HeyJaredStartup Stories from the Treehouse
Welcome to Startup Stories from the Treehouse, where we bring you the most captivating tales of entrepreneurship. Each episode is a new adventure, featuring entrepreneurs who turned their dreams into reality.
- Indexed episodes, last 90 days
- 6
- Latest publication
- Sep 24, 2026
- Audience
- Checking…
- Earliest in this view
- Jul 16, 2026
Latest episodes
Validation Isn’t Growth (opens the original)
Read excerpt
Your traction looks like proof. Thirty paying customers, a Google grant, a top European accelerator. Most founders would read that as a signal to keep pushing. Vitalii Sydorenko walked away from exactly that. In this episode, Todd talks with him about why. Vitalii built his first company at twenty-two with no funding and grew it into the market leader in his country, with McDonald's and Samsung on the client list. Then he built a second the "right" way and watched it churn out from under him. Th
You Don’t Have a Pitch Deck Problem. You Have a Strategy Problem. (opens the original)
Read excerpt
Your pitch deck isn't landing, and you're convinced the problem is the slides. A better template, a slicker designer, tighter animations. Meredith Clause has torn down hundreds of decks, and she says the problem almost never lives there. In this episode, Todd talks with Meredith about why the deck is the strategic work, not the chore you finish before it. They get into the problem slide that says "healthcare is broken" when it should name one specific, under-the-radar pain. Why founders cast the
Two Combat Tours, Zero Panic Attacks. Two Years in Business, Two. (opens the original)
Read excerpt
You can white-knuckle your way through almost anything, until the day it stops working. In this episode, Todd Gagne sits down with Sean Patton, a West Point graduate and Green Beret who spent two years in combat without a single panic attack, then had two in his first years as a founder. Open sores, appendicitis, bankruptcy, driving Uber. They get into why grit gets you to the fight but won't tell you who you are when you lose one. Sean talks about the gap between vision and reality that never c
What David Woodbury Learned by Hitting the Wall (opens the original)
Read excerpt
David Woodbury built seven companies and hit a wall so hard he walked away for three years. In this episode, he unpacks what burnout actually looks like—decision fatigue, not drama—and the bike that taught him you can't outwork the grind. We talk niching (the mistake that cost him a market, the pivot that borrowed $20M in marketing budget), why domain expertise beats AI, and the question every founder should ask before starting: do you actually like this, or are you proving something? Now he's b
The Month Google Spent $4 (opens the original)
Read excerpt
The $4 Month That Revealed Google's Death — And What Founders Must Do Next In August 2024, Jon Mest discovered Google had spent just $4 of his thousands-dollar monthly ad budget. Nothing was broken—Google's AI overview was simply answering his customers' questions for free, above his #1 ranking and his ads. Instead of complaining, Jon treated it as confirmation that discovery was shifting from search engines (ten blue links) to answer engines (ChatGPT, Gemini) that choose winners for you. He bui
Publishing over time
Last 90 days. Choose a month to open its work.
Recurring subjects
Named in the text we hold. One piece can cover several.
Audience
No verified audience measurement yet.
About this data
Counts cover the work we have indexed. Tone needs enough text and a confident classification. Excerpts and episode notes are not full articles or transcripts.
Identity or attribution wrong? Suggest a correction.