School for Startups Radio

January 9, 2023 – Be Visionary Marty Strong, International Tech Recruiting Ilya Brotzky and Link Builder Aaron Anderson

Marty Strong - Author of Be Visionary: Strategic Leadership in the Age of Optimization
Every day spend 20 minutes, clear your mind of your To Do List, andthink about the future. Say what do I want to look like? What do I want my family to look like? What kind of house do I want to live in? What kind of team do I want working for me?
Marty Strong has an accomplished leadership career spanning four decades. He worked his way from enlisted SEAL Team member to the SEAL Officer corps, retiring with twenty years’ service in that highly-decorated and esteemed military unit. After retiring from service, Marty was a successful account vice president and investment advisor to high net worth individuals and institutions with the United Bank of Switzerland (UBS). Today he is a CEO, Chief Strategy Officer, board director, and business investor. Marty is also a sought-after speaker and leadership consultant. For many years Marty gleaned wisdom from the best and brightest writers and thought leaders in strategy, human systems design, human capital management, and leadership. As he began to mentor and coach his own executives and others outside his organization, Marty had difficulty locating guides, books, or coherent musings that were not solely focused on large corporations. This frustration motivated Marty to write his first leadership book, Be Nimble - How the Navy SEAL Mindset Wins on the Battleground and in Business, set for release January 1, 2022. His second business leadership book, Be Visionary - Strategic Leadership in the Age of Optimization, is set for release in October 2022.
 
Ilya Brotzky - Founder of VanHack 
In the beginning, we did not invest too much in the product. We used an e-mail list, a Google form and an Excel spreadsheet. We did everything manually, it was all very basic.
Ilya Brotzky is Founder of www.vanhack.com which has been featured in Fast Company, Forbes and Time, Ilya Brotzky is the CEO and CoFounder of VanHack, one of Canada’s leading HR Tech startups. Ilya leads a team of over 30 employees from 11 countries with the mission of creating a borderless world for tech talent through jobs. He holds a Bachelors of Applied Economics from Cornell University and has helped raise over $100,000 for a variety of charities in Africa and South America.Aaron Anderson - Linkpitch and Host of Let's Talk Link Building Podcast
There are a lot of misunderstandings about link building and what it actually means. There are lots of strategies and link building approaches that no longer work. Link building where people are adding links to their sites because great content or your service is of value, it is still very important and one of the top ranking factors for Google.
Aaron Anderson is an expert on SEO and helping companies build strategies through high-quality link-building services. Aaron has been working in the SEO industry full-time since 2013,  he saw a big demand for high-quality link-building services, so he started a link-building agency back in 2018. His approach to link building is purely outreach driven.

January 5, 2023 - Employee Ownership Corey Rosen and Product Rebel Heather Samarin

Corey Rosen, PH.D - Founder of National Center for Employee Ownership (NCEO) and Author of Ownership: Reinventing Companies, Capitalism, and Who Owns What 
Most ESOPs are 100% employee owned and one of the tax rules is that they don't have to pay any taxes. Congress likes employee ownership.
Corey Rosen, PH.D., is the founder and senior staff member of the National Center for Employee Ownership (NCEO), a nonprofit organization that’s the nation’s primary source of information on employee ownership (ESOP). One of the world’s leading experts on the subject, he’s worked with government leaders, business owners, employee groups, and academic leaders worldwide and serves on seven ESOP company boards. He’s the co-author of Equity: Why Employee Ownership Is Good for Business (Harvard Business School Press; 2005) and the new book Ownership: Reinventing Companies, Capitalism, and Who Owns What (Berrett-Koehler Publishers; September 13, 2022).Heather Samarin - Co-Founder of Product Rebels and Author of Groundwork: Get Better at Making Better  
I love ‘me too’ products. I hear that philosophy from School forStartups and love it. One of the ways you win at that is making surethat you understand the problem of the customer better thanthe other guy.
Heather Samarin is the co-founder of Product Rebels a product management leadership training company, and has over 17 years of experience in delighting customers through the design, development, and management of customer experiences within both B2B and B2C marketing and product management. She started her career and spent over 13 years at Intuit where she met Vidya and built her passion for customer-driven decision making. It was in her positions as Director of Quickbooks Enterprise and VP of Product Management in the TurboTax business where her love for new product design and innovation began. She and her team launched Intuit’s QuickBooks Enterprise business, an up market Quickbooks product that is now achieving over $50MM in revenue. Since then, she has held C-level and senior roles within multiple industries like social gaming and healthcare markets where she led product strategy and new product design and development. She holds a BS in finance from California State University and an MBA in marketing from Santa Clara University. Heather lives in the Pacific Northwest and enjoys mentoring local entrepreneurs, angel investing, and taking advantage of all the beauty that living in the northwest has to offer!

