ONE The Come UP

Today I had the pleasure of speaking with Hristo Tenchev. Tenchev, for my international listeners, is the CEO and founder of the company that probably makes your favorite video game - XS Software. Tenchev began his career when he was 18, creating a web-based video game that quickly went viral in Bulgaria. Pursuing his education at the Technical University of Sofia, Tenchev wanted to study computer science but the only thing he ende...

I’m starting to lose count of the episodes, so I’ll ditch the tradition of saying it’s such and such number of episodes, and instead I’ll resort to saying it’s n and n+1 episodes. But then I’ll exhaust n and lose track of counting again, so I think I’ll just stop counting altogether ;)

For this episode of One the Come Up, I was honored to be joined by Matthew Simmonds. Simmonds' career began at the University of Oxford, where he g...

For the thirty third episode of One the Come Up, I was honored to be joined by Teasha Feldman-Fitzhum. Feldman-Fitzthum’s career began at MIT as a physics major. Originally intending to pursue graduate school, she pivoted to entrepreneurship after enrolling in MIT’s 13.366 entrepreneurship class, where she and her cofounder successfully launched EverVest. Originally known as Cardinal Winds, and a company a little bit beyond my unde...

Kostapanos Miliaresis and I covered a lot of ground on the thirty-first episode of One the Come Up, so I suppose I’ll go in chronological order. Miliaresis' journey began in the Boy Scouts, where he first discovered a passion for volunteering. The idea of volunteering continued with him to Athens University of Economics and Business, where he was involved with AIESEC (an opportunity that brought him to Taiwan to teach for three mon...

For the 30th episode of One the Come Up, it was my fortune to be joined by Anton Toll Håkanson, the CEO and founder of DayCape. Toll Håkanson’s career began somewhere far away from entrepreneurship or user experience: scuba diving. After being a scuba diving instructor for a year, he decided to head off to Hyper Island, where he got his first taste of entrepreneurship, and where he developed his idea for DayCape. After completing h...

The first Dutchman on the Podcast!, Ferdinand Grapperhaus is the CEO of Nextsense, a company aimed at decarbonizing real estate. Grapperhaus’ career began at Delft University of Technology, where, when pursuing his MSc, he made a once-in-a-lifetime discovery: a substance to be used in windows to convert natural light into energy. Recognizing the potential of this innovation, Grapperhaus and a co-founder started Physee in 2014 (Phys...

For the 27th episode of One the Come Up, I was fortunate to share the time with Mr Matthew Rastovac. The former CEO of Respell (now acquired by Salesforce), his career began at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign. Here, Mr Rastovac was co-president of Founders, the university’s entrepreneurship club, where he doubled the group’s budget and grew from 5 to 60 members. During this time, he also landed internships at NASA and F...

For the 26th episode of On the Come Up, I was honored to be joined by Ms. Milagros Barsallo, who currently serves as the Outreach Director for the Denver Mayor’s Office. Her career began at Cornell University, where she studied Government and International Relations. After college, her first role was as a bilingual third and fourth grade teacher through Teach For America in Colorado, working to support underserved students. Afterwa...

For my first guest outside of Forbes 30 Under 30, I was fortunate to be joined by Mr Peter Hazlehurst. The CEO and founder of Synctera, a platform that provides the technology infrastructure, compliance tools, and banking partner connections to enable FinTech companies and other businesses to build and launch financial products like bank accounts, debit cards, and lending services. Originally from Australia, Mr Hazlehurst landed in...

For the twenty-fourth episode of One the Come Up, I had the fortune of speaking with Mrs Karoliina Kauhanen – twice. Unfortunately (or, maybe, fortunately) the first go around had issues with the recording (and prompted new measures on my part), so I had the pleasure of a second interview. Mrs Kauhanen joined me all the way from Finland, where her career began at Humak University of Applied Sciences and the University of the Arts H...

The Podcast is back!! After a little hiatus (Thank you AP Exams ;), I was excited to debut the podcast again with Mr Steel! Starting his career at UCLA, where he majored in Sociology, Mr Steel started his first company (GoGuardian) in a different direction. After his friend’s backpack was stolen (and in it was his personal computer), Mr Steel decided to create a Chromebook tracker to recover the device in case of a robbery. Posting...

Joining me all the way from Hong Kong, as my first guest from Asia Forbes, for the twenty-second episode of “One the Come Up” I was excited to have Mr Youssef El Kaddioui as my guest. The CEO and Founder of Scalelab, a venture-building studio and lead generation agency based out of Hong Kong, Mr Youssef began his career at Rouen Business School. Here he acquired his Masters degree, before going to Zhejiang University and Wharton to...

For episode twenty-one of “One the Come Up,” I was honored to have Mr Ernest Owens as my guest. What’s to say about him – what’s not to say about him? –  where to even start – where will it end? – fortunately the story’s been given to me, for I’m no writer, myself. A Renaissance Man is the only character in my story, but I have quite the story to tell. I suppose the best way to tell a story is to tell it from the beginning – for th...

For episode number 20 – wow! That’s a lot of episodes – I was honored to have Ms. Tsolova as my guest – the CEO and Founder of JAMBA, a company that provides educational and employment opportunities for those with disabilities in Austria, Hungary, and Bulgaria. Starting in high school where she volunteered at an orphanage, Ms Tsolova has always had a passion for meaningful causes. She obtained her education from the University of N...

For the nineteenth episode of “One the Come UP,” I was joined by Ms Stephanie Michelsen – the CEO and Founder of Jellatech, a biotechnology company based out of Raleigh, North Carolina that seeks to create highly valuable proteins in a scalable, efficient, and sustainable way. Her career began in Denmark, where she attended the University of Copenhagen, and then the University of Denmark. It was also during this time that she parto...

For the 18th – or maybe 17th, it’s starting to get hard to count – episode of “One the Come UP,” I was fortunate to have Professor Amaury Hayat as my guest. A researcher in mathematics at Ecole de Pont, I’m sure he could help me keep track of my episode numbers – that, and a little bit more. His academic career began in Classe Preparatoire at Lycée Sainte-Geneviève, before he continued on to obtain his PHD from Sorbonne Universit...

For the Seventeenth episode of “One the Come UP” I was excited to have Ms Chloë Downes as my guest. The CEO and Founder of SHFT, an influencer talent management agency based in the UK, she seeks to bring genuine inclusivity to an industry of smoke and mirrors. While many companies have an inclusive work culture on paper, Ms Chloe has seen firsthand that doesn’t always translate to the real world. After graduating from Bournemouth U...

For the 16th episode of “One the Come Up,” it was a pleasure to have Mr Richman Neumann as my guest. An architect, a businessman, an acapella singer, a mathematician, a man of many hats – some have been led to call him a human podcast. Mr Neumann got his start at Carnegie Mellon University where he studied architecture – the art of “frozen music” that perfectly blended his interests in math and design. Upon graduating in 2013, he w...

For the fifteenth episode of “ONE The Come UP,” I was excited to have Mr Valentin Meaux as my guest, for his first podcast experience!! The Co-Founder and Managing partner of Raisers Partners, a Fundraising/M&A advisory firm for African startups, they’re based out of Paris, France. Mr Meaux started his career in a program called Classes Préparatoires aux Grandes Écoles, where students go through 2 years of intense preparatory s...