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When COVID-19 upended the global job market in 2020, John Diklev didn’t find a job—he built a company instead. His thesis-driven insights into the challenges of renewable energy evolved into FLOWER (Flexible Power), a cutting-edge energy tech company based in Sweden.

In this interview, John walks us through his journey from stock-savvy teenager to climate-focused founder. He touches on product innovation, capital raising strategy, regulatory battles, and team building. His views include a healthy dose of Swedish pragmatism and fierce conviction.

Listen to the full podcast episode and review the transcript here.

John Diklev grew up in Stockholm, Sweden—a place he calls “the best in the world” to grow up in. While his sister followed a path into medicine, John charted a different course in engineering and physics.

John’s love for math, logic, and structured thinking led him to study industrial engineering and management, which served as the perfect bridge between analytic precision and business acumen.

John’s early passion for stock trading was sparked by family involvement in Swedish investment competitions, and this further honed his instincts for market behavior and long-term strategy. He developed his own investment thesis.

“It was like chess,” John reflects. “A constant challenge to see who’s the smartest in the room always appealed to me.” This perspective spurred him to venture into the unknown, choosing to be an entrepreneur in a country where medicine, law, and consulting were the main career paths.

As John points out, Sweden has the second-highest number of unicorns per capita outside of Silicon Valley. He himself is following in the tracks of Spotify and Skype and comes from a family of entrepreneurs. His parents and grandparents all have their own companies.

John set out to find a job during COVID, but instead realized that inflation was low and the capital markets were alive and kicking. Raising money for a startup was actually easier than finding a job at the time. And that’s where he set his sights.

The seed for FLOWER was planted during his thesis work, where John saw a glaring problem. He realized that the academic community widely acknowledged the need for adding intermittent renewable power supplies to the existing energy system.

While people accepted that they needed flexibility and storage solutions for renewable energy systems, no one was building at scale to solve it. “I basically said, if we all agree this is a problem, someone needs to build the solution,” John shares.

And so FLOWER—short for Flexible Power—was born, with a mission to address the underlying challenge of energy transition. How can we stabilize renewable energy through intelligent power management and energy storage?

FLOWER connects with flexible energy assets like EV chargers and large-scale batteries to control the power exchange within the energy system. The objective is to manage the volatility of wind and solar energy by using energy storage to create a stable and reliable system.

FLOWER transforms unpredictable green electrons into stable, baseload power for industries. Its model involves buying power through long-term PPAs (power purchase agreements) from wind farms for more than seven years, and managing the intermittency.

The company purchases the volatile production and adds a base of flexibility. It then sells a fixed volume of power at fixed price contracts to industries and other retailers that can rely on renewables plus flexibility to manage their operations and have predictability in their cost base.

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One investor summed up the business model accurately. He said, “You’re running a technology company, a hedge fund, and an infrastructure firm.” And he wasn’t wrong. John has invested a lot of capital into building the infrastructure and physical assets, specifically batteries.

At one point, FLOWER bought the biggest battery farm in Sweden, becoming a startup competing with infrastructure capital for the purchase. Facing rejections at multiple stages, FLOWER was twice kicked out of the process..

Yet John kept negotiating and ultimately won the bid by being flexible on deal terms. Just weeks before signing, their financing fell through. The team scrambled and raised more capital in that short window than they had since the company’s founding.

When the deal closed, it marked a major milestone: “That’s when I told my wife, ‘We’re finally out of the bankruptcy zone,’” John says.

FLOWER operates at the intersection of energy markets, software, and asset development. But with complexity comes capital needs, and FLOWER has raised over €57M ($64.88) in equity and an additional €60M ($68.29) in project debt since inception.

Storytelling is everything that John Diklev was able to master. The key is capturing the essence of what you are doing in 15 to 20 slides. For a winning deck, take a look at the pitch deck template created by Silicon Valley legend, Peter Thiel (see it here), where the most critical slides are highlighted.

Remember to unlock the pitch deck template that founders worldwide are using to raise millions below.

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However, as John explains, they’ve only burned around €6M to €7M (~$7M) on operating expenses since the onset. FLOWER’s capital strategy reflects John’s thoughtful approach to financial management.

They use debt for project financing, which is cheaper and more scalable for physical assets, while reserving equity for strategic growth and corporate operations.

But FLOWER doesn’t plan to own all assets long-term. Instead, they are forming joint ventures with partners with a lower cost of capital, allowing FLOWER to optimize its capital structure while focusing on innovation.

“We’re not building just a software company that plays a key role,” John explains. “To make a real impact, you also need real assets.” Capital pools won’t adapt to fit the company’s needs. They must slice the risk and diversify the risk profiles within the company to suit different capital pools.

When it comes to fundraising, John highlights three key ingredients:

FLOWER’s team has scaled from 10 people to nearly 140 in just two years. In the early days, everyone wore multiple hats—sometimes ten at once. To manage scale, the company developed an organizational blueprint, placing each employee on a future-looking organizational chart.

John said to his team, “You are sitting on 10 different chairs simultaneously right now. We know that we’re pushing you and we need to try to find someone to to shoulder your responsibilities.”

This helped depersonalize role changes, eliminated the emotional aspect of having their responsibilities taken away, and prevented burnout. As the CEO, John understands the sense of loss they might feel, but also stresses making progress in a quicker, healthier way.

Now, FLOWER is entering a maturity phase, where the focus shifts from headcount to productivity. John’s strategy created clearer processes, improved communication, and made every team member more effective. They now have the right people in the right capacity in the right place.

In the end, they ended up improving productivity, which was the key objective. “Scaling is about moving from one phase to another,” John says. “What worked for the first two years won’t work in the next two. We needed a new set of skills and perspective.”

In addition to commercial challenges, FLOWER also had to face skeptical regulators. Their pitch was using 1000 EV chargers as part of a national energy grid insurance plan.

If the nuclear power plants dropped offline, FLOWER would alleviate the system from the load corresponding to the amount of production that’s been lost. It was unprecedented. The regulators were used to big turbines and hydropower plants, not “stochastic” household behavior.

So FLOWER took an unusual approach: they wrote a 12-page “philosophical room” paper and shared all their charger data to build trust. The gamble paid off since the paper addressed all the concerns.

They were able to convince regulators that having multiple small assets would increase reliability rather than having one larger turbine. John recalls how building the product took them about half a year, but a part of their first two-year journey was just getting the regulatory aspects in place.

“It wasn’t a technical problem,” John recalls. “It was a trust issue. Once we showed them everything, we changed the conversation.”

If FLOWER succeeds, Europe will have a sovereign energy system in the European context based on renewables by building out a large amount of energy storage in the form of batteries.

They will also make sure that distributed assets, like heat pumps, EV chargers, or larger industrial processes, are an integrated and active component in the energy system. Today, these components are essentially passive, simply consuming the power available.

The end result? A reliable, stable, low-cost, climate-friendly energy system that doesn’t treat consumers as passive endpoints, but as active players in energy optimization.

Looking back, John reflects on the early startup grind and the temptation to chase every lead: “We said yes to too many things, some we knew wouldn’t scale, but we needed traction. That came at a cost.”

His advice to his younger self? “Be ruthless in your conviction. Say no more. Focus on what will scale and stick to it.”

From skeptical regulators to high-stakes battery bids, from Stockholm to shaping Europe’s green energy backbone, John Diklev’s journey with FLOWER is about conviction, adaptability, and practical thinking.

