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In this episode of Just Wondering with Norm Hitzges, Norm and Mary Hitzges look backward and forward at the same time — tracing the remarkable evolution of the Super Bowl while unpacking a franchise-shifting decision by the Dallas Mavericks. Norm begins with Super Bowl 60, revisiting how the game went from an awkward, half-empty afternoon in 1967 to the most powerful annual spectacle in American sports. From $12 tickets and $42,000 commercials to today's $8–10 million ad slots, Norm explains how the Super Bowl's growth mirrors the transformation of sports, television, and money itself. Along the way, he shares unforgettable history — including Max McGee's hungover heroics in Super Bowl I and the astonishing reality that neither network bothered to save the full game tape. The episode then shifts to the present, where Norm breaks down the Dallas Mavericks' decision to move on from Anthony Davis, effectively closing the book on the Luka Dončić era. Norm explains why the trade wasn't about talent — Davis was still productive when healthy — but about flexibility, criticism fatigue, and long-term cap strategy. With Dallas now projected to have $44 million in cap space, Norm outlines how the Mavericks may follow a patient, Oklahoma City–style rebuild built around flexibility, draft assets, and opportunistic trades. It's a thoughtful episode about growth, money, patience, and perspective — from the Super Bowl's unlikely beginnings to a franchise trying to find its next identity. Just Wondering_1.mp3 ⏱️ Chapters (YouTube-Friendly) 00:00 – Super Bowl Sunday questions and today's themes01:26 – The origin of the Super Bowl name02:10 – From $12 tickets to $10M commercials02:58 – 32,000 empty seats at Super Bowl I04:57 – Why the full game footage was never saved05:53 – Max McGee's hungover Super Bowl legend06:49 – Super Bowl 60 matchup and betting context08:02 – Why defense still wins Super Bowls08:56 – Transition to the Mavericks' big move11:09 – Anthony Davis traded and what it really means11:54 – Criticism fatigue and why Dallas wanted out13:20 – What the Mavericks actually received14:15 – The real prize: $44M in cap flexibility15:40 – Following the Oklahoma City rebuild model16:21 – Pieces Dallas still likes going forward17:18 – What Dallas ultimately got for Luka18:27 – Sponsors and closing thoughts19:19 – Final sign-off Check us out: patreon.com/sunsetloungedfwInstagram: sunsetloungedfwTiktok: sunsetloungedfwX: SunsetLoungeDFWFB: Sunset Lounge DFW Just Wondering is a long-form sports commentary podcast hosted by longtime broadcaster Norm Hitzges, offering thoughtful, numbers-driven analysis of the NFL, college sports, the NBA, and the business and culture surrounding them. Each episode blends experience, history, and curiosity to explore why things happen — not just what happened. New episodes feature clear-eyed perspective, context you don't hear elsewhere, and questions worth sitting with a little longer.
A lot of investors talk themselves into believing their market is “too competitive” or “dried up.”I don't buy it.In every city, there are a few operators quietly closing deals while everyone else complains there's nothing left.That usually means the market isn't the problem.Activity is.Lindsay and I break down how to actually diagnose your market, how to tell when an area is truly tight versus when you simply haven't talked to enough sellers yet.Once you create more activity in the market, more opportunities show up.And more opportunities demand better funding.If you have access to capital, your market never really dries up.That's the entire focus of Bill Allen's new 2-Day Flip Funding Challenge.In just 2 days, you'll learn how to raise up to $10M in private capital over the next 12 months, using the same system Bill has used to raise over $150M and fund 200+ deals a year.CLICK HERE to join the 2-day Flip Funding Challenge >>Catch you later!LINKS & RESOURCES1,000 FREE Seller LeadsGet your first 1,000 seller leads FREE from our partner BatchLeads and start closing deals immediately. CLICK HERE: http://leads.getbatch.co/mztQkMr7 Figure Flipping UndergroundIf you want to learn how to make money flipping and wholesaling houses without risking your life savings or "working weekends" forever... this book is for YOU. It'll take you from "complete beginner" to closing your first deal or even your next 10 deals without the bumps and bruises most people pick up along the way. If you've never flipped a house before, you'll find step-by-step instructions on everything you need to know to get started. If you're already flipping or wholesaling houses, you'll find fast-track secrets that will cut years off your learning curve and let you streamline your operations, maximize profit, do MORE deals, and work LESS. CLICK HERE: https://hubs.ly/Q01ggDSh0 7 Figure RunwayFollow a proven 5-step formula to create consistent monthly income flipping and wholesaling houses, then turn your active income into passive cash flow and create a life of freedom. 7 Figure Runway is an intensive, nothing-held-back mentoring group for real estate investors who want to build a "scalable" business and start "stacking" assets to build long-term wealth. Get off-market deal sourcing strategies that work, plus 100% purchase and renovation financing through our built-in funding partners, a community of active investors who will support and encourage you, weekly accountability sessions to keep you on track, 1-on-1 coaching, and more. CLICK HERE: https://hubs.ly/Q01ggDLL0 Connect with us on Facebook and Instagram: @7figureflipping Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.
Brim, Kim and Mr. Greer are back at it again. Apart from all the usual shenanigans, the gang chats about everything in pop culture with all the trimmings as they discuss a plethora of AI headlines including the man who predicted AI, the new AI agent only social media (Skynet here we come), Google dropping Project Genie, and the man arrested for collecting royalties of over $10M for AI music. The crew also chats about the boxer who got his toupee knocked clean off, the great mini duck search (or not so great), Luigi Mangione no longer facing the death penalty, and why 90s kids think differently than Gen Z. The cast talks about the passing of Catherine O'Hara and Grady Demond Wilson, Motley Crue defeating Mick Mars in court, The Last of Us, and White Castle vending machines. They talk about Ted Lasso's comeback, Cher fumbling of Kendrick Lamar's win (all in good fun), and Jaden Smith's awesome restaurant. The crew also discusses how Wendy's is owning Chik-Fil-et with their trolling, and the Epstein Files... people who continued to stay involved after he'd been convicted. The crew chats about entertainment news, opinions and other cool stuff and things. Enjoy.Wherever you listen to podcasts & www.thegrindhouseradio.comhttps://linktr.ee/thegrindhouseradio
WBS: The Great Bacon Caper. #347 -- The gang is at it again. Brimstone is joined by his wing-man Alex DaPonte, Meg Suss and Brim's wife Danielle as they chat about Alex's bacon adventures, Luigi Mangione no longer facing the death penalty, and the new Mark Iplier film reaching number two in the country. They discuss the new AI agent only social media platform, and the man who was arrested for making fake AI bands and reaping over $10M in royalties. They discuss the passing of Catherine O'Hara and Grady Demond Wilson, and how Major Labels are signing AI acts for millions. Brim explains what gets Within Brim's Skin.
“An hour of planning can save you 10 hours of doing.” — Dale CarnegieThere's been a trend sweeping the world and that's cold exposure.In the busy world we're in today, more and more people are connecting back to these ancient traditions that help us feel our best.Onward,JamesPS — We just passed 10M+ views on YouTube! Join 23K+ other subscribers on YouTube
WBSRocks: Business Growth with ERP and Digital Transformation
Send us a textThis week's enterprise software news highlights a widening gap between glossy innovation narratives and the hard operational and governance realities shaping buyer risk. On the innovation side, BlackLine's launch of Verity for the Office of the CFO, Tray.ai's Agent Hub, Genstore's $10M seed round, and Blue Yonder's new TMS features underscore the accelerating push toward AI-enabled automation and orchestration layers across finance, integration, and supply chain. Versori's partnership with Fluent Commerce and Acumatica's 2025 R2 update further signal growing emphasis on ecosystem connectivity and incremental platform modernization. At the same time, the darker counterpoint is impossible to ignore: Zimmer Biomet's $172M ERP lawsuit against Deloitte, a major European city council's continued delays in fixing a failed Oracle system, and the EU Commission's investigation into SAP's practices reinforce how execution risk, vendor governance, and regulatory scrutiny are now front-and-center issues for enterprise buyers. Taken together, these developments reflect a market bifurcating between rapid AI-driven experimentation and escalating consequences for large-scale ERP missteps—raising the strategic stakes for both technology selection and transformation leadership.In today's episode, we invited a panel of industry analysts for a live discussion on LinkedIn to analyze current enterprise software stories. We covered many grounds including the direction and roadmaps of each enterprise software vendors. Finally, we analyzed future trends and how they might shape the enterprise software industry.Video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_tFlYu6W_iwQuestions for Panelists?
The survival rate of brands at $1 is brutal enough. And at $10M, even more hit a wall or die. But the real problem that survivors face as they scale into eigth figures is stagnation. The grand delusion is that adding more and more retail accounts will keep the brand growing. But this is an illusion whose fragility exposes itself once deceleration begins and doesn't reverse with new accounts. Growing past $100M and deep into the nine figures is NOT a sales game. It is a marketer's game. But most brands need to change one thing. Have a listen and take notes. This is not material in my book.Your Host: Dr. James F. Richardson of Premium Growth Solutions, LLC www.premiumgrowthsolutions.com Please send feedback on this or other episodes to: admin@premiumgrowthsolutions.com
In this episode of The First Day from The Fund Raising School, host Bill Stanczykiewicz, Ed.D., sits down with Carly Berna, Vice President of Marketing (and the impressively titled “Fundraiser in Residence”) at Virtuous. Carly shares findings from the latest Virtuous Benchmark Report, a treasure trove of data gleaned from over 570 nonprofits using the platform for at least three years. The result? A layered look at donor trends across sectors and revenue sizes, from faith-based orgs to human services, all the way from scrappy sub-million-dollar shops to the $10M+ fundraising heavyweights. “Flat doesn't mean bad,” Carly notes, sometimes staying steady means you've weathered the storm. Bill and Carly dig into the meaty data highlights, starting with online giving. The average online gift increased by $5 in the last year and is up a whopping $22 since 2020, showing just how powerful digital channels are becoming, no surprise given Boomers are now a driving force online (61% of them give that way!). Meanwhile, Carly waves the mid-level donor flag with pride, celebrating growth in this oft-ignored group. Nonprofits are learning not to put all their donor eggs in one major gift basket. The conversation turns to recurring giving, a favorite of sustainability-minded fundraisers everywhere. While the average nonprofit sees 13% of their revenue coming from recurring donors, Virtuous' top quartile of performers boasts a hefty 33%. Donor retention is also slowly rebounding post-pandemic, reaching a six-year high of 50%. But Carly urges listeners not to settle, “Top performers hit 67%, so shoot for the stars!” Finally, the duo dives into donor acquisition and lifetime value. New donor acquisition is slipping, now around 30%, but those who do give are investing more over time, with average donor lifetime value rising to $784. Carly's message is clear: nonprofits need to be smart, not just generous: track your data, find your gaps, and don't just pat yourself on the back for being average. With the right balance of stewardship, segmentation, and sustainability, nonprofits can build donor relationships that last longer than most gym memberships.
App Masters - App Marketing & App Store Optimization with Steve P. Young
In this episode, we're joined by Liubomyr Pivtorak, Chief Product Officer at Hily, one of the world's fastest-growing dating apps with over 40 million users worldwide.Liubomyr has spent the last 10 years in B2C mobile, including 8 years in the hyper-competitive dating industry, leading products that scaled to 10M+ and 30M+ users globally.He'll take us behind the scenes of how Hily grew in a red ocean market, competing against giants like Tinder, Hinge, and Bumble — by running 100+ in-app experiments every quarter and obsessing over data, user behavior, and retention.You will discover:✅ The experiment-driven framework that powers Hily's growth (100+ experiments every quarter)✅ How to grow in a red ocean market like dating apps✅ What actually worked vs what failed — real growth experiment stories✅ The data-driven mindset behind scaling from millions to tens of millions of users✅ How to compete with giants like Hinge, Bumble, and Tinder using smarter experimentsLearn More:Try Hily → https://hily.com Connect with Liubomyr → https://www.linkedin.com/in/liubomyrp/You can also watch this video here: https://youtube.com/live/rUiISNtS3ssGet training, coaching, and community: https://appmasters.com/academy/*********************************************SPONSORSGot tons of freemium users who won't upgrade? Encore turns free users into paying customers and reduces churn by adding smart, curated affiliate offers at key user moments. Everyone wins with Encore.Learn more at https://encorekit.com/*********************************************Still designing, resizing, and uploading screenshots manually? AppScreens lets you pick from hundreds of high-converting templates, generate for every device size and language in minutes, and upload automatically to directly to App Store Connect and Google Play Console. Trusted by more than 100K developers and ASO experts worldwide.Try it free: https://appscreens.com/?via=am*********************************************Follow us:YouTube: AppMasters.com/YouTubeInstagram: @App MastersTwitter: @App MastersTikTok: @stevepyoungFacebook: App Masters*********************************************
January 30, 2026: Your daily rundown of health and wellness news, in under 5 minutes. Today's top stories: Hims & Hers airs Super Bowl spot titled "Rich People Live Longer," framing consumer health as response to structural inequity in preventive care access Climatic raises $10M seed round to launch first daily lung health system backed by Mount Sinai research, creating new wellness category AG1 announces Hugh Jackman as global ambassador as Bryan Johnson publicly criticizes the brand, sparking debate over clinical evidence and supplement credibility More from Fitt: Fitt Insider breaks down the convergence of fitness, wellness, and healthcare — and what it means for business, culture, and capital. Subscribe to our newsletter → insider.fitt.co/subscribe Work with our recruiting firm → https://talent.fitt.co/ Follow us on Instagram → https://www.instagram.com/fittinsider/ Follow us on LinkedIn → linkedin.com/company/fittinsider Reach out → insider@fitt.co
Some of our streets still haven't been cleared, nearly a week after the Pittsburgh region was hit with double digit snowfall. When can we expect some relief? And will UPMC's $10 million gift for emergency vehicles make things better? (Also, just how generous is this gift, really?) City Cast Pittsburgh host Megan Harris is joined by producer Sophia Lo and contributor Colin Williams to share the latest on snow removal. Plus, they discuss city and county efforts to restrict ICE activity, whether the new Steelers head coach counts as a win or loss for our city, and how you can help make a Pittsburgh-themed Lego set become a reality. Notes and references from today's show: UPMC gives $10M to city for plows, ambulances [Axios Pittsburgh] The challenges Pittsburgh Regional Transit faced before making rare decision to suspend service during snowstorm [Post-Gazette] Pittsburgh-area school districts are running out of snow days [KDKA] PODCAST: Mayor O'Connor on ICE, Affordability & AI [City Cast Pittsburgh] PODCAST: Can You Be Charged for Getting in ICE's Way? [City Cast Pittsburgh] Ways To Support Pittsburgh's Immigrant Communities [City Cast Pittsburgh] 'Pittsburgh is my world': Emotional Mike McCarthy introduced as new Steelers coach [Post-Gazette] Guild Journalists, Pittsburgh Community, Local Labor Comes Together to Launch PAPER [CWA] Architecture: Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania [Lego Ideas] Who Should Be On Pittsburgh's Walk of Fame? [City Cast Pittsburgh] Walk of Fame Nominations [Pittsburgh Walk of Fame] Learn more about the sponsors of this January 30th episode: Fulton Commons The Westmoreland Museum P3R Planned Parenthood of Western Pennsylvania Become a member of City Cast Pittsburgh at membership.citycast.fm. Want more Pittsburgh news? Sign up for our daily morning newsletter. We're also on Instagram @CityCastPgh! Interested in advertising with City Cast? Find more info here.