January 4, 2023 – EY SMB Data Ken Englund, Side Hustler Cliff Beach and TwnSqr Paul Wakim

Cliff Beach - Musician and Author of Side Hustle & Flow: 10 Principles to Live and Lead a More Productive Life in Less Time
Cliff Beach knows how to side hustle. Cliff has an MBA from Pepperdine University and a BM in Music Business Management. He is a Distinguished Toastmaster & Member of Toastmasters International based in Culver City, CA. He is the house band leader for Josh Gates Tonight on Discovery Channel, host of Deeper Grooves on 88.5 FM KCSN, a TEDX speaker, and his hit song ‘Confident’ is approaching 1 million streams on Spotify - all while maintaining his full-time day job as VP of Digital Operations with an online beauty company. In Side Hustle & Flow, Cliff tells the story of how he found a happy, balanced way to live a passion-filled and successful life -  and how we can, too. Side Hustle & Flow eschews the avalanche of books that make vague promises of fame & fortune. Cliff describes a detailed and realistic approach to building a more fulfilling life using practical productivity practices and real life techniques built upon 10 principles. Cliff’s story helps us to discover a thoughtful way to embrace our own side hustle - as a creative outlet, a chance to give back, an additional income stream while we continue to work our ‘day job’ - and helps us to flow.
Paul Wakim - Founder of TwnSqr   
Paul Wakim is the co-founder and CEO of TwnSqr. I have completed over 30 real estate transactions in my career before starting TwnSqr. I created TwnSqr to help other investors succeed in the same way I have - through connection and collaboration with more experienced investors in my market. TwnSqr is the premiere off market property dispositions tool that connects real estate investors with one another and the largest institutional buyers in the world. Our goal is to support sellers, investors and buyers of all sizes through world class technology!

January 3, 2023 – World’s Leading Happiness Ambassador Deepak Ohri and $40M Revenue Nick Bare

Deepak Ohri - founder and CEO of lebua Hotels & Resorts     
Discovery is the key to innovation. Everything starts with the discovery, and discovery can only happen if you move out of your comfort zone.
In today's life it is very easy to achieve what we want to achieve.We need to believe in two things. First, we have to believe inourselves and second we have to believe in our dreams.
Deepak Ohri, founder and CEO of lebua Hotels & Resorts, is well-known worldwide as an award-winning entrepreneur who has transformed the luxury hospitality landscape in Asia. In November 2022, Deepak Ohri was named the World's Leading Happiness Ambassador by the World Travel Awards. Deepak Ohri has spearheaded lebua Hotels & Resorts, a Thailand-based hospitality company, to grow exponentially through his concept of ‘experiential luxury’. Central to Ohri’s success is his unique approach to luxury and hospitality. He believes that the focus should be on creating lasting emotional experiences for guests – his initial vision for lebua – which has now become an industry-wide trend. He has been recognized globally as an award-winning entrepreneur and celebrated speaker, being featured speaker at the Forbes Global CEO conference and Financial Times Business of Luxury Summit, amongst many others. Combining his vast knowledge and the power of storytelling, he weaves compelling cases with both science and experiences. Ohri is also a guest lecturer at many prestigious business schools including Harvard Business School, Columbia University, NYU Stern School of Business, and MIT Sloan. Ever committed to sharing expertise he provides mentorship to business students with career advice and industry insights to help shape the next generation of leaders in hospitality and luxury. Deepak Ohri has been appointed Executive in Residence in Entrepreneurship and Innovation at the College of Business at Florida International University (Miami, Florida). He has also co-created and helped pioneer the first MBA course in luxury marketing and management www.luxuryincubator.bz for the Graduate School of Business at FIU.Nick Bare - Founder and CEO of Bare Performance Nutrition
I am a firm believer in building businesses slowly and the rightway. When you build a brand that is super strong with a reallygood product and people, it might take you 10 years, but youcan be proud.
Nick Bare, a veteran, fitness expert and founder and CEO of Bare Performance Nutrition, a premium fitness lifestyle brand. Nick Bare has an emotional and motivational story - and would be a dynamic guest (fitness, lifestyle, entrepreneurism and embracing the idea of Go One More, which is a mantra he lives by and inspires his team and community with each and every day).

