Today Philip Kasumu had the pleasure of speaking with Raz who's vision is fueled by wanting to leave a better environment for his children and the next generation, Rich ‘Raz’ Razgaitis is tackling a problem most people don’t even know they have: toxic drinking water. As Co-Founder & CEO of FloWater , which is the world’s most advanced water refill station and member of the Inc. 500 list , Raz is combining this vision with his 20+ years of leadership & tech experience to deliver a product...
Jul 07, 2021•1 hr 49 min
Today's interview was with Amir Salihefendić the CEO and Founder of Doist and Twist. Amir has viewed life a little differently ever since his family fled war-torn Bosnia for Denmark. He began to see the world becoming borderless and that worldview has influenced his mission to shape the future of work as Founder and CEO of Doist , a fully distributed, bootstrapped company that creates productivity tools used by over 25 million people globally. Amir has always believed that the future of work is ...
Jun 30, 2021•1 hr 13 min
In this episode, Philip spoke with Girish the co-founder & CEO at Shopalyst. Prior to Shopalyst, he was a Vice President at Infosys where he was responsible for their Retail Industry Solutions Business. An author of four patents that he helped commercialize, he is passionate about how data and technology are shaping our world. Besides adoption by global customers, his work is featured in MIT Tech Review, Businessweek, and Fast Company, among others. Girish is a Mechanical Engineer from UVCE ...
Apr 28, 2021•45 min
Peter Yared is the founder and CEO of InCountry, a regulatory technology company that is providing data residency-as-a-service worldwide. Peter is also a 7x founder with more than $500M in exits, A Silicon Valley veteran, Peter founded six enterprise software companies that were acquired by Sun, Oracle, Citrix, VMware and more. Previously, Peter was the CTO/CIO of CBS Interactive, where he was responsible for bringing CBS into the cloud with the end-to-end replatform of its Comscore #7 group of ...
Apr 06, 2021•1 hr 5 min
In this episode, Philip speaks with Kal Vepuri, serial investor and founder and CEO of Hero , the IoT-connected device that automatically dispenses medication when you need it, was inspired to build his company after his mother, who's an M.D., admitted herself to the hospital for quadruple bypass surgery. The surgery was successful, but it was what came next for his mother that opened her son's eyes to the difficulties millions of Americans face every day. Dr. Vepuri, herself a nationally renown...
Jan 25, 2021•1 hr 7 min
John is the Founder, CEO, & Product Architect of Enemy Tree, a California, USA based technology startup whose products are wide-reaching experiments in hardware, software, and services that positively impact peoples lives. Previously, John spent nearly 6 years at Tesla Motors leading teams and internally innovating in areas like operations, sales, delivery, customer service, and marketing. This created an even deeper passion for startups that was already so strong it pulled JOhn to the West ...
Sep 30, 2020•1 hr 42 min
(Rerun) This week we sat down with Austen Allred of Lambda School, Fit Marketing, Grasswire, and Lendup. On this episode we discuss: - Growth marketing galore - The free upfront model - When to invest Austen Allred has a super interesting origin story, having dropped out of university himself, he went on to co-found his own school and pushing the envelope for the future of education. For those of you who are out of the loop, Austen created Lambda School, a coding school that asks for no money up...
Sep 16, 2020•48 min
(Re-run) This week on Startup Handmedowns, we sat down with Gaston Tourn, CMO of Badoo which for those of you who don’t know is a dating app that is most popular in Europe and South America. Gaston describes himself as a writer and a poet, creating the narrative of the customer and integrating their stories into the product in question. Like many of us, Gaston once had the belief that marketers go out and trick people, that it’s more of a "slimy job", which makes his journey to marketing even mo...
Sep 09, 2020•47 min
In this repeat episode, Philip speaks with Alex about how you should approach investors or attempt to raise money from the crowd? We talk to the founder of Beam and JustPark's Ex-Ceo Alex Stefani about what it took to raise the largest Crowdfunding campaign of its time and to lead JustPark to become a household name. We discuss 1. Tips and tricks to a successful crowdfunding campaign 2. How to make it easier to launch projects when starting out 3. Why focus groups are dangerous and reliable alte...
Sep 08, 2020•24 min
(Re-upload) In this week’s episode of Startup Handmedowns, we sit down with Ryan Walsh who is currently a partner at Floodgate. Ryan has had a very rich career history, from starting out as a performing DJ in San Francisco to co-founding his own startup, and working as the VP of product at Beats by Dre. His origin story is wild, as Ryan got his start as a raver in Pittsburg, taking pictures of the polished DJ’s equipment with a disposable camera to figure out how to emulate that sound. After fig...
