Johanna Hartzheim

Post-pitch story

Qleek's story on the show is practically a trilogy. Ismail Salhi and Johanna Hartzheim pitched a beautiful wooden hexagon that played your digital music — a physical object for a streaming world. The investors on the show passed. Then something rare happened: a listener heard the episode, believed in it, and invested to keep the company alive in 2017. The show later aired a full postmortem-and-comeback episode about it. Qleek fought on for a few more years, but the economics of small-batch hardware are unforgiving, and the company finally shut down during the COVID-19 pandemic in 2020. Here's the twist, though: Salhi and Hartzheim didn't leave the subscription world — they conquered a different corner of it. The two went on to co-found Wildgrain, a subscription service delivering artisan bread, pasta and pastries, which has grown into a genuinely successful business with a loyal following. So the Qleek story ends up being less about a gadget that didn't make it and more about two founders who took everything they learned — subscriptions, logistics, physical products people love — and applied it to sourdough. The second pitch worked.