Founder Chats

About Bijan Moallemi:A graduate of UCSD, Bijan Moallemi has nearly a decade of experience building and leading finance functions at companies like Qualcomm and Palantir. He knew CFOs deserved access to better tools, so he co-founded Mosaic Finance to build the next generation of finance software for CFOs and their teams. Today, Mosaic has achieved a 3.5x increase in customer base, raised $18.5 million in funding with investors like General Catalyst and Founders Fund, and is deployed by the fastest-growing technology companies worldwide.About Mosaic Finance:Mosaic is a compass for business leaders, providing a real-time Analytics and Planning platform that helps teams get from data to decision — faster. Historically finance teams have spent the majority of their efforts in reactive mode, wrangling data to unlock basic facts about the past. A Strategic Finance Platform like Mosaic breaks that cycle by integrating data, automating analytics, and connecting teams so they can focus on the future.Show Notes:01:00 s

About Will Peng:Will Peng is the CEO and Co-Founder of Northstar, a financial wellness and benefits platform. Prior to founding Northstar, Will worked in Venture Capital and his firm was an early investor in Coinbase, Guideline, Even, and Oscar. Inspired by the positive change fintech can have on people’s lives, Will set out to solve the inequality of financial guidance.About Northstar:Northstar’s financial wellness program helps employees make the most of their total compensation, and helps companies support their teams at scale through onboarding, open enrollment, equity events, and more. Northstar has raised more than $10M from investors including M13, Foundation Capital, Workday Ventures, and Parade Ventures. Our employer customers include Zoom, Snap, NerdWallet, Superhuman, Virgin Orbit, and more.Show Notes:1:30 Will Peng’s entrepreneurial journey9:00 starting a career as a VC analyst14:30 demonstrating proactivity when looking to switch careers26:00 finding the right career direction through intuition a

About Jon Penland:With 6+ years of experience working remotely in the technology space, and 10+ years working with customer-facing teams across multiple industries, Jon stepped into the role of Chief Operating Officer at Kinsta, where his responsibilities include hiring and onboarding as Kinsta has grown from a team of 4 to a team of more than 250 worldwide. While he didn't write his first line of HTML until he was 25 years old, within 3 years Jon was working full-time in technology, first as a freelance writer for technical websites and eventually as a Support Engineer at Kinsta. From there, he moved into management roles, initially as Chief Customer Officer and now as the COO. When he's not driving company-wide strategy and finding ways to help our distributed team stay connected, Jon can be found in rural Georgia with his wife and five kids. You can find him at @jonrichpen on Twitter.About Kinsta:Kinsta is a premium managed WordPress hosting provider that makes running your site simple. Our services are po

About Douwe Mann:Born and raised in the Netherlands, Douwe Maan was introduced to computers early by his father, and picked up programming at the age of nine. While studying at Utrecht University, Douwe co-founded a SaaS startup that grew to $150k in ARR, which led to him joining GitLab in 2015 as employee number 10 after landing the parents of its CEO as customers. After graduating summa cum laude with a bachelor's degree in Computer Science, Douwe spent six months traveling the world, visiting and working with 49 colleagues in 14 countries on 5 continents. In early 2020, Douwe took over as the General Manager of GitLab's internal Meltano project, which quickly gained traction and spun out of GitLab in early 2021 to become an independent startup under Douwe's leadership. Douwe currently lives in Mexico City with his wife, who he met while traveling the world, and their two cats.About Meltano:Meltano is an open source data operations platform that supports data integration connectors for over 300 sources and

About Bryan Clayton:Bryan is CEO and co-founder of GreenPal, an online marketplace that connects homeowners with local lawn care professionals. GreenPal has been called the “Uber for lawn care” by Entrepreneur magazine and has over 200,000 active users completing thousands of transactions per day. Before starting GreenPal, Bryan Clayton founded Peachtree Inc. which had a $10 million annual revenue before it was acquired by Lusa holdings in 2013. In 2020 GreenPal generated $20 million in annual revenue.About GreenPal:GreenPal is an online marketplace connecting homeowners with lawn mowing professionals that want their business. Get 5 bids in minutes, pick the pro you want, and schedule and pay all online or with the mobile app. Founded by landscaping professionals to make the lawn care industry easier and more efficient for homeowners and vendors. Show Notes:01:15 Growing a high school job into a highly successful medium-size business5:45 Hiring the right number of employees6:30 Developing methods to minimize

About Aran:Aran Khanna has been labeled many things. Thought leader. Innovator. And (at times) troublemaker. Now, in his search to give technological control back to developers and business leaders, he’s added cloud management entrepreneur to that list as the Co-Founder & CEO of Archera, a company that helps organizations find cloud solutions that fit their companies. About Archera:Archera uses machine learning to help organizations automate & de-risk their cloud strategies. The company's goal is to put control back into the hands of developers and business leaders so they can use the resources they need when they need them, without hemorrhaging time and money. Founder Chats listeners get a free demo of Archera. Claim your perk.  

