Simon Swords founded Fundipedia after starting in a backyard shed, building bespoke software. Originally a custom development shop, his firm built a data governance platform for major buy-side asset managers ...
Practical Founders Podcast with Greg Head
Every week, host Greg Head interviews a successful software founder who started, grew, and sometimes sold a valuable software company—without VC funding.
Older Founder
Guy Rubin is the co-founder and CEO of Ebsta, a revenue intelligence platform that works with Salesforce and Hubspot to automatically analyze existing data to improve sales performance. Started in London in 2012, Ebsta found success in the ...
Todd Watson is the owner and CEO of Showit, a popular no-code website builder and platform for designers and photographers. Todd is a native of Phoenix, Arizona where he started as a videographer before joining a friend in 2007 to create a ...
Erin Fletter had a long career in the restaurant business before starting an after-school enrichment program to teach kids how to cook at her daughters' school in 2011. Her cooking program became popular, and she improved and expanded it to ...
Mike Trasatti spent 10 years in the automotive dealer software business before he found an auto dealer in Iowa who had built is own complete software system. They partnered up in 2008, and Mike became the first CEO of the spinout software ...
Charlie Alsmiller is the founder and CEO of APIWORX, a powerful integration platform for mid-sized ecommerce companies. Charlie is an experienced, practical founder who has created and grown several software companies. His first venture was ...
Jeromy Wilson spent over ten years in the software business as a product management leader working for PE-owned and VC-funded software companies. When he decided to start his own software company, he focused on serving public libraries, like ...
Paul Van Metre was the co-founder of a successful machine shop that manufactured custom parts for the aerospace and medical device industries. Over 15 years, they created and improved software to run their entire business, which created huge ...
Chris Savage is the co-founder of Wistia, a leading video marketing platform for businesses. Wistia was started in 2007 by Chris and a college friend when inexpensive cloud hosting and easy web video encoding became available. They created the ...
Gregg Scoresby founded CampusLogic in Phoenix in 2021 to provide software for colleges and universities in the US to make it easier for students to apply for college loans and grants online. Initially self-funded, CampusLogic raised investment ...
Esben Friis-Jensen and his cofounder, Sebastian Seilund, teamed up in 2021 to create Userflow, a no-code user onboarding product for SaaS companies. This week, it was announced that Userflow has been acquired by Beamer, a maker of product user ...
Antony Ceravolo is a successful two-time startup founder from Adelaide, South Australia. He started his career in investment banking but left in 2002 to start a DVD rental business in London that raised funding from big VCs and Amazon. It grew ...
Shameem Hameed created several companies, including a medical billing services company, before starting ZH Healthcare in 2008 to provide billing and EHR software to innovative healthcare providers. Their BlueBriX software grew into a ...
Harry Hopkins is co-founder and CIO of Viewgol, a medical billing technology software and services company based in Dallas, Texas. Viewgol was started in 2017 by three founders who got the product and revenues going before hiring additional ...
Hamed Mazrouei owned a security monitoring business and other businesses for many years before he started his first software and services business called Vivant Corporation. Vivant provides a complete turnkey connectivity and managed network ...
Subramanyam Kasibhat has created dozens of products in many different industries. He and his wife were contracted by a friend to build a software solution for a manufacturing plant for a German company. Seven years after they started with their ...
Bernardo Carvalho Wertheim is a worldly entrepreneur who grew up in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, and then moved to the UK to go to school and start his career in advertising. He kept traveling and eventually settled in Santiago, Chile, where he ...
Mike Roberts is the founder and CEO of SpyFu, a leading competitive research tool for marketers and entrepreneurs with over 15,000 paid customers and hundreds of thousands of free users. SpyFu was launched in 2006 and has been a profitable and ...
Raution Jaiswal grew up in India and then worked in management roles at large companies in the US before he discovered a problem experienced by small insurance agencies. He validated the problem, built an early solution, and didn't quit his ...
Bryan Clayton is the co-founder and CEO of GreenPal, a leading on-demand marketplace of lawn care services for homeowners across the US. With a team of 25 remote employees, they help 300,000 homeowners connect with 35,000 landscape service ...
Wissam Tabbara is a serial entrepreneur who has created multiple software startups in Seattle since 2009 when he left Microsoft where he was a software development manager. He led multiple startup technology teams and now is an experienced CEO ...
Patrick Fingles grew a successful roofing company with hundreds in the Baltimore-Washington DC area. In 2013, they created software to help new salespeople estimate, quote, and close new roofing sales. They started selling the software to other ...
Jordan Fleming grew up in Toronto and New York, then lived in Edinburgh, Scotland for 15 years where he created a successful consultancy helping larger businesses automate and improve their processes. His experience developing workflow apps ...
