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You keep hearing that success is about vision. That is not wrong, but it misses the harder truth. Vision is easy. Living with the consequences of your decisions is the work.I spoke with Jae Lee, a founder on his eighth startup, and what stayed with me was not the wins. It was the pattern. He did not begin with some grand plan. He saw problems that were right in front of him. A school without a website. A publisher with a bad one. He built something. Then he did it again. And again.That sounds clean when you say it fast. It is not clean when you live it.Four of his companies failed. Not soft failures. Real ones. Money lost. Time gone. Teams broken. And the cause was not market timing or tech. It was people. Bad hires. Missed signals. Ignored warnings. The kind of mistakes that do not show up in pitch decks but end companies all the same.He said something worth sitting with. Feedback is a gift. You do not have to like it. But you should ask who gave it and why. Most founders say they want honesty. Few actually take it when it costs them something.There is also this idea that founders are always right. He believes that. I think he is half right. The founder makes the call. That is the job. But being right in that sense just means you own the outcome. It does not mean the call was good.Then the world steps in.He was building in the Gulf. Deals in motion. Meetings lined up. Real traction. Then conflict hit the region. Plans stopped. Movement slowed. Momentum broke. He was not even in the blast zone, but it did not matter. The system around him changed. That is the part people do not like to admit. You can do everything right and still get knocked sideways.So what do you do when the ground shifts?You adjust. Not in a dramatic way. Not with some heroic pivot story. You narrow the focus. You pick a tighter problem. In his case, from general building management to data centers. Same direction, smaller target. You keep moving.That is the through line here. Not brilliance. Not luck. Endurance with small corrections.I asked him why he keeps doing this. Why not take the safe route. He gave a simple answer. One life. One shot. He wants to leave something behind that shows he helped people move forward in their work. Not money. Not status. Influence in the practical sense.You can agree with that or not. But it explains the behavior.Most people want control. Founders learn, slowly, that control is thin. You do not control markets. You do not control timing. You barely control your own reactions some days. What you control is whether you keep going when the easy path is to stop.That is the job. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.keepgoingpod.com/subscribe

Arthur Chen is trying to do something boring on purpose.Chen is the co founder and CEO of Verdi Agriculture, and he describes the company as “physical AI for farm infrastructure,” starting with irrigation. The pitch is not about tractors or drones. It is about the pipes, valves, pumps, and filter stations that farms rely on every day, and that most farms still run by hand. Chen says about 95 percent of farms still operate this stuff manually, with workers walking fields to check equipment and turn things on and off.Verdi’s approach is retrofit. Instead of asking a farm to rip out infrastructure and install a bespoke automation system, Chen says Verdi builds modular devices that sit on top of what is already there and make it “smart.” The same core idea can be applied across equipment, from pipes and valves to filter stations and even sulfur burners. The benefit is not just efficiency. It is reducing repetitive field work that eats time and labor.I asked what makes this hard, because the parts sound like commodity hardware. Chen’s answer was that the hardware is only half the story. The real complexity is in the software and firmware that lets devices act as a fleet. Irrigation is not as simple as flipping a valve. He pointed to hydraulic constraints, open a valve too early or too late and you can run out of water, or blow something up. Verdi’s system coordinates sequences so farms can automate without breaking infrastructure.The reason he cares is personal. Chen said the founding team comes from farming families, and that the work is driven by what they have seen up close, rising labor costs, water scarcity, and extreme weather that makes farming less predictable. His view is that the point of better infrastructure is resilience, keeping food production stable even as conditions get worse.Hardware is also a fundraising problem, so I asked how they raised. Chen framed the product as “digital labor,” a substitute for human labor on repetitive operational tasks. He said Verdi has shown enough adoption in a tough market to bring in investors, including hard tech and climate focused funds.Verdi is working in a corner of agriculture that Chen says has been overlooked. John Deere and others are heavily digitized, but in mobile machinery. Irrigation infrastructure is still mostly analog, and even where automation exists it has tended to be expensive and custom, which is why adoption is low. Chen said there are a couple of companies building into this segment, but he sees the 95 percent of farms that are not automated as the real market.A big part of the strategy is usability. Farmers and farm operators are not sitting in front of spreadsheets all day. They are dealing with immediate problems in the field. Chen said Verdi is built for the everyday operator, not the farm engineer. The product is meant to offload the constant equipment checking and troubleshooting so people can focus on the work that actually needs human judgment.On go to market, Chen said agriculture is still relationship driven, but door to door selling and trade shows do not scale. Verdi uses outbound sales built around registries and databases to target the growers where they can have the most impact. He also said they use satellite data to enrich lead targeting and understand needs by region. At the same time, he said inbound demand matters because growers want agency, they want to choose tools, not be shoved into them.When I asked what success looks like, Chen said he expects farms to look different in ten years. Not just irrigation, but every piece of infrastructure, processing buildings, power systems, and basic plumbing, will be smart in some way. He pointed to the size of the agricultural equipment market to make the case that infrastructure can support a very large company, and he wants Verdi to be that company on the infrastructure side.He also has a second obsession, finance. Chen said agriculture lacks the kind of project finance and structured financing instruments that helped scale clean energy. He thinks there is room for fintech built specifically for agriculture, to finance the upgrade cycle that resilience requires.Verdi is currently focused on the west coast of North America, the US and Canada, and is expanding across the continent, into Mexico, and into Latin America later this year. Chen said sales grew about 16x over the past year. He said the company is not raising right now and expects to raise a Series A in early 2027. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.keepgoingpod.com/subscribe

Stefan Lindstrom has spent years studying entrepreneurs. Not the mythology but the actual behavior. He’s givens of thousands of tests and had thousands of conversations. And what he came back with is not inspiring.It’s repetitive.Same people succeed over and over. Same people stall over and over. He sees the same habits. The same reactions. The same blind spots.But who succeeds and who fails? Lindstrom has an answer.He keeps coming back to the same thing. Self-awareness. Not journaling, not vibes. Just noticing what you do when things go wrong, and being honest about why you keep doing it.Most founders can’t do that.They’re built to act. They see a problem, they move. That’s the whole game. But they also get attached. The idea becomes theirs. And once that happens, they stop listening.He said it in a way that stuck. “Ideas are like children. Everyone thinks theirs is special.”That’s where things break.The market doesn’t care. Customers don’t care. You either adjust or you don’t. And if you don’t, you repeat the same pattern until you run out of time or money.There’s another piece to it.A lot of founders don’t know how to sell.They build something real, something that works, and then they freeze when they have to explain it. Especially outside the U.S. You don’t grow up pitching. You don’t grow up selling yourself.So you get stuck with a good product and no way to move it.Meanwhile the market right now is a mess. Frozen in places. Nobody really knows what’s next.That’s not a bad thing.That’s the only time entrepreneurship works.If everything is stable, nothing new gets built. When things shift, when the ground feels off, that’s when someone steps in and figures something out.Entrepreneurs don’t wait for clarity. They move into the confusion and try to shape it.That’s it.Not vision. Not passion. Not some founder story you can package.You notice what you’re doing. You fix what you can. You keep moving even when it feels wrong.And sometimes, that’s enough. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.keepgoingpod.com/subscribe

David Silverstein started building Amaze Health in 2019, before the current AI wave made “AI health” feel like its own category. He told me he was not trying to invent the models, he was trying to build the platform that would be ready when the models were ready.Silverstein, CEO, describes the company as an operating system for healthcare, something employers and patients can use to manage care the way a computer runs apps. The product started in what most people think of as telemedicine, then expanded into areas like mental health, virtual primary care, ortho support, navigation, and care coordination, all packaged as a subscription so the user is not paying a new fee every time they need help.Where Amaze is trying to draw a line is how it uses AI. Silverstein says the company has its own medical team and a national medical practice, with providers as full time employees. That setup lets them use AI mostly behind the scenes, not as a chatbot trying to replace a clinician, but as software that makes clinicians faster and better.He gave a simple example. If a patient messages in about a rash, Amaze can prompt for a photo while the call is ringing, and he says they answer most calls in 15 or 20 seconds. Once the photo is captured, the AI can do visual pattern recognition and flag a likely match, poison ivy was his example. The patient can still wait for the clinician, ask for more info, or hang up if they already know what to do. In parallel, the clinician sees the photo and a probability score on their screen.A second example gets at why this is not only about convenience. Silverstein described a scenario where a parent calls about a child vomiting overnight. While the clinician is asking the normal questions, the AI is transcribing, taking notes, and running a rolling diagnosis. He said the system could call out to CDC data through an open API, spot that there have been recent E. coli cases near the caller, and surface that context to the clinician in real time.The line he kept coming back to was “meeting patients where they are.” Some people want a human every time. Some people want a fast answer and a safety net. Silverstein’s view is that a hybrid system can let the patient choose the pace, while still keeping a real clinician in the loop.He also talked about public health signal. Amaze is not trying to train new medical models from scratch. He says the company is still relatively small in data terms, with a little over 100,000 patients, and he does not think it would be responsible to claim they are “improving medicine” through training at that scale. But he does think they can spot patterns faster than traditional reporting loops. He described seeing COVID flare ups in near real time because of concentrated employer use in Phoenix, then checking later and seeing the same spikes reflected in CDC reporting after a delay.On the product side, he says they already use AI to generate provider notes and to evaluate patient sentiment, including whether a patient sounds receptive to instructions. He also mentioned using AI to score a “patient activation measure,” a way to estimate a patient’s knowledge, skill, and confidence in managing their own care, and then use that to tailor how clinicians communicate on future calls.Silverstein’s bet is that healthcare will get more technical under the hood and more relationship driven on the surface. In his view, AI will keep getting better at complex diagnosis, but patients will still need a trusted partner to help them decide what to do next, where to go, and how to pay for it as the system gets more confusing. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.keepgoingpod.com/subscribe

I sat down with comedian DC Pearson and what struck me wasn’t the success. It was the patchwork.From the outside, it looks clean. Comedy group, Sundance film, books, writing for TV. A straight line. But it isn’t.“Our life is composed of days,” he told me. “And this is one of them.”That’s the job. Not the career. The day.Because most of the time, it’s not the dream. It’s the gap between dreams.DC spent the last year working in social media advertising. Not because he wanted to pivot. Because the work slowed down. Because strikes happened. Because the industry does what it always does, it dries up and then floods again.“It was challenging to my identity as a creative person,” he said. “But then it was also cool… and I was grateful for it because it’s a job and it allows you to be alive.”That’s the truth nobody puts in the highlight reel.You don’t “make it.” You stitch it together.You jump from one thing to the next. You write jokes for someone else all day, then try to find enough energy at night to write something for yourself. You take the corporate gig, then try not to let it eat the part of you that wanted this life in the first place.And most of the time, it almost does.The only thing that saved him was simple. Another person.Someone else in the same situation. Same background. Same problem.“We would kind of be accountability partners… I’d say I’m gonna write this thing this weekend… and then I’d come back and say, I did it.”Not a system. Not a course. Not a master plan.Just two people refusing to let the work die.That theme came up again when we talked about how he started. It wasn’t strategy. It was proximity.Five people. One group. Each doing a different thing well enough to make something real.“We had… the ability… to go and make sketches that looked better than a lot of stuff that was out there at the time.”Not because they were perfect. Because they were there.This is the part people miss now. Especially with AI sitting there, ready to do everything faster.You can generate the thing. You can fake the output. You can make something that looks right.But you lose the reason you started.“I would rather come up with ten dumb toilet puns… that nobody’s ever going to notice… and be like, I did every single one of those.”It’s the quiet satisfaction that you made the thing yourself, even if no one sees it.We talked about AI, and he didn’t panic. He didn’t celebrate it either.He just called it what it is.“Plausible.”It looks right. It feels right. It passes at a glance.But it doesn’t hold up.And more importantly, it doesn’t carry the weight of a real life behind it.“A server farm can’t do that,” he said, talking about the weird, difficult experiences people put into their work.That’s the bet now.Not that AI disappears. It won’t.But that the connection between a person and the thing they made still matters.Even if it gets harder to make money. Even if the pipeline gets worse. Even if everything gets noisier.Because the alternative is easy.Too easy.And easy work rarely means anything.At the end, I asked him where this is all going. Where media goes. Where attention goes.He didn’t pretend to know.But he said something I keep thinking about.“There are things fomenting that we don’t even know what they are… it’s probably already happening, and the algorithm is not picking up on it.”That’s where the next thing is.Not in the feed. Not in the obvious place.Somewhere small. Somewhere ignored. Somewhere real.And if you’re paying attention, you’ll find it.Or better, you’ll build it. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.keepgoingpod.com/subscribe

I talked to Ela Thier this week on Keep Going, and she said something early on that told me exactly where the conversation was headed. Filmmakers, she said, know a lot about failure. That sounded like a joke, but not really. It was more like a basic fact of the trade.Thier is a writer, director, and the founding director of the Independent Film School, which now has something like 65,000 members. The strange part is how it began. She could not get a job. She applied for a dog-walking job and did not get that either. So she did what a lot of people do when the normal routes close up. She made her own opening. She announced that she was starting a screenwriting class. Two people signed up. One of them wanted a discount. So she made the first class free, twenty people showed up, eight stayed for the full course, and the thing took on a life of its own.That story sounds neat when you tell it fast, but what I liked about her version is that she does not pretend she had some polished strategy from the start. She was trying things. She was paying attention. She was making changes. Now people would call it a lead magnet and act like it was all part of a system, but back then it was just common sense. Let people see what you can do. Let them decide if they want more.There is a lesson in that which has nothing to do with film school and everything to do with work. A lot of people wait for permission, or for the market to confirm them before they begin. Thier did the opposite. She put something in the world, saw what happened, and kept moving. That is a better way to build almost anything.The phrase she kept coming back to was “follow the fun,” which could sound soft if it came from somebody less serious. From her it did not. She meant it as a discipline. She meant that when the work stops feeling alive, you should pay attention, even if the safer move is to keep grinding in the same format. She said she has changed things at the school in ways that cost her students and forced her to rebuild. The biggest break came when she moved from in-person teaching to online teaching. Most of the old students vanished. She had to start over. But the move let the school grow in a way it never could have otherwise.That is the hard part of following what feels alive. It is not comfort. It is risk. Adults forget that. Kids do not need to be taught how to enjoy making things. They do it by default. Then school, work, status, and all the usual junk come in and flatten that instinct into a set of measurements. Thier’s point was that the chase for success and fear of failure can pull you away from the work that actually matters to you. For artists that is deadly. It is probably bad for everyone else too.She was also blunt about money, which I appreciated. When I asked how an artist makes enough to survive, she did not romanticize it. She said you get a job. That was her answer. Being an artist, in her telling, is a labor of love, not a reliable business model. If some money comes from the art, good. But counting on that is like building your life around a winning lottery ticket. Better to separate the two goals. One is keeping the lights on. The other is making the work you need to make. Once you jam those together, you often fail at both.That answer matters because too much advice around creativity is built on fantasy. We tell people to monetize their passion, build their brand, scale their gifts, and all the rest of it. Most of the time that just means turning the thing you love into another machine for stress. Thier has a more useful view. Protect the work first. Protect your ability to do it. Get honest about the economics. Then keep going.At the same time, she does not draw a hard line between art and business. She said that when she moved the school online and had to learn marketing, course-building, team management, and sales, she found that process deeply creative too. She treated it like making something, not like taking a day job away from her real work. That is probably why she got through it. She was not just doing admin. She was building a structure that could hold the rest of her life up.Still, there was a cost. For a few years, she had to put filmmaking aside and put her energy into the school. That tradeoff was not theoretical. It took real time away from the work she most wanted to do. But the payoff came later. The school made it possible for her to direct another film, one starring J.K. Simmons, which she is releasing this year. That is the kind of delayed return most people hate because it takes too long and gives you no guarantee. It is also, very often, the only kind that counts.One of the strongest parts of the conversation came when she talked about her film Tomorrow Ever After. By her account it did everything an independent filmmaker could ask once audiences actually saw it. It got standing ovations. It won awards. It had a perfect Rotten Tomatoes score during its run. And yet it still could not get proper distribution. She told me about meeting with an executive at Sony Pictures Classics who said they loved the film and could not buy it. It was not at Sundance. It had no known actors. They could not sell it.That, she said, was when she became a grownup.It is a hard line, but an honest one. She realized that if you want to beat the game, sometimes you have to pretend to play it. So the next films got built with financeable actors attached. That was not the death of her principles. It was an adjustment to reality. There is a difference. Artists hate that distinction because it feels like compromise, and sometimes it is. But there is also a point where refusing the rules just means nobody sees the work. That can become its own kind of vanity.I asked her why she stays in New York when it is expensive and hard and increasingly absurd in all the normal ways. Her answer had nothing to do with career. It was about people. Family in Brooklyn. Her nephew. The relationships that make a life feel real. She said those are the safest investment we have. I think she is right. A lot of people make decisions about where to live or what to build based on some abstract idea of winning. Thier’s view is more grounded than that. Stay near the people who make you yourself.By the end of the interview it was clear that her school is not some side project that got out of hand. It is part of the same body of work. She cares about her students. She would like to coach all of them herself, but the thing is too large now, so she coaches the coaches and keeps the system going that way. She also argues, correctly I think, that her students are better served when she keeps making films. If she stopped doing the work, her advice would go stale.She has a book coming out in May called How to Fail as an Artist: My Best Tips, which is the exact kind of title I like because it does not pretend the road is clean. She described it as a memoir, but also as a pep talk for artists who have given up, or are about to, which probably means most artists at one point or another.That is what this whole conversation was really about. Not failure as branding. Not failure as a cute origin story. Failure as the weather you work in if you care about making something real. Thier’s answer is not to deny that. It is to build a life sturdy enough to keep working anyway, keep teaching anyway, keep making films anyway, and keep some part of the whole thing joyful enough that you do not turn into a dead machine while doing it. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.keepgoingpod.com/subscribe

I ran into a strange hack this week. It looks simple at first, but it is not. It targets job seekers. I think I recall submitting a resume for a job at a company called Runeapes, which, at least on the surface, looks like a real website.You get a message saying you missed an appointment. It points you to a booking page. The name looks normal, the flow looks normal. You click through, pick a time, go through the usual steps. Nothing stands out.Then it asks you to get ready for the meeting.There is a download for Windows, which is expected. Then there is a “download” for macOS. That is where things change. Instead of a file, you get a terminal command. A curl command. It tells you to paste it into your terminal. If you’re not technical, this step can inject so much malware into your system that you’ll probably be hacked for life.That should stop you right there.The command points to a domain that looks real at a glance but is not. The domain was created recently. Same with the app domain tied to the booking flow. Both showed up within the past month or so.I started poking around. The site has all the usual pages: Pricing, About, Blog, Careers, Contact. Every single one is dead. Links go nowhere. Social links are junk. It is a full layout with no substance behind it.I tried to pull the file without running it, just to see what it was doing. Even that failed. The endpoint is already gone. Whatever was there has been taken down or moved.So what is the point?The point is to get you to run a command you do not understand. If you paste that into your terminal and hit enter, you are giving it permission to do whatever it wants on your machine. Download code, run it, install something, pull data, anything.Most people are not used to seeing terminal commands in a normal workflow, but the setup here is convincing enough that someone might go along with it. It looks like a meeting tool. It feels like onboarding. You are already halfway committed by the time you see the command.That is the trick.If you take one thing from this, it is simple: Do not paste random commands into your terminal. Ever. It does not matter how official the site looks or how normal the flow feels. If you do not know exactly what a command does, do not run it.Also, we know that hackers are targeting the desperate. There are endless crypto scams out there, and this one targets job seekers who are already probably exhausted. Please be careful any time someone asks you to use anything outside of Zoom, Calendly, or Google Meet. Also, make sure you never, ever download weird apps to connect to any kind of video meeting.This one is already dead, but there will be more. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.keepgoingpod.com/subscribe

I talked to Bobby Mascia this week on Keep Going, and what struck me was how different his story is from the usual startup script. A lot of founders like to talk about building from nothing, but Bobby’s problem was almost the reverse. He had something waiting for him, a family business, a clear role, a life that had already been sketched out by other people, and he still had to figure out whether staying in that world was loyalty or surrender.Mascia came out of Wall Street and landed in the one place he never wanted to be, his family’s Dunkin’ Donuts and Baskin-Robbins business in New Jersey. After 9/11 and a series of health problems in his family, he stepped in because his parents needed help and because, in his words, family came first. Over nine years they grew the business from 20 locations to 40, which sounds like success until you look at the cost. He was underpaid, frustrated, and stuck inside a structure that ran on old rules, unclear expectations, and the kind of family tension that never stays in the office.That is really the center of his story. Family businesses are rarely just businesses. They are full of old slights, private assumptions, and power struggles that started long before anyone talked about margins or strategy. Mascia said the biggest failures in his own experience were communication and transparency. Everybody had expectations, but nobody actually said them out loud. He assumed he would eventually take over. His father assumed he would hand over more responsibility when the time felt right. Other relatives had their own ideas. None of that added up to a plan.What I liked about Bobby’s take is that he does not dress this up as some clean business lesson. He talks about resentment, confusion, and the weird emotional math of trying to be a son, an operator, and a future owner at the same time. He gave a good example during the interview about how family members in business often switch roles in the middle of an argument without even noticing it. One minute you are talking as CEO and CMO, then suddenly you are talking as siblings, then as equal owners, then as two people reliving something from twenty years ago. Once that happens, the actual issue is gone. You are no longer solving a business problem. You are fighting over identity.That part felt useful well beyond family business. A lot of people build companies with friends, spouses, or long-time collaborators, and the same confusion creeps in. If you do not know what role each person is playing in a given conversation, then every disagreement becomes personal. Mascia’s answer is simple enough to sound obvious, but most people never do it. Name the role. Name the conversation. Stay inside it. If you need to have a different conversation, have it later.The other part of his story that stayed with me was what happened when he finally left. He started over in finance, built Green Ridge Wealth Planning from scratch, and spent a year barely speaking to his father. That split sounds brutal, and it was, but it also gave him the space to figure out who he was without the family machine around him. He did not leave with a pile of money. He left with a wife who told him he looked miserable and needed to do something that felt like his own life. That may have been the smartest advice in the whole interview.There is a common lie in family business, and probably in life in general, that staying is always the noble move. Sometimes staying is just fear with a respectable face. Sometimes leaving is the only honest act left. That does not mean leaving is clean or painless, and it certainly does not mean everyone will thank you for it. In Mascia’s case, success only changed the conversation later, once his father could see that walking away was not a tantrum or a mistake. It was a real choice.We also talked about AI, which could have turned into the usual stale debate about which jobs are doomed, but Mascia had a more grounded answer than most. He thinks people who hide from AI are making a mistake, but he also thinks the businesses that will hold up best are the ones where human judgment still matters and where people still need to sit across from another person and work through hard decisions. In his world, wealth management is not just portfolio construction. It is helping people through conflict, grief, risk, inheritance, and fear. Those are not spreadsheet problems. Those are human problems.That led into one of the better lines of the conversation, which was not really a line so much as a theme. Hard skills still matter because you need to know when the machine is wrong, but soft skills are going to matter more than people expect. Communication matters. Presence matters. Being able to understand what someone means when they are scared matters. If you cannot do that, then all the automation in the world is just faster confusion.Mascia wrote a book called Unchained, and unlike a lot of business books, it came out of something real. He said he had no interest in writing the same recycled advice everybody has already heard a hundred times. What pushed him to write was not some urge to build a personal brand. It was the sense that his story might actually help somebody who was stuck in the same kind of trap, caught between loyalty and ambition, between what the family wants and what a life requires.That is the part that makes this episode worth hearing. It is not really about succession planning, although that is in there. It is not just about entrepreneurship, either. It is about what happens when the thing you are supposed to inherit is also the thing that is holding you in place. It is about the cost of not saying what you want. It is about how many people spend years trying to be good sons or daughters when they should be trying to become themselves.For all the talk about hustle and grit, this was a conversation about boundaries, and that feels a lot more useful right now. Not every good opportunity is your opportunity. Not every family duty has to become your whole identity. Sometimes the best thing you can do for the people you love is stop pretending you can live the life they picked for you. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.keepgoingpod.com/subscribe

I sat down with Anne Karber and what struck me right away was not the résumé. Entrepreneur, author, podcast host, all of that is fine, but it is not the story. The story is what happens when you build a life that works on paper and still feels wrong when you wake up in it.She came up in construction, which is not a forgiving place. Long hours, constant pressure, and a culture that rewards output above everything else. She learned to operate in that mode early. Work harder than everyone else. Push through anything. Do not stop to think about how you feel because that slows you down. That approach got her success in the way most people define it. Money, stability, control. But it also trained her to ignore anything that did not fit into that system.Then her sister died, suddenly and without warning, and that kind of loss does not fit into a system built on control. It breaks it. What followed was not some dramatic collapse. It was something more common and more dangerous. She kept going, but she started numbing herself to get through it. Work during the day, drinking at night, and repeating that cycle until it became normal. Not chaos, just a steady flattening of everything that mattered.She described it in a way that is hard to ignore. You are not living your life at that point, you are anesthetizing it. You remove the parts that hurt, but you also remove the parts that make anything feel real. The problem is that it works, at least for a while. That is why people stay there.What changed for her was not some sudden moment of clarity. It was exhaustion with the pattern. She got to a place where she could not look at herself and feel any sense of pride. That is a low bar, but it is a real one. When you cross that line, something has to give.She went to rehab. She doubled down on therapy. She started doing things that sound simple and are anything but simple when you are used to avoiding yourself. Writing things down. Sitting without distractions. Paying attention to where her time and energy were actually going. Not where she thought they were going, but where they really went when she looked at it honestly.One of the sharper points she made is that energy is the only resource that really matters. Everyone talks about time, but time is not the issue. Energy is. You can spend hours doing something and feel fine, or you can spend twenty minutes on something that drains you completely. Most people never track that. They just move from one habit to another and assume it is all the same.She started treating energy like something that had to be accounted for. What gives it back. What takes it away. What is neutral. Once you see that clearly, you start to realize how much of your life is built around habits that do nothing for you. Endless scrolling. Drinking. Overworking. All of it framed as necessary, but none of it actually helping.There is a hard part here that she did not soften. You have to be honest about what you are doing. Not in a vague way, but in a direct way. If you spend three hours a day on your phone, you write that down. If you drink every night, you admit what that is doing, not what you tell yourself it is doing. Most people avoid that step because it is uncomfortable, but without it nothing changes.She also pushed back on the idea that people do not have time to fix any of this. That excuse falls apart the second you look at how your day is actually spent. There is time, it is just not being used well. That is not a moral judgment, it is just a fact.What I found interesting is that she did not replace one extreme with another. She still works. She still builds things. The difference is that it is not coming from the same place. Before, work was part of the numbing. Now it is something she chooses with intent. That sounds small, but it changes everything.There is also a broader point here about how people define success. She followed the standard path for decades. The house, the cars, the outward signs that you have made it. When she got there, it did not deliver what it promised. That is not a new story, but it is one that people keep ignoring because the alternative requires more thought and more responsibility.The question she kept coming back to is simple and uncomfortable. What are you using to avoid your own life. Not what are you doing to relax, not what are you doing to unwind, but what are you using to not feel what is actually going on. If you answer that honestly, you start to see the structure you are living in.Most people sense that something is off at some point. They have that moment where they think there has to be more than this. The usual move is to ignore it and keep going. What Anne did was stop and follow that thought instead of pushing it away.There is nothing clean or easy about that process. It is slow and it forces you to deal with things you have been avoiding for years. But the alternative is to stay in a loop that never changes.The takeaway is not some neat system or set of rules. It is more basic than that. Pay attention to what you are doing. Be honest about why you are doing it. Then start making changes, even small ones, based on what you see. Most people never get past the first step.She did, and that is the whole difference. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.keepgoingpod.com/subscribe

