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Kevin Kennedy, vice president of global partner ecosystem at Red Hat The channel has fundamentally changed – and for a long time, Red Hat‘s partner program hadn’t caught up. That’s the candid starting point for Kevin Kennedy, who joins In The Channel this week fresh off his appointment as Red Hat’s vice president of global partner ecosystem. Kennedy’s career spans just about every layer of the channel – direct sales at IBM and Xerox, close to a decade at Arrow Electronics, and leadership roles at VCE, Dell EMC, and TD SYNNEX before joining Red Hat in 2022. That perspective shapes how he talks about the shift from a model built on clear “swim lanes” – where resellers, services partners, and software sellers all stayed in their own lanes – to the multi-partner, collaborative engagements that define how business gets done today. “It’s really hard to even define a partner today,” Kennedy says. “We can’t go to market by ourselves any longer.” Red Hat’s program refresh responds to that reality with a bifurcated incentive structure: front-end rewards for individual sellers at the deal level, and back-end incentives for firms making deeper investments in Red Hat competencies. Kennedy is direct about what drove the change: “We were putting all of our rewards around the resell of our products. And that ship had sailed.” The conversation also covers the Broadcom/VMware disruption as a modernization opportunity rather than a rip-and-replace play, where AI realistically fits in the partner revenue picture right now, the evolving role of distribution as an ecosystem aggregator, and – for Canadian partners specifically – the growing urgency of data sovereignty as a go-to-market factor. And Kennedy offers a memorable frame for Red Hat’s long-term platform ambition: “Red Hat inside” – the idea that Red Hat increasingly underpins solutions partners build and customers buy, whether or not the name is on the box. Read Full Transcript Robert Dutt: Hello and welcome to In The Channel from ChannelBuzz.ca, bringing news and information to the Canadian IT channel community for the last 16 years. I’m Robert Dutt, editor of ChannelBuzz.ca and your host for the show. My guest today is Kevin Kennedy, vice president of the global partner ecosystem at Red Hat. Kevin’s career spans just about every seat in the channel: direct sales at IBM and Xerox; the better part of a decade, on and off, at Arrow Electronics; leadership roles at VCE and Dell EMC; and then about five years running advanced solutions at Tech Data and TD SYNNEX before coming to Red Hat in 2022. That’s a resume that takes you from carrying a bag, through distribution leadership, to vendor-side ecosystem strategy. That full-channel perspective shapes how he thinks about the partner business in ways that are pretty evident in this conversation. Red Hat recently named him the permanent head of its global partner ecosystem, and the word “ecosystem” in that title is deliberate, as you’ll hear. We get into how the partner business has fundamentally shifted from the old swim-lane model to something much more collaborative and complex; what Red Hat is changing in its partner program and why; the VMware modernization opportunity; where AI realistically fits in the partner revenue story right now; and what data sovereignty means for Canadian partners specifically. Let’s get right into it, my chat with Kevin Kennedy. Robert Dutt: Kevin, thanks for taking the time. I appreciate it. Kevin Kennedy: Thanks for having me, Rob. I appreciate being here. Robert Dutt: You’ve been in so many different seats facing the channel, from starting in direct sales at IBM and Xerox, to distribution, and now, of course, the vendor side. I’m curious: when you look back at the arc of the channel, as it were, over that time, what’s the biggest way the partner business has changed since you started looking at it and watching it closely? Kevin Kennedy: That’s a great question, because there has been a significant evolution, that’s for sure. I think it starts with the definition of what a partner is. It used to be that you had very clear swim lanes. You had resellers, you had services partners, and you had people who always sold software or people who always sold hardware. Everybody had their individual lanes, and that was predominantly the way the channel made money: through the resale of all those things. If you fast-forward to today, it’s completely different. It’s really hard to even define a partner today. You can’t put them in one camp. Take a larger partner like WWT, for example. It used to be the preeminent reseller for a myriad of OEM lines. Today, that may be just a portion of its business. If you look at its total bottom-line profitability, I would say the vast majority of that comes from the services it offers and the contracts it manages for very large customers. Partners have evolved. We used to be able to go sell something individually. With the complexity that now exists in technology and the solutions that customers are demanding, we can’t go to market by ourselves any longer. We’re forced to collaborate and build relationships outside of our historical domains in order to present a customer with a holistic solution that’s going to drive the outcomes or efficiencies they demand. I think all of that dynamic is great. We talked about multi-partner engagement for decades and couldn’t get it to work because, realistically, we were all competing for the same nickel. If I went into a customer with you, likely one of us would get cut out of that deal or eventually be eased out. Today, that’s not true. We’re really dependent on each other. You bring your strengths to the table, I bring mine to the table, and those combined strengths are what the customer is going to realize. I think that’s the exciting component that’s really changed dramatically, especially over the last 10 years, and even more so over the last five. Robert Dutt: That speaks to the fact that you’re coming in as vice president of the global partner ecosystem, rather than vice president of channel sales or vice president of partner programs. I’m guessing, especially from that latter point about the co-sell and multi-partner arrangement becoming much more accepted and more of a default, that it’s a meaningful and purposeful distinction. What changes day to day when you call it an ecosystem, or when you think of it as an ecosystem, rather than a channel? Kevin Kennedy: I think your point is well made. The title and our nomenclature – ecosystem versus channel, or ecosystem versus partner – are intentional. Again, it goes back to illustrating the necessity of multiple people with varying levels of expertise in a variety of domains. All of them are required to bring a customer a solution and drive an outcome. It actually makes things more complex in some regards. From my lens, at the end of the day, what do we want to sell? We want to sell Red Hat products and our platforms into a customer. In years gone by, that might have been a much more simplistic arrangement. Our sales teams would call on a customer, represent only what we’re good at, and get that deal done. That no longer remains the case. I have to make sure we’re selling the value of Red Hat’s portfolio not just to the customer. I’ve also got to make sure the systems integrator sees how we can bring value to the solutions they’re going to represent to their customer base. I’ve got to represent the value of Red Hat to the hyperscalers – why they should care about us and how we may drive consumption in their marketplaces. I’ve got to bring value to the distributors and explain why they want to put resources around our product portfolio. I need to show them how our portfolio is going to help accelerate some of the more profitable lines they represent. On one hand, the ecosystem model illustrates the necessity for all of us to come together. On the other hand, it invites complexity from a go-to-market standpoint because everybody’s my customer. That’s traditionally been true in distribution, where a lot of my heritage comes from. We used to have the adage that we’re nobody’s customer and everybody’s customer, because I have to constantly sell the value of why we exist and why we should matter to you, and how we can help you be successful. Robert Dutt: That must make it an interesting challenge to structure programs when it’s no longer as simple as, “You are a reseller, therefore you fit in box A.” Now you’ve got to get creative with your programs and incentives in order to keep partners excited about what you’re doing, engaged with your platforms, and recognizing where you’re headed and why that might be valuable to them. Kevin Kennedy: I’ve got to construct a program with incentives that look at presales and the whole customer-management lifecycle. It’s no longer just, “We’ve got a product and a contract for that product that’s going to be sold.” Now I’ve got to think about adoption. I’ve got to think about how we make that product more pervasive through an organization. I’ve got to ensure that everything we said was going to be done when we presented the solution is actually coming to fruition, so the customer sees a return on that investment. If they don’t, I’m going to be a one-and-done. If they do, it’s going to give me an opportunity to have conversations around other things we can bring to bear that might provide similar or even better outcomes than what they did initially with us. Robert Dutt: When you did the program refresh, you said it was built around simplicity, predictability and profitability – three words that come up a lot in channel chief conversations, for obvious reasons. I don’t think those are unique to Red Hat, but along with what you’ve already touched on, what did you see or hear from partners about what they were experiencing that made those changes the priority at this time? Kevin Kennedy: That’s a good question. When I joined Red Hat, I observed that we weren’t necessarily meeting partners where they were. We were still thinking about the way things had been in years gone by. We were typically putting all of our rewards – and, by the way, they were plentiful – around the resale of our products. That ship had sailed. The ecosystem had evolved considerably, but we hadn’t necessarily evolved with it. What we tried to do, especially with the incentives we launched in January, was meet partners where they are. That means we have to bifurcate our incentive structure. We’ve got sellers at those partner organizations, and we need to make sure we’re targeting incentives on the front end, at the deal and transaction level, to get them excited about moving Red Hat products. Primarily, I look at that as a great opportunity for customer acquisition. There are a lot of places where we haven’t been, and those sellers are going to be able to introduce us to those customers. They have respected and long-tenured relationships that are going to help us land our objectives, which is to have the Red Hat portfolio consumed there. Similarly, we’ve got to make sure we’re incentivizing the firms to make the investments necessary to upskill their people and ensure they have the technical requirements and technical capabilities to deliver our solutions. We’re showing them a path from whatever managed services they currently provide in the enterprise to how they can include Red Hat as part of that. That’s going to be accretive to their service capabilities and to their profitability. We’re ensuring that we have both the front end and the back end covered. Again, we’re meeting partners where they are in the market, rather than saying that we only care about what they’re going to do for us from a product standpoint. We recognize that services are probably the most profitable component of their business. How do we translate the sale of our products into an increase in their services business, which is going to be accretive to their overall profitability? Robert Dutt: The nice part about that approach, even if you are coming from playing catch-up a little bit, is that there isn’t quite as much need to educate or incentivize partners to come around to where you’re going. You’re setting it up based on where they’re at today. Kevin Kennedy: Exactly. Recognizing that partners need a lot of hand-holding and a lot of our Red Hat engagement isn’t necessarily true. In many cases, partners have a level of sophistication that’s beyond what we would even address in a traditional enablement program. Now it’s about leveraging all those skills and competencies and translating them into what that means for Red Hat and how that accelerates adoption of our portfolio. From a partner standpoint, what does our portfolio mean to them in terms of plugging into what they’re already doing from a go-to-market standpoint? It puts more bullets in the gun when they’re talking to a customer. Robert Dutt: One of the areas of opportunity right now has to be the whole Broadcom-VMware situation, which has created a lot of disruption for partners, customers and pretty much everyone. Red Hat is obviously positioned well in that space, but capturing the opportunity through the channel is different from simply having the right technology on the shelf. How are you helping partners have that conversation with customers, especially those who are frustrated and interested in other options but aren’t necessarily ready to make the big jump? Kevin Kennedy: When the whole Broadcom situation first transpired, I think we all saw it as a generational opportunity to make a land grab. We all had varying degrees of success. And when I say “we all,” I don’t just mean Red Hat, but others that play in this space as well. Where we’ve seen a tremendous acceleration in our opportunity is by changing the conversation. When we go out with one of our partners and talk to customers about what they’re doing from a virtualization perspective, it’s no longer simply about moving off VMware onto Red Hat, for instance. It’s about modernization. It’s about making sure that the customer is prepared for its technology journey – moving from virtualization and modernizing its data centre toward the AI conversation that I’m sure we’ll get to in a moment. Red Hat and our partners can help customers on that journey and accelerate it without requiring a rip-and-replace approach or a complete transformation of their entire infrastructure. They can leverage the things they may do with us today to move off VMware and into a more modernized, virtualized, containerized and Kubernetes-based environment. That prepares them to take the next step into AI. It’s not a step back. It’s not a step sideways. It’s a step forward from their initial investment with us. Robert Dutt: It is 2026, and we’ve been talking for 12 or 13 minutes now, so I am legally required to ask an AI question at this point. You’ve been pretty straightforward in saying that virtualization, automation and hybrid cloud are still the real revenue drivers, while AI is more of a near-future opportunity. I respect that honesty, and I think it probably maps closely with what partners are telling you about where they are today. But where does that leave the partner who’s getting pressure from customers to have an AI story right now? Do you lead with the infrastructure story, or do you lead with AI and then backfill toward virtualization, automation and hybrid cloud? Kevin Kennedy: I think we lead with the hybrid modernization and automation play first, and then segue into the AI discussion. Part of what we’ve seen over the last year, especially, is the need to separate AI reality from AI hype. Everybody talks about AI, and I think the pockets of success have come from partners who are listening to customers and giving them the counsel and advice that they don’t need to boil the ocean. Let’s start with some very specific processes that the customer could look to automate by leveraging AI technology and Red Hat technology. Then the customer will be able to see an immediate win and a return on that initial investment. From there, we can see where to grow. For most customers, it’s not too different from us as consumers. We think of AI and ChatGPT, and all of these things where we’re going to be able to ask a whole bunch of questions and get smart answers back to help inform us about where to go. For a lot of customers, that’s debilitating. They don’t even know where to start. The whole thing is a massive labyrinth of issues they’re trying to sort through. Every partner that can go in and provide consultative advice – saying, “We don’t need to look at everything. Let’s start with some very direct things that you say require a lot of manual intervention or take up a lot of cycles” – can leverage AI technology to circumvent a lot of that. They can make processes that took weeks or months translate into hours or minutes. What productivity increase do you see as a result? That’s an immediate win and a return on the initial investment. I think the partners that understand what collaboration looks like in this space are also going to be successful, because AI forces us to talk to others and play well with others. Even for us, we’ve enjoyed a lot of recent announcements around collaborative partnerships with NVIDIA, Dell, Cisco and others. We’re doing these things together. It’s not because we each woke up one day and said, “I really want to build a partnership with NVIDIA,” or, “I really want to build a better partnership with Cisco.” We were forced to have those conversations because of the outcomes customers expect. We realized that while we have a really important and robust piece of the solution, it’s only a piece of the pie, and the customer wants the whole pie. How do we orchestrate and architect it together so that we collaborate and go to the customer together and say, “Here’s what we can do for you. Here’s your whole pie”? Robert Dutt: You spent years on the distribution side, as you said earlier. A lot of your career was spent there. Now you’re managing some of those same companies, or the companies they’ve become over time, as a vendor. I’m curious: has your background in distribution changed what you actually ask of distributors, or what you think vendors typically ask of distributors but either shouldn’t or should ask more of? Kevin Kennedy: I tell anybody who wants to be involved in the ecosystem that if you’ve worked in distribution, that’s your MBA of channel engagement. You learn so much because, when I was at TD, for instance, I was doing business with every major OEM in the world, each with different expectations and demands. I was running a business on basis points. Understanding how to get the greatest efficiencies in the sales model and how to reap the greatest amount of profit in order to continue investing in the business prepared me better for the ecosystem role I have today. Even when I got to Red Hat, I think the way we leveraged distribution was much more traditional. We appreciated distributors for the financial piece they brought to the equation. That continues to be a critical thing that distribution adds to technology in general: they’re a financial backbone for a lot of the investments we’re all making. But distributors were also viewed as providing logistics and operational efficiencies. While that’s still part of what they do, it’s just a small part of what they do today. I look at distributors as aggregators. We talked about how one, two, five or seven partners may touch every transaction a customer buys. There’s no better place to bring all of that together than within distribution. Distributors have developed their own great level of sophistication. They’ve got technical expertise across multiple vendor lines. They’ve made tremendous investments in AI on their own, and they have specialists who are trained, competent and capable. I’m leaning on them to do a lot of the enablement for me. When I look at how we go to market with all these different partner types – whether it’s hyperscalers, OEMs, GSIs or ISVs – I can go to distribution, which is also doing business across all those same partner types, and say, “How do we work more effectively together to develop a really cohesive go-to-market strategy?” The distributor is the aggregator. It can go to the partners we all share in common – the WWTs, CDWs, Softchoices and Mobias of the world – and say, “How can you bring all this together for us to present to these partners, so they can go talk to a customer and have a holistic solution to put in front of them?” Distributors represent that capability for me. We’re leaning in hard with distribution, certainly on the legacy and traditional things they bring to bear, but more importantly on the forward-looking investments they’re making in their own enterprises that are going to help accelerate partner adoption of our solutions. Robert Dutt: Close to home, data sovereignty is a major issue for Canadian organizations right now. Between government guidance and some muscle being put behind that, there’s a growing concern about where data resides and the whole CLOUD Act question. Do you see that showing up in partner conversations in Canada, and how does Red Hat’s story change in that context, if it does? Kevin Kennedy: It’s a prevalent and very relevant conversation today in Canada, certainly in EMEA and APAC – essentially everywhere outside of the United States. It’s forced us to re-evaluate how we’re going to market in those environments. It changes the perspective on simply talking about the hyperscalers. It changes the perspective on what a sovereign cloud looks like and who the players are. It’s introducing us to players in spaces such as telecom, where telcos are now looking more like the sovereign cloud providers of the future. How do we build a secure solution, working on a public cloud, private cloud or sovereign cloud provider, that will be required – especially in government and GOE spaces – and provide them with the opportunities they’ll need in the future? It started to emerge perhaps at the end of last year, but it’s now a massive topic of conversation with us, and I think that’s going to continue. When we talk about AI, this is going to be a big component as well. How do we protect this data, and how do we have it reside in a secure environment that’s critical to government agencies and how they operate every day? Robert Dutt: Do you see Red Hat partners as having a major untapped or under-realized opportunity right now? Kevin Kennedy: I still think virtualization is a major, major untapped market. We’re hot on the customer-acquisition trail. Traditionally, we’ve grown through established customer relationships that have been great to us over the years. We’ve made mutual investments in those relationships, and we’re certainly going to continue that. But we’ve got to find new business. I think AI is the accelerant in that. It gives us a forum for conversations around what we’ve built. Anybody who has made an investment in our core portfolio has a springboard to get to where they want to go relative to AI. The partnerships I referenced with NVIDIA, Cisco, Dell, HPE and others are great catalysts for opening discussions with customers who perhaps didn’t know Red Hat before. I sometimes think about it this way – and this is probably an oversimplified way to put it – but for years we all bought laptops that ran on Intel chips. “Intel Inside” was a great marketing ploy for a whole host of reasons. I kind of see Red Hat that way a little bit: Red Hat inside. We’re going to be the underpinning of a lot of solutions that customers are going to buy in the future. They may not even know that Red Hat is running in there, and I’m not sure that we care. We want to be that secure platform that provides mobility from the cloud to on-premises environments, with seamless motion back and forth. We want to provide the level of security that’s going to be required, whether that’s in a sovereign environment or in our current state, where data security is the utmost concern. We want to be the underpinning that allows all that stuff to run effectively and efficiently, and gives customers portability and an open concept. Whether or not the customer actually knows Red Hat is there, I’m not sure that matters that much to us from the customer lens. It matters more in terms of how we’re going to work with some of the other partner routes we’ve talked about, especially given the ecosystem discussion. Robert Dutt: I’m curious what you’d like to see partners doing more, better or differently for the benefit of Red Hat, yes, but especially for their own businesses and where the business is going. Kevin Kennedy: I want to be a catalyst for them to sell autonomously. I think OEMs have often seen themselves in an outsized role when it comes to going to market with partners. We’ve acted as though partners need us in order to deliver the solution, or need a Red Hat badge in order to get validated by the customer. Certainly, there may still be an element of that, but I’ve found that partners’ customer relationships and the trust they’ve already earned with those customers supersede our need to be necessarily involved. I’m looking at ways to pour gasoline on that fire. How can I get out of the way and let partners move at a quicker pace than they may have in the past? Certainly, we’re part of the solution. We want to make sure partners have everything necessary, whether that’s training, enablement, demo equipment, proofs of concept or executive briefing centres – whatever they need to ensure they have the utmost confidence to position a solution that contains Red Hat products in the best light with the customer. But we know partners don’t need our help to have that sales conversation. They don’t necessarily need our help to deliver the services after the sale, to do the migration or to provide managed services, because they already have that expertise. We just need to make sure they feel confident that they can incorporate us into that motion. That’s really my focus, even from an ecosystem program standpoint. I want to put the incentives in a place that accelerates all the things partners are already good at and simply includes us in that motion. Robert Dutt: It sounds from those last couple of answers that you’re quite happy being the underpinning, the foundation behind either the customer solution or the partner’s sales motion. How does that shape what you’re focused on personally and program-wise in terms of what partners can expect from you and from Red Hat over the balance of the year and beyond? Kevin Kennedy: My mantra has been to do more with less. What I mean by that is that the partners who already fit the profile I’ve been describing – those with core competencies and skills, strong market presence, tremendous customer relationships, and investments in upskilling their people with the technical and sales expertise to represent Red Hat well in the marketplace – are the partners I want to invest in to a high degree. The partners who may traditionally have just wanted to put our logo on their website and clicked through to become a partner because they wanted to resell or perform more fulfilment activities – that’s great, and I still want to welcome those partners. But those are not the partners around whom I’m going to build programs or in whom I’m going to invest heavily. They’re not the partners where I’m going to continue putting direct resources side by side with them to win in the marketplace. I want to go deeper and wider with fewer partners who have the investments and skills necessary to bring customers the outcomes and efficiencies they’re looking for. Robert Dutt: That’s a great place to leave it. Kevin, thank you very much for taking the time. Kevin Kennedy: Thank you for having me. It’s been a great time, and I appreciate the opportunity. Robert Dutt: There you have it, Kevin Kennedy from Red Hat. I’d like to thank Kevin for his time today. He’s someone who has thought seriously about how this business actually works from multiple vantage points, and that comes through. Thanks for listening as well. A couple of things I’m taking away from this one. The “Intel Inside” framing that Kevin used – the idea that Red Hat is increasingly going to be the underpinning of solutions that customers buy and partners build, without necessarily being the name on the box – is a significant strategic statement. It’s a bet that being foundational is worth more than being front and centre. It’s worth watching how that plays out for partners who are building practices around Red Hat technology, or potentially are. And the ecosystem-versus-channel distinction doesn’t come off as just a title change. When you’re talking about a single customer engagement that might bring together a cloud provider, a services integrator, a software specialist and a reseller, all at the same table, the question of how you build a program and reward structure around that is unsolved across the industry. Red Hat is working on it, but so are a lot of other people. For Canadian partners specifically, the data sovereignty conversation is one to pay attention to. Kevin was candid that it’s reshaping how Red Hat thinks about going to market outside the United States, and the Canadian regulatory environment is only going to make that more pressing over the next few years. If you found this useful, please follow or subscribe wherever you get your podcasts. We’re on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, YouTube and most major directories. Ratings and reviews are always appreciated. Until next time, I’m Robert Dutt for ChannelBuzz.ca, and I’ll see you in the channel.