Gregory Shepard is a serial entrepreneur who has created and sold 12 companies, including marketing software and ad technology companies. In 2016, he sold two of his bootstrapped software companies, AffiliateTraction and AdAssured to eBay for ...
Dave Savage was a top-producing mortgage loan officer in the early 1990s who used computers and software to help him sell more. He became a software entrepreneur by creating a new software solution for loan officers to help them educate their ...
Beth Sanders was selling computer software and equipment for a regional computer retailer in Ohio when she recorded her grandmother's life stories on a tape recorder. It was so powerful she decided to create a website in 2001 that allowed ...
Esben Friis-Jensen was a technology professional in Copenhagen, Denmark before he and three Danish friends moved to San Francisco in 2013 to start a new startup called Cobalt. Cobalt.io grew steadily and raised several rounds of VC funding to ...
Massimo Arrigoni grew up in Milan, Italy, and moved to California 27 years ago to create software products and start a family, eventually moving to the San Francisco area in Silicon Valley. While leading product at the software company MailUp, ...
Dave Whorton is an experienced tech investor and funded founder who spent the first 20 years of his career at the highest levels of Silicon Valley venture capital and tech-boom startups. He started his career at Hewlett Packard and experienced ...
Windermere Real Estate is a large and well-known residential real estate broker in the Seattle area. In the late 1990s, they invested to build an internal software system to power their own business and differentiate their services. After using ...
Jon Nordmark founded eBags.com in 1998 as one of the first Internet e-commerce companies and grew it into the largest online retailer of luggage, bags, and travel accessories. Jon was previously a successful corporate executive who led ...
Deb Muller was an experienced HR executive at a large global company who left her job to start a consultancy specializing in managing important employee incident investigations. Surprisingly, her customers asked her for a software solution that ...
Sandeep Kumar quit his job working for an Indian consulting company to start a software company in 2005, when product-focused startups were not common in India. For the next 10 years, they experimented with product features and customer ...
Mark Abbott was an active investor and board member for 20 years when he realized that most of the 100+ companies he helped were not good a their "business fundamentals." The fundamentals of setting long-term goals, making short-term plans, and ...
Jeff Matlow is a serial entrepreneur and a crazy triathlete and long-distance runner who found a way to put those passions together in a crazy software startup. He saw an opportunity to create a better registration experience for endurance ...
Howard Gottlieb created and sold several businesses before starting a school fundraising website in 2003 called Easy Fundraising Ideas. It grew into the most popular Internet website for school fundraisers. He experimented with many business ...
Scott Pickard didn't know he was embarking on a 15-year software entrepreneurial journey when he signed on to manage a horse veterinary practice in Calgary, Canada. But they had built some internal software to help them manage their large ...
Joe Griffin recently left his job of 8 years as co-CEO of ClearVoice, a company that he and co-founder Jay Swanson started in 2014 out of their digital marketing agency business in Phoenix, Arizona. ClearVoice was acquired by Fiverr in 2019 and ...
Karl Swannie was a geographer working in the scenic city of Victoria, British Columbia, Canada, when he started analyzing social media data based on location. He quickly saw there was valuable real-time information that was not being used, so he started Echosec Systems to find a practical use for those insights.
Melissa Kwan created her first software company in 2014 and then sold it in 2019. It was extremely difficult to start and even harder to grow, but it’s how she learned what not to do in her next startup and what was really “non-negotiable” in her life. Now she’s a nomadic world traveler and the founder of a growing software business.
Sean Meister was a sales professional and leader with a successful career selling hospital and medical supplies before he left to join his long-time friend who had a vision for a new software company serving smaller trucking fleets with simple ...
Thomas Brown creatively bootstrapped his software company and ran it as a very small "lifestyle" business before committing to growing his SaaS business with a larger team.
Thomas was an independent insurance claims adjuster in the 1990s in ...
Luke Hohmann was an engineering and product management leader at Silicon Valley startups before he became an acclaimed author and speaker in the enterprise software development world. He used funding from his consulting business—plus revenue ...
Hamid Shojaee is a technical founder and serial entrepreneur who created several software companies and dozens of products in the last 25 years. He sold his two software companies in 2021—Axosoft and Pure Chat—and now is an active investor and ...
Dan Jaffe is the founder and CEO of LawLytics, a practical website marketing platform for small law firms. Dan was a practicing lawyer before he became an internet entrepreneur with his first venture, which he sold before he started LawLytics ...
Rafael Zimberoff was CEO of ShipRush, a software company he founded in 2001, then grew and eventually sold in 2017 to Descartes Systems Group for $17 million. Rafael started ShipRush as an add-on product for popular CRM and accounting software ...
Todd Watson is the owner and CEO of Showit, a popular no-code website builder and platform for designers and photographers. Todd is a native of Phoenix, Arizona where he started as a videographer before joining a friend in 2007 to create a ...
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