-stack parking management company that helps real estate owners increase their income. Jonathon and his co-founders Chelsea and Scott started the company in 2017. They’ve since raised roughly $15 million from investors including Founders Fund, Floodgate, a16z, Abstract, and prior guest of the show Ryan Delk. — Brought to you by Securefra...

Dan Lorenc is the Co-founder and CEO of Chainguard, the best way to secure your open source software. Dan and his co-founders Kim, Matt, and Ville started the company in 2021 after spending a decade working together at Google on all things open source and software security. They’ve since raised $116 million from investors including Spark (led Series B), Sequoia (led Series A), Amplify (led Seed),...

Nichole Wischoff is the founder of Wischoff Ventures, a Pre-Seed and Seed firm that invests up to $1 million in non sexy industries. Nichole closed her first fund in 2021, and previously was an early employee at Blend (NYSE:BLND), One (acquired by Walmart in 2022), and Built. — Brought to you by Secureframe , the automated compliance platform built by compliance experts. Sign-up here:  https://bit...

Waseem Daher is the Co-founder and CEO of Pilot, the bookkeeping, CFO, and tax provider for startups and fast growing businesses. Prior to Pilot, Waseem and his co-founders Jeff and Jessica sold companies to Oracle and Dropbox. — Waseem, Jeff, and Jessica started Pilot in 2017, and have since raised over $160 million from investors like Index Ventures, Stripe, Sequoia, Whale Rock, Jeff Bezos, and...

Vlad Magdalin is the Co-founder and CEO of Webflow, software that empowers designers to build websites without code. Vlad started the company with his co-founders Sergie Magdalin and Bryant Chou in 2013, and has since raised roughly $335 million supported by investors like Accel, Khosla Ventures, YCombinator, Capital G, and Eric Bahn. — — — — Brought to you by Mercury , the bank built for startups...

Keith is the Co-founder and CEO of OpenStore, a portfolio of brands building its own shopping destination. Before starting OpenStore, Keith was an early executive at companies like PayPal, eBay, LinkedIn, and Square, a co-founder of OpenDoor, and an early investor in companies like DoorDash, Faire, Affirm, Webflow, Ramp, and Stripe, and is also currently a General Partner at Founders Fund Keith st...

Natasha Vernier is the Co-founder and CEO of Cable, the all-in-one effectiveness testing platform for financial services. Prior to Cable, Natasha joined UK neobank Monzo when it had less than 100 customers. She built and led their financial crime team for five years, and is one of the most knowledgeable individuals in the world on financial crime, which amounts to over $4 trillion per year, or 4%...

Alex Bouaziz is the Co-founder and CEO of Deel, a full stack global HR and payroll platform. But the company didn’t start that way, and we’ll talk through Alex and his co-founder Shuo’s journey from zero to one, starting with a product that helped startups hire international employees. Alex and Shuo launched the company one week before YC Demo day in 2019, and have since scaled to 20,000+ customer...

Semil Shah is the Founder of Haystack, an institutional venture capital firm that backs outlier founders at the earliest stages. Semil started Haystack in 2013, and has since invested in X unicorns like DoorDash, Instacart, Figma, HashiCorp, Ironclad, Carta, Applied Intuition, and Opendoor. This episode takes us behind the scenes of Semil’s two decade journey building Haystack from scratch. We’ll...

Sean Frank is the CEO of Ridge Wallet, a men’s wallet and accessories brand that does over 9-figures in annual revenue. The company started in 2012 and raised $266,000 in a Kickstarter campaign to sell the first 5,200 wallets. Ridge hasn’t raised a single dollar of outside capital since, and has also expanded into new categories like rings, knives, watches, backpacks, and keys, with dozens of more...

Dimitri Dadiomov is the Co-founder and CEO of Modern Treasury, an operating system for the new era of payments. Dimitri and his co-founders Matt and Sam started the company in 2018 after running into the same problem working together at their previous startup. Modern Treasury has since raised over $183 million, supported by investors like YCombinator, Benchmark, Altimeter, Salesforce Ventures, Qui...

Kendall Baker currently leads Yahoo’s sports newsletter business. In 2017 he launched the first daily sports newsletter called Sports Internet, which he sold to Axios in 2019. Before Sports Internet, he convinced the founders of The Hustle to focus their online tech blog on a daily newsletter, which he wrote for a year and a half. And before The Hustle, he produced SportsCenter at ESPN. He’s spent...

Dan Porter is the Co-founder and CEO of Overtime, a sports network for the next generation of fans. OT reaches 85 million fans per month and runs a basketball league (Overtime Elite, OTE), a flag football league (OT7), and is launching a boxing league (OTX) the week this episode airs. Dan started Overtime with his co-founder Zack Weiner in 2016, and has since raised over $215 million. OT is suppor...

Nick Saltarelli is the Co-founder of Mid-Day Squares, a healthy, functional chocolate bar. Nick, his wife Lezlie, and her brother Jake started the company in 2018 from their kitchen in Montreal, and have since built their own factory with $70 million in capacity, and grown the company to a $26 million revenue run rate. Brought to you by Secureframe, the automated compliance platform built by compl...

Ilir Sela is the Founder & CEO of Slice, the online ordering and all-in-one software platform that helps pizzeria’s manage their business. Ilir started the company in 2010 as MyPizza, rebranded to Slice in 2015, and has since raised over $125 million and supports over 20,000 independent pizza shops. Slice is supported by investors like GGV, KKR, 01 Advisors, Primary Ventures, FJ Labs, and RiverPar...

Adrian Aoun is the Founder and CEO of Forward Health, which is rebuilding healthcare as a product, not a service. Forward is supported by investors like Founders Fund, Khosla Ventures, Softbank, Expa, Marc Beinoff, Ashton Kutcher, The Weeknd, Lee Linden, Josh Kushner, First Round Capital, Eric Schmidt, DCVC, and more, Before starting Forward, Adrian worked with Larry Page at Google to setup and la...

Immad Akhund is the Co-founder and CEO of Mercury, a digitally native bank for startups. Mercury is supported by investors like a16z, Coatue, CRV, Chapter One, Ryan Peterson, Scott Belsky, Serena Williams, Terrence Rohan, Zach Coelius, Todd Goldberg, and more. Before Mercury, Immad was a part-time partner at YC, co-founded Heyzap which sold for $45 million, and co-founded and scaled Clickpass to m...

Ryan Delk is the Co-Founder and CEO of Primer, a startup helping ambitious kids unlock their potential by empowering teachers to launch and run their own micro-schools. Primer’s supported by investors like Founders Fund, Khosla Ventures, Village Global, Susa Ventures, Sam Altman, Naval, Ryan Peterson, Amjad Masad, Julie Zhuo, Tobias Lutke, Lachy Groom, Howie Liu, Dylan Field, Packy McCormick, and...

Ken Ehrman is the co-founder and Managing Partner of Halo Collar, a smart dog collar that tracks your dog with GPS. Halo Collar uses patented technology that allows customers to instantly create up to 20 unique virtual dog fences from their phone using GPS. Brought to you by Secureframe , the automated compliance platform built by compliance experts: https://secureframe.com/request-demo-4?utm_sour...

Jonathan Neman is Co-Founder & CEO of Sweetgreen, an American fast casual restaurant chain that serves salads. Jonathan and his co-founders started the company in 2007, opening their first restaurant just three months out of college. Sweetgreen opened its second and third locations in the middle of the 2008 Global Financial Crisis, and went public in 2021 in the middle of the COVID-19 pandemic. Sw...