The Yaro Podcast

David Ciccarelli is the CEO and founder of Voices.com.

Based in London, Canada, Voices.com provides an online marketplace, facilitating transactions between business clients and over two million voice over professionals.

In this interview David shares the origin story of Voices, how they first launched their platform, secured a great domain name, attracted new customers and new voice talent to make sure they had both supply and demand and then grew the company to the point where it is today, heading towards a Nasdaq listing after raising $18 Million from Morgan Stanley and others.

Enjoy the episode.

Yaro

Podcast: https://www.yaro.blog/pod/

Blog: https://www.yaro.blog/

Teddy Kyres is the founder of Groupe Orbis, a Montreal based mortgage brokerage firm, with over 60 brokers following the system Teddy created for succeeding as a mortgage broker.

Teddy is also my mortgage broker and helped me secure finance for investing in Montreal when I didn't have much of a tax history in Canada after moving here from Australia. The banks wouldn't loan to me, so Teddy helped me find alternative financing until I built up more history as a Canadian tax payer.

During this podcast we look at Teddy's early years as a mortgage broker and what he did to become one of the most successful in the entire country, doing over $100 Million in loans in a single year as one individual broker.

We then look at how Teddy branched out on his own starting a brokerage firm so he could expand by building a team.

Throughout the interview I also ask Teddy to break down his own property investing strategy, which as you would expect, has played a big part in Teddy's strategy for growing his net worth over time.

Enjoy the episode.

Yaro

Podcast: https://www.yaro.blog/pod/

Blog: https://www.yaro.blog/

Joshua Scigala knows a lot about crypto (thus this is a LONG episode!).

He was there when Satoshi first released Bitcoin and he was unfortunately there as well when the first major exchange, Mt. Gox, collapsed.  

Today Joshua is leading a new Defi project called The Standard, a decentralized lending platform run by a DAO that focuses on hard and soft assets as collateral.

The protocol will have the ability for users to issue multiple fiat pegged algorithmic stablecoins starting with "Standard Euro" then USD, YEN and more to be rolled out.  

Before this he co-founded Vaultoro, one of the first platforms where you can directly trade Bitcoin and gold, allowing you to hedge against each asset class.   

During this interview we went back in time to hear about Joshua's early career and businesses in Australia, where he grew up and how he became aware of the emerging cryptocurrency movement.  

We also dive deep into all things crypto and how Joshua setup his two cryptocurrency projects. 

Enjoy the conversation.  

Yaro

Podcast: https://www.yaro.blog/pod/

Blog: https://www.yaro.blog/

Collis Ta'eed with his wife Cyan started out with an idea -- they wanted to create a marketplace where digital media producers could sell their creations to customers.

They began with the then popular Flash file format and later expanded into things like WordPress themes, music, video and code. Each type of media had a marketplace, including Themeforest for Wordpress and Audiojungle for music files.

As is typical for the marketplace model, they took a small fee from each transaction.

All these marketplaces would later be combined together under the company name Envato. 

Today Envato is still a privately held company having been bootstrapped from day one. Because they are private, we don't have any public numbers about how much money they generate, but based on what journalists in Australia have written, the company does about $300 Million a year in revenue.

Collis, at the time he stepped down as CEO of Envato in 2020, reported that they had crossed the major milestone of $1 Billion in creator earnings. 81,000 creators have earned through Envato since the company was founded.

The Early Days

I connected with Collis back when we were both part of the Australian blogging community around 2010.

Back then, Collis was the creator of a blog called Freelance Switch, supporting freelancers with advice and tutorials for growing their business.

That was early days for his marketplaces, but signs were already showing that he had a business that was scaling rapidly.

A few years later I was producing a new interview series as a subscription product for my education business and invited Collis to do a bonus interview for the program.

At the time Envato was already a multi-million dollar business selling a digital item every ten seconds.

Collis and I recorded this interview at a great time. They were successful, but they had yet to reach the point where he and his wife were appearing on the 'young rich list' in Australia, which immediately boosted their public profile significantly (making it a lot harder to get in touch with Collis!).

During the interview, Collis shared the entire foundation story of Envato, from going into $100,000 in debt and living with his inlaws, how they built their marketplaces and attracted creators and buyers and why they never took on investment finance and stayed bootstrapped the entire way.

