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Tarun Raisoni is one of the rare “tier zero” founders who has not only built, scaled, and financed world-class businesses but also navigated them through full-cycle acquisition exits. Not once, but twice. He carries an aura not just of success, but of sustained, repeatable excellence. And now, Tarun is back at it again, this time taking on the enterprise AI challenge with his newest venture, Gruve. In this engrossing interview, he talks about building a team and a culture around them to get them excited about the future he envisioned. Listen to the full podcast episode and review the transcript here. *FREE * The Ultimate Guide To Pitch Decks Early Roots: From Small-Town India to Silicon Valley Tarun’s story begins in the U.S., but his formative years were spent in India, growing up in a close-knit, family-centered environment focused on learning. Like many in India at the time, he faced the societal push toward engineering or medicine. Embracing his family’s engineering legacy, Tarun earned a degree in chemical engineering. He later transitioned to electrical engineering at the peak of the dot-com boom. This education would be beneficial in his career journey as he progressed. Arriving in 1999, Tarun quickly realized the power of technology and shifted his focus at USC to pursue a master’s degree in electrical engineering. That pivot led him to Cisco Systems, then the world’s largest networking company, where he spent a decade learning about culture, enterprise systems, sales, and scaling. “Cisco was like an industry of 200 companies. It was foundational for how I learned to think about growth and systems.” Tarun started as a software engineer, but transitioned into pre-sales systems engineering and then into sales. Next, Emerson came along, offering him a role in the data center business, where he would manage some of their hyperscale or Web 2.0 customers in the Bay Area. Enter Rahi Systems: Bootstrapping a Global Infrastructure Play While at Emerson, working with tech giants like Google, Facebook, Yahoo, Microsoft, and Amazon, a client casually mentioned an unmet need in the data center space. That lunch turned into a lightbulb moment and the genesis of Rahi Systems. Rahi was designed to enable global enterprise clients to deploy a consistent, scalable data center infrastructure across multiple countries. This was 2012 when cloud computing was just emerging. As Tarun recalls, Google Cloud did not exist in its entirety at the time. He recognized that it was the opportune time to kick off the idea. Despite challenges, Rahi, the data center builder, grew rapidly without raising a dime of outside capital. “We bootstrapped it. Not because we didn’t want capital, but because no one wanted to fund us early. Once we hit 40% to 50% YoY growth, we never looked back,” Tarun reveals. The Importance of Culture and People Culture and people were the pillars of Rahi’s success. As Tarun sees it, people are the most critical asset in hyper-growth technology companies or companies that service technology companies. People are on the team as partners and customers. Business is about people and how you bring them together. Rahi started with seven or eight people in its first year. Over the next ten years, it eventually grew to 1,200 employees globally. Tarun opines that culture is the most important fabric that brings people together. The values of a company’s culture should be designed in a way that helps resolve conflicts typically arising between individuals. At Rahi, they aligned the values of prioritizing their work with delivering to their customers, and then conducting all internal prioritization of the work. Culture flows from top down, Tarun strongly believes. The leadership must embody and demonstrate the values of the culture. Only then will the entire organization embrace it. Empowerment goes bottom up. Empower the team at the bottom tier, at the most individual contributor level, and then that extends to the top. Tarun is all about getting the team excited about the execution and pushing toward the future. See How I Can Help You With Your Fundraising Or Acquisition Efforts Fundraising or Acquisition Process: get guidance from A to Z. Materials: our team creates epic pitch decks and financial models. Investor and Buyer Access: connect with the right investors or buyers for your business and close them. Book a Call In Parallel: Building ZPE Systems While scaling Rahi, Tarun co-founded ZPE Systems, this time focused on software automation in data centers. Born from conversations with brilliant engineers at Emerson, ZPE developed software-defined infrastructure tools, scaling globally once again. And again, bootstrapped. Tarun recalls how he drew on his experience and background with data centers. He was excited to write the first few checks to the initiative and take it to market. He found the right co-founders to execute and scale ZPE. As Tarun says, “The good part was it gave us a lot of exposure into how to build some world-class software for our companies.” Both ventures ultimately culminated in major exits: Rahi Systems was acquired by Wesco for $270M. ZPE Systems was acquired by Legrand for $295M. “Once you’ve done it twice, people stop calling it luck. But it was always about building platforms that created real value,” Tarun recalls. Looking back at their reasons for the exit, he explains that after reaching a certain scale, they needed a larger platform to service and customers. Tarun also points out that he believes in equity sharing with the team, and after 10 years, a liquidity event was very desirable for them. Scaling and liquidity were the two aspects that prompted the exits. Gruve: The Next Chapter in AI Enablement Tarun could foresee that data centers would require a significant amount of power and energy, and he began to consider how to achieve this in a sustainable, scalable, and cost-efficient manner. His first solution was to build a renewable energy company that could scale and the energy demands of all aspects of electrification and digitization worldwide. Then, ChatGPT happened. Rather than retire, Tarun spotted another seismic wave: enterprise AI. He took four months off to study renewable energy, sustainability, and AI trends at Stanford and envisioned a future where every company becomes an AI-driven company. Tarun realized that enterprises will want to adopt AI over the next five to 10 years. Every company is a data company. Every company is a technology company. Every company will be an AI company. However, to become that AI company, enterprises will need considerable assistance. Enterprises are very good at what they do, but they often need a lot of help building and leveraging their technology stack. Gruve was born to help enterprises adopt and operationalize AI, not with vague promises but with outcome-based pricing. The Gruve Business Model and Funding Raised Clients only pay when Gruve helps them deliver tangible results. It is an outcome-based model. “This isn’t services for the sake of services. This is technology that drives impact, and we get paid only when it works and we earn their trust,” Tarun says. To deliver this outcome-based model, Gruve has utilized a significant amount of in-house AI to build its technology services. Next, they help customers create the AI technology fabric within their business, designed around the specific outcomes they are looking for. To bring Gruve to life, Tarun raised funding, partnering with Mayfield and Cisco Investments, and chose other investors who could offer more than just capital: mentorship, networks, and deep enterprise understanding. These aspects are significantly more valuable than just capital. Storytelling is everything that Tarun Raisoni was able to master. The key is being able to capture the essence of what you are doing in 15 to 20 slides. For a winning deck, take a look at the pitch deck template created by Silicon Valley legend, Peter Thiel (see it here), where the most critical slides are highlighted. to unlock the pitch deck template that founders worldwide are using to raise millions below. Access The Pitch Deck Template Unlock the pitch deck template used by founders to raise millions. Just enter your email below. Your email address is 100% safe from spam! The Future of AI, According to Raisoni Tarun believes we are at a 1999-equivalent moment for AI. The tools are early, adoption is choppy, and failures are inevitable, but the transformation is irreversible. AI is poised to get democratized across the board through software, hardware, models, and business use cases. As AI becomes increasingly democratized, its impact will become more pervasive. Tarun points out that we are in the same cycle today with AI, where 75% to 80% of AI projects transition from pilot to failure. However, they don’t progress to the next phase. All that is set to change. As enterprises undergo the AI growth spurt, they will also realize the elements they need to build around it, such as trust, governance, guardrails, and data safeguarding. Gruve is ready to help these requirements. It is poised to help them through that journey with top talent. Tarun foresees exceptional triple-digit growth within the business today, thanks to its robust foundation. He hopes Gruve will be able to showcase tremendous outcomes to its customers, who will be significantly more advantaged in their industry. Tarun wants Gruve to be that differentiator. Final Advice: Be Bold, Take Risks Reflecting on his journey, Tarun shared one piece of advice he’d give his younger self: “Be more bold. Take more risks. And never have regrets.” From small-town India to Silicon Valley exits, and now building in the AI frontier, Tarun Raisoni exemplifies what it means to bet on your instincts, build for the long term, and continue innovating, even after the big wins. Stay tuned. Gruve might just be his boldest chapter yet. Listen to the full podcast episode to know more, including: Bootstrapping isn’t a limitation, it can be a launchpad. Rahi and ZPE scaled globally before raising a dollar. People and culture are the true scale enablers. Leadership must live the culture for it to cascade. Exits should serve both vision and team. Liquidity is not just about founders; it’s about rewarding long-time team . Spotting trends early is a competitive advantage. Whether cloud, data centers, or AI, timing and insight matter. Outcome-based pricing is the future of enterprise tech services. Performance must justify spend in the age of ROI ability. Strategic investors bring more than capital. The right partners offer domain expertise, credibility, and access, thus multiplying a startup’s execution potential far beyond just financial . Founders don’t retire — they retool. After two major exits, Tarun chose to study, reflect, and re-enter the arena with a sharper lens and bolder vision, proving that ion, not profit, drives the best entrepreneurs. SUBSCRIBE ON: iTunesGoogle PlayStitcherTuneInRSSSoundCloudSpotify For a winning deck, see the commentary on a pitch deck from an Uber competitor that has raised over $400M (see it here).  *FREE * The Ultimate Guide To Pitch Decks to unlock for free the pitch deck template that founders worldwide are using to raise millions below. Access The Pitch Deck Template Unlock the pitch deck template used by founders to raise millions. Just enter your email below. Your email address is 100% safe from spam!

Teddy Solomon has demonstrated that in the startup world, the best entrepreneurs aren’t just born, they are forged through unexpected challenges, relentless creativity, and the courage to take leaps when the stakes are highest. Teddy is the co-founder of Fizz, the fast-growing, community-driven social app that has secured funding from top-tier investors like Green Sands Equity, VSC Ventures, Arc180, and Owl Ventures. In this episode, you will learn: Fizz was built to capture the 99% of life that Instagram and TikTok miss, creating a real, meaningful community. Teddy’s background in competitive sports taught him grit, focus, and the art of perseverance–lessons he now applies to building Fizz. Staying even-keeled through highs and lows is critical. “Death” is the only true failure for a startup. Fizz’s impressive $41M fundraising success stemmed from strong metrics, authentic leadership, and financial discipline. Teddy believes NYC, not the Bay Area, is the best place today for building high-energy, consumer-first companies. The next phase connects campuses and communities nationwide, with privacy, relevance, and shared experiences at the core. Fizz’s focus isn’t just scale. It’s about transforming how Gen Z builds relationships in a digital-first world.   SUBSCRIBE ON: iTunesGoogle PlayStitcherTuneInRSSSoundCloudSpotify For a winning deck, see the commentary on a pitch deck from an Uber competitor that has raised over $400M (see it here).  *FREE * The Ultimate Guide To Pitch Decks to unlock for free the pitch deck template that founders worldwide are using to raise millions below. Access The Pitch Deck Template Unlock the pitch deck template used by founders to raise millions. Just enter your email below. Your email address is 100% safe from spam! About Teddy Solomon: Teddy Solomon is the Co-Founder and CEO of Fizz an anonymous posting app that is transforming the way college communities connect, engage and sell online. See How I Can Help You With Your Fundraising Or Acquisition Efforts Fundraising or Acquisition Process: get guidance from A to Z. Materials: our team creates epic pitch decks and financial models. Investor and Buyer Access: connect with the right investors or buyers for your business and close them. Book a Call Connect with Teddy Solomon: LinkedIn Crunchbase TheOrg Out Read the Full Transcription of the Interview: Alejandro Cremades: All righty, hello everyone, and welcome to the DealMaker Show. Today, we’re going to have a truly amazing founder ing us. We’re going to talk about the building, the scaling, the financing, all of the above. I think that his story is quite impressive. Alejandro Cremades: Very inspiring, you know, journey too. You know, starting with sports at a very competitive level, you know, early on in his life. But again, brace yourself for impact because it’s going to be quite the conversation. And without further ado, let’s welcome our guest today, Teddy Solomon. Welcome to the show. Alejandro Cremades: So, born and raised in San Francisco — give us a walk down memory lane. How was life growing up for you? Teddy Solomon: Yeah, it was interesting growing up in the middle of a relatively big city — quite different from most people’s experiences. But I had a relatively traditional upbringing, at least within the context of being born and raised in San Francisco. Teddy Solomon: Growing up, I had a couple of key ions. I was never that much of a school guy. I was always kind of working on my own projects and doing things outside of the classroom. When I was really young, I got into ping pong — or table tennis. When I was nine years old, I went to this rec center near my house and met a guy named Lam. He was 85 years old, spoke no English, and taught me how to play ping pong at the age of nine. Teddy Solomon: Over the course of the next decade, I ended up becoming a competitive table tennis player. I played in the Olympic trials in 2020 — lost miserably — but still had the opportunity to really play at a high level, which was a great time. Teddy Solomon: Other than that, I was really into college basketball from the age of three. It was sort of my life’s ion. I wanted to be a college basketball journalist. Growing up in San Francisco, I went to elementary school two blocks away from the University of San Francisco and eventually had the opportunity to build my own media outlet in high school and travel all around the country covering college basketball. That was my long-term dream. Teddy Solomon: And to this day, it’s still one of my great ions and hobbies. You know, with it being April now, I no longer have any hobbies — just trying to get along now that March Madness is over. Alejandro Cremades: So entering Stanford was quite a pivotal experience for you, even though it didn’t obtain the desirable outcome because you didn’t really go all the way. But give us a sense of what happened there. You entered Stanford, and then all types of things happened that really pushed you into the venture world. Teddy Solomon: Yeah, I 100% did not expect to end up where I am right now. Back in 2020, I arrived at college during a really weird time. My senior year of high school was when the pandemic hit. Teddy Solomon: March of 2020 was my senior year of high school. Then in September 2020, when college was supposed to start, we were really in the core of the lockdowns and the COVID pandemic. Teddy Solomon: Stanford told us we couldn’t come to campus. Teddy Solomon: That was crushing for me, as somebody who really loved the concept of the college experience. Through my journeys covering college basketball, I knew I wanted that experience — to meet my classmates and not just live at home. I love people; I think people are interesting. Teddy Solomon: So, back in August 2020, I got onto a Zoom call with about 100 people who, like me, didn’t want to live at home. They wanted to experience something akin to college, even though we couldn’t come to campus because of the pandemic. Teddy Solomon: I got put into a breakout room on this Zoom call with a guy named Ashton. He was in Columbus, Ohio; I was in San Francisco. I said to him, “Ashton, I’ve got this idea: a bunch of Stanford freshmen going and living in Scottsdale, Arizona.” Teddy Solomon: It was 116 degrees, it was super cheap at the time, and we knew we couldn’t afford to live in the Bay Area on our own. Ashton was on board. So we went and convinced about 25 Stanford freshmen to move with us to Scottsdale, Arizona. Teddy Solomon: That led me on a pretty unbelievable journey over the next few years — which ties into your question about why I didn’t stay at Stanford that long. Teddy Solomon: I initially wanted to be a college basketball journalist. Like I said, from the age of three, that was my calling. But when I arrived in Arizona and looked around, I saw that people were on Instagram — where they post twice a year, just highlights. It’s not a place where people talk about anything real in their life. It’s entertainment. Teddy Solomon: Zuck is in court right now saying it’s entertainment and not social media. There was a giant group chat, but maybe three people would speak, because growing up on social media, you’re expected to present the most perfect version of yourself. If you can’t do that, you don’t say anything at all. Teddy Solomon: So we said, there has to be another way. There has to be some way to bring community together in an authentic way — to encom the 99% of things that don’t make it onto Instagram and TikTok. Teddy Solomon: And that’s what eventually led me on the journey — which we’ll talk about — that led to me dropping out. Alejandro Cremades: Let’s talk about dropping out, because here you are at one of the top universities in the world. Dropping out of it is quite the decision. Alejandro Cremades: And I know that came out of a frat party, of all places. Walk us through the sequence of events there. Teddy Solomon: Yeah, where I just left off — we saw the problem with social media and knew there had to be a solution. We wanted to connect with our peers at Stanford. So we spent our freshman year building what we called Fizz — this private, verified community. You with your .edu email. Once you’re in, you can post images, polls, videos, GIFs, links, DM people, buy and sell — the whole nine yards. It’s the one-stop shop for campus life. Teddy Solomon: We always believed there had to be a way to build communities around shared experience, context, and identity — and school was the logical starting point. Teddy Solomon: So we spent our freshman year jumping around the country — living in Michigan, Tennessee, Florida, Arizona — all while building the app. Teddy Solomon: Fast forward to the summer of 2021: at 6:00 a.m., a bunch of friends and I walked around Stanford’s campus and threw flyers under people’s doors. Teddy Solomon: The app, Fizz, which we had been building for the last eight months, exploded on campus. By dinner time, the majority of the school was on it. It was outrageous. Teddy Solomon: And we — people who didn’t expect to end up in startups — were like, “What do we do about this?” Teddy Solomon: Within two or three days, we had every single VC in Silicon Valley in our email inbox. We were like, “What is going on right now? I want to cover college basketball — that’s my dream.” It was wild. Teddy Solomon: We decided not to take money in that moment. But when we came back to school in fall of 2021, I went to a frat party — the infamous frat party you’re referencing. Teddy Solomon: I showed up, gave my phone number to some people, and met a girl named Hila. Teddy Solomon: She texted me at 3:00 a.m. and said, “You need to meet my dad. He’s a serial entrepreneur and is really interested in what you guys are doing.” Me and my co-founder, Ashton, were really intrigued. Teddy Solomon: We had always thought: the reason we’re not dropping out is because we don’t have mentorship. We never wanted to be in the startup world — we just loved our product and solving the problem. Teddy Solomon: So I went and met Rakesh, her dad. After a many-hour conversation, he basically said to us: “I’ll put $750,000 into the company and come on as the initial CEO. All you have to do is drop out of school.” Teddy Solomon: Me and Ashton went back, grabbed a whiteboard, wrote out some pros and cons, and really quickly decided: “All right, we’re leaving.” Teddy Solomon: We dropped out of Stanford. No regrets. The rest is history. It’s been an incredible journey — I wouldn’t trade it for the world. Alejandro Cremades: Wow. So, what ended up becoming Fizz? Tell us — and how do you guys make money too? Teddy Solomon: Totally. So, Fizz is a community platform where Gen Z can connect around their shared experience, context, and identity. Teddy Solomon: It started with colleges — where people are posting everything from parties, classes, memes, jokes, and confessions — everything about campus life. Teddy Solomon: It has a peer-to-peer marketplace as well, used in place of legacy platforms like eBay or Facebook Marketplace. It’s effectively the one-stop shop for campus life, used by almost every student at Stanford, Dartmouth, Tulane, SMU, Rice, Vanderbilt, Duke — you name it. Teddy Solomon: These students use it to know what’s going on at their school. And again, the reason we built it was to give people a way to express the 99% of their lives that don’t make it onto Instagram and TikTok. Teddy Solomon: In practice, that means 30% of our weekly active s are creating content, and 25 million posts have been made on the platform to date. Teddy Solomon: We’ve democratized content creation and democratized information — where the president of the top fraternity and someone who never leaves their room have access to the same information. It’s all in a centralized feed, hyperlocal, and relevant to each ’s experience. Teddy Solomon: As for making money: we’ve raised over $40 million over the years to fuel product initiatives, growth, and building our team — now based in New York, previously in Palo Alto. Teddy Solomon: But in the past six months, we’ve also been building a new type of ads engine — where s actually like the ads. We work with companies that are synergistic with our base. Teddy Solomon: We’ve worked with companies like Perplexity, Calci, Quizlet, and a Fortune 500 company. Teddy Solomon: Not only have we brought in significant ad revenue, but we’re also able to give back to s — whether it’s a year free of Perplexity Pro, a month free of Quizlet Plus, etc. We’re building out a really cool ads business right now, and we’re really excited. Alejandro Cremades: At what point did you realize: “Hey, we’re onto something here. Dropping out of school wasn’t that stupid after all”? Teddy Solomon: We always had a lot of confidence, but we never knew if it would go the distance. Social media is a space where nobody succeeds — literally nobody since Snap. Teddy Solomon: We thought: “Social media is hard, but let’s give it our all.” Teddy Solomon: I spent a couple of years jumping across hundreds of college campuses — immersing myself in the experience. Not just at Yale and Princeton, but places like Abilene Christian, Eastern Kentucky, and rural schools across the U.S. Teddy Solomon: I think it was in August 2022 when we did our first big run of launches at lots of schools. I told my friends at Stanford: “We don’t have much money in the bank. We need your help to launch at these schools.” Teddy Solomon: We hit Yale, Princeton, Tulane, Rice, SMU, Wake Forest, Elon, Creighton — a bunch of schools all around the U.S. Teddy Solomon: The app just blew up at each school over the course of two weeks. And that’s when I knew: there’s something really special here. Teddy Solomon: Shortly after that, we raised our Series A — and it’s been off to the races ever since. Alejandro Cremades: So tell us about the capital raising experience, too, because, I mean, obviously for first-time founders, it’s not easy when you’re out there knocking on doors to get money. Alejandro Cremades: How was the experience of going through the motions and raising all that cash? Just to get a better sense, how much capital have you guys raised to date? Teddy Solomon: Yeah, so we’ve raised $42 million. We did that in three rounds, back to back to back. Our most recent round was two years ago, and we still have 80% of that in the bank. So we have no interest in raising at the current moment. Teddy Solomon: We raised in the bottom market — we raised in 2022 and 2023. People like to say, well, you know, the best companies came out of that market because it was so challenging to raise. Teddy Solomon: To me, there were a couple of really important things when we went out to raise money. One of them was: the metrics speak for themselves. We have the engagement and retention of the top social platforms that have ever existed. Teddy Solomon: We have the highest D30 retention in the history of social media. That is not easy to attain — and it speaks for itself. But from my standpoint, when I have the opportunity to talk to investors, I’m always going to be genuine about who I am. Teddy Solomon: I’m someone who wanted to be a college basketball journalist. I’m somebody who dropped out at the age of 19 and started building this app at the age of 18. I’m someone who has worn a suit and tie maybe twice in my life. It’s not necessarily the typical person who might go to Wharton and then start a company afterward. Teddy Solomon: I just care a lot about our s and our product. I went to over 200 campuses around the U.S., and I still love immersing myself in that experience. Teddy Solomon: Investors are not used to seeing somebody like me — a college dropout who didn’t want to go into startups or tech — who just loves people and understanding the psychological experience behind why people need a platform like ours and how it changes their lives. Teddy Solomon: The best moments on campuses are when students tell me, “Look, I’m not the most social person. I don’t go out and interact with everybody on campus, but through Fizz, I’ve had the opportunity to interact vicariously with the community at my school.” That’s really special to see. Teddy Solomon: By being authentic, being genuine, staying in touch with our base, and letting the metrics speak for themselves, we were able to raise a lot of money — and we raised it quickly and had really hot rounds when we did. Alejandro Cremades: So talking about hot rounds — how do you run an effective process? What have been the biggest lessons to be effective at raising money? Teddy Solomon: Yeah, I think at the end of the day, any founder has to raise from a position of power. You don’t want to be close to zero. If you’re close to zero, it’s hard to raise money because the question is: why are you close to zero? Teddy Solomon: You need to find people who are going to add value to your company. I’m really happy about the people we have on our cap table. I’m really happy about the people we have on our board. They’re people who add a lot of value every single time I talk to them. Teddy Solomon: They’re ive of my vision for how I want to operate the company and are able to provide expertise. Right now, I’m not 19 anymore, but I’m still 23, and I’m still learning. I’m still trying to understand exactly how to do this well. Teddy Solomon: For founders, it’s super important to put yourself in a position where you’re not close to zero — and never get there. Teddy Solomon: You need to be careful with your cash. It’s not 2020 or 2021 anymore. You need to run a lean operation. You need to be efficient. You need to grow only where you need to grow in of your team. Then you’ll have a great team around you to hit your milestones and get you to the next round. Teddy Solomon: Where we sit right now, every investor in America wants to lead our Series C. I don’t want to raise yet because we raised a $25 million round two years ago — and $18 million of that is still in the bank. Teddy Solomon: We have over three years of runway, and we could be profitable in two weeks if we wanted to pour fuel on the fire for monetization. Teddy Solomon: I might raise in Q4 of this year, and I think it’s likely that I do, but for now we’re heads down. Being heads down is the best — that’s when you grow the product and grow the base the most. Teddy Solomon: So that’s what I’m excited about. Alejandro Cremades: Tell us about the team — how you’ve gone about building the team around you guys. Obviously, coming out of Stanford, there’s quite a network there. But how have you built the team? Teddy Solomon: Yeah, we have a really awesome team of about 25 people. Teddy Solomon: As I mentioned, we moved from Palo Alto about six weeks ago, and all but one person who could move made the decision to move to New York with the company. So we’re all in person here in New York. Teddy Solomon: We have a combination of growth people, engineering people, and operations people. Our VP of Operations worked many decades in supply chain management. He’s been with us for