1 · SummaryPart 2 of 2. Part 1 laid out the bet: a fund built only for Indian consumer brands, back when the idea sounded absurd, and the anti-power-law machine Kanwal Singh built to make it work. This half is the person. The near-decade at Hindustan Lever that gave him his love of consumer, the Intel years, and the Paper Boat conviction that taught him to back the founder over the idea. Then the man himself: parents who came to India as refugees from Pakistan, a father who kept collecting degrees while feeding the family, the coach he started seeing in his sixties and what separates coaching from therapy, and how he reads a founder by meeting their family. He turned down twice the money he could have raised. He rates his life a 10.2 · Chapters0:00 Part 2 intro 1:22 The Hindustan Lever decade that started it all 2:25 Intel Inside, and bringing the inside out 4:22 The Paper Boat conviction: backing the founder 6:38 What he adds as Fireside's "CEO," and value of good 17:53 Capping the fund: turning down 2x the money 20:24 Hiring: read the person, meet the family 27:01 Refugees, and a father who never stopped studying 30:39 Three words, and a 100%-locked calendar 33:30 Motivating through the down days 34:51 The coach, and coaching vs therapy 43:40 How he learns, and consumer vs tech founders 51:27 Rating his life a 10, and success redefined 52:47 Cotswolds, golf, and the empty nest refilled3 · Pull-quotes[17:56] "I could have raised 2x of this. Genuinely, we could have raised 2x of this."[23:55] "You cannot build to sell. You build for sustenance, you build for good."[27:04] "Both my parents were refugees from Pakistan."[51:34] "A 10." (asked how happy he is with his life)4 · Frameworks & mental modelsFounder assessment through the family: read a founder by their story and support system, often over a meal with their spouse, on the belief that no one survives a decade-long build without one.Build for sustenance, not to sell: the best businesses are bought, not sold; you build for the long run and treat a sale as a business decision along the way.Value of good ("do good to do well"): founder first, planet first, one Fireside, with goodness as the foundation of doing well.Coaching vs therapy: therapy addresses a medical issue; coaching is vulnerability and honesty in a business context, and only works once you have the self-awareness to accept there's a problem.This episode was produced by Rohin Dharmakumar and mixed and mastered by Rajiv CN.Write to us at fp@the-ken.com with your feedback, suggestions, and guests you would want to see on First Principles.If you enjoyed this episode, please help us spread the word by sharing and gifting it to your friends and family.

Founded in 2010, the Institut Pasteur spinout PathoQuest sold to top CRO Charles River for $70M this year, a product of years of collaboration and stepwise investments.Jean‑François tells us how the exit unfolded, as well as the importance of biosafety and CMC as pharma and biotech outsource heavily and cell and gene therapies mature. We also cover how animal testing is disappearing from CMC and how France must nurture its biotech ecosystem.---For transparency, this episode has been sponsored by PathoQuest.---⭐️ ABOUT THE SPEAKERJean-François has more than 20 years of pharma leadership under his belt. Before his ten years at PathoQuest, he was a Senior Vice-President in charge of Ipsen's GI-oncology and endocrinology franchise.He has an engineering degree and a master's degree in Foreign Trade.

When a company moves from lab validation to commercial conversations, the phone does not just ring once. It starts ringing from multiple directions.HPQ Silicon's technology partner Novacium has signed a non-binding, non-exclusive Letter of Intent with GH Technologies, a Hong Kong based B2B distributor, to evaluate potential commercial opportunities for high capacity GEN4 lithium-ion cells in Asia Pacific markets.The LOI covers Novacium's GEN4 18650 and 21700 formats, along with other lithium-ion batteries built on Novacium's GEN4 silicon anode technology. Asia Pacific represents more than 57% of global demand for cylindrical lithium-ion cells, making it one of the most important regions for battery commercialization.GH Technologies entered the LOI following its evaluation of Novacium GEN4 cells, including reported capacity exceeding 6,600 mAh, reported energy density of 319.9 Wh/kg, and international certifications including IEC 62133, UL 1642, and UN 38.3.A related Novacium LinkedIn post added another layer of context, referencing a potential partnership value of more than US$30 million over 36 months. That figure should be understood as potential value, not confirmed revenue or a completed sales contract. Still, when combined with the official LOI, it points to the scale of the commercial opportunity now being evaluated.For HPQ, which holds a 36.8% equity interest in Novacium and exclusive North American rights to commercialize the technology under the ENDURA+ trademark, the story is moving from technical performance toward early commercial execution.WHAT YOU NEED TO KNOWAsia Expansion: Novacium signed a nonbinding, nonexclusive LOI with GH Technologies to evaluate potential commercial opportunities for GEN4 battery technologies across Asia Pacific markets.Potential US$30M Value: A Novacium LinkedIn post referenced a potential partnership value of more than US$30 million over 36 months, which should be viewed as potential value rather than confirmed revenue.High Capacity Results: GH Technologies entered the LOI after evaluating Novacium GEN4 cells, including reported capacity exceeding 6,600 mAh and reported energy density of 319.9 Wh/kg.Major Battery Market: Asia Pacific represents more than 57% of global demand for cylindrical lithium-ion cells, according to the company's release.Phone Ringing: Bernard Tourillon says HPQ is now focused on converting growing market interest into first sales, with about 10 NDAs active.Nimble Strategy: Rather than chasing only large, slow moving contracts, HPQ is targeting flexible buyers in markets such as drones, electric bikes, power tools, defense, embedded systems, and high energy density electronic equipment.CEO Bernard Tourillon:“This LOI provides a framework for Novacium and GH Technologies to evaluate potential business opportunities involving GEN4 battery technologies in Asia-Pacific markets. HPQ's 36.8% equity ownership in Novacium SAS and its exclusive North American license provide the Company with access to these technologies for Canada, the United States, and Mexico under the HPQ ENDURA+ trademark.”INVESTOR TAKEAWAYHPQ Silicon is progressing from lab validation toward early commercial execution. Novacium's GEN4 battery technology has now attracted an Asia Pacific LOI with GH Technologies, following reported high capacity cell performance and international certifications. HPQ's 36.8% equity interest in Novacium and exclusive North American commercialization rights under the ENDURA+ trademark give the company multiple ways to participate if the technology continues to advance.For investors, the key question is no longer only whether the technology can perform in testing. The next stage is whether HPQ and Novacium can convert interest, validation, and commercial discussions into first revenue, customer adoption, and a scalable commercialization model.

Episode 521 00:00 Introduction 01:58 AI layoffs impact on commercial real estate 03:30 Logistic & Industrial real estate growth 05:05 Intel exponential performance of past 12 months 15:44 Boeing too big to fail … 2020 flashback 20:00 Next book: invest with the Illuminati 21:16 Nvidia upcoming earnings what for backorder issues 29:45 Alphabet is the best Deep State stock Watch the VIDEO Sign up for free ALERTs & Market Commentary at:  https://www.investablewealth.com/subscribe/ ——————————————————

