Ari Rosman - Founder, Engineer, Executive Coach
Ari Roisman spent over a decade building two ambitious consumer technology companies, raised $40 to $50 million pre-revenue, grew Glide to 20 million users, and co-founded Wristcam, the only Apple-certified camera for the Apple Watch. Then he burned out. And what he learned on the other side of that became a second career that, by his own accounting, fills him up more than anything he has ever done.
In this episode of What Fuels You, host Shawna Suerland sits down with Ari for a wide-ranging conversation that covers growing up in Wilmington, Delaware, a semester studying engineering in Hebrew at the Technion in Israel, a near-miss at getting Bill Campbell as a coach, pioneering push-to-talk video before Zoom existed, and what he now does every week sitting with founder CEOs as an executive coach. The throughline: a deep love of people, a spiritual practice that shapes everything, and a conviction that connecting to your source is not a luxury but a necessity.
📋 Episode Chapters
| 00:00 | Rapid fire: morning minyan, AirPods, WhisperFlow, half marathons, and Cincinnati as a hidden gem |
| 10:00 | Growing up in Wilmington, Montessori and Quaker schools, tinkering on circuit boards, and overclocking computers in middle school |
| 18:00 | His father's 30-year career and the corporate layoff that planted a deep distrust of putting his fate in anyone else's hands |
| 24:00 | WashU, learning Hebrew at the Technion, and a graduate nanotech company that got acquired before he finished his degree |
| 32:00 | Founding Glide: push-to-talk video before Zoom existed, 20 million users, $50M raised, and the hottest company in Jerusalem |
| 42:00 | Co-founding Wristcam: the Apple Watch, Dick Tracy video calls from the wrist, and what happens when a pandemic kills your retail distribution |
| 50:00 | Burning out, trying to get Bill Campbell as a coach, and what finally getting a coach taught him about himself |
| 58:00 | Coaching founders: what to look for in a coach, the value of a reference point, and AI-powered session notes in Notion |
| 65:00 | YPO Forum Officer for the Global Entrepreneurship Network, peer groups, and a vision for making confidential community accessible to everyone |
| 70:00 | Shabbat as a reference point, the combustion energy startup coming out of his graduate research, and what fuels Ari |
The Layoff That Made Him Unemployable by Anyone Else
Ari Roisman grew up in Wilmington, Delaware, the son of an engineer who had worked for the same publicly traded company for 30 years. His father was a hard worker who lived modestly and put everything into his children's education, sending Ari to elite private schools and saving enough to cover any university tuition. Then the company went through downsizing, and his father was let go.
"Seeing my father dedicate himself to a company for 30 years, and then new management comes in and he just gets canned. It seeded a very deep distrust in putting my fate in the hands of anyone else. I need to be able to carve my own path and do my own thing. And that's pretty much what I've always done."
— Ari Roisman
That distrust became the founding logic of a career. Roisman has been building companies for two decades, from a nanotech startup spun out of his graduate lab that was acquired by the world's largest materials manufacturer, to Glide, to Wristcam. Every step has been self-directed. Every bet has been his own.
He did not come to entrepreneurship through an obvious path. He started at WashU as an electrical engineer, shifted to mechanical engineering when he saw the mechanical engineers were modding RC cars while the electrical engineers were moving pixels on screens, studied a semester at the Technion in Israel on a leave of absence, learned fluent Hebrew by taking all his coursework in the language, and came back to WashU to finish a master's degree while simultaneously building out an energy research lab that grew into the largest lab at the university. The nanotech company born from that work was acquired before he had even graduated. He was 22.
Glide: Pioneering Push-to-Talk Video Before Zoom Existed
In 2012, video calling meant Skype, and Skype meant scheduling a call at a desktop. Roisman and his childhood friend co-founded Glide around a different idea: what if you could send someone a video message the way you send a text, but they could watch it live as you were recording it, and reply instantly from wherever they were? A video walkie-talkie, streaming to the cloud the moment you pressed record.
"We wanted to tap into the magic of the self-facing camera and collapse time and space. Bend time and space. Transcend space and time. Allow people to connect face-to-face at their convenience. That's really what instant video messaging does. It's real-time like a call, but it's also asynchronous."
— Ari Roisman
From a literal idea and a team of two, Glide grew to $50 million raised pre-revenue, close to 100 people, 20 million users, and a reputation as the hottest company in Jerusalem. They were TechCrunch Disrupt finalists. They were on stage at the world's biggest tech conferences. The mayor of Jerusalem helped them find office space.