EP 152 - This Simple Calendar System Will Scale Your Clothing Brand Is the #1 thing you're avoiding right now a timeline and calendar for your brand? In this episode of The Business of Apparel Podcast, Rachel unpacks why building a detailed, backwards-planned timeline is the foundation of a successful and stress-free apparel brand. Whether you're selling direct-to-consumer or eyeing wholesale, understanding your calendar isn't just helpful, it's essential. Rachel details production schedules, fashion industry timelines, and the leadership mindset required to hit your dates and grow your brand. You'll also learn about the "invisible killer" of apparel businesses: poor decision-making at key milestones. Stick around to the end for crucial advice on Spring 2027 launch timelines and how The Board membership can give you insider tools and mentorship to level up your operations. Sign up for the Secrets Behind Billion Dollar Apparel Brands Masterclass here: https://www.thebusinessofapparel.com/secrets Join The Board here: https://www.thebusinessofapparel.com Key Moments: 00:00 Introduction: The Importance of a Brand Timeline 00:33 Leveraging Fashion Calendars for Success 01:14 Building a Stress-Free Timeline 02:28 Decision Making and Leadership 04:24 The Importance of Timely Decisions 06:42 Masterclass: Secrets Behind Billion Dollar Apparel Brands 07:27 Commitment to Timelines in Leadership 07:49 Wholesale Buying Timelines 09:38 Planning for Spring Collections 18:46 The Board: Your Strategic Advantage 20:21 Direct to Consumer Strategies 23:20 Conclusion: Join the Board for Industry Insights Watch more of The Business of Apparel Podcast episodes: Wholesale 101: https://youtu.be/lpezH1YwCyE Use AI in Your Apparel Brand: https://youtu.be/Dn9tjPNmfaw Grow A 7-Figure Apparel Business: https://youtu.be/rpQYDyo5Rao We can't wait to hear what you think of this episode! Purchase the Business of Apparel Online Course: https://www.thebusinessofapparel.com/course ABOUT RACHEL: Rachel Erickson—Fractional COO, Apparel Industry Consultant, and founder of Unmarked Street and The Business of Apparel. With 20+ years in technical design and product development leadership, I've sat at the executive table of a $25M apparel line and helped scale it to $60M in one year. After decades working inside major fashion companies, I learned the truth behind billion-dollar brands, and it's not about chasing trends or pumping out endless products. It's about building clean processes, tightly edited assortments, and obsessively focused customer targeting. I help founders and CEOs of performance apparel brands: ✅ Build lean, profitable product lines ✅ Streamline operations for growth ✅ Replace overwhelm with executive clarity ✅ Create garments that fit bodies in motion Whether you're just hitting $1M in revenue or trying to break through the $10M ceiling, my team joins you as an embedded operations and product partner—running fittings, line plans, tech packs, and vendor communications so you can get back to leading. To connect with Rachel, you can join her LinkedIn community here: LinkedIn. To visit her website, go to: www.unmarkedstreet.com.
Rainforest enables vertical software companies to embed payment processing directly into their platforms - solving the complexity that previously forced software companies to direct customers to separate banks or resellers for payment processing. Founded by Joshua Silver, who spent nearly 20 years in payments starting with PatientCo (a healthcare billing company that scaled to process billions for major healthcare organizations), Rainforest now serves as the enabling layer for thousands of vertical software companies. In this episode of BUILDERS, Joshua shares the unconventional GTM decisions that shaped Rainforest's trajectory: from making contracts a product feature to implementing a zero bugs policy, and why he measures podcast success by qualified lead conversion rather than download counts. Topics Discussed: The embedded payments opportunity: why software companies stopped directing customers to banks Building in highly regulated environments where traditional MVP approaches fail The extended foundation-building phase required before processing the first payment Transitioning from 2.5-3 years of founder-led sales to a scalable GTM motion Using contract terms as competitive differentiation rather than negotiation leverage Implementing a zero bugs policy and its impact on service costs and retention Building thought leadership through the Payment Strategy Show and Vertex conference Lead quality metrics over vanity metrics for content investments GTM Lessons For B2B Founders: Hire from the industry and invest disproportionately in technical onboarding: Rainforest maintains one of the highest concentrations of payments talent on a percentage basis—nearly everyone has worked in payments or payments-adjacent roles. But hiring isn't enough. Joshua obsesses over training because in complex sales, prospects ask detailed technical questions and "the moment that you give bad answers or don't know your stuff, they're going to detect that and that's going to detract a lot from the trust." When selling technical infrastructure, surface-level product knowledge kills deals. Every touchpoint—engineers, support, account execs—must understand not just how the product works, but why it works that way. Engineer your standard contract to eliminate negotiation cycles: Joshua inverted conventional wisdom by making Rainforest's standard contract "overly favorable to the client"—no hidden terms, no punitive clauses, no exclusivity provisions. The result: "We don't have to spend a lot of legal time going back and forth. We don't have to invest a lot of time and by the way, burning a lot of goodwill too in contract negotiations." Prospects consistently report the legal process was shockingly easy compared to competitors. This isn't about being naive—it's strategic capital allocation. Joshua's philosophy: "Pick the fights that really matter and everything else is just rounding." Time spent in legal negotiations is wasted time that could be spent onboarding customers. Embed sales capabilities into your customer success function: Rainforest trains their CS team on negotiation tactics, value selling, and objection handling—competencies rarely developed in post-sale teams. Joshua noted the primary goal is customer assistance, but growth is an underlying objective. This isn't about making CS "do sales"—it's about equipping them to have commercial conversations when customers naturally express expansion interest. The key enabler: strong product-market fit means "we don't have to sell it that much. It's really a conversation about solutioning." Enforce a zero bugs backlog in high-stakes environments: Joshua's unofficial core value—"don't f with the money"—manifests in their zero bugs policy. It's not that they never create bugs; it's that "we don't tolerate living with them. We don't have a backlog of bugs to fix." When a bug is validated, they fix it immediately. His head of engineering recently discussed this on a podcast because people find it radical. The payoff: "When you have a higher quality product, you don't have to invest as much in service because the product just works and you have naturally happy customers." For infrastructure products where errors cascade into customer incidents, the accumulated cost of technical debt vastly exceeds the upfront investment in quality. Qualify content success by whether it's converting your ICP: Joshua rejects vanity metrics entirely. When asked about podcast ROI, he said: "I'd rather have 100 highly qualified listeners that are great targets for us than have 100,000 listeners and not have 100 qualified ones." They track this rigorously—every inbound lead is asked how they discovered Rainforest, and an increasing percentage cite the podcast. Prospects explicitly say "we heard the podcast and nobody else is putting this content out there." The metric isn't downloads; it's whether qualified buyers are self-identifying through your content and entering sales conversations pre-educated and pre-sold. Build ecosystem assets without demanding immediate attribution: Rainforest launched Vertex—a curated conference for vertical software founders and operators—that explicitly isn't a Rainforest sales event or user conference. Joshua doesn't track lead conversion from the conference: "That's not one of the key metrics. We actually look at NPS score as one of the key metrics. Did people find value in the conference?" They're running it twice this year because attendees report it's the highest-quality conference they attend annually. His philosophy: "Go create value, legitimate, genuine value for the ecosystem and they will come to us." They deliberately limit attendance to several hundred and choose venues that physically can't accommodate massive scale—maintaining intimacy as a forcing function against growth-for-growth's-sake. Plan for extended pre-market build phases in regulated industries: Joshua's advice for payments founders: "Make sure you know what you're getting into. It's a big build and there's very low tolerance for misses." Before processing their first payment, Rainforest had to achieve PCI compliance, SOC2 compliance, and implement comprehensive security infrastructure. Only then could they begin customer development with close network contacts. He contrasts this with his standard founder advice: build an MVP, sell quickly, get feedback, iterate. In payments, that playbook doesn't work—"you actually have to build so much of the foundation first just to process your very first payment." Founders in regulated spaces need patient capital and realistic timelines that acknowledge compliance infrastructure isn't optional. Institutionalize "ruthlessly simplify" as an operating principle: One of Rainforest's core values is ruthless simplification, which Joshua applies to "the legal contract, the engineering documentation, anything." He asks his team repeatedly when reviewing anything: "Can we simplify it? Can we simplify it? Can we simplify it?" The output quality dramatically improves. He references the Tim Ferriss framing: "What would this look like if it were simple?" When applied consistently, it cuts approximately 50% from plans, strategies, and deliverables—even when the creator thought they were already building simply. // Sponsors: Front Lines — We help B2B tech companies launch, manage, and grow podcasts that drive demand, awareness, and thought leadership. www.FrontLines.io The Global Talent Co. — We help tech startups find, vet, hire, pay, and retain amazing marketing talent that costs 50-70% less than the US & Europe. www.GlobalTalent.co // Don't Miss: New Podcast Series — How I Hire Senior GTM leaders share the tactical hiring frameworks they use to build winning revenue teams. Hosted by Andy Mowat, who scaled 4 unicorns from $10M to $100M+ ARR and launched Whispered to help executives find their next role. Subscribe here: https://open.spotify.com/show/53yCHlPfLSMFimtv0riPyM
Radical AI is building scientific superintelligence—AGI for science—through a closed-loop system that combines AI agents with fully robotic self-driving labs to accelerate materials discovery. The materials science industry has a fundamental innovation problem: discovering a single new material system takes 10-15+ years and costs north of $100 million. This economic reality has frozen innovation across aerospace, defense, semiconductors, and energy—industries still deploying materials developed 30 to 100 years ago. In this episode, Joseph Krause, Co-Founder and CEO of Radical AI, explains how his company is attacking the root causes: serial experimentation workflows, systematically lost experimental data, and the manufacturing scale-up gap. Working with the Department of Defense, Air Force Research Lab on hypersonics systems, and as an official partner to the DOE's Genesis mission, Radical AI is focused on high entropy alloys that maintain mechanical properties in extreme environments—the kind of enabling technology that unlocks entirely new product categories rather than optimizing existing ones. Topics Discussed: The structural economics preventing materials innovation: 10-15 year timelines, $100M+ discovery costs, and why companies default to decades-old materials Three fundamental process failures in scientific discovery: serial workflows that prevent parallelization, the 90%+ of experimental data that lives only in lab notebooks, and the valley of death between lab-scale discovery and manufacturing scale-up How closed-loop autonomous systems capture processing parameters during discovery—temperature ranges, pressure requirements, humidity impacts, precursor form factors—that map directly to manufacturing conditions High entropy alloys as beachhead: 10^40 possible combinations from the periodic table, requiring materials that maintain strength and corrosion resistance at 2,000-4,000°F in oxidative environments created by hypersonic flight The strategic rationale for simultaneous government and commercial GTM: government for long-shot applications like nuclear fusion and access to world-class science institutions; commercial customers in aerospace, defense, automotive, and energy for near-term product applications Why Radical AI focuses on enabling technology rather than optimization technology—solving for markets where novel materials unlock new products, not incremental margin improvements GTM Lessons For B2B Founders: Engineer downstream adoption barriers into your initial system architecture: Joseph identified that customer skepticism centered on manufacturability, not discovery speed. Most prospects understood AI could accelerate experimentation but questioned whether discoveries could scale to production without restarting the entire process. Radical AI's response was architectural: their closed-loop system captures processing parameters—temperature ranges, pressures, precursor concentrations, humidity effects, form factors like powders versus pellets—during the discovery phase. This data maps directly to manufacturing conditions, eliminating the traditional restart cycle. The lesson: In deep tech, the adoption barrier isn't usually your core innovation—it's the adjacent problems customers know will surface later. Engineer those solutions into your system from day one rather than treating them as future optimization problems. Select beachheads where problem complexity matches your technical advantage: Radical AI chose high entropy alloys not because the market was largest, but because the search space is intractable for humans—10^40 possible combinations that would take millions of years to experimentally test. This creates a natural moat where their ML-driven autonomous system has exponential advantage over traditional approaches. Joseph explicitly distinguished "enabling technology" (unlocking new products) from "optimization technology" (improving margins on existing products), then targeted markets with products ready to deploy but blocked by materials constraints. The strategic insight: beachhead selection should optimize for where your technical approach has structural advantage and where success unlocks new market creation, not just better unit economics. Structure dual-track GTM to derisk technology while building commercial pipeline: Radical AI simultaneously pursues government contracts (DOD, Air Force Research Lab, DOE Genesis) and commercial customers (aerospace, defense primes, automotive, energy). This isn't market hedging—it's strategic complementarity. Government provides access to the world's most advanced scientific institutions, funding for applications with 10-20 year horizons like nuclear fusion, and willingness to bridge the valley of death that scares commercial buyers. Commercial customers provide clear near-term product applications, faster revenue cycles, and market validation. Joseph views them as converging rather than divergent, since transformative materials apply across both. The playbook: in frontier tech, government and commercial aren't either/or choices—structure them as parallel tracks that derisk each other while your technology matures. Reframe the economics of the innovation process itself: Joseph didn't pitch faster materials discovery—he reframed the entire process from serial to parallel, from data-loss to data-capture, from discovery-manufacturing gap to integrated workflow. This changes the fundamental economics: instead of 10-15 years and $100M+ per material, the conversation shifts to discovering and scaling multiple materials simultaneously with manufacturing parameters already mapped. This reframing unlocks budgets from companies that had stopped innovating because the traditional process was economically irrational. The insight: when industries have stopped innovating entirely, the problem isn't usually that existing processes are too slow—it's that the process itself is structurally broken. Identify and articulate the broken process, not just the speed/cost improvement. Lead with civilizational impact to filter for long-term aligned stakeholders: Joseph explicitly positions Radical AI as "building a company that fundamentally impacts the human race" and tells prospective talent, "if you are focused on a mission and not a job, this is the place for you." This isn't recruiting copy—it's strategic filtering. In frontier tech with 10-15 year commercialization horizons, you need customers, partners, investors, and talent who think in decades, not quarters. Mission-driven positioning attracts stakeholders aligned with category creation over optimization and filters out those seeking incremental improvements. It also provides air cover for decisions that prioritize long-term technological breakthroughs over short-term revenue optimization. // Sponsors: Front Lines — We help B2B tech companies launch, manage, and grow podcasts that drive demand, awareness, and thought leadership. www.FrontLines.io The Global Talent Co. — We help tech startups find, vet, hire, pay, and retain amazing marketing talent that costs 50-70% less than the US & Europe. www.GlobalTalent.co // Don't Miss: New Podcast Series — How I Hire Senior GTM leaders share the tactical hiring frameworks they use to build winning revenue teams. Hosted by Andy Mowat, who scaled 4 unicorns from $10M to $100M+ ARR and launched Whispered to help executives find their next role. Subscribe here: https://open.spotify.com/show/53yCHlPfLSMFimtv0riPyM