December 29, 2022 - Security Camera AI Dr. Daniel Reichman and Berkeley SkyDeck Caroline Winnett

Dr. Daniël Reichman - CEO and co-founder of Ai-RGUS       
If Duke University has this problem with its security 2000 cameras, probably somebody else has that problem too. So, I ran with an idea that wasn't even mine. We use AI to make sure security cameras are working. Recent estimates say there are 900 million cameras in the world. So, lots of potential problems.
Dr. Daniël Reichman is the CEO and Chief Scientist of Ai-RGUS, an AI startup which provides a software solution to security camera systems. Ai-RGUS automatically verifies that security cameras are producing the video they were intended to capture, thereby ensuring video evidence will be available after an incident has occurred. Ai-RGUS is commercializing AI software that Dr. Reichman’s lab at Duke University developed for the institution, at the request of the administration. With over 24 university publications, Dr. Reichman obtained his doctorate in Electrical and Computer Engineering from Duke University in 2017—a program fully funded by the U.S. Army Research Office. He has successfully completed consulting projects, including the development of software to assist in reading more than 10,000 pages which needed to be summarized, and developing software to automate aspects of financial projection for New York Life Insurance’s portfolio of liabilities.Caroline Winnett - Executive Director at Berkeley SkyDeck
Our mission is to be the world's top global accelerator.
Caroline Winnett is the executive director of UC Berkeley’s startup accelerator and founder of its VC fund. As a serial entrepreneur, she co-founded neuromarketing company Neurofocus, which was acquired by Nielsen, and has been in the New York Times and Business Insider. By now, we all know that women and minority-led companies need more funding, but there’s another gap-closing tool that Caroline swears by: finding a mentor. Few founders have one (22%), but nearly 70% of companies noticed a rise in productivity due to mentorship. From introducing you to valuable connections to sharing tips on getting VCs to take you seriously as a woman or person of color, mentors are like a cheat code!

December 27, 2022 – Digistore24 Sven Platte and HR Hints Roza Szafranek

Sven Platte - Founder of Digistore24                    
You need very little money to start an online business, you just need to find services like Digistore24 to help you scale.
Sven Platte is the founder and CEO of Digistore24, the industry leader in Europe in the online sales platforms space. The company offers technology solutions for online entrepreneurs such as an integrated online store, affiliate networks, payment processing, and tax automation. The platform Digistore24 enables thousands of coaches, consultants and other online entrepreneurs to focus on their core business while they take care of the rest: technology, administration, integration of platforms and payments. As an investor, he is more than just his projects - he is committed to the development of other companies in the music, energy and fintech sectors. He is also the founder and host of SvenCast, a popular podcast and YouTube channel where he interviews entrepreneurs, business leaders, entertainers, and athletes about their stories and insights into building successful brands. Sven's mission is to help people monetize their passion by driving digital innovation.Roza Szafranek - CEO of HR Hints
HR Hints is the first company which offers human resources as a monthly subscription.
Roza Szafranek is the Founder & CEO of HR Hints, the first HR boutique operating in a subscription model, dedicated to startups and fast-growing tech companies. Together with her team, she has supported over 50 startups, teaching leaders how to be better with people and effectively develop companies. She shows founders and managers how to run companies based on engaged teams that deliver. Roza helps to build superior organizations of the type dreamed of by founders and managers. She cooperated and still cooperates with companies such as Ramp Network, Infermedica, Packhelp, Omnipack, Telemedi, inSTREAMLY, Zowie, Aleph Zero, ShopRunner, Inovo Venture Partner and Innovation Nest. She is a mentor of InCredibles, Sebastian Kulczyk’s mentoring program, a winner of the HR Pearls competition and the title of Recruiter of the Year 2018. She is featured in the Strong Women in IT Global Edition 2021 report. Roza is the author of both industry and academic articles, co-author of books, and a conference speaker. In addition, she runs the People from Work podcast.

