OPERATORS

What happens when your bank promises you $20 million, strings you along for a year, and then rips it all away the same week you need it most?  
Sean Frank (CEO, Ridge) and Matt Bertulli (CEO, Pela Case & Lomi) sit down with Curtis Matsko (CEO, Portland Leather Goods) for a raw conversation about how ecommerce brands fund growth. 
Curtis shares one of the most gut-punch founder stories in Operators history. Wells Fargo promised him a $20–25M line of credit, demanded $2M back overnight, and nearly killed Portland Leather Goods at the exact moment he had ~$14M tied up in a brand expansion. He survived a year of not paying suppliers, negotiating week-to-week, and somehow came out more profitable than before.
The three dig into the real math of affording growth without investors. Why it’s “impossible, but you have to do it anyway,” how supplier relationships are the single best source of working capital leverage, and why the cash conversion cycle will break your business if your margins aren’t right.  
They close with one of the most important warnings for early operators — stop counting revenue, start counting what’s left. 
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What do you do when you’ve already won, and still can’t stop building?  
Sean Frank and Matthew Bertulli sit down with Mike Beckham, (CEO of Simple Modern and Simple Ventures), to unpack what happens after you climb the mountain. Mike shares how Simple Modern grew from a bootstrapped “Yeti knockoff” to nearly $200M in annual revenue, paid off all its debt, and suddenly found itself generating more cash than it could reinvest — and what he decided to do about it.  
The conversation covers Mike’s framework for capital allocation when the obvious moves run out, including why he launched electrolyte brand Trevi (and what the $2–3M learning curve actually bought him), how Simple Ventures is building a portfolio of lean, AI-powered businesses with single-threaded leaders, and why Mike believes now is the single best moment in history to be a builder.
From the counterintuitive case for being 13th in a massive market, to rewiring your brain around what AI makes possible, to why physical goods aren’t going anywhere — this one goes deep.  
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Special episode on what billions in recent ecommerce exits, raises, and M&A mean for your brand. 
Curtis Matsko (CEO, Portland Leather Goods) joins hosts Matt Bertulli (CEO, Pela Case & Lomi) and Mike Beckham (CEO, Simple Modern) to dig into the wave of consumer deals. They debate whether strategic buyers and PE firms are truly back, why physical consumer brands are suddenly looking like the safest asset class, and what it takes to build something worth acquiring. 
The conversation covers LTV math behind consumables to TikTok shop’s role in driving $200K days at Portland Leather Goods. It explores how to build a durable brand using first principles in a chaotic macro environment defined by tariffs and AI disruption. The speakers also dive into why omnichannel presence is now essential for a premium exit, and reveal the single most important question every founder must answer before taking their first step. 
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“If you become really good at harnessing that data, AI can let you not only predict the future, but create it.”
Jenna Habayeb (President of Posh Peanut) sits down with Jason Panzer (President of HexClad) and honorary Operator’s co-host Cherene Aubert. Together, they unpack what modern ecommerce leadership looks like at every stage. Jenna brings a rare arc — from Ogilvy to Chief Brand Officer at Ipsy, where she helped grow the business from $300M to $1B, through a CRO role at Ruggable, and now her first president role at Posh Peanut.  
Discover the “forgotten community flywheel” and how a 250,000-person Facebook group drives real revenue. The conversation moves on to why most companies are further behind on data infrastructure than they’d like to admit — and why AI, layered on top of a clean data warehouse, is changing what’s possible.
They also get into the evolution of the CMO role, managing teams up a mountain without losing your humanity, and the mental shift required when you go from marketer to president.  
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“We had no cash, no supply chain, high product market fit, and low CAC. There was this giant button flashing: hyper growth.”  
What does it take to build a profitable pet brand from a studio apartment to a nine-figure business with its own factory?  
Russell Breuer (Co-Founder and CEO, Spot & Tango) joins hosts Sean Frank (CEO, Ridge) and Mike Beckham (CEO, Simple Modern) to trace the full arc of building one of DTC’s most quietly dominant pet brands. Russell shares how Spot & Tango launched Unkibble days into COVID with nearly no cash, sold out in three days, and then had to resist pressing the hyper-growth button without inventory to back it up. 
The conversation gets deep into the math of subscription growth — payback windows, LTV by channel, contribution margin, and why Russell’s kids know what a CAC is. They cover the contrarian decision to build a dedicated factory, how vertical integration added 30-plus margin points and created a competitive moat, the trade-offs of going omnichannel when you’re profitable DTC, and why discipline is what separates brands that last.
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