Keep Going

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

On this week’s episode of the Startup Show, I sat down with Jayashree Dutta—Jaya for short—the co-founder and CEO of Atronous AI. Jaya’s background in retail tech runs deep, with previous stints leading data teams at Walmart and The RealReal. Now she’s building something designed to shake up how product catalogs get created in e-commerce.The problem? Only a small percentage of products ever make it online. Most suppliers and retailers are stuck wrangling with bad or incomplete data. That leaves a huge opportunity—the long tail of inventory—uncaptured.Atronous AI tackles this by using what Jaya calls “agentic orchestration.” Instead of relying on offshore catalog teams or cobbling together a patchwork of content and pricing tools, Atronous automates the entire process. Their platform pulls in data, infers complex attributes, formats everything according to the quirks of different marketplaces, and gets full listings online in hours—not months.What stood out to me is that this isn't just a better version of an old tool. They’re stitching together a deep stack of open-source and proprietary models—from image captioning and segmentation to custom transformers—all trained on real retail data. Think frying pans, beauty products, apparel—anything that needs a solid, structured listing.Jaya says their moat isn’t just technical. It’s in how well they plug into enterprise systems—PIMs, ERPs, CRMs—and in how they’re approaching patents, attributes, and vertical-specific logic. It's also the kind of tool that big players couldbuild internally—but rarely do.They just wrapped their pre-seed and are kicking off their seed raise via Alchemist Accelerator. If you're in enterprise AI or retail tooling, it's worth a look.Check them out at atronous.ai. 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

Sometimes on Keep Going, I talk to people who have failed a few times and got up again. Other times, I talk to people who were hit so hard that getting up again was the entire story.Lizzie Snider is one of those people.On paper, Lizzie was doing everything right. She was applying to PhD programs in psychology, doing research on child development and psychopathology. Then she was in a car accident. A serious one — double impact, traumatic brain injury, cognitive symptoms that left her unable to spell her own name, let alone write a research paper.Doctors told her she was done. No grad school. Possibly permanently disabled.She didn’t accept that.Instead, she went deep into functional medicine, psychedelics, acupuncture, and eventually founded Global Wellness — a community-focused practice for trauma recovery that works with somatics, breath work, and integration therapy. Her work helps people manage PTSD, anxiety, concussion recovery, and emotional trauma using treatments that are often outside the standard psychiatric playbook — but increasingly supported by evidence.We talked about what healing looks like when you’ve been told healing isn’t possible.We also talked about how hard it is to navigate recovery when your mind is the thing that’s been injured. That’s one of the most important things that stuck with me: it wasn’t just the trauma that was the problem. It was the disorientation — the loss of memory, the fractured sense of self, the daily struggle to remember basic things. That’s what she calls “the real trauma.” Not the event, but the residue it leaves behind in your nervous system.Lizzie was clear: she tried the traditional route. Top clinics. Pain programs. Long rounds of meds. It didn’t work. So she started exploring alternatives, carefully. Ketamine, SGB (stellate ganglion block), hyperbaric oxygen, neurofeedback. Eventually, she found a blend that helped her stabilize. It wasn’t a miracle. It was experimentation, patience, and persistence.Now, she runs Global Wellness to help others find that path before they fall through the cracks. We talked about how to know when something is off — not just physically, but emotionally and mentally. If you’re judging others constantly, feeling shame, feeling blame, Lizzie says, that’s your sign. That’s your signal that something’s out of alignment. That’s the time to pause.One of the simplest techniques she recommends? Coughing. Literally just coughing.It sounds ridiculous, but it’s part of vagus nerve stimulation. You can also do breath work, cold plunges, or light gag reflex activation. All these methods help reset the nervous system, which can be on high alert for years after trauma.If you're building a startup, hitting a wall, or just burning out quietly — listen to this one. Not every setback is dramatic. Some are invisible, creeping, slow. But they still knock you off your path.Lizzie’s story is a reminder that healing isn’t always linear, but it’s always possible — especially when you stay curious and stay connected. 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 don't think about engineering managers until something breaks. Code slows down. Tickets pile up. Meetings drag on. Then someone asks, “Who’s managing all this?”John Kennedy, CEO of Actual AI, knows that problem better than most. He’s building software for the people holding the tech world together — engineering managers who plan, coach, and report across teams but are often stuck doing it with duct-taped dashboards or a dozen browser tabs.I talked to John on Startup Show about why Actual AI isn’t just another dashboard or bot. It’s an agent. It sees code changes, turns them into business summaries, tracks developer velocity using Stanford-grade metrics, and cuts out the grunt work that usually drags teams down. Not by flooding your Slack with hallucinated code reviews, but by actually working — quietly, usefully, and consistently — in the background.He told me their biggest goal is giving engineering managers their time back. Not with chat prompts or half-baked integrations. But by building something custom-fit: a true system of record for real-time development. The endgame? Let managers coach their devs, not babysit them.It's not flashy. It's not buzzwords. But it’s exactly the kind of thing that matters if you’re trying to build something real and not fall apart halfway through. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.keepgoingpod.com/subscribe