The American healthcare system is full of software. It is not always full of care.That was one of the clearest lessons from my conversation with Melissa Hanna, the co-founder and CEO of Mahmee, a company that provides prenatal and postpartum support through doulas, lactation consultants, nurses, mental health providers, and nutritionists. The services are bundled together and, in many cases, covered by insurance. The support begins during pregnancy and continues through a child’s first year.At first glance, Mahmee sounds like a healthcare startup built around coordination. In one sense it is. But Hanna’s story is really about something harder. She started with the belief, common in startups, that a broken system could be fixed by better software. Over time she found that software mattered, but it was not the thing standing in the way.The original problem that pulled her in was simple and disturbing. The United States has some of the worst maternal and infant health outcomes in the developed world. For Black women, the numbers are far worse. Hanna said Black women face maternal mortality rates three to four times higher than peers with similar clinical and economic profiles who are not Black. Native American and Indigenous women also face sharply elevated risks. These are not small gaps at the margins. They are structural failures.Hanna began by treating the issue as a data and communications problem. Why were patients falling through the cracks. Why were providers not sharing information. Why were systems not talking to one another. Those are reasonable questions, especially in American healthcare, where fragmentation is a defining feature. Patients move between doctors’ offices, hospitals, insurers, specialists, and community providers, often with little continuity between them.So Mahmee’s first life was as a software company. For roughly five years, the company built tools to connect providers and surface information that was not being captured elsewhere. Hanna and her team focused on the providers who often sit outside the formal medical stack, doulas, lactation consultants, nutritionists, nurses, and mental health professionals working in communities, private practices, or local nonprofits.Those providers often knew a great deal about what was happening with a patient. A doula might hear details a patient never shares with an OB-GYN. A lactation consultant might see warning signs that never make it into a medical record. A mental health provider might understand a patient’s risk in ways that do not show up in a standard clinical workflow. But much of that information was effectively invisible to the larger system.Mahmee built software to change that. The company created electronic health record tools, care management systems, communications features, and scheduling and billing software aimed at these community based providers. In doing so, it found real demand. Thousands of providers signed up across 44 states. The footprint was broad. The product was useful.But scale did not follow.That was the hard part. Each provider might only serve dozens, or perhaps a hundred, clients a year. The software worked, but the market around it was too small and too fragmented to produce the kind of reach Hanna believed was necessary. She used an analogy from The Founder, the film about Ray Kroc and McDonald’s. You can have a very good milkshake machine, but if the burger stands are too small to use it at scale, the machine alone does not solve the problem.That was the pivot.Hanna realized the real barrier was not simply that community based maternal health providers lacked software. It was that they lacked a place inside the formal healthcare economy. Insurance often did not cover their services. Payment models were broken. The people who were often best positioned to support mothers before, during, and after birth were sitting outside the system that paid for care.At that point Mahmee stopped being a pure software company. It became a tech-enabled healthcare services provider. Instead of just selling tools to doulas and lactation consultants, the company employed them and built a coordinated care organization around them. The software remained important, but it became infrastructure for a services model rather than the product itself.This is a more interesting kind of startup story because it runs against a habit in tech. Founders often want the clean answer. There is a messy industry, and software will organize it. Hanna found that the mess was deeper than that. The system was fragmented not just technically, but financially and institutionally. Data could not solve a funding problem. A dashboard could not make insurers reimburse the people who were doing essential work.That matters because maternal care is not a niche. Hanna put maternal and infant healthcare in the United States at roughly a $200 billion market. Yet for something that large and consequential, the experience is often poor, costly, and isolating. Many women move through pregnancy and birth without enough support, without clear information, and without much sense of agency over what is happening to them.One of the strongest parts of our conversation came when Hanna described a patient story that made this concrete. The woman was in her early twenties, already had one child, and lived in a rural area with limited hospital and doctor access. During her first pregnancy, she felt judged throughout the process. She was young, a woman of color, and she came away from the experience feeling that she had no control. Labor was difficult. The care felt harsh. She was in pain, asked for help, and felt talked down to rather than supported.When she became pregnant again, she was afraid. She wanted the baby, but did not want to relive the first experience.Through Mahmee, she learned something basic that had been missing the first time. She had choices. She could ask questions. She could slow a conversation down. She could say no. She could ask about pain management options beyond the narrow set that had been presented to her before. She could participate in the process rather than just endure it.That may not sound radical, but in practice it often is. The modern medical system moves quickly, especially in high stress environments like labor and delivery. If a patient is not informed and supported, decisions get made around her rather than with her. Hanna’s point was not that doctors and nurses do not matter. Quite the opposite. In high risk pregnancies, they matter enormously. Her point was that support, education, and continuity of care change the experience and often the outcome.This is also where her critique of the system is most useful. She does not reduce everything to one cause. Systemic racism and bias, she said, are real and they amplify disparities. But she also pointed to two other drivers, fragmentation and the chronic underfunding of preventive care. If support is only available at moments of crisis, then people will continue to arrive at those moments without the preparation, context, and trust they need.Hanna also spoke frankly about the difficulty of funding a company in this area. Building in healthcare is hard. Building in women’s healthcare is harder. Raising venture money for maternal health can mean explaining the problem to investors who have never had to think about it in concrete terms. Part of the job, she said, was reframing the opportunity so people could understand it as both a human problem and a business one. Another part was finding investors for whom the issue already felt personal, because they or someone close to them had been through a birth experience that was worse than it should have been.What stayed with me most was the shape of the lesson. The original thesis was not wrong. Technology does matter. Mahmee still builds software. It still uses connected tools and remote monitoring. It is now looking at how AI might fit into care delivery. But the mature version of the thesis is more grounded. Better care does not come from software alone. It comes from software plus people, software plus payment systems, software plus trust, software plus someone who is actually there when a patient needs help.That is not as neat as a pure software story. It is more true.There is a tendency in startups to assume that every broken institution is waiting for the right app. Sometimes what is actually missing is a workforce, a reimbursement model, and a way to bring overlooked people into the center of the system. Mahmee’s story is about discovering that the missing layer in maternal care was not just information. It was support that had been treated as optional, informal, or outside the reimbursable core of medicine.Hanna’s company now tries to make that support part of the default package rather than a luxury add-on. The goal is not only to improve outcomes, though that is clearly part of it. It is also to change what pregnancy and postpartum care feel like for the person going through it.That may be the real measure here. Not whether a startup found product-market fit in the usual sense, but whether it found a way to make a system less cold, less fragmented, and less likely to fail people at a moment when failure carries enormous cost.—TranscriptJohn Biggs (00:00.161)Welcome back to Keep Going, podcast about success and failure. I’m John Biggs. Today on the show, we Melissa Hanna. She’s the CEO and co-founder of Mahmee M-A-H-M-E-E, which is a fascinating startup. You guys work with doulas and you work with care during birth, right? So why don’t you tell me about that? Welcome.Melissa Hanna (00:30.561)Thanks, yes. Well, Mahmee provides wrap-around prenatal and postpartum support. We do that with a team of doulas, lactation consultants, registered nurses, mental health providers, and nutritionists. And it’s all included in one bundle.that’s actually covered by insurance. In most cases, we work with most major insurance companies and the services start during pregnancy, go all the way through labor and delivery and until baby’s first birthday. So it’s a pretty comprehensive package of support for new and expecting parents.John Biggs (01:05.006)So I mean, just tell me why you started this. What was the impetus?Melissa Hanna (01:09.909)Well, the business has been through a number of evolutions, but the impetus and the vision and mission have stayed true and consistent all the way through. We’re on a mission to make the US the best place in the world to give birth. Right now, the US is not close to having that title. So it’s a big, hairy, audacious goal, you could say, that we’ve taken on. We’re not doing it alone.John Biggs (01:30.21)Mm-hmm.Melissa Hanna (01:36.705)There are a of folks that are really passionate about this space. We work with a number of different health system and health plan partners and doctors, researchers across the country, and of course, a broad network of providers. But I started the business because I was hearing a lot about maternal and infant health statistics, the morbidity and the mortality rates in the United States.And I kept hearing numbers that just felt very wrong, like they could not be correct. The US is in last place with the worst maternal mortality and also an egregiously high infant mortality rate compared with all other developed first world, wealthy nations, however you want to describe that. We have the best tech, the best know-how, the most passion for providing health care to a diverse population. If you look atyou know, just what the United States looks like and the resources we have to provide care to people and to hear that moms and babies are being failed every day across the country was really shocking to me. And I thought that just can’t be right. The more that I dug into it, the more I realized there was a real structural challenge in solving this. And it became more and more interesting to me. And I started pursuing it as a software problem, as a data problem.Could we connect the dots together to figure out why people are falling through the cracks of the system? Why systems aren’t talking to each other? Why providers aren’t talking to each other? Is this a communications issue? What kind of software tool set could help provide a better experience both for the patients and the providers working in this space? And then learned over time that that was not actually going to be the answer. And therein lies the story of a pivot.John Biggs (03:22.892)Mm-hmm.John Biggs (03:26.284)Okay. And so, and this is especially egregious here in the States for the people of color as well, right? I think I interviewed someone years ago about women’s health and she pointed out that that was just abysmal.Melissa Hanna (03:32.491)Yeah.Melissa Hanna (03:40.223)Yeah, it is, it’s true. Black women have an on average rate of three to four times a higher rate of maternal mortality of death during or shortly after childbirth. this, and that’s just the average. There are some communities where it is much higher than that compared with peers with similar clinical profiles, similar economic profiles that are not black.And so, and that’s the case also for Native American and indigenous women as well. So these two populations really are off the charts in terms of mortality rates and morbidity rates, which is the rate of injury where there could be a near death situation or sort of a near miss where something could have gone wrong and luckily didn’t happen, but there still was an injury that occurred. In all of these cases, it’s really hard to talk aboutthese stats without talking about systemic racism and bias in healthcare. That is a root cause of these disparities in care. What I found in doing this research over several years as I was building the tech company that Mahmee started as was that there were a number of different contributing factors and that systemic racism and bias was an amplifier. ultimately, high fragmentation, excuse me,high fragmentation and really a lack of proactive care, just like the dollars not being allocated to preventative care, the way that we need them to be, were two of the other major drivers of this. So I started looking at this from the standpoint of, how do you solve for fragmentation? You start to think about information superhighways and information exchanges and connecting.systems together, even if you can’t necessarily connect the institutions together. And then when it comes to dollars being allocated toward more effective solutions, you think about payment innovation in healthcare and how do you actually redirect funding toward the solutions that have the greatest impact on the community.John Biggs (05:54.19)So I think this is a really interesting point. mean, what you said, and I want to hear about this pivot very specifically. The language that you used before for the first iteration was kind of the language that I hear all the time from like entrepreneur who wants to do something in like, don’t know, STEM toys or education. And it’s very much like, can do this. It’s a software problem, right? And it sounds like you quickly discovered it wasn’t a software problem. So tell me about that pivot.Melissa Hanna (06:21.759)Yeah, I wish I could say that I quickly discovered that because it’s a little bit more painful than that. But I will say that this business being in the healthcare industry has had a different sort of profile and different time horizon than businesses and other verticals that are VC backed and sort of, you you come to an idea, you put it in the market, maybe the first version doesn’t work, you test it again, and then all of a sudden you’re like, this is actually taking off.John Biggs (06:25.174)Okay.Melissa Hanna (06:51.553)We actually, we did have that experience with our software solution. And I can talk about that in a second, but suffice to say that we saw growth within the software play that we originally developed. But what was happening behind the scenes is we started to understand that the market wasn’t actually mature enough. The market wasn’t established for scale. So even though we launched something and we did have that moment of like, this is going to be big. When we started to see the development of that business,the signs were there and they were small and they were sort of early because the market wasn’t developed yet to say, this might not get as big as we want it to get. And that was the critical insight. So I said, I wish it would have happened sooner, but it took years really to understand first what the software problem was in the market. And I talk about the fragmentation and sort of like the payment challenge.I’ve got emojis there, I don’t know. But I have to avoid talking with my hands too much. The software challenge was much more apparent because the United States has so many different kinds of healthcare institutions and so many different ways that healthcare is paid for.John Biggs (07:54.126)Yeah, that’s done. It’s a bad one. Yeah, okay, great.Melissa Hanna (08:18.145)That means there’s a lot of different kinds of providers that can provide that care, whether those are retail providers taking cash pay, whether those are integrated delivery networks in large systems like the Kizers and Geisingers of the world that have a much more integrated set of hospitals and doctors’ offices and urgent care facilities and all of that, and plans associated with their brands.And then you have sort of your freestanding medical facilities of all different types and you take your commercial insurance or you take your Medicaid insurance to these organizations and you hope that insurance is going to pay for most of the care you receive. So there’s like so many different ways that people get health care in the United States that we first had to figure out, could you build software that could connect these systems together? So we did that actually for the first five years of this company’s life.And what we realized was that in order to find the missing data that would tell a different story and provide an opportunity to actually improve clinical outcomes within this population, we had to distribute software to a number of independent providers that really didn’t have those tools yet. So we’re talking about those doulas, those lactation consultants, mental health providers, nutritionists, nurses that are working in the communities. Often they’re working in private practice or maybe even alocal community center, a nonprofit with some grant funding and providing those in between moments of support between going to your OBGYN and your pediatrician’s office for clinical care from your doctor, maybe your baby’s doctor. There’s all these other people you’re talking to along the way. And a lot of those people had really important insights, but that data wasn’t actually manifesting. wasn’t surfacing in the system. And so that was the key. That was the first insight was, okay, we to get them online. We have to actuallycreate tools for these kinds of providers. And we did. We created an electronic health record. We created a care management system, a communications tool set, a number of different features that allowed for these providers to provide care in the community. And as sort of part and parcel of that, we realized, OK, now I to figure out how to actually create more of that market, because a lot of the rich and valuable data was actually coming from these folks. You kind of tell your dual in your life story. You tell your Latish consultant,Melissa Hanna (10:37.067)you know, the aspects of, you know, your experience that you might not feel comfortable talking about with your OB-GYN. Even though we want you to feel comfortable talking with your OB-GYN, it might not be happening. And so someone else might be getting that story. What can we do to empower that person with that key information about your health and wellbeing to be able to participate in improving your care? And so we had to find a way to actually fund these providers getting into the healthcare stack is what I call it. Really getting them to be able toJohn Biggs (11:05.88)Mm-hmm.Melissa Hanna (11:06.987)participate fully as players on that patient’s team. So we had the tech for them. We had to figure out how to actually finance this. When we realized that the payments model for these types of providers was severely broken, that became a major blocker. said, wait a minute. OK, there’s all these people out here that can provide this care and have this really valuable insight and this really powerful way that they can have an impact in the industry. But they’re not participating in the health care stack. And we can’t seem to figure out how to getpayments flowing to them because insurance wasn’t covering a lot of these services. So the tough realization here was that being a pure software play was not going to maximize the impact, the ability to achieve the mission of the company, the valuation of the business, right? Because there was this blocker in terms of how these services are actually funded to allow for greater participation.in healthcare. Otherwise, you’ve got, you know, all these doctors, hospitals, all these folks that care about you and are providing care to you, but they’re missing a piece of the pie over here. And these folks are just out of the system. We ultimately became a tech enabled healthcare services provider. We took the tech that we had built initially and we started to employ those providers and actually build the scalable healthcare organization that had all of those independent and slurry wraparound service providers in house. Because without that,John Biggs (12:14.36)Mm-hmm.Melissa Hanna (12:34.123)We just had a market that wasn’t scaling on its own. We had to become the scalable player. And now we have become that.John Biggs (12:41.806)Did it ever get so frustrating that you just didn’t want to just didn’t want to continue?Melissa Hanna (12:48.363)There certainly have been moments. Yes. The mission is, it’s sort of like a well to drink from, to restore yourself because as long as this continues to be an issue in the United States, for myself and for many others, certainly the folks in our company and I think a lot of our peers across the industry, this is just something that people can’t stand, they can’t live with.And so yeah, it’s hard. It’s hard building a startup, right? It’s hard to build a startup in healthcare. It’s hard to build a startup for women’s healthcare. All of those things are true. But you look at the stats, you look at the economics of the industry, we’re talking about a trillion dollar market that is healthcare in the United States. Maternal and infant healthcare is approaching a $200 billion market. It’s tracking to be on par with the size of the global video games industry.John Biggs (13:44.413)Okay.Melissa Hanna (13:45.57)to an investor, it’s like, you could back video games or you could back maternal health care. And a lot of people are like, I hadn’t thought of it that way. That’s part of the problem. And I feel like as long as I’m sitting in the seat, I get to sit in and seeing the big opportunity from a clinical impact and also from a financial impact perspective, like, this is where I want to work, this is where I want to build. But yeah, definitely there are hard days where I think, gosh, when is this going to change and mask across?across the country, especially because there are opportunities globally to take these insights elsewhere too. But there’s a lot of work to do here and as such there’s a lot of value built here.John Biggs (14:25.196)What about investment? mean, I’ve heard historically it’s been difficult as a female founder to get investment and then specifically talking about maternity, some dude in a vest on Sand Hill Road probably doesn’t know a lot about that. So what did you have to do?Melissa Hanna (14:43.285)Well, I think it’s a lot of reframing the opportunity so that people can find an access point into it. It seems big and far away. Someone else is having a not great healthcare experience in some other city, some other state, some other community that you’re not a part of, and that can make it difficult for the value proposition to resonate with investors. Ultimately, I both had to learn how toreframe it for accessibility for those investors and also find the investors who it did immediately resonate with that knew someone who had gone through an experience that could have been better and wondered why it wasn’t and find investors who had had their own personal experience that was not what they expected it to be and started asking their own questions about like, why does it suck to have a baby in the United States right now? Like this should not be happening.John Biggs (15:37.912)Mm-hmm.Melissa Hanna (15:39.682)It shouldn’t cost this much. It shouldn’t feel this isolating and it shouldn’t be this medically difficult. You know, there’s so much risk associated with the care, lots of medical intervention that is not necessarily appropriate in every case. But in other cases, you you’re glad that there are people with, know, specialty, specialties that can save your life if that’s what it comes to, but notevery birth should be a life-saving instance of care. And so, you know, a lot of people that I met along the way were asking those questions because they had experienced it or they knew someone who had experienced it themselves. I’d say that’s a good portion of our cap table. Ultimately, though, we were able to bring in really strong investors from Sand Hill Road and from Wall Street and bring folks across the country to this work.as the business was growing and demonstrating what it was capable of doing.John Biggs (16:46.594)When you were building this, did you expect to be able to ship some software and then just have the business? Did you expect this along a thing? mean, sounds like when you, it’s like trying to rebuild a, rehab a house or whatever. And then all of a sudden you find a bunch of like broken wood somewhere that you have to fix, right? So it sounds like you started digging and hit some rough spots.Melissa Hanna (16:55.585)Yeah.Melissa Hanna (17:11.231)Yeah, that’s fair. I don’t think that I ever imagined it to be an overnight success. I did feel very confident, and I still do, that technology is a very critical component in solving this problem. And that’s why we’re ultimately a heavily tech-enabled health care service provider. We develop software every day. There are things every day that we’re doing to...refine the operation and ask questions about how we provide a better patient experience, how we provide a better provider experience through technology itself and through even connected devices that we use for real patient monitoring. So there’s a number of different components to this that just continue to persist because the core thesis was right, but the market wasn’t ready for it. Actually, you use the analogy of sort of a house you buy in.Yeah, you find some things wrong with it. The analogy that resonates for me, the movie, The Founder, and sort of the Ray Kroc, McDonald’s story, like trying to sell milkshake machines and being like, this could be huge. This is a really great piece of tech and everyone should have it for their burger stand. And then, you know, going out to try and sell to burger stands and realizing that none of them had the scale to need this like.John Biggs (18:09.742)Mm-hmm.Melissa Hanna (18:35.349)you know, this great piece of equipment. It was just like not where their heads were at to buy that equipment. And then, you know, him coming across the McDonald’s, you know, stand and being like, wow, okay, they’ve got something here. Like this could actually scale. Realizing that, you know, you couldn’t sell the piece of technology until you could find the business that could scale and use it and really, you know, realize the value of it. That resonated when I watched that movie because...John Biggs (18:57.357)Mm-hmm.Melissa Hanna (19:03.391)That’s kind of how I felt going out there trying to convince your sort 1Z, 2Z, doula, lactation consultant outfits, like, you guys need to get online. You need to have a complete set of medical software tools to book and schedule and communicate. Have you guys heard of HIPAA compliance? And they’re like, what? And I’m like, you guys, you’re going to be subject to state and federal regulation soon enough. And I got laughed out of so many rooms because people were like, no, this is not.John Biggs (19:26.926)Mmm.Melissa Hanna (19:30.057)where we’re at, we’re not going to need this. We fly under the radar of the rest of the healthcare industry. And I was like, but do you want to? Like, is that where you want to be? Because the care that wraparound service providers offer is so essential to the broader experience that noon expecting parents are having as consumers. I was like, that’s going to be like really valuable. And a lot of people were just like, yeah, no, I don’t need your app. AndAnd what’s interesting is I did find a lot of people who did, and we ended up having thousands and thousands of providers sign up across the country. We were in 44 states with providers using our software to provide care in their communities. And from a footprint, we were like, okay, geographically, like this is great. But from an actual like scale capacity standpoint, like each provider was taking care of like dozens, maybe a hundred patients a year.Right? So like each person kind of could only do so much on their own, even with a great piece of tech. And we were getting that feedback like, yeah, okay, I see what you’re doing here. Yeah, it is right. It is nice to have these kinds of tools and the ability to book and schedule and pay, you know, charge people and track my patients care longitudinally over the course of their maternity episode. Oh, this sounds nice. And I’m loving using it for my 50 clients. And I’m like 50 clients. There’s likeyou know, almost 4 million babies born in the country every year. How are we going to actually get to scale? And we ultimately, this vertical integration, bringing people together and saying, well, maybe on an individual basis, y’all are doing the most. You’re doing what you can and it feels impactful. But what if we joined forces and created a team-based model of care? Then what happens? And the amplifier of that really isJohn Biggs (20:59.63)Mm-hmm.Melissa Hanna (21:27.499)people are doing 10x what they were doing before. Each provider is able to do so much more. And the data is living this out. We’re taking care of thousands and thousands of people a year because of this shift in operations. Ultimately, that’s what we did.John Biggs (21:45.486)Tell me a story about somebody whose life you changed because of this.Melissa Hanna (21:49.062)There’s we get letters every day. We get emails. We get cards in the mail with baby photos There’s so many There there’s there was a mom recently that it was this was a Unique one in that we get a lot of like first time, you know, I couldn’t have done this without you. This was amazing Thank you so much first time parents, butIt really strikes me and it strikes the team when we get a message from someone who is not a first time parent, who has been through this before and is already carrying the burden of their previous experiences. And this was a young woman, early 20s with a toddler who became pregnant in aagain in a very rural part of the state. There’s like one hospital there, one doctor’s office. And she found out about Mahmee being available through her insurance plan. And she didn’t know what it was, but she told us that based on what happened to her the first time around and how difficult of a medical experience it was for her.The pregnancy was otherwise pretty smooth and she was very healthy and very excited to be pregnant. But once she started to get into care, she felt so judged many times over. This was a woman of color who had said, I just didn’t even know what to expect, but I had doctors asking, are you ready for this baby? You’re really young. She was still in school and she was just...She said she had no agency in her initial pregnancy experience. And the labor and delivery was very difficult and she was in pain and everyone was like, well, this is what happens when you get pregnant. Like, what did you think? Labor and delivery is not easy. She wanted medication. There was just a lot of bias that was creeping into this experience in a story that was an otherwise medically well patient. And this is not to say that anyone around her wanted to make her feel bad, butMelissa Hanna (24:13.587)In these high stress moments and when patients are going through their own emotional and physiologic birth experience, it can be a lot. And then people start saying stuff and they don’t even realize sometimes what they’re saying to you. I’m not going to defend her medical care team from her first pregnancy, but hearing this woman’s story, it just sounded like people didn’t know how to control themselves as she’s screaming in pain there and being like, my God, the baby’s coming in. like.Okay, yeah, well, we’ll go get the doctor for you. And just this attitude around it. The second time around, she wrote in was to tell us that she didn’t know how many places along the way between her pregnancy experience and her labor and delivery experience, and even in postpartum, she had agency. She didn’t know that there were moments where she could say, hey, this is how I want it to go. Like, can we try this? Can we slow down here? Can you give me a second to do some deep breathing?what are my options for pain medication versus, you know, sort of haranguing her for asking for any at all. She didn’t even know necessarily what the different choices are. And it isn’t just epidural or bust, right? There’s a lot of different ways to manage pain. There’s a lot of different junctures where a medical decision needs to be made. And if the patient isn’t fully empowered and educated in what those decisions might be, the doctors and the nursing team will very quickly start to step in and sort of direct you toward those decisions. And so,John Biggs (25:14.478)Mm-hmm.Melissa Hanna (25:39.296)She wrote in and her message was, I didn’t know that there were moments where I could say no. I didn’t know there were moments where I could just take a beat and participate in it and direct others around me. And this one was very powerful because it speaks to how outcomes actually do change because there are people who have clinical risk. We take care of a very high risk population, patients that come in with a history of diabetes.A history of hypertension, cardiac concerns, multiple high risk pregnancies, right? These are stories where there’s already going to be like a whole medical team around this patient. But we’re talking about a young woman who has no other history, no other concern, but said, I was so terrified to get pregnant the second time. I thought to myself, my gosh, like I want this baby, but I don’t want to have to go through what I did before. Ultimately, that narrative is one that we love hearing because it talks about sort of the silent majority.of what women are going through in this country, which is to say that if you don’t have access to education, support, a provider or a team of providers like you get at Mahmee who can empower you to be able to say no, to be able to know what your choices are and how to direct and participate in your own pregnancy and labor experience, there’s a whole other storyline that may happen that may lead someone to say later, my gosh, that pregnancy was so difficult, or I really didn’t enjoy.labor and delivery when it should be a wonderful and empowering and you know, Exciting experience to meet your baby So that’s that’s one where someone said you changed my life and what she meant when she said that was was very clear that it wasn’t just about that Eternity experience it was that someone for the first time in her life said, you know, you have the power you actually have the agency here and and you’re in control of you andJohn Biggs (27:16.418)Yeah.Melissa Hanna (27:36.637)you have a right to speak up for yourself. And it was, my gosh, we were all moved by that.John Biggs (27:42.84)Well, that’s beautiful. Yeah. thank you for this. has been a, like, it’s fascinating to see a move from like, I don’t know, pure software play. I’m going to solve this thing. And then all of a sudden you realize there’s so much to solve and comes down to just people, right?Melissa Hanna (27:55.809)Yeah, that’s it. It ultimately comes down to how we care for each other. There are many different ways that people are addressing health care issues across the United States. I’m really excited about all of the ways that people are now imagining AI as a component of these solutions. We’re doing that work as well. What we found is that it’s always been and it’s always needed to be the combination of people and tech.And so whatever that combination looks like as we go forward, it’s that blend of the two because caring for each other really is where you have transformative experiences where someone says like, it only took one person. It only took one person being by my side to help transform the narrative for me. And everyone deserves that. And it shouldn’t be something that’s a luxury. It shouldn’t be something you have to pay through the nose to get. And that’s why I’m excited about what we’re doing becauseit’s possible now to give this experience, to make this experience available to a lot more people.John Biggs (29:01.326)The service is called MAHMEE.com. Melissa, thank you for joining us. been great. All right. This has been Keep Going. I’m John Biggs. We’ll see you next week.Melissa Hanna (29:09.409)Thank you so much. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.keepgoingpod.com/subscribe

This is a free preview of a paid episode. To hear more, visit www.keepgoingpod.comToday I ran a short, hands-on session for Keep Going on OpenClaw 101, a plain look at what people mean when they say “AI agents” and how they actually work in practice.An agent is just a chatbot with access. It can reach into your files, your email, your servers, and your tools.In this video I show a live setup. We ran OpenClaw on a Raspberry Pi, connected it to Telegram, and used it to make real changes. It edited a website header, sent emails, created a simple site, and monitored inputs, all from short prompts. I also spent time on the risks. Giving a system this level of access is not trivial. It can write code, trigger actions, and touch production systems. It is useful, but it demands caution.The goal was simple: I wanted to strip away the hype and show what this looks like up close and how it works. As a fan of exploring new tech, I hope you enjoy this quick video and I’ll probably do another one in a few weeks.

Work is eating our lives. That much feels obvious. What is less obvious is why we let it happen.I spoke with psychologist and author Guy Winch about his new book Mind Over Grind, which looks at a familiar but poorly understood problem: the slow psychological takeover that happens when work becomes the dominant force in a person’s life. Many of us think we are simply tired or busy. Winch argues that something more corrosive is happening, a kind of sustained dread that alters how we think, how we behave at home, and how we relate to the people around us.The timing is not accidental. The workplace is changing in ways that make people uneasy. The pandemic briefly pushed companies to talk about emotional health and work life balance, but the underlying pressure never really went away. Burnout continued to rise. Now a new layer of uncertainty has appeared in the form of AI, automation, and the constant sense that entire professions may shift under our feet.That uncertainty produces a specific emotional state. Winch calls it dread. It is not simple stress or boredom. It is the heavy anticipation of something bad that may happen but cannot be clearly defined.Psychologists have studied this kind of anticipation in laboratory settings. In one set of experiments people were given a choice between receiving a mild electrical shock later or a stronger one immediately. Many participants chose the stronger shock simply to avoid waiting for the mild one. The anticipation itself was so unpleasant that people preferred to get the pain over with.Work can produce the same effect. When people wake up already dreading the day ahead, the stress does not remain confined to office hours. It bleeds into everything else.A common pattern looks like this. Someone finishes work but cannot mentally leave it behind. They replay conversations with colleagues, worry about tomorrow’s meetings, and anticipate problems that have not yet happened. These thoughts arrive uninvited. They intrude during dinner, while watching television, while trying to fall asleep. The result is hours of unpaid emotional overtime.The damage compounds quickly. Poor sleep makes people more reactive the next day. Emotional withdrawal leads to tension with partners and family members. Hobbies, friendships, and personal interests slowly fall away because the person feels too drained to engage with them. Over time the individual begins to lose parts of themselves that once had nothing to do with work.Winch has seen this pattern repeatedly. He also admits that he has experienced it himself. That admission is important, because the problem is not limited to employees trapped inside rigid corporate structures. It often appears even more strongly among founders, freelancers, and people who run their own businesses.Self employed workers do not have a boss setting limits on how much they can push themselves. If you are ambitious and motivated, there is always more to do. A new client to chase. Another product to ship. Another email to send. The boundary between effort and obsession can disappear without anyone noticing.Technology complicates the picture further. AI systems can now perform many of the small tasks that once filled the workday. Drafting emails, organizing schedules, producing summaries, even generating reports can be handled automatically.In theory this should reduce pressure. In practice it often does the opposite.People rarely use saved time to step away from work. Instead they fill the space with more tasks. At the same time the presence of automation introduces a deeper anxiety. If a machine can handle part of your job today, it may handle the rest tomorrow. Entire professions now operate under that shadow.Even psychologists are not immune. Winch mentioned that some of his clients already consult large language models when he is unavailable. Others bring AI generated advice into therapy sessions and ask whether it matches his recommendations. The implication is obvious. If a machine can simulate the voice of expertise, what happens to the human expert?These questions are still unfolding. Researchers have only begun to examine the psychological consequences of widespread AI interaction. One emerging concern involves emotional attachment to digital agents. Some people now describe their AI assistants as companions or collaborators.Winch views that development cautiously. Emotional attachment to software may signal that other relationships have weakened. When work dominates a person’s attention and energy, connections with family, friends, and communities can erode. In that context it is not surprising that people begin forming attachments in strange places.None of this means that work itself is the enemy. Winch argues that work occupies a central place in human life for understandable reasons.Most people spend more waking hours working than doing anything else. Work provides income, which satisfies basic needs like shelter and food. It also offers social structure, status, identity, and a sense of accomplishment. Much of Maslow’s hierarchy of needs, from security to self esteem, flows through employment.Because of that, threats to work feel existential. Losing a job does not only mean losing income. It can mean losing status, routine, social networks, and a sense of purpose. The unconscious mind interprets those risks as serious dangers, which helps explain why dread becomes such a powerful emotion.The real question is how to prevent work from overwhelming everything else.Winch’s approach is pragmatic rather than philosophical. He focuses on specific behaviors that interrupt the cycle of rumination and anxiety.One of the most common traps involves replaying workplace conflicts or uncertainties long after the workday ends. The brain returns to the same problem repeatedly because it has not identified a resolution. The solution is to convert the worry into a concrete plan.If you are stewing about an argument with a colleague, the task becomes identifying what outcome you want and how you might achieve it. Do you need a conversation to clear the air. Do you need to set boundaries. Do you need to escalate the issue or simply move on. Spending fifteen minutes outlining a response can quiet the brain because the uncertainty has been reduced.In cases where the problem cannot be solved immediately, scheduling time to address it later can have a similar effect. Writing “handle client issue tomorrow at 8:45 a.m.” into a calendar signals to the mind that the concern has not been ignored. The worry is parked for later rather than allowed to circulate endlessly.Another element involves the structure of the workday itself. Many people respond to overwhelming workloads by pushing forward without pause. They move from meeting to meeting, task to task, trying to survive the day.Ironically this behavior reduces productivity. Cognitive performance declines as fatigue accumulates. Creativity, judgment, and executive functioning all deteriorate when the brain remains under continuous strain.Short restorative breaks can interrupt that decline. A few minutes of physical movement, a brief walk outside, or a supportive conversation with a colleague can reset mental resources. What matters is that the break genuinely restores energy rather than adding more stimulation. Doomscrolling through social media or reading the news rarely qualifies.These techniques are modest but practical. They require attention rather than radical lifestyle changes. Most people already spend hours each evening mentally revisiting work problems. Redirecting a fraction of that time toward structured reflection can produce a noticeable difference.The deeper question that emerged during our conversation concerns the future of work itself. If automation eventually provides widespread basic income and eliminates many traditional jobs, what replaces the psychological role of employment?Winch does not pretend to know the answer. Work provides purpose, competition, creativity, and social structure. If those elements disappear, people will almost certainly invent new forms of aspiration to fill the gap. Humans rarely remain idle for long.The shape of those aspirations remains unclear. They might emerge in artistic communities, local organizations, scientific exploration, or forms of competition that do not yet exist. What matters is that the underlying psychological drive toward goals and progress will remain.For now the immediate challenge is simpler. Work has always demanded effort and attention. What has changed is the degree to which it invades the rest of life. Phones keep us connected to the office at all hours. Global competition raises expectations. AI adds uncertainty about what the future holds.The result is a quiet epidemic of dread that many people treat as normal.It is not normal. It is a signal that the balance between effort and recovery has collapsed.Rebuilding that balance does not require abandoning ambition or disengaging from work. It requires noticing how the mind responds to pressure and intervening before the grind becomes the only thing left. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.keepgoingpod.com/subscribe