over three years, and he’s really held us able — conserving cash, being operationally sound. He’s been an incredible addition to the team. Teddy Solomon: Our Head of Product is a Stanford GSB grad who spent four years at TikTok heading up creator monetization. He has unbelievable intuition for the product — again, an amazing addition. Teddy Solomon: We just have a lot of really great people — people who care about the mission, who are empathetic toward the s, and a lot of recent college grads too. You need that if you’re going to build for this generation; you have to have that DNA inside the company. Teddy Solomon: I’m definitely on the younger end among the people here. Alejandro Cremades: Now about location — talking about New York — there are probably a lot of people listening and wondering: “Am I in the right place? Should I move? Where should I start my business?” Alejandro Cremades: Why New York? Walk us through that decision. Teddy Solomon: Yeah, I’m a big believer that the Bay Area is dying. I’ll say that straight up. I posted that on LinkedIn; I have no problem notifying the world that’s my belief. Teddy Solomon: And that’s coming from someone who spent 22 years in the Bay Area. I spent my entire life there until I moved to New York six weeks ago. Teddy Solomon: For our company specifically, in New York, we can get closer to our s — but also closer to young consumer talent. Teddy Solomon: If you’re a young person — graduating college or in your late 20s or early 30s — you want to be in New York. You don’t want to leave the office at 8 p.m. and find the entire city shut down. You want to walk out into New York City — comedy shows, bars, restaurants — you can do whatever you want. Teddy Solomon: We’re also closer to rs in New York, which makes sense for us. Teddy Solomon: Plus, we like the startup energy out here. It’s go, go, go. There’s a lot of partnering with other companies, trading ideas with founders and investors. Roe, the startup bank out here, does a great job of bringing founders and investors together. It’s been really cool. Teddy Solomon: Our team — especially the ones who had the Palo Alto experience — if you walked around our office and asked which they like more, they’d all say New York. And that speaks volumes. Teddy Solomon: People love it here. I think New York is on the rise — and the Bay Area is dying. I’m excited we’re here. Alejandro Cremades: Let’s talk about the future. We’ve talked about the team and investors — they’re obviously betting on the future you’re building. So let’s say I put you in a time machine. You’re able to open your eyes in a world where the vision for Fizz is fully realized. What does that world look like? Teddy Solomon: I’ll start with the social space in general, then what that means for us. Teddy Solomon: People ask me, “What will the social space look like in five years?” I tell them: there are four companies — but I’m not sure they’re actually social media companies. I think we’re the only one. Teddy Solomon: Instagram and TikTok will still exist. They’re the 1% of your life. Zuck himself says they’re entertainment, not social media. It’s about influencers and entertainment — not your friends. Teddy Solomon: X, or Twitter, is a global news platform — answering “What’s happening now?” Teddy Solomon: We answer that same question, but on a hyper-local, meaningful basis: what’s happening at the dining hall, what’s happening down the street — not across the world. Teddy Solomon: Fizz is about bringing people together around shared experiences, context, and identity. Teddy Solomon: We recently announced in Forbes the launch of Global Fizz — which has been blowing up. We’ve seen a 60–70% increase in daily active s over the past four weeks. Teddy Solomon: Global Fizz says: this siloed product of just your school isn’t the end vision. Teddy Solomon: If I’m a student at Stanford, I also want to connect with students at Santa Clara, USF, Princeton, Yale, Dartmouth — people who share something academically or culturally with me. Teddy Solomon: We’re crossing communities while keeping the privacy component. Teddy Solomon: It’s not just a college thing — it’s a Gen Z thing. We’re getting ready to move beyond college too, and we’re really excited. Alejandro Cremades: Now, let’s say I bring you back to when you were thinking about dropping out of Stanford. You can have a chat with your younger self and give one piece of advice before launching the business. What would that be — and why? Teddy Solomon: I would say: how you perform, act, and think at the lowest points of the company will determine how well the company does. Teddy Solomon: You need to take the lows and highs in moderation. Teddy Solomon: There will be low points — and at those times, you need to operate at your best. As long as the company isn’t dying, you have a chance. Teddy Solomon: At the highs, don’t get too high. At the lows, don’t get too low. Teddy Solomon: Stability, being grounded, and just pushing forward — that’s how you build a great company. Teddy Solomon: Back then, we wanted to celebrate the wins. But staying locked in, staying composed — that’s key. Teddy Solomon: Nowadays, we’re in the best position the company has ever been — strong cash, strong engagement, lots of s — but we stay composed. Teddy Solomon: Things can go poorly at any moment, and we have to be ready to persevere. That’s what’s key. Alejandro Cremades: Amazing. Well, this is fantastic, Teddy. For people listening who would love to reach out and say hi, what’s the best way? Teddy Solomon: They should reach out to me on LinkedIn — Teddy Solomon, Fizz. You’ll see it there. Teddy Solomon: Always happy to chat. You may even see me on a college campus because I still like to go every month to talk to s and understand how we’re doing. Teddy Solomon: So yeah — no worries reaching out by email or LinkedIn. Alejandro Cremades: Amazing. Well, Teddy, thank you so much for being on The DealMaker Show today. It’s been an honor to have you with us. Teddy Solomon: Likewise — it’s been an honor. Thanks for having me. ***** If you like the show, make sure that you hit that subscribe button. If you can leave a review as well, that would be fantastic. And if you got any value either from this episode or from the show itself, share it with a friend. Perhaps they will also appreciate it. Also, , if you need any help, whether it is with your fundraising efforts or with selling your business, you can reach me at al*******@**************rs.com  

Christopher Pirie is one of the few founders in the biotech sphere who has explored multiple frontiers. In this conversation, he shared powerful lessons from his ventures, spanning synthetic biology, RNA vaccines, and sustainable manufacturing. Christopher also talks about alternative financing, customer-centric business models, the history of biotechnology, and the impatience of going through the journey of building his latest startup, Decycle Bio. Decycle Bio has secured funding from top-tier investors like Ecosphere Ventures and Pack Ventures. In this episode, you will learn: Venture formation is often about timing, team, and the courage to make strategic pivots. Alternative funding sources, such as grants, licensing, and angel investors, can offer resilience in tough markets. Sustainability in biotech is both a necessity and a massive market opportunity. Your investor’s track record says as much about them as their term sheet does. The best technologies don’t sell themselves; founders must learn to translate deep science into compelling business narratives. Failure forces introspection, tests assumptions, and sharpens your execution instincts. Founding a company is also a personal journey that involves significant life changes.   SUBSCRIBE ON: iTunesGoogle PlayStitcherTuneInRSSSoundCloudSpotify For a winning deck, see the commentary on a pitch deck from an Uber competitor that has raised over $400M (see it here).  *FREE * The Ultimate Guide To Pitch Decks to unlock for free the pitch deck template that founders worldwide are using to raise millions below. Access The Pitch Deck Template Unlock the pitch deck template used by founders to raise millions. Just enter your email below. Your email address is 100% safe from spam! About Christopher Pirie: Christopher Pirie is an entrepreneurial biotechnology professional with a focus on innovation in areas such as protein and enzyme engineering, synthetic biology, metabolic engineering, polymers, drug delivery, and biopharmaceuticals, including RNA vaccines and therapeutics. His expertise encomes alternative financing and business models for the commercialization of cutting-edge technology, intellectual property protection strategies, and customer engagement. Christopher holds a PhD in Biological Engineering from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and a BS in Bioengineering with a Minor in Chemistry from the University of Washington. Christopher has contributed to various organizations, including serving as a coach at MIT Bootcamps, co-founder and COO of HDT Bio, advisor to the Science Bounty System, CEO of Virvio, director of Protein Engineering at Manus Biosynthesis, senior scientist at Manus Biosynthesis, and board member of MIT Entrepreneurship Review, among others. He has also worked as a research scientist at the Koch Institute for Integrative Cancer Research and held roles such as founding editor at MIT Entrepreneurship Review and research assistant at MIT. See How I Can Help You With Your Fundraising Or Acquisition Efforts Fundraising or Acquisition Process: get guidance from A to Z. Materials: our team creates epic pitch decks and financial models. Investor and Buyer Access: connect with the right investors or buyers for your business and close them. Book a Call Connect with Christopher Pirie: LinkedIn Crunchbase Life Science Washington Clay Read the Full Transcription of the Interview: Alejandro Cremades: Alrighty, hello everyone and welcome to the DealMaker Show. Today, we have an amazing founder—someone who has done it multiple times. I think we’re going to learn quite a bit about building, scaling, financing, and more. This conversation is going to be quite inspiring. We’ll cover how he thinks about alternative financing, customer-centric business models, the history of biotechnology, and how he has dealt with impatience throughout his journey. So get ready for a really exciting conversation. Alejandro Cremades: And without further ado, let’s welcome our guest today, Christopher Pirie. Welcome to the show. Christopher Pirie: Thank you very much. Pleasure to be here. Alejandro Cremades: Originally born in Northern California—give us a walk down memory lane. What was life like growing up for you? Christopher Pirie: Oh gosh, quite idyllic, I would say. Five acres of Sonoma rolling hills is not a bad place to wake up every morning when you’re a little kid—just walk out the door and run around in the woods. Christopher Pirie: It was an amazing place to spend my early years. When I was a bit older, we moved up to Seattle, which was just as pleasant a place to grow up. It also gave me a great educational foundation. Seattle is amazing in that regard. Alejandro Cremades: How did you get into problem-solving, and all of that good stuff that eventually led you to MIT? Christopher Pirie: As an undergrad, like so many folks navigating the college experience, I went to an academic counselor and said, “Look, I’m good at math and science—what should I do with my career?” They said, “Well, if you want to live in California, major in chemical engineering. If you want to live in Seattle, major in biological engineering.” Christopher Pirie: I loved Seattle and was at the University of Washington, so I ed the biological engineering department. Christopher Pirie: There, the undergraduate class was about 50% pre-med and 50% pre-PhD. I gravitated toward research. Christopher Pirie: At the same time, I had a real fear of becoming a doctor and having patients who wouldn’t listen to my advice and would keep getting sicker. So clinical practice scared me. Christopher Pirie: I leaned more toward the research side of things, and when it was time to pick a graduate school, MIT was hard to say no to. Alejandro Cremades: I hear you. How did you start getting into the business side of things? It sounds like the venture world came knocking during your time at MIT. Christopher Pirie: I’m not sure it’s unique to MIT, but being close to the business school helps. Most grad students eventually realize they won’t be in academia forever, and start exploring beyond scientific research. Christopher Pirie: For me, that meant taking classes at the Sloan School and building relationships with MBA students—some of whom I still work with today. Christopher Pirie: Spending time both in the lab and in business classrooms gave me cross-sectional exposure. I’d already had a bit of that growing up—my dad started a couple of companies in the telecom industry, so I’d been around early-stage ventures. Christopher Pirie: I always enjoyed operating at the interface of cutting-edge science and the entrepreneurial journey. Towards the end of my thesis work, I connected with a couple of like-minded folks and started my first company. Alejandro Cremades: Let’s talk about that. How did your first company get started? Christopher Pirie: It actually began in one of those Sloan classes. Researchers from across campus would present their work, hoping it might have commercial potential. Christopher Pirie: As a student, you’d rank which technologies you wanted to work on. I listed one as my second choice and ended up with it when I didn’t get my first. Christopher Pirie: That second-choice technology became the foundation of Manus Bio. I worked with the inventor, a postdoc in the chemical engineering department, during the semester. Christopher Pirie: After the class, I was ready to return to my thesis work. Then, a few weeks later, he emailed me and asked to meet. He brought along a Sloan fellow he had worked with, and said, “I think the three of us should start a company.” Christopher Pirie: And that became Manus Bio. We spent the next 6–12 months hanging around campus, figuring out what to build and working through early product-market fit for what began as a very academic technology—but ultimately became a commercial success. Alejandro Cremades: Looking back, what were some of the toughest things you faced as a first-time entrepreneur? Christopher Pirie: As a scientist, especially in academia, you’re rewarded for how much you know—ing exams, publishing papers, presenting at conferences. You prove your knowledge to the world. Christopher Pirie: But very quickly after starting the company, I realized that didn’t matter much. In a startup, you’re part of a broader, cross-functional team tackling grand challenges. Christopher Pirie: Success starts to hinge on communication—especially with non-scientists—and on how well you manage people, which is less about knowledge and more about human interaction. Christopher Pirie: I definitely had growing pains, but I was lucky to have two co-founders with some experience in those areas to my growth. Alejandro Cremades: So what did Manus Bio become? Christopher Pirie: Manus Bio was built on metabolic engineering—modifying microbes to eat sugar and produce flavors and fragrances, many of which are natural products traditionally sourced from plants. Christopher Pirie: Our approach was to use fermentation, a classical process used for centuries to make beer and wine, to produce these ingredients more efficiently at scale. Christopher Pirie: One example we used a lot was rose oil. If you wanted enough for every woman in China to have Chanel No. 5, you’d have to cover the planet in roses. But we could ferment an acre of corn into the same compounds at scale. Christopher Pirie: They’ve since scaled manufacturing and brought those early products to market, even after I left a few years ago. Alejandro Cremades: And the company recently announced a merger and raised over $100 million. That’s a strong outcome. When did you feel it was time to turn the page and move back to Seattle? Christopher Pirie: It’s always hard for a founder to recognize when it’s time to transition—whether the company outgrows them, or they grow in different directions. Christopher Pirie: For me, it was personal—I wanted to be closer to friends and family on the West Coast. And frankly, I was tired of shoveling snow in Cambridge. Christopher Pirie: After five years, I felt I’d built the enzyme engineering team I was hired to lead and had empowered them to succeed even in my absence. So I left to return to Seattle and start my next company. Alejandro Cremades: Let’s talk about Verveo. As they say, you either succeed or you learn, and Verveo was definitely full of learning. Christopher Pirie: Absolutely. It was an opportunity to work with David Baker—now a Nobel Laureate—at a time when his protein design techniques were still underappreciated. Christopher Pirie: I saw a Nature paper he’d published with a postdoc and was inspired to try commercializing it in 2016. Christopher Pirie: In hindsight, you can always look at the team composition, the tech’s timing, or product-market fit as weaknesses in the venture thesis. Christopher Pirie: But for me, the most valuable part was exploring every operational mode the venture could take, and struggling to get traction. Christopher Pirie: Success usually happens in one mode. Failure teaches you through many. That was powerful—it helped me grow personally and as a founder. Christopher Pirie: We’re all ionate about our science and our ventures, but that ion can blind you to fundamental flaws. I came away from Verveo a more disionate, pragmatic entrepreneur. Alejandro Cremades: I hear you. So when did HDT Bio come into the picture? Christopher Pirie: Like many founders, relationships from one chapter come full circle in another. An investor who ed on Verveo later came back and said, “We liked what you were building, even if it wasn’t right for us then.” Christopher Pirie: He introduced me to two folks developing RNA vaccine tech in 2019. We developed the vision for HDT Bio around RNA cancer vaccines. Christopher Pirie: At the time, RNA wasn’t an accepted therapeutic modality. But then the pandemic hit in early 2020—and suddenly everyone wanted RNA-based infectious disease vaccines. Christopher Pirie: And that very quickly catalyzed the growth of HDT Bio through multiple government contracts, international licensing transactions, and clinical trials. Ultimately, it demonstrated that the underlying technology was tremendously successful in differentiating itself in of patient safety, memory, and cellular immune response—through clinical development in several countries, but principally in India, where the technology eventually received emergency use authorization. Alejandro Cremades: So obviously at this point, you had raised money a couple of times, given your experience with previous companies as well. How did you go about raising the $20 million at HDT Bio? What was that experience like? What were you really looking for in investors? Christopher Pirie: I think both myself and the other founders had a fair amount of prior fundraising experience and familiarity with institutional capital. In HDT Bio’s case, our investor base was largely made up of angels from the outset and was heavily supplemented by a combination of government grants, contracts, and international licensing revenue. Christopher Pirie: Putting all those together gave us a funding base that wasn’t tied strictly to traditional venture capital fund cycles or market-driven liquidity opportunities. Christopher Pirie: It was fascinating for us as founders and operators to watch the 2021–2022 downturn in the public markets and see its consequences on many of our peers in the early-stage biopharmaceutical world—while we remained relatively insulated, thanks to the diversity of our capital base. Christopher Pirie: That foundation has helped the company grow to over 50 people, and we continue to innovate on the RNA vaccine platform through partnerships with government entities and commercial organizations. We’re exploring more infectious disease applications, have recently published some of our successes, and maintain interest in the cancer vaccine domain as well. Alejandro Cremades: So now, when it comes to timing, it sounds like you know when it’s time. You did that with Manus Bio, and you did that again with HDT Bio. Now you’ve launched a new company—DeCycle Bio. Talk to us about timing, because for a founder, it’s like saying goodbye to your baby, and that’s never easy. Christopher Pirie: Yeah, and it’s really about fit. Sometimes you leave too early or stay too long. There’s no exact science to it—it’s about personal feel and how both the company and the people evolve. Christopher Pirie: I’ve learned a lot about myself over time. During the HDT Bio journey, the pandemic affected everyone—but personally, I also got married and had two kids. So over the course of those five years, my whole world changed. Christopher Pirie: I was doing the business things I knew I’d signed up for, but my personal life evolved in ways I hadn’t expected. Having kids made me realize how important each day is—and how much the future matters for our children. Christopher Pirie: That realization is part of what inspired DeCycle Bio. I had spent nearly a decade in biopharma after Manus Bio, which itself was focused on sustainability. Christopher Pirie: In 2024, after my second child was born, I read a paper from MIT on biochemical reaction modeling using AI. It reignited memories of my time at Manus Bio, and I saw this as an opportunity to build on that work. Christopher Pirie: I reached out to the authors, started a conversation, and—as often happens in entrepreneurship—one conversation led to another. By mid-last year, we had strong conviction that there was a business to be built around this technology. Christopher Pirie: That became DeCycle Bio. We closed our first financing round in January and now have four full-time founders pushing this vision forward. Alejandro Cremades: So what is DeCycle Bio all about? Give us the 30-second high-level overview. Christopher Pirie: We’re using computational approaches originally developed at MIT and combining them with cell-free systems and techniques adopted from one of our faculty advisors at Stanford. Christopher Pirie: We bridge those two approaches using enzyme engineering—the same kind I was practicing back at Manus Bio. Together, they enable what some call “waste-to-value” transformations. Christopher Pirie: Many global industries generate waste streams that contaminate the environment. Our technologies create opportunities to convert those waste streams into value-added products. Christopher Pirie: We operate at the molecular level—taking in waste molecules and using enzymatic cascades to convert them into valuable chemical products. Christopher Pirie: These are inherently more sustainable than today’s typical chemical production processes, which rely on oil and gas feedstocks, high temperatures, high pressure, and often toxic methods. Christopher Pirie: We’re using biology to enable more sustainable chemical manufacturing. Alejandro Cremades: Now, as a repeat founder, raising money isn’t as hard because people can see you’ve been around the block. How do you filter for the right investors for the right reasons? Christopher Pirie: That’s a great question. Though I wouldn’t say it’s always easier. Every venture is different. The type of investor we talk to at DeCycle Bio is different from those we spoke to for HDT Bio. Christopher Pirie: The team, the technology, the market—everything is new. But relationships do survive across ventures, which helps. Christopher Pirie: When thinking about investor fit, I look for those who are in it for the right reasons. Maybe not purely mission-driven investors, but those who truly put the founders and the venture first. Christopher Pirie: Many claim to do that, but few consistently walk the talk. Christopher Pirie: Getting to know your investors before taking a check is critical—whether it’s through direct conversations, speaking to founders of other portfolio companies, or researching how they’ve ed those ventures. Christopher Pirie: Especially with pre-seed or seed-stage investors, their track record of guiding founders through growth says a lot about the kind of they can provide—and their connections to the next stage of investors. Christopher Pirie: We’re very thoughtful about who we bring around the table. Another important factor is whether they’ve operated in your tech or market space, because that affects their ability to help you with hiring, capital access, and business development. Alejandro Cremades: Now imagine you go to sleep tonight and wake up in a world where DeCycle Bio’s vision is fully realized. What does that world look like? Christopher Pirie: It’s a world where our business has successfully displaced one or more traditional chemical manufacturing processes with more sustainable alternatives. Christopher Pirie: I don’t expect us to be the only company driving this shift, but I hope we’ll play a meaningful role in this broader transition toward sustainable, scalable chemical manufacturing. Alejandro Cremades: So, Christopher, let’s look at the past for a moment. Imagine I put you in a time machine and take you back to your MIT days—those moments when you were thinking about co-founding a company. If you could give your younger self one piece of advice, what would it be and why? Christopher Pirie: That’s a great question. At that time, I think there were a few key lessons I hadn’t yet learned. Christopher Pirie: We touched on my experience at Manus Bio and the professional growth I had there. Then there was Verveo, where I became more disionate and pragmatic as an entrepreneur. Christopher Pirie: If I could wrap all that learning into one story and tell it to myself coming out of my PhD, I think it would have made my journey a bit smoother. There are always growing pains, but sometimes you need to hear it from yourself for it to sink in. Alejandro Cremades: I love it. For those listening who would like to reach out and say hi, what’s the best way to do that? Christopher Pirie: You can find me on LinkedIn or reach out through the page at dcycle.bio. Drop me a note—I’m always happy to early-stage founders. Christopher Pirie: I try to locally here in Seattle and also through the broader MIT entrepreneurship ecosystem. Christopher Pirie: I’ve had both successes and failures, and I believe the world needs more entrepreneurial leaders to guide us forward. Alejandro Cremades: Amazing. Well, Christopher, thank you so much for being on the DealMaker Show today. It has been an absolute honor to have you with us. Christopher Pirie: Thank you so much. Pleasure to be here. ***** If you like the show, make sure that you hit that subscribe button. If you can leave a review as well, that would be fantastic. And if you got any value either from this episode or from the show itself, share it with a friend. Perhaps they will also appreciate it. Also, , if you need any help, whether it is with your fundraising efforts or with selling your business, you can reach me at al*******@**************rs.com  

