Adam Harris is the Co-founder and CEO of Cloudbeds. Together with Co-founder Richard Castle, Adam has led Cloudbeds from a small startup to an award-winning company that powers tens of thousands of hospitality properties in over 135 countries. Adam started his career as an investment banker until his love of entrepreneurship and travel pulled him from Wall Street to some of the most remote corners of the planet. He has many years of experience in consulting, has built and sold multiple companies, and has traveled to more than 51 countries over the course of his career. Adam believes that travel and food are the keys to understanding the world and that, in particular, unique properties give travelers the best opportunity to explore and experience local culture.

Pat Sullivan has been building software for over 30 years. Along the way, he was named one of the “80 Most Influential People in Sales and Marketing History” along side Henry Ford, Walt Disney, Jack Welch and Bill Gates by Sales and Marketing Management. He was also twice named Ernst & Young “Entrepreneur of the Year” for both ACT! and SalesLogix software.

Philip Soffer has been the CEO of test IO since May of 2016, splitting his time between Berlin and the SF Bay Area. Prior to test IO, he held senior leadership roles in product, development, and marketing at Plumtree Software, Lithium Technologies, and Piazza.

Ian has been involved in technology businesses and start-ups for over 22 years and has built businesses in Australia, Taiwan, Silicon Valley and the UK. Ian has grown Adthena since 2012 to its current position as the premier global provider of competitive intelligence. While Adthena itself has won many major industry awards, Ian’s entrepreneurial determination has also been recognized with the Developing Entrepreneur Award at the WCIT Enterprise Awards – commonly regarded as the ‘Oscars for technology entrepreneurs’.

Gabriele joined Doodle in 2016 to transform it into a SaaS business. After studying physics, he went into consulting, got an MBA at London Business School and joined Doodle’s mother company Tamedia. Swiss and Italian, Gabriele is a polyglot and loves the Mediterranean, the Swiss Alps, seafood and Swiss cheese.

In 2010, Drew Sheahan started a GPS Fleet Tracking Business from his up-stairs bedroom that would eventually rank #126 on the 2014 INC500 List. He sold that company in 2016 to pursue solving the #1 issue he encountered while scaling a business that generates website leads. That business became BirdSeed.io

Alex Bates is an angel investor and a Member of Peter Diamandis’s Abundance 360 Network. He has spent the last decade bringing artificial intelligence and machine learning to the forefront of the industrial market. From leading DARPA funded research in neural networks, to applying analytics for the world’s largest data warehouses at Teradata, to creating Mtell, a machine learning company acquired by Aspentech (NASDAQ: AZPN), he believes the coming wave of human-centered Al has the potential to make us superhuman and create a world of abundance.

Matthew is a seasoned growth-stage technology investor and career VC, having originated, managed and completed dozens of transactions. As General Partner at Plaza Ventures, Matt specializes in deal flow, investment transaction processing, ecosystem development and investor relations. He sits on the board of numerous companies, as well as various accelerators and charities.

Software veteran Dave Keil brings a growth-oriented leadership approach to his job as CEO of QASymphony. For more than 25 years Dave has built a strong track record of business success. Prior to QASymphony, Dave was CEO of Digistrive, a provider of e-commerce solutions to large membership based organizations. He grew and eventually sold that business to a large private company. Before joining Digistrive, Dave was CEO of Integrated Broadband Services (IBBS), a software and services company. During his tenure, the company doubled in size, completed two strategic acquisitions and established a market leadership position in the "Tier Two" broadband space. Earlier in his career, Dave served as Chief Strategy Officer and later as Senior President and General Manager at ChoicePoint, a NYSE listed global information services provider (acquired by Lexis Nexis in 2008). Dave has also held senior executive roles at Novient, and Robinson Humphrey (now part of SunTrust). He received a MBA from The Wharton School and a BS in Applied Mathematics and Economics from Brown University. He lives in Atlanta with his wife and two kids.

LBA Ware™ CEO Lori Brewer is an accomplished entrepreneur and technology leader. Following the conclusion of her service in the U.S. Air Force, Brewer has dedicated her talents to improving the mortgage industry. She founded LBA Ware in 2008 to deliver business process optimization through LBA Ware’s flagship products CompenSafe™ and LOS Talker™.

Payman Taei is an avid technologist who loves new trends and tries to keep up with the ever-evolving internet. Taei’s background in Biology led him to truly believe in the art of evolution: everything changes in time and you either follow or create new trends or are left behind. Taei founded HindSite Interactive, a digital agency, in 2001 and out of that in 2014 incubated Visme, one of the leading presentation and infographic tools online. Visme empowers more than a million businesses, non-profits and individuals from over 90 countries, including NASA, IBM, and SONY, by improving the way ideas are visualized into engaging presentations, infographics and other forms of visual content.