This week on Keep Going, I talked to Trevor Longino from CrowdTamers, a repeat guest and someone who’s made a career out of iterating through failure. Trevor doesn’t just tolerate failure—he plans for it. He opens every client engagement with a $100 ad test that’s designed to fail. Why? Because failure, early and cheap, tells you what not to do.But here’s the thing: not everyone wants to hear the truth. Trevor ran a campaign that outperformed a client’s original messaging 4x. Clear win. But the client didn’t like it. It didn’t “feel” right. So they stuck with the version that made them feel safe—even if it performed worse.That moment stuck with me. Because you’re not just selling results—you’re selling change. And not everyone is ready to change, even when the data begs for it.Trevor also opened up about making hard calls: firing clients who weren’t a good fit, reshaping his business around what actually works, and letting team members go—not because they weren’t good, but because the business had changed. It’s the quiet, unglamorous side of running something real.This episode is about that: seeing failure not as a single moment, but as a sequence. What you learn one month after the fall isn’t the same as what you learn a year later. Founders keep going not because they win every time—but because they’re willing to look hard at what didn’t work and move anyway.Listen in. And if you’re in the middle of a shift—or thinking about giving up—maybe this is what you need to hear today. 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 of us don’t think twice about how we use computers. We move a mouse, type in a form, click a button. We’ve built up decades of patterns and habits, and the machines have evolved to meet us halfway. But what if the next evolution wasn’t a new interface—but the same one, just used by something that’s not us?That’s what Ang Li is working on. He’s the co-founder and CEO of Simular, a company building what he calls “autonomous computers.” His idea isn’t about adding more APIs or building smoother backends. It’s about making software agents that interact with the machine exactly like we do—by moving a mouse, typing into boxes, and navigating the graphical interface.Agents that act like us, but aren’t us.The conversation stuck with me. Partly because of the tech, which is impressive—they’re outperforming OpenAI in UI automation benchmarks. But mostly because of the philosophical weight behind what he’s building. The name Simular says it all. This isn’t human intelligence. It’s something like it. Something that mimics, that reflects.Ang comes out of DeepMind, where he split his time between AGI research and product engineering. That tension—between theory and practice—is exactly where Simular sits. They open source their tools. They build in public. They’re not trying to lock the future into a closed-loop platform. They’re trying to make it usable now, by anyone.What stuck with me most was his answer to the problem of trust. Most AI startups talk about full automation—hand over your tasks, and the machine will handle it all. But Ang is honest: no one is giving their Gmail password to an agent. No one is giving it their credit card. So instead of pretending the agent can do it all, Simular is building a shared workspace. You and the machine work together. You do the sensitive stuff. It handles the rest.There’s something oddly human about that.Maybe AGI doesn’t come in a wave. Maybe it doesn’t look like a breakthrough. Maybe it looks like a computer that clicks and types, just like we do. And maybe that’s the future: a machine that isn’t better than us, just similar. 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

NOTE: This podcast discusses adult themes but we are careful not to describe too much. It’s mostly about tariffs.Every founder hits a wall. For Brian Sloan, the guy behind AutoBlow—a high-tech, internet-connected sex toy for men—that wall came in the form of a 145% tariff.This wasn’t his first rodeo. He’s been in the game 16 years. He lived in China, built deep relationships with his factory, and figured out how to bring a niche product to a mainstream customer. He knew his margins. He knew his risks. And still, he got crushed.Here’s what happened: thanks to a sudden tariff shift, his previously duty-free product category was now facing taxes that could double the cost of importing his goods. A $200,000 container would now cost $300,000 just to get into the U.S. That’s before selling a single unit.Keep Going - A Guide to Unlocking Success is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.The kicker? The news didn’t arrive with much warning. So he kept selling—at a loss—hoping the situation would resolve before the next shipment landed. It did. Barely. But not without cost. Retailers got nervous. Canadian buyers stopped ordering. Every day became a spreadsheet nightmare of gambling on timing, cash flow, and broken policy.Sloan didn’t ask for pity. He explained what actually happens when tariffs hit: they don’t hurt China. They hit American businesses, ones that design and market their products here but manufacture abroad—because that’s the only place where it’s still possible to make things at the price U.S. consumers expect. His factory wasn’t some faceless government proxy. It was a group of engineers, workers, and line managers he knew personally—folks who already operate on slim margins.And the alternatives? Absurd. Building in the U.S. means paying someone to solder cheap electronics for a product that might retail for $100. Nobody’s doing that profitably.Even now, with tariffs scaled back to 30%, the damage is done. Sloan raised prices. He’ll survive. But others won’t. Promotional goods sellers, housewares manufacturers, small operations locked into pricing contracts—this could wipe them out.This wasn’t a tech story. It was a survival story. And in a moment when supply chains are weaponized and manufacturing is politicized, Sloan’s message was simple: we’re not bad guys. We’re just trying to make things people want at prices they can afford, and if the rules change overnight, the entire system breaks.He made it through. Barely. And he came on Keep Going to talk about it not because he wanted to complain, but because he wanted people to understand: behind every line of policy, there’s a real business hanging on by a thread. 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