Roisman led the company for 11 years. Then he co-founded Wristcam, an Apple Watch camera accessory so ambitious that the first person he pitched to quit Apple on the spot to join him. They built it from scratch: their own video communication protocol, their own apps, their own APIs, everything. Wristcam remains the only official Apple-certified camera for the Apple Watch and landed on Time's 100 Best Inventions list.
What the Pandemic Took Away
The plan was to launch through Apple retail. Then COVID hit. Physical distribution of third-party products through Apple stores went to zero. Roisman is proud of the product, proud that they shipped it, and clear-eyed that timing conspired against the outcome they had built toward. The company continues under new leadership, now called Endless AI, focused on computer vision.
Burning Out, and What Finally Getting a Coach Taught Him
For all the momentum Glide generated, the last few years of leading it extracted a significant personal cost. Roisman was traveling constantly. As the founder CEO, fundraising was always his responsibility, which meant always being on. He stopped intentionally investing in himself. He lost his personal sense of value and his connection to his own inner life.
"I was really out of touch with my own inner greatness. It was like I was just burnt out. It was so easy to lose yourself. My co-founder was still tinkering, still putting together a comic book. I was totally swept away with the company and just stopped taking care of myself."
— Ari Roisman
He had tried to find a coach years earlier, even asking a well-connected Silicon Valley attorney whether anyone like that existed. The attorney said no. Coaches did not exist in startup land. When he eventually found one, in the final months before he resigned from Glide, the experience was transformative: a clear, loving space to think through what came next, what he actually wanted, and how to leave well. He passed the baton, secured some capital so the company could continue, and stepped away on good terms.
"It was like a new lease on life."
Now He Coaches the Founders Who Need What He Never Had
Roisman works with a small number of founder CEOs as an executive coach, typically meeting weekly or biweekly. He is clear about who he is built to serve: founders who have been in it long enough to have accumulated real scar tissue, who have hit genuine turbulence, and who are ready to actually listen. He has no interest in coaching first-time founders still in the wide-eyed phase who have not yet encountered what Ben Horowitz calls The Struggle.
"It's incredibly gratifying to be able to sit with a founder CEO for an hour a week and have a massive impact. You see over a long time horizon how the biggest issues are getting resolved, how their company's growing, how they're getting along better at home. It fills me up."
— Ari Roisman
His approach blends formal coaching technique with the hard-won instinct of someone who has raised capital from Tokyo to Beijing, settled lawsuits, navigated co-founder splits, and shipped both software and hardware products. He uses Notion to record and transcribe sessions, with founder permission, and can query across the archive to find themes and track progress over time. He calls it AI-powered coaching in practice.
He also serves as Forum Officer for YPO's global Entrepreneurship Network, standing up confidential peer groups for founders within YPO worldwide. And he holds a broader vision: that the world would be a meaningfully healthier place if everyone had access to a confidential space with peers on a shared journey. He is channeling that vision through these roles while something larger takes shape.
The Reference Point Framework
One of Roisman's most useful frameworks for explaining why coaching and peer community matter comes from physics. In Einsteinian relativity, the true speed or orientation of anything is only understood in relation to a reference point. A cube has six sides, but it is the space inside that gives it structure and prevents it from collapsing. Without an outside perspective, even brilliant, high-achieving founders get lost in ways they cannot see from inside the work.
"It's amazing how lost or confused we get as people in isolation without that reference point. Having a framework where I'm holding myself accountable to showing up consistently and talking through all of the things — that's where the value lives."
— Ari Roisman
Shabbat, Source, and What Actually Fuels Him
Roisman observes Shabbat fully, from sundown Friday to sundown Saturday, every week. He describes it not as a religious obligation but as the most important reference point in his week: a full digital detox that creates definition, rest, and the kind of depth of connection with family, friends, and his own inner life that the rest of the week makes nearly impossible.
Several times a year, a two-day Jewish holiday falls adjacent to Shabbat, giving him 72 or more consecutive hours completely offline. He does not treat this as a sacrifice. He treats it as the best thing that happens to him.
"The spiritual version of going to a national park is available to us at all times if we just allow ourselves to go inward and block out all the noise. Get back in touch with the presence, the inherent reality that we're all part of something so much bigger than ourselves. When we do, it fuels us. It's tapping into our source."
— Ari Roisman
He also has something else in the works: a pressurized combustion energy company building directly on the graduate research he began at WashU, now a multi-patented technology capable of running a carbon-negative power generation process in a modular, factory-built unit that can be shipped to wherever power is needed. His graduate advisor's lab grew into the largest at the university and won tens of millions in Department of Energy grants. Roisman started consulting with the university a year ago and is now deep in the financial planning and brand development. He describes it as feeling like destiny.