December 22, 2022 - Self-Employed Life Jeffrey Shaw and Recording Superstar Peruquois

Jeffrey Shaw - job title and Author of The Self-Employed Life: Business and Personal Development Strategies That Create Sustainable Success 
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Jeffrey Shaw became one of the most preeminent portrait photographers in the United States. His on-location style and fine craftsmanship made him the go-to photographer for families of C-suite executives of Anheuser-Busch, Twitter, and many others, Supermodel Stephanie Seymour, news anchors Jim Nantz and David Bloom, sports icons Tom Seaver, Pat Riley, and Wall Street executives too many to mention. His portraits appeared on The Oprah Show, CBS News, in People and O Magazine and hang at Harvard University and The Norman Vincent Peale Center. After 35 years of exceptional service to his exclusive clientele, Jeffrey decided to share his knowledge of business, branding, and marketing to support self-employed and small business owners as well as progressive-minded companies. He's an in-demand keynote speaker at conferences such as HOW Design, Growth Marketing, corporations the likes of Verizon and BMW, and institutions such as Florida Atlantic University and the Adams Center for Entrepreneurship. Jeffrey is also the author of two books, LINGO and The Self-Employed Life, a LinkedIn Learning instructor, and a regular contributor to various publications. In 2014, Jeffrey started a podcast, Creative Warriors, later rebranded as The Self-Employed Life which is amongst the top 15% of all podcasts. Peruquois - Recording Artist and Healer     
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Around the world, she fills huge stadiums, arenas and concert halls bigger than Radio City Music Hall and Carnegie Hall—often averaging 6,000 a night! But in North America, she is still a mystery to be discovered! Peruquois (pronounced Peru-Kua)—she is called by one name only—is a phenomenon in herself. Bringing forth an extraordinary healing sound that is part singing in a range never heard before on the planet, part multidimensional healing, part evoking the feminine goddess within all women—Peruquois stands alone. There is no one else like her. She is the world leader in applied spirituality for women. International recording star, renowned wisdom teacher, accomplished female shaman, master of multicultural music from jazz to Indian Classic to a sound uniquely her own, Peruquois opens women to a part of themselves often long buried, or maybe never even discovered. She is committed to helping women experience a true deep love of themselves. Using an ultra-high/low overtone form of singing she developed, Peruquois can produce up to four voices at a time! A unique sound that has been scientifically-tested to heal in many concerts conducted with her. But it’s her remarkable story of how this voice unfolded that is so compelling! Losing her father to a fishing accident at three only began the first of her travails. At 11, she had both legs detached above the knee and then reattached in a botched surgery designed to cure genetic hip rotation, nearly disabling her. Her suffering committed her to rising above pain to focus on living fully and finding the love within. She left home at 15 to find her own way and despite parental disapproval, she turned to her passion to sing as a career. In just one year, she covered 10 years of music education –and, at 19, passed the exams to enter the Western Australia Academy of Performing Arts as a jazz vocalist.

