Fractional CFO | Helping Founders Scale Beyond $2M ARR with Strategic Finance & OKRs | Founder @ FounderFirst

There's a point where you just can't wing it anymore.

Usually around $2M ARR.

When growth is real, but messy. When the business works (but the numbers don't fully add up). When pricing gets risky, hiring gets heavy, and suddenly every "quick decision" starts showing up in your burn.

That's where I come in.

I step in as your Fractional CFO to help turn momentum into structure.

We build pricing, capital allocation, operating constraints, and targets the team actually runs on.

Over the last decade, I've worked with 20+ early and growth-stage companies, both VC-backed and bootstrapped, across SaaS, fintech, edtech, and agencies. I've helped scale revenue from $500K to $20M, grow teams from 10 to 200+, and build finance and ops foundations from scratch.

I've been in the room for pivots, layoffs, down rounds, near-bankruptcies, and exits - not as an observer, but owning the financial logic behind what happened next.

In 2024, I founded FounderFirst to go deeper with this work, helping teams build finance that actually supports growth, long before they're ready for a full-time CFO. Since then, we've partnered with 70+ founder-led startups and SMBs, including leading accelerators and venture studios.

That's the professional story. Here's the real one.

I grew up in Dimitrovgrad, Bulgaria - no English, no tech exposure, no obvious path.

At 17, I taught myself English.
At 19, I earned a scholarship to study in the U.S.

I arrived with a suitcase, less than $300, and no backup plan, and did whatever scrappy thing it took to stay afloat.

Eventually, I found my way into startups. The chaos, the ownership, the pressure, for the first time, I felt like I fit.

What started as survival became a decade of building behind the scenes.

Now I bring all of it - the scrappiness, the strategy, and the systems - to founders who are ready for real financial leadership.

When I'm not deep in spreadsheets or board decks, you'll find me hiking a national park or nose-deep in a book. (Always open to recommendations.)

If the next set of decisions actually matters, let's talk: https://bit.ly/3NEYTqT

Nobody warns you that habits are stealthy.

You think you’re just skipping the gym.
Answering a few late-night emails.
Snapping at your team because you’re tired.
But then it becomes… who you are.

Not overnight - gradually, quietly.
And that’s the catch.
Most of the traits we admire in others - calm under pressure, showing up on time, saying what they mean
They’re not superpowers.
They’re practice.
Built early.
Repeated often.
Invisible until they’re not.

And if you don’t build the right ones early, the wrong ones will take over for you.
You’re not too busy.
You’re just in the middle of becoming someone.

*Video credits: entrepreneursonig insta

Mariya Valeva

Late nights. Tough calls. Cash Burns. The weight of your team's future on your shoulders.

Hey there, founder. I see you. I've been you.

90% of startups fail. Of the 10% that survive, many struggle to scale beyond initial traction. Reaching $1M to $10M ARR is a critical and challenging journey. You choose which path you want to follow.

If you want to be in this 10%, keep reading.

My journey:
→ 10+ years supporting Tech founders like you scale from $500K to $11M ARR
→ 2x founding team member
→ 2x grew teams from 2 to 200+ 
→ 3x built finance, ops, and people ops from scratch
→ 2x pivoted entire business models when everything was on the line

[Tough, right? But your vision matters. You have what it takes.]

That's why I started FounderFirst. I've seen too many brilliant ideas stall out, too many founders stuck on their scaling journey. It hurts every time.

Working with 10+ startups—from bootstrapped to Series A/B, spanning B2B and B2C SaaS models in edtech, fintech, and other tech sectors—has taught me a crucial lesson: success often hinges on the right support at the right time.

Every challenge, every pivot, every late night has been a lesson—and now, these hard-earned insights are the foundation of how I help founders like you.

Scaling to $10M ARR isn't about fancy strategies.

Scaling to $10M ARR is about rolling up our sleeves and making your vision work. We turn your biggest hurdles into your greatest strengths.

This is what you can expect if you contact me and we start working together:
📈3x overall performance growth in 12 months
⚙️ 40% boost in operational efficiency through targeted process optimization
🌱 50%+ increase in team alignment via tailored cross-functional integration methods
🚀100% of core business processes optimized within 90 days

No generic playbooks—just bespoke operating systems that work.

I'm (and have been for the past 10+ years) in the trenches with tech's future at Techstars, Harvard Innovation Labs, 500 Global, and Y Combinator.

Because scaling your startup isn't something you have to do alone.

Scaling your startup isn't just numbers.

It's your dreams, your team's future, your impact on the world.

Ready to turn sleepless nights into breakthroughs? Let's talk, founder to founder.

🫴Reach out:
→ Email: mariya@founderfirstpartners.co
→ Website: founderfirstpartners.co
→ Book a Free Discovery Call: https://calendly.com/mariya-founderfirstpartners/initialchat?month=2024-09

Fractional CFO for B2B SaaS ($2M+ ARR) | Founder @FounderFirst

Raúl Z.