Jome built a marketplace for new construction homes by solving a transparency problem most people don't know exists: the vast majority of new builds never appear on Zillow, Redfin, or traditional MLS systems. In this episode of BUILDERS, I sat down with Dan Hnatkovskyy, CEO and Co-Founder of Jome, to unpack how he identified a massive category gap during Austin's pandemic housing boom and scaled from scraping builder websites to partnering with 1,700+ builders including 92 of the top 100. Dan shares the specific market moments that unlocked builder partnerships, how he discovered Google's separate product category for new construction, and why early LLM traffic became a meaningful acquisition channel. Topics Discussed: Why IDX feeds and MLS requirements systematically exclude new construction inventory The three market inflection points that accelerated builder partnerships from 500 to 1,500+ in 12 months How Google's separate new construction product category created an arbitrage opportunity against brand-focused builders The manual MVP: Typeform + text message delivery before building any real product Why the mortgage rate lock-in effect (50%+ of mortgages under 3.5% vs 6-7% prevailing rates) compounds the housing shortage Accidentally discovering ChatGPT and Perplexity were driving closed transactions through analytics instrumentation The decision to optimize entirely for buyers despite builders being the sole revenue source GTM Lessons For B2B Founders: Map structural exclusions in existing distribution systems: New construction homes can't enter MLS because they often lack finished addresses, real images, or completed properties—requirements designed for resale homes. This structural incompatibility created a $400B+ blind spot. Dan didn't just find underserved customers; he identified a category systematically locked out of dominant distribution. B2B founders should analyze whether incumbent platforms have structural requirements that exclude segments of the market, not just underserve them. Exploit paid search category mismatches between buyer intent and seller behavior: Dan discovered Google maintains separate product categories for new construction versus resale homes. Zillow and Redfin competed intensely in resale, but new construction was dominated by individual builders (Lennar, DR Horton) who assumed brand-driven intent—similar to car manufacturers. The reality: buyers search "new construction homes in Austin," not "Lennar homes." This category/behavior mismatch created immediate arbitrage. B2B founders should audit whether buyers search by problem/outcome while incumbents bid on brand terms, creating white space for aggregators. Time enterprise outreach to industry stress events, not product readiness: Jome scaled from 500 to 1,500 builders in one year by capitalizing on three specific moments: (1) pandemic demand surge when builders needed millennial/Gen Z reach, (2) 2022 quantitative tightening when builders feared demand collapse, (3) Zillow's 2023 policy change excluding builders with under 10 communities. Dan didn't wait for product-market fit—he mapped when prospects would be most receptive to any solution. B2B founders should create a calendar of industry stress events (regulatory changes, market corrections, competitor policy shifts) and time outreach to these windows regardless of product maturity. Instrument conversion funnels to detect emergent channels before consensus forms: Jome discovered meaningful lead volume and closed transactions from ChatGPT and Perplexity through analytics, not strategy. Only after seeing the data did they experiment with what Dan calls "reinforcement learning with LLMs"—promoting positive results to train the models. This wasn't about SEO or prompt engineering; it was about measurement infrastructure that surfaced signal before the channel was obvious. B2B founders should track referral sources at the closed deal level, not just top-of-funnel, to catch emerging platforms while unit economics are still favorable. Manually deliver value at zero margin before building product: Before any integrations or platform, Jome ran Google Ads to a Typeform, manually created searches in their agent-facing tool, and texted results to buyers. Dan's framework: "Start with manually creating value...and then step by step, improve it, automate it, make it more efficient." He launched this on a personal credit card and got immediate signal. B2B founders should resist the urge to build scalable product until they've proven someone will pay for (or convert on) manual delivery of the outcome. Optimize for the non-paying side when you're building a two-sided marketplace: Despite 100% of revenue coming from builder commissions, every product decision optimizes for buyer experience. Dan's logic: "If we want to bring value to the builders...we need to start with the buyers. We need to create the best possible home buying journey." This isn't idealism—it's recognition that in transaction-based models, buyer liquidity determines builder participation. B2B founders in marketplace businesses must identify which side is supply-constrained and build obsessively for the other side. // Sponsors: Front Lines — We help B2B tech companies launch, manage, and grow podcasts that drive demand, awareness, and thought leadership. www.FrontLines.io The Global Talent Co. — We help tech startups find, vet, hire, pay, and retain amazing marketing talent that costs 50-70% less than the US & Europe. www.GlobalTalent.co // Don't Miss: New Podcast Series — How I Hire Senior GTM leaders share the tactical hiring frameworks they use to build winning revenue teams. Hosted by Andy Mowat, who scaled 4 unicorns from $10M to $100M+ ARR and launched Whispered to help executives find their next role. Subscribe here: https://open.spotify.com/show/53yCHlPfLSMFimtv0riPyM
In this episode, Eric Coffie breaks down a massive Q1 opportunity: the government has roughly 90 days to obligate $82.8B in unobligated DoD funds—or risk losing budget authority. Eric shares how he triangulated data across sources (including NDAA legislation, Treasury Fiscal Data, CBO, and unobligated balance reporting) and explains what "unobligated" really means: authorized money that hasn't been committed to contracts yet—creating a high-pressure spend window from January through March. Eric also explains why this is a "perfect storm" for small businesses: higher sole-source thresholds (non-manufacturing up to $8M, manufacturing up to $10M), relentless small business goal pressure, and a huge recompete marketplace where long-term vehicles can lock up spend for 5–10+ years. He closes with actionable next steps (buyers lists, low-competition hit lists, NDAA cheat sheets, agency pain points, and recompete trackers) so contractors can stop reacting late—and start positioning early. Key Takeaways: Q1 is a use-it-or-lose-it spend window—position now, not when the bid drops Most money is tied to task orders/IDIQs + sole source, not just SAM "open bids" Track recompetes + agency pain points to negotiate and partner before teams are picked If you want to learn more about the community and to join the webinars go to: https://federalhelpcenter.com/ Website: https://govcongiants.org/ Connect with Encore Funding: http://govcongiants.org/funding Join 2026 Surge Bootcamp Starting January 31: https://govcongiants.org/surge
“It's very simple; just look at your life to see where you're heading. You're always in a momentum of something.” ― Maria ErvingWe're four weeks into 2026, and I have a question for you: How are those New Year's resolutions going?If you're like most people, the initial excitement has already started to fade. The clarity you had a few weeks ago is already getting cloudy.In this minisode, I'm going to show you how winners plan their year so, even if you're off to a tough start, you can still finish strong. Onward,JamesPS — We just passed 10M+ views on YouTube! Join 23K+ other subscribers on YouTube
CADENA 100 destaca las buenas cifras de empleo, con 22.4 millones de trabajadores y el paro bajo 2.5 millones. La OMS retira a España de la lista de países libres de sarampión por su circulación desde 2024, impulsando a Sanidad a reforzar la vacunación. Un estudio BBVA revela creencias como que las vacunas causan autismo (6%), la Tierra es plana (1/20) y visitas extraterrestres (casi 30%). En '¡Buenos días, Javi y Mar!', oyentes comparten lesiones accidentales. Una empresa de EE. UU. acepta reservas para un hotel en la Luna (apertura 2032, hasta 10M€). Se advierte sobre ciberdelincuentes en rebajas, aconsejando desconfiar de grandes descuentos y verificar HTTPS. Jimeno explora secretos infantiles (críticas a vecinos, palabrotas). Se discuten irritaciones domésticas (brick de leche casi vacío, poco papel, no sacar basura). La borrasca Christine provoca fuertes lluvias y nevadas en España, generando atascos. Justin Bieber confirma su participación en Coachella, sin gira en 2026. Se ...
Welcome back to the Top Contractor School Podcast, where contractors come to grow stronger, scale smarter, and build businesses that last. In this episode, Eric Guy sits down with Gerri Detweiler, a nationally recognized business credit and financing expert with nearly 30 years of experience helping small business owners understand credit, cash flow, and smarter financing decisions. Gerri breaks down the often-overlooked world of business credit, explains why so many contractors get trapped in expensive financing, and shares practical strategies to improve cash flow without crushing margins.
aiOla is pioneering speech-to-data technology that transforms unstructured speech into actionable data for enterprise operations. As a serial entrepreneur on his sixth startup, Co-Founder Amir Haramaty built aiOla after witnessing firsthand how traditional AI implementations fail to deliver ROI in enterprise settings. The company has developed proprietary technology that achieves near-100% accuracy in challenging environments with heavy jargon, multiple languages, and difficult acoustics. With strategic investors including a major airline and partnerships with Nvidia, Accenture, and USG, aiOla is addressing the fundamental challenge that 95% of enterprise AI pilots fail to show value by focusing on immediate, measurable ROI through speech-based data capture. Topics Discussed: The genesis of aiOla from consulting work revealing AI's implementation gaps in traditional enterprises Solving the triple challenge of speech recognition: accuracy in jargon-heavy environments, separating signal from noise, and converting speech to structured workflow data aiOla's "jargonic" approach: creating hyper-personalized language models for specific processes without retraining Early customer acquisition through serendipitous encounters and demonstrating immediate ROI Vertical expansion strategy from food manufacturing to aviation, travel, hospitality, and retail Channel partnership strategy refined from previous startups to achieve scale The shift from convincing customers about speech technology to being pulled into diverse use cases Building the aiOla Intelligate orchestration layer to dynamically select optimal speech recognition models GTM Lessons For B2B Founders: Make CFOs your best friend, not IT departments: Amir explicitly targets CFOs rather than IT as primary buyers because "it doesn't matter how small or big you are, you still have to do more with less." While IT serves as facilitators, CFOs control budgets focused on operational efficiency and ROI. B2B founders should identify which executive truly owns the pain point and budget authority, even if IT will implement the solution. Deploy capital strategically to remove obstacles before they emerge: aiOla convinced their airline investor to provide working capital specifically to fund POCs for prospects without existing budgets. This eliminated the "we don't have pilot budget" objection before it arose. B2B founders should proactively identify and neutralize common barriers in their sales process, whether through creative deal structures, proof-of-concept funding, or implementation support. Prioritize instant ROI over long-term transformation promises: Amir explicitly avoids "digital transformation" conversations, instead selecting use cases delivering "biggest impact within shortest period of time with minimum obstacle possible." The airline baggage tracking example saved 110,000 hours immediately, creating momentum for expansion. B2B founders should resist selling comprehensive transformation and instead identify narrow use cases with quantifiable, rapid returns that create internal champions. Replicate proven use cases across customers rather than customizing: Once aiOla achieved success with specific applications like CRM data entry or pre-op inspections, they "stop, print, replicate" rather than reinventing for each customer. This approach reduced a two-hour inspection process to 34 minutes in food manufacturing, then replicated across industries. B2B founders should document successful implementations as repeatable playbooks and resist the urge to over-customize for each prospect. Channel success requires speaking the partner's economic language: When working with telcos, Amir demonstrated that his solution increased ARPU by 34% and reduced churn by 17%—the only two metrics telcos prioritize. He built predictable models showing exactly how many units each channel rep would sell by geography. B2B founders pursuing channel strategies must translate their value proposition into the specific KPIs that drive partner economics and compensation. // Sponsors: Front Lines — We help B2B tech companies launch, manage, and grow podcasts that drive demand, awareness, and thought leadership. www.FrontLines.io The Global Talent Co. — We help tech startups find, vet, hire, pay, and retain amazing marketing talent that costs 50-70% less than the US & Europe. www.GlobalTalent.co // Don't Miss: New Podcast Series — How I Hire Senior GTM leaders share the tactical hiring frameworks they use to build winning revenue teams. Hosted by Andy Mowat, who scaled 4 unicorns from $10M to $100M+ ARR and launched Whispered to help executives find their next role. Subscribe here: https://open.spotify.com/show/53yCHlPfLSMFimtv0riPyM
Doctronic became the first AI in the world legally licensed to practice medicine through Utah's AI Learning Lab regulatory sandbox in December 2025. In this episode of BUILDERS, I sat down with Matt Pavelle, Co-founder and Co-CEO of Doctronic, to learn how he and his co-founder (a physician) launched an AI-powered primary care chatbot in September 2023, validated demand through Facebook chronic condition groups and minimal Google Ads spend, and navigated uncharted regulatory territory to offer $4 prescription renewals for chronic conditions—targeting the medication non-adherence problem that causes 125,000 preventable deaths and costs $100B annually. Topics Discussed: Why friends with excellent health insurance still couldn't get medical answers quickly Building clinical accuracy into GPT-3.5 when context windows were small and hallucinations were rampant The tactical launch: Google Ads plus Facebook chronic condition groups in September 2023 Architecting safety: RAG with tens of thousands of physician-written clinical guidelines The study: 99.2% agreement rate between AI treatment plans and human doctor reviews across 500 patients Navigating Utah's AI Learning Lab: the only regulatory sandbox that mitigated medical licensing laws Securing AI malpractice insurance through Lloyd's Market—a first in the industry The three-phase oversight model: 100% human review, then 10%, then spot checks Expansion strategy: targeting other state regulatory sandboxes and international governments GTM Lessons For B2B Founders: Launch with the minimum feature set that proves your core hypothesis: Pavelle shipped Doctronic in September 2023 without user accounts—chats disappeared when closed unless users saved them manually. Within days, user requests for persistent chat history validated demand. The insight: your MVP should test one assumption, not solve every user need. If you're hesitating to launch because features are missing, ask whether those features are actually required to validate your hypothesis or just things you assume users want. Use specificity to unlock early adoption in skeptical markets: Rather than targeting "healthcare" broadly, Pavelle posted in Facebook groups for specific chronic conditions, offering a free AI backed by clinical guidelines. Half the groups banned them for commercial activity, but the other half engaged immediately. The lesson: in regulated or skeptical markets, narrow targeting with explicit safety mechanisms (clinical guidelines, physician co-founder credibility) converts better than broad positioning. Identify where your skeptics congregate and address their specific objections upfront. Design system architecture to prevent failure modes, not just tune models: Doctronic's safety architecture separates AI decision-making from prescription execution. The LLM asks questions and determines renewal safety, but deterministic code outside the AI verifies the prescription exists, checks dosage accuracy, and confirms the schedule. Even if adversarial prompting compromises the LLM, the deterministic layer prevents bad outcomes. Founders building high-stakes AI products should architect multiple independent verification layers rather than relying on prompt engineering or temperature tuning alone. Target regulatory pain points with quantified deaths and costs: Pavelle approached Utah with specific numbers: 125,000 preventable deaths annually from medication non-adherence, 30-40% caused by renewal friction, and a $100B economic burden. These statistics—combined with Utah's rural population and physician shortage—made the problem impossible to ignore. When approaching regulators, lead with mortality and cost data that make inaction untenable, not just efficiency gains or convenience improvements. Regulatory sandboxes require proof of safety methodology, not just technology demos: Utah's AI Learning Lab didn't just grant Doctronic permission—they required a three-phase oversight structure where human physicians review 100% of initial prescriptions in each medication class, then 10%, then ongoing spot checks. Pavelle also secured AI malpractice insurance through Lloyd's Market before launch. The insight: regulatory innovation offices want risk mitigation frameworks, not promises. Build and fund your oversight methodology before approaching regulators, and treat insurance underwriting as a third-party validation of your safety claims. Publish clinical validation studies before scaling—they become your regulatory and sales asset: The study showing 99.2% agreement between Doctronic's AI and human physicians across 500 patient encounters became the foundation for regulatory conversations and public trust. Founders in regulated spaces should budget for formal validation studies early—these aren't marketing expenses, they're the permission structure for everything that follows. Work backward from what regulators and enterprise buyers need to see, then design studies that generate that specific evidence. // Sponsors: Front Lines — We help B2B tech companies launch, manage, and grow podcasts that drive demand, awareness, and thought leadership. www.FrontLines.io The Global Talent Co. — We help tech startups find, vet, hire, pay, and retain amazing marketing talent that costs 50-70% less than the US & Europe. www.GlobalTalent.co // Don't Miss: New Podcast Series — How I Hire Senior GTM leaders share the tactical hiring frameworks they use to build winning revenue teams. Hosted by Andy Mowat, who scaled 4 unicorns from $10M to $100M+ ARR and launched Whispered to help executives find their next role. Subscribe here: https://open.spotify.com/show/53yCHlPfLSMFimtv0riPyM
