Daniel Robbins
- VP, Marketing, Roku Inc
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Articles by Daniel Robbins
How Toilet Paper Taught Tony Hawk a Vital Lesson About Branding
A toilet paper test unit showed Tony Hawk what careless licensing could do. His response became a durable lesson for founders protecting a name well. Pro skateboarder Tony Hawk worked on landing his infamous 900 trick for more than a decade, breaking a rib along the way and landing on his back repeatedly. His steel-like approach to skating transferred well into his career as an entrepreneur. He launched Birdhouse in 1992 in the middle of a skating lull.
The Best Advertising Isn’t Advertising, Says the Founder of This Accounting Firm
George Dimov scaled an accounting firm nationwide by answering clients quickly, serving overlooked tax customers, and auditing every expense closely. “Quality work is always in demand,” says George Dimov. “The biggest complaint we hear in accounting, and the biggest reason people change accountants, is a lack of responsiveness.” Dimov started his company during the collapse of 2008, right as businesses were failing left and right.
Tony Robbins Says 1 Trait Explains Christopher Zook’s 95 Percent Profitability Rating
After setting a 10-year goal in 1991, Christopher Zook built CAZ Investments and later partnered with the man who first inspired the ambition. In 1991, Christopher Zook came home from a long day, turned on the TV to relax, and saw what he describes as a very large human being with big hair and big teeth. It was Tony Robbins. He liked what he heard and ordered the 30 day cassette series, which he and his wife, Lisa, worked through together.
20 Companies and Over 1 Billion Dollars Later
Image credit: Photo by Pexels Brent Freeman was 23, fresh out of USC and carrying a quarter million dollars in student debt, when he closed a $10 million deal in Dubai. He celebrated that night and the next morning he woke up expecting to feel fulfilled. Instead, he felt empty. “Full stop. Money does not make you happier,” he told me on Founder’s Story. Going From $1 Billion in Deals to Total Burnout Freeman went on to co-found 20 companies that generated over $1 billion in revenue.
Cannabis Brands Are Banned From Many Advertising Channels. This Partnership Offers a Different Playbook
Weedmaps can’t rely on the advertising playbook most brands use. Its Rolling Loud partnership shows how a restricted industry can earn attention through experiences. Weedmaps, a cannabis directory and marketplace, is partnering with international hip-hop festival Rolling Loud. Today, the two brands are announcing a year-round lineup of artist-driven experiences, starting September 10 in Brooklyn with the Kickback New York Lit by Rolling Loud festival.
Sri Sri Ravi Shankar Says the Happiest People in the World Do 1 Thing
Artificial Intelligence 5 hours ago We're ‘dangerously close’ to dead internet theory, says Pangram's CEO TechCrunch - Rebecca Bellan • 5h The internet has a trust problem, and it’s not just because social media feeds are filling up with AI slop. AI-generated text and images are now making their way into job applications, product reviews, and even insurance claims, leaving platforms and users alike scrambling to figure out what’s real.
Sri Sri Ravi Shankar Says the Happiest People in the World Do 1 Thing
Gurudev Sri Sri Ravi Shankar has negotiated with warlords and presidents for 45 years. His diagnosis of the founder mindset is blunt. Gurudev Sri Sri Ravi Shankar opened our conversation with an observation that hit uncomfortably close to home. “The most successful entrepreneurs I know have money but still can’t sit alone in silence,” he told me. “Why? They don’t know the skill, how to quiet the mind.” He would know. His breath-based meditation has reached more than 800 million people.
How Peter Murphy Turned $1,800 Into a Multimillion-Dollar Company By Charging Customers Less
A potential partner laughed at Peter Murphy’s $20-a-month pricing. Nine years later, that affordability has become Pocket Prep’s moat. Nine years ago, Peter Murphy got on a call with a company he hoped would feature Pocket Prep, his exam-preparation app, on its website. Most prep products for the certification cost thousands of dollars. His cost $20 a month. The two people on the phone giggled throughout the call.