$40 billion. 
Richest self-made woman in the world. 
And you’ve never heard her name.

She didn’t inherit it.
She didn’t marry into it.
She built it, from one ship.

Rafaela Aponte-Diamant was born in Haifa, in what was then Mandatory Palestine. 
Her family later fled to Switzerland.
She grew up an outsider. 
Watching quietly. 
Learning early that real power doesn’t announce itself.

She watched her father, a banker, navigate a world of closed rooms and quiet influence. 
She learned early that power looked like access. 
It looked like control.

In the 1960s, on a ferry off the coast of Italy, she met Gianluigi, a sea captain.
They fell in love.
But more than that, they became partners in every sense.
In 1970, with a ~$200,000 loan and no safety net, they bought an aging cargo ship called
The Patricia. 
That was the birth of MSC - Mediterranean Shipping Company.

They entered one of the most brutal, capital-intensive industries on earth with: 
• No government backing 
• No generational wealth 
• No fleet 
• No brand Just debt, discipline, and a willingness to go where others wouldn’t.

So they did the unfashionable thing. 
They bought used ships. 
Ran ignored routes. 
Mediterranean → Somalia. 
Europe → West Africa.

Every dollar earned went back into the next ship. 
No dividends. 
No lifestyle inflation. 
Just reinvestment.

While Gianluigi was the visible “captain,” insiders say Rafaela was the one driving the financial engine.
- She secured loans.
- Negotiated with European banks
- Assessed risk vessel by vessel
- Ran the balance sheet with surgical discipline

She also built the discipline behind the empire:
They never took outside money.
Never went public.
Never sacrificed long-term control for short-term cash.
It meant slower growth.
But it also meant ownership.
Real, enduring, generational ownership.

By the 1980s, MSC had become one of the fastest-growing private shipping lines.
By the 2000s, they were in every major port.
By the 2010s, they weren’t just in cargo.
Rafaela led the expansion into cruises.
She personally oversaw the design, the product, the customer experience.
MSC Cruises is now one of the top 3 cruise operators globally, behind only Carnival and Royal Caribbean.

Today, MSC owns:
- 700+ ships
- Ports and terminals across 70 countries
- A full logistics network (trucks, trains, warehousing)
- And 100% of its equity
Still private.
Still family-owned.
Still split 50/50 between Rafaela and Gianluigi.

She didn’t pitch.
She built.
No press. No playbook.
Just an immigrant girl with one ship,
and a reason to never stop.

$34B. 
Richest self-made woman in the world. 
Built from nothing. 
Answering to no one.

40 law firms turned her down.
She sued the U.S. government. 
Today, her startup is worth $11B.

Luana didn’t come here with a dream.
She came here with a decision.
To never live the life her parents had.
To find a way out.
Even if it broke her.

In Brazil, she trained at one of the toughest ballet schools in the world.
Her days were 14 hours long.
They tested her pain tolerance by burning her skin with cigarettes.

At 17, she walked away from ballet.
Taught herself English.
Got into MIT.
Graduated with degrees in math and computer science.
While her classmates chased hedge funds, she was chasing something else:
A question.
“What if anyone could trade on real-world events - like elections - the same way they trade stocks?”

That question became Kalshi.
A prediction market platform.
The kind of platform that didn’t exist in the U.S.
Because the government didn’t want it to.
She was told no, over and over.

40 law firms turned her down.
Regulators stalled.
Investors warned her to walk away.
Instead, she sued the U.S. government.
And she won.

In 2024, Kalshi became the first federally regulated prediction market in the country.
It handled $500M+ in election trades.
Raised $1B.
Partnered with Robinhood and Solana.
And hit an $11B valuation.
Luana was 29.
And officially, the youngest self-made female billionaire on the planet.

No hacks.
Just a woman who refused to quit, even when the system told her to sit down.
That’s not a startup story.
It’s a survival story.
And she wrote every word of it herself.

They were $30,000 in credit card debt.
Their website was getting zero traction.
And the "startup world" thought selling air mattresses on a living room floor was the dumbest idea in history.

The founders of Airbnb were 24 hours away from quitting.
So they did something embarrassing.
They became cereal salesmen.

It was 2008.
The U.S. economy had just collapsed.
No one was booking travel.
VCs weren’t replying to emails.
They couldn’t make rent.
They couldn’t cover the server bill.
And yet, they weren’t ready to give up.

So they walked into a grocery store, bought the cheapest cereal they could find,
and made two limited-edition boxes:
Obama O’s
Cap’n McCains
Hand-folded them. Glued the labels.
Sold them for $40 a box.
One by one. Box by box.
Until they made $30,000.
Just enough to clear the debt and stay alive.

When they finally met Paul Graham at Y Combinator, he didn’t care about their platform.
He cared about the cereal.
“If you can convince people to pay $40 for a $4 box of cereal,” he said,
“you can figure anything out.”

