The Backup That Built a Business: Inside Rewind with Mike Potter

Dec 1, 2025

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Join a community of ambitious CEOs who are looking to build market-leading companies without sacrificing health and happiness.

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What if the “boring” SaaS backup tool you rarely think about is actually a rocketship, and the CEO behind it refuses to sacrifice his marriage or his health to build it?

In this episode, I sit down with my friend Mike Potter, co-founder & CEO of Rewind – the category-defining backup platform for mission-critical SaaS apps like Shopify, GitHub, Jira, Confluence, and more. We talk about how a catastrophic hard-drive failure at Adobe turned Mike into a backup obsessive, how he and his co-founder quietly created a new category in SaaS, and why the big platforms’ own backups won’t save you when just your account goes sideways. We also get into the messy reality behind the scenes: bootstrapping for years, supporting 16+ platforms without drowning, and ultimately raising from Inovia, Bessemer, and Insight without abandoning their values.

The second half of the conversation is all about how to build a big business without blowing up your life. Mike shares the story of his first startup nearly costing him his marriage, the panic attack that became a turning point, and the explicit pact he made with his co-founder this time: “The business will not destroy our relationships.” We unpack his operating rules for sustainable high performance: respecting people’s time, using sleep and space to solve hard problems, building systems so the CEO can walk away, and delegating so the company no longer depends on him to “save” it.

If you’re a founder or CEO trying to balance hypergrowth with your health, your family, and your sanity, this one’s for you.

Mike Potter

https://www.linkedin.com/in/mikepotter/?originalSubdomain=ca

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My website: https://limitless.ceo/

Linkedin:https://www.linkedin.com/in/themarkmacleod/

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