5 Key Takeaways
Ari Rosman - Founder, Engineer, Executive Coach
Ari Roisman spent over a decade building two ambitious consumer technology companies, raised $40 to $50 million pre-revenue, grew Glide to 20 million users, and co-founded Wristcam, the only Apple-certified camera for the Apple Watch. Then he burned out. And what he learned on the other side of that became a second career that, by his own accounting, fills him up more than anything he has ever done.
In this episode of What Fuels You, host Shawna Suerland sits down with Ari for a wide-ranging conversation that covers growing up in Wilmington, Delaware, a semester studying engineering in Hebrew at the Technion in Israel, a near-miss at getting Bill Campbell as a coach, pioneering push-to-talk video before Zoom existed, and what he now does every week sitting with founder CEOs as an executive coach. The throughline: a deep love of people, a spiritual practice that shapes everything, and a conviction that connecting to your source is not a luxury but a necessity.
📋 Episode Chapters
| 00:00 | Rapid fire: morning minyan, AirPods, WhisperFlow, half marathons, and Cincinnati as a hidden gem |
| 10:00 | Growing up in Wilmington, Montessori and Quaker schools, tinkering on circuit boards, and overclocking computers in middle school |
| 18:00 | His father's 30-year career and the corporate layoff that planted a deep distrust of putting his fate in anyone else's hands |
| 24:00 | WashU, learning Hebrew at the Technion, and a graduate nanotech company that got acquired before he finished his degree |
| 32:00 | Founding Glide: push-to-talk video before Zoom existed, 20 million users, $50M raised, and the hottest company in Jerusalem |
| 42:00 | Co-founding Wristcam: the Apple Watch, Dick Tracy video calls from the wrist, and what happens when a pandemic kills your retail distribution |
| 50:00 | Burning out, trying to get Bill Campbell as a coach, and what finally getting a coach taught him about himself |
| 58:00 | Coaching founders: what to look for in a coach, the value of a reference point, and AI-powered session notes in Notion |
| 65:00 | YPO Forum Officer for the Global Entrepreneurship Network, peer groups, and a vision for making confidential community accessible to everyone |
| 70:00 | Shabbat as a reference point, the combustion energy startup coming out of his graduate research, and what fuels Ari |
The Layoff That Made Him Unemployable by Anyone Else
Ari Roisman grew up in Wilmington, Delaware, the son of an engineer who had worked for the same publicly traded company for 30 years. His father was a hard worker who lived modestly and put everything into his children's education, sending Ari to elite private schools and saving enough to cover any university tuition. Then the company went through downsizing, and his father was let go.
"Seeing my father dedicate himself to a company for 30 years, and then new management comes in and he just gets canned. It seeded a very deep distrust in putting my fate in the hands of anyone else. I need to be able to carve my own path and do my own thing. And that's pretty much what I've always done."
— Ari Roisman
That distrust became the founding logic of a career. Roisman has been building companies for two decades, from a nanotech startup spun out of his graduate lab that was acquired by the world's largest materials manufacturer, to Glide, to Wristcam. Every step has been self-directed. Every bet has been his own.
He did not come to entrepreneurship through an obvious path. He started at WashU as an electrical engineer, shifted to mechanical engineering when he saw the mechanical engineers were modding RC cars while the electrical engineers were moving pixels on screens, studied a semester at the Technion in Israel on a leave of absence, learned fluent Hebrew by taking all his coursework in the language, and came back to WashU to finish a master's degree while simultaneously building out an energy research lab that grew into the largest lab at the university. The nanotech company born from that work was acquired before he had even graduated. He was 22.
Glide: Pioneering Push-to-Talk Video Before Zoom Existed
In 2012, video calling meant Skype, and Skype meant scheduling a call at a desktop. Roisman and his childhood friend co-founded Glide around a different idea: what if you could send someone a video message the way you send a text, but they could watch it live as you were recording it, and reply instantly from wherever they were? A video walkie-talkie, streaming to the cloud the moment you pressed record.
"We wanted to tap into the magic of the self-facing camera and collapse time and space. Bend time and space. Transcend space and time. Allow people to connect face-to-face at their convenience. That's really what instant video messaging does. It's real-time like a call, but it's also asynchronous."
— Ari Roisman
From a literal idea and a team of two, Glide grew to $50 million raised pre-revenue, close to 100 people, 20 million users, and a reputation as the hottest company in Jerusalem. They were TechCrunch Disrupt finalists. They were on stage at the world's biggest tech conferences. The mayor of Jerusalem helped them find office space.