https://youtu.be/oPA1dSUab9Y James Green, CEO of Cognome and former Pixar executive under Steve Jobs, is driven by a deep curiosity and a pull toward ideas that can create massive impact. From early internet ventures to mobile innovation and now AI in healthcare, James has consistently aligned himself with transformative trends. In this episode, he shares hard-earned lessons from scaling multiple companies and introduces a simple but powerful framework that explains why many startups struggle to grow beyond their early stages. We explore James' 3-Stage StartUp Growth Framework: Whiteboard Phase, PowerPoint Phase, PDF Phase—a model that captures how organizations must evolve as they scale. He explains why early-stage chaos is necessary, how structure begins to take shape in the middle phase, and why standardization becomes critical at scale. James also dives into the toughest leadership challenges—especially making difficult people decisions—and shares why aligning with strong market tailwinds and creating “pull” from customers is essential for sustainable growth. — Grow Your Business in 3 Phases with James Green  Good day, dear listeners. Steve Preda here with the Management Blueprint, and my guest today is James Green, the CEO of Cognome, a health tech company that is solving the problem of how to manage different AI models that are being deployed in healthcare today. Earlier, he worked as a vice president at Disney. He worked directly under Steve Jobs at Pixar, and he has had at least six other CEO roles in ed tech, media, and healthcare. Welcome to the show, James.  Thank you very much. Delighted to be here.  Yeah, super excited. And Steve Jobs—you don't often have people that have known Steve Jobs now even Tim Cook has resigned. Yeah. Yeah.  And it’s 13 years, I guess. Steve Jobs is being gone. So what was it like working with the man? Was he a difficult boss?  First of all, most of the things you hear about him are accurate. So it’s not one of these things where you hear a lot about Steve Jobs and actually the man was totally different. So most of what you’ve heard is true. And I’ll give you one short anecdote sort of before we go on, which is something that I always found incredibly impressive about him. When you work for him, if you disagreed and said, “Hey, you want it to be white, I want it to be black,” without hesitation he would say something like, “Here are seven reasons why you're wrong.” First of all, before we go into those seven reasons, what’s impressive about that is he had a number and he stuck with it.  And it happened in seconds and he didn’t know before. So if you think about that, it’s hard to keep all of that in your head. So the guy was just super, super clever. And then he would list them 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, and you’d be out. Like it’s done. It’s like, “Oh, damn.” So yeah, he was unbelievable human, and it was an honor and a privilege to have worked with him.  Yeah, well, that's awesome—to talk to you, having worked with him and having some direct experience. Definitely not an easy boss when he has seven guns to shoot you down. Yeah.  But there's a lot to learn. I mean, you learn the most from these kinds of bosses.  Yeah.  So let's get into the question—which is normally the first one, but this is the exception: What is your personal “why,” and how are you manifesting it in Cognome, James, and in your previous jobs?  Yeah, I've thought about this a lot. I've tried to come up with what my “why” really is. And what I’ve come up with is I can’t help myself. And I’m going to go through examples of it and what I mean by that. I pay a lot of attention to the world. I pay a lot of attention to what’s going on. I get very seduced by new ideas and new things and things that I think will have big impact. And once I start thinking about it and thinking about what that impact is, I cannot help but start getting involved in it. That sounds very abstract, so I want to try to make that super concrete. So when I was working at Pixar, for example—the internet was being born. This is the late '90s.  I couldn't help myself. I started an ad-serving company called Sabela Media. That company got sold to 24/7, then to DoubleClick, which later got acquired by Google. So the internet was there. I had to do it. I had to have something in it. Then after that, I was thinking about what to do next—and mobile phones, if you remember, were still flip phones, mostly used for texting. The second company that I did was putting content onto those phones. It just seemed obvious to me—I couldn't help myself. I saw the opportunity, and it clearly worked. That company was called GiantBear. It was sold to BlueCora. After that, there was this crazy innovation going on in television of all things with effects. Now, again, we take these things for granted. We’ve got AI creating things all day long, back in the day, we didn’t. So I ran a company called PVI, which is famous for inventing the first-down line you see in football games. So that was kind of the very first virtual object you saw in live things. Again, it may seem like, oh, that’s an everyday event, but back in the day it was totally not. And I think it opened up football to many more people—you no longer needed the chain crew to understand what was going on. And then if we fast-forward—there are a few things in the middle, but I don't want to bore everyone—to where I am today at Cognome. I even wore my little Cognome shirt so I could advertise it throughout the podcast.  Yeah, that's smart. I have to do that.  AI is clearly the big thing today. But for me, intellectually, it's not enough to just say, “I'll do an AI model,” like everyone else. For me, healthcare is one of the areas that AI will have the biggest impact with. Healthcare for a lot of reasons has been a laggard technologically for specific things about how they store data, so it hasn’t been adopted things like multi-tenant SaaS, because the data has to stay local and things like this. So AI will revolutionize it. And AI will make decisions about whether people live or die, right? So it's really consequential. And for me, the question is—how are you going to manage that? That's a super interesting intellectual opportunity. And so Cognome ExplainerAI. So my “why” is: what's going on, what's interesting, and what's changing the world? And the beautiful thing about that is you get a “rising tide lifts all boats” situation. You're not fighting against a trend—you're moving with it. The whole world is rising, and you can be part of that. That’s sort of my “why”.  Yeah, so basically—in other words—it's about coming up with revolutionary ideas and implementing them?  Yeah. I mean, I want to make an impact in the world. I want to make a difference. I'm not a very religious person—in fact, not at all. So I believe our time here is limited. I want to make a difference. I want to be part of what's going on. So yeah, that's my “why.”  Yeah—tapping into trends. Well, that’s great. I mean, don't know if it's a “why,” but making the most of the opportunity to be here and maximizing impact—that's a huge one. Love it.  Yeah.  STEVE PREDA: So let me segue to the next one. This podcast is all about frameworks. So the objective here is what’s a shortcut that you can teach the listeners that they can implement in their business? So what is your “shortcut” to success? Maybe “shortcut” is the wrong word. What is the framework you use to interpret the world, understand it better, and make decisions?  Yeah, this is another thing I struggled with a little bit. So I listened to your questions, and I tried to make my answers really personal. I'm trying to be authentic—this is what I actually do all the time, as opposed to this is what I’m doing at the moment, or this is what I did for a second. The truth is, frameworks come and go. There are a lot of frameworks out there. I've probably used 15 different sales frameworks. I mostly operate in the B2B world, so there are lots of frameworks you can use—for example, in sales. But I tried to think of something more consistent—a framework I've used across every company I've worked with, all the time. And the one I always come back to is about growth. So what I want to talk about is: how do you manage a company that's going through growth? Because it's not obvious—and I do have a framework for it. And unlike some of the other frameworks—like something McKinsey, Bain, or someone’s invented this framework and you are adopting it. This is really pretty personal to me, and I’ve adopted various little things about it. There are these two ideas that live in parallel. One is in the sales process, where I think companies go through this idea of, I call it a Whiteboard sales process, a PowerPoint sales process. And forgive me for being a little dated, but a PDF style process, something you can’t change. And at the same time, they go through these stages where you are a small company, a medium-sized company, and a larger company. Think of it roughly as fewer than 12 people, then 10 to 75, and then 75 to 100 and beyond. And I’ve managed all of these sizes. And what’s interesting about these is that if you don’t have a framework to manage yourself through these stages, you’re going to fail. You as a leader will be replaced. I personally have replaced leaders who cannot go through those kinds of things. One of the things I've done in my career is act as a sort of hired gun for VCs. They make an investment, and then they bring me in to replace the founder if they haven't been able to navigate that growth stage. And so the framework works like this. When you're starting a company—what I call the “whiteboard” phase—what you're selling is a little different every time. And the consequence of that inside the company is everyone is doing everything. It’s a little chaotic and it’s okay. Like, less than 10 people, it’s okay. It’s okay that the finance person is doing a little selling and the engineer is doing a little marketing. It’s okay, because you only have 10 people maybe. When you go into a client, you are sort of inventing yourself as you go. There's always that first client where you're saying, “I think we should do this. This is how I'm going to help you make money, save money, or do something better.”  You’re figuring things out. Yeah.  And maybe there's some pivots in there. Maybe there isn't. Not everyone gets to be Google and get it right the first time, but you’ll see. In the end, you start getting things right. And then you go through what I call the PowerPoint phase. So what this is—you now have more than 10 people. It kind of isn't okay that the sales guy is doing finance, or the engineer is doing marketing. You actually have people in their swim lanes. I call it the PowerPoint because you've built PowerPoints, so you’ve got slides that you can use and it’s replicable. Guess what? You tend to tweak them for each client. You are still—you know what—the way you're selling to… I don't want to make a stupid example up—Home Depot is still a little different than selling to Lowe's. You know that—even though it should be exactly the same—it's still a little different. You're tweaking it each time. You're moving slide three to slide seven. Sometimes you don't show slide 10. You're still tweaking it.  Yeah. I relate to that.  And your organization is structured, but not completely rigid. Everyone still knows each other in the company. It's up to maybe 50—I think it maxes out at about 75 people. But every single person in the company knows each other. They’re all collaborating. You don’t need a lot of structure inside the company because there’s sort of culture in there to hold everyone together, right? And then you get to the third stage, which I call the PDF stage—where you've figured it out. You sell the same thing. Maybe you have three PDFs because you're selling in three verticals. But you go into a client—this is the thing—and it never changes. Slide one is always slide one. Slide two is always slide two. Slide three is always slide three. And you have maybe a hundred people in your company. And by the way, now you have levels. So not everybody knows everybody. And as a CEO, I have my lieutenants. My lieutenants have people working for them. And I sort of feel like everyone can manage—I don't know—five, six, seven, eight people. More than that is difficult unless the roles are not very sophisticated. So you need this management layer, which separates the CEO from the rest of the organization. So you need a lot more structure. And as you go through these three phases—and they're really different—a tragic thing happens. It happens all the time. The person who was so helpful in the whiteboard phase, who was your go-to person, they don’t make it in the third phase because they’re a generalist. They liked the chaos. They liked being able to have their foot, and they’ll complain to you. They'll say, “Why aren't you listening to me?” It's an engineer saying, “Why isn't sales listening to me?” Dude, you're an engineer—stick to your knitting. Like, no. And this culture goes through every single company I’ve ever run. Most of them have gone through these three phases—small, medium, and large. And one of the things I try to do with employees in these phases—and this is part of the framework—is to give them a huge amount of latitude to see if they can succeed in the phase. So, to give them the freedom—if you're being blunt—to give them enough rope to hang themselves. And if you're being kind, to give them the freedom to be who they are, to be the best they can be, and to support them—not control them. And so, if you are aware of this framework as you grow, and you give that latitude, and you hire smart people, then you can see which ones you keep and which ones you don't. And honestly, the worst and hardest part of managing through growth is that selection and weeding-out process—of the people who worked in the first stage but don't work in the last stage. So that is the only kind of framework for me that has stood the test of time. It has worked in media, worked in healthcare, and worked in various other places. Does that make sense to you? Does it resonate with you?  Absolutely. And I was just working on a chapter in my new book, and I was actually writing about this very idea—why some companies are never able to grow, because they are not able to make these decisions, these painful decisions, as you described.  Super painful—the worst. It’s the worst part. Firing people is the worst part of being a CEO. If you enjoy that, you’re a bad CEO. You want to have a positive environment, so you want to everyone have a good time. And when there’s growth, usually there’s incredible optimism and great culture. So any CEO who enjoys that process is not a good CEO. Yeah, that’s so true. This is kind of a difficult thing. You have to be ruthless to some degree.  You do. Yeah. That's why this framework has helped me—and it's helped me be gracious and kind to people. Let's just call her Jane, right? A totally fictitious person. But you can go to Jane in stage three and say, “Jane, do you remember how much you loved it in the first phase?” I'm going to give you some time here. You are going to leave, but I'm going to give you some time to work on a special project. But you also need to find your next startup—because you love that environment. And I am going to put this bureaucracy in place, and you're going to fight it until the day you die. So I can't have you here—I just can't. I can give you this little thing to do and you can have some weeks to go do that and give you some time, but the framework helps you be gracious and helps you make those decisions as you grow. That’s an amazing framework. This is really unique. We've recorded, I think, close to 400 episodes with different frameworks—and this hasn't come up. Nothing similar has come up.  Woo-hoo.  Love it. So where are you now in your business? Which phase are you in?  I am in between the whiteboard and the PowerPoint phase. Maybe because I'm an optimist, I'm going to say I'm in the PowerPoint phase. But I know there's still part of me that's drawing things on the whiteboard. We have 12 people, so we're just at the edge of growing out of that phase. I don’t have that layer in the middle. We have half a dozen clients. I suspect that by the end of this year, we'll be fully in the PowerPoint phase. And it'll be another 18 months after that until we get to the next stage—and that's assuming we continue to grow. I mean, my whole raison d'être is to find these really special things, grow them, and make an impact. So let’s hope that happens. Yeah, well, you've had some practice in your previous six CEO positions, so I'm sure you'll figure this out. So what drives growth in your business?  Yeah, this goes a little bit back to phase one. So I've picked an area that's growing by itself. I mean, AI—there are more and more models being deployed in hospitals. Hospitals are growing. The number of models deployed in them is growing at about 2.2 times the rate of the general population. So good for me. There are federal regulations coming that say you need to control what your AI models are doing. That's also good for me. It's a lovely day when regulation is good for your business—it usually isn't. But it's not unusual in healthcare. If you look at electronic health records, that was driven by government regulation and funding. So this is a little bit like that. Federal, state, and other institutions are driving this trend. And then there are things happening inside healthcare organizations themselves that we can tap into. I always think that when you're selling, you should have a good story. So I'm going to tell you the kind of story we use.  When we meet with a chief information officer, we tell stories like the ones I'm about to share. And this really helps us tap into that growth. Because part of growth in a B2B environment is having a strong sales team, good engagement, and solid frameworks—like: do they have budget? Are you talking to the right decision-maker? All of those kinds of frameworks, which to me are more tactical—I've used a lot of them. But we go in and say things like: “Have you ever experienced a situation in radiology where a new model was released and no one told you about it—and now you have to monitor it?” This is happening. And they're like, “Oh my God—yes.” And then they tell you a story about it.  And then you say, “What about that note from CMS?”—that's the organization that runs Medicare and Medicaid, for those not in healthcare. “Did you hear that they're coming down to audit some of your peers?” And they're like, “Oh my God—we just got notice that we're being audited.” And then—how about your board? How's your board doing? Are they coming down and saying, “What are you doing in AI?” So you try to tell these stories and then you create this tension, where they have to grow and they have to control, and then that’s where we come in. We can help all of these companies manage all of these models. What we do—we have this product called ExplainerAI. We tap into the underlying data from the electronic health record—the EHR, or medical record. We tap into the models—the front end—and the logging files behind them. And then we can tell whether the model is exhibiting drift, and how it's performing across different areas. That could be geographic areas, or demographic areas. Is it performing the same with young men and older women? Is it performing the same over time? Is it degrading? Is it releasing personal health information when it shouldn't? Is it hallucinating, if it's an LLM? That’s what we do. And then we can send alerts out to people, saying, “Hey, listen, this model is making shit up right now, you need to deal with it.” And then they can talk to the vendor and handle it. So we're in a good space. And so growth is, to some extent, this idea of a rising tide lifting all boats. I've picked an area that's growing, so I can grow with it. And then part of it is being connected and having a good way of engaging with people who are buyers. And so we have these stories that we tell in our decks about how we help in these situations.  Have you had to pivot between the original idea and where you are?  Yeah, we have. And for anyone who's listening and thinking, “Oh my God, I'm going to have to pivot,” I use Google as my favorite example of someone who just got so lucky. They were like, “We're going to have this little thing that searches the internet,” and they never really changed—until they got so big they could do more. That is the exception, not the rule. And what’s interesting about the way we started is it’s still a core differentiator for us—we started with the ability to take data from an EHR, from a medical record, translate it, and store it in a common data model. It's called OMOP. It's the most common way that researchers structure this kind of data.  And we thought this technology would be widely adopted by researchers. We have contracts with people like Hopkins, Ohio State, NYU—big institutions—but it's not big enough. It’s not going fast enough. What it does do, though, is for our ExplainerAI, it gives us the technology—it's a moat—to connect to the source of truth, the electronic health record, so that you can get actual outcomes versus predictions. Many models cannot get the actual data out of the EHR. So they just say, “This is my prediction, this is my prediction, this is my prediction.” And over time—that's fine, those are predictions—but how do they actually compare to what really happened?  Yeah. What actually happened? And because of where we started, we have a way of efficiently and accurately getting that information. So it is still the bedrock. But it's definitely a pivot. And then you basically put an AI layer on top, and that's great. And how did you know when to pivot? How do you reach that tipping point? How do you know this is the moment—you have to pull the plug on this because it's not working?  First of all, I think on a personal level, I'm always late. So I think I could always have made this decision earlier. If I'm being self-critical at a high level. And I don't think I have a clean answer—but I'll tell you how I've done it. If you have a better way, I'd love to know. It’s about sales engagement. So you go to a hundred people, you have a hundred meetings, and you sell to two. That's not good enough. It's just not good enough. And those two are complaining. What you want to see in a product—and I think this is true of all great products, especially today—I use examples like Facebook and Tesla—is that products are pulled, not pushed. If you still find yourself, after nine months, pushing—and you don't have the momentum where your product is being pulled—you're wrong. You need your clients to be making referrals, and you need to be pulled into deals. In today's advertising and marketing world, it's too noisy.  Maybe back in the seventies you could do it, but now it's just too noisy—especially in B2B. There are so many people selling to the same buyers that they need to hear about your product from others, have people around them recommending it, and pulling you in. There's some time—and I usually take closer to a year, which is long. It would be better for me to do it in six months or even three months. I haven’t found a way to do that where you pivot if you’re just not getting traction, basically.  Yeah, okay. I love it. So what's one thing in your company that you're trying to figure out right now? One thing in my company that I'm trying to figure out right now is how to further ramp up sales. I'm cheating a little bit here, because I think we may already have it figured out—but leaving you with an unanswered question isn't very helpful. So we were having—and still are, to some extent—problems getting ExplainerAI rolled out. People were interested in it, but they wouldn't buy. So we tried to figure out why. And one of the things we found is this: For those of your listeners who may not know, healthcare is probably the largest portion of GDP in the country. Buyers are very large. We don't always think about it this way, but if you do—everyone goes to the doctor. It affects 100% of the population. And these large institutions—a hospital is usually a multi-billion-dollar organization—and there are about 6,500 of them in the country. So we've got 6,500 multi-billion-dollar companies in this country. It’s crazy, right? They don't want to buy from small companies—they want to buy from big companies. This is one of the things we found out. So we get to the finish line, they say yes—and then no one tells you the truth, right? No one says, “I'm not buying from you because you're small.” But we ended up figuring it out through triangulation. So we've been building partnerships. We started with Intel. We made some of our models work on Intel CPUs, and I'm actually pretty proud of that work. For the nerds out there—we're working on Xeon 6 chips, the Granite Rapids chips—running locally deployed LLM ensembles. Think of it as models like Qwen and LLaMA running inside their chips—what I'd call small-to-medium language models, not large language models.  Up to 32 billion parameters, running on a CPU, not a GPU. So that’s a big deal. Intel loves us, and we've been able to leverage their ecosystem to have their partners sell our product. So now you've got HPE selling ExplainerAI. You've got Lenovo selling ExplainerAI. And probably my favorite partner—love you, ePlus, if you're listening—I think you're the best. They're a Fortune 1000 reseller selling ExplainerAI. So now we have large companies selling our product, and that's starting to come to fruition. Now, it's not solved—my revenue isn't going boom yet—because if it were, I'd be firmly in the PowerPoint phase, heading toward the PDF phase. But it's looking really good, and I'm very excited.  Cognome Inside.  There you go. Cognome Inside—yes. Cognome Inside. Intel Inside—for those of you who remember. Yes.  Love it. Okay, so before we wrap up, I have one more question for you: What is a question that entrepreneurs should always be asking themselves?  I think the hardest thing about being an entrepreneur is dealing with the amplitude of the variance that happens inside it. There are incredibly high days, and there are incredibly low days. There are days when you don't even want to get out of bed in the morning. You don't have many clients, and one of them has just told you that you're a complete moron. Even if you've got the best product in the world, if you're in the whiteboard or PowerPoint phase, you're going to make mistakes. You just are. No one's perfect. And there are days when some combination of a client, an employee, or the product—something has failed, someone has left, something isn't working—and you feel awful. So what I'd say to entrepreneurs is this: if you really are an entrepreneur, it is your personality that you can still get through those and wake up in the morning and say, I believe in this. I know I can do it. I can keep doing it.  And one of the things that I think separates an entrepreneur from someone who isn't is this: When I go through these moments, I ask myself, “What's the worst that could happen?” And I usually start with: “Is anyone going to die?” And the answer is almost always no. No one's going to die. So it’s not that bad. And by the way, I remember giving that advice to a young person once—and I saw their face go white. And I thought, “Oh, that's not an entrepreneur.” That's the kind of person who hears that and thinks, “Oh my God, really? You think about the worst thing that could happen so you can deal with it?” And I'm like, yes.  Does that apply to the company itself? Is the company included in that “worst-case” question?  To me, the next step is: is an individual going to die? That's a higher stake than whether the company is going to die. But yes—is the company going to die? That's part of the thinking, because you're going through all the consequences. Am I going to lose all my money? Is the company going to fail? Those are escalations of that thinking. But to me, company death is less tragic than a human death.  Yeah, true.  Not everyone might agree with that, but I think so.  You can try again.  Yeah.  Start another company.  Yeah, exactly. Anyway, your question was: what is a question that an entrepreneur should always be asking themselves? For me, turning that upside down and inside out—it's: what's the worst that can happen, and can you get through it? Are you able to get through it? Do you have the drive and the imagination to keep going? That's the question I've continually found myself asking, as opposed to any other kind of existential question. And I think some of the other questions are not always the right way to look at it—like“Is this the best business?” Because there's a very big difference between an entrepreneur and an investor.  An entrepreneur has to keep going, while an investor might quit. Investors, they’re playing the portfolio game. They can say, “That's not working—I'm dropping that and keeping this.” As an entrepreneur, you can't really play that game with your time. I mean, Elon Musk is running four companies—so okay, fine—but most of us aren't. Most of us are running one or two, and we need more tenacity to make it work—to pivot or to find another path. That's a really big difference between an entrepreneur and other kinds of people. And it's why I've kept doing it. It comes back to the very first question: why do you do this? I can't help myself. I just can't. It's what I like to do.  Yeah, the contrast is addictive—the contrast between near-death and near-Nirvana, right? Yeah. I love it. I mean, you can't have euphoria without depression. You wouldn't know what it was—it would just seem normal.  Yeah, just a personal example of that—I was in Hungary, where I was born, for the election two weeks ago.  By the way, I'm so excited about that election, for many reasons.  The exhilaration that I felt—and that everyone else felt—was even greater than when the Berlin Wall came down, because the system was worse.  Yeah.  And if they hadn't lived through that for 16 years, they wouldn't have felt it. Now, we didn't experience it directly—but still.  But even I was paying attention to a lot of things, and I was following that one very closely. Even I felt that sense of euphoria. I was like, “That's great.” I was at the dinner table with my wife and kids—and I'm not Hungarian, it's not affecting me. I mean, Viktor Orbán isn't really having any effect on my life at all. Maybe he shows up at some conferences in the U.S., but still—not affecting me. But I'm sitting there at dinner like, “Did you hear what happened today? That's great.” Anyway.  Awesome. I'm glad you're on that side of the equation. James, if people would like to learn more—if they'd like to learn about Cognome and connect with you—where should they go? Where can they find you?  Yeah, so you can certainly go to cognome.com. You can email info@cognome.com. But if you've listened to this podcast, I'm always happy to hear from people. I answer every single email myself. And if you know my name—James Green—you can just put a dot in the middle and add @cognome.com at the end, and that will get to me. Delighted to hear from any of you—especially if you're a CIO in a hospital, you should reach out.  Well, all those hospital CIOs—please call James, or at least send him an email. And for those of you listening—this was an amazing framework: from whiteboard to PowerPoint to PDF. Definitely relatable. And remember—if no one's dying, it's okay. You can always pivot and live to fight another day. So, James, thanks for coming—and thank you for listening. Important Links: James' LinkedIn James' website James' email: info@cognome.com

In this episode of "Voices of Self-Funding," host Ramesh Kumar sits down with Trey Hinson, Founder of Goliath Sales Strategies and a seasoned marketing and sales leader with over 24 years in the healthcare benefits space. Trey unpacks what authentic, research-driven sales and marketing look like in today's self-funded ecosystem. You'll learn: - Why modern brokers are demanding measurable outcomes, value-aligned proof, and a disciplined ICP strategy—and how carriers and TPAs can better meet those expectations. - The shift from feature-centric pitching to case-study-backed storytelling. - The importance of rep enablement for building a sales system that scales sustainably. This is a must-listen conversation for anyone looking to strengthen broker relationships, improve retention, and build sales systems that last. Tune in now! This episode is sponsored by zakipoint Health. At zakipoint Health, we are transforming the healthcare experience by delivering transparency, direction, and personalized support to members of self-insured plans. Our powerful platform unifies all benefit services, data, insights, and tools into one intelligent ecosystem empowering members to make informed decisions and take proactive steps toward better health outcomes. With AI at its core, zakipoint Health functions as the “Intel Inside” of healthcare navigation driving engagement, reducing risk, and delivering measurable cost savings. Employers and partners benefit from robust reporting, actionable insights, and tools that not only identify healthcare risks but also guide members toward high-value care. By bridging the gap between complexity and clarity in the U.S. healthcare system, we help organizations lower costs, improve outcomes, and support healthier, more engaged populations making healthcare less stressful and more effective for millions. Find all of our network podcasts on your favorite podcast platforms and be sure to subscribe and like us. Learn more at www.healthcarenowradio.com/listen/

On this episode of Voices of Self-Funding, host Ramesh Kumar welcomes Jonathan Socko, President of East Coast Underwriters, LLC, a Managing General Underwriter (MGU) specializing in Stop Loss insurance. Jonathan shares his perspective on stop-loss underwriting for small groups and unveils the blueprint for a remarkable success story: a 30-life employer group that has been successfully self-funded for 10 years with their PMPM costs increasing only 10% over that decade. You'll learn: - The crucial role of partner cohesion between the broker, TPA, and stop-loss carrier to manage claims proactively. - Why data transparency and a specific data flow are non-negotiable for effective claim prediction and management. - The essential mindset shift—and commitment to aggressively attacking costs—that ensures a small group's self-funded plan remains successful and sustainable. Don't miss this conversation for an insider's view on stop-loss and the strategy that delivers long-term savings. At zakipoint Health, we are transforming the healthcare experience by delivering transparency, direction, and personalized support to members of self-insured plans. Our powerful platform unifies all benefit services, data, insights, and tools into one intelligent ecosystem empowering members to make informed decisions and take proactive steps toward better health outcomes. With AI at its core, zakipoint Health functions as the “Intel Inside” of healthcare navigation driving engagement, reducing risk, and delivering measurable cost savings. Employers and partners benefit from robust reporting, actionable insights, and tools that not only identify healthcare risks but also guide members toward high-value care. By bridging the gap between complexity and clarity in the U.S. healthcare system, we help organizations lower costs, improve outcomes, and support healthier, more engaged populations making healthcare less stressful and more effective for millions. Find all of our network podcasts on your favorite podcast platforms and be sure to subscribe and like us. Learn more at www.healthcarenowradio.com/listen

เคยสังเกตสติกเกอร์เล็กๆ บนคอมพิวเตอร์หรือแล็ปท็อปของเราไหมครับ สติกเกอร์ที่มีคำว่า Intel Inside ดูเผินๆ มันก็แค่สติกเกอร์ธรรมดาที่แปะมากับเครื่องเพื่อบอกสเปก แต่ความจริงแล้ว เบื้องหลังสติกเกอร์จิ๋วแผ่นนี้ คือหนึ่งในแคมเปญการตลาดที่ประสบความสำเร็จที่สุดในประวัติศาสตร์โลกธุรกิจ แคมเปญที่เปลี่ยนบริษัทผลิตชิ้นส่วนที่แทบไม่มีคนทั่วไปรู้จัก ให้กลายเป็นแบรนด์ระดับโลกที่ทรงอิทธิพลเหนือบริษัทผู้ผลิตคอมพิวเตอร์เสียอีก เรื่องราวนี้มีจุดเริ่มต้นอย่างไร และ Intel พลิกเกมธุรกิจได้อย่างไร วันนี้ผมจะเล่าให้ฟังครับ เลือกฟังกันได้เลยนะครับ อย่าลืมกด Follow ติดตาม PodCast ช่อง Geek Forever's Podcast ของผมกันด้วยนะครับ =========================  สนับสนุนโดย =========================

"We don't view ourselves as a TPA, we view ourselves more as a platform... our goal is to simplify and reduce the barriers of entry into the TPA space."The role of the Third-Party Administrator is undergoing a massive evolution. No longer just a back-office claims processor, the modern TPA is being asked to serve as the high-tech, high-touch "nucleus" of the entire health plan.My guest this week is Vinny Esposito, CEO of Reflect Health (formerly S&S Health). Drawing on a decade of experience in the hedge fund world, Vinny recognized a massive opportunity to bring scalable, asset-light infrastructure to the self-funded market. Today, Reflect Health acts almost like the "Intel Inside" of the industry, licensing its proprietary claims technology to other TPAs and health plans.In this episode, we explore exactly what it takes to build the TPA of the future. We discuss how to solve "point solution fatigue" through a centralized marketplace, the mechanics behind infusion drug carve-outs, and how to successfully deploy dynamic deductibles to incentivize better care routing. Vinny also shares his bold vision for "frictionless claims" paid instantly at the point of service, moving us closer to an Amazon-style shopping experience for healthcare.If you want to understand the technological and administrative innovations driving the self-funded market forward, this episode provides the blueprint.Thank you to our 2026 sponsors!ParetoHealth: ParetoHealth empowers midsize employers with a long-term solution to reduce volatility and lower overall health benefits costs. Visit ParetoHealth.com to learn more.Samaritan Fund: A program that connects those who need help to the support they need. We are proud to offer the Samaritan Fund Program. Visit SamaritanFundProgram.com to learn more.Vālenz Health: We're Vālenz Health, your partner in improving health literacy, reducing plan spend, and delivering high-value healthcare. Visit ValenzHealth.com to learn more.Imagine360: Imagine360 helps self-funded employers save on healthcare with smarter health plans. Cut expenses by 20-30% with custom solutions. Contact us today at Imagine360.com.Chapters:(00:00:00) Intro: Competing on Service in the TPA Market (00:01:56) Meet Vinny Esposito & Reflect Health (00:03:35) Rebranding from S&S Health (00:07:32) From Hedge Funds to Healthcare Disruption (00:11:05) The Platform Model: Licensing Tech to Other TPAs (00:15:05) The Marketplace & Infusion Drug Carve-Outs (00:19:14) How the TPA Role is Expanding (The "Nucleus") (00:24:12) Direct Contracting, RBP, and DPC Integration (00:29:15) Dynamic Deductibles & Tiered Networks (00:33:25) Curing "Point Solution Fatigue" (00:41:09) The Future of Stop-Loss and Preventative Care (00:45:44) The Fiduciary Breaking Point & 80% Renewals (00:50:26) Frictionless Claims & Amazon-Style HealthcareKey Links for Social:@SelfFunded on YouTube for video versions of the podcast and much more - https://www.youtube.com/@SelfFundedListen/watch on Spotify - https://open.spotify.com/show/1TjmrMrkIj0qSmlwAIevKA?si=068a389925474f02Listen on Apple Podcasts - https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/self-funded-with-spencer/id1566182286Follow Spencer on LinkedIn - https://www.linkedin.com/in/spencer-smith-self-funded/Follow Spencer on Instagram - https://www.instagram.com/selffundedwithspencer/

