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

I sat down with Constantin Kogan last week after we randomly met in Salt Lake City. We both live near New York. Sometimes the universe has a sense of humor.Konstantin is the founder of Holistic Capital, a multi strategy investment firm focused on digital assets. He also runs a podcast called Holistic Investments. Over 100 episodes. More than 600,000 followers across platforms. Not bad for something he started during COVID while stuck at home.But the interesting part of his story is not crypto. It is not Bitcoin in 2012. It is not Ethereum in 2016. It is not being early to hedge funds or registering with the SEC.It is this: social capital is capital.During COVID he found himself in a tough place. Like most of us. No travel. No meetings. No momentum. He asked a simple question. What can I do that I actually enjoy? His answer was long conversations. Honest conversations. The kind you have in a kitchen at midnight over wine.So he started a podcast.No monetization plan. No big strategy. Just curiosity and discipline. For five years he made nothing from it. Most podcasters quit before episode thirty. He kept going past one hundred.Why?Because he was not optimizing for money. He was optimizing for relationships and learning.That changes everything.We talked about failure. I asked him about bad trades. Crypto winters. Market crashes. He surprised me. The real failures were not financial. They were relational.Picking the wrong partners.He described business like a marriage. You can survive small disagreements. But when a real crisis hits, that is when character shows up. Do you share a vision. Do you share values. When it gets ugly, does your partner protect the mission or protect their ego.You cannot really test that in advance. There is no checklist. No personality quiz that guarantees success. At some point you rely on judgment and instinct. And you accept risk.That is uncomfortable. But it is honest.We also talked about investing. Early in his career he focused on technology and timing. Now he looks at people first. Ideas are abundant. Execution is rare. Motivation varies wildly. Some founders want status. Some want money. Some want to prove themselves. Some want to change the world.Only one of those types will survive when things get hard.If you are building something, remember this. Investors are not just evaluating your deck. They are evaluating your stamina. Your alignment with your team. Your ability to handle conflict without blowing up the room.And if you are thinking about starting a podcast or some other media project, understand what you are signing up for. It is a business. It consumes time. It demands consistency. It does not pay right away. Maybe not for years.But it builds something else. Reputation. Network. Intellectual capital. A record of your thinking.That can compound.Konstantin does not even call himself a VC anymore. He trades liquid markets now. Algorithmic strategies. Volatility. But the podcast still runs. The network still grows. Yesterday he met the co founder of Venmo and invited him on the show on the spot.That is how opportunity works. Quiet compounding. Relationship by relationship.You cannot fake that. You have to show up. You have to publish. You have to keep going when the numbers are small and the monetization is zero.There is a lesson here.Build things that create optionality. Build things that connect you to other capable people. Build things that make you better at thinking and listening.Money follows. Sometimes slowly. Sometimes indirectly. But it follows.In the meantime, protect your partnerships. Choose carefully. Align early. Agree on how you will handle conflict before it arrives.Because markets rise and fall. Technologies shift. Cycles repeat.Character does not.TRANSCRIPTWelcome back to keep going. A podcast about success and failure. I’m John Biggs today on the show. We have Constantin Kogan. He’s the, uh, GP at holistic capital. And you also have a, really cool podcast, which I’m going to be on eventually. So I get to actually,Constantin Kogan (01:18.537)Mmm.John Biggs (01:37.954)meet your audience. But we met just a week ago and you have a really, cool story. So tell us what you’re up to, Constantin.Constantin Kogan (01:47.235)Hi, John. First of all, an honor to be here. Yes, we met in Salt Lake City out of all the places, ironically, live in close by in New York. I don’t know where to begin the story. guess maybe just a little bit of background. I’m originally from Ukraine. was born and raised there, 11 years in the United States. I started my career as a...John Biggs (01:56.236)Yeah.Constantin Kogan (02:12.651)I’m a modernism future trader. Chicago Bota Trader was my first venue where I started to explore financial markets. From there, went through a hole and bought my first 5 Bitcoin in 2012. 2016, I a conscious choice to go all in when Ethereum got out and...thought that programmable money is definitely going to be the future of tokenization of all the assets. 2017, I became a partner in the first crypto fund of hedge funds in the world. We’re the first SEC registered firm. And from there, you know, I had a wild journey co-founding three companies, you know, investing in 80 plus venture startups and running my own.you know, my own hedge fund, working for hedge funds and now focusing on holistic capital, which is basically a multi-asset, multi-strategy investment firm, mostly focused on digital assets, but eventually we will work with different assets on blockchain as well, which I think that’s where the future is going to. And also, as you mentioned, I...also run Holistic Investments, which is the podcast which I started during COVID time. My first guest was Dan Moritz from Pantera Capital because we invested in Pantera so we good relationships with them. Since then, I 100 plus guests on my show and enjoy learning from incredible individuals.John Biggs (03:49.278)And you’ve got you got like 600 plus thousand followers across your across all your platforms. What do you think led to that level of success? And what is what does that give you as a VC? Like I know what this gives me as a I don’t know, just a putz on the internet. But what does that give you as a VC?Constantin