Startup Mindsets

Ahmed Elsamidisi founded Narrator.ai when he experienced the problem of not knowing how to answer/taking too long to answer data queries at WeWork as a Data Engineer. He realized that he had to be the one to solve this problem after talking to companies who might be solving this but weren't. In the episode we discuss Ahmed's "Ah ha" moment💡, Getting into YCombinator, Living with your co-founders in the same house, funny stories while pitching venture capitalists and customers, and much more! We welcome guest host, Jovanni Lara, to go more in depth about the product and his experience trying to make sense of data.  Narrator  powers self-service analytics across all your data. It allows anyone to  get answers in minutes instead of weeks, using the same data as your  data team. Narrator helps your data team build a full customer 360 that covers every interaction customers have with your business (opened  emails, paid invoices, new support tickets, etc...), Anyone can answer quick questions and self-serve requests across all  your data without needing SQL and then integrate that data with your  existing tools (spreadsheets, BI, and SaaS tools like email providers). Provide the foundation for a comprehensive self-service experience for your company by going to Narrator.ai

Freddie Van Huynh has an incredible story, you've got to hear about. Born in Sweden as the son of Cambodian immigrants Freddie had a unique upbringing. Combining his love for travel and providing others opportunities led him to found Absolute Internship.  Fred has been to 50+ countries, speaks 7 languages,and practices Jiu Jitsu regularly.   He details his experience founding Absolute Internship, an international internship program for university students looking to intern abroad.  Not being able to take out salary until year 4 of founding the company, Freddie talks about living cheaply and often eating $2 pasta while chasing his dream. The journey wasn't easy, however, today Absolute Internship is one of the world's top international internship providers in the world having served 2,000+ students in more than 10 countries.  (26:50) NOTHING GROWS IN YOUR COMFORT ZONE Get 30% Startup & Small Business Accounting with our partner BENCH Accounting Here.

Arjun founded Solid in 2019 with the idea that they could enable every company to offer their own suite of fintech services. With every company thinking about how to create their own experiences powered by fintech, Arjun and team saw an opportunity to build the layer that powers this.  On today's show, we discuss (5:29) Fintech as a service, the value of companies owning the fintech experience for its customers (14:19)  Transitioning from seed to series A (18:09) Valuing investor feedback Solid offers a fully integrated & compliant suite of FinTech services. Integrate in minutes to build never-before-seen experiences.

How Hard Can It Be author, Arnaud Henneville Wedholm, joins startup mindsets to talk about his new book, How Hard Can It Be, Lessons From Trying to Take Down Facebook. Inspired from his efforts to build a startup that would be better than Facebook. Arnaud tells his story on how his startup, InternalDesk, became a "Broken Unicorn." We hear about what it's like to struggle as an entrepreneur and why success comes from trying and failing. InternalDesk was created to incentivize people to complete challenges to better themselves. Noteworthy Discussion Points The Social Media "Like" is the modern day tiger.  Why we should seek failure so we can prepare for it more. Overcoming fear and mental blocks  Why motivation comes from within and relating to purpose. Learn more about Arnaud and purchase his book: https://howhardcanitbethebook.com or at Amazon & Barnes & Noble.

Earl met David when he was in high school in the Philippines starting YouthHack, an international nonprofit helping students learn how to code in the Philippines. We discover the success a simple cold email to Huffington Post could have where he ended up becoming a contributing writer in college. David’s also been a part of Dorm Room Fund, First Round Capital’s fund for university entrepreneurs, Growth and Analytics at Amplitude and a recent investor and now operator at Rutter building the e-commerce API layer.

For this episode, we bring on Rene Morkos founder of ALICE an AI construction simulation and optimization software.  The value Alice brings to construction planners is how they are able to simulate over a million ways to build a building.  We talk in depth about Rene attaining a PhD in construction management at Stanford, creating Alice from his thesis, and life as a professor at Stanford. Meaningfully we found out what kept Rene pushing forward often spending 20 hour days working on getting a PhD and after hearing 300 rejections from potential investors. Today, Alice is backed by Lightspeed Venture Partners and Merus Capital to name a few. Lastly we learn that Rene's startup mindset is pushing the boundaries and finding out when his breaking point would be.  Leave us a review and share us on social!

Selling and buying a car tends to be a hassle nowadays especially when you're trying to get the best bargain. Enter TopMarq a new way to compare the top car websites (Carvana, Carmax etc.) while listing or shopping. CEO of TopMarq, Quinn Osha, joins us on today's podcast to talk about what he's building as a solo founder.  Quinn takes us through his experience graduating CalTech and learning how to code on his own, where he gets the ability to tackle new obstacles in business such as learning marketing for the first time, raising funding, and championing progress over perfection.

Matt Spettel cofounded CoPilot while he was in undergrad at Carnegie Mellon. In this episode, we hear how it was balancing college and running a startup, how Matt met his cofounder Gabe, overcoming age bias, and building the company to what it is today.  We learn about his route to entrepreneurship as a kid who would make his own video games and sell them at school to pretending to be a personal trainer. Fresh off a 6M Series A Round led by Hyde Park Venture Partners with Maven Ventures and TenOneTen Ventures participating. Give CoPilot a try!

Karthik Suresh joins us for this episode of Startup Mindsets. Having a career that's varied from being an engineer on Wall Street writing code for algorithmic trading he wanted to pursue a profession that meant more than making money. This lead to an eventual career in product management having worked for Facebook as a product manager before leaving to start Ignition. Listen to learn how early stage product management differs from large corporations and why having more flexibility plays to your advantage as an entrepreneur.  Ignition makes launching a product easier by bringing different times together.  Go check Ignition out on Product Hunt and see how they can benefit your next launch!  Startup Mindsets is now a Bench.co Partner!!! Use our referral link for 30% off your businesses' book keeping services for the first 3 months.

The global risk management market is 17 billion and expected to grow exponentially by 2027.  Ferret.ai runs a background check that ensures business is done with the right people to deter being taken advantage of. We hear about his experience at UCLA Anderson and how what's learned in the classroom gets applied directly into the startup the next day then brought back to class to make an ultimate feedback loop.  Matt tells stories of when deals have gone wrong and what Ferret can do to prevent this from happening.