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PODCAST

The Foundr Podcast with Nathan Chan

Hear the stories, learn the proven methods, and accelerate your growth and future through entrepreneurship. Welcome toThe Foundr Podcast with Nathan Chan. About the show: For over a decade,The Foundr Podcast with Nathan Chan has been a leading entrepreneurship podcast for open-book conversationswith, by, and forfounders.Whether you"re starting, building, or dreaming about your business,The Foundr Podcastis where you can access experienced founders who"ve been in your shoes to learn their proven

business entrepreneurship

All Episodes

10:06

713: (Solo) The Black Friday Profit Trap and How to...

The Foundr Podcast with Nathan Chan ·

2026/10/05

We are all gearing up for Black Friday Cyber Monday, and if you have not started planning yet, you need to. Here is a story that will stop you in your tracks: a founder in our community did $1 million over Black Friday Cyber Monday a few years ago and barely broke even. Not an exaggeration. A million dollars in revenue and almost nothing to show for it.Here is the trap: you have a massive sales month and it looks incredible, but nobody models what that revenue actually cost. Peak November ad

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49:02

712: The Near-Death Experience That Built a $400M...

The Foundr Podcast with Nathan Chan ·

2026/10/01

Matt Pohlson was clinically dead for four and a half minutes. His heart had stopped, the doctor had already called it, and 40 ICU staff had gathered at the window like a silent choir when his mother refused to let them stop fighting. He came back - and the clarity from that experience reshaped his entire company. Omaze, the platform he co-founded to raise money for charity by giving everyday people the chance to win once-in-a-lifetime experiences, has sent people to be mentored by Michelle Obama,

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41:35

711: Natasha Quit Her 9-To-5 In June - Her Drink...

The Foundr Podcast with Nathan Chan ·

2026/09/30

Natasha was on maternity leave with a newborn who cried until he was five months old, permanently thirsty, and completely fed up that the one drink bottle she owned had grown mould. She switched to drinking from a glass - hardly practical with two small kids - and mentioned to a friend, in passing, that she needed to find something better. Three or four weeks later that friend circled back: "That drink bottle thing you mentioned - are you still doing it?" That one question convinced Natasha there

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15:09

710: (Solo) I Asked 10 Billionaires The Same Question...

The Foundr Podcast with Nathan Chan ·

2026/09/28

Over 12 years of interviewing more than 100 billionaires, I started asking every one of them the same question: if you lost everything tomorrow, the money, the brand, the team, and you had to start completely from scratch, what would you do first? Richard Branson, Mark Cuban, Drew Houston, Kendra Scott, people who built billion dollar companies from nothing.Here is what struck me: ten billionaires, ten different industries, ten completely different answers on the surface. But underneath every

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52:50

709: AI Agents: The Only Skill That Matters in 2026...

The Foundr Podcast with Nathan Chan ·

2026/09/24

Ari Meisel spent 15 years teaching founders to do less. He's worked with over 300 assistants and once ran his business on a single hour of work a day after Crohn's disease nearly took him out. Now AI has changed the game entirely. He's running 32 AI agents across six different companies, has two agents that have been working nonstop for over 160 days, and rebuilt an entire DTC customer service operation with agents - taking first response time from 25 minutes to 44 seconds while cutting costs from

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12:08

708: (Solo) What Nobody Tells You About Scaling Past...

The Foundr Podcast with Nathan Chan ·

2026/09/21

Every stage of business breaks you in a different way, and nobody warns you which thing is about to break. So it always feels like you are the only one who cannot figure it out. You are not. The game just changed and nobody told you.Here is the pattern I have seen after building Foundr for over a decade and interviewing 700 founders: the person who gets you to $1 million is not the same person who gets you to $10 million. Each milestone demands you become someone new, and the hardest part is never

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52:27

707: How Two Aussies Took On Samsonite & Rimowa - and...

The Foundr Podcast with Nathan Chan ·

2026/09/17

Athan Didaskalou had bet everything on a one-year-old suitcase brand called July. Then Covid wiped out travel and nearly took the business with it. What happened next turned it into a nine-figure global company. Athan came from the agency world and sold out of two businesses to go all in; his co-founder Richard Li brought the manufacturing and supply chain muscle. They chose luggage precisely because it was hard to make and dominated by a single global player. They survived lockdown on drink

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37:26

706: Jay Hated His Plumbing Job - Now He Sells Beach...

The Foundr Podcast with Nathan Chan ·

2026/09/16

Jay Haddad hated being a plumber. He lived for the weekends - free diving, waterfalls, surfing, the beach - and when he and his wife had their first daughter at 23, the outdoor life they'd promised each other suddenly got hard. On his first Father's Day, they bought some fabric from Spotlight, watched a YouTube tutorial on how to thread his mother-in-law's dusty sewing machine, and made a waterproof beach pool so their daughter had somewhere safe to play. Strangers on the beach kept stopping to ask

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11:54

705: (Solo) How Success Made Me Neglect the Thing...

The Foundr Podcast with Nathan Chan ·

2026/09/14

I am going to tell you about the dumbest thing I have done in 12 years of building Foundr. It is not a bad hire or a failed launch. It is something far more dangerous, because I did not even realise I was doing it. For four years I took my eye off the thing that built this entire business, and by the time I noticed, I had left years of growth on the table.Here is the trap: when your monetisation engine is printing money, it gives you permission to be complacent about the thing that is actually

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49:13

704: How One Pivot Turned My FAILING Startup Into a...