December 21, 2022 - Without a Plan Jeremy Delk and Get Local Hila Nissim

Jeremy Delk - Serial Entrepreneur and Author of Without a Plan: A Memoir of Unbound Action and Failing My Way to Success               
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Jeremy Delk is a serial entrepreneur with a passion for disrupting industries. Born and raised in a small-town, blue-collar household, he jumped into entrepreneurial ventures with the naivety of a child and the tenacity of a tycoon. Since 2001, Jeremy’s businesses have earned hundreds of millions in revenue, created hundreds of high-paying American jobs, and earned one of Inc. 500’s fastest-growing company distinctions. Now focused on investing in and advising entrepreneurs, Jeremy shares the good, bad, and ugly of entrepreneurship. While great times don’t last forever, neither do the truly bad ones. He jumped into entrepreneurial ventures with the naivety of a child and the tenacity of a tycoon. He started the day trading at the age of sixteen, learning and failing with each trade. It is this process of adapting through failures that is paramount to his success in business. After high school, he attended college in Rhode Island under a business & marketing scholarship. However, he spent most of his class time using his palm pilot to day trade. By the age of 19, he earned 30K to 50K a day as a day trader from the desk of his college classroom. He felt invincible! As quickly as the money came, it vanished just as fast. After amassing almost 2 million in his early twenties as a day trader, it took him only four days to lose it all! The tech bubble has a way of making people go broke quickly. To make ends meet, he began renting apartments, earning commissions on the sales. As luck would have it, one of the people was a newly relocated executive at Fidelity in Boston. His knowledge and skill as a day trader would help him land a job as one of the youngest brokers at Fidelity trading institutional equities in Boston and later in New York. He was earning great money, but it didn’t fulfill the entrepreneurial spark within him, so he decided to go out on his own.Hila Nissim - CMO of BLEND Localization
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Hila Nissim is CMO of BLEND Localization. BLEND will be launched a SaaS startup program. The program is called First Stamp and it was designed to fuel startup growth. The program will help startups expand into an additional market to tap into a new consumer base, provide access to investors and more. Given the recessionary environment, startups are cutting back on activities. Geo-expansion is expensive but rewarding and BLEND is looking to support 10-15 startups (value of $100K) to boost their presence.

December 20, 2022 - Waze Founder Uri Levine and Auto AI Barrett Young

Uri Levine - Co-Founder of Waze and Author of Fall in Love with the Problem, Not the Solution: A Handbook for Entrepreneurs          
If you are afraid to fail, in reality, you have already failed.
Uri Levine is a passionate entrepreneur and disruptor, a two-time ‘unicorn’ builder (Duocorn). He is co-founder of Waze, the world's largest community-based driving traffic and navigation app, which was acquired by Google for $1.1 billion in 2013, and former investor and board member in Moovit, ‘Waze of public transportation’, which was acquired by Intel for $1 Billion in 2020. Levine has built more than a dozen startups and has seen everything ranging from failure, midlevel success, to immense success. Unicorns—companies that reach a valuation of more than $1 billion—are rare. Uri Levine has built two. Levine is co-founder of Waze, —the world’s leading commuting and navigation app with more than 700 million users to date which Google acquired in 2013 for $1.15 billion—and his second unicorn, Moovit. Dubbed “the Waze of public transportation,” Moovit was sold for $1 billion to Intel in 2020. In his new book, Fall in Love with the Problem, Not the Solution: A Handbook for Entrepreneurs, with a foreword by Steve Wozniak, co-founder of Apple, Levine reveals the formula and key components of building a successful start-up that drove those companies to compete with industry veterans and giants alike. Significant tech companies in the world today—Tesla, Waze, WhatsApp, Facebook, Uber, Netflix—were start-ups not that long ago, but Levine believes the next generation of entrepreneurs will make an even bigger impact. As a mentor and teacher, Levine intends to help entrepreneurs disrupt inefficient markets and improve under-functioning services, to focus on solving society-wide problems while saving consumers time and money.
Barrett Young - Senior VP Fleet Safety Strategy at Netradyne    
Our automobile driving artificial intelligence has almost 37,000 years’ worth of training.
Barrett Young is a strategic and innovative leader with half a decade in fleet safety and fleet management technology and over a decade of integrated marketing experience for both B2B SaaS and B2C companies. He has developed and led strategic go-to-market initiatives of advanced safety technology and the roll-out of the ELD mandate. He is passionate about GTM analysis and has a fury for big thinking and innovation that scale companies and revenue. With roads increasingly more crowded with delivery drivers and commercial vehicles, driver safety is top of mind for everyone. Between road risks and driver safety concerns, small and medium businesses (SMBs) with fleets face unique challenges in today’s climate. In fact, a recent survey revealed that two-thirds (66%) of decision makers at SMBs with fewer than 1,000 employees and five or more vehicles in their commercial fleets are making financial decisions based on immediate needs instead of safety. Smart tech and A.I. driving solutions may make staying on top of driver safety and saving money easier for these owners. With businesses making safety a priority for their fleet of drivers, this keeps all drivers safe on the road.

