About this episode My guest this week is David Sellinger, founder of Deep Sentinel. David’s startup resume is remarkable and includes such highlights as: Being an early employee at Amazon working directly under Jeff Bezos and co-inventing Amazon Advertising which now generates BILLIONS of dollars in revenue Co-founding the real estate brokerage RedFin (now a multi-billion company) Revolutionizing the shopping experiences for major brands like Macy’s and Office Depot with his...

About this episode My guest this week is Clay Alexander, the inventor and founder of Ember. Ember is a temperature control brand that seeks to disrupt how the world eats, drinks and lives. Their very first product was a Travel Mug and was launched in 100 Starbucks locations. Since their launch they have expanded to other product lines. Clay has an incredible founder story that I hope more people discover because I think it brings encouragement and inspiration to so many. Let me be clear,...

About this episode My guest this week is Michael Werner, founder and CEO of HomeX. Until 2003, Michael served as President and Vice Chariman for his family's 100 year old business, Werner Ladders. The Werner Company continues on today and is now a $1 billion dollar global brand…but Michael has moved on and launched a technology startup within a $500 billion market. HomeX is the first of its kind home services platform for both homeowners and service providers that is radically improving...

About this episode Whenever I’m asked which episode of The Startup Story has been my favorite, I truly can’t give an answer. I enjoy every single episode because of how much value every entrepreneur brings to the table and how much I learn from them. However, if I were to be asked which episode stands out the most in my mind, it would have to be one of my earliest episodes: my interview with Brandon “Monk” Muñoz from Monkwood Studios. Out of all of the interviews I’ve held, I’ve only...

About this episode This week we are featuring Randi Zuckerberg, founder of Zuckerberg Media. If her last name sounds familiar, it should. It’s also the last name of her little brother who had a startup about a book of faces or Facebook or something like that. Randi Zuckerberg is an entrepreneur, investor, best selling author, and Emmy-nominated tech media personality. She is the founder and CEO of Zuckerberg Media, with the mission of supporting current and future entrepreneurs through...

About this episode As a pioneer, there is not a single roadmap to work from. There’s no way to model your success off of another because there is no other--you’re it. You’re the front runner. There must be an internal competition established within your brain to be constantly improving. Richard Garriot has experienced all of this throughout his time in the gaming sector. Richard is an investor and private astronaut as well as a pioneer and legend. What drew me to him was his role within...

About this episode My guest this week is Matt Meeker, Co-founder of Bark, and while the Bark’s name itself might not cause your ears to perk up in excitement for what's to come in this episode. Bark’s various product lines are household names. Their flagship product being BarkBox, with over 1.7 million active BarkBox subscribers, BarkBox is the Premier subscription dog toy and treat service. In addition to BarkBox, Bark has various product lines that can be found in over 23,000 retail...

About this episode My guest this week is Ryan Serhant, star of Bravo’s hit series Million Dollar Listing New York, Best Selling Author, and founder of Serhant. How do the crossroads of reality television and entrepreneurship ever cross? Well, this episode will answer that question very clearly for you. My guest has been the star of Bravo’s hit show, Million Dollar Listing New York for the last 10 seasons as well as launching one of the fastest growing Real Estate brands in the nation....

About this episode My guest this week is Sean Cannell, founder of Think Media. His episode was originally released on February 11th of last year. Just 45 days before everything started to unravel from COVID. Sean is an incredible human being and entrepreneur as well as a best selling author, YouTuber, speaker, and absolute digital marketing mogul that has centered his mission on helping entrepreneurs and creatives build their influence with online video. Sean’s various YouTube channels...

About this episode My guest this week is none other than Evan Goldberg, Founder & EVP of Oracle NetSuite. The startup story of NetSuite is amazing because Evan and Larry Ellison spent 5 minutes on the phone discussing the idea of selling software from the cloud (which wasn’t called the cloud back in 1999) and then one year later they were selling to customers. NetSuite is the market leader in small business cloud-based ERP solutions and have over 27,000 customers across the globe....

About this episode About six weeks ago one of our past guest experienced a life-changing event with regards to his startup. On September 13, 2021 it was confirmed that Mailchimp had been acquired by Intuit for $12 billion in cash and stock. Because of the recent headlines that have hit the mainstream tech sites, regarding this acquisition, I thought it would be nice to counter the false “overnight success” narratives with an honest discussion about how Ben Chestnut, co-founder of...

About this episode In the past month or so, I’ve had a few newer listeners reach out to me asking me when I would share a bit more about my story and how I got to the point of bringing The Startup Story to market. Well, as I responded to each of those listeners, I realized that it has been almost two years since my startup story episode has been released. What I also realized is that, when we did release that episode we were sitting at around 30,000 listeners…well we are now close to 100,000...

