Season 1 Trailer

0:03Hi, I'm David Rusenko. I'm a startup founder turned early stage investor, and this is Leap forward, a podcast about founders with an unusual twist. In each episode, we talk to a founder you might have heard from, and also someone you haven't, someone who believed in them before anyone else, someone like their first boss, first investor, their co-founder, or their mom. To be honest, I always used to think he's extraordinarily brilliant, because he used to get 100 out of 100 in meds. So I always called him the best, the best, the best. Imad type of children are very few in the world, I think. These conversations reveal something rare and honest.

0:51They help us see the moments before people made it big, through the eyes of the people who knew them best then. Sean and Adrian, they're kind of rough around the edges. We're like, should we be concerned in terms of how they present. Like Adrian being a t-shirt that he'd worn for the last 24 hours eating cornflakes in front of a client. It was amazing luck that Jessica was the perfect person to do this. It wouldn't have existed. It wouldn't have existed. I would never have thought about Y Combinator without her. I remember thinking to myself at that moment, like, when is the next time your best friend's going to ask you to start a company with him?

1:31Like, this is the once in a lifetime. These conversations reveal the moments things almost fell apart. We weren't really talking to our investors. We were scared to go talk to our investors because like we didn't really have anything impressive to show. And it was like, you know, it was starting to feel kind of dire. How low did you get? I think we got down to four weeks, maybe three weeks. And when ideas came together that would go on to change the world, like Airbnb, Y Combinator, and Twitch. There are many times that Justin TV almost died, but this was kind of a big boy. And there was a whiteboard in the room.

2:08It was like, on one side of the whiteboard, I'm going to write everything that we can do to save money. On the other side, I'm going to write everything we can do to make money. And we're not leaving this room until both sides of the whiteboard are completely covered. That little moment in a North Beach apartment turns into live streaming, right? which is something you take for granted now as like a very ubiquitous thing. But it didn't exist back then. I mean, do you ever think back to that? Isn't that weird? This is the life of a startup, right? It only sounds like a good plan afterwards. Success is often chaotic, and the best way to learn from it is to hear the intimate stories of people who have built something that matters.

2:51I always think about the fact that being a founder is such a lonely job. Oh, it definitely resonates. It's lonely in that it's just an unrelatable career path, and you can't fathom the total transformation of your life unless you're in it. Welcome to Leap Forward, a show for anyone who's interested in startups and the human stories behind them. Coming soon, wherever you get your podcasts. Thank you.