PODCAST · business
Builders & Doers
by Horizon Search
Builders & Doers is where founders, operators, and investors get practical about building. Each episode unpacks one decision that mattered, the options on the table, and the evidence behind the choice. Clear lessons you can use to launch stronger, lead smarter, and stay ahead.A Horizon Search production.Get The Searchlight newsletter: https://www.thesearchlight.com/subscribe
Episodes
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An Actor's Playbook for Leadership, Sales & Presence — Dominic Colenso | 85
Dominic Colenso is a former actor turned leadership, sales, and communication coach who has worked with tens of thousands of people over the past 12 years. He trained at Drama Centre London, acted on stage and screen, and is the author of Cut Through. In this conversation, Dominic explains why…
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CFOs, AI, and startup hiring — Tom Hunter | 84
When should a startup make its first finance hire? When does it actually need a CFO? And what happens when the numbers you’re presenting to investors aren’t as solid as you think? Tom Hunter, Story Recruitment - first-CFO and first-finance-hire search for Australian tech, fintech and deeptech...
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Your Body Needs Sunlight Like It Needs Food—Torkil Færø | 83
Dr. Torkil Færø is a Norwegian physician, wearable-data researcher, and author of The Pulse Cure — now back with a new book, The Sun Cure, released today in Norway. After noticing that heart rate variability could double simply from sun exposure, Torkil spent years digging into the research and...
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Why Regeneration Beats Bouncing Back — Stuart J. Green | 82
Stuart J. Green is the founder and CEO of Blue Green Advisors, working across the marine and ocean space with multilateral banks, development agencies, and organizations navigating major transitions. After his wife's death upended his life, Stuart spent years searching for a framework beyond...
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The CEO Who Survived Death Threats - Dane Hudson | 81
Dane Hudson spent 25+ years as a global CEO — running KFC in Southern Africa during a stretch that included death threats and a bulletproof car, then going on to lead operations across Sydney, Shanghai, Johannesburg, and New York, with a final role overseeing 200,000+ employees. He's since become...
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Why You're Living a Perpetual Life Crisis - Rob Cross | 80
Rob Cross is an executive coach and leadership advisor with 25 years of experience working with leaders across industries and cultures. After a career that began in the British Air Force and took him through executive ranks before becoming a full-time coach, Rob has spent the last quarter century...
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Conflict Is Data, Not Disruption - Anne-Maartje Oud | 79
Anne-Maartje Oud is a workplace behavior specialist with more than two decades of experience, the founder and CEO of The Behaviour Company in Amsterdam, and a certified behavior analyst trained by former FBI agent Joe Navarro (the only person to have completed his five-year apprenticeship…
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Zero to $30 Billion: Inside Sam's Club Scan & Go - Rick Ton | 78
Rick Ton is a 20-year veteran of growth and go-to-market, having spent his career scaling revenue at companies like Meta, Sam's Club, Walmart, Under Armour, Walgreens, and several high-growth startups. He was a founding team member on Sam's Club's Scan & Go — a self-checkout app that grew from…
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From the Fortune 500 to a Mission-Based PR Agency - Blair Huddy | 77
Blair Huddy is the co-founder of a mission-based PR agency she runs with her husband, focused on companies and projects that help people and the planet. After 15+ years in the corporate marketing world — including a tenure leading the rebrand and growth of a $7B affordable housing company that...
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97% of Business Owners Never Crack $1M. Here's Why. - Chris Kille | 76
Chris Kille is a Boston-based entrepreneur, author, and operations expert with four profitable exits behind him — including a payments business he scaled more than 10x in five years using just one domestic employee and four remote office assistants. After a cardiac event caused by burnout, he...
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The Pretending Pandemic in Your Workplace - Angela Cox | 75
Angela Cox is an executive coach, founder of Purseda 360, and host of the Leader Unmasked podcast. After more than a decade running lean transformation at Lloyds Banking Group, change management at Barclays, and strategy for a half-billion-pound business at Compass Group, she moved into coaching...
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Choose Change or Else - Barbara Salopek | 74
Barbara Salopek is an economist, author, and innovation consultant who grew up in Croatia and built her career in Norway. She teaches at BI Norwegian Business School, advises companies on bringing ideas to market, and is the author of an Amazon bestseller on innovation that scored 8/10 with...
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Why Your Heart Rate Knows You Better Than You Do - Dr. Torkil Færø | 73
Dr. Torkil Færø is a Norwegian general practitioner and emergency physician with 26 years of clinical experience, the author of five bestselling books, and the writer behind The Pulse Cure — translated into 10 languages and the only book to date dedicated to using consumer wearables for...