That moment had nothing to do with breakfast.
It had everything to do with what building actually looks like before the case studies. 
Before PMF. 
Before growth charts. 
Before anyone calls it “inevitable.”
Here’s the part most startup stories skip: 
→ Refreshing Stripe and still seeing $0 
→ Being weeks from shutting it down 
→ Doing something that feels beneath you just to stay alive

If your business feels hard right now…
Maybe you don’t need to scale.
Maybe you just need to survive.
→ Find your cereal box.
→ Do the thing that feels beneath you, but buys you time.
→ Stop waiting for perfect.
→ Close the gap between today’s panic and tomorrow’s clarity.

Before it’s beautiful,
it’s usually messy.
One box. One listing. One win at a time.
That’s how Airbnb made it through.
And maybe that’s how you will, too.

Ever had a “brilliant idea”…
that never turned into anything?

Ideas are exciting.
They come with clarity, momentum, and that rush of this could really work.

But turning an idea into something real?
That’s the part no one prepares you for.
Because between idea and execution lives a messy middle:
• Trade-offs you didn’t expect
• Constraints that aren’t in the slide deck
• Systems that don’t talk to each other
• Models that work beautifully… until they meet real customers
• People problems, tech problems, money problems, all at once

Execution is rarely a straight line.
It’s craftsmanship.
And that means rethinking, rewriting, rebuilding - again and again.

The idea is just the spark.
But building? That’s the fire you have to keep feeding.
So if you’re in the weeds right now, keep going.
This is the part where the real product - and the real company - gets made.

*video credits: growasentrepreneurs insta

He was delivering pizzas. 
8 years later, he owned 70% of a £1.3B company.

Ben Francis didn’t follow the traditional startup path.
No VC.
No paid media.
No over-engineered “go-to-market” strategy.

He built one of the UK’s rare bootstrapped unicorns with strategic decisions most founders overlook.

Here’s how Gymshark actually scaled👇

1. First came cash flow. Then came product.
Gymshark started in 2012 as a dropshipping site for fitness supplements.
No physical product.
No inventory risk.
No fixed cost base.
It wasn’t glamorous - but it was profitable from day one, and that revenue became seed capital to fund their first real product: apparel built for the modern lifter.

2. They didn’t “use” influencers. They built with them.
Gymshark scaled through creator partnerships, but this wasn’t performance marketing.
It was infrastructure.
They built a network of athletes who:
- Had long-term equity in the brand
- Were featured in launches and events
- Drove real community pull, not paid push
This kept CAC near zero.
It also gave them a loyal, portable growth engine across international markets - without ever relying on retailers or ad budgets.

3. When revenue scaled, Ben stepped down.
By 2015, Gymshark was growing fast and Ben stepped aside as CEO.
Why?
His team told him he wasn’t the leader the company needed yet.
Ben focused on product, brand, and developing himself as a leader, and let an experienced operator, Steve Hewitt, build the infrastructure. 
Years later, when Gymshark was ready for global scale, Ben returned - sharper, better equipped, with the right team already in place.

4. They hit unicorn status with cash in the bank, not because they needed it.
By 2019, Gymshark’s numbers looked like this:
- £176M revenue
- £18M pre-tax profit
- 70%+ gross margins
- No outside investors
In 2020, they sold a 21% minority stake to General Atlantic, in a deal valuing the company at over £1B ($1.3B).
Ben increased his ownership to over 70% - retaining control while unlocking capital for expansion in North America.

5. Behind the branding was pure operational discipline.
What most people saw:
✔️ Slick branding
✔️ Fitness influencers
✔️ Fast product drops
What was really there:
✔️ A lean, cash-generating model
✔️ Repeatable systems built for scale
✔️ A founder with the discipline to delay ego for long-term equity
There’s no hype here.
Just smart sequencing: cash → community → brand → infrastructure → optionality.

Most startups raise too early, scale too fast, and try to fix systems after things start breaking.
Gymshark didn’t.
And that’s why it scaled without losing money, momentum, or control.

He started out flipping burgers atDQ. 
20 years later, he sold his snack company for $5 billion.

Daniel Lubetzky’s story doesn’t start in Silicon Valley.
It starts in Dachau.
His father survived the Holocaust, escaped to Mexico with nothing, and rebuilt life from scratch.
No degree. No investors.
Just a suitcase and a belief:
Kindness can be power.

Daniel was raised on that idea.
And when he moved to the US at 16, he brought it with him.
Except no one was handing out startup capital.
So he did what immigrants do:
- Sold watches in kiosks.
- Flipped burgers at Dairy Queen.
- Launched his first business from a basement.
- Packed boxes himself. Took losses. Kept going.

His first venture (PeaceWorks) took 10 years to stabilize.
But in that grind, he built the muscles founders never talk about:
→ Operational depth
→ Distribution discipline
→ Creative capital stacking

So when KIND launched in 2004, it didn’t just hit the market.
It hit a nerve.
A clear bar with clear ingredients.
No gimmicks. No shortcuts.
While competitors chased volume, KIND chased trust. 
And trust scaled.