A New-Old Interview

Although this interview is not brand new, it's never been released to the public before. Only members of my membership site had access until now.

I'm releasing it here on Vested Capital because it's a story of an Australian tech unicorn (not officially, but the numbers would justify the valuation if they ever did an IPO or raised finance privately) and shares how the company was started.

Marketplaces are still an amazing business model to go after today, so I know this interview will prove inspiring and insightful.

Enjoy the podcast.

Yaro

Podcast: https://www.yaro.blog/pod/

Blog: https://www.yaro.blog/

Gabriele Musella is a well-educated, well-traveled, co-founder of Coinrule.com, a company where you can build or copy sets of rules for automatically trading cryptocurrencies.

The company recently raised $3M+ from MKB Bank, Urban Innovation Fund, Zilliqa and many Business Angels (Kayak Co-founder, EightSleep Founder).

Before that they also successfully ran a crowdfunding campaign on Seedrs, providing funds which helped them to navigate the pandemic when capital briefly dried up.

During this podcast we dive into Gabriele's past, which is full of education (London School of Economics, MIT, Harvard), travels throughout Europe and the USA for various jobs (Nokia, Loyds Bank) and three previous startups before the current one, Coinrule. The most notable was Paylinko, a fintech payments app.

Gabriele has certainly lived a full life so far, and it was exciting to piece together all the highlights that came before his current project and then also spend some time talking about how to build a Crypto trading platform.

Enjoy the podcast.

Yaro

Podcast: https://www.yaro.blog/pod/

Blog: https://www.yaro.blog/

Kison Patel is the founder of DealRoom.net, a SAAS platform for managing the lifecycle of mergers and acquisitions.

Kison spent ten years of his life running his own boutique M&A advisory firm, participating in some way with 363 asset sales.

During this career, Kison noted how many processes of deals were handled with very 'old' technology, for example using spreadsheets for tracking due diligence. 

This lead to the idea for DealRoom, which at first as an MVP was an attempt to better document and add a communication layer to the due diligence process.

During the interview I wanted to learn more about M&A, as well as hear the story behind how Kison grew his SAAS company, which is 100% bootstrapped at the time of this recording.

I asked Kison for examples of deals he worked on, how he sourced deals, what's the difference between a business broker and M&A advisory services and we also talked about how he built what he calls a 'media company' within his SAAS as a marketing strategy.

If you're growing a SAAS in a legacy industry or thinking about starting one, make sure you listen to this interview.

Enjoy the podcast.

Yaro

Podcast: https://www.yaro.blog/pod/

Blog: https://www.yaro.blog/

Russ Heddleston is the co-founder and former CEO of DocSend, which was acquired by Dropbox for $165 Million in early 2021. Russ currently works at Dropbox continuing the vision he had for DocSend.

During this interview we hear how Russ went from studying at Stanford, to working at a startup called Greystripe, then as an intern at Dropbox, and then launching his own startup Pursuit.

Pursuit was later acquihired by Facebook, where Russ continued to work for two years. He shares some interesting insights into why Pursuit didn't take off and the lessons learned, which he then took into his next startup, DocSend.

We spend a good amount of time talking about what marketing Russ and his team did to grow DocSend, how they revised their positioning and copy on their website to add fuel to their growth and how eventually the deal with Dropbox happened.

If you like B2B SAAS startup stories, this interview is for you.

Enjoy the podcast.

Yaro

Podcast: https://www.yaro.blog/pod/ 

Blog: https://www.yaro.blog/

Sara Mauskopf is the co-founder and CEO of Winnie.com, a marketplace platform that connects parents looking for childcare and preschool providers with over 250,000 centres around the USA.

To date, Sara and her team have raised $15.5 Million in venture funding over three rounds, with the most recent $9 million series being led by Rethink Impact. 

In this interview we first dive back into Sara's history as a math major, then moving over to computer science, which led her to a job at Google after graduation. She later left Google for Twitter, then left again to join Postmates, where she met her co-founder, Anne Halsall.

Sara and Anne were a little unique as working parents inside Postmates, and realized how difficult it was to juggle raising children and maintaining full time jobs. One of the challenges was childcare, an industry that was still driven mostly by a word-of-mouth for finding good options.

