One the Come Up

If you’re like me and navigating the college application process, you may have heard of today’s company, UStrive, but you also may not of heard of its founder and today’s guest, Michael Carter. In the event the latter fact is true, you’re in the right place. Carter’s career began as a freshman at WashU, where he recognized that many qualified high school students were not pursuing 4-year college educations simply because they did not have adequate guidance resources in high school to help them navigate post high school life. Creating a solution to this issue, Carter started (what was then known as) Strive for College, a platform that connects aspiring high school students with college mentors to help them navigate the admission and financial processes of college. After growing for several years as exclusively an in person mentoring program, Strive switched in 2013 to an online platform to reach more students. Today, the company has helped over nine million students across 200 countries and has expanded its offerings to a wider variety career development consultings. 

The podcast is back! and joining me for the first conversation in almost two months is Angel Low, Venture Capitalist and Operator @ The Hive. Low's career began at Beijing University where she obtained her degree in economics. After graduating, she landed her first job in the ultra competitive Chinese job market as an analyst at Huisheng Consulting Group. Today, Low works at The Hive in Malaysia, where she oversees how the firm invests its $50 million to drive Malaysia's startup ecosystem. As the my guest join me from Southeast Asia, Low brings to the podcast a unique and diverse perspective on international dynamics and the Asian ecosystem.

A little bit late in the makings, this is an episode from the archives! I don't know how this conversation slipped between the cracks. Originally recorded in March of 2025, this was the 23rd podcast. Enjoy!

Today I was joined by Dr. Alexei Mlodinow, founding CEO of Surgical Innovations Associates (SIA), a med tech company spun out of Northwestern Feinberg School of Medicine and Kellogg School of Management in 2016, and acquired by Integra LifeSciences in 2022. Alexei’s career began at UC Santa Barbara where he studied business economics and Japanese language and culture. You might be asking yourself at this point: I thought he was a doctor, where was his premed? I was wondering the same thing, so I asked him: he took the necessary medical courses on the side. Ever get the impression that the higher education system is trying to bottleneck your career before it even begins? It was refreshing to learn some academic freedom is allowed; if you’re considering medicine, you don’t necessarily pigeonhole yourself by initially studying something else. Enrolling in Northwestern Medical School in 2012, Mlodinow was recruited by his research mentor to work on a device designed to enhance soft tissue support in surgical procedures. This was the genesis for SIA: Mlodinow would grow the company to 25+ employees, raise $23 million in equity funding and NIH grants, and lead the sale to Integra in 2022. If you think there are 24 hours in a day, I’ll direct you to Dr. Mlodinow at this time. In 2020, while pursuing his MD and running SIA, Mlodinow also co-founded RapidRona (acquired 2021), a Covid testing platform. Mlodinow began his plastic surgery residency in 2021 and ultimately left to take a sabbatical recently, after deciding he prefers medical innovation to clinical practice.

For this episode, I was joined by Amy Zitelman, the CEO and Co-founder of Soom Foods, a Tahini brand. Completing their first sale in 2013, Zitelman and her two sisters founded Soom to capitalize on tahini’s relative obscurity in the American market. While tahini is a primary ingredient in everybody’s favorite dip - hummus - few people realize the full versatility of this delicious spread. But Soom’s efforts to grow Tahini’s recognition have paid off. From starting as a three-person team, with Zitelman bringing this little-known ingredient to farmers markets and sampling events and packaging Amazon orders by hand, Soom has come a long way. In 2025 alone, they expanded their reach by over 2,000 in-store locations and can now be found in 5,500 locations nationwide. The future looks even more promising: with less than 1% of households using tahini, Soom is set to get this awesome spread into as many hands as possible.

Joining me on today’s episode is Rachel Mercer, MD of Design and Customer Experience at JPMorganChase. Mercer started her career at Northeastern University, where she obtained her Bachelor’s in Design and Interactive media. A unique part of Northeastern University is the co-op program which rotates 6 months of full time work with 6 months of coursework. In 2011, Mercer started at CP+B as a UX Designer where she worked on various projects such as Domino’s Pizza Tracker. In 2014, Mercer made it across the pond to London, working for digital consultancies Made By Many and The Upside. In 2020, Mercer (by this time back across the pond) co-founded Proto, an innovation consultancy of her own making. Transitioning to a more corporate role (and better hours), Mercer left Proto in 2022 to join JPMorganChase where she now leads design across their Credit Card Experiences.

