Hidden Foundations

Peter Groverman on Grovara, AI, and 15 Years to Overnight Success | Hidden Foundations Ep. 12

• Kendall Schoenrock • Season 1 • Episode 12

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In this episode of Hidden Foundations, Kendall sits down with Peter Groverman, founder of Grovara, to explore the long entrepreneurial road behind building a global B3B trading platform. Peter shares how early exposure to his father’s box factory, flea market negotiations, family business, Villanova Law, Haiti relief work, and early platform technology shaped the way he sees opportunity, value, and risk.

The conversation moves from the early days of Venmo and exporting American brands overseas to Grovara’s evolution through failures, fundraising, leadership lessons, Pokemon logistics, wholesale distribution, AI automation, and the future of global commerce. Peter also explains why it took 15 years to become an overnight success, why business partners matter, how AI is changing company efficiency, and why there may be no shortage of opportunity for entrepreneurs willing to start.

Chapters
00:00 Cold Open: 15 Years to Overnight Success
 00:41 Meet Peter Groverman
 01:12 Early Startups, LTL Prints, and Haiti Relief
 06:14 Launching Grovara and the First Venmo Use Case
 13:32 Fundraising, Failure, and Building the Platform
 17:03 B3B, Wholesale, Pokemon, and Global Logistics
 28:01 Law School, Family Business, and Learning to Sell
 39:15 AI, Leadership Lessons, and Founder Advice

A special thank you to The Franklin on Rittenhouse for graciously allowing us to record these episodes inside their hotel. Their hospitality, atmosphere, and attention to detail gave us the perfect setting to host thoughtful conversations and bring Hidden Foundations to life in Philadelphia.
Check out their hotel here: https://www.thefranklinonrittenhouse.com/
https://www.instagram.com/franklinonrittenhouse/

Hidden Foundations is a weekly podcast hosted by entrepreneur and investor Kendall Schoenrock, examining how family systems, early adversity, and childhood dynamics quietly shape high-performing adults. Each conversation uncovers the “invisible wiring” behind resilience, ambition, leadership, and grit — told through candid stories from entrepreneurs, athletes, creators, and leaders.

Guided by the thesis that strength is forged early at home, the show uses a consistent framework to explore emotional environments, money narratives, family roles, conflict patterns, and early challenges. Every episode delivers at least one practical, repeatable insight for parents, leaders, and anyone seeking to understand how greatness is built long before it’s visible.

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Learn more or connect with Kendall:
Website: https://kendallschoenrock.com/
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/schoenrock/
SilverRock Ventures: https://silverrockventures.com/about-us/
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Apple Podcasts: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/hidden-foundations/id1895154229

#HiddenFoundations #PeterGroverman #Grovara

SPEAKER_00

It took 15 years to become an overnight success. The company's doing better today, in 2026, with a headcount of 10, than we were doing in 2023 with a headcount of 34.

SPEAKER_01

One of the things that I enjoy about you specifically is the uh outside of the box thinking.

SPEAKER_00

But I'm probably the only American you've met who's ripped off a Chinese company and brought it to America.

SPEAKER_01

This is Hidden Foundations, a show about how family, childhood, and adversity shape leaders. Because before they became who they are, their foundation was already being formed. Thanks for joining us for another episode of the Hidden Foundations Podcast. Today I'm joined by Peter Groverman. We've known each other for a couple of decades now.

SPEAKER_00

Really?

SPEAKER_01

I think so. Wasn't it an early late 2000s? Yeah, almost 20 years. Yeah. Yeah, that's incredible. Um, talk to me about how you started the business, uh, the Gravara technologies, and how you came up with the idea of let's talk about what it is.

SPEAKER_00

Well, we can start with our history first.

SPEAKER_01

Oh, sure, we can do that.

SPEAKER_00

Right. So your background was with LTL Prints.

SPEAKER_01

Larger than Life Prince, which was a startup in uh Old City. Right. And we raised money from Ben Franklin Technology Partners. Okay.

SPEAKER_00

And uh it was an oversized wall graphics business that was doing on-demand printing in Old City, which is amazing because like at the time, too, like you don't realize it, but like having like a commercial printer at home was a unique innovation. You couldn't, before 2005, really, you didn't, you couldn't even, you couldn't get a printer to print a billboard at a home. You had to go to like contract out to do it, right? And then it was like a like a whole thing. But you, I my my earliest memory of coming to your office was you had like a two-bedroom apartment in Center City and one bedroom literally, literally wall to wall was a printer. Right. And you were just doing home prints. The other thing I which I thought was like fascinating to have that access to the hardware, like that was that was the innovation in itself, right? That was pretty cool. But the second part that I thought was like really cool and very novel at the time was you had like an automated help desk, or like if somebody went to your website, you knew who they were, where they were from, at least from their IP address, and you could say, Hey, it's Kendall here. How can I help you? And it would boop boop, pop up on their screen, like an instant message. Yeah, which I at the time, like now, you're like, oh, who cares? Right. Like at the time, that was like incredibly novel, right?

SPEAKER_01

Right. And so it it was some of that technology was really crucial for us because I would track the shoppers and I would monitor in the chat window and see where they were in the site, what they were looking at, what they were searching for, and then if they put something in the shopping cart, and then if it died. Right. So the you have the cart abandonment. And that was so as a small startup, we were really just attempting to find our own way. And I found that technology, we built it into the website, and then I would actively monitor the visitors to the website, see how they were interacting with the site, with the search, looking for specific images, and then if I could see a pattern in what they were searching for, I could instigate a chat and offer to help find an image or an alternative solution for their specific need based on their real-time search queries.

SPEAKER_00

Yeah, that was so new. No one was doing that.

SPEAKER_01

Nobody was doing that, and then uh I could walk them through the the checkout process.

SPEAKER_00

Yeah, it was really novel. I remember seeing that. Yeah, that was cool. And then we had an uh a nonprofit, we didn't have the non-profit at the time, but then there was a uh our background happened because there was an or um an earthquake in Haiti 2010. Right. And an orphanage got destroyed. And you charter a plane? Yes. I chartered a 737. I actually brought this with me. It's part of my notes. Oh, yeah. Brought props and we launched the Relief Foundation. Now, this is kind of cool. Now, I I I had this like grand, I chartered a 737. I just got a picture in here. I'll put on the screen of me and the plane. It was like ridiculous. And this that I was in law school at the time, so in order to get law credit for school, the dean let me do put on this whole uh relief mission. You went to Villanova for law school. Yes. So that's obviously where we were connected.

SPEAKER_01

Villanova connection. Then you were entrepreneur at residence there.

SPEAKER_00

Yes. And um, but at the time, 2010, I had uh, you know, this is after we had met, a couple years after you had LTL going. And I chartered this plane, and I was like, um, wouldn't it be cool if we could put one of Kendall's big prints on the side of the plane so when we land, at least, you know, what a beautiful that'd be a really cool site when we had a photo of it, right? And have like one of your sticker things along the side. Do you remember what you said?

