Foreign Founders

Looking to renovate your next commercial space? Work with AikitoIn this episode:Andrew’s family history in hospitalityPivoting from law to real estate, and again to a tech entrepreneurFounding his first company, EthosAikito and the problems that they solveAndrew McCarthy is a tech, real estate, and hospitality entrepreneur with over 15 years of experience. He holds a Law Degree and Master's in Real Estate Finance from NYU.He began his career in Mexico City working on major property transactions and public REITs and private equity hospitality funds before moving to NYC. There, he led acquisitions and development at Minotaur Management and pioneered innovative hospitality concepts Ethos and Ethos Remote using modular construction.After moving to NYC, Andrew transitioned to the tech world. His entrepreneurial spirit led him to co-found Ethos and Ethos Remote, pioneering new hospitality concepts using modular construction and transforming existing commercial spaces to hotels and community campuses.More recently, he co-founded Aikito, an end-to-end solution for commercial buildouts.As Head of Growth, he has quickly driven over $1.5M in revenue and built a $80M pipeline and partnerships with 50+ vendors.An innovative community-builder passionate about revolutionizing real estate models through technology and sustainability, Andrew brings broad experience spearheading new ventures from the ground up.Aikito aims to change the experience of building commercial spaces and is the simplest way to build locations and expand, through a vetted best-in-class construction marketplace, sustainable buildouts, and, all the tools to scale expansion including client and project management, standard contracts and budgets, insurance, and financing.The goal is to remove the pain of the construction and save CEOs and founders +90 hours per month and hundreds of thousands of dollars in pitfalls and mistakes.Enjoy the episode!Aikito website: https://www.aikito.co/LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/andrew-mccarthy-impact-entrepreneur/If you love this episode, please share and review the podcast! It will help more immigrant and international founders find these content. Please do not hesitate to reach out to foreignfounderspod@gmail.com for any inquiries and questions.

Learn more about Dileepan Siva and his executive coaching serviceDileepan Siva is a two times founder who has bootstrapped his company to profitability and north of $1B of GMV, prior to that experience he’s scaled several early to mid stage companies, and helped raise over $100M in venture capital.Dileepan shares a lot in this episode:His first experience of feeling underrated in schoolBeing accused of being a foreign spyMoving from politics to business, and the advantages that it’s given DileepanTwo narratives that immigrants tell themselves that may be detrimental long termWhy people should be more comfortable asking for helpAs a serial entrepreneur turned executive coach, Dileepan believes in the power of business as a tool for both personal and social transformation. Over the course of a 20 year professional career, he learned that your own strengths and weaknesses are mirrored in the organization you build. And how you relate to your business is often how you relate to other parts of your life. This experience led Dileepan down the same path advising and coaching top tier founders and leaders in their own business–and personal–transformation journeys. Dileepan has built, scaled and sold three high-growth venture-backed startups and also served as a senior commerce executive at Twitter and eBay. Before working in the technology sector, he advised leaders at global Fortune 50 companies including PepsiCo and Unilever as well as public and non-profit institutions including the United Nations, US Department of State and the Gates Foundation. He brings this breadth of experience across sectors and in career transition to his coaching practice. Blending executive coaching with depth psychology and spiritual traditions, Dileepan leverages a range of modalities in his work. He is trained as a coach through the Co-Active Training Institute (CTI), Conscious Leadership Group and Neuro-Linguistic Programming (NLP) Marin. Dileepan draws on his Buddhist meditation and mindfulness experience. He received his MBA from Harvard Business School and BA from the University of California at Berkeley.Work with Dileepan Siva today!Enjoy the episode!Twitter: https://twitter.com/dileepansivaLinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/dileepansiva/If you love this episode, please share and review the podcast! It will help more immigrant and international founders find these content. Please do not hesitate to reach out to foreignfounderspod@gmail.com for any inquiries and questions.

