He Made 500 Cold Calls a Day and Slept in the Office. Now He's Automating a $2 Trillion Problem

Tarek Alaruri is the founder of Stuut, an AI platform that helps businesses collect the money they're owed. Companies like Honeywell, PerkinElmer, and CharterUp use Stuut to automate accounts receivable end to end, collecting 40% more revenue in their first few months on the platform. But before Stuut, Tarek was a broke kid out of college who took a commission-only trucking job because a recruiter told him people there made $500K. He was the first one in the office and the last one out, sometimes sleeping there overnight, making up to 500 cold calls a day. One month in, he landed his first customer: a salt company selling to Midwest retailers. In this episode, Tarek and Rob get into why everything worth doing is hard, the fun of failure, reframing rejection as a next step, and why Stuut redesigned its entire platform after two years rather than risk falling behind. Follow Rob:   / roberthilmer   Listen on Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/show/0cTzEJW... Listen on Apple Podcasts: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast... Subscribe on YouTube:    / @goannacapital   Very First Win is hosted by Robert Hilmer, founder of Goanna Capital, a private equity firm investing in generationally important frontier technology companies including SpaceX, Anthropic, OpenAI, Databricks, and Neuralink.