building-in-public
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Joel Gascoigne and the price of staying put
Buffer’s co-founder spent $3.3 million buying out investors so he could keep building on his own terms. Years of uneven growth have made that choice more interesting, and more expensive, than a tidy startup fable.
Good ideas deserve a test drive.
The Startup Ideas Podcast turns business brainstorming into something you can watch, question, and try. Greg Isenberg’s real subject is the distance between an interesting idea and a paying customer.
Build a business. Keep your life.
The Bootstrapped Founder turns Arvid Kahl’s experience of building and selling a SaaS into a practical education business. Its most useful lesson is how much success can cost the person doing the succeeding.
Max Greenwald and the art of changing your mind
A co-founder matching app went nowhere. A Zoom detour took years. Max Greenwald kept revising Warmly until it found paying customers - and, in 2026, a new home at HubSpot.
Arvid Kahl
Arvid Kahl is a German-Canadian bootstrapped entrepreneur, author, and content creator best known for co-founding FeedbackPanda - an ESL teacher productivity SaaS he built with his partner Danielle Simpson and sold to SureSwift Capital for a seven-figure sum in 2019. He now runs Podscan.fm (a podcast intelligence platform tracking 3.7M podcasts), writes the widely-read Bootstrapped Founder newsletter, hosts a podcast with 175,000+ downloads, and has authored two books - Zero to Sold and The Embedded Entrepreneur - that have become foundational texts for bootstrapped founders worldwide.
Sam Corcos
Sam Corcos is a four-time founder and the co-founder and former CEO of Levels Health, a $300M metabolic health company that pairs continuous glucose monitors with a software layer to help people understand how food affects their blood sugar. He co-founded CarDash (Y Combinator S17, acquired 2020), Sightline Maps, and LearnPhoenix before building Levels into a category-defining health company with $67M raised from a16z and a community of 1,400+ member-investors. In 2025, he joined the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) and was appointed U.S. Treasury Chief Information Officer. He is also known for extreme minimalism (one pair of pants, one backpack), tracking time in 15-minute increments, and hosting 100+ intellectual salon dinners in New York and San Francisco.