Ambition Today Blog Posts

Lorenzo Thione is the Managing Director of Gaingels, a leading LGBTQIA+/Allies investment syndicate and one of the largest and most active private investors in North America. He is also the co-founding Chairman of StartOut, Chairman of the Board at Social Edge, and previously co-founded Powerset, a natural-language search engine startup sold to Microsoft for $100 million in 2008.

Last month I had the opportunity to sit on the opposite sit of the podcaster’s table to be a guest on the Millennial Investing Podcast! Where hosts, Robert Leonard and Clay Finck interview successful entrepreneurs, business leaders, and investors to help educate and inspire the millennial generation.

In the fall we sat down with one of the godfathers of Venture Capital, Jordan Levy, who shares his very inspiring founder story and how that led to his career as an investor.

From a 6 year old calling around on car repairs for his mother, to a thriving CEO of Kangarootime, our next guest Scott Wayman gives us insight on how he got to where he is today. Scott was the oldest son of 24 kids (18 of which were adopted).

Pete Kazanjy is Ambition Today’s new guest from Southern California. He is sitting in San Francisco, CA right now as we speak, enjoying Alamo Square. He is a serial founder and seasoned early stage Saas executive, advisor, and investor.

From growing up on a dairy farm, to a successful entrepreneur with hundreds of employees, meet our next guest, Jack Greco. Greco co-founded ACV Auctions, an online auction dealer platform, which was last valued at $1.5B.

Kevin Siskar and Tim Shisler are at it again, discussing the current news in our world today.

Our next guest is so amazing, we had to interview him a second time! He was on nearly 5 years ago on Episode 8! Jeff Wald is an entrepreneur who has started three technology companies, with his latest company, WorkMarket, being sold to ADP.

In this new and exciting podcast, Kevin Siskar and Tim Shisler talk about the current events in our world today.

Imagine being on a cruise with friends and a good business idea comes to mind, then months later, your idea is now being distributed in Walmart’s around the world! Today’s guest, Alexis Beechen was enjoying her time partyin’ and thought, putting wine in a can would be much easier to casually drink.

Imagine being on a cruise with friends and a good business idea comes to mind, then months later, your idea is now being distributed in Walmart’s around the world! Today’s guest, Alexis Beechen was enjoying her time partyin’ and thought, putting wine in a can would be much easier to casually drink.

Packing for a nice relaxing vacation, you look around, and realize, you have these beautiful plants that you have worked so hard in growing, and you wonder, are they going to be thriving when you get home?

Welcome to Season 3 of Ambition Today! My guest today is Taylor Jacobson. He is the founder of Focusmate, the app that helps you focus and in return be more productive. In this episode, we discuss with Taylor what in his personal life lead him to the idea of needing a solution like Focusmate, as well as his personal take on a lot of procrastination issues.

Bryan Janeczko has a colorful portfolio of businesses including: NuKitchen, a food preparation service that helped people eat healthier, which was later sold to Nutrisystem.  Gro Academy, an on-demand startup academy, Loeb, a new-approach to launching startups.  Now, his latest venture that is currently in the seeding stage is Nunbelievable Foods, a baked goods company that turns their profits into feeding the homeless. Bryan was also recently named Top 23 LGBTQ people in Tech.

From being forced to layoff his whole staff, to selling his company for $140 million, our next guest, Michael Diamant, has great insight on how he became successful. Michael Diamant created a well-known brand with his wife, called Skip Hop, which was sold to Carter’s for $140 million.

Today, my guest is a fellow Founder Institute Director, Benjamin Chong. Benjamin has been the director of Founder Institute in Australia since 2011 and is also well known as a partner at Right Click Capital.

Joining us today is Founder and CEO of Loeb.NYC and Loeb.ATL, Michael Loeb. Loeb Enterprises is an early stage venture investing company and an incubator for startups.

Approaching two decades later, our guest, Brian McCullough’s company is still going strong. Brian is CEO of ResumeWriters.com which is the longest lasting company for this service, shout out to Brian.

Ramphis is a serial entrepreneur, investor, and philanthropist. He is the co-founder of ScienceVest, a venture capital fund for hard-tech and life science companies. He is an experienced technologist and product strategist that has led and supported venture-backed teams from idea to exit. He is a Kauffman Fellow and co-Chairs the NYC chapter of the Society. As a Fellow, his research focused on the funding gaps for radical science companies in the U.S., collecting interviews of over 200 stakeholders across the research & commercialization ecosystem in the U.S.

Author, Blogger, Entrepreneur, Teacher, Investor, and Consultant, also known as our next guest, Nir Eyal. Well known for his blog, Nir & Far, Nir writes about “behavioral design” the intersection of psychology, technology and business. He helps companies with techniques to motivate and manipulate users.

Fascinated about how things worked and technology from a young age, today’s guest, Byron Reese, makes you question, are you a machine?

Starting out young, today’s guest, Matt Mandell, created his first company at the age of 12. Matt grew up with a supportive family full of entrepreneurs, so Matt was very comfortable with entrepreneurship from the start. He attended college in DC, where he spent the next several years developing multiple companies that were selective to college students.

Entrepreneur, investor, public speaker and author are a few titles that Dr. Dileep Rao is known for. He came from India to America in 1973 for his education, and has been a success ever since. While obtaining his PhD, he started working for an Adventure Capital firm one summer that ended up changing his life. He since then has helped invest in hundreds of businesses, which includes four businesses he started himself.

Today’s guest grew up with Entrepreneurial spirit surrounding him. All of the men in Greg Alterman’s family for generations owned and operated one of the largest grocery stores chains in the South since the early 1900’s.

NASA made history on August 12, 2018, launching the Parker Solar Probe; their first ever mission to touch the sun. Luckily, I was invited by NASA to come down to Cape Canaveral to have a front row seat to the rocket launch! While there, I had the opportunity and pleasure of interviewing Felipe Ruiz, who is the Deputy Lead Mechanical Engineer from John’s Hopkins Applied Physics Laboratory.

Did you know that only 17% of all startups have a female founder? Well we are lucky enough to have a female founder on our show today, Alex Batdorf. Alex is a business coach, co-founder of Zip Fit, a company that delivers a perfect fit denim for every body and now the creator of a YouTube series called Get Sh!t Done.

We are exploring the marketing world on today’s episode, with our special guest, Mitch Wainer. He is the creative marketing leader with many accomplishments such as Co-Founding Digital Ocean and being the Chief Marketing Officer at Clubhouse, a project management platform for software teams that provide the perfect balance of simplicity and structure. Mitch is an active advisor and speaker on entrepreneurship and growth marketing to the startup community

Growing up in an immigrant family, Brian Pasalich lived in Chicago, Croatia and even a small town in Montana all by the age of 13, which has allowed Pasalich to have a deeper understanding of the different walks of life that people face. This combined with a passion for helping people led him to his career in financial planning. He is the founder of Foundational as well as the Vice President of MassMutual.

As a serial entrepreneur, Matt Britton has successfully acquired and sold many companies at the perfect time. He is most known for his important role in creating MRY (Mr. Youth) and Suzy.

Do you have to be an expert on a product in order to become a successful entrepreneur? Let’s ask today's guest, Adam Tishman. He is a New Yorker through and through, growing up in Manhattan helped his independence from a young age before becoming the co-founder of Helix Sleep.