In an industry where capital intensity, regulation, and complexity present significant challenges, FLOWER stands out not just for its technology but also for its vision of a brighter, more resilient energy future.

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The post This Entrepreneur Raised Over $133 Million To Optimize And Manage Clean Energy Systems in Europe Using AI-Powered Tools first appeared on Alejandro Cremades.

The post This Entrepreneur Raised Over $133 Million To Optimize And Manage Clean Energy Systems in Europe Using AI-Powered Tools appeared first on Alejandro Cremades.

In today’s founder spotlight, we’re joined by a rare breed, Adam Schwartz, who has lived the full startup cycle, not once but multiple times, and has done so on his own terms. He is a founder who went from building scrappy marketplaces to scaling a profitable, venture-free company.

In this insightful interview, Adam talks about tackling enterprise transformation with AI through his latest startup, Parable.

Listen to the full podcast episode and review the transcript here.

Adam’s roots trace back to Boston’s famed Route 128 loop, once the Silicon Valley of the East. “My dad was part of the early semiconductor wave in the ‘70s and ‘80s,” he recalls. That tech-drenched environment of biotech and high-tech companies seeped into his upbringing, quietly shaping his future.

Eventually, Adam made his way to New York City by way of Florida, just as the city’s startup scene was taking shape. It was 2008. “Back then, you could fit the entire New York tech ecosystem into one room,” he says, referencing the now-legendary New York Tech Meetup.

At one of these gatherings organized by the founder of Meetup.com, Adam felt the entrepreneurial spark fully ignite. “I was 23, had no idea what I was doing, but I knew I had found my people.” The community was infused with a collaborative, cooperative energy that was truly inspiring.

That passion led 24-year-old Adam to launch his first company in 2009—Le Souk, a marketplace for sustainable textiles. The idea was personal: Adam’s grandfather had worked in textiles in New York, and Adam’s office was, poetically, on the same street he once walked in an old textile mill.

Le Souk was set in an eCommerce marketplace where fashion brands and designers could source sustainable textiles from suppliers. Adam and his team were trying to connect the supply and buy sides.

The company became a case study in all the things that can go wrong early on: lack of product-market fit, co-founder misalignment, and an industry that wasn’t ready to change to conform to the digital marketplace, which was a different way of doing business.

“We were solving a real problem,” Adam explains, “but the stakeholders—especially on the supply side—weren’t willing to adapt.” Still, those years were anything but wasted. Adam learned how to iterate and pivot the business as a result of the feedback they were getting from the market.

He also learned how to manage an engineering team, run a sales motion, triage, roadmap, and leverage the resources to build the product that would have an impact, and fundraise without traction. “It was a crash course in how hard it is to find product-market fit.”

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One door closed, another opened—dramatically. Through a mutual connection, Adam met Josh Abramson, founder of Vimeo, CollegeHumor, and BustedTees. Josh wanted to buy BustedTees back from IAC and was looking for a partner.

“He told me it was a profitable business with a lot of potential. We clicked instantly,” Adam says.

The duo connected over the idea of an internet-based business that is cash flow generative and profitable. This was in 2011, when even the good tech companies didn’t have revenue.

Adam and Josh ran BustedTees like a private equity play: lean team, obsessive focus on unit economics, and ruthless optimization. “We doubled the business. But more importantly, we learned what it means to squeeze every ounce of performance from a business.”

Adam worked with a small team of just 10 people and was personally involved in aspects like the customer acquisition lifecycle, web product, and supply chain. Yet, despite the success, he realized the model wasn’t scalable.

“It was 2013. We were competing against companies like Groupon and Gilt that were throwing money into the digital advertising space with unprofitable ads and bleeding cash. We couldn’t match that burn,” Adam recalls.

These companies would spend 80 cents on a dollar to acquire customers. Worse, the business lacked the network effects or product dynamics needed for long-term defensibility. BustedTees wasn’t a digital product. It was a retail business with digital distribution and had limitations.

“We were creative, but we were the only creatives. That’s when the idea for TeePublic was born,” Adam says.

TeePublic flipped the script. Instead of being the creators, Adam and Josh opened the doors to a global community of independent designers and artists using Vimeo as an example.

The duo eliminated inventory risk using print-on-demand tech and created a scalable, zero-CAPEX retail model. Designers would create designs, and TeePublic would host them on an aggregated marketplace, handling the supply chain.

What started as an experiment quickly grew into a juggernaut. As a byproduct of owning BustedTees, Adam and Josh came across new printing technology that allowed them to print one-off of a digital print file to print one T-shirt or one art print.

TeePublic scaled profitably for a decade, never raising venture or debt. “We were profitable every quarter. Every decision was built around sustainable growth.”

The key? Understanding their marketplace flywheel. “Most marketplaces are supply-side driven. We saw a direct correlation between designer activity and customer demand. That gave us clarity—we invested 100% into growing our artist base and it paid off.”

As Adam points out, their competitors were more focused on the demand and customer sides, which worked to their advantage. They were the most supply-driven of the competitor set. By the time they exited, TeePublic had 35x more SKUs than Walmart—no exaggeration.

When TeePublic was acquired by an Australian public company, it wasn’t out of desperation—it was opportunistic. “There was no pressure. We had a profitable, non-venture-backed business. But we saw an opportunity to scale the impact.”

Josh moved on, but Adam stayed post-acquisition for three years, navigating an entirely new world of Australian public boards, international operations, and enterprise complexity. In that complexity, Adam found the seed for his next big thing.

The acquisition for $40M+ without external investors is a huge success and helped the broader company significantly.

While serving on boards of companies undergoing massive transformation, like after acquisitions, for example, Adam noticed something deeply broken. He noted a complete lack of operational data around organizational design, resource allocation, operations, workflows, and outcomes.

At the enterprise level, there is no telemetry data to understand what was happening inside it. The lack of data was an incredible inhibitor to the company’s ability to create alignment and efficiency in driving toward its strategy.

“We had more insight into our customers than our own employees,” Adam says. “There’s this enormous data gap inside organizations when it comes to how people work and where time and resources go.”

That’s where Parable comes in. Parable is building a new category of enterprise software. Using AI to parse unstructured and fragmented operational data from hundreds of software tools, it creates a baseline of how an organization actually functions.

From there, Parable identifies inefficiencies, recommends transformations, and helps implement them all while measuring real-time impact. AI creates a continuous improvement loop or a virtuous cycle that reconstitutes a company around a new, efficient, and aligned way of working.

“You can think of it as a digital twin of your organization,” Adam explains. “Eventually, leaders will be able to ask questions in plain language and get a simulation of their org—see the trade-offs, simulate different outcomes, and execute a strategy.”

Unlike TeePublic, Parable is backed by venture funding, but intentionally, since it is a cutting-edge technology business. In mid-2024, they raised a $5.2M pre-seed round, led by founder-operators: the minds behind HubSpot, Ramp, Vimeo, Superhuman, Squarespace, and more.

“Retail and DTC? Poor candidates for venture capital. But enterprise AI? That’s a perfect fit. We’re targeting a $500B to $1T market. You need venture-scale ambition and capital for that,” as Adam explains. They needed the funding to invest in a team of some of the best AI engineers.

Storytelling is everything that Adam Schwartz was able to master. The key is capturing the essence of what you are doing in 15 to 20 slides. For a winning deck, take a look at the pitch deck template created by Silicon Valley legend, Peter Thiel (see it here), where the most critical slides are highlighted.