After building products at Microsoft (Xbox, Surface), a gaming startup acquired by Disney, Twilio, and Box, Vanessa Larco joined NEA where she led seed investments in Greenlight (debit card for kids), Majuri (C2C jewelry), and Limitless (acquired by Meta). She served on Robinhood's board for five and a half years through IPO and the GameStop crisis. In this conversation, Vanessa breaks down the specific traits that separate top 1% founders from the rest, why venture capital is experiencing structural chaos from simultaneous mega-fund expansion and generational transition, and why technical founders who deeply understand consumer behavior change represent the next wave of breakout companies. Topics Discussed: How customer-focused decision-making at Robinhood during GameStop contradicted public perception The specific paradox great founders must balance: maniacal focus versus recruiting ability Why venture is simultaneously dealing with fund size chaos and generational leadership transition The decision framework for staying in venture versus returning to operating Why consumer is radically underinvested despite users' demonstrated willingness to pay for "magical" experiences How AI tools create internet-scale behavior change by synthesizing information rather than just accessing it The authentic voice problem in VC personal branding and platform-specific challenges GTM Lessons For B2B Founders: Great founders possess maniacal focus on the right problems, not all problems: Vanessa describes exceptional founders as having an "insatiability" where "they pick the thing and they can focus on the thing and not get distracted by anything else and be maniacal about it." This isn't generic persistence—it's the ability to identify which specific problem deserves obsessive attention while ignoring everything else. Employees often push back ("we have these other fires"), but top founders maintain "one track" focus. The implementation challenge: most founders spread maniacal energy across too many initiatives. The best founders are "obsessive compulsive about how they build" on 1-2 things maximum, then deliberately de-prioritize everything else, even when it feels irresponsible. Incentive structure misalignment creates unwinnable scenarios: During GameStop, Robinhood faced retail traders whose incentives were fundamentally incompatible with traditional market participants. As Vanessa notes, "if your team and your company is bound by a certain set of incentives and you're up against someone with a very different set of incentives, that never really ends well." The Wall Street Bets mantra—"we can stay irrational longer than they can stay solvent"—explicitly weaponized this mismatch. For founders: map not just competitor strategies but their underlying incentive structures. Are they optimizing for growth, profitability, strategic acquirer appeal, or something else? When your incentives conflict with a market participant's (customer, partner, regulator, competitor), you cannot win through superior execution alone—you need structural repositioning. Technical founders who ship faster capture AI-era market position: Vanessa specifically seeks "technical founders with an eye for consumer behavior change" because "speed is really important in this era." This isn't about being first to market—it's about iteration velocity. When foundational models improve every few months and user expectations evolve weekly, the team that can "deliver on it faster than anyone else" compounds advantages. Non-technical founders add product/sales/fundraising cycles between insight and deployment. Technical founders collapse these cycles, testing behavioral hypotheses in days rather than quarters. In markets where "what's possible" changes monthly, this velocity differential determines who owns category definition. Behavior change wedges beat feature superiority: Vanessa looks for founders who understand "how this new technology is changing how people behave and changing what people expect of their tools" and can identify "what need can I fulfill better because I can build this thing that couldn't be built before." The critical insight: users don't adopt based on capability—they adopt when technology enables a behavior they already want but couldn't execute. She emphasizes products that are "radically faster, radically cheaper, radically easier" (not 10% better) and founders who understand "how they'll wedge into behaviors." Implementation framework: don't ask "what can this technology do?" Ask "what behavior is currently blocked by cost/speed/complexity that this technology removes the blocker for?" Category creation happens post-problem-solving, not pre-launch: Discussing Robinhood's positioning, Vanessa reveals how the team "stayed focused" on enabling "people to continue participating in the markets" rather than defending an abstract category. The company focused on structural problems (settlement times, capital requirements) rather than category messaging. For founders: solve the acute problem your customer articulates, even if it seems tactically narrow. Category definition emerges after you've solved related problems for enough customers that the pattern becomes obvious. Premature category creation forces you to defend an abstract positioning rather than deepen specific problem-solving. Personal brand building only works at the intersection of authenticity and utility: Vanessa admits "I can't find my authentic voice on Twitter to save my life" and her successful posts are "when I'm on an airplane and it's delayed by like over an hour and I'm angry." Meanwhile, "video and audio, way more my comfort zone" but requires "discipline that I don't think I yet possess." The lesson for founders: audience building helps ("people then know what you are, what you stand for... it helps establish trust faster, it helps people find you") but forced authenticity backfires. Better to own one channel where your natural communication style works than maintain mediocre presence across all platforms. LinkedIn for thoughtful analysis, Twitter for real-time reaction, podcasts for deep conversation—pick the format that doesn't require you to perform. // Sponsors: Front Lines — We help B2B tech companies launch, manage, and grow podcasts that drive demand, awareness, and thought leadership. www.FrontLines.io The Global Talent Co. — We help tech startups find, vet, hire, pay, and retain amazing marketing talent that costs 50-70% less than the US & Europe. www.GlobalTalent.co // Don't Miss: New Podcast Series — How I Hire Senior GTM leaders share the tactical hiring frameworks they use to build winning revenue teams. Hosted by Andy Mowat, who scaled 4 unicorns from $10M to $100M+ ARR and launched Whispered to help executives find their next role. Subscribe here: https://open.spotify.com/show/53yCHlPfLSMFimtv0riPyM
What would it change in a trades business if the sales team stopped waiting on leads and started owning the pipeline? In this episode, Jordan White tells Chad Peterman how he moved to Nashville with a beat-up truck, slept on a kid's couch, and built a high-end roofing company that grew from $2M to just over $20M in four years, almost entirely off door-to-door hustle. Jordan breaks down how he and his partner built a visionary/integrator partnership, fed the business first instead of chasing early distributions, and created a culture where clean-cut, young hustlers can make multiple six figures by knocking on doors in affluent neighborhoods. The conversation connects directly to HVAC, plumbing, electrical, and other home service leaders who are tired of blaming "the market" or "this generation" and are ready to build a scoreboard-driven, people-first sales culture instead. If you lead a trades business and want a place to work on your leadership, culture, and growth strategy with other owners who get it, get plugged into The Arena, the private community built for home service leaders who refuse to coast. Join The ARENA - a CSTG Community (powered by our media partner, PeopleForward Network) Additional Resources: Connect with Jordan White on LinkedIn Learn more about SeekOne Roofing Subscribe to CSTG on YouTube! Connect with Chad on LinkedIn Chad Peterman | CEO | Author Learn more about the Peterman Brothers Follow PeopleForward Network on LinkedIn Learn more about PeopleForward Network Key Takeaways: From top sales rep to founder – how Jordan left a "safe" high-commission role to launch a roofing company in a brand-new market. Visionary and integrator for trades growth – how he and his partner split roles so the business isn't dependent on one person. Reinvesting profits to scale revenue – why they let the business eat first and delayed big distributions past $10M and $20M. Building a door-to-door sales machine – the recruiting, training, and culture that turns hungry talent into "shark" closers. Scorecards, KPIs, and accountability – how tracking numbers removes drama from coaching and drives higher sales performance. Marketing and builder partnerships for recurring revenue – how retail marketing and custom homebuilder relationships create predictable, long-term growth.
Confirm uses organizational network analysis to surface hidden high performers and toxic actors that traditional performance reviews miss - identifying the quiet contributors everyone relies on and the problematic employees who manage up effectively. In this episode of BUILDERS, I sat down with David Murray, Cofounder & CEO of Confirm, to dissect their most painful go-to-market lessons. David shares why leading with methodology superiority torpedoed their early sales, the specific discovery framework that flipped their win rate, and how they segment the four distinct HR buying motions that require completely different sales approaches. Topics Discussed: Why traditional performance reviews are 60% manager bias according to research by Maynard Goff How organizational network analysis identifies introverted high performers and manages-up toxic actors The catastrophic early GTM mistake: positioning against existing processes Discovery frameworks for conservative buyers in compliance-heavy functions Talk ratio targets and silence techniques from clinical psychology applied to enterprise sales Channel testing methodology that identified LinkedIn ads as their primary acquisition driver The four-quadrant framework for HR sales: CHRO vs line manager, company-wide vs HR-only tools Messaging strategies that balance shock factor with substantive education GTM Lessons For B2B Founders: Discovery trumps differentiation in category creation: Confirm's design partner had promoted toxic employees and lost quiet high performers in the same cycle—a perfect case study for their ONA methodology. But when they pitched other HR leaders with "here's why your approach is broken," they hit walls. The shift: stop selling methodology, start diagnosing pain. Reference what you've observed at similar companies—"Some folks at your size tell us they struggle with X, is that true for you?"—then let prospects surface their version of the problem. Only after they've articulated their pain do you map your differentiated approach to their specific context. Target buyer timing, not just buyer titles: Confirm identified a specific trigger: HR leaders in their first 1-2 months at a new company. These leaders are hired to make change and need early wins. The outreach question: "How are you looking to make your mark?" This surfaces whether they're hungry for innovation or managing political capital. A newly hired CHRO has different motivations than a 5-year veteran protecting their process choices. Map your outreach to career timing, not just seniority. Enforce 50/30/20 talk ratios in discovery: David's target: prospects speak 60-80% of discovery calls, with 50% being acceptable. If you're talking more than half the time, you're pitching, not discovering. The clinical psychology technique: positive encouragers ("yeah," "huh") plus deliberate silence after open-ended questions. Prospects will fill silence with the real issues—budget constraints, political dynamics, past vendor failures. This intel is gold for multi-threading and objection handling later. Test channel-message fit with minimal spend: Confirm's approach: "do everything a little bit and see what sticks." They found LinkedIn ads with precise targeting (title, company size, recent job changes) delivered qualified pipeline cost-effectively, while other channels didn't. The framework: allocate 10-15% of budget across 5-6 channels for 60 days, measure cost-per-qualified-meeting, then concentrate spend. Plan for 3-6 month creative refresh cycles as audiences develop ad fatigue—this isn't set-and-forget. Map your product to the HR buying matrix: David identifies four distinct quadrants: (1) CHRO buyer, company-wide deployment = traditional enterprise sale, 6-18 month cycles, heavy multi-threading required; (2) CHRO buyer, HR-only tool = shorter cycles but still executive selling; (3) Line manager buyer, company-wide = requires bottom-up adoption mechanics; (4) Line manager buyer, HR-only = SMB-style transactional sale. Confirm operates in quadrant 1—the longest, most complex sale. Most founders don't explicitly map which quadrant they're in, leading to mismatched sales motions and blown forecasts. Use provocative messaging with technical substance: "One-click performance reviews" generated meetings because it triggered both excitement (managers hate writing reviews) and concern (is AI replacing human judgment?). The key: the shock factor gets the meeting, but you need depth on the call. Confirm's explanation: the AI aggregates data from Asana, Jira, OKRs, peer feedback, and self-reflections to reduce recency bias, then generates a draft managers edit. The dystopian concern becomes a feature when you explain the data anchoring. Surface-level shock without technical credibility burns trust. Adjust for organizational risk tolerance by function: HR and healthcare share conservative buying cultures due to compliance, documentation, and legal requirements. David contrasts this with selling to CTOs or engineers who "kick tires and want to break things." This affects everything: longer evaluation cycles, more stakeholders in legal/compliance, emphasis on security and data handling, reference checks weighted heavily. If you're selling to risk-averse functions, adjust your content (white papers, compliance documentation), your timeline expectations, and your change management positioning. Reframe education as extraction, not instruction: David's mental model shift: "I need to learn from them" replaced "I need to educate them." In practice: "I've heard from others that calibration meetings consume 10+ hours per cycle with unclear outcomes. They tried approaches like forced ranking or manager-only decisions. Have you experimented with either?" This positions you as a pattern-matcher across their peer group, not a lecturer. They become receptive to alternatives because you've demonstrated you understand their world through other customers' experiences. // Sponsors: Front Lines — We help B2B tech companies launch, manage, and grow podcasts that drive demand, awareness, and thought leadership. www.FrontLines.io The Global Talent Co. — We help tech startups find, vet, hire, pay, and retain amazing marketing talent that costs 50-70% less than the US & Europe. www.GlobalTalent.co // Don't Miss: New Podcast Series — How I Hire Senior GTM leaders share the tactical hiring frameworks they use to build winning revenue teams. Hosted by Andy Mowat, who scaled 4 unicorns from $10M to $100M+ ARR and launched Whispered to help executives find their next role. Subscribe here: https://open.spotify.com/show/53yCHlPfLSMFimtv0riPyM
EPISODE 344 - Clark is joined by Will and Roy for the first time in 2026 to talk Pokemon cards, WWE cards, and of course, sports cards as well. Off the top, they discuss Logan Paul's Pikachu Illustrator Pokemon card that's up for auction, which has already surpassed the $6M mark. Can it $10M? And is it time to take Logan Paul more seriously in the hobby?For Hobby Headlines, the guys go through another the Athletic article called "Sports card year in review: Jordan, Ohtani and the data that defined 2025." The guys then look at what the data said (by playing Family Feud style) and guesses if the trend would continue into 2027 next year. Then they play a fun round of Quiz Show before ending the episode with their regular weekly segment called "Pick 1."--------------------------CONNECT WITH US!Instagram: @cardstothemoon | @fivecardguys (Clark) | @yntegritysportscards (Hyung) | @tradeyouatrecess (John)Website: https://fivecardguys.com/podcastDaily Auctions (w/ affiliate links): https://fivecardguys.com/dailyauctionsIf you have any questions about the hobby that you would like addressed, email us at hello@fivecardguys.com or DM us on Instagram at @cardstothemoon or @fivecardguys.
