#123: How Practical Founders Are Winning Big with Growth Equity Funding – Growth Street Partners
Release Date: 12/20/2024
#152: Practical SaaS CEO Stays On After 100% Cash Sale - Tracy Larson
Practical Founders Podcast
Tracy Larson is President and CEO of WeSuite, a vertical sales automation platform designed for larger integrators who sell complete security systems for commercial and residential real estate. Tracy and the cofounders were in the security systems business before launching a sales software company for this market in 2008. is now a comprehensive solution that addresses the complex industry requirements for lead tracking, quoting, proposal management, contracting, commissions, and pipeline management. Hundreds of integrators in the US use WeSuite for their end-to-end quote-to-contract...
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#151: Facial Recognition SaaS for Casinos to Almost $10M in Revenue – Henry Valentino
Practical Founders Podcast
Henry Valentino is the founder and CEO of , a leading provider of facial recognition software for casinos and stadiums, ensuring venue security and compliance. He founded EConnect in 2009 and pivoted several times before focusing on a security platform utilizing AI for casinos during the COVID-19 pandemic. The Econnect platform offers facial recognition surveillance software that integrates with special cameras at venue entrances to identify known security risks and ensure compliance. Security teams get immediate identification of “known bad guys” in large venues. Econnect is...
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#150: Grew an Unsexy Small Software Biz Into a SaaS Powerhouse - Josh Turley
Practical Founders Podcast
Josh Turley is CEO of , a fleet management software company that his grandfather started in the 1980’s and ran as a small family business for decades. Then Josh’s father ran the business until 2015, never growing this slow, old-school business past $2 million in revenues. Josh had worked in the business before, but in 2016, Josh bought the business, to over as CEO and slowly began to make improvements—and mistakes—as they started to grow. Josh had an ambition to grow the company and learn how to be a real CEO. They started retooling their code to build modern cloud software,...
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#149: How Partner-Led Sales Built A $7M Bootstrap SaaS Business - Sameer Narkar
Practical Founders Podcast
Sameer Narkar is the founder and CEO of , a global SaaS company based in Mumbai that provides an omnichannel customer experience platform to consumer brands in 100 countries. Sameer created Konnect Insights in 2015 to help customer service teams respond to customers who mention their brands on social media. The product and company have expanded from a slow start working through marketing agencies in India to now distributing through ISV partners in all major global regions. The Konnect Insights product includes social listening, ticketing, reputation monitoring, and social media analytics....
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#148: These Bootstrappers Sold Modern Digital LeadGen to Conservative German Businesses - Chris Erler
Practical Founders Podcast
Chris Erler was co-founder and COO of ComX, a sales pipeline generation for mid-market B2B companies in Germany and Europe. Chris and two other founders started the company in 2018 to conduct turnkey modern digital marketing and lead generation solutions for traditional German companies. As a tech-enabled service that combines technology, data, and people-powered solutions, ComX delivers proven results through subscription and outcome-based pricing. They grew quickly to approximately $20 million in revenue in four years before being acquired by the private equity firm FLEX Capital. In...
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#147: How a Philadelphia Insurance Agent Built the Uber of Surety Bonds - Aaron Steffey
Practical Founders Podcast
Aaron Steffey is the co-founder and co-CEO of , an online platform that enables insurance agents and brokers to issue surety bonds instantly — without the lengthy paperwork or back-and-forth typically involved in bonding. Aaron was an insurance agent, and his co-founder cousin, Chris, was a surety bond underwriter before 2019, when they set out to revolutionize the way surety bonds are bought and sold. They initially bootstrapped with a software development partner who accepted equity instead of fees. Their first version drastically simplified the process of buying and selling surety bonds...
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#146: This European SaaS Bootstrapper Raised $22M in Growth Equity Without Losing Control - Roy van den Broek
Practical Founders Podcast
Roy van den Broek is the founder and CEO of , a rental business management software platform for event and media production companies. Roy built software for his event equipment rental business in the Netherlands. He had over 100 software customers in Europe before selling his rental equipment company in 2015 to focus on growing his Rentman SaaS company. Rentman grew slowly and profitably as word of mouth spread in the industry and their product evolved. In 2024, after growing to nearly 100 employees and 200,000 users across 100 countries, Roy raised a $22 million growth equity round...
