Finding Founders

Finding Founders

A podcast about vulnerability and entrepreneurship — learn from the life stories of founders 🚀, activists ✊, and even drug lords 💊 Our aim is to inspire you and let's face it... you aren't inspired when you hear about success. Real inspiration comes from hearing someone's lowest moment, and rising with their success. Using music, sfx, and voiceover, we interview the founders of companies, movements, and even drug cartels to reveal vulnerability so you can learn from victory. I’m your host, Samuel Donner, and together with my team we aim to inspire and educate a global community of leaders.

Episodes

From $0 to $25M Jewelry Events: Reinvention, Resilience & AI Storytelling w/ Theresa Bruno - #225

April 18, 2025 • 88 mins
In this emotional and inspiring episode, Theresa Bruno recounts her extraordinary journey from Juilliard-trained concert pianist to award-winning creative director and founder of a multi-million-dollar fine jewelry brand. After a career-ending injury, she pivoted into advertising, secured major clients like Regions Bank, and later launched a jewelry business that caught the attention of The New York Times and even First Lady Michel...
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The Joy-Driven Inventor — Kevin Surace on Building 5 Companies, Revolutionizing Tech & AI Video #224

April 3, 2025 • 97 mins
In this episode, we sit down with Kevin Surace, a legendary inventor, keynote speaker, and the man credited with creating the world’s first virtual assistant—technology that would eventually power Siri, Alexa, and Google Assistant. With 94 patents under his belt and a track record of turning vision into billion-dollar industries, Kevin walks us through his unconventional path from tinkering with radios at age 12 to co-founding Air ...
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How an Attorney Became a NYT Best-Selling Author…With a Cookbook- #153 Joanne Molinaro | Creators

March 27, 2025 • 60 mins
Only a year after joining social media, Joanne Molinaro would become a New York Times bestseller for “The Korean Vegan Cookbook”— but when she was crying in her car, stressed about her job, her divorce, and future, this eventual reality seemed like a fantasy. Now, Joanne is one of leading voices in the cooking world with 3 million followers on tiktok, nearly 1 million Youtube subscribers, and more than 600,000 instagram followers. ...
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How France's #1 Song Became a Fart Themed Ringtone - #154: Christian Buttner | Creators

March 20, 2025 • 67 mins
We all start somewhere…and for christian, that start was a best-selling, chart-topping, fart-themed ringtone. Now, with over 1.7 billion views on YouTube, 6 million subscribers, and 3 million monthly Spotify listeners, Christian-better known as TheFatRat- has outgrown this early legacy and made an extraordinary impact on the electronic music scene. But how did this German artist get his start? Before composing for Dota 2 and Rocket...
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Lessons from Losing a Mentor: Omar Alvarez on Startups, AI Family Stories & Life | #223 Kinnect

March 13, 2025 • 91 mins
In this episode, Omar Alvarez, founder of Kinnect, shares his incredible journey from growing up amid gang violence in Chicago to breaking into Nike’s ultra-competitive hiring pipeline—beating a 0.5% acceptance rate. He dives into his experiences as a Division 1 athlete, surviving a Twitter mass layoff before even starting his job, and eventually launching Kinect, an AI-powered platform preserving human stories. Omar discusses: H...
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Why 20 Subs is Enough to Quit Your Job And Pursue YouTube- #142: Hunter Williams | Creators

March 6, 2025 • 37 mins
Hunter Williams witnessed his mother’s diagnosis, prognosis, decline, and passing in the span of only two months and two weeks. And at the end of the summer of 2016, he suddenly found himself stranded in the middle of his life, unable to move forward in any direction. Fast forward to today and Hunter Williams is a full time YouTuber known for his sharp, well edited video essays on the business of being a content creator. From hit...
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From $30,000 Debt to an 8-Figure AI Publishing Empire – The Yehuda Niv Playbook | #222 Spines

February 27, 2025 • 45 mins
In this episode, Yehuda Niv, founder of Spines and Niv Publishing, shares his entrepreneurial journey from a struggling musician to a publishing disruptor. Yehuda details how he built Israel’s largest publishing house, scaling it to over 1,200 books a year, and later transitioned into AI-powered publishing with Spines, securing $16M in Series A funding. Key takeaways include: Navigating failure: How Yehuda moved from an unsuccess...
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From $1M in Debt to Financial Freedom: Chris Miles’ Money-Making Playbook | #220 - ChrisMiles | MoneyRipples

February 20, 2025 • 101 mins
In this episode, we sit down with Chris Miles, CEO of Money Ripples, who shares his journey from financial advisor to financially free entrepreneur – twice. Chris opens up about how he built a successful career, lost it all in the 2008 financial crisis, and came back stronger by developing cashflow-based wealth strategies that break the traditional financial planning mold. Key discussion points include: The biggest myths in finan...
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From Obscurity to Viral Horror: The YouTube Growth Strategies Behind Gemini Home Entertainment | #221: Remy Abode | Gemini Home Entertainment

February 13, 2025 • 33 mins
In this episode, we dive deep into the mind of Remy Abode, the creator of Gemini Home Entertainment, a critically acclaimed YouTube horror anthology series with over 348,000 subscribers and 14.4 million views. We explore Remy's early inspirations, including his childhood fascination with horror soundtracks, his early experiments in filmmaking with his siblings, and the pivotal moment when he discovered Local 58, the series that def...
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Reluctant Disrupter: How an Entrepeneur Went From Torrents to TextNow | #231 Derek Ting | Text Now