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When Everything Was Stripped Away - Fay Niewiadomski | 72
Fay Niewiadomski is the founder and CEO of ICTN (International Consulting and Training Network), a strategic intervention and executive coaching firm she's run for over three decades from offices in Beirut, Amman, and New York. A pioneer of strategic intervention in the Middle East, Fay has…
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Building Digital Twins to Run Your Social Media - Matt & Jack of HeySquibb | 71
Matt and Jack are co-founders of HeySquibb, an AI research lab modeling human psychology to build digital twins that run your social media. After Matt built an AI therapy clone in 2023 and saw the impact a digital representation of someone could have, the team came together around a bigger…
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The Hidden Cost CEOs Don't See Until They're Burned Out - Jon Basford | 70
Jon Basford is the founder of Lateral Solutions, a consulting firm that helps founders, CEOs, and nonprofit leaders build the internal operations their growth actually depends on. After a career that took him from law school to association management to the startup world as a fractional COO, Jon...
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Why Most People Go to Therapy Isn't What You Think - Dr. Emily Anhalt ｜69
Dr. Emily Anhalt is a clinical psychologist, co-founder of Coa (the gym for mental health), and author of Flex Your Feelings: Train Your Brain to Develop the 7 Traits of Emotional Fitness. After interviewing 100 psychologists and 100 entrepreneurs, she identified the seven traits emotionally...
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When You're Absolutely Positive, That's Your Warning Sign - Mitch Weisburgh | 68
Mitch Weisburgh is an educator, author, and founder of MindShifting, a framework built on three capacities he believes the world urgently needs more of: resourcefulness, resilience, and collaboration. After nearly four decades at the intersection of education and technology, a 2017 email from a...
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Why Your AI Strategy Is Backwards — and What to Do Instead - Peter Swimm | 67
Most companies are letting AI make decisions it shouldn't and missing the simple moves that would actually save them time and money. Peter Swimm has spent 30 years in tech, from Chicago libraries to Microsoft, and he's built a smarter way to think about conversational AI, autonomous agents, and...
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From a Target Aisle to $1.2M Pre-Seed - Zarina Bahadur | 66
Zarina Bahadur is the founder and CEO of 123 Baby Box, a subscription box company she launched as a student at UC Irvine after spotting an exhausted mom struggling in a Target baby aisle. She's since grown the business 245% in a single year, closed an oversubscribed $1.2M pre-seed, and been...
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The Hardest Person You'll Ever Lead Is You - Jen Ostrich | 65
Jen Ostrich is an executive coach, Enneagram expert, and founder of Grow Collective. After a career in advertising and brand leadership, she trained at the Hudson Institute and has spent the last decade and a half helping leaders understand the "why" behind how they think, feel, and act. She's...
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From Sleeping on Couches to Building a Seven Figure Insurance Agency - David Price | 64
Fifteen years ago David Price was battling addiction, sleeping on couches, and had no car. Today he runs a thriving insurance agency and mentors hundreds of agents across the country. His path from rock bottom to building a business that grows without him is a masterclass in grit, long-term...
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Why Hiring Family Could Be Killing Your Business - Liz Weber | 63
Liz Weber is a certified management consultant, executive advisor, and author ranked among the top 30 global gurus on leadership. After building a career helping founder-led and family-owned businesses navigate succession, strategy, and leadership development, she's become the person owners call...
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She Paid Off Six Figures of Debt in 3 Years on a Starter Salary - Veronica Deraleau | 61
Veronica Deraleau is an opera singer, Army Reserve veteran, financial coach, and author of Making Money is Simple. After graduating with an MBA and staring down six figures of student debt, she applied commercial real estate underwriting techniques to her personal finances and paid it all off in...
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The Future of XR Is Closer Than You Think - Karen Alexander | 61
Karen Alexander, founder of XR Women and co-founder of the Academy of Immersive Arts and Sciences, joins David and Becky to explore why extended reality is approaching a tipping point in adoption. From her unconventional journey out of academia and literature into immersive technology, Karen…
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The 12-Minute Secret That 25x'd His Income - John Mitchell | 60
At 50, John Mitchell was making $200–300K a year and felt stuck. Three months later, he discovered what he calls the full secret of Think and Grow Rich, developed a 12-minute daily technique around it, and within four years had 25x'd his income. John now teaches the Science of Success at the...
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Why 60% of CEOs Get Fired (and How to Avoid It) - Glenn Gow | 59
Glenn Gow has coached CEOs for decades and served as a venture-backed CEO for 25 years. In this conversation, we explore the hidden neural pathways that drive CEO behavior, why the habits that got you here won't get you there, and what it actually takes to scale yourself alongside your company....