Roisman led the company for 11 years. Then he co-founded Wristcam, an Apple Watch camera accessory so ambitious that the first person he pitched to quit Apple on the spot to join him. They built it from scratch: their own video communication protocol, their own apps, their own APIs, everything. Wristcam remains the only official Apple-certified camera for the Apple Watch and landed on Time's 100 Best Inventions list.
What the Pandemic Took Away
The plan was to launch through Apple retail. Then COVID hit. Physical distribution of third-party products through Apple stores went to zero. Roisman is proud of the product, proud that they shipped it, and clear-eyed that timing conspired against the outcome they had built toward. The company continues under new leadership, now called Endless AI, focused on computer vision.
Burning Out, and What Finally Getting a Coach Taught Him
For all the momentum Glide generated, the last few years of leading it extracted a significant personal cost. Roisman was traveling constantly. As the founder CEO, fundraising was always his responsibility, which meant always being on. He stopped intentionally investing in himself. He lost his personal sense of value and his connection to his own inner life.
"I was really out of touch with my own inner greatness. It was like I was just burnt out. It was so easy to lose yourself. My co-founder was still tinkering, still putting together a comic book. I was totally swept away with the company and just stopped taking care of myself."
— Ari Roisman
He had tried to find a coach years earlier, even asking a well-connected Silicon Valley attorney whether anyone like that existed. The attorney said no. Coaches did not exist in startup land. When he eventually found one, in the final months before he resigned from Glide, the experience was transformative: a clear, loving space to think through what came next, what he actually wanted, and how to leave well. He passed the baton, secured some capital so the company could continue, and stepped away on good terms.
"It was like a new lease on life."
Now He Coaches the Founders Who Need What He Never Had
Roisman works with a small number of founder CEOs as an executive coach, typically meeting weekly or biweekly. He is clear about who he is built to serve: founders who have been in it long enough to have accumulated real scar tissue, who have hit genuine turbulence, and who are ready to actually listen. He has no interest in coaching first-time founders still in the wide-eyed phase who have not yet encountered what Ben Horowitz calls The Struggle.
"It's incredibly gratifying to be able to sit with a founder CEO for an hour a week and have a massive impact. You see over a long time horizon how the biggest issues are getting resolved, how their company's growing, how they're getting along better at home. It fills me up."
— Ari Roisman
His approach blends formal coaching technique with the hard-won instinct of someone who has raised capital from Tokyo to Beijing, settled lawsuits, navigated co-founder splits, and shipped both software and hardware products. He uses Notion to record and transcribe sessions, with founder permission, and can query across the archive to find themes and track progress over time. He calls it AI-powered coaching in practice.
He also serves as Forum Officer for YPO's global Entrepreneurship Network, standing up confidential peer groups for founders within YPO worldwide. And he holds a broader vision: that the world would be a meaningfully healthier place if everyone had access to a confidential space with peers on a shared journey. He is channeling that vision through these roles while something larger takes shape.
The Reference Point Framework
One of Roisman's most useful frameworks for explaining why coaching and peer community matter comes from physics. In Einsteinian relativity, the true speed or orientation of anything is only understood in relation to a reference point. A cube has six sides, but it is the space inside that gives it structure and prevents it from collapsing. Without an outside perspective, even brilliant, high-achieving founders get lost in ways they cannot see from inside the work.
"It's amazing how lost or confused we get as people in isolation without that reference point. Having a framework where I'm holding myself accountable to showing up consistently and talking through all of the things — that's where the value lives."
— Ari Roisman
Shabbat, Source, and What Actually Fuels Him
Roisman observes Shabbat fully, from sundown Friday to sundown Saturday, every week. He describes it not as a religious obligation but as the most important reference point in his week: a full digital detox that creates definition, rest, and the kind of depth of connection with family, friends, and his own inner life that the rest of the week makes nearly impossible.
Several times a year, a two-day Jewish holiday falls adjacent to Shabbat, giving him 72 or more consecutive hours completely offline. He does not treat this as a sacrifice. He treats it as the best thing that happens to him.
"The spiritual version of going to a national park is available to us at all times if we just allow ourselves to go inward and block out all the noise. Get back in touch with the presence, the inherent reality that we're all part of something so much bigger than ourselves. When we do, it fuels us. It's tapping into our source."
— Ari Roisman
He also has something else in the works: a pressurized combustion energy company building directly on the graduate research he began at WashU, now a multi-patented technology capable of running a carbon-negative power generation process in a modular, factory-built unit that can be shipped to wherever power is needed. His graduate advisor's lab grew into the largest at the university and won tens of millions in Department of Energy grants. Roisman started consulting with the university a year ago and is now deep in the financial planning and brand development. He describes it as feeling like destiny.
