Charlie Dolan is the founder of Sequoia Waste Solutions, a technology company aimed at modernizing waste management. When Charlie first looked at the waste management industry, he saw business still being run on paper with enormous inefficiencies needing to be addressed. So, he started building. Today, the firm employs more than a dozen people and offers a suite of software and hardware solutions that drastically reduce costs associated with billing for and hauling away garbage. In this conversa...
Jun 08, 2020•38 min
John Feghali’s technology startup blends augmented reality, digital media, and animation to enable a new style of storytelling. Most animated videos take thousands of hours of work and come with hefty price tags. For example, Frozen 2 cost $150 million and Toy Story 4 cost $200 million. John’s company, Toaster Pets Cartoons, allows children and adults to make their own animated cartoons by recording cardboard cutouts and using artificial intelligence to translate the live action into a digital c...
Jun 01, 2020•48 min
Luke Glass is building a digital marketplace for land rights in the US. That means that any property owner can list their property’s rights to timber, solar, wind, or oil & gas for sale. Luke’s company, RealX is aiming to unleash the trends of digitization, globalization, and virtualization on a marketplace that still operates on postcards and paper contracts. As vice president and general manager of ListHub, which was purchased by Move in 2010, Luke Glass grew the platform into the nation’s...
May 25, 2020•39 min
Luke Skurman is the CEO and Founder of Niche.com. Niche is an informative website that provides insight and analysis from experts and neighbors to help people choose colleges, K-12 schools, and places to live. Niche, formerly College Prowler, was founded in 2002 and recently raised $35 Million to expand its client base and grow its team. This Series C funding was led by the New York-based Radian Capital and San Fransisco-based Salesforce Ventures. Luke has been at the helm of this college resour...
May 18, 2020•40 min
Keith Hamon has over 30 years of operational restaurant experience, with 10 years in active financial management and 7 years of direct experience owning, operating, growing, and stewarding a small group of restaurants. His firm, Alchemy Financial, serves as a bookkeeper, financial planner, and CFO for clients in the hospitality space. Keith is committed to helping small restaurants and bars survive and thrive using better financial planning and thinking strategically about pricing. In this episo...
May 11, 2020•1 hr 2 min
Ben Hunt is the creator of Epsilon Theory and co-founder of Second Foundation Partners. Epsilon Theory is a newsletter and website that studies markets using game theory and history. It is read by over 100,000 professional investors and allocators across 180 countries. Ben is the founder of two technology companies, a past professor of political science, and a successful investor. He’s worked in venture capital and subsequently on two long/short equity hedge funds. He evolved to blend his backgr...
May 04, 2020•42 min
Flori Marquez is the cofounder of BlockFi, a fintech firm that provides wealth management products to investors in cryptocurrency. BlockFi currently offers interest-bearing crypto accounts, crypto trading, and crypto-backed loans. In the last year, BlockFi has raised an $18.3 million Series A and a $30 million Series B from investors like Morgan Creek Digital, Fidelity, the Winklevoss twins, and Valar Ventures. Flori has spent her career managing alternative lending products, including a $125MM ...
Apr 27, 2020•36 min
The Coronavirus (rightfully) gets most of the headlines. However, we are also living through an oil price war between Saudi Arabia and Russia that has worldwide ramifications. Matt Wieszczyk is the Managing Member of Par City Holdings, a land services company that specializes in the acquisition of oil and gas mineral and royalty rights. At PCH, he has placed $15mm for various investors in SW Appalachia. Prior to Par City, Matt was Acquisitions Manager & General Counsel for San Jacinto Minera...
Apr 20, 2020•36 min
LBRY is a place where they can find great videos, music, ebooks, and more. How? LBRY started as a new protocol that allows anyone to build apps that interact with digital content on the LBRY network. Apps built using the protocol allow creators to upload their work to the LBRY network of hosts (like BitTorrent), to set a price per stream or download (like iTunes) or give it away for free (like YouTube without ads). The work you publish could be videos, audio files, documents, or any other type o...
Apr 13, 2020•43 min
Two years ago, Ian Rosenberger and his company took a leap forward by launching a backpack. It was made from Thread International’s first product, fabric made from plastic waste that had been recycled. The backpack raised $571,000 on Kickstarter and represented an important new chapter for the business. At the beginning of 2020, they launched two specific brands; Day Owl (for consumers) and First Mile (for brands like Reebok, Puma, and Converse to buy the fabric). In this conversation, Ian and A...
