Stephen Hakami

Co-Founder (Company Acquired, Nov 2020)

When I was 15 years old, I started my first software company. "Restaurant Solutions" was an iPad app that let you order food and get your bill without waiting on your server.

Ok, fine... it was never actually an app. I couldn't afford to get it developed, so for Christmas in 2012 I asked my parents for $500 to help me pay a designer to make wireframes.

Then, I went door to door at different restaurants in Toronto trying to sell them a subscription to my non-existent app with those designs.

Needless to say, it didn't work out, but starting things with little to no resources is comfortable for me.

12 years later, I'm bootstrapping Wiza.com into the most accurate contact data tool in the world.

Our amazing small team, has built a tool that outperforms billion-dollar companies by thinking a little differently.

Founder, Chief Executive Officer

Wiza is a prospecting tool in a league of it's own, helping sales reps across the globe find thousands of valid leads. Learn more at www.Wiza.com

I never thought by 27 I'd already have:

– $50M in VC funding
– A exec team of Ivy league grads (3 AI advisors)
– Daily catered poke bowls and oat milk
– A Silicon Valley PR firm on retainer
– 0 paying customers

And I was absolutely right. I don't have a single one of them (we're a profitable $15M ARR bootstrapped SaaS)

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Wearing your bluetooth headphones could be the modern version of chain smoking cigarettes 🎧🚬

I read somewhere that bluetooth headphones could possibly be carcinogenic… 

And despite the fact that we don’t know the impact yet 

It’s scary how quickly we accept the risk for the sake of convenience.

That’s what technology does best. It trades the invisible for the instant.

That’s why I switched back to wired headphones.

No charging. No pairing. No problem if I lose them.

And maybe… a little less radiation next to my head.

Makes you wonder…what else are we normalizing today that will look insane in 20 years?

New cold email spam method just dropped 👀

Early on, culture builds itself. Later, you have to build it on purpose.

When you’re small, it’s easy. 

Everyone’s close, everything moves fast, and alignment happens naturally.

As you grow, it takes intention.

You start thinking about culture before you hire, not after.

Skill still matters, but attitude becomes the difference between a good team and a great one.

One rule of thumb I’ve learned:

A good interview should feel like you ran out of time, not things to talk about.

And when you find someone amazing who doesn’t fit the team… you face a real decision.

Do you move the team toward them, or move on?

Patience is hard when you’re hiring, but it’s almost always worth it. ⚡

🥊 Choose your fighter (desk drink edition):

A) Drip coffee from Starbucks
B) Celsius 
C) Diet Coke
D) Another drip coffee from NewsBar Cafe
E) Water

Friendly reminder:

Brand 👏 is 👏 the 👏 only 👏 real 👏 moat 👏

Anyone can copy your product.

No one can copy how it *feels*

Big wins are overrated...


The real game is learning to love slow progress

Because the most impactful progress doesn’t always feel exciting

It’s made up of quiet, consistent improvements that stack up over time

So many people obsess over the end game

But everything is iterative

It might feel slow. It might not look groundbreaking.

But that’s how momentum actually works

Lowering the bar for “big wins” doesn’t mean lowering ambition

It just means prioritizing motion over perfection.

Sometimes the standard prospecting filters just aren’t enough.
So we built something smarter.

Introducing AI Research Fields — rolling out to Wiza users soon.
It lets you go beyond basic filters and search exactly the way you think.

Our beta users are already finding picture-perfect leads with prompts like:
“Is this company B2B or B2C?”
“Find this companies biggest competitor”
“Find this companies G2 rating”

Highlights:
- Ask AI anything about people or companies
- Instantly filter your prospects based on that research
- Export the findings — including the AI's reasoning
It’s like having a full-time analyst embedded in your prospecting workflow.

If you want this turned on in your Wiza account early, shoot me a DM.

Wiza leveled up when I stopped doing the things that made me feel productive. 

For a long time, my day was filled with tasks.

Spreadsheets ✅ Customer emails ✅ Sales calls ✅

It felt good, like progress you can see.

But the truth is, once you hit a certain stage, that kind of work starts holding you back.

When we added more managers, it forced a shift.

My time became less about doing, and more about thinking. 

Less fixing, more leading.

The hardest part is that high leverage work doesn’t feel productive.
 
But it compounds in ways busy work never will.

Want to look 10x more polished in your next demo? 👇


One small thing that improved our demo conversions instantly: a clean screen share setup 💻

No random tabs. No icons all over your desktop. Just a clean, distraction free view of what I actually want prospects to see. 

Something I started doing a while back: I built a separate Chrome profile just for demos.

Everything I might need is bookmarked. 

Pricing, integrations, case studies, all based on the questions I get most often.

It’s always clean. Always ready to go. ✨

Might sound minor, but it instantly changes the perception of your product.

Consider this your sign to go through your old notes. Might just find some hidden gems 💎

If you ask marketing who owns pipeline, they’ll say “we do.” 

If you ask sales, they’ll say the same thing.

So, I'm curious.. who should actually own it? 👇

The author can see how you vote. Learn more

Most people say they want to build simple products.

But simplicity always has a cost 💰

Remember when Apple removed the CD drive from the MacBook? 💿💻

People absolutely lost their minds. 

🎯 But that’s the point. 

To make something truly simple, you have to sacrifice functionality.

Sooner or later you have to stop building more, and start deciding what to live without.

You can’t have the elegance of simplicity without the potential pain (or outrage) of removing features. 

💬 Now I want to know… what’s the one feature that really makes your favorite product? 👇

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