Remember to unlock the pitch deck template that founders worldwide are using to raise millions below.

Unlock the pitch deck template used by founders to raise millions. Just enter your email below.

Parable also needed capital to build a product and motion to deliver to Fortune 500 companies, which is the space and sector it was targeting. However, as Adam says, having telemetry data around operations is a universal problem every enterprise and small business faces.

Adam pauses, reflecting. “I’d tell him to think as big as possible. Don’t shy away from the biggest problems. Learn the frameworks, study the masters—but ultimately, trust your own intuition. You’re going to have to.” There are no playbooks, and every founder builds their company in a unique way.

Adam Schwartz’s story is a testament to evolution—how each chapter, even the messy ones, can shape a founder into someone capable of tackling billion-dollar problems.

From bootstrapped beginnings to enterprise AI transformation, Adam’s journey is proof that building with intention—and integrity—can take you far. And with Parable, it seems he’s just getting started.

Listen to the full podcast episode to know more, including:

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The post This Entrepreneur Sold A Company For $40+ Million And Is Now Building An AI Tool To Help Organizations Manage Their Time Efficiently first appeared on Alejandro Cremades.

The post This Entrepreneur Sold A Company For $40+ Million And Is Now Building An AI Tool To Help Organizations Manage Their Time Efficiently appeared first on Alejandro Cremades.

Dan Magy’s journey from a sun-soaked surf town in Southern California to building some of the most impactful defense technology in modern warfare doesn’t follow any conventional path. He’s not a coder, nor does he claim to be a technical wizard.

But what Dan lacks in technical prowess, he makes up for in vision, grit, and relentless curiosity—traits that have fueled three startups, two exits, and a defense tech rocket ship called Firestorm Labs.

Listen to the full podcast episode and review the transcript here.

Growing up in an older surf town in San Diego, Dan describes a childhood that blended the idyllic beach lifestyle with a deep respect for education. “There were still horses on our street,” he laughs. “And avocado farms. It was this really beautiful balance of freedom and discipline.”

Dan’s early years were shaped by a hunger for experience. “I believe in treating life a

little like a game,” he says. That philosophy led him to places like South Korea, where he taught English at the Sogang University.

Dan also traveled to Thailand, where he spontaneously became a scuba guide after walking past a shop with a “Help Wanted” sign. That unplanned detour didn’t just shape his worldview—it led him to meet Will Dickinson, his co-founder for his first company, Fanpics.

Looking back on this stint, Dan describes working a very physically demanding job with two four-hour shifts or one very long day shift. He had to clean the store, fill the tanks, and set up trips for the next day.

Dan enjoyed the gruelling schedule and considers it one of the best times of his life. They lived on Koh Phi Phi in Thailand, the island immortalized in the Leonardo DiCaprio movie, The Beach. Later, Dan moved to London and entered the London School of Economics, the top business school.

In 2010-2011, the fundraising environment in the UK was highly challenging. The best offer founders could expect was £250K for a 35% stake in the company. Eventually, Dan packed his bags and moved to New York, where he stayed for a few months before moving to San Diego.

Dan raised $4.5M at a $25M valuation for his idea there. In contrast, Dan believes such opportunities are lacking in European countries. Most of his friends continued working in banks, became consultants, or worked in the government.

15 years down the road, the startup ecosystem is much more developed than it was at the time.

Fanpics was Dan’s first shot at building a tech company, without being a technical founder. The idea was charmingly simple and undeniably cool.

They had robotic cameras installed in sports stadiums that captured real-time reaction photos of fans during major moments and delivered them directly to their phones. Think: a personalized, digital souvenir of your team’s game-winning touchdown.

Despite being ahead of its time, the venture faced brutal truths about the sports industry. “TV money dominates everything,” Dan says. “Fan experience isn’t prioritized when every team gets a couple hundred million dollars annually, no matter how bad they are.”

Still, Fanpics raised $8M and partnered with major teams to earn revenue shares by selling sponsorships on the pictures. The company ran for three years and laid the groundwork for Dan’s first full-cycle founder experience—from ideation to capital raising to acquisition.

“We didn’t really make money on the deal,” Dan admits of the exit during COVID. “But we learned. And that helped set us up for what came next.” He learned not to take investor disinterest personally and to be resilient in the face of rejection.

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What came next was anything but expected. In 2015, while still at Fanpics, stadiums began asking Dan a strange question: “Can you build a drone defense system?” They were tackling the problem of drones entering sports stadiums.

That curiosity snowballed into the founding of Citadel Defense Company—a counter-drone company that ended up deploying systems in Iraq to combat ISIS drone threats in 2016-2017. Navy SEALs in Naval Special Warfare used their drones.

Citadel’s path to defense contracting wasn’t easy. The defense world is infamous for red tape, opaque procurement processes, and skeptical gatekeepers. Dan and his team had to comply with guidelines for employing different technologies on the battlefield.

“The best tech doesn’t always win,” Dan explains. “You have to navigate requirements, deployment doctrine, and even find the money yourself.” The process is long and complicated. Still, they did it.

Citadel raised $13M, got battlefield validation from elite military units like the United States Naval Special Warfare community, and eventually sold the company in a nine-figure exit to Blue Halo. This company was buying different future defense tech companies to add to a single portfolio.

Months later, Citadel (now rebranded as Titan) won a multi-hundred-million-dollar contract. But Dan didn’t find the financial outcome most meaningful.

“At my wedding afterparty, a Navy guy told me our system had saved his life two weeks earlier. That moment? That’s what it’s all about,” Dan says. It’s about making a difference for “people doing dangerous things in dangerous areas.”

As Dan sees it, entrepreneurship is all about understanding the pattern recognition that you have a unique product to meet customer demands. Next, it’s about executing on the product side and getting it where it needs to be to unlock the bigger contracts.

Being a non-technical person, Dan believes in making the user experience incredible when using the product. He wants to push the complicated aspects behind the scenes so the customer is surprised and delighted to have a product that is really easy to use.

Dan instituted a test at Fanpics and Citadel called the Dan Test. He wanted to be able to set up and use the drone himself, which was an important lesson for the engineers designing the product.

Dan makes it a point to go into meetings and ask a bunch of questions to get to the center of the truth. Like his customers, he can’t build or write code for the drone. So, over the years, he has developed some basic principles for motivating his engineers in the right direction.

With two exits under his belt, Dan could’ve easily gone into venture or taken a break. Instead, he launched Firestorm Labs, a company born out of the war in Ukraine and a hard-earned understanding of modern warfare.

The thesis is bold: “We build drones like Ferraris. We need to build them like minivans.” Dan aimed to develop drones capable of performing multiple missions. These drones should be affordable, customizable, and produced in large quantities.

To make that happen, Dan brought in Ian, his CTO, an aerospace engineer with a background in additive manufacturing, a.k.a. 3D printing.

Dan also brought Chad McCoy from the JSOC, a super elite engineer in the special operations group, on board. Chad had been on important raids and used several interesting technologies. He’s famous for being on the team that saved Captain Phillips.

Dan’s strategy was to build a credible, eager-to-learn team. He also ensured they got the right customer feedback on the product side and then raised the money to execute it. In the initial months, Firestorm was bootstrapped but started bringing in defense investors in 2023.

Firestorm builds modular, multi-mission drones that are affordable, flexible, and made with 3D-printed parts in containerized, mobile factories. Dan ensures they can be built in about a tenth of the time at about a fifth of the cost.

