HeyJaredStartup Talks
Startup Talks is a weekly podcast where two founders break down real startups — what they do, why they matter, and how they're built to win. Each episode covers startups from recent news, with sharp takes on business models, market dynamics, and go-to-market strategy.
- Indexed episodes, last 90 days
- 7
- Latest publication
- Aug 15, 2026
- Audience
- Checking…
- Earliest in this view
- Jul 4, 2026
Latest episodes
EP 24 — Survivor Winners Sold Out Their Kickstarter (opens the original)
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Two Survivor winners launched Paprclip, an accountability app where you and one friend keep each other honest with photo proof, and their Kickstarter beat its goal in about a day and a half. We take the campaign apart: an average pledge of $128.57 for an app that will be free to download, a tier ladder that sold the most devoted fans lifetime Pro access forever, and comments that read like fan mail instead of user feedback. The real question of the episode: when a famous founder's crowd shows up
EP 23 — How to Get Your First 10 Customers With No Budget (opens the original)
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Your first ten customers do not come from a tool, an ad, or automation. They come from you, by hand. We walk a 6-step checklist with the real numbers behind it: customers one to three come from your warm network (one founder closed half her batch via second-degree LinkedIn intros), four to ten come from unscalable moves (a founder closed more in 3 days at a trade show than in 3 months of cold email, another flew to Hawaii, got kicked out in 8 minutes, and won one of his biggest accounts). We cov
EP 22 — Theranos: When the Hype Has No Engine (opens the original)
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This episode is the full rise and fall of Theranos — the company that promised hundreds of blood tests from a single finger-prick, hit a nine-billion-dollar valuation, and built a board of generals and statesmen with not one doctor among them. We trace how Elizabeth Holmes built the hype, the three things that brought it down (the device never worked, a culture of fear and forgery, and the whistleblowers who went to the press), and the legal reckoning that followed. The uncomfortable takeaway: f
EP 21 — Why Most Startups Actually Fail (ranked S to F) (opens the original)
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Most startups don't die because they ran out of money. That's the symptom on seventy percent of the death certificates, not the disease. In this episode we rank the real causes by how often they actually kill, counting down to the true number one. Broken unit economics (19%) is the weakest, survivable cause, almost every fast-growing company passes through it. Founder conflict (23%) gets named constantly but it's a downstream symptom, a moderatable risk. Bad timing (29%) can be forced with enoug
EP 20 — Baroo: When Success Is the Trap (opens the original)
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This episode is about a failure pattern that's harder to spot than a bad idea — the False Positive. Baroo was a Boston pet care startup that launched into a perfect storm of lucky circumstances, mistook them for market validation, and scaled before the foundation existed. The idea was good, the founder was experienced, the early numbers were incredible. And that's exactly what killed it.
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