On this week’s episode of Keep Going, I spoke with Patricia Martin, writer, researcher, and author of Will the Future Like You? She has spent a decade studying what happens when failure is not just professional but personal. The kind that makes you wake up and ask, who am I now?Patricia calls it identity-threatening failure. Not every setback qualifies. Missing a target or losing a client stings. But when your business is your baby, when your persona is fused to your public presence, when your work becomes your self, a collapse can feel like rejection at the level of love. The brain codes it that way. Cortisol rises. Adrenaline spikes. Dopamine drops. Executive function weakens. You feel empty, hypervigilant, unmoored.Entrepreneurs are especially vulnerable. We are taught to invest identity in what we build. In the attention economy, we perform ourselves across platforms, post after post, video after video. The persona gets muscular. The inner self gets quiet. Patricia calls the result “persona fog.” We externalize the self so thoroughly that when something breaks, we do not know what remains.What struck me was how physical this all is. This is not motivational poster talk. There is a somatic reaction to identity collapse. A rewiring. Some people pivot sharply. A tech founder goes back to the family farm. A software executive returns to the factory floor. Not because they failed, but because they need ground again.So what do you do if you cannot escape to a dairy farm?Patricia argues there is no hack. There is practice.First, discernment. Identity failure scrambles executive function. You lose clarity. You must relearn how to hear yourself.Second, reflection. We have lost the muscle of self-reflection. There is no app for the inner world. You have to sit with the question: what is this doing to me?Third, confirmation and witness. Own what is happening. Say it out loud. Find someone who can remind you who you were before the fog rolled in.As we talked, the conversation turned to AI, to coders who fear obsolescence, to journalists wondering what work remains. Patricia’s answer was not comfort. It was responsibility. You must know who you are. You must identify what you bring that cannot be replicated. Creativity. Imagination. Sentience. The ability to feel and transmit meaning.Machines can perform. They can flatter. They can automate. They cannot enact being.We are entering what she calls an age of hyper reinvention. Pivots will not be rare events. They will be routine. That means resilience can no longer be grit alone. It has to include an active relationship with the unconscious, with creativity, with reflection.There is a line Patricia shared that I keep returning to. Every defeat of the ego is a victory for the unconscious.In a culture built on dominance and performance, that feels radical.The question is not whether the future will like you. The question is whether you can hear yourself clearly enough to survive it.TranscriptWelcome back to Keep Going, a podcast about success and failure. I’m John Biggs. Today we have Patricia Martin. She’s a writer, she’s a podcaster, she’s a researcher, and she’s recently wrote a book. It’s coming out soon, Will the Future Like You? Which I’m afraid to hear the answer for, so welcome, Patricia.Patricia (01:26.852)It’s a pleasure to be here, John.John Biggs (01:28.942)So you’re an old hat at podcasting. You’ve been doing this for quite a while. A million views on your stuff. I want you to welcome to mine. And I’m actually really happy you’re here because this book sounds fascinating. Why don’t you just give us a quick recap about what you wrote.Patricia (01:45.167)So I researched this material in the book for 10 years. And I entered into the research originally to understand the impact of the digital age on the human psyche. And I encountered not only a variety of people and their stories, and then also, you know, as an entrepreneur myself.I underwent a massive change in my life and in my business. And I woke up one morning asking the age old question, who am I? And that is when my research took a fresh direction. And I began focusing on what it means to lose and rebuild identity in the digital age.John Biggs (02:34.144)Mm-hmm. So you were talking earlier about the identity destroying failure. I guess reducing failure, right? A failure so poignant that it changes essentially your entire life. So tell me about that.Patricia (02:49.378)So not every failure that we have affects us at an identity level. What tends to happen though with entrepreneurs, and I would say this is generally a cultural issue for Americans, is that we invest a lot of identity in what we do. Entrepreneurs more so because it’s your baby, it’s your creation. You’re doing something, usually it can be out of a passion or you’re addressing a need in the marketplace.But it is something that you have spotted and you internalize as part of yourself. So what happens when we fail at an identity level, especially in the attention economy, is that we begin to recruit differently from the interior world of ourselves. So let’s say, for instance, you have somebody who has built an online business and they’re an influencer.That is persona heavy identity. And the persona is the weakest part of the psyche. It has never been, it was never designed to undergo the garrulous rigors of online life, right? And yet we’re pounding it day after day, post after post, video after video. And so when something goes awry there, there are some specific things that start to happen.when we tip that into an identity problem. So first of all, it’s a social neural pain. We treat that failure as a rejection, just like we would treat it as a love rejection. And that’s how the brain codes it and the body feels it. The other thing that happens is it’s probably not a surprise that we get a cortisol rush from that kind of failure, but it has a lingering effect.Probably I think the most intriguing thing that came out of the neuroscience is the amount of adrenaline that courses through the body during a failure that is specific to the loss of identity. So it’s as if we are now hyper vigilant to find our sense of self again and we begin the search to recruit back the sense of who we are.Patricia (05:10.536)And so that has an effect that is, you know, and your dopamine goes low. So now you’re operating on cortisol, adrenaline, and low dopamine. So it’s kind of a perfect storm for feeling really empty, lost, stuck, disconnected. So, you know, you’ll talk to people who have had a failure like that. And it requires in the attention economy more than just grit.Because it’s moving so fast, you’re not just, you know, pulling yourself back up by your bootstraps and standing back on your feet. Back on what? What ground? The territory is moving so fast. So this is where you find people tend to tumble out. You’ll also find people at this point sometimes will take a sharp pivot. I talked to people who went fromrunning software companies to working in their father’s box factory. One woman was in a tech startup that got really big. She sold it, and she went back to running the family dairy farm. So it was kind of like they needed an antidote to kind of clear themselves. some of these were success stories. But what was interesting is that some of them didn’t go back to the hurly burly and the grind of something that was as intense.as an online business.John Biggs (06:38.67)So I love that you’re able to codify this and describe it in a very clear way. think a lot of people have that. I mean, first off, a lot of people have that fantasy, right? I think that every single Hallmark movie is about that, where you go back to the small town and you become a dairy farmer after having a hard business, like a hard charging business life. So I think the primary question is, you’re in that mode, once you end up failing out of it,out of an entrepreneurial situation, you described the persona being destroyed to a degree. from a layperson’s point of view, the persona would be just, I don’t know, just my day to day happy-go-lucky whatever. But it sounds like you’re talking about something a lot deeper here. what happens when that identity is destroyed? And how do we get it back, aside from working at a dairy farm?Patricia (07:30.989)Well, here’s the thing. Yeah, because we can’t all do that, right? And some people genuinely like to learn and ladder up. Failure, success, failure, success. I think, though, what’s important to understand about the difference between a more linear type of set of milestones in one’s career and the matrix of what we’re experiencing now.So pivots and turning points happen more frequently. I think we’re going to see with the rise of AI, that is going to become an annual event for people. I’m just putting a pin in that. We’re going to be pivoting more and more and more. And so I think the problem with the internet age is it has made us externalize the self.So, you know, there’s no app for the inner world. We are always out there. We’re always on. We’re always pushing content. And we’re dividing our sense of self across multiple platforms and multiple personas. So when we’re externalized like this, we’re vulnerable. We’re vulnerable to the kind of change.the kind of failure that we’re talking about that have real bodily consequences and psychological consequences. So I would say the plague of our time is something I identify in the book as persona fog. And what happens is that when this gap opens between the true self and the externalized self, we’re no longer in search for the self.We’re performing a self. That’s a very different proposition. The self is at arm’s length to begin with, also making us vulnerable. And so when we take a loss and we’re in this fogged state already, first of all, it’s very hard to hear the signals from the self. I’m a Jungian, right? People fall into, are you?John Biggs (09:53.484)You don’t look it.Patricia (09:54.222)Are you a Freudian or a Jungian? And I’m a Jungian. And Carl Jung’s definition of the self is that it is actually an ever active resource in our lives and it will give us symptoms that are signals. And these signals will continue, they will persist.plasticity in the self. And the trouble with persona fog is that when we identify so much with our external self, you know, we’re, there’s a noise floor we’re hitting so that we can’t hear the signals. So we prolong our pain and suffering. so, you know, part of what the mission of the book was is to help people understand how to hear those signals first and then what to do about them. So I think theAntidote is like a three-part process and the first requires discernment and that is tough because another thing that goes offline when we have an identity failure, you know, when our failure is an identity failure is we lose, this has been proven, we lose loss of executive function. So some of what makes us feel competent and like you have a handle on this, this is lost to you and thatJohn Biggs (11:16.11)Mm-hmm.Patricia (11:23.507)also means a loss of discernment. having to tune into yourself becomes a practice. It’s not a hack, it’s a practice. You have to get good at listening to the signals of the self so that you pull yourself up off the noise floor. The second thing you can do is, this is so simple and this sounds a little self-helpy, John, but we’re losing this ability to reflect. I mean, you could talk to anybody in psychotherapy.And they will tell you what the one primary skill is, self-reflection. We’re so out there, we found it hard to get back in here. And the myth of the digital age is that what we put out there has no effect, right? About what’s going on inside. Like that is the biggest myth we need to shatter. So, know, reflection is like, okay, I failed.How is this making me feel? What’s going on inside there right now? Just asking ourself a simple inventory of questions. And then I think the third thing is to confirm. Confirm with yourself. Own it. This is what’s happening to me. This is how I’m reacting to this psychologically and physically. And then to seek a witness. To seek.someone to talk to, someone who can reflect with you and remind you, well, this is how I see you. This is how I’ve always seen you. You can’t, I can’t state this enough. And it’s part of what made me seek out psychology because as I was interviewing some of these entrepreneurs, they were kind of turning me into their therapist. And I thought it was in over my head, you know, like I’m a researcher and I’m a writer. I am, I’m really not qualified.John Biggs (13:14.656)Mm-hmm.Patricia (13:20.436)So that’s what kind of turned me into a Jungian.John Biggs (13:24.898)mean, that’s literally why I did this podcast, right? So I was a hard charging journalist weirdo for TechCrunch. I would get pitched at urinals. I had a million friends around the world, a million friends around the world, but if I was in a pinch, not a single one of them pick up the phone, right? So that was the depression aspect. And I also met so many entrepreneurs that were clinically depressed and some of them who died. I knew...Patricia (13:34.225)my God.John Biggs (13:50.382)quite a few folks who just couldn’t handle it. And I think this is so vital. mean, those three things that you just described are just the self-reflection, I think, is the other thing. I would also argue that in this day and age, those entrepreneurs are going to like mushroom retreats or whatever to get their self-reflection. Is that an alternative? Is that a way to go? Or should it just be sober reflection in a dark room?Patricia (14:14.592)Well, I think it’s interesting that people are trying to ingest consciousness.John Biggs (14:20.736)Mm Exactly. That’s I mean, that’s the answer, right? It’s like you said you said there’s no app for for self for the self. But to a degree, a couple of mushrooms are kind of like that. It’s like it’s like it’s like Matrix Neo in the Matrix.Patricia (14:22.785)Yep.Patricia (14:34.6)Right. And so, I mean, this is the danger of my work all the time. You’ve been asking me good, deep questions, but, you know, often people just want the set of 10 hacks, you know, the listicle. And that’s not what this is. I mean, I’m really asking people to take a hard look at what’s happening to them and how they’re losing their sense of self and what the costs are. And you’re right about the cost because, you know,John Biggs (14:46.039)Mm-hmm.Patricia (15:01.458)One of the people that I had in the research study attempted suicide. mean, the costs are very real. so what you’re really talking about though is rich because, you know, Carl Jung was a big believer that much of what makes us who we are lives in the unconscious. It’s not a fish, it’s a whale we’re riding on. And so to access that.is vital in restoring your sense of self. And so it doesn’t surprise me that people are taking hallucinogenics and people are ketamine and people are trying to get there however they can. I have never done it myself. So I’ve looked at some of the science on it. I can’t poo poo it, but I certainly can’t proclaim it either. I think the more opportunities you have toraise the unconscious and make it conscious, the better you’re going to be. So keep in mind the persona is attached to the ego. And Carl Jung said, every defeat of the ego is a victory for the unconscious. And so the more you confuse the two, the more you fuse the two, the more resilient you’re going to be. So this is like keeping just a simple dream notebook.John Biggs (16:15.822)Mm-hmm.Yeah.Patricia (16:28.574)Next to your dream. mean, one of the things that I found is that some of the entrepreneurs I interviewed were so strung out, they weren’t dreaming anymore. And this is a, this is a signal. This is a signal from the self that you’re starting to lose your attachment to the unconscious. So anything you can do to tap into the unconscious meditation, walking, re embodying yourself.I mean, we live such disembodied lives in the digital culture that even reconnecting to your senses by walking outdoors has a huge impact on your inner world.John Biggs (17:14.958)I like from a Jungian standpoint, we could argue that some of the self-medication and some of like raves and all that other good stuff, the group activities, et cetera, that these folks are Burning Man or whatever, they’re trying their damnedest to hit those notes and try to bring that unconscious up. What does it mean in a normal sense? Explain to me the idea of...dissolving ego and connecting to the unconscious.Patricia (17:48.748)So the ego serves a function. That’s where your executive function emanates from. The ego plays a role. The ego is there for a reason. The ego will keep you safe. The problem is that the ego is hungry. And it will turn everything you do in your life into a project of the ego if you’re not attuned to that. And so this is whereYou know, sometimes for an entrepreneur, the ego will be, will get, you know, you hear phrases like, you’re getting in your own way. That is typically the ego wanting to try to protect you from taking risks. So being able to monitor the ego is, valuable. especially for people who are reaching high strivers, entrepreneurs, but, but I would also say that we’re not trying to dissolve the ego.John Biggs (18:31.47)Mm-hmm.Patricia (18:47.295)What we’re trying to do is raise what is in the unconscious to bolster the other parts of the self, right? The ego is only one part of the self. And so it gets very muscular, especially in American culture. And you’re seeing this play out in politics and business, right? And everything else gets atrophied. So you’re trying to bring things into balance.John Biggs (19:09.688)Sure, sure, sure.John Biggs (19:16.846)So the suggestion is that the ego doesn’t allow for, I don’t know, obviously reflection and obviously maybe kindness to a degree. mean, if we look at the current political state, it’s all ego, right? It’s all bluster. And it’s all just the assumption you being right constantly is what’s polarizing us. So the question I have, especially related to the book, is how do we survive these next?this next decade, right? So I was speaking to a guy just now who is, literally he’s been a coder all his life. He’s probably one of the best coders I know. And he says he’s going to be obsolete in half a year, basically because of AI. he can, the bosses who are full of ego say to themselves, we can replace this guy with a couple Claude instances and we’ve saved $200,000 or whatever this guy wants for his contract.How are we even not the hard chargers? How does mental management survive this? How do the folks who are eking out a living being journalists and media creators?Patricia (20:25.429)of what you have to answer is number one, who are you? And really understand that and know that. number two, what you bring to this that makes you unique that Claude or Chachi B.T. cannot replicate. So I think where...John Biggs (20:44.482)Mm-hmm.Patricia (20:50.097)human contribution is going to be most valuable is in some of the ways that we as humans connect to each other and in some of the ways that we are sentient beings so that we receive messages and send them out to other human beings. So one of the things that fascinates me, John, is just how much the new platforms for AI have learned fromyou know, years and years and years of internet success. And one of the things I’m really tuned into is how my robot wants to love Bummy. Right? I’m a genius.John Biggs (21:30.318)Mm-hmm.Patricia (21:32.971)And I have to tell you, if you talk to my robot, you know, he would tell you all kinds of things about just how special I am. What is at the root of that? They are coded in these early phases of public engagement to build trust that then can be leveraged and...John Biggs (21:33.432)Yeah.Patricia (21:56.554)you know, the en-shitification is coming, but it will learn as much as it can about us by love bombing us. And so...awareness that we’re in this moment. I mean, we’ve been here before, right? Especially people like you and you and me, we were there in the early days. If you were writing for TechCrunch, you’ve been around. So we’ve been here before and understanding that this is the moment we’re at and really digging in and doing some work to understand who we are.John Biggs (22:17.582)Mm-hmm.Patricia (22:32.651)There was a case study that I wrote about in the book, Janet. She was a coder at a very young age. She went to a STEM school. And she was great at online gaming, massive multiplayer games. She was great at blogging. She was on every single platform at the time that was available to her. And she was 17. And around.18, she was getting ready to apply for colleges and she was like, said, this was her phrase to me, I felt empty. She didn’t know who she was. So she actually disciplined herself to write a paragraph in her notebook describing herself to herself.John Biggs (23:10.382)Mm-hmm.Patricia (23:21.771)And then she went out to every single one of those platforms where she had a persona that was active and she ignored how many clicks. She ignored how popular it was. She ignored the places where she was trolled. And she said, is that me? Does that align with this paragraph? And if it did, she kept that voice. And if it didn’t, she, she self-regulated. And it was 18 years old. And I thought, what a lesson.John Biggs (23:35.278)Mm-hmm.John Biggs (23:40.28)Wow.John Biggs (23:47.694)at 18 too, which is wild.John Biggs (23:56.312)So this is heartening, Usually these things end up as not being so chipper. But I’m trying to find a historical corollary for where we are right now. we’re talking about, I always think about this scene in American Splendor where Paul Giamatti is working in a hospital. And this is the 70s. He’s working in hospital where there’s paper files everywhere, all over the place.like in a few years, those paper files would have been gone. But at that point, he was as Harvey Picar was like in a in a room full of paper. And he was perfectly fine. He was perfectly happy. He was he was the kind of guy who would who wanted to be alone in this room. But when all that went over to computer, when all that went automated, what changed, he no longer had a place. So who gets who loses that who loses that that that position who loses that their persona when we go fromessentially dumb machines to machines that are either constantly like complimenting us or are doing most of our work for us and we no longer have that thing. How do we rebuild that persona in this case?Patricia (25:07.848)Well, that’s a huge question, OK? And listen, I’m still figuring some of this out myself. I realize that I have stumbled on territory that a lot of neuroscientists are also still trying to figure out, and psychologists. And the other thing about this, this is interdisciplinary work. And science has gotten so specified.John Biggs (25:12.056)Mm-hmm.John Biggs (25:17.239)Mm-hmm.Patricia (25:35.752)that we’re starting to behave now more like humanities departments, where there’s a guy in history and a woman in sociology and somebody else in art and culture. And we’re now starting to have conversations about how do we get back to a humanity that is resilient, has something to offer, and what is core to the human identity thatcannot be replicated. And some of that is actually has to do with getting back to what is creative about us. Creativity, imagination, that cannot be replicated by a machine. What the machine can do, just like love bombing, is it can give the performance of that, but it can’t enact it. And so I wrote a book in 2008,which was called the Ren Gen, the rise of the Renaissance generation. And it talked about that in every, what are the conditions that precede a Renaissance? And it is always the same through history. Death comes first. The civilization is wiped out. A seed bed is created and something new emerges and it emerges from human contribution of creativity. So I think what we’re seeing now,John Biggs (26:40.611)Mm-hmm.Patricia (27:04.828)is we’re seeing how bankrupt this dominance and aggression script is. And what it’s doing, it’s very good at destroying, but it’s not creating anything. And so there is going to be an equal and opposite drive that will be toward creativity. And I can see the wheels of this starting to crank up. And so...John Biggs (27:12.238)Mm-hmm.Patricia (27:33.876)The future is yet to be seen, but the people who can tie into that part of themselves have a future.John Biggs (27:43.854)That’s amazing. I’m glad you said that. I think that’s vital to hear. think there’s plenty of people who just aren’t hearing that, right?Patricia (27:50.792)Well, that’s the noise floor. They can’t hear it. It doesn’t resonate with them. And dominance, when you look at the dark emotions that rule dominance, they’re constrictive for a reason, because that’s how dominance stays dominant. So people who wriggle out from underneath that, like if you saw the halftime show.John Biggs (27:53.39)Mm-hmm.Patricia (28:19.642)at the Super Bowl. You know, you see how people wriggle out from underneath that. And it resonates with a massive amount of other people. This is what I mean by humans being sentient. We pick up the signals across the culture from each other. And this is what will save us.John Biggs (28:19.758)Mm-hmm.John Biggs (28:44.834)Patricia, thank you for this. This has been amazing. When is your book coming out?Patricia (28:49.726)March 5th, launches, it’s in pre-order now. It’s called, again, Will the Future Like You? And it’s about this age of hyper reinvention when we’re having to pivot and pivot and pivot and reinvent ourselves, what it’s doing to us and what we can do about it.John Biggs (29:05.998)We’ve made a lot of people like me happy because I have like, on my LinkedIn, I think it’s like two or three pages of just like doing different things almost every year, which I think is, that makes me an early adopter of this future, right? It’s scary, but it’s fun.Patricia (29:17.704)Yes. It’s scary, but it’s fun. And you’re going to figure out like what keeps you resilient. The recipe is a little different for everybody. But the fact that you’re asking questions and you’re curious, the self always knows what it’s doing.John Biggs (29:39.316)Wonderful. Well, thank you for this. It’s been amazing.Patricia (29:41.546)Thank you. Pleasure.John Biggs (29:43.79)This has been Keep Going. I’m John Biggs. We’ll see you next week. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.keepgoingpod.com/subscribe

Kevin Gaskell walked into a room expecting to be fired.Instead, he was handed the keys to Porsche UK.That moment says a lot about his career. He is an engineer by training. Then he added an MBA. Then accountancy. Blueprint and balance sheet. He joined Porsche in his twenties, rose through operations, and found himself in a company that was sliding. Three years of unsold inventory. Brutal headlines. Public jokes about pigeons and deposits.He thought he was getting a ten minute exit interview.He stayed for four hours. He told the owners exactly what he thought. What to cut. What to fix. Where to aim. He expected consequences. He got promoted.Five years later, Porsche UK went from last to first.That sounds like a clean arc. It was not. They cut costs by 50 percent. They simplified. They endured press attacks. They carried the weight of three years of unsold cars. That is not glamour. That is grit.Then he did it again at BMW. Then he quit.This is where the story turns.He left one of the best jobs in European automotive to build Cars Direct Europe. Rented office. Desk. Phone. Two young kids at home. American backers. Big plan. Six months in, the investors pulled out.Gone.Now what?No salary. No bank support. No track record as a founder. Just a business plan and three colleagues.This is the part people skip. The terror. The mortgage. The silent nights staring at the ceiling.They negotiated a sliver of funding. Raised money from friends and family. No safety net. Then they pivoted. Consumers were not ready to buy cars online. So they went after fleet operators. Boring. Back office. Massive inefficiency. Two hundred people on phones sourcing cars.They built a platform. They became the backbone. They prepaid dealers with token systems, which quietly funded their growth. Five years later they sold for nine figures.That does not happen because someone is lucky.It happens because when the bottom falls out, you do not flinch.Kevin talks about luck. He was in the right room at Porsche. That is true. But courage matters. When you think you are about to be fired, you can shrink. Or you can speak clearly.He chose clarity.There is another thread running through his story. He does not build fragile companies. He stays five to eight years. He builds teams that can run without him. He does not asset strip. He builds foundations.Today he runs multiple companies in parallel. Fiber networks. Data platforms. Investments. He has rowed oceans. Walked to the poles. Climbed mountains.That part is dramatic, but it is not the point.The point is this: failure comes first. Success is the fight that follows.When the press mocks you. When investors leave. When no bank will return your call. That is the test.Do you believe in the thing?If the answer is yes, you keep going.That is the through line.Not hype. Not trends. Not whatever the market is excited about this week. He is openly skeptical of herd behavior in investing. Dot com. AI. Railways. The pattern repeats. Tools matter. Products matter more. Service matters most.Build something real. Tell the truth about where you stand. Simplify. Cut what does not work. Double down on what does.And when you think you are about to be shown the door, speak up anyway.You might walk out unemployed.Or you might walk out in charge. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.keepgoingpod.com/subscribe

I sat down with Constantin Kogan last week after we randomly met in Salt Lake City. We both live near New York. Sometimes the universe has a sense of humor.Konstantin is the founder of Holistic Capital, a multi strategy investment firm focused on digital assets. He also runs a podcast called Holistic Investments. Over 100 episodes. More than 600,000 followers across platforms. Not bad for something he started during COVID while stuck at home.But the interesting part of his story is not crypto. It is not Bitcoin in 2012. It is not Ethereum in 2016. It is not being early to hedge funds or registering with the SEC.It is this: social capital is capital.During COVID he found himself in a tough place. Like most of us. No travel. No meetings. No momentum. He asked a simple question. What can I do that I actually enjoy? His answer was long conversations. Honest conversations. The kind you have in a kitchen at midnight over wine.So he started a podcast.No monetization plan. No big strategy. Just curiosity and discipline. For five years he made nothing from it. Most podcasters quit before episode thirty. He kept going past one hundred.Why?Because he was not optimizing for money. He was optimizing for relationships and learning.That changes everything.We talked about failure. I asked him about bad trades. Crypto winters. Market crashes. He surprised me. The real failures were not financial. They were relational.Picking the wrong partners.He described business like a marriage. You can survive small disagreements. But when a real crisis hits, that is when character shows up. Do you share a vision. Do you share values. When it gets ugly, does your partner protect the mission or protect their ego.You cannot really test that in advance. There is no checklist. No personality quiz that guarantees success. At some point you rely on judgment and instinct. And you accept risk.That is uncomfortable. But it is honest.We also talked about investing. Early in his career he focused on technology and timing. Now he looks at people first. Ideas are abundant. Execution is rare. Motivation varies wildly. Some founders want status. Some want money. Some want to prove themselves. Some want to change the world.Only one of those types will survive when things get hard.If you are building something, remember this. Investors are not just evaluating your deck. They are evaluating your stamina. Your alignment with your team. Your ability to handle conflict without blowing up the room.And if you are thinking about starting a podcast or some other media project, understand what you are signing up for. It is a business. It consumes time. It demands consistency. It does not pay right away. Maybe not for years.But it builds something else. Reputation. Network. Intellectual capital. A record of your thinking.That can compound.Konstantin does not even call himself a VC anymore. He trades liquid markets now. Algorithmic strategies. Volatility. But the podcast still runs. The network still grows. Yesterday he met the co founder of Venmo and invited him on the show on the spot.That is how opportunity works. Quiet compounding. Relationship by relationship.You cannot fake that. You have to show up. You have to publish. You have to keep going when the numbers are small and the monetization is zero.There is a lesson here.Build things that create optionality. Build things that connect you to other capable people. Build things that make you better at thinking and listening.Money follows. Sometimes slowly. Sometimes indirectly. But it follows.In the meantime, protect your partnerships. Choose carefully. Align early. Agree on how you will handle conflict before it arrives.Because markets rise and fall. Technologies shift. Cycles repeat.Character does not.TRANSCRIPTWelcome back to keep going. A podcast about success and failure. I’m John Biggs today on the show. We have Constantin Kogan. He’s the, uh, GP at holistic capital. And you also have a, really cool podcast, which I’m going to be on eventually. So I get to actually,Constantin Kogan (01:18.537)Mmm.John Biggs (01:37.954)meet your audience. But we met just a week ago and you have a really, cool story. So tell us what you’re up to, Constantin.Constantin Kogan (01:47.235)Hi, John. First of all, an honor to be here. Yes, we met in Salt Lake City out of all the places, ironically, live in close by in New York. I don’t know where to begin the story. guess maybe just a little bit of background. I’m originally from Ukraine. was born and raised there, 11 years in the United States. I started my career as a...John Biggs (01:56.236)Yeah.Constantin Kogan (02:12.651)I’m a modernism future trader. Chicago Bota Trader was my first venue where I started to explore financial markets. From there, went through a hole and bought my first 5 Bitcoin in 2012. 2016, I a conscious choice to go all in when Ethereum got out and...thought that programmable money is definitely going to be the future of tokenization of all the assets. 2017, I became a partner in the first crypto fund of hedge funds in the world. We’re the first SEC registered firm. And from there, you know, I had a wild journey co-founding three companies, you know, investing in 80 plus venture startups and running my own.you know, my own hedge fund, working for hedge funds and now focusing on holistic capital, which is basically a multi-asset, multi-strategy investment firm, mostly focused on digital assets, but eventually we will work with different assets on blockchain as well, which I think that’s where the future is going to. And also, as you mentioned, I...also run Holistic Investments, which is the podcast which I started during COVID time. My first guest was Dan Moritz from Pantera Capital because we invested in Pantera so we good relationships with them. Since then, I 100 plus guests on my show and enjoy learning from incredible individuals.John Biggs (03:49.278)And you’ve got you got like 600 plus thousand followers across your across all your platforms. What do you think led to that level of success? And what is what does that give you as a VC? Like I know what this gives me as a I don’t know, just a putz on the internet. But what does that give you as a VC?Constantin Kogan (03:55.957)Yes.Constantin Kogan (04:10.313)Well, to be completely transparent, I don’t consider myself as a VC anymore. Like I used to be. Right now I’m...mostly with trading more liquid assets, right? So you can think about it as algorithmic trading firm, high frequency trading, right? Closer than, so I used to be at VCN. I thought that was incredible opportunity in emerging markets, right? But regardless, what it gives me, it gives me network. I think...Social capital is another form of capital, right? Not necessarily like people who invest in you is your, you know, main business partners in life. You know, some people like stay with you regardless of whether you succeed or you fail. And I think the more value you bring to other individuals, like what look what we’re doing today, right? You’re the firstwho allowed me to be on your podcast, which I’m very grateful for, and then you’re gonna be on mine, and that’s hopefully gonna inspire others to do the same and share thoughts, you know, learn from each other. I would say intellectual capital and social capital, that’s what’s the primary goal for me, and that’s how I’m giving back to the world by educating the future generations.John Biggs (05:28.396)Mm-hmm. So tell us about the growth of this media empire, I guess you could say. So you started out just deciding to do this. What was the impetus? Why did you want to do it?Constantin Kogan (05:40.105)Well, media empire, it’s a big word. love how you frame it. Future media empire, yes. Yes, I appreciate it. Look, I, again...John Biggs (05:47.03)Yeah, we gotta tuck each other up, yeah.Constantin Kogan (05:54.363)Wholeheartedly, was in a very tough spot during COVID. I think it was a very challenging time for everyone. And I thought to myself, what can I do? I mean, we’re sitting at home. There’s not much to do. you know, everything is digital anyway. You cannot go out. And I started to ask myself, it was more of a soul searching exercise. Like, what can I do to at least do something what I love to, you know, have a cohesive discussion and also somehow impactothers to inspire them or to help them in some way and that podcast format was the most relevant for me. I’ve listened to a lot, I’m a big fan of know like Joe Rogan, Alex Hermosy, know and Alex Friedman and many other like greats know people who went bold and started to invite other individuals, have long discussions with them so myMy format is about 60 minutes, right? So it’s enough time to learn about a person, about their journey, about where they’re coming from, and also how they achieve this success. And also ask them uncomfortable questions, which allows to bring less controversy, but more about what were the failures? What are the learning lessons? Something that you would not talk on your board meeting or somewhere in the traditional media, right? So more like honest, friendly conversations,you will have when you’re drinking wine with your friend in the kitchen.John Biggs (07:30.606)So tell me about some of those failures. think you, I mean, right now we’re looking at a crypto winter. So that sounds like, it sounds like you might have some issues right now, but tell me about the failures as you move through and try to enter this space.Constantin Kogan (07:44.255)Yeah, as a matter of fact, we’re doing great. maybe we like when you’re trading.the market is a strategy, you’re not like long like any asset like we’re making money even shorting right now. So for us, the volatility and big spikes is where we make most of our money. And that’s the exciting part. Like, and that’s when I finally understood after three cycles in the industry that how to navigate the markets. So that’s number one. The failures mostly, ironically, I wouldn’t call them financial decisions. It’s mostlywho you’re going with. So I would say how to pick your partners. Like, and I think that’s one of the most challenging parts because if you think about a business, it’s like as a form of marriage, so to speak, like a very big connection you spend with your business partners a lot of time, you’re building something, it’s your venture is like your baby, right? And when there is, I would say, not clearunderstanding of what is the vision, how do you work together, like you know what’s gonna happen next, like when the actual challenges come into play, that’s when you learn the character of a person, that’s how you learn how they react, that’s how you learn if they’re gonna be supportive or they’re gonna put you down or maybe even like publicly humiliate you, like there’s a lot of things that are completely unknown besides the business challenges, we’re also talking about likebasic human to human relationship. And I would say that the biggest learning experience for me as a failure is how to choose the right partners and how to make sure that these people not only share your vision, but also there will be for you when it’s going to be the hardest, when nobody will want to support you, when the market is against you. And in these moments, it’s incredibly important to have a person whoConstantin Kogan (09:46.024)is basically you’re person that you consciously decided that no matter what you go till the end and you make it a success.John Biggs (09:53.582)I mean, have you ever was give me an example of someone who who didn’t fulfill that for you.Constantin Kogan (10:00.043)Well, I don’t want to put names, right? But I would say, I should say if you read statistics in traditional VC companies that are well-funded, let’s imagine even they found product market fit and everything, one of the third aspects why companies fail is because of the pure misunderstanding and quarrels between the teams, right? And the founding team. So it’s an ego issue, right?John Biggs (10:03.918)We’ll just kick. Yeah, sure sure sureConstantin Kogan (10:29.578)There are people who are money driven, there are people who are purpose driven. When you are purpose driven, like you’re always trying to ways how to mitigate certain conflicts, how to find a way to harmonize a relationship, even though you might disagree on very particular topics, right? Very tactical, pragmatic business decisions, but still respect.another person who might disagree with you. And then you find out that some people besides can be brilliant, analytical, and very active in business. They might not have, let’s say, what we call in a common sense, like high emotional intelligence. And that equals to...bigger misunderstanding, right? When you like, again, marriage is probably one of the most like relevant examples when two people, let’s say they’re not on the same page, it creates like an environment where you might be successful in other aspects of life. But when you come back home, let’s say, and you were not like feeling.that it’s the most supportive environment, then everything else becomes challenging. It becomes, I wouldn’t call it obsolete, but I would say it becomes irrelevant. that’s, would say, the most important example. whenever you’re picking people who you want to go with, and by the way, that’s also...relevant for the partnerships, right? People who will be, let’s say, your investors or people who will be your customers, who one of the biggest ones. That’s one of the most important aspects. Are you in the same page? Do you have the same values? Is it like, are you going to be able to work long term together?John Biggs (12:21.326)Okay, yeah, fascinating. So what do you do to test people before you trust them?Constantin Kogan (12:30.121)You know, it might sound funny, but I don’t think there’s a way to test it. I really don’t. think it’s some... somehow it’s a gut feeling, you know, like it’s when you pick a partner you see immediately, like whether there’s gonna be potential conflict and whether you’re gonna be able to navigate this conflict so that you come out...the same as you started your relationship. And yeah, sometimes it’s more about the examples of life, the practical issues that help you. For example, my current business partner, know each other for 17 years. So we’ve been through a lot of hardships. We know how would each one of us react.And sometimes you know a person from an industry or somebody referred this person to you and you meet for the first time, you think, oh, wow, it’s a great idea. We can make a lot of money together. But eventually, when a serious conflict situation arrives, like maybe small things you can dodge or you can raise above those issues, but then the big one destroys everything. And it’s impossible to know in advance. That’s the irony of life.So you have to just have, mean, some people do psychometric analysis, like astrological analysis, right? I don’t believe it works. It’s just a matter of that you agree from the get-go. What are you going to do? Not if, but when the issue is going to arrive.John Biggs (14:13.43)OK, very interesting.How do you make decisions on what to invest in, what to buy, that sort of thing? Like, let’s say we’re talking to an entrepreneur right now. What would you be looking at when you beat them?Constantin Kogan (14:29.961)Well, as I mentioned, right now we’re mostly focusing on liquid market, right?John Biggs (14:34.382)Well, yeah, but yeah, but like before or just in general, because I mean, we have fairly.Constantin Kogan (14:40.677)Before as a startup, same, I look at the people a lot. Before I looked at technology and the scalability, whether it can be 10x, 100x idea, whether it’s a good timing, whether the market is ready, when they have a product market fit and they have some traction, whether they have some revenue or some goods, I don’t know.downloads or like you know any like monthly average users like daily average users like you know that’s sorry active users right so but nowadays I actually look at the people more mostly like after investing in 80 projects and realizing that most of the startups are just statistically like they will fail like so the only question now remains in my head is like whether this is the right team to execute the visionThe idea can be incredible. The vision can be also like, you know, right on time, like on point. You have like backing, like, you know, of the top VCs or like angel investors. But then you look at the people and you think, okay, well, are they are in a good place, like in their life? Do they have enough experience? Are they motivated enough? Because motivation of founders can be also very different.One founder can have, I don’t know, two previous exits and for him it’s like more of a like he really wants to change the world while other can it can be his first startup and he’s gonna grind to make it happen no matter what just because like he wants to you know prove himself like and there is other scenarios where people already just do itJohn Biggs (16:12.398)Mm-hmm.Constantin Kogan (16:18.372)for reasons because they need to do it, because there was a merger or because somebody told them that’s going to be a great opportunity. So that’s the most important, think, right now. You look at the people, you have multiple meetings, and you try to analyze whether they’re going to be the right fit for this particular idea to execute it.John Biggs (16:40.47)And for folks in your boat, they start up? Should they start a podcast or would you recommend it? Or is it a is it too is it a pain?Constantin Kogan (16:44.169)You know, starting a podcast is first of all, you have to think about a starting a business. I mean, you know, better than anyone else, it’s a very challenging endeavor. It requires a lot of time.John Biggs (16:53.39)Mm-hmm.Constantin Kogan (17:00.173)not always I will pay out immediately for five years. I haven’t been able to monetize it. I was just doing it for my own passion, right? You know, because I truly believe that learning from other great minds was something that I wanted to. And if at least like a few hundred people will be inspired by that, that was my motivation. But then you realize, okay, well, like you spend your own time, you spend resources, right?you we’re spending right now, you allocate half an hour of your valuable time in life, right? Then you’re going to spend time on editing, right? Then you’re going to spend time on distribution. And then you ask yourself, is this going to be monetizable because you spend all this resources and you hope at some point it will be. And if you don’t have a clear answer when and how it’s going to happen, then the question is like, how long you’re going to last. Statistically, most of the podcasters whogo into this journey, they don’t last more than 30 episodes. So if you’re over 30 episodes and let’s say you get into 50 to 100, that’s already, that means you’re a survivor. The question is how big you want to go. That’s all.John Biggs (18:14.74)Mm-hmm. Yeah. mean, think I’ve got 260 or something like that. So I feel like I’m a survivor, but I’m in the same boat where it’s in terms of monetization is kind of silly. so where can people find what you’re working on?Constantin Kogan (18:27.784)Holistic investments you can Google my name Konstantin Kogan and holistic investments. I am an Apple podcast Spotify. I have seven other platforms There’s also a YouTube version of it right there. I put her telegram Instagram the short version of it YouTube obviously the fullSo I’m doing right now in studio in New York. if any of your listeners think that you’re a great potential guest or you want to refer someone, feel free to go to my website, constantnikogon.com and there’s a form you can submit someone and I’m like my team would be happy to review it and come back to you. And yeah, it’s mostly relationship based nowadays. for example, yesterday I met co-founder of Venmo.honestly was not planning to do that, right? And then I was very inspired, he’s building a new project and I was so excited about his vision that I want to support him. So I invited him immediately, the first moment we met. There are others who takes time, it’s a publicly traded company, so it takes me three months to book them, right? So I’m very open-minded to talk to anyone here, constructive feedback about the format, about the questions.Sound, light.John Biggs (19:50.478)All right, very cool. Constantin, thank you for joining us.Constantin Kogan (19:52.786)Thank you so much.John Biggs (19:54.382)All right, this has been Keep Going. I’m John Biggs. We’ll see you next episode. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.keepgoingpod.com/subscribe

