Foreign Founders

Learn more about Dileepan Siva and his executive coaching service

Dileepan Siva is a two times founder who has bootstrapped his company to profitability and north of $1B of GMV, prior to that experience he’s scaled several early to mid stage companies, and helped raise over $100M in venture capital.

Dileepan shares a lot in this episode:

• His first experience of feeling underrated in school
• Being accused of being a foreign spy
• Moving from politics to business, and the advantages that it’s given Dileepan
• Two narratives that immigrants tell themselves that may be detrimental long term
• Why people should be more comfortable asking for help

As a serial entrepreneur turned executive coach, Dileepan believes in the power of business as a tool for both personal and social transformation. Over the course of a 20 year professional career, he learned that your own strengths and weaknesses are mirrored in the organization you build. And how you relate to your business is often how you relate to other parts of your life. This experience led Dileepan down the same path advising and coaching top tier founders and leaders in their own business–and personal–transformation journeys. Dileepan has built, scaled and sold three high-growth venture-backed startups and also served as a senior commerce executive at Twitter and eBay. Before working in the technology sector, he advised leaders at global Fortune 50 companies including PepsiCo and Unilever as well as public and non-profit institutions including the United Nations, US Department of State and the Gates Foundation. He brings this breadth of experience across sectors and in career transition to his coaching practice. Blending executive coaching with depth psychology and spiritual traditions, Dileepan leverages a range of modalities in his work. He is trained as a coach through the Co-Active Training Institute (CTI), Conscious Leadership Group and Neuro-Linguistic Programming (NLP) Marin. Dileepan draws on his Buddhist meditation and mindfulness experience. He received his MBA from Harvard Business School and BA from the University of California at Berkeley.

Work with Dileepan Siva today!

Enjoy the episode!

Twitter: https://twitter.com/dileepansiva

LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/dileepansiva/

If you love this episode, please share and review the podcast! It will help more immigrant and international founders find these content. Please do not hesitate to reach out to [email protected] for any inquiries and questions.

Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Kicking off season 4 of Foreign Founders with big guests! Our first episode is with Zohar Hod.

Zohar Hod is a serial entrepreneur in the fintech industry with 5 startup involvements and two exits under his belt. His latest venture is in the digital marketing space is called One Creation and is a personal passion project for him. As CEO and Co-Founder of One Creation Corporation, Zohar leads a team working to provide solutions to help brands progressively gather and digitize customer preference data through customizable consumer experiences. Helping brands personalize experiences in an cookie-less, ethical and transparent way. Prior to this, Zohar held leadership roles as Global Head of Technology and Data Sales at Intercontinental Exchange (ICE) Data Services, Head of Sales and Support at SuperDerivative, and led IBM’s Trading Solutions Group.

In this episode, I ask Zohar about the lessons of every early stage founders because he’s experienced them all… Failure, successes, exits, co-founder breakups, fundraising and more.

There’s a lot of important details in the episode, but some highlights include:

• How he recommends early stage founders to find the right investors
• Raising from ventures vs. not investing
• His multiple exits - including having an exit that started from having an argument with his co-founders
• One Creation starting from a deeply personal problem that he experienced when his family member was in the hospital

Enjoy the episode!

Do you want to get personalized customer information with their consent? Work with One Creation: https://www.one-creation.com/

X: https://twitter.com/onecreationone

LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/onecreationcorporation/

If you love this episode, please share and review the podcast! It will help more immigrant and international founders find these content. Please do not hesitate to reach out to [email protected] for any inquiries and questions.

Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Bhuva Shakti (she/her) is the Chief Sustainable Innovation Officer at Wallet Max, a FinTech startup revolutionizing fundraising for eco-conscious businesses globally, and the Chief Ethics and Culture Officer at Women in AI. She is the board director and fractional C-Suite advisor for social impact corporations, and a keynote speaker passionate about economic inclusion and climate-friendly partnerships. With an MBA from Columbia University in New York and as a senior executive director on Wall Street, Bhuva has managed diverse financial portfolios and launched several digital transformation products across investment banking, capital markets, risk governance, credit ratings, regulatory compliance, payments, and mergers acquisitions.

In this conversation, we cover so many topics about how she thinks about her work and the world around her, including:

• Her curiosity and thirst for knowledge differentiated her early on
• Bhuva’s story of arriving in New York City with $80
• Accelerating her mission of inclusion and diversity through Bhuva’s Impact Global
• How founders can think about ethics in AI as they build their company

and so much more.

