I didn’t get through my usual podcast queue this week, I’ll admit. Between wandering around NYC, playing Backgammon and Mancala in the Hamptons, and my latest hyperfixation (read: needlepoint), I was booked and busy.
But, the few podcasts I did squeeze in were good ones. Three stories of companies we all know and love, with stories that remind you every “overnight success” is anything but.
1. Founders: The Marketing Genius of the Michelin Brothers
While I may have hit play for the Michelin stars, the tire story is just as iconic.
The Michelin brothers, Edouard and Andre, inherited a failing factory in the 1880s and turned it into one of the most influential brands in the world. Edouard didn’t know how to work with rubber, while Andre didn’t know how to sell tires (mostly because no one was buying them yet).
But they knew how to learn. And they knew how to win.
From the start, the Michelin brothers were relentlessly resourceful. Incredibly smart, obsessed with quality, secretive, and aggressive. They cut every unprofitable product and focused on what worked. At the time, that meant rubber brake pads for horse-drawn carriages. But they weren’t interested in clinging to a dying industry. They were betting on the future.
First came bicycles. Their early insight? Make tires easy to remove so they’re easier to repair. Then came the bigger leap: cars.
Their next challenge wasn’t just selling tires but creating demand for them. And if tires wear down the more people move, then their job was to get people moving.
So they built the conditions for success: more driving → more movement → more wear → more tire sales.
That idea would ultimately lead them to publish the Michelin Guide: a handbook to promote road trips, complete with maps, hotels, restaurants, and more. And yes, the Michelin Stars were born out of that guide:
⭐️ A good meal, worth stopping for
⭐⭐ Excellent, worth a detour
⭐⭐⭐ One of the best tables in France, worth the trip
The brilliance? Michelin made the destination the reason to wear down your tires. And they gave the guide away for free for twenty years. Because it wasn’t a side hustle. It was the marketing strategy.
And it worked. When Andre created excitement, Edouard had the product to back it up. And when Edouard built something new, Andre had already built the world to welcome it.
All in all, they didn’t wait for the market to catch up. Instead, they paved the road for it (pun intended).
2. The Room Podcast: Partiful
Live from NY Tech Week, The Room Podcast sat down with Shreya, co-founder of Partiful: the social events platform that took over your calendar. Named Google’s Best App of 2024, Partiful was born out of one big question: why is it so hard to hang out with your friends?
Shreya didn’t grow up dreaming of entrepreneurship. She was raised in Texas, later moved to suburban Florida, and ended up at Princeton studying politics by way of a short-lived mechanical engineering major (turns out physics and partying don’t mix).
She stumbled into entrepreneurship by making a list of what she wanted in her next job and realizing it didn’t exist. So, she built it. The problem she couldn’t stop thinking about? Social isolation.
She teamed up with her co-founder Joy, an exceptional engineer who also cared about building a company with the same set of values as her and the two closed their first funding round in March 2020 (talk about timing).
They built for 18 months without being able to test, but what they did do was obsess over removing friction: launching without an app, leaning into SMS, and staying insanely lean (they had seven people when they raised their Series A).
Shreya’s favorite thing about starting early: no one cares. You can launch something bad. You can try things. You get to learn before you scale.
Partiful now has over 2 million users in 2025 alone, but they still haven’t thrown up a paywall. Why? Because if you start charging before you understand what people really want, you miss the opportunity to learn. Plus, “you shouldn’t have to pay to hang out with your friends.”
The platform is now integrated with things like Instacart, but monetization has always taken a back seat to growth. Especially when your TAM is “literally everyone.”
Partiful’s whole thesis is built on belonging, on the power of the friend-of-a-friend flywheel. In a world of algorithmic entertainment and social media drift, they’re unbundling the noise.
Now, the question is: what happens when your calendar shifts from house parties to weddings and baby showers? Shreya’s thinking about that too. How do we build tools for connection at every stage of life? How do we grow the engine of friendship alongside the people using it?
The vision isn’t just to make party planning easier. It’s to build an infrastructure for real-world community, from your first rager to your kid’s first birthday. And honestly? We’re rooting for it.
3. How I Built This: Talenti
Before Talenti was the best-selling gelato brand in the country, before the signature clear pint and incredibly successful exit, it was just one guy in Dallas.
Josh Hochschuler moved to Buenos Aires right after graduating from Boston University in 1996. He had no money, no job, and also didn’t speak Spanish. He taught English to pay the bills and spent his afternoons wandering the city, falling hard for its cafes, culture, and most of all, its gelato.
This wasn’t your average scoop. Argentinian gelato is rich, low in air, and dense in flavor. What Italian gelato used to be, before it got commercialized. Josh couldn’t stop thinking about it.
When he moved back to the States, he realized no one was eating gelato. And he missed Argentina enough to build it. So, at 28, he took his dad’s advice: “the best time to start something is before you have a mortgage and a family.” Josh would then raise $600K and open the first Talenti shop in Dallas in 2003.
Summers were incredible, but the winters were brutal. The average sale was under $2, and customers weren’t buying pints to take home. The shop was big, the overhead was bigger, and retail life was thankless. After two years, he shut it down. It felt like failure. He had to lay off his team, including his wife.
But he didn’t give up. Instead, he moved into a warehouse and pivoted to wholesale. He made gelato to order (yes, any flavor a chef could dream up) and delivered it himself. He did $175K in sales the first year, acting as CEO, janitor, delivery driver, and more.
Things started to turn. One account led to another. He got into Costco, then Whole Foods. The signature clear pint? Inspired by a container he saw at a trade show in Italy. Even still, the business was shaky and debt was piling up. Josh started feeling like he was in over his head and needed help. He was looking for both capital and experience.
Through a friend, he connected with the founders of Belvedere Vodka, Eddie Phillips and Steve Gill. They invested $1M, bought out the original storefront investors, and joined the journey. Steve eventually took over operations and brought structure and scale.
Together, they got Talenti into Publix, after promising $500K in radio ads, then Kroger. By 2013, they hit $95M in sales. That’s when Unilever came calling.
At first, Josh said no. He didn’t want to sell. But after 18 months of conversations and a conversation with his dad about “taking some chips off the table,” he finally said yes. They closed the deal, and by 2016, Talenti was doing $245M a year. It was the number one gelato brand in the US.
These days, Josh has a ranch, five kids, and runs Green Acres Nursery & Supply. He’s traded pints for plants, a new hobby that began in the pandemic. A happy ending, all around.
As always, you can find all the podcasts mentioned on trust me on this linked here.
More soon,
Taylor
P.S. Curious about the Diddy verdict? The Daily did a great deep dive with Jodi Kantor.