Startup HandMeDowns

Today Philip Kasumu had the pleasure of speaking with Raz who's vision is fueled by wanting to leave a better environment for his children and the next generation, Rich ‘Raz’ Razgaitis is tackling a problem most people don’t even know they have: toxic drinking water.

As Co-Founder & CEO of FloWater, which is the world’s most advanced water refill station and member of the Inc. 500 list, Raz is combining this vision with his 20+ years of leadership & tech experience to deliver a product that keeps 5.5 plastic water bottles from reaching our landfills and oceans every second (230+ million to date).

startuphandmedowns.co 

Today's interview was with Amir Salihefendić the CEO and Founder of Doist and Twist. Amir has viewed life a little differently ever since his family fled war-torn Bosnia for Denmark. He began to see the world becoming borderless and that worldview has influenced his mission to shape the future of work as Founder and CEO of Doist, a fully distributed, bootstrapped company that creates productivity tools used by over 25 million people globally.

Amir has always believed that the future of work is remote way before covid 19 and that innovation doesn’t only happen in offices. From day one, when Amir began working on his first productivity app (Todoist) from his dorm room, the Doist team has been fully distributed. It’s now made up of over 70 employees across 30 countries around the world, building tools like Todoist and Twist -  an anti-Slack, asynchronous communication tool made for the modern workplace. Having bootstrapped Doist to profitability from the beginning, Amir has zero plans of ever seeking outside investment or exiting the company.

In this episode, Philip spoke with Girish the co-founder & CEO at Shopalyst. Prior to Shopalyst, he was a Vice President at Infosys where he was responsible for their Retail Industry Solutions Business.

An author of four patents that he helped commercialize, he is passionate about how data and technology are shaping our world. Besides adoption by global customers, his work is featured in MIT Tech Review, Businessweek, and Fast Company, among others.

Girish is a Mechanical Engineer from UVCE Bangalore, and a management graduate from the Indian Institute of Management, Bangalore (IIM-B).

We talk all things; product, early upbringing and more.

Startuphandmedowns.co

Peter Yared is the founder and CEO of InCountry, a regulatory technology company that is providing data residency-as-a-service worldwide. Peter is also a 7x founder with more than $500M in exits, A Silicon Valley veteran, Peter founded six enterprise software companies that were acquired by Sun, Oracle, Citrix, VMware and more. Previously, Peter was the CTO/CIO of CBS Interactive, where he was responsible for bringing CBS into the cloud with the end-to-end replatform of its Comscore #7 group of Internet properties. At Sun, Peter was the CTO of the Application Server Division and the CTO of the Liberty federated identity consortium that designed SAML 2.

Site: Startuphandmedowns.co

In this episode, Philip speaks with Kal Vepuri, serial investor and founder and CEO of Hero, the IoT-connected device that automatically dispenses medication when you need it, was inspired to build his company after his mother, who's an M.D., admitted herself to the hospital for quadruple bypass surgery.

The surgery was successful, but it was what came next for his mother that opened her son's eyes to the difficulties millions of Americans face every day. Dr. Vepuri, herself a nationally renowned physician, underwent two readmissions that could have been prevented if she managed her medication as prescribed. Kal talks about the creation of Hero and the work that went into it before they had one customer. In addition to that, we talk about Kal's early success as a founder before he went to college and how he's managed to become a stellar angel investor as well as investing in some household names such as ClassPass, Sweetgreen, Warby Parker, Harry's and more. 

Website: startuphandmdowns.co

John is the Founder, CEO, & Product Architect of Enemy Tree, a California, USA based technology startup whose products are wide-reaching experiments in hardware, software, and services that positively impact peoples lives.

Previously, John spent nearly 6 years at Tesla Motors leading teams and internally innovating in areas like operations, sales, delivery, customer service, and marketing. This created an even deeper passion for startups that was already so strong it pulled JOhn to the West Coast. It gave him a profound appreciation for the incredible people who sacrifice so much to make a product and company great.