Apr 06, 2020•41 min
Anthony Pompliano is a co-founder & Partner at Morgan Creek Digital. He leads investments in early-stage startups and cryptocurrency. He was formerly a product manager at Facebook. He writes a daily letter analyzing crypto news for institutional investors and a prolific podcast with other top thinkers in finance and crypto. In this conversation, Pomp and Aaron discuss the Bitcoin halving, economic stimulus, and kindness. Pittsburgh’s best conference to Expand your Mind & Fill your Heart ...
Mar 30, 2020•48 min
Kyshira Moffett is a digital brand strategist, entrepreneur, and author. She’s built a business as a coach helping other businesses and entrepreneurs market themselves effectively. Kyshira also launched Life of a Bombshell Cosmetics in 2017, offering premium makeup products at an affordable price to businesswomen. Her experiences in marketing a wide variety of businesses, running a conference (Hustle HER Way Summit), and earning an MBA have given her a wealth of knowledge to call upon. In this c...
Mar 23, 2020•46 min
Tom Lauwers is on a mission to get robots into classrooms. As the founder and chief roboticist at BirdBrain Technologies, he designs educational tools that show students the basics of coding, engineering, and collaboration. Tom received a Ph.D in robotics in 2010 from Carnegie Mellon, where he initially designed the Finch robot and Hummingbird robotics kit. The Finch is a small robot designed to inspire students learning computer science by providing a tangible representation of their code. The ...
Mar 16, 2020•36 min
The Going Deep podcast returned to Fayette county for a second interview with one of the area’s top entrepreneurs. J.D. Ewing, President of COE Distributing, regained control of his company just after the Great Recession. J.D. had to secure financing from the bank so he could buy inventory. When they asked for a business plan, J.D. estimated the firm would reach $10 million in revenue in 3 years. COE Distributing ended up blowing past that number to more than $24 million. They did $9 million in ...
Mar 09, 2020•47 min
Marco Marandiz is a Co-founder and Head of Marketing for Elliot, a global commerce startup based in NYC. Prior to Elliot, Marco spent time as a strategist for high-potential DTC brands and led digital product teams at HomeAway and CapitalOne. Through building and shipping products that served hundreds of millions of users, Marco learned about what makes products work in the digital realm. In this podcast, you’ll hear Aaron and Marco discuss how commerce on the internet is getting easier, how Twi...
Mar 02, 2020•55 min
What’s a doctor to do when they become disenchanted with the healthcare system? Dr. Timothy Wong decided the answer was to start his own micro-practice. In his office in the East Liberty neighborhood of Pittsburgh, Dr. Wong sees ~20 patients per day and only charges $35 for a visit. This allow people without health insurance to get the care they desperately need. Dr. Wong believes that healthcare needs to be simple, needs to be about the patient & the doctor, and needs to be accessible. His ...
Feb 24, 2020•37 min
Jack Welsh is the co-owner of LumberjAxes and Sliders Curling. He has successfully transitioned from a union job and bartending gig into running a business that delivers genuinely unique experiences. He and his co-founders first came across axe throwing in Philadelphia and decided to bring the concept to Pittsburgh. It’s been a winner and has grown to multiple locations. To keep the momentum going, he has now opened Sliders Curling in the adjacent lot to offer competitive, bar-style curling to t...
Feb 17, 2020•29 min
Bill Sarris has been in the candy business for more than 40 years. Upon graduating from college, Bill joined his father’s business and has overseen significant growth while building a Sarris Candies into a regional leader in chocolates. Sarris Candies was started by his father Frank in the family’s basement. Behind Bill’s efforts, the company grew to include more than 350 employees and $16 million in annual sales. Today, the Sarris Chocolate Factory and Ice Cream Parlour fill an area the size of...
Feb 10, 2020•41 min
Glen Meakem is the founder & CEO of a permanent cloud photo storage and sharing company called Forever. He previously took his first technology startup, FreeMarkets, public in late-1999. FreeMarkets grew up during the height of the Dotcom Bubble and reached a peak valuation of over $10 billion. While the spectacular highs of the bubble could not last, underneath the market Glen was tripling revenues each year and operating. After selling FreeMarkets to Ariba in 2004, Glen started angel and v...
Feb 03, 2020•1 hr 25 min
Dr. Gordon Vanscoy is the founding Chairman and CEO of PANTHERx Rare, the nation’s leading rare disease and orphan drug-focused pharmacy. PANTHERx Rare assists patients in navigating the complex process of getting orphan & precision medicines. They also help innovative biotechnology entrepreneurs get their medicines approved by insurers and healthcare providers. Prior to PANTHERx, Dr. Vanscoy developed 7 health care companies while concurrently serving in various leadership roles at the Univ...