Kogan (03:55.957)Yes.Constantin Kogan (04:10.313)Well, to be completely transparent, I don’t consider myself as a VC anymore. Like I used to be. Right now I’m...mostly with trading more liquid assets, right? So you can think about it as algorithmic trading firm, high frequency trading, right? Closer than, so I used to be at VCN. I thought that was incredible opportunity in emerging markets, right? But regardless, what it gives me, it gives me network. I think...Social capital is another form of capital, right? Not necessarily like people who invest in you is your, you know, main business partners in life. You know, some people like stay with you regardless of whether you succeed or you fail. And I think the more value you bring to other individuals, like what look what we’re doing today, right? You’re the firstwho allowed me to be on your podcast, which I’m very grateful for, and then you’re gonna be on mine, and that’s hopefully gonna inspire others to do the same and share thoughts, you know, learn from each other. I would say intellectual capital and social capital, that’s what’s the primary goal for me, and that’s how I’m giving back to the world by educating the future generations.John Biggs (05:28.396)Mm-hmm. So tell us about the growth of this media empire, I guess you could say. So you started out just deciding to do this. What was the impetus? Why did you want to do it?Constantin Kogan (05:40.105)Well, media empire, it’s a big word. love how you frame it. Future media empire, yes. Yes, I appreciate it. Look, I, again...John Biggs (05:47.03)Yeah, we gotta tuck each other up, yeah.Constantin Kogan (05:54.363)Wholeheartedly, was in a very tough spot during COVID. I think it was a very challenging time for everyone. And I thought to myself, what can I do? I mean, we’re sitting at home. There’s not much to do. you know, everything is digital anyway. You cannot go out. And I started to ask myself, it was more of a soul searching exercise. Like, what can I do to at least do something what I love to, you know, have a cohesive discussion and also somehow impactothers to inspire them or to help them in some way and that podcast format was the most relevant for me. I’ve listened to a lot, I’m a big fan of know like Joe Rogan, Alex Hermosy, know and Alex Friedman and many other like greats know people who went bold and started to invite other individuals, have long discussions with them so myMy format is about 60 minutes, right? So it’s enough time to learn about a person, about their journey, about where they’re coming from, and also how they achieve this success. And also ask them uncomfortable questions, which allows to bring less controversy, but more about what were the failures? What are the learning lessons? Something that you would not talk on your board meeting or somewhere in the traditional media, right? So more like honest, friendly conversations,you will have when you’re drinking wine with your friend in the kitchen.John Biggs (07:30.606)So tell me about some of those failures. think you, I mean, right now we’re looking at a crypto winter. So that sounds like, it sounds like you might have some issues right now, but tell me about the failures as you move through and try to enter this space.Constantin Kogan (07:44.255)Yeah, as a matter of fact, we’re doing great. maybe we like when you’re trading.the market is a strategy, you’re not like long like any asset like we’re making money even shorting right now. So for us, the volatility and big spikes is where we make most of our money. And that’s the exciting part. Like, and that’s when I finally understood after three cycles in the industry that how to navigate the markets. So that’s number one. The failures mostly, ironically, I wouldn’t cal

On this episode of Innovators, I spoke with Jason Ambrose of People.ai about what “agentic AI” actually means, why sales data is messier than most people think, and why blindly trusting large language models is a mistake.People.ai has been around long enough to see multiple waves of enterprise software come and go. Now it’s repositioning itself squarely in the agent era.Most CRM systems tell you what was entered. They don’t tell you what’s actually happening.People.ai takes a different approach. Instead of relying on manual updates, their AI analyzes the communications that define modern sales, emails, Slack messages, meetings, chat transcripts. The system maps that activity to accounts, contacts, and opportunities.That sounds straightforward until you scale it up.If you’re a startup selling to a small business, maybe one salesperson is talking to one buyer about one product. That’s simple. But when Microsoft sells to Verizon, you might have dozens of people on both sides, across legal, technical, procurement, and executive roles. Conversations happen everywhere. Mapping that complexity into a clean CRM record is hard.That’s where People.ai claims it shines. It uses its own AI models, trained on billions of transactions, to reconstruct what’s really going on inside a sales organization.What Is an Agent, Really?We talked about the shift from chatbots to agents.A chatbot answers a question. An agent has an objective.Jason framed it in terms of business process automation. Old-school automation works when the logic is predictable. If this, then that. Stay inside one system, follow a defined workflow.Agents step in when reasoning is required. They cut across systems. They pursue a goal. They have to decide what to do next.But that only works if they’re plugged into real expertise.Jason made a useful distinction. Public LLMs are trained on public data. Enterprise expertise lives in private systems. If you want an agent to act intelligently inside a company, it needs access to proprietary data. That’s a big trust ask. You’re effectively saying, “Let our AI read your emails.”That’s not a small decision.Avoiding “Build Trust With Stakeholders”Anyone who has used a generic LLM for business advice has seen the problem. You ask for guidance and you get vague platitudes. “Build trust.” “Accelerate the deal.” “Engage the customer.”That’s not actionable.Jason argues that this is where expert agents come in. Instead of spitting out generalized advice, they ground recommendations in specific