Kicking off season 4 of Foreign Founders with big guests! Our first episode is with Zohar Hod.Zohar Hod is a serial entrepreneur in the fintech industry with 5 startup involvements and two exits under his belt. His latest venture is in the digital marketing space is called One Creation and is a personal passion project for him. As CEO and Co-Founder of One Creation Corporation, Zohar leads a team working to provide solutions to help brands progressively gather and digitize customer preference data through customizable consumer experiences. Helping brands personalize experiences in an cookie-less, ethical and transparent way. Prior to this, Zohar held leadership roles as Global Head of Technology and Data Sales at Intercontinental Exchange (ICE) Data Services, Head of Sales and Support at SuperDerivative, and led IBM’s Trading Solutions Group.In this episode, I ask Zohar about the lessons of every early stage founders because he’s experienced them all… Failure, successes, exits, co-founder breakups, fundraising and more.There’s a lot of important details in the episode, but some highlights include:How he recommends early stage founders to find the right investorsRaising from ventures vs. not investingHis multiple exits - including having an exit that started from having an argument with his co-foundersOne Creation starting from a deeply personal problem that he experienced when his family member was in the hospitalEnjoy the episode!Do you want to get personalized customer information with their consent? Work with One Creation: https://www.one-creation.com/X: https://twitter.com/onecreationoneLinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/onecreationcorporation/If you love this episode, please share and review the podcast! It will help more immigrant and international founders find these content. Please do not hesitate to reach out to foreignfounderspod@gmail.com for any inquiries and questions.

Bhuva Shakti (she/her) is the Chief Sustainable Innovation Officer at Wallet Max, a FinTech startup revolutionizing fundraising for eco-conscious businesses globally, and the Chief Ethics and Culture Officer at Women in AI. She is the board director and fractional C-Suite advisor for social impact corporations, and a keynote speaker passionate about economic inclusion and climate-friendly partnerships. With an MBA from Columbia University in New York and as a senior executive director on Wall Street, Bhuva has managed diverse financial portfolios and launched several digital transformation products across investment banking, capital markets, risk governance, credit ratings, regulatory compliance, payments, and mergers acquisitions.In this conversation, we cover so many topics about how she thinks about her work and the world around her, including:Her curiosity and thirst for knowledge differentiated her early onBhuva’s story of arriving in New York City with $80Accelerating her mission of inclusion and diversity through Bhuva’s Impact GlobalHow founders can think about ethics in AI as they build their companyand so much more.Bhuva's Impact Global (BIG) is a premium board advisory and fractional services business that serves as an extended team for public and private company CEOs, C-Suite, and the board of directors. Backed by three decades of Wall Street, non-profit, and startup leadership experience, Bhuva's Impact Global drives strategic oversight and governance in the areas of corporate risk management, ethical product engineering, and sustainability.Enjoy the episode!Bhuva's Impact Global (BIG): https://www.bhuvas-impact.global/LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/bhuvashakti/If you love this episode, please share and review the podcast! It will help more immigrant and international founders find these content. Please do not hesitate to reach out to foreignfounderspod@gmail.com for any inquiries and questions.

This episode is sponsored by Sessions. I created an online event in 7 minutes and you can too - get 20% off.Alex Koshykov is a Ukrainian entrepreneur who is passionate about building startups. He is the co-founder and CEO of BeKey, a software and hardware development company. His main expertise is in health tech and wellness, and when he’s not working on his company, Alex travels the world interviewing digital health founders on his YouTube channel and recently started a series of events in NYC called Health2Tech.We discuss:His experience as an exchange student in upstate NYTraveling to 15 countries in 2 years, and his favorite stories of founders he’s metA platform his company launched right after the invasion of Ukraine called Doctors4UAWhat he found to be broken in the US healthcare systemEnjoy the episode!Work with BeKey: https://bekey.io/X: https://twitter.com/BeKey_IncLinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/bekeyinc/If you love this episode, please share and review the podcast! It will help more immigrant and international founders find these content. Please do not hesitate to reach out to foreignfounderspod@gmail.com for any inquiries and questions.