SPEAKER_01

I was concerned with I didn't want the the the print to get sucked into one of the engines.

SPEAKER_02

Yes.

SPEAKER_01

Take out because I I we had we had not done any speed tests on a fuselage at 500 miles an hour at altitude. I mean, the the there was some live.

SPEAKER_00

This was this was what I wanted to print. This was the help Haiti. Uh you remember when these things were all the rage? Yes. Yeah, it was right around there. So we had our own little badge, and then you ended up uh making a couple of these, and we had them on the trip, and they they made their way through uh something. But yeah, you wouldn't uh I that must have been such a funny conversation. What's he want to do? He wants to put on the side of a plane. We can't take the liability. I mean, I had no clue. I got the email back from me. It was like, no, we can't do this. We're afraid it's gonna get sucked into the engine.

SPEAKER_01

I like I there's some liability here that I just didn't want to take back in the day for the peel and stick wall graphics. It was funny. Yeah, that was a good time. Yeah, I love the creative thing. This is one of the things that that I enjoy about you specifically is the uh outside of the box thinking. You think that really impacts your your current business?

SPEAKER_00

Yes.

SPEAKER_01

Yeah, let's talk about the yeah.

SPEAKER_00

So I launched Grovara around the same time. I I I finished law school. I had this, uh we had an amazing success story with Haiti. Um, I got offered the Venmo guys, Akram and Cortina were in Philly, and I was helping them. And the then the first dollars the flow through Venmo went to build this orphanage. This is how Venmo launched.

SPEAKER_01

Right. You were an alpha, I was an alpha user of Venmo. You you were an alpha user of Venmo.

SPEAKER_00

Yes. I was the first one that will really propagate. Venmo wasn't even an app, right? It was a text message. I think Akrom and Cortina were facing like serious jail time. They were violating like every single like bank wire law at the time, which is kind of crazy to think about. And um uh really the first commercial use of Venmo was to help raise, it was several hundred thousand dollars for the the charter of this plane and send 130 people down the Port of Prince to rebuild an orphanage. Right. And so um actually Akron was like, we need you on the marketing side, you should join our team. And I was like, I can't do that. Uh I want to do this because I had this, I had this idea of taking American brands overseas. Right. At the time in 2010, Obama was president. There were under well, what percentage of US manufacturers in 2010 were exporting? Actually taking their commercialized products with a barcode on it and selling them outside the US. What do you think? 2010. I don't know. What is it now? It's under 5% today.

unknown

Yeah.

SPEAKER_00

At the time, it was under 1% of US manufacturers. Meaning if it was made in the US, it was being sold overseas under 1% of the time. Isn't that wild?

SPEAKER_01

Yeah, that's crazy. I mean it's shockingly low. My my initial got shot was was gonna say closer to 20%. Right? But like my intuition was like, oh, it's probably a quarter, quarter of the firms are selling abroad.

SPEAKER_00

No, it's like a fraction of in even today. And how come? And the answer is because it's technical, there's a lot of processes, it's scary. 2010 was still a lot closer to 2001 when uh 9-11 happened. And at the time in 2010, even like doing business with someone in the Middle East was taboo. You're working with a guy named Muhammad, that was like a still apropos, you know, racial undertone or not. That was the truth. People are calling these manufacturers saying, I'm in Saudi Arabia, I want your product, and they're like literally saying, I won't work with someone named Muhammad. Now I'm seeing this firsthand because I'm traveling the world. My parents took my sisters, I have two younger sisters, it was my parents' 35th wedding anniversary, and my mom her whole life wanted to go see the pyramids. And I had just passed the bar exam, became an attorney, and I was like, let uh we went on a family trip. My sisters graduated from undergrad, and it was like a whole big family trip in 2010. And when we were in Egypt, let's see the pyramids, um, I saw an opportunity to bring American brands to not just Egypt, but all of Africa. You know, at the time, this was before BRICS, before Brazil, Russia, India, China, South Africa was really on the uptick 2010. And so I had that forward thinking to see that this is well, a lot of commercial development. How come I can't get American products here? How can I get American products here? Who do I need to talk to? And and that outside the box thinking is what really got this up and running.

SPEAKER_01

Yeah. So there was a a kind of a false start for you in the business, though. You started it and then hired a different CEO and then backed away and passed the baton. Walk me through that process and then how you step back in to take over.

SPEAKER_00

Okay. Well, it's not less of a takeover, I guess, but it is a takeover. There's a way of phrasing it that you can seem a little more diplomatic. You know what I'm saying? I understand. Right. But the company went through a lot of iterations. Again, 2010, you you take everything for granted today. You know, touch screen interface being the norm. No, 2010, people still have Blackberries. Right. And there was a fight between is the Blackberry gonna win or is the iPhone gonna win? Right, right? And you know, um, and so and plat the technology was really, really expensive compared to today. Today it's like actually pretty cheap. You know, AI can just use Repli or Levelable, make an agent that can then build you a software and what used to take six years and cost six million dollars can now be built in six weeks and cost you sixty thousand dollars. Right? And that's you know, 16-year difference now. So back then, you know, my background was really in tech and platforms. I have my first job ever when I was 16, I worked for uh half.com with uh Josh Koffman.

SPEAKER_01

He was Josh Koffelman. And I overlapped at the Turntide, the anti-spam company. That was my my first job and my first angel investment right out of college.