Ryan Kalil Saw Retired Athletes Get Stuck. Here’s How He Started Building His Next Career
The former NFL center explains how early preparation, humble learning, and an overlooked football market in Mexico shaped his second act in business. Ryan Kalil had a front-row seat to one of the most predictable collapses in sports. “I had a lot of really great mentors when I was playing. And these were older guys who retired before me,” he told me. “I also got a front row seat at how guys transitioned.
Shane Ginsberg Has Interviewed 300,000 Strangers on the Street. He Says the First 3 Seconds Decide Everything
Shane Ginsberg spent years building before street polling paid off. Now brands pay him to do the one thing AI can’t: talk to real people. Shane Ginsberg’s childhood didn’t look like anyone else’s. His dad taught people how to sell on Amazon starting in 2003, and Ginsberg tagged along to the conferences.
Vince Molinari Built a Fintech Company by Doing What the Startup Playbook Says Not to Do
Vince Molinari explains why regulated-industry founders should expect more time and expense, learn from failure, and innovate inside the rules. Vince Molinari has testified before the U.S. Congress and Senate, spoken at the U.S. State Department and the U.N., helped develop blockchain patents, and broadcasts daily from the floor of the New York Stock Exchange. His company, Fintech.TV, is fresh off its $50 million acquisition of Tap Inc.
Microsoft Employees Just Saw Exactly What Their Job Is Worth. Your Startup Candidates Have No Idea. Here’s the Fix
The number on your equity offer is doing more recruiting work than ever, yet it’s a part of the offer candidates can’t really read. That’s a problem you should fix before your next hire. This week, a spreadsheet of Microsoft salaries leaked, showing base pay by level, bonuses, and stock awards. Though Business Insider reports that the data is anonymous, unofficial, self-reported, and not comprehensive, the stock data still makes for a good read.
For $100 a Month, Fans Can Own 15 Racehorses. More Than 4,000 People Are Waiting to Join
The subscription stable pairs low-cost ownership with race winnings, owner credentials, VIP experiences, and a community that keeps members engaged. Horse racing has a fan problem, and Adam Kluger thinks he knows exactly why. “Every major sport builds fans first and gamblers second,” he told me. “Horse racing has done the opposite.” For generations, actually owning a racehorse required six figures, an owner’s license, vet bills, and insider connections.
He Sold 4 Companies With 1 Rule: Never Build Anything Customers Won’t Pay For
Raj Toleti’s Andor Health is profitable at $100 million by promising measurable results to health systems, not just selling another software tool. Raj Toleti tried retiring once, after his first exit. It lasted two months. “My wife said, I think it’s really unhealthy for our relationship. I think you should just go do something,” he laughed. Maybe that restlessness comes from his family. Toleti’s family has 33 clinicians. His parents were physicians. His grandparents were physicians.
Everyone Saw Detroit’s Decline. Larry Brinker Jr.’s Family Saw the Opportunity Others Missed
Larry Brinker Jr. walked me through Michigan Central Station, once the world’s symbol of Detroit’s decline, now its proudest comeback story. His grandparents arrived at that station from Mississippi. His company restored it. Detroit filed the largest municipal bankruptcy in U.S. history. The world watched the city fall, and plenty of people counted it out. Larry Brinker Jr.’s family did the opposite. They moved in.
This Founder Has Never Had an Employee Quit. His Retention Secret Has Nothing to Do With Salary.
Lukas Kerrebijn sponsors athletes, football clubs, and racing teams. The surprising payoff isn’t sales. It’s building a hiring pipeline that rarely misses. Lukas Kerrebijn was a 19-year-old intern at a real estate agency in Amsterdam, showing up on Fridays. He came in maybe three or four times total. That was all it took to spot a flaw in the entire industry. The market was so hot that everything sold. Forty people would show up to view a single property. The intern did the viewings.
