Episodes
The Yaro Podcast⁠ Anthony Zhang is the co-founder of Vinovest.co, a platform and marketplace for investing in wine and whiskey as an asset class. Anthony explains in this podcast how to add wine and whiskey to your portfolio and takes us through the origin story of his startup. This is an interesting business model, with one part very much internet driven matching buyers and sellers online, but also a very offline business to source and store the product safely (sometimes even located in...
Published 08/07/23
Published 08/07/23
The Yaro Podcast What is the difference between 'intent' based marketing and 'discovery' based marketing when growing your online business? Listen to this solo episode as I break down these two very important online marketing concepts. Enjoy the episode. Yaro YARO'S NEWSLETTER Join over 20,000 subscribers to the multiple streams of income newsletter: ✉️ ⁠https://yaro.blog/newsletter/⁠ YARO'S BLOG 💻 ⁠https://yaro.blog⁠ YARO ON SOCIAL 👔 LinkedIn: ⁠https://linkedin.com/in/yarostarak/⁠ 🐤...
Published 08/02/23
The Yaro Podcast Brian Nichols in 2014 had an offer to work at Facebook, Twitter or Lyft. He chose Lyft. This was just one of the early startups he worked out, many of which turned into great experiences, but no big financial gains. This lead Brian to realize he'd rather have a small piece of lots of startups rather than have all his eggs in one basket as an early employee at one. Hence he became an investor. It wasn't easy though, no venture fund wanted him, and he wasn't rich so...
Published 07/19/23
https://www.yaro.blog In this episode I break down the 5 content marketing tactics that ultimately led to my agency becoming a 7-figure business. You can find the companion blog post that goes with this episode here: https://yaro.blog/33946/how-we-used-content-to-grow-agency-into-a-7-figure-business/ Podcast guesting agency mentioned: https://podcastconnection.org/ --- Send in a voice message: https://podcasters.spotify.com/pod/show/yaro/message
Published 05/03/23
https://www.yaro.blog I'm concluding Vested Capital as a podcast series and reverting this show back to its previous name, The Yaro Podcast. --- Send in a voice message: https://podcasters.spotify.com/pod/show/yaro/message
Published 05/03/23
Matheus Riolfi Co-founder & CEO of Tint.ai, an AI powered insurance solution for companies to embed insurance as part of their product offering. A good example is Turo, a peer-to-peer car sharing service, which requires custom insurance for each part of the world it enters. Matheus previously worked as the head of international expansion at Turo, which gave him an insight (and the eventual idea for Tint) because he spent so much time figuring out the insurance challenge. In this...
Published 12/12/22
Krish Ramineni is the co-founder & CEO of Fireflies.ai, a meeting assistant and voice intelligence platform.  In this interview Krish shares the story behind his two previous startup ideas -- a drone delivery company and an AI chatbot, which he built along with his co-founder. These companies are directly connected to what Fireflies is today, but not always in obvious ways. Krish also shares with us how Fireflies has grown, how they built the early version of the tool (the MVP) and why...
Published 11/11/22
Yoav Vilner is the co-founder and CEO of Walnut.io, a SAAS platform creating an entire new category of no-code, cloud-based, product demonstration technology.   Walnut gives sales and marketing teams the ability to create stable interactive product demos and collect insights on their usage. They are growing very fast, as you will hear in this interview with Yoav, as he explains how the idea for Walnut came to be and how they first launched the company. VESTED CAPITAL...
Published 10/28/22
Yahya Mokhtarzada, along with two of his brothers, founded Truebill, which was acquired by Rocket Companies for $1.275 billion. In this interview you will hear the origin story for the Truebill app, how they tested the MVP idea of cancelling credit card subscriptions, how they acquired their first 30,000 users, switched on premium services, scaled to $100,000,000 ARR and then sold for $1.275 billion dollars. VESTED CAPITAL PODCAST 🎙️https://vestedcapitalpodcast.com YARO'S NEWSLETTER Join...
Published 10/15/22
Michelle Tascoe is based in LA and has one of the longest running private one-on-one financial advice coaching practices. She's now earning over half a million a year, but it wasn't always like this. It's been a long and steady journey to become a seven figure coach. You will hear that story in today's podcast interview. VESTED CAPITAL PODCAST 🎙️https://vestedcapitalpodcast.com YARO'S NEWSLETTER Join over 20,000 subscribers to the multiple streams of income newsletter: ✉️...
Published 08/01/22
This is Vested Capital episode 32, featuring Thomas Smale, the founder of FE International, a leading M&A firm.   I first interviewed Thomas 9 years ago (https://yaro.blog/11850/thomas-smale/).  At the time his company had helped to facilitate over $5 Million in deals. Now that number is over a billion dollars in business acquisitions.   I asked Thomas what led to the growth and how his team has expanded. We also talked about what business models leads to the biggest exit prices, what...