Jeremy has spent the last 15 years in the tech-industry as a serial entrepreneur, startup adviser, and occasional investor. Jeremy has helped dozens of B2B companies drive adoption of digital commerce, and is still an active board member at a number of fintech companies. He started his career in technology as an engineer at nanotech startup Digital Instruments, which was acquired by Veeco (NASDAQ: VECO). Jeremy holds a BS in Computer Engineering from the University of California and a Masters in Business from the University of Massachusetts.

After working inside newspapers for 10+ years, Lloyd started OwnLocal to fix the business of news. With initial seed investment from Y Combinator, OwnLocal has grown to work with 276,000 SMBs through 3,500 newspaper partners all over the world. Today, OwnLocal is profitable and growing with 8-figure revenues.

James is the founder and CEO of Adzerk, an API company that powers native ads, promotions, and sponsored listings for companies like Ticketmaster, Wattpad, imgur, and many others. Prior to Adzerk, James co-founded TekPub which was acquired by PluralSight.

Web entrepreneur with an IT background working on his second startup.

Chad Rubin (Ecommerce Renegade) builds e-commerce businesses. Fresh out of college and Wall Street, he took his family vacuum business online and built his own direct to consumer e-commerce business called Crucial Vacuum. He grew it from 0 a $20 million dollar valuation in just 7 years. He happens to be a top 250 Amazon seller. He co-founded Skubana with DJ Kunovac and built one of e-commerce's hottest operational softwares.

For the first 18 years of my career, I built and scaled sales organizations at both Gartner and CEB. The corporate cultures instilled a sales rigor and discipline that has helped me to appreciate the complexities of sales management, operations, as well as the development of reps and their managers.

Serial Entrepreneur (1 Acquisition & 2 disastrous failures prior to this venture) and Online Advertising expert with more than 8 years of experience in advertising for retail brands and their retail locations.

Deb Noller is the dynamic CEO and co-founder of Switch Automation, a smart building software company specializing in building performance optimization. With 20+ years of experience in real estate, technology and sustainability, she is passionate about helping enterprises leverage next-generation facilities management technology to execute more efficient business operations.

Chris started Versium six years ago with the vision of helping marketers to utilize data and data technologies to improve their marketing and ROI. He lives and breathes technology innovation. Being involved in several early-stage technology ventures, his success spans enterprises in the Internet, mobile, and SaaS spaces.

Angam Parashar is a founder of ParallelDots. He is a graduate of Indian Institute of Technology Kharagpur. After his graduation and before starting ParallelDots, he worked as a consultant at Opera Solution, a niche big data consulting firm.

Lover of dogs, people, uncontrollable laughter, and of course water fountains

Nicole Verkindt is the Founder & CEO of Canadian technology company, OMX (theomx.com). Previously, she led a high tech manufacturing business selling to Governments around the world. Nicole is on the Board of the Canadian Crown Corporation, CCC (Canadian Commercial Corporation) that performs government to government contracts between Canada and other countries around the world. She is also on the Advisory Board of the Peter Munk School of Global Affairs, known for their Munk Debates. She is a commentator on CBC and columnist for Vanguard magazine focusing on technology and business news and a “Dragon” on CBC’s Next Gen Dragon’s Den, which is dedicated to early stage technology businesses. She was named Canada’s national woman entrepreneur of the year in 2017. She joined Gimlet media’s show “The Pitch” as the 4th investor for the 2018 season.

CEO & founder of Pingboard, which provides live org charts & planning software to thousands of companies. Prior to Pingboard, Bill was CTO & co-founder of Webmail, the largest B2B email provider before Gmail. After Webmail was acquired by Rackspace, Bill co-founded Capital Factory, which helps entrepreneurs in Austin build great companies

'm currently 25 years old and is the co-founder and CEO of two software startups. I started coding at the age of 13. Started my first software business at the age of 18. I founded a web called Cloudfoyo in 2015, which was a web development agency. In 2017, I started Engagespot as a side project which is currently one of the leading push notification platforms, that sends around 400M notifications a month.