By 2015, KIND was the fastest-growing snack brand in the U.S.
- High gross margins
- Asset-light (co-manufacturing, no factories)
- Brand-led, not price-led

Then Mars stepped in.
First as a minority investor.
Then majority.
Then full acquisition, reportedly $5B.
Daniel walked away with billionaire status, and still held a stake.

But this is where most people stop the story.
He didn’t.
He turned that liquidity into Equilibra, his family office.
And started backing the next generation of mission-led brands:
Cava. 
Ellenos. 
Belgian Boys. 
gimMe Snacks. 
And more.

Not spray-and-pray capital.
Conviction capital.
In founders who remind him of himself:
→ Scrappy.
→ Underrated.
→ Values-first.
→ Building not just for exit, but for impact.

Daniel’s net worth was last estimated at $2.2 billion.
Built bar by bar.
Deal by deal.
With the kind of focus only hardship teaches you.
And yet, his real flex?
Is not how much he made.
It’s how many people he’s pulling up behind him.

So if you’re building from scratch..
You don’t need a fancy MBA.
You don’t need a perfect pitch deck.
You don’t need to play the game everyone else is playing.
You just need the courage to build your own.
And the discipline to scale it - one bar, one bet, one act of kindness at a time.

Building is brutal.

Not because you're doing it wrong,
but because it’s supposed to be.

Hiring, firing, cash flow stress, shifting markets, broken ops, broken sleep
it’s a constant reshuffling of problems you didn’t see coming.
And no framework or cheat sheet prepares you for the emotional load of it.

At some point, everyone hits a wall.
What separates the ones who keep going?
They care enough not to quit.
Not surface-level excitement.
Not “this could be big someday” energy.
I mean deep, irrational conviction in the thing they’re building,
even when the evidence isn’t there (yet).

The people who make it through aren’t always the smartest or most experienced.
But they’re in it for the long game.
They’re obsessed with solving the problem.
And they’ve made peace with the fact that progress looks like chaos up close.

If you're in the middle of the mess right now,
you're not broken.
You're just building.

*Video credits: foundedarchive instagram

Everyone blames Amazon for killing Toys “R” Us.
But Amazon didn’t bury them.
A $6.6 billion financial trap did.

For years, Toys “R” Us was the toy industry.
They didn’t just dominate - they were category-defining:
→ 1,500+ stores worldwide
→ Billions in annual revenue
→ A brand kids begged their parents to visit
This wasn’t a dying business.
It was a profitable company with massive market share.

So what went wrong?

In 2005, Toys “R” Us was bought out by Bain Capital, KKR, and Vornado in a $6.6 billion leveraged buyout.
Over $5B of that deal was debt, loaded onto the company itself.

What that meant in practice:
- $450–500 million/year went to interest payments
- Debt ballooned to ~7x EBITDA
- No cash flow left for innovation, upgrades, or digital transformation

And here’s where it gets worse.
Toys “R” Us didn’t lose because Amazon was smarter. 
They lost because they were financially handcuffed. 
They had options. 
They just couldn’t afford any of them.

The debt forced them to: 
❌ Delay store modernization 
❌ Underinvest in e-commerce at the worst possible moment 
❌ Miss the shift to omnichannel retail 
❌ Lose pricing power to Walmart and Target, who used toys as loss leaders

They weren’t technologically outpaced.
They were financially paralyzed.
Even though the core business was still profitable on paper, it couldn’t survive small shocks, let alone a weak holiday season or changing consumer behavior.

By 2017:
→ $5B in long-term debt
→ $400M coming due in 2018
→ No cash reserves
→ No investor appetite to restructure

They filed for Chapter 11.
Six months later, they liquidated.
800 U.S. stores shuttered.
33,000 employees gone.

Toys “R” Us didn’t die because of competition.
It died from compounding fragility, baked into its financing, reinforced by short-term decisions, and invisible until it was too late.
This is what happens when:
→ You borrow without protecting downside
→ You cut costs instead of modernizing
→ You scale without upgrading your internal engine
→ And you optimize short-term optics over long-term health

7’1”, 300+ pounds, and hungry.
Shaq walked into a Krispy Kreme one morning and said:
“I want to own this place.”

Not a donut.
The whole damn store.
They thought he was joking. He wasn’t.
Weeks later, the deed had his name on it.

Because by then, Shaquille O’Neal had made a rule for himself:
If he was going to show up, wear the brand, or lend his name, he was going to own a piece of it.

After retiring from the NBA with $292M in career earnings, he could’ve coasted.
Instead, he quietly built a $500M empire, one of the smartest post-career business portfolios in sports. 
Not flashy startups. 
Not hype plays.
Cash-flowing, boring, durable businesses.

