Top Founders

Vadim Yasinovsky, co-founder of pdfFiller and CEO of airSlate (parent of pdfFiller, signNow, DocHub, US Legal Forms, airSlate Flow), breaks down how a plain-looking PDF editor page became a $106M/year product with 866,000 paying customers — inside a company doing $200M in revenue across 1.1 million customers at an average of $180/year. He raised just $150M total (last round: $52M at a $1.25B valuation in June 2022) and now says the company is optimistically worth $800M — despite doubling revenue since. He bought signNow at $3M and grew it to $35M. He built an SEO machine on 4.8 billion keywords and 35 million pages, and now says that playbook is dead within 9–12 months as ChatGPT and AI search take over. In this episode: Why 650 employees are split into siloed 120-person product teams with no shared tech Why airSlate didn't become Harvey despite 85,000 lawyer-built legal forms as a training set Why Vadim says the "ChatGPT SEO" gurus are "b.s." and his influence on search drops from 80% to 30% His unannounced AI product (bizdraft.com) and why he won't monetize it The path from $200M to $400M: 20–30% from existing products, the rest from vertical AI His M&A filter: product-market fit, domain expertise, $5–10M+ revenue minimum His advice to founders: raise as late as you can, cash is king, preserve it now Topics: SaaS, SEO, programmatic SEO, AI search, ChatGPT, document automation, e-signature, PDF editor, legal forms, SMB software, bootstrapping, vertical SaaS, M&A, capital efficiency.

Jeff Lu quit Google Cloud in 2022 to build his own AI video models at Akool, a generative AI platform for avatars, face swap, and video translation. He skipped the giant foundation models and trained small ones for specific tasks on rented servers, then watched revenue go from $100K in 2022 to $3M in 2023, $13M in 2024, $25M in 2025, and over $3M in June 2026 alone. He breaks down why Coca-Cola picked him over the foundation models and now pays him $4m per year. He'll share how he's driven huge usage (500,000 images and videos created daily) and what he'd say if Google offered $500M cash. Akool revenue data: https://getlatka.com/companies/akool.com

Antoine Fort launched Qobra in 2020 with a $100K pre-seed from 7 angels, and his first investor was also his first customer. He started by cold calling with a phone list from a provider later shut down over European privacy law (GDPR), charging $10K/year. Today Qobra is at about $30K/year per customer, 250+ customers, and roughly $7–8M ARR. Along the way, one meme ad closed an $80K/year deal, and a single sales rep on the platform earned $1.5M in commissions (75x the average). So when Nathan asks if he'd sell for $100M cash today, his answer is surprisingly honest. Qobra is an AI-first sales compensation and commission software platform. Antoine covers his $5M seed and $10M Series A, the $2M in debt he raised to limit dilution, the $200K–300K/year he spends on LinkedIn, YouTube and Google ads, his G2 and SEO glossary playbook, and the three AI agents Qobra is building to replace commission consultants.

Sevan Marian, co-founder and CEO of Fleet, bootstrapped his Paris-based laptop rental company for 7 straight years to roughly $40M in annualized revenue and close to $10M in yearly profit (EBITDA), without raising a single dollar of VC. His trick: customers pay about $50/month on 36-month contracts, and Fleet sells each contract to a bank that pays it upfront on day one. That's how he's financed 50,000+ devices across 20 countries without holding inventory. In early 2026 he sold about 25% of the company at a $100M valuation, and every dollar went out to the team: employees cashed out 100% of their shares, worth several million euros.  

At 23, Alex Jekowsky started building Cents, an all-in-one software, hardware, and payments platform for laundromats, dry cleaners, and shared laundry rooms. In 2025, Cents generated $60 million in revenue, up 67%, with just 80 employees and EBITDA margins above 20%. The company now has 99% customer retention, powers laundry rooms in nearly 7,000 apartment buildings, and recently raised a $140 million Series C at an approximately $800 million valuation. In this episode, Alex reveals: • How Cents grew from $700,000 to $60 million in four years • Why its first customer was a 73-location laundry operator • How Cents combines software, payments, and custom-built hardware • Why the company generates roughly $750,000 in revenue per employee • How Cents maintains 99% customer retention • Why Alex acquired a hardware company instead of continuing to build everything internally • How the $140 million financing included a $30 million employee tender • Why founders should avoid raising at valuations that eliminate future options • How Alex plans to turn an overlooked industry into a multibillion-dollar company