May 16, 2025 – Golf.com Kass & Mike Lazerow and Fair Trade Founder & Social Entrepreneur of the Year Paul Rice

School for Startups Radio

Kass & Mike Lazerow – Cofounders of Golf.com & Author of Shoveling $h!t: A Love Story

Kass and Mike Lazerow are serial entrepreneurs and investors best known as the cofounders of Golf.com and Buddy Media, a software company that sold to Salesforce.com for $745 million. With a lifetime of stories from decades of building businesses and helping others as investors and advisors, they are in high demand as public speakers, writers, and podcast guests. After selling Golf.com to Time Warner in 2006, Kass and Mike cofounded Buddy Media, which would become the world’s leading social media marketing platform. And since selling Buddy Media to Salesforce in 2012, they have focused on providing capital and advice to the world’s most innovative founders. Kass and Mike have supported close to 100 early-stage startup founders. They served as angel investors and advisors to Scopely, which sold to Savvy Games for $5 billion in 2022, and Liquid Death, the canned water company whose “evil mission” is to make people laugh and get more of them to drink healthy beverages more often, all while helping to kill plastic pollution. Kass and Mike live in New York City and the Hudson Valley and have three grown children (Myles, Cole, and Vivian) and two rescue dogs (Cece and Gizmo).
Paul Rice – Founder of Fair Trade USA and Author of Every Purchase Matters: How Fair Trade Farmers, Companies, and Consumers Are Changing the World

Paul Rice is an award-winning social entrepreneur and the founder of Fair Trade USA, the leading certifier of Fair Trade products in North America. Under Rice’s leadership, Fair Trade became one of the fastest growing segments of the food and beverage industries in North America, benefitting over 1 million farmers and workers in 70 countries worldwide. Rice has been named Ethical Corporation’s 2019 Business Leader of the Year and has been recognized four times as Social Capitalist of the Year by Fast Company magazine. Rice is also a recipient of the prestigious Skoll Award for Social Entrepreneurship and the World Economic Forum’s Social Entrepreneur of the Year.