Golf Genius: $53M ARR, $10M Self-Funded, Zero VC — Mike Zisman
Release Date: 06/03/2026
The Surprising Way This Startup Bank Makes Millions
Top Founders
Froda generated $57 million in revenue in 2025 by lending to the small businesses traditional banks often overlook. In this episode, Nathan Latka sits down with Froda co-founder Oliver Mohseni to unpack the economics behind the startup bank. Froda has supported 150,000 businesses across seven markets and funded approximately $3.45 billion since launch. Oliver explains how Froda uses retail deposits, automated underwriting, and embedded partnerships with banks, fintech companies, payment providers, and software platforms to scale its lending operation. Listen to learn: • How Froda makes money...
info_outline
He Sells AI Door-to-Door. $3.5M ARR, 400% Growth, $0 Ads
Top Founders
Carl Turner, founder of Swipe.by, built an AI marketing platform for restaurants to $3.5M ARR growing 400% year-over-year — with $0 spent on ads and every customer closed by a rep knocking on doors. He breaks down the exact rep comp plan (6 locations/month, $6K ACV, 30–40% commission), why he took $450K from Founderpath instead of Stripe, and why he gives away websites and online ordering for free. Then he turns down a $15M cash offer and explains the 2x liquidation preference math that could leave a founder with nothing. SaaS, bootstrapped, AI, restaurant tech, outside sales, SMB, Nathan...
info_outline
He Makes $50m/yr on Cookie Popups, Controls 2% of all Web Traffic
Top Founders
Raphaël Boukris is the co-founder and Chief Revenue Officer of Didomi (didomi.io), the Paris-based consent management platform that helps enterprises comply with GDPR, CCPA, and privacy laws worldwide. Roughly 2% of all global web traffic passes through Didomi's SDK, and the company processes billions of consent decisions every month for customers including Bloomberg, Sky, and Adyen. In this interview, Raphaël breaks down the full financial history on the record: three funding rounds, two acquisitions, and a majority sale to private equity. He raised under €300k from angels, then €5m...
info_outline
Why Does Google Pay Him $2M A Year?
Top Founders
Stéphane Donzé has bootstrapped AODocs and Talarian to a combined $60m in 2026 revenue without raising capital. His top three customers each pay more than $2m per year, including Google, which pays him millions annually to control the documents behind its data center builds. He funded fourteen years of R&D off a cloud consulting business, never burned more than $200k in a month, and has fielded private equity calls four times a week declining $600m offers.
info_outline
How He Bootstrapped Dental Software to $16m
Top Founders
He bootstrapped to $16.5m ARR selling software to 2,000 dental offices. Zero dollars raised, 24% EBITDA, and $1.5m in free cash flow last year. COVID cut him back to $2m in 2021; he's added $14.5m since, charging $13k per dental office per year. When I asked what happens if Henry Schein shows up with $180m cash, he gave a surprising answer.
info_outline
How David Chevalier Hit $15M ARR With a Chrome Extension and No Sales Team - Surfe
Top Founders
How do you go from a Chrome extension with no sales team to $15M in revenue in five years, while raising less money than most startups spend in their first year? David Chevalier is the co-founder and CEO of Surfe, the leading CRM enrichment and waterfall data platform for B2B sales teams. He bootstrapped for two years, grew to $1.5M purely through HubSpot and Pipedrive marketplace rankings, and has never taken a dollar of personal secondary despite being six years into the company. Today Surfe processes 50 million data points per year and is the third partner inside HubSpot's AI prospecting...
info_outline
Practice by Numbers: $16.5M Dental SaaS, 24% EBITDA, Zero VC - Rohit Garg
Top Founders
How do you build a $16.5M vertical SaaS company with 24% EBITDA margins with zero paid acquisition, zero outside funding, and your wife as co-founder? Rohit Garg is the co-founder and CEO of Practice by Numbers, an all-in-one dental practice management platform serving 1,300 customers across 2,000 locations. He started building it in 2015 because his wife is a dentist and he was the one running SQL queries to answer her business questions. Today they are bootstrapped, profitable, and sitting on $2 billion in untouched payment GMV from their existing customer base. You'll learn: Why Rohit...
