Building, Scaling, and Selling: 35 Years of Lessons from Three Exits With Joe Polish Featuring Mark Rukavina

Building, Scaling, and Selling: 35 Years of Lessons from Three Exits With Joe Polish Featuring Mark Rukavina

June 5, 2026 · 50 min · Season 1 · Episode 57

About this episode

Joe Polish interviews Mark Rukavina about his experiences building and selling technology companies, focusing on his latest venture, iMemories.

Mark Rukavina has spent 35 years building and selling technology companies. iMemories is the third, and the one he loves the most. Joe Polish sits down with him at Genius Network to break down how a guy in a spare bedroom turned a fragmented cottage industry into a 250-employee, 24/7, almost fully automated operation that just sold to Ancestry, and what the playbook actually looks like for any Entrepreneur trying to build something big and sellable from the ground up. Here's what you're about to discover in this conversation: Why Mark calls iMemories "The Netflix of home movies", and the 1,000-decks-to-one-operator ratio that makes the math actually work. The Lek-commissioned study that found 8 billion home movie tapes and over a trillion photos sitting in American boxes right now, and the hundred-year-runway TAM Mark just plugged into Ancestry. The hiring mistake that quietly burned through real money when Mark's Team kept bringing in senior leaders out of Apple and Hewlett Packard, and the one trait he now screens for instead. The four-year Walgreens deal Mark landed by replacing the incumbent across 8,000 stores (and the surprising reason that partnership is now only 5% of his…

People in this episode

Host: Joe Polish

Guest: Mark Rukavina

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Mentioned in this episode

Organizations: iMemories, Ancestry, Apple, Hewlett Packard, Walgreens

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