In this episode of the Startup Foundations Podcast, host Greg Miaszkiewicz interviews Jude Gomila, the CEO and founder of Golden, a startup that maps the world’s knowledge. Jude, a serial entrepreneur who previously sold HazeApp for $45 million, explains how Golden moved from a Series A round to landing its first paying customers despite operating in a nascent market with few direct competitors. He outlines the strategic constraints that shape Golden’s product—public topic pages, high‑margin, repeatable revenue, large ARR, and low churn—and how these constraints guided the identification of target customer segments such as information‑service providers (Thomson Reuters, Bloomberg, PitchBook, Crunchbase), consulting firms, expert‑network platforms like GLG, and CRM systems (Salesforce, Affinity). Jude describes a rigorous customer‑discovery process involving extensive interviews, trial deployments, and iterative feedback loops that helped surface resonant features and align the product architecture with the company’s long‑term mission. He likens successful models to “gravity wells” that pull the business toward the right market fit. The conversation concludes with Jude’s reflections on the importance of building a market for a product category that does not yet exist and the value of learning from innovative customers.
Chapters
Hello, founders and entrepreneurs. Welcome to the Startup Foundations Podcast. I'm your host, Greg Miaszkiewicz, and today on the show, I speak with Jude Gomila, who is CEO and founder of Golden, a startup mapping the world's knowledge. Jude is a serial entrepreneur who sold his last company, HazeApp, for $45 million to Fiverr in 2015. In addition, he's a prolific angel investor who has invested hundreds of startups over the years. In our conversation, we discussed Jude's journey as an entrepreneur and investor. Cool. And so now you've raised the Series A for Golden and you have your first paying customers. Like, how did you go about getting customers for this product? Because there's not a lot of similar products on the market, so it's kind of an interesting Zero to one problem of, of how do you build a market for a product category that doesn't necessarily already exist?
Yeah. So one, one of the constraints is, so we've, we've maintained this constraint that we want to build topic pages that are public. And, and it's interesting when you have a constraint like that and there's architecture on the other side where we said, I want a high margin business. I want a business where I'm working with innovative customers who are teaching us stuff. to make us more competitive. And that have the goal of Golden, the ultimate goal of Golden building this database of knowledge in line with what they want. And then, so we've kind of architected, and then I, we want repeatable business, we want large customers, we want large ARR, we want low churn. So we thought about the dynamics of what we want as a business, and we thought about our goal of what we are trying to do and seeing, are there companies that align with that goal? that wanna know that information. So you've got the world of information services companies like Thomson Reuters, Bloomberg, PitchBook, Crunchbase, from the smaller companies to like the larger companies, that whole world. And then you've got consulting who have not automated all the data collection. Then you've got GLG, which is a marketplace for expert knowledge. And some of that expert knowledge is canonical information as well being passed verbally. So you've got all this world of the information services and then we've got this other world of like the CRMs, Salesforce and Affinity and all this other stuff for storing information that don't really have necessarily the knowledge and the data. And we've tried to bring the two together. And then we, I guess, talking to customers and I've interviewed so many businesses at this point. So interviewing the businesses, talking about their problems in respect to our goals and what we could do for them. And then we found features, I guess, that have resonated possibly with them enough to make them buy and get them to do trials. And then the trials have continued and we've iterated around the customer feedback and tried to guide it towards particular architecture of the kind of business we want to build that fulfills the end mission and goal of Golem. And that process, and then you've got these models that work, they're kind of like gravity wells that you get sucked into a model that works and like, Can we— are we on the right model here? So yeah.
All right, awesome, Jude. Thanks for joining us and thanks for the valuable advice you've shared.
It's great to see you, man. I hope you're well.
Thanks for listening to the Startup Foundations Podcast, the podcast that tells the stories of startup founders and how they built their companies from the ground up. Until next time, keep building and keep innovating.