"We don't view ourselves as a TPA, we view ourselves more as a platform... our goal is to simplify and reduce the barriers of entry into the TPA space."The role of the Third-Party Administrator is undergoing a massive evolution. No longer just a back-office claims processor, the modern TPA is being asked to serve as the high-tech, high-touch "nucleus" of the entire health plan.My guest this week is Vinny Esposito, CEO of Reflect Health (formerly S&S Health). Drawing on a decade of experience in the hedge fund world, Vinny recognized a massive opportunity to bring scalable, asset-light infrastructure to the self-funded market. Today, Reflect Health acts almost like the "Intel Inside" of the industry, licensing its proprietary claims technology to other TPAs and health plans.In this episode, we explore exactly what it takes to build the TPA of the future. We discuss how to solve "point solution fatigue" through a centralized marketplace, the mechanics behind infusion drug carve-outs, and how to successfully deploy dynamic deductibles to incentivize better care routing. Vinny also shares his bold vision for "frictionless claims" paid instantly at the point of service, moving us closer to an Amazon-style shopping experience for healthcare.If you want to understand the technological and administrative innovations driving the self-funded market forward, this episode provides the blueprint.Thank you to our 2026 sponsors!ParetoHealth: ParetoHealth empowers midsize employers with a long-term solution to reduce volatility and lower overall health benefits costs. Visit ParetoHealth.com to learn more.Samaritan Fund: A program that connects those who need help to the support they need. We are proud to offer the Samaritan Fund Program. Visit SamaritanFundProgram.com to learn more.Vālenz Health: We're Vālenz Health, your partner in improving health literacy, reducing plan spend, and delivering high-value healthcare. Visit ValenzHealth.com to learn more.Imagine360: Imagine360 helps self-funded employers save on healthcare with smarter health plans. Cut expenses by 20-30% with custom solutions. Contact us today at Imagine360.com.Chapters:(00:00:00) Intro: Competing on Service in the TPA Market (00:01:56) Meet Vinny Esposito & Reflect Health (00:03:35) Rebranding from S&S Health (00:07:32) From Hedge Funds to Healthcare Disruption (00:11:05) The Platform Model: Licensing Tech to Other TPAs (00:15:05) The Marketplace & Infusion Drug Carve-Outs (00:19:14) How the TPA Role is Expanding (The "Nucleus") (00:24:12) Direct Contracting, RBP, and DPC Integration (00:29:15) Dynamic Deductibles & Tiered Networks (00:33:25) Curing "Point Solution Fatigue" (00:41:09) The Future of Stop-Loss and Preventative Care (00:45:44) The Fiduciary Breaking Point & 80% Renewals (00:50:26) Frictionless Claims & Amazon-Style HealthcareKey Links for Social:@SelfFunded on YouTube for video versions of the podcast and much more - https://www.youtube.com/@SelfFundedListen/watch on Spotify - https://open.spotify.com/show/1TjmrMrkIj0qSmlwAIevKA?si=068a389925474f02Listen on Apple Podcasts - https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/self-funded-with-spencer/id1566182286Follow Spencer on LinkedIn - https://www.linkedin.com/in/spencer-smith-self-funded/Follow Spencer on Instagram - https://www.instagram.com/selffundedwithspencer/

With a career spanning the US Navy, executive leadership positions at PetSmart and Banfield Pet Hospital, and pioneering online training, Don brings unique insights into building and scaling businesses across industries. Throughout the conversation, Avanish and Don discuss OpenSesame's evolution from an online learning marketplace to an AI-powered platform that serves enterprises, learning management systems, and content publishers. They explore the "Intel Inside" ecosystem strategy, the Simon AI tool that democratizes course creation and enables instant translation into 70 languages, and how organizations can successfully navigate workforce reinvention in the AI era while meeting customers where they are.In this episode, Avanish and Don discuss:OpenSesame's dual-sided platform strategy: Partnering with 200+ LMS/HRIS systems on the delivery side while aggregating 50,000 courses from 200+ publishers, providing distribution for small publishers to reach enterprise customers and enabling large publishers like Harvard Business Publishing to access mid-market and SMB segments.The Simon AI course creation tool: Democratizing content development by enabling subject matter experts to create high-quality courses without instructional designers, with built-in translation capabilities across 70 languages for voiceover and text—expanding global reach for multinational organizations.Workforce reinvention as strategic imperative: Positioning OpenSesame at the center of organizational AI transformation by providing not just technology but comprehensive change management roadmaps, helping HR and learning leaders guide their teams through adoption with curated content and use cases.The "meet them where they are" philosophy: Balancing long-term product vision with practical customer adoption paths, especially during transformational periods like AI implementation, by understanding customer needs deeply before prescribing solutions and allowing products to flex without compromising the ultimate vision.The 1% better daily improvement mindset: Embracing continuous learning and incremental progress as the foundation for breakthrough innovation, recognizing that overnight successes are built on consistent dedication and discipline over time.About Don Spear:Don Spear is CEO of OpenSesame. Before his current role, he founded BlueVolt.com, held executive leadership positions at Banfield Pet Hospital and PetSmart, and served as a submarine officer aboard the USS Tunny (SSN 682).About OpenSesameOpenSesame, the leading provider of online business training, is the choice for L&D professionals wanting to drive learning initiatives forward with innovation, agility, and care. We offer the world's most comprehensive digital learning catalog, with regularly updated content from expert publishers in a variety of formats and languages. By providing comprehensive learning resources and innovative tools like Simon, OpenSesame empowers L&D professionals to exceed their goals and champion learning across their entire organization.Host Avanish SahaiAvanish Sahai is a Tidemark Fellow and served as a Board Member of Hubspot from 2018 to 2023; he currently serves on the boards of Birdie.ai, Flywl.com and Meta.com.br as well as a few non-profits and educational boards. Previously, Avanish served as the vice president, ISV and Apps partner ecosystem of Google from 2019 until 2021. From 2016 to 2019, he served as the global vice president, ISV and Technology alliances at ServiceNow.  From 2014 to 2015, he was the senior vice president and chief product officer at Demandbase.  Prior to Demandbase, Avanish built and led the Appexchange platform ecosystem team at Salesforce, and was an executive at Oracle and McKinsey & Company, as well as various early to mid-stage startups in Silicon Valley.About TidemarkTidemark is a venture capital firm, foundation, and community built to serve category-leading technology companies as they scale.  Tidemark was founded in 2021 by David Yuan, who has been investing, advising, and building technology companies for over 20 years.  Learn more at www.tidemarkcap.com.LinksFollow our host, Avanish SahaiLearn more about Tidemark

After 968 episodes and nearly a decade, I'm pausing the Goal Digger Podcast. Season one is complete, and I'm so excited about what comes next. I've been searching for women who stepped back at the height of their careers not from crisis or failure but from peace, intention, and pure joy. Those stories are rare, so I'm modeling it in real time: what it looks like when a woman makes a conscious, celebratory choice to step away from something that's working because she's designed her life to have that freedom. Here's what lights me up about this: the through line of my entire business has always been about getting back your time. Me being able to make this choice right now, to pause a thriving seven-figure revenue stream while my business continues to run beautifully, is the ultimate proof that everything I've taught actually works. This is the goal we've been digging for all along. I'm not disappearing, I'm expanding. My courses, email list, and programs are still thriving and I'll be even more present and creative in those spaces. Will there be a season two? Maybe. I'm wide open to whatever magic emerges. Stay connected on my email list where I'm personally writing weekly: https://jennakutcher.com/penpals If you've been wondering what it looks like to build something meaningful, enjoy your success, and choose what comes next from a place of abundance and possibility, this one's for you. Goal Digger Facebook Community: https://www.facebook.com/groups/goaldiggerpodcast/ Goal Digger Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/goaldiggerpodcast/ Goal Digger Show Notes: https://jennakutcherblog.com/a-new-chapter-for-goal-digger Thanks to our Goal Digger Sponsors: Sign up for your $1/month Shopify trial period at http://shopify.com/goaldigger. Find a co-host today at http://airbnb.com/host. Check out What Should I Do With My Money? from Morgan Stanley. Listen now at https://mgstnly.lnk.to/bqe8HiAC!GD.  Visit http://www.spectrum.com/freeforlife to learn how you can get Business Internet Free Forever. Experience the power of a Dell PC with Intel Inside®, backed by Dell's price match guarantee. Shop now at https://www.dell.com/deals. Your dream wardrobe's one click away. Visit https://www.revolve.com/goaldigger for 15% off your first order with code GOALDIGGER.

Drew's back on the mic after a few years, and honestly, I wasn't sure what this conversation would uncover. We've been married for fourteen years, together for half of our lives, and we're standing at this threshold where both girls are finally in school full-time and we're asking ourselves: what do we actually want now? Not what we're supposed to want. Not what comes next on the achievement timeline. But what lights us up, what grounds us, what makes us feel alive. Drew never thought he'd be a stay-at-home dad. He definitely never thought he'd be the guy with chickens and a garden and a therapist he calls every week. But here we are, doing the deep work on ourselves both individually and as a couple, figuring out how to lead our marriage differently, how to raise kids who see activism and community service as normal, how to build a life that doesn't require us to be in a constant state of rush. We talk about intuition as a business superpower, why I'm actually an introvert who hates small talk, what happens when you finally stop performing and start slowing down, and the advice Drew would give to anyone partnered with an ambitious woman. This isn't some polished marriage advice episode. It's two people mid-journey, mid-evolution, learning that the best parts of life are often the simplest ones. If you've ever wondered what it looks like to build a marriage that doesn't follow traditional roles, if you're trying to figure out how to grow together while also growing individually, or if you're in a season where you're rediscovering who you are outside of your roles, this one's for you. Goal Digger Facebook Community: https://www.facebook.com/groups/goaldiggerpodcast/ Goal Digger Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/goaldiggerpodcast/ Goal Digger Show Notes: https://jennakutcherblog.com/real-talk-about-marriage-parenthood-and-growth Thanks to our Goal Digger Sponsors: Sign up for your $1/month Shopify trial period at http://shopify.com/goaldigger. Find a co-host today at http://airbnb.com/host. Check out What Should I Do With My Money? from Morgan Stanley. Listen now at https://mgstnly.lnk.to/bqe8HiAC!GD.  Visit http://www.spectrum.com/freeforlife to learn how you can get Business Internet Free Forever. Experience the power of a Dell PC with Intel Inside®, backed by Dell's price match guarantee. Shop now at https://www.dell.com/deals. Your dream wardrobe's one click away. Visit https://www.revolve.com/goaldigger for 15% off your first order with code GOALDIGGER.

Becoming an entrepreneur is the most expensive personal development program you will ever pay for, and I'm not even talking about the money. I'm talking about the version of yourself that you have to let die: the people pleaser who waits for permission, the woman who apologizes before she speaks, that part of you who thinks staying ahead of everything will finally make you safe. I've watched the “girl boss” era rise and fall. I've witnessed hustle culture get worshipped and then finally questioned. I've been in rooms I thought I needed to be in only to realize those weren't my rooms at all. Here's what I know: entrepreneurship is not just about building a business. It's about becoming someone who can. For women especially, this journey will ask you to unlearn almost everything you've been taught: to stop making yourself small, to stop waiting for permission, to stop apologizing for wanting more. Goal Digger Facebook Community: https://www.facebook.com/groups/goaldiggerpodcast/ Goal Digger Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/goaldiggerpodcast/ Goal Digger Show Notes: https://jennakutcherblog.com/entrepreneurship-costs-and-rewards  Thanks to our Goal Digger Sponsors: Sign up for your $1/month Shopify trial period at http://shopify.com/goaldigger. Find a co-host today at http://airbnb.com/host. Check out What Should I Do With My Money? from Morgan Stanley. Listen now at https://mgstnly.lnk.to/bqe8HiAC!GD.  Visit http://www.spectrum.com/freeforlife to learn how you can get Business Internet Free Forever. Experience the power of a Dell PC with Intel Inside®, backed by Dell's price match guarantee. Shop now at https://www.dell.com/deals. Your dream wardrobe's one click away. Visit https://www.revolve.com/goaldigger for 15% off your first order with code GOALDIGGER.

Anna Malaika Tubbs is a two-time New York Times bestselling author and a leading voice in gender, race, and equity. Her newest book Erased: What American Patriarchy Has Hidden From Us is a wake-up call, one that challenges us to rethink everything from who gets remembered to who gets rewarded. I met Anna recently at a retreat hosted by Onsite in Tennessee and she was magnetic. The best part about meeting her is I had no idea what she did for a career and didn't learn about her books until the very last day. Once I heard what she was writing about, I knew she would make the perfect guest for this show. Anna pulls back the curtain on the narratives that have quietly shaped how we see ourselves, our businesses, and our worth. What sets her apart is her ability to take complex systems and translate them into powerful stories that reveal what's been buried and show us how to reclaim what's ours. And trust me, you'll never see patriarchy, power, or your own story the same way again.  So if you've ever felt like the rules of success weren't written for you, if you've struggled with visibility or making space for your full self in your business, if you've been playing small because it felt safer than being too much, this conversation is for you. Goal Digger Facebook Community: https://www.facebook.com/groups/goaldiggerpodcast/ Goal Digger Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/goaldiggerpodcast/ Goal Digger Show Notes: https://jennakutcherblog.com/how-to-break-free-from-patriarchal-systems  Thanks to our Goal Digger Sponsors: Sign up for your $1/month Shopify trial period at http://shopify.com/goaldigger. Find a co-host today at http://airbnb.com/host. Check out What Should I Do With My Money? from Morgan Stanley. Listen now at https://mgstnly.lnk.to/bqe8HiAC!GD.  Visit http://www.spectrum.com/freeforlife to learn how you can get Business Internet Free Forever. Experience the power of a Dell PC with Intel Inside®, backed by Dell's price match guarantee. Shop now at https://www.dell.com/deals. Your dream wardrobe's one click away. Visit https://www.revolve.com/goaldigger for 15% off your first order with code GOALDIGGER.

When you read the title of this episode, you may have thought that I'm here to tell you about the next app you need to download or the algorithm hack you're already late to. But no… Goal Digger, I'm here to tell you what I'm seeing beneath the surface. The shifts that are happening whether we talk about them or not. The moves the sanest, smartest women I know are already making quietly. This isn't about keeping up. It's about seeing what's coming and deciding—on your terms—what you want to build toward. The future doesn't belong to the loudest or the busiest. It belongs to the women who built something they can actually sustain. Who chose presence over performance. Who said no to the parts of this that were slowly killing them. So let's talk about where we're headed. Not so you can add ten more things to your to-do list. But so you can exhale. So you can see what you've been feeling is not just you… It's the beginning of something new. Goal Digger Facebook Community: https://www.facebook.com/groups/goaldiggerpodcast/ Goal Digger Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/goaldiggerpodcast/ Goal Digger Show Notes: https://jennakutcherblog.com/2026-marketing-predictions-for-small-business  Thanks to our Goal Digger Sponsors: Sign up for your $1/month Shopify trial period at http://shopify.com/goaldigger. Find a co-host today at http://airbnb.com/host. Check out What Should I Do With My Money? from Morgan Stanley. Listen now at https://mgstnly.lnk.to/bqe8HiAC!GD.  Visit http://www.spectrum.com/freeforlife to learn how you can get Business Internet Free Forever. Experience the power of a Dell PC with Intel Inside®, backed by Dell's price match guarantee. Shop now at https://www.dell.com/deals. Your dream wardrobe's one click away. Visit https://www.revolve.com/goaldigger for 15% off your first order with code GOALDIGGER.

Every time my mom comes on the show, you ask me to bring her back. You want her wisdom and her perspective, the way she sees straight through to what actually matters… and today, we're giving the people what they want! My mom, Sue Shelerud, is intelligent, fierce, persuasive, empathetic, and deeply respected. Over the years, she built her impact face to face in classrooms and living rooms and hospital hallways. She shaped people and held space and asked the hard questions that made them think differently.  I realized that as I've gotten older, we need collectively to learn from women like her, the ones who led in different ways than we do, the ones whose platform looked different, but whose influence was undeniable. The ones who remind us that impact isn't about how loud you are, it's about how deeply you show up.  So today we're talking about motherhood and identity, about the differences between her generation and mine, about what it means to be a safe space for people, about what gets passed down when you lead with presence and not performance. This powerful conversation is for me, it's for my daughters, it's for anyone trying to learn from the women who came before us, the ones who did things differently, and the ones whose power showed up in ways we're only now learning to name. Goal Digger Facebook Community: https://www.facebook.com/groups/goaldiggerpodcast/ Goal Digger Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/goaldiggerpodcast/ Goal Digger Show Notes: https://jennakutcherblog.com/motherhood-generational-wisdom-conversation-with-my-mom  Thanks to our Goal Digger Sponsors: Sign up for your $1/month Shopify trial period at http://shopify.com/goaldigger. Find a co-host today at http://airbnb.com/host. Check out What Should I Do With My Money? from Morgan Stanley. Listen now at https://mgstnly.lnk.to/bqe8HiAC!GD.  Visit http://www.spectrum.com/freeforlife to learn how you can get Business Internet Free Forever. Experience the power of a Dell PC with Intel Inside®, backed by Dell's price match guarantee. Shop now at https://www.dell.com/deals. Your dream wardrobe's one click away. Visit https://www.revolve.com/goaldigger for 15% off your first order with code GOALDIGGER.

When I started this show, I was working from home, building a business in isolation, and I felt like an imposter in every room I tried to enter. I thought maybe a podcast could help me feel less alone. Maybe it could help me prove I had something worth saying. And here's the part I never saw coming: I didn't think I could do solo episodes! I truly believed I needed a guest, a co-host, someone else to carry the conversation. But hundreds of episodes later, I can talk to a wall forever. I can hold space for an idea, unpack a framework, and connect with you, even though you're not responding in real time. That shift didn't happen overnight. It happened because I kept showing up. And along the way, this mic taught me more than any business course, any mentor, or any strategy ever could. Today, I want to share what I wish someone had told me about what's really possible when you start speaking your truth. Not the surface-level lessons about audio quality or interview techniques, but the deep, transformative shifts that happen when you give yourself permission to grow in public. Maybe you've felt that tug to use your voice, or you've been wondering if podcasting could be the thing that finally changes everything: I want you to understand what you're really signing up for… And why it might be the most important thing you ever do. Goal Digger Facebook Community: https://www.facebook.com/groups/goaldiggerpodcast/ Goal Digger Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/goaldiggerpodcast/ Goal Digger Show Notes: https://jennakutcherblog.com/lessons-from-podcasting  Thanks to our Goal Digger Sponsors: Sign up for your $1/month Shopify trial period at http://shopify.com/goaldigger. Find a co-host today at http://airbnb.com/host. Check out What Should I Do With My Money? from Morgan Stanley. Listen now at https://mgstnly.lnk.to/bqe8HiAC!GD.  Visit http://www.spectrum.com/freeforlife to learn how you can get Business Internet Free Forever. Experience the power of a Dell PC with Intel Inside®, backed by Dell's price match guarantee. Shop now at https://www.dell.com/deals. Your dream wardrobe's one click away. Visit https://www.revolve.com/goaldigger for 15% off your first order with code GOALDIGGER.