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IMD Professor: Why 90% of Companies Get Sustainability Wrong - Goutam Challagalla | 58
Goutam Challagalla is a professor at IMD Business School, where he directs the Strategy Governance for Boards program. His new book, Clean Winners, studied hundreds of companies and found that the vast majority are approaching sustainability backwards: putting it at the center of strategy instead...
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This Psychologist Assessed 1,500 Leaders. Here's What Power Actually Does - Nik Kinley | 57
Nik Kinley has spent 35 years studying human behavior, from prison therapy rooms to Fortune 500 boardrooms. He's assessed over 1,500 senior leaders, coached CEOs of national banks, heads of national security, and Formula One team managers, and written nine books on leadership. In this…
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From Human Rights to the C-Suite: Navigating AI, Conflict & Career Reinvention - Minyang Jiang | 56
Minyang Jiang (MJ) is the Chief Strategy Officer at Credibly, where she runs marketing, sales, tech innovation, and corporate strategy. Before FinTech, she spent nearly a decade at Ford Motor Company launching commercial vehicles with $95M budgets, and before that worked in human rights. She's…
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From Cold Calling Billionaires to Decarbonizing NYC - Sarah Mae Selnick | 55
At 22, Sarah Mae Selnick was cold calling billionaire real estate developers from a boutique brokerage in Manhattan with zero experience and no idea what she was doing. By 24, she had put together the largest single transaction in Brooklyn's history: a deal worth over a billion dollars. Now she's...
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AI Messaging, Sales, and Startup Growth - Chris Brisson | 54
Chris Brisson talks about accidental entrepreneurship, human-first messaging, and where AI is taking sales. He shares how he went from selling rims and tires on eBay to building software, what he learned from a stagnant business he had to reinvent, why most companies get SMS wrong, what “texting…
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Brilliant Managers Don’t Have the Answers - Laura Ashley-Timms | 53
Most managers were promoted because they were good at the work, not because they were trained to lead people. In this conversation, Laura Ashley-Timms explains why so many “manager as coach” programs fail, why accidental managers are quietly draining productivity, and why the best leaders stop...
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HBS, BCG, HireFrame: The Real Story Behind the Resume - Mike Wu | 52
Mike Wu’s résumé looks like the classic prestige path: USC, investment banking, Sony, Harvard Business School, BCG, and then entrepreneurship. But in this conversation, he explains why that neat story looked much cleaner on LinkedIn than it felt in real life. We talk about career searching versus...
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From Homeless in Japan at 18 to Scaling a Startup - Alex Peñuñuri | 51
At 18, Alex found himself homeless in Japan for a week during finals. Years later, that same ability to stay calm in chaos shaped how he approaches startup life: uncertainty, pressure, constant fires, and the discipline to keep moving anyway. In this episode, we talk about the real lessons behind...
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He Built a $600M Nonprofit Engine. His Leadership Rule Is Simple - Howard Pearl | 50
Howard Pearl explains how CARS returned over $600 million to nonprofits, why donor trust and operational transparency matter so much, how respect became his core leadership principle, what drove extremely low turnover, why mission-driven work broadened his worldview, and what first-time CEOs need...
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Stories That Convert: The 5C Framework for Speaking & Business Growth - Danny Brassell | 49
In this episode, speaker-coach and former educator, Danny Brassell, breaks down why great communication is rarely about “more information” and almost always about better stories, better structure, and one clear next step. Danny walks through his 5C process for high-converting talks and pitches:...
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Sports Business: How Teams Build Revenue, Fans & Demand - Lou DePaoli | 48
In this episode, I sit down with Lou DePaoli, President at General Sports Worldwide, for a masterclass in sports business, fan growth, and revenue strategy. Lou shares lessons from decades across professional sports, including how he helped teams improve business performance, why ticket demand...
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From Business Burnout to Selling a Business, Identity & Syndications - Elijah Iung | 47
Elijah (Legacy Way Holdings) joins us for a candid conversation on what happens after building and selling a business, why exits are more emotional than most founders expect, and how he transitioned into multifamily real estate investing and syndications.We talk about founder identity, faith and...
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AI Finance, 30K Users, and the Truth About Startup Exits - Alexander Harmsen | 46
Alexander Harmsen joins me to break down how AI can improve financial outcomes without fully replacing humans, why personalization is where the real value is, and how he’s building in one of the hardest regulated categories.We also talk about founder resilience, product iteration, growth…
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Escape the Insta Fantasy - Greg Styan | 45
In this conversation, Greg Styan breaks down why burnout is often disguised as hustle and how social comparison quietly drains your agency. We unpack the “insta fantasy” loop, how to step off the treadmill, and the practical systems Greg uses to build clarity and consistency without burning out....
