Start a Company When Things Are Terrible - A conversation with David Leeds

Build It. Sell It. Repeat. - A conversation with Clark Peterson

Clark Peterson has been in the right place at the right time five times — and it was never an accident. From selling cell phones before most people had ever seen one, to building the nation's first nationwide cellular network, to pioneering cloud communications before anyone trusted the cloud, Clark has spent 35 years identifying windows of opportunity and moving fast before they close. In this conversation, Clark walks through the full arc: getting hired at Cellular One because he already owned a cell phone, sending a blank fax to Craig McCaw that launched three more companies, watching employees shop for houseboats as their stock hit a million dollars right before the dot-com bubble wiped it out, and convincing businesses to trust their phone systems to something called "the cloud." What comes through most is his instinct for timing — knowing when to build, when to go public, and when to sell. Key Moments [00:40] — How Clark paid his way through college with a mobile window tinting business, used one of the first cell phones to land a Yellow Pages ad, and got hired at Cellular One because he was the only candidate who'd actually used one. [03:10] — Why he turned down Pfizer after making more in his first two months at Cellular One than he would have made in an entire year at the pharmaceutical job he'd already accepted. [03:51] — The blank fax: Clark and colleagues sent Craig McCaw a completely blank page with only the words "what's next" — and the companies that followed: Nextlink, Nextel, and ClearWire. [05:02] — Why banks refused to fund Cellular One, projecting only 7% of the population would ever afford a cell phone, and how Michael Milken's junk bonds filled the gap. [07:44] — The houseboat lesson: why managing people when everyone's stock crosses a million dollars is harder than managing them in tough times — and what the dot-com bubble taught Clark about taking money off the table. [11:18] — How Carl Icahn skipped the boardroom, sat with a customer care rep for 30 minutes, and learned more about what was broken in the business than the entire C-suite in New York knew. [12:29] — Building ClearWire from scratch as Craig McCaw's first employee, proving the model in one market before raising money to scale, and going public three years later in a successful 2007 IPO. [21:25] — Selling Telesphere's $45M revenue business for $117M, then building Vonage's business division from zero to $800M — which Ericsson eventually acquired for $6.2 billion. [25:21] — Why being acquired by a company that already does what you do usually fails, and why the opposite is actually an opportunity to build something new with someone else's money. [36:26] — Ontologics: Clark's current venture using proprietary AI to analyze every patent filed worldwide, score portfolios, flag infringement, and predict where emerging technologies are heading. [42:10] — "It's so much harder to find an opportunity from the bench than if you're playing in the game." [57:19] — His dad's advice that's driven everything: "The harder you work, the luckier you get." About Clark Peterson Clark Peterson is a serial entrepreneur and telecom veteran who has built and exited companies across cellular, fiber, wireless data, and cloud communications. He co-founded the Cloud Communications Alliance, whose members today include Zoom and Cisco, and is currently building Ontologics, an AI-powered patent intelligence platform.

