Operate Podcast

Andy Fathollahi joined me on the show and immediately delved into the reality of being a founder and longtime entrepreneur. He’s a serial one and done it here in Orange County. He founded

Prior to Kanvas he was founder and CEO of Incipio Group, which he started and grew here super successfully, until selling a majority of it to private equity in 2016.

Andy was a great guest and shared a lot about the challenges of being an entrepreneur and the different perspectives he's had as time has gone on in his journey.  I loved his views on himself and what he'd advise others, based on his 25 year old self, 35 year old self and 45 year old self.  Similarly we both have had a hard time taking off time in between adventures!

Tom Baine joined me on the show to talk about the homebuilding industry, which he's been in for 30 years in Southern California.  That’s a lot of change he's seen in both our area and his industry!  I looked up before the show the population change over those 30 years here in Orange County - 2.4MM in 1990 vs. 3.2MM in 2020 (a nearly 33% increase in people here)

Tom is currently the division president of Southern California for Landsea Homes, where he oversees planning, development and implementation of their communities here. He previously spent a considerable amount of his 30 years in the industry at Taylor Morrison Homes throughout Orange County and other parts of the region. Orange County has been a trendsetter and leader in this industry for decades, and there is no slowing expected in that leadership. Tom is also locally educated, graduating from both UCI and Pepperdine.

Landsea came to Newport Beach in 2018 and sold out Lido Villas in Newport Beach, which was one of the last remaining coastal communities in the area.  They are just about to launch their High Performance Home Program in some other new communities in the area. 

We talked a bit on the show about how technology and other innovations have come into the homebuilding industry, as well as the changes in what people want to be able to both live and afford to own property in Orange County.  I believe there will be big innovations in homebuilding here in the next decade.

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Sue Parks became the President and CEO of Orange County United Way in 2017, after a 15 year history of volunteering and working with the organization, including being the Chair of its Board.  Before she signed on as CEO of United Way, she was an entrepreneur and business executive.  She co-founded and was CEO of a corporate wellness company, iCount Wellness.  She also held senior roles in innovative companies like Kinkos, Gateway and USWest.  Both Kinkos and Gateway had storied founders, I’d even call “characters”, so I’m sure she has great stories! 

She has not just made impact at United Way here in Orange County.  She’s touched many other important organizations in our community – she’s on the Executive Leadership Council of UCI Diabetes Center; she is a past chair and co-chair of Women’s Wellness Day for the Susan Samueli Center for Integrative Medicine at UCI; former board President of Susan G. Komen Orange County Affiliate; former board member of Girl Scouts of Orange County, and the Paul Merage School at UCI.

Sue has been named an OC Business Journal Businesswoman of the year award winner as well as a Pioneer by the National Association of Women in Business Organization (NAWBO). I’m so grateful that she joined me on Accelerate OC, and shared some amazing stories of the impact that they have in the lives of nearly 1 in 4 Orange Countians every year.

Also listen to her story of walking 5 miles in each of OC's 34 cities!

I was super excited to have Reynolds Bish on Accelerate OC. He’s had an illustrious career in the technology industry, mainly here in Southern California, and we had a lot to discuss. He is currently the CEO and a Member of the Board of Directors of Kofax, one of the largest software companies in Orange County, and he also has employees in 35 countries and over 25,000 customers.  He’s on his second tour of duty with Kofax, and we talked about that and the fun world of private equity.  In an incredibly unique story, he shared how Kofax was sold 3 times in less than 3 years - what an experience!

Reynolds is super involved in our community outside of his company. He’s on the board of OCTANe, where we serve together, and he’s also on the board of Trustees at The Pegasus School in Huntington Beach, one of my kids’ rival schools. Ha.  He’s is on and has been on other company boards as well, both public and private companies.  And before Kofax he co-founded and was CEO of Captiva Software in San Diego, and successfully grew and ran it for many years. It was a NASDAQ listed company and was eventually acquired by EMC Corporation.

He’s been an E&Y Entrepreneur of the year and a corporate director of the year. And like me, he’s a Big 10 guy (Penn State) for his university alma mater.

Another one of the things I was excited to talk with Reynolds about is the pace of change he’s seeing now vs. earlier in his career in the software industry.

Charles Antis possesses energy and passion like few people I've ever met. It just makes me want to hang out with him more. We spoke about his leadership and life philosophies, his company and its mission and purpose, and the amazing other work he’s doing in Orange County.

He is the founder and CEO of Antis Roofing and Waterproofing, a company he founded here in Orange County over 30 years ago.  Charles describes them as "a shepherd in the community, purposed by helping healthy families to have safe, dry homes." He has firmly embraced and lives by the principle of doing well by doing good. We talked a lot about that in our conversation.

Charles is super involved in our community outside of his company. He’s on the board of Ronald McDonald House, Habitat for Humanity, an advisor to OneOC, and the National Roofing Contractors Association (NRCA) For the last 10 years Antis has donated every roof installation of every home built by Habitat here in the county.