Ron Miller, CEO of StartEngine,who was in Episode 40 of The Top and Chad Newell, CEO and founder of Snapwire. Listen as Ron and Chad explain how the new rule of SEC in equity crowdfunding helped their companies.  Famous Five: Favorite Book? – Ron: The E-Myth  What CEO do you follow? –  Chad: Sean Malarkey Favorite online tool? — Ron:  Internal Email / Chad: Google Sheet Do you get 8 hours of sleep?— Ron: No If you could let your 20-year old self know one thing, what would it be? – “It’s all about confidence.” – Ron Miller   Time Stamped Show Notes: 01:40 – Nathan introduces Ron and Chad to the show 02:30 – StartEngine is the nation’s leading platform that allows entrepreneurs to directly connect with potential investors to raise capital 02:45 – The new law opened up the possibility for everyone to become an investor 03:11 – It allows companies to advertise broadly 03:24 – StartEngine was launched in June 2015 03:30 – Total amount invested is $20 million 03:42 – 60,000 unique users have joined their community 04:00 – StartEngine charged 5% of the total capital from the proceeds raised 04:20 – Entrepreneur can raise up to $50 million a year in the online public offering and StartEngine charges $50 per investor 05:10 – “We are currently focusing on the US market and there’s no SaaS in there” 05:30 – What made Chad decide to use StartEngine 06:40 – Why StartEngine is ground-breaking 07:00 – The congress’ limitation on investing in a company 07:31 – “Real wealth is made by being an early investor” 07:54 – The new law is a radical shift 08:51 – Nathan believes that the best investors are customers 09:10 – Snapwire has 300,000 photographers in the platform 09:22 – Buyer ratio is much smaller than the photographers 09:45 – Snapwire has pay-as-you-go and a SaaS model 10:08 – Snapwire’s revenue is 50% from pay-as-you-go and 50% from SaaS 10:20 – 9,000 images have been bought in Snapwire since their launch 10:30 – Snapwire was founded in 2014 10:34 – Snapwire has raised $2.8 million 11:15 – Snapwire raising in StartEngine opened up a lot of opportunities 11:45 – Can you use StartEngine after a price round? 11:52 – The main advantage is that companies can set their terms 12:03 – Some companies have to essentially create a second priced or non-priced round 12:58 – The good thing about equity crowdfunding is you have to disclose everything 13:08 – Disclosure statement is clear 13:41 – Lawsuits and CAP table 14:10 – There’s a disclosure and subscription agreement that investors sign 14:30 – “I think there’s an immersion of risk” 16:14 – There are limits to investments and to returns 16:28 – During crowdfunding, there’s also a limit on the amount of investment that a company will accept 17:00 – “As far as information rights, you can be very clear in the disclosure” 18:00 – It is not allowed to give out public information even if it is unintentional 18:15 – Upon investing, you will get a shareholder report that is in compliance with security exchange commission requirements 18:40 – “Competition can’t reverse engineer your strategy in execution” 19:06 – StartEngine has 12,000 – 14,000 investors 19:20 – Total of 15-18 companies have raised in StartEngine 19:30 – 14 team size in StartEngine 19:36 – StartEngine raised capital through seed round and Series A 19:47 – Total of $7.7 million raised 19:54  - Ron didn’t use their platform to raise 20:25 – Average value of an investment is $1400 20:40 – StartEngine’s biggest competitors are Seed Invest, Next Seed, WeFunder and Flash Funder 21:11 – What should people look for in the marketplace? 21:23 – If certain companies are establishing themselves in a specific niche area 21:43 – Success rate of the companies 21:57 – Support the companies can provide to entrepreneurs 22:13 – Connect with Ron through his email 22:34 – Contact Chad at Chad@Snapwi.re 24:53 – The Famous Five   3 Key Points: Real wealth is made by being an early investor. The good thing about equity crowdfunding is the disclosure. Be confident in yourself.   Resources Mentioned: Toptal – Nathan found his development team using Toptal  for his new business Send Later. He was able to keep 100% equity and didn’t have to hire a co-founder due to the quality of Toptal  developers. Host Gator – The site Nathan uses to buy his domain names and hosting for the cheapest price possible. Freshbooks – The site Nathan uses to manage his invoices and accounts. Leadpages  – The drag and drop tool Nathan uses to quickly create his webinar landing pages which convert at 35%+ Audible – Nathan uses Audible when he’s driving from Austin to San Antonio (1.5-hour drive) to listen to audio books. Assistant.to – The site Nathan uses to book meetings with one email. Acuity Scheduling – Nathan uses Acuity to schedule his podcast interviews and appointments Drip – Nathan uses Drip’s email automation platform and visual campaign builder to build his sales funnel. Ron@StartEngine.com – Ron’s email address Chad@Snapwi.re – Chad’s email address Show Notes provided by Mallard Creatives