Keep Going

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 ca...

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 edito...

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...

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...

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 202...

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 ye...

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 mak...

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 accide...

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 doi...

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 t...

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 bu...

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,...

I spoke with Bille August recently, and what struck me most wasn’t just his long, decorated career as a director, but the way he described why he’s still doing it. After nearly 45 years, he’s not chasing relevance or acclaim. He’s chasing those short, fleeting moments of magic on a set—when everything clicks, when the actors and script and crew fall into rhythm—and you know it can never be repeate...

This week on Keep Going , I talked with Benjamin Wallace — author of The Billionaire’s Vinegar and, more recently, The Mysterious Mr. Nakamoto . We didn’t focus on plot or spoilers. Instead, we talked about what it means to write for a living right now, in a world that’s drowning in content and racing toward automation. Wallace is one of those writers who makes it look easy. But he’s honest: it’s...

Founded by journalist and engineer Arikia Millikan , CTRL+X is a startup building a blockchain-based licensing system to help independent journalists protect, distribute, and monetize their work. Millikan started working on the idea nearly a decade ago, when she saw firsthand how media companies neglected digital infrastructure and treated editorial content as disposable. With the collapse of lega...

This week on Keep Going , I sat down with Scott Stevenson , CEO of Spellbook , a company that started with a frustrating legal bill and turned into one of the most widely used AI tools in the legal world. Scott’s story isn’t a straight line. He started building video games. Then musical instruments. None of them took off. But what stuck with him was the pain of trying to build something creative a...

I’ve been working on a book called Shroomies —a straightforward look at how mushrooms are helping people. Not the flashy kind of help. The real kind. People coming off SSRIs. People showing up for their kids. People remembering how to laugh again. When I started talking to Tracey Tee, founder of Moms on Mushrooms , I realized this conversation was exactly the kind of thing that should be on Keep G...

This week on Keep Going , I sat down with Richard White, founder and CEO of Fathom —the AI note-taker built for the flood of Zoom, Meet, and Teams meetings we all sit through. Fathom was early. It launched back in 2021 before the LLM boom, betting that AI would get better and note-taking would become table stakes for knowledge work. They were right—but it didn’t feel like that at first. When they...

In this week’s Startup Show, I talked to Quinn Kwon from Delabs Games . She’s helping rethink how we make, launch, and grow games. And it doesn’t look anything like the traditional model. Instead of throwing money at ads on Google or Facebook, Delabs is building games that grow inside messaging platforms—Telegram, Line—and reward users directly for helping spread the word. This is Web3 gaming, but...

This week on Keep Going , I sat down with Judy Kadylak . She’s a leadership coach who works in psychedelic integration. That sounds like two different jobs, but she’s found something interesting in the overlap: people trying to lead others without knowing how to sit still with themselves. Judy’s focus lately has been on dopamine. Not the abstract brain science stuff, but the actual patterns we fal...

When Jonathan Lowenhar says he enjoys his work, he means it. He’s the founder of Enjoy the Work , a firm that helps startup founders grow into actual CEOs. Not “founders who can speak on panels,” but operators—leaders who can run companies with hundreds of employees and real stakes. I had him on Keep Going to talk about what happens when the startup dream gets real—and why so many founders hit a w...

Startups are a grind. Hardware startups? Even tougher. This week on Keep Going , I sat down with CrackBerry Kevin (aka Kevin Michaluk) , the guy who made BlackBerry blogging a thing, sold a media empire, and then jumped back into the game—this time with a physical product: Clicks , a BlackBerry-style keyboard for modern smartphones. From BlackBerry to Clicks Kevin built CrackBerry.com in 2007, tur...

Anyone who’s built something from scratch knows the struggle. Some days you feel unstoppable, and other days, quitting seems like the only option. This week on Keep Going , I sat down with Spenser Skates , CEO of Amplitude , to talk about the challenges of staying the course, the moments when giving up seemed like the rational choice, and what ultimately made the difference in his journey. The Ear...

The workplace isn’t exactly known for being a warm and fuzzy place. Stress, pressure, and the relentless pursuit of profit usually take priority over things like employee happiness. But what if that’s the wrong approach? On this episode of Keep Going , I talked to Shereen Eltobgy , the Chief of Belief at Kindr Workplaces —a new initiative that aims to make kindness a core part of company culture....

On this week’s episode of Keep Going , I spoke with Hannah Cohen , a somatic coach and transformational guide specializing in breathwork and sound healing. In today’s world of relentless pressures, both personal and professional, Hannah’s work offers tools to navigate the noise and reconnect with the body and self. Creating Space to Breathe Hannah believes the first step to finding balance is carv...