Aug 26, 2020•1 hr 12 min
Ian the CEO of Mind Candy the creators of Moshi Monsters and more recently Moshi Sleeps. Ian's wealth of entertainment experience comes from his time at Ubisoft and Electronic Arts, which led to his role as International Managing Director at IGN where he was responsible for its global expansion and making IGN the #1 video games and entertainment media network in the world. A father of two, Ian’s inspiration for Moshi comes from his vision of helping millions of families around the world become h...
Aug 19, 2020•47 min
Morgan Housel is a partner at Collaborative VC an investment fund focused on supporting and investing in the shared future. The fund centers around two macro themes which are the growth of the creative class and the concept of collaborative consumption. Now, Morgan has a unique role at the fund because he's not actually an investing partner, he's a writer. He produces all the written content for the fund which was why I wanted to talk with him. In this episode, we talk about content marketing, w...
Aug 12, 2020•58 min
Tzahi (Zack) Weisfeld is a seasoned executive and a serial entrepreneur, with 25+ years of experience in tech consumer and enterprise markets. General manager and head of Ignite, Intel's Startup Mentorship Program. President of ASN (Accelerating Startup Nations), Zack was one of the founders of Microsoft Israel R&D site as well as a member of its management team for 8 years where he created Microsoft for startups which has gone on to be one of the most successful programmes in the world. sta...
Jul 29, 2020•59 min
In this episode Philip spoke with serial entrepreneur and investor Haymo Meran. Haymo is currently the head of product at Usersnap which provides SaaS companies with feedback collection tools so that they can become more customer-centric and truly make use of the voice of the customer to improve their service. But before this, Haymo built and sold 2 companies and that is what we spent of our time discussing. How to build meaningful products and what the production process should look like. We al...
Jul 01, 2020•52 min
Dan Bowyer co-founder and invest at Superseed VC. Dan invests in technical founders building smart B2B tech startups (SaaS/health/data), with a mission to help them to find global market fit. It's Dan's job to help them get out of startup mode using scalable, repeatable and profitable sales models. Ensuring they get the right people on the bus, create the right energy, infrastructure & activity to get to their first £1m in recurring revenue - which is definitely the most exciting and precari...
Jun 24, 2020•50 min
In this episode Philip spoke with Andrea Hippeau is a Principal on our investment team. Prior to joining Lerer Hippeau, she held management and business development roles at portfolio companies. Andrea worked in corporate development while at Advance Publications and managed client relationships for Thomson Reuters. After studying French and business management at Skidmore College, she went on to get her MBA from Columbia Business School. In this episode, Philip and Andrea talk all things ventur...
Jun 17, 2020•45 min
Melissa has been an executive at high-growth companies for over twenty years. She is now Principal of Daimler Partners, working as an advisor, facilitator, and executive coach. Her primary focus is on helping leaders define and operationalize culture. Prior to starting Daimler Partners, Melissa was an executive who experienced multiple leadership viewpoints throughout her career. She led HR for a fast-growing venture-funded startup. She created and built Learning & Organizational Development...
Jun 09, 2020•1 hr 8 min
Mick is a Brooklyn-based multi-talented creative with influential footprints internationally – from New York to LA, London to Tokyo. He is a DJ, style influencer, tech investor, inspirational speaker, music curator and brand consultant. He's also a pretty cool dad from what I hear also! In this episode, we talk about Mick's approach to becoming the go-to DJ for many celebrities and how he's the ability to network and add value afforded him many opportunities. Many of these opportunities included...
Jun 03, 2020•47 min
Peter Rojas is a founding partner at Betaworks Ventures, a seed-stage venture capital fund based in New York and San Francisco. He is also the co-founder of several startups, including Weblogs Inc. (acquired by AOL in 2005), where he created and was editor-in-chief of both Engadget and Joystiq; Gizmodo (formerly Gawker Media, now part of Univision); music discovery service RCRD LBL; and gdgt, a social commerce platform (acquired by AOL in 2013). Prior to Betaworks Ventures, he worked at AOL as V...
May 19, 2020•1 hr 2 min
Hadley has done a little bit of everything on the path to co-founding Eniac. Starting as an engineer and development team lead at Pegasystems, he later took on roles as a product manager at Microsoft and strategist at Samsung, where it became clear that big companies were not for him. In 2007 he was very fortunate to join a very talented AI team out of MIT at Vlingo where he ran a few aspects of the business across product, strategy, and marketing until it was sold to Nuance for $225M. He rolled...