At his peak, he owned:
- 155 Five Guys
- 17 Auntie Anne’s
- 9 Papa John’s stores (plus a board seat)
- 150+ car washes
- Several 24 Hour Fitness gyms
- A movie theatre in Newark
- And that iconic Krispy Kreme in Atlanta

Brick by brick, deal by deal, he built a portfolio throwing off $60M+ annually in physical businesses alone.
Then he decided to build his own.

In 2018, he launched Big Chicken - a Vegas-born fast casual concept with sandwiches named after his family.
It’s now in:
- 40+ locations
- Cruise ships, stadiums, airports
- Franchise pipeline valued in the 9-figures
Projected to cross $100M in systemwide revenue.

But Shaq’s real magic?
It was how he structured deals. 
He stopped taking checks, and started asking for ownership.
His deal structure changed forever:
✅ Invested early in Google → 20–30x estimated return
✅ Backed Ring → acquired by Amazon for $1B
✅ Invested in Lyft pre-IPO → became brand ambassador
✅ Partnered with Alkaline Water Co → stock + advisory role

Then, he turned himself into an asset.
He licensed his name through Authentic Brands Group, so now every Shaq sneaker at Reebok, hoodie at JCPenney, or collab earns him royalties, not not one-off endorsements.

His brand doesn’t just show up.
It pays out.
By 2025: 
• Net worth: ~$500M 
• ~$60M+ from operating businesses 
• ~$120M+ from media & endorsements 
• ~$28M in real estate 
• And a growing, compounding pile of equity

Not bad for someone who also DJs festivals on weekends as DJ Diesel, just because he enjoys it.

He’s not chasing impact. Or influence.
He’s stacking ownership.

You don’t need to be Shaq.
But if you’ve built any kind of platform
A following. A reputation. Trust in your name.
Don’t trade it for claps.
Trade it for equity.

Shaq didn’t walk into Krispy Kreme for the sugar.
He came for the deed.

“Once we raise, we can finally…”
It’s one of the most expensive sentences a founder can say.

Because the moment you plan for after the round, 
you stop building for customers 
and start building for investors. 
That shift is subtle, but deadly. 
What usually follows: 
→ Growth hacks instead of growth engines 
→ Vanity metrics over margins and retention 
→ Hiring for optics, not leverage

Here’s the reality:
🚫 If funding is what makes the model viable, the model isn’t viable
🚫 If you need capital to prove value, you haven’t found it yet
🚫 If you’re still guessing, VC only adds pressure, not clarity

Raising before proof doesn’t buy time, it burns it.
And guess what?
The best startups don’t avoid fundraising. 
They delay it intentionally.
Not because they’re against capital, but because they know how to use it well.

They raise when:
✅ There’s repeatable acquisition
✅ Retention is strong
✅ Growth is blocked by capacity, not conviction
VC isn't fuel for experiments.
It's fuel for scale.
And mistiming that fuel can set the whole machine on fire.

PS: I break this down in today’s newsletter 👉 Check it here: https://lnkd.in/ej3GB8dc

There’s a country in Europe not only known for bratwurst, beer, and bureaucratic efficiency…
It also gave us Celonis, DeepL, HelloFresh, GetYourGuide, Zalando, and N26.

All global companies.
All still rooted in Germany.
All built in a system that - let’s be honest - doesn’t get enough credit.

Germany is not obsessed with founder fame or launch parties.
But it quietly became the underdog of Europe..

Here’s why:

1. The default isn’t hype - it’s structure
You don’t get rewarded here for promising big and cleaning it up later.
German founders don’t raise money off chaos.
They build solid before they scale - ops, finance, product, all aligned.
There’s no badge for being “visionary” while your reporting’s on fire.
You’re expected to know your margins and your roadmap.

2. Government support is operational, not performative
This is one of the few ecosystems where public capital actually helps founders take risks.
Deep tech grants, co-investment schemes, R&D tax relief, infrastructure funding.
Building AI, climate, logistics, defense?
You’ll find real money - without giving up your entire cap table or moving to SF.

3. Finance isn’t an afterthought.
The financial stack isn’t something you “clean up later.” 
It’s a decision tool. 
That’s the difference between: 
“We’re not ready for a CFO yet” 
and: 
“We already know what breaks if CAC jumps 20%.”

4. The talent is built for execution.
When your country has an industrial backbone, engineering-first education, and global corporates everywhere - you don’t need to teach operators what ops means.
B2B, logistics, SaaS, deep tech - these aren’t trendy verticals here.
They’re second nature.

5. The alumni effect compounds quietly.
The first wave (Zalando, Delivery Hero, Rocket Internet) didn’t just cash out.
They built the infrastructure.
Now you’ve got a network of repeat founders, scale-stage operators, and early employees who’ve been through real growth.
And they’re not writing thinkpieces.
They’re building again.

Germany isn’t perfect.
But it just works.

If you’re a founder and your company’s growing faster than your systems can handle,
the problem isn’t your ambition.
It’s that you’re trying to scale without structure.
Germany proves you don’t have to.

