Founders In LA

"Look at your weaknesses and try to find people for your advisory board or board of directors that close out those weaknesses. Because you cannot be the best salesperson around, you cannot be the best operator, and you cannot be the best finance person [all at once]." Andrey Kudievskiy, Founder and CEO of Distillery, shares his remarkable journey from growing up in the USSR to building a successful AI-driven software dev...

In this episode, Vince Lucero, Founder & CEO of DubPrime, shares his journey from working on the Google Play Store and Credit Karma to founding a company aimed at revolutionizing credit access for gig workers.

Vince discusses the challenges of traditional lending systems and how DubPrime is leveraging AI to assess creditworthiness in a more inclusive way.

With a deep commitment to social impact, Vince’s story is one of innova...

"My two passions in life from as long as I could remember were technology and fashion."

We welcome Jessie Somekh, Co-Founder and Co-CEO of Rotate Your Closet, a peer-to-peer clothing rental app designed to monetize those barely-worn pieces sitting in your wardrobe in this episode of Founders in LA.

Jessie shares her journey from a STEM-focused education at Vanderbilt to pivotal roles at Microsoft, Amazon, and Google...

"The idea that we cannot leverage our most intimate and valuable space in any way to recoup any value while we're gone is insane."

In this episode of Founders in LA, we sit down with Bo Abrams, Co-Founder of kommu, a groundbreaking home-sharing network.

Bo shares his journey from a determined business school applicant to a visionary entrepreneur revolutionizing the rental market. 

kommu leverages trusted persona...

"If you can really be the lowest risk, highest return option, people will get it. The experts in that industry will get it and they will sign up."

We sit down with Rachael Nelson, the Founder and CEO of Brandy, in this episode of Founders in LA. Rachael shares her journey from aerospace manufacturing to leading a groundbreaking app that democratizes influence by allowing everyday consumers to earn meaningful money th...

"You need a great lawyer and you need a great accountant. Those two things are inevitable. But they look at me and I go, 'Oh, you've never looked at your cap table."

Joshua Lee, CEO and Founder of Ardius explores the vital importance of cap tables in managing startups and guiding investment decisions, in this episode of Founders In LA. With his deep background in accounting and building ventures, Joshua sheds ...

"Cold calls are the base of our entire business. The first three months we spent in Flick's basement, cold calling, and it's still the best tool that we have. We still do it every day."

Flick Moradian and Louis Pascal Walsh, Co-Founders of Tequio, a premium canned tequila cocktail brand, share their entrepreneurial journey, highlighting their persistent cold-calling efforts to establish connections, secure pa...

"It's these knowledge graph relationships that tie all these episodes together and enable users to discover each other's new content somewhat serendipitously or organically."

"I've talked to founders who have been in LA for years and never felt like they had a sense of community within like a group of other founders who were doing the same things."

"We specialize in creating experiences that are immersive and spatial."

"Customer feedback is gold. Whether it's good, bad, ugly- whatever the feedback is- that's gold."

"One of the biggest problems we see, at least on the physician side, is that any other kind of disease that you have, you always get a quantitative test. So if you have heart disease or high cholesterol, you get that blood panel back with concrete numbers on it. and if it's diabetes, it might be A1C, it might be glucose, but for musculoskeletal disorders, it's always in either an x-ray or an MRI, which is considered qu...

"So now these humans, these agencies, are stuck with going with these other platforms that are available out there that are catering clearly saying we hate the middleman like you. And I'm like, what's going on here?"

"In Uruguay, we are used to going against the odds."

"We think it is unethical and broken for tech companies to steal people's copyrighted artwork and train models and derive value from it without permission and without compensation."

"Humans are really good at workarounds. We have finite brain capacity and the flood of information that's coming in, especially with Gen AI, can't be processed by humans."

"We solve the problem of knowledge walking out the door when someone retires or changes jobs, and we elevate everyone to the level of a star performer"

"How do you make [athletes] reach their best performance without injuring them? That's it. That's the equation we're trying to solve."