Prior to that, JOhn not only built a very strong business and operations foundation by working at BIC Consumer Products and learned the roots of quality, systems, process, and execution but also dove deep into the practical and theoretical details of business

In addition to building products now, John is also an active Angel Investor, as well as a mentor and advisor to several startups and entrepreneurs.

John was an early investor in Gimlet Media which sold to Spotify for $200m.

site: startuphandmedowns.co

(Rerun) This week we sat down with Austen Allred of Lambda School, Fit Marketing, Grasswire, and Lendup. On this episode we discuss: - Growth marketing galore - The free upfront model - When to invest Austen Allred has a super interesting origin story, having dropped out of university himself, he went on to co-found his own school and pushing the envelope for the future of education. For those of you who are out of the loop, Austen created Lambda School, a coding school that asks for no money up front in an exchange for a percentage of your salary after you get a job making more than 50k. Austen got his start in the business world at Stubtopia, a ticket brokering company that he started with his brother at 18. After handing over the reins to his brother, he went on to complete an LDS mission in Ukraine which ended up setting a tone of dedication and perseverance for his whole career. If you’re an entrepreneur trying to make your move, I suggest listening to what Austen has to say as he gives honest advice about growth, product market fit, fundraising, and how to take the right advice. Listen on Spotify, iTunes and anywhere else you listen to podcasts!

(Re-run) This week on Startup Handmedowns, we sat down with Gaston Tourn, CMO of Badoo which for those of you who don’t know is a dating app that is most popular in Europe and South America. Gaston describes himself as a writer and a poet, creating the narrative of the customer and integrating their stories into the product in question. Like many of us, Gaston once had the belief that marketers go out and trick people, that it’s more of a "slimy job", which makes his journey to marketing even more interesting. Hear how he didn’t set out to become a marketer at all, and how he was actually convinced by Google to try it out. I mean, if Google told me what job I’m meant for, I’d believe them too. Gaston talks about his time working on projects such as Google Adwords and Youtube before joining Badoo as CMO. The work he’s doing at Badoo is pretty impressive, and from the way he describes it in the interview, it totally makes sense that he sees himself as a writer and a poet. Gaston is working to fix online dating, on the whole, adding safety measures within the app and features to rid some of the common online dating problems and ultimately, get the users on more dates. As well as trying to mend online dating’s failures, he is focusing on the stories of couples who have found each other on Badoo and telling their stories. Gaston is super interesting and has a lot of great tips, especially if you’re marketing a new startup with a limited budget.

In this repeat episode, Philip speaks with Alex about how you should approach investors or attempt to raise money from the crowd?  We talk to the founder of Beam and JustPark's Ex-Ceo Alex Stefani about what it took to raise the largest Crowdfunding campaign of its time and to lead JustPark to become a household name. We discuss 1. Tips and tricks to a successful crowdfunding campaign 2. How to make it easier to launch projects when starting out 3. Why focus groups are dangerous and reliable alternatives for collecting data.

(Re-upload) In this week’s episode of Startup Handmedowns, we sit down with Ryan Walsh who is currently a partner at Floodgate. Ryan has had a very rich career history, from starting out as a performing DJ in San Francisco to co-founding his own startup, and working as the VP of product at Beats by Dre. His origin story is wild, as Ryan got his start as a raver in Pittsburg, taking pictures of the polished DJ’s equipment with a disposable camera to figure out how to emulate that sound. After figuring out that the party life of a DJ was not for him, Ryan went on to found a company called Pulselocker, which was meant as a DJ tool to cooperate with streaming services. If you’ve ever talked to a musician who has been playing pre-Napster, you’ve heard all about how much the music business has changed and how rapidly the way we buy and sell music shifts. Well, the way music was being consumed and DJ’d changed even faster than his company could develop a product, and he eventually left Pulselocker.