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By Leo Pohlmann, editor and producer at the Rising Talent Podcast. This one is from my side of the timeline.
I’m a teenager, and I spent weeks inside Nathaniel Stevens’ story — cutting the interview, pulling the clips, and building the whole Rising Talent episode around a founder who sold his company for $342 million. You notice things differently when you watch a moment forty times to get the edit right. Here’s what stuck with me.
$342 million: what Web.com paid for Yodle, the company Nathaniel Stevens started as a college undergrad.
If you don’t know him yet: Nathaniel Stevens dropped out of Wharton to build Yodle into one of the biggest local-marketing companies in the world. You can meet him properly in the college pitch that started it all, and everything he’s building now lives on his personal site.
Here are both conversations I put together for the podcast — the full sit-down interview, and the original college pitch where Yodle began:
Editing a $342M story changes how you see your own age
The thing that hit me first: Nathaniel Stevens started this when he was barely older than I am now. It’s easy to think you need to wait — for a degree, for permission, for the “real” version of yourself to show up. Watching his story frame by frame killed that excuse for me. He didn’t wait, and the age I keep treating as a limitation was the exact age he used as a runway.
The flyers lesson: start with what you already have
Nathaniel found his first CTO by putting up flyers on campus. No network, no funding, no fancy intro — just the resources in front of him. As a young creator, that’s the most useful thing in the whole interview. I don’t have a studio or a team. I have a laptop, an editing timeline, and the willingness to start. That turns out to be enough to begin, which is the only part that matters.
Learn SQL, master prompting — advice I actually took
When Nathaniel said the two skills he’d learn today are SQL and prompting, I stopped the edit and wrote it down. Understand your own data, and learn to direct AI so one person can do the work of a team. I’m already leaning on AI to move faster on production — hearing a $342M founder name the exact same skills made me take it seriously instead of treating it as a shortcut.
Health is the first thing founders trade — I’m watching for that
Nathaniel was honest about the cost: the grind pushed everything else — health, sleep, a normal life — to the side. That part I didn’t romanticize. If I’m going to build young, I want to build in a way I can sustain, not burn out chasing a highlight reel. The most valuable thing a founder can hand a younger person isn’t the win — it’s the honest receipt for what the win cost.
Why we built this on the Rising Talent Podcast
Stories like Nathaniel Stevens’ are exactly why the Rising Talent Podcast exists — to put young builders in the room with people who’ve already done it. I get to produce those conversations, and honestly I learn as much from cutting them as anyone learns from watching. Watch both videos above, and if you’re building something young, take the flyer lesson: start with what you have.
Leo Pohlmann edits and produces the Rising Talent Podcast, where young builders sit down with founders worth learning from.