Show Notes:00:46 Starting your first business03:30 As a company, how do you provide value to your employees? Is offering high commissions sustainable?06:30 Losing a business isn’t the end of the world, there’s no shame in taking a job while you regroup09:20 Outsourcing labor in the days before Upwork etc11:25 Getting the mojo back: starting a second business after the first one failed13:30 Discovering a market for listing online businesses14:55 Collaborative team sales vs. individual sales - sharing sales commissions across the whole team16:00 How do you incentivize your team to act in the best interest of your company?18:35 Using equity and open strategy meetings to encourage all employees to work towards your company’s long-term success28:45 How to effectively implement sales goals: top down vs. bottom up approach32:20 Forecasting problems of the future to discover a new market niche34:00 Know what kind of entrepreneur you are and build a team with complementary skill sets and interests36:00 Challenges of w

About Matija Kovač:Matija Kovač is the co-founder and head of development at Taia Translations, a company that bridges the gap between language barriers with the help of Artificial Intelligence and machine learning.About Taia Translations:Taia Translations is a modern translation platform, where we help companies translate their documents, websites, and other content with AI-assisted, human-perfected translations. If advanced neural machine translation is good enough, you can get your files translated, with formatting intact, in just a few seconds. But when you need a professional touch, you can order from a range of services, right inside the app.

About Reed-McGinley-Stempel:Reed is the Co-Founder and CEO of Stytch, a platform for passwordless authentication that makes it simple for apps and websites to retire the password.Before founding Stytch, Reed joined Plaid as one of their first 100 employees. He remained with them until they grew to a $5B+ valuation.With a selection of new products about to hit the market, Stytch is prepped to spearhead the transition to a passwordless future.About Stytch:Stytch improves security and user experience with passwordless authentication. Stytch is building the developer platform for authentication to enable teams to easily build experiences that delight their users. 

About Benn Stancil: Benn Stancil is co­founder and Chief Analyst at Mode Analytics, a company building collaborative tools for data scientists and analysts. Benn is responsible for overseeing Mode's internal analytics efforts, and is also an active contributor to the data science community. In addition, Benn provides strategic oversight and guidance to Mode's product direction as a member of the product leadership team.To stay up to date with Benn's writing on the modern data experience, check out his substack. About Mode: Mode helps businesses grow faster by speeding up answers to complex business problems and making the process more collaborative, so that everyone can build on the work of data analysts.  The Mode platform combines the best elements of Business Intelligence (ABI), Data Science (DS) and Machine Learning (ML) to empower data teams to answer impactful questions and collaborate on analysis across a range of business functions. In 2021, Mode has added a number of premiere enterprise companies to

About Mike Potter: Mike Potter is the co-founder and CEO of Rewind, the leading data backup and recovery provider for cloud and SaaS data. While studying Mechanical Engineering at McMaster University, Mike began his start-up career as the founder of InTheHack.com, one of the most popular sporting websites in Canada. Since founding Rewind in 2015, Mike has focused on building a company culture that values and respects employees. When Mike isn’t running backups, he can usually be found assembling LEGOs with his kids or walking his dogs.About Rewind: Since 2015, Rewind has been on a mission to help businesses protect their SaaS and cloud data. Today, over 100,000 customers in more than 100 countries use Rewind’s top-reviewed apps and support to ensure their software-as-a-service applications run uninterrupted. The Rewind platform enables companies to back up, restore, and copy the critical data that drives their business.About Baremetrics: Baremetrics provides real-time subscription metrics for teams built with

About Jeff Solomon:Jeff is a 6x founder and has been in the startup scene for most of his career. He has done just about every role from CEO to Chief Janitor, Head of Product to Marketing Lead.He has deep expertise in Saas, Content Marketing, SEO, Mobile Apps, Startup Accelerators, Lead Generation, UX, Angel & Seed Funding, B2B Software, Enterprise Sales and Bootstrapping. And he's been writing content on these topics for most of his career.Jeff co-founded Amplify, Startup Accelerator (5 funds, $50MM raised, 10x exits) and Velocify (sold in 2017 for $128MM). He has raised $35MM+ in venture capital. And he's had one startup fail miserably. He's angel invested in a dozen companies. Moreover, Jeff has seen over 3,000 startups apply to Amplify and been pitched by hundreds of entrepreneurs. And he's helped raise more than $50MM in venture funding for his companies.Jeff is currently growing Markup Hero, a screenshot & annotation SaaS tool and has been teaching high school entrepreneurship for 6 years. He re

About Jeroen Corthout:Jeroen is the co-founder and CEO of Salesflare, a simply powerful CRM that automates data to build better relationships and make more sales. It's a fast, visual and easy-to-use sales machine. Salesflare is the most popular CRM ever on both Product Hunt and AppSumo. It also got featured on TechCrunch and Entrepreneur.com. Prior to Salesflare, Jeroen was helping companies to implement their new CRM, marketing and sales.About Salesflare:Salesflare is the intelligent CRM startups and small businesses love to use. It's a zero-input sales pipeline tool that thinks and works for its user, not the other way around. No more manual data entry. Salesflare fills out your address book and keeps track of all interactions with the people you're in contact with. It takes data from social media, company databases, phone, email, calendar and hands it to you in automated customer timelines that tell you everything you need to know. Jeroen's LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/jeroencorthout/https://sales

