In this episode of Driving Performance, Noah Friedman joins the show to talk about building at the intersection of community, capital, and consumer brands.

A familiar name in the CPG world, Noah is the cofounder of Top Shelf Ventures, a venture and private equity fund backing standout opportunities across beverage alcohol and other “vice” categories, from spirits and beer to nicotine.He’s an investor in brands like SUNBOY (featured earlier this season with founder Yair), The Long Drink (the celebrity-backed brand cofounded by Miles Teller), and Gratsi Wine.

Before launching Top Shelf, Noah built his career by leaning into the mentorship of legendary entrepreneur Michael Loeb. The two first met when Noah was still in college, attending an intensive bootcamp for founders. Noah was the youngest person by at least 10 years and made a point to introduce himself to Michael who saw something in him and took him under his wing.

That relationship led Noah to help scale Loeb-backed company 3x3, where he spearheaded go-to-market strategy and built one of the fastest-growing retail networks in the beverage alcohol industry, expanding to more than 2,000 liquor retailers. He ultimately became COO, gaining deep, ground-level expertise in how the alcohol business really works.

But Noah’s drive started long before business. Growing up in New York City with a voiceover-artist father (whose work you’ve likely heard in national commercials like Honey Nut Cheerios, Chase, and A.1. Steak Sauce) and a therapist mother, he developed both performance instincts and emotional intelligence early. A competitive hockey player from childhood, he built the discipline that still defines him today — including a daily push-up streak he’s only broken a handful of times in his life. Add in early acting experience, and you get someone who knows how to show up, communicate clearly, and sell a vision.

That ability to bring people together became the foundation for Uncharted, the media and events company Noah cofounded with Michael Loeb. What began as a single curated dinner in 2021 — an intimate gathering of high-performing founders and operators — evolved into a national community and marquee events business. Today, thousands of entrepreneurs have come through Uncharted gatherings, including its flagship summer summit in the Hamptons. Noah shares how intentional community-building leads to real relationships — and real deals.

We also dive into the power of mentorship and earned opportunity, including how Michael Loeb and longtime business partner Richard Vogel pushed Noah to raise outside capital for Top Shelf instead of handing him an easy check. That experience helped shape his investment philosophy and the thesis behind Top Shelf Ventures, where he now backs founders from seed to Series A in resilient, culturally relevant categories.

Finally, Noah talks about the future of consumer growth through Outersignal, a customer intelligence platform he’s an early investor in that helps brands unify data and deliver true 1:1 personalization at scale.

This episode is a masterclass in sales mentality, mentorship, community as strategy, and how long-term relationships compound into real opportunity.

Listen now to hear how Noah Friedman is driving performance across industries — and building ecosystems, not just companies.

In this episode of Driving Performance, we sit down with Chris Tiffin—better known as Tiffin—founder of Aisle, the retail growth platform trusted by nearly 750 brands to turn real-world marketing into measurable in-store sales.

Tiffin’s journey starts early. From running a high school landscaping business called *Weed Boys* to thinking he was headed for a finance and investment banking career, entrepreneurship was always close to home—his mother founded RunLites, after all. Everything changed when Supercoffee came to speak at his school. Tiffin slid into the founders’ DMs, landed an internship in 2017, dropped out of school, and quite literally lived on their couch.

At Supercoffee, he ran the online business during a period of hypergrowth—helping scale revenue from $700K to $5M in just one year. But as the brand grew in retail, Tiffin noticed a major blind spot: once products hit store shelves, brands lost visibility into who was buying and why.

That insight became the foundation for Aisle.

We unpack how Tiffin raised capital before Aisle even had a product (including a legendary investor cold email involving a grocery receipt), why early attempts as a consumer-only rewards app nearly burned through $400K, and how a pivot—sparked by Nuggs asking to white-label the technology—set Aisle on its current path.

Today, Aisle powers receipt-verified offers like BOGO and 50% off across more than 200,000 retail locations, pays shoppers back in minutes, and gives brands the data they’ve been missing in brick-and-mortar. Along the way, the company has raised over $5M in venture funding and facilitated more than $20M in rewards to shoppers—helping redefine promotions and loyalty in physical retail.

This conversation is a must-listen for anyone building in CPG, retail media, or consumer tech—and for founders navigating pivots, blind spots, and the realities of scaling fast.

In this episode, we sit down with Josh Suggs — Founder & CEO of StreetTalk (formerly 203Media) — the agency redefining how brands win attention through viral street interviews and reaction-driven content.

A self-taught creator who cut his teeth making Vine videos and YouTube vlogs, Josh has built one of the fastest-growing content agencies in the brand world by mastering what today’s audiences actually want to watch. His work has powered campaigns for brands like Dr. Squatch, Grüns, Mike’s Hot Honey, Tabs Chocolate, and more.

Josh’s path to entrepreneurship was anything but traditional.

