Beyond the Bottom Line

Testing the Untestable: Building Happy Path with Noah Bortz

Long before he was automating enterprise software testing, Noah Borts was selling herbal cigarettes in high school, building a catering-scheduling platform that launched three months before COVID, and learning, the hard way, what it means to find a problem that's actually big enough to build a company around.

On this episode of Beyond the Bottom Line, Miguel sits down with Noah, co-founder of Happy Path, an AI-powered platform that automates software testing for complex enterprise implementations like Workday. Noah walks through the winding path that got him here: growing up in a family where entrepreneurship was "pervasive, maybe even contagious," the release-hell problem he lived through in trading that inspired Happy Path, and the strategic decision to go all-in on one niche instead of chasing every market his team's collective experience could have opened up.

The conversation goes deep on what it actually takes to build an AI company right now, why "we slapped AI on it" isn't a strategy, how Happy Path keeps costs down by not always reaching for the newest, most expensive model, and why Noah believes the founders who win in an AI-saturated world will be the ones who pick up the phone instead of hiding behind another automated email. He also gets candid about choosing co-founders (find people who complement your weaknesses, not just your friends), the paradox of needing total confidence externally while staying honest about what you're bad at internally, and why patience, not building, has been the hardest skill of his founder journey.

In this episode:

• Why Noah's early ventures (including one before COVID) taught him to validate market size, not just the problem
• The "release hell" story from his trading days that became the idea behind Happy Path
• Why AI companies keep failing at "knowing what to build and why"
• How Happy Path keeps AI costs low while staying accurate enough for QA
• What makes a strong co-founder match (hint: it's not just friendship)
• Why in-person relationships and old-school sales skills matter more, not less, in the AI era

About Our Guest

Noah Borts is the co-founder of Happy Path, an AI-powered software testing platform that helps companies automate and improve how they test complex enterprise software implementations, with an initial focus on Workday. Before Happy Path, Noah spent over eight years across product management and operations, including time in trading and consulting, giving him firsthand experience with the challenges of implementing and testing complex technology.

Learn more about Happy Path at happypath.io.

Connect with Miguel

Connect with Miguel on LinkedIn or reach out at [email protected].

In this episode of Under the Hood, Daniela turns the interview around and puts Miguel in the hot seat. They get into what burnout actually looks like for him, not too much work, but doing the wrong things at the wrong time of day, and how structuring his schedule around his own energy, rather than just pushing through, changed how he leads the team.

Miguel also reflects on a prediction that didn't pan out, the assumption that clients needed custom-built software rather than accessible AI tools, and what he'd do differently if he were starting the firm today. The conversation moves through leadership, presence, and the moments early in a business that end up mattering more in hindsight than they seemed to at the time.

Every founder's inbox is drowning in AI-generated outreach. So where's left to actually reach people?

In this episode, Miguel talks with Sharon Melzer, co-founder of Venue Hopper, a targeted event marketing company that connects tech companies to communities in New York City. Sharon is also a content creator and marketer currently finishing her degree at NYU, sharing her take on entrepreneurship, AI, and personal branding along the way.

For any founder rethinking where their marketing dollars actually work anymore, this conversation makes the case for real-world connection at a moment when digital channels are more saturated than ever. Sharon walks through why she believes in-person events are becoming one of the few channels that can't easily be automated or spammed, what actually makes an event worth someone's time (hint: it's not the open bar), and the mistake founders make when they name and design events without thinking about who they actually want in the room.

The conversation also gets into the reality of building a company as a first-time founder: how Sharon evaluated whether her co-founder was the right fit, the pivot Venue Hopper made from event logistics to sponsor connections, and why letting go of past progress is often the hardest part of changing direction. Sharon and Miguel also talk candidly about the founder tension between staying "always on" and protecting personal boundaries, and where she sees human connection heading as AI reshapes how people work and communicate.

Other insights from this episode include:

• Why Sharon believes IRL events are one of the last channels that can't be easily saturated
• What actually makes an event format work: curation, agenda, and designing for connection
• The no-show problem at public events, and a simple fix that can meaningfully raise turnout
• How to know if a co-founder is the right fit (hint: coffee chats won't tell you)
• The difference between a small pivot and the kind that sends you back to square one
• Why Sharon thinks the loneliness epidemic is driving renewed demand for in-person community
• How founders across generations experience the pull between connection and constant availability
• Sharon's honest take on where AI helps, where it doesn't, and what stays uniquely human

About Our Guest

Sharon Melzer is the co-founder of Venue Hopper, a targeted event marketing company connecting tech companies to communities in New York City. She's also a content creator and marketer, currently completing her degree at NYU, where she shares her perspective on entrepreneurship, marketing, AI, and personal branding.