The Foundr Podcast with Nathan Chan ·

2026/09/10

Mariam Naficy sold her first company for over $100 million in cash - two weeks before the Nasdaq crashed in 2000. Then she did something harder. She built Minted, a crowdsourced design marketplace her own investors thought was weird, watched it generate zero sales for its first month, and was one day away from shutting it down when it turned the corner and took off like a rocket ship. Today Minted does around $300 million a year, and she's now chairwoman while building her third company, Arcade, an

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10:44

703: (Solo) If I Had to Start Over in 2026, Here's...

The Foundr Podcast with Nathan Chan ·

2026/09/07

If I lost everything tomorrow, the team, the audience, the network, here's the exact tactical playbook I'd use to build back to $1 million from scratch.If I lost everything tomorrow, the team, the audience, the brand, the 13 years of relationships and network I have built, and I had to make $1 million from zero, here is exactly what I would do. This is not a motivational pep talk. It is the real, tactical, step by step playbook with no fluff. Here is the thing most founders get backwards: they

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60:36

702: Mark Cuban Calls Us His BEST Shark Tank Deal...

The Foundr Podcast with Nathan Chan ·

2026/09/03

Four childhood friends pooled $30,000 in a Chicago apartment to make wet wipes for men. Everyone told them dudes would never use them. Thirteen years later, Dude Wipes does close to $220 million in retail sales, runs on a team of just over 20 people, and is Mark Cuban's best-ever Shark Tank investment. They bootstrapped almost the entire way, none of them had retail experience, and they built a nine-figure business in a category the legacy players weren't even watching. In this interview,

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28:25

701: Trieu Doubled His Brand To $200K/Month In 5...

The Foundr Podcast with Nathan Chan ·

2026/09/02

Trieu became a dentist because he liked working with his hands and helping people - he got into UCSF's dental school as the very last student accepted, number 81 in a class of 81. Then the job started breaking his body. Aching neck, aching back, and mentors around him retiring early from surgeries. So he tinkered with some prisms until he could sit up straight and see like he was looking through a microscope, filed a patent, and built Hero Loops - ergonomic loupes that do the job of a $20,000

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13:49

700: (Solo) The Ambassador Strategy - How to get...

The Foundr Podcast with Nathan Chan ·

2026/08/31

I interviewed the founder of HexClad about a year ago. Cookware, pots and pans, not the sexiest category in the world. But their ambassador is Gordon Ramsay, one of the most famous chefs on the planet. And when he holds up your pan, you do not need to explain anything else. So here is the question nobody asks: how does a cookware brand get Gordon Ramsay without a massive ad budget or a celebrity agency on retainer?Here is the answer: a genuinely great product and a strategy. The same strategy I

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73:08

699: A Pizza Oven Saved My Life - Then It Built a...

The Foundr Podcast with Nathan Chan ·

2026/08/27

Tom Gozney hit rock bottom with addiction at 21 and spent nearly a year in a South African rehab facility. What saved him back home wasn't a business plan - it was a brick oven he dug into his garden, because cooking pizza for his friends was the only way he could socialise without alcohol at the centre of it. He noticed something: after a few weeks, people stopped bringing beer and started bringing toppings. That shift in behaviour became the entire thesis of the brand. Fifteen years later,

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12:14

698: (Solo) She Worked 7 Hours a Day & Made Zero...

The Foundr Podcast with Nathan Chan ·

2026/08/24

I got on a call recently with a founder in our community who had everything right. Amazing product, clear gap in the market, strong differentiators, all the boxes ticked. But she had no sales. So I asked her to walk me through her days, and she said she was doing seven hour days posting on TikTok, Instagram, running Facebook ads, trying everything. And I told her that was the problem right there.Here is what I keep seeing: the number one reason new brands fail at marketing is not a bad product. It

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50:32

697: I Sold My House to Fund My Idea - and Built a...

The Foundr Podcast with Nathan Chan ·

2026/08/20

Sam Faiers had already shut down two businesses. She'd laid off her entire team in one day when the fashion brand stopped turning a profit. So when she found a collagen formula every manufacturer told her couldn't be made, she put the money from the sale of her house into it anyway. Revive Collagen launched in August 2020, mid-lockdown, with no marketing budget, and hit £1 million in sales in 13 weeks. Six years later it's on track for £26 million, sits in 6,000 US retail doors including Ulta,

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60:15

696: Jamie Left a Nike Exec Job to Bootstrap A...

The Foundr Podcast with Nathan Chan ·

2026/08/19

Jamie spent over 20 years in corporate America, including a stint as a Nike executive, before a barbecue accident changed everything. Hosting friends and family in Park City after a near-perfect day outdoors, he tripped and sent a tray of drinks flying over everyone. That clumsy moment sparked two ideas at once: a better, genuinely leak-proof product, and a brand built around the outdoor-lifestyle-and-moments-of-pause philosophy he and his wife Michelle wanted to live by. He funded SMMT Outdoor

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12:02

695: (Solo) I Was Winning. So Why Was I Falling Apart?

The Foundr Podcast with Nathan Chan ·

2026/08/17

A few years ago I started waking up in the middle of the night, heart pounding, cold sweats, this overwhelming feeling of dread I could not explain. And the strangest part was there was no crisis. The business was good. Revenue was up. Everything on paper was working. But something was deeply wrong, and it took me weeks to even name it.Here is what nobody tells you about burnout: it does not always show up when things are falling apart. Mine showed up during the best run of my professional life

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49:44

694: We Were Two Weeks From Shutting Down - Then We...

The Foundr Podcast with Nathan Chan ·

2026/08/13

Chris and Jake Yap were two weeks from shutting down. A billion-dollar retailer had copied every product they launched and sold them for one tenth the price, then put it in the news - buy this coffee table from us for $499, or from them for $49. They'd burned their business savings, their personal savings, and taken out personal guarantee loans chasing speed. Jake was telling his wife he wasn't sure he could make rent. Then in those two weeks they made one switch that changed everything:

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