Top Founders

How do you build a $10M business by teaching robots to write handwritten notes with real pens, and do it with zero outside investment for 12 straight years?
David Wachs sold his text message marketing company for eight figures in 2012, started Handwrytten the next day, and has bootstrapped it to 200 custom-built robots in a Phoenix facility sending 350,000 notes per month. He owns 100% of the company, took $350K in profit last year, and is targeting $10 to $11M in revenue this year.
You'll learn:
Why David thinks physical CapEx is now a competitive moat in the AI era, and why he is glad he can't be vibe coded away in a weekend
How Handwrytten went from $1M in 2018 to $9.4M in 2024 without raising a single dollar
The veterinarian euthanasia franchise that has been sending 80,000 robot-written notes per quarter for 8 straight years
Why a $5 Google ad click from a realtor generates only 20 cents in contribution margin and what that forced them to do instead
How they built a paper feed system that can write on a stuffed envelope without mismatching a single card across hundreds of thousands of sends
The robot leasing model: 30 units in the field at $1,000 to $1,250 per robot per month going to 3PL facilities and swag companies
How integrations with HubSpot, Shopify, Claude MCP, Zapier, and Salesforce turned Handwrytten into a fully automated marketing channel
Why David would sell for $100M today and what roll-up strategy Nathan pitched him live on camera
The SEO playbook that drives 40,000 organic clicks per month with zero agency spend and one in-house writer
What it actually costs to build a robot when you manufacture them yourself in Tempe, Arizona
Connect:
YouTube: youtube.com/@NathanLatkawatch
Handwrytten: handwrytten.com
Founderpath: founderpath.com

How do you go from a pricing experiment inside a failing product to $3.6 million in annual revenue with 10,000 customers — in under two years and with zero paid marketing?
Eugene Cheah is the co-founder and CEO of Featherless.ai, the largest open source LLM inference provider on Hugging Face. He co-created RWKV, the first attention-free AI architecture under the Linux Foundation, and today runs a 27-person team serving customers that pay anywhere from $25 a month to $2 million a year.
You'll learn:
Why Featherless started as an accident — a pricing experiment that outperformed the original company within days
How they grew to 10,000 customers with zero paid marketing using only Reddit posts to AI communities
The enterprise sales motion that closes $1 to $2 million per year contracts by showing startups how to cut their OpenAI or Anthropic bills in half
Why supporting 6,700 models versus competitors' 100 is the moat — and why no one else is doing it
How the RWKV architecture has the potential to reduce AI inference costs by over 1,000x compared to today's transformer models
Why the bottom 50% of AI model usage — the fine-tuned, niche, non-English models — is where the real money is hiding
What happened when servers caught fire from user growth and the team had to add capacity faster than they could hire
How a $20 million Series A in December 2025 finally gave them enough server capacity to breathe
Why Eugene believes AI models today are massively over-parameterized — and what a human brain tells us about where efficiency is actually going
The refund guarantee Eugene made live on camera and what it says about their confidence in the product
Connect:
YouTube: youtube.com/@NathanLatkawatch
Featherless: featherless.ai
Founderpath: founderpath.com

How do you build a $15M revenue business by teaching autonomous drones to find missing sneakers in warehouses, and get customers to more than double their spend every single year?
Sankalp Arora is the founder and CEO of Gather AI, a physical AI company that uses autonomous drones and computer vision to track inventory in real time across warehouses. He holds a PhD in robotics from Carnegie Mellon, built the world's first safe autonomous helicopter for DARPA, and today has 30 to 40 customers paying an average of $500K per year with net revenue retention of 170%.
You'll learn:
Why Sankalp spent three years writing code with zero revenue before getting his first customer in 2021
How a $2 warehouse pick turns into a $15 pick because of one inventory location error, and how Gather cut that by 70% for Barrett
The land and expand math: customers start with 5 facilities and expand to 100 within three years at $500K per facility network
Why 170% net revenue retention is possible when your product is embedded in daily warehouse operations
How Gather AI built neural nets that can read barcodes a standard grocery store scanner cannot, with no human annotation required
Why Sankalp passed on big-name VCs and chose Smith Point Capital, founded by Keith Block, former CEO of Salesforce
The forklift vision product that turns any warehouse into an Amazon Go store using off-the-shelf hardware from Best Buy
How Sankalp was carrying suicidal thoughts since his teenage years and only discovered life without them a year and a half ago, while building a company past $9M in revenue
The Series B math: $40M raised at roughly $270M to $400M valuation selling 10 to 15% of the business at $15M in revenue
Why Gather AI is touching just 0.1% of its addressable market today, and what 1% would actually mean in dollar terms
Connect:
YouTube: Nathan Latka
Gather.ai: gather.ai
Founderpath: founderpath.com