Start a Company When Things Are Terrible - A conversation with David Leeds

David Leeds spent nearly two decades building Tango Card from his basement in West Seattle — literally fulfilling gift card orders at midnight — into a company processing over $1.5 billion in rewards annually before being acquired by Blackhawk Network. But before Tango, he co-founded Fiber Tower, pitched 45 venture capital firms, got 45 rejections, and took it public anyway. What comes through in this conversation is his instinct for timing. He started Tango in January 2009, right in the teeth of the financial crisis, because he believed that was exactly the right moment. Then he threw out the existing playbook entirely — no delivery fees, no platform minimums, no reporting fees — in an industry where 15 to 30% fee stacks were completely normal. Microsoft was his first customer. Their finance team all closed their laptops when he explained the model. ---------------------------------------- Show Notes * Tango Card — acquired by Blackhawk Network (2023) * Fiber Tower — telecom infrastructure, taken public via reverse merger (2007) * Bing Rewards — Microsoft loyalty program, one of Tango's first integrations * giftcertificates.com [http://giftcertificates.com] — Omaha-based competitor acquired by Tango post-fundraise * Blackhawk Network / Silver Lake — acquirer of Tango Card ---------------------------------------- Timestamps [00:32] Growing up, studying abroad in Copenhagen, and choosing a program where English wasn't the native language [04:17] Nations Bank, Lexmark, and presenting to French leadership in broken French [06:38] Starting a consulting company in China — and why he hated being a consultant within a year [08:40] Stanford during the dot-com peak, graduating right as everything crashed [09:29] Founding Fiber Tower: four folding desks, no windows, 45 VC rejections [17:55] The core lesson: start a company when the economy is in ruins [20:10] January 2009 — launching Tango Card, self-funded, in the financial crisis [23:28] How a research note about gift card payment growth became a $1.5B business [35:52] The original product: a physical card, a website, and midnight basement fulfillment [39:30] Landing Microsoft as customer #1 and the moment their whole finance team closed their laptops [44:05] The business model that changed everything: zero fees, just spend your budget [54:38] Building a self-serve portal — and why his CTO tried to talk him out of it [1:06:29] How David recruited and kept great people through transparency and a mission everyone could actually recite [1:12:21] The Blackhawk acquisition — why global reach was the whole point [1:19:22] Why a gift card company keeps a sledgehammer in the office

Sell It Before It Exists - A Chat with Renato Villanueva

Renato Villanueva went from struggling to land a job out of UVU to helping build Divvy into a billion-dollar exit — then quit his job on a whim to start Parallel, an AI-powered financial modeling tool for founders. In this episode, Renato gets brutally honest about pre-selling a product that didn't exist, pricing mistakes that cost them 30% of their customers, and why he ultimately stepped down as CEO of his own company. ---------------------------------------- Key Moments: [00:53] — Renato's unlikely career path: from cold-emailing Signal Peak for free work to landing at Divvy and riding it to acquisition. [03:49] — How he raised $200K the same night he quit his job — and why fundraising is exactly like dating. [08:00] — Selling Gab Wireless an annual contract before a single line of product existed. [10:40] — The pre-selling trap: why saying yes to every customer feature request nearly broke the company. [11:17] — Churning 30% of customers in early 2025 and what they learned from it. [15:13] — The real way to figure out pricing: guess, iterate, and treat every "no" as data. [17:12] — Why pricing is a treasure chest of ICP intelligence — and the mistake of ignoring what it tells you. [22:39] — Why Renato stepped down as CEO, and how his investors actually responded. [25:45] — His current obsession: the gap between hyper-personalized AI and the reality that most people are just lazy.

Your Software Is Worth Nothing — The Business Is Everything

What happens when your startup fails — and why that might be the best thing that ever happens to you? Chris Chumley has spent his career building, breaking, and betting on software companies. From nearly getting expelled for sneaking into school to play Oregon Trail, to leading product at a venture-backed startup that cratered, to helping build CampusLogic from a handful of customers to a $50M ARR acquisition by Ellucian — Chris has seen every phase of the startup lifecycle up close. In this episode, Chris and Nate dig into the real lessons behind building great products: why your software is worth nothing (but your business is everything), how to stay differentiated when sales is screaming for me-too features, and why the best product strategy starts the moment you choose what to build. Chris also shares his framework for the "lighthouse" approach to roadmapping, what it really takes to build trust with a CEO, and why niching down — not boiling the ocean — is what took CampusLogic to $50M. Now a venture partner at Phoenix Ventures, Chris brings his operator lens to what he's seeing in early-stage investing today, including why pre-seed is getting harder, what he looks for in a founder, and why vibe coding both excites and scares him. Plus — a candid conversation about Claude Code, the future of engineering, and a question neither of them can fully answer: if AI does all the grunt work, how does the next generation actually learn?