What I’ve seen from Charles as well in the innovator’s mindset. He’s constantly learning, trying and thinking about what more he can do or impact. It’s inspiring. He’s taken what many might consider a boring business and elevated it to the top of its game nationally, and been recognized for it.  He says what he thinks and shares what he believes.

One of the things that struck me when we met at his office was how cool it was.  I felt like I might be in a tech startup.  We spoke about why he did that – for most of my crowd you’d never expect that from an old school business like roofing.

He’s also embraced social media to share his impact with the community, we discussed the open, authentic life and sharing it with others.

Ike Kavas joined me on Accelerate OC to share his story, leadership philosophy and current company, Ephesoft, where he is the founder and CEO.  It's a company he founded here in Orange County nearly 10 years ago.  They have built the first document capture platform for the cloud and serve global customers in areas of automated data entry, compliance and document processing.  

Before Ephesoft he was a senior technical architect and professional services manager at Kofax, a longtime technology company based here as well.  Ike is a technologist through and through and has committed to becoming a great entrepreneur, CEO and people leader as well, which I greatly admire about him.

To me Ike epitomizes the modern entrepreneur and leader – he has great passion and deeply cares for all the constituents around a company – customers, employees, investors and his broader community.  We discussed that during our conversation. 

Ike has won awards like the High Tech Innovation Awards, a “Best Place to Work” for 2019, Top Workplace for 2018 and he was an EY Entrepreneur of the Year Finalist in 2019.  Ephesoft was even in the INC 500 fastest growing companies a few years ago.

He’s a super busy guy, traveling the world for his company, so I felt fortunate to have him on Accelerate OC to share his story.

Peter Polydor is the founder of Eureka Building and Eureka Hub, a 3-acre event, office and creative campus that many of our community has enjoyed and visited in the last 6 years since it opened.  Peter’s vision was to support the startup community here with it, and it has. Eurekafest is an annual celebration of entrepreneurship that is one of the few can’t miss events in Orange County.

Peter joined me for our first remote conversation on Accelerate OC, in front of an audience of several dozen of our friends - this one at the OC4 Venture Studio in Costa Mesa.

Peter is also the President of Ergo Holdings, an investment group focused on Property, Technology, Workspaces and Diversified Investments in the US and Canada.  Peter is an honorary professor, a venture capitalist and real estate investor.  And he started out at one of the few local venture funds based in Orange County, Sail Venture Partners, where he quickly rose through the ranks in his few years there.

He’s been a fast-mover for a long time, winning awards like Power 30 under 30 and the Greek 40 under 40. He’s built companies and a successful investment firm.  He has strong ties and experience here in Orange County, and also a perspective we can learn from as he's spent considerable time in an innovative global city, Toronto.  We talked about those similarities and differences in our conversation as well.  

Neel Grover is currently the founder and CEO of Indi, a software as a service video platform to help brands engage their customers and enable "individual commerce" (where the name Indi comes from).  He shared more about Indi and how the opportunity came to him in our conversation.  Before Indi he was CEO for a couple well-known e-commerce companies, Bluefly and Buy.com, and he’s been a board member for several other companies and advisor to both companies and private equity firms. 

Neel started his career as an attorney, and we talked about his transition from elite firm, Brobeck, to the tech startup world, and he always felt like he'd go into the business world.

Neel has also been in Orange County for awhile, and graduated from UC Irvine, where he played on the tennis team. He's still an elite level competitive tennis player.  Neel is a great example of a world-class leader raised here in our back yard.

It was a lot of fun to welcome Lori Torres to Accelerate OC to share her amazing journey with Parcel Pending, a company she founded in 2013.  She was the founding CEO and remains in the role today, and I could hardly imagine anyone else ever replacing her!

Lori grew the company to over 150 people and thousands of customers around North America. She sold the company in January of this year to Neopost, a global company based in Paris.  Prior to Parcel Pending she was an executive at The Irvine Company, where she oversaw a huge apartment portfolio.  Lori had a very successful career in commercial real estate before becoming an entrepreneur.

Lori also has a great story in that she raised a significant amount of her early investment from a group of local investors, particularly folks in Tech Coast Angels here.  They were greatly rewarded when she sold the company!  Lori and Parcel Pending are a great example of a local entrepreneur and local investors working together to build a great company and achieve a great outcome.  And hopefully they’re now reinvesting here in Orange County in the next generation of entrepreneurs. 

Lori learned a ton through this process, as she’s shared with me, and she also had a lot of help along the way, which she talked about during our conversation.  She’s also continued to grow Parcel Pending post-acquisition, so we talked a bit about life inside a bigger company after an acquisition.

She’s a great example of a world-class leader here in our community, accelerating things in her industry, her business and in Orange County.