A Sports Handicapper Called Justin Gaethje’s White House Upset. His Rule: Don’t Pick With Your Heart
After calling Justin Gaethje’s upset, Zach Hirsch explains why smart predictions require memory, experience, discipline, and one bias-killing rule. When Justin Gaethje stepped into the Octagon on the White House lawn as an underdog, almost nobody gave him a chance. Zach Hirsch did. “They said I was biased. That I made the pick because he’s a friend of mine and I’d spent time in camp with him,” Hirsch told me. “But it’s a numbers game.
Daymond John Says Most Companies Die From 1 Mistake. It’s Not a Lack of Funding
Daymond John nearly lost FUBU despite strong demand and big orders. His story reveals the overlooked mistake he believes destroys companies every day. “This is what I try to tell founders. Run out of a very small amount of money,” says Daymond John. That’s a hard-earned insight; I recently sat down with John to talk about FUBU, the Queens-based apparel brand he founded in 1992. As it turns out, in the early years of the company he ran out of a lot of money.
A Major Insurer Partnered With This Startup After It Solved a Costly Problem No One Else Could
After watching his father struggle to access life-saving rehabilitation, Harry DiFrancesco launched Carda Health. Now the startup is helping solve one of health care’s biggest patient-access problems. Harry DiFrancesco has been his father’s sole caregiver for more than a decade. After his dad had a serious heart event, he was prescribed a rehabilitation program, a series of exercises and nutrition interventions designed to get him back to health. He couldn’t access it.
Why This Serial Entrepreneur Never Celebrated a Single Exit
Most entrepreneurs obsess over getting acquired. Tom Sosnoff never put a company up for sale—and still attracted bidding wars. Here’s the mindset behind it. Tom Sosnoff and his business partner Scott Sheridan have built and sold multiple companies. And yet in all those years they have never once congratulated each other. “We’ve always had one rule. Only one rule we live by,” Sosnoff told me. “No high fives. We haven’t congratulated each other once. Not even once. And it’s on purpose.
Everyone Says AI Needs More Intelligence. This Founder Says That’s Exactly the Wrong Goal
What if the race to make AI smarter is focused on the wrong thing? One founder who has spent decades working with machines says the real challenge isn’t more intelligence, or more power. Rana Gujral has spent his career thinking about the relationship between humans and machines. He led Behavioral Signals, an AI company that detects emotion and intent in the human voice, and before that he spent years as an operator across software and consumer hardware.
The Founder Who Watched His Employees Miss Out on Millions—and Decided to Fix It
Equitybee CEO Oren Barzilai says startup employees lose tens of billions of dollars annually because they don’t understand stock options. The stories behind that number are stunning. I recently learned that someone I know made millions off the SpaceX IPO. They weren’t a founder or in the C-suite. They had only been at the company for a couple of years. Stories like that make equity sound like a golden ticket.
‘It Was Faster to Train a Grad’: An AI Pioneer Explains Why Half Her Agents Failed
Sol Rashidi helped launch IBM’s Watson reveals why half her agents failed—and what most companies still get wrong about scaling AI. If anyone on earth should be bullish on AI agents, it’s Sol Rashidi. She’s spent 15 years deploying AI inside Fortune 100 companies, becoming one of the world’s first chief AI officer in 2016 and helping IBM launch Watson in 2011. That’s why I was surprised when I learned Rashidi has fired half of her agentic staff: “The ones I fired were unreliable,” she told me.
Leo Pareja Thought Hustle Was the Key to Success. Then a Mentor Gave Him a Rude Awakening
He became the number one real estate agent in the world at 28. Then came a brutal conversation that changed his entire career. When Leo Pareja was 23 years old, he owned 14 rental properties, and his accountant had just told him he was worth $5 million. Eight months later, that number was negative $1 million. “I was in the fetal position crying, negotiating with banks to take some of the properties back,” he told me.
