This week, Melissa catches a wave with Kevin Tighe II, CEO of Beach.ly, by learning about his journey of building a lifestyle subscription e-commerce company. With his start at a Hawaiian-based accelerator program to raising the right type of capital, Kevin shares what’s worked, why product market fit matters, and the importance of focusing on building a great business vs. fundraising.     

This week we're pleased to have Ben Camp, the CEO of Recovery.com, join Melissa to share his story on why he started a service to make it easier to find addiction and mental health treatment services. He shares what it has taken to grow Recovery.com, the challenges of building a sales team, and why company culture is essential to Recovery.com's success.

We are fortunate to have Marc Verissimo as our chairman. With over 40 years of banking experience and 24 years at Silicon Valley Bank, Marc has held several senior roles, including SVB's Chief Risk Officer. In this special podcast, Marc shares a unique viewpoint on what's happening in banking and what contributed to SVBs downfall. He provides insights into SVB's history and how it's intertwined with the economy, venture capital, and the overall technology startup economy.

Host Melissa Widner, CEO of Lighter Capital, is joined by Omer Usanmaz, the CEO and co-founder of Qooper.io, software that empowers organizations to run impactful mentoring, learning, and inclusion programs, to share his story of why he started Qooper.io, and what he has learned along the way. Omer's path to entrepreneurial freedom has taken many turns, but each turn gave him an important lesson that helped push Qooper.io to success.

Host Melissa Widner, CEO of Lighter Capital, is joined by Jodie Baker, the founder of Xakia Technologies, a technology that is simplifying legal matter management, to discuss Jodie's journey from lawyer to technology entrepreneur and why she started Xakia Technologies. Jodie shares her insights on what she learned along the way and why being an entrepreneur has been such a rewarding experience.

Host Melissa Widner, CEO of Lighter Capital, is joined by Tiger Safarov from ZenSupplies, a technology platform that improves day-to-day dental practice operations, to tell his inspiring story of why he started ZenSupplies, what he learned from starting a business from scratch, raising capital and choosing non-dilutive funding.

Host Melissa Widner, CEO of Lighter Capital, is joined by Rebekah Johnson from Numeracle, the identity management solution, to tell her story of how she grew her startup using a combination of her personal savings and non-dilutive funding.

Host Melissa Widner, CEO of Lighter Capital, is joined by Spencer Lee from Telin, a unique telecom company, to tell his story of how he grew his startup using non-dilutive funding.

Introducing Bootstrapped : The Lighter Side. Lighter Capital CEO Melissa Widner gets insights from various CEOs and their entrepreneurial journies with growing their companies without selling equity or raising capital through traditional methods.