SPEAKER_00

That's cool. Yeah. So I um Josh, I think this guy, Mark Hughes. Mark Hughes uh wrote the book Buzz Marketing, and he was my first real boss. Um, under him was this guy, Randy Angler. Uh, and so it was me, Randy, Mark, Josh at half, which is kind of an awesome. And half had all these other employees too, actually. They had a whole room of developers in their back office, it was sick. Really good internship. And so I got to see the power of platforms, and then I and have a little marketing conditioning too under this guy, Mark Hughes, who like viral wasn't even things going, things didn't go viral. They had Buzz, which really was the predecessor, kind of an interesting um roll-up. But you had Mark uh who coached me on the marketing, you had my uh you know, platform understanding. I launched, uh, went through Dream Adventures with uh a company when I was in law school called Tap Inco, which was an eBay for advertising, another platform. So I started seeing all these platforms. But the problem was in 2010, I had just passed the bar and became an attorney. So I'm telling everyone, oh, I want to do this. And I was like, dude, go be an attorney. You just spent all this money on being an attorney. Now you want to go start something? Like, come on, you get get some experience, and then you can go do something. I'm like, no, I'm like, the future is global. You know, and then okay, Peter, under 1% or exporting the concept. So we would go to like these trade shows for like food and beverages. I brought a couple of our brands here, but like you talk to these brands and you'd be like, hey, I want to take you overseas, and they'd say, go right ahead. No one else is doing it. That sounds like a distraction. I'm gonna focus on the U.S. Grovara, you can do all of our international. And I met a couple of my co-founders at the time, my age, 27 years old, looking for something to do at the time. It was not a good environment for work. But you gotta keep in mind, like uh when the economy kind of uh uh is like not hiring, people have to be innovative, and this is kind of an outshow from that time. And so, long story short, it was first proving that um I and I when I was pitching people for money too, because I wanted to launch this thing. You know, I got my first check from the SBA, and then I I start going to like Ben Franklin for Capital, and there was this guy, Wayne Barr is at Ben Franklin. He's like mad patrolling on me on his big dry erase board. I drew out everything Gravar is today in 2010 on a dry erase board. And I was super proud and excited because I get the show I mean. I'm like, and it makes perfect sense, obviously. But in 2010, 27-year-old Wayne looked at me and goes, I get it, I like it, but how do I know you're the guy to do it? And it's too early, you're you're an attorney, you've never exported anything, have you? I'm like, no, no, but I I can figure it out. I passed the bar, I can export a kombucha or something, you know? Right. At the time was like kind of new, gluten-free or whatever, kind of new. And he's like, uh, he was like, he's like, okay, well, you're just too early for me. So I had to go spend a couple years actually manually traveling, exporting technology free, but promising people, selling people in the future of the technology. And uh, and that's how I got in the kind of agree and sign up. And it there's a lot of stutter steps to get to 2020, which is really when we first raised a significant round, or something was a little bit before 2020, like 20, yeah, 2020, we raised the first significant round. And by that point, I had been CEO for 10 years. And I had one co-founder who really was Jones in for the role, and uh one of our investors, uh uh David Potrick, former CEO of Charles Schwab. Charles Schwab, right? Yep, former, and we by that point we'd raised maybe, I probably had raised maybe like seven million dollars from like 80 people over 10 years, which is a story in itself. And um uh David offered to come out of retirement because he loved the way the platform economy was growing, to help be the executive chairman of the company, offer me the vice chair position, and then I could go do my next thing and have a co-founder run the show. And which he did.

SPEAKER_01

He did Shameless Plug, wasn't he on your podcast recently? Patrick was yeah. So we'll we've we'll we'll link that in the show notes. It'd be cool because he talked about wrestling, which is another, but let me table that for a second.

SPEAKER_00

That was a long-winded story of saying uh, you know, there was a lot of iterations over 10-year period. Yeah, 10-year period, uh, and a lot of failures. We brought on board developers and promises of something that ended up not being usable multiple times. And we blew through a lot of cash try trying to prove the model worked, and um ultimately um um, you know, it it took 15 years to become an overnight success.

SPEAKER_01

Yeah. A lot of hard work, hidden hard work in the background, yes, in order to get there. And so the specific thing that you're solving is the ability to you call it B3B, or tell tell me that name again.

SPEAKER_00

Right. Everyone knows B2B now, which actually also back in 2010. Right, it was all new. There was no B2B. Right. B2C was just coming out, right? You know, or like D2C, direct to consumer was just coming out. You know, Shopify wasn't even really a thing, and Instagram was being made fun of as like the hipster gram, you know, hipsters Facebook. 2010 again. So and then over the 10-year period, you saw all these different innovations come to the market. Um, the platform economy really took shape. And then ultimately B2B happened, or it was just business to business. And we're saying, well, we're taking it a step further, Grovar, where we have not just brands and buyers, B and B, but we've built a system for the broker model too. So you have the brands, the brokers, and the buyers. That's that 3B, maybe it's B to the third power, whatever you want to call it. We just said B3B because uh the copyright and trademark were open. Yeah.

SPEAKER_01

So and so here's let's talk about some of the yeah, let's I can walk through what we're doing here.

SPEAKER_00

This so this is this is a one of our products, Roar. It's a beverage. We can still we can take anything with a barcode. So anything with this barcode right here on it. Okay, could be a Pokemon even. And you got your Pokemon cards, right? Anything with a barcode gets sold in the wholesale market. Okay, and it goes from wholesale to right. Well, it's a hotel.

SPEAKER_01

Those are the pallets. Yeah, selling giant pallets.

SPEAKER_00

Yeah, you get a store, like a supermarket, they're not gonna, they're they're not gonna buy a full run. Like a full run when they go, when they make this, when Roar makes their product, they'll make a minimum of 50,000 bobs, right? I'm just making that number up, but it's about 50,000 bottles on a run. A run being when they hit start, all the ingredients mix, the bottles get filled, and then the run will stop, right? And at the end of the run, you have 50,000 completed SKUs available, ready for sale. They can then now most manufacturing has only a certain amount of line time, which is interesting. Because you think, like, oh, I can just get that anytime, anywhere. No, they can only make so much at a time until they have to get more capital expenditures and grow their factory, you know, the bill that make more, right? But even still, there's only a certain amount of line time. So as a wholesaler, you get access to allocation. So a percentage of that inventory of that 50,000 bottles will then go to a broker or a distributor or a retailer directly, but mainly a broker or distributor first, who then will palletize it and then pick it up, take it to their warehouse, where they then have their trucks, then take it to all the different stores that then buy it. And sometimes you'll have a retailer, we'll have 40 stores, and they'll contract with the distributor, and then that distributor has like weekly fulfillment.

SPEAKER_01

You used to outline domestic production and domestic distribution. Yes. And in your special sauce, your key technology allows a domestic producer to export globally.

SPEAKER_00

So what I just outlined is the first tranche of wholesale domestic wholesale, which we do easy, easily. In fact, that's our bread and butter today. Domestic wholesale. 85% of Gravaro's new business development today is domestic. When we launched, we were a hundred percent export business. Right. Because what because that was our niche. That's where we found a need. And we couldn't, we felt afraid at the time. We didn't have the HUTSPA or the understanding, and we were a little bit intimidated by the domestic distribution channels, which are already pre-established. Third generation. Right. Well defined. It's a relationship-based business, B2B on like direct to consumer. If I go on Amazon, I really don't care what I'm buying at, uh, I'm buying Aurora for. I'm just wondering what's the best price and make sure it's not expired and it's not counterfeit. And that when I buy it, they're actually gonna ship it to me. Right? It's not like that in wholesale. Wholesale is right, handshake. Handshake, looking at you. He's that, that's Kendo, he's got the jacket. Every time he comes to you, always looks sharp. I love that guy. And he pays on time. Right. That's wholesale. Sure. Right? Uh, you know, and like retail, which is again, it's faceless. Wholesale, you're doing a million-dollar transaction with someone, you want to sit down, take them to dinner, and make sure that everything's gonna go smoothly. It's like when you buy a house or a car, sometimes for people, that's the biggest thing they'll do in their life is buy a car or buy put down a down payment on a house. But if your job is in the millions of dollars at a time, you're gonna give that opportunity as much consideration as you would absolutely give buying a house or a car, which is a face-to-face, in-person, big decision way of thinking about it. Sure. And it's scary, it's technical. And you can imagine, I outlined step by step for domestic, you can imagine the additional workflows for going global, for taking this to uh Paraguay or Bahrain, right? Because then you got to get the ingredient panel here stickered, so it's translated into whatever language. And sometimes like words are regulated like vitamins. I might have to put a sticker over the word vitamins with so that because the if it's a vitamin, then in and it's in the Middle East, it needs to go through another whole thing. And before I create a custom packaging that is in my country's language, uh I need to make sure it's gonna sell through first. So the first order, first few container loads need to be a stickered process, which you can imagine. I didn't have to literally, there's no machine that can pick it out, fine lemonade, and put a sticker or vitamins, you know, whatever. It's uh it's a manual human thing. They now have some automation with some robots doing, but even still, I'd say 99% of all fulfillment is still manual. Right in 2026. So, yes, the long end, long-winded answer here. Mike, I'm covering a lot of ground.