Why Not Knowing the Industry Was His Greatest Advantage
By ignoring the status quo, Kris Fishman spotted a bottleneck insiders missed—and turned it into a national advantage for one of the largest compounding Thirteen years ago, Kris Fishman didn’t know what a compounding pharmacy was until his wife explained it to him. Today he’s the CEO and president of Wells Pharmacy, one of the largest compounding pharmacies in the United States, serving thousands of patients and working with telemedicine companies at a national scale.
Why a Former F1 Driver Is Going After One of the Messiest Industries in the World
Six races into his F1 career, everything changed. Now Jack Doohan is chasing something even harder: fixing the broken systems behind global fast-food chains. Jack Doohan was seven years old when he saw a sign for university on his way to school. He turned to his mom and said he’d never need to go because he was going to be a Formula One driver. He was right. He made it.
The Real Estate Industry Is in Freefall—So He Launched a Rival to Its Largest Organization
Mauricio Umansky sold the Playboy Mansion, built The Agency into a global brand across 17 countries, and just launched an organization to reshape the entire real estate industry. His advice: when there’s chaos in your industry, that’s exactly when you move. Mauricio Umansky was delivering pizzas at 16 years old.
Oprah Just Said Something at Cannes Lions That Made Me Rethink Everything I’m Building
I’ve been so focused on revenue, subscribers, and deals that I forgot why I started. Then I saw Oprah speak at Cannes Lions yesterday. Yesterday, on day one of the Cannes Lions creativity festival, Oprah Winfrey said something that hit me so hard I had to put my phone down and just sit with it. She was telling the story of a conversation with Maya Angelou. Oprah had told Maya that the girls at her school in South Africa would be her greatest legacy.
Fortnite Star Clix Made His First $1 Million at 13. Now the 21-Year-Old Is Building a Business Empire
Clix dropped out of middle school and built one of the most loyal communities in streaming. He has a successful clothing line. He has a VeeFriends trading card. His collectibles sell out in minutes. Here’s his secret. When video game streamer Clix was five years old, he told his parents he was going to play video games for a living. He didn’t say professional esports athlete—he said video games. At 13, Clix, whose real name is Cody Conrad, became a professional Fortnite player.
Knicks Champion Jalen Brunson Posted 7 Words on LinkedIn Today. Every Founder Needs to Read Them
The Knicks trailed by at least 10 points in every Finals game. They won anyway. For founders who’ve spent their careers being underestimated, Brunson’s seven words should really resonate. Jalen Brunson posted something on LinkedIn today that stopped me cold.
This AI Can Create, Launch, and Optimize Your Ads Without You. There’s a Twist
Higgsfield’s Supercomputer 2.0, built on Nvidia’s Agent Toolkit, gives brands an autonomous marketing system with security and permissioning that most AI tools still lack. The company’s revenue has nearly quadrupled in the first five months of 2026. AI-generated ads are having an interesting chapter. Last week, a New York State law requiring AI-generated commercial actors to be labeled as “synthetic” just went into effect.
SpaceX’s Biggest Impact Has Nothing to Do With Its Stock Price
SpaceX’s IPO is stirring controversy. But its technology is already changing lives in places the internet never reached. SpaceX starts trading today on the Nasdaq under the ticker SPCX at $135 per share. The valuation is $1.75 trillion. It’s the largest IPO in stock market history. And the internet is losing its mind over whether this is legitimate or a financial shell game. I have a different perspective. I’ve actually used SpaceX’s Starlink technology.
His Manager Gave Him the Keys— Then He Learned Why
Harrison Allen Lewis went from scooping ice cream at Baskin-Robbins to becoming a CIO for major enterprises. He says the lesson that shaped his entire career came from the worst manager he ever had. Harrison Allen Lewis was working at a grocery store in college when his manager walked up to him looking strange. He handed Lewis the keys and said he needed to run to the mall for an hour. Lewis was thrilled. He clipped those keys to his belt and walked the store like he owned it.
