Makerpad

101 Studios was an edutainment startup that created video games to teach medical students, with their flagship game Antibody being a Pokemon-style game where players fought germs and bacteria. Despite professors liking the concept, they wanted highly customized solutions for their specific classes, making the business model unscalable. The startup failed to achieve product-market fit and pivoted to League of Fighters after 6 months.

140 Canvas was a failed startup that allowed users to create custom fake tweets and purchase them as canvas prints for £30. Despite getting 17,000 visitors from a successful YouTube influencer campaign, they only converted 20 sales, losing £145 total due to lack of market validation and a complicated user experience requiring customers to write their own tweets.

Bigfoot Capital, founded by Brian Parks in 2017, provides non-dilutive debt financing to B2B SaaS companies with $1M-$10M ARR. Parks drew on his experience as an investment banker and startup founder to identify a market gap in funding options. The firm has funded approximately 35 companies and recently raised $30 million for its own growth.

Rob Schall is a serial SaaS entrepreneur who sold his first real estate website company for $80M and his second vacation rental platform for $15M. He's now building CN, an AI-powered sales productivity platform that measures lead quality, seller attributes, and macro factors to help sales teams scale more effectively. The company has raised just over $2M and is targeting the trillion-dollar opportunity of AI applied to CRM systems.

Bright Edge is a $100 million revenue SaaS company in the search and AI space, bootstrapped by founder Jim Yu over 18 years. The company has scaled to approximately 500 employees across multiple segments (mid-market, enterprise, international, and channel) by implementing disciplined operating cadences focused on balancing operational execution with strategic innovation and product development.