Burkland
142 episodes listed below
PRESS PLAY
On Startup Success, we discuss what’s working right now for scaling founders and investors... You’ll hear interviews with founders and investors who have compelling stories to share, new trends, and conversations from thought leaders and experts who have walked the walk. Each episode will dig into a crucial area of startup success: finance, entrepreneurship, fundraising, hiring, marketing, sales, and operations to help your startup or portfolio company scale.
Based on 6 episodes we listened to · September 2026
Startup Success clarifies the financial relationships and operating decisions that shape venture-backed companies after the pitch ends.
Startup Success turns startup finance into a sequence of operating decisions, using guest interviews to examine what happens before and after capital arrives.
That celebrity board member will not help you find product-market fit.
Press play if you want
Short reviews from the PlayNext desk, based on the episodes we processed.
A practical hiring conversation that treats startup scale as an operations problem, not a gut feel test.
Startup Success treats startup scaling as an operations problem, and Lydia Becker keeps the hiring side grounded. She talks from both mature-company experience and the scratch-build, pre-revenue side, which makes the advice feel usable: define success clearly, ask better…
A runway-bet pivot turns clear user pull into momentum.
The episode tracks a founder pivot that starts with a simple constraint: the team sees it has about a year of runway left, then tests a new product against real demand and finds more pull than expected.
A practical look at how pricing and packaging get brittle when the logic lives in product code.
Finn Glover, co-founder and CEO of Schematic, treats pricing as an operating problem, not just a spreadsheet exercise. The strongest part is the practical one: pricing and packaging get brittle when the logic sits inside application code, especially once a team has to bill…
A clear look at how an investor can help founders beyond writing a check.
Startup Success looks at what an investor can do for founders after the pitch: quick WhatsApp replies, help sharpening the story and deck, and backing that starts before a check is written.
A grounded founder story linking financial education, urgency, and investor alignment.
A founder story about financial education, but it also makes a practical case for how mission and market can line up. Tanya Van Court traces Goal Setter back to years at Nickelodeon, Discovery, and ESPN, then turns to the harder problem of serving families, institutions, and…
A grounded founder conversation about Radical AI and materials development, with a clear look at how one technical breakthrough can ripple across an industry.
Radical AI gets a founder story that business listeners can use. Joseph Krause, the co-founder and CEO, explains how the company is approaching materials development through R&D AI, and his path into founding the company gives the mission a clear frame.
A practical case for making customer feedback part of how companies grow.
Customer feedback is treated as a working habit, not a checkbox. Eli Portnoy, founder and CEO of BackEngine AI, points to the gap between collecting opinions and using them, then comes back to a plain question: how can companies hear customers well enough to grow?
A clear lender-side guide to when venture debt helps and when it does not.
Marshall Hawks makes venture debt sound less like a default answer and more like a tool that only works in the right hands. He lays out how lenders think, when debt fits a startup capital plan, and where founders tend to trip up if they shop only on terms and price.
Rob Walling on bootstrapped SaaS growth, plateaus, and exits — with founders who lived them.
Abbey Ashley's playbook for turning your job skills into a virtual assistant business.
Naval Ravikant on epistemology, startups, and crypto, from David Deutsch to Vitalik Buterin.
Alex Theuma interviews SaaS founders and investors on scaling to $10M-plus ARR.
Guy Raz traces founders' origin stories and fields live advice-line calls from entrepreneurs.
Alex Blumberg interviews guests like Megan Phelps-Roper and Shane McAnally about failure and reinvention.
Startup Success brings Lydia Becker of Build It Labs into the studio for a conversation about operational consulting and startup scaling.
Catherine Tomko, a partner at First Ascent Ventures, traces her path from a criminology and political science degree at the University of Guelph to probation and parole work in Kitchener-Waterloo, then to Facebook privacy work starting in 2008.
Pricing gets emotional fast.
Arielle Lechner, founder of Newpo and an executive coach who works mostly with CEOs, says her 2022 rebrand stands for “New Possibilities.” She connects startup coaching to a “lift and thrust” culture model, where teams need both psychological safety and real momentum or high performers leave.
The episode centers on startup boards.
Steve Lord, COO at Berkland, analyzes the Q3 startup ecosystem, discussing Fed rate cuts, economic health, and VC trends.
Ariana Papin Zoghbi says AOA began with a search through academic offices, poster publications, and patent filings before landing on Professor Saragove's novel biomarker work for ovarian cancer.
Tim He, founder and CEO of Cherrytree, says co-founder relationships are usually strained more by overtrust than by outright betrayal.
Mike Collins says Alumni Ventures gets capital from individual accredited investors, not institutions, and that the firm has raised nearly $1.5 billion from more than 11,000 investors backing over 1,000 portfolio companies.
Tanya Van Court joins Startup Success.
Rick Taurosi, GM and co-founder of PIE, describes how the Portland Incubator Experiment has spent 16 years helping corporations, universities, and government groups work with startups in Portland.
Daniel Loretto says Jetify began with developer environments, then pivoted to AI agents after the AI wave changed what was possible, with TestPilot as its first product.
Ferris returns to Startup Success to argue that founders should "outsource the headache" and stop spending time on work that does not match the company’s current phase.
Kate welcomes Julia Austin to talk about life after fundraising.
Joseph Rudokongwa, co-founder and CEO of Rozi, shares how his AI startup achieved profitability before funding by focusing on customer needs.
Ian Bateman, co-founder and CEO of Highscore, discusses his journey from a successful acquisition to launching a gaming startup that solves Mac compatibility issues.
Jorge Richardson and Christina Henico tell the story of Hope Hydration, a company built around free water refill stations.
Kate sits down with Joseph Krause, co-founder and CEO of Radical AI.
Meryl Lutzky joins Startup Success to walk through how Graphite came together and the path to the company in AI software development tools.
Startup Success talks with Nathan Beckard about fundraising when founders are competing for attention.
Itamar Novik joins the show with a long operator and investor background.
Marshall Hawks joins Kate to break down venture debt from the lender’s side.
Kate welcomes Ivan Montoya, managing partner of Numundo Ventures, and opens with the path that brought him from abroad to the Bay Area.
Kevin Turpin talks through his path from growing up in Kansas to starting a business in high school and eventually leading Webex.
Marlena Saranac, cofounder and fractional CMO at The Company Advice, says startup go-to-market has shifted from big PR launches and broad outbound to a narrower, more operational playbook.
Eli Portnoy joins Startup Success to talk about customer feedback.
Steve Allord, COO of Birkeland and head of KnowledgeShare, says Q1 2025 started with more uncertainty than founders expected after the election.
Jacqueline Basolto, founder and CEO of SeedX, says startups need to treat the website as a 24/7 salesperson, then build ads and email around the same value proposition.