HeyJaredThe Grit Factor Podcast w/ Karl Jacobi
The Grit Factor Podcast brings real conversations with founders, entrepreneurs, and builders. No fluff. Just honest stories, hard lessons, and practical takeaways you can apply right now. New interviews plus solo episodes on mindset, leadership, and execution.
- Indexed episodes, last 90 days
- 12
- Latest publication
- Aug 7, 2026
- Audience
- Checking…
- Earliest in this view
- Jul 3, 2026
Latest episodes
The Thing Saving You Is Already in Your Hands with Bart Merrell (opens the original)
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Episode Summary Bart Merrell grew up on a pig farm in New Mexico with a father who had his hands in a dairy in Idaho, a mushroom warehouse in Utah, a produce warehouse in Arizona, and the Pork Producers Association, all simultaneously. Nobody sat Bart down and taught him the birds and bees of business. His father showed him by example that you could do many things at one time and that opportunities were everywhere if you trained yourself to see them. That programming never left. His first big dr
Nearly Went Bankrupt Three Times, Now Chasing Twenty-Five Million with Chris McManus (opens the original)
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Episode Summary Chris McManus graduated high school, skipped college, and put grass in the ground because it was flexible enough to keep racing motocross while he figured out what else to do. He was not building a company. He was buying time. Then one Sunday afternoon in Pennsylvania he worked fifty hours that week and got smoked at the racetrack and cried the whole way home in his van and knew. He sold the bikes, the van, the gear, all of it. And turned back to the little landscaping operation
You Hit Every Goal and Feel Nothing? Here's Why Success Feels Empty | The Sunday Edition (opens the original)
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Episode Summary You hit the goal you chased for years. And you felt nothing. Not disappointment. Not relief. Just a quiet flatness underneath everything you built, and no way to say it out loud without sounding ungrateful. If you have been asking why do I feel empty when everything on paper says I won, this one is for you. Karl Jacobi has been there. He built, scaled, and exited multiple companies totaling over $40 million in career revenue, starting from a dining room table. Then he hit the exa
Episode 051: The Hidden Price of High Performance with Matt Smith (opens the original)
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Episode Summary Matt Smith is a music major who accidentally fell in love with software development when it reminded him of writing songs. Twelve notes, infinite combinations. Same with code. Same with a company. That creative wiring has followed him through every chapter, small startups, consulting work, a co-founded company that he eventually had to blow up to get out of, and the platform he is building now that is genuinely changing how aging people experience the world. But before the curren
Episode 050: Sixteen Years Making Someone Else Win Till He Discovered Himself with Derek Fredrickson (opens the original)
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Episode Summary Derek Fredrickson was very good at making other people win. That was his gift, his lane, and for sixteen years his entire identity. Wall Street first, Deutsche Bank, Lehman, UBS, running project management and doing what analytical, disciplined, systems-minded people do well inside a machine that rewards exactly those traits. Then the train ride that changed everything. He looked across at a man in his mid-seventies on the five forty-one commuter rail from Connecticut to New York
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