Connect with Sharon on LinkedIn.

Connect with Miguel on LinkedIn or [email protected]

Behind the Bookkeeping

In this Under the Hood minisode, Miguel sits down with Renee and Maria, two of the people quietly keeping the firm's client work running behind the scenes. Renee, who's stepping from client success and project management into an operations role, and Maria, an accountant managing the full accounting cycle for clients, talk through what a real day looks like, from Renee's early-morning quiet hours before the rest of the team logs on, to Maria's steady afternoon stretch once the meetings finally clear.

The conversation turns personal as they trace how they each landed here. Neither planned on accounting, Renee came from hospitality and a communications degree, Maria failed her first accounting class before ever imagining she'd earn a CPA and both found the firm almost by accident, through a stray job listing and a cold email that wasn't supposed to lead anywhere. What was meant to be temporary for both of them turned into years.

It's a reminder that behind every client relationship is a team figuring things out one day at a time and that some of the best career paths are the ones nobody plans.

Leadership Lessons from the Cockpit

Most business owners plan a launch, run it, and move on to the next thing, without ever asking their team what worked and what didn't. Randy Miller learned a different way in the U.S. Air Force, where every mission ended with a "debrief," and rank didn't matter once the discussion started.

In this episode, Miguel sits down with Randy Miller, a Vistage Chair in Austin who spent over 20 years flying F-4 fighter jets before building an Inc. 500 staffing company and later becoming an executive coach. Randy breaks down the leadership habits he picked up in the military and later in business that most CEOs never build into their teams.

Other insights from this episode include:

• Why the military "debrief" is a habit most businesses are missing
• How to communicate the "why" behind every ask, not just the ask itself
• Challenger Sales: why asking the right questions outsells pitching features
• The "can you do one more?" trick for compounding team productivity
• Why employees don't leave companies, they leave managers
• How Randy is using AI tools like Claude to sharpen his coaching

About Our Guest
Randy Miller, Vistage Chair in Austin, leads CEO peer advisory groups helping business owners and executives grow their companies.

Connect with Miguel on LinkedIn or [email protected]

Lessons and the Future

This time, Daniela flips the script and interviews Miguel and he doesn't get to dodge anything.

She starts with a question every partnership faces: what happens when the two of you disagree on a live client call? Miguel walks through how he handles it (hint: the client never sees the disagreement). From there, things get more personal — the last time Miguel actually burned out and what caused it, the internal software idea he was convinced would work that AI quietly made pointless, and what he'd do differently if he were starting the firm today instead of almost 10 years ago.

They close on presence versus ambition, the pull to always be building toward the next thing, and why some of the best moments end up being the ones you weren't trying to plan for at all.

What happens when a self-taught 14-year-old hacker from the Dominican Republic grows up to rebuild the payments infrastructure for an entire industry? On this episode of Beyond the Bottom Line, Miguel sits down with Rodrigo Romero, founder and CEO of Aloha, a Miami-based fintech company building the banking and payments infrastructure powering the future of travel across the Americas.

Rodrigo's path started far from fintech, building his first $100 websites in Yahoo Chat rooms, landing a $2,000 client at 14 without knowing how to build what he'd just sold, and eventually co-founding Aloha with Jorge Dupri after Jorge's own boutique hotels kept losing bookings to cross-border payment friction. What began as a software play quickly became something bigger: a platform solving the real problem underneath it, moving money seamlessly across countries and currencies for travel and hospitality businesses.

In this conversation, Rodrigo breaks down why travel is one of the least "tech-touched" industries around, how Aloha protects both merchants and travelers from fraud and chargebacks, and why compliance can never be an afterthought in fintech. He also gets candid about the hardest pivot of his company's life, when the software layer they built to bootstrap the business started outgrowing the payments business it was meant to support and how he uses AI agents (not chatbots) to run reconciliation, investor outreach, and even serve as a sparring partner for his own blind spots.

In this episode:

• How a Packard Bell computer and a printed HTML manual sparked a fintech career
• Why "just get a customer" beats perfecting your product
• The real problem Aloha solves: payments, not just software
• How Argentina's currency tax changes are reshaping cross-border travel spending
• Using closed-loop AI agents instead of prompt-and-wait AI
• Why onboarding is a non-negotiable leadership principle
• What to look for in a co-founder (hint: not someone just like you)

About Our Guest

Rodrigo Romero is the founder and CEO of Aloha, a Miami-based fintech company building the payments and banking infrastructure powering the future of travel across the Americas. Alongside co-founder Jorge Dupri, he founded Aloha to help travel and hospitality businesses simplify cross-border payments, access local banking services, and move money seamlessly across countries and currencies.