December 19, 2022 - Data Capture Will Robinson and What is Economy Eric Johnson

Will Robinson - CEO at Encapture                 
Start with one very specific area, nail it, get a bunch of customer feedback, show that you have strong product market fit, and then bring on great people to help you scale that.
Will Robinson is the CEO at Encapture, a high-growth SaaS platform that helps banks automatically extract important information from documents. Launched 20 years ago in Dallas, Texas, Encapture helps companies such as Wells Fargo, Frost Bank and Truist save time and money by using machine learning to process large amounts of data. Since joining the fast-growing company in 2019, Will has assembled a strong team of individuals that shares his passion for fintech and AI banking, ensuring sustainable growth, achieving innovative excellence and tripling revenue. He leads Encapture with an emphasis and passion for company culture and setting a high standard of excellence for a team that is constantly learning and excelling. Encapture’s user-friendly automation empowers banks to save valuable time and reduce compliance risk by processing documents efficiently and accurately in an easily accessible format. Instead of getting bogged down with quarterly compliance and regulatory audits, they can put a greater focus on delivering an exceptional customer experience and boosting satisfaction. Best of all, no technical expertise is required to utilize and reap the benefits of the Encapture platform thanks to the power of sophisticated machine learning AI. Before joining Encapture, Will held several executive management positions at Dynata, the largest market research data company with over 3,000 clients in 40+ countries. While at Dynata, he led the company’s global product development teams and pioneered the use of automated research and integrated data within the industry. Prior to Dynata, Will was an investment professional at The Carlyle Group, one of the world’s largest and most successful investment firms. He helped to source, conduct due diligence and manage technology and business services investments on behalf of the firm’s $14 billion US buyout fund. He also worked closely with Carlyle’s portfolio companies to execute various financial and strategic initiatives. Will began his career in the investment banking division of J.P. Morgan. He received a Bachelor of Business Administration from Baylor University, where he was a Carr P. Collins Scholar. Today, he lives in Dallas with wife and two sons, and is involved in leadership roles at several community organizations.Eric Johnson- Angel Investor and Author of What The Hell Is an Economy?: 2nd Edition
Interest rates have remained too low for too long which led to too much speculation and excessive borrowing. I think we are due for a correction.
Eric Johnson is the founder/CEO of a software engineering firm and a successful entrepreneur. After selling his firm, he focused on “angel investing” and has invested in more than 50 start-up firms in a variety of industries. He has served on several boards of both profit and non-profit organizations. Eric holds a bachelor's degree in engineering from Harvey Mudd College and master’s degree in electrical engineering from San Diego State University. In 2007, a surprise call from his broker expressing concerns about the economy enabled Eric to make financial decisions that allowed his family to weather the Great Recession. Never wanting to feel financially vulnerable again, he set out on a 15-year journey of empowerment, namely the self-education of finance and economics. In “What the Hell is an Economy,” Eric shares his accumulated knowledge and practical experience so you too will become similarly empowered to make better financial decisions.