In an era where mental health challenges are on the rise but access to care remains limited, Dr. Oliver Harrison has positioned himself to drive meaningful change. He is a trained psychiatrist turned entrepreneur with an extraordinary journey through technological innovation. Oliver’s company, Koa Health, has secured funding from top-tier investors like Wellington Partners, MTIP AG, Asabys Partners, Alma Mundi Ventures, and Akilia Partners. In this episode, you will learn: Dr. Oliver Harrison transitioned from psychiatry to entrepreneurship, leveraging digital solutions to address the global gap in mental health services. The loss of two friends to suicide deeply motivated his mission to use technology for early detection and intervention in mental health. Koa Health combines AI-powered detection, personalized care, and scalable treatment using just smartphones, not wearables. Spinning out from Telefonica into an independent, VC-backed company posed significant challenges, especially during the pandemic. Koa Health raised an oversubscribed €30M Series A, backed by investors impressed with its strong IP portfolio and clinical focus. The company leverages over a decade of AI research to build predictive tools and digital therapeutics that enhance mental health outcomes. Oliver’s vision is “mental health for everyone,” aiming to remove barriers like cost, stigma, and access delays globally.   SUBSCRIBE ON: iTunesGoogle PlayStitcherTuneInRSSSoundCloudSpotify For a winning deck, see the commentary on a pitch deck from an Uber competitor that has raised over $400M (see it here).  *FREE * The Ultimate Guide To Pitch Decks to unlock for free the pitch deck template that founders worldwide are using to raise millions below. Access The Pitch Deck Template Unlock the pitch deck template used by founders to raise millions. Just enter your email below. Your email address is 100% safe from spam! About Dr. Oliver Harrison: Dr. Oliver Harrison is the CEO and founder of Kia Health. He trained as a medical doctor at the University of Cambridge and the University College London (UCL). He practiced psychiatry for six years before dedicating his career to digital mental health. Oliver spent five years in McKinsey’s Health Tech practice and the last 15 years deg and building scalable health tech solutions. See How I Can Help You With Your Fundraising Or Acquisition Efforts Fundraising or Acquisition Process: get guidance from A to Z. Materials: our team creates epic pitch decks and financial models. Investor and Buyer Access: connect with the right investors or buyers for your business and close them. Book a Call Connect with Dr. Oliver Harrison: LinkedIn Crunchbase Forbes Technology Council Koa Health Read the Full Transcription of the Interview: Alejandro Cremades: Alrighty, hello everyone and welcome to the DealMaker Show. Today we’re going to be talking with an amazing founder. We’re going to be talking about mental health, building, scaling, financing—you name it. Alejandro Cremades: I think it’s a very important topic that we’re going to be covering. It’s something that is now top of mind. There’s more consciousness around it, and I think that it’s going to be really exciting to dig a little bit deeper into this segment today. So again, brace yourself for a very inspiring conversation. Alejandro Cremades: And without further ado, let’s welcome our guest today, Oliver Harrison. Welcome to the show. Dr. Oliver Harrison: Thanks, Alejandro. It’s great to be here. Alejandro Cremades: So, born and raised in London. Give us a walk down memory lane. How was life growing up for you? Dr. Oliver Harrison: Well, life was great. Yes, born in St. Albans in Hertfordshire, just north of London, and lived there until I went off to university. One of two brothers. My mum’s family was originally from Poland during the war, though she was born in the UK in 1948, and my dad’s family is London born and bred. Dr. Oliver Harrison: I had a very happy childhood. My parents were not particularly wealthy, but they put all the money they did have into private education for my brother and me, and really nurtured our interests in the world. Dr. Oliver Harrison: My brother is a PhD engineer, and I realized quite early on that I wanted to be a doctor. I did well at school and ended up at Cambridge University, where I studied medicine and neuroscience. Dr. Oliver Harrison: There I met some fantastic people who really encouraged my interest in the brain and the mind. When I went to medical school at UCL, I decided I really wanted to pursue a career in psychiatry and mental health. Dr. Oliver Harrison: I graduated in the ’90s and worked for about six years, training in psychiatry at Imperial College and in public health at Johns Hopkins, while also doing some research on how the brain works using some crazy MRI scanners at Queen Square Hospital. We were looking at human consciousness and how we process visual information, in particular. Dr. Oliver Harrison: I realized pretty early on that we were never going to win the battle of supply versus demand. Demand for mental health services around 2000 was increasing significantly, and the supply of human mental health professionals was relatively fixed. It takes a lot of time and money to train a mental health professional. Dr. Oliver Harrison: So waiting times got longer and longer. I became very interested in digital tech—this was the time of the first dot-com bubble—as a way to open up access to mental health services. Dr. Oliver Harrison: Around that time, sadly, I lost two friends to suicide who were on NHS waiting lists for treatment for depression. That really galvanized me to focus my career on the topic of using technology to open up access to mental health services. Dr. Oliver Harrison: I decided to McKinsey, where I could learn how to use data and technology to solve client problems. I spent five years in the healthcare practice, working on technology and data projects with clients around the world. Dr. Oliver Harrison: Then in 2006, following a McKinsey project, I was approached to a group that was essentially setting up a new healthcare system in the Middle East. Dr. Oliver Harrison: I moved my family over to Abu Dhabi and spent seven years as Director of Public Health. There, we used data to tackle diabetes, heart disease, cancer, road accidents, infectious diseases—lots of runs on the board. We meaningfully improved life expectancy and became partners with the World Health Organization, pharmaceutical companies, IBM, Optum, and so on. Dr. Oliver Harrison: With those runs on the board, when I moved back to Europe, I was approached by Telefonica, the big phone company. Alejandro Cremades: And before that—I mean, it’s like all over the world—unbelievable. What kind of perspective did it give you to be able to live all over the place? Dr. Oliver Harrison: Well, I think having the privilege to live in different parts of the world opens your eyes beyond watching something on TV or reading about it in a newspaper. These places have a different way of life, different culture, and a different way of seeing the world. Dr. Oliver Harrison: I think it’s hugely enriching for people to spend a bit of time living in a different part of the world. I think it adds a lot to your ability to empathize with other cultures around the world. Alejandro Cremades: And I guess really now tapping into the Spanish goodies, into one of the largest corporations there—Telefonica. How did you basically cross paths with Telefonica, and what happened there? Dr. Oliver Harrison: Telefonica at the time was setting up a new incubator for innovation. They called it Alpha, and it was deliberately modeled after Google X. This was to complement their venture capital investments and their Telefonica R&D unit, which really focused on improving their core services—mobile phones, internet connectivity, and so on. Dr. Oliver Harrison: This was looking at what was called “Moonshots”—projects that were really ambitious and, in Telefonica’s case, at the intersection of three things: a massive social challenge worldwide that needed to be solved, emerging technology that could help solve it, and something where Telefonica had a unique advantage because of their data access and understanding of different markets around the world. Dr. Oliver Harrison: The first topic they wanted to look at was health. With my background and experience, I was approached by a headhunter on their behalf to have a conversation about founding a new company ed by Telefonica—but ultimately to become independent—and that’s now Coa Health. Alejandro Cremades: So then let’s talk about Coa Health. What is Coa Health? For the people that are listening, what could you tell them in of the business model and how you guys make money? Dr. Oliver Harrison: Coa Health is a digital mental health company that’s developing breakthrough technology to solve that gap between the demand for mental health services and the supply of mental health services worldwide. Dr. Oliver Harrison: We do that by looking at three different domains. The first is ways to detect mental health symptoms—both to detect new cases when somebody develops depression or anxiety, or to look at symptoms as they fluctuate over time in what’s often quite a chronic condition. Dr. Oliver Harrison: And we do that just using the smartphone—not using a new wearable, but just using ubiquitous technology that everyone carries. The second is personalization—algorithms for getting the right care to the right person at the right time. Dr. Oliver Harrison: The third is scalable approaches to treatment. That’s both for people with everyday mental health symptoms who are below the threshold for clinical diagnosis and treatment, and then a set of digital technologies for ing people in clinical treatment for a diagnosed mental disorder. Dr. Oliver Harrison: Put all of those together and this is a technology stack that we sell as software. But we also bring our own clinicians through partnerships with provider organizations in different countries, and we offer technology-enabled service. The benefits are earlier detection, earlier intervention, less suffering, lower cost, better clinical outcomes, and, using our therapy, we can keep people well who’ve got early signs of developing a mental disorder. Dr. Oliver Harrison: Where people do have a mental disorder—for seven conditions—we can treat them with better outcomes using significantly less clinician time. So it’s much more scalable and much more affordable. Alejandro Cremades: So how does it feel to be a doctor and run a business? What does that look like? Dr. Oliver Harrison: It felt very early on in my career that the only way to be a doctor was not sitting in a clinic writing prescriptions. In fact, there are some limitations to that model. You can only see a certain number of people in a day. But if you can create a new technology, then that can help tens of thousands or millions of people worldwide. I became very interested in this idea of being a doctor—but being a technology doctor. Dr. Oliver Harrison: So, developing technology that can improve health outcomes. I have a huge amount of respect for people that trained in medicine and continue to work in the traditional way. We will always need people who operate in clinics, operating theatres, and hospitals. Dr. Oliver Harrison: But for me, that wasn’t the right path. I wanted to do something that could help more people, and also combine my interest in technology and medicine. Alejandro Cremades: So mental health—why is mental health so important today? And why is there suddenly so much attention around it, when before there wasn’t? Dr. Oliver Harrison: You can maybe make out in the background this picture of the brain that my wife got me for Christmas a few years ago. I’ve always been really ionate about the brain and the mind. When I was a kid thinking about a career in medicine, I considered different parts of the body. The heart—really important, right? But it’s basically a muscle that pumps and has four valves to keep the blood flowing. Dr. Oliver Harrison: The lungs are like air sacs that exchange oxygen for carbon dioxide. Your kidneys are like filters. But the brain—wow. Okay, this is like one kilo of jelly that sits inside your head. Dr. Oliver Harrison: It’s responsible for your imagination, your emotion, your memory, your creativity—everything we love about people and what makes us really special as a species and as individual citizens. Dr. Oliver Harrison: We are only just beginning to understand how it works. It is the most complicated organism in the universe. Alejandro Cremades: Thank you. Dr. Oliver Harrison: Hundreds of billions of cells interacting in chemical, electronic, and, in many ways, metaphysical ways. Dr. Oliver Harrison: It’s just wondrous. I fell in love with it as a kid and remain in love with it today. What we’ve seen—certainly since the pandemic, which focused minds—but really since the early 2000s, is a very rapid increase in the prevalence of mental disorders, particularly in younger people. Dr. Oliver Harrison: That has really brought it up the priority list in healthcare systems around the world. Now, we really worry about the impact of mental disorders on labor market participation—people being in employment, avoiding long- or short-term absence from work, being productive at their desk. Dr. Oliver Harrison: And that data is getting worse. So it’s become a really important priority for families, communities, countries—and really, for the world. Alejandro Cremades: So obviously, as we were talking earlier, Telefonica got involved, and you were part of the incubator that they had. How was that spinout process? Dr. Oliver Harrison: Phenomenally difficult—for a range of reasons. I Jose Maria, who set up Alpha and is the president and chairman of the Telefonica Group, used to describe Telefonica working with small companies as an elephant in bed with a mouse. Dr. Oliver Harrison: The elephant rolls over in the night and squashes the mouse dead. It didn’t mean to—it just did, because it’s such a big company. So we had huge benefits from being part of the Telefonica Group—not only financial , but also the reputation of a major global company that allowed us to work with the best universities and healthcare systems: Oxford, Harvard, MIT, Stanford, University College London, NHS England, etc. Dr. Oliver Harrison: Also access to data sets—anonymous data from 600 million global mobile phone s on the network. Dr. Oliver Harrison: So we could use that data to train algorithms and do really special, deep science. When it came time to move on, there was a little bit of pull—we wanted to move—but also a little bit of push. The financial situation at Telefonica was challenging with the impact of the pandemic in 2020. Dr. Oliver Harrison: We were pushed out into the world maybe a few months too early—certainly before we had a chance to build a commercial team. And there we were, an independent standalone company, venture capital-backed, and looking to build our profit and loss statement and start generating revenues. Dr. Oliver Harrison: That transition was particularly challenging for Coa because the Telefonica years were really geared around a moonshot—innovation and radical innovation. Dr. Oliver Harrison: But sometimes business is about doing the basics really well and doing it with discipline, so you don’t spend too much money. Really getting out into the market and engaging with people on what they want to buy and how they want to buy it. Dr. Oliver Harrison: So it was a big transition. Alejandro Cremades: So, talking about the capital raise too—because obviously you guys had Telefonica, and that was a component of being able to raise the money—but how was that journey? Like raising the money during the Telefonica years and then post-Telefonica years? Dr. Oliver Harrison: Yeah, so the effort really began midway through 2019. We started putting together pitch materials, thought in detail about the assets we’d built, how we would go to market, how we would monetize them—the TAM, SAM, SOM, all of that sort of thing. Dr. Oliver Harrison: We knew that the first product we could sell was a prevention product that we called, at the time, Evermind, and it became Coa Foundations. We started pitching to VCs—and boy, there are a lot of VCs out there. Dr. Oliver Harrison: I think over the next year and a half, we probably spoke to 160 or 170 VC funds. What happened along the way is we had a conversation with the fund Ancora Finance from London. Dr. Oliver Harrison: We met them at a mental health conference, and they were fascinated by our IP. At the time, we had about 20 patents—we now have 56. They were really interested in a company that had the discipline to protect its intellectual property and to have a good patent portfolio. Dr. Oliver Harrison: That’s how the conversation started. Ancora Finance decided to lead our round, put a price on it, and led the negotiations with Telefonica. Those were tough negotiations during a really difficult time—during the pandemic. So, all Zoom calls, no face time, which makes it a lot harder when you’re doing business like that. Dr. Oliver Harrison: Through Ancora, we were introduced to Wellington Partners, MTIP, Asabys, Achillea, Mundi Ventures, Creas, and one or two high-net-worth individuals. Together, we managed to raise an oversubscribed 30 million euro Series A capital raise. Dr. Oliver Harrison: And lo and behold, we were an independent company. Alejandro Cremades: So then, tell us about the scaling as well. You guys now have about 67 employees or so, and about 500 clients plus. How has the process been? You’ve achieved product-market fit, you’ve validated it—now it’s time to think about scaling. Dr. Oliver Harrison: Yeah, so not without its challenges. As I mentioned—but just to make it explicit—with the Telefonica , we were in stealth mode. We had no products in the market apart from tests and prototypes. Dr. Oliver Harrison: We had no salespeople at all, no marketing materials, no website, no public presence. So, starting from day one, we had to learn all of that stuff in a hurry. And we were launching into the world during the pandemic, which is challenging. Dr. Oliver Harrison: It was difficult to cut through. Plus, the product that we started with—because it was the easiest from a regulation perspective—was a prevention product. Dr. Oliver Harrison: Think about it as a bit similar to Calm and Headspace. These were two brands already very well established in the direct-to-consumer market but had also begun to sell into businesses. Dr. Oliver Harrison: We decided early on that we wanted to sell into businesses. And frankly, we found it a much more crowded marketplace than we expected. It was harder to cut through and get our messaging across during the pandemic. Dr. Oliver Harrison: That led to a few years where we were generating a little bit of revenue from Coa Foundations, but also through consultancy relationships with a couple of medical device and pharmaceutical companies. Dr. Oliver Harrison: We were really trying to manage the size of the team while working on our clinical products—both in prediction AI and therapeutics—in order to build a clinical solution, which is very different from just Calm or Headspace. Alejandro Cremades: Now, in your case too, one thing that is really interesting is that you’ve been involved with AI for a while. How does that look now? Everyone is talking about AI—it’s like this perfect wave happening. And this is something that you actually started looking into about 10 years ago. Alejandro Cremades: How do you see things happening? How do you see Coa benefiting from being able to ride that wave? Dr. Oliver Harrison: Yeah, wow. So, I think there are two things going on here. One is the hype curve that we’ve all seen before with previous technologies. Some of the more outlandish expectations of AI are maybe beyond what we’re going to see, certainly over the next few years. Dr. Oliver Harrison: That said, the combination of ever more powerful and ubiquitous computing—not least the cloud transformation— Dr. Oliver Harrison: —which means that through the web, we can get access to very powerful computing—and advances in mathematics, combined with imagination and creativity—have really created transformative technology. Dr. Oliver Harrison: People don’t really talk very much anymore about the Turing test, where you interact with a computer to see if it’s human or not, based on its responses—because, actually, a readily available ChatGPT can the Turing test for most people most of the time. Dr. Oliver Harrison: We’ve also seen enormous advances in the practical application of AI. For example, protein folding. The fact that we can now design drugs specifically to interact with a particular protein by looking at how a sequence of DNA leads to a sequence of amino acids, which then leads to a specific protein structure. Dr. Oliver Harrison: That’s a massive transformation. I when I was at Cambridge in the ’90s, the drug discovery process started with a million drug candidates and involved trying all of them in the lab—one after another—and seeing which one binds with the receptor. Dr. Oliver Harrison: We can now do all of that with a fraction of the cost and effort. So, all to say—the era of AI is here. We’ve reached a level of computing power and a mathematical toolkit with a lot of potential. Dr. Oliver Harrison: At the same time, society is digitized. So, AI has access to a lot of data— as citizens, about healthcare, about travel, banking, and finance. Dr. Oliver Harrison: That combination is really leading to this revolution. And then, add the funding going into AI companies and research around the world, and we truly stand on the edge of a revolution. It’ll be fascinating to see how it plays out. Alejandro Cremades: So, talking about how it plays out—let’s say you go to sleep tonight and you wake up in a world, Oliver, where the vision of Coa Health is fully realized. What does that world look like? Dr. Oliver Harrison: Yes, our vision at Coa is mental health for everyone. And we mean everyone—poor, wealthy, younger, older—people living in countries all around the world. Dr. Oliver Harrison: I’m really fascinated by two aspects of that. The first is the sheer potential to unlock human ambition and potential. If we think about people experiencing mental disorders, people with risk factors, people who feel shame and stigma— Dr. Oliver Harrison: Imagine all of that falling away—and what we could all achieve as families, as communities, as nations, and as a global society. The second aspect is the social impact. If you can get access to mental health treatment just like that—no cost barrier, no waiting time— Dr. Oliver Harrison: Why stigma? Why is this something to be ashamed of? The social impact of removing the fear from mental health and turning it into something ubiquitous—I think has the potential to transform society’s view of mental health from something to be feared to something to be embraced. Alejandro Cremades: Now, as they say, entrepreneurship involves depression, unfortunately. And there are probably a lot of people listening to us who are dealing with it. Alejandro Cremades: What message do you have for them? Dr. Oliver Harrison: Well, sometimes entrepreneurship feels like bipolar disorder—with radical highs and radical lows. I think you do need to be somewhat obsessive in how you think, and compulsive in how you act. Dr. Oliver Harrison: And, in all seriousness, there is a higher rate of mental disorders among entrepreneurs and their families than in the general population. Dr. Oliver Harrison: So I would say—blessed are the cracked, for they let in the light, right? People who have a slightly unusual take on life may bring a transformative level of innovation to seemingly intractable problems. Dr. Oliver Harrison: Maybe it’s a little bit to do with how atypical I am—that I didn’t just settle for sitting in a clinic writing prescriptions for antidepressants and antipsychotics in my career—but instead embarked on a different journey, which brought me to a different place. Dr. Oliver Harrison: So I would say: look after yourself, celebrate your individuality, find peers and mentors who can provide along the journey, and make sure you keep the cup topped up. You can’t pour from an empty cup. Alejandro Cremades: I love it. Now, imagine I was to put you into a time machine, Oliver, and I bring you back to that moment when maybe you were in Abu Dhabi, thinking about packing up the bags and entering the venture world. And you had the opportunity to have a chat with your younger self. Alejandro Cremades: Let’s say that younger self is getting on a plane en route to Europe, and you’re able to sit down next to him and give him one piece of advice before launching a business. What would that be, and why, given what you know now? Dr. Oliver Harrison: I would say that at the time of the spin-out from Telefonica, the thing to do with 30 million euros in the bank is to significantly reduce the cash burn and make that 30 million last for as long as possible. Dr. Oliver Harrison: Time flies very quickly, and achieving product-market fit—even in the best of times—is a challenge. It’s really important to control your burn rate. Dr. Oliver Harrison: So I think in the transition between Telefonica and being a VC-backed startup, we missed the opportunity to be more radical in restructuring the team and cost base to give ourselves as much time as possible. Alejandro Cremades: I love it. Oliver, for the people listening who would love to reach out and say hi, what’s the best way for them to do so? Dr. Oliver Harrison: Drop me an email: oliver.harrison@coahealth—all one word—coahealth.com Alejandro Cremades: Easy enough. Well, Oliver, thank you so much for being on the DealMaker Show today. It has been an absolute honor to have you with us. Dr. Oliver Harrison: Thanks, Alejandro. It’s been fun. ***** If you like the show, make sure that you hit that subscribe button. If you can leave a review as well, that would be fantastic. And if you got any value either from this episode or from the show itself, share it with a friend. Perhaps they will also appreciate it. Also, , if you need any help, whether it is with your fundraising efforts or with selling your business, you can reach me at al*******@pa**************.com  

Aron Alexander’s entrepreneurial journey is a powerful story of perseverance, reinvention, and vision. It spans from growing up in London’s independent retail scene to founding Runa, a company reshaping how digital money moves worldwide. Runa has raised funding from top-tier investors like 13books Capital, AlbionVC, Stride.VC, and Fuel Ventures. In this episode, you will learn: Aron’s early health battles built resilience that fueled his entrepreneurial journey. Lessons from the military translated directly into startup execution. A rebrand from WeGift to Runa unlocked massive strategic growth. Runa’s infrastructure byes traditional payment systems entirely. Turning down acquisition offers was rooted in a bigger vision for global impact. Customers validated Runa when investors wavered. Runa’s ultimate mission is frictionless, global money mobility.   SUBSCRIBE ON: iTunesGoogle PlayStitcherTuneInRSSSoundCloudSpotify For a winning deck, see the commentary on a pitch deck from an Uber competitor that has raised over $400M (see it here).  *FREE * The Ultimate Guide To Pitch Decks to unlock for free the pitch deck template that founders worldwide are using to raise millions below. Access The Pitch Deck Template Unlock the pitch deck template used by founders to raise millions. Just enter your email below. Your email address is 100% safe from spam! About Aron Alexander: Aron Alexander is the Founder and CEO of Runa, a digital value infrastructure that simplifies payout processes. The platform facilitates a smooth and instant transfer and exchange of digital value, including from fractional shares and gift cards. With a background in financial services, Aron is a fintech industry veteran who brings a fresh perspective and unique insights to the table. He gained essential business experience from his family’s retail and grocery stores and later managed a substantial portfolio in a family office. A graduate from Cambridge, Aron worked with a prominent B2B2C payment company. Inspired by a £5 paper voucher, he founded Runa (formerly WeGift) in 2016. WeGift expanded quickly, developing a network of 1,300+ brand partners and working with some of the world’s largest and most-influential companies, including Rapyd, Tango Card, Monzo, and Freetrade. In 2023, WeGift became Runa, a digital value infrastructure that enables organisations to issue, send, hold and accept digital value and enable the instant conversion & exchange of digital gift cards, shares, crypto, donations and other digital assets. See How I Can Help You With Your Fundraising Or Acquisition Efforts Fundraising or Acquisition Process: get guidance from A to Z. Materials: our team creates epic pitch decks and financial models. Investor and Buyer Access: connect with the right investors or buyers for your business and close them. Book a Call Connect with Aron Alexander: LinkedIn Crunchbase RocketReach TheOrg Read the Full Transcription of the Interview: Alejandro Cremades: Alrighty, hello everyone, and welcome to the DealMaker show. Today we have a really fantastic founder. We’re going to be talking about the good stuff that we like to hear—the building, the scaling, the financing, and really amazing stories of turning down acquisition offers. Also, stories of perseverance, as well as taking a look at rebranding and positioning—you know, that’s not easy at all. Alejandro Cremades: But again, I think the story of our founder today is going to be quite inspiring. So brace yourself for a very powerful conversation. Without further ado, let’s welcome our guest today—Aron Alexander, welcome to the show. Aron Alexander: Thanks so much for having me. It’s such a pleasure to be here. Alejandro Cremades: So, originally born in London—give us a walk through memory lane. How was life growing up for you? Aron Alexander: Interesting times. So I was born, as you said, in London. I grew up in a family who owned independent retail stores. I guess part of my journey in building Runa really stems from the experiences there—growing up and working in a grocery store, a bakery, or a clothing store with a pricing gun in my hand. I saw the grit, determination, and effort of building something from scratch, the day-to-day grind, and the attention to detail. Aron Alexander: And customer care. That was really quite an informative experience. I had a lot of other experiences growing up that taught me a lot about building a business. Aron Alexander: I don’t need to go into all of them, but some might be interesting in of resilience and perseverance. I unfortunately had to go through about 20 operations before I was 19, which really taught me a lot about keeping going when there’s no finish line in sight and trying to stay the course when things are difficult. Definitely, as a founder, you go through a lot of pain on the journey, but I think that was good preparation for building a business. Aron Alexander: Rolling forward, I started the company when I was 17. Fortunately— Alejandro Cremades: And before that too, I mean, I think that’s so powerful what you mentioned there, because being a founder is all about living with uncertainty—being okay with not knowing what the future holds. You know, in the morning everything is great; by night, things are falling apart. It’s just the cycle you go through. Alejandro Cremades: I guess in your case too, as you were saying—dealing with 20 operations, health-wise—that’s very difficult. Ultimately, it’s about dealing with uncertainty, but doing so at a very early stage in your life. How do you think that shaped who you are today? Aron Alexander: I think the thing to think about there is that we all go through difficult things. Everyone has their challenges. We don’t all start from the same position. The learning for me was that you’ve got to find a way to hold on to what’s important to you to keep going. Aron Alexander: Then use those experiences to try and build something for yourself—to achieve whatever it is you want to achieve in life. If you can go through something difficult in one part of your life, instead of letting it be something that holds you back or is only a period of trauma that’s hard to process, you can actually use it as fuel to go do something meaningful. Aron Alexander: We don’t always choose the things we go through, but it’s about making the most of them and doing what you can with the things you can control to create something that matters to you. Alejandro Cremades: Now, for you, obviously, you were going through schooling and education, but you decided to drop out and go into the military. That’s quite the course of action. Aron Alexander: Well, I had, as I mentioned, the health issues going on, so I couldn’t really finish school with all the A-levels that I probably wanted to. I had to take a step back, and I wanted to do things that rewarded the other skills I had—determination and focus. Aron Alexander: Maybe you can use those in academia, but I didn’t have the opportunity to go to the best institutions at that stage of my life. Going into the military really taught me a lot about excellence. Aron Alexander: If you persevere, there are paths to