In this final episode of Billion Dollar Moves for a bit, I sit down with Jake Karls, Co-Founder and Rainmaker of Midday Squares, for a candid conversation about building one of North America’s boldest founder-led consumer brands.

Jake shares how he, his sister, and his brother-in-law went from making 50 bars a day in a Montreal condo kitchen to building an automated factory capable of producing more than 150,000 bars daily.

We talk about why the co-founders committed to therapy from day one, how founder-led storytelling helped turn customers into a community, and why great marketing is not simply content—it is making people feel part of something.

Jake also opens up about burnout, anxiety, his decision to step down as CMO, Midday Squares’ pivot beyond chocolate, and the work required to build a company that can eventually stand without its founders.

For founders, funders, family businesses, and consumer investors, this is a conversation about trust, brand, resilience, and what it really takes to build for the long term.

Watch the full conversation and subscribe for more discussions at the intersection of capital, leadership, and long-term value.

00:00 - Intro: Building something that can outlast you
01:20 - Meet Jake Karls and Midday Squares
02:15 - From a Montreal condo kitchen to 150,000 bars a day
03:35 - Why build another snack brand?
04:20 - Finding white space in a crowded market
05:20 - Building a company with family
06:00 - Why the co-founders committed to therapy
07:15 - The two best investments they ever made
08:00 - Communication as protection against founder conflict
09:20 - Asking, “How are you really feeling?”
10:00 - When the CEO stepped away for her mental health
11:00 - Building structure without losing the soul
12:05 - The product differentiation behind Midday Squares
13:00 - The cocoa crisis that threatened the company
14:00 - Betting on the no-bread PB&J pivot
15:20 - The road from $40M to $100M
16:00 - Why the founders work in three-year tours
16:40 - Raising equity and government-backed debt
17:15 - Scaling manufacturing without growing too fast
19:00 - Building US retail distribution strategically
20:00 - Why attention matters as much as product-market fit
21:00 - Turning a snack company into a “band”
22:00 - Why content is not marketing
22:35 - How community helped Midday Squares break into Costco
24:10 - Selling community, not just a product
24:40 - Building a memorable founder persona
26:00 - The roles each founder plays in the brand
27:15 - Why Jake stepped down as CMO
28:00 - Becoming the company’s Rainmaker
29:00 - The risk of building a founder-led brand
30:00 - Making the company less dependent on its founders
30:30 - From anxiety and tears to trust in the team
31:20 - Hiring people better than the founders
32:30 - Building a brand that can stand on its own
33:30 - Why overnight success often takes 10 to 20 years
34:00 - Jake’s burnout and nervous breakdown
35:40 - The warning signs he ignored
36:20 - What recovery taught him about ambition
36:45 - The Wall Street meeting that changed how he showed up
38:15 - Authenticity, memorability, and having fun
38:40 - Taste-testing the no-bread PB&J
39:20 - Why the journey matters even if the outcome is uncertain
39:55 - Final reflections from Billion Dollar Moves

About Jake Karls

Jake Karls is Co-Founder and Rainmaker of Midday Squares, a better-for-you snack company founded in Montreal alongside his sister, Lezlie Karls, and brother-in-law, Nick Saltarelli.

The company began in a condo kitchen producing 50 bars a day and has since grown into a major North American consumer brand with a fully automated manufacturing facility, millions of customers, and ambitions to become a global afternoon snacking platform.

Jake leads relationship-building, brand momentum, media, retail partnerships, and investor engagement. He is widely known for Midday Squares’ founder-led storytelling strategy and its unfiltered approach to documenting the realities of entrepreneurship.

Billion Dollar Moves Podcast | The Top Global Venture & Business Podcast for Founders & Funders | Backed by HubSpot Podcast Network

Conversations with billionaires, unicorn founders, and the world’s leading funders.

Hosted by Sarah Chen-Spellings, Billion Dollar Moves examines how enduring companies—and the capital behind them—are built.

Through long-form conversations, the show explores decision-making under uncertainty, capital allocation, and the inflection points that shape category-defining businesses. From early platform backstories to allocator frameworks used across private markets, the focus is on judgment, incentives, and long-term value creation—beyond headlines and hype.

Built for those who take the long view.