Published 04/06/22
To kick off 2022 I'm reviewing how I am investing my capital, including what went well and what did not go so well with my investments and business in the previous year, and what I am focusing on for this new year. If you have any guest suggestions for the show, email me - [email protected]
Published 01/28/22
Mikkel Thorup hosts The Expat Money Show podcast (I was on episode 155) and has spent over 21 years in continual travel around the world, visiting more than 100 countries including Colombia, North Korea, Zimbabwe, and Iran.  Mikkel runs a consultancy to help high net worth individuals move overseas, providing guidance on tax structure, visas, residencies, passports, raising your family (education, lifestyle), company structure and banking. I asked Mikkel on to Vested Capital, first to learn...
Published 12/01/21
Arthur Menard is the CEO and co-founder of Lambs, a clothing brand that blocks 99% of EMFs (cellphone, 4G, 5G, Wifi, Bluetooth radiation) as well as 10x the amount of UVs compared to traditional clothing. His company is doing 8-figures in sales, having got their start selling men's underwear online -- which I actually purchased several years ago. Arthur has an interesting backstory, having first got started as an entrepreneur selling online training, then later co-founding a local marketing...
Published 11/18/21
David Ciccarelli is the CEO and founder of Voices.com. Based in London, Canada, Voices.com provides an online marketplace, facilitating transactions between business clients and over two million voice over professionals. In this interview David shares the origin story of Voices, how they first launched their platform, secured a great domain name, attracted new customers and new voice talent to make sure they had both supply and demand and then grew the company to the point where it is today,...
Published 11/10/21
Teddy Kyres is the founder of Groupe Orbis, a Montreal based mortgage brokerage firm, with over 60 brokers following the system Teddy created for succeeding as a mortgage broker. Teddy is also my mortgage broker and helped me secure finance for investing in Montreal when I didn't have much of a tax history in Canada after moving here from Australia. The banks wouldn't loan to me, so Teddy helped me find alternative financing until I built up more history as a Canadian tax payer. During this...
Published 11/03/21
Joshua Scigala knows a lot about crypto (thus this is a LONG episode!). He was there when Satoshi first released Bitcoin and he was unfortunately there as well when the first major exchange, Mt. Gox, collapsed.   Today Joshua is leading a new Defi project called TheStandard, a decentralized lending platform run by a DAO that focuses on hard and soft assets as collateral. The protocol will have the ability for users to issue multiple fiat pegged algorithmic stablecoins starting with "Standard...
Published 10/25/21
Collis Ta'eed with his wife Cyan started out with an idea -- they wanted to create a marketplace where digital media producers could sell their creations to customers. They began with the then popular Flash file format and later expanded into things like WordPress themes, music, video and code. Each type of media had a marketplace, including Themeforest for Wordpress and Audiojungle for music files. As is typical for the marketplace model, they took a small fee from each transaction. All...
Published 10/18/21
Gabriele Musella is a well-educated, well-traveled, co-founder of Coinrule.com, a company where you can build or copy sets of rules for automatically trading cryptocurrencies. The company recently raised $3M+ from MKB Bank, Urban Innovation Fund, Zilliqa and many Business Angels (Kayak Co-founder, EightSleep Founder). Before that they also successfully ran a crowdfunding campaign on Seedrs, providing funds which helped them to navigate the pandemic when capital briefly dried up. During this...
Published 10/14/21
Kison Patel is the founder of DealRoom.net, a SAAS platform for managing the lifecycle of mergers and acquisitions. Kison spent ten years of his life running his own boutique M&A advisory firm, participting in some way with 363 asset sales. During this career, Kison noted how many processes of deals were handled with very 'old' technology, for example using spreadsheets for tracking due dilligence.  This lead to the idea for DealRoom, which at first as an MVP was an attempt to better...
Published 10/12/21
Russ Heddleston is the co-founder and former CEO of DocSend, which was acquired by Dropbox for $165 Million in early 2021. Russ currently works at Dropbox continuing the vision he had for DocSend. During this interview we hear how Russ went from studying at Stanford, to working at a startup called Greystripe, then as an intern at Dropbox, and then launching his own startup Pursuit. Pursuit was later acquihired by Facebook, where Russ continued to work for two years. He shares some interesting...
Published 10/07/21
Sara Mauskopf is the co-founder and CEO of Winnie.com, a marketplace platform that connects parents looking for childcare and preschool providers with over 250,000 centres around the USA. To date, Sara and her team have raised $15.5 Million in venture funding over three rounds, with the most recent $9 million series being led by Rethink Impact.  In this interview we first dive back into Sara's history as a math major, then moving over to computer science, which led her to a job at Google...
Published 10/05/21
I'm resurfacing this interview from 2016 because recently (2021) the team at MacGyver HQ has been sharing this interview on their social media, so I thought it would be a great time to share it with those new to Vested Capital. It was quite a thrill to see the actual MacGyver twitter account tweet out this podcast, especially as I was a kid who grew up watching the show on TV in Australia. Here's how it all came to happen... ****** When I received an email offering a chance to interview Lee...
Published 09/29/21
It's hard to summarize all the success of Wil Schroter. He's founded so many companies. Today he's founder of Startups.com, a business education site and suite of tools and resources for entrepreneurs, some of which were previous startups by Wil (Fundable, Bizplan) and some were acquired (Zirtual, Clarity). Wil got his start early online, initially exploring bulletin boards with a commodore computer. He then launched a web design agency, Blue Diesel, in 1994, again very early to a new...
Published 09/17/21