CalmWave is tackling ICU alarm fatigue—a problem where patients generate up to 1,600 alarms per day because clinicians lack data-driven guidance on setting vital sign thresholds. The company processes 32 million data points daily from a single 14-hospital system by fusing high-frequency vital signs from Philips InteliBridge with EMR data from Epic in real time. This represents 10 billion data points annually at current run rate. Ophir Ronen, a sixth-time founder who previously sold to PagerDuty, built CalmWave by applying enterprise IT operations patterns to healthcare infrastructure. The company secured its first comprehensive system-wide agreement within months of launch and now holds 51 patents with 20 more pending as medical device manufacturers pursue distribution partnerships. Topics Discussed Why middleware interoperability is a prerequisite for clinical safety, not a feature The technical challenge of fusing 10x more data from vitals systems than EMR systems Building trust through transparent AI that exposes mathematical reasoning to clinicians Scaling from 7 million to 32 million daily data points across hospital rollout phases How CalmWave's common signal format enables data scientists to work with clean datasets Positioning alarm fatigue as a beachhead into broader hospital operations platforms The innovation investment arm validation pathway for startup enterprise sales Extending the signals-incidents-events pattern to energy, defense, and manufacturing GTM Lessons For B2B Founders Interoperability becomes your moat when it's a safety prerequisite: CalmWave couldn't provide safe alarm recommendations using only vital signs data without knowing which medications had been administered that could affect those vitals. This forced them to build bidirectional integration with both Philips InteliBridge (high-frequency vitals) and Epic EMR before addressing the clinical problem. The integration layer itself—which normalizes, enriches, and structures data into their common signal format—became defensible IP. Ophir noted that high-frequency vitals data is "erased on a rolling 30-day basis" at most hospitals, making CalmWave's fused dataset genuinely novel. Founders in healthcare or other regulated industries should identify whether data fusion across siloed systems is required for safety or efficacy, then build that integration capability as core infrastructure rather than expecting customers to solve it. Transparent AI sells better than black box AI in clinical environments: When presenting to 30 senior leaders including a notoriously difficult CMO, CalmWave walked through the mathematical basis of their algorithms—demonstrating exactly how they calculate safe alarm threshold adjustments. The CMO stood up mid-presentation and said, "You guys shouldn't even call yourselves AI. This is math and statistics. I understand exactly what you're doing. Well done. This is truly innovative." This validation from clinical leadership came from showing the work, not from accuracy metrics alone. Founders selling AI into risk-averse environments should build explainability into their core product architecture, enabling clinicians to understand why each recommendation is generated rather than treating interpretability as a post-hoc feature. Innovation investment arms provide validation pathways that bypass procurement: CalmWave's breakthrough came when an innovation investment arm from a major health system reached out after three months of due diligence, then placed them in front of clinicians. Two weeks before signing a comprehensive system-wide agreement, they presented to the C-suite. This pathway avoided traditional vendor procurement cycles. The innovation arm acted as internal champion, pre-validating the startup's approach before exposing them to decision-makers. Founders targeting large healthcare systems should identify which organizations have dedicated innovation or venture arms, recognizing these groups are measured on finding novel solutions rather than minimizing vendor risk. Beachhead problems in enterprise must be urgent enough to overcome startup friction: Ophir explicitly chose alarm fatigue because health systems with IT budgets in the hundreds of millions needed "something compelling enough to make them engage" with a startup. ICU alarm fatigue has regulatory scrutiny, patient safety implications, and nursing burnout consequences that create executive-level urgency. The problem was important enough that clinical leadership would tolerate the integration complexity and vendor risk of working with an early-stage company. Founders should evaluate beachhead opportunities not just by market size but by whether the pain point has organizational consequences severe enough to justify betting on an unproven vendor. Adjacent domain pattern recognition creates non-obvious competitive advantages: CalmWave's team came from building large-scale operations platforms at PagerDuty, where they developed expertise in processing massive streaming data, correlating events, and reducing alert noise. They recognized that ICU alarm fatigue followed the same structural pattern as IT operations alarm fatigue—too many alerts without context. This allowed them to apply a proven architectural approach (signals → alarms → incidents → events) to a new vertical where healthcare incumbents lacked that specific systems thinking. One hospital generates 7 million data points daily; their platform now handles 32 million across multiple facilities. Founders with deep operational expertise in one domain should actively map their architectural patterns to adjacent verticals where incumbents haven't solved analogous problems at scale. // Sponsors: Front Lines — We help B2B tech companies launch, manage, and grow podcasts that drive demand, awareness, and thought leadership. www.FrontLines.io The Global Talent Co. — We help tech startups find, vet, hire, pay, and retain amazing marketing talent that costs 50-70% less than the US & Europe. www.GlobalTalent.co // Don't Miss: New Podcast Series — How I Hire Senior GTM leaders share the tactical hiring frameworks they use to build winning revenue teams. Hosted by Andy Mowat, who scaled 4 unicorns from $10M to $100M+ ARR and launched Whispered to help executives find their next role. Subscribe here: https://open.spotify.com/show/53yCHlPfLSMFimtv0riPyM
Subscribe to DTC Newsletter - https://dtcnews.link/signupFan Bi is the founder of The Hedgehog Company, where he acquires distressed DTC brands and helps get them profitable fast. He's also the creator of In the Money, a must-follow podcast and content brand unpacking the capital side of consumer.For DTC founders navigating exits, plateaus, or profitability hell...What most founders still get wrong about valuationsHow the buyer landscape has shifted post-Unilever & WalmartSigns your bridge round is a bridge to nowhereThe trenches of sub-$20M exits, explained with examplesWhy switching costs matter more than everWho this is for: Founders, operators, and investors trying to understand today's DTC M&A landscapeWhat to steal:20%+ post-marketing contribution as a key health metricThe 3-week test to know if your exit has tractionRealistic comps on $3M, $10M, $30M brand valuationsTimestamps00:00 Real math behind DTC exits in today's market02:15 Why 3–5x revenue exits no longer exist05:00 The real state of DTC profitability and acquisition costs07:00 What makes a distressed DTC brand worth buying09:00 Turning around Baboon to the Moon and fixing fundamentals11:00 DTC exit trenches from $1M to $100M+ brands15:00 What kills DTC acquisition deals fastest17:00 Why bridge rounds often fail19:00 DTC vs software and AI from an investor lens22:00 Product market fit vs product channel fit24:00 Categories that still work for DTC exits26:00 What it takes to build a winning DTC brand todayHashtags#DTC #DirectToConsumer #DTCExits #Ecommerce #EcommercePodcast #StartupExits #MergersAndAcquisitions #BrandAcquisition #DTCBrands #EcommerceGrowth #FounderAdvice #ConsumerBrands #PrivateEquity #ShopifyBrands #BusinessPodcast Subscribe to DTC Newsletter - https://dtcnews.link/signupAdvertise on DTC - https://dtcnews.link/advertiseWork with Pilothouse - https://dtcnews.link/pilothouseFollow us on Instagram & Twitter - @dtcnewsletterWatch this interview on YouTube - https://dtcnews.link/video
Blake Lively rallied her famous friends v. Justin Baldoni, Timothy Busfield & the Michael Jackson playbook, Oscar nominations, not-a-Prince Harry cried in court, investigating the death of Jim Irsay, Maz's bad picks, Jim's Picks: Top 10 B-Sides, and My Strange Addiction introduces us to Vabbing. We've been binging The Ben Show clips on YouTube. Timothy Busfield defense is Michael Jackson 2.0. Oscar Nominations are out. Who were the big winners and who was snubbed? Reliving Gwyneth Paltrow's Oscar Speech from 1999. Blake Lively texted Taylor Swift, Ben Affleck, Matt Damon and more of her famous friends to use them vs her battle with Justin Baldoni. Prince Harry is a baby and proves it in court. A brand new Bonerline. Another crazy My Strange Addiction. Meet Cassy from Boston. She is addicted to Vabbing. Can you guess what she smells like? Brooklyn Beckham's wife, Nicola Peltz is the worst and so is her stupid husband, Brooklyn Beckham. It sounds like Britney Spears is ACTUALLY going to go on tour with her son, Jayden. Bret Michaels and his bandana are trying to screw over the rest of Poison. Phil Collins is almost dead. Rolling Stone Magazine dug into Mike Smith. He's a singer/songwriter that scammed the system out of $10M by buying bots and making people think a lot of people were listening to his music. Sherrone Moore was in court today to say he did nothing wrong. The FBI is investigating Jim Irsay's death. Something happened to Stuttering John's pants...Some people are saying... Tom finally called back...After a business meeting. Tom got all of last week's NFL predictions wrong. Then he gives predictions for this week's game. Maz throws some half-ass trivia questions at us. Jim's Picks: Top 10 B-Sides Merch remains available. Click here to see what we have to offer for a limited time. If you'd like to help support the show… consider subscribing to our YouTube Channel, Facebook, Instagram and Twitter (Drew Lane, Marc Fellhauer, Trudi Daniels, Jim Bentley and BranDon)
(00:00-36:29) Monitoring the forecast. A good nine incher. The Buck Swope Library. Can't go two days without bread, eggs, or milk. Gotta hoard a couple days worth of wings and fries. Maybe we'll give away a roof next. Are all of the sports ball games going to get in this weekend? Late period De Niro. Dear Diedre Gate and a Three Part Movie Boi. Not Korean enough. The 15 year anniversary of "Load It Up" Guy. Does Sharon have a $10M home in Florida?(36:37-1:06:37) Da Baby. Don't throw your shoe. Early start for the Billikens at the Bonnies today. They're turning on each other in Miami. Luke Skywalker tells the story of running into the producer from The Dan LeBatard Show. Michael Irvin flabbergasted that people thought he was on some junk. Wouldn't take pictures with Indiana fans. Jesse Spano and Jimmy Walker. Doug never saw cocaine anywhere.(1:06:47-1:27:57) Blues analyst, Joey Vitale joins the show. Ever had a game canceled due to inclement weather? A guy with balloons outside of his window. Opportunity in Dallas to get the wheels in motion a bit. Something about Jimmy Johnson and 2x4s. Does the balloon guy make gerbils?See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.
