Founders with Pek

Shar Darafsheh is the Co-Founder of Bill Flow, a billing page company that helps SaaS businesses architect and implement self-service billings.

He started his journey in 2003 when he first moved to the United States. As a young man, he fell in love with programming and had a concept of building and monetizing softwares. In 2005, Shar sparked an interest in online payments, and in 2017, he saw the opportunity to create a subscription billing platform.

In September of 2019, Shar finally made his dreams come true and launched Bill Flow. Today, his company upscales and has hit over $1.5 million worth of transactions.

Stephanie Postles is the CEO of mission.org, a podcasting service that creates podcast shows from the top technology marketing to business podcasts. Her podcasting business tops 20 in the podcast ranking chart, has 4 million downloads annually, producing 600 episodes, and won two of Apple's Best of the Year Podcasts.

Her story started in 2011 when she graduated fresh out of college and started working in Fannie Mae writing housing reports as an intern. Stephanie had some interests working with side hustles, such as writing books to create funny apps.

She worked in google, found inspiration, and sparked a curious bone. In 2017, Stephanie started writing stories she wanted to know and crafted the series called "The Story", where she talked about famous billionaires and how they found their success. She then sold her series to Salesforce, and that jumpstarted her career.

Today, Stephanie has a successful podcast business. She gets to interview leading executives, CEOs, world leaders, and influencers- a network of C-suite and executive-focused podcasts.

Kai Tse is the Managing partner at Structural Capital, an investment firm providing growth capital to finance tech companies in technology-enabled markets. He has over 20 years of experience as an entrepreneur in financial lending and capital investments.

Mr. Kai always was a numbers person. In 1995, he graduated with B.S. Account from the University of Illinois. In 1996, he was granted the CPA certification and a CFA charter holder four years later. Kai Tse's educational journey does not stop there. In 2006, he graduated from U.C. Berkeley and proudly holds the title of M.B.A.

In addition to his achievements, Kai Tse is the Managing Director at TriplePoint Capital- a lead investor in the financing growth breakout of YouTube, Facebook, Riot Games, to name a few.

Deji Jimoh is a software development specialist, the CTO, and co-founder of WealthBlock AI- a comprehensive end-to-end capital raising platform that targets three demographics of capital raisers: traditional broker, Venture Captial, and PE firms, and the crowdfunding space.

Deji was born in Nigeria and migrated to Boston, Massachusetts when he was about one year old up until high school. He moved to St. Louis, Missouri and studied at the Washington University, and graduated with a degree in Computer Science and Engineering.

In 2016, Deji was a finalist of ITA Citylight’s “Technologist of the Year” award, and today, he has developed 47 independent platforms in the SaaS-B2B market.

In this episode, we talked about:

⦁ About WealthBlock AI

⦁ Start-up of WealthBlock AI

⦁ What is blockchain technology?

⦁ Did blockchain enable platform vs. digitalizing private capital markets?

⦁ Great funding advice to kick-start a business

⦁ The difficulties when starting up a business

⦁ Business during COVID

⦁ Our story of trial and error

⦁ Avail 50% off WealthBlock AI

Sanjay Goel is the definition of progressive tech innovation in the virtual credit card industry. He is the founder and CEO of NachoNacho- a virtual credit card company and marketplace where users can connect, do B2B transactions, sell SaaS products, and create one virtual VISA credit card per subscription.

Before he came up with his business model, his story began when he was thinking of new ways of acquiring new customers in his previous work.

Since he worked in a seller subscription company, he realized there was a flaw in the industry. He thought of a solution- a marketplace where he could plug in his product and get access to millions of buying customers off that platform- a single destination for businesses to manage and buy SaaS products. Since there was no platform for that, he decided to build one.

Meet Sashee Chandran, a woman empowering others in the industry.

Sashee is the founder and CEO at tea drops. Tea drops is an innovative tea company based in California that creates organic and bagless teas. Sashee's mother was Chinese and her father was Sri Lankan. Before founding tea drops, Sashee worked in Silicon Valley leading digital marketing and market research campaigns for fortune 100 brands.

Highlights from the episode;

Sashee stresses that the main uniqueness about tea drops is in the form factor. She symbolizes her tea drops to a bath bomb in the manner which they dissolve in hot water.

Sashee tells how she was fused to loving Chinese and Sri Lankan dishes because of her parents. She quotes it to have been really exciting. (Delicious she whispers)

Sashee says that she has a utility patent for the process of how tea drops are made. she says that it was a long process.

Pek asks Sashee to explain when she decided to bootstrap it, she starts off by explaining that a part of it was like she was deciding to do an MBA at that time and the money she would have she'd shift it to email startup money.

Asked on how a grant from Tory Burch came about, Sashee explains how they made top 50 and top 10 in the fellow program. It provided her with the opportunity to pitch in front of Tory Birch and her panel.

On how she got Michelle Obama and Chris's Tiegen rave about her tea, she just says that it's important to send your products everywhere so that you can create your own luck and she narrates how after sending her product she received a letter months later in her office with a seal from the white house.

As the episode draws to its conclusion, Pek asks Sashee if there's anything she could have done differently. Sashee says that not having a place to turn to like a founder community was really lonely.

Nattu Adnan is a Co-Founder and the CTO of Lottie Files. He is a Product Designer and Full-stack developer from the Maldives.

His story of success began when he left the Maldives and moved to Malaysia to support his wife. Nattu was not expecting to find a job but ended up diving into the start-up industry. According to him, the Malaysian culture and people helped a lot because everyone was open to sharing ideas.

Today, Nattu has about 20 years of experience in building Web applications. His approach involves using a user-centered design process to turn complex problems into understandable and good-looking products.

Pek Pongpaet, your host, spoke with Joshua Tsui, the co-founder and CEO of Robomodo, in this episode. Josh's career began in 1993 at Midway Games, where he assisted in the development of WWF WrestleMania The Arcade Game. Before leaving Midway in 1999, he also worked on Mortal Kombat. He and a few colleagues formed Studio Gigante, which worked on Microsoft Game Studios' Tao Feng: Fist of the Lotus and THQ's WWE WrestleMania 21. Josh's next move was to EA Chicago in 2005, where he worked on the Fight Night series. When EA Chicago closed in 2007, Josh and his colleagues decided it was time to start a new studio: Robomodo, which has since released three games for Activision: Tony Hawk Ride, Tony Hawk Shred, and Tony Hawk's Pro Skater HD.

Pek talks to Josh about his gaming career, how he got started, and what it's like to run a company. They also talk about the documentary Insert Coin, which tells the story of Midway Studios from behind the scenes.

Christine is the CEO and co-founder of Sounding Board- a female-founded, VC back start-up company innovating in leadership coaching in the $40+ billion leadership and training industry.

Before she started her business, Christine was the Senior Vice President of Developer Relations at Tapjoy. She led the growth of over $100 million in revenue in less than three years. She has also advised several venture-backed start-ups such as: Flyby Media, Immersv & Comprendi.

In addition to her achievements, Christine led an e-commerce partnership and strategy at YouTube, holds an MBA in Operations and Marketing from Wharton and BA in Business Administration from UC Berkeley.

Today, she envisions a world with the most agile and impactful leaders. Her goal is to deliver a highly personalized model of leadership coaching through her company, Sounding Board.