After exiting his car auction business at seven times revenue, Stan Markuze did something most founders skip entirely. He sat down and wrote a long list of criteria for what his next venture had to be, then iterated on it until it came down to just three things. Work with people you like. Learn things that genuinely interest you. Sell to people who can and will pay. Everything he has built since has been filtered through those three rules.
Stan is a serial entrepreneur who has built across logistics, automotive, real estate, and now fintech. He co-founded Joyride Auto, a virtual auction platform for impounded vehicles, and exited it two years later at a seven times revenue valuation. He is now the founder of Balance, a platform that automatically moves a company’s idle operating cash into government-backed money market funds so that reserves sitting in a checking account are actually earning interest rather than doing nothing.
In this conversation Stan and Matthew get into how to spot a market that is genuinely underserved rather than simply unprofitable, why he built Balance to scratch his own itch as a real estate investor, the customer feedback story that had his team shipping a fix overnight, and the honest truth that a great deal of success comes down to luck, so the only sane response is to obsess over what you can actually control.
CONNECT WITH STAN MARKUZE
LinkedIn → https://www.linkedin.com/in/stanmarkuze
Balance → https://balancecash.io
Email → stan@balancecash.io
THE CEO AND THE SALESMAN PODCAST
Subscribe for more episodes → https://www.youtube.com/@TheCeoAndTheSalesmanPodcast
Follow Matthew on LinkedIn → https://www.linkedin.com/in/matthewwhyatt
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