i6 Group is connecting the fragmented aviation fuel ecosystem-airlines, fuel suppliers, and service providers-through a real-time digital platform that eliminates paper-based processes at over 260 airports worldwide. After launching with British Airways at Heathrow in 2015 and recently closing their Series B with German PE firm Itrium, i6 is proving that even heavily regulated, risk-averse industries can achieve step-function operational improvements through software. In this episode of BUILDERS, Alex Mattos, CEO and Managing Director of i6 Group, breaks down how they navigated decade-long enterprise sales cycles, leveraged strategic customers as Series A investors, and are now building toward profitability to maximize exit optionality. Topics Discussed: The surprising analog nature of aviation fuel operations despite advanced aircraft technology i6's pivot from defense fuel system testing to commercial aviation digitization The multi-party fuel ecosystem: airlines, suppliers, service providers, and logistics chains Strategic approach to landing British Airways and Virgin Atlantic as launch customers Fundamental differences between European fuel optimization vs. US supply chain management models Multi-stakeholder enterprise sales involving fuel teams, flight ops, pilot unions, and CFOs Strategic Series A with customer-investors: British Airways, JetBlue, Shell, and World Fuel Services Series B transition from strategic to PE backing focused on scaling operations and go-to-market Network effects driving compounding value as airport coverage expands Path to self-sustainability and exit strategy considerations GTM Lessons For B2B Founders: Target brand DNA, not just budget, for early enterprise customers: i6 deliberately approached Virgin Atlantic because of Richard Branson's reputation for "being entrepreneurial, taking a risk, doing something different." This wasn't naive brand worship—it was strategic targeting based on organizational risk tolerance. When selling complex infrastructure to enterprises pre-product-market fit, a prospect's innovation track record matters more than their budget size. Map your early pipeline based on cultural willingness to partner with startups, not just technical fit. Invest in non-paying reference customers as currency for tier-one deals: Virgin Atlantic became i6's first operational deployment without payment. This wasn't charity—it was strategic capital allocation. The working reference at Virgin directly unlocked British Airways: "we turned up, demonstrated what we were doing...we've done this trial with Virgin and here's the results, and it went really well." For founders selling to conservative enterprises, one live deployment at a credible brand is worth more than a dozen pitch decks. Budget 6-12 months of runway for strategic pilots that generate proof points, not revenue. Create forcing functions with specific follow-up commitments: When British Airways said "if you're still here in six months, come back," most founders would hear soft rejection. Alex heard a calendar commitment and returned "to the day" with results. This precision signaling—we take your requirements seriously enough to track them to the day—separates serious vendors from tire-kickers. When enterprises set conditional bars, treat them as binding contracts and demonstrate execution discipline through exact follow-through. Position for market disruption by maintaining warm enterprise relationships: i6 benefited when an incumbent competitor liquidated, creating urgent procurement needs at British Airways. But luck favors the prepared—they had already established credibility through their Virgin deployment. Maintain enterprise relationships even when deals seem stalled. In concentrated B2B markets, competitive exits, budget releases, and trigger events happen regularly. Your position in the consideration set when disruption hits determines whether you capture the opportunity. Engineer word-of-mouth in concentrated industries through excellence, not marketing: Four months after Heathrow deployment, Dubai airport approached i6 unsolicited: "we've heard great things." In the aviation fuel community—which Alex describes as "surprisingly small"—exceptional execution travels faster than any outbound motion. This changes GTM strategy: in concentrated industries, over-invest in customer success and operational excellence at early deployments rather than spreading thin across many accounts. Your first customers are your sales team. Segment GTM by operational model, not just geography or company size: i6 discovered European airlines optimize for fuel efficiency and real-time decisions, while US airlines (controlling their own supply networks since the late 1980s) prioritize supply chain visibility: "how much fuel did we put in the plane, how much have we had delivered, how much have we got left." These aren't feature preferences—they're fundamentally different jobs-to-be-done driven by market structure. Don't assume global enterprises have unified needs. Segment by operational model and regulatory environment, then customize messaging and roadmap accordingly. Stage investor expertise to match company evolution, not just valuation milestones: Series A brought strategic investors who were actual users (British Airways, JetBlue, Shell, World Fuel Services) for product validation and network access. Series B brought PE firm Itrium for "scaling the business...building and growing our sales and revenue teams." This wasn't opportunistic—it was deliberate staging of capital sources to match capability gaps. Don't optimize fundraising purely on valuation or dilution. Map your next 18-month bottleneck (product validation vs. operational scaling vs. market expansion) and raise from investors who've solved that specific problem. Build for profitability to control your exit timing and terms: Alex's goal is avoiding Series C entirely: "we build and establish a fully self-sustaining business...the business becomes fully sustainable in the next couple of years." This isn't conservatism—it's strategic optionality. Reaching profitability eliminates the forced march toward subsequent rounds, letting you choose between IPO or M&A based on market conditions rather than cash position. For infrastructure plays with long implementation cycles, factor sustainability into your growth model early, even if it moderates topline growth rates. // Sponsors: Front Lines — We help B2B tech companies launch, manage, and grow podcasts that drive demand, awareness, and thought leadership. www.FrontLines.io The Global Talent Co. — We help tech startups find, vet, hire, pay, and retain amazing marketing talent that costs 50-70% less than the US & Europe. www.GlobalTalent.co // Don't Miss: New Podcast Series — How I Hire Senior GTM leaders share the tactical hiring frameworks they use to build winning revenue teams. Hosted by Andy Mowat, who scaled 4 unicorns from $10M to $100M+ ARR and launched Whispered to help executives find their next role. Subscribe here: https://open.spotify.com/show/53yCHlPfLSMFimtv0riPyM
Amplio operates a two-sided marketplace that helps manufacturers monetize surplus inventory and decommissioned industrial equipment rather than writing off assets or paying for disposal. The company has won contracts with GM and SpaceX despite competing against liquidators with 30-year local relationships. In a recent episode of BUILDERS, we sat down with Trey Closson, Co-Founder and CEO of Amplio, to unpack how the company executed a complete business model pivot from supply chain risk software to marketplace, discovered that enterprise deals close faster than SMB despite conventional wisdom, and built repeatable GTM motions in a fragmented $100B+ market previously dominated by local operators. Topics Discussed: Executing Amplio's pivot from supply chain risk software to surplus inventory marketplace Moving four truckloads of inventory through a WeWork to prove the business model Closing GM and SpaceX inbound from Google Ads as the PMF validation signal Displacing 30-year incumbent relationships through corporate + local dual threading Why enterprise contracts closed faster than SMB deals in Amplio's specific context Scaling beyond founder-led sales to repeatable AE motions Operating a two-sided marketplace: supply acquisition strategy vs. demand conversion GTM Lessons For B2B Founders: Manual heroics prove economics before automation: When a customer offered Amplio $25 million in surplus inventory, Trey had no warehouse, no logistics infrastructure, and no playbook. What was supposed to be four pallets became four full truckloads delivered to their WeWork. Trey and one employee physically moved inventory boxes off pallets into their office space, then figured out how to sell it while the WeWork management threatened eviction. The core insight: "the first time solving a problem, it doesn't need to be an automated, efficient process, it just needs to be okay. A customer has a problem, we need to figure out a way to solve that problem." Only after proving they could profitably solve the problem multiple times did they invest in automation and efficiency. For founders, the implication is clear—delay infrastructure investment until you've manually proven unit economics and repeatability, even if execution requires unsustainable effort. True PMF signals come from zero-relationship wins: Trey leveraged 15 years of supply chain relationships to secure initial customers and build product infrastructure. But he identifies the precise PMF inflection point: "middle of last year, we had both GM and SpaceX respond to a Google Ad." These companies had zero connection to Trey or his co-founder, found Amplio through SEM, and chose them over traditional liquidators they'd worked with for years. This is the distinction between "my network will buy from me" and "the market will buy from us." Founders should use their Rolodex to achieve velocity and prove the concept, but recognize that true product-market fit only exists when customers with no founder relationship choose your solution over established alternatives. Enterprise velocity depends on payment direction and urgency profile: Amplio deliberately focused on enterprise after being told by multiple founders to avoid "hunting whales." They discovered enterprise closed faster than SMB for three structural reasons. First, SMBs had unrealistic recovery expectations—wanting $900K back on $1M inventory when market reality is cents on the dollar, creating unresolvable expectation gaps. Second, enterprises had the problem across 100+ facilities with no dedicated owner and urgent mandates from finance or supply chain leadership. Third, because Amplio pays customers rather than charging them, legal review velocity increased dramatically. As Trey explains: "the lawyers thankfully determine, because we're not getting paid by them, that there's low risk for them in terms of signing a contract with us." Founders should map their specific deal structure and customer urgency profile rather than defaulting to SMB-first based on generic advice. Displace entrenched relationships through dual-threading: The surplus liquidation market is hyper-fragmented with hundreds of thousands of local liquidators, many holding 30-year plant-level relationships. Amplio's breakthrough: "partnering together with that person at the corporate level we can indicate not only can we solve the problem locally, but we can also do it across the entire enterprise." They pair the local plant manager with corporate procurement or finance leadership, demonstrating local problem-solving plus enterprise-wide scalability that local liquidators cannot match. This dual-threading strategy neutralizes the incumbent's relationship advantage while showcasing the efficiency and consistency that corporate leadership values. For founders entering relationship-driven markets, identify the corporate stakeholder whose enterprise-wide objectives trump individual facility loyalty. Accelerate trust through predictable execution in low-NPS markets: Industrial liquidation is a "really low NPS industry—nobody loves working with their liquidator." In markets with poor customer satisfaction and commoditized offerings, trust accelerates when you focus on "say-do ratio"—if you commit to something, execute it. Amplio often solves adjacent problems outside their core offering and frequently removes inventory from warehouses faster than economically optimal to make customers "look like an absolute hero." This over-delivery in low-satisfaction markets creates disproportionate differentiation. The tactical implementation: understand what problems the organization is trying to solve beyond your core product, find ways to solve those problems even if not monetizable, and prioritize making your champion successful over optimizing every transaction. // Sponsors: Front Lines — We help B2B tech companies launch, manage, and grow podcasts that drive demand, awareness, and thought leadership. www.FrontLines.io The Global Talent Co. — We help tech startups find, vet, hire, pay, and retain amazing marketing talent that costs 50-70% less than the US & Europe. www.GlobalTalent.co // Don't Miss: New Podcast Series — How I Hire Senior GTM leaders share the tactical hiring frameworks they use to build winning revenue teams. Hosted by Andy Mowat, who scaled 4 unicorns from $10M to $100M+ ARR and launched Whispered to help executives find their next role. Subscribe here: https://open.spotify.com/show/53yCHlPfLSMFimtv0riPyM
Grow My Accounting Practice | Tips for Accountants & Bookkeepers to Grow Their Business
Show Summary: In this GMAP episode, Brandon Hall joins the conversation to break down what actually holds accounting firms back from meaningful scale—and why technology alone isn't the answer. Drawing from his experience as a CPA, firm founder, and real estate investor, Brandon explains why most firms don't have an operations problem—they have a sales and leadership problem. He challenges the idea that sales should be "balanced" with operations, arguing instead that healthy firms intentionally let sales outpace operations to force growth, systems, and accountability. The discussion dives into why firms stuck at the $1M mark struggle to reach $10M, highlighting the real blockers: weak accountability, the absence of a true leadership team, and outdated governance models that reward mediocrity over ownership. Brandon also addresses the role of AI, making it clear that while technology can enhance efficiency, it won't replace accountants who lead, think critically, and guide clients strategically. This episode is a must-listen for firm owners who want to scale with intention, build strong leadership structures, and move beyond survival-mode growth into long-term, sustainable success. Website:www.therealestatecpa.com LinkedIn:https://www.linkedin.com/in/brandonhallcpa/ Facebook:https://www.facebook.com/realestatecpa Twitter: @TheRECPA Corporate Partner:Kick - https://www.kick.co/ Profit First App Version 2.0 is here! More Education. More Functionality. More Profit!
Your Apparel Brand Is NOT For Everyone! Niche Down to Grow and Build Customer Loyalty In this episode of The Business of Apparel podcast, Rachel discusses why your apparel brand cannot be for everyone. Learn the critical strategy of niching down to a specific target market, which is essential for launching, growing, and scaling your business. Rachel explains that trying to create a product for everyone leads to making products for no one, highlighting the importance of focusing on one perfect target segment. She uses compelling examples, from nudist colonies to different types of runners, to illustrate how varied customer needs are. Discover how defining a clear customer avatar, like 'Kara', can guide all your business decisions, from product development to marketing, ensuring you build brand loyalty through superior fit and comfort. This approach helps attract new customer segments organically and build a profitable, fulfilling brand that stands the test of time. Sign up for the Secrets Behind Billion Dollar Apparel Brands Masterclass here: https://www.thebusinessofapparel.com/secrets Join The Board here: https://www.thebusinessofapparel.com Chapters: 00:00 Introduction: The Reality of Target Markets 00:33 Understanding Your Target Market 02:26 The Importance of Niching Down 03:03 Masterclass and Community Support 04:26 Creating Brand Loyalty Through Fit 09:21 Defining Your Target Customer 12:41 The Power of a Clear Target Customer 17:58 Conclusion Watch more of The Business of Apparel Podcast episodes: Wholesale 101: https://youtu.be/lpezH1YwCyE Use AI in Your Apparel Brand: https://youtu.be/Dn9tjPNmfaw Grow A 7-Figure Apparel Business: https://youtu.be/rpQYDyo5Rao We can't wait to hear what you think of this episode! Purchase the Business of Apparel Online Course: https://www.thebusinessofapparel.com/course ABOUT RACHEL: Rachel Erickson—Fractional COO, Apparel Industry Consultant, and founder of Unmarked Street and The Business of Apparel. With 20+ years in technical design and product development leadership, I've sat at the executive table of a $25M apparel line and helped scale it to $60M in one year. After decades working inside major fashion companies, I learned the truth behind billion-dollar brands, and it's not about chasing trends or pumping out endless products. It's about building clean processes, tightly edited assortments, and obsessively focused customer targeting. I help founders and CEOs of performance apparel brands: ✅ Build lean, profitable product lines ✅ Streamline operations for growth ✅ Replace overwhelm with executive clarity ✅ Create garments that fit bodies in motion Whether you're just hitting $1M in revenue or trying to break through the $10M ceiling, my team joins you as an embedded operations and product partner—running fittings, line plans, tech packs, and vendor communications so you can get back to leading. To connect with Rachel, you can join her LinkedIn community here: LinkedIn. To visit her website, go to: www.unmarkedstreet.com.
