In this episode, Patrick Bosek talks with Rebecca Brady, founder of Top Seedz, about her journey from New Zealand to Buffalo and from stay-at-home mom to building a rapidly growing food company. Rebecca shares how she went from selling a handful of crackers at a farmers market to landing on shelves at Wegmans and Whole Foods and eventually scaling to 70+ employees, 3,500 stores, and roughly 10,000 boxes a day. The conversation explores the power of networking, product-market fit, disciplined scaling, and using competition and sports-inspired thinking to build an efficient, energetic culture. Rebecca also reflects on resilience, taking smart risks, and how winning 43North helped her step out of the day-to-day and start building Top Seedz for its next stage of growth.

In this episode, Patrick speaks with Peter Dean a serial entrepreneur and longtime member of the Upstate New York startup community. Patrick and Peter trace his career shaped by experimentation, resilience, and a deep belief in people-first culture. Peter shares the lessons behind building three different start-ups in three very different industries.

Peter tells the stories behind Athletic Dynamics, scaling the outdoor e-commerce company Upside Over, surviving its collapse during the 2008 financial crisis, and ultimately growing RenderTribe into a successful agency that was acquired by Media Logic. Along the way, they dig into business-model innovation, the realities of cash flow and founder risk, and how culture can become a genuine competitive advantage when employees feel trusted, supported, and connected to a shared purpose.

Patrick Bosek talks with Lauren Washington—serial entrepreneur, community builder, and Director of the University at Buffalo’s Cultivator Program—about her amazing journey through multiple ventures to helping shape Buffalo’s startup ecosystem. Lauren shares how winning the first-ever 43North with her social listening startup “Keep Up” taught her hard lessons about platform risk and building on someone else’s APIs. From there, she talks through founding a community, Black Women Talk Tech, before pivoting back to commercial start-ups by launching Funder. Finally, Lauren explains how UB’s Cultivator accelerator deploys first checks and provides mentorship to help Western New York founders compete on the global stage.