achieving things you didn’t think were possible—not to mention the teamwork, planning, and resilience needed to operate in an infantry unit. Aron Alexander: That all kind of maps to building a company as well. Aron Alexander: I was fortunate after that to teach myself my remaining A-levels while working, and I earned a place at Cambridge University. I think the experiences that inspired me in the military—like working hard to create opportunities—showed me that doesn’t just apply to military life, but to any part of life. Aron Alexander: Again, it’s about taking what you have and seeing how far you can go. That’s something I lacked in school but learned in the military, and it really allowed me to move forward in other areas of life. Alejandro Cremades: How do you think Cambridge changed things for you professionally? Aron Alexander: That was a real experience in a multitude of ways. It was a culture shock for me personally, not coming from that background—first in my family to go to university. I think I was the first to finish high school. Aron Alexander: There were some amazing experiences there that doubled down on what I said earlier. Cambridge is known for academic excellence, but it’s also a center of excellence in many other areas—whether it’s the rowing team, Footlights comedy, or other activities. You see a lot of high achievers—not just in academia. Aron Alexander: I got a great grounding in analytical thinking there. I was pushed to my limit and acquired new skills that I still use today—first principles thinking, solid research, and effectively presenting information about markets, customers, or documentation. Aron Alexander: But it also reinforced that if you focus and master your craft, you can excel in any area—not just academia or the military. That shaped my thinking and how I approach things today. Alejandro Cremades: Now in this case, you ended up going into a payments company, then a family office, and then into the world of entrepreneurship. Walk us through those events that led you there. Aron Alexander: I was fortunate to grow up in a family of entrepreneurs and got exposed to that early on. So from a familiarity perspective, it felt like something I had seen a lot. Aron Alexander: I started my first business at 17 in school. I actually started my second one while at university, again in the investment space. Aron Alexander: The family office was during the time I was teaching myself A-levels—so a little earlier. But the point is that having had those experiences—growing up and through school and university—I always felt a drive to solve problems. Aron Alexander: I was fortunate to go through some internships in financial services while at university. I did some trading and forex—Runa does a lot of cross-border money movement. Aron Alexander: I also did equity research in retail, and Runa works with retail merchants where you can spend money sent via Runa. So I had a lot of different experiences that mapped to what we’re building today. Aron Alexander: After university, I worked at a payments company that integrated into retail point-of-sale systems. Runa is kind of a Venn diagram between my entrepreneurial background, payments experience, financial markets exposure, and tech familiarity—all of which came together to build a new infrastructure for sending and spending digital money. Alejandro Cremades: Let’s talk about entering Runa. How did you decide Runa was the right thing for you? Aron Alexander: It was about spending time in the market—seeing the problems and figuring out which ones were the most important to solve. At the payments company, it took us about a year to get separate new s approved by the banking system and maybe even longer to work with Visa. Aron Alexander: This was back in 2013—things were different. But at the time, it seemed like traditional banking and card rails were extremely difficult for businesses to interoperate with. Aron Alexander: During that period, I received a $5 paper voucher refund in the mail. Having worked a bit in retail, the cost of picking, packing, and shipping something with such little value didn’t make sense to me. Aron Alexander: I looked into it and realized that money is just an agreement between two parties—a medium of exchange to access goods and services—but it requires both parties to agree on that medium. Aron Alexander: We use card rails and fiat cash to power that exchange, but this voucher was a multi-store voucher running completely outside of those rails. It didn’t need a bank . If I could digitize it, I could move it instantly to anyone. Merchants got better commissions compared to traditional interchange—especially in Europe, where that’s low. Aron Alexander: The traditional rails were failing businesses and consumers. If you can integrate directly with enough merchants, you can build your own rails to move digital money instantly in any format to anyone, anywhere. Aron Alexander: That felt like an important problem to solve. I validated the idea, found businesses struggling with payouts—refunds, rewards, loyalty redemptions, freelancer remittances—and followed the insight to build Runa. Alejandro Cremades: For the people listening—what ended up being the business model of Runa? How do you make money? Aron Alexander: Runa is an infrastructure that allows companies to send digital money to the people they serve for various use cases—class action payouts, refunds, rewards, remittances, and more. Aron Alexander: Businesses deposit money on one side—say $100,000—and can send $1 to 100,000 people in real time. Each person gets a link that serves as a wallet. They can spend that link online or in-store with over 5,000 merchants in 50+ countries. Aron Alexander: It’s an appless, cardless, bankless way of transferring money. Every redemption triggers a merchant commission—that’s how we make money. Sometimes customers pay access fees because it’s such a novel, frictionless, global way of sending and spending money. Aron Alexander: What’s really interesting now is that we’ve built our own merchant network, and we’re now adding other off-ramps to Runa—moving money into bank s or onto prepaid cards. Aron Alexander: We’ve dabbled with stablecoins in the past, and we’ll be bringing that online again. So it’s really about the ability to move money to anyone, anywhere instantly—specifically right now from a business to a consumer. And then we make money on the redemptions that happen when those consumers spend online or in-store. Alejandro Cremades: So how was it to go through the first stages of the company? I know that even early on, you guys almost ran out of money. So it sounds like it was bumpy. Aron Alexander: Yeah. Well, you know, it’s a difficult thing to try to sell—building a new rail. And working in the UK in the earlier stages of venture, almost nine years ago now, was a different market and a different fundraising environment. Aron Alexander: We were lucky to have the backing of a few angels and to start getting some traction. But there was a point where I got a phone call from one of my team saying, “Well, actually, we may not have money to make payroll next month.” Aron Alexander: You’re like, how did that happen? Things are moving so fast, and sometimes you can kind of get lost in the swirl of things. That taught me a lot about being on top of all the details in the business. We had a really hairy moment where we were wondering how we were going to continue to build the company if we couldn’t make payroll next month. Aron Alexander: You kind of run out of runway, run out of time. But we were lucky that we had people who believed in the vision from the investor side who backed us. We had some early customers who were prepared to take the leap with us—kind of before we really had a working product. It was more of a concierge service. Aron Alexander: Then we managed to prove that people wanted what we had, and that allowed us to raise some institutional money and bridge that gap. But it was definitely touch-and-go there for a second. I think every company has those near-death experiences, especially when you’re trying to build something new. Aron Alexander: I read once: if you want to build something really innovative, prepare to be misunderstood. So I think we definitely were—for a while—and we managed to find a way through it. Alejandro Cremades: In that case too, you guys have raised about $55 million. How has the journey been, going through the motions of raising all that money? Aron Alexander: I think, again, at least for me—and I’m sure for many people out there—life is like a series of reinventions. You just have to iterate your way through and learn how things work. It definitely took a while to understand the whole way of selling, storytelling, and plotting a line from where you are to where you want to get to. Aron Alexander: We were really lucky to find people who believed in the vision of a whole new way of sending and spending money, who saw the opportunity, who believed in me and the team. Aron Alexander: We were fortunate to raise a Prophecy Round in 2019. That gave us the fuel to prove out the product risk and the go-to-market risk. Then, during COVID, we had another touch-and-go moment with our Series A. We had a bunch of people lined up, due to the traction of the business, who were super excited—kind of got to IC. Aron Alexander: There were three or four funds very engaged with us. Aron Alexander: And overnight, you kind of wonder where everyone disappeared to—if they’d moved country or something. Then we got the party line of, “We’ve got some stuff going on, we have to think about this a bit more.” No one wanted to be direct. That was just as COVID was hitting in late March 2020. Aron Alexander: We had the rug pulled out from underneath us, which I’m sure happens to many companies, but it’s never fun. Again, we focused on the problem and got our heads down. Aron Alexander: We proved that customers wanted what we were building. And if you do that, you will find partners who want to back you. That really is the story. Alejandro Cremades: The rebrand you guys went through was quite the challenge as well. Rebranding is painful. How did you go about it, and why did it make sense? Aron Alexander: This again was maybe the naivety of starting a technology company for the first time with no resources. You’re trying to tell the story but maybe don’t know how. At least for us, we tried to get an agency involved, but didn’t really have much money to professionally approach this. Aron Alexander: We thought, well, we’re building our network using gift cards as a hack—a way to get retailers to accept the digital money we were issuing. All our customers wanted gift cards at the time. We didn’t think about the future enough, I think. So we thought a simple, SEO-friendly way to explain what we do was to call ourselves “WeGift.” Aron Alexander: But underneath the hood, we were building a really powerful engine to move any form of value to anyone, anywhere, instantly. We even did an integration with Coinbase, where we were cashing out cryptocurrencies in 2018 in real time, while the rest of the market was taking five days and charging 3–4% in fees. Aron Alexander: We would give a bonus on top. We were building some really cool stuff, but it was hard to get the market to understand that. Aron Alexander: So we persevered with the naming, but it was quite a jarring experience—trying to talk about future payment infrastructure while dragging along the millstone of “gift cards.” Aron Alexander: We realized early on that we needed to change the name. It took a while to get there, but we eventually told our story better by rebranding to Runa. Aron Alexander: The name speaks to the mysticism of moving money instantly. How do you make money appear somewhere in real time? If you give me dollars, I give you gift cards. If you give me euros, I give you crypto. If you give me pounds, I give you airtime credit. Aron Alexander: The idea of runes and the mystical movement of value was something we really attached to. It helped people put us in the right box and think of us the right way. Then we were able to attract the right talent, the next set of investors, and the right customers. Aron Alexander: There’s an old saying—what’s in a name? Aron Alexander: I’ve learned: a lot is in a name. Maybe to our detriment in the early years. But it’s been transformative for the business. It’s a super hard lift, but if you can think about what drives value for customers and how to communicate that in a way that tells a story, it’s going to help you move a lot faster. Alejandro Cremades: Talking about checking the boxes, there were a series of acquisition offers that you received but turned down. Turning down acquisitions is a really big deal. Why not? And how do you think about timing when it comes to acquisitions? Aron Alexander: Everyone has their own set of criteria. For us, we had a lot of legacy players in our space at the time—this is around 2018–2020. Aron Alexander: We were building a Stripe for digital incentives and rewards. It was really cool tech and would’ve been valuable for certain incumbents. Aron Alexander: But the vision was always so much bigger. It felt like we’d be selling ourselves really short. We could take the money on the table, but I believe Runa has a massive opportunity to redefine the whole industry. Aron Alexander: At the moment, we’re already impacting the lives of tens of millions of people every year who receive money through Runa. I think we’ll reach 40 million people this year. These individuals receive money in real time and spend it faster than they would through traditional rails. Aron Alexander: If you can keep going on that journey and impact hundreds of millions—potentially billions—that felt like the financial outcome would take care of itself. If you can take the pain and keep going, you get to build something that matters. That doesn’t come along very often. Aron Alexander: For me, it was like, “You know what? I can keep going—pain’s an old friend,” kind of adage. Aron Alexander: The upside was just so much bigger than the near term. Thinking long-term about the impact you want to have and the outcomes you want to achieve—that was my guiding principle. Alejandro Cremades: Let’s talk about the outcomes you want to achieve. Let’s say you go to sleep tonight, Aron, and wake up in a world where Runa’s vision is fully realized. What does that world look like? Aron Alexander: I think we’ve connected to every merchant that matters to consumers and built the ability for anyone—business or consumer—to send money to someone else, anywhere, instantly, outside the card and banking rails, in a way that’s personalized, data-rich, faster, and more economic—driving more revenue for everyone. Aron Alexander: That looks like an API to make payouts to consumers, like consumers receiving money in a real wallet, sending money to each other, then using that wallet to pay merchants. Businesses using Runa to send money to other businesses—unifying all payment flows in one elegant, simplified platform. Aron Alexander: Making money frictionless—just like the internet. Making money as simple as an email. Aron Alexander: Money is moving on from the days of PayPal into formats people care about more and more. It’s more localized—wallets, gaming credits, cryptocurrencies. Aron Alexander: The digital universes we’re building now mean money takes many forms. Our vision is to make all of those interoperable and seamless with the mainstream economy—to enable people to access goods and services wherever they are, whenever they need them. Alejandro Cremades: Now imagine I put you in a time machine. Let’s go back to when you were coming out of Cambridge, entering payments, family office, all of that—and starting to think about launching something. Alejandro Cremades: If you could sit with your younger self and give one piece of advice before launching the business, what would it be and why? Aron Alexander: At the risk of repeating myself, I think it would have been the branding. That felt like the biggest unlock we created for ourselves. The opportunity is there in our market. Aron Alexander: It’s just—can you engage the right audiences with messaging that resonates so you can deliver the value? Because if you build the best product in the world and no one sees it—if you don’t have distribution—it doesn’t matter. Aron Alexander: Looking back, if we had nailed the branding earlier, I think we would have attracted the best talent sooner, the right investors sooner, and the right customers sooner. Aron Alexander: We wouldn’t have had to wait so long to really step into ourselves the way we are now. Aron Alexander: That was our journey. For others, it might be different. But if I were to go back and redirect the ship, that would be the advice. Alejandro Cremades: I love it. Well, Aron, for the people listening who’d love to reach out and say hi, what’s the best way for them to do so? Aron Alexander: You can reach me at ar**@ru**.io or feel free to hit me up on LinkedIn. Alejandro Cremades: Amazing. Easy enough. Well, Aron, thank you so much for being on the DealMaker Show today. It has been an honor to have you with us. Aron Alexander: Thank you so much for your time. ***** If you like the show, make sure that you hit that subscribe button. If you can leave a review as well, that would be fantastic. And if you got any value either from this episode or from the show itself, share it with a friend. Perhaps they will also appreciate it. Also, , if you need any help, whether it is with your fundraising efforts or with selling your business, you can reach me at al*******@pa**************.com  

When COVID-19 upended the global job market in 2020, John Diklev didn’t find a job—he built a company instead. His thesis-driven insights into the challenges of renewable energy evolved into FLOWER (Flexible Power), a cutting-edge energy tech company based in Sweden. In this interview, John walks us through his journey from stock-savvy teenager to climate-focused founder. He touches on product innovation, capital raising strategy, regulatory battles, and team building. His views include a healthy dose of Swedish pragmatism and fierce conviction. Listen to the full podcast episode and review the transcript here. *FREE * The Ultimate Guide To Pitch Decks Stockholm Roots and an Engineering Mindset John Diklev grew up in Stockholm, Sweden—a place he calls “the best in the world” to grow up in. While his sister followed a path into medicine, John charted a different course in engineering and physics. John’s love for math, logic, and structured thinking led him to study industrial engineering and management, which served as the perfect bridge between analytic precision and business acumen. John’s early ion for stock trading was sparked by family involvement in Swedish investment competitions, and this further honed his instincts for market behavior and long-term strategy. He developed his own investment thesis. “It was like chess,” John reflects. “A constant challenge to see who’s the smartest in the room always appealed to me.” This perspective spurred him to venture into the unknown, choosing to be an entrepreneur in a country where medicine, law, and consulting were the main career paths. As John points out, Sweden has the second-highest number of unicorns per capita outside of Silicon Valley. He himself is following in the tracks of Spotify and Skype and comes from a family of entrepreneurs. His parents and grandparents all have their own companies. John set out to find a job during COVID, but instead realized that inflation was low and the capital markets were alive and kicking. Raising money for a startup was actually easier than finding a job at the time. And that’s where he set his sights. Building FLOWER: From Thesis to Venture The seed for FLOWER was planted during his thesis work, where John saw a glaring problem. He realized that the academic community widely acknowledged the need for adding intermittent renewable power supplies to the existing energy system. While people accepted that they needed flexibility and storage solutions for renewable energy systems, no one was building at scale to solve it. “I basically said, if we all agree this is a problem, someone needs to build the solution,” John shares. And so FLOWER—short for Flexible Power—was born, with a mission to address the underlying challenge of energy transition. How can we stabilize renewable energy through intelligent power management and energy storage? A Business Model That Defies Categorization FLOWER connects with flexible energy assets like EV chargers and large-scale batteries to control the power exchange within the energy system. The objective is to manage the volatility of wind and solar energy by using energy storage to create a stable and reliable system. FLOWER transforms unpredictable green electrons into stable, baseload power for industries. Its model involves buying power through long-term PPAs (power purchase agreements) from wind farms for more than seven years, and managing the intermittency. The company purchases the volatile production and adds a base of flexibility. It then sells a fixed volume of power at fixed price contracts to industries and other retailers that can rely on renewables plus flexibility to manage their operations and have predictability in their cost base. See How I Can Help You With Your Fundraising Or Acquisition Efforts Fundraising or Acquisition Process: get guidance from A to Z. Materials: our team creates epic pitch decks and financial models. Investor and Buyer Access: connect with the right investors or buyers for your business and close them. Book a Call Acquiring the Largest Battery Farm in Sweden One investor summed up the business model accurately. He said, “You’re running a technology company, a hedge fund, and an infrastructure firm.” And he wasn’t wrong. John has invested a lot of capital into building the infrastructure and physical assets, specifically batteries. At one point, FLOWER bought the biggest battery farm in Sweden, becoming a startup competing with infrastructure capital for the purchase. Facing rejections at multiple stages, FLOWER was twice kicked out of the process.. Yet John kept negotiating and ultimately won the bid by being flexible on deal . Just weeks before g, their financing fell through. The team scrambled and raised more capital in that short window than they had since the company’s founding. When the deal closed, it marked a major milestone: “That’s when I told my wife, ‘We’re finally out of the bankruptcy zone,’” John says. Raising Funding for FLOWER FLOWER operates at the intersection of energy markets, software, and asset development. But with complexity comes capital needs, and FLOWER has raised over €57M ($64.88) in equity and an additional €60M ($68.29) in project debt since inception. Storytelling is everything that John Diklev was able to master. The key is capturing the essence of what you are doing in 15 to 20 slides. For a winning deck, take a look at the pitch deck template created by Silicon Valley legend, Peter Thiel (see it here), where the most critical slides are highlighted. to unlock the pitch deck template that founders worldwide are using to raise millions below. Access The Pitch Deck Template Unlock the pitch deck template used by founders to raise millions. Just enter your email below. Your email address is 100% safe from spam! However, as John explains, they’ve only burned around €6M to €7M (~$7M) on operating expenses since the onset. FLOWER’s capital strategy reflects John’s thoughtful approach to financial management. They use debt for project financing, which is cheaper and more scalable for physical assets, while reserving equity for strategic growth and corporate operations. But FLOWER doesn’t plan to own all assets long-term. Instead, they are forming t ventures with partners with a lower cost of capital, allowing FLOWER to optimize its capital structure while focusing on innovation. “We’re not building just a software company that plays a key role,” John explains. “To make a real impact, you also need real assets.” Capital pools won’t adapt to fit the company’s needs. They must slice the risk and diversify the risk profiles within the company to suit different capital pools. Fundraising Wisdom: Brutal Honesty and Pipeline Discipline When it comes to fundraising, John highlights three key ingredients: Radical transparency – “It’s a complex business. We lay it all out: the problems, the risks, and how we solve them. It builds trust.” John believes in listing the problems they’re facing, along with their solutions and their plans for growing within the space. Pipeline diversification – “You can’t bet on one investor. It’s a numbers game. The work is tedious but necessary.” Navigating negotiations is a time-consuming and painstaking process, but that’s part of the game. Salesmanship – “You’re not just raising capital—you’re selling equity. Building momentum is a craft.” John’s fundraising mantra is clear: close the round, but be happy with the round you closed. Building a Scalable and Healthy Team FLOWER’s team has scaled from 10 people to nearly 140 in just two years. In the early days, everyone wore multiple hats—sometimes ten at once. To manage scale, the company developed an organizational blueprint, placing each employee on a future-looking organizational chart. John said to his team, “You are sitting on 10 different chairs simultaneously right now. We know that we’re pushing you and we need to try to find someone to to shoulder your responsibilities.” This helped depersonalize role changes, eliminated the emotional aspect of having their responsibilities taken away, and prevented burnout. As the CEO, John understands the sense of loss they might feel, but also stresses making progress in a quicker, healthier way. Now, FLOWER is entering a maturity phase, where the focus shifts from headcount to productivity. John’s strategy created clearer processes, improved communication, and made every team member more effective. They now have the right people in the right capacity in the right place. In the end, they ended up improving productivity, which was the key objective. “Scaling is about moving from one phase to another,” John says. “What worked for the first two years won’t work in the next two. We needed a new set of skills and perspective.” The Regulatory Gauntlet: Gaining Trust with Data In addition to commercial challenges, FLOWER also had to face skeptical regulators. Their pitch was using 1000 EV chargers as part of a national energy grid insurance plan. If the nuclear power plants dropped offline, FLOWER would alleviate the system from the load corresponding to the amount of production that’s been lost. It was unprecedented. The regulators were used to big turbines and hydropower plants, not “stochastic” household behavior. So FLOWER took an unusual approach: they wrote a 12-page “philosophical room” paper and shared all their charger data to build trust. The gamble paid off since the paper addressed all the concerns. They were able to convince regulators that having multiple small assets would increase reliability rather than having one larger turbine. John recalls how building the product took them about half a year, but a part of their first two-year journey was just getting the regulatory aspects in place. “It wasn’t a technical problem,” John recalls. “It was a trust issue. Once we showed them everything, we changed the conversation.” The Vision: A Resilient, Renewable European Grid If FLOWER succeeds, Europe will have a sovereign energy system in the European context based on renewables by building out a large amount of energy storage in the form of batteries. They will also make sure that distributed assets, like heat pumps, EV chargers, or larger industrial processes, are an integrated and active component in the energy system. Today, these components are essentially ive, simply consuming the power available. The end result? A reliable, stable, low-cost, climate-friendly energy system that doesn’t treat consumers as ive endpoints, but as active players in energy optimization. Looking back, John reflects on the early startup grind and the temptation to chase every lead: “We said yes to too many things, some we knew wouldn’t scale, but we needed traction. That came at a cost.” His advice to his younger self? “Be ruthless in your conviction. Say no more. Focus on what will scale and stick to it.” Final Thoughts From skeptical regulators to high-stakes battery bids, from Stockholm to shaping Europe’s green energy backbone, John Diklev’s journey with FLOWER is about conviction, adaptability, and practical thinking. In an industry where capital intensity, regulation, and complexity present significant challenges, FLOWER stands out not just for its technology but also for its vision of a brighter, more resilient energy future. Listen to the full podcast episode to know more, including: John Diklev founded FLOWER to solve renewable energy volatility by integrating flexible assets like batteries and EV chargers into the power grid. FLOWER combines technology, infrastructure, and energy trading to deliver stable baseload power from intermittent renewable sources. The company has raised over €117M ($133.5M) through a mix of equity and project debt, emphasizing capital efficiency and asset deployment. A pivotal moment came when FLOWER secured Sweden’s largest battery farm despite initial rejections and last-minute financing hurdles. John attributes fundraising success to radical transparency, a wide investor pipeline, and strong narrative momentum. Team scaling required a thoughtful organizational blueprint to manage rapid growth and avoid burnout during key phases of development. FLOWER’s regulatory breakthroughs were driven by transparency, data sharing, and a strategic challenge to conventional grid assumptions.   SUBSCRIBE ON: iTunesGoogle PlayStitcherTuneInRSSSoundCloudSpotify For a winning deck, see the commentary on a pitch deck from an Uber competitor that has raised over $400M (see it here).  *FREE * The Ultimate Guide To Pitch Decks to unlock for free the pitch deck template that founders worldwide are using to raise millions below. Access The Pitch Deck Template Unlock the pitch deck template used by founders to raise millions. Just enter your email below. Your email address is 100% safe from spam!  