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#145: Making Big Bold Bets with Patient Execution as a Bootstrapped Founder - Gopal Krishnamurthy
Practical Founders Podcast
Gopal Krishnamurthy is the founder and CEO of , which has a suite of products focused on enterprise performance management (EPM). Their apps allow users to plan, report, and analyze data using the modern native app framework vs. traditional SaaS on top of modern cloud data platforms such as Microsoft Fabric, Snowflake, Databricks, and others. Lumel’s products provide a full stack of integrated Planning, BI & data apps on the customers' data platforms. He grew his enterprise services company, Visual BI, to over 200 employees and sold that company to Atos in 2021, as he described in his ...
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#144: From Founder-Led Sales to Scalable Go-To-Market in Vertical SaaS - Phil Stern
Practical Founders Podcast
Phil Stern is the operating principal of , a growth equity firm that invests in bootstrapped vertical SaaS companies. Mainsail offers deep operating support to the leaders in their portfolio companies to help them grow more efficiently. Phil leads the GTM operations team, helping their founders scale sales, marketing, and success teams. Phil was an experienced SaaS sales leader at several companies before joining Mainsail to focus on helping their portfolio companies scale up to $30M ARR or more. Phil’s team helps founders solve challenging problems with sales leadership, rev ops...
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#143: From Professional Services to a $30M SaaS Business with a PE Acquisition - Sean Hoban
Practical Founders Podcast
Sean Hoban was co-founder and former CEO of Kimble Applications, a leading professional services automation (PSA) software for organizations to manage their professional services business's entire operational and financial lifecycle. Sean and his co-founders had already started, grown, and sold a pro services organization before creating a PSA product and building a SaaS business. With a little funding from the founders and a few angel investors, Kimble started efficiently and grew steadily, eventually raising a practical minority funding round from private equity investors Accel-KKR in...
info_outlineSteve Wolfe and Nate Grossman are co-founders at Growth Street Partners, a growth equity firm focused on investing in early-stage B2B SaaS companies between $2M-$6M in ARR. They discuss how growth equity funding works for SaaS founders and how it allows entrepreneurs to maintain control while still benefiting from investment and liquidity.
In this expert episode, Steve and Nate get specific and share real examples of how SaaS founders use growth equity to win bigger, when it can be a good fit for founders, and how founders scale their businesses and win with multiple exits. They also describe:
- Why Growth Street Partners focuses on practical founders with growth equity.
- How growth equity is different from traditional private equity and venture capital.
- Why successful founders are “learn-it-alls” with a growth mindset.
- How founders can achieve multiple exits through strategic partnerships.
- Why building a strong team is essential for scale-up success.
Quote from Steve Wolfe, co-founder of Growth Street Partners
“We know that when entrepreneurs have fun, their companies do much better. When founders continue to feel real ownership in their business and in the success of their company, they do a lot better, too.
“So we set up our whole firm to enable that. We are investing to own just 20% to 50% of a business, so the founder still controls the company. We go to them with execution ideas and proven frameworks and approaches, but we are really just giving them the tools to make better decisions themselves.
“They know they make the decisions in the end, so they will make sure that it’s successful. There’s something beautiful about that relationship and about helping that founder get to where they want to go while still feeling like they did it.”
Links
- Steve Wolfe on LinkedIn
- Nate Grossman on LinkedIn
- Growth Street Partners on LinkedIn
- Growth Street Partners website
Podcast Sponsor – Full Scale
This week’s podcast is sponsored by Full Scale, one of the fastest-growing software development companies in any region. Full Scale vets, employs, and supports over 300 professional developers, designers, and testers in the Philippines who can augment and extend your core dev team. Learn more at fullscale.io.
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