Not Another Podcast

Justin Kramer has watched friends raise $10, $20, even $30 million and end up sitting on it with no idea what to do next. He raised venture himself, and he still thinks most founders shouldn't. Justin spent his early career at Morgan Stanley managing money for people who were already rich. When GameStop and AMC started wiping out everyday investors, he left to build Moby, a company that uses A...

Chloe Samaha told the crew in the green room that your calendar predicts your future better than your ambition does. Brennan opened the episode with it. She's 22, co-founder and CEO of BOND , and she got into Y Combinator at 21 off a reply to a single tweet. Before that she cold emailed hundreds of private equity partners as a freshman, learned that sales was the one thing she could prove on a...

Brennan Pothetes builds companies out of New York, and in this episode he says San Francisco is a B tier place to start one. No guest this time. Just the arguments he has with founder friends over drinks, settled out loud with letter grades. Brennan ranks the six things founders fight about most: where to build, how to fund it, what to read, how to lead, how to work, and what to do with your twent...

Adam Delehanty has been a Knicks fan since he was zero years old. What struck him about last season's run was that when OG tips the ball in, there is no debate about what just happened. Then he goes back to his own work, and the work of most of the people watching, and it's Google Docs and strategy decks and products nobody may ever see. Brennan sits down with him as the founder and CEO of...

Sarah Perl had fewer than 150 followers when a tarot video she posted as a college sophomore went viral overnight. Three years later she'd made over a million dollars in courses, paid off the student debt she took on for a teaching degree everyone told her not to get, and left Brooklyn for LA. This year she shipped Stella, an AI app she designed the front end of herself using Claude Code, on n...

Afsheen Afshar has one of the strangest résumés in tech: an MD and a PhD who built brain-machine interfaces that helped paralyzed patients type using only their thoughts, then walked away from medicine to become Wall Street's first Chief Data Science Officer at J.P. Morgan. So when he says most of the AI being sold today is "theater," he has the standing to mean it. In this conversat...

Brennan Pothetes built eight companies in a single year and just closed a $24M raise for Infinity Constellation. So when listeners flooded him with questions, he did what most founders won't: he answered them straight, including the ones that expose his own contradictions. In this solo AMA, Brennan breaks down the exact first move Infinity makes before anyone writes a line of code, why he no l...

Silicon Valley says move fast and break things. Shensi Ding built Merge by doing the opposite: nine months of building with zero users, obsessing over margins while everyone else chased growth at any cost. Today the fastest-moving AI companies in the world, including Mistral and Perplexity, run on the infrastructure she refused to rush. Brennan sits down with the co-founder and CEO of Merge ($75M...

For 25 years, you have been renting. Your photos, your files, your audience, your work… all of it lives on someone else's servers, in formats you can't touch, monetized by a handful of companies that can evict you anytime. Ben Guo thinks that's the great unspoken scam of the modern internet, and he left a nearly nine-year career at Stripe to do something about it. Ben was an early empl...

George Kurdin spent years as a professional poker player before online poker was shut down overnight. The skill he carried into building a company wasn't the one you'd expect. It had nothing to do with reading faces across a table and everything to do with expected value, risk, and the discipline to iterate before you get crushed. Now George is co-founder and CEO of Monk, an AI-native acco...

Americans spent roughly a trillion dollars on property and casualty insurance last year. Only about 60% of it came back as claims, and that number has been falling for decades. Rashmi Melgiri wants to know where the other $400 billion went, and why nobody seems to be measuring whether the industry is getting any better. Rashmi started as an antitrust economist at 21, modeling DOJ and FTC cases, be...

Anastasia Leng 's first company got everything a founder is supposed to want. Time named it a top 10 startup to watch. The press loved it. She still couldn't raise a dollar, and it died a slow, public death. What she built next, CreativeX, now works with Unilever, Heineken, and Google. This conversation with Brennan Pothetes is about the psychology that made the second time different: para...

Jenny Fielding has returned three funds' worth of capital and backed two 2015 unicorns she's still holding 11 years later. So when she posted that early-stage VC's entire model might not survive the disruption cycles it's funding, founders listened… and almost no VCs commented. In this conversation with Brennan Pothetes, Everywhere Ventures' Managing Partner says the quiet part...