About this episode My guest this week is Neil Shah, a co-founder of ThinkNimble. Neil is a serial entrepreneur and technology expert and ThinkNimble is a software development agency that helps startups and socially-focused companies grow and scale. As the show has expanded its reach, the demographic that we reach has shifted some as well. Within the last few months I have had some very early-stage founders reach out to me with some very specific questions, and many of them have been...

About this episode My guest this week is Eli Harris, is the co-founder of R-Zero. R-Zero is disrupting an archaic industry (disinfection), and in doing so - creating a category around health security + biosafety technology. Eli and his co-founders recognized that the COVID pandemic was going to present a massive shift in health security, much like 9/11 did for physical security. The opportunity for Eli and the R-Zero team is enormous and we discuss this societal shift in great detail...

About this episode My guest this week is Joshua Wöhle, CEO & co-founder of Mindstone. Mindstone is an online platform that creates the best learning pathways from the best content available online. Imagine aggregating and curating all the best articles, podcasts, videos, and anything else, to help you learn faster, remember more, and develop your skills and expertise on that given topic of interest. In a world with unlimited access to information and resources, Joshua and the Mindstone...

About this episode My guest this week is Betsy Fore, co-founder of Tiny Organics. For those that might not be aware of Tiny Organics, they are an early childhood nutrition company that focuses on introducing our little ones to their first 100 flavors to kickstart a lifelong health oriented pallete. In fact, Betsy says that Tiny Organics mission is to help shift the pallete or our children from being sweet oriented to savory oriented. As a dad, what I heard when she described her startup this...

About this episode My guest this week is Jeff Abrams, founder and Creative Director of Rails. For those that might not be aware of what Rails is what product they provide, allow me to enlighten you. Rails is a global lifestyle clothing brand that has an incredibly robust women’s and men’s collection. The brand started in 2008 with just a $5,000 investment and Jeff has since grown Rails into a brand that is sold in over 40 countries through 1,500 retail partners. Since 2008, Rails has...

About this episode My guest this week is Danny Wajcman, co-founder of Lucky Orange. For those that might not be aware of Lucky Orange, this episode will be an absolute treat for you because Lucky Orange is one of the most dynamic website analytic tools available to help you truly optimize the customer journey to increase your conversion. Most people think of Google Analytics when it comes to website analytics, but Lucky Orange fills some in the gaps that Google Analytics doesn’t address....

About this episode My guest this week is Mia Plecic, founder of the Slick Hair Company and branding genius who brought the Slick Stick to market in the midst of a global pandemic. Mia is no stranger to the show and was actually our featured founder for episode 19, so she has been part of The Startup Story family from very early on! I highly encourage you to listen to her initial episode because she gets incredible raw with us as it relates to how she processed various startup failures that...

About this episode This week's episode features an interview with Vlad Magdalin, co-founder of Webflow. For those that may not be aware, Webflow (at its core) is a website building platform, but yet it is so much more. Webflow is a platform that has enabled thousands of designers to act as an design and development agency because Webflow allows anyone to design masterfully, and develop online engagements without any need to know how to code. In fact, just a few weeks ago we had Duncan Hamra,...

About this episode My guest this week is Chris Ronzio, founder and CEO of Trainual. If you're unfamiliar with Trainual their product is the absolute easiest way to train and grow your team. In order to grow your business you have to establish processes, and those processes need to be documented. Well, that is if you want consistent results. Small and growing businesses across the world are using Trainual to build playbooks, train teams and scale their business. By using Trainual you can...

About this episode My guest this week is Melanie Travis founder and CEO of Andie. Andie is a brand created for every woman, every activity and every body with well-fitting swimwear and intimate in sizes 0 to 26. It’s designed for the modern woman, for all of life's occasions. I first discovered this when looking for an appropriate swimsuit for my teenage daughter. Every single suit these days is super cheeky and yes and Andie does have those suits but they truly do have a swimsuit for...

About this episode My guest this week is Robert Brunner, founder of Ammunition and Chief Designer of Beats by Dre. Robert has designed some of the most iconic products that you and I have integrated into our everyday lives. He built Apple’s very first Internal Design Studio. He designed the Ember mug which we featured on The Startup Story last month. He completely redesigned how we view retail point of sale systems when he designed the Square card reader, as well as, the Square POS unit....

About this episode My guest this week is Duncan Hamra, founder of Memberstack. For those who might not be aware, Memberstack is a credentialing or user account solution, for those that would much rather leverage a polished solution and then try and code their own user-access flow. If you have content that you want to put behind a user account, Memberstack can solve that for you. Or if you are building a mobile app and you want to allow user-centric customization, Memberstack can be a key...