The most expensive person on your cap table isn’t your investor…
It’s the ex you dated for 6 months. 
(Yes. This actually happened.)

Or the 20% you gave to a “strategic” advisor.
No vesting. No deliverables. Just vibes.
Two years later, the advisor is gone - but the 20% is still on the cap table.
Investors walk away. The raise collapses.

It happens ALL THE TIME.
Because in the early days, equity feels like Monopoly money.
You want to keep people around. You want to be generous.
So you say yes to “just 1%”...
Until you realize you’ve built something valuable,
and your cap table’s a dumpster fire.

Here’s what most founders get wrong:
They price equity based on guilt, optics, or Google searches.
The result?
Your top engineer gets 0.2%...
And the guy who sent 3 intros owns more than your VP of Product.

This week’s newsletter is your regret-proof equity guide.
Inside:
→ The 3 equity archetypes: co-founders, builders, helpers
→ Real benchmarks for early hires & advisors (no more guesswork)
→ The single question to ask before every grant:
Will this make my remaining stake more valuable?

If you plan to give away equity in 2026, read this before you do.
👉 Today’s drop is live. Check it out here → https://lnkd.in/ej3GB8dc
This one could literally save your exit.

$180M ARR. 
More than 1M devices shipped. 
0 investors.

The story starts in a cramped San Francisco apartment with one question:
Why do meetings lose the most important parts?
Not the words. 
The insight.

Nathan Gao wasn’t chasing AI hype. 
He just wanted a way to remember what actually mattered. 
So he built something small. 
Literally. 
A voice recorder the size of a credit card. 
It clips to your phone. Records everything.
Syncs to an app that transcribes, summarizes, and structures your thinking - across 100+ languages. 

No VC money. 
No paid team. 
No press tour. 
Just a prototype, a crowdfunding page, and his own savings. 

The first batch sold out. 
That cash funded batch two.
Then batch three. 

Then something important happened: 
Customers didn’t just buy the device. 
They stayed. 
Hardware was the hook.
Subscriptions became the engine. 

Fast forward: 
→ Hundreds of thousands of devices sold 
→ Customers in 170+ countries 
→ ~$180M in recurring revenue 
→ Still founder-controlled 

No CAC blowouts.
No growth-at-all-costs nonsense. 
Just a disciplined system. 

When Plaud scaled, they didn’t “go global.” 
They went systematic. 
→ 13 Amazon marketplaces 
→ Top-3 category placement in most within 90 days 
→ 2,000+ AI-tested ad creatives per month 
→ Markets chosen by buyer intent, not vibes 
→ Ad spend held under 9% of revenue All while bootstrapped.

Plaud didn’t raise capital.
They engineered momentum.
They didn’t wait for validation.
They shipped, listened, iterated, and sold.
And they didn’t try to look like a tech company.
They looked like a useful one.

It started with a banana.

Literally.

Walmart’s best-selling product of all time?
Not TVs.
Not toys.
Not detergent.

🍌 Bananas.
Not just during holidays. Not just in certain states.
Across seasons, across geographies, year after year, bananas top the charts.

Walmart sells ~4.5 billion bananas annually. 
Inside a company doing $680B+ in revenue with 160M products. 
And yet… 
the #1 seller is a 25-cent fruit.

Here’s why that matters (and why it should matter to you too):

1. The product that never needed selling
No one goes to Walmart for bananas. 
But almost everyone leaves with them. 
Bananas are frictionless: 
• No comparison shopping 
• No brand loyalty 
• No decision fatigue 
They’re habitual. Subconscious. Automatic. 
And once they’re in the cart? 
So is cereal. 
Milk. 
Paper towels. 
A cordless drill you didn’t plan to buy. 
Bananas don’t drive revenue. 
They drive behavior.

2. The quiet power of repetition
Because bananas sell so often, they create a live behavior loop.
They’re a litmus test:
- What happens when prices rise?
- When weather hits supply?
- When local stores tweak placement?
Bananas become a proxy for bigger decisions:
- Price sensitivity
- Foot traffic triggers
- Store-level performance
- Cross-sell behavior
Walmart doesn't just sell bananas.
They use them as data infrastructure.

3. The backend is where the leverage lives
Selling bananas at Walmart scale isn’t “produce.” 
It’s logistics engineering. 
• Multi-country sourcing 
• Cold-chain optimization 
• Fast-turn inventory 
• Shelf-life math down to hours 
A 1% improvement in spoilage, routing, or packaging? 
Multiply that by billions of units. 
That’s margin power most companies never touch.

4. A Trojan horse for brand equity
Bananas show up in every segment:
- Gym bags
- Toddler snacks
- College kitchens
- Office drawers
They’re cheap. Consistent. Ubiquitous.
Which is exactly the point.
Bananas are Walmart’s quiet brand promise:
“We’re here. We’re reliable. You can count on us.”

So… what’s your banana? 

The thing no one brags about.
The “boring” line in your P&L.
The low-margin, high-frequency product you’ve ignored. 

