Practical Founders Podcast

Morgan Katz is the founder and CEO of Ticketnology. Morgan was an enthusiastic athlete with a degree in sports management who started her career in ticket sales for sports teams and front-line venue management. Morgan saw how companies with season tickets had difficulty managing their digital tickets after COVID, so she started her own company to solve it with a software solution.  Ticketnology is a fast-growing leader in the new category of season ticket management software. Started with a mix of hands-on concierge services and a software solution, Ticketnology is now a complete platform that helps season ticket holders manage and distribute tickets to maximize the value of their season ticket investment.  Ticketnology is a bootstrapped and profitable software company with just over $2 million in revenue, four full-time employees, and an outsourced development team. They doubled revenues this year and expect to double each year for the next few years. Morgan is a member of a Practical Founders Peer Group.  Learn more at practicalfounders.com.

In this podcast, Stephanie Betters, CEO and founder of LeftMain REI, shares her remarkable journey from being a Nurse Practitioner in heart surgery to creating a successful CRM tailored for real estate investors. She discusses the frustrations that led her to build the software herself, teaching herself to code in just three months. Stephanie also highlights the rapid growth of her company, achieving nearly $3 million in annual recurring revenue while remaining bootstrapped. Her inspiring story emphasizes innovation, resilience, and dreaming big in the entrepreneurial space.

Shameem Hameed created several companies, including a medical billing services company, before starting ZH Healthcare in 2008 to provide billing and EHR software to innovative healthcare providers. Their BlueBriX software grew into a comprehensive and customizable platform used by hundreds of healthcare organizations around the world.  ZH Healthcare now has almost 200 employees in the US and India. The company has been profitable every year and has not taken on any outside funding. 

Kevin McArdle spent 15 years working in large software companies before becoming a practical investor and acquirer of smaller SaaS businesses. Kevin is the CEO and co-founder of Big Band Software, a holding company that buys and holds small, profitable, and growing SaaS businesses—with no intent of selling those businesses. Kevin has acquired over 40 businesses in the last 10 years with this buy-and-hold model.  As an expert guest on the podcast, Kevin answers common questions from practical founders about the holding company approach as an exit path. Holding companies are common in other industries, including Warren Buffet's Berkshire Hathaway, but relatively new to the software industry. Learn more at practicalfounders.com.

Harry Hopkins is co-founder and CIO of Viewgol, a medical billing technology software and services company based in Dallas, Texas. Viewgol was started in 2017 by three founders who got the product and revenues going before hiring additional staff. Their revenue cycle management (RCM) analytics software reveals medical billing problems and missed revenue opportunities at physician offices in the US. As the company expanded its service offerings, Viewgol grew very quickly, from three employees in 2019 to almost a thousand employees at the end of 2023. Viewgol was acquired in October 2023 by CPSI, a public medical billing solutions company, for a reported $67 million in cash and earnouts.  Learn more at practicalfounders.com.

Hamed Mazrouie owned a security monitoring business and other businesses for many years before he started his first software and services business called Vivant Corporation. Vivant provides a complete multi-site internet phone system to thousands of restaurants and law firms across the US. Vivant grew steadily and profitably for 10 years and is now a maturing business with 50 employees.  In the last four years, Hamed and his growing team have been building Milagro, a complete restaurant management system to increase repeat customer business. They now have happy paying customers who use their powerful software which includes advanced data analytics. Their vision is expanding based on early customer results.  Learn more at practicalfounders.com.

Subramanyam Kasibhat has created dozens of products in many different industries. He and his wife were contracted by a friend to build a software solution for a manufacturing plant for a German company. Seven years after they started with their first customer, they rewrote the software to serve other customers and the Vegam Solutions business started to grow.  Vegam Solutions is smart factory software for digital optimization and control of complex manufacturing plants. Vegam now has 180 remote employees, primarily in India, with almost $10 million in revenue. They have grown without outside funding by selling to large customers with complex needs. Learn more about practicalfounders.com.

Jafar Owainati was a mechanical engineer before he got an MBA in entrepreneurship and decided to start a software company with two friends. They looked at many ideas before building software to help sales engineers respond to Requests for Proposals (RFPs) faster and easier. They launched Loopio in 2014 and had paying customers within one year.  The three founders built the software and sold the first customers before adding more employees as they approached $1M ARR. They kept growing faster with a disciplined and frugal approach to $3M ARR before raising a round of VC funding from OpenView Ventures, a practical investor that aligned with the vision and approach of Loopio’s founders.  Loopio now has hundreds of employees and Sumeru Equity Partners made a strategic $200 million private equity investment in 2021. Jafar left to start a compensation management software company called Barley which is starting to grow quickly now.   Learn more at practicalfounders.com. 

Miles Schwartz a cofounder of Zūm Rails, a fast-growing fintech based in Canada with a growing worldwide presence. In just 3.5 years and without any outside funding, Zūm Rails has grown from a focused startup to a credible open banking and instant payment gateway with $10M in ARR. Zum Rails also integrated KYC (Know Your Customer) technology which reduces fraud across all payment types.  Miles and his cofounder had experience with fintech payments before they started Zum Rails to improve EFT payment processing in Canada. As they worked with more partners and grew revenues, they expanded the Zum Rails solution and built relationships with larger partners. Fast-growth, larger partner opportunities, and traction with a US expansion are causing Miles and his cofounders to think differently about the potential for the company and potentially raising growth capital from the right VC investment partner.  Learn more at practicalfounders.com. 

Bernardo Carvalho Wertheim, founder of The Bridge, shares his journey of building a successful tech startup in Latin America. Topics discussed include the challenges of operating in Latin America, the impact of COVID-19 on the digital talent market, and the transition from startup to a big company.