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Money Buys Happiness. Become Time Rich, Not Busy - Lloyd James Ross | 44
In this conversation, Lloyd James Ross (author of Money Buys Happiness and host of the Money Grows on Trees podcast) breaks down what money is actually for, and why being “time rich” is the real win. We talk about inner vs outer scorecards, the Focus Funnel, and the practical steps that create...
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Moneyball Venture, Real Outcomes: A 90% Startup Survival Rate - Adam Coughlin | 43
In this conversation, Adam Coughlin (Co-founder of York IE) breaks down why the “soft” stuff (storytelling, empathy, presence, and clear communication) is quickly becoming the hard advantage in company-building. We unpack how a journalism mindset helps founders translate complexity, why being...
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When to Split the Difference and When It’ll Kill the Deal - Derrick Chevalier | 42
In this conversation, Derrick Chevalier (author of “Evolve or Be Slaughtered”) breaks down what “evolved negotiation” really means and why most popular rules break the moment reality gets messy. We unpack when splitting the difference is smart, why negotiating “issues” is a trap, and how to…
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The “Switzerland Structure” for Exits - Nunzio Presta | 41
In this conversation, Nunzio Presta (Founder of BuyAndSellABusiness.com, Rothwell Capital, and Pallet Connect) breaks down the micro-M&A world and the truth behind “entrepreneurship through acquisition”. We unpack why the sub-$5M enterprise value market is heating up, how to choose the right...
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The CFO Is the New Chief Data Officer - Salvatore Tirabassi | 40
In this conversation, Salvatore Tirabassi (Managing Director of CFO Pro+Analytics) breaks down the modern CFO role as something far bigger than accounting. He explains why great finance leaders act as the “chief data officer” for the business, how to build a true single source of truth, and what...
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Uncovering the Threads of Humanity - Fredrik Haren | 39
In this engaging conversation, Fredrik Haren, a creativity explorer, shares his insights from traveling to over 70 countries, including his experiences in Bhutan and the unique perspectives on creativity he encountered. He discusses the importance of curiosity, the common threads that unite...
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Captain Your Career in the Age of AI - Dora Boussias | 38
From cultivating tobacco in rural Greece to becoming an award-winning data & AI executive and global keynote speaker, Dora Boussias has spent 30 years proving that you can be the captain of your own ship. In this conversation, she shares how she navigated immigration at 17, built a…
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Don't Buy a Business Until You Learn These Truths - Rafa Caldas & Zach Krumholz | 37
They had the perfect resumes. The elite MBAs from Columbia Business School. The foolproof plan to skip the startup grind and buy an existing, successful company. They thought it would be easier. They were wrong. This is the untold story of what happens after you launch a search fund. It’s a…
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From Google to Spotify to Venture Studio: Kal Amin on Building with Integrity | 36
What do Spotify, Google, and AI venture studios have in common? Kal Amin has been at the center of all three, shaping global operations and building companies that balance growth with integrity. From Spotify’s shift to mobile-first, to Google’s early “focus on the user” mantra, to leading...
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ABOUT THIS SHOW
Builders & Doers is where founders, operators, and investors get practical about building. Each episode unpacks one decision that mattered, the options on the table, and the evidence behind the choice. Clear lessons you can use to launch stronger, lead smarter, and stay ahead.A Horizon Search production.Get The Searchlight newsletter: https://www.thesearchlight.com/subscribe
HOSTED BY
Horizon Search
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Frequently Asked Questions
How many episodes does Builders & Doers have?
Builders & Doers currently has 83 episodes available on PodParley. New episodes are automatically indexed when they're published to the podcast feed.
What is Builders & Doers about?
Builders & Doers is where founders, operators, and investors get practical about building. Each episode unpacks one decision that mattered, the options on the table, and the evidence behind the choice. Clear lessons you can use to launch stronger, lead smarter, and stay ahead.A Horizon Search...
How often does Builders & Doers release new episodes?
Builders & Doers has 83 episodes. Check the episode list to see recent publication dates and frequency.
Where can I listen to Builders & Doers?
You can listen to Builders & Doers on PodParley by clicking any episode. We provide an embedded audio player for direct listening, and you can also subscribe via your preferred podcast app using the RSS feed.
Who hosts Builders & Doers?
Builders & Doers is created and hosted by Horizon Search.
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