deal data. Who hasn’t responded in three weeks? Which technical blocker hasn’t been addressed? Where did the last conversation stall?Without that grounding, AI defaults to corporate fortune-cookie language.The Capital Markets RealityWe also touched on fundraising.SaaS is being repriced. Public markets adjusted first, and private markets followed. Companies that once enjoyed premium multiples are now being reevaluated in light of AI disruption.Capital is flowing into AI-native plays. If you look like “just another SaaS company,” you need a credible AI story. If you genuinely sit at the center of AI transformation, you’re in a stronger position.People.ai is not currently raising, but Jason sees the shift clearly. The market is asking who is being disrupted by AI and who is using it to build something new.Is AI Replacing Jobs?It’s the obvious question.Jason’s take was pragmatic. Technology changes work. It always has. He remembers the early days of the web and the anxiety that came with it. Some jobs disappear. Most jobs change.His line stuck with me: people should work with people, and let AI do the rest.Sales, at its core, is still about relationships. AI can summarize, surface risks, and suggest next steps. It can’t replace trust, empathy, or judgment. At least not yet.If you’re in sales and you haven’t started using AI, Jason’s advice is simple.Start.Use ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini, whatever tool you prefer. Have it rewrite emails. Summarize meeting notes. Draft follow-ups.But don’t copy and paste.He pointed out something many executives are quietly thinking: if you send a clearly AI-generated email without tailoring it, you’re signaling that you didn’t invest the time. And if you didn’t invest the time, why should the recipient?AI can amplify your work. It can’t replace the part that makes you human.People.ai is betting that the future of sales is agentic, cross-system, and grounded in real communications data. Not just dashboards, but reasoning systems that understand what’s actually happening inside complex deals.Whether you buy that vision or not, one thing is clear. The next phase of enterprise AI won’t be about novelty. It will be about integration, trust, and measurable outcomes.And that’s a much harder problem than writing clever emails.TRANSCRIPT Welcome back to the Innovators show about amazing people doing very cool things. I’m John Biggs. Today on the show we have Jason Ambrose from People.ai. It’s agentic and it’s for sales teams, but why don’t you add to that, Jason, welcome.Jason Ambrose (00:24.482)Yeah, thanks, John. So what People.ai does is our AI figures out what’s happening in a sales organization by looking at the communications between your field and your customers. So we analyze emails, chat transcripts, meetings, Slack messages, and the like to turn that beyond just the data to what’s actually happening. How does thathow do you find the answers of what’s happening in the organization? And we provide that either to humans or to agents. So that’s been our big shift this year is to realize that the stuff that we were doing for humans in CRM is also very relevant when you have agents trying to figure out what’s happening in sales.John Biggs (01:04.094)So let’s explain agents to folks who might not even understand what’s going on. So the idea originally was that you had a chat bot. You asked it something, and it responded to you. But now we’re talking about agents, which are supposed to be autonomous to a degree. So how do you guys describe those, and how do you use them?Jason Ambrose (01:24.086)Yeah. And hey, look, you know, I may not have everything right on this too, but at least the way that I think about it is maybe starting from a business process automation, right? So, you know, for, for periods of time when we had predictable workflows and we knew, you know, sort of if then else, there’s not thinking that happens there, but we could automate work if that had to happen.John Biggs (01:28.188)Mm-hmm. Yeah.Jason Ambrose (01:48.302)In the case of agents, that now becomes something where they have some chain of thought, they have some reasoning. So they know they have an objective or a purpose that they’re trying to work through. They have to figure out how to get that done. So when there’s a little bit more, you know, thinking, reasoning that needs to happen to figure out how to get that objective, that suits an agent. What I think we’re seeing with customers is they’re figuring out how to unlock that forwork that needs to get done across a lot of different systems, right? So, know, BPA, business process automation, or what you have in your workflow tools that tends to say within the silo of a system from data to business roles to presentation layer to humans. When you start to cut across the systems, that’s where there’s been big opportunities for agents.John Biggs (02:37.214)So in this particular case, you guys are focusing on sales leads, that sort of thing. So you basically take every single data point that you have and say, this person, I don’t know, emailed you two weeks ago and also was tweeting this and is interested in this. So why don’t you give him a ring? Is that generally how it works, or what’s the?Jason Ambrose (02:56.376)That’s yeah, that’s really close. Yeah. I think the difference is, you know, let’s think about two different types of selling, right? you could be a startup and you’re selling to a small business. That’s, know, pretty much one buyer. So, you know, if you think about it in the context of CRM, you’ve got one salesperson. You’re selling to one buyer at one account and you’re selling one product that that is pretty simple to figure out, right? Where it gets more complicated is if you’re.Microsoft selling to Verizon just to pick two big companies. You might have 30 or 40 people or more on the Microsoft side. You might have 30 or 40 people on the Verizon side answering different technical questions, having different conversations about different elements of your business relationship and how you match those activities to records in CRM that represent, you know, here’s a person that we’re talking to, here’s the account that we’re talking to.you know, here’s the specific sales opportunity that