Jan 27, 2020•47 min
Jake Loosararian is the CEO and co-founder of Gecko Robotics, a Pittsburgh robotics startup. Gecko recently announced a $40 million Series B round of fundraising led by Drive Capital. Gecko Robotics builds robots that do unassisted inspections of power plant boilers. The robots’ sensors measure key data including temperature, wall thickness, and other system failure indicators. Jake invested his life savings into the company and was named the top startup in Y Combinator’s Winter 2016 cohort. In ...
Jan 20, 2020•37 min
Kent McElhattan’s entire business career has been dedicated to the safety of workers. In 1985, Kent co-founded Industrial Scientific and built a worldwide leader in IOT and predictive analytics for the safety industry. The company climbed to hundreds of millions in revenue and sold to Fortive. After that success, Kent started another company, Discovery Robotics, aimed to bring robotics technology to the field of janitorial services. Their first product is an autonomous floor-cleaning robot. The ...
Jan 13, 2020•41 min
Anthony Gadient is co-founder and Chief Strategy Officer for Voci Technologies. Voci uses GPU-accelerated, deep machine learning speech technologies to help companies understand what their team members are saying on the phone. Their technology helps clients mine actionable insights from their voice data. It can be applied to customer service, sales, and compliance analysis. The company is built with technology spun out of Carnegie Mellon University. Previously, Anthony co-founded Neolinear, a se...
Jan 06, 2020•40 min
2019 was a year of growth and learning. Thank you for being a part of it. We're planning for even more in 2020. 📈 📈
Dec 30, 2019•11 min
David Levine founded NuGo Nutrition Bars in 2000 after raising a small sum of capital from friends and family. NuGo Nutrition uses real dark chocolate to make their protein bars and have been committed to making healthy, high-caliber bars from their inception. The company has developed a variety of SKUs developed for Kosher, gluten-free, organic, vegan, and low sugar diets. David and Aaron discuss the founding of the company, how NuGo has scaled its distribution, and the fake chocolate used by o...
Dec 23, 2019•34 min
Brian Gaudio is the CEO of Module, a design & technology startup based in Pittsburgh. Module is developing a pay-as-you-go housing solution that enables homebuilders to provide an affordable and flexible entry point for homeownership. One of their distinctive features is a design that allows a buyer to turn a one-bedroom starter unit into a 3 bedroom house. Brian has previously directed a documentary about the housing crisis in South America, worked as a Fulbright Scholar in Santiago, Domini...
Dec 16, 2019•41 min
J.D. Ewing is the President of COE Distributing, the largest furniture-only wholesale office furniture distributor in the United States. We traveled out to Uniontown, PA to record this interview at the company’s headquarters, which includes a 300,000 square foot warehouse. The company also operated hubs in North Carolina and Texas, which allows it to serve the entire continental United States. Over the last decade, COE has been growing rapidly. He bought the family business back after an acquire...
Dec 09, 2019•42 min
Jessica Gibson is CEO and Co-Founder of Ariel Precision Medicine, an integrated genomics and digital health company. Ariel helps patients with complex chronic diseases by using genetics and health information to model the mechanisms and drivers of disease. This enables clinicians to establish an early diagnosis, long-term prognosis, and targeted management plan. Ariel's PancreasDx® is the most comprehensive genetic test for pancreatic disease and is built off of Dr. David C. Whitcomb’s leading r...
Nov 25, 2019•40 min
Matt Kesinger’s company, Forest Devices, is developing the medical device ALPHASTROKE to help first responders identify stroke and triage patients to the right hospital. Strokes are the #1 cause of disability worldwide. Lives are changed by how quickly a stroke is diagnosed and treated. Matt was EMT in Boston for two years and learned how hard it can be to diagnose a stroke with just a clinical exam. While attending the University of Pittsburgh School of Medicine, Matt conducted and published re...
Nov 18, 2019•36 min
Lillian Rafson did not plan to start her business Pack Up + Go. But, on a trip to Latvia, she came across an idea that was too good to pass up. Booking surprise travel for vacationers. She came back to the US, started the business, and hoped to get 50 clients that year. She got 500. She followed the sharp trajectory upwards and remained bootstrapped the whole way. Now she runs a team, does millions in revenue, and is charting expansion plans. In this conversation, Lillian and Aaron discuss the i...
Nov 11, 2019•32 min