SPEAKER_01

I love it. I love it. Go ahead. So when you're talking about specific products, how many products do you have on the platform right now?

SPEAKER_00

Thousands. Thousands of SKUs from all over the world. We have products from like South Africa that we're now selling into Colombia. Not just US to the world anymore or US to US, but world to world. Kind of play that B3B thing that we're trying to play with, which is technical in itself. What flavor do you have there? Man, this is so good. Roar organic strawberry lemonade. Do you like this?

SPEAKER_01

Well, let me let me sample. This is dragon fruit punch.

SPEAKER_00

Yeah, I'm a fan.

SPEAKER_01

It's got a great flavor.

SPEAKER_00

Gluten-free, vegan, keto-friendly. And it's got very low sugar, which I'm really into these days. I'm trying like cut, I'm trying to cut some LBs for the spring. Yeah. So, so um, you know, one gram of sugar for uh um half the bottle. Five percent juice. Locally made in Pennsylvania, I think. I think this is made in Pennsylvania. I know it's actually coming out of Lehigh Valley, the factory. It um brought this to market. But Roar is one of our brands. We also have Pokemon. This is our top-selling product. We're gonna open some packs. Yes. Well, I was what's it called? Ripping packs? We're gonna rip some packs. Now these are special. I want I wanna I want to call this out. These have the Gravara hologram. This is the Gravara hologram, meaning this is an official bona fide punch. There is so much counterfeit Pokemon, Kendall. Millions of dollars of counterfeit Pokemon being sold today in 2026. Billions of cards worldwide, and a lot of it is uh legitimate, but there's certainly a lot of it that's not. These are legitimate packs. These are, you know, they're legitimate because it's got the covariance seal of approval. Yeah. And so uh we go through every single one of our suppliers, making sure they're getting rid of the real deal holy field. We're looking for that Charizard today, aren't we? I don't know what that is, but I'm gonna say yes. I'm gonna play in for some some of these, some of these, some of these cards are worth a fortune, thousands of dollars. The way it works, this is pretty cool. Our packs get 40 cards. Now, Kendall, you need 60 cards to play the game.

SPEAKER_01

Okay.

SPEAKER_00

Okay? And and it's not just 60 random cards. You gotta build your deck.

SPEAKER_02

Okay.

SPEAKER_00

So that's the whole purpose of this. You gotta like, and every card you need, like it's remember like Magic the Gathering or Dungeons and Dragons, you gotta have like your resources cards, your action cards, and then you have some of your collectible cards. Like, look at this shiny holo rare card. Okay. Every one of our packs, you're guaranteed at least one holo rare in your deck. And um, you know, some of the way you'll recognize names. A lot of time we're just selling to dads who just want to shut their kid up in the back seat. So they buy these for the kid, they give it to the kid. The kid's just, oh my god, I got the cat. I love cats. Oh, they can't even read, but they love the cards. Anything uh popping out that you're kind of uh interested in at the moment?

SPEAKER_01

I uh I have to confess I don't know what I'm looking at. Okay, this one's very shiny.

SPEAKER_00

Yeah, well, what do you got there? That's your holo rare. Ooh, a cladle. Is Claydle good? We like Claydle? Could be, could be. I got a Scovillian. I don't know. This guy looks really cool though. You get they have these power cards up here, and you can see if you look on the bottom, it tells you what series it came from. So ours are kind of neat because you can get um these have uh all series from all years. Yeah. It's a collector's pack, and it's just a really random. Um, I don't think I gotta go through and see what you got there, but you get the idea. Certainly. But we're moving millions of dollars of these cards. If you can imagine a tractor trailer going down the road, right? And in that tractor trailer is 40 pallets of cards. Each pallet, uh, you can imagine um uh a container is about six hundred thousand dollars of inventory, all right? And you have all those pallets of uh on there, and each pallet's filled with cases. Each case is 144 packs, and each pack is selling uh retail for about $12, up to $12 per unit. Right. That's a lot of money moving. Sure. So you're moving these things. There's a lot of logistics and compliance. Like even yesterday we had a couple of trucks moving, and we're like, should we get a security truck to drive alongside? Because lately these things have been hijacked. There's like people going out there, organized crime that are around Pokemon. Around Pokemon, around lobsters. I don't know if you saw, but like last week, I think, or it was two weeks ago, uh, $400,000 truck full of lobsters heading to Costco was hijacked. Right. So you have all these common commodities are worth it, you know, they're they're weight and gold in some cases, and they're moving and they're targets. So you gotta make sure everything's covered with insurance, you gotta make sure that you have visibility on the inventory, and then sometimes people do like crazy things in this business where they they'll you'll have a trucker who's having a really bad day and it'll take his aggression out on the product. You can imagine that happening. Sure. Right. And then the product gets delivered, and I get a phone call from someone be like, my card showed up damaged. And I'm like, what? And then you gotta uh rewind the whole trade, you gotta figure out what was damaged, what should he pay for, what should he return, what should I do an insurance claim for? This is a real work. That's my day-to-day.

SPEAKER_01

Yeah. So let's go back because there's one one part of the story that I I wanted to further explore. You made a deliberate decision after going to law school not to go and practice law. Right. You wanted to be an attorney.

SPEAKER_00

Yeah.

SPEAKER_01

Tell me the feedback that your parents had, that your siblings, your sisters gave you. Who did you talk to when you made that decision?

SPEAKER_00

I originally went to undergrad at the University of Miami, and I was uh motion picture marketing major. Okay. Which uh, and like uh, yeah, it was really marketing was my major, motion picture was my minor, but uh I was in the student government and I passed some uh legislation to the combine, give myself my own unique degree, which for accreditation purposes at the time was not favored by the university, but I did it, and I came out, I came home from law school, from undergrad, excuse me, and I was having dinner with my best friend from college from you know Miami and a couple of my high school friends. And one of my friends from high school was like, Well, now, Peter, what are you gonna do with your life? And I was like, I don't know, maybe I'll go to a law school. And she was like, There's you're not smart enough to get a law school. And my best friend was like, Oh, you're gonna take that? And I went out, took the L set, did well enough to get in the Villanova, got in the Villanova, and my Jewish grandmother was like, uh, like like so over the moon about this. And I was talking, I'm like, I don't know, grandma. Because all my friends at the time too were getting into all these tech startups.