FOLLOW SARAH:

Instagram: https://instagram.com/sarahchenglobal

LinkedIn: https://linkedin.com/in/sarahchenglobal

In this episode of Billion Dollar Moves, I sit down with Suneera Madhani, founder of Stax and Worth, for a candid conversation about building, scaling, exiting, and knowing when it is time to begin again.

Suneera shares how a rejected idea became a billion-dollar payments company, why focus and customer obsession mattered more than any single formula, and what she learned from raising capital as a young Pakistani-American woman building outside Silicon Valley.

We also talk about liquidity, private equity, rolling too much equity into a deal, losing control after a majority recap, and the difficult truth that a company can stop feeling like yours long before you officially leave.

For founders, funders, and family offices, this is a conversation about conviction, ownership, wealth, and the discipline to know when to hold on—and when to let go.

Watch the full conversation and subscribe for more discussions at the intersection of capital, leadership, and long-term wealth.

00:00 - Intro: Building, letting go, and a new chapter
02:35 - Growing up in an immigrant entrepreneurial family
04:40 - The confidence her father gave her
07:25 - Risk, family expectations, and becoming a reluctant entrepreneur
09:30 - The rejected idea that became Stax
11:30 - Reinventing payments through a subscription model
14:00 - Being laughed out of the room
15:15 - Quitting her job and starting Fattmerchant
16:20 - From $5M to $5B in payments
17:00 - Building a memorable brand
18:10 - From Fattmerchant to Stax
21:10 - Scaling from $100M potential to a billion-dollar company
22:00 - Why everything breaks as a company grows
24:30 - Focus, customer obsession, and a winning culture
26:15 - Raising capital as a minority woman founder
27:30 - Scrappiness, rejection, and the first investor yes
30:00 - Why she chose to build in Orlando
31:35 - Preparing for an exit
34:00 - Revenue growth and the majority recap
35:30 - Selling at the height of the market
36:00 - What founders get wrong about diligence
38:15 - Creating a competitive private equity process
39:00 - Choosing the right buyer
40:30 - The deal terms she would rethink
41:30 - Why she wishes she had taken more cash
43:20 - The reality behind her exit
44:00 - When the company stops feeling like yours
46:00 - Why founders should sometimes sell and walk away
47:10 - Building again after exit
49:00 - Why Worth became the next fintech
50:00 - Solving business credit and underwriting
54:00 - Why onboarding is a revenue problem
55:00 - Eliminating bias with better business data
58:30 - The vision for the Worth wallet
59:45 - Reaching $10M ARR in 18 months
01:00:30 - Raising capital differently the second time
01:01:00 - Rapid fire
01:02:00 - Know your worth and take chips off the table
01:02:35 - Why funding women is a billion-dollar move
01:03:00 - CEO School and building the next generation of women-led companies

About Suneera Madhani

Suneera Madhani is a fintech entrepreneur, investor, and founder of Stax, a payments platform that reached unicorn status after processing tens of billions of dollars in transactions.

After exiting Stax, she co-founded Worth, a financial technology company focused on modernizing business underwriting, onboarding, and credit intelligence.

She is also the founder and host of CEO School, a platform and community supporting women entrepreneurs as they build, scale, and create wealth.

Billion Dollar Moves Podcast | The Top Global Venture & Business Podcast for Founders & Funders | Backed by HubSpot Podcast Network

Conversations with billionaires, unicorn founders, and the world’s leading funders.

Hosted by Sarah Chen-Spellings, Billion Dollar Moves examines how enduring companies—and the capital behind them—are built.

Through long-form conversations, the show explores decision-making under uncertainty, capital allocation, and the inflection points that shape category-defining businesses. From early platform backstories to allocator frameworks used across private markets, the focus is on judgment, incentives, and long-term value creation—beyond headlines and hype.

New episodes weekly.
Built for those who take the long view.

PODCAST INFO:
Podcast website: https://billiondollarmoves.com
Watch on YouTube: https://tinyurl.com/sarahchenglobal
Join the community: https://sarah-chen.ck.page/billiondol...

FOLLOW SARAH:
Instagram: @sarahchenglobal
LinkedIn: @sarahchenglobal

Erika Aquino is a next-generation family office allocator and angel investor building on a Filipino family business legacy.

