Top Founders

18:14

"I Built My Own AI Video Model, Now Make $3M a...

Top Founders ·

2026/10/06

Jeff Lu quit Google Cloud in 2022 to build his own AI video models at Akool, a generative AI platform for avatars, face swap, and video translation. He skipped the giant foundation models and trained small ones for specific tasks on rented servers, then watched revenue go from $100K in 2022 to $3M in 2023, $13M in 2024, $25M in 2025, and over $3M in June 2026 alone. He breaks down why Coca-Cola picked him over the foundation models and now pays him $4m per year. He'll share how he's driven huge

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19:03

You Make $8m/yr, Would You Sell for $100m Cash?

Top Founders ·

2026/09/29

Antoine Fort launched Qobra in 2020 with a $100K pre-seed from 7 angels, and his first investor was also his first customer. He started by cold calling with a phone list from a provider later shut down over European privacy law (GDPR), charging $10K/year. Today Qobra is at about $30K/year per customer, 250+ customers, and roughly $7–8M ARR. Along the way, one meme ad closed an $80K/year deal, and a single sales rep on the platform earned $1.5M in commissions (75x the average). So when Nathan asks if

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19:34

How He Makes $40M/yr Renting Laptops for $50/Mo

Top Founders ·

2026/09/24

Sevan Marian, co-founder and CEO of Fleet, bootstrapped his Paris-based laptop rental company for 7 straight years to roughly $40M in annualized revenue and close to $10M in yearly profit (EBITDA), without raising a single dollar of VC. His trick: customers pay about $50/month on 36-month contracts, and Fleet sells each contract to a bank that pays it upfront on day one. That's how he's financed 50,000+ devices across 20 countries without holding inventory. In early 2026 he sold about 25% of the

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17:59

How Does Laundry Software Make $60M a Year?

Top Founders ·

2026/09/17

At 23, Alex Jekowsky started building Cents, an all-in-one software, hardware, and payments platform for laundromats, dry cleaners, and shared laundry rooms. In 2025, Cents generated $60 million in revenue, up 67%, with just 80 employees and EBITDA margins above 20%. The company now has 99% customer retention, powers laundry rooms in nearly 7,000 apartment buildings, and recently raised a $140 million Series C at an approximately $800 million valuation. In this episode, Alex reveals: • How Cents

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17:47

The Surprising Way This Startup Bank Makes Millions

Top Founders ·

2026/09/08

Froda generated $57 million in revenue in 2025 by lending to the small businesses traditional banks often overlook. In this episode, Nathan Latka sits down with Froda co-founder Oliver Mohseni to unpack the economics behind the startup bank. Froda has supported 150,000 businesses across seven markets and funded approximately $3.45 billion since launch. Oliver explains how Froda uses retail deposits, automated underwriting, and embedded partnerships with banks, fintech companies, payment providers,

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22:54

He Sells AI Door-to-Door. $3.5M ARR, 400% Growth, $0 Ads

Top Founders ·

2026/09/01

Carl Turner, founder of Swipe.by, built an AI marketing platform for restaurants to $3.5M ARR growing 400% year-over-year — with $0 spent on ads and every customer closed by a rep knocking on doors. He breaks down the exact rep comp plan (6 locations/month, $6K ACV, 30–40% commission), why he took $450K from Founderpath instead of Stripe, and why he gives away websites and online ordering for free. Then he turns down a $15M cash offer and explains the 2x liquidation preference math that could leave

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18:21

He Makes $50m/yr on Cookie Popups, Controls 2% of all...

Top Founders ·

2026/08/25

Raphaël Boukris is the co-founder and Chief Revenue Officer of Didomi (didomi.io), the Paris-based consent management platform that helps enterprises comply with GDPR, CCPA, and privacy laws worldwide. Roughly 2% of all global web traffic passes through Didomi's SDK, and the company processes billions of consent decisions every month for customers including Bloomberg, Sky, and Adyen. In this interview, Raphaël breaks down the full financial history on the record: three funding rounds, two

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17:14

Why Does Google Pay Him $2M A Year?

Top Founders ·

2026/08/18

Stéphane Donzé has bootstrapped AODocs and Talarian to a combined $60m in 2026 revenue without raising capital. His top three customers each pay more than $2m per year, including Google, which pays him millions annually to control the documents behind its data center builds. He funded fourteen years of R&D off a cloud consulting business, never burned more than $200k in a month, and has fielded private equity calls four times a week declining $600m offers.

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20:47

How He Bootstrapped Dental Software to $16m

Top Founders ·

2026/08/11

He bootstrapped to $16.5m ARR selling software to 2,000 dental offices. Zero dollars raised, 24% EBITDA, and $1.5m in free cash flow last year. COVID cut him back to $2m in 2021; he's added $14.5m since, charging $13k per dental office per year. When I asked what happens if Henry Schein shows up with $180m cash, he gave a surprising answer.

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24:11

How David Chevalier Hit $15M ARR With a Chrome...

Top Founders ·

2026/07/23

How do you go from a Chrome extension with no sales team to $15M in revenue in five years, while raising less money than most startups spend in their first year? David Chevalier is the co-founder and CEO of Surfe, the leading CRM enrichment and waterfall data platform for B2B sales teams. He bootstrapped for two years, grew to $1.5M purely through HubSpot and Pipedrive marketplace rankings, and has never taken a dollar of personal secondary despite being six years into the company. Today Surfe

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20:00

Practice by Numbers: $16.5M Dental SaaS, 24% EBITDA,...