Bhuva's Impact Global (BIG) is a premium board advisory and fractional services business that serves as an extended team for public and private company CEOs, C-Suite, and the board of directors. Backed by three decades of Wall Street, non-profit, and startup leadership experience, Bhuva's Impact Global drives strategic oversight and governance in the areas of corporate risk management, ethical product engineering, and sustainability.

Enjoy the episode!

Bhuva's Impact Global (BIG): https://www.bhuvas-impact.global/

LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/bhuvashakti/

If you love this episode, please share and review the podcast! It will help more immigrant and international founders find these content. Please do not hesitate to reach out to [email protected] for any inquiries and questions.

Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

This episode is sponsored by Sessions. I created an online event in 7 minutes and you can too - get 20% off.

Alex Koshykov is a Ukrainian entrepreneur who is passionate about building startups. He is the co-founder and CEO of BeKey, a software and hardware development company. His main expertise is in health tech and wellness, and when he’s not working on his company, Alex travels the world interviewing digital health founders on his YouTube channel and recently started a series of events in NYC called Health2Tech.

We discuss:

• His experience as an exchange student in upstate NY
• Traveling to 15 countries in 2 years, and his favorite stories of founders he’s met
• A platform his company launched right after the invasion of Ukraine called Doctors4UA
• What he found to be broken in the US healthcare system

Enjoy the episode!

Work with BeKey: https://bekey.io/

X: https://twitter.com/BeKey_Inc

LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/bekeyinc/

If you love this episode, please share and review the podcast! It will help more immigrant and international founders find these content. Please do not hesitate to reach out to [email protected] for any inquiries and questions.

Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

This episode is sponsored by Sessions. I created an online event in 7 minutes and you can too - get 20% off.

Throughout his ventures, Adam Silverman developed the belief that humans are currently doing robot work. There is no reason humans should be spending their time doing tasks that can be automated. To address this, Adam co-founded AgentOps.ai to develop reliable, autonomous AI agents that complete tedious tasks for humans.

We cover:

• Differences of building a company in Canada 🇨🇦 and United States 🇺🇸
• Future of autonomous agents
• Limitations of being on a B-1 Visa

and much more!

AgentOps - Build virtual employees with observability, evals, and replay analytics. No more black boxes and prompt guessing.

Book a Free Agent Consultation: https://calendly.com/itsada/consultation?back=1&month=2024-03

AgentOps: https://www.agentops.ai/

Twitter: https://twitter.com/AgentOpsAI

LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/aistaff/

Enjoy the episode!

If you love this episode, please share and review the podcast! It will help more immigrant and international founders find these content. Please do not hesitate to reach out to [email protected] for any inquiries and questions.

Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

This episode is sponsored by Sessions. Run all your online meetings and get 20% off.

Andres Glusman is a tech and business veteran. He saw and shaped the early internet with one of the earliest digital marketing agencies. Then spent 15 years with Meetup.com, and saw the product and company grow to its ultimate exit to WeWork.

He’s currently the co-founder and CEO of DoWhatWorks. DoWhatWorks is a startup helping growth, marketing, and product teams accelerate their conversions rates. Their product tracks thousands of growth experiments from leading companies and arms you with the winners.

Learn more about how DoWhatWorks can help drive lift or request a demo here.

We cover so much!

• His early experience with the commercial web in the mid-1990s
• The early marketing campaigns in the dot-com era and Andres’ primitive performance marketing stack (this was really cool to hear!)
• Growing Meetup.com from the early days to their exit to WeWork
• His most counter-intuitive growth experiments at Meetup.com
• Their proprietary technology to see all the success and failures of growth experiments on the web with DoWhatWorks

and more!

Enjoy the episode!

Accelerate Your Learnings with DoWhatWorks

LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/glusman/

If you love this episode, please share and review the podcast! It will help more immigrant and international founders find these content. Please do not hesitate to reach out to [email protected] for any inquiries and questions.

In New York on Monday, March 25? Join Foreign Founders, Unshackled VC, and Antler VC for our meetup!

Read Foreign Founders on Substack

Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Head over to Sessions.us and sign up for a 14-day free no strings attached free trial

Tatyana Isa is a General Partner at KITSF (San Francisco). “We invest in people.”

She is an individual with extraordinary ability according to the United States Department of Homeland and Security.

Tatyana is an entrepreneur with over 13 years, the founder of TRINITY Education Group (Ukraine), KITSF (San Francisco), UATEG (San Francisco). She is residing in San Francisco.

She has a diverse experience in education, sales, marketing, fundraising, building startups, and talent acquisition. She conducted over 10k job interviews and hired over 500 employees for her company as a founder.

