ScaleApp Podcasts with Prof Dan Isenberg
ScaleApp is a podcast for growing ventures, not startups. It features interviews with successful scalers and content to help you grow your company better. Hosted by Professor Dan Isenberg, the show focuses on scaling businesses that already have traction.
Episodes
Episode #38 - Robert Wessman - Master of Scale
I have been writing cases about entrepreneurs since 2005 - close to 50 HBS cases published. None is so interesting as the three cases I (some with my HBS colleague, Bill Kerr) I have written on Robert Wessman, 57, Icelandic, founder of SEVERAL multi-billion dollar companies - Actavis (formerly ACT) is now one of the top three generics companies IN THE WORLD. Alvotech (ALVO) is one of the leading b
Episode #37 - Rupesh Kumar, CEO/Founder Ariqt - 130 AI Engineers and Scaling Fast
In Episode #37 of ScaleApp Podcasts, I sit down with Rupesh Kumar, founder & CEO of ARIQT Global Technologies. Rupesh left a top-1%-earning developer job in India to move to the Netherlands out of what he simply calls “curiosity,” founded ARIQT in June 2020 and has scaled it to 130 colleagues across India, the Netherlands, Australia, and Ireland, breaking $5M in revenue. In Scalerator we used
Episode #36 - One Brain, Infinite Robots. Ashish Kapoor Scales Up General Robotics
What if the robots are already there — but nobody can get them to actually work, inexpensively and at scale?In this episode, Ashish Kapoor, founder of General Robotics and former head of the Microsoft Research robotics initiative, discuss how General Robotics is powering the usefulness of robots, immediately and at scale. Ashish has spent his career at the intersection of frontier AI and real-worl
Episode #35 - Natech - The bank behind the banks. €11mm and GROWING global - Natech Banking Solutions and Thanasis Navrozoglou CEO/Founder
What does it take to build a global fintech platform from a small Greek city — and end up powering banks and fintechs across Europe and the Middle East?Enter Natech, headquartered in Ioannina, Greece. Founded in 2003, Natech builds core banking systems, digital channels, and regulatory technology for financial institutions — primarily smaller, agile banks that need to move fast. Their front-to-bac
Episode #34 — 3D Printing America's Manufacturing Future — Jay Rogers, CEO/Co-founder, Haddy.life
Jay Rogers is a serial entrepreneur who doesn't just learn from failure — he codifies it. His previous venture, Local Motors, 3D printed autonomous vehicles and deployed 150 of them across 29 cities and three continents. The technology worked. The pricing worked. They raised $100 mm or so in capital. Regulation slowed everything down and they never learned how to sell. The company failed as a
Episode #33 - Kevin Kilty/Hubpay - From "too early yesterday" to "$100 mm tomorrow"
In Episode 33 of ScaleApp Podcasts, Kevin Kilty and I unpack the messy, honest reality of building a cross-border payments platform from the UAE — one of the world’s fastest-growing trading hubs. HubPay is now approaching $10 million ARR (already at a $10mm run rate), profitable, with 58 people across Dubai and London, and a Series B in motion. Kevin launched HubPay in 2019 with a clear vision: a
Episode #32 - Sam Smith, SuperScalers and £50 million finnCap
In Episode 32 of ScaleApp Podcasts, Sam Smith and I unpack her 24-year scale journey: building FinnCap from an in-house corporate finance desk into an IPO-listed £50 million revenue financial services firm, staying profitable throughout.At 24 – “I literally had no clue what I was doing” after painstakingly building to £3 million revenue, a step change along with a management buyout created real ow
Episode #31 - Clarity Pediatrics - Upping the Care for Childhood Disorders - Christina LaMontagne
Christina LaMontagne on Scaling Healthcare with ConvictionScaling in healthcare is never just about growth—it’s about trust, discipline, and conviction. In this 31st episode of ScaleApp Podcasts, I sat down with Christina to unpack what it really takes to build and scale a healthcare business that works for patients, parents, providers, and payers alike.Christina’s journey is grounded in first pri
Episode #30 - Sahar Hashemi "Two-Time Scaler" - Coffee Republic and Skinny Candy (UK)
From Immigrant Teen to Scale Up Pioneer: The Sahar Hashemi StoryWhat does it take to build one of the UK’s fastest-growing retail brands, lose it, rebuild yourself, and then reinvent entrepreneurship for an entire generation of women founders? In this episode, I sit down with Sahar Hashemi OBE, co-founder of Coffee Republic and Skinny Candy, and founder of the movement Buy Women Built.Sahar’s jour
Episode #29 - Scaling Global Services from Puerto Rico to the World - Jorge Rodriguez and Paciv