Learn more about Aloha, or connect with Rodrigo on LinkedIn.

Connect with Miguel

Connect with Miguel on LinkedIn or reach out at [email protected].

Building a Business Partnership: Miguel & Daniela's Origin Story

What does it actually take to merge two firms into one? In this minisode, Miguel sits down with his business partner, Daniela Menache, to talk about the real story behind how their partnership came together — nerves, negotiations, and all.

Before they were partners, Daniela was running a full-service firm on her own, personally reviewing 500 tax returns a year while searching for a tax manager she never quite found. She was at a breaking point: find a partner, sell part of the business, or walk away from clients she loved. That search for balance is where this story begins.

Miguel and Daniela take listeners through their Joint Venture phase, the trial run before the full merger, and get honest about what didn't go as planned. They talk through the messy, practical side of combining two firms — choosing which systems to keep, aligning two different company cultures, cleaning up client contracts (and canceling a lot of unused subscriptions) — and how reducing their client count actually grew their bottom line.

It's a candid look at what complementary skill sets look like in practice, why having a partner means you can actually take a vacation, and how they're thinking about the future of their industry in the age of AI.

If your business can't run without you for a month, it's not a business yet, it's a job.

In this episode, Miguel sits down with Christine "Chrissy" McDannell, serial entrepreneur, author, and founder of Magnolia Firm, a boutique M&A brokerage known for handling digital business exits from start to finish. Chrissy has personally built and exited 10 startups and now helps founders navigate valuation, positioning, due diligence, and close.

For any founder who's ever wondered what their business is actually worth, or whether anyone would even want to buy it, this conversation is a masterclass in thinking like a buyer before you ever plan to sell. Chrissy breaks down her "7 R's" framework for what makes a business acquirable (remote-based, relocatable, recurring revenue, retention of clients and team, removal of the owner, revenue growth, and repeatable processes), and why the single hardest habit for most owners to break is being the best salesperson in the room.

The conversation also gets refreshingly specific: how add-backs and personal expenses actually get treated in a sale, why cash transactions can quietly cost you multiples of their face value, what a personal guarantee really protects, and why so many small business owners walk away from six or seven figures simply because they assume nobody would want to buy what they've built. Chrissy also shares how she's navigating AI's impact on her own industry and the founders she works with, including the AI Implementation Club she runs in Austin to help business owners stop talking about AI and start building with it.

Other insights from this episode include:

• The "7 R's" framework Chrissy uses to evaluate whether a business is truly sellable
• Why removing yourself as the top salesperson is the last (and hardest) step before an exit
• How personal expenses and "gray area" add-backs actually get treated during due diligence
• Why cash-based transactions can cost sellers multiples of their face value at exit
• The role (and limits) of seller financing and personal guarantees in a deal
• What buyers are really looking for in remote, recurring-revenue digital businesses
• Why so many founders undervalue their business or give it away instead of selling it
• How AI is reshaping which businesses are sellable, and what founders should do about it
• The emotional reality of exiting: what happens financially and mentally the moment the deal closes

About Our Guest

Christine McDannell is a serial entrepreneur, author, and speaker, and the founder of Magnolia Firm, a boutique M&A brokerage specializing in digital business exits. She has built and exited 10 startups over her two-decade career and is the author of Get Acquired: Seven Steps to Your Most Lucrative Exit. She also leads the AI Implementation Club in Austin, a weekly in-person build session for founders.

Learn more about Magnolia Firm at magnoliafirm.com

Connect with Miguel on LinkedIn or [email protected]

We get asked a lot of questions at Centurion Firm questions like, "If I can't pay my taxes, do I even need to file?" or "Isn't transferring money to myself the same as payroll?"

Most clients feel a little embarrassed to ask these questions out loud, so in this minisode, Miguel's partner, Daniela Menache, decided to answer them anyway.

There are no stupid questions, just real ones people are quietly Googling (or asking AI) instead of asking us directly.

We go through the ones we hear most: filing when you can't pay, whether the IRS actually knows your income, the real difference between an LLC and an S corp, why duplicate transactions show up in QuickBooks, and whether your business credit card really covers everything you buy with it. If you've ever nodded along in a meeting with your accountant while quietly wondering what a balance sheet actually is, this one's for you.