SPEAKER_02

Right.

SPEAKER_00

Facebook was on the uptick, social media was a thing, like the internet was having a boom. I'm seeing all my friends, all my tech smart buddies are starting their own things and they're super pumped. And I'm like, I should do what they're doing. I don't want to go back to school for a couple years. Praise, what are you nuts? But my Jewish grandmother was like, no one can take away your education. And that's why I went to law school. And I started at Villanova, and I very quickly found out that it was not meant for me. But the school really did a good job catering towards my entrepreneurial spirit. There's this dean at Villanova, Dean Brogan, Doris Brogan. Oh my God, I owe everything the dean Brogan. She like, she was the one that really pushed me. Yeah. And but and so I didn't want to practice law. And I told her, I'm like, if I the law didn't, she's like, well, then why are you here? I'm like, well, I I can do so much. I go in the politics, uh, I could become an attorney by if I wanted to. Uh then also from like a business perspective, uh, it's like a force multiplier. I can do my own contracts, right? And and it's and my grandmother said, I can always fall back on my education. No one can ever take that away from me. Yeah. He did Brogan was like, well, I'd like, I'd like to, I'd like to foster your innovation. And because at the time, and still to this day, you the law schools have an obligation to make sure that their students don't leave, transfer, or drop out because there's a bar passage rate.

SPEAKER_01

As a as a key performance indicator for the school.

SPEAKER_00

Yes, and as part of your rankings. So Villanova at the time was like really competitive. Drexel had just launched their law school and had poached a bunch of professors from the area to launch their program. And Villob was just worried about their their standing and all the so much to it. As Nadine Brogan was like, I don't want you dropping out, kid. But I was I was bottom 10% of the class. And so she um is that because you weren't interested? I was too busy um coming up with business ideas, and I was distracted. I was so interested. But I also know these are the smartest kids, these are lawyers as students.

SPEAKER_02

Right.

SPEAKER_00

I was a motion picture marketing kid at the University of Miami, where my main degree was football and loving life with my friends at Miami, right? So so I'm now in law school with like these top of their class from Notre Dame. And I I was very active on Miami's campus. So I'd like I was in every pro student government and fraternal life and and club. I was very active. To this day, I had now, if you go to the student government office in Miami, my name's on the door. Yeah. It's kind of cool. Yeah, that's neat. Yes. So you have um, that's what got me into Villanova. I had a good L set, decent LSAT, but I was nowhere close to my best friend in law school who had like a 178. You know, my other friends are like 165, they're like top 10%. You get your ranking in in the schools, and I was I was towards the the bottom tier. But Sadim Brogan gave me the ability to launch a business in the class instead of having hypothetical cases with the students. The professors, several of the professors incorporated Tab Inco, my business idea, into the curriculum. And that allowed me the ability to then channel my innovation, build a business with my peers and my professors, and get course credit.

SPEAKER_02

Yeah.

SPEAKER_00

And so then my parents, I wanna thought I was crazy at the same time. Uh, if you know my family, there's just it's just an entrepreneurial lineage. Um, and my dad is like, I don't want to say as distracted as I am, but he sees opportunity and knows how to convert it into value.

SPEAKER_01

So let's talk about your your dad and your your father's business career. Yeah. How that has impacted you.

SPEAKER_00

Great. Yeah. So my dad, when I was growing up, my dad had a box factory in West Philadelphia, like 5610 Lancaster Avenue. Boa's Box Factory. Amazing factory. Giant old World War II manufacturing building on Lancaster Avenue, right in Overbrook, uh, right next to Overbrook Plaza. And the the building would make corrugated boxes and gift boxes. So, like if you go to Gap and you buy a shirt and they put in that box with the tissue paper and has that hot stamped silver gap on the top. My dad would have machines that would take a giant reel of paper the size of this room with these like cores, like these real thick like cores made of like heavy-duty paper. And this, and they pick them up on a forklift and they'd put them in the machine, they'd feed the paper into the machine, the machine would run the paper down this whole assembly line and would stamp, crank, move, and stack, and humans stacking these things up and wrapping them, and then you would then could fold these boxes that then they could present at the checkout line at Gap or the Children's Company, all these different stores. So that was kind of neat being able to walk the floor. He was CEO of the company, president of the company, it was his business. I got to walk the floor with him. Uh, and I really grew up there every summer working in the factory, helping my dad. If I got sick, I went to the factory for the day and sat in my dad's office, had like a little corner with a couple games, and and got to really shadow him through my life, which was really encouraging. His hobby was always antiques. So we had thrift stores and antique shops, and he would do estate sales. And so I got to see uh every Sunday, he had an antique shop in Lancaster, Pennsylvania, at uh Black Angus Antiques or and Reninger's Antiques, two flea markets and um uh antique centers. I'd go with him every Sunday. And before he would open his shop, we'd get there early and we walk the floor. And you and you go outside, and there's all these vendors who had their tables and their booths, and we'd see stuff, and he had his own little collections. I have batons of my own collections of things, and I learned how to haggle and negotiate and really barter with people. And as a kid, I learned early on I could get away with a lot more because I was a cute kid who had an interest in collecting things and I had my own money, and I was and I he had his his antique uh shop and I had like my own little corner where I could then sell stuff, and people would occasionally come over and be like, How much for the PES dispenser? And my dad, like, Peter. And I come over as like a nine-year-old kid and go, $26. And they go, $26? I'll give you $15. They go, $20, and they give me $20. And so that was really a cool, forced, uh, interactive uh business negotiation at a young age that really conditioned my appreciation for um finding value and creating value. Sure.

SPEAKER_01

Do you think that that tying with your father um is uh what led you to the ability to close major deals, raise $7 million, uh start the business?

SPEAKER_00

Absolutely. That we contributed to it. My grandfather was equally as entrepreneurial-minded. He had a Robinson Alarm Company in Philadelphia, which is actually wants something really interesting. Sure. Some more props for you. My my grandfather had an alarm company called Robin. Now it's so interesting. Originally, his father uh they were all in, they were in involved in some way of with bootlegging in like the prohibition era.

unknown

Right.

SPEAKER_00

And they were like supplying, uh, they were either doing the financing or supplying the alcohol and booze to Philadelphia locations and Atlantic City.

SPEAKER_01

Yeah.