Supersede manufactures structural building products from recycled industrial and agricultural plastic waste, creating drop-in replacements for plywood and OSB. What makes their approach notable isn't the environmental mission - it's the deliberate market sequencing strategy that let them reach the top 10 boat builders globally within months of launch. CEO and Co-Founder Sean Petterson, whose father died on a construction job and who previously built and sold a construction safety equipment company, knew the construction market's reputation for slow adoption would kill them before they could prove their product. So instead of pitching the $12B+ annual US construction market directly, they started with marine applications where regulatory pressure, product toxicity issues, and performance failures created urgent buying windows. In this episode, Sean breaks down how they used trade show metrics to validate product-market fit, why they're absorbing shipping costs to prove regional demand before building plants, and the operational art of scaling manufacturing capacity against pipeline conversion timing. Topics Discussed: Strategic market entry: why marine and RV serve as proving grounds and revenue generators before construction How material properties (waterproof, high density, VOC-free) dictated target application selection The regulatory catalyst: California's formaldehyde ban creating electrolysis problems in boat transoms Trade show execution at IBEX Tampa: converting sustainability pavilion traffic into top 10 builder partnerships Multi-plant expansion strategy: Phoenix for marine, Indiana for RV proximity to Elkhart manufacturing hub The timing challenge: balancing capex on new production lines against uncertain customer adoption curves Using shipping cost absorption as market validation before committing to regional manufacturing Product thickness decisions and the constraint of running 24/7 production on single SKUs Long-term infrastructure goal: lights-out factories in every state to hit 10% US market share GTM Lessons For B2B Founders: Map product attributes to urgent pain points, not general market needs: Sean's framework was ruthlessly specific—Supersede's material is waterproof, twice as dense as wood, VOC-free, and has superior fastener retention. Rather than positioning these as generic benefits, they mapped each attribute to acute pain: marine grade plywood costs 3-4x more, leaches formaldehyde and CCAs into water, and California's new regulations were causing electrolysis that corrodes aluminum transoms. This isn't marketing positioning—it's matching physics to procurement urgency. Founders should inventory their product's fundamental characteristics and find markets where each one solves an active crisis. Use expensive distribution as a validation tool before infrastructure investment: Supersede services Florida boat builders from their Phoenix plant despite shipping costs destroying margins. This is intentional—they're paying for market intelligence. Only after customers move from single units to full product lines do they commit manufacturing capex to that region. Sean's calculus: "As long as we have enough comfort in the unit economics to manage shipping costs, we can explore how markets look before sinking too much in." Most founders optimize for margin too early. Supersede optimizes for learning, treating distribution costs as cheaper than building the wrong plant in the wrong location. Create credibility through extreme durability testing, then cascade down: Sean describes pontoon boats with twin 300hp motors hitting 60mph over waves as their "value proposition crucible." This isn't about marine market success—it's about creating an unarguable proof point for every downstream market. When they enter construction, they won't debate whether their product can handle a roof load; they'll show years of data from conditions that make construction look gentle. The insight: win in the most punishing environment first, then every easier application becomes a layup. Most founders do the opposite—start easy, then struggle with credibility when moving upmarket. Sequence markets by sales motion similarity, not revenue size: The marine-to-RV-to-construction path isn't about market size—it's about operational leverage. Sean notes RV has "the same exact process, except they move a little quicker" as marine. Both are concentrated geographies (marine in Florida, RV in Elkhart), both have OEM buyers making high-volume decisions, both value durability and water resistance. This lets them reuse sales playbooks while building revenue. Construction, despite being 10x larger, requires completely different distribution (retail + wholesale), longer approval cycles (two years for major projects), and more diverse buyer personas (contractors, architects, developers, retailers). The sequencing strategy funds the capability build they'll need for construction without the distraction of learning three different GTM motions simultaneously. Treat trade shows as validation metrics, not lead generation: Supersede tracked specific conference-provided data at IBEX: highest searched booth, highest saved, most traffic despite being in the "sustainability pavilion" that attendees typically skip. They didn't just collect business cards—they validated that their value proposition resonated at scale before committing to a multi-plant buildout. Sean converted this signal into partnerships with all top 10 builders by volume within the show cycle. The lesson: use trade shows as market research tools with quantifiable success metrics, not as top-of-funnel activities. If you can't win a trade show in your target segment, you're not ready to scale. Balance production constraints against customer optionality to force prioritization: Supersede faces a counterintuitive challenge—they have demand for multiple product thicknesses but can only run 24/7 production on one thickness per line to maintain efficiency. This forces brutal customer prioritization decisions. As Sean puts it: "Which customer we like better." Rather than viewing this as a problem, recognize it as a focusing mechanism. Resource constraints force you to choose customers who value your core offering most rather than customizing yourself into complexity. Most founders try to serve everyone before proving they can serve anyone exceptionally. // Sponsors: Front Lines — We help B2B tech companies launch, manage, and grow podcasts that drive demand, awareness, and thought leadership. www.FrontLines.io The Global Talent Co. — We help tech startups find, vet, hire, pay, and retain amazing marketing talent that costs 50-70% less than the US & Europe. www.GlobalTalent.co // Don't Miss: New Podcast Series — How I Hire Senior GTM leaders share the tactical hiring frameworks they use to build winning revenue teams. Hosted by Andy Mowat, who scaled 4 unicorns from $10M to $100M+ ARR and launched Whispered to help executives find their next role. Subscribe here: https://open.spotify.com/show/53yCHlPfLSMFimtv0riPyM
SaaS Revolution Show with Alex Theuma and Andrew Zhyvolovych, CEO and Founder of Precoro. Together, they unpack a 10-year journey of building a B2B SaaS business to nearly $10M in ARR. Andrew shares how his early career in car sales, finance, and Groupon shaped his mindset as a founder, and how those lessons helped him build Precoro through disciplined execution, customer-funded growth, and a strong “sports team” culture. You'll learn: - How Precoro grew from idea to nearly $10M ARR - Why revenue is the best form of market validation - How to build and motivate a high-performance team - What AI really means for B2B SaaS today - Why cold calling is making a comeback - How Andrew plans to scale to $100M ARR This episode is packed with practical insights for SaaS founders, operators, and anyone building a serious B2B business. Check out the other ways SaaStock is helping SaaS founders move their business forward:
Ready to change how a towing company grows, leads, and earns trust? We sit down with Jeff Bauer, president of Cardinal Legacy Group, to unpack how a small A-to-B operation modeled itself after local giants, then earned the chance to carry those legacies forward through disciplined acquisitions in St. Louis, Kansas City, and Naples. The story isn't just expansion—it's the playbook behind it: align people to strengths, train for leadership at every level, and protect an industry's reputation with daily, repeatable standards.Jeff takes us inside the system that powered the jump from 11 trucks to a regional footprint. We dive into the leadership retreat in Cape Coral—two days focused on conflict resolution, temperaments, and practical tools influenced by John Maxwell's principles. You'll hear how a 10-minute survey saved a career by moving a struggling service writer into a high-performing accounting role, why blind spots quietly cap performance, and how to turn big-picture vision into steps your team can execute. It's real talk about culture, safety, dispatch under pressure, and the habits that make professionalism visible to customers and partners.We also connect the dots between values and growth. 2019's $10M milestone became north of $60M within five years by multiplying leaders, not just locations. That kind of scale demands clear hiring profiles, onboarding that teaches judgment, and managers who coach rather than micromanage. Whether you run light-duty recoveries, heavy-duty rotations, or a service business outside towing, you'll find a framework for building trust, reducing turnover, and delivering consistent results.If you're ready to remove blind spots, give your team a path, and lead with integrity, press play—and then share this with a manager who's ready for the next level. Explore upcoming dates at CardinalLegacyTowing.com/backslash events, check our free deep dives on the American Towing and Recovery Institute YouTube channel, and subscribe to catch new trainings and conversations as they drop. Your move: what leadership habit will you build this week?
Databox is an easy-to-use Analytics Platform for growing businesses. We make it easy to centralize and view your entire company's marketing, sales, revenue, and product data in one place, so you always know how you're performing. Learn More About DataboxSubscribe to our newsletter for episode summaries, benchmark data, and moreRodrigo Fernandez has helped 400+ SaaS companies drive over $1B in self-serve revenue and he's seen one problem kill growth over and over again: no one truly owns activation.In this episode, Rodrigo breaks down:Why “activation” is almost always misdefined (and who should actually define it)How teams confuse activity with value — and what to track insteadThe fatal flaws in bottom-up metrics and AI gimmicksWhat a real product activation journey looks like (solar system analogy and all)Why most PLG stacks are noisy, bloated, and doomed from the startIf you're stuck at $10M and can't see a path to $20M, this might be why.
Sixteen years ago I walked away from the traditional career path. And I haven't looked back. Between selling websites in college, building SEO niches, launching service retainers, coaching, and exploring coffee shops and AI apps, I've generated somewhere between $10M and $20M without ever punching a clock. Today on the podcast, I'm pulling back the curtain on every money-making venture I've tried, the lessons I learned, and the fresh ideas I'm gearing up to launch next. Listen in and discover how I flipped websites in college for $2K–$10K apiece, why niche SEO sites once paid me $300+ per month on autopilot, the secret to pitching reoccurring service retainers that clients can't cancel, how I scaled one-on-one consulting into $120K last year, my upcoming experiments—from an underground coffee pop-up to parenting AI tools, faceless YouTube channels, and daily text-message coaching If you've ever wondered how to turn hustle into real income, or what to try next, this episode is your roadmap. Tune in now and pick the path that fits your life (and your wallet). Did you enjoy this episode? I'd love it if you'd share it on Instagram and tag me @iambrandonlucero! Thank you for supporting the show. Find me on: IG: @iambrandonlucero Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/IAmBrandonLucero Website: https://www.brandonlucero.com
Insurance claims, storm chasers, and broken incentives — welcome to the dark side of roofing.In this episode, John Wilson sits down (again) with Adam Cherup to unpack what really happens behind the scenes in roofing — from “deny, delay, defend” insurance tactics to the storm-chasing playbook that leaves homeowners stuck holding the warranty bag. They also get practical: seasonality, lead gen, cash flow, and what it actually takes to start a roofing business (especially in Florida).In this episode, we cover:The Insurance Game: “Deny, delay, defend” — and why carriers aren't your friend.Retail vs. Insurance Strategy: Why some roofers push retail first, then litigate the claim after.How to Win Insurance Work: Xactimate, codes, the paperwork game, and why payouts can double when done right.
El rumor de James Rodríguez rumbo a Austin FC sigue dando de qué hablar. Analizamos qué tan viable es su llegada bajo un contrato Max TAM según las reglas de la MLS. Luego, el fichaje de Facundo Torres toma fuerza, con reportes que lo colocan como Jugador Designado en una operación entre $9.5–10M a largo plazo, a la espera de exámenes médicos en Brasil. Además, Jon Gallagher firma una extensión hasta 2028, Jayden Nelson destaca con Canadá en medio de mayor competencia por las bandas, se filtra un nuevo uniforme de Austin FC, y Owen Wolff se somete a una cirugía exitosa.
Andrew Walworth, Carl Cannon and RCP White House correspondent Phil Wegmann discuss the latest from The World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland, including remarks by Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent, French President Emmanuel Macron, and California Governor Gavin Newsom. Also, Democrats call for the removal of President Donald Trump under the 25th amendment, citing his recent social media posts on Norway and not receiving the Nobel Peace Prize. Then, they talk about a new Justice Department investigation into ICE protests that disrupted services at a Minnesota church on Sunday, and Bruce Springsteen's on-stage call for ICE to get out of Minneapolis. Next, they discuss Elon Musk's donation of $10M in support of the campaign of Nate Morris, a businessman running for the Kentucky senate seat vacated by Mitch McConnell's retirement. And finally, according to financial disclosure statements obtained by the North American Values Institute (NAVI), the National Education Association (NEA) spent millions of dollars of union members' dues on “social justice-oriented” groups and causes in 2024. Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See https://pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.
Guest: Brynn Wilson – Sales Consultant, Hook Agency This episode breaks down what a realistic and effective roofing marketing budget looks like heading into 2026, and why many roofing companies either overspend emotionally or underspend out of fear—both of which stall growth. The episode explains why most roofing companies should expect to invest roughly 5–10% of revenue into marketing depending on market size, competition, and growth goals, and why that range feels uncomfortable in today's increasingly aggressive landscape. It explores how private equity, higher competition, AI-driven tools, and expanded channel options have permanently raised the cost of visibility, while also clarifying when it actually makes sense to not be in growth mode. The discussion walks through when traditional channels like TV, radio, and billboards begin to make sense—typically in the $5–10M range—and why those channels only work when branding is strong, memorable, and differentiated. It dives into the importance of sticky brand names, visual identity, and cutting through noise before spending on awareness channels. The episode then outlines where most roofing companies should prioritize budget first: high-intent search channels like Google Ads and Local Service Ads, local brand visibility through trucks, yard signs, jobsite branding, and community presence, and social media that features real people on camera rather than generic posts. It also explores low-cost, high-effort strategies such as Facebook group engagement, referral ecosystems, networking groups, geographic dominance (“five-mile fame”), sales enablement materials, and compounding word-of-mouth. Finally, the episode emphasizes the principle of layering instead of chopping, explaining why sustainable growth comes from stacking channels over time rather than constantly restarting marketing efforts, and why focusing on being referable, visible, and trusted in a tight local market outperforms spreading efforts thin.
Facundo Torres to Austin FC is gaining momentum, with reports pointing to a Designated Player signing in the $9.5–10M range on a multi-year deal, pending medicals in Brazil. We also break down the James Rodríguez rumor and what a potential Max TAM move would look like under MLS rules. Plus, Jon Gallagher signs an extension through 2028, Jayden Nelson impresses with Canada amid increased wing competition, a new Austin FC kit leak surfaces, Owen Wolff undergoes successful surgery, and Austin FC II announces preseason plans.