Everyone Said Her Eyebrow Idea Was Ridiculous. An Endorsement From Oprah Winfrey Proved Them Wrong
Anastasia Soare created an entirely new segment of the beauty industry using the golden ratio she learned from Leonardo da Vinci. Her husband, her landlord, and her entire community thought she was crazy. Anastasia Soare cried every day for six months after arriving in Los Angeles from Romania. She had left her family, her security, and everything she knew behind.
This Founder Spent Hours Copy-Pasting Contracts Into Slides. It Sparked a $100 Million Idea
Brandon Card left Microsoft, Oracle, and IBM to solve a problem hiding inside every Fortune 500 company. Today, Terzo AI has raised over $40 million and counts the biggest enterprises in the world as customers. Brandon Card was sitting in his home office, building a PowerPoint presentation. Each of the 95 slides was a screenshot of a contract—one for every country where his client, one of the biggest auto companies in the world, had a Microsoft agreement.
The Man Behind the Lean Startup Movement Says This Is Why Successful Companies Keep Losing Their Soul
Eric Ries spent 15 years watching companies he helped build get destroyed from the inside. His new book explains why it keeps happening and what founders can do. I read Eric Ries’s book The Lean Startup about 15 years ago. The MVP concept changed how I built every one of my businesses after that. So when Ries told me his new book, Incorruptible, isn’t about building companies but about protecting them, I had to understand why.
The Manager Behind TikTok Star Brooke Monk Explains What Actually Makes a Creator Brand Work
Inside the two-year journey to launch Brooke Monk’s Doting Beauty, and why follower count is the wrong metric to chase. Devain Doolaramani started managing TikTok star Brooke Monk when she was 17 years old. Five years later, Monk is one of the biggest digital creators on the planet and Doolaramani is helping her build her first consumer brand—a line of false eyelashes called Doting Beauty—from scratch.
A Doctor Tried to Prescribe Him Statins. He Decided to Take a More Entrepreneurial Route
When he learned he had high cholesterol and high blood pressure in his 40s, former O-Town star Ashley Parker Angel sought a second opinion. Now he’s launching a medical-grade supplement company with a world-renowned cardiologist. Ashley Parker Angel rose to fame as a member of O-Town and has gone on to sell 10 million records, had a number one song and two hit TV shows, and played Madison Square Garden.
Zero to $62 Million in 2 Years: The Real Story Behind This Controversial AI Startup
Shawn Zhang co-founded Sanas at Stanford when his friend was being discriminated against for his accent at work. The company has raised $121 million and now has over a million users. When Shawn Zhang asked his friend Raul about his new call center job in Nicaragua, he expected the usual complaints about difficult customers. Instead, Raul told him something that would turn into a controversial story about AI startup growth. Customers were complaining about his accent.
‘Shark Tank’ Judge Daniel Lubetzky Says Most Founders Make This 1 Big Mistake
Lubetzky spent 10 years selling sun-dried tomato spreads door to door and trying everything he could think of before launching Kind. Here’s what he learned from his mistakes. Daniel Lubetzky almost didn’t launch KIND. After ten years of building PeaceWorks, a company that sold food products produced in partnership by Israelis, Palestinians, Jordanians, Egyptians, and Turks, he was exhausted.
He Left a Top Job at Bank of America to Build 2 NASDAQ Companies. His Secret? 1 Simple Framework for Risky Bets
Sam Tabar walked away from a high-powered career in law and banking to become an entrepreneur. This is his framework for evaluating risky bets. Sam Tabar grew up the son of a car mechanic and a tarot card reader in Canada. There was always a material gap between his family and the kids at school. That gap motivated everything that followed. “It really bugged me,” Tabar told me.
How Maury Povich Outlasted the Daytime TV Wars Using This 1 Business Framework
Jerry Springer called Maury Povich ‘the real deal.’ Povich says his competitive advantage comes down to one business strategy. Maury Povich and Jerry Springer both launched their talk shows in September 1991. Their shows lasted about three decades, ending within a few years of each other. In that time, the two rivals had created a new category in television. But by Springer’s estimation, Povich’s show had a clear competitive advantage.