becomes really hard to do properly. And that’s, that’s where we, that’s where we shine. And that’s where we have, you know, pretty large customers like Red Hat, Verizon as a customer and some others.John Biggs (04:09.712)Would you be able to still do this without AI? Would this exist if we didn’t have this kind of, I don’t know, synthesis, right?Jason Ambrose (04:15.798)It would be really difficult, right? So we have our own AI that’s applied to do the math to figure this out. And it’s learned from looking at billions of transactions over the years, right? The second piece, I think, is how you integrate or interface with other systems. So you mentioned the chat interface. So a human does want to do that, right? So we put this alongside sales opportunity record.If you want to get the full story, you can ask the chat bot, are the risks in these deals or what’s happening in this account? Now with MCP, that same type of interaction can happen from an agent to our system. So the agent asks those questions and works through its own reasoning model to ask those things. So if you want these agents to be effective, you do need AI helping them on their side with the reasoning and ours on our side answering those qu

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

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

I caught up with Marcos Bravo, a Chilean guy living in Portugal, who has spent most of his adult life bouncing between tech, sales, marketing, and whatever paid the bills. He is 46 now. He has a family. And he is in that phase where you look at your work and ask a blunt question: Is this all I am showing my kids, that life is just paying bills.Marcus is not doing the clean midlife pivot. He is doing the messy version. He wrote a book because he had time, he was unemployed, and he needed to put the stories somewhere or he was going to lose his mind. He got the idea after seeing a tweet about how, with everything going on, we might see another Anne Frank “in our backyard.” That stuck with him. He started writing a kids book, got blocked, then wrote a different story that took shape. It became Ana Luz’s Diary, about a girl named Anna hiding in an attic with her brother and aunt, trying to stay quiet because noise brings the wrong people. He ran it past his daughter, she signed off, and he shipped it.At the same time, he is doing video work for companies because that is what keeps things running. He is starting an ice cream brand with his wife. He is putting together a punk band in Portugal. He is trying things, not because it is efficient, but because he is trying to figure out what feels like his life. He said he does not want to be a one road guy. When something feels right, he wants to take a shot.We also talked about why storytelling still matters when AI can generate words all day. His point was simple. The missing part is connection. You can generate a story, but you cannot replace the feeling of a real person looking you in the eye and saying something that lands. He ties it back to work, too. In marketing and sales, if you do not know people, you cannot connect to people. Your story falls flat.He is also clear-eyed about aging in tech. He worries about how long he can keep doing what he does, and whether the industry will move on without him. His answer is to stop chasing status. He does not want to manage people. He wants to deliver a specific thing well, mentor when asked, and stay useful. He thinks experience will matter again, not as a title, but as real history you can apply.The part that stuck with me was how he thinks about safety. He does not judge people who stay in the cubicle. He just does not want to end up like his dad, who spent decades in one company and now, at 75, feels like he missed his chance to do more. Marcos wants to look back and say, that was a lot, that was worth it.He framed his goals in a way I liked. He wants to give his kids a few core memories they will actually keep. A trip to Japan for his daughter. A steak in New York for his son, yes, Peter Luger. He wants those things, and he wants to be able to say his own life was good too. He even mentioned he stopped drinking and still enjoys life, which is its own kind of data point.This is the whole point. You do not need a clean plan. You need motion. You try things. You keep what works. You drop what does not. You pay the bills, but you do not let that become the only story your kids learn from you. Marcos is doing it in a way that looks chaotic from the outside, but it has a clear center. He is trying to make sure his life is not just a job history, it is a life.His book is Ana Luz’s Diary, by Marcos Bravo. If you want to see what he made, it is on Amazon.TranscriptJohn Biggs (00:27.042)Welcome back to Keep Going, a podcast about success and failure. I’m John Biggs. Today on the show we have Marcus Bravo. He’s Chilean. He lives in Portugal now. I met him in Poland when we were pros approximately, I think, six years old, I think. That’s what it feels like at this point, right? So welcome, Marcus. You’re an author, you’re a marketer, you’ve done loads of work.Marcos Bravo C. (00:46.072)Yeah, something like that. Yeah.John Biggs (00:55.252)over the years with multiple clients, multiple places, and now you’re kind of doing your own brand. You’re kind of building your own presence. So why don’t you tell me what you’re working on.Marcos Bravo C. (01:03.398)So, well, I like you said, I moved to Portugal from Poland two years already here. And yeah, I needed to start something else. I mean, felt that I was getting old for being the tech guy or the sales guy. And I just thought, well, let’s see what I can do. Right. So a mix of crazy stuff. You try to do everything that you think that you feel that it can.be sort of meaningful to yourself, but you really realize that you don’t know what’s meaningful to yourself. So you have to rediscover all of that. one of the things I’m doing now, I just wrote a book, which was on my bucket list, I guess. I wrote a book. I’m starting with video again. I started putting together a punk rock band here in Portugal. mean, Jesus, I’ve been trying to do everything just to figure out.what’s the right thing to do. And when you have a family, you have to figure