“A factory shouldn’t be a building with a roof,” Dan says. “We can drop a 20-foot container anywhere and start producing drones, parts for vehicles, even medical braces.”

And the business model? It’s not just drone sales. Firestorm also repairs other manufacturers’ drones, makes replacement parts, licenses its modular manufacturing systems, and prints parts for military vehicles..

Dan and his team have raised $50M and brought in top-tier investors like Lockheed Martin, who are opening doors to massive government contracts and challenging and interesting programs. Firestorm customers have problems they rely on smaller, more flexible companies to solve.

Storytelling is everything that Dan Magy was able to master. The key is capturing the essence of what you are doing in 15 to 20 slides. For a winning deck, take a look at the pitch deck template created by Silicon Valley legend, Peter Thiel (see it here), where the most critical slides are highlighted.

Remember to unlock the pitch deck template that founders worldwide are using to raise millions below.

Unlock the pitch deck template used by founders to raise millions. Just enter your email below.

Dan has seen firsthand how timing can make or break a startup. Citadel’s exit came just before a massive contract win. Fanpics might’ve been huge if the market were ready. Firestorm is catching the wave of a new defense tech boom.

As Dan points out, they can revolutionize warfare by developing technologies that stop aggressive nations from attacking others. At present, we are focused on deterrence, which is very important. However, how we build and view drones needs to change fundamentally across the West.

In Dan’s opinion, we need to develop the infrastructure worldwide to not only support the manufacturing and repair of these systems, but also bring down the costs across the military for fixing, repairing, and deploying things that we can do with our printing systems.

Dan’s biggest advice to his younger self? “It takes just as much time to build something big as it does to build something small. So dream big.” From selling scuba tours to life-saving defense systems, Dan Magy proves that great founders aren’t always great engineers.

Sometimes, they’re just relentless learners, master communicators, and bold enough to chase big ideas—even when they don’t have all the answers. And for Dan, the journey’s far from over.

Listen to the full podcast episode to know more, including:

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The post He Sold A Company To Blue Halo For Nine Figures And Now Raised $50 Million To 3D-Print Drones In 20-Foot Container-Sized Spaces first appeared on Alejandro Cremades.

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If you’ve ever done data analysis in Python, there’s a good chance you’ve used Pandas, the groundbreaking open-source library that transformed how data scientists work. But behind Pandas is Wes McKinney’s story of intellectual curiosity, risk-taking, and a relentless drive to build useful tools for others.

That story belongs to Wes and goes far beyond a GitHub repo. In this conversation, he opened up about his journey from math competitions in Ohio to MIT, from a skunkworks project at AQR to shaping Python as the lingua franca of data science.

Wes also talks about the early startup experiences of building and scaling Voltron Data into a $110M Series A rocket ship. He reveals his experiences with open sourcing, knowing the opportune time to turn the page and move on to the next chapter, and managing relationships.

Listen to the full podcast episode and review the transcript here.

Wes’s path wasn’t preordained. Born near Philadelphia and raised in Knoxville and Northeast Ohio, his early academic pursuits leaned heavily toward math.

In high school in Cuyahoga Falls near Akron, Ohio, Wes competed in math competitions, driven more by intellectual curiosity than structure or mentorship. He did very well, reaching the state and national levels. He was also into foreign languages.

At MIT, Wes initially envisioned a future in theoretical mathematics and doing something more academic. But an early realization set the stage for what would come: he wanted to do something applied with real-world impact.

That pull toward impact—and Wes’s budding interest in computer programming—would ultimately steer him away from pure math and into the world of data science, software engineering, and entrepreneurship.

As Wes recalls, he enjoyed the structured aspect of problem solving, abstract thinking, and building up a stack of tools that fit together to solve increasingly more complex problems.

Wes’s entry into finance after college took him to AQR Capital Management, a top quantitative hedge fund. There, he began building a Python-based research framework—not as an assigned project, but as a productivity experiment.

Ultimately, the company decided to use Python to rebuild the future models that ran the business. Wes believes AQR and much of the financial industry have been running on Python-based core principles over the last decade.

Unbeknownst to Wes, his skunkworks tool would become the foundation for Pandas at that time. Convincing AQR leadership to open-source the core data analysis framework was no easy feat.

It took months of internal lobbying, legal reviews, and strategic analysis. But the bet paid off—not just for AQR, which gained credibility and hiring leverage in the engineering community, but for the entire data science world.

Pandas catalyzed the growth of the Python data ecosystem and, as Wes puts it, “helped make Python the number one language of AI and data science.” People outside the company would contribute to the project and improve it.

Pandas and several other projects in that era fit together to create a productive environment for data analysis and data science work. Google, Meta, and all the other companies ended up choosing Python as the language to build their AI frameworks.

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Despite his growing success with Pandas, Wes wasn’t done exploring. He briefly started a PhD in statistics at Duke, but quickly realized that his real calling was in industry. He wanted to develop a better academic and applied foundation for data science work.

Conference talks about using Python for quantitative finance, and the early adoption of Pandas brought inbound interest. Soon, Wes dropped out, moved back to New York, and went all-in on open source and entrepreneurship.

With Chang She, a former colleague from AQR, Wes co-founded DataPad, a business intelligence platform built around Python extensibility. The company raised a seed round from Accel and relocated to San Francisco in 2013.

Wes and Chang hired a small team and started building the business analytics product, working with some initial design partners. Despite early traction, DataPad faced a brutal market reality: the business intelligence space was overcrowded, and differentiation was challenging.

By late 2014, the team contemplated raising a bridge round, but instead opted for a strategic acquihire exit to Cloudera—a move that preserved the mission and found a home aligned with Wes’s passion for open-source software and data infrastructure.

Cloudera proved to be a springboard rather than a destination. While there, Wes, with a group of other open source developers, co-founded Apache Arrow, a project aimed at creating a new standard for accelerated data connectivity and processing.

However, Cloudera wasn’t the ideal environment to incubate it in the long term. Enter Two Sigma, which brought Wes in full-time to keep building Arrow. As Arrow gained adoption, so did interest from companies like NVIDIA, Bloomberg, and others.

These companies were interested in committing capital to fund Arrow development. Initially, Wes decided to create Ursa Labs, a nonprofit industry consortium to combine these capital commitments into one place, and to continue working on the project without necessarily founding a for-profit company.

Wes built Ursa Labs inside RStudio, which is now called Posit, a leading data science platform company. Posit provided funding for Ursa Labs and handled the operational side of running the team, dealing with the healthcare, benefits, and other aspects.

But by 2020, it became clear there was a startup opportunity. Armed with conviction, co-founder Neal Richardson, and backing by GV and Walden Catalyst, Ursa Computing was born.

The goal? Building enterprise solutions for accelerating data access and processing while supporting the growth of the Arrow ecosystem.

Retracing the steps in his journey, Wes explains that they went from Ursa Labs to Ursa Computing, and then to Voltron Data. They initially raised the seed round for Ursa Computing, a startup that spun out of Ursa Labs.

At the end of 2020, Wes contacted Josh Patterson, who was leading the RAPIDS team at NVIDIA. RAPIDS is a GPU acceleration framework for analytics at NVIDIA, and Josh and his team were interested in founding a company.

Wes had business ideas about pursuing Ursa Computing around enterprise support for Apache Arrow and improving and accelerating enterprise data connectivity.