Sara breaks down all the steps from making the first version of their platform, how they built the supply side up, attracted parents to the site, raised funding and currently make money.

There's a lot to learn from Sara and she shares a lot of wisdom, so don't miss this one.

Enjoy the podcast.

Yaro

Podcast: https://www.yaro.blog/pod/
Blog: https://www.yaro.blog/ 

I'm resurfacing this interview from 2016 because recently (2021) the team at MacGyver HQ has been sharing this interview on their social media, so I thought it would be a great time to share it with those new to Vested Capital.

It was quite a thrill to see the actual MacGyver twitter account tweet out this podcast, especially as I was a kid who grew up watching the show on TV in Australia. Here's how it all came to happen...

******

When I received an email offering a chance to interview Lee Zlotoff, the creator of MacGyver for the my podcast, my initial reaction was mixed.

I was excited to speak to someone who created such an iconic show, yet I wasn’t sure if he would be a good fit for a podcast about online entrepreneurship.

As I investigated what Lee was up to currently, it became clear that although he was not an online entrepreneur, what he is teaching is so relevant for anyone building a business or trying to solve their financial problems.

The MacGyver Secret

Just as ‘Mac’ the lead character on MacGyver was able to solve problems using ingenious combinations of elements to get out of tricky situations, Lee explains that we all have access to the same ability to solve problems, if we can distract our conscious mind.

In this podcast interview we go back in time to the point where Lee was an upcoming screenwriter, writing for one of his first television shows. There were only three writers and as a result he was under a lot of pressure to produce entire episodes with short deadlines.

As you will hear Lee explain, he realized that his best ideas often came up during periods where his conscious mind was distracted, like while in the shower. He took this principle and formalized it, turning into a lifelong practice he tapped into whenever he needed to be creative (for example, when writing scripts) and to solve problems.

Towards the end of the interviews Lee breaks down the three steps he currently teaches to help anyone tap into their own ‘inner MacGyver’. You can also learn the steps at his website, MacGyverSecret.com .

The MacGyver Origin Story

I couldn’t interview the creator of MacGyver without learning how the show was created. In particular, I was curious what the process was to come up with all the unique situations and solutions that the show featured every episode.

You can listen in to the first half of the episode to hear how Lee first got his start as a screenwriter, how he wrote the pilot episode and also what’s coming up for MacGyver currently.

Enjoy the interview, and make sure to test out the three steps to tap your own inner MacGyver next time you face a challenging situation.

Yaro Starak

Podcast: https://www.yaro.blog/pod/
Blog: https://www.yaro.bl og/ 

It's hard to summarize all the success of Wil Schroter. He's founded so many companies.

Today he's founder of Startups.com, a business education site and suite of tools and resources for entrepreneurs, some of which were previous startups by Wil (Fundable, Bizplan) and some were acquired (Zirtual, Clarity).

Wil got his start early online, initially exploring bulletin boards with a commodore computer. He then launched a web design agency, Blue Diesel, in 1994, again very early to a new industry.

His agency grew, later merging with a more traditional design agency, creating a full suite offline/online marketing firm. In a surprise success, the firm landed a massive client worth $250 Million in billings, beating out many larger agencies. 

Wil eventually exited his agency ownership shares when the company was acquired. As a youg guy of just 27 he had earned enough money to retire, yet he decided to get back into entrepreneurship.

I enjoyed this part of the podcast because Will explained why it was a mistake to be the founder of so many companies after exiting his first, yet why he wanted to and what his life was like back then working 16 hour days.

After a massive anxiety attack that landed Wil in the hospital, he realized things had to change (he was also about to have his first child, adding to his motivation to stay healthy and alive!).

This experience informed his decision to create Startups.com, and how he would still have multiple entities, but they would be integrated to serve the same customer and thus be easier to manage and grow together.

Towards the end of the podcast I asked Wil to explain how he is able to market and attract customers to so many different companies over the years, and also to briefly touch on his current personal investing strategy.

Enjoy the podcast.

Yaro

Podcast: https://www.yaro.blog/pod/
Blog: https://www.yaro.blog/