On this episode of Innovators, I spoke with Jason Ambrose of People.ai about what “agentic AI” actually means, why sales data is messier than most people think, and why blindly trusting large language models is a mistake.People.ai has been around long enough to see multiple waves of enterprise software come and go. Now it’s repositioning itself squarely in the agent era.Most CRM systems tell you what was entered. They don’t tell you what’s actually happening.People.ai takes a different approach. Instead of relying on manual updates, their AI analyzes the communications that define modern sales, emails, Slack messages, meetings, chat transcripts. The system maps that activity to accounts, contacts, and opportunities.That sounds straightforward until you scale it up.If you’re a startup selling to a small business, maybe one salesperson is talking to one buyer about one product. That’s simple. But when Microsoft sells to Verizon, you might have dozens of people on both sides, across legal, technical, procurement, and executive roles. Conversations happen everywhere. Mapping that complexity into a clean CRM record is hard.That’s where People.ai claims it shines. It uses its own AI models, trained on billions of transactions, to reconstruct what’s really going on inside a sales organization.What Is an Agent, Really?We talked about the shift from chatbots to agents.A chatbot answers a question. An agent has an objective.Jason framed it in terms of business process automation. Old-school automation works when the logic is predictable. If this, then that. Stay inside one system, follow a defined workflow.Agents step in when reasoning is required. They cut across systems. They pursue a goal. They have to decide what to do next.But that only works if they’re plugged into real expertise.Jason made a useful distinction. Public LLMs are trained on public data. Enterprise expertise lives in private systems. If you want an agent to act intelligently inside a company, it needs access to proprietary data. That’s a big trust ask. You’re effectively saying, “Let our AI read your emails.”That’s not a small decision.Avoiding “Build Trust With Stakeholders”Anyone who has used a generic LLM for business advice has seen the problem. You ask for guidance and you get vague platitudes. “Build trust.” “Accelerate the deal.” “Engage the customer.”That’s not actionable.Jason argues that this is where expert agents come in. Instead of spitting out generalized advice, they ground recommendations in specific deal data. Who hasn’t responded in three weeks? Which technical blocker hasn’t been addressed? Where did the last conversation stall?Without that grounding, AI defaults to corporate fortune-cookie language.The Capital Markets RealityWe also touched on fundraising.SaaS is being repriced. Public markets adjusted first, and private markets followed. Companies that once enjoyed premium multiples are now being reevaluated in light of AI disruption.Capital is flowing into AI-native plays. If you look like “just another SaaS company,” you need a credible AI story. If you genuinely sit at the center of AI transformation, you’re in a stronger position.People.ai is not currently raising, but Jason sees the shift clearly. The market is asking who is being disrupted by AI and who is using it to build something new.Is AI Replacing Jobs?It’s the obvious question.Jason’s take was pragmatic. Technology changes work. It always has. He remembers the early days of the web and the anxiety that came with it. Some jobs disappear. Most jobs change.His line stuck with me: people should work with people, and let AI do the rest.Sales, at its core, is still about relationships. AI can summarize, surface risks, and suggest next steps. It can’t replace trust, empathy, or judgment. At least not yet.If you’re in sales and you haven’t started using AI, Jason’s advice is simple.Start.Use ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini, whatever tool you prefer. Have it rewrite emails. Summarize meeting notes. Draft follow-ups.But don’t copy and paste.He pointed out something many executives are quietly thinking: if you send a clearly AI-generated email without tailoring it, you’re signaling that you didn’t invest the time. And if you didn’t invest the time, why should the recipient?AI can amplify your work. It can’t replace the part that makes you human.People.ai is betting that the future of sales is agentic, cross-system, and grounded in real communications data. Not just dashboards, but reasoning systems that understand what’s actually happening inside complex deals.Whether you buy that vision or not, one thing is clear. The next phase of enterprise AI won’t be about novelty. It will be about integration, trust, and measurable outcomes.And that’s a much harder problem than writing clever emails.TRANSCRIPT Welcome back to the Innovators show about amazing people doing very cool things. I’m John Biggs. Today on the show we have Jason Ambrose from People.ai. It’s agentic and it’s for sales teams, but why don’t you add to that, Jason, welcome.Jason Ambrose (00:24.482)Yeah, thanks, John. So what People.ai does is our AI figures out what’s happening in a sales organization by looking at the communications between your field and your customers. So we analyze emails, chat transcripts, meetings, Slack messages, and the like to turn that beyond just the data to what’s actually happening. How does thathow do you find the answers of what’s happening in the organization? And we provide that either to humans or to agents. So that’s been our big shift this year is to realize that the stuff that we were doing for humans in CRM is also very relevant when you have agents trying to figure out what’s happening in sales.John Biggs (01:04.094)So let’s explain agents to folks who might not even understand what’s going on. So the idea originally was that you had a chat bot. You asked it something, and it responded to you. But now we’re talking about agents, which are supposed to be autonomous to a degree. So how do you guys describe those, and how do you use them?Jason Ambrose (01:24.086)Yeah. And hey, look, you know, I may not have everything right on this too, but at least the way that I think about it is maybe starting from a business process automation, right? So, you know, for, for periods of time when we had predictable workflows and we knew, you know, sort of if then else, there’s not thinking that happens there, but we could automate work if that had to happen.John Biggs (01:28.188)Mm-hmm. Yeah.Jason Ambrose (01:48.302)In the case of agents, that now becomes something where they have some chain of thought, they have some reasoning. So they know they have an objective or a purpose that they’re trying to work through. They have to figure out how to get that done. So when there’s a little bit more, you know, thinking, reasoning that needs to happen to figure out how to get that objective, that suits an agent. What I think we’re seeing with customers is they’re figuring out how to unlock that forwork that needs to get done across a lot of different systems, right? So, know, BPA, business process automation, or what you have in your workflow tools that tends to say within the silo of a system from data to business roles to presentation layer to humans. When you start to cut across the systems, that’s where there’s been big opportunities for agents.John Biggs (02:37.214)So in this particular case, you guys are focusing on sales leads, that sort of thing. So you basically take every single data point that you have and say, this person, I don’t know, emailed you two weeks ago and also was tweeting this and is interested in this. So why don’t you give him a ring? Is that generally how it works, or what’s the?Jason Ambrose (02:56.376)That’s yeah, that’s really close. Yeah. I think the difference is, you know, let’s think about two different types of selling, right? you could be a startup and you’re selling to a small business. That’s, know, pretty much one buyer. So, you know, if you think about it in the context of CRM, you’ve got one salesperson. You’re selling to one buyer at one account and you’re selling one product that that is pretty simple to figure out, right? Where it gets more complicated is if you’re.Microsoft selling to Verizon just to pick two big companies. You might have 30 or 40 people or more on the Microsoft side. You might have 30 or 40 people on the Verizon side answering different technical questions, having different conversations about different elements of your business relationship and how you match those activities to records in CRM that represent, you know, here’s a person that we’re talking to, here’s the account that we’re talking to.you know, here’s the specific sales opportunity that becomes really hard to do properly. And that’s, that’s where we, that’s where we shine. And that’s where we have, you know, pretty large customers like Red Hat, Verizon as a customer and some others.John Biggs (04:09.712)Would you be able to still do this without AI? Would this exist if we didn’t have this kind of, I don’t know, synthesis, right?Jason Ambrose (04:15.798)It would be really difficult, right? So we have our own AI that’s applied to do the math to figure this out. And it’s learned from looking at billions of transactions over the years, right? The second piece, I think, is how you integrate or interface with other systems. So you mentioned the chat interface. So a human does want to do that, right? So we put this alongside sales opportunity record.If you want to get the full story, you can ask the chat bot, are the risks in these deals or what’s happening in this account? Now with MCP, that same type of interaction can happen from an agent to our system. So the agent asks those questions and works through its own reasoning model to ask those things. So if you want these agents to be effective, you do need AI helping them on their side with the reasoning and ours on our side answering those questions so that they get to an answer that’s actionable.The thing we see that happens a lot is if you just try to throw LLMs at what’s happening, it’ll say things like, you know, build trust with a stakeholder, right? Or, you know, accelerate this deal. Like that doesn’t really do anything for you, right?John Biggs (05:26.078)See, that’s a good question. mean, it feels like traditional AI is kind of elides over a lot of information, right? It kind of says like, it’ll give you like, what a good idea. Well, I think that by moving forward this way, you’re going to do X, Z. How do you avoid that sort of like ham handed optimism that usually pops out of these things?Jason Ambrose (05:47.446)Yeah, I think that that’s where you see the place for what I would call expert agents, right? So some people call those like the first agent. so I’ve heard the metaphor of like, it’s a really smart intern. It doesn’t really know much, but it’s smart and figures things out. Right. So you have to work with proprietary data to be able to find meaningful answers and working within the enterprise, having the trust where the enterprise will allow you to go.find that information and turn it into something useful to those agents within the enterprise is the important complementary piece to all of those. The LLMs are working off of all the public information, but that expertise really sits in the private information. So how do I, as a customer, get comfortable with allowing somebody else’s AI to look through all that stuff? It’s a big ask from us. Let us go read all your emails and provide these answers. There’s a lot to do there.John Biggs (06:37.992)Mm-hmm.Yeah, exactly.John Biggs (06:45.192)So how is it raising for an AI company right now? I mean, you guys have been around a little bit, so you’re probably not looking right now. is it easier? Have you noticed that it was easier than, I don’t know, some of your other ventures?Jason Ambrose (06:58.006)Yeah, so you’re right. So we’re not looking right now. But I guess what I would see in the capital markets is certainly everything going on with SaaS. The way that I look at it is the market was pricing in success with SaaS that it’s re-evaluating. And you start with public markets, and that carries down into ABC rounds. And that capital shifting to AI right now, a lot of that is going to the big players.The capital markets are saying AI is posing risk to these businesses that had it baked in. So we have to reflect that on the valuations. And we want to see the opportunities to say, how do we invest in AI and the potential that could be there in that? So to the extent that you fit in the latter case, I think you’re having an easier time with raises. If you fit into the former case, you have to tell the story of how you’re going from looking like a SASCO to looking like.John Biggs (07:45.884)Interesting.Jason Ambrose (07:57.269)know, NAIA play in this world.John Biggs (08:00.53)I don’t think you guys have this problem, but what would you say to folks who are saying, I don’t know, this is replacing our jobs, they’re laying us off because of this, et cetera.Jason Ambrose (08:11.47)Yeah, I think it’s changing. It’s like anything else, right? And you know, when you haven’t, I remember I was there in the early days on the internet, you know, when the webs first started coming out, I was actually building computer networks and downloaded Mosaic out for the first time it came out. And there was a lot of anxiety about what might change or whether it was going to change. think there was more skepticism back then of it’s this just a fad, is it really going to happen? But, you you think about people who were pushing around inter office mail, you know,That went away, Print stuff that you were publishing. It’s not that the activities went away. It’s that they changed in the way that they were done. So I think it’s going to be simpler, similar, but also simpler in the sense, we talk about, I have this phrase, we want people to work with people in AI to do the rest, right? We’re not made to sit there and look at browsers and look at spreadsheets. We’re made to socialize and communicate. And that’s the stuff that I think.particularly in the sales organization, we will keep doing and do more of. So in that sense, I think it will be better now. Can you say that AI is replacing or changing these jobs?I guess to some extent that that’s a viewpoint that some people have, but I think there are some macro trends that are also behind it.John Biggs (09:33.342)What would you tell a, I don’t know, sales professional right now who needs to know a little bit about AI, isn’t using you guys, just what should they start looking at? What should they start trying to understand?Jason Ambrose (09:46.382)The biggest thing is just start using it. Just start working with ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini, pick your tool. Start thinking about and starting with, how can it help me rewrite some emails? How can it help me summarize some information I’m getting? That’s the easy stuff that you can do with the LLM. And you’ll get a sense of what it’s good at and what it’s not good at doing. But I think with that, what everybodymarketers and sellers need to be conscious of is make sure you’re not copy and pasting and just sending out what the LLMs are telling you. Your job and your uniqueness is going to be tailoring it and understanding what the customer wants to hear. mean, you know, as a CEO, I get so many emails that, you know, it’s clear that it was just straight pass through of what came out of Tat GPT. And my view is like, look, if you can’t spend the time,thinking about what I want to hear in this email, why should I give you the time to respond? understanding that it can help you, but also you need to still put in the work to tailor the message is the best path for you to navigate this if you’re just starting on that, figuring out AI and what it means for your journey.John Biggs (11:03.878)So the website is people.ai. People should just go on and try to get a demo.Jason Ambrose (11:07.598)Yeah.Jason Ambrose (11:11.182)Yeah, well, come check out the content. We have some demo streams where you can get a sense of what the product does. If you want to tailor it some more, understand how we can apply directly for you, fill out the form, give us a call, and we’ll help you out.John Biggs (11:13.628)Mm-hmm.John Biggs (11:25.726)All right, perfect. Well, thank you, Jason. It’s been fascinating. right, this has been The Innovators. I’m John Biggs. We’ll see you next episode.Jason Ambrose (11:29.1)Yeah, sounds good, John. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.keepgoingpod.com/subscribe

This week on Keep Going, I talked with Chantelle Shakila Tiagi, the founder of Tiagi, a creative production and artist consultancy that works across fashion, beauty, and lifestyle. What struck me was not the scale of the work, which spans London, Los Angeles, and Mumbai, but how unplanned the entire thing was.Tiagi did not start as a master plan. It started as momentum.Chantelle came up through fashion and production, worked with a boutique agency, then went freelance because she needed a break. That break turned into opportunity. One shoot led to another. Porter Magazine. Big talent. Serious campaigns. At a certain point, the work was too big to pretend it was just freelancing. She formed a company not to build an empire but to protect herself. The structure followed the work, not the other way around.That pattern comes up again and again on this show. People imagine founders sitting down with a five year plan, a pitch deck, and a vision board. In reality, most businesses worth talking about start because someone is good at something, other people notice, and demand quietly grows until it cannot be ignored anymore.Tiagi’s model is simple in theory and hard in practice. Brands come with a brief. Sometimes it is detailed. Sometimes it is a single image. Tiagi builds the team. Photographers. Directors of photography. Set designers. Creative directors. Producers. Fifty moving parts, all of which have to work together. Chantelle described producers as conductors. The orchestra only sounds good if the right people are playing the right instruments.This matters more now, not less.We talked about the DIY turn in creative work. Ring lights. Instagram reels. Cheap tools. Anyone can make something now. The fear is that expertise no longer matters. Chantelle’s take was calm and practical. People always want the real thing. They want best in class. You can cut corners, but it shows. Quality reveals itself over time, especially when brands are putting serious money behind campaigns.The same logic applies to AI. We talked about virtual models, synthetic environments, and brands experimenting with fully generated shoots. Her view was not defensive. AI exists. Ignoring it is how you get left behind. Tiagi will use it where it makes sense, especially in post production. If AI can create a background instead of flying a crew to a beach, that can be useful. But the idea that all shoots will become synthetic misses the point. Production is human. It is logistical. It is relational. It is physical. AI cannot run an event, manage a crew, or solve problems on set when things go wrong.The more interesting part of the conversation came when we talked about growth.Tiagi looks big from the outside. Big brands. Big names. Multiple offices. Internally, it is small. Chantelle kept it that way on purpose. Contractors expand and contract based on projects. The core team stays tight. COVID reinforced this lesson. Many companies realized they were carrying internal weight they did not need. Tiagi leaned into being nimble. Boutique turned out to be an advantage.This is where the title of the show really fits. Keep Going does not mean keep scaling. It means keep moving forward without losing your footing.Chantelle was honest about the tradeoffs. She rarely produces shoots herself anymore. Her days are contracts, meetings, sales, and management. This is a shock for a lot of founders, especially in creative fields. You start because you love the work. If things go well, you end up doing less of that work. Her advice was blunt. You have to learn to love the rest of it, managing people, building careers, making decisions, and taking responsibility. Otherwise, you will resent the thing you built.What stood out most was her emphasis on doing good. Tiagi makes a point of supporting underdogs and bringing new talent into rooms with established names. That is not marketing copy. It is how they build teams. Access is power in creative industries. If you have it, you have an obligation to use it carefully.We also talked about being an operator. Chantelle now has to handle contracts, billing and legal details: the unglamorous parts. Chantelle likes that work. Producers have to. It is a thankless role. You only hear from people when something breaks. But when a massive project comes together, when the shoot lands, when the team pulls it off, the satisfaction is real. The admin is the price of that feeling.There was no grand lesson at the end of this conversation. No blueprint. No hustle sermon. Just a clear pattern.Do the work well. Let momentum build. Do not grow faster than you understand. Stay small longer than feels comfortable. Accept that success will pull you away from the thing you started with. Decide whether you are okay with that before it happens. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.keepgoingpod.com/subscribe

On this episode of The Innovators, I sat down with Mitchell Jones, founder of Lava, to talk about one of the least glamorous and most urgent problems in AI right now, getting paid without going broke.Mitchell is building what amounts to billing infrastructure for AI products. If you are running agents, LLM powered tools, or anything where compute costs change by the minute, you already know the problem. Traditional payment systems were built for flat subscriptions. AI is not a flat subscription business.Lava sits in the middle. It routes AI model calls through a gateway, tracks real time usage and cost, and lets companies price that usage in a way that actually preserves margins. You can choose how much you want to make per action, per credit, or per customer, and Lava handles the rest, including paying through to the underlying model providers.What makes this urgent is something most founders are only now learning the hard way. In AI, your best customer can be your worst customer. Power users can quietly rack up massive compute bills while paying the same monthly fee as everyone else. That model worked in SaaS. It breaks fast in AI.Mitchell’s insight is simple and hard to argue with. AI behaves more like a utility than a software license. Utilities are metered. SaaS pricing is not. Lava exists to close that gap.We also talked about where the company came from. Mitchell has spent his career deep in payments, running Facebook’s digital wallet in emerging markets and founding a prior fintech company before starting Lava earlier this year. He did not wake up one day and decide to build an AI company. He talked to customers. Over and over. When everyone said they were duct taping Stripe together and hated it, he knew there was a real problem.The conversation also veered into founder advice, especially for people outside the usual tech pipelines. Mitchell grew up in Dayton, Ohio. His path ran through finance internships, late CS coursework, Dropbox, Facebook, and then startups. His advice was consistent throughout, do not stare at the top of the mountain. Focus on the next step. Compounding effort matters more than pedigree.Lava has moved fast. The company landed its first customers within months, raised a $5.8 million round, and now works with AI startups and legacy companies trying to shift from flat SaaS pricing to usage based models.If you are building anything with AI under the hood and have felt that creeping sense of dread when the compute bill hits, this episode will feel uncomfortably familiar.You can check out what Mitchell and his team are building at lava.so. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.keepgoingpod.com/subscribe