Josh and Wes decided to join forces and also add in BlazingSQL, a startup that had worked closely with the RAPIDS team to build a GPU-accelerated SQL engine.

Together, they created a super company that could compile all the concepts. Lip-Bu Tan from Walden International, now CEO of Intel, stepped up to spearhead the effort from the fundraising side. They leveraged the potential for their ideas to bring significant capital to the table.

In the initial few months of 2021, Wes and his partners created a reorganized company and geared up for the next funding rounds.

Voltron Data’s first year was a whirlwind. The team scaled from 35 to 130 people in 18 months. They pulled together components from various efforts—Ursa Computing, NVIDIA’s RAPIDS leadership, and BlazingSQL—and raised $110M in Seed and Series A funding.

Storytelling is everything that Wes McKinney was able to master. The key is capturing the essence of what you are doing in 15 to 20 slides. For a winning deck, take a look at the pitch deck template created by Silicon Valley legend, Peter Thiel (see it here), where the most critical slides are highlighted.

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But with scale came the need for focus. By the end of 2022, the macro environment had shifted—interest rates were up, capital was tighter, and the company had to hone in on narrower, high-value verticals like GPU-accelerated data workloads.

For Wes, this meant some of the directions he was passionate about no longer aligned with the company’s short-term roadmap.

Recognizing that his core contributions—creating foundational tech, forming the leadership and engineering teams, raising capital—had been made, Wes chose to transition from full-time operator to senior advisor to be able to spend time on a broader portfolio of projects.

As a way to stay involved in open source data science, Wes seized an opportunity to rejoin Posit, which had recently made Python a first-class citizen in its open source and enterprise software offerings. Additionally, he looked for ways to spend more time helping fellow entrepreneurs.

Looking around, Wes noted that many new companies were being founded in and around the Arrow ecosystem and using Arrow and related technologies as part of their core technology platform. He didn’t just walk away from startups—he leveled up.

Now an active investor, Wes has made over 40 angel investments and launched Composed Ventures, a venture fund focused on data infrastructure, data science, accelerated computing, developer tools, and deep tech. Wes prefers to work with deep tech companies or technical founding teams.

Wes has also developed pattern recognition to see what works and doesn’t, and identify founders with a higher chance of success.

What does Wes look for in founders?

Wes is particularly bullish on a composable data stack—where tools and systems are modular, interoperable, and future-proof, a philosophy rooted in Arrow itself.

If Wes could advise his younger self—or any aspiring founder—it would be this:

Wes McKinney’s journey is a rare blend of technical brilliance, open-source ethos, entrepreneurial grit, and long-term strategic thinking.

From laying the foundation of Python’s rise in data science to scaling a deep-tech startup and backing the next wave of builders, his story is a masterclass in navigating the intersections of code, community, and capital.

As the data ecosystem continues to evolve, one thing is sure: Wes will be there, whether building, advising, or investing, helping to shape the tools that power tomorrow’s breakthroughs.

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When you hear the term self-made, you might think of grit, long nights, and entrepreneurial tenacity. But in Suneera Madhani’s case, it’s a generational story—one forged in gas station aisles, sharpened in corporate boardrooms, and carried forward in billion-dollar exits.

Suneera didn’t just build a business—she built a legacy. Twice.

Listen to the full podcast episode and review the transcript here.

Born in Chicago and raised in a whirlwind of relocations including Dallas, Suneera is the daughter of immigrant parents who came to the U.S. as teenagers with no formal education, just the ambition to chase the American dream.

They didn’t just pursue it—they built it, brick by entrepreneurial brick. Her father, a born hustler with “entrepreneurial ADHD,” started with one gas station in Texas and grew it into multiple businesses, including franchises.

Suneera and her brother, Sal, were along for the ride—literally. After-school hours were spent stocking shelves, managing inventory, and tagging along on supply runs to Restaurant Depot.

“We always say that was our MBA,” she says. “Watching our parents work hard and learning those values from the ground up—that’s the foundation of everything.”

But it wasn’t all smooth sailing. The family moved so often that by the time Suneera graduated college, she’d attended 10 different schools and even lived in Karachi for three years after what was supposed to be a vacation. He father started a few companies during his stay there.

That constant disruption taught Suneera to adapt to new environments fast, make friends quickly, and hold tight to the one constant in her life—her family. At 16, she moved to Florida with her family.

Suneera was the first in her family to graduate college, earning a full ride to the University of Florida where she studied finance and marketing. Like many children of immigrants, she initially followed the corporate path—safe, secure, and everything her parents had worked for.

Suneera’s parents wanted her and her brother to get the best education possible and graduate at the top of their classes. A good education was high on their list of priorities which meant that the siblings had the opportunity to attend the best schools.

Suneera was the first in the family to graduate from college. And, the fire was more than lit. Her brother, Sal, followed behind with a degree in finance and leadership. Both went on to follow a career path in the corporate world.

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While working at a payments company in early 2010, Suneera saw firsthand how stagnant and commoditized the industry had become.

There was no innovation, no transparency, and no real passion to service the end customers she deeply cared about—small businesses, like the ones her parents had run. At that time, credit card processing was very expensive, which was a huge line item for their business.

Suneera recalled how there was no transparency in what they were paying for or how percentages worked. Customers were expected to just pay it without getting any real value–a necessary evil.

Then came the turning point: a Texas snowstorm and a binge-watch of Shark Tank. Trapped in her grandmother’s house for days, Suneera not only got inspired—she got clarity. There was so much she wanted to change about the industry.

Suneera wanted to step out of her comfort zone and create something innovative. “I saw subscription businesses booming in software and consumer products,” she says. “And I thought—why hasn’t anyone built a subscription-based payment processor?”

Suneera Googled it. Nothing. That was the spark.

Armed with a business plan, Suneera pitched the idea to her company’s executive team at the headquarters in Houston. Their response? “Little girl, we love your big ideas. Go back to your box.”

The executives were of the opinion: This will never work. Why do you think that we should invest in technology? Why would we want to give a flat subscription, give away 40% of our margin to go get more market share?

That stung. But it didn’t stop her. As Suneera recalls, she was working as a territory sales manager and, like her, other women were working in sales or with customers like in service positions. No one had a leadership position.

Suneera was confident she had given the best presentation and her idea was excellent. Having to go back to the status quo and continue working seemed hard.

Back home at Sunday dinner, her father looked at her and said, “Sonny, why don’t you just start the company?” That was all she needed.

In 2012, at just 25, Suneera quit her job and founded what would become Stax Payments.

Within a year, her brother Sal joined her, and together they built a payments platform that would eventually process $40B, serve 40,000 small businesses, and employ 400 people—without raising venture capital for the first leg of the journey.

It wasn’t easy. “There’s so much to unpack in those ten years,” Suneera says. “We got rejected more times than I can count. But we believed in the mission: to make payments transparent, fair, and service-driven.”

Over time, the brother-sister duo raised strategic capital, scaled recurring revenue to over $100M, and exited in 2021 at a valuation north of $1B. As Suneera recalls, they wanted to be disruptive and serve their customers. They believed in people and invested in technology and the right things.

Storytelling is everything that Suneera Madhani was able to master. The key is being able to capture the essence of what you are doing in 15 to 20 slides. For a winning deck, take a look at the pitch deck template created by Silicon Valley legend, Peter Thiel (see it here) where the most critical slides are highlighted.

Remember to unlock the pitch deck template that founders worldwide are using to raise millions below.