About André Monteiro:André is the co-founder and CTO of Verb Energy.  He's a NY-based entrepreneur that leads the tech team at Verb Energy, one of the fastest growing food and beverage brands in the country. André and his team have built a suite of internal tools like a CRM and workflow orchestrator that enable their team to personalize and manage an SMS-based customer journey at scale. About Verb Energy:At Verb, our mission is to energize all humans everywhere. We believe there is nothing more powerful than human energy, and that when a person feels their best, they can do amazing things. We started Verb to make people feel incredible by delivering energy in a healthy, convenient, and delightful way, and now we are one of the fastest growing food and beverage brands in the country. We make delicious energy products that we sell uniquely through text message and online. www.verbenergy.cowww. baremetrics.com www.baremetrics.com/founder-chats

About Rand Fishkin: Rand Fishkin is cofounder and CEO of audience research software startup, SparkToro. He’s dedicated his professional life to helping people do better marketing through his writing, videos, speaking, and his book, Lost and Founder. When Rand’s not working, he’s usually cooking a fancy meal for the love of his life, author Geraldine DeRuiter. If you bribe him with great pasta or remarkable cocktails, he’ll happily pull back the curtain on big tech’s dark secrets. About SparkToro:SparkToro® is a software company founded by Casey Henry & Rand Fishkin. We believe high quality market research and audience intelligence should be available to everyone, not just tech giants and those with huge budgets. Learn more about audience intelligence, marketing, and the future of work at the SparkToro Blog:  https://sparktoro.com/www. baremetrics.com www.baremetrics.com/founder-chats

In this episode, we talk about Spencer's start in investment banking, his decision to leave banking & start a SaaS, and how he pivoted multiple times to find product market fit.

About Craig Hewitt: Craig is the founder of Castos, where he leads of team of 15 extremely talented individuals that are crafting the best podcasting platform in the industry. He's a husband to an amazing wife, and father to two incredible children. About Castos:Castos is a full-service podcast hosting, distribution, and analytics platform, with an industry-leading production service built right in. In our platform, you can easily create, promote, and distribute your podcast and grow your audience. Learn more about starting and growing a podcast at the Castos Blog:  https://castos.com/blog/www.castos.comwww.baremetrics.comwww.baremetrics.com/founder-chats

About Marc Brown:Marc Brown is the founder of Byta. Marc got his start in music at murderecords, Canada’s premier artist-owned label during the mid 90s. After working in A&R at the legendary London indie Creation Records, then at Alan McGee’s Poptones, Marc started his own boutique UK radio promotion company off the back of his success with The Hives. For over 10 years Marc worked with an impressive list of indie rock luminaries including Wilco, Bloc Party, Conor Oberst/Bright Eyes, Spoon and Refused as well as legends such as Tom Waits, Yoko Ono, Booker T and Mavis Staples. About Byta: Byta enables sending and receiving of digital audio in a clean, simple and secure way. Built for everyone working with music today, Byta is inspired by Marc's time spent as a radio plugger based in London, UK in the early 00's.Links to articles mentioned by Marc during the interview:Decentralized tension- https://byta.com/blog/viznomics/music-is-different-decentralised-tension/Here to there - https://byta.com/blog/viznomic

ABOUT PETER SCHOENKE:Peter Schoenke is the co-founder and President of RotoWire.com, a leading content and technology provider to fantasy sports consumers and media companies including ESPN, Yahoo! Sports, NFL.com, FanDuel, DraftKings and Sirius XM Radio. Mr. Schoenke is also a board member of the Fantasy Sports & Gaming Association, where he heads up lobbying and government affairs and served more than a decade as Chairman. Mr. Schoenke has led the FSGA's efforts to fully legalize fantasy sports in all 50 states which has resulted in the passage of 25 state laws since 2012. He has testified in Congress and 10 state legislatures in support of fantasy sports and sports betting legislation. In 2011, Mr. Schoenke was elected to the hall of fame for both the Fantasy Sports Trade Association and Fantasy Sports Writers Association for his contribution to the growth of the industry. ABOUT ROTOWIRE:RotoWire is a leading content and technology provider to fantasy sports consumers and media companies including ESPN

ABOUT SANTI:Santi Bibiloni is a Silicon Valley-based technology entrepreneur and co-founder & CEO at COR, an AI Management Software that serves Worldwide top Agencies and Consultants. Prior to COR he founded Balloon Group, one of Argentina’s fastest-growing digital agencies, among other businesses. Today he also mentors on Sales & Fundraising in 500 Startups. ABOUT COR:COR is the Next-Generation Solution for Creative and Professional Teams that Intelligently Suggests How to Manage your Projects, Teams, and Finances, all in one tool. ABOUT BAREMETRICS: Baremetrics is the all-in-one metrics, forecasting, analytics, insights and engagement tool for teams using Stripe, Braintree, Chargify, Recurly and more.  ABOUT FOUNDER CHATS:Founder Chats is a podcast about starting and growing tech companies, as told candidly by the founders behind them.