For one of the most fun conversations I’ve had on the podcast so far, today I was joined by Matthew Rooda, the CEO and Founder of SwineTech. Rooda’s career began at Hawkeye Community College, a time in which he worked on a pork worked on a pig farm caring for sows and delivering piglets - perfect preparation for med school. It was also at Hawkeye that he met his co-founder. The two would then transfer to the University of Iowa, a place where Rooda would learn that he was not meant to be a med student after all, but a founder. An email came; a startup was pitched; an accelerator program happened (over a missed semester); and half a million dollars (raised) later, SwineTech was born. The focus of Swinetech was to reduce cases of overlaying - the event where a sow rolls over and kills a piglet. However, there was a bit of a disconnect - they were saving all these piglets but farms were not capitalizing on the additional ROI. So SwineTech expanded their services and now provides advanced management solutions to pork farms.

Today I was joined by Nathanael Ren, former co-founder of Buoy Health (2014-2022). Ren’s career began at Harvard, where his first assignment was an unlikely destination for an 18 year fresh out of high school: go undercover to an iPhone factory in China. Returning to the States, he completed his degree in 2012, when he began working on Buoy Health. After building in a cave for the first three years (a move he says he wouldn’t repeat) Buoy launched to the public in 2017. Buoy was the avant-garde brain child of three Harvard graduates, who imagined a ChatGPT for the health industry long before OpenAI was even founded. Ren led Buoy through fundraising that positioned the company at a valuation of $187 million (the most valuable company I’ve had on the podcast so far)! After cashing out at the end of 2022, Ren started working at ASAPP. Today he is the Director of Product at Tarro, a company that specializes in AI for small scale restaurants. But once a founder, always a founder: Ren has been bitten by the startup bug (it happens to the best of us). Already working on his new product, tradingpal.io, something tells me it won’t be long before Ren returns to the 996, Monster energy, Silicon Valley-esque environment of startup land. Also, if you want more Ren than these thirty-two minutes can provide, check out his Youtube channel: @nate-unfiltered (TradingPal).

I was honored to be joined by Emily Hazelwood and Amber Sparks, the co-founders of Blue Latitudes, a certified women-owned marine environmental consulting firm. Before starting Blue Latitudes in 2015, Hazelwood and Sparks started their careers on opposite sides of the country. Hazelwood’s career began at Connecticut College where she obtained her B.A. in environmental science. In 2011, she worked on the BP 252 Oil Spill where she witnessed firsthand the devastation and destruction of oil spills. It was here, however, that she learned of a unique silver lining in this mercurial industry: the Rigs to Reef program. Meanwhile, on the other side of the continent, Sparks started her career at UC Berkeley where she obtained her B.A. in marine science. A former Ocean Curator at Google, Sparks engineered and launched intelligent layers in Google Earth and Google Maps to relate complex ocean concepts to a variety of audiences. When their timelines finally converged at Scripps Institution of Oceanography, something awesome was bound to happen. And it did: Blue Latitudes. What started as a graduate school capstone project has developed into the premier Rigs-to-Reefs firm, repurposing offshore platforms as thriving reefs worldwide and using our patent-pending software, FishLAT, to deliver scalable, data-driven solutions that transform how the offshore industry approaches a sustainable future.

Today I had the pleasure of speaking with Hristo Tenchev. Tenchev, for my international listeners, is the CEO and founder of the company that probably makes your favorite video game - XS Software. Tenchev began his career when he was 18, creating a web-based video game that quickly went viral in Bulgaria. Pursuing his education at the Technical University of Sofia, Tenchev wanted to study computer science but the only thing he ended up learning was that the Soviet style curriculum of Bulgarian higher education was out of date for 21st century concepts (to say the least). So, not one to sit around but to always be pursuing new opportunities, he started Software University, an (now) online computer science boot camp for much of eastern Europe. Today, both of Tenchev’s companies continue to thrive. XS Software has over 50 million registered users (the largest number of users of any company on this podcast so far!) and Software Uni. has educated almost 10% of the Bulgarian population. The future is not analog - it’s AI, and that is where Tenchev is heading next.