SPEAKER_00

It was like something straight out of like boardwalk and yeah, there's like an HBO show about that. About some Jews out of Philly running. I think I've seen that. Right. Now, somehow, not saying it's my family, but there's some connection and some capacity. Okay. No question. And so when things became legitimized, my grandfather had all these relationships with people who need still needed security. And it was right around the time when people were getting phones in their homes. Which you think about everyone has a phone in their home. No, it back in like the 20s and 30s, it wasn't. You were a somebody if you had your own line. Your own and you didn't have your line. You had party lines where you had like an operator assist. And the whole thing was kind of crazy. Let's see if I can find this picture. But yesterday I was walking down the road, and and my grandfather's like really, really um, really into branding for the so he so he he had all these relationships with people needed security. The phone line was getting installed at in people's homes, and he turned to home alarm. There was no home alarm automated home alarm. You had to have a switchboard and you had all this stuff. And so he owned the Robinson building in uh in Center City, and he it was Central Station. Um, right now it's like it's where uh right across from the Oyster House. And was it 15th and Sansome or 14th and Sansome? That used to be the Robinson building. And there's that parking garage there. That garage was filled with all of his trucks, so the security trucks. And he had like the the the Liberty Bell had an alarm and all the casinos he did, everything from Philly to Atlantic City, Robinson alarm coming. And even to this day, you can still see. I walked by yesterday, this was on uh one of the buildings, the old, the old stickers still on a building.

SPEAKER_01

Oh, that's great. We'll have to show that.

SPEAKER_00

We will. But what's kind of and they're still around. If you go to the Mother Museum, you still see a Robinson alarm sticker.

SPEAKER_01

Yeah.

SPEAKER_00

Now, truth be told, that number doesn't go anywhere. This is just a decoy. But that was one of his innovations was the idea of now that you have an alarm system, tell people you have an alarm system. So he had a novel, really cool logo, kind of scary. And then if whether you had an alarm or not, you wanted the sticker because someone's gonna think twice. Right. And that was really neat. So seeing those types of like again, outside the box, thinking, um, you know, coming from my dad's side, my mom's side, uh, all over the place was like very innovative in conditioning my growth as an entrepreneur. I love it. It's a lot.

SPEAKER_01

Sorry. I love it. Thank you for that. Nice. Um, so let's fast forward. You've started Gravara. Yeah. Um, there was uh a major raise. You tested a ton a number of different uh assumptions, you finally figured out what's working. Um, you're now selling Pokemon and thousands of other other products. Where do you see the business going?

SPEAKER_00

Yeah, great question. Alibaba is what I'm modeling the company after. Because it's a very strong statement. Because it's one of the biggest companies on the planet. But I'm probably the only American you've met who's ripped off a Chinese company and brought it to America, right? You always hear about the Chinese ripping off the Americans. I'm ripping off Jack Ma's business plan. Alibaba, there's the parent co, and then underneath Alibaba, he's got T Mall, he's got Ali Pay, Ali Logistics, all these different sub-entities. And we're doing the same exact thing. I'm literally just copying his model. We'll have our whole financial crowbar, G G whatever the heck, what do you call it? Like G Finance or GPay, right? You're gonna have our direct-to-consumer business, like our T Mall equivalent, uh, whatever you want to call that. Um, you're gonna have um uh uh you know our service house, our marketing support and services, you know, creating content. Yeah, so you have all these different sub-entities over the next 36 months.

SPEAKER_01

Is it really a technology company?

SPEAKER_00

100%. Yeah, tech drives everything, especially in 2026. The AI is driving everything.

SPEAKER_01

How are you using AI in the business?

SPEAKER_00

Um my god, it's so cool. Everywhere you can use uh technology in 2026, uh we're using AI. From A to Z. Put this in perspective. The company is doing better today in 2026 with a headcount of 10 than we were doing in 2023 with a headcount of 34. How come?

SPEAKER_01

Are they more efficient? Is that what I'm hearing?

SPEAKER_00

A couple things. Yes, they're more efficient, and the technology is automating all the things. Before, if I wanted to put reviews on all the different brands' pages, I had to manually add reviews to every single page. Now we have an AI agent scraping all the reviews off the internet, aggregating those reviews, and automatically while I'm sleeping. It reminds me of Men in Black when they open up the mailbox and there's that octopus-looking thing going like this with all the mail. That is what is replaced now the average employee at our business and in our model. So AI, and like even for me now, it's so easy. Like I have all these I've I wake up, I have like 400 messages of like of different conversations and orders where people are communicating and they're asking me a question. And I just go click, click, click, click, click, just an AI button, and it automatically puts replies for me. I just double check, make sure all the replies are good, and then I click, click, send, send, send, send, send. And 90% of what they say is accurate, or what I should say, because now the AI is trained up on my voice and how I talk and how the team talks, and it reviews all the conversations and it goes to the websites to see more about them and Googles them to see what other news or things are that it should know in its response that's relevant to the business and the deal specifically. And it can also um trigger flags and excuse me, flag deals that need stronger physical touch or personal touch than other deals that are can be more automated. Yeah. So, and then all the compliance and the regulatory and all of it now is just becoming much more streamlined. We can now make a promo video. So if we get interest from a retailer for our smart glasses, right? We get interest for our smart glasses uh from a big retailer, we can now create a video for that retailer within 24 hours. Well, what have taken three months and cost $100,000 in a private shoot we can now do in 24 hours for under $1,000, all because of AI. So A to Z really is how we're using incorporating the AI into the model. And it's uh it's um it's really encouraging. It's also, I think, in my opinion, with AI, it's kind of a land grab. You can really get swaths if you can hop into a niche and be the first to put the AI into the niche, you can really own a niche and really create huge barriers to entry for other people to try and break it and catch up. Yeah. Because always be there always gonna be a couple steps behind if you're at the at the forefront and you're doing it smart.

SPEAKER_01

Yeah. Um what advice would you have for an entrepreneur or a person that's looking to start a business? If you had to go back and and have a conversation with yourself before you launched Gravara a decade ago. What would you say?

SPEAKER_00

The hardest part in business, in my opinion, is first off getting capital. Because if you're always chasing capital, then you're always going to be distracted from the business. And there's different advice that I would give to me in 2010 than I would give to a person who's starting a business today. Okay. What do you want to know?

SPEAKER_01

Let's let's keep it generic. What advice would you have for someone else?

SPEAKER_00

Today.

SPEAKER_01

Today.

SPEAKER_00

Start.

SPEAKER_01

Just get after it.

SPEAKER_00

Yes. Uh, that's the first thing I would recommend. Second thing is be careful who you work with. Because business partners can be very exciting, but they can also be big distractions. And your reputation is tied to who you work with. Right. And if you could do everything right in the whole world, everything right in the whole world. And then your business partner's having a bad day and he says something to the wrong guy at the wrong time, and it's going to jeopardize you and your relationship and make you look bad. And once you lose someone's trust or someone loses respect, it's very hard to get it back.

SPEAKER_02

Yeah.

SPEAKER_00

So you want to make sure that you who you work with is the right person. Um, and lastly, you got to make sure let me interrupt for a second.