Top Founders ·

2026/07/16

How do you build a $16.5M vertical SaaS company with 24% EBITDA margins with zero paid acquisition, zero outside funding, and your wife as co-founder? Rohit Garg is the co-founder and CEO of Practice by Numbers, an all-in-one dental practice management platform serving 1,300 customers across 2,000 locations. He started building it in 2015 because his wife is a dentist and he was the one running SQL queries to answer her business questions. Today they are bootstrapped, profitable, and sitting on $2

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21:03

Handwrytten Sends 6 Million Fake Handwritten Notes a...

Top Founders ·

2026/07/10

How do you build a $10M business by teaching robots to write handwritten notes with real pens, and do it with zero outside investment for 12 straight years? David Wachs sold his text message marketing company for eight figures in 2012, started Handwrytten the next day, and has bootstrapped it to 200 custom-built robots in a Phoenix facility sending 350,000 notes per month. He owns 100% of the company, took $350K in profit last year, and is targeting $10 to $11M in revenue this year. You'll learn:

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19:12

Featherless: $3.6M Revenue Running 6,700 Open Source...

Top Founders ·

2026/07/01

How do you go from a pricing experiment inside a failing product to $3.6 million in annual revenue with 10,000 customers — in under two years and with zero paid marketing? Eugene Cheah is the co-founder and CEO of Featherless.ai, the largest open source LLM inference provider on Hugging Face. He co-created RWKV, the first attention-free AI architecture under the Linux Foundation, and today runs a 27-person team serving customers that pay anywhere from $25 a month to $2 million a year. You'll

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20:17

Gather AI: $15M Revenue With Drones and 170% Net...

Top Founders ·

2026/06/17

How do you build a $15M revenue business by teaching autonomous drones to find missing sneakers in warehouses, and get customers to more than double their spend every single year? Sankalp Arora is the founder and CEO of Gather AI, a physical AI company that uses autonomous drones and computer vision to track inventory in real time across warehouses. He holds a PhD in robotics from Carnegie Mellon, built the world's first safe autonomous helicopter for DARPA, and today has 30 to 40 customers paying

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23:03

Tive Hit $100M Revenue After a Down Round and $10K in...

Top Founders ·

2026/06/11

How do you go from $10,000 left in the bank and a down round to $100 million in annual revenue — without ever seriously considering quitting? Krenar Komoni is the founder and CEO of Tive, a hardware-plus-SaaS company that tracks shipments in real time across trucks, ships, and planes worldwide. He started in his basement in 2015, charging his father-in-law $19.99 a month, and today has 1,300 customers — nine of which pay over $1 million per year — at a $545 million valuation. You'll learn: Why

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18:42

Golf Genius: $53M ARR, $10M Self-Funded, Zero VC —...

Top Founders ·

2026/06/03

How do you build a $53M ARR software company, stay profitable for eight straight years, and give 60% of the cap table to your employees — without ever taking a venture check? Mike Zisman is the founder and CEO of Golf Genius, the dominant tournament management and handicapping platform for golf clubs worldwide. He self-funded $10M of his own money as interest-free debt, did 10 acquisitions before hitting $60M in revenue, and today sits on $14M cash while printing 20% EBITDA margins with 300

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21:21

$28M Series A at $100M Val: The Pest Control SaaS...

Top Founders ·

2026/05/27

How do you build a $100M SaaS company by charging apartment residents $5 a month to keep rats out of their bedroom? Justin Clements is the co-founder and CEO of PestShare, an on-demand pest control platform embedded inside property management software. He bootstrapped from 2019 to 2020, raised just $5M over two rounds, then closed a $28M Series A at a $100M valuation in 2025, the same year he crossed $10M ARR. You'll learn: — Why PestShare's revenue model is structured like a warranty, and why

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24:44

He Lost $50/User to Build a $30M ARR AI Empire (Fathom)

Top Founders ·

2026/05/21

How do you go from 0 to $30 million in ARR in just 3 years while purposely losing money on every single free user? Richard White is the founder and CEO of Fathom, a free AI meeting assistant used by hundreds of thousands of professionals daily. After running UserVoice for nearly two decades, Richard entered the hyper-competitive AI transcription war against giants like Zoom, Otter, and Firefly. Instead of playing the traditional VC game, he gave the product away, lost $50 per user, and built an

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25:08

How 1Mind Hit $1M in 3 Months Selling $100k AI Sales...

Top Founders ·

2026/05/13

How do you hit $1 million in contracted revenue in three months and achieve 211% net dollar retention in your first year? Amanda Kahlow is the founder and CEO of 1Mind, an AI platform building go-to-market superhumans that replace SDRs, AEs, and sales engineers. You'll learn: - How to sell AI software for $100,000 to $400,000 using flat subscription pricing instead of metered models. - The unit economics of replacing 89 SDRs and 19 sales engineers with a single custom agent. - How they maintain 80

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24:18

Selling Check for $400M, Now Building a $1.5M ARR AI...

Top Founders ·

2026/05/06

How do you build a $1.5 million ARR enterprise AI platform after previously selling a fintech startup for nearly $400 million? Ahikam Kaufman is the CEO of SafeBooks AI, an agentic data automation platform for the office of the CFO. You'll learn: - How to charge $125,000 ACVs by pricing against the cost of an accounting headcount. - Why the company raised a $15 million seed round just to build their initial data architecture. - How they landed a $300,000 engagement in their first year of going to

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