Entrepreneurship is often presented through its most visible moments: the launch, the funding announcement, the growth milestone, or the successful exit.
Jay Avigdor wants to create more room for the conversations that happen between those moments.
In his podcast,Chewing Glass, the founder and CEO of Velocity Capital Group will sit down with business owners, founders, and executives to discuss the less polished realities of building and leading companies.
The conversations will explore subjects that are often absent from traditional business coverage, including investor pressure, financial uncertainty, difficult personnel decisions, missed family milestones, and the responsibility of supporting an entire organization.
“The majority of the job of being CEO is handling all of the garbage that none of your other employees can and/or want to,” Avigdor says.
That perspective is central to the podcast. While entrepreneurship can appear glamorous from the outside, the day-to-day experience can be far more complicated. Leadership often requires absorbing problems quietly, making consequential decisions with incomplete information, and continuing forward without knowing whether the work will ultimately pay off.
The idea behindChewing Glassalso connects closely with Avigdor’s forthcoming book,Need It, Don’t Want It, which is now available for pre-order.
The book took three years of early mornings, late nights, setbacks, rewrites, and self-doubt to complete. Its underlying story, however, began much earlier through Avigdor’s experiences building Velocity Capital Group.
Founded in 2018, Velocity provides revenue-based financing solutions to small and midsize businesses. The company has completed more than $1 billion in financing transactions and manages over $200 million in assets.
Its growth has been supported by technology, disciplined operations, and a data-driven underwriting process that analyzes thousands of data points while handling a significant daily volume of business financing submissions.
Those figures provide the business context for Avigdor’s story, butNeed It, Don’t Want Itis less focused on celebrating the results than examining what was required to achieve them.
As Velocity grew, Avigdor encountered many of the pressures familiar to business owners: making payroll, carrying responsibility for a growing team, navigating rejection, missing personal milestones, and making difficult decisions without any guarantee of a favorable outcome.
“Entrepreneurship isn’t the highlight reel people see online,” Avigdor wrote while announcing the book. “It’s lonely. It’s exhausting. It’s uncertain. But it’s also one of the most rewarding journeys you’ll ever take.”
Rather than offering a fixed formula for success, the book reflects on the persistence that entrepreneurship often requires after the initial excitement has faded. Its title expresses Avigdor’s belief that wanting success is different from feeling compelled to continue pursuing it, particularly when progress is slow and quitting appears to be the easier choice.
Through that lens, rejection becomes information, setbacks become lessons, and uncertainty becomes an unavoidable part of the process rather than evidence that the process has failed.
The book and podcast approach the same subject from different directions.Need It, Don’t Want Itpresents Avigdor’s own experience, whileChewing Glassexpands the conversation by inviting other business leaders to speak openly about theirs.
Together, the projects are intended to offer a more complete account of entrepreneurship, one that includes both the visible achievements and the private pressures behind them.
Avigdor is not attempting to make building a company appear easier than it is. He is creating space for founders and CEOs to acknowledge that struggle is often inseparable from growth.
For entrepreneurs still working through uncertainty, his message is straightforward: keep going, learn from what happens, and take the next shot.