SPEAKER_01

Would that advice also apply if you were speaking to young Peter before launching Gruvara the first time?

SPEAKER_00

Yes. Because at the time, first of all, grow grow the way I saw it was I was very ambitious, obviously, and very optimistic and very tr over trusting in many ways. Yeah. Because and like I gave a lot of people a chance to try and help. Because at the time, again, people needed help. I'm like, I can help start a company, I can help bring my friends in who also are looking for work, or other people I know I meet that are recommended from other friends and people and bring them in, and then we could all work together and it'd be great. You know, it takes a village to build a B3B trading platform. Sure. I'm smart enough. No, I can't do it alone. At the beginning, you only have so much you can give away. And 100% seems like a lot of equity. So let's split it up and find the right team to help bring this to market. But then, like, people get married, people get sick, people fall out of love with the business, people fall out of love with you, or even you fall in love with them, or people do things that piss you off. We had early on one of the people that we co-founded the business with, um, he was in charge of the samples policy. When we bring a brand on board, they send us samples and we take those and we break them down into little sample boxes with handwritten personal notes and we ship them to the buyers. And the buyers get it, and the buyers tell us that they like it or they don't like it, and that's a sampling process. It's a whole process in itself. So the idea here really is um, you know, it's a it's a it's something that needs a lot of oversight. We get all these brands involved and they send us all their samples, and I start traveling to Costa Rica and Panama and all these countries. I meet with people selling, bringing product with me and selling. And then I have a big trip plan to go to like one of these big trade shows, and I tell the sample guy I need this, this, this, and this, because the buyers are interested in in all of those and and whatever whatever marketing materials you have. And the guy was like, Well, I have all the marketing materials, but we don't have any inventory on hand. Why don't we have inventory on hand? I drank and ate it all. And I went, What, what you know, because he didn't value. It was just like, oh, okay, all right, we got samples. Let's let's use it, let's try them out. And then he had friends come over, and his friends and friends would come over. And then they didn't, there was no inventory controls at the time because we just started the business and it stutter stepped my trip. I didn't, I did everything right. I sap the buyers meeting, I got them interested. I went to the country in in some cases, and and it, you know, that step one, before you're gonna buy fifty thousand dollars or something, you want to try it. Maybe you don't have anything to offer them to try it. And then imagine how much of an asshole I look like when I had to call the company about like, hey, can you send us another wrap of samples?

SPEAKER_01

Send us more.

SPEAKER_00

And like, well, what happened to the first round we sent you? Like, oh, our business partner ate them all. I'm not gonna tell them that, but I'm like, uh what do I say, right? The unforeseen consequence of being a CEO. And the last part is if you have the more people you have, you think logically that it's uh more business is gonna get done. But actually, what and what I discovered is I had more people I had, the more conversations, the more opinions, and the more distractions. And it was just like more opportunities for things to go wrong, opposed to the right. And so that was uh a death blow to the business in many regards. Or again, start a step the company's trajectory. Sure.

SPEAKER_01

Um how do you deal with the misalignment of the team members? Because in my what I'm what I'm hearing right there, right, was either a lack of a standard operating procedure, it just wasn't defined, or a lack of clarity on goals and vision for the business, because the employee who maybe had no malintent but made a mistake or operated outside of what the expectations were of obviously the company that supplied the product wasn't expecting your team to consume it. So there's a misalignment there. Um how do you deal with that when it comes to leadership as a CEO?

SPEAKER_00

You know, one of the roles that a leader plays is disciplinarian. And there's a fine line between being a good leader and being an asshole. And you have to really learn that. I'll give a good example. And and there's a lot of uh risk in being a leader, of course, obviously. But one of the biggest risks is going against a court key member who's steadfast in their opinion and making sure that you listen to yourself. The last thing I do, when I go to bed at night, I go to bed, I sleep great. Because I'm like a stubborn, and and my intuition, I I've learned to trust my intuition, which early on it takes time and a career to learn to trust or intuition. Because you have so life is built for no. No, no, don't touch that, don't pick that up, put that down. Uh, what are you thinking? No, no. That is what life is about, and it's learning boundaries. And just because someone's one person's boundary is one way doesn't necessarily make it right, and also doesn't make it uh uh advantageous for yourself. It might be advantageous for them. So early in 2016, six years into the business. I'm handing my head against the wall because we're not making money. The technology's not built. Oh well, I've Jimmy rigged this whole system, I've like Dropbox, I have an SOP, all this stuff. And also that's the other part. SOPs don't become SOPs without first having to be stress tested and A B tested and figuring out if you're inventing a new category. Like before us, no one was exporting natural food and beverages manufacturing in the U.S. So we're first to market. So we're inventing the entire process. Like Steve Jobs in 2001, when he was like, every single MP3 is gonna cost 99 cents, regardless of who wrote it, how long it is, how short it is, uh, or where it's from. That that took that was a risk to say that the world will adopt 99 cents as the standard price for for music. Right? That was crazy. Because at the time it didn't work like that. So now he took a risk. But then for a decade at least, it became that's how much a song costs.

SPEAKER_02

Right.

SPEAKER_00

In 2016, I was hitting my head against the wall. I'm like, God damn, this gotta make more money. And we had the team at the time, and I went and we had a morning stand-up. I said, guys, I hate this. We gotta work smarter, not harder. Like, well, what are you thinking, Peter? I'm like, I'm thinking we charge brands an onboarding fee to get into our catalog. They laughed.

unknown

Ha!