How do you go from $10,000 left in the bank and a down round to $100 million in annual revenue — without ever seriously considering quitting?
Krenar Komoni is the founder and CEO of Tive, a hardware-plus-SaaS company that tracks shipments in real time across trucks, ships, and planes worldwide. He started in his basement in 2015, charging his father-in-law $19.99 a month, and today has 1,300 customers — nine of which pay over $1 million per year — at a $545 million valuation.
You'll learn:
Why Krenar almost went bankrupt twice and laid off 75% of his team — and what kept him going
The pricing mistake that nearly killed the company: manufacturing a tracker for $150 and selling it for the same price
How hiring two college kids to cold call strangers became the GTM playbook that took Tive from $2.5M to $10M in revenue
Why 60% of new revenue at Tive comes from existing customers expanding, not new logos
The patent that creates a physical switching cost competitors can't replicate: ping-rate configuration based on shipment events
How Krenar negotiated a down round from $21M to $11M valuation with $10K in the bank — and why he doesn't regret it
What it actually takes to land a million-dollar-per-year customer when you sell physical hardware on monthly contracts
Why Krenar thinks AI agents will fully automate the supply chain in 24 to 36 months — and how Tive is already building toward that
The secondary liquidity story: why his Series A1 investor had to push him to take money off the table before he had the courage to ask
How Tive went from $250K revenue in 2019 to $100M run rate in 2026 — the full year-by-year breakdown
Connect:
YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/@NathanLatkawatch
Tive: https://www.tive.com/
Founderpath: https://founderpath.com/

How do you build a $53M ARR software company, stay profitable for eight straight years, and give 60% of the cap table to your employees — without ever taking a venture check?
Mike Zisman is the founder and CEO of Golf Genius, the dominant tournament management and handicapping platform for golf clubs worldwide. He self-funded $10M of his own money as interest-free debt, did 10 acquisitions before hitting $60M in revenue, and today sits on $14M cash while printing 20% EBITDA margins with 300 employees across the US and Cluj, Romania.
You'll learn:
Why Mike structured his entire $10M founder investment as debt instead of equity — and how it created a tax shield that paid him back on the way out
How the USGA handicapping contract in 2019 transformed Golf Genius from a niche club tool into the infrastructure layer of global golf
How Golf Genius went from $0 to $1M ARR in 8 years, then from $1M to $53M in the next 8 — and what the USGA relationship had to do with the inflection point
Why 50% of his 300-person team are engineers based in Cluj, Romania — and how that structural cost advantage funds 20% EBITDA while competitors burn cash
The exact three-phase acquisition strategy: legacy desktop customer rollups, league expansion, then B2C mobile apps with 8M+ users
How Mike negotiated the GolfShot acquisition — and why he forced their entire cap table behind a single LLC before closing
Why employees own 60% of the cap table at $53M ARR and how that drives 6-7% annual attrition across the entire company including Romania
What Mike would say if a PE firm offered $400M all cash today — and why he says he's more excited about what's next than he's been in years
Why he thinks AI will make SaaS companies radically more productive, not obsolete — from a founder whose doctoral thesis in 1977 was already on artificial intelligence
The rule of 40 reality at $53M ARR: why growth slows as companies scale and what Mike does to stay above the 10% industry average
Connect:
YouTube: youtube.com/@NathanLatkawatch
Golf Genius: golfgenius.com
Founderpath: founderpath.com