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The win wasn’t just personal—it was community-driven. Stax created over 30 millionaires on its team and delivered major returns for investors. “It wasn’t about the money,” Suneera reflects. “It was about impact. That’s what made it all worth it.”

After Stax, most would rest. But Suneera is a builder. A visionary. And she saw another massive gap waiting to be filled. Through onboarding thousands of small businesses, she realized the real challenge wasn’t payments—it was onboarding and underwriting.

While consumers can get approved for credit in minutes, small businesses face endless paperwork, scrutiny, and friction. So Suneera asked: Why can’t a company be onboarded as quickly as an individual? Why is the standardization and innovation missing?

Enter Worth AI, a platform to redefine how financial institutions assess business credit to onboard a small company. Using just three fields—name, tax ID, and address—Worth AI provides a comprehensive Worth Score to assess a business’s creditworthiness in real time.

No manual review. No bias. Just data-driven trust. “We’re building the FICO of small business,” Suneera says. “It’s time to standardize business credit and make it equitable.” They have set out to build an onboarding platform with the most incredible technology.

As Suneera explains, Worth AI has been in the stealth mode with a huge team of data scientists working to build the platform for large enterprise financial services. Their objective is to create a better experience for all small businesses.

Just a year into the market, Worth AI raised a $25M seed round, with backers who believed in her long before the billion-dollar exit. This time, she chose the investors—not the other way around.

Suneera has never forgotten where she came from—or who she is. A minority woman founder in a space where less than 2% of VC dollars go to women, and even fewer to minorities, she’s rewriting the rules by showing up fully as herself.

“Business is personal,” Suneera says. “I used to try to fit into their world. Now I know—I can build my own.” That’s why her new company isn’t just about tech. It’s about representation, access, and equity.

In a world where loan officers still judge small business owners based on their names, Worth AI is building a future where the business stands on its own. As Suneera sees it, the platform is going to be transformative and she’s excited about its much border mission.

Suneera’s message is clear: “I want my parents’ generation, and the new generation of entrepreneurs, to have the tools they need to succeed without gatekeepers in their way.” She wants to be surrounded by people who are champions, smart, strategic, and incredible humans.

Talking about her vision for the future, Suneera sees a world where a business is not evaluated on the basis of human perspective or conscious and unconscious bias. A business should be able to stand on itself and its credibility.

Worth AI will build a more equitable and efficient financial landscape for small businesses.

“Believe in yourself,” Suneera says without hesitation. “I always had it—but I didn’t always know it. If I could go back, I’d tell her to drown out the noise, ignore the naysayers, and trust her worth.”

Even now, Suneera admits, she still has to remind herself. Success doesn’t eliminate self-doubt. But it gives you the receipts to silence it. And as she builds Worth AI into another billion-dollar disruptor, one thing’s for sure.

Suneera Madhani isn’t just chasing the American dream. She’s redefining it.

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The post She Founded And Sold A $1-Billion Payments Company And Is Now Building A Credit Assessment Platform For Small Businesses first appeared on Alejandro Cremades.

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In a world where adult beverages have long been synonymous with alcohol, Bill Shufelt saw something different—a cultural and economic opportunity hidden in plain sight. He successfully navigated the startup ecosystem–scaling, manufacturing, building, and financing his company.

Bill’s journey from a Wall Street hedge fund to founding Athletic Brewing, the pioneering non-alcoholic craft beer company, is more than just a story of entrepreneurship. It’s a lesson in patience, passion, and purpose-driven business building.

Listen to the full podcast episode and review the transcript here.

Bill grew up in a tight-knit, finance-heavy town in Connecticut, just a short drive from New York City. Surrounded by investment bankers and private equity executives, finance felt less like a choice and more like a default path.

“We came from a wealthy town, but my family definitely wasn’t wealthy,” Bill recalls. “The people doing well were in finance, so I aspired to that.” Naturally gifted in math and science, Bill attended Middlebury College, where he doubled down on his ambitions of having a career in finance.

Internships and recruiting opportunities with companies like Goldman, Lehman, Morgan Stanley, and Bank of America, among others, led him straight to Wall Street. He cut his teeth at Knight Capital Group, a fast-paced trading shop where he fell in love with the energy of the markets.

Later, Bill joined Point72, one of the top hedge funds led by legendary investor Steve Cohen. Bill thrived in the competitive atmosphere, which perfectly matched his personality.

“At Point72, I was surrounded by the smartest people I’ll ever be in a room with,” Bill says. “It was intensely merit-based. You showed up prepared every day, and you were rewarded based on performance. That kind of culture stuck with me.”

Looking back at his time at Point72, Bill remembers being exactly where he wanted to be—at the top of the investment process. The firm had a high turnover, a lot of trading, and was very intellectually challenging.

Bill’s key takeaway from Point72 is that a merit-based opportunity-driven culture is probably more important than a great culture. Getting opportunities and feeling good about the work you’re driving forward shapes careers. His bosses believed in his potential and encouraged him.

Twelve years into a successful finance career, Bill began to feel misaligned. The typical Wall Street lifestyle—late nights, happy hours, and boozy client dinners—started to wear on him. At 29, as he prepared to get married, he took a hard look at his life.

“My family, my health, my career—alcohol was probably holding all of those back,” Bill realized.

“It was the biggest life hack I’d ever discovered,” Bill says. He developed an interest in long-distance running and although he was still doing three to four work dinners a week, he switched to a standard brown level or brown bottle, non-alcoholic beer.

But there was one glaring problem—there were no great-tasting non-alcoholic beverage options for adults who still wanted to enjoy the ritual of drinking without the alcohol.

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As Bill continued his alcohol-free lifestyle, he began to notice just how underserved the market was. He started exploring the stats and found that 60% of adults have less than one drink per week.

“Why is alcohol the default functional ingredient in all adult beverages?” Bill wondered. Although moderation aligned perfectly with modern health standards, it was out of reach and not on the menu.

That question sparked a two-year business planning journey that would ultimately lead to the creation of Athletic Brewing. Rather than rushing to market with an MVP, Bill meticulously built a business plan while still working full-time.

“There were weeks I didn’t touch it and others where I was on fire,” he says. That long planning period allowed him to define core company values and develop a mission, employee handbooks, and culture for the company’s foundation.

Eventually, Bill found a technical co-founder: John Walker, an award-winning brewer from Santa Fe, New Mexico. Together, Bill and John spent months homebrewing non-alcoholic beer in Gatorade jugs—batch after batch until it wasn’t just “good for non-alcoholic beer,” but good beer, period.

More than the economics of the project, Bill was concerned about the meaningful, fulfilling impact his idea could have on potentially tens of millions of people. He underscores that they are not anti-alcohol or trying to bring back prohibition, but rather, Athletic seeks to provide an alternative.

Hundreds of thousands of people die from alcohol every year. 5% of cancers are attributed to alcohol, and 40% of incarcerated people were drunk when they committed their crimes. Bill and John wanted to give people the option to be moderate when they wanted.

Considering that 15 million people are in documented recovery in the U.S., they wanted to make moderation accessible rather than anonymous and hidden. Bill reflects on this decision to team up with a co-founder to materialize his idea into an actual product.

Bill had extensive experience and a robust foundation in finance, sales, and marketing. He was capable of handling HR and the legal elements of the business. However, he lacked technical skills, knowing nothing about beer-making or running a manufacturing facility.