out how to the bills. So I’m still having an affair with tech. But basically, I’m just trying to still discover things when I’m 46, which is I don’t know if it’s right or not, but it’s weird.John Biggs (02:06.734)Mm-hmm.John Biggs (02:11.011)What is that impetus to discover as we get older?Marcos Bravo C. (02:16.756)I guess I get so used to, well, I have to figure out how to pay the bills and that’s it. I started figuring out, well, what am I showing my kids? Is it all about money? Is it all about just to go through life without trying to not die of hunger? And I wanted to do something that is meaningful for me as well. I had to sort of ask permission. It’s like, do you mind if I don’t do this?crap, I make less money, but I do something else that might be more meaningful. And that’s what I’m doing. I mean, the whole book came out of almost an accident, just like watching videos of people writing books, trying to come up with an idea. And because I couldn’t write the book that I wanted to write, I ended up writing another book that ended up taking shape. And now it’s on sale. mean, every little step that I’m doing is just sort of showing me something new. And like you said, we’ve been around for a while. We’ve been doing tech.John Biggs (02:48.429)Mm-hmm.Marcos Bravo C. (03:15.374)all the stuff for many years, but there’s always a space for something new, something better, something meaningful.John Biggs (03:25.378)What does it mean to be meaningful, right? So your book is Analyst’s Diary, which is a kid’s book, right? And it’s about a little girl, why don’t you tell us the story?Marcos Bravo C. (03:37.382)So basically, Andalus came out, I was writing a kids book, I was writing a bunch of stories, like very cool, fun, weird, scary, whatever. And then when I was blocked, I was like, well, I need to write something else. And I remember seeing a tweet right before started writing. It says like, with all this happening around the world, we soon we’re to have an Anne Frank in our backyard. And I was like, right, well.What if Anne Frank’s still around? There are many Anne Franks around the world, especially with how things are. So I started to write the story, like, how would I see from maybe like a little bit of a Latin view or like trying to add my own experiences into this little girl called Anna who got stuck in the attic with her brother and her auntie and they’re trying to figure out how to be quiet because noise will bring more people, will bring the bad people.John Biggs (04:06.926)Mm-hmm.John Biggs (04:29.976)Mm-hmm.Marcos Bravo C. (04:30.38)And that ended up taking very nice shape. I started adding all of the things that I knew of storytelling. And I created a story that is maybe not an easy to read story, but it made sense to me and it made sense. mean, my daughter had to approve it. So it made sense to her too. It worked.John Biggs (04:48.782)Is the goal to just do this? Is the goal to allow this to be part of your personality, part of how you grow? Do you think it’s Marcos Bravo’s for the rest of your life? Or is it Marcos Bravo who does everything else that you’ve done before,Marcos Bravo C. (05:11.43)I think it has to be a mix. The first thing I realized for sure is that I don’t want to be the one road guy. But every time or anytime there’s something that feels good, that feels right. The world, let’s give it a shot. For sure I’m writing more. I love writing and I’ve been writing since I was a kid and this is the first time I actually said, and this is because I was unemployed. I’m like, I have all this time in my hand. I need to do something, otherwise I’m gonna go crazy.So I need to put stories in there and it felt right and that’s definitely something I want to keep exploring and we’re going to keep doing.John Biggs (05:52.014)Tell me about storytelling in general. How do you use storytelling in your career? How do you use it to, well, mean, first off, beat AI, right? Because right now we can blast out. We could feasibly blast out your book if we gave it the idea. We would just blast it out. It wouldn’t be any good. But how do you keep that humanity? How do you keep that aspect of storytelling?Marcos Bravo C. (06:09.989)Yeah.Marcos Bravo C. (06:16.271)Well, mean, AI, even though it’s been helpful with many things, I I use it quite often for work, but it was a huge threat for me because I mean, my whole career beside marketing and sense of whatever is because of storytelling is because I found that I can tell stories that people want to listen. And rediscovering that people, yeah, they’re okay with that. can create stories in AI like that. But it’s this connection thatis missing, like you and I talking, you and I look at each other and having that feeling, that’s irreplaceable. That’s not going to happen anytime soon. It might happen. Absolutely. mean, anything can happen. But I think the reason people connect to other people is because they see beyond the story, right? They get to feel something because of the story. And I don’t think that’s

On this episode of The Innovators, I spoke with Jasper Fu, CEO of CoinSub, about what crypto payments actually look like when you strip away the hype and aim for real adoption.CoinSub has been operating for roughly two and a half years and has grown to a 22-person team, most of them engineers. The company’s focus is narrow by design. Instead of trying to convince millions of merchants to adopt crypto directly, CoinSub sells infrastructure to payment service providers. These are the companies that already process card payments for thousands, sometimes hundreds of thousands, of merchants. CoinSub’s bet is that adoption happens faster when crypto looks like just another payment option, not a new system merchants have to learn.Fu framed the problem simply. Crypto and stablecoins are often described as liquid assets, but in practice they are hard to use for everyday payments. Merchants do not want to think about wallets, chains, or conversions. They want money in their bank accounts. CoinSub handles the movement behind the scenes, converting between dollars, Bitcoin, and stablecoins, then packaging that capability so payment processors can offer it under their own brands.For merchants, the experience is meant to feel familiar. Crypto