In today’s founder spotlight, we’re ed by a rare breed, Adam Schwartz, who has lived the full startup cycle, not once but multiple times, and has done so on his own . He is a founder who went from building scrappy marketplaces to scaling a profitable, venture-free company. In this insightful interview, Adam talks about tackling enterprise transformation with AI through his latest startup, Parable. Listen to the full podcast episode and review the transcript here. *FREE * The Ultimate Guide To Pitch Decks A Front Row Seat to Innovation Adam’s roots trace back to Boston’s famed Route 128 loop, once the Silicon Valley of the East. “My dad was part of the early semiconductor wave in the ‘70s and ‘80s,” he recalls. That tech-drenched environment of biotech and high-tech companies seeped into his upbringing, quietly shaping his future. Eventually, Adam made his way to New York City by way of Florida, just as the city’s startup scene was taking shape. It was 2008. “Back then, you could fit the entire New York tech ecosystem into one room,” he says, referencing the now-legendary New York Tech Meetup. At one of these gatherings organized by the founder of Meetup.com, Adam felt the entrepreneurial spark fully ignite. “I was 23, had no idea what I was doing, but I knew I had found my people.” The community was infused with a collaborative, cooperative energy that was truly inspiring. Learning the Hard Way: Le Souk That ion led 24-year-old Adam to launch his first company in 2009—Le Souk, a marketplace for sustainable textiles. The idea was personal: Adam’s grandfather had worked in textiles in New York, and Adam’s office was, poetically, on the same street he once walked in an old textile mill. Le Souk was set in an eCommerce marketplace where fashion brands and designers could source sustainable textiles from suppliers. Adam and his team were trying to connect the supply and buy sides. The company became a case study in all the things that can go wrong early on: lack of product-market fit, co-founder misalignment, and an industry that wasn’t ready to change to conform to the digital marketplace, which was a different way of doing business. “We were solving a real problem,” Adam explains, “but the stakeholders—especially on the supply side—weren’t willing to adapt.” Still, those years were anything but wasted. Adam learned how to iterate and pivot the business as a result of the they were getting from the market. He also learned how to manage an engineering team, run a sales motion, triage, roap, and leverage the resources to build the product that would have an impact, and fundraise without traction. “It was a crash course in how hard it is to find product-market fit.” See How I Can Help You With Your Fundraising Or Acquisition Efforts Fundraising or Acquisition Process: get guidance from A to Z. Materials: our team creates epic pitch decks and financial models. Investor and Buyer Access: connect with the right investors or buyers for your business and close them. Book a Call BustedTees: The Rebuild One door closed, another opened—dramatically. Through a mutual connection, Adam met Josh Abramson, founder of Vimeo, CollegeHumor, and BustedTees. Josh wanted to buy BustedTees back from IAC and was looking for a partner. “He told me it was a profitable business with a lot of potential. We clicked instantly,” Adam says. In a world obsessed with hypergrowth and unicorns, Adam and Josh did the unthinkable—they focused on profitability. The duo connected over the idea of an internet-based business that is cash flow generative and profitable. This was in 2011, when even the good tech companies didn’t have revenue. Adam and Josh ran BustedTees like a private equity play: lean team, obsessive focus on unit economics, and ruthless optimization. “We doubled the business. But more importantly, we learned what it means to squeeze every ounce of performance from a business.” Adam worked with a small team of just 10 people and was personally involved in aspects like the customer acquisition lifecycle, web product, and supply chain. Yet, despite the success, he realized the model wasn’t scalable. “It was 2013. We were competing against companies like Groupon and Gilt that were throwing money into the digital advertising space with unprofitable ads and bleeding cash. We couldn’t match that burn,” Adam recalls. These companies would spend 80 cents on a dollar to acquire customers. Worse, the business lacked the network effects or product dynamics needed for long-term defensibility. BustedTees wasn’t a digital product. It was a retail business with digital distribution and had limitations. “We were creative, but we were the only creatives. That’s when the idea for TeePublic was born,” Adam says. TeePublic: The Marketplace Masterclass TeePublic flipped the script. Instead of being the creators, Adam and Josh opened the doors to a global community of independent designers and artists using Vimeo as an example. The duo eliminated inventory risk using print-on-demand tech and created a scalable, zero-CAPEX retail model. Designers would create designs, and TeePublic would host them on an aggregated marketplace, handling the supply chain. What started as an experiment quickly grew into a juggernaut. As a byproduct of owning BustedTees, Adam and Josh came across new printing technology that allowed them to print one-off of a digital print file to print one T-shirt or one art print. TeePublic scaled profitably for a decade, never raising venture or debt. “We were profitable every quarter. Every decision was built around sustainable growth.” The key? Understanding their marketplace flywheel. “Most marketplaces are supply-side driven. We saw a direct correlation between designer activity and customer demand. That gave us clarity—we invested 100% into growing our artist base and it paid off.” As Adam points out, their competitors were more focused on the demand and customer sides, which worked to their advantage. They were the most supply-driven of the competitor set. By the time they exited, TeePublic had 35x more SKUs than Walmart—no exaggeration. The Exit and What Came After When TeePublic was acquired by an Australian public company, it wasn’t out of desperation—it was opportunistic. “There was no pressure. We had a profitable, non-venture-backed business. But we saw an opportunity to scale the impact.” Josh moved on, but Adam stayed post-acquisition for three years, navigating an entirely new world of Australian public boards, international operations, and enterprise complexity. In that complexity, Adam found the seed for his next big thing. The acquisition for $40M+ without external investors is a huge success and helped the broader company significantly. Enter Parable: AI-Powered Enterprise Transformation While serving on boards of companies undergoing massive transformation, like after acquisitions, for example, Adam noticed something deeply broken. He noted a complete lack of operational data around organizational design, resource allocation, operations, workflows, and outcomes. At the enterprise level, there is no telemetry data to understand what was happening inside it. The lack of data was an incredible inhibitor to the company’s ability to create alignment and efficiency in driving toward its strategy. “We had more insight into our customers than our own employees,” Adam says. “There’s this enormous data gap inside organizations when it comes to how people work and where time and resources go.” That’s where Parable comes in. Parable is building a new category of enterprise software. Using AI to parse unstructured and fragmented operational data from hundreds of software tools, it creates a baseline of how an organization actually functions. From there, Parable identifies inefficiencies, recommends transformations, and helps implement them all while measuring real-time impact. AI creates a continuous improvement loop or a virtuous cycle that reconstitutes a company around a new, efficient, and aligned way of working. “You can think of it as a digital twin of your organization,” Adam explains. “Eventually, leaders will be able to ask questions in plain language and get a simulation of their org—see the trade-offs, simulate different outcomes, and execute a strategy.” Venture or Not? It Depends Unlike TeePublic, Parable is backed by venture funding, but intentionally, since it is a cutting-edge technology business. In mid-2024, they raised a $5.2M pre-seed round, led by founder-operators: the minds behind HubSpot, Ramp, Vimeo, Superhuman, Squarespace, and more. “Retail and DTC? Poor candidates for venture capital. But enterprise AI? That’s a perfect fit. We’re targeting a $500B to $1T market. You need venture-scale ambition and capital for that,” as Adam explains. They needed the funding to invest in a team of some of the best AI engineers. Storytelling is everything that Adam Schwartz was able to master. The key is capturing the essence of what you are doing in 15 to 20 slides. For a winning deck, take a look at the pitch deck template created by Silicon Valley legend, Peter Thiel (see it here), where the most critical slides are highlighted. to unlock the pitch deck template that founders worldwide are using to raise millions below. Access The Pitch Deck Template Unlock the pitch deck template used by founders to raise millions. Just enter your email below. Your email address is 100% safe from spam! Parable also needed capital to build a product and motion to deliver to Fortune 500 companies, which is the space and sector it was targeting. However, as Adam says, having telemetry data around operations is a universal problem every enterprise and small business faces. Final Thoughts – One Piece of Advice for His Younger Self? Adam pauses, reflecting. “I’d tell him to think as big as possible. Don’t shy away from the biggest problems. Learn the frameworks, study the masters—but ultimately, trust your own intuition. You’re going to have to.” There are no playbooks, and every founder builds their company in a unique way. Adam Schwartz’s story is a testament to evolution—how each chapter, even the messy ones, can shape a founder into someone capable of tackling billion-dollar problems. From bootstrapped beginnings to enterprise AI transformation, Adam’s journey is proof that building with intention—and integrity—can take you far. And with Parable, it seems he’s just getting started. Listen to the full podcast episode to know more, including: Startups live or die by product-market fit. Validating both sides of a marketplace early is advisable. Bootstrapping forces operational discipline and clarity on what actually drives growth. Profitability can be a competitive edge, especially when your competitors are burning cash. Marketplaces thrive when you obsess over supply — build for creators, and customers will follow. Exits are smoother when you’re not under pressure — build a business that doesn’t need to sell. There’s a massive data gap in how organizations understand themselves. Parable aims to close it. Venture capital is a tool, not a rule — use it only when the opportunity and model demand it.   SUBSCRIBE ON: iTunesGoogle PlayStitcherTuneInRSSSoundCloudSpotify For a winning deck, see the commentary on a pitch deck from an Uber competitor that has raised over $400M (see it here).  *FREE * The Ultimate Guide To Pitch Decks to unlock for free the pitch deck template that founders worldwide are using to raise millions below. Access The Pitch Deck Template Unlock the pitch deck template used by founders to raise millions. Just enter your email below. Your email address is 100% safe from spam!  

Dan Magy’s journey from a sun-soaked surf town in Southern California to building some of the most impactful defense technology in modern warfare doesn’t follow any conventional path. He’s not a coder, nor does he claim to be a technical wizard. But what Dan lacks in technical prowess, he makes up for in vision, grit, and relentless curiosity—traits that have fueled three startups, two exits, and a defense tech rocket ship called Firestorm Labs. Listen to the full podcast episode and review the transcript here. *FREE * The Ultimate Guide To Pitch Decks Southern California Roots and a Global Mindset Growing up in an older surf town in San Diego, Dan describes a childhood that blended the idyllic beach lifestyle with a deep respect for education. “There were still horses on our street,” he laughs. “And avocado farms. It was this really beautiful balance of freedom and discipline.” Dan’s early years were shaped by a hunger for experience. “I believe in treating life a little like a game,” he says. That philosophy led him to places like South Korea, where he taught English at the Sogang University. Dan also traveled to Thailand, where he spontaneously became a scuba guide after walking past a shop with a “Help Wanted” sign. That unplanned detour didn’t just shape his worldview—it led him to meet Will Dickinson, his co-founder for his first company, Fanpics. Looking back on this stint, Dan describes working a very physically demanding job with two four-hour shifts or one very long day shift. He had to clean the store, fill the tanks, and set up trips for the next day. Dan enjoyed the gruelling schedule and considers it one of the best times of his life. They lived on Koh Phi Phi in Thailand, the island immortalized in the Leonardo DiCaprio movie, The Beach. Later, Dan moved to London and entered the London School of Economics, the top business school. In 2010-2011, the fundraising environment in the UK was highly challenging. The best offer founders could expect was £250K for a 35% stake in the company. Eventually, Dan packed his bags and moved to New York, where he stayed for a few months before moving to San Diego. Dan raised $4.5M at a $25M valuation for his idea there. In contrast, Dan believes such opportunities are lacking in European countries. Most of his friends continued working in banks, became consultants, or worked in the government. 15 years down the road, the startup ecosystem is much more developed than it was at the time. Fanpics: A Vitamin for Sports Fans Fanpics was Dan’s first shot at building a tech company, without being a technical founder. The idea was charmingly simple and undeniably cool. They had robotic cameras installed in sports stadiums that captured real-time reaction photos of fans during major moments and delivered them directly to their phones. Think: a personalized, digital souvenir of your team’s game-winning touchdown. Despite being ahead of its time, the venture faced brutal truths about the sports industry. “TV money dominates everything,” Dan says. “Fan experience isn’t prioritized when every team gets a couple hundred million dollars annually, no matter how bad they are.” Still, Fanpics raised $8M and partnered with major teams to earn revenue shares by selling sponsorships on the pictures. The company ran for three years and laid the groundwork for Dan’s first full-cycle founder experience—from ideation to capital raising to acquisition. “We didn’t really make money on the deal,” Dan its of the exit during COVID. “But we learned. And that helped set us up for what came next.” He learned not to take investor disinterest personally and to be resilient in the face of rejection. See How I Can Help You With Your Fundraising Or Acquisition Efforts Fundraising or Acquisition Process: get guidance from A to Z. Materials: our team creates epic pitch decks and financial models. Investor and Buyer Access: connect with the right investors or buyers for your business and close them. Book a Call Citadel Defense Company: From Stadiums to Battlefields What came next was anything but expected. In 2015, while still at Fanpics, stadiums began asking Dan a strange question: “Can you build a drone defense system?” They were tackling the problem of drones entering sports stadiums. That curiosity snowballed into the founding of Citadel Defense Company—a counter-drone company that ended up deploying systems in Iraq to combat ISIS drone threats in 2016-2017. Navy SEALs in Naval Special Warfare used their drones. Citadel’s path to defense contracting wasn’t easy. The defense world is infamous for red tape, opaque procurement processes, and skeptical gatekeepers. Dan and his team had to comply with guidelines for employing different technologies on the battlefield. “The best tech doesn’t always win,” Dan explains. “You have to navigate requirements, deployment doctrine, and even find the money yourself.” The process is long and complicated. Still, they did it. Citadel raised $13M, got battlefield validation from elite military units like the United States Naval Special Warfare community, and eventually sold the company in a nine-figure exit to Blue Halo. This company was buying different future defense tech companies to add to a single portfolio. Months later, Citadel (now rebranded as Titan) won a multi-hundred-million-dollar contract. But Dan didn’t find the financial outcome most meaningful. “At my wedding afterparty, a Navy guy told me our system had saved his life two weeks earlier. That moment? That’s what it’s all about,” Dan says. It’s about making a difference for “people doing dangerous things in dangerous areas.” Entrepreneurship and the Dan Test As Dan sees it, entrepreneurship is all about understanding the pattern recognition that you have a unique product to meet customer demands. Next, it’s about executing on the product side and getting it where it needs to be to unlock the bigger contracts. Being a non-technical person, Dan believes in making the experience incredible when using the product. He wants to push the complicated aspects behind the scenes so the customer is surprised and delighted to have a product that is really easy to use. Dan instituted a test at Fanpics and Citadel called the Dan Test. He wanted to be able to set up and use the drone himself, which was an important lesson for the engineers deg the product. Dan makes it a point to go into meetings and ask a bunch of questions to get to the center of the truth. Like his customers, he can’t build or write code for the drone. So, over the years, he has developed some basic principles for motivating his engineers in the right direction. Firestorm Labs: Making Minivan Drones, Not Ferraris With two exits under his belt, Dan could’ve easily gone into venture or taken a break. Instead, he launched Firestorm Labs, a company born out of the war in Ukraine and a hard-earned understanding of modern warfare. The thesis is bold: “We build drones like Ferraris. We need to build them like minivans.” Dan aimed to develop drones capable of performing multiple missions. These drones should be affordable, customizable, and produced in large quantities. To make that happen, Dan brought in Ian, his CTO, an aerospace engineer with a background in additive manufacturing, a.k.a. 3D printing. Dan also brought Chad McCoy from the JSOC, a super elite engineer in the special operations group, on board. Chad had been on important raids and used several interesting technologies. He’s famous for being on the team that saved Captain Phillips. Dan’s strategy was to build a credible, eager-to-learn team. He also ensured they got the right customer on the product side and then raised the money to execute it. In the initial months, Firestorm was bootstrapped but started bringing in defense investors in 2023. Firestorm Business Model and Raising Funding Firestorm builds modular, multi-mission drones that are affordable, flexible, and made with 3D-printed parts in containerized, mobile factories. Dan ensures they can be built in about a tenth of the time at about a fifth of the cost. “A factory shouldn’t be a building with a roof,” Dan says. “We can drop a 20-foot container anywhere and start producing drones, parts for vehicles, even medical braces.” And the business model? It’s not just drone sales. Firestorm also repairs other manufacturers’ drones, makes replacement parts, licenses its modular manufacturing systems, and prints parts for military vehicles.. Dan and his team have raised $50M and brought in top-tier investors like Lockheed Martin, who are opening doors to massive government contracts and challenging and interesting programs. Firestorm customers have problems they rely on smaller, more flexible companies to solve. Storytelling is everything that Dan Magy was able to master. The key is capturing the essence of what you are doing in 15 to 20 slides. For a winning deck, take a look at the pitch deck template created by Silicon Valley legend, Peter Thiel (see it here), where the most critical slides are highlighted. to unlock the pitch deck template that founders worldwide are using to raise millions below. Access The Pitch Deck Template Unlock the pitch deck template used by founders to raise millions. Just enter your email below. Your email address is 100% safe from spam! On Timing, Grit, and Dreaming Big Dan has seen firsthand how timing can make or break a startup. Citadel’s exit came just before a massive contract win. Fanpics might’ve been huge if the market were ready. Firestorm is catching the wave of a new defense tech boom. As Dan points out, they can revolutionize warfare by developing technologies that stop aggressive nations from attacking others. At present, we are focused on deterrence, which is very important. However, how we build and view drones needs to change fundamentally across the West. In Dan’s opinion, we need to develop the infrastructure worldwide to not only the manufacturing and repair of these systems, but also bring down the costs across the military for fixing, repairing, and deploying things that we can do with our printing systems. A Piece of Advice in Conclusion Dan’s biggest advice to his younger self? “It takes just as much time to build something big as it does to build something small. So dream big.” From selling scuba tours to life-saving defense systems, Dan Magy proves that great founders aren’t always great engineers. Sometimes, they’re just relentless learners, master communicators, and bold enough to chase big ideas—even when they don’t have all the answers. And for Dan, the journey’s far from over. Listen to the full podcast episode to know more, including: You don’t need to be technical to build deep tech—just relentlessly customer-focused and vision-driven. Great products are built when complexity is hidden, and experience is prioritized. Resilience and pattern recognition are the real superpowers in fundraising and scaling. Fanpics taught Dan that timing and incentive alignment are everything in tough industries like sports. Citadel’s success came from solving a real battlefield problem, not just building cool tech. Firestorm is reimagining defense manufacturing with 3D-printed, modular, multi-mission drones. It takes just as much effort to build something small as something massive, so always aim big.   SUBSCRIBE ON: iTunesGoogle PlayStitcherTuneInRSSSoundCloudSpotify For a winning deck, see the commentary on a pitch deck from an Uber competitor that has raised over $400M (see it here).  *FREE * The Ultimate Guide To Pitch Decks to unlock for free the pitch deck template that founders worldwide are using to raise millions below. Access The Pitch Deck Template Unlock the pitch deck template used by founders to raise millions. Just enter your email below. Your email address is 100% safe from spam!  