May 06, 2020•54 min
For close to 20 years, George has run a national executive search firm mostly dealing with executive search and leadership at the C-Suite level such as CEO, CFO, CTO roles throughout the US, Europe, and South America. He's worked with small startups to some household named organizations. Besides managing his recruiting firm, he also works with similar executives by helping them take control of their careers and branding themselves appropriately when looking for their next move. In this episode, ...
Apr 26, 2020•1 hr 5 min
Michael Brody-Waite is an award-winning CEO, tech-startup entrepreneur, and recovering drug addict. In 2009, Brody-Waite left a Fortune 50 company to co-found and lead InQuicker, a healthcare SaaS company that allows patients to self-schedule appointments. His leadership grew the organization from two employees to 50 employees and 20,000% revenue growth in less than six years. This exceptional growth landed InQuicker a spot on the Inc. 500 list of Fastest-Growing Private Companies . In 2015, InQ...
Mar 11, 2020•1 hr 10 min
Rebroadcast: This week we sit down with Patrick, founder/CEO at HelloFresh. An all-around foodie, Patrick talks us through his road to success and the difficulties of bringing a new product to market. For those who haven’t tried it yet, HelloFresh is a meal kit service that brings portioned packages of food to your door with easy recipes to follow, and it’s actually the first meal kit service of its kind. Being the first of your kind in any sphere is tough, and Patrick really brings to light the...
Feb 25, 2020•57 min
This week in Startup Handmedowns, we chat with Abhi Lokesh, founder CEO of Fracture and down-to-earth world traveler. Fracture is a glass printing company that emerged out of Abhi’s university passion project, an e-commerce art business that donated all of its profits to charity, as well as a trip to Swaziland with his classmate, Alex. A major lesson in this week’s episode, is patience. Abhi talks about refreshing his order intake page and projecting the typical hockey stick growth curve in a na...
Feb 05, 2020•53 min
In today’s episode I had the pleasure of interviewing Rodney Appiah founder and chairman of Cornerstone partners, an angel investment group focused on investing in predominantly black founders. They not only invest in the business but they also provide debt financing to businesses already in operation and generating significant revenues. Rodney is also a Director and venture capital investor at Foresight Private Equity, a leading investment firm focusing on earlier stage UK businesses. He has wo...
Jan 29, 2020•1 hr 26 min
Jude Gomila is a serial entrepreneur and a serial angel investor. He's invested in over 180+ companies including Airtable. In this episode, Philip talks with Jude about early life and "failed" projects to moving to San Francisco and starting Heyzap with his childhood friend which they went on to sell for $45m. We also discuss getting into Y-combinator and the conversation with Paul Graham (PG) on the sidewall.
Jan 22, 2020•1 hr 30 min
Lo Toney is an investor and founding managing partner of Plexo Capital a fund that invests in women and people from minority backgrounds. Plexo Capital, the fund founded by the former GV partner recently closed its first fund of $42.5 million. The plan is to invest in both startups and emerging VC funds, with 60% of the capital going toward venture capital funds as a limited partner, and 40% going directly to startups. Lo has had an incredible career to date and on this episode, we discuss the w...
Jan 15, 2020•1 hr 6 min
Anthony Frasier is a digital strategist, tech entrepreneur, author, and public speaker. A Newark, NJ native, Anthony has a long history of mentoring, advising startups & community infrastructures, to solve real problems and build solutions. Before joining Newark Venture Partners as their entrepreneur in residence, Anthony was one of the founders behind The Phat Startup. With well over a decade of experience in tech, media, speaking and coaching aspiring entrepreneurs and students from unders...
Dec 18, 2019•50 min
Today I had the pleasure of interviewing Andrew MacGill who’s an entrepreneur and product director. Andrews has been through 2 exits where the ideas have been in their early stages of development so he knows a thing or two about building meaningful products. Andrew is currently the VP of product at Pager, a New York-based startup that’s transforming the way consumers interact with their healthcare. Pager has raised over $34m to date. They allow you to interact with your doctor or carer through y...
Dec 11, 2019•1 hr 2 min
Ramon is a serial entrepreneur and in my opinion a serial hustler. He’s a different kind of entrepreneur, not a tech startup tech-savvy kind of guy but more of a methodical "how do I drive traffic and monetize" it kind of guy. In this episode we discuss how to create engaging content and drive huge amounts of traffic to your site and also, how Ramon started a soap opera blog which he went on to sell for $9m without ever watching a single soap opera show. Learn how to pick a topic, start testing ...
Dec 04, 2019•1 hr 5 min