I caught up with Marcos Bravo, a Chilean guy living in Portugal, who has spent most of his adult life bouncing between tech, sales, marketing, and whatever paid the bills. He is 46 now. He has a family. And he is in that phase where you look at your work and ask a blunt question: Is this all I am showing my kids, that life is just paying bills.Marcus is not doing the clean midlife pivot. He is doing the messy version. He wrote a book because he had time, he was unemployed, and he needed to put the stories somewhere or he was going to lose his mind. He got the idea after seeing a tweet about how, with everything going on, we might see another Anne Frank “in our backyard.” That stuck with him. He started writing a kids book, got blocked, then wrote a different story that took shape. It became Ana Luz’s Diary, about a girl named Anna hiding in an attic with her brother and aunt, trying to stay quiet because noise brings the wrong people. He ran it past his daughter, she signed off, and he shipped it.At the same time, he is doing video work for companies because that is what keeps things running. He is starting an ice cream brand with his wife. He is putting together a punk band in Portugal. He is trying things, not because it is efficient, but because he is trying to figure out what feels like his life. He said he does not want to be a one road guy. When something feels right, he wants to take a shot.We also talked about why storytelling still matters when AI can generate words all day. His point was simple. The missing part is connection. You can generate a story, but you cannot replace the feeling of a real person looking you in the eye and saying something that lands. He ties it back to work, too. In marketing and sales, if you do not know people, you cannot connect to people. Your story falls flat.He is also clear-eyed about aging in tech. He worries about how long he can keep doing what he does, and whether the industry will move on without him. His answer is to stop chasing status. He does not want to manage people. He wants to deliver a specific thing well, mentor when asked, and stay useful. He thinks experience will matter again, not as a title, but as real history you can apply.The part that stuck with me was how he thinks about safety. He does not judge people who stay in the cubicle. He just does not want to end up like his dad, who spent decades in one company and now, at 75, feels like he missed his chance to do more. Marcos wants to look back and say, that was a lot, that was worth it.He framed his goals in a way I liked. He wants to give his kids a few core memories they will actually keep. A trip to Japan for his daughter. A steak in New York for his son, yes, Peter Luger. He wants those things, and he wants to be able to say his own life was good too. He even mentioned he stopped drinking and still enjoys life, which is its own kind of data point.This is the whole point. You do not need a clean plan. You need motion. You try things. You keep what works. You drop what does not. You pay the bills, but you do not let that become the only story your kids learn from you. Marcos is doing it in a way that looks chaotic from the outside, but it has a clear center. He is trying to make sure his life is not just a job history, it is a life.His book is Ana Luz’s Diary, by Marcos Bravo. If you want to see what he made, it is on Amazon.TranscriptJohn Biggs (00:27.042)Welcome back to Keep Going, a podcast about success and failure. I’m John Biggs. Today on the show we have Marcus Bravo. He’s Chilean. He lives in Portugal now. I met him in Poland when we were pros approximately, I think, six years old, I think. That’s what it feels like at this point, right? So welcome, Marcus. You’re an author, you’re a marketer, you’ve done loads of work.Marcos Bravo C. (00:46.072)Yeah, something like that. Yeah.John Biggs (00:55.252)over the years with multiple clients, multiple places, and now you’re kind of doing your own brand. You’re kind of building your own presence. So why don’t you tell me what you’re working on.Marcos Bravo C. (01:03.398)So, well, I like you said, I moved to Portugal from Poland two years already here. And yeah, I needed to start something else. I mean, felt that I was getting old for being the tech guy or the sales guy. And I just thought, well, let’s see what I can do. Right. So a mix of crazy stuff. You try to do everything that you think that you feel that it can.be sort of meaningful to yourself, but you really realize that you don’t know what’s meaningful to yourself. So you have to rediscover all of that. one of the things I’m doing now, I just wrote a book, which was on my bucket list, I guess. I wrote a book. I’m starting with video again. I started putting together a punk rock band here in Portugal. mean, Jesus, I’ve been trying to do everything just to figure out.what’s the right thing to do. And when you have a family, you have to figure out how to the bills. So I’m still having an affair with tech. But basically, I’m just trying to still discover things when I’m 46, which is I don’t know if it’s right or not, but it’s weird.John Biggs (02:06.734)Mm-hmm.John Biggs (02:11.011)What is that impetus to discover as we get older?Marcos Bravo C. (02:16.756)I guess I get so used to, well, I have to figure out how to pay the bills and that’s it. I started figuring out, well, what am I showing my kids? Is it all about money? Is it all about just to go through life without trying to not die of hunger? And I wanted to do something that is meaningful for me as well. I had to sort of ask permission. It’s like, do you mind if I don’t do this?crap, I make less money, but I do something else that might be more meaningful. And that’s what I’m doing. I mean, the whole book came out of almost an accident, just like watching videos of people writing books, trying to come up with an idea. And because I couldn’t write the book that I wanted to write, I ended up writing another book that ended up taking shape. And now it’s on sale. mean, every little step that I’m doing is just sort of showing me something new. And like you said, we’ve been around for a while. We’ve been doing tech.John Biggs (02:48.429)Mm-hmm.Marcos Bravo C. (03:15.374)all the stuff for many years, but there’s always a space for something new, something better, something meaningful.John Biggs (03:25.378)What does it mean to be meaningful, right? So your book is Analyst’s Diary, which is a kid’s book, right? And it’s about a little girl, why don’t you tell us the story?Marcos Bravo C. (03:37.382)So basically, Andalus came out, I was writing a kids book, I was writing a bunch of stories, like very cool, fun, weird, scary, whatever. And then when I was blocked, I was like, well, I need to write something else. And I remember seeing a tweet right before started writing. It says like, with all this happening around the world, we soon we’re to have an Anne Frank in our backyard. And I was like, right, well.What if Anne Frank’s still around? There are many Anne Franks around the world, especially with how things are. So I started to write the story, like, how would I see from maybe like a little bit of a Latin view or like trying to add my own experiences into this little girl called Anna who got stuck in the attic with her brother and her auntie and they’re trying to figure out how to be quiet because noise will bring more people, will bring the bad people.John Biggs (04:06.926)Mm-hmm.John Biggs (04:29.976)Mm-hmm.Marcos Bravo C. (04:30.38)And that ended up taking very nice shape. I started adding all of the things that I knew of storytelling. And I created a story that is maybe not an easy to read story, but it made sense to me and it made sense. mean, my daughter had to approve it. So it made sense to her too. It worked.John Biggs (04:48.782)Is the goal to just do this? Is the goal to allow this to be part of your personality, part of how you grow? Do you think it’s Marcos Bravo’s for the rest of your life? Or is it Marcos Bravo who does everything else that you’ve done before,Marcos Bravo C. (05:11.43)I think it has to be a mix. The first thing I realized for sure is that I don’t want to be the one road guy. But every time or anytime there’s something that feels good, that feels right. The world, let’s give it a shot. For sure I’m writing more. I love writing and I’ve been writing since I was a kid and this is the first time I actually said, and this is because I was unemployed. I’m like, I have all this time in my hand. I need to do something, otherwise I’m gonna go crazy.So I need to put stories in there and it felt right and that’s definitely something I want to keep exploring and we’re going to keep doing.John Biggs (05:52.014)Tell me about storytelling in general. How do you use storytelling in your career? How do you use it to, well, mean, first off, beat AI, right? Because right now we can blast out. We could feasibly blast out your book if we gave it the idea. We would just blast it out. It wouldn’t be any good. But how do you keep that humanity? How do you keep that aspect of storytelling?Marcos Bravo C. (06:09.989)Yeah.Marcos Bravo C. (06:16.271)Well, mean, AI, even though it’s been helpful with many things, I I use it quite often for work, but it was a huge threat for me because I mean, my whole career beside marketing and sense of whatever is because of storytelling is because I found that I can tell stories that people want to listen. And rediscovering that people, yeah, they’re okay with that. can create stories in AI like that. But it’s this connection thatis missing, like you and I talking, you and I look at each other and having that feeling, that’s irreplaceable. That’s not going to happen anytime soon. It might happen. Absolutely. mean, anything can happen. But I think the reason people connect to other people is because they see beyond the story, right? They get to feel something because of the story. And I don’t think that’s something AI can really do well.Especially when you tell the story, can read something fun that the AI created that can come up with super cool ideas. the reason why I keep getting hired for making videos for companies is for this, right? Because I can look at you in the eye and say something that it will get you to think, it will get you to connect, it will get you to relate. And I think that’s the part of storytelling that fascinates me that when you know people, and this is something that marketers and sales, they will definitely knowJohn Biggs (07:26.52)Mm-hmm.Marcos Bravo C. (07:40.632)you have to know people in order to connect to people. If you don’t know who are you talking to well, your story is just going to fall off the cliff and not going to go anywhere.John Biggs (07:51.534)Okay.Does doing all this stuff reduce you in the eyes of a professional class? I think you and I are similar in that we do a lot of things. I’ve written whatever, I’ve written 10 books, I’ve been a marketer, I’ve been a journalist, I’ve been doing all kinds of things. If you look at my LinkedIn, it’s like a Bible. There’s 50 stories in there. What do you think about that idea thatIf you’re not focused on one thing, if you’re not focused on one startup for X amount of time, then you’re essentially wasting your time. You’re not a good, you’re not a professional person.Marcos Bravo C. (08:35.462)I think growth cannot be unidirectional. It cannot be just one path. You don’t get to grow that way. You just get to walk. I feel that, remember my first job, there was something that they told us straight away. We only want you for three to five years. We don’t want you more than that. Because then you’re going to burn out and you’re not going be good to us. So commit to work with us for at least three years. And since then, back in 2000, I get to like...I cannot do something for that long. I kind of focus that much into one thing because then I don’t learn anymore. Right now I get to work with 20 year old people that they’re teaching me how to how they connect, how they write stories. Right. But but that’s the thing. I mean, I I’m proud of my LinkedIn as well. Like, I’m proud of all those that crazy stories that are there. I mean, from beer, a character in Disney World like.John Biggs (09:17.838)Mm-hmm.Marcos Bravo C. (09:30.86)any random stuff that I in my life has been taking me here. And the place that I am right now, even though it’s been hard the last four or five months, is the place that I want to be. I wouldn’t change it for the world. I am glad of taking detours in easier ways and harder ways. But it shaped what I have now, which is exactly what I want it to have.John Biggs (09:56.358)Mm Do you think do you think you’re lucky in that you took that detour? Like a lot of people kind of stay in a stay in a they’re cubicle, right? But I mean, a lot of those people are making $500,000 a year and driving a driving a Porsche, whereas you’re writing books. I’m up here in an attic recording podcasts.Marcos Bravo C. (10:15.536)Thanks.But I guess it will depend. I I think people don’t know any better. And I don’t mean it that in a bad way. mean, my dad worked almost 50 years in the same company, same cubicle, wearing a suit for all of those days, A tie and everything. And now he’s discovering that he had so much more to do. And he hates himself because he didn’t do it before. And he’s getting sick now and he’s 75. And he’s like...John Biggs (10:41.966)Mm-hmm.Marcos Bravo C. (10:46.438)I don’t want that. want to look back at certain point and say like, Tim, I did so much. That was crazy. I think that will be the ideal thing to say before I leave this world is like, look back and say, that was crazy. But I wouldn’t blame it people, right? I wouldn’t blame it on other people. Like if they want to have one path, it’s safety. And somehow also like...John Biggs (11:07.476)Safety, right? Safety.Marcos Bravo C. (11:13.254)It’s not ignorance the world I’m looking for. is not my full language. It’s more of like not knowing any better if you know what I mean.John Biggs (11:21.954)Well, you don’t know what the alternative is, If your entire life was about business development, you wanting to become a sous chef at a Michelin star restaurant, kind of hard, right? You kind of doing that pivot. Tell me about aging. Tell me about how you feel now. You’re working with 20-year-olds. You’re in an entirely different world to a degree than what we came up with. It was a different environment, different ways of working, different ways of communicating.Marcos Bravo C. (11:27.878)Yeah.Marcos Bravo C. (11:35.182)Mm-hmm.John Biggs (11:53.214)I’ve tried, this is my penance, right, to apologize to all the startups that I’ve frustrated. So, and I know that this sort of gentleness, I think, is more important now than it used to be. It used to be us, were hard charging, except for the crypto bros or whatever on Twitter. But tell me about your feeling about aging into an industry that could easily knock you out of it in the next couple years.if you’re not careful and if the cards aren’t stacked properly.Marcos Bravo C. (12:21.379)Marcos Bravo C. (12:24.954)I mean, it’s scary for sure. Every day I wonder how many more years of making videos for companies I have or how many more years of knowing enough that people want to learn from you. And that’s one of the things, for example, my last job interview was like, well, we have this career path that we can do.I don’t want to manage anyone. I don’t want to see level position. That’s long gone for me. I’m happy with where I am. If people want to learn from me, I’m happy to mentor, happy to show my experience, but don’t give me more responsibilities. I’m happy with providing a very specific thing for you. And good luck with that. Here’s what you asked me for. If you want to know more, if I can show you something better, I’ll be happy to do so.I’m trying to limit my knowledge delivery into like, right, what you want from me? Here it is. Do you want more? Let’s talk about it. I think we will have a of a revival of we want experience. We want people with, and I don’t mean stories or like in the storytelling sense, but with history behind it, right? Like people who would be there. Because after all, you can read whatever you want on AI.John Biggs (13:30.669)Mm-hmm.Marcos Bravo C. (13:38.886)But if you don’t know what it means, if you don’t know how to do it, if you know how to like where that came from, it’s nothing. So I’m taking it easy. know eventually it just there’s no more taking it easy, right? Eventually, I need to figure out a way to what happened after. I mean, I with my wife, we just started an ice cream brand now here in Portugal. So hopefully that’s going to pick up, right? Like, and I’m applying whatever I know marketing into it. ButJohn Biggs (13:59.17)Hmm.Marcos Bravo C. (14:06.224)But yeah, because I also know that eventually you will be sort of unplugged from this world of business and tech and whatever. So I’m taking it step by step. I don’t know what’s going to happen next year, especially with this world. But I’m trying to enjoy it. Scary, but I’m trying to enjoy it more.John Biggs (14:28.856)How does it feel? mean, you’re from Chile. You’re seeing all kinds of messy stuff. I mean, even in Europe, it’s not the friendliest towards outsiders, How are you dealing with that? How are you using that, your identity to your advantage?Marcos Bravo C. (14:46.63)I think eventually, I never sort of introduced my I’m not afraid or embarrassed from my background at all. I’m actually very proud. But is is what happened after I left Chile that built who I am, right? Like until I was 20 years old in Chile, I was just smoking weed, going to uni whenever I could and just party every weekend and whatever. But then then everything took a turn to like, right. More I want to do more. I want to see more. I want to see the world.Chile just got too small. So I started building something new. So when I meet people from anywhere in the world, now I can say, I’ve been there. Where are you from? Yeah, I’ve been there. I hide this. I cooked your food. I’ve done this. Or I’ve seen people from. So it just opens up a whole new thing. So it’s not just like, this is guy from Chile. I don’t even know if he speaks English. Now it becomes like, all right, I’ve seen the world. I can tell you things that you have no clue. And that changed the perception too.John Biggs (15:26.478)Mm-hmm.Marcos Bravo C. (15:46.008)One of the biggest thing that I was doing always was trying to connect Poland with the US, even though I’m not American, I knew how to talk to American people. I know how to go to Las Vegas and have drinks and close deals that way, But it was because I saw the world. I had to go out of my shell and see what’s happening outside in order to create not a new me, but a better me or something different.John Biggs (16:10.414)Mm hmm. I get it. Interesting. So you got the book, you’ve got the ice cream brand. What else is in your head right now?Marcos Bravo C. (16:19.695)Yeah.Marcos Bravo C. (16:23.684)I mean, whatever time I have off, I mean, I’m doing video for companies, like I said, right? That’s sort of my main, like, bill payer job. But I still get to play punk rock during the weekends with friends and go to events. I sell the ice cream myself. I don’t sit down in the background. And the rest is just to, I want to make sure that I can deliver a couple of.good core memories to my kids. I know not everything that you do means anything or something. Right. So I want to make sure that the couple of things that they will remember forever. So I’m trying to figure out. I mean, there are probably already some that I’ve done without really thinking. But I don’t know. I want to take my my daughter to Japan. I want to my son to New York because he wants to eat a steak in this big steakhouse that he knows. And for some reason, he’s only nine. Right. But yeah.John Biggs (17:11.694)Peter Luger.Marcos Bravo C. (17:16.826)That’s, yeah. So.John Biggs (17:18.134)Yeah, when you get out here, I’ll take you.Marcos Bravo C. (17:21.062)Yeah, no, I to work with them. I like I can’t wait to actually visit again. But that’s the thing. I mean, I just want to I want to make sure that. I deliver to my family this feeling of like that was cool, that was awesome. But I also want to make sure that I can say also, oh, man, my life was awesome. I enjoyed it till the end. And I think I am doing it. I mean, I. I even stopped drinking and I still enjoy it.which for me was always, So like all of every little step is being like, it’s getting better. I mean, there are awful times that we all go through. But I think you get to stop every so and so and look back and see how high you are and say like, wow, that road was crazy, but here I am. And then you look up and like, s**t, there’s still a lot to go.John Biggs (17:50.6)wow.Marcos Bravo C. (18:17.262)And then you keep going. those moments that when you stop and turn around and say like, all right, well, it’s been awesome. Let’s keep moving. I think that’s sort of what I’m focusing on right now.John Biggs (18:29.55)So book is called Analoosa’s Diary, Marcos Bravo C, which you would look for if you’re looking on Kindle. I’ll put a link to it in the story. But I want people to check that out. Yeah, I wrote my kids two books, but yeah, especially now. I mean, sounds like it’s actually a vital story. Like said, I wrote my kids two books, but I don’t think they even read them. So I think you might have even one up on me, which is pretty cool.Marcos Bravo C. (18:32.806)Mm-hmm.Marcos Bravo C. (18:40.582)Thank you.Marcos Bravo C. (18:52.742)youThanks, man.John Biggs (18:58.638)Yeah, so this has been great. I’m glad we got to talk for a minute. And I think your view on this whole thing is pretty nice and healthy. Hopefully you don’t hit any walls as you creep up in age. But I don’t think we will. I think we’ll be OK. We made it through this far. think we’ll pull off the rest of the ride.Marcos Bravo C. (19:14.689)We’ll get over this.Marcos Bravo C. (19:22.022)Absolutely. Absolutely. And thanks for the invitation, I mean, we haven’t catch up in ages and we haven’t seen each other in ages. So it’s good to even through this is cool.John Biggs (19:31.874)Mm-hmm. All right. Well, Marcus, thank you for joining us. been great. His new book, Analoos’ Diary, check it out. It’s on Amazon. Pick it up. This has been Keep Going, podcast about success and failure. I’m John Biggs. We’ll see you next week. This is a public episode. 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On this episode of The Innovators, I spoke with Jasper Fu, CEO of CoinSub, about what crypto payments actually look like when you strip away the hype and aim for real adoption.CoinSub has been operating for roughly two and a half years and has grown to a 22-person team, most of them engineers. The company’s focus is narrow by design. Instead of trying to convince millions of merchants to adopt crypto directly, CoinSub sells infrastructure to payment service providers. These are the companies that already process card payments for thousands, sometimes hundreds of thousands, of merchants. CoinSub’s bet is that adoption happens faster when crypto looks like just another payment option, not a new system merchants have to learn.Fu framed the problem simply. Crypto and stablecoins are often described as liquid assets, but in practice they are hard to use for everyday payments. Merchants do not want to think about wallets, chains, or conversions. They want money in their bank accounts. CoinSub handles the movement behind the scenes, converting between dollars, Bitcoin, and stablecoins, then packaging that capability so payment processors can offer it under their own brands.For merchants, the experience is meant to feel familiar. Crypto becomes another icon at checkout, alongside cards or digital wallets. Whether funds settle as stablecoins or dollars is not something the merchant has to manage. Fu compared it to card networks. Merchants do not think about how Visa or Mastercard clears transactions, they just expect it to work.That distribution strategy also shapes CoinSub’s view of competition. While many crypto payment companies target merchants directly, CoinSub targets the providers upstream. There are billions of dollars flowing through a relatively small number of payment processors, many of which lack the technical capacity to build crypto infrastructure themselves. CoinSub positions itself as a way for those companies to keep pace without rebuilding their stacks.Usage data suggests there is real demand, even if it remains early. Fu said CoinSub processed roughly $400 million in transaction volume last year. That number varies widely by region and industry, but it reflects actual consumer-to-business payments, not trading or speculation. Some sectors adopt faster than others, including cross-border commerce and industries that struggle to maintain stable card processing relationships.Fu pushed back on the idea that crypto adoption hinges on hype cycles. He views blockchain and tokenization as infrastructure, a more efficient way to store and move data and value. Speculation and scams, he argued, appear in every new technology wave and do not define the underlying system. In his view, hype draws attention, but utility determines what survives.Stablecoins are central to CoinSub’s timing. Fu said regulatory clarity, treasury backing, and growing institutional interest have aligned incentives across governments, issuers, and payment networks. Payments and commerce, he said, are the logical next phase after issuance. Once stablecoins exist at scale, the question becomes how people actually use them.Fu’s path to CoinSub started outside crypto. After leaving a corporate role, he took time off to think about what he wanted to build next. Payments stood out as a place where incremental efficiency could have broad impact. Making money movement cheaper and more accessible, particularly across borders, felt like a net positive use of time and capital.That mindset also shapes CoinSub’s internal culture. Fu said he prefers the startup environment because it allows for empathy-first leadership and long-term thinking. He believes effort cannot be bought, only invited, and that teams perform better when people are treated as contributors rather than interchangeable resources.Looking ahead, CoinSub is expanding beyond its initial engineering phase. The company is working to capture more of the payment service provider market while it still has an early mover advantage. Longer term, Fu sees applications beyond checkout, including payouts, invoicing, and potentially ATMs, anywhere money needs to move across systems or borders.Fu is realistic about maturity. He expects fragmentation before consolidation, with many stablecoins and blockchains competing before a smaller set emerges as dominant. In that environment, CoinSub’s role is to abstract complexity away from customers and let them benefit from whichever systems ultimately win.Crypto payments, in Fu’s telling, are not about replacing everything overnight. They are about quietly fitting into existing workflows until their presence feels unremarkable. That, more than price swings or headlines, is what adoption looks like.TranscriptJohn Biggs (00:07.982)Welcome back to The Innovators, a podcast about amazing people doing amazing things. Today on the show I have Jasper Fu. He’s the CEO of CoinSub, a stable coin operation. We do a lot of crypto on here, so I’m happy to have somebody back from the crypto world. Welcome, Jasper.Jasper Fu (00:27.501)Thanks for having me, John.John Biggs (00:28.588)Yeah. So tell us about CoinSub. How long have you been around and what are you up to?Jasper Fu (00:33.923)Yeah, absolutely. So we’ve been around for two and a half years. The team is about 22 people now with 17 being engineers. And what we jumped into the space to do is like everyone’s heard of this stable coin crypto blockchain Bitcoin stuff, right? And there’s a variety of value, value props. But what we realized is a lot of it’s just not hitting to the mass market.We particularly target payment service providers in fintechs, right? A lot of stable coin around, a lot of Bitcoin around, why can’t we pay with it was our first thought. You say it’s liquid, how do we make it liquid? And as we dug into the space, we realized this early, early stage of adoption, there’s a lot of demand from both the merchants, the businesses, as well as these payment providers to be able to offer this, right? But this is totally new tech to them.And most of the solutions in this space are either going for, hey, directly to the businesses themselves, or they’re these esoteric APIs that are hard for non-technical people to understand. So what we do is we pre-build out the infrastructure so that somebody could go from US dollars to Bitcoin to stable coin to US dollars. And we apply that to different things like payment acceptance and payouts.and we wrap and package that whole thing up and allow other companies, allow other payment providers who are already selling say card payments to now add this additional capability underneath their own brand.John Biggs (02:07.726)Interesting. in a nutshell, is the focus more on stablecoins? Is the focus more on general crypto? What am I as a merchant? So say I’m a merchant, want to sell my widgets online or I want to sell them in the store. What am I doing with you guys? How do you sell to me?Jasper Fu (02:25.924)So merchants usually get their payment products through their payment provider. So that’s the interesting insight that we had, right? You usually only want to work with one person and that might be say your stripe or your clover or whatever it is. So we actually sell to the clovers, you know, the clovers of the world, the payment service, the payment processors of the world. But what that looks like for the merchant isyou reach a point of awareness where you’re like, I know that I should probably accept this kind of payment, but at the end of the day, I’m just trying to expand my business and grow my revenue. So for us, it’s just one more thing that gets added on at checkout, and that’s the last thing you have to worry about. Whether it ends up as stable coin or whether it ends up in US dollars in your bank, you shouldn’t have to worry about it. Focus on your business. You don’t worry about how your credit card gets there from Visa or MasterCard, and you don’t worry about how PayPal, Google Pay, Apple Pay, Clarion don’t work.And so that’s the kind of level of adoption we want to bring where people understand that there’s some value there and we just go, great, here you go. Let me make sure that it’s comfortable for you.John Biggs (03:32.383)So the icons when you check out are like credit card, don’t know, PayPal, Venmo, Alipay, and then crypto. OK. You’ve got a lot of competition in that space. How is that working out?Jasper Fu (03:37.997)with crypto.Jasper Fu (03:46.244)So the competition in this space would only apply if the target market is the merchants themselves. There’s very few companies that are actually targeting the payment service providers. If you think about it, there’s hundreds of millions of merchants in the world that capture trillions of dollars of payment volume. But there’s only really thousands of payment service providers, independent sales orgs, and these are the ones that are already kind of selling card processing.they’ve already captured the entire market. And the reality is most of these have been around for 15, 20, 25 years and they’re not tech savvy. So when you get these first movers like a stripe, right, offering stable coin payment acceptance, what that actually does for the rest of the industry is it pressures kind of the middle of the pack or the earlier adopters to take action. And there’s not enough time for them to build it because as you said,the space is saturated and it applies to not just crypto but traditional payments as well. And so the options to buy and to date, we think of ourselves as like orthogonal to the competition. Our difference isn’t in what necessarily we’re offering them as an end product but rather the deployment model. Rather than deploying it to the merchants and trying to onboard millions of merchants, we onboard a couple dozen.payment providers that then grant us access to hundreds of thousands of merchants. So that’s it.John Biggs (05:15.854)And then hundreds of thousands of customers as well. I mean, this has been the age old question, right? First off, when mass adoption? And how much of crypto is hype versus reality? So what are you seeing in terms of people using that button, basically?Jasper Fu (05:40.878)So we’re seeing about, like last year we saw about 400 million in transaction volume. So relatively significant pretty early on. And it varies by industry and it varies by region. So I’d say that the demand from a consumer perspective exists. Demand from the merchant perspective also exists because customer goes, hey, can I pay with crypto? And the merchant goes and asks their payment provider, hey, how can I pay with crypto? So this kind of upstream demand is occurring now where it’smay not have particularly in the US in the past couple of years. So the demand is there. And now whether or not we want to think about whether it’s hype or not, I don’t think about this as crypto itself necessarily.John Biggs (06:17.006)Mm-hmm.John Biggs (06:21.422)I mean, you said yourself $400 million in money moving through the system is wild.Jasper Fu (06:27.748)Mm-hmm. Which is a relatively, you know, if we think about it at scale, it’s super small, but it does prove that there’s that actual volume there, right? In the actual use case of payments and commerce from a consumer to business perspective, not necessarily B2B, not necessarily watch trading or, you know, exchange trading or high frequency trading, but actual use case for somebody who’s like, man, I got some Bitcoin in my hand, like,John Biggs (06:31.075)Mm-hmm.John Biggs (06:54.958)Mm-hmm.Jasper Fu (06:55.808)Why shouldn’t I just be able to pay with it? Or cross-border payments, of course. And then there’s also certain industries where they’re just, they have a really hard time keeping card payments and they’re not even weird industries. It’s like peptides. Peptides for some reason, like really has a hard time keeping like a stable card processor. And the demand is there. The product is actually relatively stable. And just makes no sense financially that that’s not being taken care of. know, that industry is not being.John Biggs (07:07.64)go.Jasper Fu (07:25.643)addressed.John Biggs (07:27.63)I mean, there’s obviously some places where crypto works really well, like online gambling and sort of adult stuff, that kind of thing. But it sounds like just even for like supplements, which would seem that that shouldn’t be a big problem.Jasper Fu (07:42.372)It should not, supplements, VPN tools, oddly enough, multilevel marketing, of course. And then now this new class of AI girlfriends that surprisingly large group. whether crypto is hype or not, I think about it on a multi-tech cycle level.John Biggs (07:45.719)Mm-hmm.John Biggs (07:49.879)Yeah.Jasper Fu (08:08.606)Is the underlying technology, call it blockchain, Are cryptographically tokenized assets meaningful or impactful anyway? Do they solve anything? Do they make the market larger? Do they make it more efficient? And the answer is yes. At the end of the day, it’s just a more efficient way of storing, retrieving, accessing data. The fact that we choose to tokenize something and the fact that someone chooses to do a get rich quick scheme that happens in every single industry. And so, yeah.Are there use cases where it’s all hype? Absolutely, that’s how new tech gets there, right? If there’s no hype, no one’s sitting there reading research papers being like, yeah, this is great. It gets adoption through the people that’ll hype it, and then it kind of reaches maturity at some point.John Biggs (08:52.014)You mentioned before we were talking about the rise of stablecoins. I mean, we’re talking about ETFs. We’re talking about government adoption. sounds like, gosh, sounds like Texas is trying to do something right now with their own sort of currency. Are you in the right time for all this right now? Was it harder a few months ago?Jasper Fu (09:16.758)When we first started building it was certainly harder, right? Stablecoins themselves, like all of this, like the terms have to get into the human zeitgeist and kind of be branded. And then somebody has to understand what that actually means.And then it has to gain adoption and practice. So yeah, absolutely. This is such a great time to be doing it. The other day I looked and I think it was like stablecoin.org or something, the domain was on sale for like a hundred thousand. I was like, this is how you know we’re still super early in awareness because you know, somebody would snatch that up if this was a little bit, you know, more mature of a space, right? Um, but I think stablecoins are just starting to get adoption, regulatory clarity.John Biggs (09:46.775)Okay.Jasper Fu (10:02.083)The incentives are all properly aligned, right? Stablecoins being backed by T-bills, meaning that there’s more purchase of T-bills from the government, which means they have an incentive to positively impact the creation of more, the issuance of more stablecoins. So I think everything is pointed in the right direction for.adoption and more money coming into the system.John Biggs (10:25.586)Why did you pick crypto? Why did you pick this?Jasper Fu (10:30.916)Oh man, so I was leaving corporate and decided to take a little sabbatical to hike, hike some mountains. Sitting there I was like, what do I want to do with the next phase of life? I want to do something that’s meaningful, like I’ve got a decent network, new great technical talent, and more or less are like, okay, what do I do with the next phase of life? What can I do that’s meaningful, impactful, andnet positive or additive to society. And I went through a couple of different thoughts and ideas and just realized like, if I can make the market and payments a little bit more efficient, not just for institutions, but for individuals, grant a little bit more access to financial systems and shake things up a little bit and make the market larger itself. Like, yeah, I think that’s a good thing to put time into. And of course, having your finger on the pulse of money movement never hurts forJohn Biggs (11:28.75)Mm-hmm.Jasper Fu (11:30.221)growth network valuations.John Biggs (11:31.966)If you want to make money, you go where the money is, right? What about getting funding? You guys are working on a round now. How’s that going?Jasper Fu (11:34.743)Mm-hmm.Jasper Fu (11:41.097)It’s going super well. Stablecoins is really hot right now. Stablecoin, stablecoin payments particularly, right? It took a little bit for people to go stablecoin issuer companies like this trend goes, okay, great crypto, great stablecoins. Okay, now what do we do with the stablecoins? And payments and commerce is kind of the next wave of interest. And so we’ve seen a lot of interest from traditional finance funds.high net worth individuals, family offices, as well as of course the crypto VCs. So it’s currently the hot spot to be. Now it’s just trying to figure out who do we align ourselves with maximally? Like what actually makes sense here? Far cry from two years ago when it was not a sexy thing to talk about stable coin three years ago, when it was not a sexy thing to talk about stable coin payments because everyone was so hype about real estate, know, RWA tokenization, still a thing, right? And token launches.John Biggs (12:39.278)Do you think the industry’s finally hit that level of maturity where it needs to be to, I mean, first off, support a constellation of startups that are actually doing things that people want them to do, right? That people are excited about. And also that they’re not going to have like rug pulls and huge funding announcements that end up petering out. It sounds like you’re slow and steady wins the race in this case, right?Jasper Fu (13:07.78)We are very slow and steady. We’ve got a long-term plan for what we think will happen at each stage of adoption, and we kind of just go forward with that and try to ignore the hype or take advantage of the narrative whenever it makes sense. But as far as the industry reaching maturity,Jasper Fu (13:30.888)Not yet, right? We’re at the stage where everyone is beginning to have awareness of the value and opportunity, which means we’ll actually have more influx of capital coming in for a variety of reasons. Each of those will be interested in capturing their own ecosystem. So the technology is actually going to become harder to use in the short term as it goes from just once upon a time, say just Bitcoin or Litecoin, right? Two tokens to a fragmentation of dozens, maybe hundreds of different stable coins that are each thatof whom each have their own incentives to maintain their ecosystem and may or may not be compatible with others. Same with the underlying blockchains. There’ll be more and more of them each trying to do an ecosystem battle.John Biggs (14:12.608)Is there a collapse or is an ecosystem collapse or can the industry handle that?Jasper Fu (14:17.924)It’ll be a consolidation is what I’m thinking. I mean, at the end of the day, the money flowing in is large by individual standards, but relatively trivial by traditional finance standards, So the ecosystem can certainly handle it, but you’ll see consolidation early on when automotive manufacturers were around the US. The US had hundreds, if not thousands, of automotive manufacturers early on. And then, of course, it kind of consolidates and peters out to a couple of the dominators.And I expect that to happen with this as well.John Biggs (14:50.744)Why do you like the startup world versus corporate, or do you?Jasper Fu (14:55.272)I like the startup world because I got this hypothesis that you can still be like a good person and an honest person and treat your team well and like go empathy first. And that that’ll turn out actually better than kind of treating an individual as a commoditized resource. You can buy people’s physical presence and time, but not their effort.John Biggs (15:01.038)Hmm.John Biggs (15:19.214)Did that frustrate you in the corporate world that you had all these people who got paychecks but they didn’t do anything?Jasper Fu (15:31.318)It wasn’t that so much as the people who really wanted to shine and excel were not like accordingly, like rewarded. almost like, you know, you see all these like young people that are excited, want to work hard, want to kind of grind, push forward, get into a corporate setting. For me, it was consulting. And then it almost just, you hit like a quick, like quick stand real quick.And so that’s not necessarily frustrating because I understand why things work the way, like why it works the way that it does. But I just want to be able to create, well, I want to see if a different culture can be created and still work.John Biggs (16:20.558)Would you jump back into, hold on a second, would you recommend somebody go into corporate first, consulting first, and then do startup? Or should young people do startups immediately right out of college or in college?Jasper Fu (16:34.149)depends on your financial situation. Corporate is, well, I don’t know if job stability is still a thing. Corporate’s reasonably reliable. Startups, corporate’s reliable and safe is what I would say. Startups provide far more opportunity for upside, whether or not you’re just grinding away at your own consulting company or building websites for people. There’s far more upside to it and far more personal growth that must.John Biggs (16:35.757)Mm-hmm.Jasper Fu (17:03.535)happen. So it depends on whether you want to just have a nine to five or a set amount of time traded for money and then enjoy the rest of your life or whether or not you have something that drives you that you want to keep growing and learning for.John Biggs (17:21.678)What’s next for CoinSub? What are you guys working on?Jasper Fu (17:24.388)So as we complete our arrays, we’ve been engineering heavy so far. And now it’s just taking this working formula that we know and expanding it. In terms of bringing together the best talent, the best consultants, making sure that at least from a payment service provider industry, like our existing target segment, that we capture a significant portion of the market while we still have a first mover advantage in who we’re targeting. And then beyond that, it’s seeing where elsethe same technology of money conversion while it’s on ramps, off ramps, and this kind of flexible technology can apply, whether it’s like ATMs, right, it’s kind of an interesting side one for us, or whether it’s like focusing on particularly like on the payout space. So it’s just seeing what’s next, what’s the next spot.John Biggs (18:17.614)Who’s your ideal customer? Like who would you love as a customer?Jasper Fu (18:21.803)Right now, things like a Worldpay, an Adyen, a Square, Anything that has large distribution as far as controlling merchants. But then, other than that, our favorite customer is the one that has some level of, call it startup hunger. It doesn’t matter if they’re like a middle-sized, right? There’s plenty of...John Biggs (18:45.475)Mm-hmm.Jasper Fu (18:50.996)middle market companies whose names are unknown, who have significant reach in the tens or hundreds of thousands of merchants that are doing single digit billions, right? But at scale comparatively, they don’t have a differentiator. So somebody who wants to utilize, basically take advantage of this emerging technology and disruptive kind of money movement to take their company from one of the smaller fish in a saturated market to an outstanding kind of front runner.John Biggs (19:21.634)Have you used, are you using crypto or stable coins in point of sale? you tried that yet? Is that a thing?Jasper Fu (19:28.451)That is actually our point of sales virtual turnables checkouts. That was our first entry in. And then subscriptions was our differentiator for a value prop that others did not have.John Biggs (19:39.84)Mm-hmm. And how long does it take to like, mean versus like, I don’t know, tapping, how long does it take to do a crypto transaction?Jasper Fu (19:47.011)So the actual point of sale, longer, which is why I wouldn’t recommend crypto for physical transactions, rather digital, unless time is on the issue.John Biggs (19:54.368)I’m thinking I’m thinking like that. I don’t know the vape the vape shop or whatever, right? Something like somebody somebody wants.Jasper Fu (19:59.461)At best, you’re looking at like 50 to 45 seconds in 45 seconds, right? Depends on which chain it is. I think there still needs to be another kind of layer built before point of sales is functional. Can you imagine standing in the line at the grocery store and everyone waiting 45 seconds? You have to pay is nearly infinite. There’s a level of like pre-funding and trust and risk that goes on there, which can be built towards.John Biggs (20:03.726)Mm-hmm.John Biggs (20:17.23)Yeah, exactly.John Biggs (20:22.648)Mm-hmm.John Biggs (20:29.11)OK, very cool. All right, so coinsub.io, you’re looking for investors and you’re looking for partners. And you’re well on your way to actually making people. Maybe I’ll try to find some of your partners and I’ll pay for stuff with crypto. What do I pay for crypto recently? I think I bought a watch once with crypto. So there you go. So I’m on my way there,Jasper Fu (20:35.854)Mm-hmm.Jasper Fu (20:50.458)cool. Yeah, luxury goods, definitely. Also, less interesting use, but one-on-one invoicing. How do you invoice someone from Turkey? If they got stable, there’s certain, we use our tech ourselves within our team members, so our team is globally distributed. And so sometimes it’s the only way to pay our team members. So there’s these interesting use cases there as well.John Biggs (20:58.733)Mm-hmm.John Biggs (21:14.114)Yeah, very cool.John Biggs (21:18.188)All well, Jasper, thank you for joining us. This has been a nice deep dive. And I think you explained it better than almost anybody else has explained crypto on this show, so it’s important. All right, Jasper Fu, coinsub.io. I’m John Biggs, and this has been The Innovators. We will see you next episode.Jasper Fu (21:27.645)thanks, John. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.keepgoingpod.com/subscribe