Your banana might be: 
• A starter tier that builds trust 
• A weekly habit that drives retention 
• A free tool that pulls people in 
• A customer segment with outsized LTV 
It’s the entry point that shapes behavior before the big sale. 

Bananas aren’t flashy. 
They’re just strategically perfect. 
And most founders are too busy chasing watermelons to notice.

“I haven’t paid myself in 18 months.”
Most people hear that and think:
“Wow, that founder is so committed.”

I hear it and think:
“This company has a broken financial strategy.”

I’ve seen this pattern too many times:
→ Founders overpay themselves early 
→ Or don’t pay themselves at all

Neither is healthy. 
And both create second-order problems founders rarely anticipate.

Your compensation isn’t just a line item. 
It’s a signal. 
It tells your team, your investors, and your future self what kind of business you’re building.

When you don’t pay yourself:
🚩 You normalize self-sacrifice as an operating model
🚩 You underprice your services, because your time feels “free”
🚩 Investors worry you’ll need side income to survive
🚩 You send a message to your team: “don’t ask for what you’re worth”
🚩 You defer real life - housing, health, family - for a company that may never repay you

When you overpay yourself:
🚩 You erode trust with investors
🚩 You constrain your ability to hire ahead
🚩 You signal insecurity about the future upside, and try to lock in your ROI too early

The fix isn’t “pay yourself more” or “take less.”
The fix is: pay yourself fairly
- What’s the salary benchmark for your company stage? (pre-seed, seed, etc)
- What does the business need to look like to support that salary sustainably?
- What trade-offs need to be made - on pricing, hiring, margin - to make that true?

What I see consistently:
Founders who are paid fairly - even modestly - make better decisions.
They’re more realistic about hiring.
More thoughtful about pricing.
Less reactive with cash management.

Because once your actual life is reflected in the numbers, 
you stop building the company on denial. 
So if you’re still holding your breath, telling yourself
“after the next round…” or “after the next milestone”

Ask a better question:
What would this business look like if I treated myself like a critical hire?

Because you are. 
And if your model can’t afford you, 
the problem isn’t you. 
It’s the model.

He has more billionaires following him than most VCs.
And he built that audience… by making fun of them.

The character was never supposed to become a business.

In 2018, a London-born ex-Apple employee filmed a parody of the ultra-wealthy for a friend’s mom in Gstaad.
A fictional Swiss aristocrat named Constancem, draped in Loro Piana, bored, absurdly rich.

He shared it on WhatsApp.
And something strange happened.

It spread, not to the masses, but through private group chats of real billionaires.
The type of people who summer in Capri and winter in St. Moritz.
The kind who don’t follow anyone… but followed him.
He had accidentally built the perfect Trojan horse for the ultra-rich.

From there, Gstaad Guy did what few creators have the patience to do:
He didn’t monetize. Not for 3 years.
No product.
No pitch.
No personal brand funnel.
Just character-driven content that quietly satirised the 1% and made the 1% feel in on the joke.

By the time he launched his first product, his audience was small...
but so high-value that one Loro Piana shoe drop sold out faster than anything in the brand’s history.

Here’s how he built a luxury media empire disguised as comedy:

↳ Characters before commerce
Two archetypes became IP:
Constance: the old-money European.
Colton: the new-money crypto bro.
They were cultural satire, and ultimately… brand mascots.

↳ Audience before assets
He grew a loyal following inside UHNW circles.
Then came the brand partnerships:
Loro Piana. Audemars Piguet. Acqua di Parma.
He embedded their products into his storylines, not ads, but artifacts of his fictional world.

↳ Products with status-coded narrative
Then, and only then, did he launch his own brands:
- Palais Constance Rosé, poured in Cipriani, LPM, and yacht clubs.
- Poubel Jewellery, £450 charm bracelets mocking luxury excess.

↳ Satire, but strategic 
Most creators chase reach. 
He built IP.

You don’t need a million followers. 
You need the right thousand. 
And a story that makes them feel seen.

Most startups try to sell to anyone who’ll listen. 
The smart ones speak precisely to who they’re built for, and ignore the rest.

That’s not luck. 
That’s positioning. 
And it’s why billionaires don’t just follow Gstaad Guy. 
They buy from him.

They had $4B in revenue, 800 stores, and global brand recognition. 
And still… they blew it.

Forever 21 didn’t just fail.
It self-destructed.

Not because of Shein.
Not because of Gen Z.
Because of how the business was run.

Do Won and Jin Sook Chang immigrated from South Korea with $11,000 and limited English.
They opened their first store in Los Angeles in 1984.
By the 2000s, Forever 21 was everywhere - malls, airports, international markets.
A true American dream… until it wasn’t.

1. Inventory chaos turned growth into a cash leak.
By 2024, 28% of inventory went unsold. 
That’s not a merchandising issue. 
That’s trapped cash. 
Shein mastered micro-batch production. 
Forever 21 stayed locked into bulk manufacturing and markdowns. 
They lost $100M+ every year to excess inventory alone.