February 6, 2025 • 114 mins
Derek Ting began his entrepreneurial journey in high school, founding two companies: TorrentReactor, a torrent-sharing platform, and WoolNet, a web hosting service. He later earned a degree in Computer Engineering from the University of Waterloo. In 2008, Derek launched TextNow to provide free texting, inspired by his own struggles to afford phone bills as a student. Despite early challenges Derek steadily grew TextNow into the fir...
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Browness, World Travel , and the Artistic Experience- #176: Linda Vallejo | Creators

January 30, 2025 • 58 mins
Linda has experienced a lot. She’s traveled the world as an army brat, played piano and sung in Led Zeppelin's tour bus, explored drugs as an “X rated hippie”, and worked to understand her Latin American, Chicano, and Indigenous roots through her art. Through these various paintings, sculpture, and ceramic work Linda embraces her brownness and the world has taken notice. Her work has been shown globally in major galleries and museu...
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How Chickpeas Met Shanghai's Eat Well Movement | #162 Jimmy Edgerton & Julie Meyer | Creators

January 23, 2025 • 32 mins
You just heard from Jimmy Edgerton about a crucial time in his entrepreneurship career, a moment when it seemed like his new startup was going down in roasted chickpea flames. Luckily, these hard times didn’t last forever, since today I’m presenting a special episode, a podcast swap with seasoned entrepreneurs and business consultants Jimmy Edgerton and Julie Meyer from AugMentors. Before they taught us to navigate the nuances of n...
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Partnering with Cesar Millan & Mr. Beast: How Spot Insured 500,000 Pets | Trey Ferro #230 | Spot Pet

January 16, 2025 • 51 mins
Trey Ferro, CEO of Spot Pet Insurance, turned a lifelong love for animals into a mission to revolutionize pet care. From mimicking animal sounds as a toddler to raising millions in funding for Spot, Trey’s journey blends personal passion with innovative leadership. Using AI and celebrity partnerships with names like Cesar Millan and MrBeast, he’s made Spot one of North America’s fastest-growing pet insurance companies. Tune in to h...
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Building the Machine: How this Man's Journey Leads Amazing Tech | #229 Jeremy Toeman | Augie Studios

January 9, 2025 • 114 mins
Tech has always been a part of Jeremy Toeman’s life. Loving math at a young age allowed Jeremy to want to continue his career path in the tech industry. Jeremy learned basic C++ programming during elementary school. Today he owns Augie Studio, a programmed AI system able to make videos for marketing as well as social media purposes. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
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How to Create a Best-Selling YA Series with No Money- #137: Kimberly Derting | Creators

January 2, 2025 • 42 mins
Despite having two hit book series under her belt, it was at this moment that Kimberly caught a glimpse of the publishing industry’s true nature. The world of literature had a short term memory and she was only as good as her most recent book’s sales. No matter how proud she was of her stories or how many book tours she’d finished, it felt like maybe she would never get the chance to reach the same heights. Luckily, this burnout di...
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How Inventing a Drinking Game Almost Bankrupted This Creator- #148 Ali Spagnola | Creators

December 19, 2024 • 20 mins
You just heard Ali describing one of her breaking points, where a battle for a copyright claim over one of her creations caused her to file a lawsuit. Now, Ali Spagnola, musician, comedian, and artist, has proved herself to be a creator you can’t look away from. With her eccentric dedication to living “outrageous”, Ali has won over 1.4 million tiktok followers and more than 400k subscribers on YouTube with her bubbly enthusiasm and...
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Haunted Houses, Writing Horror, and Winning Stoker Awards | #228 Lisa Morton | Author

December 12, 2024 • 45 mins
Writer, Halloween expert, paranormal historial, and bookseller, Lisa Norton’s entire life is defined by the genre she has devoted her career to. Beginning as a young child in Pasadena consuming a large amount of horror content, she now loves to set her prose in her hometown, creating stories of suspense and supernatural happenings. Lisa is a six-time winner of the Bram Stoker Award for both her fiction and nonfiction work relating ...
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Horseback riding, SNL greenrooms, Brain Hemorrhages, and Aligning Capitalism with Ethics | #227 Alex Mufson | Entrepeneur

December 5, 2024 • 90 mins
Alex Mufson has always been an entrepreneur, from her first imaginary business she began at the age of three years old to a very real horse training company that she ran nearly a decade. But after experiencing deep frustration with the medical system, she felt led to build a values based business to help support others battling similar situations. Without any investors, Alex built the company from zero figures to seven in three yea...
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Writing Through Natural Disasters and a Space for Nomads- #182: David Abraham | Destination Outpost

November 28, 2024 • 59 mins
Somehow David has repeatedly found himself at the center of disaster. His most life changing trip through Asia was during the Asian financial crisis, his first big writing opportunity was during the 2008 financial crisis (which resulted in him losing his day job), this earthquake in Japan cemented that position as a writer, and now post covid the world needs the kind of community David is building more than ever. I actually think t...
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How to Survive Med School and Make it as a YouTuber- #190: Zach Highley | Creators

November 21, 2024 • 49 mins
Zach put 40 hours into his YouTube debut only to get 10 views and a spam comment. That left him to question his online identity; was this the end of his short-lived YouTube career? I mean there wasn’t much in his favor. He was starting at the height of covid and the worst of med school just around the corner. I’m sure Zach was questioning whether juggling his work and his passion would amount to anything. But today, Zach Highley’s ...
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