What if the fatigue, brain fog, or stubborn symptoms you've been brushing off are actually your body's way of waving a red flag—one that could completely change your health if you knew how to read it? That's exactly what happened to me a few years ago. I was stuck in a cycle of stress, exhaustion, and mystery symptoms I couldn't quite name—until today's guest stepped in. Check out The Being Collective here: http://jennakutcher.com/being  Brigid Titgemeier is a Functional Medicine Registered Dietitian and founder of BeingBrigid Functional Nutrition. She and her team have helped more than 25,000 people—everyone from Fortune 500 CEOs to busy moms—lower inflammation, balance hormones, improve gut health, and actually reclaim energy through evidence-based nutrition and lifestyle strategies.  In this conversation, we're going to talk about the five biggest lessons from my own health journey with Brigid, what's changed in the science of hormone health and nutrition since she was last here, and the exact steps you can take to support your body through stress, perimenopause, detoxification, and more. If you've been feeling tired, foggy, bloated, or depleted and you're tired of trying “healthy” things that don't actually make you feel better, this is for you. Brigid's membership, The Being Collective, gives you the structure, strategy, and support to stop chasing symptoms and finally feel like yourself again. You can learn more and join the next cohort at http://jennakutcher.com/being! Goal Digger Facebook Community: https://www.facebook.com/groups/goaldiggerpodcast/ Goal Digger Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/goaldiggerpodcast/ Goal Digger Show Notes: https://jennakutcherblog.com/tired-foggy-bloated-what-your-body-is-telling-you  Thanks to our Goal Digger Sponsors: Sign up for your $1/month Shopify trial period at http://shopify.com/goaldigger. Find a co-host today at http://airbnb.com/host. Check out What Should I Do With My Money? from Morgan Stanley. Listen now at https://mgstnly.lnk.to/bqe8HiAC!GD.  Visit http://www.spectrum.com/freeforlife to learn how you can get Business Internet Free Forever. Experience the power of a Dell PC with Intel Inside®, backed by Dell's price match guarantee. Shop now at https://www.dell.com/deals. Your dream wardrobe's one click away. Visit https://www.revolve.com/goaldigger for 15% off your first order with code GOALDIGGER.

For nearly a decade, I've sat behind this microphone teaching strategies, sharing systems, and talking about how to grow a business that lasts. But beneath all of that has always been something deeper, and it has taken me years to find the words for what this work has really been about. When I look back, I can see a through line running through every story, every season, and every shift—a consistent truth that connects everything, the invisible thread that makes sense of all the seemingly separate pieces. It's the reason I started this show from a small town in Wisconsin, the same reason I launched a photography business with a $300 Craigslist camera and a heart full of hope. It's the same reason I kept showing up here as I've grown and evolved and pivoted a bunch of times.  I thought I was building a business. What I was really building was a life that felt like mine. This episode is about the truth underneath every strategy, the heartbeat behind every framework, and the through line that has quietly guided it all. Goal Digger Facebook Community: https://www.facebook.com/groups/goaldiggerpodcast/ Goal Digger Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/goaldiggerpodcast/ Goal Digger Show Notes: https://jennakutcherblog.com/building-a-business-vs-building-a-life  Thanks to our Goal Digger Sponsors: Sign up for your $1/month Shopify trial period at http://shopify.com/goaldigger. Find a co-host today at http://airbnb.com/host. Check out What Should I Do With My Money? from Morgan Stanley. Listen now at https://mgstnly.lnk.to/bqe8HiAC!GD.  Visit http://www.spectrum.com/freeforlife to learn how you can get Business Internet Free Forever. Experience the power of a Dell PC with Intel Inside®, backed by Dell's price match guarantee. Shop now at https://www.dell.com/deals. Your dream wardrobe's one click away. Visit https://www.revolve.com/goaldigger for 15% off your first order with code GOALDIGGER.

Have you ever had a gut feeling that you ignored, only to realize months later you should have listened? Or maybe you're sitting in a decision right now, paralyzed, because you don't know if you can trust yourself anymore? Sheetal Story is a Psychic Medium, Spiritual Grief Support Counselor, and Professional Astrologer, but she's also grounded and business-savvy with a Master's in Coaching and a Business Degree from the University of Alberta. She works with entrepreneurs who are stuck, burned out, or in major life transitions to help them break through the blocks keeping them from their next level. In this conversation, we're talking about the hard stuff. How to know when to pivot versus when to push through. How to stop manifesting the same painful patterns. How to release the guilt of wanting something different than what you built. And how to start listening to your intuition again after years of being told you're wrong. If you've been second-guessing every decision, if you're craving permission to trust yourself, or if you're in a season of transition and you just need someone to tell you it's going to be okay, click play! Goal Digger Facebook Community: https://www.facebook.com/groups/goaldiggerpodcast/ Goal Digger Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/goaldiggerpodcast/ Goal Digger Show Notes: https://jennakutcherblog.com/how-to-trust-your-intuition-again  Thanks to our Goal Digger Sponsors: Sign up for your $1/month Shopify trial period at http://shopify.com/goaldigger. Find a co-host today at http://airbnb.com/host. Check out What Should I Do With My Money? from Morgan Stanley. Listen now at https://mgstnly.lnk.to/bqe8HiAC!GD.  Visit http://www.spectrum.com/freeforlife to learn how you can get Business Internet Free Forever. Experience the power of a Dell PC with Intel Inside®, backed by Dell's price match guarantee. Shop now at https://www.dell.com/deals. Your dream wardrobe's one click away. Visit https://www.revolve.com/goaldigger for 15% off your first order with code GOALDIGGER.

In this episode, I'm giving you everything I know about email marketing: the timeless principles that have built my multi-seven-figure business, plus the emerging trends that will keep you ahead through 2026 and beyond. Even though I've talked about the importance of email marketing for the last decade of podcasting, I've never done THIS. A true masterclass; a soup-to-nuts, start-to-finish guide covering why email still works in 2025, how to actually start and grow your list, the emerging trends that are changing everything, and the exact strategies you need to stay ahead. Whether you're at zero subscribers wondering where to even start, or you've got a list but it feels stale and you're not sure what to do with it, or you're doing well but want to level up for what's coming, this episode is for you. And if you want to see how all of this applies specifically to your business type, I'm hosting a FREE live webinar called From Zero Subscribers to an Engaged List of Buyers. Grab your spot now at https://www.growanemaillist.com! Goal Digger Facebook Community: https://www.facebook.com/groups/goaldiggerpodcast/ Goal Digger Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/goaldiggerpodcast/ Goal Digger Show Notes: https://jennakutcherblog.com/the-email-advantage-marketing-strategy Thanks to our Goal Digger Sponsors: Sign up for your $1/month Shopify trial period at http://shopify.com/goaldigger. Find a co-host today at http://airbnb.com/host. Check out What Should I Do With My Money? from Morgan Stanley. Listen now at https://mgstnly.lnk.to/bqe8HiAC!GD.  Visit http://www.spectrum.com/freeforlife to learn how you can get Business Internet Free Forever. Experience the power of a Dell PC with Intel Inside®, backed by Dell's price match guarantee. Shop now at https://www.dell.com/deals. Your dream wardrobe's one click away. Visit https://www.revolve.com/goaldigger for 15% off your first order with code GOALDIGGER.

Picture this: you're scaling your business without burning out. Actually, let me be more specific—you're scaling with the help of a team that never sleeps, never needs a vacation, and costs you almost nothing. Sound impossible? It's not. And today's guest is here to show you exactly how. Natalie MacNeil is an Emmy Award-winning media entrepreneur, a futurist, and a visionary when it comes to AI and entrepreneurship. She's actively reshaping how we build businesses with her AI Dream Team™, a system of 40+ custom GPTs designed to support every core function of a business. If you've been drowning in the day-to-day, if you're tired of being the bottleneck in your own business, or if you're curious about how to use AI with integrity and strategy, this conversation is going to change how you work. Curious about having an AI Dream Team of your own? Check out https://www.jennakutcher.com/AI! If you embrace your AI partnership, and follow Natalie's proven framework, it will amplify your reach and multiply your impact as a transformational leader. And the more of us using AI ethically and for good, the brighter our collective future will be! Visit https://www.jennakutcher.com/AI to learn more. Goal Digger Facebook Community: https://www.facebook.com/groups/goaldiggerpodcast/ Goal Digger Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/goaldiggerpodcast/ Goal Digger Show Notes: https://jennakutcherblog.com/build-your-ai-dream-team  Thanks to our Goal Digger Sponsors: Sign up for your $1/month Shopify trial period at http://shopify.com/goaldigger. Find a co-host today at http://airbnb.com/host. Check out What Should I Do With My Money? from Morgan Stanley. Listen now at https://mgstnly.lnk.to/bqe8HiAC!GD.  Visit http://www.spectrum.com/freeforlife to learn how you can get Business Internet Free Forever. Experience the power of a Dell PC with Intel Inside®, backed by Dell's price match guarantee. Shop now at https://www.dell.com/deals. Your dream wardrobe's one click away. Visit https://www.revolve.com/goaldigger for 15% off your first order with code GOALDIGGER.

When you started your business, you probably thought it was going to give you freedom. More time. More flexibility. The ability to be present in your life, not just busy in your business. But somewhere along the way, it started to feel like the opposite. Like you're always on. Always behind. Always wondering if you're doing enough, posting enough, showing up enough just to stay relevant. You thought entrepreneurship would give your life back. But instead, it feels like it's taking more and more of it. I get it, because I've been there, but eventually I said enough was enough. Eventually, I figured out how to build a business that didn't run me. A business that could grow, serve people, and make an impact, without requiring me to be glued to my phone or constantly creating just to stay afloat. And that's what I'm going to walk you through in this episode. Not some fluffy promise of work less, make more, but the actual systems I put in place that gave me my time, my energy, and my life back. These are the same systems that have kept my business consistent, predictable, and low-stress for the last seven years, and can set you free too! Goal Digger Facebook Community: https://www.facebook.com/groups/goaldiggerpodcast/ Goal Digger Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/goaldiggerpodcast/ Goal Digger Show Notes: https://jennakutcherblog.com/business-systems-that-set-you-free  Thanks to our Goal Digger Sponsors: Sign up for your $1/month Shopify trial period at http://shopify.com/goaldigger. Find a co-host today at http://airbnb.com/host. Check out What Should I Do With My Money? from Morgan Stanley. Listen now at https://mgstnly.lnk.to/bqe8HiAC!GD.  Visit http://www.spectrum.com/freeforlife to learn how you can get Business Internet Free Forever. Experience the power of a Dell PC with Intel Inside®, backed by Dell's price match guarantee. Shop now at https://www.dell.com/deals. Your dream wardrobe's one click away. Visit https://www.revolve.com/goaldigger for 15% off your first order with code GOALDIGGER.

What happens when the person who usually asks the questions… becomes the guest? Today's episode is a little different, because the tables are turning on me. My right-hand, our VP of Operations, and truly the co-strategist who's been in the trenches with me for years, Marisa, is taking over the interviewer's chair. If you've been following along on this show, you know that evolution is part of my DNA—I'm never afraid to pivot, shift, and reimagine what business and life can look like. But some of the biggest shifts happening behind the scenes lately might surprise even my longtime listeners.  From unexpected lessons in leadership and team changes, to the ways my relationship with YOU has evolved, this conversation is a candid look at the past, present, and future of my brand. You'll hear the real stories behind what's stretched me, the concepts that have stopped me in my tracks, and yes… a few Easter eggs about what's to come. We're not spilling it all just yet, but if you've ever wondered what it's really like to build, bend, and evolve a business while keeping alignment at the center, click play! Goal Digger Facebook Community: https://www.facebook.com/groups/goaldiggerpodcast/ Goal Digger Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/goaldiggerpodcast/ Goal Digger Show Notes: https://jennakutcherblog.com/small-changes-big-shifts  Thanks to our Goal Digger Sponsors: Sign up for your $1/month Shopify trial period at http://shopify.com/goaldigger. Find a co-host today at http://airbnb.com/host. Check out What Should I Do With My Money? from Morgan Stanley. Listen now at https://mgstnly.lnk.to/bqe8HiAC!GD.  Visit http://www.spectrum.com/freeforlife to learn how you can get Business Internet Free Forever. Experience the power of a Dell PC with Intel Inside®, backed by Dell's price match guarantee. Shop now at https://www.dell.com/deals. Your dream wardrobe's one click away. Visit https://www.revolve.com/goaldigger for 15% off your first order with code GOALDIGGER.

I'm going to say something that might sound crazy: I spend less than an hour a week on one platform, and it drives over 20,000 visitors to my business every single month. No dancing. No trending audio. No desperate posting three times a day hoping someone sees it. While everyone else is exhausted trying to outsmart the algorithm, I've been quietly winning with a platform where the algorithm actually works with you, not against you. In this episode, we're talking about the platform that outlasted the algorithm, and why Pinterest is still the smartest move you're not making!  Goal Digger Facebook Community: https://www.facebook.com/groups/goaldiggerpodcast/ Goal Digger Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/goaldiggerpodcast/ Goal Digger Show Notes: https://jennakutcherblog.com/how-to-get-traffic-from-pinterest  Thanks to our Goal Digger Sponsors: Sign up for your $1/month Shopify trial period at http://shopify.com/goaldigger. Find a co-host today at http://airbnb.com/host. Check out What Should I Do With My Money? from Morgan Stanley. Listen now at https://mgstnly.lnk.to/bqe8HiAC!GD.  Visit http://www.spectrum.com/freeforlife to learn how you can get Business Internet Free Forever. Experience the power of a Dell PC with Intel Inside®, backed by Dell's price match guarantee. Shop now at https://www.dell.com/deals. Your dream wardrobe's one click away. Visit https://www.revolve.com/goaldigger for 15% off your first order with code GOALDIGGER.

If you've ever stared at your email list wondering why it's not growing or if you're not even sure where to start, this coaching session is going to light a fire under you. Then, sign up for my FREE class: From Zero Subscribers to an Email List of Engaged Buyers at http://growanemaillist.com!  Shilpi Zalani is a high-performance coach who helps women break through limiting beliefs, get financially independent, and finally create a business that actually fits their lives. She has started, scaled, and exited multiple six-figure ventures, generating over $1M in revenue across her businesses. And she's done it all while navigating motherhood, cultural expectations, and the highs and lows of entrepreneurship… making her uniquely qualified to guide other women toward that same freedom. In today's coaching session, we're diving into one of the most valuable assets in business: your email list. We're talking about how to grow it when you don't have a big audience, how to create lead magnets that convert, and most importantly, how to actually sell without feeling pushy or salesy. If you've been spinning your wheels chasing the algorithm and you're craving a system that works behind the scenes to grow your business, this episode is for you. And hey, if you're ready to grow your list, serve your audience, and maximize your impact without feeling like you're stuck on the content hamster wheel, sign up for my FREE class at http://growanemaillist.com!  Not only will I teach you how to start and grow your email list, I'll pull back the curtain on the metrics that show off email's superpowers when compared to social media. Save your seat now: http://growanemaillist.com  Goal Digger Facebook Community: https://www.facebook.com/groups/goaldiggerpodcast/ Goal Digger Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/goaldiggerpodcast/ Goal Digger Show Notes: https://jennakutcherblog.com/email-marketing-for-consistent-sales  Thanks to our Goal Digger Sponsors: Sign up for your $1/month Shopify trial period at http://shopify.com/goaldigger. Find a co-host today at http://airbnb.com/host. Check out What Should I Do With My Money? from Morgan Stanley. Listen now at https://mgstnly.lnk.to/bqe8HiAC!GD.  Visit http://www.spectrum.com/freeforlife to learn how you can get Business Internet Free Forever. Experience the power of a Dell PC with Intel Inside®, backed by Dell's price match guarantee. Shop now at https://www.dell.com/deals. Your dream wardrobe's one click away. Visit https://www.revolve.com/goaldigger for 15% off your first order with code GOALDIGGER.

I know this keeps a lot of us up at night: When do we speak? What do we say? What if we get it wrong? And honestly, I've been wrestling with it too… From letting my actions speak louder than my words for years, to finding my voice in ways that feel more direct and meaningful now. Here's what we're covering today: the real trade-offs of using your platform, how to discern what's actually yours to carry, why "staying in your lane" might mean something completely different than you think, and what it looks like to lead imperfectly while building bridges instead of walls. If you've been wrestling with when or how to speak up about the things that break your heart, this conversation is for you. Click play to learn how to speak up about your beliefs without losing yourself or your people! Goal Digger Facebook Community: https://www.facebook.com/groups/goaldiggerpodcast/ Goal Digger Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/goaldiggerpodcast/ Goal Digger Show Notes: https://jennakutcherblog.com/ Thanks to our Goal Digger Sponsors: Sign up for your $1/month Shopify trial period at http://shopify.com/goaldigger. Find a co-host today at http://airbnb.com/host. Check out What Should I Do With My Money? from Morgan Stanley. Listen now at https://mgstnly.lnk.to/bqe8HiAC!GD.  Visit http://www.spectrum.com/freeforlife to learn how you can get Business Internet Free Forever. Experience the power of a Dell PC with Intel Inside®, backed by Dell's price match guarantee. Shop now at https://www.dell.com/deals. Your dream wardrobe's one click away. Visit https://www.revolve.com/goaldigger for 15% off your first order with code GOALDIGGER.

We live in a world where rest has been branded as lazy. Where women, especially ambitious women and entrepreneurs, are expected to do it all: run the business, raise the kids, support the family, maintain friendships, and keep it all looking effortless. But beneath the surface? So many of us are exhausted, overwhelmed, and quietly wondering if we'll ever feel “enough.” Nicola Jane Hobbs is here to challenge that narrative. Nicola is a chartered psychologist with a master's degree in sport and exercise psychology, and she's spent more than a decade supporting women's health and wellbeing through yoga, meditation, and therapeutic practice. She's also the founder of The Relaxed Woman, a movement and community dedicated to helping women recover from stress and burnout. In this episode, Nicola and I are unpacking why rest feels so hard for women, why female entrepreneurs in particular struggle to switch off, and the practical rituals and strategies we can use to finally make peace with rest. If you've ever felt guilty for slowing down, or if burnout has been lurking in the background of your business journey, this episode is for you. Goal Digger Facebook Community: https://www.facebook.com/groups/goaldiggerpodcast/ Goal Digger Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/goaldiggerpodcast/ Goal Digger Show Notes: https://jennakutcherblog.com/ Thanks to our Goal Digger Sponsors: Sign up for your $1/month Shopify trial period at http://shopify.com/goaldigger. Find a co-host today at http://airbnb.com/host. Check out What Should I Do With My Money? from Morgan Stanley. Listen now at https://mgstnly.lnk.to/bqe8HiAC!GD.  Visit http://www.spectrum.com/freeforlife to learn how you can get Business Internet Free Forever. Experience the power of a Dell PC with Intel Inside®, backed by Dell's price match guarantee. Shop now at https://www.dell.com/deals. Your dream wardrobe's one click away. Visit https://www.revolve.com/goaldigger for 15% off your first order with code GOALDIGGER.