becomes another icon at checkout, alongside cards or digital wallets. Whether funds settle as stablecoins or dollars is not something the merchant has to manage. Fu compared it to card networks. Merchants do not think about how Visa or Mastercard clears transactions, they just expect it to work.That distribution strategy also shapes CoinSub’s view of competition. While many crypto payment companies target merchants directly, CoinSub targets the providers upstream. There are billions of dollars flowing through a relatively small number of payment processors, many of which lack the technical capacity to build crypto infrastructure themselves. CoinSub positions itself as a way for those companies to keep pace without rebuilding their stacks.Usage data suggests there is real demand, even if it remains early. Fu said CoinSub processed roughly $400 million in transaction volume last year. That number varies widely by region and industry, but it reflects actual consumer-to-business payments, not trading or speculation. Some sectors adopt faster than others, including cross-border commerce and industries that struggle to maintain stable card processing relationships.Fu pushed back on the idea that crypto adoption hinges on hype cycles. He views blockchain and tokenization as infrastructure, a more efficient way to store and move data and value. Speculation and scams, he argued, appear in every new technology wave and do not define the underlying system. In his view, hype draws attention, but utility determines what survives.Stablecoins are central to CoinSub’s timing. Fu said regulatory clarity, treasury backing, and growing institutional interest have aligned incentives across governments, issuers, and payment networks. Payments and commerce, he said, are the logical next phase after issuance. Once stablecoins exist at scale, the question becomes how people actually use them.Fu’s path to CoinSub started outside crypto. After leaving a corporate role, he took time off to think about what he wanted to build next. Payments stood out as a place where incremental efficiency could have broad impact. Making money movement cheaper and more accessible, particularly across borders, felt like a net positive use of time and capital.That mindset also shapes CoinSub’s internal culture. Fu said he prefers the startup environment because it allows for empathy-first leadership and long-term thinking. He believes effort cannot be bought, only invited, and that teams perform better when people are treated as contributors rather than interchangeable resources.Looking ahead, CoinSub is expanding beyond its initial engineering phase. The company is working to capture more of the payment service provider market while it still has an early mover advantage. Longer term, Fu sees applications beyond checkout, including payouts, invoicing, and potentially ATMs, anywhere money needs to move across systems or borders.Fu is realistic about maturity. He expects fragmentation before consolidation, with many stablecoins and blockchains competing before a smaller set emerges as dominant. In that environment, CoinSub’s role is to abstract complexity away from customers and let them benefit from whichever systems ultimately win.Crypto payments, in Fu’s telling, are not about replacing everything overnight. They are about quietly fitting into existing workflows until their presence feels unremarkable. That, more than price swings or headlines, is what adoption looks like.TranscriptJohn Biggs (00:07.982)Welcome back to The Innovators, a podcast about amazing people doing amazing things. Today on the show I have Jasper Fu. He’s the CEO of CoinSub, a stable coin operation. We do a lot of crypto on here, so I’m happy to have somebody back from the crypto world. Welcome, Jasper.Jasper Fu (00:27.501)Thanks for having me, John.John Biggs (00:28.588)Yeah. So tell us about CoinSub. How long have you been around and what are you up to?Jasper Fu (00:33.923)Yeah, absolutely. So we’ve been around for two and a half years. The team is about 22 people now with 17 being engineers. And what we jumped into the space to do is like everyone’s heard of this stable coin crypto blockchain Bitcoin stuff, right? And there’s a variety of value, value props. But what we realized is a lot of it’s just not hitting to the mass market.We particularly target payment service providers in fintechs, right? A lot of stable coin around, a lot of Bitcoin around, why can’t we pay with it was our first thought. You say it’s liquid, how do we make it liquid? And as we dug into the space, we realized this early, early stage of adoption, there’s a lot of demand from both the merchants, the businesses, as well as these payment providers to be able to offer this, right? But this is totally new tech to them.And most of the solutions in this space are either going for, hey, directly to the businesses themselves, or they’re these esoteric APIs that are hard for non-technical people to understand. So what we do is we pre-build out the infrastructure so that somebody could go from US dollars to Bitcoin to stable coin to US dollars. And we apply that to different things like payment acceptance and payouts.and we wrap and package that whole thing up and allow other companies, allow other payment providers who are already selling say card payments to now add this additional capability underneath their own brand.John Biggs (02:07.726)Interesting. in a nutshell, is the focus more on stablecoins? Is the focus more on general crypto? What am I as a merchant? So say I’m a merchant, want to sell my widgets online or I want to sell them in the store. What am I doing with you guys? How do you sell to me?Jasper Fu (02:25.924)So merchants usually get their payment products through their payment provider. So that’s the interesting insight that we had, right? You usually only want to work with one person and that might be say your stripe or your clover or whatever it is. So we actually sell to the clovers, you know, the clovers of the world, the payment service, the payment processors of the world. But what that looks like for the merchant isyou reach a point of awareness where you’re like, I know that I should probably accept this kind of payment, but at the end of the