Jorge Rodriguez, founder of Paciv, built a world‑class industrial automation and computer systems validation company from a small warehouse in Puerto Rico to a global player serving Eli Lilly, Johnson & Johnson, and other pharma giants. The son of Spanish immigrants who arrived on the island with nothing but work ethic and discipline, Jorge translated family lessons about integrity, paying sup
Episode #28 - Raspberry Pi's Just Desserts - How to be a $250 million category creator
Eben Upton, co-founder and CEO of Raspberry Pi, turned a Cambridge lab experiment into an intriguing scale-up stories. What began as a mission to create more programmers in the world by empowering kids to program, became a $250 million public company that has shipped over 70 million units worldwide and helped redefine accessible computing. At its heart, Raspberry Pi is a simple but revolutionary
Episode #27 - Capturing the Caribbean - Reshma Advani Rojas (Advanced Commercial, T&T)
Reshma Advani Rojas, CEO of Advanced Commercial Equipment (ACEL), has turned a family legacy into the Caribbean’s most respected restaurant supply companies. Based in Trinidad & Tobago, ACEL serves 14 countries across the region and generates approximately $30 million in revenue. In this episode of ScaleApp Podcasts, Reshma shares how leadership, culture, and clarity drive scale—not just capit
Episode #26 - 30 Years of Scale - Jerry Jendusa (EMTEQ $250 mm, Breakthru)
From garage to a $250 million global aerospace supplier—and then do it again and again as an investor and mentor. In this episode, Jerry Jendusa, founder of EMTEQ and now head of Breakthru, shares how a mix of listening to customers, discipline, and people-first leadership drove his growth journey. From bootstrapping to $100 million in sales and $250 million exit, Jerry reflects on lessons learne
Episode #25 - Raphael Afaedor - Jumia (NYSE), Supermart, Kyosk - Unicorn Entrepreneur in Africa
From Ghana to Czech Republic to Harvard Business School to the frontlines of Africa’s digital economy, Raphael (“Rafi”) Afaedor's career is a masterclass in vision, immersion, and execution. Having co-founded Jumia—the first African e-commerce giant to list on the NYSE—and later Kyosk, a B2B platform connecting fast-moving consumer goods producers to informal retail shops and end customers, R
Episode #24 - Metis Construction Ohio - Breaking $30 million with Resilience, Trust, and Systems - CEO/Founder, Julie Brandle
I believe that one of the biggest challenges in going from a few millions to a few tens of millions is building systems and processes that enable scaling. We have seen this challenge in the majority of the ScaleApp Podcast discussions, Giscad is just the most recent example. As Julie Brandle explains, one aspect of their scaling challenge was to bring on more specialized professional services - le
Episode #23 - Giscad of Trinidad & Tobago - A rapidly growing Caribbean venture.
BackgroundIn this episode, I welcome our first Trinidad & Tobago venture to ScaleApp Podcasts: Giscad, co-founded by Desmond Dougall and Sudesh Botha. What began 22 years ago as two engineers suddenly out of work has grown into a 50-person regional powerhouse operating across nearly numerous Caribbean markets. Giscad is a ScaleratorT&T alumnus.Academics in the entrepreneurship space often
Episode #22 - Positron AI - Attacking NVIDIA's Market - CEO Mitesh Agrawal
Do we need to re-define "Chutzpah" = "Positron?" Mitesh Agrawal, CEO and co-founder of Positron AI, is leading one of the most audacious ventures in the tech world today: building silicon to compete directly with NVIDIA. Backed by over $70 million in funding from DFJ, Valor, Atreides, Oakseed (disclosure: I am an LP) and others, and already shipping product within 18 months of
Episode #21 - Ketryx! - Accelerating Regulatory Compliance for Pharmas and Device Makers - CEO/co-founder, Erez Kaminski
Background / IntroductionWhat is the biggest bottleneck keeping the stream of drugs and devices from getting to market? R&D? Capital? Maybe, but managing regulatory compliance is right up there. Safely speeding time to market for pharmaceutical and medical device makers is huge.... IF you can pull it off. 50% of time to market is in regulatory compliance.Enter Erez Kaminski and Ketryx. Managin
Episode #20 - FactoredAI 70% YOY Growth and Leading the AI Revolution - CEO/Founder Israel Niezen
Background / IntroFactoredAI was incubated in 2019 by Israel Niezen out of Andrew Ng’s AI Fund with $2.5 mio “we didn’t really need,” and today has over 300 of the top 1% of talent in LATAM solving complex data problems by building world-class AI and ML/LLM solutions. Factored went from $.7mio in 2020 to $3mio to $8mio to $13mo to $18 mio in 2024, and will break $30mio in 2025. Their plan is to br
Episode #19 - Mrs. Dunster's Scales its Home Style Baked Goods - Co-CEOs Rosalyn and Blair Hyslop (Scalerator Alums!)