SPEAKER_00

What are you talking about, dude? Peter, no one's gonna pay the PR catalog. Why not? We're doing all the heavy lifting. It seems common sense today. It's like, duh, you're doing all this work. But back then, no one was exporting. And exporting was just a complimentary sale that Grover was gonna handle for us, and Grovar was gonna handle for us. So there's no value in that. Good luck, kid. If you don't do it, I'm not gonna do it. So, but I was like, no, we're doing too much work. They gotta start paying us. They're not taking us seriously. Should take us seriously. We're doing all this work to them. We're not taking us seriously. And I'm like, and I'm like, when I grew up, if I bought a lacrosse stick, I had more value for that lacrosse stick than my parents bought it for me. Yeah. Right? Because I worked far hard for it. And I went even that, and Josh Coplin talked to me early on, and I learned from him that even if someone has just one dollar of skin in the game, they're gonna take you more seriously. They'll answer your call, they'll they'll they'll they'll they'll get you more respect than if they um if you they gave it to you for free. And so um 2016, I say this to the team, they laugh. Hang, I get out of the meeting, and I was like, God damn. This is before Zoom, before all the G chats. It was literally a phone conference, free conferencecall.com team meeting in the morning. And I and I called, you know, Chris Myers. I don't. He's like an old Philly advisor, you have another advisor friend. Get a good advisor, that's my other really good advice for someone starting a business. But I call Chris. Chris, I tell him a story. I'm like, I think brands will pay to be in our catalog. But the team says, I'm crazy. What do I do? He's like, Peter, is there any brand out there that you just don't care about? I'm like, yeah, I got like a whole book of brands. He's like, find a brand that you don't care about, call them up, and see if you can sell them. So I was like, all right, I thought it was smart. I came up with an idea, $5,000 up front to join our catalog. And if we don't do $50,000 in sales in that first 12 months, your second year is free. And for $5,000 you can get in your catalog. And I open up this book, and the very first page, I will scroll down to the random page, and it said, very sleepy. B-R-R-Y sleepy, very, very sleepy. It was a tart cherry extract pill that you take and helps you fall asleep faster. Okay. What a piece of crap product in my head. No offense. It ended up exiting for millions of dollars and did very, very well. But in my head, I'm like, I would never buy that, and it seems like a random thing. I called the phone number. What do you believe the CEO picked up? And he, I told him who I am, what I'm doing. We can handle your international. He's like, oh my God, absolutely. I have a book of cards from trade shows of international leads I haven't followed up with. Uh what's your deal? How do you work? I'm like, $5,000 up front. That's your first year. We don't do $50,000 in that first year. Your second year is free. He was like, that's it? Where do I where am I sending the money? Kid, send me a contract. Hung up the phone, drafted the contract. He signed it that day, overnight me a check. And on the two days later, I picked up the phone and I got in the free conference call in the morning meeting. The call starts off, and I was like, hey guys. And I told him what I did. And I depos I deposit the check in the account. I said, check the account. And they check the account. They go, Where the what the fuck is Barry sleepy? And I'm like, I'm like, that's our and I send them the contract. And it's like an awkward pause on the phone. Like, what the fuck did Grove gonna do? What the fuck is five? What the fuck? And what do you think they said?

SPEAKER_01

I I think that that they probably would then completely buy in that that uh you were right.

SPEAKER_00

You would think that, wouldn't you? I would hope so. No. They said, Where did you get five thousand dollars from? Why didn't you charge him more? And in my head, I was like, what an asshole statement.

unknown

But yeah.

SPEAKER_00

And I called Chris Myers up. I was like, I told him exactly what happened. He's like, exactly. And so, like, my point again being like everyone has an opinion, but you got to follow that intuition, and you also have to figure out you can stress test things, and like you can treat your business in some regard like a laboratory. And then, you know, it's not always gonna work. Uh, and when it does work, there's gonna be a been a lot of people who said it wasn't worth the time, but in actuality, it wasn't worth the time for them because they they didn't know how to do what I was able to do. Yeah, which then I if you think about it, I go back to law school and drafting my own contracts, sure, and uh having the ingenuity to think about a guarantee based on a certain threshold of sales volumes. These are common sense, non-obvious, intuit, intuitive things that have all been part of the happenstance of my uh entrepreneurial rise.

SPEAKER_01

And I would imagine you could probably even draw it a step before that, where the ability, the conf the confidence that you have to cold call a CEO or to call a CEO and haggle about a $5,000 charge to get in the platform, the origin of that confidence came from haggling at a flea market with your dad. Totally. What advice would you have for my daughters? Uh uh 11 and 12 years old. Are they gonna watch this? I would hope so. Well, we're we might have to bleep out some of the foul language.

SPEAKER_00

Oh, snap.

SPEAKER_01

It's not as if they haven't heard it before.

SPEAKER_00

Oh, just try to keep it honest. Honest and real. Sure. My advice Pokemon. Pokemon. Yeah, gotta get them all. Gotta get them all. Shameless, shameless blog. Tell your dad to buy a tractor trailer of Pokemon's. Always be sorry. Always uh what won't my advice be a be it's such a great time to be a female entrepreneur. Yeah, why? First off, um, in 2010 was really when Shark Tank came out. It's kind of interesting that you think about before 2010, when you told someone you were going to be an entrepreneur, that first of all was taboo. You sound like a crazy person.

SPEAKER_01

Yeah. There's that line in social media where he's like, oh, I'm an entrepreneur, and they say, Oh, that means you're unemployed.

SPEAKER_00

Right. It was a joke. But then what happened in 2010? Shark Tank came out. And Mark Cuban's up there talking about entrepreneurs, valuation, and women are coming on with their products, and it became like female empowerment. And because it really was. I talked about my grand great-grandfather, my grandfather. Those days, if you're a woman in the office, uh, if if you were anyone of power for the most part, um you had a very difficult time. You faced harassment in the workplace on the regular. And that was common and that was acceptable. Whether it's a hard pill to the swallow or not, that's what happened. Or you were a secretary, and you were equally as um. There was a lot of derogatory language thrown around in the workplace, and women weren't given level playing field. Many universities and uh schools didn't even allow women. Some today still don't allow women. 2026, boys only, women only. You know, and that's okay. And I think there's nothing wrong with it. I'm just saying it was really, really bad for female entrepreneurs. And uh you think about how far society's come and now the incentives are huge. There's a lot of female uh founded funds that are looking for you. And well, it doesn't matter what age you are. In fact, if you're younger, the better. If you're a young go-getter, and you can we have a couple entrepreneurs that I've seen who are like young teenagers who start a GoFundMe. And next thing you know, they got a check from one of the sharks for $10 million. And they're on TV. And then next, and you know, so whether or not they stick with it or not, uh, it it becomes a certain large part of their identity. Um, so I would I would keep that in mind that and us the SBA and all the public assistance for female, uh for women entrepreneurship. You've had a lot of success with the SBA. Yes. The government has done great things for my business. We would be nothing without Ben Franklin Technology Partners, the SBA, um, uh the the World Trade Center, the Foreign Agricultural Service, the Commerce Department. There's so much public assistance. Your tax dollars actually really do support innovation in our country, which most countries people don't have. You know, you think about it, I forget what the percentage is to be an American. I think it's like under 8% of all humanity can identify as American. And you forget about that because we live in America. But as a female entrepreneur in 2026 in America, you are given a red carpet that has never been offered before. And you combine that with the innovations with AI and the new age technologies, which have decreased the cost of starting a business. And there is, again, the quote John Hickenlooper, Sander John Hickenlooper, no shortage of opportunity.

SPEAKER_01

Yeah. I think that's a beautiful positive note to end on. Nice. Thank you so much for coming on and having this discussion with us. Where can people find you online?

SPEAKER_00

Grovara.com, g-r-o-v-ar-a.com, or you can just go to the Growdega podcast on YouTube, Instagram, LinkedIn, Spotify, and all that. I think we're coming soon on TikTok. Growdega. This is my podcast. You're gonna come on my podcast? I'd love to. Oh, I'd love to. I would be honored. Are we gonna rip some more Pokemon packs? Yeah, we gotta find that. That I gotta teach a little bit more about the deck.

SPEAKER_01

Uh, like, comment, subscribe. We want to hear from you. Talk to us about what you like. Um, we're here for you. Come with us on this journey. Thank you.