day, I’m just trying to expand my business and grow my revenue. So for us, it’s just one more thing that gets added on at checkout, and that’s the last thing you have to worry about. Whether it ends up as stable coin or whether it ends up in US dollars in your bank, you shouldn’t have to worry about it. Focus on your business. You don’t worry about how your credit card gets there from Visa or MasterCard, and you don’t worry about how PayPal, Google Pay, Apple Pay, Clarion don’t work.And so that’s the kind of level of adoption we want to bring where people understand that there’s some value there and we just go, great, here you go. Let me make sure that it’s comfortable for you.John Biggs (03:32.383)So the icons when you check out are like credit card, don’t know, PayPal, Venmo, Alipay, and then crypto. OK. You’ve got a lot of competition in that space. How is that working out?Jasper Fu (03:37.997)with crypto.Jasper Fu (03:46.244)So the competition in this space would only apply if the target market is the merchants themselves. There’s very few companies that are actually targeting the payment service providers. If you think about it, there’s hundreds of millions of merchants in the world that capture trillions of dollars of payment volume. But there’s only really thousands of payment service providers, independent sales orgs, and these are the ones that are already kind of selling card processing.they’ve already captured the entire market. And the reality is most of these have been around for 15, 20, 25 years and they’re not tech savvy. So when you get these first movers like a stripe, right, offering stable coin payment acceptance, what that actually does for the rest of the industry is it pressures kind of the middle of the pack or the earlier adopters to take action. And there’s not enough time for them to build it because as you said,the space is saturated and it applies to not just crypto but traditional payments as well. And so the options to buy and to date, we think of ourselves as like orthogonal to the competition. Our difference isn’t in what necessarily we’re offering them as an end product but rather the deployment model. Rather than deploying it to the merchants and trying to onboard millions of merchants, we onboard a couple dozen.payment providers that then grant us access to hundreds of thousands of merchants. So that’s it.John Biggs (05:15.854)And then hundreds of thousands of customers as well. I mean, this

This week on Keep Going I talked with Nelly Mendoza, the founder of Nelly Creative Studios. She has been making jewelry for about ten years, and her story is not a clean startup arc. It starts with her walking into a class in the basement of her college art center, kind of by accident, and finding the one thing she kept coming back to, even while she was majoring in economics.The part that stuck with me was how practical she is about an “impractical” career. She did not raise outside money. She took a few fellowships, one was about $5,000 after graduation, and used it to buy materials, mainly gold, and get herself set up. After that, she kept the loop tight, money from projects went back into materials and equipment. There is no magic here. It is repetition, reinvestment, and staying alive long enough to get better.She also talked about the part people skip when they say “follow your passion.” In a creative business there is no set path. There is no job ladder. It is trial and error, and it can be lonely. She described those stretches where sales slow down and you start asking if you should turn around and do something safer. She had those moments. She also knew that if she took the safe route too early, she might never leave it. So she learned to measure progress in small wins, one new client, one new piece, one new idea, and keep moving.On the growth side, she did the work that actually gets attention. She built a consistent online presence, wrote blogs, kept a “jewelry journal,” and made her brand for both men and women, not just women. She leaned on word of mouth because jewelry is visual, people see it, ask about it, and that conversation sells better than an ad. Then she added something a lot of online brands miss, physical experiences. Last year she rented a gallery, invited people she trusted, and let them handle the pieces in person. No storefront, so she created the moment herself. She is planning another pop-up, and she is careful about safety and about building a real community around the work.One more choice mattered. She took a job at Tiffany, in their innovation studio, for four years. Not to quit her business, but to buy time and learn. She called it a kind of second degree. It gave her skills, contacts, and more confidence in how the industry works. Then she left when she felt the job was taking too much time away from the thing she wanted to own. That is a hard call, and she made it without pretending it was romantic. It was about control and focus.Her economics degree shows up in how she thinks about pricing and tradeoffs. She does not price from feelings. She prices from materials, opportunity cost, and the reality that gold has gotten expensive enough that old prices do not work anymore. She is now thinking about entry-level pieces for younger followers, using different materials, without turning the work into disposable trend-chasing.If you want the lesson from this episode, it is this. Making your own way is slow and it is messy. You do not need a dramatic leap. You need enough runway to learn, enough discipline to reinvest, and enough patience to stick with the lonely parts. Allie built her business the old-fashioned way, one piece at a time, one customer at a time, and one decision at a time. That is still how it works.Transcript:Welcome back to Keep Going, podcast about success and failure. I’m John Biggs. The other show we have Nelly Mendoza. She’s the founder of Nelly Creative Studios, your jewelry maker. Nelly, welcome. Yeah, so you’ve been doing this for 10 years. I think you’re the first person I’ve talked to who is actually making jewelry or some kind of likeNelly (00:58.162)Thank you.Nelly (01:02.184)I have closed ears now, yep.John Biggs (01:09.728)or accessories, etc. So this is a this is a new one for me. So why