This week on Keep Going I talked with Nelly Mendoza, the founder of Nelly Creative Studios. She has been making jewelry for about ten years, and her story is not a clean startup arc. It starts with her walking into a class in the basement of her college art center, kind of by accident, and finding the one thing she kept coming back to, even while she was majoring in economics.The part that stuck with me was how practical she is about an “impractical” career. She did not raise outside money. She took a few fellowships, one was about $5,000 after graduation, and used it to buy materials, mainly gold, and get herself set up. After that, she kept the loop tight, money from projects went back into materials and equipment. There is no magic here. It is repetition, reinvestment, and staying alive long enough to get better.She also talked about the part people skip when they say “follow your passion.” In a creative business there is no set path. There is no job ladder. It is trial and error, and it can be lonely. She described those stretches where sales slow down and you start asking if you should turn around and do something safer. She had those moments. She also knew that if she took the safe route too early, she might never leave it. So she learned to measure progress in small wins, one new client, one new piece, one new idea, and keep moving.On the growth side, she did the work that actually gets attention. She built a consistent online presence, wrote blogs, kept a “jewelry journal,” and made her brand for both men and women, not just women. She leaned on word of mouth because jewelry is visual, people see it, ask about it, and that conversation sells better than an ad. Then she added something a lot of online brands miss, physical experiences. Last year she rented a gallery, invited people she trusted, and let them handle the pieces in person. No storefront, so she created the moment herself. She is planning another pop-up, and she is careful about safety and about building a real community around the work.One more choice mattered. She took a job at Tiffany, in their innovation studio, for four years. Not to quit her business, but to buy time and learn. She called it a kind of second degree. It gave her skills, contacts, and more confidence in how the industry works. Then she left when she felt the job was taking too much time away from the thing she wanted to own. That is a hard call, and she made it without pretending it was romantic. It was about control and focus.Her economics degree shows up in how she thinks about pricing and tradeoffs. She does not price from feelings. She prices from materials, opportunity cost, and the reality that gold has gotten expensive enough that old prices do not work anymore. She is now thinking about entry-level pieces for younger followers, using different materials, without turning the work into disposable trend-chasing.If you want the lesson from this episode, it is this. Making your own way is slow and it is messy. You do not need a dramatic leap. You need enough runway to learn, enough discipline to reinvest, and enough patience to stick with the lonely parts. Allie built her business the old-fashioned way, one piece at a time, one customer at a time, and one decision at a time. That is still how it works.Transcript:Welcome back to Keep Going, podcast about success and failure. I’m John Biggs. The other show we have Nelly Mendoza. She’s the founder of Nelly Creative Studios, your jewelry maker. Nelly, welcome. Yeah, so you’ve been doing this for 10 years. I think you’re the first person I’ve talked to who is actually making jewelry or some kind of likeNelly (00:58.162)Thank you.Nelly (01:02.184)I have closed ears now, yep.John Biggs (01:09.728)or accessories, etc. So this is a this is a new one for me. So why don’t you just tell me about the business and how you started.Nelly (01:15.45)Yeah, so I started in college kind of by accident. Just enjoyed making jewelry, just walked in into a class one day into like the basement of the art center and then started making jewelry that way. And then I was an econ major, kind of went back and forth in terms of careers, but the one consistent thing was always jewelry. And then once it was time to pick a career, you know, last...last semester or last quarter of school, I decided to try jewelry. I got, yeah, so I started that way. At first, I wasn’t sure what it would look like and how the future would pan out. But as time continued, I kind of figured things out a little bit more.John Biggs (02:04.536)So what was the driving force behind this decision? I mean, you had an economics degree and making jewelry is, I suspect, fairly difficult thing because it’s fashion-based and I can’t imagine that it’s cheap to get started.Nelly (02:23.694)No, it’s not cheap for sure. You have to be creative in terms of, know, I never got any external funding just because I know what that means. It’s like giving up control of who you are and the type of work you’re working on. So the only funding I got was a few fellowships. Like post-graduation, I got like $5,000 to just buy materials. So I just bought gold and a few other things. And then I waskind of set up in terms of a studio space. I used the space in the college for a bit. And then that was my first kind of funding. And then after that, I continued to self-fund whatever projects I would get, I would just kind of put back into my work. So I would just go back into buying gold or materials or equipment.John Biggs (03:14.926)So tell me about the process. How do you start a jewelry business? What were some of the things that you faced?Nelly (03:24.04)The reason I started was because there was really nothing else that I wanted to do. No, you know, it’s, difficult at first. You’re like, okay, I want to do this career, but how do you do it? It’s not as easy as, okay, I want to work in investment banking. Let me apply for different roles. And then I’ll go through these application process, you know, application rounds and interview rounds. It’s more of, okay, you want to do this. You have a goal, but how do you get there? It’s not.Like someone has done that already and laid a path for you. So it’s a lot of trial and error in terms of how do you get to where you want to be right from you. It was always having control of my own work, being independent and just making beautiful things and having people buy by them as well. Right.John Biggs (04:12.794)Mm-hmm. How do you get attention as an artist in that way? mean, obviously, you need to build a fan base. You need to build folks that are repeat customers. But you also have to capture people who are just going to come off the street and say, hey, I like this. What did you do to get started?Nelly (04:31.558)Yeah, so I definitely made sure I had a strong presence online. So all of my socials and whatever I was putting out very consistent. So I would always write blogs and I have a jewelry journal just based on, okay, like this is, you know, what the trends are happening for men. And, you know, and I always focused on having serving both men and women as opposed to just doing jewelry for women.and just having that consistent product, right? So I started my first clients where people I went to school with and then just kind of started telling their friends. And fortunately, jewelry is a very visual product. you know, people see it on you and they’re like, I like it, it’s easy to sell in that way. So you always, you know, I have the work that I wear, but I also, the best people,Are my best clients or those who wear it and kind of tell their friends? So it’s a lot of word of mouth. And then how do you get it to the wider public? Last year I had my first show. So I rented out a gallery and I just invited friends, friends of friends and, and so on. And a few people who walked in, but it was a closed event, private, just kind of getting, you know, it’s like, people have kind of known me for a bit, but don’t really know who I am and letting them interact with my.product, especially since I don’t have a store or anything like that. Just having the physical aspect has also helped. So that’s kind of like the next phase of my business, just continuing those pop-up ideas. So I have one planned for this year, for example, somewhere in SoHo again, and just letting people interact with the product. And this will be for a bigger client base. First one was mostly for people already knew.Obviously you’re dealing with jewelry. You don’t want just anyone walking in. I want people to feel safe when they’re in there as opposed to someone randomly walking in and being a safety thing. So I’m always careful about who I invite and making sure they’re interested just to create, because I’m not just making jewelry or selling jewelry. I also want a good community of people who enjoy my work or who enjoy the arts.Nelly (06:54.648)and as opposed to just, you know, it’s just something I sell.John Biggs (07:00.206)Was there ever a moment when you said, I should probably get back into investment banking?Nelly (07:05.339)that’s very interesting. would say, yes, definitely a few moments where you’re just like, okay, like I’m not selling as much jewelry. just, you know, the creative, the creative career is so interesting because it’s very lonely. You go through these moments where you’re just walking a path and you’re like, this is the right path. Or is it time for me to turn around? I would say once I was past those dark moments of doubt,I was like, all right, I just have to keep going and things, you know, you have to build slowly. And for me, like the reason I didn’t go until one of those traditional careers starting off is because I knew I would get trapped in that safety net very early on. And it’s once you’re in that, it’s so difficult to leave. So at least for me, it’s like, all right, I had to celebrate the small wins. All right. I have a new client. have a new project, a new idea. I just have to like, put all my focus on there. So.for very brief amount of time, but I think for me, I just knew this is kind of what I had to do. And if I didn’t do it at a younger age, as opposed to waiting, things just get more difficult. And for jewelry, you kind of have to have mentors and you have to just kind of out in the field and explore and figure things out.John Biggs (08:28.952)Did you feel you were able to do it because you did have that backup of an economics degree? I mean, this is like the age-old question, right? Do you go to school for something practical and then do your art on the side, or do you kind of fall in completely? What was your thinking when you were in that position?Nelly (08:51.56)You know, having an economics degree definitely made me more confident in terms of, all right, this is how you manage money a little bit more. I think as an artist, like before college for me, I had no idea how money worked. No idea about the stock market, you know, like the value of money, the opportunity cost of something, right? Like if you do X as opposed to Y, what happens? So it definitely taught me to think in a very analytical way.you know, yes, do I regret sometimes not going into straight up just art, you know, an art degree occasionally, but then I look back at the big picture and it’s like, no, it’s better that I have both the analytical and the artistic because then I can look at something and figure out what it should be priced at as opposed to just the emotional side of, it’s just beautiful.So yes, it’s an interesting question you ask, like which one came, you know, it’s like, what do you do, right? I don’t think I even thought an arts degree was gonna be something that would help me just when I was in school, but looking back at it, I think I would have been fine either way, but definitely the economics gave me a lot of confidence to just go into my career with full faith, if that makes sense.If everything failed, I would have that. Sorry, that’s my dog right there. Yeah, I would have, you know, I would have something to fall back on. Yeah, I don’t know if I did a good job answering your question, but.John Biggs (10:24.352)HahahaJohn Biggs (10:30.478)interesting.No, think that’s, I mean, look, I think you’re honest about it. I think a lot of people would say that, no, I burned my bridges, I burned the boats, and I just decided I’m not going back. I’m not even going to follow the idea of becoming not an artist.Nelly (10:46.308)Yeah, yeah, I mean, that’s, that’s interesting. Yeah, for me, I just knew that it’s a time sensitive thing. I think in college, you have the benefit of, you know, you’re still a student and people are like, okay, like, what do you want to do with your life? And you’re almost allowed to play a little bit more, as opposed to what I see now withA lot of my friends are just like very fixed in their career, very serious career and so on. Here, let me just take care of my... He’s... I think he just... He’s not used to seeing me on calls. All right, let me just give him a little treat.John Biggs (11:18.606)Yeah, sounds like somebody wants out of the hole.Nelly (11:33.244)or this early on, here, sit. All right. He’s a little shiba, so he’s very demanding of attention. He’s very much like, give me attention. He’s like a little baby. Yeah, I think for me, just knowing that very early on that I had that room to just play and if you fail, it’s not gonna be like, you have a mortgage, you have kids, and what are you doing with your life?John Biggs (11:41.453)Hmm.Nelly (12:04.156)So that’s what I mean by time sensitive.John Biggs (12:07.018)What would you say to someone who’s starting out in this industry?Nelly (12:11.752)to be patient. And you you can’t just, you can’t wait for things to just come to you. You just have to kind of go for it and get it. You know, like for me, it’s just, whenever I had moments of darkness and just being like, all right, what am I doing? Just, okay, it’s like, you know, you have the talent, you have the skill, and you can’t think about what you don’t have. You really have to think about, okay, what are the things that I can offer?Because for me, was like, you know, totally self-funded, like buying materials, gold, everything, just kind of figuring that out. You know, I can be complaining of, I don’t have this or that, but it’s just, it’s, you know, to be in a creative career, it means figuring it out with whatever resources you have, if you really want to make it work.John Biggs (13:01.358)I mean, if you really want to make it work, does it mean to really want to make it work? Again, is it a burning your boats kind of situation? You wanted this. I think what I’m trying to say is when you told the story, the beginning of the story, you almost fell into the thing. You went down to the basement. You did some work in the student art lab or whatever.Nelly (13:26.81)Yeah, the Hopkins Center up in New Hampshire at Dartmouth. So it’s just like very random, right? Like completely random. And then here we are today. Yeah, so really making it work because here’s the thing, you can definitely make a living doing things that are easier. You know, you can go and again, traditional career and not worry about, you know, when is your next, you know, big project? Is something going to be done right?John Biggs (13:32.311)Mm-hmm.John Biggs (13:35.949)Yeah.Nelly (13:56.956)You know, like if you have a big client, how are you going to make sure, you know, like to follow through with them to deliver like the best product that you can. And it’s a lot of back and forth. And I would say for other stuff, it’s like, all right, you do your task and you go home. You know, there’s no such thing as like, I need to follow up with my client. need to follow up with my, my stone setter. I need to follow up with this other person. It’s just so many different links.that I have to work with on a daily basis as opposed to just, I’m gonna just finish whatever I’m told and do that. And I spent a few years at Tiffany, actually my last day was just last year. And part of the reason I was working there in their innovation studio. So again, making it work at a point where I was like, all right, I have this job offer.John Biggs (14:52.834)Mm-hmm.Nelly (14:56.496)and I’m gonna have some time to just kind of keep figuring things out. And this was two years out of school. And I was like, okay, this sounds amazing. I can learn a lot. And I took that job, it’s like the financial security was great, but also I knew I had to go into the world and learn a little bit more just so I had more experience and again, more confidence. I think it’s all about building that.creative confidence too.John Biggs (15:27.662)So you basically took, yeah, you took a gig to work with Tiffany to just, but that was to expand your line, right? Just to have your experience.Nelly (15:34.94)Yeah, expand my line, expand my work, my experience. I spent four years there, but towards the end, was like, you know, it’s time again to go back into my business full time. I’m not dedicating as much time into it as I would like. And for me, it’s just, again, having that, you know, authority of this is the work I want to be working on and these are the projects I want to be doing. I think that’s what really drives me.John Biggs (16:04.502)No, so this is, I’m looking at the, I’m looking at the site now, nellycreativestudios.com. So it’s a little rich for my blood, but I’m a watch guy. I’d spend a lot on it.Nelly (16:08.912)Yeah.Nelly (16:13.704)I know I, yeah, I mean, it’s all, you know, with the price of materials nowadays, it’s, it’s incredible how much jewelry has like, appreciate it. You know, I had some stuff on there that, you know, now I can’t even keep those old prices because it would just be more in the gold. So it’s yeah, it’s definitely appreciated. And then, you know, that affects everything because again,John Biggs (16:21.784)Mm-hmm.John Biggs (16:36.174)Wow.Nelly (16:42.93)figuring out like, okay, still want to offer. So actually that’s something that I’m working on now, just offering more affordable work as an entry point for people. Because I have a lot of younger followers who don’t necessarily have the budget to afford a solid gold or a solid platinum bracelet. So are offering alternating materials that haven’t been as popular.aren’t as popular yet and you’re kind of the first mover that makes sense making it popular and offering something different. I think, yeah.John Biggs (17:23.064)What do you want to say to somebody who is just discovering your work? Why should they pick up one of your pieces versus somebody else’s? I don’t know, go down to Tiffany, right?Nelly (17:34.286)is it’s always going to go out or go up in value in terms of, know, it’s like as I’ve gotten, you know, more experience and exposure, my work has only gained popularity. So something I see a lot now is a lot of, you know, brands who just kind of make stuff trendy. And they’re like, all right, this is trendy for now. It’s kind of following a similar path of like that, like fashion. And I hate to say this, but fast fashion in a way.of like make something that’s trendy and then it’s not going to hold that beauty or value in the long term. So for me, it’s like making stuff that you can have and be proud of for 20 years, know, 20 years from now, like something you can give to your kids or your grandkids. and with Tiffany, you know, it’s their stuff is, you know, their bread and butter. You have the designs very consistent. but you can get that any, any other time, right? It’s not something that you can only get.once in a lifetime. for a lot of my clients, do, especially when I do like a one of one piece, it’s something that they treasure and they keep and they wear almost like a piece of artwork that they’re wearing. Yeah.John Biggs (18:48.494)All right, so we’re going to send folks over to Nelly Creative Studio. Everybody’s going to buy all your jewelry, and you’re going have to make some more. So that might be a nice problem to have.Nelly (18:57.562)Yes. Yeah, exactly. And you know, the nice thing, you know, about having that Tiffany experience now, I just have so many people on my court in terms of the skills they offer, you know, and I didn’t have that before, like coming from a liberal art school, you don’t really have those connections. So I would say like spending those few years at Tiffany is almost like my second degree. And you were talking about an art degree, like I would consider thatJohn Biggs (19:16.556)Mm-hmm.Nelly (19:27.016)kind of like my art degree in a way.John Biggs (19:28.686)All right, very cool. Well, Nelly, Nelly Mendoza, Nelly Creative Studios, go check it out. And tell us, I guess, tell us what they especially like. I like the angel pendant. Yeah, I like that. It’s like degraded, of, which is pretty cool.Nelly (19:32.765)Thank you.Nelly (19:42.053)the angel. Yes, those are. Yes.Nelly (19:48.206)Yeah, just for my show, I had a few different pendants with again with granulation with the 22 karat. And it was based on the gods. The theme of my show is Ambrosia, who are the gods. So I had, you know, those up pendants. It’s Aphrodite and then Apollo and then Hermes and then a few other gods. But those are always fun to me.John Biggs (19:59.085)Mm-hmm.John Biggs (20:03.48)Sure.Nelly (20:16.2)Those do very well for men as well.John Biggs (20:19.116)Mm-hmm. Yeah, I should become a jewelry guy. I never became a jewelry guy.Nelly (20:21.946)Yeah, yeah, I mean the path, you know, the line between like watches are jewelry for men. And, you know, hopefully in the next few years, I’ll get to design more watches. That’s definitely a goal of mine. So yeah, one of one would be would be really fun.John Biggs (20:28.663)Mm-hmm.John Biggs (20:38.936)right, very cool.John Biggs (20:44.238)All right, well thank you for joining us. I this has been fascinating.Nelly (20:46.684)Thank you. Hopefully I answered all your questions. Thank you.John Biggs (20:48.844)No, I think you did. This has been Keep Going. I’m John Biggs. We’ll see you next week.Nelly (20:56.38)Thank you. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.keepgoingpod.com/subscribe

This week on Keep Going, I sat down with Karl Alomar, Managing Partner at M13, and former COO of DigitalOcean.Carl’s career, when you say it fast, sounds like a highlight reel. He came to the US from England with an engineering background, started his first company in California in the late 90s, sold it in 2000, got an MBA at Columbia, built a global fintech business to real revenue and exited in 2010, then joined DigitalOcean and helped take it from early product days to IPO. Now he invests at M13.I pushed him on the part people skip, the moment where it almost breaks.He told a story from his first company that still makes my stomach drop. They were raising a big round for the time, about $20 million. Closing day. Fire alarm. Everyone in the parking lot. He gets a call on a brick of a phone. The lead investor tells him the bottom just fell out, they cannot close, they do not know if they ever will. That is not a small problem. That is the whole floor giving way.Carl had to make choices fast. Cut the team in half. Slash spend. Decide whether to try to patch the round together without a lead, which is close to impossible when the mood turns. He had been approached by potential buyers earlier, and in a hot market those talks feel optional, almost annoying. In a cold market, those talks are the only door that still opens. He took the door. In about two months they got an exit. Not the dream outcome, but a real outcome. People got returns, everyone lived to fight again.What stuck with him was not the deal mechanics. It was the loneliness.He said he had no deep bench. No real board support, no real advisor bench, no system around him when the air went out of the room. He was young, the pressure was on him, and he felt like an island. His lesson was blunt. Never go into battle without an army. In plain terms, build a support network before you need it. Investors, board members, mentors, peers, people who can tell you the truth, and keep you steady enough to make good calls.I asked him what that looks like in real life. He was clear that it is not some magic fix. For him it is not a yogi. It is the people you choose to take money from, the board you build, the mentors you keep close, the peers you can call when you are scared and tired and tempted to lie to yourself. He also noted that the culture has changed. Coaching is normal now. Mental health is talked about more openly. In the late 90s, money was just money, and nobody asked what came with it.Then we moved into the question sitting in the room with all of us right now. AI. Are we headed for another crash, another 2000.Carl pushed back on the timing in a way I found useful. He thinks we are closer to 1996 or 1997 than 2000. Early. The “killer” product is not fully settled. He used the browser era as a frame. People thought browsing was the point, but search was the point, and Google won by solving that. His take is that AI still has not found its final shape, not in a way that locks the category down. We have chat tools and model access, but the big lasting system, the one that makes the next giants, is still coming into view.He also pointed out something practical that founders feel every day. Building in AI is still expensive and hard. The tools and the cost curve have not flattened the way cloud did for web builders. If cloud made it cheap to ship software, what makes it cheap to ship AI. Better access to compute, better tools around data and GPUs, better infra. He is excited about the boring part, the picks and shovels that let more people build.I asked the other side of it, the part people whisper about. If you are a regular worker and a wave is coming, what do you do. Carl did not pretend he could map the next 20 years. But he did say the labor market shifts, it does not just vanish. Some work gets automated, other work shows up, and the shift is not overnight. He brought up the growth of gig work, the rise of people building independent lives outside big firms, and the simple fact that lots more people now want to build things than they did decades ago. He sees that trend getting stronger as tools get better.He is not an AI cynic. He thinks cynicism is a way to lose twice, first by missing what is real, then by refusing to adapt. He is optimistic, but he keeps a realist’s eye on the losers that come with any big wave.As we wrapped, I asked what he looks for when he sees the fiftieth “Fitbit for dogs.” He laughed, because he has seen it. His answer was old school. He starts with the founder. Can he work with this person for years. Do they have vision, and can they explain it. Can they hire. Can they raise. Can they steer when the first plan fails. He brought up Slack’s origin story, a good reminder that a strong founder can turn a weak start into a real company.That is the episode in a line. Big waves come, and they always feel obvious after. In the moment, they are confusing, loud, and full of bad copies. The way through is still the same. Keep your head. Build your people around you. Make choices you can defend in the morning. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.keepgoingpod.com/subscribe

Some talks stick under your skin. This one did.On this week’s Keep Going I sat down with Mechele Dickerson, a law professor at the University of Texas at Austin School of Law. Her new book is called “The Middle Class New Deal: Restoring Upward Mobility in the American Dream.” It comes out in January 2026.I picked up the pitch because I have the same nagging feeling everyone else has. The middle class we grew up hearing about feels thin now. Like an old photograph in a cracked frame.Mechele has spent more than a decade trying to write this book. That part alone makes her a good guest for a show about success and failure.She started years ago with a book on homeownership. While she worked on that, she kept seeing a larger pattern. Families were not just locked out of houses. They were locked out of everything we used to connect with a stable life. She saw people who made a decent wage yet could not do basic “middle class” things without strain.So she built a bigger project. She sold the first version of the book to a press. The idea was clear. It is harder than ever for lower and middle income people to become and stay middle class. It is even harder if you are not white. Then the world started shifting under her feet.The 2016 election hit. Commentators suddenly cared about “middle class anger” and “anxiety.” She did not buy the story as it was told, but she knew she had to respond to it. So she rewrote the book to fit that moment.Then 2020 arrived. A pandemic tore through the same families she had been studying. You cannot write about money, housing, and work in this country and ignore those years. She rewrote again. That second rewrite blew up. Reviewers tore it apart. The publisher walked away. A decade of work, gone in one email.This is the point where many people quietly give up. Mechele did something different. She took the hit, walked away for a season, enjoyed Thanksgiving and Christmas, then came back and started from page one. A third draft. New press. New title. Same core idea.That alone is a lesson. Sometimes the work is right and the timing is wrong. Sometimes you are right and the gatekeeper is wrong. You rest. You come back. You keep going.The rest of the talk dug into what “middle class” even means. Mechele uses a simple income band, roughly seventy five to one hundred thirty thousand dollars a year. She picked it for a practical reason. It is the range many universities use when they hand out tuition breaks to families they see as “middle income.” It also adjusts over time, which matters.She is quick to note that income does not land the same in each place. That money looks one way in Abilene, Texas, and another in Austin. Still, the markers are familiar. A home you can afford. A job with health care and some sort of retirement plan. The ability to send your kids to college without wrecking your own future. Maybe a bit put aside for shocks.Her bluntest point is simple. We did not arrive here by magic. The old middle class was built by policy. The GI Bill sent people like my dad to college. New mortgage rules turned owning a house from a rich person’s trick into something workers could reach. Employers built health and pension plans when they could not raise wages during the war.We treat those pieces as background now. They are not. They were choices. They could be made again in new forms.Instead, college costs have climbed far faster than inflation since the eighties. Need blind admission is fading. “Merit” scholarships tilt money toward kids from richer families who look good on paper. Employers use a bachelor’s degree as a filter, so a diploma has become a ticket to even knock on the door.On housing, the ladder keeps moving up. The average age for first time homebuyers is rising. People float the idea of fifty year mortgages, which Mechele, quite correctly, calls “rent” with different branding. If you buy at forty and pay for fifty years, do the math.She walked through how zoning locks people out. Large minimum lot sizes. Rules that make it hard to put up multifamily units. Homeowners’ associations that wrap it all in “protecting values” while making sure cheaper units never appear. At city level, at state level, we have built a system that slowly pushes normal families away from the places where opportunity sits.I pushed the conversation toward entrepreneurship, because the show often goes there. For a lot of kids, the fantasy now is that a startup will be their scratch off. You cannot count on a steady wage to get the markers. So you dream of building the next app, or site, or whatever, to leap straight over the grind.She agreed with the feeling, but brought it back to ground. Starting a business takes capital. Capital comes from family wealth, or from a house you can borrow against, or from a system that lends to people with no cushion. If your parents do not have money and you do not own a home, you are playing with thinner odds. That does not mean you should never try. It does mean we should be honest about the risk.Near the end I told a story about my own family. My grandparents in Ohio, steel town on the edge of West Virginia. They had a house. They had food on the table. My cousins had pools, big televisions, a couple of cars in the drive. All on a worker’s paycheck or a small business. Nothing lavish. Just steady.Standing in modern Chicago or New York, you do not feel that world anymore. The core feels like a stage set for the very rich. Everyone else services it from the outside.So I asked the question out loud. Can we go back. Or is that period gone for good.Her answer was measured. We cannot rewind time. But we can recognize that the old middle class was a choice. It came from rules and programs that treated stability as a public goal. We can make new choices. Tighter rules around predatory loans. Better ways to fund college so a degree is not a lifetime chain. Zoning that lets builders put up real housing, not just luxury towers and big lots.None of this is easy. None of it fits on a bumper sticker. It is easier to bark about culture than to rework tax codes or housing law. That is why very little changes. But the path is not mysterious. We have done it before.As we wrapped, she circled back to why she kept going with the book. She is not writing for one side. She wants people in both parties to see that a strong middle class is not just a feel good phrase. It is the base of a stable country. It is who buys the toaster ovens, the cars, the fridges. It is who keeps the lights on in the real economy.For me, this conversation lit up a vague anger I have carried since walking those polished streets in big cities. The feeling that something is off, that the store window that used to be for everyone is now for a tiny slice at the top. Mechele’s work gives that feeling names and numbers and a path forward.Her book is “The Middle Class New Deal: Restoring Upward Mobility in the American Dream.” It lands in January 2026. When it does, I think it will give a lot of people language for what they see and cannot quite explain.In the meantime, the lesson is simple and personal. If she can drag a book through three full rewrites, one public rejection, and a changing world, the rest of us can take one more swing at whatever hard thing is sitting on our desk. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.keepgoingpod.com/subscribe

Most people meet plant cell culture in the grocery store without knowing it. You see it in the perfect row of blueberries, the identical bananas, the white orchids that look the same every single year. You do not see the lab bench and the flask behind them.On The Innovators, I talked with Yoni Kalin, CEO of Plant Cell Technology, about the quiet infrastructure under all of that. His company has been working in plant tissue culture since 1993. What started as a small family business selling “pet plants” in jars has grown into a Utah based factory, a catalog of more than 500 products, and a bridge between plants, animal cells, fungi, and the people who work with them.At the core, Plant Cell Technology makes the media and tools that keep cells alive and dividing. In the plant world that means the gel or liquid that feeds tiny cuttings, the nutrients that turn one node into a full clone. In the animal world that means the formulas that keep mammalian cells healthy in dishes and flasks. You can think of them as the food and basic kit that every lab needs before any vaccine or seedling can exist.For the first thirty years they stayed in the plant lane. Last year they bought a manufacturing facility and stepped into mammalian cell culture. Now they blend media for human, animal, and insect cells as well. That move puts them inside the engine room of pharma and biotech, where the same cell lines are used for decades to test drugs and make biologic medicines.Yoni gave a simple example. CHO cells, Chinese hamster ovary cells, have been in use since the middle of the last century. The original cells came from one animal. That line has been split and expanded for more than eighty years. Those cells are a standard test bed. If you want to grow a protein drug or check how something behaves, you feed those cells and watch. That kind of work used to mean a lot of live animal testing. The more you can do in culture, the less you have to do in a whole animal.Plant cell culture is less visible but just as important. Instead of planting a seed and accepting whatever mix of traits comes back, growers take a cutting from a known plant, usually a meristem or small node, and regrow it in sterile media. The result is an exact clone of the parent. Every plant you make that way has the same genetics and the same performance.If you are a berry grower, that consistency matters. It is the reason the box of blueberries you pick up in January tastes like the one you bought in July. If you are a greenhouse operator selling fancy houseplants, it means you can produce a thousand copies of the one pink variegated plant everyone wants instead of hoping more seeds turn out the same way. In orchards, forests, and replanting projects, it means you can fill a hillside with trees that all have the traits you need for that climate.It is also the reason you can walk into a store like Trader Joe’s or Home Depot and see the same orchid color and shape every year. Orchid seeds are rough to work with. Cloning them in tissue culture lets growers keep exact copies of the best lines in circulation.Plant Cell Technology sits in that supply chain as a “picks and shovels” vendor, to borrow Yoni’s phrase. They do not sell the fruit or the orchids. They sell the media, the bioreactors, the lab gear, and the training that lets growers and researchers do the work.That education piece is important and it is where things get interesting outside the pure lab. Until a few years ago, if you wanted to learn plant tissue culture, you went to a university or a big corporate lab. You paid tuition or you got hired. Everyone else was on the outside.Around 2020, while people were learning to bake sourdough and dance on short videos, Plant Cell Technology started posting long form instructional content. They now have hundreds of free videos that cover the basics, from aseptic technique to plant physiology to step by step protocols for setting up a small lab. On top of that they run in person and online master classes that focus on practical scale, not just textbook purity. Their goal is to teach you how to produce ten million banana plants, not just how to pass a midterm.That effort has pulled in a new crowd, hobbyists and small entrepreneurs who want to clone rare plants at home. Anyone who has wandered into a trendy plant shop and seen a single cutting selling for forty or fifty dollars knows the appeal. With basic gear, a clean space, and the right media, you can take a small piece of that plant and grow hundreds of copies. That can feed a side business or just fill your home with green.The same idea applies to fungi. Mycology is booming, and tissue culture is a good way to preserve and expand mycelium strains. It is easier in some ways, since many fungal media formulas are simple, often just agar and sugar. Yoni sees that as a gateway for people who might later move into more complex plant or mammalian work.Behind the scenes, the company is pushing on automation. Tissue culture has been labor heavy for decades. A tech sits at a clean bench, cuts, transfers, seals jars, and repeats. That is slow and expensive.Plant Cell Technology’s answer is a low cost bioreactor they call the BioCoupler, paired with an automated system called BioTilt. Instead of growing plantlets on gel in jars, they suspend plant cells or tiny explants in liquid and cycle them through soaking and draining. Soak, let them breathe, soak again. That simple rhythm gives the plant material full contact with nutrients, then air, which speeds up growth. Yoni says they see multiplication rates many times higher than on static gel media.The cost drops too. Gel agents like agar and gellan gum are not cheap. A single kilogram can run close to a couple hundred dollars. A liquid system needs less of that. The BioTilt handles timing and immersion automatically. Sensors and software can watch the process, adjust schedules, and log data in a way a human tech with a clipboard cannot match.The vision is clear. Larger labs and commercial houses will bring in robotics that can cut and move plant material. Bioreactors will handle the growth phase. AI systems will watch sensors, track contamination, and refine conditions. That kind of setup already exists at the very high end. Yoni wants to drag it into the middle of the market and make it less exotic.When I asked him if this was the future of agriculture, he pushed back a bit. This is the present, he said. Seeds are not going away. Fields and barns are not going away. What he sees coming is a stack. At the bottom, a tissue culture lab where farmers keep their own genetics and do their own breeding. Above that, nursery space. Above that, growing and harvest.Vertical farming has been a buzzword for a while. Tissue culture gives it teeth. You can stack genetics in a small lab that would need vast acreage outside. You can build local food systems that rely less on long chains of seed companies and middlemen. You can give farmers some control over the varieties they plant, instead of locking them into sterile seed contracts that keep them dependent.Plant Cell Technology has moved a long way from a single “pet plant” in a jar. Under Yoni’s leadership, the company has turned into a small ecosystem, part manufacturer, part educator, part guide into a field that is usually hidden behind white coats and controlled access doors.If you are a researcher who needs media, a grower who wants to scale, or a curious person who just wants to clone a favorite houseplant instead of buying three more, their site at plantcelltechnology.com is a place to start. The tools that shape our food and forests are no longer reserved for the biggest labs. They are slowly moving into reach, one flask at a time. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.keepgoingpod.com/subscribe

I am writing this with an Audigo mic sitting next to a hulking broadcast preamp on my desk. The old rig is a nest of cables and knobs. The Audigo is a small square that looks like it fell out of the future and landed in my hand. That contrast is the whole story.On this episode of Keep Going I talked with Armen Nazarian, founder and CEO of Audigo. He is a drummer who took a long detour through engineering and Tesla before circling back to sound. His company makes a small wireless mic and app that lets musicians record real multitrack audio straight to their phones without feeling like they are engineering a studio every time they press record.If you grew up on tape decks and four tracks, the promise of the phone era was simple. Recording would get easier. Sharing would get easier. What Armen found when he came back to music was that a lot of the gear companies had not moved very far. The boxes looked nicer, the apps were shinier, but the basic problem was the same. If you were a musician and you wanted decent sound, you needed a pile of equipment and spare hours to set it up.At Tesla, his job was to sit in the middle of hardware and software and make them feel like one thing. He saw what happens when one team owns the whole stack. The car feels simple even when the system under it is anything but. That experience ruined him for lazy product work. When he picked up a drumstick again and tried to record, he could not stop thinking about the gap. We have supercomputers in our pockets and yet most people still sound like they are playing in the bottom of a well.So he did the mad thing. He walked away from a great job at one of the most famous companies on earth and started a tiny hardware company in 2020, which is about as bad as a calendar can get for that move. Chip shortages. Travel bans. Factories with shutdowns you could not predict. Parts with twelve week lead times suddenly slipping to sixty five.Most of us would have taken that as a sign from God to go back to work on electric cars.Instead, Armen and his small crew started building the first hundred units by hand. They would write code and design boards during the day, then sit and assemble devices at night. Solder, test, pack, repeat. They did not have the luxury of flying to Shenzhen and living on the factory floor. That meant they had to understand every part of their own build before they could trust anyone else with it.Hardware is hard in a very literal way. If a component changes, you cannot ship a patch. If a factory shuts down, your product line stops. Investors know this. When Armen started raising money, he was doing it at a time when everyone in venture still had the ghost of Juicero in their minds. Add to that the normal suspicion of solo founders and you have a nice little wall in front of you.His Tesla badge helped a bit. It told people he knew what a production line looked like and that he had lived through at least one intense product culture. It did not make money fall from the sky. He still had to convince people that a small box with some mics in it was worth taking seriously.Before he left Tesla he did something I respect a lot. He took a week off, told people he was going on an international trip, and stayed home. He had a short list of ideas. He gave each one a full day. He looked at cost, market, and his own stomach. Could he live with this idea for ten years. Could he wake up every day and care about it.Most people skip that part. They leave out of rage or boredom and then try to figure it out on the fly. He treated that week like a tiny private lab. No slides. No pitch deck. Just him, a notebook, and the question of where to spend the next decade of his life. Audigo is the one that would not let go.He also reframed the risk in a way I wish more people would. Around him, at Tesla, people were quitting to go to business school or grad school. They were about to drop a small house worth of money on an education and walk away from a salary for two years. He looked at that and thought, I could do the same thing and call it a startup. No salary, but no tuition either. Two years of hard learning that no case study could match.That is how you move from theory to action. You do not pretend the risk is small. You set it beside other risks you have already accepted and see it in scale.What I like most about Audigo is not some spec sheet. It is what it does to the slope between idea and first take. Most musicians are already drowning in gear. They have pedals, interfaces, cables, and mics that live in drawers and crates. Every extra step between them and the record button is a chance to give up and scroll instead.Armen built for two very different people. On one side there are signed artists who can fly to any studio they want. They use Audigo because it fits in a pocket and lets them grab song ideas, backstage runs, and live clips without hauling a rig. On the other side there are people in their seventies who have played their whole lives and never once recorded a proper track. For them, this is the first time their voice or guitar sounds like it does in the room.Those are very different use cases. The thread is the same. Less friction. Less shame over bad phone audio when you post. More chances to actually hear yourself and send that sound out.The company is not done of course. They are rolling out an Android app now and a web experience next, so people can log in from a browser, pull up projects, and share them. You can feel where this goes. A small piece of hardware and a cloud that holds your sketches, takes, and mixes, whether you are on a phone, a laptop, or in a van on tour.I asked if I should throw out my big Electro Voice setup and live on this thing alone. He laughed and gave the honest answer. Use it more. See where it fits. Tell us what breaks. The product today is tuned for music, not talk radio. Podcasting is on the horizon, not the core yet.That kind of answer is rare. Most founders will tell you their thing replaces everything you own and will also fix your marriage and your sleep. Armen is more careful. They picked a lane, musicians, and they are staying in it long enough to get the details right.So what does all this mean for you if you are stuck in a big company with an idea in your pocket.The first lesson is boring. Give your idea actual time. Not ten minutes between meetings. Take a real block of days. Work through the numbers and the story and your own limits. Some ideas are fun to talk about and horrible to live with.The second lesson is that “safety” is often just a story you tell yourself. The people you see going back to school are taking a huge financial swing. You just do not flinch because the path is familiar. Starting something of your own feels foolish, but the math is often not that different.The third is that the hardest years are the ones no one claps for. No audience sees you sitting in a room, hand building the first hundred units of anything, wondering if the next part shortage is going to kill you. That is the part of “keep going” that this show is really about. Staying with the work when the timing is bad, the market is cold, and your old job looks very warm and safe in the rearview mirror.Audigo will live or die on the same thing every creative tool lives or dies on. Does it actually help people make more work they care about. From what I have seen, it does. It turns social clips from a chore into a quick side effect of playing. It gives shy players a way to hear themselves without booking a studio. It gives pros a way to stay honest when the hotel room starts to feel like a cage.If you are holding an idea that keeps tapping you on the shoulder, take a page from Armen. Step back from the noise. Study it like an engineer. Feel it like a musician. Give it a week of real thought. Then, if it still will not leave you alone, accept that there is no perfect time, only the time you have right now, and keep going. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.keepgoingpod.com/subscribe

