Beyond Zenith

In this episode of Beyond Zenith, Mike (Co-Founder and CPO, Koah) sits down with Kian Wilkinson to unpack the journey from building eleven apps in search of the right idea, to launching Koah, an AI native ad network built for a world where AI apps need to monetize without wrecking the user experience. They get into why founders should not delegate their first customers to anyone else, what Koah actually looks for when hiring, why he wishes he had started exercising in the morning years earlier, and the thinking behind Koah's recent rebrand.

In this episode of Beyond Zenith, Irina sits down with Nicola Moss to unpack how a single phone call from the US Air Force turned into a mission to unlock cutting edge technology for the US government, why she hires the leader before the team every time she can, the real story behind Knox's 16 authorizations to operate with a 17th on the way, her advice for founders chasing product market fit, and the hardest lessons she's learned building three companies back to back.

Alex Reynolds went from Bain to employee twenty five at Peak, then built his first startup, Swift Intro, on top of LinkedIn's API, only to watch it disappear overnight when LinkedIn shut the API down. He landed at Shutterstock, met his future co-founder Stefan during a New York blizzard when barely anyone else showed up to the office, and together they took a new business line from zero to a hundred million dollars in four years. That experience became the blueprint for Vendelux, the event intelligence platform he now runs as co-founder and CEO, which he bootstrapped for years before Tribeca Venture Partners led a fifty million dollar Series B.In this episode of Beyond Zenith, Alex sits down with Kian Wilkinson to talk about why in-person connection is becoming the last trust channel as AI floods every other one with noise, the blizzard that led him to his co-founder, what it actually felt like the moment Vendelux hit product market fit, the real decision behind bootstrapping versus raising venture money, why he anti-sells Vendelux to almost every candidate he meets, and his twenty year vision to help humanity build meaningful professional relationships.

Brian didn't start in product. He started in email marketing, back when email marketing was still new. He talked his way into product management at a startup that had none, made a few mistakes, learned on the fly, and never looked back. Now he's Senior Director of Product Management at CloudForce, building Nebula One, an AI gateway that gives universities, hospitals and governments a secure way to deploy AI without losing control of it. In this episode of Beyond Zenith, Brian sits down with Nicola Moss to talk about walking into CloudForce as its first dedicated product leader with no roadmap to inherit, why he's a self confessed Claude fanboy who's only now starting to test the others, the real cost behind the AI bill that's coming due for every company giving away free tokens, why the intern test is the best way to get people started with AI, and what he thinks won't change about product leadership no matter how far AI goes.

Doug Toulmage spent years building Starlink from the earliest test satellites at SpaceX. Then ChatGPT launched, he met his co-founders for brunch, and within days he'd left his job to start Gradial. In this episode of Beyond Zenith, Doug (Co-Founder and CEO, Gradial) sits down with Nicola Moss to unpack the whole story: why he chose marketing over finance, HR, and legal as the vertical to bet on, the moment he knew Gradial had found product market fit for not one but two products, how customers have taken campaigns from six weeks down to six hours, and what he learned about founder life the day his calendar went from packed to empty.