don’t you just tell me about the business and how you started.Nelly (01:15.45)Yeah, so I started in college kind of by accident. Just enjoyed making jewelry, just walked in into a class one day into like the basement of the art center and then started making jewelry that way. And then I was an econ major, kind of went back and forth in terms of careers, but the one consistent thing was always jewelry. And then once it was time to pick a career, you know, last...last semester or last quarter of school, I decided to try jewelry. I got, yeah, so I started that way. At first, I wasn’t sure what it would look like and how the future would pan out. But as time continued, I kind of figured things out a little bit more.John Biggs (02:04.536)So what was the driving force behind this decision? I mean, you had an economics degree and making jewelry is, I suspect, fairly difficult thing because it’s fashion-based and I can’t imagine that it’s cheap to get started.Nelly (02:23.694)No, it’s not cheap for sure. You have to be creative in terms of, know, I never got any external funding just because I know what that means. It’s like giving up control of who you are and the type of work you’re working on. So the only funding I got was a few fellowships. Like post-graduation, I got like $5,000 to just buy materials. So I just bought gold and a few other things. And then I waskind of set up in terms of a studio space. I used the space in the college for a bit. And then that was my first kind of funding. And then after that, I continued to self-fund whatever projects I would get, I would just kind of put back into my work. So I would just go back into buying gold or materials or equipment.John Biggs (03:14.926)So tell me about the process. How do you start a jewelry business? What were some of the things that you faced?Nelly (03:24.04)The reason I started was because there was really nothing else that I wanted to do. No, you know, it’s, difficult at first. You’re like, okay, I want to do this career, but how do you do it? It’s not as easy as, okay, I want to work in investment banking. Let me apply for different roles. And then I’ll go through these application process, you know, application rounds and interview rounds. It’s more of, okay, you want to do this. You have a goal, but how do you get there? It’s not.Like someone has done that already and laid a path for you. So it’s a lot of trial and error in terms of how do you get to where you want to be right from you. It was always having control of my own work, being independent and just making beautiful things and having people buy by them as well. Right.John Biggs (04:12.794)Mm-hmm. How do you get attention as an artist in that way? mean, obviously, you need to build a fan base. You need to build folks that are repeat customers. But you also have to capture people who are just going to come off the street and say, hey, I like this. What did you do to get started?Nelly (04:31.558)Yeah, so I definitely made sure I had a strong presence online. So all of my socials and whatever I was putting out very consistent. So I would always write blogs and I have a jewelry journal just based on, okay, like this is, you know, what the trends are happening for men. And, you know, and I always focused on having serving both men and women as opposed to just doing jewelry for women.and just having that consistent product, right? So I started my first clients where people I went to school with and then just kind of started telling their friends. And fortunately, jewelry is a very visual product. you know, people see it on you and they’re like, I like it, it’s easy to sell in that way. So you always, you know, I have the work that I wear, but I also, the best people,Are my best clients or those who wear it and kind of tell their friends? So it’s a lot of word of mouth. And then how do you get it to the wider public? Last year I had my first show. So I rented out a gallery and I just invited friends, friends of friends and, and so on. And a few people who walked in, but it was a closed event, private, just kind of getting, you know, it’s like, people have kind of known me for a bit, but don’t really know who I am and letting them interact with my.product, especially since I don’t have a store or anything like that. Just having the physical aspect has also helped. So that’s kind of like the next phase of my business, just continuing those pop-up ideas. So I have one planned for this year, for example, somewhere in SoHo again, and just letting people interact with the product. And this will be for a bigger client base. First one was mostly for people already knew.Obviously you’re dealing with jewelry. You don’t want just anyone walking in. I want people to feel safe when they’re in there as opposed to someone randomly walking in and being a safety thing. So I’m always careful about who I invite and making sure they’re interested just to create, because I’m not just making jewelry or selling jewelry. I also want a good community of people who enjoy my work or who enjoy the arts.Nelly (06:54.648)and as opposed to just, you know, it’s just something I sell.John Biggs (07:00.206)Was there ever a moment when you said, I should probably get back into investment banking?Nelly (07:05.339)that’s very interesting. would say, yes, definitely a few moments where you’re just like, okay, like I’m not selling as much jewelry. just, you know, the creative, the creative career is so interesting because it’s very lonely. You go through these moments where you’re just walking a path and you’re like, this is the right path. Or is it time for me to turn around? I would say once I was past those dark moments of doubt,I was like, all right, I just have to keep going and things, you know, you have to build slowly. And for me, like the reason I didn’t go until one of those traditional careers starting off is because I knew I would get trapped in that safety net very early on. And it’s once you’re in that, it’s so difficult to leave. So at least for me, it’s like, all right, I had to celebrate the small wins. All right. I have a new client. have a new project, a new idea. I just ha

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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