Latasha Gillespie, former global executive at Amazon, shares how culture, customers, and risk were evaluated inside one of the world’s most powerful companies.

In this episode of Billion Dollar Moves, I sit down with David Berry, Co-Founder and Managing Partner of Averin Capital, for a conversation about building billion-dollar breakthroughs in healthcare.

David has founded more than 30 companies, including seven valued over $1B, and has helped shape companies across biotech, AI drug discovery, microbiome therapeutics, agriculture, and health infrastructure.

From losing a childhood friend to brain cancer, to asking why the hardest problems are worth pursuing, David shares how mission, science, and capital come together to create venture-scale healthcare companies.

For founders, funders, and family offices investing in the future of health, this is a conversation about conviction, ethics, and building for impact at scale.

Watch the full conversation and subscribe for more discussions at the intersection of capital, governance, and long-term wealth.

00:00 - Intro: Why go after the biggest problems?

01:12 - Truth vs. belief in science

03:00 - The myth that humans only use 10% of their brains

04:28 - Rethinking cancer and inherited assumptions

05:38 - How big ideas emerge from questioning “truth”

06:30 - Entrepreneur vs. investor: The N of one

08:10 - Building Seres Therapeutics and the microbiome frontier

11:00 - Turning strange science into a venture-scale company

12:20 - Why drug development does not always have to take 10–15 years

14:10 - Valo Health and AI-powered drug discovery

17:15 - Product-investor fit in biotech

20:30 - Why companies fail: Teams, resilience, and near-death moments

22:15 - Averin Capital and the transformation of health through technology

23:20 - BioLink and the future of continuous health monitoring

26:00 - Ozempic, access, and ethics in healthcare

31:10 - Women’s health, clinical trials, and bias in medical data

35:00 - David’s vision for Averin Capital

39:00 - How family offices should think about investing in health

40:00 - The next billion-dollar moves in healthcare

40:35 - Rapid fire

About David Berry

David is Co-Founder and Managing Partner at Averin. As an innovator and a company builder, he has been driven by the power of technology to transform industries. David has been a founder of over 30 companies, including 7 that have been valued at over $1B.

David was previously a General Partner at Flagship Pioneering. He was also founder and CEO of Valo Health, where he raised over $500M and executed a transformative partnership with Novo Nordisk.

David received his M.D. from Harvard Medical School and his Ph.D. from MIT through the biological engineering division, where he worked with Professors Robert Langer and Ram Sasisekharan. David works closely with Biolinq amongst other Averin companies.

In this rare conversation, Jim Sorenson breaks down what happens after liquidity—when building a company turns into building systems of capital.

We start with the moment everything nearly fell apart: losing $1M a month during the dot-com crash, and the unexpected pivot that transformed Sorenson Communications into a near $1B exit—by aligning technology with regulation and real, underserved demand.

From there, Jim unpacks how that experience reshaped his approach to investing.

This isn’t a conversation about philanthropy.

TIMESTAMPS

00:00 – Intro

About Jim Sorenson
James Lee Sorenson (Jim) serves as chairman of the Sorenson Impact Foundation, which funds sustainable, scalable endeavors that maximize positive impact on the lives and societies they touch. Sorenson endowed the Sorenson Impact Center at the University of Utah. Sorenson is also Chairman of the Board of Village Capital and a member of the National Advisory Board of Impact Investing. Sorenson was instrumental in developing several new industry categories, including digital compression software that helped usher in the online video revolution at Sorenson Media, where he serves as Chairman of the Board and video relay services which transformed opportunities for deaf and hard of hearing individuals through Sorenson Communications. Jim has served on many community boards, including Utah's David Eccles School of Business, University Venture Fund, Art Works for Kids, Gallaudet University, and the Utah Sports Commission.
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Billion Dollar Moves Podcast | The Top Global Venture & Business Podcast for Founders & Funders | Backed by HubSpot Podcast Network

Conversations with billionaires, unicorn founders, and the world’s leading funders.
Hosted by Sarah Chen-Spellings, Billion Dollar Moves examines how enduring companies — and the capital behind them — are built.
Through long-form conversations, the show explores decision-making under uncertainty, capital allocation, and the inflection points that shape category-defining businesses. From early platform backstories to allocator frameworks used across private markets, the focus is on judgment, incentives, and long-term value creation — beyond headlines and hype.
New episodes weekly.
Built for those who take the long view.