My guest is Sudheesh Nair, co-founder and CEO of Tinyfish. He has done this before. Early at Nutanix through IPO. Then six years running ThoughtSpot. He left both without drama. Not because of ego or boredom. Because the rooms filled with the same talks about price and discount. Because he wanted to build again, from first principles, and be accountable as the one in the chair.Tinyfish is an AI shop by label, but the pitch is plain. Make the web act like a person with a browser, at scale, and do work that matters to a customer. Do not sell buzzwords. Sell outcomes. On their site the story is a small hotel in rural Japan, eight rooms, not wired into any fancy API. An agent signs in like a human, checks dates and room types, reads the price and availability, and updates Google Hotels so the listing shows live numbers, not “call for rate.” The hotel changes nothing. Google shows richer results. A traveler gets a real choice. That is the point. Not the model size. Not the paper count. A change you can see.We talked about leaving public companies. He said it straight. Loyalty is not a slogan. A company is a set of contracts, with investors, customers, and employees. You should fight for the mission while you are in the seat. You should also remember who picks you up when you fall. Family. We forget that when things go well. We dump on them when things go bad. If you want to build a place worth working at, draw clean lines, hold purpose and professionalism together, and be all in, until you are not.What drives him now is less shine, more fit. Call it Ikigai if you like. What you are good at. What pays. What the world needs. Cut the romance. Cut the cosplay. Be honest about your limits. Then pick the work where your strengths meet a real need, and grow the pie so others win with you.We also covered the noise around AI. Every site sings the same chorus. He refuses to sell that. The team tells a clear story instead. His co-founders make sense of that stance. Keith was a Wall Street Journal and Bloomberg reporter, Pulitzer finalist on Hong Kong. Shu Hao is a deep browser thinker. One believes in lowering barriers to information. The other believes the browser can be a bridge, not a wall. Sudheesh comes from analytics and knows this truth, fresh data starts on the open web, but most stacks mangle it before it’s useful. So they send agents to do the reading, sort the signal, and return only what helps. Less plumbing. More proof.Under it all sits a worry I share. We moved from blue links to feeds to one answer in a chat box. Power pools at the top. If we let that stand, the best coffee or the best small hotel stays invisible, not for lack of quality, but for lack of API glue and ad spend. An outcome-first web is one answer. Do the task. Show the result. Lift the tiny fish, not only the whales.Hire for that mindset. He likes journalists for a reason. Curiosity. Hard questions. Pattern sense. In a field this young, certainty is a tell. The honest posture is study and ship.If you want to see the idea land, go to tinyfish.ai and look at the hotel case. Eight rooms, now visible. Simple, not easy. The kind of fix that bends the web a little closer to fair. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.keepgoingpod.com/subscribe

I recorded this episode in an old hoodie, unshaven, feeling more “survival mode” than “thriving.” Which is exactly why I wanted to talk to Jon Rosemberg.Jon is the co-founder of Anther and the CEO of Strongpoint Group. He also has a background in positive psychology and a new book coming out, A Guide to Thriving, from Wiley on November 25. On paper he is the kind of person my inner cynic wants to roll its eyes at. In reality, he is someone who has thought very hard about how to keep going when the world feels like it is sliding sideways.We started with a simple point. If you and I were living a hundred years ago, there is a good chance we would already be dead. No antibiotics. No clean water on demand. No modern surgery. No cheap food from the supermarket. By almost every hard metric, life expectancy, infant mortality, access to education, we are in a far better spot than our grandparents.Jon calls this a kind of golden age. I pushed back with a Matrix joke, because of course I did. But he is not naive about it. His argument is that we confuse the state of the world with the state of our feeds. We stare at screens that are tuned to keep us twitchy and outraged, and we start to believe that this is the full story.He gave a small, sharp example. If you buy all your clothes on Amazon and Amazon only shows you three types of shirts, you live in a world of three shirts. You feel like you are choosing, but someone else quietly narrowed the menu. That is what he means by a loss of agency. We are letting algorithms make the first cut on our options, then telling ourselves we are free.Agency is the core of his book. Not in the motivational poster sense. In a very specific way. Agency, the way he defines it, is the capacity to make an intentional choice, backed by a real belief that the choice matters, that it will have an effect on your life and the people around you.I asked him the question that keeps coming up on this show. What about the project manager who gets replaced by an AI agent. What about the media worker whose “email job” is now a prompt in a chatbot. Do you tell that person to open a bakery, move to the country, become a monk.He refused the easy answer. Instead he walked through a simple framework he uses, AIR, which stands for awareness, inquiry, and reframe.Awareness is the first step. When you get fired, the only thing you can see is the disaster in front of you. He used a Rubik’s Cube as a prop during our talk. When it is right up against your eye, all you see is one little red square. Awareness is the act of moving it away just enough to see that there is a whole cube there. More colors. More faces. More moves than you first thought.Inquiry is the second step. That is where you start to turn the cube. You test ideas. You ask what skills you really have, who is in your network, what resources you can use. You look for more than one path out of the mess. Not fantasies. Actual options.Reframe is the third step. It is not magic. It does not make the pain go away. It is the moment where you admit that your story is not “my life is over because I lost this job.” It becomes something closer to “this is a hard change, and here are three real things I can try next.” That shift sounds small on the page. In practice it is the difference between being frozen and taking a step.This is where AI enters the conversation in a serious way. We are in a very strange time. You can feel the temptation inside big companies. Fire the person making two hundred and fifty grand. Hire a vendor. Drop in an AI system. Call it innovation. Cash the savings.Jon does not pretend to have a script for the next five years. He compared AI to fire. It will be used for good things and for stupid, cruel things. But he pointed to one solid data point. Companies that treat employee well-being as a real priority tend to outperform the ones that do not. Markets are not kind, yet even in that cold space, looking after people seems to pay off.None of that solves the feeling a lot of us have right now. We are living longer. We have more calories, more streaming shows, more everything. And at the same time, depression and anxiety are everywhere. The basic needs are met, and yet we feel like we are coming apart.His answer there is not new, but it is backed by a lot of research. Social connection shifts almost every health outcome we care about. Live longer. Less heart disease. Lower risk of stroke. Better immune response. Lower odds of dementia. You could describe it as the closest thing we have to a real life “miracle drug” that is free.So what do you do with that if you are stuck in a small apartment in a big city, working a job you are scared to lose, scrolling yourself numb at night. You do not fix it in one sweep. You do not suddenly find a tribe by Tuesday. You start with one intentional move toward another human. A regular coffee with one friend. A club. A class. A weekly call with someone who is not part of your household. It sounds tiny. It is not.We also talked about small towns, where you see the same faces every day and still feel alone because everyone is on their phones. He kept returning to the same word. Choice. Not in a “you can do anything if you try” way. In a quieter way. You can choose to put the phone down for an hour and talk to someone. You can choose to ask for help. You can choose to listen.He brought up Viktor Frankl, who wrote Man’s Search for Meaning after surviving the camps. Frankl’s claim was stark. Even in terrible conditions, there was still one last human freedom, the ability to choose how to respond inwardly. Jon is careful here. Some people really do not have options, because of health, war, or poverty. But many of us have more room than we think, and we convince ourselves we have none.That is really the heart of this episode for me. Keep Going is a podcast about success and failure, but it is really about this thin strip between the two, the place where you decide to take one more step or not. Jon’s work is about widening that strip. Creating a bit more space between “everything is ruined” and “I have at least one move.”If you want to go deeper into his ideas, his book is called A Guide to Thriving. It is split into small sections so you can chew on one topic without committing to a big reading project.In the meantime, if today feels like survival mode, try AIR. Notice what is actually happening. Ask a few hard questions about your options. See if you can tell yourself a slightly different story about where you are and what comes next. It will not fix the world. It might help you keep going long enough to see the next door that opens. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.keepgoingpod.com/subscribe

Most people never think about the battery until it dies. Charlie Welch has spent his whole career thinking about nothing else.On The Innovators, he walked me through what he is building at Proper Voltage. Before this, he was doing applied research in battery chemistry at Northrop, trying to get “interesting and exotic” chemistries into real military systems, from underwater gear to aircraft to special operations kits. The problem he kept hitting was not physics. It was integration.Every new battery team heard the same thing from the customer. “We’d love to use your tech, if you redesign it for our system.” Every big OEM said the opposite. “We’d love to use your battery, if you redesign your system for us.” No one wanted to move first. No one wanted to touch legacy hardware. That standoff kept better chemistries on the shelf instead of in the field.Proper Voltage is his attempt to cut through that. The company is not betting everything on one magic chemistry. Instead, they are building a kind of battery operating layer that sits between the cells and the product. They work with sodium ion, lithium titanate, niobium and other “odd” chemistries that each have their own strengths. Then they add a hardware and software block they call a voltage command unit. That unit makes voltage a programmable interface. One pack can now present itself as whatever the device expects, without the device designer having to rip up their boards or add twice as many cells.He gave a clear example. Standard lithium ion cells sit around 3.7 volts. Many sodium ion cells sit closer to 2.3. If you try to drop sodium into a system that expects lithium and do nothing else, you need almost twice as many cells in series. That means more size, more cost, more weight, and energy you do not actually need. With a programmable voltage layer, the system sees what it expects. The chemistry can change underneath without touching the rest of the stack. The product team gets to pick sodium for safety and life, not walk away because the nominal voltage is “wrong.”This matters a lot in defense and aerospace. There are standard formats like the 6T battery for vehicles or the soldier’s small tactical universal battery. There are missiles and aircraft that went through years of testing and certification. No one wants to open those designs just to squeeze in a new pack. Welch told me the only way that community moves is if the new unit is truly drop in. Same form factor, same pins, same expectations. If Proper Voltage can let new chemistries look and behave like the old packs from the outside, while giving better power and life on the inside, that is a real wedge.We also talked about the state of the art. Phone batteries have been roughly the same “spicy pocket brick” for a long time. The gains are slow. Roughly a few percent each year in energy density. The reason you do not feel a huge leap is that every time battery teams squeeze out another watt hour, the chip and software teams spend it on more compute, more video, more background tasks. The pack improves. Your day of use feels about the same.The big jumps happen when you change chemistry outright. Welch mentioned a humanoid robot project that switched from its old pack to a lithium titanate system. Charge time dropped from three hours to about six and a half minutes. Peak power went up by a factor of four. That is not a small tweak. That is a new class of behavior for the machine. Proper Voltage sits in the middle of moves like that, making sure the robot still sees smooth, stable voltage even when it is sprinting or jumping. When robots do high dynamic moves, voltage usually swings all over the place. Their system flattens that, so the robot sees the same “fuel” from full to empty. There is a small efficiency hit in the power electronics, but because the device can use more of the pack’s range without tripping over low voltage issues, you often end up with more usable energy, not less.The near term focus at Proper Voltage is not sci fi robots, though that work is clearly a proving ground. The team is leaning into three markets. First is infrastructure, backup power for telecom sites, data centers, LNG plants, all the places that still sit on old lead acid banks. Sodium ion and other chemistries are well suited there, and Welch likes that the United States has the raw materials to build a domestic supply chain around them. Second is defense, from 6T vehicle batteries to drones and soldier gear. Third is “industrial” in the plain sense, robotics and machines where power, charge time, and lifetime are the difference between a lab demo and a real business.There is a quiet lesson in how he talks about all this. We like big claims about a single breakthrough that will rewrite the rules. Proper Voltage is going after something more boring and more important. The connective tissue. The thing that lets new battery chemistries plug into old systems without fifteen rounds of redesign and risk. If they pull that off, we will not see it in a flashy consumer product first. We will see it in a Humvee that has reliable backup power, a cell tower that stays up during an outage, a robot that can run all shift without a fragile pack.The future of batteries will not arrive as one perfect cell that solves everything. It will come as a lot of different chemistries, each strong in its own narrow way, finally getting a path into real hardware. Proper Voltage is betting that if you want that future, you need to fix the link between the lab and the product. That is not a hot topic on social media. It is the kind of ugly, necessary work that moves the field forward, one pack swap at a time. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.keepgoingpod.com/subscribe

I used to think my job was to judge founders. Now I ask people to tell me what broke and what they did next. I call it a podcast. It is also penance.This episode is with Dr. Rod Berger. He is a writer, consultant, and the author of The Narrative Edge. We talked about story. Not the fake kind. The real kind.Rod’s view is simple. Story is how people survive each other.You get pulled over for speeding. Before the cop gets to the car, you’re already building your story. You’re trying to make yourself forgivable.First date. Job interview. Getting caught stealing cookies when you’re six. Same act. What can I say so I don’t get dropped. We learn this young. We never stop.Rod says leaders pretend story is optional. It isn’t. It is the only thing that makes you human to other people.Most CEOs are bad at this. I’ve interviewed them. You ask, When did you screw up. They answer, We’re very excited about our platform. Dead air. No blood. No point.Rod says that comes from fear. Since childhood, most of us are still asking, Am I going to get picked. No one wants to tell a story that might make them sound weak. They’re afraid they’ll lose status if they’re honest. So they default to talking points. They seal themselves shut. You can’t connect with that. You can barely stay awake.He told me about someone he interviewed a few times across a few years. Total lockdown. Polished. No air. He finally told her PR rep, Don’t call again. There was nothing human left to work with.So how do you fix that.This is what he does in his consulting work. He sits people down off the record. He interviews them. Long form. He makes them walk through their own past, moment by moment. What happened. Then what. Then what. He watches what they avoid and what they rush to tell. Then he shows them the transcript. He shows them how they actually sound in public. He shows them the gaps.A lot of them hate hearing it. Good. Hate is honest. Hate means they finally heard themselves. After that, most of them want more. He said it can feel like a drug. Once someone feels what it’s like to be listened to for real, they want to keep going. They start to open up. They start to risk.That is the start of being a storyteller. Not branding. Not performance. Just saying what really happened, and how it felt, without flinching.He said something else worth keeping. Story lives in the pause. Not in the slide deck. Not in the press release. In the quiet moment between floors on the elevator, where you admit to yourself what actually happened.He also said this. Life is a series of at bats. You might miss three curve balls. Fine. Next time you see the pitch a little earlier. That’s how you get better at talking like a person. You stand in. You swing. You listen.Rod’s book is The Narrative Edge. If you lead people, or you want to, you probably need what he’s teaching. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.keepgoingpod.com/subscribe

I spoke with Mikhail Baklanov, CEO and founder of Donkit, about a problem every enterprise AI team hits sooner or later, retrieval augmented generation that is accurate enough for production. The numbers he quotes are familiar. Companies spend heavily and still spend 18 months experimenting with indexes, chunking, embeddings, evaluators, and guardrails. Accuracy is often not good enough at the end.Donkit’s pitch is simple. Give their “RAG ops” agent your goal and your data. One engineer sets it loose. It runs hundreds of experiments and returns a production ready configuration in about two days. The team pivoted to this idea in March. By August they had a closed alpha. A dozen enterprise teams are piloting it now.Baklanov frames RAG like a library, with indexes, storage, and a librarian. Donkit is a library factory. Instead of hand tuning for months, the agent explores the space of options, evaluates on your data, and converges on what works. The promise is less art project, more systematized process for context engineering and memory management.Their buyer is the head of AI, or a principal AI engineer with a mandate to ship internal assistants and agents. Donkit is not for small teams standing up a single chatbot. It is for accuracy sensitive use cases where error compounds across steps. As Baklanov puts it, if your RAG layer is 80 percent accurate and an agent queries it five times in a chain, the final step’s effective accuracy can collapse. That is why enterprises throw so much effort at squeezing out the last five to ten percent.One pilot sits inside a large retailer’s HR call center. Fifty three specialists support three thousand employees across time zones. Routine questions can take thirty minutes in SAP. Donkit’s approach augments the specialist in real time, first through typed suggestions, then by listening to calls and surfacing answers on screen. It is a clear ROI case that lives or dies on reliable retrieval.Baklanov has talked with more than eighty heads of AI. He sees the same adoption gap. People do not understand how AI works or how to use it. The wins show up in augmentation, not replacement. In software development he says the job is already shifting from hand coding to tasking and reviewing AI generated code. Speed of iteration trumps the debate over organic versus AI code.Donkit has raised $470,000 in angel funding and is preparing an institutional seed. The site is donkit.ai. If you are a larger organization with a head of AI, running agents that depend on trustworthy retrieval, they want to talk.RAG is where a lot of AI projects stall. Everyone has a demo. Few have a system that survives contact with real data and real users. If Donkit can consistently compress the tuning loop from 18 months to two days and do it with one engineer instead of a roomful, that changes the economics. It also sets a higher bar for what “production ready” means. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.keepgoingpod.com/subscribe

I first spoke with Ehren Cruz and felt something I do not get often in this space, grounded optimism. He runs a retreat center north of Asheville and guides people through psilocybin journeys with a process that looks more like a rite of passage than a thrill ride.Here is how he works. He starts with a real assessment. Meds, mental health history, trauma, and whether he is the right person to help. Then a month of preparation. Sleep, food, time off the treadmill, and intention. He teaches basic emotional regulation so you are not surprised by your own mind. Only then do you sit. Music, instruments, careful facilitation, and a room that feels safe. Afterward comes the hard part, landing the craft. What did you learn. What will you change. Who do you need to forgive. How will you embody that tomorrow morning.If the language around psychedelics feels too soft, Ehren can meet you in plain English. He talks about neuroplasticity and the way a wider thalamic filter lets you consider ideas that your habitual self would ignore. He also talks about something older. Fungi as a living partner, not a static compound. You bring your healing intelligence. The medicine brings its own. The work happens in the space between.We talked about the fear of change. Many people know they need it but stay put. The familiar pain feels safer than the unknown. Ehren gave me a frame I like. Letting go happens when the risk of staying the same finally outweighs the risk of stepping into mystery. You do not need to force it. You prepare the ground and notice when the fruit is ready to drop.You can do a lot without medicine. Ehren recommends patient practice, Vedic meditation, time with discomfort, and the discipline to ask what pain is trying to teach. Microdosing can help some people create capacity, but he is clear that the big session is not the only door. It is the deep end of the pool. You get dunked. You come out with an imprint you cannot unknow. Then you act.Who should reach out. Curious people who feel stuck. People doing honest mental health work who want a held container. People hungry for individuation, not only symptom relief. He reminds everyone that a ceremony is a step in a longer arc. Not a miracle. Not a single ticket to awe. Part of a continuum of growth, supported by community.If you want to learn more about Ehren’s work and his programs, he is at thesparc.co and active on LinkedIn. If you got something from this conversation, sit with it. Make one small change this week that your future self would thank you for. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.keepgoingpod.com/subscribe

Robots do not need pep talks. They need power. In the field, cables and careful hands are a liability. That is the problem Quaze is trying to solve, and it came through in my talk with Francis Roy, their Chief Strategy Officer.Quaze’s pitch is simple. Turn big surfaces into charging points. Not small targets that demand perfect alignment. Broad mats that you can fold, carry, and drop on dirt or concrete. Plates you can mount on a vehicle so small drones can return, touch down, and sip energy. Panels you can fix at a pier so an underwater vehicle can press, recharge, and push off. If the machine makes contact, it takes power. Shape does not matter. Maker does not matter.The mat is the first product in the wild. It accepts power from what you have on hand, a truck, a wall plug, a solar array. It gives that power back to whatever lands or rolls onto it. Useful, but the point sits deeper, in the electronics that make a surface act like a fuel pump for electrons.That core is the Q6 module. One box, many uses. Mount it in a troop carrier to turn it into a mothership for small drones. Fix it near a net where quadcopters cycle through sorties. The receiver that rides on the aircraft is light, about forty grams in the demo Roy showed. It slots between battery and body. The cost and complexity live on the transmitter side, which keeps retrofit work on the airframe cheap and fast.Numbers matter. Today the Q6 pushes roughly one hundred to two hundred fifty watts. Feed a one hundred watt hour pack at one hundred watts, plan on about an hour, in clean conditions. Field work is never clean, but the point holds. You want steady cycles, not lab trophies. Go, return, touch down, take power, go again. No human kneeling in the dust.Adoption is under way. The mat has early buyers inside the NATO world for testing. That is a good first beachhead. After that, the real work starts, where concepts of operation rule. Where do you place the surfaces. How do vehicles queue. What fails over when a unit is soaked, iced, or shot. Quaze says it has nine integrations in two years with robot makers and prime contractors. That suggests teams can take the electronics, wire them in, and field something real.Why not sooner. Part of the answer is habit. With people hauling batteries and plugging cables, the problem can look solved. Once the people leave, your charge point must work on first contact. Large, forgiving surfaces cut out the alignment dance that kills missions.There are limits. The current power band caps how big and how fast you can refill. Heavy platforms still want generators or pack swaps. Every charger you drop is another box to harden, maintain, and secure. None of that breaks the idea. It is the cost of turning electrons into a supply line.The upside is plain. Uniform energy access across mixed fleets. Fewer hands at risk. Less babying of small drones. A path from one-off hacks to a standard practice that operators can trust.If autonomy is going to move from demo to duty, edge power must be boring, rugged, and always there. Quaze is pushing in that direction. That is worth attention. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.keepgoingpod.com/subscribe

In this week’s Keep Going, I sat down with Steve Rad, founder and CEO of Abacus Brands and Backdrop.com, to talk about building two thriving companies from the ground up. His story starts not in a boardroom but in a Taco Bell parking lot, selling trade show displays out of the back of a car after the 2009 financial crash. What grew from those early hustles became Backdrop.com, a full-scale event display business that’s now introducing Backdrop Alive — a system that turns static backdrops into interactive, augmented reality experiences for trade shows and brand activations.Steve isn’t just rethinking how companies connect with people in physical spaces. He’s also reshaping how kids connect with science and technology. His toy company, Abacus Brands, builds immersive learning kits that mix hands-on projects with virtual reality — from digging up dinosaur bones to exploring crystal caves. The company has already earned a Toy of the Year award and now has new lines launching with National Geographic, DK, and even ESPN.We talked about bootstrapping, surviving the pandemic when trade shows disappeared overnight, and staying “lean and consistent” when everything feels unstable. Steve’s advice for founders is simple: stay in your lane, focus on what you can do exceptionally well, and don’t chase every shiny opportunity.He calls himself a “Basecamp One” entrepreneur — far from the summit, but climbing. That mindset, the willingness to stay small, nimble, and hungry, runs through his entire story.Listen to the full episode to hear how a Craigslist side hustle turned into a two-company career and why, for Steve Rad, making toys is still about wonder, not just sales. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.keepgoingpod.com/subscribe

We recorded late in Tokyo, and Evan Burkosky, CEO of Kimaru AI, laid out a claim that is both obvious and ignored. Most supply chains still run on spreadsheets. People glue together ERP exports, POS reports, CRM notes, and a flotilla of pivot tables, then hope the next week behaves like the last one. It rarely does.Kimaru calls its approach decision intelligence. Strip away the hype, and you get a layer that sits above the systems of record, learns from the metrics the business already tracks, and proposes concrete actions that a human reviews before anything happens. Instead of looking backward at what sold last quarter, planners see forward, with specific guidance on replenishment, pricing, safety stock, and routes, all framed by the constraints that actually govern their work.The company builds what they call a decision digital twin for each user and stakeholder. That twin encodes the choices a role can make, the outcomes that matter, and the limits that cannot be crossed. A set of software agents handles the tedious jobs that eat time, from connecting data and cleaning it, to reconciling mismatched fields across vendors and partners. Once that groundwork is in place, the system runs structured simulations and produces a single best recommendation. The user adjusts or approves, and the order flows back into the existing tools to open a purchase order or move a shipment. Nothing woolly, no free-running bot that buys five million widgets on a whim, and a clear circuit breaker that the user controls.The need is plain in any complex chain. An electronics maker in Taiwan hunts for copper, chips, and specialty parts, sells into high-end audio, and now faces tariffs, shifting routes, and new suppliers in places like Vietnam. A missed signal upstream turns into idle inventory and missed revenue downstream. Many teams still try to manage this with manual reports that take days to compile. Kimaru’s pitch is that the same work can take half a minute once the model understands the business and the user’s risk tolerance.Large firms often have parts of this effort underway. Data lakes in Snowflake or Databricks. Early agents that score demand or smooth seasonality. Kimaru’s value is the connective tissue. The architecture keeps raw data on site through federated learning, shares patterns without moving sensitive records, and records actions for compliance. It plugs into the stack that already exists and tries to make it useful, rather than selling an expensive rip and replace.Under the hood, the tools are not science fair novelties. They are the engines that have powered recommendations and prescriptive planning for a decade, from Monte Carlo to random forests to modern neural nets. The twist is in how those parts are arranged, how cross-company collaboration is modeled, and how the system learns from every correction a planner makes. Evan talked about chaos engines and fractal simulation from his CTO’s doctoral work, and even exploratory talks with quantum groups. The point is not to impress with jargon. The point is to give a planner a credible option on Tuesday morning that shortens a meeting and prevents a stockout.This is not a product for crane operators. It serves the inventory lead at a regional grocer, the VP who sets policy for a chain of factories, the manager who runs a distribution center and needs to pick a lane now. Kimaru has spoken with hundreds of people in those seats. All of them admit they live in spreadsheets because the official systems cannot keep up with the chaos outside the building.There is also the mood to consider. A wave of flashy pilots has soured many buyers on artificial intelligence. Reports claim that most generative pilots fail to produce value. Evan’s answer is blunt. Language toys are probabilistic by design, which makes them risky as a control surface. Operations need structure and memory. The decision layer gives the model something firm to run on, it narrows the error bars, and it keeps people in charge at the points that matter.Kimaru just finished Alchemist, closed out a pre-seed, and is opening a seed round. Interest is strong because the problem is large, boring, and very expensive. The global supply chain ties up vast sums in safety stock to hedge against shocks, and wastes more when plans lag reality. Every hour pulled out of manual reconciliation is an hour that can move product or cut costs.That is the theme worth noting. The most useful advances rarely sparkle. They remove friction that everyone has learned to tolerate. They give professionals a way to make the same decisions they make today, only faster, with clearer guardrails, and with less risk of groupthink. If Kimaru can turn the spreadsheet habit into a system that thinks ahead, it will not be glamorous. It will just be how the work gets done. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.keepgoingpod.com/subscribe

My guest this week was Ashley Manta, a certified sexologist and relationship coach. She works with high achieving women and with couples. Here focus is on pleasure, connection, honesty, and the habits that keep those things from drying out.She says we have to start with stress. If you run a company or live inside one, you know the drill. You carry the day in your jaw, in your shoulders, in your gut. You tell yourself the strain is a tax for the life you chose. Then the bill shows up at home. You argue more. You touch less. You feel alone in a crowded room.Ashley’s first instruction is not soft. Breathe, then unclench your pelvic floor aka your a*****e. On the exhale, let everything loosen. Jaw, hips, the place you never notice until someone reminds you it exists. The body follows the mind, the mind follows the body. If you can learn to relax on purpose, even for a moment, you can find your footing again.From there, she asks basic questions. Where do you feel pressure in your body? What happens when you are alone? Are you checking out on a screen, or can you be present for yourself? With a partner, are you actually there, or are you mentally triaging tomorrow’s tasks while you go through the motions? Presence is not a poster on a wall. It is a skill, and you can practice it.The next step is time. Most of us rush intimacy the way we rush email. We try to beat the clock. Ten minutes, quick kiss, lights out, then wonder why it all feels thin. Slow down. Breathe together. Make eye contact. Ask your body simple questions. Can you feel your right hand. Your left foot. Can you notice your partner’s breath without racing ahead to a finish line. If you treat your bedroom like a sprint, you will get sprint results. Slow work pays.Many couples call their relationship sexless. That word hides more than it reveals. What do you mean when you say you want sex? Do you want pleasure? Do you want to feel wanted? Do you want a break from worry? Do you want a sense of control for a change? Those are concrete needs. You can meet them in many ways. Kissing. Touch. Time together without a screen in sight. Articulate the need, then design the time.Pain and disconnection are real for many women. Ashley talked about plant medicine and the bedroom, not as a cure all, as a set of tools. Some people do not want pills. Some want options that work with their bodies. Be cautious, be informed, talk to real clinicians, then test what helps. The point is agency. Do not outsource your body.We touched the culture too. The grind has become a religion in some rooms. Wear the hours like rank. Build a wall between the self at the office and the self who wants to be known. In other rooms, there is bitterness, the online stew that curdles into contempt. If you are marinating in that mess at three in the morning, there is work to do before you date anyone. If you are simply lost in your calendar, the fix is harder than a quote on a fridge, and still simple. Set boundaries. Delegate. Hire someone to take a shift so you can be a person, not a dashboard.Screens numb. Bodies need air and motion. Touch a tree. Touch water. Lift something heavy and set it down. Watch a sunset without filming it. This is not a lifestyle trend. It is maintenance. When you remember you are alive, you become easier to be with. You are kinder to yourself. You are more open to other people.Ashley runs retreats, workshops, and private coaching. She keeps a Substack where the theme is joy. She travels, a lot. She meets people where they are, online and off. Her end state is clear. A world with more pleasure. Not a cheap slogan. A society where adults feel safe in their bodies, where couples choose each other on purpose, where the half smile on a city street is not rare.I like the plain frame she uses. Pleasure is not a luxury. It is a sign of health. Connection is not a trend. It is an anchor. Sex is not a scoreboard. It is a language. Learn to speak it with care.We keep the show focused on success and failure. Here is the hard truth. If you succeed at work and fail at home, you did not win. You traded one kind of hunger for another. The fix starts with a breath. Relax the muscles you forgot you have. Slow down. Ask for what you want. Give what you can. Put the phone away.Until next week. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.keepgoingpod.com/subscribe

In this episode of The Innovators, I spoke with Pablo Zegers, Chief AI Officer at Kaspix, a company that’s turning everything we think we know about artificial intelligence upside down. Zegers and his team are building analog AI—systems that don’t need transistors, GPUs, or data centers. Their technology runs intelligence directly in hardware, even when that hardware has physical imperfections.Pablo describes it this way: they’ve found a way to make AI work inside the circuitry itself. Instead of relying on digital computation, their system performs the same matrix calculations that underpin modern AI through electrical relations—voltage, current, resistance—executed at the speed of light. It’s artificial intelligence without the silicon.The implications are enormous. Imagine a world where every sensor in a car, every industrial machine, or even every household device could process information locally, without having to beam endless data to the cloud. In Zegers’ words, “you could have a tire that knows when it’s about to fail.” By putting intelligence on the edge—literally in the sensor—systems can predict, react, and self-correct without lag or dependence on distant servers.This isn’t theory. Kaspix is already working with design partners to integrate the technology into real-world applications. The promise goes beyond efficiency and energy savings. If AI runs locally in analog hardware, it becomes nearly impossible to hack, since the intelligence lives in static circuits rather than a centralized, updatable database. In that world, your personal AI could live on your desk—private, secure, and entirely yours.Zegers has been chasing this vision for four decades, and it’s finally real. As he puts it, “In fifty years, all artificial intelligence will be run on this kind of technology.” This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.keepgoingpod.com/subscribe

I spoke with David Carvalhão in Lisbon. He is the CTO at IH Care and sits on a few boards. He has started more companies than most people will ever work for. Twenty six. Some hit. Some missed. Then he lost sixteen in one blow when a partner moved assets out from under him. He fought in court for years. He now calls that a mistake. He says he should have let go sooner.What he works on now is simple in goal and hard in practice. Hospital acquired infections kill about 90,000 people a year in Europe. IH Care is trying to push that number down. They build a device that lets staff give real showers to bedridden patients. They make bed linens that repel water and are antibacterial and antiviral. They coat surfaces in rooms so that when bugs land, they go biologically inactive. Not dead, just quiet. No arms race. No resistant strain winning the day.He put it plainly. Kill and you select for the strongest. Inactivate and nothing new learns to fight back.Keep Going - A Guide to Unlocking Success is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.Why this path. Family. He lost a grandfather and a grandmother to infections after hospital stays. He had worked in AI and software for years. In 2015, after the business collapse, he decided to spend his time on social problems. He still builds tech. He just points it at different targets. One project measures carbon stored in forests from satellite images to issue better credits. Another estimates emissions from huge events so organizers can offset with some basis in fact.His mind runs hot. He knows it. He likes to start things. He also knows the cost. In 2022, as the war began in Ukraine, he spun up an NGO to help refugees get to Portugal and settle. It scaled fast. A call center. Hundreds of volunteers. Twelve thousand people moved through the system. The work won an award from the European Commission. On stage in Stockholm, he broke. Memory gone. Seven months to recover.He did not dress it up. The first three months he mostly slept. Long and short term memory both took hits. Then the urge to work came back before the brain was ready. He wrote a book to keep himself steady. In time, he felt whole again.So how does he keep from spinning out now. The answer is boring in the best way. Strict time blocks. He schedules family time and treats it as hard law. He meditates ten minutes a day. He journals for five minutes. Once a month he vanishes for a weekend with an old Nokia, no apps, no feed, no news. He sits. Walks. Rests. Thinks. Monday comes and he knows what matters for the next four weeks.He also faced the standard investor critique. Too many projects. Lack of focus. He agrees it is a fair shot. His response is practice, not talk. He spends most of his time on IH Care. He delegates the rest. He is clear about his edge. He is best at creating and launching products. Others scale them.There is a line he repeats from his grandfather. Leave the world a little better than you found it. It is not a slogan for him. It is a filter. Hospital infections. Carbon math. Refugee work. If it makes a dent and he can help, he leans in, but now with guardrails.I like guests who do not make excuses. David does not. He names the failures and the cost, then keeps going. If you want the short version, here it is. Build for something larger than your own scorecard. Put fences around your time. Rest on purpose. Then do the work. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.keepgoingpod.com/subscribe