If you’ve ever done data analysis in Python, there’s a good chance you’ve used Pandas, the groundbreaking open-source library that transformed how data scientists work. But behind Pandas is Wes McKinney’s story of intellectual curiosity, risk-taking, and a relentless drive to build useful tools for others. Wes’s latest initiative, Composed Ventures, is a micro venture capital (VC) fund that invests in early-stage data infrastructure, AI, and ML companies, as well as next-generation Python tooling and other related technologies. In this episode, you will learn: Open-sourcing Pandas at AQR was a pivotal moment that helped establish Python as the dominant language for data science. Wes dropped out of a PhD program to fully pursue open source and entrepreneurship, driven by early traction from the community. His first startup, Datapad, exited via acquihire after recognizing the challenges of differentiating in a crowded BI market. Apache Arrow emerged as a foundational open-source project for modern data infrastructure, eventually leading to Voltron Data. Voltron Data raised $110M in funding to tackle GPU-accelerated data workloads and the Arrow ecosystem at scale. Wes stepped out of operations at Voltron to split his time between building tools for open source data science at Posit and investing in startups aligned with his deep-tech thesis. His investing playbook centers on technical founders with strong execution skills and a clear vision for the future of data systems.   SUBSCRIBE ON: iTunesGoogle PlayStitcherTuneInRSSSoundCloudSpotify For a winning deck, see the commentary on a pitch deck from an Uber competitor that has raised over $400M (see it here).  *FREE * The Ultimate Guide To Pitch Decks to unlock for free the pitch deck template that founders worldwide are using to raise millions below. Access The Pitch Deck Template Unlock the pitch deck template used by founders to raise millions. Just enter your email below. Your email address is 100% safe from spam! About Wes McKinney: Wes McKinney is an entrepreneur and open-source software developer focusing on analytical computing. He is currently a Principal Architect at Posit PBC. Wes co-founded Voltron Data and now serves on its advisory board. He created or co-created the pandas, Apache Arrow, Apache Parquet, and Ibis projects. He is a Member of the ASF and has authored three editions of Python for Data Analysis. In the past, Wes was with Ursa Computing, Ursa Labs (with Posit’s help), Two Sigma Investments, Cloudera, DataPad, and AQR Capital Management. Wes received his S.B. in mathematics from MIT in 2007. He grew up in Knoxville, TN, and Akron, OH, and currently lives in Nashville, TN. See How I Can Help You With Your Fundraising Or Acquisition Efforts Fundraising or Acquisition Process: get guidance from A to Z. Materials: our team creates epic pitch decks and financial models. Investor and Buyer Access: connect with the right investors or buyers for your business and close them. Book a Call Connect with Wes McKinney: LinkedIn Crunchbase PitchBook WesMckinney.com Read the Full Transcription of the Interview: Alejandro Cremades: All right, everyone, thank you so much for tuning into The Dealmaker Show. Today we have an amazing guest. He’s a founder—a repeat founder—a founder that has had exits. His last company also raised quite a bit of money. We’re going to be talking about open sourcing, knowing when it’s the right time to turn the page and move on to the next chapter, as well as managing relationships, building, scaling, and financing—all the things we like to hear. So without further ado, let’s welcome our guest today, Wes McKinney. Welcome to the show. Wes McKinney: Thanks for having me. Alejandro Cremades: So Wes, originally born near Philadelphia, but you did travel quite a bit. Give us a walk down memory lane. How was life growing up for you? Wes McKinney: Yeah, well, my dad was in the newspaper business. He was managing newspapers, so we moved around a fair bit growing up. I have no memory of the Philadelphia area, but I was born there. When I was a year old, we moved to Knoxville, Tennessee. I spent about half my childhood in Knoxville and the other half in Northeast Ohio. I graduated from high school in Akron, Ohio—a little suburb of Akron called Cuyahoga Falls. Then I left the Midwest, went to MIT, and studied math. Initially, I was interested in becoming a mathematician or doing something more academic. I had a ing interest in computers and computer programming, but I didn’t realize that my future career would lie in computer programming, data science, and entrepreneurship. But sometimes we stumble into things and we find our ion. I’m okay with how things ended up. Alejandro Cremades: How did you develop that love for math? How did you get into math? Wes McKinney: It was pretty self-driven. I think I enjoyed the structured aspect of problem-solving and abstract thinking. Being able to solve more and more difficult problems, building up a stack of tools that fit together and enable you to think through these really complex or abstract problems. When I was in high school, I started doing math competitions. I went to a high school that did have a math team, but it was a little bit self-organized by the students. There was a teacher who helped facilitate, but we didn’t have a lot of formal instruction or former mathletes to help teach us. So I went down the rabbit hole of doing math competitions. I did pretty well at the state and national level in high school, but I never reached the USA Math Olympiad or the International Math Olympiad or anything like that. But that was kind of my interest in math at the time. I’d done a little bit with computers, but high school for me was basically math, a little bit of computers, and foreign languages. When I got to college, I pretty quickly realized that I wasn’t going to become the greatest mathematician. I figured I should find something more practical to apply myself to—something that could have more impact in the world, something less abstract, more applied and tangible in of having a real effect outside of the esoteric world of theoretical mathematics. Alejandro Cremades: Let’s talk about how you got into finance after college and ed AQR. One thing you did there that may be quite interesting to our listeners is open sourcing IP from a financial firm. That sounds like quite the challenge. Wes McKinney: Yeah, it wasn’t easy. I started building a body of Python code in 2008, basically building a little miniature research framework for myself at AQR so I could do my work faster, be more productive, and be better at my job. It was also an experiment to learn Python programming and try to use Python for data analysis. I found that I really enjoyed building tools for working with data and also for other people. But it was totally a skunkworks project. It wasn’t really sanctioned, authorized, or planned by company management. I think I showed up one day and had rebuilt a number of pieces of fund infrastructure in Python just so I could do research. I found a couple of champions in leadership who said, “This seems really interesting. We should give him a couple of people to work with—a little more room to focus on this and see if it could be a viable path for the future of the company.” They ultimately decided to use Python to rebuild and build the future models that run the business. Now, I believe AQR—along with a lot of the financial industry—runs on Python based on those core principles from 15, 17, 18 years ago. In 2009, after working on this for about a year, I started making the pitch about open sourcing some of the core IP, which was the data analysis framework that’s now known as the Pandas project. It’s now a very popular Python data science library for working with data. I’d say it took probably six months to convince everyone and get all the lawyers on board, figure out the licensing, and make sure it wasn’t going to create liability for the company or give away our secret sauce or competitive edge. But I think I made the argument convincingly that it would mostly serve as an ment for the fund—that smart programmers could come to AQR and work on tools like Pandas and use Python. Also, people outside the company would contribute to the project and make it better, and we would reap the benefits of the external open-source community. It required a leap of faith on everyone’s part, but I think in the fullness of time, it’s been a good decision. It helped catalyze the growth of the Python data science ecosystem. Pandas, along with a number of other projects that came about during that era, all fit together to create a really productive environment for doing data analysis and data science work. Without Pandas and the other projects that happened at the same time, it’s unclear that Python would be where it is today as the number-one language of AI and data science. At a certain point, Google, Meta (formerly Facebook), and other companies piled on and chose Python as the language for building their AI frameworks. Now all of the LLMs and AI frameworks are built in Python. It’s definitely a big change from 20 years ago, when people were questioning whether Python was a safe language for building real software. Alejandro Cremades: No kidding. Now in your case, you go from there into thinking that maybe a PhD is your next chapter, but then you drop out and really enter the world of entrepreneurship. How did that happen? Wes McKinney: I started a PhD in statistics at Duke because I wanted to develop a better academic and applied foundation for doing data science work. But while I was in grad school, I started getting pinged by folks who had seen Pandas and one of my first conference talks, which was ing Python for quantitative finance. I saw there was a lot of interest in using Python for real industry work. I said to myself, “I can’t stay in grad school and not have this be my primary focus.” So I took a leave from grad school, ultimately dropped out, and went back to New York to work full-time on open source. I had a couple of small contracts to help pay my rent, but it was really an exploration—just to see how far down the well goes, so to speak. I got a couple of my colleagues from AQR to me and start exploring entrepreneurial ideas. Initially, we were interested in building a financial analytics framework based in Python, but we found it was going to be pretty difficult to get hedge funds and other financial institutions to buy it—at least at a price that would make sense for a startup. So we ultimately decided not to pursue that route. Adam Klein and Chang She—Chang and I ultimately decided to found a different company called Datapad, which was more of a business analytics, business intelligence company, all Python-powered. We raised a seed round from Accel in early 2013. We decided that building the company in San Francisco was the best move, so we relocated from New York to SF at the beginning of 2013 and built the company in the heart of SOMA. Alejandro Cremades: That’s amazing. Now with Datapad being a venture-backed business, what I want to ask—and I think this will be really impactful for founders listening—is: how do you think about exiting well? In the case of Datapad, how did you guys think about it? When did you realize it was the right time? Walk us through that process. Wes McKinney: We worked on the company for about two years before we exited in an acqui-hire type deal to Cloudera at the end of 2014. After we raised our seed round, we hired a small team and were really heads down building the product and working with some initial design partners to get . But in the broader context of the time, we were in a really crowded space. Even though we were building a business analytics product that featured Python and Python extensibility at its core, we were classified in the business intelligence space—which was super crowded. There were some really successful companies founded around that time, like Looker, that were taking up all the attention of the venture community. When we went to raise our Series A round in 2014, we saw pretty quickly that we were facing an uphill battle in of differentiating ourselves and succeeding in this ultra-crowded market. At a certain point, we were contemplating a bridge round of financing, and we decided it would be better to find the right home for the team—a place where we could exit well… Wes McKinney: As co-founders, we wanted to end up in a place where we could get good jobs for as many people on the team as we could. We entertained a number of offers—I think we ultimately had four different offers to exit. So we ran a pretty tight M&A process, and it came together really quickly. But we ended up choosing Cloudera because we knew we were ionate about data infrastructure and open-source software. We decided we wanted to be in a place that valued those things, where we could continue to make an impact in the space of open-source data science and data infrastructure. Alejandro Cremades: Talking about open source and ecosystems—I know after Cloudera, you spent a bit of time there. But after the integration, you went on to work at Two Sigma, and from there it all matured into what became Voltron Data, your next company. What events needed to happen for you to feel really good and comfortable with the thought of doing it again? Wes McKinney: Yeah, it was a bit of a winding journey from the exit to Cloudera in 2014 to founding Voltron Data in 2020. Initially, while I was at Cloudera, a group of other open-source developers and I created a new open-source project called Apache Arrow, which was a new data connectivity and data acceleration framework. So we focused on building that project. After about six months or so, I realized that Cloudera was not going to be the best place to continue that work. Two Sigma got in touch with me because they had seen the early Arrow work. They offered to hire me to work on Arrow, and I thought, “This sounds great.” After a very productive couple of years being full-time at Two Sigma, there were a bunch of other companies interested in committing capital to fund Arrow development. That included NVIDIA and some other financial firms like Bloomberg. I thought, “Well, I’m not going to leave Two Sigma and go NVIDIA or some other company”—although it probably would have been a good short-term financial decision to NVIDIA in 2016 or 2018. So instead, I created a kind of nonprofit industry consortium to combine all those capital commitments into one place so we could continue working on the project without necessarily founding a for-profit company. It took a long time for me to convince myself there was even a business to be created around Arrow. The big lesson was that, first, I needed to collect evidence that there was a need in the market—that there was a product to be created and that a startup was actually needed. Not just to found a startup for the sake of it, but because there was a real opportunity. I also needed to feel conviction about going down the startup path, because startups are really difficult. It’s a lot of work. It involves managing a lot of relationships—with investors, with your team—you’re carrying a lot of weight on your shoulders. Having been through that the first time at a small scale with Datapad, I was familiar with the emotional burden you carry as a founder, and the toll that process takes on you. But by 2020, just as the impact of Arrow was snowballing, Neil Richardson and I—who were leading Ursa Labs—had built up the conviction that it was time to found a company. We had built Ursa Labs inside RStudio (now called Posit), the data science platform company. In effect, they were our startup incubator. We set up a separate entity for all the committed funds to the development work. The operational side—healthcare, benefits, all that—was managed by RStudio (Posit). In 2020, in the middle of COVID while we were all quarantining at home, we decided to spin out of Posit to create a startup. We raised our initial round of venture capital, led by Google Ventures (GV) and Walden, in August 2020. So we were off to the races. Alejandro Cremades: So obviously that became Voltron Data. For the people listening, to really get it—what ended up being the business model of Voltron Data? Wes McKinney: Yeah, so just to briefly explain how we went from Ursa Labs to Ursa Computing to Voltron Data: We raised the seed round for Ursa Computing, which was the startup spun out of Ursa Labs. At the end of the year, I started talking with Josh Patterson, who led the RAPIDS team at NVIDIA. RAPIDS was a GPU acceleration framework for analytics at NVIDIA. They were interested in founding a company. Another startup called BlazingSQL had been working closely with the RAPIDS team to build a GPU-accelerated data engine. We had business ideas we were pursuing at Ursa Computing around enterprise for Apache Arrow and improving and accelerating enterprise data connectivity. Pretty quickly, ideas started to percolate to create a “super company” that could bring all these concepts together. During that time, we also spent more time talking with Lip-Bu Tan and his fund, Walden. Lip-Bu is now the CEO of Intel. They were really keen—if we could bring all these folks together—there was a lot of appetite to bring significant capital to the table to build an accelerated computing company around all of our ideas. We were able to do that at the beginning of 2021. There was a bit of “sausage making” involved in reorganizing the company to make sure everybody had equity stakes they were happy with and to get the rounds of funding done. By the end of 2021, we had a Series A in the works to bring our total capital raised to $110 million. So we were suddenly operating on a scale of business that was an order—or probably two orders—of magnitude greater than what I had been involved with before at Datapad, which was a small seed round a decade earlier. Alejandro Cremades: So you said a Series A of $110 million? That’s quite a lot of money for a Series A. Wes McKinney: It is, yeah. I mean, it was the first—well, it’s funny these days. What you call a Series Seed versus a Series A—those lines are blurry. But we called it a Series A because it reflected, first, the stage of the business. We were definitely a Series A company in of where we were at in the development timeline. But also, the level of ambition of the business—to build an accelerator-native, multi-hardware, distributed execution engine. To the development and growth of the Arrow ecosystem. To do enterprise . And to partner with other vendors to become more Arrow-native. We were tackling a very ambitious space. So I think the $110 million Series A also reflected the scale, scope, and ambition of the business. Alejandro Cremades: I guess for you guys, that was quite the ride, quite the journey. At what point do you realize it might be time to turn the page? How do you go about that as a founder—especially as the founder of such a fantastic and meaningful operation? Wes McKinney: Yeah. Well, in 2021, when we initially put the company together, we were around 30–35 people. We went from 35 people to 130 in about a year—definitely some pretty intense blitzscaling. We also had a large founding team, and fairly diverse in of the different product directions we were pursuing. The big thing that changed between when we founded the company and when I decided to step out of my full-time operational role—well, there were a number of things. First, the economic environment in 2021 was very different from the environment at the end of 2022. Interest rates went up a lot. Capital became a lot harder to raise. We had to make a conscious decision as a company to really focus on narrower verticals in our product strategy. We had to place fewer bets but focus on areas where we could be really successful. The area the company chose to focus on was large-scale, GPU-accelerated data workloads. For me, there were a number of directions I was interested in pursuing within the company that we just couldn’t fit into our short-term product strategy. We had built an amazing team to work on the GPU-accelerated side of the business. And increasingly, I felt that the impact I had brought to the business was in building the underlying core technology—Apache Arrow—and helping catalyze the creation of these frameworks we were using to build the company’s products. Getting the company started, raising money, building the leadership team, building the engineering team. But I felt the desire to spend my time on a broader portfolio of projects. I had started investing more actively and wanted to be able to spend more time doing that—without feeling guilty about taking energy away from my startup. So there were a bunch of factors that led me to feel that… Wes McKinney: You know, it was best for me to not be in a full-time operational role so I could spend more time investing, spend more time working with other founders on projects that are based on the Arrow ecosystem. As I saw that there were lots of new companies being founded in and around Arrow. Alejandro Cremades: Well, let’s talk about that. Why don’t we double-click on that, Wes? Because on the investment side, you’ve done 40 investments. I mean, you’ve done 40 angel investments. Now you’ve got the venture fund going too. I guess as part of these investments and working with founders—when you’ve done over 40—you develop pattern recognition to see what works and what doesn’t, right? When it comes to investing in founders. What would you say are the three key ingredients that you see repeating from those founders that tend to be the ones with more chances of succeeding? Wes McKinney: Yeah. I mean, the investments I’ve made have been focused on data infrastructure, data science, accelerated computing, and developer tools more generally. I’ve tended to prefer working with deep tech companies or founding teams that are technical. Since I’m a technical founder, I enjoy working with other technical founders—especially technical CEOs. Especially as we created the Arrow project in 2015–2016, a few years later, more and more companies started using Arrow and related technologies as part of their core technology platform. So I said to myself, “Well, if companies are going to use this technology, I’d like to be involved and be as helpful as I can to these companies.” I initially started angel investing as a way to be involved and participate in the success of entrepreneur friends of mine. They would start companies, and I’d say, “Hey, could I invest in your company?” And they would let me. But now it’s become a little more structured. I’m thinking about broader technology trends and theses. One of the core ideas is this notion of the composable data stack—enabling data systems and data infrastructure to become more modular, composable, and interoperable. That’s one of the central ideas of Arrow. I think about older legacy systems and how we could rebuild those systems in a way that incorporates principles of modularity, composability, and interoperability. So in of investments, if I meet founders who have the right stuff—the technical background, the ability to execute—but who are also operating on a similar intellectual wavelength, where they perceive what’s wrong with the prior generations of technologies and have an idea of what they can make better… I think it’s about the right way of thinking—being able to visualize what the future might look like with their contributions through their companies—and combining that with the ability to execute. When I meet with founders, I’m really trying to recognize those attributes. I’m looking at people’s track records, what they’ve done in the past. The joke—or the saying—among venture investors is always to try to skate where the puck is going. Alejandro Cremades: Yeah, no kidding. Now, imagine if I could bring you back in time. Let’s say I bring you back to that moment when you were working at AQR and thinking about maybe starting something of your own. And you had the opportunity to have a chat with that younger Wes and give him one piece of advice before launching a company. What would that be, and why, given what you know now? Wes McKinney: I think it’s important to know yourself—your strengths—and to be really mindful in choosing who to work with. Firstly, choose to work with people you’re in sync with in of values and how you think about operating day to day, how you communicate. Also look for people who can fill in the gaps in your skill set. Because realistically, you can’t be great at everything. And so being honest with yourself about what you’re good at, what you’re not good at—you can grow and improve, of course—but you need to seek out people who are really good in those areas, who can bring the whole picture into balance. Something I’ve learned—and I think I’ve always felt this way, but more so as time has gone on—is that working relationships are long-term things. You might work with someone for a period of time, and they might pop up again. You might be able to help them, or they might be helpful to you in some way. So I think being a reliable person of integrity—someone who’s helpful and upstanding, consistently—a useful person over time… I think that bears dividends. Investing in relationships, being a reliable person that people value—that’s worth a lot. And you never know when the time and effort you’ve spent helping someone, or being useful in your role in the past, is going to show up later and pay dividends. Alejandro Cremades: That’s so profound. I love it. For the people who are listening and would love to reach out and say hi, what’s the best way for them to do so? Wes McKinney: You can reach out on LinkedIn. I’m here and there—I try not to spend a lot of time on social media. I guess these days, LinkedIn is basically social media. I do have a Twitter/X —less and less active there. I’m also on Blue Sky. I think on Twitter/X, I’m Wes McKinney. On Blue Sky, I think I’m my domain name—wesmckinney.com. I’ve blogged, and I have a blog and a Python book, Python for Data Analysis. You can read that on my blog. I haven’t been writing as much lately, but whenever inspiration strikes and I have something to say, I do enjoy writing here and there. Alejandro Cremades: Amazing. Well, Wes, thank you so much for being on The Dealmaker Show today. It has been an absolute honor to have you with us. Wes McKinney: Thanks again for having me. It’s great.   SUBSCRIBE ON: iTunesGoogle PlayStitcherTuneInRSSSoundCloudSpotify For a winning deck, see the commentary on a pitch deck from an Uber competitor that has raised over $400M (see it here).  *FREE * The Ultimate Guide To Pitch Decks to unlock for free the pitch deck template that founders worldwide are using to raise millions below. Access The Pitch Deck Template Unlock the pitch deck template used by founders to raise millions. 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When you hear the term self-made, you might think of grit, long nights, and entrepreneurial tenacity. But in Suneera Madhani’s case, it’s a generational story—one forged in gas station aisles, sharpened in corporate boardrooms, and carried forward in billion-dollar exits. Suneera’s latest company, Worth AI, has attracted funding from top-tier investors like Silicon Valley Bank, Ingeborg Investments, DeepWork Capital, and Florida Funders. In this episode, you will learn: Your upbringing can be your greatest business education—Suneera turned lessons from her immigrant parents into entrepreneurial fuel. Challenging the status quo sparked the idea for Stax, born from frustration with outdated payment systems. Rejection from her corporate employer led her to build a billion-dollar business on her own . Stacks scaled to $40B in payments and a billion-dollar exit without early venture capital—proof that scrappy execution wins. Her new venture, Worth AI, is transforming how small businesses are underwritten by building the FICO score for SMBs. This time around, Suneera chose investors based on values, proving business is deeply personal. Even after a billion-dollar success, she still reminds herself—and others—to trust their worth and lead authentically.   SUBSCRIBE ON: iTunesGoogle PlayStitcherTuneInRSSSoundCloudSpotify For a winning deck, see the commentary on a pitch deck from an Uber competitor that has raised over $400M (see it here).  *FREE * The Ultimate Guide To Pitch Decks to unlock for free the pitch deck template that founders worldwide are using to raise millions below. Access The Pitch Deck Template Unlock the pitch deck template used by founders to raise millions. Just enter your email below. Your email address is 100% safe from spam! About Suneera Madhani: Suneera Madhani is a true trailblazer in the business world. As the founder of Stax Payments, she built one of America’s top 10 fastest-growing fintech companies from an idea to over $160 million in recurring revenue, making it a billion-dollar technology platform, which she successfully exited north of $1 Billion. Suneera is the first female CEO to lead a unicorn out of Florida and has received numerous accolades for her success, including being recognized by Fortune’s 40 Under 40, EY’s Entrepreneur of the Year, Entrepreneur Magazine’s 100 Most Influential Women, Inc.’s 100 Female Founders among others. After facing countless challenges as a woman in business, Suneera has become a ionate advocate for gender equality and female entrepreneurship. She founded CEO School, a company empowering women to scale their businesses and change the statistics. With less than 2% of female founders ever breaking $1 million in revenue, Suneera is on a mission to make sure her success isn’t a unicorn but becomes the norm. Suneera is the daughter of Pakistani immigrants and the first person in her family to attend college. Beyond her professional achievements, she is a sought after speaker, top 100 podcast host with over 1 million s, a mom of two, philanthropist and an avid traveler. Suneera regularly speaks on some of the world’s most coveted stages including; Meta, Capital One, Forbes 30 under 30 and SXSW. Suneera is a role model for balancing work and life and is an angel investor in over 40 businesses. See How I Can Help You With Your Fundraising Or Acquisition Efforts Fundraising or Acquisition Process: get guidance from A to Z. Materials: our team creates epic pitch decks and financial models. Investor and Buyer Access: connect with the right investors or buyers for your business and close them. Book a Call Connect with Suneera Madhani: LinkedIn Crunchbase Forbes SuneeraMadhani.com Read the Full Transcription of the Interview: Alejandro Cremades: Alrighty, hello everyone and welcome to the DealMaker Show. Today we have a very exciting founder — a female founder. You know, being a girl’s dad myself, I’m very excited about this podcast coming up. Alejandro Cremades: We’re going to be talking about building, scaling, financing — all of the above. I mean, in this case, she built a billion-dollar company. Let that sink in. So again, I think you’re going to find this podcast very inspiring. Without further ado, let’s welcome our guest today, Suneera Madhani. Welcome to the show. Suneera Madhani: Thank you so much, Alejandro, for having me. I’m very, very excited to be here. Alejandro Cremades: So originally born in Chicago but raised in Dallas — and you moved quite a bit growing up. Alejandro Cremades: Give us a walk down memory lane. How was life growing up for you? Suneera Madhani: Life was wonderful growing up. I feel like I had the most incredible family and parents — but they were also a bit crazy, like most families are. I’m the daughter of immigrant parents. My parents immigrated to the U.S., to Chicago. They met in Chicago, and I was born there in the… Suneera Madhani: …late ’70s — I was born in the ’80s — and their love story and entrepreneurial journey began then. Suneera Madhani: They were both entrepreneurs, but out of necessity. Neither one of them went to college or even graduated high school. They both came to America around the age of 15 or 16 to build a better life for their families. So they were both working parents. Suneera Madhani: For my father in particular, the only way to build the American dream was through entrepreneurship — to own your own business. Suneera Madhani: And that’s exactly what they set out to do. They bought their first convenience store — actually a gas station — in Texas because his cousins were starting that business there. We moved from Chicago to Dallas, and he was very successful in turning one store into two, then three. I just grew up watching all of that — watching my parents work really hard. Suneera Madhani: I have a brother; we’re two years apart. He was born in Texas, and we grew up with the businesses. Suneera Madhani: My dad expanded from gas stations to franchises and other ventures. I just , even as a young kid, after school we’d go to the stores. On weekends, I’d help my parents stock shelves or go to Restaurant Depot — whatever was needed. Suneera Madhani: We grew up in the business. My brother and I always say that was our MBA — watching our parents work hard. There are so many values I feel we now have as a company and in how we work together, and what we’re building is really based on what we saw. Suneera Madhani: I’m so grateful for that. That was a little growing up. But also, it wasn’t all roses, right? Entrepreneurship is not easy, and owning small businesses is not easy. We got to see that side of it too. I watched my parents really struggle as well. Suneera Madhani: We moved around a lot. My father was great at starting businesses, but he had entrepreneurial ADHD — always onto the next thing. So we moved quite a bit. Suneera Madhani: My brother and I went to 10 different schools by the time we were done with university. Suneera Madhani: At one point, my dad decided we were moving to Karachi. We went on vacation there and never came back — we stayed for three years. He started some companies in Karachi. Suneera Madhani: Then he got bored there, and we came back to the U.S. and moved to Florida. I was 16 at the time — that was my third high school. There were so many wonderful things, but that was one thing I really didn’t want: I didn’t want to move again. Suneera Madhani: So I ended up going to the University of Florida. I got a full ride and went to UF. From there, I settled back in Orlando and haven’t left since — it’s been 22 years. Suneera Madhani: That’s where my journey is now. I was like, “Okay, I’m here and I’m not moving.” Alejandro Cremades: One thing there… Suneera Madhani: My husband is here. Alejandro Cremades: One thing there for you… Suneera Madhani: My family is here. All of it. Alejandro Cremades: Dealing with uncertainty, Suneera, is one thing that really comes to mind. As you said, being in 10 different schools by the time you were done with university — new friends, new environments, new everything. Alejandro Cremades: What do you think that taught you about uncertainty — being exposed to it so early in life? Suneera Madhani: Yeah, I mean — so much. There are so many great things that came out of that. I feel like we learned very quickly how to adapt. We learned how to make friends — and those are amazing skills. I feel like I can go into a room and make friends with anyone. Suneera Madhani: If I couldn’t be charming, funny, kind — all of those things — I’d be alone at the lunch table. Suneera Madhani: So you learn how to fit in and adapt. Yes, there was uncertainty, but one thing that was really stable was our home life. My parents were very stable. Our safety was stable. Financially, I never had to worry. Even through the chaos, we didn’t have financial instability — I’m so grateful for that. Suneera Madhani: The only thing I was required to focus on was getting a great education. That was a huge part of everything — every school we went to, my parents made sure we went to the best ones. Suneera Madhani: They wanted us to graduate at the top of our class. Education was the most important thing — because they didn’t have it. They worked hard so my brother and I could get educated. Suneera Madhani: We could become and be anything we wanted to be. That was their American dream — that they figured it out so we wouldn’t have to. We could truly have an opportunity to become anything. Suneera Madhani: What’s crazy is that I ended up in entrepreneurship — and we both did. My brother and I actually run our companies together. It’s funny how that played out. I was the first person in my family to graduate college — on both my mom’s and dad’s side. Suneera Madhani: I got a degree in finance and marketing. Sal got a degree in finance and leadership. We both went into corporate paths. And after a couple of years in corporate, that’s how the first business came about — Stax Payments. I’m sure we’re going to talk about that. Suneera Madhani: Eventually we ended up wanting to build something for ourselves, and entrepreneurship found us. Alejandro Cremades: So let’s talk about entrepreneurship finding you. Because here you go — the corporate route. I’m sure your parents were like, “Finally! Our kids have stability, a nine-to-five, all of that.” Especially after college — you were the first in the family to go. Alejandro Cremades: What was that moment like when the idea for Stax Payments came to you? And why did you decide it was meaningful enough to take action? Suneera Madhani: I was working for a payments company. I was in financial services — this was early 2010. Suneera Madhani: I grew up watching my parents challenge the status quo. Excellence was always expected of us. I have so many memories of learning to do things with precision — perfection was important, and excellence was the standard. Suneera Madhani: When I got to this company, I saw so much opportunity — but everyone was just status quo. I couldn’t understand it. Why didn’t people care deeply about the work? Why were they just clocking in and out? Suneera Madhani: I discovered something huge: the industry was so commoditized. There was no innovation. No ion for serving the customers — which were small businesses. Suneera Madhani: Small businesses — like my parents’. Credit card processing was expensive. A huge line item. There was no transparency. No one explained how the fees worked — you were just expected to pay them. And you got no value. It was a necessary evil. Suneera Madhani: Now I was on the other side. And I was like, “Why aren’t we doing better?” Suneera Madhani: One week I was visiting family in Texas and got stuck in a snowstorm. Literally, I was in Dallas during an ice storm and couldn’t fly home. I was stuck at my grandma’s house. Suneera Madhani: I watched the entire first season of Shark Tank. That really happened. And I’m sitting there thinking, “Wait — you just pitch your idea, and this is how you raise money?” Suneera Madhani: That week, I was inspired. I started thinking about what I could change in the industry. I was going online to check on my subscription boxes — I had clothing, dog subscriptions. I was 25, and all about those. Suneera Madhani: I was texting my mom to make sure she grabbed my boxes, and I thought — subscription is the future. Suneera Madhani: It was happening in software. It was happening in physical products. And I thought: why isn’t there a subscription-based payment processor? This is it. Suneera Madhani: I did what every entrepreneur does — I Googled it. It didn’t exist. I was shocked. Suneera Madhani: I spent the whole week working on a business plan. Instead of flying back to Orlando, I rerouted to Houston — where the company’s headquarters was. I’m really good at getting a seat at the table and getting meetings. Suneera Madhani: I got the meeting with the executive team. Of course, no women in leadership — all the women were in sales or customer service. Suneera Madhani: I was a territory sales manager. I gave the best presentation of my life. I knew in my bones this was going to be something. Suneera Madhani: Their response? Crickets. “This is never going to work. Why invest in tech? Why give away 40% of our margin for market share?” Suneera Madhani: “Little girl, we love your big ideas. Go back to your box.” That’s how I left that meeting. Suneera Madhani: I was crushed. I went back home to Orlando, and I thought — what am I going to do? How can I keep working for a company that doesn’t believe in me, where I’ll never be heard? I’d have to accept the status quo. Suneera Madhani: And part of being—like, I don’t know—there’s this DNA that you have as an immigrant kid. Like, I don’t know… you just challenge stuff. You want things to be better. Like, why doesn’t everybody just want things to be better? Suneera Madhani: I get home, and we’re having Sunday dinner at my parents’ house. Suneera Madhani: My brother also happened to be there from California. My dad looks at me and goes, “Sonny”—that’s my nickname—he goes, “Why don’t you just start the company?” I’m 25, and I’m like, “Dad, where do I go find Mr. Visa?” Suneera Madhani: Like, how do I start a payments company? How do I go build technology? And he goes, “Somebody else figured it out. You can figure it out.” And that was it. So I quit my job. Suneera Madhani: And I also think that, you know, it’s timing, right? I mean, when you’re that young—I had no kids, no responsibility—yeah, like no financial responsibility. You can take risks. Suneera Madhani: And I’m so grateful that I took the risk. That was the start of the company. Within the first year, Sal came on board to me. He left his job, and we both started building. From just us—just the two of us—we grew it to $40 billion in payments through the platform we created. Suneera Madhani: We onboarded 40,000 small businesses, hired 400 employees. We never raised any capital at the beginning. We went from being rejected to raising, like—there’s so much to unpack in a 10-year journey. Suneera Madhani: It took 10 years, but we did our seed, our A, B, C, and D rounds. We recapped the business. We exited the business in 2021 for north of a billion. Suneera Madhani: So it was a wild ride. It was a 10-year ride, and I’m really proud of it. Alejandro Cremades: So what was that moment like when you exited the company for north of a billion? I mean, that’s… that was probably quite the feeling. Alejandro Cremades: What was that process like? What was that journey like—going through something like that? Suneera Madhani: I mean, it’s a lot. It’s hard to unpack, right? I feel like I could sit here and share so much with your audience. I would say—it was a very proud moment, for so many reasons. Suneera Madhani: I didn’t know I could build a million-dollar business, let alone a billion-dollar business. But our hearts were in the right place. We never did it for the wrong reasons. We really wanted to serve people—our customers. We wanted to be disruptive. Suneera Madhani: We always invested in people. We always invested in technology. We always invested in the right things. And I felt like—we had, you know—it takes a lot to build a billion-dollar company. A lot of execution, a lot of everything. Suneera Madhani: To go from zero to $100+ million in recurring SaaS revenue—that’s what it was. Reaching that milestone is every tech founder’s dream. It’s the textbook definition of incredible—it’s the epitome of startup success. Suneera Madhani: And so I feel very proud of it. Very, very grateful. At the same time, it meant a lot. It wasn’t about the dollars in the pocket. Suneera Madhani: We did incredibly well for our team too—we made over 30 millionaires on our team. Suneera Madhani: Sal and I didn’t own the entire company, right? We had investors all along the way. We made hundreds of millions of dollars for our investors—for our community. It was a very big moment, not just for us, but for so many people. Suneera Madhani: So it makes it… the word I can think of is—it was worth it. You look back at all the sacrifices—it didn’t just happen. It wasn’t just luck. It wasn’t just given. Suneera Madhani: It took every day of execution. It took every ounce of so many people’s energy, and everything going right—for it to really happen. So it was really special. Alejandro Cremades: Well, you mentioned luck. Obviously, luck is when opportunity meets preparation. Alejandro Cremades: Let’s talk about that—opportunity meeting preparation. Because right after exiting Stax, you guys got started with Worth AI. Suneera Madhani: Yeah. Alejandro Cremades: So what is Worth AI? How do you guys make money? What’s the business model there? Suneera Madhani: At Stax, we onboarded 40,000 businesses. One of my biggest challenges wasn’t the product I was selling—which was payments. One of my biggest challenges was onboarding and underwriting small businesses. Suneera Madhani: Looking through the small business lens, there’s so much amazing technology now in financial services. Right now, Alejandro, you can go on your phone, sign up for an Apple credit card, walk down to Starbucks, and make a transaction before this conversation is over. Suneera Madhani: But if you want that credit card under “Alejandro LLC,” everything stops. It says: send us three years of tax returns. We need your P&L. We need this, we need that. Suneera Madhani: There’s so much friction in onboarding a small business. Why is that? Suneera Madhani: Why isn’t that the same for Alejandro versus Alejandro LLC? In financial services, we’ve had a huge boom in personal finance technology. But on the business side, we haven’t had that level of innovation. Suneera Madhani: What’s missing is that there’s no standardization of how we view what’s called “credit worth.” For Alejandro, we’ve got your credit score—your W-2, your credit history—so whoever you’re working with, whether it’s a bank, a credit card company, whatever, they can easily determine your credit worth. Suneera Madhani: For small businesses, that hasn’t existed. So we set out to build the business credit score. We set out to build a platform. And now, we’re in 2025—we have the most incredible technology. Suneera Madhani: We went to all our partners and built an onboarding platform so that when financial institutions want to onboard a small business, they don’t need to ask for all of these documents. With just a name, tax ID, and address—three fields—we should be able to know that business instantly. Suneera Madhani: So we started the company. It’s been a year since we’ve been in market. We were in stealth for a little bit. It’s incredible technology—a huge team of data scientists—and we’re in market now, selling the platform to large enterprise financial services firms. Suneera Madhani: This helps small businesses onboard faster, so we can have a more equitable and efficient world for SMBs. Small businesses are our heart. We know how to serve them. We love them. We are them. Suneera Madhani: There needs to be a better experience for us in all of financial services. That’s what we’re building. It’s called Worth. We’re building the Worth Score, and we’re really excited about doing it again. Alejandro Cremades: Well, I know investors are excited about ing you too, because you recently announced your $25 million seed. That’s quite the seed! Suneera Madhani: Yeah, it is. I mean, it’s different the second time around, right? The first time, Alejandro, I could tell you stories of every room I walked into—it wasn’t like this. Suneera Madhani: Trying to get funding to build technology, even the first time around—as a woman, as one of three minority founders—less than 2% of venture capital still goes to women-founded companies. Suneera Madhani: And even less than 1% goes to minority founders. Suneera Madhani: There’s a huge gap. But this time, we have credibility. Now we get to choose our investors. The investors back at the table now—we got to decide who they are, and they’re people who believed in us the first time. Suneera Madhani: So it’s really exciting to go build again. We did amazing things on the first journey, right? Suneera Madhani: But now we want to build something that really changes the world. I believe that if we can give small businesses access to their credit worth—right now, that’s always been determined by banks and institutions. Everyone else controls that. Suneera Madhani: If we empower our businesses—people like us, like my parents, like half the country—we can give them the transparency and tools to succeed. Suneera Madhani: I think it’s going to be transformative. So we’re excited for a much broader mission and to do it again. We know it requires capital. But this time we’re saying: what do we really want? What will it take to build, and build fast? We have the playbook. We know what we’re doing. And we’re going to be at it again—hopefully building another billion-dollar business in less time. Alejandro Cremades: You said it’s different now when you enter a room. So why did you choose the investors you chose to bring along on this journey? Because now, having done a billion-plus business, investors see you through a different lens. Suneera Madhani: It’s super simple: I love the humans behind them. That’s it. I believe business is personal. Everyone always told me it’s not personal, but it is. It’s the most personal thing you do. I spend more time here than anywhere else in my life—besides my family. Suneera Madhani: It’s my work and my family. It is personal to me. The people I want on this journey—I want to have fun with. I’m doing it again because I’m a builder. We’re innovative. We’re young. We’re creative. We want to do big stuff. Suneera Madhani: We want to be surrounded by champions—smart, strategic, incredible humans. That is important to us, to me. And that’s who’s on our side. I’m so grateful for our investors. Suneera Madhani: These were the investors who believed in us when no one else did. That’s so special and important to Sal and me. Alejandro Cremades: Let’s talk about vision. Those investors are betting on vision. So if you went to sleep tonight, Sunira, and woke up in a world where the vision of Worth is fully realized—what does that world look like? Suneera Madhani: That world looks like an equitable landscape. Right now, in financial institutions, humans do underwriting. A human looks at a business and makes a decision. Suneera Madhani: A business shouldn’t be judged based on someone else’s perspective. There’s conscious and unconscious bias in people. My maiden name was Ramatula—it’s my brother’s last name. People can make many assumptions about my business based on that. Suneera Madhani: I want my business to stand on its own credibility. In a world with Worth, businesses stand for themselves. They can understand what they need to build strong financial credit—which is what great businesses are built on. Suneera Madhani: When Worth is in the hands of all small businesses—and financial institutions are using it—not only will enterprises be more efficient, but the entire system will be more equitable. Alejandro Cremades: Now, let’s talk about the past for a moment. If I put you in a time machine and brought you back to your corporate life—when you gave your notice and walked out of the big building into the unknown—what’s one piece of advice you’d give that younger Sunira before launching the business? Suneera Madhani: Oh, if I could go back, I’d tell her: know your worth. Believe in yourself. I had a lot of self-doubt. It took the of many people around me to get through. Suneera Madhani: Now I look back—I always had it. I had it all along. I’d tell her: don’t listen to the naysayers. Keep going. Stay on the path. Suneera Madhani: I still have to remind myself of that, right? Even now, doing it again, in financial services, in fintech—it’s still a man’s world. I have to carry a different level of gravitas to play the game. Suneera Madhani: For so long, I was trying to fit in. Now, I’m just myself. I’m feminine. I don’t have to be something I’m not. Suneera Madhani: I think before, I was trying to fit into the world to make it work. But now, I’m ready for the next chapter. I’m reminding myself that I don’t have to follow how it’s been done—I can do it my way. Suneera Madhani: Even now, I have to remind myself. No matter your level of success, if you’re not a little scared, if there’s not that fear—that means you care. That fear means you want it to work. It doesn’t come from ego. It comes from groundedness and humility. Suneera Madhani: Those are still the conversations I have with myself. Alejandro Cremades: I love it. For the folks listening who’d love to reach out and say hi, Sunira, what’s the best way for them to do so? Suneera Madhani: You can find me on every platform. Suneera Madhani—S-U-N-E-E-R-A, last name M-A-D-H-A-N-I. On LinkedIn, Instagram, all the things. And when you go to my profile, you’ll find Worth and everything I’m working on. Alejandro Cremades: Amazing. Well, Sunira, thank you so much for being on the DealMaker Show today. It has been an absolute honor to have you with us. Suneera Madhani: So excited. Thank you, Alejandro, for having me today. ***** If you like the show, make sure that you hit that subscribe button. If you can leave a review as well, that would be fantastic. And if you got any value either from this episode or from the show itself, share it with a friend. Perhaps they will also appreciate it. Also, , if you need any help, whether it is with your fundraising efforts or with selling your business, you can reach me at al*******@pa**************.com  

In a world where adult beverages have long been synonymous with alcohol, Bill Shufelt saw something different—a cultural and economic opportunity hidden in plain sight. He successfully navigated the startup ecosystem–scaling, manufacturing, building, and financing his company. Bill’s company, Athletic Brewing, has attracted funding from top-tier investors like General Atlantic, Keurig Dr Pepper, Blake Mycoskie, and Lance Armstrong. In this episode, you will learn: Bill Shufelt left a successful Wall Street career to build Athletic Brewing after realizing the power of an alcohol-free lifestyle. A two-year business planning phase and mission-driven vision laid the foundation for long-term success. Vertical integration and owning manufacturing became Athletic’s key quality and supply chain advantage. Grassroots marketing—like sampling at races—and e-commerce innovation jump-started early customer adoption. Raising capital for a manufacturing-heavy business was challenging but ultimately successful through disciplined, aligned investors. Scaling manufacturing requires careful planning around utilization, logistics, and operational costs. Deep ion for the mission enabled Bill to endure entrepreneurial lows and build a brand that reshaped modern drinking culture.   SUBSCRIBE ON: iTunesGoogle PlayStitcherTuneInRSSSoundCloudSpotify For a winning deck, see the commentary on a pitch deck from an Uber competitor that has raised over $400M (see it here).  *FREE * The Ultimate Guide To Pitch Decks to unlock for free the pitch deck template that founders worldwide are using to raise millions below. Access The Pitch Deck Template Unlock the pitch deck template used by founders to raise millions. Just enter your email below. Your email address is 100% safe from spam! About Bill Shufelt: Bill Shufelt has worked in the financial industry since 2005. He began his career as a trader at KCG Holdings, Inc., and then moved to Point72 in 2011, where he held the same role. In 2017, Bill became Co-Founder & CEO of Athletic Brewing Company. In 2021, he was appointed Board Member – Chairman of the Adult Non-Alcoholic Beverage Association (ANBA). Bill Shufelt attended Middlebury College from 2001 to 2005, earning a Bachelor’s degree in Economics. He also holds a CFA, Lapsed from the CFA Institute. See How I Can Help You With Your Fundraising Or Acquisition Efforts Fundraising or Acquisition Process: get guidance from A to Z. Materials: our team creates epic pitch decks and financial models. Investor and Buyer Access: connect with the right investors or buyers for your business and close them. Book a Call Connect with Bill Shufelt: LinkedIn Crunchbase TheOrg RocketReach Read the Full Transcription of the Interview: Alejandro Cremades: Alrighty, hello everyone and welcome to the DealMaker Show. Today we have a founder behind an amazing company. I’m a big, big fan—my fridge is full of the beers that he and his team have been putting together. What a remarkable story. Very inspiring—the way they’ve thought about scaling, manufacturing, building, financing—all of the above. I think today’s episode is going to be very inspiring, especially the way they’ve dealt with all types of economic cycles that have come their way. Alejandro Cremades: So, brace yourself for what’s coming. What a conversation we have ahead of us. Without further ado, let’s welcome our guest today, Bill Shufelt. Welcome to the show. Bill Shufelt: Thank you so much for having me. Cheers. It’s exciting to be here. Alejandro Cremades: That’s amazing. So, Bill— Bill Shufelt: Thank you for the kind words on our beers, also. Alejandro Cremades: I mean, mega fan—mega fan. It’s going to be exciting to chat about it today. So, Bill, give us a walk down memory lane. How was life growing up for you in Connecticut? Bill Shufelt: You know, I had a great childhood. It was pretty straightforward—a great family, a great community, a small community. I grew up loving the outdoors, loving sports. I was always in motion. Bill Shufelt: My calendar was always full. I did every activity under the sun, played at a minimum of three sports year-round—seriously—but usually it was six to eight sports. I generally just loved being in motion, playing outdoors, playing sports. I grew up in a town that was very finance-oriented—we’re just outside New York City. Bill Shufelt: I left that town for college thinking: finance, finance, finance. That was kind of the life I was on. Alejandro Cremades: And why finance? Was it just because you were surrounded by a bunch of investment bankers and private equity folks and so forth? How did the whole finance idea come to you? Bill Shufelt: It was really almost the default path. We definitely came from a wealthy town—my family was definitely not wealthy. We were definitely pretty thrifty, but we had a really nice childhood. A lot of the people I saw doing the best in our town were in finance, so that’s kind of what I aspired to. I attributed that to success. Bill Shufelt: I also found finance and investing really intellectually interesting. I’ve always been a math and science person, so I went to college with that track in mind. At Middlebury—which was a great educational experience and a great athletic experience—the companies that came to interview people for what I thought were the best jobs were finance companies. So it was Goldman, Lehman, Morgan Stanley, Bank of America—everyone. That was definitely the track I was on. I did finance through college and then 10 years in New York City after that. It was a great start to my career. I loved sharpening my sword, if you will, in the financial field. Bill Shufelt: So it was a good start. Alejandro Cremades: Well, I mean, you ended up at Point72—Steve Cohen, probably one of the most successful hedge fund guys and one of the top firms. Now they’re obviously doing a bunch of stuff around startups and things like that. How did you end up there? What was the experience like? Because I’ve heard the culture at Point72 is quite competitive as well. Bill Shufelt: Yeah. Honestly, it was a perfect fit for me. I’m an extremely competitive person. My default mode is “on.” Of course I can relax, but my favorite state is moving and being “on.” Bill Shufelt: I can’t say enough good things about Point72. I started in the financial world at Knight Capital Group. I had a really good professor at Middlebury who helped me think through what I was actually interested in within finance, and I really zoomed in on trading. I loved the concept of trading—how fast-paced it was. When I was interviewing at firms, Knight