Before meeting John, Bill pitched the concept to hundreds of brewers but faced constant rejection. John is not only talented but, like Bill, a lifelong learner. Bill appreciates finding someone who matches his vision and enthusiasm, and a business partnership that complements their skills.

As Bill points out, alcohol has been the tag-along adult beverage for 5,000 years. Adults use alcohol as a meal pairing, refreshment, and de-stressor. Athletic Brewing is essentially revolutionizing beer for the modern adult.

From day one, Athletic Brewing committed to something radical: owning their own manufacturing. While most consumer packaged goods (CPG) brands outsource production, Bill insisted on building their own breweries.

He wanted to develop an award-winning beer that could compete with any other alcoholic beverage. Until then, non-alcoholic beer was heavily imported and in the contract-brewed category. Bill wanted to make it in the U.S. and achieve the ultimate differentiator in quality.

“Every beer that goes out our door undergoes over 55 quality tests,” he says. “We weren’t going to compromise.” That decision turned off many investors early on. “We’d get to the part about manufacturing, and people would literally stand up and walk out,” Bill laughs.

Hundreds of millions of dollars were needed to build the manufacturing plants. But in the long run, vertical integration became one of Athletic’s greatest advantages—especially during COVID-19, when supply chains collapsed and outsourced brands struggled to deliver.

Bill and John launched Athletic beer in local liquor stores in Connecticut, starting with Whole Foods. They also convinced a local distributor, Star Distributors, the biggest beer distributor in the state, to stock their beer, which was a huge win. However, the rate of sale had yet to pick up.

Bill realized that no one had been looking at the non-alcoholic set for 50 years. People were just not aware of the availability of their product. With no major marketing budget in the early days, Bill took an unconventional route: he started showing up at local races across Connecticut.

“I’d run the 5K, then be behind a table handing out beers,” he says. Bill estimated that he could interact with 300 to 500 people in a 20 to 30-minute period. That strategy helped build grassroots awareness and generate word-of-mouth momentum.

Distribution was a significant challenge that Bill and John had to overcome. They had to find distributors and stores every few counties, let alone states. To build a national DSD beer network, they would have had to have 270+ distributors, which would have taken multiple years.

Bill came up with a great solution. He launched an e-commerce site, something unheard of in beer then. “People said I was an idiot—no one’s going to buy beer online,” he remembers.

Within months, they were shipping hundreds of orders a day. That direct-to-consumer channel gave them priceless first-party data, another huge differentiator. Bill had opened a national taproom where people could order in minutes and have their orders mailed to them.

Soon, John started making a different, unique, limited-variety beer every week for a category that had never had any variety. People could sample double IPAs, Goses, pumpkin beers, and other innovative, limited-time offerings. Athletic quickly outgrew its first brewery—within just 10 months.

Bill recalls how they raised their first angel round of $3M to build the first non-alcoholic production brewery in the country. At the time, the category did not exist and had no momentum. They went through 120+ meetings, facing 90% rejections in the first 50.

However, once the Athletic concept caught on, Bill and John started getting inbounds. They ended up with an angel team of about 70 people, and that first round helped them build the first brewery. This group also helped carry them through three financing rounds.

Since then, Bill has raised upwards of $225M from private investors rather than traditional venture capital. Over $150M went directly into building four state-of-the-art breweries across the U.S. They also built a national sales force and marketing channels.

Storytelling is everything that Bill Shufelt was able to master. The key is being able to capture the essence of what you are doing in 15 to 20 slides. For a winning deck, take a look at the pitch deck template created by Silicon Valley legend, Peter Thiel (see it here), where the most critical slides are highlighted.

Remember to unlock the pitch deck template that founders worldwide are using to raise millions below.

Unlock the pitch deck template used by founders to raise millions. Just enter your email below.

That commitment to infrastructure didn’t always align with the fast-return mindset of institutional investors and venture capitalists. “We had to find investors who believed in multi-year timelines,” Bill says. “But we were extremely disciplined stewards of their capital.”

Scaling manufacturing came with its challenges. Bill candidly shares how early financial models didn’t fully account for low utilization rates, skyrocketing logistics and shipping costs, and the complexities of shipping beer nationwide.

Further, Bill’s original business model was not built around e-commerce, but it accounted for over 50% of the business in the early days. At one point, they were losing more money for each package they sold than they were making profits.

“There’s such a short window when your brewery runs at full capacity before you build the next one,” Bill says. “I was almost at economies of scale for ingredient costs from the start,” he added. Scaling, manufacturing, and utilization are crucial facets to get right.

Bill remarks that experience has helped when building the third and fourth breweries. They built them in staged processes, having utilization thresholds that trigger to unlock the next build.

So, what does success look like for Athletic Brewing? “It’s when you can open a menu at a bar or restaurant, look at both the alcoholic and non-alcoholic side, and be equally excited about both,” Bill says. “We’ve broken the barrier to that happening in society.”

Today, Athletic isn’t just a non-alcoholic beer brand—it’s a movement. With a fast-growing national presence and a clear mission to make moderation accessible and enjoyable, the company is redefining what it means to drink as an adult.

If Bill could give his younger self one piece of advice, it wouldn’t be about fundraising tactics or product-market fit.

“The passion has to be there,” Bill says. “It’s going to be the hardest thing you ever do, so if you don’t absolutely love the idea, it’s going to be almost impossible to push through the lows.”

He also stresses the importance of investor alignment, transparent governance, and financial discipline—especially when building something as capital-intensive as manufacturing.

But at the end of the day, it comes down to showing up daily, solving problems, and moving forward purposefully.

In a world obsessed with hypergrowth and software scale, Bill Shufelt built something rare—an authentic, values-driven U.S. manufacturing business from the ground up—one Gatorade jug at a time.

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Some entrepreneurs build one company. Others become serial founders. Then there’s Vadim Rogovskiy — a rare breed who has built, scaled, sold, shut down, invested, and started all over again. His journey involved switching industries and switching sides on both sides of the table.

Born in Odessa in Ukraine, Vadim’s journey spans ad tech, computer vision, venture capital, AI, and even micro-private equity. Through it all, he’s kept the same compass: a passion for building, a bias toward action, and a growing sense of perspective — forged through both wins and scars.

Listen to the full podcast episode and review the transcript here.

Vadim’s roots shaped his drive. Raised in a coastal city similar to cosmopolitan San Francisco with a heavy mix of cultures, he came from a humble background. His father is a telecom engineer turned professor at Polytechnic University, and his mother is a piano teacher.

Vadim studied business management at a Ukrainian university, but his real education came when the internet sparked his imagination. While at university, he worked a few jobs at a software company, an online casino, and a software development shop.

Vadim recalls, “Before I was 18, I never thought I’d become a founder. My dad had a stable career, and I thought I’d follow in his footsteps. But I kept getting fired from early jobs — I just didn’t like taking orders.”

Fascinated by the internet, Vadim started building pet projects. What began as a creative outlet turned serious with his first real startup: AdCenter, a social media ad platform that helped local Ukrainian businesses advertise on networks like Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, and VK.com.

Vadim was responsible for creating ads describing the development team’s functionality or documentation. He soon became an expert in designing, auctions, ad placements, dynamic pricing, and more, learning about the industry.

By then, Vadim had already founded a social media marketing agency, Face 2 Face Media. Between running his two companies, Vadim gained extensive experience in social networks and promoting businesses on them.

