The Idea:
After high school, Gideon Keyson left Amsterdam for Israel on his own. He did a six-month coding bootcamp, then joined the Israeli Navy as a lone soldier and promptly discovered he got seasick. It took him three months of pills, patches and ginger just to function.
When everyone else in his unit went home for the weekend, Gideon stayed on the boat and coded. His project was Debater.tv, a platform where politicians with opposing views could argue it out over video. Back in the Netherlands, his older brother Nadav, then studying for an MBA, cold-pitched Dutch politicians to come on.
By October 2019, they had senior politicians signed up and a platform that worked. What they didn’t have was viewers. When they shut it down, nobody even asked where it had gone.
But buried inside was something clever. Instead of streaming the debate over a shaky connection, Gideon’s tech recorded each person locally on their own computer, then stitched the files together afterwards. Studio quality, no matter how bad the Wi-Fi.
This was the beginning of Riverside.
The Execution:
- October 2019: Debater.tv is ready, with senior Dutch politicians on board, but it never finds an audience. The brothers keep the local recording engine and point it at podcasters fed up with Zoom-quality audio.
- March 14, 2020: Riverside launches on Product Hunt with two paying customers. Within days, lockdowns send every podcast host in the world home.
- Spring 2020: With no funding, they can’t afford a free tier, so they charge from day one. The goal is just 100 customers and $4,000 a month, enough for both brothers to live on. Nadav cold-emails Dutch media, and the country’s leading news site says yes. Then the NFL does too.
- Late 2020: Gideon is sitting in a Torah class when Nadav messages him: Hillary Clinton is recording on their platform, live. Investor Oren Zeev leads a $2.5M seed before Riverside has a single employee or is even registered as a company. Instead of a pitch deck, they show investors the payment dashboard.
- April 2021: Alexis Ohanian’s Seven Seven Six leads a $9.5M Series A. A year later, a $35M Series B follows, and the team has grown to 100.
- December 2024: A $30M Series C takes total funding to $80M, with creators like Casey Neistat and Marques Brownlee among the angels.
- 2025: Taylor Swift records her New Heights episode on Riverside, and Elon Musk livestreams an X AMA through it.
- October 2026: Riverside launches Riverside Agents, an AI producer, editor, clipper and marketer that get to work the moment a recording ends.
- October 30, 2026: Riverside crosses $100M ARR, with 2.3 million creators, 16M+ guests and 42% of Apple’s top 100 podcasts on the platform. Next stop: $1B.
The lesson? Debater.tv failed, but the clever part was never the debates. It was the plumbing underneath: recording everyone locally so a bad connection couldn’t ruin the take. The Keysons spotted that, ripped it out and handed it to the people who needed it most, just as the whole world was forced to record from home. Two brothers who once hoped for $4,000 a month are now 10% of the way to $1B ARR. Sometimes your failed startup is just the right technology in the wrong wrapper.