I invited Shay Levi on because I wanted to separate the AI that writes emails from the AI that moves a business. He is the co-founder and CEO of Unframe, and his pitch is simple. Tell us the pain. We come back in five days with a production-ready solution. If it moves a real metric, you subscribe. If not, you walk.He calls ChatGPT the gold standard for generic tasks. Drafting notes, tidying a paragraph, that kind of thing. Unframe is about the gnarly stuff inside big companies. Think underwriting, lease management, complex workflows that touch five or six systems and a mess of data. You do not want a prompt window for that. You want something that plugs into your stack and quietly does the work.Here is how they do it: They have built a shelf of reusable components, the Lego bricks you always end up writing from scratch. They assemble those into a tailored app for a single business need. No long scoping phase. No hostage-style SOW. Data can stay inside the customer’s perimeter. Then the team hands the keys to the business users and measures impact. Pay only if it works.That model feels like a Fiverr analogy for the Fortune 500. Wish for an application, try it, then decide. The difference is risk. You are not paying up front for a maybe. You are testing a live tool on your data.Shay has done this before. His last company, Noname Security, grew from zero to 250 people in four years and sold to Akamai. He left before the papers were signed because he could not shake the feeling that enterprises were about to drown in point solutions and half-baked build attempts. In his words, the ground in AI moves every morning. Someone had to give value, not just sell more consultants.He is honest about the limits. We still need engineers. Code generation got better, but it did not make software teams obsolete. He also thinks the research gap is wider than people expected. More GPUs alone are not going to deliver a sudden leap. Until we get a new idea, the near term is a man-machine partnership. Humans to define the goal and guardrails. Machines to push the work.One tension I asked about was the in-house IT team. Nobody wants to walk into a department with twenty years of relationships and say your tools will be here in five days. Shay’s answer is practical. Internal teams build the top five, core use cases. Everything else goes to a long wish list. That is where Unframe lives, and it is where most DIY projects stall. If Unframe can ship a working tool in a week, the business moves faster. Nobody gets ripped out. The company gets a head start.There is ambition behind all of this. He does not want to sell the company. He wants to see if this model can scale across industries. If it does, he thinks it is bigger than his last win. If it does not, he will know because customers will cancel. The contract structure forces the truth.What I like here is the focus on time to value. Five days is a claim you can test. You either reduce days outstanding in receivables, or you do not. You either shorten lease onboarding, or you do not. In a space full of big talk, that concreteness is refreshing.If you run a team with a backlog full of good intentions, this is worth a look. Start with one stubborn workflow. Define the metric. See what a week buys you. Worst case, you learn how to scope the next attempt. Best case, you cross something off the list and move to the next one.We will keep watching this model. If Unframe proves you can repeatedly turn messy enterprise needs into working tools in days, that is a real shift. Not a demo. Not a deck. Software that shows up and does the job. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.keepgoingpod.com/subscribe

I met Cesar Marin at a psychedelics event in Denver. I watched him on stage. He had a calm ease that carried across the room. Today he tells the story behind that calm.Cesar spent twenty five years at CNN as a producer. He built live shows. He chased breaking news. He lived inside a clock. Then the layoffs came. He was fifty five. The title that shaped his life was gone.Plant medicine had arrived in his life just before that fall. He did not come to it for healing. He was curious. He tried psychedelics once and felt a sharp shift. He started reading. He found communities. He learned how people use these tools for depression, anxiety, trauma, and habit change. He began to microdose with intent. He says it helped him change a hard relationship with cannabis. It also forced a question he had avoided. If the old job ends, what comes next.His answer is Cultivating Wisdom. He built an apparel line that does one thing. It starts plain talk about psychedelics without the tie dye costume. He wanted a shirt you could wear under a blazer. He wanted words that open a conversation in a grocery line. He told a story about a woman who walked up to him, saw the word “microdosing” on his chest, and shared how small, planned doses helped her stop finishing a bottle of wine every night. One shirt. One talk. No stigma.He also built microdosingover50.com. The site is for people who want clear, adult guidance. He does not prescribe. He does not diagnose. He shares what worked for him. He points to research. He asks people to read, ask questions, and go slow. No mystery bars from a gas station. Pick intent first, then protocol, then support.We spoke about work and age. The market does not care about your years of service. It cares about cost and speed. If you are midlife and worried, his advice is simple. Take inventory. Write down what you know well. Turn that into assets that teach. Give something away. Build a course. Speak to people who know less than you, not to the few who know more. That is a sober way forward in a loud time.He is now shaping the Summit Within. It is a small, private container for senior leaders. Five or six people at a time. The plan is to use legal plant work where allowed, breathwork, and other tools to improve focus, care, and honesty. Leave the status gear at the door. Bring your real problems. Learn how to run a company and still be a decent parent, partner, and neighbor. He calls it a move from “F-you wealth” to “love-you wealth.” Make enough to care for your family. Use the rest to make more people smile. That is the entire pitch.We covered risk. We covered the old fears. He agrees that no one should treat this like a toy. Read the science. Talk to a doctor if you have a condition or take meds. Respect the law where you live. Do not do this alone if you can avoid it. These are tools. Tools can help. Tools can also hurt.Cesar’s story is not tidy. He lost a career. He built a new one from scratch. He did it with help, and he says that out loud. Mentors showed up. Friends told the truth. His partner said the quiet line that kept him steady. “The universe has you where it needs you.” He believed it. He worked. He kept going.If you want to learn more, go to cultivatingwisdom.net for the apparel and stories. Go to microdosingover50.com for his courses and community. He set up a 20 percent discount for our listeners. Use code KG20 at checkout. If you buy something and post a photo, he says he will send a bigger code you can share with your friends. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.keepgoingpod.com/subscribe

The Innovators is a new show about how people actually build. Not slogans. Not hype. The work. Each episode starts with a pitch, then gets into the choices that make or break a young company. We ask basic questions that most founders avoid. Who pays you. Why do they stay. What broke. What did you fix. The goal is simple, help real builders sharpen their story and pressure-test their plan, while giving listeners a clear view of how a business grows from zero.Our first guest is Dani Dufresne, founder of Aux Co. Think of Aux Co as a plugged-in production brain for small agencies and brand teams. Not a vendor line item you add at the end. A team you invite in at the start. Dani came up through film and commercial production, then spent years inside big agencies. She saw a pattern. Small, sharp creative shops had ideas worth making, but not the overhead for full-time producers. Big holding company shops had budgets, politics, and habits that dragged the work off course. The result was friction, waste, and flat outcomes.Aux Co is her answer. The firm embeds early, helps shape the creative into something that can be made on time and on budget, then brings the right crew to the table. Agencies keep the client relationship. Aux Co supplies an executive producer mindset and a deep bench. It is white label when needed. It is visible when that helps. The goal is the same in both cases, protect the idea, spend money where it matters, and keep the quality bar high.Dani’s view on incentives is blunt. A freelancer takes a brief and gets it done. An in-house EP at a big shop might default to the same three vendors. Both paths can work, but both can settle. Aux Co set itself up to question decisions early, to tell a client when the plan is off, and to push for better options that fit the money and the clock. That only works if you get in the room before the pitch goes out. So they do that, often without charging for pitch support, and earn their keep in production.The model scales in a quiet way. Retainer clients get producers embedded in Slack, in email, in the office when needed. When a brief lands, Dani assigns specialists for that job, not whoever is idle. She oversees the start, then steps back while her team runs the shoot, the event, the build. That frees creative teams to focus on the idea, not vendor whack-a-mole. It also keeps the work fresh, since the roster is wide and curated. The firm avoids the bad habit of reusing the same production company out of comfort.We talked about the risk in this kind of service. It looks like staff, it acts like staff, but it is not headcount. Finance teams want cost clarity. Dani keeps pricing simple, hourly or flat packages, small retainers that roll over, production fees that track the real job. The promise is speed and fit. You get the right director or developer in days, not months, because the list is already built. You pay for what you use. You keep quality up because the team can say no when something does not line up with the mission you stated at kickoff.There is also a cultural point. Aux Co looks for clients who see questions as care, not conflict. That matters. A lot of work fails because no one raises a hand when the plan drifts. Dani builds teams that ask why, tie choices back to the brief, and hold the line. It sounds small. It is not. It is the difference between a film that lands and a film that sits in a drive.Where is this going. Dani sees brands moving back into the world. Less empty feed. More real life. Community events. Collabs with local groups. Experiences that get people to close the laptop and do the thing the brand stands for. That shift needs producers who can work across formats, from a quick social shoot to out of home to a live build. It also needs partners who can move fast without cutting corners. That is the lane Aux Co lives in.Why start The Innovators with this story. Because it shows the point of the show. A clear pitch. A simple problem, the gap between idea and execution. A practical fix, bring senior production into the room before the sell, keep it lean, keep it honest. You can argue with the approach. You cannot say it lacks a plan.If you run a small agency, this episode will help you rethink when you call production. If you run a brand team, it will help you weigh headcount against access. If you are a founder, it will push you to name your edge and the tradeoffs you refuse to make. That is the tone we want every week. Take the pitch. Pull on it. Find the weak points. Leave with a tighter story and a better path to revenue.New episodes will follow the same line. Founders, operators, and makers walk us through what they sell, how they sell it, and how they keep clients. We keep the talk plain. We push for numbers when it counts. We respect craft, but we do not hide behind it. We ask about the first ten customers, the hardest hire, the month that almost killed the company, the new plan that kept the lights on. We want lessons you can use on Monday morning.If you want to learn more about Aux Co, visit theaux.co, or look up Dani Dufresne on LinkedIn. If you want to pitch on The Innovators, send a short note with what you build, who buys, and why they stay. Keep it tight. Keep it real. We will bring questions. You bring proof. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.keepgoingpod.com/subscribe

This is a free preview of a paid episode. To hear more, visit www.keepgoingpod.comWhen you talk to Diane Yu, you hear the mix of humility and steel that makes a founder stand out. She’s the co-founder and CEO of Tidal Wave, an AI company that is trying to modernize one of the most entrenched and slow-moving sectors out there: mortgages.Her take is simple. We live in a world where everything else moves fast—food, rides, even love—but mortgages drag on, slow and archaic. Tidal Wave is her answer: an AI-powered mortgage point of sale system that does the hard work of evaluating and completing applications before an underwriter even looks at them. It’s not flashy, but it’s practical. And in this industry, practical is revolutionary.

Most of us know Anker as the little black brick that saved our phones when the battery dipped into the red. What’s less known is how Steven Yang built the company. He started as a Google software engineer, left a stable life, and moved into hardware without any real experience. That leap, and the mistakes along the way, tell us a lot about what it takes to keep going.1. Curiosity is stronger than fearSteven admitted that if he had known how hard it would be to move from software to hardware, he might not have done it. But he didn’t overthink it. He saw that early smartphones had weak batteries, looked at the clunky packs people were carrying, and thought, “I can do this better.” Sometimes progress is just that simple: ignoring the warning signs and trusting your curiosity.2. Build in steps, not cliffsAnker didn’t try to be Samsung overnight. They went from replacement batteries to portable chargers, then to cables, headphones, and finally smart home devices. Steven called it “climbing stairs, not cliffs.” That lesson applies anywhere: if you can break a massive risk into smaller, connected moves, you have a better chance of surviving.3. Failures are tuitionThe company’s first big stumble came with their 3D printer. Engineers decided to use a dual USB-C cable to connect the moving print head. It worked fine at first. Then months later, customers found the connection failed during long prints. Anker had to recall units. For Steven, the pain wasn’t just technical—it was knowing that loyal customers were frustrated. The fix wasn’t to hide the mistake, but to absorb it like tuition, improve testing, and write down new rules so the same mistake wouldn’t happen again.4. Keep the customer at the centerWhen a product breaks, the instinct is often to defend yourself. Steven said the instinct at Anker is different: first, take care of the customer. Then fix the process so it doesn’t repeat. That order matters. It’s what keeps people trusting you, even when you slip.5. Think long term, but keep tinkeringSteven talked about edge AI—models that live on devices in the home, not in the cloud. His vision is layered: massive models in the cloud, medium models in the home, tiny models in wearables. They’ll all talk to each other. It sounds futuristic, but he insists it’s just a few years away. What stood out wasn’t the prediction, but that he’s still tinkering like an engineer, still trying to solve problems from the ground up.6. Build platforms, not empiresWhen I asked if he would have been happier staying at Google, he said no. What drives him now isn’t just making products, but creating a platform where other makers can build too. That’s the deeper lesson: success isn’t about being the smartest person in the room. It’s about giving people the tools and space to create something better than you could on your own.Steven Yang left a secure job, stumbled through hardware, recalled products, and still came out with one of the most trusted consumer brands of the past decade. His story isn’t about charging bricks. It’s about curiosity, humility, and the discipline to learn from mistakes without letting them stop you. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.keepgoingpod.com/subscribe

I sat down with Lisa Gralnek, Managing Director for the U.S. and Global Head of Sustainability and Impact at iF Design. She also hosts Future of XYZ podcast. We talked about awards, values, and the hard work of keeping design honest.Here is what matters.iF Design is not a new project. It started in 1953. It is a nonprofit in Germany. The award is large, global, and serious. Entries come from scores of countries each year. Jurors come from real jobs, heads of UX, design chiefs, leaders who ship. The process runs in two stages, an online cut, then an in-person review in Germany. Every entrant gets a score map, even those who do not advance. Idea, form, function, differentiation, and sustainability. That last one is now a fifth of the grade. This is rare. It makes the feedback useful, not fluff.Why enter at all? Because clear, external critique is hard to get. Because you learn where you stand in your field. Because a public win travels, and a public loss still teaches. Most award mills take the fee and send a badge. This one sends a readout you can act on.iF is pushing into the U.S. now. Lisa was hired to build that bridge. The brand is known in Europe and Asia. Here, less so. Growth has been slow and careful. Small budgets. More community than ads. More teaching than hype. They launched the iF Design Academy to share what the field has learned, and to help designers learn what schools often skip. Personal leadership. real future literacy around sustainability and new tech. most of all, business fluency.That last point hit home. Designers have too often ceded the boardroom by speaking only in color and taste. If you want a seat, learn gross margin, capex, payback, risk. Learn to defend a choice with numbers. Learn to change a choice when the numbers say you should. Beauty without a model does not survive a budget review. Beauty with a model can.Values are the spine of the institution. Lisa was blunt. iF holds to impact and excellence. It funds student and social prizes. It set up rules to keep quality high when volume rose. It added an early round to filter weak entries. It made sustainability part of the score. This is how you stay on course in a long life. You write the rules down. Then you keep them when it costs.We talked about AI. I asked the old question, what happens when a prompt can spit out a chair in a famous style in minutes. Lisa did not hand wave. The path is clear. Use AI where it is a tool, drafts, planning, research. Keep the human where it counts, framing, taste, judgment. Keep your scope tight. Be open about how you used the tool. Add safeguards. Do not let your work flatten into sameness. AI can speed the task. It cannot carry the meaning.Brand work came up as well. How do you grow something that feels faint in a loud market. You tell the truth about what you do. You back winners with real exposure. You bring jurors and teachers into the tent. You keep showing up. It takes time. That is fine. Things that last usually do.If you are a founder or a head of design, here is my ask. Enter where the feedback will help you ship better, not where a sticker will pad a deck. Write your team’s values in plain English. Share a code of conduct with clients. Teach your designers the language of money and risk. Teach your leaders the language of people and care. Use AI with a plan, and say what that plan is. Build a product that can face a jury and a P&L, and still feel human.One more note. The iF site holds a record of winners back to the mid-fifties. Spend an hour with it. You will see a clear line from then to now. Form, function, care. Dieter Rams stood on their stage and reminded a full hall that designers have a duty to make the world better. That is not a slogan. It is a job description. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.keepgoingpod.com/subscribe

On the latest episode of Keep Going, I spoke with Neil Markey, CEO of Beckley Retreats, about how he went from combat deployments and corporate burnout to guiding people through psilocybin retreats in Jamaica and the Netherlands.Carrying Forward Amanda Feilding’s LegacyBeckley Retreats is the living continuation of Amanda Feilding’s work. For decades, Feilding ran the Beckley Foundation, a nonprofit dedicated to psychedelic research and drug policy reform. She’s been called the hidden hand of the psychedelic renaissance — lobbying governments, funding research, and pushing for policy change long before the mainstream was ready.When she passed away in May at the age of 82, her family and collaborators, including Markey, stepped forward to carry her vision into practice. Beckley Retreats is that next step: creating safe, structured programs to bring psychedelic experiences to more people.From War to Burnout to a Different PathNeil’s path to Beckley is not what you’d expect. He joined the military after September 11, serving in Iraq and Afghanistan. After leaving the service, he pursued graduate degrees in business and international affairs, then went into the corporate world. On paper, it looked like success. In reality, it felt like collapse.Sleepless nights, short temper, alcohol creeping into the routine, relationships fraying — the same symptoms that haunted him after combat were back in boardrooms. Twice in his life, Neil found himself on the edge, burned out and discontent.What changed? He stepped away. He pared down expenses, saved enough to create breathing room, and allowed himself to sit in stillness. That space made it possible to find new direction.Building Retreats with Structure and CareAt Beckley, the retreats are designed as full programs rather than isolated experiences. Guests go through digital preparation first: meditation, breathwork, yoga, nutrition, and group connection. Then comes the five-night retreat in Jamaica or the Netherlands, where participants take part in two guided psilocybin sessions, held in nature with live music and careful facilitation.Afterward, integration lasts six weeks. This is where real change can take root. With the brain and body in a neuroplastic state, new habits — daily meditation, mindful eating, deeper self-care — have a chance to stick.The results Neil has witnessed are striking. Guests report more gratitude in daily life, more patience in relationships, clarity about decisions, and sometimes even a quiet end to habits like drinking. One story stuck with him: a fellow veteran whose young son had always chosen his mother for comfort suddenly began coming to him at night after the retreat. Something shifted, not just in him, but in the way his family felt him.Choosing Work That MattersNeil laughs when he admits he’s back in an intense role — running retreats is far from easy. But this time, the effort feeds him. The work aligns with his values. As he told me, it isn’t about escaping hard work, it’s about finding work worth doing.That’s the heart of Beckley Retreats: creating space, breaking cycles of burnout, and offering people the tools to reset their lives. And it’s fascinating to meet the guy who is helming it all. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.keepgoingpod.com/subscribe

When I started Keep Going, I wanted to talk to people building things with care. Not the VC-fueled wrecking balls chasing unicorn status, but the ones trying to solve real problems without leaving a crater behind. Nicki Sprinz, CEO of digital product studio ustwo, fits that bill.In a startup world that still fetishizes disruption, Nicki is pushing a different message: stop disrupting, start caring. And it’s not just a tagline. It’s the operating philosophy of an international company working at the intersection of technology, wellness, and responsible design.Here’s what I learned from our conversation.Keep Going - A Guide to Unlocking Success is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.Disruption had its moment. This is something else.Remember “move fast and break things”? Nicki does. But when you’re building tools for health, behavior change, and everyday life, that mentality doesn’t cut it. “You don’t get to break things when patients are involved,” she told me. You slow down. You design with empathy. You build with rigor. Not everything should be frictionless. Sometimes the point is to add friction—the good kind that helps people pause, reflect, or make a better choice.It’s not just about making apps that work. It’s about making apps that should exist.You can have engagement without addiction.We got into the difference between engagement and addiction. The former keeps people coming back because it’s meaningful. The latter keeps them trapped. At ustwo, they’re focused on emotional design. Think Monument Valley—the studio’s breakout game that felt like a meditative puzzle box—not the dopamine death loop of infinite scroll.Design, Nicki says, can invite autonomy. Good design earns your attention. It doesn’t hijack it.AI isn’t replacing us. It’s sitting next to us.Nicki had a nuanced take on AI. Yes, it makes things faster. Yes, it can help with structure, drafting, and research. But it can also make everything look the same if you’re not careful. At ustwo, they’re experimenting with AI tools, but always with human context and judgment at the core. They’re designing “adaptive AI”—systems that respond to users in thoughtful, helpful ways. Not just content machines, but collaborative tools.They even built Sproutiful, a project that used multimodal AI to help people track their nutrition and make small behavior changes. The idea was to nudge, not nag. And it worked.Culture isn't a slide deck. It's who you fire.One of the most powerful parts of our talk came when I asked Nicki about firing a client. She didn’t dodge. She told me about a time they walked away from a big project because the client’s behavior clashed with their values.At ustwo, those values aren’t decoration. One of them—Be Human—means don’t shout, don’t bully, and treat people with respect. It’s written into their code of conduct. It guides their hiring, their projects, and their client relationships. And when someone violates that, they walk.That kind of consistency is rare. It’s also what holds a company together when the money gets tight.The AI future still needs apprenticesWe talked about the hard stuff too. What happens when AI eats the entry-level jobs? How do you train the next generation when there’s no “junior” left? Nicki doesn’t have all the answers, but she’s thinking hard about it. “We still need people in the room together,” she said. “Even if AI is joining us in that room.”The human element—mentorship, nuance, values—isn’t going away. At least not if companies like ustwo have anything to say about it.So yeah, ustwo is a product studio. But it’s also something else: a test case for how to build tech in a way that doesn’t feel gross. That doesn’t chew people up. That doesn’t mistake velocity for vision.Nicki didn’t flinch when I pushed. She gave honest answers about tradeoffs, mistakes, and hard decisions. She talked like a human being, not a CEO out of central casting. And that, more than anything, made me think she’s onto something. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.keepgoingpod.com/subscribe

We live in a world obsessed with velocity. Founders are supposed to scale fast, pivot often, and raise money like their lives depend on it. But not every success story fits that mold. Some companies are built slowly, deliberately, and on their own terms. Reedsy is one of them.I first wrote about Reedsy back in 2014. It was a small, strange idea at the time: a marketplace for authors to find editors, designers, and other publishing professionals. Now, more than a decade later, Reedsy helps produce over 50,000 books every year. It’s profitable. It’s stable. And according to founder Emmanuel Nataf, it’s calm.We had him on Keep Going to talk about how he pulled that off.No deadlines. No burnouts. No nonsense.Emmanuel’s approach to building Reedsy is almost aggressively anti-startup. He never bought into the blitz-scaling mindset. Instead, he focused on building something that worked—then waited to see what it wanted to become.The company raised a little money early on, but quickly moved to profitability. No pressure to grow at all costs. No mad rush for the next round. Just a team of about 50 people, working quietly and consistently, building tools that authors actually want to use.That freedom has shaped the culture. There are no arbitrary deadlines at Reedsy. No imaginary pressure. If a product feature isn’t ready, it waits. If the summer is slow, they accept it. December? Forget about it. They’re not chasing unicorn status. They’re building something real, at their own pace.Studio: A writing app that doesn’t yell at youOne of Reedsy’s biggest moves was launching Studio, their collaborative writing platform. It's where writers can draft, plan, revise, and format their work—all in one place. It started as a humble book editor, but over time, it became something closer to a virtual writer’s room. Studio lets you build characters, map worlds, outline stories, and track your progress. You can even invite editors and beta readers to work with you in real time.It's a calm product, made by a calm company.Writers will invest in themselvesOne of the best insights from the interview was how Emmanuel thinks about pricing and value. Writers don’t always have a lot of money, but they do invest in their work. Just like photographers buy cameras or musicians buy guitars, writers will pay for tools that help them finish the thing that’s clawing at them from the inside.That understanding—that writing is a form of personal investment, not just a commercial pursuit—shapes the whole business.Growth, the old-fashioned wayReedsy isn’t stagnant. It’s growing steadily. But Emmanuel’s version of growth doesn’t rely on sprints, pressure, or panic. It’s about listening to the users, iterating with care, and avoiding hype. Even when things slow down, he sees it as part of the rhythm. "You keep digging, and usually, you find something,” he told me.That’s how they’ve unlocked new waves of growth again and again—by being patient enough to let them happen.A life beyond the companyIn the end, what stood out most was how Emmanuel talked about life outside of Reedsy. He and his co-founders aren’t martyrs to the startup cause. They’ve built lives with room for more than work. They write. They think. They breathe. Reedsy is central, but not all-consuming.It’s the opposite of the founder-as-hero myth. It’s just a group of people building something good, carefully.And that, to me, is what Keep Going is all about. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.keepgoingpod.com/subscribe

When Max Buchan launched Valarian in 2020, he wasn’t building the next messaging app or enterprise dashboard. He was building infrastructure—systems that sit under the surface of apps, institutions, and, more recently, battlefields.Valarian didn’t start as a defense company. It started as an enterprise software venture aimed at helping organizations control where and how their data moved. But the world changed, fast. Brexit exposed new tensions around jurisdiction. Ukraine reminded us that sovereignty isn’t a metaphor. And suddenly, the demand for what Valarian was offering—actual, operational digital control—moved from the boardroom to the front line.On this week’s Startup Show, Max joined me to talk about how Valarian went from fintech roots to working with NATO governments, deploying secure infrastructure in the field, and raising money from top defense investors like Scout Ventures and Artis.From Crypto to CompartmentalizationMax cut his teeth at CoinShares, a crypto asset manager that scaled from a tiny team to a publicly traded company. There, he saw firsthand how fragmented and vulnerable digital infrastructure can be—especially across borders. That experience, combined with the geopolitical shifts of the last few years, shaped his thesis: the next era of sovereignty would be digital.Valarian’s core product is called Acra. It's a portable, containerized backend that enterprises and governments can deploy locally, on demand. In enterprise use cases, that means secure internal communication and controlled data flow. In defense contexts, it means spinning up a network in minutes—sometimes from a Pelican case in hostile terrain.You don’t just own the encryption keys. You own the system.The Infrastructure Under the InfrastructureAcra looks less like an app and more like a replicated backend system. It runs databases, object stores, and secure communication protocols—everything you’d need to build on top of, without ever touching public infrastructure. It’s generative on deployment, meaning each instance is unique. Not even Valarian has access to customer deployments.That idea—zero external visibility—matters. Especially when you're talking about military communications or sensitive research environments. “Visibility is the threat,” Max told me. “Just revealing who’s talking to whom can compromise an operation.”Dual-Use, Real StakesThe company now operates in two tracks: Valarian Enterprise, which serves clients like banks and pharma companies, and Valarian Defense, which handles secure deployments for NATO member states.Their customers are using Acra to do everything from run compartmentalized AI workloads to spin up isolated networks in the field. Some want the system to be thermite-compatible—able to self-destruct in a crisis. Others just want to ensure their proprietary data stays in one jurisdiction and doesn’t get copied into someone else’s cloud.That flexibility—running one system in a bank, another in a war zone—is what makes Valarian stand out in a space where most infrastructure is either too lightweight or too rigid.What Europe Needs NowMax is blunt about the state of defense tech in Europe. While budgets are growing, capability isn’t always keeping pace. The U.S., he says, has built a far more responsive innovation ecosystem. Companies like Palantir and Anduril have shown that dual-use startups can thrive when the government is ready to work with them.Europe’s challenge isn’t just funding. It’s culture.“We’re more risk-averse,” Max said. “But that’s changing. People here want to buy British software. The problem is, there hasn’t been much to buy—until now.”Valarian wants to be part of that shift: not just building defense tech, but helping shape a sovereign, scalable digital infrastructure that Europe can call its own.What’s NextValarian is hiring. They’re scaling fast to meet demand across enterprise and defense. They’re also looking at acquisitions—adding capabilities that fit into their secure-by-default architecture.From fintech to the field, Valarian’s path shows what happens when you treat sovereignty not as a slogan, but as a product spec.Learn more at valarian.com. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.keepgoingpod.com/subscribe

We talk a lot on Keep Going about mental health. About reinvention. About trying again when everything feels broken. But this week, something deeper came through.Justice Leak—an actor, a seeker, and now the founder of Therapod—joined the podcast to talk about his mother, her Alzheimer's, and the way psychedelics changed their lives. Not in theory. Not in some lab. In a small town in Georgia, on a hot afternoon, with a handful of mushrooms and a prayer.Justice wasn’t a psychonaut. He wasn’t raised in a culture of altered states. His mother sure as hell wasn’t. She was a third-grade teacher, a Christian, a Southern woman who never drank, never did drugs, and certainly never imagined herself in a “non-ordinary state of consciousness.”But life has a way of closing doors until the only way forward is through one you never expected.When his mom started to lose her sense of self—first her words, then her visual awareness, then her memory—Justice saw something terrifying: her waking life began to look like his own worst trip. The kind where you can’t tell what’s real, where rooms distort and shapes dissolve, where your own mind becomes the enemy.And that’s when he realized: maybe these states weren’t just for introspection or trauma work. Maybe, just maybe, psychedelics could help rebuild the brain. Not just to feel better, but to function better.So he did the thing you’re not supposed to do. He gave his mom mushrooms. Two and a half grams of psilocybin, ground up and put in capsules. No trippy music. No festival. Just a prayer and a garden.The next day, she woke up singing. The stutter was gone. She was dressed. She was moving. It was temporary, sure—but it happened. And it kept happening. Each time they did a session, something came back. Not forever. But enough to keep going.And here’s where the story gets bigger.Because Justice realized the biggest hurdle wasn’t the medicine. It was the setting. These experiences didn’t belong in sterile clinics or chaotic forests. His mom needed a safe, beautiful, responsive space—one that supported the brain during this window of growth. One without disorienting floor reflections, with sounds tuned to 40 Hz, with curves and colors instead of walls and edges.So he built it. Therapod. A new kind of therapeutic environment. Bio-adaptive, sensory-rich, and designed specifically for non-ordinary states. Think immersive art meets neuroscience. Think DMT trip meets nature-inspired architecture. Think real-time emotional feedback—without a word spoken.Justice is still developing the tech, working with wearables that track emotional states through the body, feeding back into the room in real-time. But the mission is clear: if this medicine is going to reach people like his mom, it has to be more than molecules. It has to be infrastructure.You can’t just hand someone psilocybin and hope. You need a room. A ritual. A reason. And someone to sit with you.This episode left me shaken. Not just because it was moving, but because it made me ask: what if we’re underbuilding for the future we claim to believe in?Justice isn’t selling trips. He’s building rooms for people on the edge—of memory, of function, of life itself. He’s doing what no clinical trial can. He’s showing what love looks like when you’ve run out of options.You can learn more at experiencetherapod.com. But the real story is this: the next frontier of healing isn’t just the brain. It’s where the brain meets the world. And maybe—if we get it right—where the brain meets the end. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.keepgoingpod.com/subscribe

This week on Keep Going, I sat down with Miist—an artist whose story is as powerful as her music. She's the first native Chinese artist to break into Billboard’s Top 25 on the AC chart, and she’s worked with legends like Santana and Curtis Williams of Kool & the Gang. But her path to that stage started much earlier, and much harder.Miist didn’t grow up thinking she’d be a singer. Until late 2023, she hadn’t even released a song. That changed when Narada Michael Walden—producer, drummer, and hitmaker—heard one of her early demos and invited her to meet. What was supposed to be a 30-minute meeting turned into a three-hour jam session and the beginning of her first album.That debut album yielded “It’s Too Late to Love You,” a duet with Narada that's still on the radio across Europe. But her second album is where she’s aiming straight for the heart—with six songs built around the theme of human connection, each one tied to a 15-second action listeners can take to reconnect with others—and themselves.Miist doesn’t hide the pain that shaped her. She spoke openly about surviving childhood abuse, the deep loneliness of growing up in a boarding school, and a life-threatening cancer diagnosis that resulted in losing 60% of her liver. That pain didn’t stop her. It gave her a reason to create.What makes Miist’s work different is that she’s not just singing to entertain. She’s trying to start a movement. One of her recent tracks, “Could You Let Me Smile?”, inspired the launch of a nonprofit called the World Smile Initiative. It began with one tragic story—a young man who died alone and unnoticed—and grew into a global project translating that song into 15 languages. Each version is performed by a local artist in their native tongue. The goal: bring emotion directly to the listener’s heart, no translation needed.And if you think that sounds too earnest for the music business, well, that’s kind of the point. “If I was with a label, they would never let me do this,” she said. As an indie artist, Miist has the freedom to do what she believes in. No hooks. No formulas. Just a voice, a message, and a belief that change starts small—like with a smile.She’s also launched a podcast, Make Me Smile with Miist, where each episode focuses on one issue stopping us from forming deeper connections. Each episode ends with a 15-second action anyone can do, right then and there.When I asked her if she thought suffering was necessary to make art, she paused. “I don’t think we need to,” she said, “but I’m grateful for what I went through. It taught me how to feel. And if I can feel what someone else feels, I can write their story too.”That’s what Miist is doing—writing stories, connecting people, and reminding us that even the smallest effort can ripple outward.And yes, she got me to smile. Even if just for 15 seconds. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.keepgoingpod.com/subscribe

On this episode of The Startup Show, I spoke with Katie Kuo, CEO and co-founder of Atomistic Insights, a biotech startup working to speed up drug discovery using physics-based machine learning. Born out of Georgia Tech and currently part of the Alchemist Accelerator, Atomistic Insights is trying to fix a known problem: new drugs take too long and cost too much. Think $2.6 billion and up to 15 years per FDA approval.Katie’s background is in chemistry and drug discovery, and the company’s approach is refreshingly different. Instead of treating proteins like static objects, their system tracks how they actually move—atom by atom—in the body. That motion reveals hidden binding sites for drugs, which traditional drug design often misses. It’s like watching a lock move in slow motion until you see the exact shape of the keyhole.Their method is already patented. The team has a working MVP. They’re raising their first round. And their goal is to go beyond software licensing to actually develop in-house therapeutics—taking their discoveries all the way to the clinic.What makes Atomistic different isn’t just the tech. It’s the founder mindset. Katie isn’t chasing AI hype. She came from a lab, saw how slow and expensive drug discovery is, and wanted to do something about it. This is a startup driven by application, not abstraction.So, what’s next? More partnerships, deeper simulations, and eventually, real drugs designed faster and cheaper using Katie’s system. Atomistic isn’t trying to replace drug discovery. They’re just trying to make it suck less.You can learn more at atomisticinsights.com (or at least try to spell it correctly in your search bar). This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.keepgoingpod.com/subscribe