There are things I've never said on this podcast… not because they're secrets, but because no one's ever asked. Today, I'm going to open that door, and my hope is that in hearing my answers, you'll think differently about your own. Some of these questions come from curiosity, some from criticism… But all of them crack open a piece of where I'm at right now, and where I'm going next. So let's go “off script” together, shall we? Click play to hear the 10 questions, and my answers that may surprise you! Goal Digger Facebook Community: https://www.facebook.com/groups/goaldiggerpodcast/ Goal Digger Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/goaldiggerpodcast/ Goal Digger Show Notes: https://jennakutcherblog.com/questions-I-wish-you-asked    Thanks to our Goal Digger Sponsors: Sign up for your $1/month Shopify trial period at http://shopify.com/goaldigger. Find a co-host today at http://airbnb.com/host. Shop SKIMS Fits Everybody collection at http://skims.com/goaldigger! Create your sanctuary of comfort with Boll & Branch. Get 20% off your first sheet set plus free shipping at https://www.bollandbranch.com/goaldigger. Check out What Should I Do With My Money? from Morgan Stanley. Listen now at https://mgstnly.lnk.to/bqe8HiAC!GD.  Experience the power of a Dell PC with Intel Inside®, backed by Dell's price match guarantee. Shop now at https://www.dell.com/deals. Visit http://www.mercury.com/ to apply online in 10 minutes. Mercury is a financial technology company, not a bank. Banking services provided through Choice Financial Group, Column N.A., and Evolve Bank & Trust; Members FDIC.

We've all been fed the idea that “more is more” when it comes to growing your brand… but what if doing less is actually the key to unlocking your next level? Mei Pak is the founder of Creative Hive, and she's built multiple 7-figure handmade businesses while completely ditching the hustle mentality. She started out making just $3/hour in her first year of business, but after shifting her strategy and simplifying her approach, she went on to build thriving businesses without relying on Etsy or social media. In today's conversation, we're pulling back the curtain on what it really looks like to grow your handmade or product-based business without burning out. You'll learn how to streamline your marketing, get visible in ways that actually work, and finally let go of the pressure to do all the things. So if you've been stuck in content creation chaos or spinning your wheels trying to get noticed, this episode is your permission slip to simplify and still succeed. Goal Digger Facebook Community: https://www.facebook.com/groups/goaldiggerpodcast/ Goal Digger Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/goaldiggerpodcast/ Goal Digger Show Notes: https://jennakutcherblog.com/how-to-make-sales-without-social-media  Thanks to our Goal Digger Sponsors: Sign up for your $1/month Shopify trial period at http://shopify.com/goaldigger. Find a co-host today at http://airbnb.com/host. Shop SKIMS Fits Everybody collection at http://skims.com/goaldigger! Create your sanctuary of comfort with Boll & Branch. Get 20% off your first sheet set plus free shipping at https://www.bollandbranch.com/goaldigger. Check out What Should I Do With My Money? from Morgan Stanley. Listen now at https://mgstnly.lnk.to/bqe8HiAC!GD.  Experience the power of a Dell PC with Intel Inside®, backed by Dell's price match guarantee. Shop now at https://www.dell.com/deals. Visit http://www.mercury.com/ to apply online in 10 minutes. Mercury is a financial technology company, not a bank. Banking services provided through Choice Financial Group, Column N.A., and Evolve Bank & Trust; Members FDIC.

What if your life ran like your business? What if you had streamlined workflows, clear responsibilities, and built-in rest and rhythm not just in your work, but in your actual daily life? As an entrepreneur with ADHD, I've spent years building incredible systems in my business. Launch calendars run like clockwork. Podcast workflows practically manage themselves. My business hums like a well-oiled machine. But at home? Pure chaos. That is, until my friend Natalie Ellis introduced me to the concept of a "life operating system," and it completely changed my perspective. What if we borrowed what's working in our businesses and applied it to our real lives? Click play to find out how I did it, and you can too! Goal Digger Facebook Community: https://www.facebook.com/groups/goaldiggerpodcast/ Goal Digger Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/goaldiggerpodcast/ Goal Digger Show Notes: https://jennakutcherblog.com/adhd-home-organization-systems  Thanks to our Goal Digger Sponsors: Sign up for your $1/month Shopify trial period at http://shopify.com/goaldigger. Find a co-host today at http://airbnb.com/host. Shop SKIMS Fits Everybody collection at http://skims.com/goaldigger! Create your sanctuary of comfort with Boll & Branch. Get 20% off your first sheet set plus free shipping at https://www.bollandbranch.com/goaldigger. Check out What Should I Do With My Money? from Morgan Stanley. Listen now at https://mgstnly.lnk.to/bqe8HiAC!GD.  Experience the power of a Dell PC with Intel Inside®, backed by Dell's price match guarantee. Shop now at https://www.dell.com/deals. Visit http://www.mercury.com/ to apply online in 10 minutes. Mercury is a financial technology company, not a bank. Banking services provided through Choice Financial Group, Column N.A., and Evolve Bank & Trust; Members FDIC.

Ever bought something you loved so much, you had to tell your friends about it? What if your entire business could be built around that kind of energy; where your customers don't just shop, they stick around, support one another, and become your brand's loudest cheerleaders? That's exactly what Bianca Gates has done as the founder and president of Birdies, the stylish-yet-comfy footwear brand that's built a cult following. What started in Bianca's living room has grown into a brand loved by women everywhere… not just because of the product, but because of the feeling it gives you. Connection. Confidence. Community. In this conversation, we're talking about the real story behind Birdies' growth. How Bianca built a community-first brand from day one, how authentic storytelling shaped Birdies' success, and how you can apply her approach to your own business—even if you're starting from scratch or feel like you're late to the game. So if you've ever wondered how to rally people around your product and create a movement, not just a moment, this episode is for you. Goal Digger Facebook Community: https://www.facebook.com/groups/goaldiggerpodcast/ Goal Digger Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/goaldiggerpodcast/ Goal Digger Show Notes: https://jennakutcherblog.com/how-to-build-a-support-circle  Thanks to our Goal Digger Sponsors: Sign up for your $1/month Shopify trial period at http://shopify.com/goaldigger. Find a co-host today at http://airbnb.com/host. Shop SKIMS Fits Everybody collection at http://skims.com/goaldigger! Create your sanctuary of comfort with Boll & Branch. Get 20% off your first sheet set plus free shipping at https://www.bollandbranch.com/goaldigger. Check out What Should I Do With My Money? from Morgan Stanley. Listen now at https://mgstnly.lnk.to/bqe8HiAC!GD.  Experience the power of a Dell PC with Intel Inside®, backed by Dell's price match guarantee. Shop now at https://www.dell.com/deals. Visit http://www.mercury.com/ to apply online in 10 minutes. Mercury is a financial technology company, not a bank. Banking services provided through Choice Financial Group, Column N.A., and Evolve Bank & Trust; Members FDIC.

Everyone's wrong about podcasting. They're telling you it's too saturated, too late, too hard. But here's what they don't know: 91% of podcasts are basically dead. While everyone's scared to start, you're walking into wide open territory. If you've been sitting on a podcast idea, convinced you've missed your chance, this article will change your perspective entirely. After helping hundreds of students launch successful shows and building my own podcast to over 100 million downloads, I've learned that the people saying "it's too late" are usually the same ones who gave up after three episodes. The truth is, now might actually be the perfect time to start your podcast. Let me show you exactly why! And if this episode inspires you to hit ‘record', you're going to want to register for my FREE class “Podcasting 101: How to Start, Record, and Profit from Your Show” at http://www.freepodcastclass.com! I can't wait to help you get your show up and running. Goal Digger Facebook Community: https://www.facebook.com/groups/goaldiggerpodcast/ Goal Digger Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/goaldiggerpodcast/ Goal Digger Show Notes: https://jennakutcherblog.com/best-time-to-start-a-podcast  Thanks to our Goal Digger Sponsors: Sign up for your $1/month Shopify trial period at http://shopify.com/goaldigger. Find a co-host today at http://airbnb.com/host. Shop SKIMS Fits Everybody collection at http://skims.com/goaldigger! Create your sanctuary of comfort with Boll & Branch. Get 20% off your first sheet set plus free shipping at https://www.bollandbranch.com/goaldigger. Check out What Should I Do With My Money? from Morgan Stanley. Listen now at https://mgstnly.lnk.to/bqe8HiAC!GD.  Experience the power of a Dell PC with Intel Inside®, backed by Dell's price match guarantee. Shop now at https://www.dell.com/deals. Visit http://www.mercury.com/ to apply online in 10 minutes. Mercury is a financial technology company, not a bank. Banking services provided through Choice Financial Group, Column N.A., and Evolve Bank & Trust; Members FDIC.

Have you ever thought about starting a podcast but then talked yourself out of it because it felt too overwhelming, too technical, or you worried no one would listen? You're not alone, and today's guest is proof that you don't have to have it all figured out to launch something truly powerful. Head to http://www.freepodcastclass.com and I'll share with you the first 3 steps to adding a podcast to your business–and how it could BECOME your business! Stacy Smith is a full-time teacher, a mom, and a graduate of The Podcast Lab. She's also the host of The Biking Wellness Podcast and today, she's asking ME the questions that have come up after launching her show. She asks me things like: How do I grow my show with limited time? How do I stay aligned with my values while still marketing what sells? How do I know if my podcast is working when the numbers feel slow? If you're wondering whether starting a podcast is worth it—or how to actually keep one going when you have a full plate—this conversation is for you. And if you're ready to finally get your show into the world, I've got you! Register now for my free class “Podcasting 101: How to Start, Record, and Profit from Your Show” at http://www.freepodcastclass.com!  Goal Digger Facebook Community: https://www.facebook.com/groups/goaldiggerpodcast/ Goal Digger Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/goaldiggerpodcast/ Goal Digger Show Notes: https://jennakutcherblog.com/how-to-build-a-business-with-no-time  Thanks to our Goal Digger Sponsors: Sign up for your $1/month Shopify trial period at http://shopify.com/goaldigger. Find a co-host today at http://airbnb.com/host. Shop SKIMS Fits Everybody collection at http://skims.com/goaldigger! Create your sanctuary of comfort with Boll & Branch. Get 20% off your first sheet set plus free shipping at https://www.bollandbranch.com/goaldigger. Check out What Should I Do With My Money? from Morgan Stanley. Listen now at https://mgstnly.lnk.to/bqe8HiAC!GD.  Experience the power of a Dell PC with Intel Inside®, backed by Dell's price match guarantee. Shop now at https://www.dell.com/deals. Visit http://www.mercury.com/ to apply online in 10 minutes. Mercury is a financial technology company, not a bank. Banking services provided through Choice Financial Group, Column N.A., and Evolve Bank & Trust; Members FDIC.

Burnout can creep in when we least expect it, and most of us don't recognize we're burned out until it's already taken a toll on our health, our work, and our joy.  In this episode, I'm pulling back the curtain on the subtle, hidden signs of burnout — the ones you might be missing — and how to start reversing them before they take you out completely. Whether you're a business owner, a busy professional, or just someone trying to juggle all the things, this conversation is going to feel like a deep breath! Goal Digger Facebook Community: https://www.facebook.com/groups/goaldiggerpodcast/ Goal Digger Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/goaldiggerpodcast/ Goal Digger Show Notes: https://jennakutcherblog.com/hidden-signs-of-burnout  Thanks to our Goal Digger Sponsors: Sign up for your $1/month Shopify trial period at http://shopify.com/goaldigger. Find a co-host today at http://airbnb.com/host. Shop SKIMS Fits Everybody collection at http://skims.com/goaldigger! Create your sanctuary of comfort with Boll & Branch. Get 20% off your first sheet set plus free shipping at https://www.bollandbranch.com/goaldigger. Check out What Should I Do With My Money? from Morgan Stanley. Listen now at https://mgstnly.lnk.to/bqe8HiAC!GD.  Experience the power of a Dell PC with Intel Inside®, backed by Dell's price match guarantee. Shop now at https://www.dell.com/deals. Visit http://www.mercury.com/ to apply online in 10 minutes. Mercury is a financial technology company, not a bank. Banking services provided through Choice Financial Group, Column N.A., and Evolve Bank & Trust; Members FDIC.

If you've ever looked at your business, your brand, even your personal relationships, and thought, “This used to feel right… but now I'm not so sure,” you are not alone, and you are not broken. Jen Hatmaker is no stranger to the hard and holy work of reinvention. She's a bestselling author of 14 books (including four New York Times bestsellers), the host of the award-winning For the Love podcast, and a beloved leader to a community of over 1.6 million. But her newest book, AWAKE, isn't about business strategy. It's about what happens when your identity, your roles, and your life fall apart… and how to rebuild from a more honest, more aligned place. Jen walks us through what she calls a Midlife Renaissance, not a crisis. It's a powerful season of reassessing everything you've been told about womanhood, worth, work, and success… and reimagining a life and business that truly feels like you. If you're an entrepreneur navigating change, if you're pivoting your purpose, or if you're wondering what stays and what goes in this next chapter… click play. Goal Digger Facebook Community: https://www.facebook.com/groups/goaldiggerpodcast/ Goal Digger Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/goaldiggerpodcast/ Goal Digger Show Notes: https://jennakutcherblog.com/starting-over-in-business-your-terms  Thanks to our Goal Digger Sponsors: Sign up for your $1/month Shopify trial period at http://shopify.com/goaldigger. Find a co-host today at http://airbnb.com/host. Shop SKIMS Fits Everybody collection at http://skims.com/goaldigger! Create your sanctuary of comfort with Boll & Branch. Get 20% off your first sheet set plus free shipping at https://www.bollandbranch.com/goaldigger. Check out What Should I Do With My Money? from Morgan Stanley. Listen now at https://mgstnly.lnk.to/bqe8HiAC!GD.  Experience the power of a Dell PC with Intel Inside®, backed by Dell's price match guarantee. Shop now at https://www.dell.com/deals. Visit http://www.mercury.com/ to apply online in 10 minutes. Mercury is a financial technology company, not a bank. Banking services provided through Choice Financial Group, Column N.A., and Evolve Bank & Trust; Members FDIC.

Your perfectionism isn't protecting your reputation… It's protecting your ego. And it's costing you real money, real impact, and real progress toward the life you want to build. After building my business over the last decade, I've learned this hard truth: perfectionism is selfish.  Every minute you spend polishing something that could already be helping someone is a minute you're withholding value from your audience. Every hour spent perfecting is an hour not spent learning from real market feedback. Every delayed launch is revenue walking straight out the door. If you have a Google Doc full of business ideas, a camera roll packed with content you'll "post later," and a heart full of dreams you're not quite ready to share, this one's for you. Goal Digger Facebook Community: https://www.facebook.com/groups/goaldiggerpodcast/ Goal Digger Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/goaldiggerpodcast/ Goal Digger Show Notes: https://jennakutcherblog.com/perfectionism-is-costing-you-money  Thanks to our Goal Digger Sponsors: Sign up for your $1/month Shopify trial period at http://shopify.com/goaldigger. Find a co-host today at http://airbnb.com/host. Shop SKIMS Fits Everybody collection at http://skims.com/goaldigger! Create your sanctuary of comfort with Boll & Branch. Get 20% off your first sheet set plus free shipping at https://www.bollandbranch.com/goaldigger. Check out What Should I Do With My Money? from Morgan Stanley. Listen now at https://mgstnly.lnk.to/bqe8HiAC!GD.  Experience the power of a Dell PC with Intel Inside®, backed by Dell's price match guarantee. Shop now at https://www.dell.com/deals. Visit http://www.mercury.com/ to apply online in 10 minutes. Mercury is a financial technology company, not a bank. Banking services provided through Choice Financial Group, Column N.A., and Evolve Bank & Trust; Members FDIC.

Intel, antaño líder indiscutible en el diseño y fabricación de semiconductores, ha perdido su posición predominante frente a competidores como Nvidia y TSMC. Durante décadas, Intel fue sinónimo de innovación en procesadores para ordenadores personales. Todos recordamos su línea de producto Pentium, el célebre eslogan “Intel Inside” y el no menos célebre Intel Bong que sonaba en los anuncios. La empresa fue fundada en 1968 por tres pioneros de los semiconductores: Robert Noyce, Andrew Grove y Gordon Moore, que formuló la ley que lleva su nombre. Durante años Intel dominó el mercado. A principios de siglo tenían una cuota de mercado del 90% en servidores y más del 80% en procesadores. Pero una serie de errores estratégicos en cadena la han llevado a perder terreno en sectores como los smartphones y la inteligencia artificial. Ha sido la irrupción de la IA la que ha transformado la industria de los semiconductores y eso ha beneficiado especialmente a Nvidia. Esta empresa, antes centrada en tarjetas gráficas para videojuegos, capitalizó la demanda de circuitos especializados para IA. Entretanto Intel ha visto como se desplomaba su su facturación y el año pasado entraron en pérdidas. A la división de fabricación no le ha ido mejor. Los taiwaneses de TSMC le han arrebatado el liderazgo y hoy esa empresa vale diez veces más que Intel. Tras la pandemia hubo escasez de chips, eso hizo subir los precios y puso a este negocio en la mira de todo el mundo. Pero Intel no supo adaptarse a las nuevas dinámicas del mercado. Su incapacidad para competir en el diseño de chips para IA la dejó rezagada. Se echó entonces en manos del Gobierno. En 2022 se acogió a la ley de chips aprobada por Joe Biden con la intención de construir nuevas plantas de fabricación y ampliar las existentes. Ahí los problemas se acumularon. La ley se fue implementando de forma muy lenta y la caída en la demanda de sus chips complicaron su situación. Con Trump las cosas han ido a peor. Tras criticar el modo en el que se había gestionado la ley de chips, el presidente exigió la dimisión del nuevo CEO de Intel, Lip Bu Tan por supuestos vínculos con China. Tan, nacido en Malasia pero ciudadano estadounidense, ha tenido que negociar con el Gobierno y ha cerrado una tregua, pero a cambio de convertir 9.000 millones de dólares en subvenciones no entregadas en una participación del 10% de Intel para el Estado federal. Junto a eso la japonesa SoftBank ha inyectado 2.000 millones de dólares en la empresa tras acordarlo con la Casa Blanca. Estas dos maniobras han permitido estabilizar la situación financiera de Intel, al menos temporalmente. No obstante, los problemas persisten. Intel sigue teniendo dificultades para competir con TSMC en fabricación y con Nvidia en diseño. La empresa ha despedido ya al 15% de su plantilla y ha cancelado proyectos como una fábrica en Alemania. Para sobrevivir, necesita nuevos clientes y productos innovadores, pero cambiar de proveedor en un sector tan especializado es complejo. La intervención del Gobierno más que una solución podría terminar siendo un problema. Con políticos de por medio se frenará la innovación ya que los nuevos dueños darán prioridad a las cuestiones políticas sobre las del mercado. Intel, ahora con el Gobierno como accionista de referencia, debe encontrar un plan creíble para recuperar su relevancia en un sector donde la competencia es feroz y los errores se pagan muy caros. En La ContraRéplica: 0:00 Introducción 3:58 Intel a la deriva 32:56 Artistas y política 38:47 ¿Por qué crece el cristianismo? 43:43 Mercado de capitales europeo · Canal de Telegram: https://t.me/lacontracronica · “Contra la Revolución Francesa”… https://amzn.to/4aF0LpZ · “Hispanos. Breve historia de los pueblos de habla hispana”… https://amzn.to/428js1G · “La ContraHistoria de España. Auge, caída y vuelta a empezar de un país en 28 episodios”… https://amzn.to/3kXcZ6i · “Lutero, Calvino y Trento, la Reforma que no fue”… https://amzn.to/3shKOlK · “La ContraHistoria del comunismo”… https://amzn.to/39QP2KE Apoya La Contra en: · Patreon... https://www.patreon.com/diazvillanueva · iVoox... https://www.ivoox.com/podcast-contracronica_sq_f1267769_1.html · Paypal... https://www.paypal.me/diazvillanueva Sígueme en: · Web... https://diazvillanueva.com · Twitter... https://twitter.com/diazvillanueva · Facebook... https://www.facebook.com/fernandodiazvillanueva1/ · Instagram... https://www.instagram.com/diazvillanueva · Linkedin… https://www.linkedin.com/in/fernando-d%C3%ADaz-villanueva-7303865/ · Flickr... https://www.flickr.com/photos/147276463@N05/?/ · Pinterest... https://www.pinterest.com/fernandodiazvillanueva Encuentra mis libros en: · Amazon... https://www.amazon.es/Fernando-Diaz-Villanueva/e/B00J2ASBXM #FernandoDiazVillanueva #intel #semiconductores Escucha el episodio completo en la app de iVoox, o descubre todo el catálogo de iVoox Originals

How does a tech company turn a simple sound into one of the world's most recognizable audio marks - second only to a baby crying? Former Intel Global Brand Director Merlin Kister reveals the strategic thinking behind Intel's most iconic brand elements during his nearly two-decade tenure.From simplifying product naming with the Core i3/i5/i7 system to creating Intel Gamer Days - an experiential event that expanded globally - Kister shares practical insights on aligning brand decisions with business objectives. He unpacks how Intel maintained its brand leadership even as competitors emerged, through initiatives like the Intel Inside program and strategic partnerships with PC manufacturers.Key topics covered:How Intel simplified its product architecture to help consumers make better purchasing decisionsThe business strategy behind the famous Intel sonic brand and Intel Inside programCreating meaningful brand experiences through partnerships with the Olympics, NFL and gaming communityBuilding trust with technical audiences while maintaining broad consumer appealBalancing short-term sales goals with long-term brand equityKister provides a masterclass in connecting brand initiatives to revenue and profitability while never losing sight of the end user experience.Love the show? Subscribe, rate, review, and share! https://www.monigle.com/

In this episode of KP Unpacked,  the number one podcast in AEC, KP Reddy and Jeff Echols go full throttle on the one thing most AEC startups get completely wrong: ignoring the owner.You're selling to GCs. You're marketing to architects. But if the owner doesn't see the value, you're just noise in the vendor stack. KP unpacks the real reason BIM didn't deliver, why most conferences are a year behind, and how smart startups are turning owners into their secret sales weapon.