In San Francisco Tatyana seamlessly bridges the gap between talent and opportunity, with a specialized focus on empowering Machine Learning engineers and Data Scientists to thrive in the competitive San Francisco Bay Area job market.

Enjoy the episode!

Are you talented? Work with KitSF: https://kitsf.com/

LinkedIn: www.linkedin.com/in/tanyasf

If you love this episode, please share and review the podcast! It will help more immigrant and international founders find these content. Please do not hesitate to reach out to [email protected] for any inquiries and questions.

Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Lisa Wehden, the CEO & Co-Founder of Plymouth. Plymouth's mission is to accelerate innovation through faster and more transparent immigration services. Plymouth has helped hundreds of individuals across artificial intelligence, climate technology and healthcare.

Previously, Lisa worked as an investor at Bloomberg Beta, a VC firm with $375M AUM. At Bloomberg Beta, Lisa created an evening course on ethics, public policy, and technological change with Stanford University. Her work on technology and ethics has been featured in TechCrunch. Before moving to San Francisco, Lisa launched Entrepreneur First’s Berlin office and studied at the University of Oxford, where she was elected President of the Oxford Union.

What we covered:

• How O1 visas are underutilized
• What makes a good startup team?
• Plymouth as a deeply personal journey
• The difference between the London, Berlin and San Francisco startup ecosystem

Enjoy the episode!

Want to know your options to the H-1B? Lisa and her team can help you! https://www.plymouthstreet.com/

X: https://twitter.com/plymouthstreet

LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/plymouth-street/about/

If you love this episode, please share and review the podcast! It will help more immigrant and international founders find these content. Please do not hesitate to reach out to [email protected] for any inquiries and questions.

Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

For listeners who has studied a non-native language, like English, for a long time but feel that they have to repeat themselves, this episode is for you! Anada Lakra is the CEO and Co-Founder of BoldVoice, AI-powered app that helps non-native English speakers improve their pronunciation and confidence in English. Their app helps non-native English speakers with videos from Hollywood accent coaches and instant AI feedback. Inspired by her experiences in both personal and professional experiences, Anada noticed that there’s a gap between learning the language on paper and speaking confidently. She’s not alone here, as there are more than 1.6 billion non-native English speakers in the world and growing!

BoldVoice is backed by Y Combinator, BoldVoice has been recognized as a top EdTech company by Forbes, and is in the top 100 Education apps on the Apple App Store with over a million global downloads. Before BoldVoice, Anada was a product leader at McKinsey, Peloton, and other high-growth companies. She graduated from Yale University and Harvard Business School, and was named a Forbes 30 Under 30 in Education.

In this episode, you’ll hear:

• How Anada created her V1 of BoldVoice by shipping quickly
• Her advice for B2C founders
• Studies on how accents have hurt people’s careers in the long run
• What she’s optimistic about

Enjoy the episode!

BoldVoice: https://www.boldvoice.com/

iOS app: https://apps.apple.com/us/app/boldvoice-pronunciation-app/id1567841142

Android app: https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.wellocution.androidapp

Twitter: https://twitter.com/boldvoiceapp

Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/boldvoiceapp/

If you love this episode, please share and review the podcast! It will help more immigrant and international founders find these content. Please do not hesitate to reach out to [email protected] for any inquiries and questions.

Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Total consumer debt balances are rising quickly, and in 2023 it was a total of $17.06 trillion per the Federal Reserve Bank of New York. Out of various types of consumer debt, credit cards increased by 13.2% year over year according to Experian. And credit card debt is one of the most expensive kind of debt!

With the new year brings a moment to reflect and for many it’s a moment to change our behaviors. So I thought this would be an amazing time to bring onto the show, a company who is tackling the problem of debt. Ela Bader is the co-founder and CEO of Debt Zero, an AI-powered debt relief solution for creditors.

Ela has 13 years of experience in technology, and 7 years as a startup founder and CEO. Prior to founding DebtZero, she was the founder of another startup AirWander and was a product manage at finance companies on mobile and web applications.

I’m excited to have Ela on the show to talk about consumer debt and DebtZero.

In this episode, you’ll hear Ela talk about:

• The increasing cost of debt for US consumers
• Importance of advisors, and how she found her advisor
• Taking months to find her co-founder

Enjoy the episode!

Check out DebtZero: https://www.debtzero.ai/

LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/debtzero/

If you love this episode, please share and review the podcast! It will help more immigrant and international founders find these content. Please do not hesitate to reach out to [email protected] for any inquiries and questions.

Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.