was one of them. Bill Shufelt: That professor actually said, “I know it’s not the biggest headline firm, but it might be an awesome spot for you to learn the craft of trading.” It was as pure a trading shop as there was. Bill Shufelt: The firm evolved over time, but at that point in the early 2000s, it was pure trading—NASDAQ—and it was a great seven years at Knight. I worked with amazing people. Bill Shufelt: Through there, I built relationships with people at SAC and learned of a job opening. I got my CFA and started to move up the investment ladder. Point72 was exactly where I wanted to be. It was at the top of the investment process, high turnover, a lot of trading, very intellectually challenging. The way Steve built that firm and attracted talent—it was the smartest collection of people I will ever be in a room with. The intensity all day was great. Bill Shufelt: It was as merit-based an organization as you can get. If you show up, you are prepared, and you get it done day in and day out—it was as merit-based and opportunity-driven as you could ask for. I had a great experience there. Bill Shufelt: And it goes right to the person with his name on the door. He was in that seat every day. The reason it’s known as a competitive environment is because he is literally in the middle of the room, eating people for breakfast—because he is “on.” I really respect how he shows up for work every day and drives the organization forward. Bill Shufelt: It’s a really talented group of people. I loved my time there and thought I would never leave. Alejandro Cremades: So I guess from a leadership and team-building perspective, what would be your three biggest takeaways from your time at Point72? Bill Shufelt: Yeah. So even in that 12 years of finance, I was very fortunate to have both really good leaders and very mediocre leaders. I learned equally as much from both. Bill Shufelt: One takeaway is that a merit-based, opportunity-driven culture is probably the most important thing. Of course, people love the soft, nice edges of culture, but at the end of the day, there’s nothing more fulfilling than having opportunity and feeling good about the work you’re driving forward. So I took a lot of those merit-based and opportunity-driven elements—that’s definitely one. Bill Shufelt: Also, especially at both Knight and Point72, one of my original bosses at Knight Capital Group, a guy named Joe, really believed in my potential and kept reinforcing that in me and giving me more and more opportunity. Bill Shufelt: That carried through at Point72 with my boss there, Jeff, who really believed in my potential as well and kept encouraging me. I’ve taken that to Athletic and given people a ton of opportunity and believed in them. People who run with opportunity cover a lot of ground and advance really quickly within the walls of Athletic. Alejandro Cremades: So then tell us about what happened with stopping drinking. Twelve years ago, that’s basically what happened. You did that for lifestyle reasons, but that kind of triggered this rocket ship that you’re riding now. How did the whole origin of Athletic come to mind? Bill Shufelt: Yeah, so in the early 2000s, when I was entering the financial field, it was a badge of honor to be hungover—to be out. People were at steak dinners and happy hours four nights a week. It was a very boozy Wall Street culture. Bill Shufelt: I saw that shift dramatically toward a performance culture over the 10–12 years I was in finance. Toward the end, it became more aspirational and more respected to ask a on Wall Street, “Hey, rather than a steak dinner, would you want to meet at Barry’s Bootcamp in the morning?” Bill Shufelt: I had a similar shift in my life. I was 29, about to get married, and looking at the future—my family, my health, my career progress—some really big bucket items. I realized alcohol wasn’t serving me and was probably holding back a lot of those things. Bill Shufelt: So I put alcohol to the side. Of course, I was drinking too much from time to time—like most people in their twenties. The second I put alcohol aside, it was like the biggest life hack I’d ever discovered. I was extremely sharp every day at work. Bill Shufelt: It created a virtuous cycle—better sleep, better eating, better performance, better relationships. It all built on itself. I found myself falling in love with distance running. I used to just survive workouts. I was sleeping eight hours through the night, which I thought was impossible as a busy adult. Bill Shufelt: I never looked back from that choice. I was lucky in the workplace, too. I shared with my colleagues that I was drawing a line in the sand—I was done drinking. Bill Shufelt: That was really well received. I was still out at three or four work dinners a week and often had nothing in my hand or a standard brown bottle non-alcoholic beer from the 1980s. That would inevitably bring up a ton of questions. I’m someone who loves beer, loves nice drinks, loves food. Bill Shufelt: It broke my mind that in today’s modern, healthy, busy world, all adult beverages contain alcohol. Why is everything centered around this one functional ingredient? Bill Shufelt: I started looking at stats. The average adult has 0.1 drinks or less per week, which is crazy. Sixty percent of adults have 0.1 drinks or less per week. Bill Shufelt: I thought of how underserved the adult community was in of offerings. More importantly, I looked around and realized that moderation—though it aligns perfectly with modern health standards—is totally out of reach and not on the menu. If you go out and want to pay $15 for an adult beverage, there’s no option without alcohol. Bill Shufelt: I saw a big economic opportunity developing, and that stuck in my craw for a year. There were awkward social situations, frustration, and no options in places I wanted to spend money. Bill Shufelt: I started saying this out loud to people. My friends and particularly my wife said, “You should fix that.” I asked, “What do you mean?” She really encouraged me to start looking into it. She was getting her MBA at the time, which was very helpful. Bill Shufelt: So my wife and I started to look into it. That began a two-year business planning journey for Athletic Brewing, before I made the fateful decision to walk out the door at Point72. Alejandro Cremades: That’s very calculated—the risk. Two years building the business plan. Typically, you see people just taking the plunge or doing an MVP. Alejandro Cremades: Two years of business planning—what were you doing during that time? Bill Shufelt: There were definitely sprints where I worked on it a lot, and times where I wouldn’t work on it at all for two or three weeks. But it was where the ion and fire for the idea turned on. I’m so glad I had such a long business planning period. Bill Shufelt: There are so many businesses that just launch without much thought. I feel for those founders. They’re up in the air and trying to build it as it goes. I had a really long business planning cycle of two years. Bill Shufelt: At the end of that, I wasn’t going to quit my job. My wife encouraged me. She said, “We’ve saved enough. You should do this.” She basically pushed me out the door of my old job. Bill Shufelt: Then I had another 18-month period where I was looking for a co-founder. I found one through a lot of rejection. We were home-growing our MVP product during that time. Bill Shufelt: Me and him were talking about what’s important for the company, building the foundation—employee handbooks, mission, culture—all these big things. I feel very fortunate that we had this huge foundation of planning before we were out the door selling our products, scaling, and hiring. Bill Shufelt: Said differently, we had 18 months where it was just me and our co-founder talking about what’s important and building the foundation. Bill Shufelt: A lot of founders are often building, and all of a sudden have 25 people around them. You’re trying to convey a culture that doesn’t exist yet. The long lead time has been an advantage for us in many ways. Alejandro Cremades: So what do you think needed to happen at that 24-month mark that made it so clear to you and your wife that you needed to take action? What was that inflection point? Bill Shufelt: That was when it went from economic to actually being a meaningful, fulfilling impact I could have. I described earlier how moderation was out of reach for most people. I probably would have moderated my drinking 10 years earlier if any options had been available. Bill Shufelt: And as you look at the stats out there—and Athletic Brewing will never stand on a soapbox and point a finger at people’s decisions—we’re not out against the alcohol industry, but… Bill Shufelt: There are a lot of stats out there. Hundreds of thousands of people die from alcohol every year. Five percent of cancers are attributed to alcohol. Forty percent of incarcerated people were drunk when they committed their crimes. Bill Shufelt: These stats just go on and on—the impact alcohol has on society. I’m not out to attack alcohol, but at least if we can give people options to be moderate when they want to… Bill Shufelt: I then saw that there are also 15 million people in documented recovery in the U.S. too. And so, if we made moderation accessible rather than anonymous and hidden, I saw a way that we could possibly impact tens of millions of lives. When that light bulb went on—I’d been working this hedge fund job that was very self-serving—it was rewarding, for sure… Bill Shufelt: But I went from a place where I was only going to positively impact myself and my family to potentially tens of millions of people. That fire lighting is something that—as you know, I know you’ve talked to a thousand entrepreneurs plus— Bill Shufelt: It is so hard to build a business. The valleys are so deep. Every day can be excruciating in its own way. That fire for me burned so bright that no matter how challenging any day is, I can plow through it and I’m excited to meet it. That moment of knowing I could have a huge impact on tens of millions of people has been so pivotal—pivotal to my whole journey. Alejandro Cremades: Now, one thing too that I find really interesting here is that you’d been at it for two years, doing all the legwork, figuring out the roap, the economics. Alejandro Cremades: It sounds like you had a clear plan. So why not go solo? Why did you decide that you needed a co-founder to be part of this journey? Bill Shufelt: Oh yeah, I definitely don’t want to paint it as if I had a super clear vision. It’s actually so funny to look back and think of how delusional I was. Bill Shufelt: I think I had a good foundation in skills like finance, sales, and marketing. I love the HR and legal elements of our business—although I’m not skilled technically in those areas. Bill Shufelt: But I had enormous blind spots. I definitely needed a technical co-founder. I had never brewed a batch of beer in my whole life. I didn’t really know anything about operating a manufacturing facility. Bill Shufelt: I teamed up with—I got rejected by hundreds of brewers I tried to network with—and then ultimately found a really highly awarded craft brewer in Santa Fe, New Mexico, named John Walker. He’s such a talented guy, but also a great person and, it turns out, a lifelong learner. He and I have been on this learning journey together, both growing with the company. Bill Shufelt: It’s been one of the most important things—probably the most important thing in the whole Athletic journey—finding someone who really matches my vision, my enthusiasm. We complement each other so well that it could have never worked without either one of us, I think. Alejandro Cremades: So let’s say I put you into an elevator with all of our listeners, okay? And you only have maybe 15 to 30 seconds to tell them—first time you meet them—what Athletic is all about. What would you tell them? Bill Shufelt: Revolutionizing beer for the modern adult. Alcohol has been tagging along on adult beverages for 5,000 years. This is a way that anyone can drink adult beverages anytime—whether it’s a meal pairing, refreshment, or just a de-stressor. Bill Shufelt: It’s the best part of your day, every day, without the alcohol. For the last 5,000 years, adult beverages have been a line in the sand—once you have alcohol, it takes all these things off the table for the rest of your day. We’ve kind of freed it from that. Alejandro Cremades: I’ve got to say, as a consumer of Athletic, I was blown away. I —just my story real quick—I had a concussion playing soccer, and I couldn’t drink during my recovery. So I tried a couple of non-alcoholic beers, and they tasted really non-alcoholic. It tasted so different. Alejandro Cremades: But then, all of a sudden, I had this cousin, and he was like, “Hey, I think you may want to taste this one.” It was Athletic—I think it was the lager. It was mind-blowing how amazing the taste was. It was just like drinking the same beer I was used to. Alejandro Cremades: Since then, I was like, “My God, I’m just going to drink this now.” In your guys’ case, I know that once you got together and everything, it took two years of iterating to really get it to that point. Alejandro Cremades: What were some of the testings and what were some of those phases you guys needed to go through in order to be like, “I think we got this taste right now”? Bill Shufelt: Yeah, so most G businesses go from idea to finding someone to make it. It jumps to a contract manufacturer, and then they outsource production the rest of the way. Bill Shufelt: What we did differently at Athletic—our first principles moment—was realizing that all non-alcoholic beer was still made with 1970s or earlier technology. We needed to reinvent how it’s made. Bill Shufelt: So we took it down to the screws, homebrewing in Gatorade jugs, and did hundreds of batches like that. Finally, around batch 30 or 40—and our co-founder John speaks to this really well—the beer started to actually taste really good. Bill Shufelt: By batch 60, it was just plain old good beer—not “good for a non-alcoholic beer.” We’ve always said: without compromise. It’s got to be award-winning beer that stacks up to any beer you have. Bill Shufelt: We achieved that. Then an even bigger decision was that we were not going to outsource our production. We were going to build it all ourselves and own the quality of everything we do. Bill Shufelt: That was a huge quality decision that continues to separate us from the field. Non-alcoholic beer is a really heavily imported and contract-brewed category. Bill Shufelt: We are making it here in the U.S. We’ve spent hundreds of millions of dollars on building manufacturing plants. But that is such a differentiator on quality. Every beer that goes out our door has undergone over 55 quality tests—for spec, for sensory—everything, every step of the way. Bill Shufelt: That dedication to quality has been a major distancing factor. I will say—it was an extreme turnoff to early investors, what the capital road ahead looked like for this business path. Alejandro Cremades: So at what point do you guys realize, “Hey, I think we’re onto something here”? When did you really feel like you were turning a corner? Bill Shufelt: Yeah. So in 2017, John and I couldn’t get anyone to talk to us. In 2018, as we were launching, I’d gone around the state of Connecticut and gotten hundreds of s—local liquor stores all the way up to Whole Foods. They had tasted the beer and thought it was great. Bill Shufelt: I got a list of s, and I convinced a local distributor—Star Distributors, the biggest beer distributor in Connecticut—to take us in, which was a huge win. I’m thankful they saw the opportunity in us. Bill Shufelt: We launched, and the rate of sale was not great to start. One of my biggest underestimations was that no one had been looking at the non-alcoholic set for 50 years. Why would they suddenly start shopping that shelf? They wouldn’t even know a new product was there. Bill Shufelt: There hadn’t been anything exciting over there ever. I realized I had to get hundreds—if not thousands—of people shopping those shelves across Connecticut really fast. We did that in a couple of ways. I started going to races every weekend. Bill Shufelt: At a liquor store sampling, you can talk to like 20 people in two hours—it’s a pretty inefficient use of time. But if I go to a local 5K down the street from a store that has our beer, I may interact with 300–500 people in a 20–30 minute period. Bill Shufelt: I’d pull up with a full cooler, usually run the race myself for fun, then be happy and sweaty behind the table handing out hundreds of beers. All of a sudden, you’ve got dozens of people going into the store the next week to buy the beer. Bill Shufelt: I saw that starting to work. I did 75 races across the area that summer—much to my wife’s chagrin. It wasn’t the best family summer. Bill Shufelt: The next year, we had five salespeople and we did like 350 events that summer. We really built it brick by brick that way. The other very differentiated thing we did in marketing early on was— Bill Shufelt: If you go back 15 years to the craft brewing scene in New England or anywhere in the country, there’d be a brewery everyone was excited about launching. Bill Shufelt: You’d have to drive to that brewery and wait in line for hours to get the beer you wanted. Bill Shufelt: Distribution is such a hurdle. You have to get on distributors’ trucks, then they have to sell it in stores. Even going a few counties away means you need another distributor—let alone in other states. To build a national DSD beer network—we have 270+ distributors at Athletic—it takes multiple years. Bill Shufelt: Beverage on e-commerce wasn’t really a thing back in 2018. But I built a website and started putting our beer for sale on it. People said, “You’re a total moron. No one’s ever going to buy beer online.” Bill Shufelt: I said, “We’ll see. I’ll pack the packages at night.” All of a sudden, it was five orders a day—no marketing budget, basically. Then next week, it was 10 orders a day. Bill Shufelt: All of a sudden, I came in and there were 30 orders a day. Within two months, it was like 200 orders waiting when I came in on Monday. Bill Shufelt: That local taproom experience—where people had to drive and go there—I had opened a national taproom, where people could order in minutes and we would mail it to them. Bill Shufelt: At the same time, non-alcoholic beer had been a shelf of five boring lagers. When Athletic Brewing launched, all of a sudden it was IPAs, stouts, golden ales. Bill Shufelt: And John was making a different, unique, limited variety every week—into a category that had never had any variety. And so, all of a sudden, people were seeing double IPAs, Gohs’, and really pumpkin beers—really fun launches. Bill Shufelt: And so, when we would put these beers for sale at five o’clock on a Monday, it was like a Taylor Swift concert on Ticketmaster—they were selling out in like 30 seconds. That was a great marketing tool also, because we not only had built this national audience, but we had this unbelievable data set too. Bill Shufelt: No beer company had ever had first-party data from their whole customer base before. That was a big advantage. And so, all of a sudden going forward at that point, I knew I’d made it—because we were selling out so fast. Bill Shufelt: The race and sampling strategy was selling out our beer at the grocery stores and liquor stores we were at—to the point where people were meeting our distributors’ trucks in the parking lot at Whole Foods. Bill Shufelt: It wasn’t even making it to the shelf. And then, um, so there was this huge amount of demand, plus I could see all the data, and that gave us really good data to go out with our future fundraising rounds then. Bill Shufelt: The downside—yeah, the downside of that is we outgrew the brewery in 10 months. Alejandro Cremades: That’s—well, talk about scale. And I guess that a piece of it, you were alluding to, is the investment, right? I know that you guys have done a bunch of rounds. You’ve raised over 220—think 225 million, correct me if I’m wrong. But walk us through: What was the experience? What was that journey like, going through all those rounds and raising the money for a company like this? Bill Shufelt: Yeah, so our first angel round was—we were essentially raising $3 million to build the first non-alcoholic production brewery in the country. And it was a category that had no momentum. The category basically didn’t exist. Bill Shufelt: Surely no marketing excitement—and we had no product. So raising that first angel round was extremely difficult. It was 120-plus meetings, mostly rejections. And then—so in the first 50 meetings, I would say it was like 90% rejections. Bill Shufelt: And then, all of a sudden, we started to network to people like one layer beyond—people who had heard about it. And so we were getting a lot of inbounds at that point from people I didn’t necessarily know, but who were really excited because they had heard about it and reached out. Bill Shufelt: So we ended up with an angel team of about 70 people in that first round that helped us build the first brewery. Bill Shufelt: That group helped carry us through three financing rounds. And so we outgrew that first brewery in about 10 months, which was way faster than we anticipated. And we basically did a round a year for four or five years after that. Bill Shufelt: And, um, you know—I know there are a lot of companies that raise a lot of venture money. Bill Shufelt: We were mostly private capital and investor capital through those early rounds. But the major difference with us is we weren’t just buying Instagram ads and throwing money into the paper shredder like a lot of brands were in this 0% interest time. And you know, a lot of our competition—still in this category, there are over 150 brands— Bill Shufelt: Most of our competition still has not built anything. They’re just spending, spending, spending. And their brands had raised way more than we had at that stage in our life, and still not built anything. Bill Shufelt: We were putting steel in the ground with our dollars. And so, of that 225 million, over 150 million went into actually building breweries. We’re currently building our fourth brewery right now. Bill Shufelt: That’ll be online by the end of the summer. We also were building a national sales force. And there was no marketing in non-alcoholic beer, so we had to market the category. Bill Shufelt: We had that obligation—leading from the front. We were spending on marketing out in front of where the category growth was. And I think a lot of companies have benefited from Athletic spending on marketing—and still don’t spend. They still don’t spend much on it. Bill Shufelt: So yeah. Alejandro Cremades: And as you’re talking there about scaling too—you know, a lot of people listening are probably used to the scaling of technology, tech startups, software, maybe hardware. I guess in this case, scaling manufacturing—how does that look? Bill Shufelt: Yeah. So manufacturing—when I told investors I was building manufacturing and planned to continue to do that—that was a hard “no” for a lot of people. I’d have whole dinners of 8 to 10 people basically stand up and walk out when we got to that point. Bill Shufelt: Same thing with institutional investors. A lot of venture capital firms want you to spend as quickly as you can, but they have a five-year time horizon. And building manufacturing does not align with five-year time horizons. Bill Shufelt: So we had to find the right investors who believed in a multi-year period to spend on manufacturing and spend on marketing—with the faith that gross margins and EBITDA would catch up. Not many companies make that turn. Bill Shufelt: We were really disciplined in how we spent and disciplined financially to make sure that did play out. We were really—I’d say—rigorous stewards of investor capital as well. Bill Shufelt: We take that obligation extremely seriously. But yeah, in of scaling manufacturing specifically—I came from a financial background. I had my CFA. I thought I knew everything in the world about finance and financial statements. Bill Shufelt: The biggest difference for entrepreneurs between financial statements and operating models is the granularity of it. Most of my models I had built as if the breweries would be running at full capacity and that I was almost at economies of scale ingredient costs from the start. Bill Shufelt: As I started to do an honest assessment of our ingredient costs and COGS builds in 2018, 2019—after we launched our business—utilization is one of the hardest factors. Very often, our breweries were being run at under 50%, and as we’re growing 100%… Bill Shufelt: There’s such a brief moment in time where you’re running your breweries at full utilization before you have to build the next brewery and layer in a lot more overhead. So that’s something I’d definitely make sure entrepreneurs are getting right. Bill Shufelt: Also, the variable costs of logistics and shipping costs—and here I was, my model had not been built around e-commerce. But e-commerce went to 70% of our business. Bill Shufelt: And a lot of that beer was shipping all the way across the country. So we were losing more money on each package we sold than we were making. So getting to the granular bit of the operating model was super important. Bill Shufelt: That scaling—manufacturing utilization—is such an important thing to get right. We’ve gotten much better at that in our third and fourth breweries—building them in staged processes, having utilization thresholds that trigger in order to unlock the next build. Bill Shufelt: Building manufacturing is really tough. And I know it was extremely out of vogue pre-2020, especially in 2021. Bill Shufelt: But when that switched—like now, there’s such a movement to onshoring for such obvious reasons. I think people realized how vulnerable supply chains were. Bill Shufelt: When 2020 hit and COVID happened, we were so lucky to be vertically aligned. Bill Shufelt: We weren’t relying on a network of eight to ten different vendors and stuff—for 3PL, for production, everything. It was Athletic doing everything. That was a huge competitive advantage in that time period—and in the current environment. Alejandro Cremades: So I want to ask you one thing here that comes to mind too. Obviously, when investors invest—and customers, employees—it’s all betting into the vision, right? And talking about the vision here—if you were to go to sleep tonight and wake up in a world where the vision of Athletic is fully realized, what does that world look like? Bill Shufelt: I think it’s a moment where you can go into a bar or restaurant and open up both sides of the menu—alcoholic and non-alcoholic—and you can be equally as excited by both. I think that’s when we’ve had a real impact—when people can hold delicious non-alcoholic beverages and have people excited to talk about that. I think Athletic achieves that and has broken the barrier to that happening in society. Bill Shufelt: So, definitely that—for sure. Alejandro Cremades: That’s amazing. Now, we’re talking about the past, but I want to talk about the past with a lens of reflection. Let’s say I put you into a time machine, and I bring you back to that moment where you’re about to give your notice at Point72 and venture into the unknown. Alejandro Cremades: And let’s say you’re able to stop that younger self coming out the door of Point72—and sit that younger Bill down for a coffee or whatever that is—and give that younger Bill one piece of advice before launching the business. Alejandro Cremades: What would that be and why, given what you know now? Bill Shufelt: So, for me personally—I’m lucky the fire burns so strongly. I think the riskiest thing for entrepreneurs in that moment is if they don’t absolutely love their idea—it’s going to be the toughest journey ever ahead. Bill Shufelt: But I loved my idea. So, there’s a million things I should have learned and known at that point that I didn’t. And I know some of those now. But the ion burning is so key. Bill Shufelt: It’s so, so key. And I was really lucky to have good household too—and an awesome co-founder. There are a million lessons on fundraising, getting good legal advice, having really good investor alignment. Bill Shufelt: I think communicating time horizon and aligning goals with your investors is so important. A lot of governance things too—that I see founders get in trouble with. Bill Shufelt: There are so many learnings along the way that are really important. And you pretty much only learn those by going through it yourself. So I think at the end of the day—if the ion is there—then time is the other variable. Because time, and just working at your problems, solves all of them basically. Alejandro Cremades: Absolutely. Absolutely. Well, Bill, for the people who are listening and would love to reach out, learn more about Athletic—what is the best way for them to do so? Bill Shufelt: Yeah, I’m on LinkedIn—super easy to get me there. And then all our information is at @athleticbrewing on social. Athleticbrewing.com on the internet is where we launch our 50 limited releases every year. Bill Shufelt: I’m just out here having fun—but I love to hear from entrepreneurs too. So please, hit me up. Alejandro Cremades: Amazing. Well hey, Bill, thank you so much for being on the DealMaker Show today. It has been an absolute honor to have you with us. Bill Shufelt: Thank you so much for having me. I had a blast. Really appreciate it. ***** If you like the show, make sure that you hit that subscribe button. If you can leave a review as well, that would be fantastic. And if you got any value either from this episode or from the show itself, share it with a friend. Perhaps they will also appreciate it. Also, , if you need any help, whether it is with your fundraising efforts or with selling your business, you can reach me at al*******@pa**************.com