In this episode, Scott Becker discusses Intel's surprising stock surge, driven by Lyft's decision to use MobileEye technology.

In this episode, Scott Becker discusses Intel's surprising stock surge, driven by Lyft's decision to use MobileEye technology.

John Konsin is co-founder and CEO of Prapela, a company pioneering noninvasive stimulation to improve infant breathing and oxygenation. The company's infant mattress technology has already received two Breakthrough Device designations from the US FDA, which expedites clearance for clinical usage. Prapela expects to debut an additional application based on the technology in 2025.  John and Wendy connected at the Redefining Early Stage of Investment (RESI) Conference in Boston, which Life Science Nation hosted. (Wendy recently interviewed Dennis Ford, founder and CEO of Life Science Nation, which specializes in fundraising for life sciences companies.) In this episode, John describes three clinical applications for Prapela's technology and outlines the company's global expansion strategy, focusing on providing valuable insight into navigating international markets, regulatory challenges, and cross-cultural communication.  The Science Behind Safer Sleep  At the heart of Prapela's innovation is that 62% of healthy infants experience irregular breathing patterns and oxygen desaturation in their first three months of life. The Collaborative Home Infant Monitoring Evaluation (CHIME) study monitored over 1,000 healthy infants at home using hospital-grade equipment to track their respiration, cardiac activity, movement, and oxygen saturation levels. Episodes varied in frequency, severity, and duration among babies—some experienced them once, while others showed multiple occurrences.  Most significantly, these breathing irregularities occurred not just in at-risk infants but in otherwise healthy babies, highlighting a previously unrecognized challenge in early infant development. (Ramanathan, R., et al. (2001). Cardiorespiratory events recorded on home monitors: Comparison of healthy infants with those at increased risk for SIDS. JAMA, 285(17), 2199-2207.)  Prapela's infant mattress helps to regulate babies' breathing through a gentle, barely perceptible vibration. The innovation grew out of research by Dr. David Paydarfar, who, in the 1990s, discovered that a specific type of random vibration, known scientifically as "stochastic" vibration, could improve the “pacemaker function,” the neurons in a baby's brain that controls automatic breathing. The vibration is so subtle it moves less than half the diameter of a human hair, making it effective and non-disruptive to sleep patterns.  The Hospital-First Strategy  The company has secured over $8 million in funding through grants and awards, allowing them to maintain control while developing their technology. John says this will enable the company to seek equity investment from a position of strength, with FDA clearance on the horizon and a clear path to commercialization.  Their market strategy began in hospitals, aiming to directly and immediately impact infant care in critical settings. This approach is grounded in decades of successful medical device launches, which built a foundation of clinical credibility before venturing into the broader consumer landscape. The technology has already demonstrated its potential, reducing reliance on supplemental oxygen and minimizing the need for traditional breathing interventions.  John envisions a future where "Prapela Inside" becomes as recognizable in infant care as "Intel Inside" is in computers, starting with the 52 global manufacturers of hospital bassinets and incubators:  [W]e we can make this mattress fit any infant sleep device worldwide. So it doesn't matter if it's an incubator, bassinet, crib, or cot, as they use the term in international markets, right? We can make it fit those products. So, our strategy is similar to that of Intel with the microchip. You'll see a little badge when you buy a computer from Dell or some other company. It says Intel inside.  By positioning their technology as a vital component that transforms standard infant care equipment into advanced breathing support systems, Prapela aims to revolutionize hospital infant care worldwide. Following FDA approval, Prapela plans to pursue regulatory clearance in other markets, initially focusing on Europe, India, and the Middle East. The sequential approach allows them to leverage their FDA clearance while adapting to local regulatory requirements in each new market.  Cultural Intelligence in Global Marketing  John offers valuable insight into cross-cultural communication and marketing. He emphasizes several key principles for successful global expansion:  Language Simplification: English is widely spoken in international business, but vocabulary depth varies significantly. John advocates using simpler terms and friendly communication to bridge language gaps.  Local Market Adaptation: Success in one market doesn't guarantee success in another. Companies must adapt messaging, pricing, and marketing approaches to local market conditions rather than forcing an American-centric approach.  Brand Management: While maintaining global brand consistency is essential, give local managers some latitude in adapting messages to their markets. This is particularly critical when moving from clinical to consumer marketing, where terms like "calmness" might carry different cultural connotations across markets.  He underscores the importance of remaining open to and respectful of local customs and traditions in international business relationships with a memorable story from his early career in Mexico. The general managers of manufacturing operations presented him with a stuffed armadillo. Initially puzzled by the gift, he later learned it symbolized appreciation for his patience and understanding of their culture.  Brand Identity Across Borders  John explains that "Prapela" was carefully constructed from Latin roots to create a unique name that wouldn't carry unintended meanings in other languages. This thoughtful approach helps avoid the pitfalls that some major companies have encountered, such as the famous case of Chevrolet's Nova in Latin American markets, where the name unfortunately translated to "doesn't go."  The company's branding strategy balances global consistency with local flexibility from the outset. It maintains core clinical messaging that resonates with medical professionals worldwide while recognizing the need for nuanced consumer-market approaches. John explains that exercise is particularly important when communicating concepts like infant calmness or comfort, as cultural interpretations can vary significantly.  Listen to the full episode to learn more about Prapela's innovative approach to their technology and market entry strategy.    Links:   Website: https://www.prapela.com/  LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/jkonsin/    Connect with Wendy - https://www.linkedin.com/in/wendypease/  Music: Fiddle-De-Dee by Shane Ivers - https://www.silvermansound.com 

Show Notes for "The Silicon Valley Podcast" – Dave House Interview Guest: David House, American Engineer and Computer Designer Bio: David House, also known as Dave House, is a distinguished American engineer and computer designer renowned for his significant contributions to Intel, where he was pivotal in developing the company's microprocessor product line. He is widely recognized for coining the slogan “Intel Inside,” a marketing campaign that transformed Intel into a household name. Career Highlights: BSEE from Michigan Technological University (1965) MSEE from Northeastern University (1969) Early career at Raytheon and Honeywell, focusing on computer design and communications systems Joined Intel in 1974, eventually becoming the General Manager of the Microcomputer Components Division Led Intel's transition towards a marketing-driven approach, launching the “Intel Inside” campaign Grew Intel's microprocessor division from $40 million to $4 billion annually Served as President and CEO of Bay Systems and later CEO of startup Allegro Current Chairman of the House Family Foundation and Chair of the Board at the Computer History Museum Developed a theory related to Moore's Law, identifying an 18-month period for the doubling of transistor capacity on integrated circuits Interview Topics: Leadership Decision Making Managing for Results Conflict Resolution Meetings Vision and Mission: Integral to leadership and decision-making with culture being a fundamental aspect, often summarized as “Culture is the rules for when there are no rules.” Key Interview Questions: Introduction: Dave, it's a pleasure to have an industry legend like yourself here. To get us started, could you give our audience a quick 30-second overview of your impressive career? Mentorship: During those early years, who were some of your mentors, and how did they shape your path? Management Focus: Can we talk about some of the lessons learned? For starters, should a manager focus on managing people or outcomes? And how can they best achieve the desired results? Overspecifying Results: Can you elaborate on what you mean by overspecifying results? Decision-Making Process: You've talked about the importance of socializing the decision-making process. Can you explain what that means and why it's beneficial? Constructive Confrontation: You've advocated for a more constructive approach to confrontation in business meetings. Can you share why and suggest alternative strategies for addressing disagreements? Roles of a CEO: For aspiring leaders, what do you see as the two most critical roles of a CEO? Career Reflections: Looking back, which career choices are you most proud of, and what life lessons can our audience glean from those experiences? . Key resources referenced: - The book "High Output Management." 

0:00:00 – HKPUG 會訊 + Tech Talk 0:43:43 – 依輪乜事 0:56:25 – Main Topic 本集全長：2:17:31 Tag: Telegram 將提供部份疑犯個人資料給執法部門成釋放 CEO 交換條件, 三星印度工廠員工罷工竟要求職位世襲, iPhone 4S 入錯密碼被鎖機 10 …

Ron Whittier Interview Introduction Intel Corporation was founded in 1968 by Robert Noyce and Gordon Moore, who left Fairchild Semiconductor to start their own company. In the early years from 1970 to 1978, Intel went through major inflection points that helped transform it from a startup to an industry leader. Ron Whittier, who joined Intel in 1970 as an engineering manager, played a key role in navigating many of these pivotal moments. This included instilling the pioneering "Intel Culture" driven by Andy Grove, expanding into new product lines like microprocessors, raising funds through Intel's first public offering in 1972, and then rapidly scaling up design and manufacturing capabilities. From 1978 to 2000, Intel experienced explosive growth riding the PC revolution and the emergence of the world-wide web. Ron helped the company successfully navigate through additional inflection points like improving manufacturing processes under Craig Barrett's leadership, the famous decision to exit the DRAM business to focus on microprocessors, developing major marketing campaigns like "Intel Inside", transitioning to being a sole microprocessor supplier, and forming new groups like the Intel Architecture Labs and Intel Capital. Through recognizing and deftly navigating these many inflection points, Ron and Intel's leadership team transformed the company into a global technology powerhouse. We talked about   How did Intel balance looking for outside ideas and developing things internally? When you listen to historians talk about the history of Intel, what are they missing or not getting 100% correct? What words do you want to say to the next generation of Intel employees and entrepreneurs out there? Did you ever look at the other companies in Silicon Valley and think that their businesses were being run in ways that you wished to model? And much more…

Andrew's iMac is back.. again! Long live Intel? Sponsor, not a sponsor. We haven't chatted about movies in a while, and Jason almost still didn't get to. Martin brings some hyper-local "tech news" to the table for discussion! So many Mangos! Using Apple Podcasts? All notes can always be found here (https://listen.hemisphericviews.com/103)! Intel Inside 00:00:00 Audio Hijack (https://rogueamoeba.com/audiohijack/)