PODCAST INFO:
Podcast website: https://billiondollarmoves.com
Watch on Youtube: https://tinyurl.com/sarahchenglobal
Join the community: https://sarah-chen.ck.page/billiondollarmoves

FOLLOW SARAH:
https://linkedin.com/in/sarahchenglobal
https://instagram.com/sarahchenglobal

In this episode of Billion Dollar Moves, Sarah sits down with Ariana Pareja for a conversation about exit timing, liquidity, and the difference between valuation and real wealth.

We’re back—kicking off our 2026 season live from SXSW Austin with the Ayana Foundation.

PODCAST INFO:

⁠Podcast Website⁠ |⁠ Watch on Youtube⁠ |⁠ Join the Community⁠

FOLLOW SARAH:

⁠LinkedIn⁠ |⁠ Instagram⁠ 

The future of food and climate resilience in Southeast Asia is being shaped as much in cassava fields and starch factories as it is in boardrooms.

In this episode of Billion Dollar Moves, Ho Ren Hua, CEO of Thai Wah Public Company Limited, joins Sarah to unpack how he is reinventing a 77-year-old family starch business into a regional agri-food and bio-materials platform built on “innovation and sustainability from farm to shelf.”

We go inside his operator playbook: leading 3,500 people through crisis with the principle “I can lose money, but I cannot lose a life,” transforming legacy vermicelli and tapioca products into higher-value ingredients and using distribution as a moat across Asia and beyond.

For investors, founders, and family-business leaders thinking in decades, this is a rare look at what long-term, values-led execution really takes.

Timestamps/Key Takeaways
02:10 – Legacy, trees & being “rooted”
06:10 – Stepping into a 77-year-old family business
12:32 – F4 framework: Farm, Factory, Family, Food
15:15 – Making circularity real: factories, water, solar & biogas
19:48 – Managing talent across China & Southeast Asia + AI workforce
23:24 – From noodles & starch to circular-economy platform
26:51 – Innovation & ROSECO: building new revenue engines
28:26 – Rockefeller Foundation, deployment & blended finance
32:19 – Time horizons, synthesis & “go slow to go fast”

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About Ho Ren Hua
Ho Ren Hua is CEO of Thai Wah Public Company Ltd, a leading Southeast Asian starch and consumer foods group founded in 1947, now expanding across multiple markets in Asia.

Previously, he was Executive Director and Country Head, China for Banyan Tree Holdings, helping cement its position as a leading luxury hospitality brand in China, and began his career at Bain & Company in New York, Hong Kong, and China in private equity and strategy.

He has served on boards including UN Women Singapore and Wharton China Alumni Club, and currently sits on the boards or advisory councils of Banyan Tree Holdings, the Asia Pacific Agri-Innovation Summit, and Singapore Management University. He holds a BS in Economics (Hons) from The Wharton School and is a graduate of the CEIBS Advanced Management Programme.

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Billion Dollar Moves Podcast | The Top Global VC Podcast for Founders & Funders | Backed by HubSpot Podcast Network

In venture, every move can make—or break—a billion-dollar outcome. Hosted by Sarah Chen-Spellings, award-winning entrepreneur, investor, and venture insider, Billion Dollar Moves pulls back the curtain on the strategies, stumbles, and breakout moments that define the world’s most iconic companies.

From boardroom power plays to investor backchannels, you’ll hear the untold stories behind iconic companies like YouTube, Canva, and Vimeo, and go inside the minds of those moving capital at firms like Sequoia, Lightspeed, and beyond.

Whether you're chasing your first $10M—or your next billion—this show is your front-row seat to how the smartest founders and funders win. Think raw, unfiltered, no-BS insight—designed to help you move faster, smarter, and bolder.

This isn’t just another business podcast. This is your billion-dollar playbook.

PODCAST INFO:

Podcast Website | Watch on Youtube | Join the Community

FOLLOW SARAH:

LinkedIn | Instagram | X/Twitter