This episode was sponsored by Ruff Liners LightSpeed VT: https://www.lightspeedvt.com/ Dropping Bombs Podcast: https://www.droppingbombs.com/ In this raw Dropping Bombs episode, former Marine Corps intelligence analyst and engineer Brandon Himmel shares how losing both parents within eight weeks became the catalyst to quit his $120K job at 40 and launch Ruff Liners—turning $15K into a $10M business in under three years. Brandon exposes his Amazon strategy that prints money, the "monk mode" sacrifice that changed everything, and his preparation blueprint that landed him three competing Shark Tank offers. Hear how over-preparation, relentless focus, and betting on yourself (at any age) can rewrite your entire life. Whether you're stuck in a safe job or ready to build something massive, this episode is your wake-up call to stop waiting and start doing. Get 20% off Ruff Liners here: https://ruffliners.com/discount/BOMBS20
Where Connection Becomes Power. TEDx Keynote Speaker | Brand Architect | Culture Strategist | Media Authority Stephen Seidel doesn't just build brands—he elevates leaders. With over 25 years at the intersection of media, PR, and high-level brand strategy, Stephen works with entrepreneurs, founders, and HR leaders who are ready to lead boldly, align deeply, and scale with purpose. His philosophy is simple yet powerful: connection is the most valuable currency in business today. As the founder of the award-winning Seidel Agency, a best-selling author, podcast creator, and co-founder of the elite men's collective, Gents Journey, Stephen delivers a rare blend of strategic precision, emotional intelligence, and magnetic presence. Known for infusing humor, heart, and clarity, he equips leaders with tools that drive influence, resilience, and legacy-level impact. Your Story Is Your Strategy | How to Lead With Confidence. The Seidel Agency Luxury Strategy. Meaningful Growth. Lasting Impact. Based in Lexington, KY, The Seidel Agency is an award-winning Branding, Marketing, and Public Relations firm built for brands that refuse to blend in. We specialize in organic, scalable growth strategies that create authority, trust, and measurable results—without compromising values. Our proven framework has:
F2 is the AI platform for private markets investors, automating due diligence and portfolio monitoring workflows with agentic AI. After building ARK into a digital banking platform that scaled from tens of millions to tens of billions in loan volume, Donald Muir developed AI technology to automate debt placement on ARK's marketplace. When upmarket institutional lenders requested access to the AI for their entire deal flow—not just ARK's marketplace deals—Donald recognized the technology's standalone value. In this episode of BUILDERS, Donald shares how he's commercializing enterprise-grade AI for an industry where he personally spent years in the private equity bullpen, and how F2 is addressing the reliability and trust barriers that prevent AI adoption in high-stakes financial decision-making. Topics Discussed How F2 emerged from ARK's internal need to automate debt marketplace screening memos The technical approach to eliminating hallucination in Excel-based financial analysis Replicating private equity's "super day" interview format to prove AI capability with live deal data Sales team composition: hiring ex-finance professionals instead of traditional sales reps AI's role in evolving private equity analysts from menial tasks to system operators Product roadmap from due diligence to portfolio monitoring to deal syndication platform Maintaining operational independence while preserving strategic alignment with ARK GTM Lessons For B2B Founders Solve your own hardest problem first, then productize: Donald built F2's core technology to scale ARK's debt marketplace, focusing on the most difficult engineering challenge—reliable financial analysis of unstructured Excel data—because the marketplace required it. This resulted in technology that foundation models still haven't replicated over a year later. The aha moment came when institutional lenders wanted the AI for all their deal flow, not just marketplace transactions. Organic internal development created category-leading capabilities and validated product-market fit before commercialization. B2B founders should identify which internal operational challenges, if solved, could become standalone products serving the broader market. Design sales processes that mirror how your ICP evaluates talent: Donald replicated private equity's "super day" format where analyst candidates receive a data room, laptop without internet access, and three hours to produce an LBO model and investment thesis. F2 runs identical timed tests—customers send live deal data rooms under NDA, F2 generates investment committee memos using their templates, and presents same-day results. This proves the AI can perform at the standard funds use to evaluate human analysts they hire 18 months before start dates. B2B founders selling into industries with rigorous talent evaluation processes should reverse-engineer those frameworks into product demonstrations that speak to buyer expectations. Prioritize credibility over sales experience in technical markets: Donald's entire sales team consists of ex-finance professionals who lived in the seat—no traditional salespeople. These reps can screen-share investment memos created that morning and discuss them authentically with MDs and principals using industry-specific language. After 4.5 years running go-to-market at ARK, Donald teaches sales methodology to domain experts rather than teaching domain expertise to salespeople. For deals averaging half a billion dollars flowing through the platform, buyer credibility outweighs sales polish. B2B founders in specialized verticals should evaluate whether domain fluency or sales pedigree matters more for their specific buyer personas and deal complexity. Engineer for auditability before optimizing for speed: F2 focused on eliminating hallucination and achieving mathematical accuracy—solving what Donald calls the "reliability and trust" gap—before addressing workflow efficiency. The company name references the F2 keystroke used to audit Excel calculations at 3 AM in the PE bullpen. This positioning directly addresses the barrier preventing AI adoption for investment decisions: LLMs hallucinate, can't do math, and lack auditability. Only after proving the AI produces auditable, trustworthy output did F2 layer on speed benefits. B2B founders building for high-stakes decision environments should identify the fundamental trust barrier and make it the core technical focus before feature expansion. Leverage institutional knowledge as competitive differentiation: Beyond automating existing workflows, F2 enables firms to pipe in decades of institutional knowledge via API—instantly benchmarking new deals against thousands of historical transactions by vertical, revenue size, leverage levels, and management quality. This transforms screening memos from isolated analyses into context-rich evaluations informed by complete firm history. The AI doesn't just work faster; it has comprehensive context that individual analysts manually searching SharePoint folders could never access. B2B founders should identify where accumulated institutional data creates compounding value beyond point-in-time automation. // Sponsors: Front Lines — We help B2B tech companies launch, manage, and grow podcasts that drive demand, awareness, and thought leadership. www.FrontLines.io The Global Talent Co. — We help tech startups find, vet, hire, pay, and retain amazing marketing talent that costs 50-70% less than the US & Europe. www.GlobalTalent.co // Don't Miss: New Podcast Series — How I Hire Senior GTM leaders share the tactical hiring frameworks they use to build winning revenue teams. Hosted by Andy Mowat, who scaled 4 unicorns from $10M to $100M+ ARR and launched Whispered to help executives find their next role. Subscribe here: https://open.spotify.com/show/53yCHlPfLSMFimtv0riPyM
Parable is building an end-to-end intelligence platform that quantifies how organizations spend their collective time—the foundation for measuring real AI impact. With a thousand data connectors ingesting activity and log data across the enterprise software stack, Parable constructs proprietary knowledge graphs that size opportunities and measure outcomes in hard dollars, not adoption metrics. In this episode of BUILDERS, I sat down with Adam Schwartz, Co-Founder & CEO of Parable, to explore why 95% of CFOs see no AI ROI, how his decade running profitable businesses under resource constraints shaped his focus on inputs over outcomes, and why 2026 requires moving AI from CapEx experimentation to measured OpEx. Topics Discussed: Why the 95% CFO stat on AI ROI matters as an arbiter of truth, despite backlash Building knowledge graphs from activity data to quantify collective time allocation across hundreds of people The fundamental problem: enterprises lack quantitative frameworks for operational efficiency pre-AI Running parallel ICP experiments to achieve sales-market fit before product-market fit Why Parable has never lost a POC once leaders see quantitative baselines Market dynamics creating false signals—unprecedented curiosity without buying intent The demarcation between companies treating AI as product work versus those waiting for vendor solutions Why AI transformation demands century-old management structures to be questioned GTM Lessons For B2B Founders: Engineer disqualification in momentum markets: Market-wide AI enthusiasm creates pipeline illusion. Prospects will engage indefinitely for education without purchase intent. Adam's framework: "How do we get people to say no to us and not drag us along... They want to keep talking because they want to learn and they want to know what's going on and they are genuinely interested." In enterprise sales during category shifts, build explicit qualification gates that force prospects to reveal resource commitment or disqualify. Extended evaluation cycles feel like traction but destroy unit economics. Use go-to-market as ICP discovery mechanism: Adam intentionally pursued multiple customer segments simultaneously—different company sizes and AI maturity stages—to let data reveal fit rather than rely on hypothesis. His memo to the team: "We're going to go after these three, you know, many different sizes of companies in order for us to decide like, who we like best." The key insight: get to problem-market fit and sales-market fit validation before optimizing product-market fit. This inverts conventional wisdom but works when TAM is massive and the bottleneck is identifying who feels pain acutely enough to buy now. Qualify on organizational structure, not verbal commitment: Every enterprise claims AI is strategic. Adam's hard filter: "Who in the organization is responsible for AI transformation? And if you don't have a one person answer to that question, you're not serious." Serious buyers have a named owner reporting to C-suite with dedicated budget and team. Buying Gemini, Glean, or other point solutions isn't a seriousness KPI—it's often passive consumption of AI as a byproduct of existing software relationships. Look for companies doing five-year work-backs on industry transformation and cascading effects on their operating model. Target post-experimentation, pre-scale buyers: Adam discovered the sweet spot isn't companies beginning their AI journey—it's those who've deployed initial programs and now need to prove value. "The market of people that have started to build AI into their operating model or into their strategy in like a coherent way, there's a team, there's an owner, there's budget... those are the people that we really want to be talking to." These buyers understand the problem viscerally because they're living it. They do product work daily—talking to stakeholders, generating use cases, building briefs, triaging roadmaps. They need your solution to professionalize what they're already attempting manually. Build measurement into your category narrative: The AI tooling market has over-indexed on soft efficiency claims that won't survive renewal cycles. Adam's warning: "There is too much hand waving around soft efficiency gains... you're going to have to renew and you need NRR and I don't think it's going to be that usage of the tool internally by employees and adoption is going to be enough." The last decade over-rotated to "everything drives revenue" due to VC pressure. This decade requires precision: does your product save time, reduce headcount needs, or accelerate revenue? Quantify it. Partner with measurement platforms if needed. Adam's insight on Calendly is instructive—it clearly saves time, but most buyers can't quantify how much, which weakens renewal economics. // Sponsors: Front Lines — We help B2B tech companies launch, manage, and grow podcasts that drive demand, awareness, and thought leadership. www.FrontLines.io The Global Talent Co. — We help tech startups find, vet, hire, pay, and retain amazing marketing talent that costs 50-70% less than the US & Europe. www.GlobalTalent.co // Don't Miss: New Podcast Series — How I Hire Senior GTM leaders share the tactical hiring frameworks they use to build winning revenue teams. Hosted by Andy Mowat, who scaled 4 unicorns from $10M to $100M+ ARR and launched Whispered to help executives find their next role. Subscribe here: https://open.spotify.com/show/53yCHlPfLSMFimtv0riPyM
When sales feel random, inconsistent, or out of your control, it's not because you need a new strategy. It's because you need new standards. In this episode, I'm showing you how to stop using revenue goals as a measuring stick for your worth and start using weekly standards as your CEO leadership system, so consistent sales become something you create on purpose.Whether you sell physical products on Shopify, Etsy, Amazon, at in-person markets, through wholesale to retailers, or on your own ecommerce website, I'm breaking down the 3 standards that drive predictable sales: promotion, follow-up, and offers. I'll share the mindset and action shift that helped me grow from a $90K side hustle to a million-dollar business, and I'll tell you how to join my free Best Seller Secrets Challenge (linked in the show notes) so you can get clear on what to sell, how to promote it, and map out a simple 30-day promotional plan to help you sell more products.In This Episode, You'll Learn:00:00 Why revenue goals without weekly action steps are just wishes.05:00 How I went from a $90K side hustle to a million-dollar product business.08:00 What consistent sales actually require (and why goals don't create consistency).15:15 What a promotion standard is (email marketing, product launches, and weekly offers).19:45 Follow-up systems that uncover “hidden money” (abandoned carts, welcome sequences, post-purchase).24:00 How to market ONE product for 14 days (focus, bestsellers, and a clear offer).28:30 Standards for in-person market sellers (email list growth + 24-hour follow-up).30:00 How standards helped build a $10M women-owned business.33:00 How your business mirrors your patterns (fear of being seen, inconsistency, perfectionism).36:15 Details for the Best Seller Secrets Challenge (free training + promotional calendar).Resources + LinksJoin the 5-day challenge to identify your best sellers and create a 30-day promo plan HEREReady to stop guessing and follow a proven system? Book your strategy call.Get business tips sent right to your inbox - join the newsletter!Watch on YouTubeFollowJacqueline on IG: @theproductbosstheproductboss.com
What does it take to scale a business to a multi-million dollar enterprise and beyond, all while maintaining profitability and a thriving culture? Chandler Bolt, founder of selfpublishing.com sits down in his bustling office to reveal the crucial shifts and strategic insights that propelled his company from the initial million-dollar milestone to hitting the ambitious $10 million mark and charting a course for even greater heights. From turning business into a game complete with scoreboards and "green days" to mastering product-market fit and the art of "reverse selling" in hiring, Chandler shares the unconventional wisdom he's gained on his journey. This episode is packed with candid advice for entrepreneurs at every stage, exploring the often-overlooked distinctions between revenue and profit, the true cost of growth, and the surprising benefits of in-person collaboration in an increasingly remote world.Timestamps:00:00 Introduction07:11 The three most important metrics & activities14:26 Is the first million the hardest?21:07 Profit over revenue for scaling27:18 Three ways to grow a business32:00 Reverse selling to attract top talent37:29 Offboarding team members gracefully43:24 The power of implementing strong processes49:50 The need for scalable customer acquisition at $10M+55:23 The shift to an in-person culture01:00:30 Remote vs. in-person debateIf you enjoyed this episode, please like and subscribe, share it with your friends, and leave a review. I read every single one.Learn more about the podcast: https://nathanbarry.com/showFollow Nathan:Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/nathanbarryLinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/nathanbarryX: https://twitter.com/nathanbarryYouTube: https://www.youtube.com/@thenathanbarryshowWebsite: https://nathanbarry.comKit: https://kit.comFollow Chandler:YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/@ChandlerBoltOfficialInstagram: https://www.instagram.com/realchandlerboltTikTok: https://www.tiktok.com/@realchandlerboltLinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/chandlerboltFacebook: https://www.facebook.com/chandler.bolt1Website: https://www.selfpublishing.comBook a call with Chandler's team: http://selfpublishing.com/work-with-usFeatured in this episode:Kit: https://www.kit.comSelf Publishing: https://www.selfpublishing.com
Today, on Can't Be Contained, I'm absolutely fired up to share an unforgettable session with powerhouse leader and my soul sister, Lori Harder! If you're ready for your next level of expansion and unapologetic authenticity—this episode is for you. Lori Harder is a celebrated entrepreneur, community builder, and motivational mastermind, here to channel the reality check and soulful pep talk every ambitious woman needs. We kick things off discussing the intersection of massive growth and the inevitable challenges that come with playing bigger in business and life. Lori Harder gets real about what it means to stretch your capacity, navigate uncertainty, and surrender to faith when life is "life-ing" hard. She unpacks her personal journey—breaking down her million-dollar startup "trampoline moment" and how failure, honest connection, and the willingness to ask for help laid the foundation for her newest venture, Glossy. This session is packed with practical wisdom including: ➤ The necessity of building a powerful female network—and exactly how to do it ➤ How to reframe challenges as the weights that build your leadership "muscle" ➤ Navigating the emotional rollercoaster of entrepreneurship—yes, ugly-cry moments and all ➤ Setting your business goals in alignment with the life you actually want (spoiler: you don't need $10M if you're not called to it!) ➤ The tough love behind partnerships and manifesting divine union (with a few hilarious stories along the way!) We'll also hear the inside scoop on Lori Harder's "Life Mastermind" for women ready to break boundaries, as well as the inspiration behind her new beauty and wellness brand, Glossy—you'll want to hear how it was born out of resilience and vision. Join us, as we explore the real, raw, and wildly rewarding parts of chasing your dreams and supporting other unstoppable women along the way. Whether you're scaling your empire, pivoting after a setback, or just craving a reminder that you can hold the vision through the fire—this episode with Lori Harder is your permission slip to dream bigger and play bolder. Can't be contained, baby! Join Her Million Dollar Year Event: https://do.pausebreathwork.com/her-million-dollar-year Learn How to Grow Your Income, Impact and Freedom by Becoming a Certified Breathwork Facilitator: https://do.pausebreathwork.com/breathwork-training About Can't Be Contained Can't Be Contained' is the unscripted, unedited – fully uncontained journal entries & real-life experiences of those who follow their bliss & intuitive hits, the freedom seekers, the sacred rebels – the ones who are here to disrupt what preceded us & create what is ahead of us. Subscribe now to stay tuned for every episode! For full show notes, resources, and links: The Pause Breathwork App is the #1 app to clear stress using your breath. Download the app here: https://pause.live/Pause-Breathwork-App
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