Vadim negotiated API access from VK.com, built an interface to support local SMBs, and sold the company to VertaMedia, a US-based ad tech firm. Although AdCenter was doing well in the local market, Vadim found it challenging to expand beyond Eastern Europe; an exit seemed like the perfect option.

Before building AdCenter, Vadim had worked for VertaMedia, which later became Adtelligent. He knew the owner well, and they expressed interest in purchasing the company since they wanted to display ads. VertaMedia had pay-per-click and contextual ads but wanted to move to social media.

At 25, with his first exit under his belt, Vadim bought a Porsche Cayenne Sport (“the loudest in Odessa,” he jokes) — and rolled into his next venture.

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Vadim’s next venture, Clickky, started as a side project while AdCenter was still alive. Initially focused on placing ads in Facebook and VK apps, Clickky hit its stride in mobile advertising, connecting iPhone and Android app developers with publishers to drive installs.

Clickky didn’t use any APIs and was basically a marketplace for publishers and advertisers. Vadim started the company with the same team he had worked with at AdCenter. Their initial attempt was to place ads inside social media and gaming applications on Facebook and VK.com.

Although the market seemed to take off initially, Vadim hit the competition roadblock. He was unsure how to scale the company and the market dynamics. However, he recognized the opportunity of placing ads in mobile phone apps.

Clickky offered performance-based installs for app developers—$3 per user, for example—and handled the backend infrastructure from scratch. With no third-party ad servers, Vadim and his team built their own ad tech stack, growing revenue to nearly $4M ARR within three years.

Vadim’s strategy was to grow the team, and although their costs were increasing, the company was also generating revenues and was profitable. It grew quickly, attracting attention from VCs.

Vadim also recalls running the Mobile Beach Conference, the biggest conference on mobile marketing in Eastern Europe. It had 1,000 attendees, with speakers from the top tech companies globally, including Google. The exposure was tremendous.

“Clickky was 100% bootstrapped. I didn’t even know the word ‘bootstrapped’ — I thought that’s just how you built a company,” Vadim explains. In 2015, they raised $2M, with half of it going toward secondaries.

After that, Vadim and his team scaled 3x in two years, hitting $13.5M ARR by 2017. But while inbound M&A interest started appearing, Vadim hesitated. He preferred waiting to hit $20M before selling. “That was my biggest mistake. We should have sold sooner,” he concedes.

By late 2017, the mobile ad market was imploding. Fraudulent bot farms were churning fake installs at scale, causing major advertisers to pull back. Multipliers and budgets collapsed. Even public tech companies were selling for 0.5%, 0.1%, 0.2%, or 0.3% to revenues.

Although Vadim got a promising M&A deal — mostly in stock — it fell apart when the buyer started poaching Clickky’s leadership. Morale dropped. Runway vanished. And Clickky was shut down.

Vadim’s biggest takeaway? “I’ve never met a founder who regretted selling too early. But I’ve met so many who regretted selling too late.” That insight would guide his next chapters.

After Clickky, Vadim shifted to a venture studio model, incubating new ideas while investing in startups. These projects included WannaBiz, Cash Cow Labs, and Geek Ventures.

One was 3DLook, a startup that leverages smartphone cameras and computer vision to scan bodies in 3D. Using just two photos, it gets an accurate 3D model with precise measurements.

Vadim recalls that, at that time, he was fascinated with everything related to augmented reality and computer vision. The concept was inspired by Snap’s acquisition of Looksery in early 2016. Looksery was an AR startup with Ukrainian roots, and Vadim firmly believed in deep Ukrainian technical talent.

What began as a side project eventually pulled Vadim back into the CEO seat. “It was just too exciting. The potential was huge — imagine people scanning themselves to shop online, get fitted uniforms, or track fitness progress.”

3DLook raised an initial $16M round and grew fast–from $100K to $1M ARR–in a year. It then raised a $10M Series A in 2021, finding traction in niche verticals — like helping US police officers get body armor that fit — but mass-market adoption lagged.

Storytelling is everything that Vadim Rogovskiy was able to master. The key is being able to capture the essence of what you are doing in 15 to 20 slides. For a winning deck, take a look at the pitch deck template created by Silicon Valley legend, Peter Thiel (see it here), where the most critical slides are highlighted.

Remember to unlock the pitch deck template that founders worldwide are using to raise millions below.

Unlock the pitch deck template used by founders to raise millions. Just enter your email below.

Eventually, 3DLook had to reach a break-even point and run like a business. Vadim realized it needed a different kind of CEO — one who could scale an operationally intensive company.

He stepped down, replacing himself with Kate, an internal leader who had grown within the company. Today, she runs the business — and is “killing it,” according to Vadim. “It was hard to watch from the sidelines, but also a proud moment. She’s doing some things better than I did.”

Vadim always believed being a VC would be the dream job: smart people, exciting industries, trends, and access to everything. He joined an early-stage fund and invested in 53 startups there. But he quickly found it unfulfilling.

“We weren’t creating real value. Some founders were coachable, but many just wanted the check. I missed building.” Vadim realized he was still a founder at heart — not an observer. So, he moved on, taking on two ventures simultaneously–both deeply rooted in his founder identity.

Reflecting on his VC stint, Vadim came across several healthy, early-stage startups that were not investable since they raised funding but could not grow fast enough so other people could invest in them. In a few years, they would stagnate because they had minimal liquidity options.

These companies were just too small, making $1M to $2M ARR, which is hard to sell to strategic or financial investors. That’s when Vadim thought of creating a micro PE fund to purchase these companies and let the founders exit. The objective was to ensure that investors got some returns.

Vadim connected with his partner, who has experience in VC and corporate finance. Together, they would grow the small companies and develop their go-to-market infrastructure before selling them to enterprises. The duo considered more than 100 companies with an ARR of $1M to $5M.

From Vadim’s perspective, their strategy was like a combination of entrepreneurship and investment. He calls it entrepreneurship through acquisition.

Vadim’s fourth startup, EVE, aims to replace human executive assistants with AI. Unlike basic scheduling tools, EVE learns your preferences, understands context, and handles 80% of a VA’s tasks — from scheduling to prioritizing messages. It can even improve with every conversation.

“At present, you can get a remote executive assistant from an offshore country for $3K a month. We want to give you an assistant for 10% of the cost of a human. Not just a calendar tool — a real assistant that gets better with time.”

EVE is in private beta now–autopilot schedule management–starting with individuals before expanding to teams. The long-term vision? Autopilot for your professional life—so you can focus on high-impact decisions while AI handles the rest.

AI can filter 80% of noise, 80% of less important threads, conversations, etc., thus extending human capabilities.

Through each chapter — from Odessa to AI, from mobile ads to body scanning, from VC to acquisition — Vadim Rogovskiy’s story is one of evolution. But the core has never changed. He’s a builder. A zero-to-one guy. Someone who prefers creating value over chasing prestige.

“The founder mindset — that’s what I’ll keep for life. And now, I’ve found my rhythm: run one company, and always have something else on the side to zoom out, learn, and reset.”

In a world of hype cycles, boom-and-bust valuations, and exit FOMO, Vadim’s story is a rare, honest reminder: startup life isn’t just about winning. It’s about learning, letting go, and building again.

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The post This 4x Founder-Investor Built & Exited Companies And Is Now Creating An AI Executive Assistant To Extend Human Capabilities first appeared on Alejandro Cremades.

The post This 4x Founder-Investor Built & Exited Companies And Is Now Creating An AI Executive Assistant To Extend Human Capabilities appeared first on Alejandro Cremades.