The Thread Podcast

155 Episodes

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Go-to-Network is Eating Go-to-Market, with The Swarm's Olivier Roth

2026-09-1823:05

Cold outreach is dying....so what replaces it? This week Justin sits down with Olivier Roth, co-founder & Chief Growth Officer of The Swarm, the go-to-network platform backed by HubSpot Ventures ($10M raised to date). The Swarm started as a network recruiting tool in 2021, but customers kept pulling it toward sales, and a category was born: go-to-network, using the combined relationships of your team, investors, advisors, and customers as the first motion in your funnel instead of going c...

The Voice Layer for Emerging Markets: Aethex AI's Co-founder and CTO Ayooluwa Odemuyiwa

2026-07-3118:42

Most voice AI startups today are thin wrappers on someone else's models. Ayooluwa Odemuyiwa went the opposite direction and built the entire stack. In this episode, Justin sits down with the CTO and co-founder of Aethex AI, who along with co-founder Mariama is building the voice layer for emerging markets across Africa and the Middle East. This is the AI that banks, call centers, and telcos use to reach the customers a human team never could, and it's already running 17,000 calls a day. Ayool...

The Scarcity of Being Human: Catherine Blackmore, Oracle's Group VP of Customer Programs and Employee Success on CS in the Age of Agents

2026-06-1238:01

Catherine Blackmore has spent nearly two decades building the programs that wrap around technology, from the early days of customer success in 2007 to her current role as Group VP of Customer Programs and Employee Success at Oracle. In this episode she sits down with Justin to unpack what the discipline got right, what it got wrong, and what survives the shift to AI. Catherine makes the case that the high touch model was right all along. It buys a company time to build its moat. But the obses...

Your Next Role Won't Be Posted, It'll Be Whispered — Andy Mowat

2026-05-2227:02

Andy Mowat has run RevOps at four unicorns, and between every role he's gone out and built something new. His latest is Whispered, an AI platform that helps top GTM execs build their careers through shared insights, warm introductions, and access to the roles that never get posted. In this episode, Andy and Justin get into why the entire GTM tech stack is heading for a two-year rebuild, what the move to a data-warehouse-first model means for RevOps teams, and why smaller companies are suddenl...

You Can't Read the Label from Inside the Bottle

2026-05-0824:29

Justin sits down with Nils Vinje, business growth guide and longtime customer success leader, to talk about the single biggest thing holding most growing companies back: everything still depends on the CEO. Nils spent the early part of his career on the leading edge of the customer success movement — convincing his first employer to ditch the "account manager" title back in 2011 — and has since coached hundreds of CS and CX leaders through the challenge of making their function legible to the...

#box-pro-ellipsis-17907944078710{-webkit-line-clamp:2;}The Thread Podcast