How the ‘Lumpia Queen’ Turned 1 Failed Recipe Into a Thriving Creator Business and a Collab With Gordon Ramsay
Abi Marquez turned an imperfect video into a global brand, built a sustainable creator business, and learned why protecting what made her famous matters more than chasing views. Abi Marquez saw leftover chocolate, marshmallows, and lumpia wrappers—delicate pastry sheets often used to make spring rolls—sitting on her counter after a friend’s event. She wondered what would happen if she fried marshmallows in a lumpia wrapper. She tried it. It failed.
The 3‑Question Test a Founder With 10 Startups Uses to Kill Bad Ideas Fast
John Witchel was an early advisor to Credit Karma and has built companies across software and energy. His latest, King Energy, has raised over $400 million by following one framework. “You want a lot of people to have the same problem,” John Witchel told me.
The ‘Devil Wears Prada 2’ Trainer Built a Global Brand With Zero Marketing. Here’s How
Monique Eastwood has trained Emily Blunt, Anne Hathaway, and Stanley Tucci for years. She never planned to build a business. Then COVID hit and everything changed. The Devil Wears Prada 2 hits theaters this week. The cast looks incredible. But the woman responsible for getting them all in shape is perhaps even more incredible.
Why Kevin O’Leary Bet on 2 Engineers Who Had Never Built a Consumer Product
How Wombi Rose and John Wise turned a $100 market booth into Lovepop, a $100M custom card empire. Wombi Rose and his co-founder, John Wise, were naval architects. They thought they were going to spend their careers in hard hats and steel toe boots. Instead, they fell in love with intricate paper art during a business school trip to Vietnam and decided to build a company around it. “It wasn’t really a business,” Rose told me.
What Snoop Dogg Knew About Cameo Before Anyone Else Did
Steven Galanis built a solution that Snoop Dogg called ‘brilliant’ on his first FaceTime call. Snoop Dogg FaceTimed Cameo founder Steven Galanis after hearing about Cameo from Ice-T. “Steven, this is brilliant,” Snoop told him. “My second biggest fan base is in Brazil. This is a way for me to go to Brazil without having to go to Brazil. Let me on this so we can billionize this together.” That’s how Cameo got one of its biggest early users. Not through an agency pitch. Not through a marketing campaign.
What David Grutman Knows About Influence That Most Founders Miss
For founders in any industry, Grutman’s playbook comes down to one principle. Before David Grutman knew Miami, he knew the celebrities who now fill his venues. Before he owned LIV, before Komodo, Papi Steak, Gecko, and Casadonna Miami, he was a guy in the nightclub business who made it his mission to bring influential people to Miami. When they arrived, he made sure every detail of their experience was unforgettable.
The Manual DM Strategy the Glamnetic Founder Used to Generate Her First $50,000 in Sales
Ann McFerran bootstrapped Glamnetic from her bedroom in Koreatown to over nine figures in accumulated revenue. Her first four hires quit on day one. Ann McFerran’s first four hires walked into Glamnetic headquarters, realized it was her bedroom in a Koreatown apartment, and quit. “They were expecting something different when they’re looking at us online,” she told me. “And then they come into the headquarters. It is actually my bedroom.” She found her fifth hire, Mia, through a friend of a friend.
The Psychological Trap of the Information Age (and How Mark Manson Used It to Sell 20 Million Books)
The author of ‘The Subtle Art’ never intended to be a writer. His career started with a viral blog post, a kitten walking away from an explosion, and six million page views in a day. Mark Manson never thought he was a good writer. He didn’t make great grades in English class. He read The 4-Hour Workweek by Tim Ferriss in 2008, tried a dozen online businesses, and the one that stuck was a dating advice blog. Now he’s sold more than 20 million books.
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