Octavia Goredema is the CEO and founder of Fire Memos, a software company dedicated to igniting careers. The platform empowers employees to record and recognize their work accomplishments with AI powered career coaching.

She’s also an acclaimed career expert: she’s the author of "PREP, PUSH, PIVOT: Essential Career Strategies for Underrepresented Women", the host of the Audible Original series "How to Change Careers with Octavia Goredema", and has been featured on CNN, Harvard Business Review, and Fortune.

Today we’re seeing stars on Startup Different!

In this episode of Startup Different, we discuss our insightful conversation last week with Mark Organ. We'll unpack the myths of entrepreneurship, the importance of communication, iterative improvement, and the dynamics of acquisitions. We'll also explore how effective communication and customer connection can drive business success, the iterative processes that lead to improvement, and the significance of understanding the founder's role post-acquisition. Let's get into it!

This week we’re talking to a ridiculously successful entrepreneur, Mark Organ. Mark was an entrepreneurial go-to-market specialist, a CEO with a focus on sales, marketing and business development. Along the way he’s lived in Toronto, Silicon Valley, Chicago and Singapore. He’s Founded 6 companies, raised more than 15 rounds of financing, hired over 250 people, built 7 offices around the world, and helped a lot of people realize their dreams. We had a bunch of questions for him but honestly he was so interesting that we just let him talk. It’s go time on Startup Different.

In this episode of Startup Different, we reflect on our previous conversation with Laurie Barkman, a business transition expert. We discuss the psychology behind selling a business, the importance of planning for exits, and the role of culture and employee engagement in startups. The conversation also touches on intrapreneurship and the resources available for entrepreneurs looking to transition their businesses. We emphasize the need for founders to think about their exit strategies early on and share personal anecdotes from our own experiences in selling our company.

Welcome to Startup Different! This week we’re excited to welcome a sherpa - specifically a business transition sherpa, to the show!

Laurie Barkman, The Business Transition Sherpa®, is the former CEO of a $100 million dollar revenue company that was sold to a Fortune 50. She guides business owners through the often overwhelming process of transition planning and facilitates sell-side and buy-side transactions in the lower middle market.

Laurie is an adjunct faculty member at Carnegie Mellon University, Amazon best-selling author of "The Business Transition Handbook," and host of the award-winning Succession Stories Podcast and the new show “the entrepreneur gene”. And she’s here to kickoff Season 5!

It's been over a year since the Startup Different Podcast kicked off, so we decided to re-record our origin story. We'll give you our backgrounds and tell you about our experience running and eventually exiting our business AppArmor.

Let's get into it! This is Startup Different!

Say hello to season five of Startup Different.

This season, we're starting things off with a bonus episode: Get to Know a Sinkinson, is our episode zero that retells our origins and the story of our company, AppArmor.

Then, like previous seasons, we move back into interviews with expert guests from our Startup Different studio.

You can look forward to a business transition Sherpa, multiple founders that have exited for hundreds of millions, and some of the most exciting and up and coming entrepreneurs.

We're Dave and Chris. This is Startup Different. We're having a good time and paying it forward to entrepreneurs with a hype-free, myth-busting business blueprint. Find us wherever you get your podcasts and check out our new book to see how we can help you with your business.

Website:

https://www.startupdifferent.com

Last week we spoke with Nathan Yeung of “Find your audience”. While having one of the more interesting business models out there, Nathan also tried to squash a huge myth about marketing - mostly that we kinda suck at it. Today we deep dive into Nathan’s myth busting and talk about the good o’l days of organic content.

It’s Startup Different with the Sinkinson Bros.