This episode is sponsored by Sessions. I created an online event in 7 minutes and you can too - get 20% off.Throughout his ventures, Adam Silverman developed the belief that humans are currently doing robot work. There is no reason humans should be spending their time doing tasks that can be automated. To address this, Adam co-founded AgentOps.ai to develop reliable, autonomous AI agents that complete tedious tasks for humans.We cover:Differences of building a company in Canada 🇨🇦 and United States 🇺🇸Future of autonomous agentsLimitations of being on a B-1 Visaand much more!AgentOps - Build virtual employees with observability, evals, and replay analytics. No more black boxes and prompt guessing.Book a Free Agent Consultation: https://calendly.com/itsada/consultation?back=1&month=2024-03AgentOps: https://www.agentops.ai/Twitter: https://twitter.com/AgentOpsAILinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/aistaff/Enjoy the episode!If you love this episode, please share and review the podcast! It will help more immigrant and international founders find these content. Please do not hesitate to reach out to foreignfounderspod@gmail.com for any inquiries and questions.

This episode is sponsored by Sessions. Run all your online meetings and get 20% off.Andres Glusman is a tech and business veteran. He saw and shaped the early internet with one of the earliest digital marketing agencies. Then spent 15 years with Meetup.com, and saw the product and company grow to its ultimate exit to WeWork.He’s currently the co-founder and CEO of DoWhatWorks. DoWhatWorks is a startup helping growth, marketing, and product teams accelerate their conversions rates. Their product tracks thousands of growth experiments from leading companies and arms you with the winners.Learn more about how DoWhatWorks can help drive lift or request a demo here.We cover so much!His early experience with the commercial web in the mid-1990sThe early marketing campaigns in the dot-com era and Andres’ primitive performance marketing stack (this was really cool to hear!)Growing Meetup.com from the early days to their exit to WeWorkHis most counter-intuitive growth experiments at Meetup.comTheir proprietary technology to see all the success and failures of growth experiments on the web with DoWhatWorksand more!Enjoy the episode!Accelerate Your Learnings with DoWhatWorksLinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/glusman/If you love this episode, please share and review the podcast! It will help more immigrant and international founders find these content. Please do not hesitate to reach out to foreignfounderspod@gmail.com for any inquiries and questions.In New York on Monday, March 25? Join Foreign Founders, Unshackled VC, and Antler VC for our meetup!Read Foreign Founders on Substack

Head over to Sessions.us and sign up for a 14-day free no strings attached free trialTatyana Isa is a General Partner at KITSF (San Francisco). “We invest in people.”She is an individual with extraordinary ability according to the United States Department of Homeland and Security.Tatyana is an entrepreneur with over 13 years, the founder of TRINITY Education Group (Ukraine), KITSF (San Francisco), UATEG (San Francisco). She is residing in San Francisco.She has a diverse experience in education, sales, marketing, fundraising, building startups, and talent acquisition. She conducted over 10k job interviews and hired over 500 employees for her company as a founder.In San Francisco Tatyana seamlessly bridges the gap between talent and opportunity, with a specialized focus on empowering Machine Learning engineers and Data Scientists to thrive in the competitive San Francisco Bay Area job market.Enjoy the episode!Are you talented? Work with KitSF: https://kitsf.com/LinkedIn: www.linkedin.com/in/tanyasfIf you love this episode, please share and review the podcast! It will help more immigrant and international founders find these content. Please do not hesitate to reach out to foreignfounderspod@gmail.com for any inquiries and questions.

Lisa Wehden, the CEO & Co-Founder of Plymouth. Plymouth's mission is to accelerate innovation through faster and more transparent immigration services. Plymouth has helped hundreds of individuals across artificial intelligence, climate technology and healthcare.Previously, Lisa worked as an investor at Bloomberg Beta, a VC firm with $375M AUM. At Bloomberg Beta, Lisa created an evening course on ethics, public policy, and technological change with Stanford University. Her work on technology and ethics has been featured in TechCrunch. Before moving to San Francisco, Lisa launched Entrepreneur First’s Berlin office and studied at the University of Oxford, where she was elected President of the Oxford Union.What we covered:How O1 visas are underutilizedWhat makes a good startup team?Plymouth as a deeply personal journeyThe difference between the London, Berlin and San Francisco startup ecosystemEnjoy the episode!Want to know your options to the H-1B? Lisa and her team can help you! https://www.plymouthstreet.com/X: https://twitter.com/plymouthstreetLinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/plymouth-street/about/If you love this episode, please share and review the podcast! It will help more immigrant and international founders find these content. Please do not hesitate to reach out to foreignfounderspod@gmail.com for any inquiries and questions.