Unscripted Bears

Lucas was an employee at a dessert brand. Four months later he was effectively running it. Then he woke up to a message saying there was one week of payroll left and everyone had to go.

What he did next is something few would think to do. He and his partner took out a personal loan to save a company he didn’t own a single share of, and within a month he owned all of it aged just 26.

In this episode he takes us through the QSR years, the 17 hour kitchen shifts, the record label that died because the funding arrived in instalments, and his future of working with artists through Hekta Music Group.

Joel and I also get our own thinking pulled apart along the way, which is the part of recording this we enjoyed most!If you’re in your first few years of building something, this one is worth your time!

Guest: Lucas, founder of Hekta Music Group

Hosts: Damian Sirso, founder of ProductivityBears, and Joel, founder of MetaMortgages

This episode was recorded in January 2026, so many things will have changed by the time of posting. We also experienced an audio challenge then, hence the lower quality audio in this episode. Hope you still enjoy it!

• 0:00 - Intro

• 3:04 - Taking over the food brand Lucas worked for
• 5:46 - Asking for equity, then taking a loan to save the company
• 8:53 - Reality of running a restaurant business
• 10:03 - How virtual franchising and brand licensing work
• 13:51 - Where the entrepreneurial instinct came from
• 17:36 - When being busy starts reading as arrogance
• 19:24 - Managing energy instead of time
• 22:18 - Four hours of real focus, and working with ADHD
• 25:50 - The two kinds of people in any conversation
• 27:43 - How he diagnoses a business, and why he named it Mercurium
• 31:09 - A million spent on IP and still no investor replies
• 34:03 - How to define your ideal customer profile
• 41:35 - What he looks at first in any business
• 46:54 - The hardest metric to measure, and the Domino’s lesson
• 48:27 - What investors want to see pre-seed
• 53:19 - How being conservative with your numbers can cost you a VC
• 57:05 - Why your business is an extension of you
• 1:00:09 - Rejection as a vaccine
• 1:02:51 - Why work-life balance is never really balanced
• 1:05:09 - The future, and advice for an early stage founder

Everyone has an idea. Almost nobody starts.

Damian Sirso, founder of ProductivityBears, and Joel, founder of MetaMortgages, on what it actually took to get going and what they'd tell anyone still thinking about it.

Two completely different routes in. Damian went from a genetics lab to building a community for young entrepreneurs. Joel trained inside the mortgage industry, then left to set up his own brokerage.

In this episode:

• Why a wrongdoer gets further than a right thinker
• How to validate an idea without writing a 50 page business plan
• Quality versus quantity in sales, where the two of us completely disagree
• Why marketing too early damages you
• The art of showing up, and why broken promises to yourself compound
• Retention over churn, and the mistake of chasing new customers

Made for first time founders and young entrepreneurs building something now, not one day in the far and uncertain future.

Chapters list:

• 0:00 - Intro
• 1:06 - Who we are and what this show is about
• 9:56 - Why doing it badly beats planning it perfectly
• 10:55 - Changing industries: from a genetics lab to a community
• 17:02 - The one thing that compounds: mindset
• 20:18 - The part of entrepreneurship nobody glorifies
• 23:34 - Choosing your path at 16, and changing it later
• 31:07 - Betting on yourself, and knowing when to leave
• 35:35 - What to learn before you make the jump
• 40:45 - Lead quality vs quantity in sales
• 46:52 - Getting over the fear of the first sales call
• 49:58 - Stop perfecting your brand, go and sell
• 55:41 - Advice for overthinkers
• 58:00 - How to start when all you have is an idea
• 1:01:21 - MVP, traction and funding your first version
• 1:05:05 - Standing out in a crowded service market
• 1:08:44 - Why marketing too early backfires
• 1:12:14 - The art of showing up
• 1:14:21 - Keeping customers, not just winning them
• 1:15:44 - Why we made this podcast