info_outline
Handwrytten Sends 6 Million Fake Handwritten Notes a Year and Makes $10M
Top Founders
How do you build a $10M business by teaching robots to write handwritten notes with real pens, and do it with zero outside investment for 12 straight years? David Wachs sold his text message marketing company for eight figures in 2012, started Handwrytten the next day, and has bootstrapped it to 200 custom-built robots in a Phoenix facility sending 350,000 notes per month. He owns 100% of the company, took $350K in profit last year, and is targeting $10 to $11M in revenue this year. You'll learn: Why David thinks physical CapEx is now a competitive moat in the AI era, and why he is glad he...
info_outline
Featherless: $3.6M Revenue Running 6,700 Open Source AI Models — Eugene Cheah
Top Founders
How do you go from a pricing experiment inside a failing product to $3.6 million in annual revenue with 10,000 customers — in under two years and with zero paid marketing? Eugene Cheah is the co-founder and CEO of Featherless.ai, the largest open source LLM inference provider on Hugging Face. He co-created RWKV, the first attention-free AI architecture under the Linux Foundation, and today runs a 27-person team serving customers that pay anywhere from $25 a month to $2 million a year. You'll learn: Why Featherless started as an accident — a pricing experiment that outperformed the...
info_outline
Gather AI: $15M Revenue With Drones and 170% Net Retention - Sankalp Arora
Top Founders
How do you build a $15M revenue business by teaching autonomous drones to find missing sneakers in warehouses, and get customers to more than double their spend every single year? Sankalp Arora is the founder and CEO of Gather AI, a physical AI company that uses autonomous drones and computer vision to track inventory in real time across warehouses. He holds a PhD in robotics from Carnegie Mellon, built the world's first safe autonomous helicopter for DARPA, and today has 30 to 40 customers paying an average of $500K per year with net revenue retention of 170%. You'll learn: Why Sankalp...
info_outlineHow do you build a $53M ARR software company, stay profitable for eight straight years, and give 60% of the cap table to your employees — without ever taking a venture check?
Mike Zisman is the founder and CEO of Golf Genius, the dominant tournament management and handicapping platform for golf clubs worldwide. He self-funded $10M of his own money as interest-free debt, did 10 acquisitions before hitting $60M in revenue, and today sits on $14M cash while printing 20% EBITDA margins with 300 employees across the US and Cluj, Romania.
You'll learn:
- Why Mike structured his entire $10M founder investment as debt instead of equity — and how it created a tax shield that paid him back on the way out
- How the USGA handicapping contract in 2019 transformed Golf Genius from a niche club tool into the infrastructure layer of global golf
- How Golf Genius went from $0 to $1M ARR in 8 years, then from $1M to $53M in the next 8 — and what the USGA relationship had to do with the inflection point
- Why 50% of his 300-person team are engineers based in Cluj, Romania — and how that structural cost advantage funds 20% EBITDA while competitors burn cash
- The exact three-phase acquisition strategy: legacy desktop customer rollups, league expansion, then B2C mobile apps with 8M+ users
- How Mike negotiated the GolfShot acquisition — and why he forced their entire cap table behind a single LLC before closing
- Why employees own 60% of the cap table at $53M ARR and how that drives 6-7% annual attrition across the entire company including Romania
- What Mike would say if a PE firm offered $400M all cash today — and why he says he's more excited about what's next than he's been in years
- Why he thinks AI will make SaaS companies radically more productive, not obsolete — from a founder whose doctoral thesis in 1977 was already on artificial intelligence
- The rule of 40 reality at $53M ARR: why growth slows as companies scale and what Mike does to stay above the 10% industry average
Connect:
YouTube: youtube.com/@NathanLatkawatch
Golf Genius: golfgenius.com
Founderpath: founderpath.com