IntroductionRosalyn and Blair Hyslop met as teenagers Atlantic Canada in Junior Achievement and from the start dreamed of running a business together. That dream became reality when they acquired Mrs. Dunster’s, a beloved regional bakery known for its authentic donuts, garlic cheese buns, and grew it to offer hundreds of other homestyle baked goods. At the time, the business had about $7M in reven
Episode #18 - Zencity - Scaling Up a SaaS Platform for Cities to Address Citizen Needs (profitably!) - Eyal Feder-Levy CEO/co-Founder
Background - Eyal Feder-Levy, CEO and co-founder of Zencity, joins me on the ScaleApp Podcasts to discuss the journey from his community-building nonprofit work in Tel Aviv to building the largest provider of community engagement software for local governments. Zencity operates in six countries, serving over 400 agencies and 200 million residents with sales “deep into double digit millions.” Feder
Episode #17 - Sourcemap - Is Sourcemap the Future Google of the Manufacturing World? (I think so) Leonardo Bonanni CEO/Founder
BackgroundLeo Bonanni is an architect-turned-entrepreneur who founded Sourcemap, a pioneering supply chain mapping platform, based on his research at the MIT Media Lab. Originally a tool for understanding the social and environmental impact of design decisions, Sourcemap evolved into a mission-critical SaaS platform used by major global brands to trace the origins of their raw materials down to th
Episode #16 - Beewise - Saving Our Food Supply - A High Tech Solution to Bee Colony Collapse - Saar Safra, CEO/Founder of Beewise
Background / IntroductionSaar Safra, serial entrepreneur and CEO/co-founder of Beewise, joins Prof. Dan Isenberg to share the extraordinary mission of his sixth startup: saving the bees to secure global food supplies. With backing from Fortissimo Capital and others, and over $170 million raised, Beewise is pioneering robotic beehives to counter catastrophic bee colony collapse—a crisis affecting o
Episode #15 - TNL Mediagene (TNMG) - $45 mio rev Asian Media Tech Group Scaling Fast
Meet Joey Chung, Taiwanese entrepreneur, co-founder and CEO of TNL Mediagene (NASDAQ:TNMG).TNMG is a media content and technology group spanning SE Asia and Japan in Chinese, English and other languages (TNMG IS NOT IN CHINA!) as an apolitical media group, growth 50% organic, 50% M&A. Ten acquisitions, including a major merger with MediaGene in Japan which allowed TNMG to go public on NASDAQ.
EPISODE #14 - Sgt. Clean ACEs It (ACE=Amazing Customer Experience) - Breaking $15 million revenues
I have always been skeptical of conflating entrepreneurship with innovation or technology and Sgt. Clean (YES, a rapidly expanding car wash chain in Ohio) is a great example. How many tech startups you know have more than $10 million in revenues, growing rapidly and profitably?And guess what? This is a $20 billion market in the US only. Highly fragmented, ripe for scaling if you can crack the cod
Episode #13 - Sunbit - How Sunbit Creates Massive Value for all its Stakeholders - Arad Levertov and Tal Riesenfeld
Episode 13 taped on Friday the 13th! How lucky can you get?There is so much I find exciting about Sunbit - talking with co-founders Arad Levertov and Tal Riesenfeld is like a huge smorgasboard of interesting topics.Just a few words about their strategy here but you have GOT to listen to how they explain in their own words how they have grown beyond $300 million and achieved profitability. (Disclos
Episode #12 - Home Surplus - Beyond $30 mio and Just Getting Started - Joe Schwartz, CEO/Founder
Home Surplus, founded by Joe Schwartz who thought he was a PE guy and found himself as CEO and is building a national chain of specialist cabinet suppliers. What's the deal? Floor and Decor took an aisle out of Home Depot and turned it into a 250 store chain worth about $8 billion. Harbor Freight did the same with tools and has 1500 stores worth about $8 billion. Joe thinks the brass ring may
Episode #11 - Epignosis - The Global Leader in Online Corporate Training Platforms (and the weird way it got started)
Meet Thanos Papagelis and Dimitris Tsingos, co-founders of Epignosis, the global leader in online corporate training. $50 million ARR, 55% and above margins, 50% and above annual growth, profitable since 2010, bootstrapped without VC. They were so good that when they tried to raise growth capital, no VCs (except 1) believed their story and responded with standard VC bullshit - "You haven&apos
Episode #10 - MavenAGI - Revolutionizing Customer Support - Jonathan Corbin & Sami Shalabi
Jonathan Corbin, Eugene Mann, and Sami Shalabi have put together decades of combined experience in senior positions at Hubspot, Google, Adobe, Stripe, IBM - need I say more - to COMPLETELY revolutionize how companies engage with customers. I will let them explain to us in this 10th!! ScaleApp Podcasts episode but the way I see it is that they have revolutionized the customer support experience as