In high school, he struggled with ADHD, spent time in special education classes, and had little interest in school — but an endless hunger to create. He knew early on that he wanted to be an entrepreneur and build through content. As a member of the tennis team, he got his first taste of business by teaching private lessons and marketing them through mom’s Facebook groups.

He later helped scale the breakout e-commerce brand Tabs Chocolate by managing its social content, turning it into a viral success powered by TikTok and UGC. In 2022, Josh dropped out of college to start 203Media, launching street interview campaigns for brands after helping a friend with content for his business. Within weeks, referrals started rolling in. What began as $50 full-suite videos quickly turned into a $20K first month — and kept scaling from there.

Today, StreetTalk sits at the center of the edutainment movement, where street interviews have become the ultimate form of reaction content.

In this episode, we cover:

• How Josh built a referral flywheel from day one
• Why street interviews are dominating brand marketing
• How he leveraged Twitter to build his team and win business
• His perspective on AI and the future of content
• And what it takes to scale a creator-first agency in a fast-moving world

A story about hustle, instincts, and building the future of brand content in real time — this is Josh Suggs on Driving Performance.

He needs no introduction — Brian Rappaport.

Founder & CEO of Quan Media, Brian has become one of the most respected minds in out-of-home advertising, helping brands like Away, Banza, and Dagne Dover rethink how OOH can be highly targeted, measurable, and accessible — even without massive budgets.

But Brian’s journey didn’t start in media.

A native Long Islander who grew up in Jericho and attended Towson University, Brian originally set his sights on a career in sports. A lover of basketball and diehard Knicks fan, he dreamed of becoming a sports broadcaster before realizing the grind of the industry would likely mean starting in the middle of nowhere. So he pivoted to sports PR — and began cold-emailing everyone he could find.

After graduating, Brian spent a year without a job in his field, working at an Italian restaurant on Long Island while trying to break into the industry. Eventually, he landed at Zenith Media, where he cut his teeth in the newspaper department and spent seven years learning the agency world from the inside.

In 2018, he took the leap and founded Quan Media with a simple but powerful belief: out-of-home advertising shouldn’t be reserved for brands with massive budgets — it should be smart, targeted, and accountable.

In this episode, Brian shares:

* The ups and downs of his early career
* Navigating agency life
* His approach to OOH selling
* And what it takes to build a modern media company from the ground up

A story about grit, timing, and betting on yourself — this is Brian Rappaport on Driving Performance.

We’re joined by Jackie Widmann — SVP of Marketing & Commercial at BERO, the premium non-alcoholic beer brand launched in 2024 by actor Tom Holland and John Herman (former President of Nutrabolt).

Jackie walks us through her impressive rise across the food & beverage world. She reflects on the early days of her career as employee #5 at The Infatuation and how she helped scale one of the most influential dining platforms in the country leading up to its acquisition by JPMorgan Chase. Prior to joining the BERO team, Jackie was a key member of the marketing & innovation team at AB InBev where she worked with in-house brands like Los Sundays Tequila Seltzer, Noonshine, and Beach Day.

Now, at celebrity-backed BERO, she leads global marketing, communications, and commercial go-to-market — with a bold vision: BERO on every menu, in every bar. We dig into BERO's strategy, including experiential events like the BERO Padel Classic and activations at Wimbledon, getting placement in Chase Sapphire lounges, navigating distribution, more.

We also talk about the booming non-alc category and what’s fueling the shift in culture. NA beer currently represents 83% of the non-alcoholic category, which NIQ projects will surpass $1B in the U.S. by 2025 — and Jackie believes BERO is perfectly positioned to win!

ABOUT ADGILE
Adgile is the leading tech-enabled, out-of-home advertising company! With data at the center of all that we do, Adgile delivers advertisers the biggest bang for their advertising dollar.

In this episode of Driving Performance, we sit down with Akash Raju, founder and CEO of Glimpse, the AI-powered platform helping consumer brands recover lost revenue by automating retail deduction management.

Founded while Akash was still in college and officially launched in April 2024, Glimpse tackles one of the most costly and overlooked problems in CPG: deductions. Driven by retailer complexity, manual workflows, and outdated accounting systems, deductions can drain 20–30% of a brand’s profit margins, with a meaningful portion - around 10% of charges - being invalid. Glimpse uses AI to automate the entire process—helping brands recover revenue they’ve already earned.

Adgile cofounders Tom Shea and Max Flannery dive into Akash’s path from growing up in the DC suburbs to studying engineering at Purdue, where he gravitated toward entrepreneurship and met his co-founders. Before Glimpse, Akash sharpened his technical chops interning at Tesla—pulling 4 and 5 a.m. shifts on the factory floor—and later at Microsoft, building AI/ML tools for Python developers inside VS Code.

Akash also walks us through getting into Y Combinator, the interview process, and the moment it all felt real—flying out to San Francisco with his co-founders. Originally exploring ideas in experiential retail and product placement through Airbnb, the team made a critical pivot in 2024 after deep conversations with brands revealed a consistent pain point: deductions.