Olowo-n'djo Tchala grew up sharing an 8x10 room with his mother and seven siblings in Togo (a family of 41 brothers and sisters, one of the world's poorest countries) and left school after the sixth grade. In 1996, a Peace Corps volunteer named Prairie Rose came to his village. They fell in love and moved to California. Later on with 17 women in West Africa, a shea nut tree, and student lo...

Shamir Karkal co-founded Simple in 2009, one of the first real digital-first banks in the US. When he sold it to BBVA for $117M in 2014, he and his co-founder fought their board to distribute $14.6M of the proceeds to roughly 100 employees, excluding the founders. He's applied that same principle at every company since, including his current AI fund, where every employee owns a stake in the fu...

Jared Kleinert is the Founder and CEO of Offsite, the company that handles end-to-end retreat and offsite planning for hundreds of companies, including Perplexity, HubSpot, Walmart, and Remote. Before building Offsite, he became one of the most connected people in the startup world, was named USA Today's "Millennial Influencer of the Year," and wrote books about building relationship...

Liisi Laaniste spent over a decade studying one of the deadliest brain cancers in the world, glioblastoma, which kills most patients within 15 months and hasn't seen a meaningful change in standard treatment since 2005. She published in top journals. She ranked first in her class at Uppsala University. She earned her PhD in Computational Systems Biology at Imperial College London. And then she...

Six months. 21 episodes. Conversations with hardware founders, AI journalists, sex therapists, repeat unicorn builders, and the people training the robots that might change everything. In this special solo episode of Not Another Podcast, Brennan Pothetes sits down alone and riffs on the clips that hit hardest, the takes that got the most heat, and what he's actually learned from the guests he&...

Nicole Maffeo was the very first guest on Not Another Podcast. She's back, and the conversation picks up right where we left off. Nicole is a former Bridgewater investor, ex-Google AI research leader, and co-founder of Gambit Robotics, where she's building specialized robots for the home. In Part 1, she gave us the thesis: the only real moat left in AI is hardware, and the global AI race is really...

Eric Litman grew up on Saint Thomas in the US Virgin Islands, graduated high school at 15, and landed at NeXT working alongside Steve Jobs while still in college. Since then he's co-founded Proxicom, built Viaduct, founded Medialets (acquired by WPP), and managed WashingtonVC, an early-stage venture fund in DC. Today he's the Founder and CEO of Aescape, a robotics company building AI-power...

Before Money20/20 and the book and NASA, she was busing tables at Ruby Tuesday's in Times Square. Scarlett Sieber graduated from Fordham with an accounting degree she never really wanted, spent a semester abroad in Beijing, came back with one clear realization: "life is short, and accounting is not it.” And then she spent the next year clearing dishes while her classmates climbed the corp...

Most travel companies measure success by bookings. Zach Resnick measures it by how many clients never leave. Ascend (formerly FlyFlat) is a travel concierge for frequent travelers and it has a 100% 18 month retention rate. Most SaaS companies would die for those numbers. Zach got there by building Ascend around one principle: your time is sacred, full stop. Before Ascend, Zach played jazz trumpet...

Alfia Ilicheva came to the U.S. at 12 without speaking English, after her father died suddenly. That experience turned into a founder operating system: wake up, look in the mirror, and ask, “Is this the life I want?” She always leads with values and mission-aligment first. Today she’s the CEO and founder of Formulary Financial, building AI-native fund administration in a world where, according to...

Ravi Kurani has two exits to his name, and he used both of them as a running start toward harder problems. As the founder of Sutro, a smart pool chemistry device that he sold to Sani Marc in an acquisition that happened before the product was fully built. And before that, he founded ImpactSpace: the "CrunchBase for impact investing," acquired by ImpactAlpha in 2015. Ravi has lived throug...

Most e-signature companies charge you to sign a contract. Marty Ringlein is giving it away for free. Marty is the CEO and co-founder of Agree.com , a fintech-forward agreement platform that collapses the signing → invoicing → payment chain into a single motion and monetizes on the money movement, not the signature. Think Stripe, but the on-ramp is a contract. This is his fourth company. He's a...