Episode #9 - Trio Mobil (Turkey) - Scaling by Making Work (Much) (Much) Safer
Imagine a company, about 7 years old, with 250 employees around the world, revenues in the "eight figures" (that means between $10-99 million), two thousand customers globally. With high 2-digit annual growth. The company uses AI enabled peripheral devices (think cameras that can interpret situations and make decisions) to make the workplace safer, networked and managed on a common pla
Episode #8 - Amazon and Ikea Love Wify - Post-purchase service for big-brand sales in India
Vikram Sharma and Deepanshu Goel founded Wify in 2020 to solve a big e-commerce and in-store pain point facing the Ikeas and Amazons of the 1 billion plus population - Not used to self-assembling and self-installing furniture and appliances at home, Indian consumers simply bought less. Building on their experience in larger companies, Vikram and Deepanshu built a tech platform to connect consumers
Episode #7 - Run:ai Acquired for "$700 million" by Nvidia - Interview with co-founder Omri Geller
Run:ai was founded in 2018 to provide the software "operating system" for development of AI and large language models (LLMs). But the real story of run:ai is not the acquisition price (unconfirmed) of $700 million nor its raise of $130 million in VC money, but in how run:ai scaled its customer penetration so rapidly after a year of invention and re-invention of its business model. (Disc
Episode #6 - Ridge Security - When Product-Market Fit Kicks In - Co-founder Nick Mo
Ridge Security is a pioneer in the new field of "penetration testing," using AI to generate offensive security for increasingly large enterprise customers. Founded in 2020 by Nick Mo and Lydia Zhang, Ridge is already generating "millions" in revenues. Originally from China, Nick and Lydia have extensive tech backgrounds at Cisco, and led Hillstone Networks from startup to NASDA
Episode #5 - Guesty - Revolutionizing Short Term Rentals Globally - >$100 mm ARR
Founded in 2013 by twins Amiad and Koby Soto, Guesty graduated from Y Combinator and set out to revolutionize the emerging short term rental industry. Starting out as a service to automate management, Amiad and Koby had to pivot from service to software, and eventually came to dominate the software market for managing short term rentals around the world. Seven acquisitions later, with $400 million
Episode #4 - UENI - Kick the Freemium Habit to Unleash Growth - Anh Pham Vu and Christine Telyan
UENI is more than a web-site builder - UENI is a strategic partner to small businesses wanting to grow bigger. Ten years after founding and $30 million raised, UENI is fast becoming a major player in helping SMEs increase their business activity through increased online presence and more effective digital-supported services. With 45,000 subscription customers UENI has amazing numbers - low acquisi
Episode #3 - Caresyntax - Becoming the AI Nexus of the Operating Room
Born out of a search fund, Bjoern von Siemens and Dennis Kogan set out over 12 years ago to dramatically improve surgical outcomes by becoming a platform for "complex coordination" (see Peter Thiel) in operating rooms around the globe. Although Bjoern never used this term, looking back it seems audacious for a small, thinly capitalized company to grow to orchestrate a complex, life-criti
Episode #2 - Yodeck - Bootstrapping $20 million ARR! Co-founders, Vangelis Mihalopoulas & Dimitris Tsingos
Vangelis Mihalopoulas and Dimitris Tsingos, two engineers in Athens now in their 40s, founded Yodeck to do a digital signage project for a customer in Greece who wanted to easily send information to numerous digital signs (think schools, government offices, sports stadiums, train stations, corporations - any place that has multiple screens conveying information that changes frequently.)In the mids
Episode #1 - Mitch Zlotnick, CEO/Founder Audimute - The Magic of Sound - Getting Past $5 million by Firing Amazon!!
Mitch Zlotnick founded Audimute to provide delightful sound experiences to famous drummers, restaurant-goers, churches, conference centers. With 35 or so employees in their Cleveland facility, Audimute makes and sells acoustics systems around the US and beyond and today sells "$5 to $6 million" after dumping Amazon as a customer. "We just couldn't make any money," laughs M
Launching ScaleApp® podcasts!!! Lessons on how to grow your company.
Ready to unlock the secrets of successful entrepreneurship? Tune into the first episode of the ScaleApp podcast series with Dan Isenberg, where you'll gain invaluable insights from a veteran with nearly four decades of experience in growing businesses. Dan, a former professor at Harvard Business School and Columbia, and a seasoned investor and former venture capitalist, demystifies the comple
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