That focus has paid off. In 2025, Glimpse raised a $10M oversubscribed round led by 8VC, with participation from Y Combinator, Origin Ventures, Informed Ventures, and Allison Pickens, former COO of Gainsight—bringing total funding to approximately $17M. Today, Glimpse is trusted by more than 200 brands and partners, integrates with major distributors like KeHE and UNFI and retailers like Target, and delivers an average ROI of 4–5x, with some brands seeing returns as high as 33x.

We wrap the conversation with Akash’s vision for Glimpse as it expands beyond deductions into a broader AI-driven back-office platform for consumer brands.

If you’re a CPG operator or founder looking to better understand deductions—and how technology can turn a major margin drain into a growth lever—this episode is for you.

On this episode of Driving Performance, Adgile cofounder Max Flannery sits down with Beekman 1802 cofounders and husband duo Dr. Brent Ridge and Josh Kilmer-Purcell for a story that’s equal parts unexpected, heartwarming, and wildly entrepreneurial.

Josh and Brent grew up in small towns. Josh grew up in Wisconsin; Brent in North Carolina. Josh moved to New York to chase a career in advertising, while Brent built a career in medicine before pivoting to help launch Martha Stewart’s Health & Wellness division. A simple apple-picking trip upstate would change everything. They fell in love with the town and decided to buy a small farm as a weekend retreat.

After buying the farm, they received a handwritten letter from a neighboring farmer, John, who was losing his land and had 80 goats with nowhere to go. Josh and Brent agreed to take them in — an act they now call the “original kindness” that sparked Beekman 1802.

Then the 2008 recession hit. Brent and Josh lost their jobs. They Googled “what can you make with goat milk,” and landed on one word: soap. They decided to make goat milk, soap bars in the middle of a recession. Understanding marketing, they got some early press which would eventually lead them to a reality TV show (The Fabulous Beekman Boys) that aired for two years.

Their first major retail breakthrough came with Anthropologie, followed by explosive growth through TV retail at QVC and HSN, where Beekman 1802 is now the #1 skincare brand across both networks. Today, they’ve sold over 60 million bars of soap, built a portfolio of 300+ SKUs, and hold exclusive U.S. partnerships with Ulta Beauty — with global expansion on the horizon.

At the center of it all? Kindness and goat milk.

Brent and Josh also share insights from their book published this year: G.O.A.T. Wisdom: How to Build a Truly Great Business--From the Founders of Beekman 1802, built around 12 maxims for modern business.

Some wisdom they dropped on the pod included the 51% Rule: whichever person is most passionate about an area of the business gets the extra 1%.

Buy their book HERE.

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On this episode of Driving Performance, the boys crack open a few cans of SUNBOY with founder Yair Tygiel—and what unfolds is the wild, winding story of how a single coconut in New York City turned into the world’s first spiked coconut water.

Yair grew up in the Bay Area, the son of Stanford professors, surrounded by ideas, experimentation, and a front-row seat to early-stage entrepreneurship. At UC Santa Cruz, he fully embraced the hippie, free-spirited energy of campus life. And because adventure was always part of his DNA, he once hitchhiked from Santa Cruz to Honduras for six months during college—just to see what might happen.

When he moved to New York after graduation and tried his first coconut in Chinatown, something clicked. Looking for a creative outlet beyond his day job, he bought a stack of coconuts in Chinatown, set up a small stand in Prospect Park, and started making coconut cocktails. People stopped and bought.

When he told a friend - Luke McKenna who became his cofounder - the two decided to build a 500-lb bamboo tiki bike that could hold 200 coconuts, rode it onto the middle of the Brooklyn Bridge at sunset, and—thanks to a group of friends who brought drums— threw a one-hour party suspended over the East River. It was chaotic, memorable, and undeniably fun. And they knew they wanted to keep going.

Soon, photos of their coconut adventures spread online, catching the attention of major brands. CoCo & Co. was born, leading to corporate collaborations with Bacardi, AmEx, and music festivals around the country. They upgraded from Chinatown coconuts to working with a supplier in Thailand—buying 20,000 at a time.

Then COVID hit. The festivals stopped. The brand deals vanished. And they were left with thousands of coconuts and a choice.

Walk away—or reinvent.

They chose reinvention. Yair refused to leave the coconut world behind, and after two years of experimenting and formulating, SUNBOY emerged: a lightly effervescent, 5% ABV coconut-water cocktail made with Thai coconut water, designed for all-day play without the bloat.
They found their foundational NYC distribution partners in 2023. What started as one passion-fruit flavor has now grown into seven, available nationwide at Trader Joe’s, Whole Foods, and more.

In this episode, Yair shares the full journey—plus the real, behind-the-scenes lessons on navigating the three-tier alcohol system, managing state-by-state regulations, working with distributors, expanding into Southern California, and building a beverage brand from pure experimentation.

It’s a story that starts with curiosity, pivots on resilience, and ends with a cold can of Sunboy. Tune in.