2. Suppliers cut them off.
The company delayed payments by 60–90 days.
Eventually, their key manufacturers in China, Vietnam, and Korea simply stopped shipping.

3. E-commerce never worked.
A 2021 platform “upgrade” broke checkout. 
Online revenue stalled at~$183M a year,
catastrophic for a brand of that scale. 
Digital wasn’t a growth engine. 
It was a liability.

4. The brand was monetized, but the business wasn’t fixed.
After their first bankruptcy, Authentic Brands Group bought the IP for $81M and licensed it out.
Licensing fees hit 25% of sales - a crushing weight for an already fragile operation.
By 2025, Forever 21 had racked up $1.58B in debt. No turnaround plan. Just liquidation.

5. Founders refused to evolve.
Even as they scaled globally, they rejected outside leadership.
No operators. No modern exec team. Just a family-led org making emotional calls at enterprise scale.

→ 2025: Chapter 11 (again). 
354 U.S. stores shut down. 9,200+ people laid off. 
Game over.

This wasn’t a retail problem. It was a founder problem.
- Chronic overproduction with no demand insights
- Outdated ops run on personal control, not systems
- Licensing revenue extracted while debt ballooned
- Zero real financial infrastructure or scalability mindset

If you’re a founder: 
Don’t wait for bankruptcy to tell you your systems are broken.
Growth will hide operational debt - until it doesn’t.

So ask yourself:
– Are you leading with clarity or clinging to control?
– Do your numbers tell you the truth - or just what you want to see?
– Is your business model built to flex - or break?

Forever 21 didn’t get disrupted. It self-destructed.
Learn from the wreckage.
Fix the foundation before the roof caves in.

You’re probably already married.
..but you don’t know yet..
and you also haven’t signed the prenup…

That’s what choosing a cofounder is like.
You’re not just choosing someone to “build” with.
You’re choosing the person whose conflict style, ego management, and decision-making blind spots will quietly shape the operating system of your business.
Every day. For years.
And if you skip the hard stuff early?
It almost always shows up later, when the stakes are higher, the term sheet is signed, or someone wants out.

The most expensive conflicts don’t come from a “bad” partner.
They come from two smart people who never designed the relationship.

Instead of waiting for things to get messy, do this:
✅ Stress-test with a real project before sharing equity
✅ Have the worst-case conversation before it’s emotional
✅ Define decision rights, not just roles (who breaks ties?)
✅ Don’t skip the founder retro. Make space for tension before it compounds
✅ And yes - put it in writing. Your memory won’t hold up when the pressure hits.

Today’s newsletter goes deeper:
– Real cofounder breakups (and what caused them)
– 5 alignment tests to run before you commit
– What to say when raising prices without breaking trust
👉 Check it out here https://lnkd.in/ej3GB8dc 

You can pivot product. 
You can pivot strategy. 
You cannot casually pivot your cofounder.

She fled an arranged marriage with 12 jars of her mother’s face cream. 
She didn’t speak English. 
She had no money. 
And she slept above a rural grocery store in Australia.
Most people know Helena Rubinstein as the woman who built a $60M beauty empire.

What they miss is how she built it,and why it still matters.

She wasn’t supposed to succeed.
Not in 1896.
Not as a poor Jewish woman.
Not as an immigrant in rural Australia who didn’t speak a word of English.

She arrived in Melbourne with no money, no connections, and no plan. 
Just jars of her mother’s homemade cream, a Polish recipe of herbs, lanolin, and botanicals.

She worked for free in her uncle’s shop.
She endured harassment from a relative.
She took jobs no one else wanted - waitress, governess, shop assistant.
She had no access to credit, so she saved every coin she earned.

And then - in the back of a pharmacy - she started experimenting.
Tweaking the cream, testing ingredients,
and charging 10 shillings an ounce (8x the cost) to sell it door to door.

What she created became Crème Valaze, a cult product sold as “youth in a jar.”
In 1902, she opened her first salon in Melbourne.
By 1908, she’d saved $100,000 - her own money - and moved to London.
Then Paris. Then New York.

She built her empire in the middle of World War I.
Bought back her U.S. business at a profit after the 1929 crash.
Outpaced Elizabeth Arden in one of the most legendary rivalries in beauty.
And by 1965, Helena Rubinstein Inc. was a global powerhouse.

But here’s what people miss:
- She invented the idea of skin types.
- She trained salon staff like they were ambassadors.
- She wrapped her clinics in luxury - velvet curtains, chandeliers, French ballet aesthetics.
- She treated cosmetics as science before it was fashionable - or even acceptable.
- She changed how women saw themselves.
Not as ornaments.
But as decision-makers. As creators. As CEOs.

She didn’t follow the rules.
She made her own.
And proved - long before it was common -
that you don’t need to be invited to take up space.
You just need the courage to start anyway.

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