Keep Going

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...

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...

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...

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 midd...

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...

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 en...

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...

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...

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 s...

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 spe...

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 e...

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 hel...

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...

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 even...

We recorded late in Tokyo, and Evan Burkosky , CEO of Kimaru AI , laid out a claim that is both obvious and ignored. Most supply chains still run on spreadsheets. People glue together ERP exports, POS reports, CRM notes, and a flotilla of pivot tables, then hope the next week behaves like the last one. It rarely does. Kimaru calls its approach decision intelligence. Strip away the hype, and you ge...

My guest this week was Ashley Manta , a certified sexologist and relationship coach. She works with high achieving women and with couples. Here focus is on pleasure, connection, honesty, and the habits that keep those things from drying out. She says we have to start with stress. If you run a company or live inside one, you know the drill. You carry the day in your jaw, in your shoulders, in your...

In this episode of The Innovators , I spoke with Pablo Zegers , Chief AI Officer at Kaspix , a company that’s turning everything we think we know about artificial intelligence upside down. Zegers and his team are building analog AI—systems that don’t need transistors, GPUs, or data centers. Their technology runs intelligence directly in hardware, even when that hardware has physical imperfections....

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 simpl...

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 pa...

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 arrive...

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 gi...

This is a free preview of a paid episode. To hear more, visit www.keepgoingpod.com When 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 el...

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...

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 s...

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 Legacy Beckley Retreats is the living continuation of Amanda Feilding’s work. For decades, Feilding ran the Beckley Foundation, a no...