Pablos: There's this idea that was just published that you could produce concrete and make it stronger by adding charred coffee grounds to the mix. And this is some research out of Australia. So concrete, if it's not obvious, is like the most used material on the entire planet, aside from oil, which we burn. Cement, is in everything, and it's this like staggering scale problem. Partly because of its contribution to greenhouse gases, right? So when you make cement, you're burning some shit to make a bunch of heat to make the cement and you need that heat and there are ideas to decarbonize cement by electrifying cement plants. But then there's this chemical process going on, which is the bulk of the carbon emissions. And there's just no way to get rid of that. So that's kind of the lay of the land. Interestingly, about half of all the cement in the entire world is made in China. That country is basically made of cement. This is one of the major targets for trying to do reductions of carbon emissions. And these guys figured out how to use coffee grounds. It's not totally clear to me that they're using, uh, used coffee grounds, I presume that's the case, because there's 10 billion Kilograms of used coffee waste every year that mostly ends up as biomass rotting in landfills. So this is worth solving. I thought this was kind of interesting. You can't just take the coffee and throw it in the cement because the oils and stuff in it will seep out and actually make the cement fall apart. They invented this pyrolyzing process where you basically heat up the coffee grounds to a specific, pretty high target temperature, around 500 C, I guess. That'll get rid of the oils presumably, and makes it into an additive you can just throw into the cement mix and it makes it 30 percent stronger. So I got two things that are kind of interesting, related to this. We Have a company our fund backed called DMAT, and these guys figured out how to make cement that's lower carbon, but the way they do it, is they solved this 2000 year old mystery in material science, which is, how did the Romans make cement? Ash: I was going to bring that up. Pablos: Yeah. Cause they made the, the Pantheon to like two millennia ago and it's still there. It's unreinforced concrete in a seismic zone. And then they, somehow got busy, watching Netflix or something and got bored and forgot all about how to make cement. And then nobody's been able to figure it out ever since. Ash: They were just looking at the colosseum. They were like, Hey, I'd rather look at the lion. Maximus Aurelius or whomever. And then that's it. They're like, forget it. Pablos: Look at the cool lion. Oh shit. The lion ate the guy who knows how to make the cement. Ash: Literally probably what happened. Pablos: That is literally probably what happened. So anyway, I got this team at MIT that figured it out. Ash: It was self healing, right? Pablos: We figured that out a little while ago. It's self healing because what happens with cement is it fractures, water seeps into the cracks and then destroys the cement from the inside out. And that's what's happening to our bridges and everything else we made. And so to make it stronger and handle that, we load it up with steel rebar. So it's steel reinforced, and then it still only lasts 50 years. The Roman cements, apparently lasting at least 2000 years. And what happens is it just gets stronger because when it cracks, water seeps into the cracks and it activates these lime deposits that are trapped in there. And so then the lime fills the crack and seals it up and heals the cement. Presumably the colosseum is just getting stronger over time. Now we know how to do that. So we can make cement that lasts virtually forever, use less of it, use less steel, and the kicker is, it's about 20 percent less CO2, out of the box without even trying. That's pretty dramatic considering the, the scale of the problem and the lack of other practical ways of decarbonizing. So these might be compatible, right? You might be able to also use this coffee additive. What I like about this is that cement is such a big thing. Most people just take it for granted. They don't know how. Intensive this is from a carbon emissions standpoint and the scale of it. this. You know like we can actually make things way, way better. with some of these ideas. Ash: And the way they were doing it, the Romans had volcanic rocks, so they had this ability to automatically have the little bubbles in it. But I think what's interesting is that, some people are like, oh, can we put plastic? Isn't that where we just got in trouble with microplastics? Let's solve one problem and then really screw up something else. The idea I was thinking is maybe this is where the coffee ground becomes like the aeration, right? Cause the whole structure was that as the bubbles popped, that was how the lime. Seeped back in, right? The water combined. Pablos: I think that was one of the theories that was debunked. I'm not positive, but I think that was the, like the prevailing idea, or it was kind of a half baked idea of like how this happened. And I think that is not what actually, it's nothing to do with the volcanic rock after all. Ash: It wasn't the volcanic, right? They had a couple , right? One was like some guy was trying to do bacteria. five, six years ago. That was the other crazy one, which was like, we will just have a living organism inside. The other question is, during production, can you trap, can you use it to just trap the stuff? Like, if you look at, was it clean, right? If you look at those guys, Pablos: So that's what DMAT solved. And they do it with this process called hot mixing. Which apparently was considered dumb for, I don't know, centuries or something. And so nobody tried it. Apparently using hot mixing they can get the lime deposits optimally trapped in the cement. I don't know all the details. Ash: I like it. Pablos: Yeah, so we'll get them on the podcast sometime and have them explain all the all the ins and outs. But yeah, pretty cool stuff. Ash: The challenge with almost all of these carbon reduction technologies is scale. Oh, hey, we're going to take carbon out of the sky. And it's like, okay, what did, what was the impact? Well, it's like half a car. Pablos: Right because the sky is like the most entropic source of carbon there is. Literally, the number 400 parts per million. Well, let's see. If you had a haystack, and you had, 400 needles and, a million pieces of straw, good luck finding a needle. It's literally, the hardest possible place to get carbon. If you want to, sequester carbon, the thing to do would be to just, leave the fucking coal in the ground. Where it's, the highest density of carbon you could find. So yeah, it's, it's kind of idiotic. Most of these things kind of solve themselves if you solve energy. If you had like a shit ton of free energy, then yeah, you could go do carbon capture from the atmosphere, but, otherwise it's pretty painful. Ash: The problem is, yeah, like you said, unless you can turn it back into like a diamond or something, like you said, put it back into coal. These magma guys are, are cranking. Maybe we can use those guys. You've heard of the magma guys? Pablos: What's the magma guys? Ash: These guys were doing the near magma experiment. They're like, we're just going to go 6, 000 feet, like just a little over a mile. What's a mile? 5,280 feet? So you just go a little bit into the mantle. Just tap into that hyper geothermal. Pablos: I don't know what you're talking about. Ash: Oh, so there's a project, just came out a couple of days ago that they revealed that they have a timeline on 2025. They're going to do two. One is an open magma bubble, it's in Iceland and then they're going to do another one on top of it. They're going to build like a little station and they're going to go straight down. This is poking the bear, I would say. Pablos: So they're basically trying to do a man made volcano. Ash: Yes, yes, that's the, that's the way to think of it. Pablos: Iceland doesn't have enough volcanoes. Ash: There's not enough problems where you could just suddenly drill a hole and burst the pimple of God, right? I don't Pablos: People are worried about AI, and here we are trying to make a cousin for Eyjafjallajökull. Ash: I like it because someone's like, "there's infinite heat." And I'm like, "yeah, but it's kind of down there for a reason." Didn't work out too well for a lot of people, right? Pablos: I don't understand, I guess if you succeeded at drilling that hole, then I think you would have basically the same thing as the makings of a volcano. Ash: Yeah, but they're trying to contain it, right? They somehow feel like, like they could drill in a place... Pablos: You're going to have to cycle it because if it cools, even if the magma comes up and cools, it's just going to plug your hole. Ash: So the point is that they have to get a turbine to magma, magma rotating. It's wild. It's going to be interesting. just liked the idea that, that someone's literally poking the bear. Pablos: Oh, they definitely should try. Ash: Cause you know, we talk about fusion being risky, but this one I just feel has a lot more problems. Pablos: Yeah, I think they're just gonna, the magma is just gonna plug the hole. Ash: No, they've got, they've got, some ideas. Yeah, well, it is pressure. It's under pressure. That's why I keep calling it a pimple. Pablos: Yeah, that's why volcanoes get made, right? Ash: That's why they gotta go to Iceland. But, the interesting thing is, if you could technically, if you could maintain pressurization all the way up to the top, right, then it can stay magmatic and you could technically build some sort of, high velocity magma drive. That's, what they're thinking of. And that will just keep cycling. Cooling, but just spinning this turbine. Pablos: What do you do with the magma that comes up hot? Ash: It becomes like a, a river. Pablos: You run the turbine, but then where does it go? You gonna pump it back down? Ash: Yeah, it's as if you were in a magma flow, right? So magma continues to move. It continues, it has a lot of movement, which people don't realize. Look, the minute I heard drill 6,000 feet into a thin crust lava magma I sort of went, Hmm, this cannot end well. That's, that's the way I looked at it. But who knows? Pablos: But it's just Iceland, so you know, there's only like 130,000 people there. They're tough though. If anybody can handle it... Ash: Don't you remember? Didn't, they stop all transatlantic flights? You remember right? There's like a little Ash: cloud and, so just Iceland, but it's, it's literally on the jet stream. We Have a few airplanes crossing right over Iceland. No more going to Europe or vice versa. Pablos: Yeah, well, we overdid it anyway. Europe is basically just like a suburb of the U.S. now. Ash: And Brexit. So, you know, Pablos: There's a lot of people who are trying to figure out how to decarbonize cement and it stalls out in part because there's like four or five thousand cement plants around the world, and they all cost $100 million to build in the first place. A lot of the ideas for decarbonizing cement require building a new plant. And even if you could build one, you're not going to build 4,000 of them. They're Just non starters. And that's part of why I like DMAT is that they can integrate in any cement plant with basically zero capex. You can just go in and upgrade, turn some knobs, and make a new formula. So, that's super cool, and hopefully this coffee based additive would have that property as well. Ash: I think what's interesting is just the coffee part of all this conversation. Pablos: If I go back to that article, it says that there's, 10 billion kilograms, which is 22 billion pounds of coffee waste a year. I presume this is post consumer grounds. Ash: This is probably commercial coffee grounds that they can track using, like, Starbucks. It doesn't include what we take home. Pablos: So it's at least something like three pounds of coffee grounds per human, for every man, woman, and child on Earth. I don't even drink coffee. So somebody else is doing double. The other one that we, got excited about and backed is this, startup called Marvel Labs. What's exciting there is they figured out how to use the used coffee grounds as an input material for 3D printers. That sounds like kind of a cute thing, but the truth is it's staggering implications. And it's because 3D printers, they're called rapid prototypers because we used them in labs and they were very expensive and impractical for a long time. And then in 2007, one of my buddies helped start MakerBot, and I was an advisor for MakerBot, which was the first consumer 3D printer. And so we thought we were gonna eventually build farms of these things like AWS, you'd just have a data center full of MakerBots and you'd wire them up to the "buy now" button, and whenever you clicked "buy now," a MakerBot would print your stuff and then print a box around it and then print a FedEx label on it. It would show up in the mail. Obviously that didn't happen, and here we are 15 years later, and you don't buy anything on Amazon that's 3D printed. There's two big reasons. One is they're one pixel printers, so they're super slow, and that makes it expensive. And then the other part of it is that the input materials are expensive, so you've got these high quality filaments, plastic filaments and things that are expensive. At the end of the day, you're competing with injection molding, which is like the cheapest way of making anything on Earth. And so, it hasn't worked out. There's a couple of exceptions. So for example, with metals, 3d printing of metals has worked out pretty well for two reasons. One, they're higher value parts. So you're printing, you know, jet parts and rockets and stuff. But also the technique in the printers is it's a powder bed, so you have this bin of powder, you run over it with a binder, like glue, from an inkjet head or a laser or something to sinter it together, and then, you pick up your part and shake it off, and you've got this part that was printed in a bed of dust. It's actually a very elegant way of making a 3D printer, and it's faster, because they're more like layer at a time instead of pixel at a time. Anyway, so what Marvel Labs did is they adapted that style of printer, which is fast, but the input material is these used coffee grounds and what the effect of that is, is now they can print stuff out of coffee. They're making all kinds of stuff. Sinks and light fixtures and bicycles and things. And the parts come out of the machine. They're made of coffee and then they just powder coat them with paint or metalize them so they look like metal and you can't even tell that it's made of coffee. And so this whole thing works awesome, but the main reason that it's important , and the reason that we invested, is that it flips the economics. So now, these parts that Marvel Labs is making, they've reshored manufacturing, they manufacture stuff in the U. S., they do it fully automated. And the parts are cheaper than doing it in Asia. That's what's exciting to me. They're also printing with seaweed. They're printing with sawdust. All the technologies they invented to make it work are about, printing with biomass in general. They're kind of the kingpin. Now we can get this whole vision together of producing things on demand in 3D printers in the U. S. Ash: It's interesting because several things, right? One is, like you said, it's not just, the on demand. All of our strategic risk starts to change, right? Think of what happens when, we get to a point where we're having another pandemic or, I don't know, they go after Taiwan. Supply chain changes if you're suddenly local, right? As long as we can get enough coffee into the system, we have enough of our own source material. Pablos: Ha, Ha, ha, ha. As a matter of national security, Americans are being asked to drink more coffee. Ash: It's a national security imperative that you get a frappuccino. Pablos: Well, I found out China just surpassed the U. S. as having the most Starbucks locations. Ash: China did. Frightening. I mean, Japan, Starbucks, whole different story. I was just looking at the botanical Starbucks in Japan, Starbucks is its own, own different conversation. But I was going to say that when you think about all of this, the implications for logistics, and one thing I wasn't sure on, on the way that they produced, what was their binding material? Because I know they're, one of the things they were talking about was biodegradability. Pablos: Marvel Labs has invented a variety of different binders. One of them is entirely sugar based. They use it with seaweed and they can make these biodegradable parts. Which is really cool, and then they have some top secret binders they invented that are super cool and they're not ready to announce them yet, but it's awesome. Ash: I saw some of the pieces. Pablos: Yeah. Oh, that's right. Ash: I got to actually play around with it. I, I think what's amazing to me is that the idea that you can cut production time. I don't know if it was an experiment or if they still do it, but remember there was Amazon Now. Where like they had little trucks going around and, and they had like USB cables or like whatever you needed, like that minute. Pablos: circulating your neighborhood With, that was loaded with the things that they predicted, were going to be bought. Ash: Yeah, 100%. That's what it was, right? They predicted that, everyone in Palo Alto needs like an extra USB cable. And they had one and you could get it like one hour delivery. Pablos: But that truck could just have a 3D printer in the back. Ash: That's exactly it. Right? Like imagine, how big are these things? How big are the printers? Pablos: The printers are, I'd say like 80 percent of the printer is the print bed by volume. So, if you have a printer the size of a refrigerator, 20 percent of it is gantry and other crap. And that's pretty typical of 3D printers, I guess you could say. And at least in a powder bed style printer. And the rest of the volume is printable. So, these printers are actually quite large. And one of the nice things about a powder bed printer is that you could just print a whole bunch of parts at once. You just fill up the bed with parts because they're just floating in powder because the powder is like the support material as well. It makes it easy to do big batches of stuff. If you're printing coffee mugs, you can print it and you got a fridge size printer. You can print, a couple hundred mugs or whatever all at the same time. And then, they just come out of there. I'd say 3D printing's future, over the next 10 years or so will be really focused on figuring out how to make multi material printers. There's a little bit of work on that now, especially trying to be able to do conductive materials. It'd be great to be able to print something like a game controller or a pair of headphones or something, have some of the wires printed in it. Ash: Maybe you have the recycled aluminum just like get blasted and powderized. I know of a magma plant coming up that might be able to... Pablos: Can we make a magma, printer? Ash: You take the aluminum, you feed it into the magma god and it comes out powderized. Pablos: Well, most aluminum comes from Iceland anyway. Aluminum is essentially made of electricity and they have access to cheap, clean electricity, Ash: That's the, the, secret, right? So we have infinite power and then they're just producing the conductive dust. One of the things I was thinking is like, how do you market this, right? Because we have to get a behavioral change on consumption. It's so easy to go with fast fAsh:ion, fast goods. We're addicted, I don't know if you've ever seen Wish? Pablos: Oh, uh, I know what it is, but I've seen Temu. I signed up for Temu. I ordered some shit before I found out it was obviously Chinese spyware app. And I um, I, bought some shit Temu cause it was so cheap. They're like paying you to take this stuff. And then it was like worse than infomercial products. Like I got these things and they're the cheapest possible things. And they had used like trick photography. I bought this bottle of, a cleaning product, I have it right here. I'm looking at it. It's this bottle called Foam Cleaner. I'm like, oh cool, I'll use that to clean the shower. I don't know what, kind of bug eye lens they must've used to photograph this thing. But when it showed up, the bottle itself is literally a 60 milliliter bottle, which is, that's like the size of, it's like a large bottle of nail polish, Ash: It's like, It's like, not even a perfume bottle. Pablos: And then it's got the full size spray head that you'd have on a bottle of Windex or something on it. So this whole thing, it looks like a joke. Nobody would ever do this. I've never seen a bottle this small with this big, like the spray head by volume is bigger than the bottle. Ash: So basically you've got a bobblehead cleaner. That's what you're saying. Bobblehead but foam cleaner. That's it. That's it. We can market it. Pablos: Yeah. I mean, I'm afraid to spray it because you know, like if I pull that trigger more than three times, the bottle will be empty. Ash: I'm sure it's not a neurotoxin or anything. Pablos: Okay. But anyway, the point being. Yeah, it's Temu and Wish and all this bullshit. I don't know about consumer behavior change. You would know more than me. What are the odds that we're ever gonna be in a world where people buy less shit? Ash: It's not that we buy less. I'm trying to figure out if we can shift them, right? Think about it. At one point, we were all obsessed around Gore Tex, it was like the magic, right? We had just left our class on osmosis and we were like, wow, it's like osmosis in a fabric, we were excited. Pablos: Maybe explain how Gore Tex works. Ash: Gore Tex's whole idea was about breathability, where the pores on the fabric were supposed to for air to go out, but water not to come in. Pablos: Which works because... Ash: It's surface tension allows the droplets to hold more together, so they're bigger than the water vapor molecules going out, right? So, so the molecular sizes are different. So you can create this sort of barrier. Now there's 50 versions of this to Sunday. But, Gore Tex was, was something which became a brand name, right? I don't know if it was before Intel Inside, but it was kind of the same concept, right? Saw a little label on Gore Tex. Pablos: It's like the Dolby of outerwear. Ash: It is. It was the Dolby of Outerwear. So I think somehow we've got to build that kind of reputational or brand concept, For example, if it's the seaweed and sugar and everything nice, right? Pablos: Okay. I see. Full circle brand where it's like "buy as much of this shit as you want. Whenever you're done we're just gonna turn it into the next shit you're gonna buy." Ash: it's not just recyclable... Pablos: It's like infinitely recyclable. Recycling is a is a joke. Ash: And the amount of energy and stuff that it takes is is sort of crazy, on that as well, right? So that's that's one of the, the sort of big, big problems that that happens with it. And I think one of the challenges is that we've got to figure out a way. That, something like what we're talking about in terms of, this new product, this new mechanism, this new process can be Gore Tex'd. Or Dolby'd, and a little bit more than like this is recyclable. I think we're kind of over it, right? Like we've seen the little symbol, we don't even know what's going on anymore. I know that in most countries they have like, at least like five bins. I think most Americans can't figure out like. What's up? There's a blue box. Pablos: You could imagine a version of this where, ultimately everything is just made of, some atoms, right? They have to come from somewhere. And then the energy it costs to, move them around and stick them together. So. You know, if you sort of just take that approach, you could say, okay, this stuff is made of this much joules and, this many atoms, like you could basically measure everything that way. Then you could say like, all right, well, the total cost of ownership in a given product could be added up that way. The cost of like mining all the shit, the cost of transporting around the world, the cost of, burning stuff to make it, whatever it takes. If you added that up for any object, it would probably be staggering. In the long run, you would, you, what you would like to do is track things that way and then be able to say, okay, this is kind of a full circle product, like an apple is probably like the closest you get maybe to a product that is low impact, it grows, we there, there's some energy cost in transporting it from a farm to your mouth, and then you eat it, you throw out a quarter of it as biomass. Ash: When you say an Apple, not your iPhone. Pablos: Oh yeah, I'm talking about like an actual physical apple. The kind you can eat. Yeah. Not an phone. Granny Smith, not a Macintosh. Ash: But maybe that's the score, right? Pablos: I think your Intel inside becomes... Ash: is it net negative? Is it net positive? Pablos: It's net negative or it's like close to the threshold of about an apple instead of being, at the threshold of like about a Tesla. Ash: That may be the interesting way to do it? So maybe a dynamic symbol is the way to think of it, right? So instead of the old Intel Inside or Dolby Atmos or whatever's going on, or Gore Tex, maybe it's about the level. Is there a number? Is there a score? Lasered in or 3D printed into the object itself or, or anything that you look at, it just tells you that this has a small number or a small something that people can understand that's better or higher or whatever. Pablos: Energy star. Ash: I look at something like calories. Like years and years ago, we all started getting obsessed and that definitely the generation that grew up with cereal boxes, who had nothing better to read. And we didn't have a iPhone to scroll. We read cereal boxes. We knew more about niacin and potassium in your cornflakes than any human should ever know. Pablos: It's true. I read a lot of cereal boxes. Ash: That's what you'd read. You read, you'd read the cereal box. When they changed the USDA standard for what you can see inside, the bigger format I remember that was like a big change on the packaging design. That was something where we could see the calories and then we realized, per standard serving size or whatever it was. And I think that at some point, the same thing has to happen, right? Each object that we consume or buy, can have that. There's actually a company. That we're looking at, called Love, like seriously called love.com. Uh, uh, I won't go into much more about that, but they're actually trying to change this, like specifically change this idea. They're trying to build an Amazon. First of all, they have love.com. I sort of tossed out the idea that it's powered by love. And that way, it can have a score, each thing you're buying. They curate what's allowed to be sold on there. So it's like an Amazon, but like, we're going to get rid of Pablos: So all you need is love. Love is all you need? Ash: It's true. That's their eventual goal is to go head to head with Amazon. A billionaire multi time, entrepreneur who's kicking this off. What's interesting, though, is I think people will start to recognize this. Pablos: Yeah, you could do some big branding campaign around, certified green or whatever, but it seems so like all these things are so gameable. I mean like calories, even like, I understand this as a kid, but now that I know what a calorie is like... Ash: It's totally gameable. Pablos: Oh my god, that's a totally fake thing that we made up that's, like, barely a measure of anything. Ash: That's why I picked it. I was going to say that with good numbers come good evil, right? Are you drinking a 12 ounce can of Coke? Was it like eight ounces? What did they do? It's interesting how it became a complete nonsense number? It mattered. We learned later that maybe the mix matters, and it wasn't about the sodium. And there's a lot of little bits that didn't matter. The question becomes, can you build something genuinely? There's another company, we invested in, Dollar Donation Club. And what's interesting about them is, when Seth, who's the founder, said, "Hey, I'm going to see if we could create the world's first super philanthropist." The idea that if we all gave a dollar a month, technically it's billions of dollars. You can make a lot of changes. He said," where am I going to give the money? I don't want to be another money place. I want to be something where I can see the impact." So he built a giant impact map of things he wanted to do. And he said, "okay, I want to know exactly how many kilos of microplastic are removed for my donation." Like, I don't care that I donate $1, $2. I was like, I'm willing to go and take out a kilo. Well, it turned out he can only get to like, I forget what the number is like 11 or 20 charities. It took that long and that his professional teams, like when they vet out what the charity really does. Pablos: Yeah. Ash: Almost no one qualified. So I think this is the unfortunate thing that's going to happen, right? So if our coffee friends bring it full circle, if Marvel can really like just crush it. Like they can demonstrate there's an actual true cost reduction I'm talking about from Guangzhou to, Columbus. By the time it gets there, like what actually happened and then the return leg, right? Like what happens on the back if, if that's actually a real score. That we can defend. Maybe that's what Marvel has to do. Pablos: The way it should be done probably is kind of like, consumer reports. There ought to be, like, life cycle metrics made for, the product coming outta Marvel Labs versus its competitor that came from Guangzhou. Here's your Samsung versus iPhone versus, Nokia or whatever and somebody does the research and figures out; this is the mining footprint; this is the shipping cost. This is how much, energy was burned. The factory is running off of a coal plant versus a nuclear reactor or whatever. Ash: Like Energy Star, but like it actually makes sense as opposed to Energy Star. Pablos: Yeah, and that could be given a score in joules that just ranks these things against each other. Ash: But we're talking about three ideas here, right? So that one idea is to get somebody to come out there and say, look, fundamentally, product life cycle measurement is something someone should go build, like someone should, whether it's independent of Marvel or not, somebody should do it. And then different manufacturers or, or whether it's a 3D printer of type company or someone else should go in and say, look, let's show you why we are the lowest score, the highest score, whatever the, whichever one's considered the better thing. And then we have to create education and marketing on that, to say, Hey, if you're not doing this, you, you are literally creating damage. Pablos: There must be initiatives like this that we don't know about. An interesting thing to consider is an iPhone is made of whatever, 2000 components. Some of them are like screws that Apple sourced and didn't manufacture. Where was the metal for the screws mined? Where's the factory for the screws? How far are the screws traveling to get to the iPhone factory? All that kind of stuff. And so you would, eventually if this were fully played out, when you design an iPhone and CAD, it would just tell you, where your screws are coming from. We already have the environmental impact score for those screws. Pick the ones that have the lower score. Ash: So this is like an SAP thing. So go back to, Fast moving consumer goods. So in the FMCG world, one of the things that's really interesting is something called, smart label and smart label is interesting because it said, Hey, like ingredients don't cut it. I want to know like really what's going on, it goes really deep, you can dive into the label, but where did you source it? Like, is it really honey from here or what was going on? I think Nestle, I think some of the biggest players all support it. Procter and Gamble, all these guys are on smart, smart label. Now that's interesting because you're almost already there, for those guys, you're pretty close, but that's for food. Hopefully that's mostly biodegradable. Otherwise we have other problems in life. Pablos: Yeah, that's interesting. Maybe that could be extended so that all the, the ingredients of my, headphones... Ash: Exactly. Could you extend that construct? I actually think back to another company, from years ago, it is one of my patents, from a while back. it was a company called, Black Duck Software. You were talking about, as you're sitting there with your CAD, I was thinking of, open source. Remember it was like, ""are you using something that's gonna infect the rest of your project?" When you're coding in Eclipse or something and you're like, oh, let me just grab this little... Pablos: You accidentally scoop up some GPL library... Ash: Yeah, it's an LGPL or something. It happened to Fidelity. Their entire mortgage calculator, their entire mortgage algorithm had to be open sourced because they used a website plug in. So, they eventually invested in the company. Obviously, they invested in us. But what was good is that, when you, were able to sit down and look at the project, it would tell you immediately, like, if you put this in there, you will like, have to open source your print driver. Pablos: All that should just be in CAD. A lot of CAD software has a plug in to tell you how much it's going to cost to machine that part that you made based on the design. And it could easily tell you how much material it's going to take and how much material cost there's going to be. But you could extend on that and say, you chose these screws. Here's how much they're going to cost. Here's what the lead times are. All that's in SAP already. And then it tells you, this is the environmental footprint of the screws you chose. Ash: And now you can tie that into some exchanges or B2B sourcing companies and just say, okay, give me a scenario. I want to automatically reduce my carbon or my, my total footprint. Where else could I source, right? So maybe instead of titanium screws, I have to manufacture for this new titanium iPhone from like some Russian mine where the titanium lives. Pablos: be seven Web3 companies trying to do this already. Ash: I think what they miss. And this is something that I think is an interesting part of the journey, right? That you and I also take is it sometimes great technology and great back end stuff doesn't hit the front. The only reason calories don't matter today because we woke up and realized that somebody paid off the cardiologists to get us to eat margarine and told us that sugar was, okay and fat was terrible. That was programming, right? That was maybe we need some good programming. I mean, we got programmed the wrong way. Maybe we need to program people. To see the right thing. And I don't know that we could be seen as altruistic or that we're necessarily not, not commercially motivated. I think that there's some way that today because of information and speed of information, I think we can create some level of transparency, like you said. And then we can turn around and say, back in the day, I couldn't tell you where my, millet was coming from for the food. Today we can, Smart Label will tell you literally where that food comes from. I think we could do something fun, fun with that. Someone should go do that. Pablos: Yeah. Someone should go do that, which is, one of the main points of doing this podcast is that hopefully we'll come up with ideas that somebody else should go do.