Keep Going

For more than 50 years, some of the women who helped build modern computing couldn’t tell anyone what they had done. Not even their families. On this episode of Keep Going, I spoke with Eileen Buckholtz, author of Queens of Code: Inspiring True Stories from NSA’s Computing Women , about the women who helped develop some of the world’s earliest computer systems while working in secrecy at the Natio...

Pete Dering , founder and CEO of Peak Design , did just that. He started in 2010 with an idea for a camera clip, launched it on Kickstarter in 2011, and spent the next 15 years turning a simple photography accessory into a company selling everything from camera straps and tripods to backpacks, phone mounts, and luggage. Along the way, he avoided outside investors, built a loyal customer base, and...

Can you rebuild a business that has been declining for more than a decade? On this episode of Keep Going, I spoke with Dorothy Belshaw, CEO and co-founder of Rockview Management Group, which recently acquired NY NOW, the New York gift and home furnishings trade show. At its peak, the show occupied more than 500,000 square feet of exhibition space at the Javits Center. But years of ownership change...

When Aaron Argueta and his business partner Jay started Bailey’s CBD for Pets, they had 50 bottles of CBD extract, about $500 and a dog named Bailey. Nearly a decade later, the company has more than 20 products and distribution in over 400 pet stores. Getting there, however, meant surviving an industry that seemed determined to put them out of business. On this episode of Keep Going , I spoke with...

Esther Dyson has spent decades studying technology, business, and the ways both affect society. But she doesn’t consider herself a futurist. As she explains on this episode of Keep Going , she’s more interested in understanding the present and helping people change what comes next. Dyson, whose forthcoming book In Defense of Limits: Human Time and AI Scale examines the relationship between human l...

What happens when you reach the end of a successful career and realize you’re not done working? On this week’s Keep Going, I talk with Alan Wexelblat , a longtime software engineer, UX leader, startup veteran, and MIT Media Lab alum who retired earlier this year. Instead of settling into retirement, Alan began volunteering full-time with organizations supporting immigrants and refugees. We talk ab...

What happens when a product takes ten years to become an overnight success? On this week’s Keep Going , I talk with Reid Robinson, founder of Robinson Exotech Corp. and creator of the X Leg , a wearable exoskeleton designed as a hands-free alternative to crutches. The idea came out of Robinson’s own recovery after a serious car crash in 2015 shattered his lower leg and ankle. Over the next two and...

What happens when you finally get everything you thought you wanted, and realize you want something else? Joe Spector came to America from the Soviet Union at ten years old. His family arrived with $100 each. Joe had a red suitcase. He studied his way into Berkeley, finished in three years, and landed a job at JP Morgan. It was the kind of secure, prestigious career his younger self thought meant...

Note: The video portion of the interview failed so this is an old-fashioned audio podcast. Scott is a great guy so I wanted to share this regardless. What does success look like after 25 years in business? On this episode of Keep Going , I talk with Scott Jordan, founder of SCOTTeVEST and self-described “Chief Pocket Scientist,” about building a clothing company around a simple idea: people carryi...

Ron Johnson built the Apple Store, then watched the world copy it for two decades. In this episode of Keep Going, he walks through how that happened, starting with a choice he made early on: learn retail from the ground up, not from a spreadsheet. After Harvard Business School, he went to unload trucks in a Mervyn’s store, then rose through Target during its big 1990s run, where he helped push “de...

This one is personal. I started working on Shroomies in 2018, after my dad died and I entered one of the darkest periods of my life. I was depressed. I was taking SSRIs. I was very close to self-harm. I didn’t feel like myself, and I didn’t know how to get back. Then a friend invited me to a psychedelic mushroom session. I thought it sounded ridiculous. I’m not a Burning Man guy. I’m not a hippie....

Melissa Mohr spent her early career at Amazon and built some amazing products before making the move to SVP of product at Vivint . Now she’s here to tell us how to maneuver office politics and survive the onslaught of AI Mohr studied animal science in college. She expected to spend her career working with horses. Instead, she ended up helping solve some of the strange problems that come with tryin...

Jim Kolchin started iWallet because he knew the problem from the inside. Before he was building fintech software for contractors, he was a contractor himself. He started his first business in 2003, spent 15 years working in the field, and grew that business from nothing into an eight-figure company. That is where he saw the pain around checks, credit cards, receivables, and all the little financia...

Angie Elita Newell does not write easy books. Her novel, All I See Is Violence , is not a fantasy escape, which she joked about after finding herself surrounded by “sexy fairy” books at BookCon. It is a historical novel built from trauma, archival research, Indigenous memory, and the long shadow of state violence. Newell is a member of the Liidlii Kue Nation, part of the Dene linguistic group. Her...

I had one of my favourite conversations in a long time this week with writer and Full Bleed podcast host Arjun Basu . We both came from the magazine world. We remember the days when magazines had millions of readers, editors could call a trend before it happened, and entire industries waited to see what would appear in next month’s issue. Then the internet arrived. Most people tell that story as i...

When most people hear the word “creator,” they think of someone promoting protein powder or the latest gadget. Tanya Cohen sees something very different. Cohen is the co-CEO of Made By Us Studios , a company trying to bridge Hollywood and the creator economy. On this week’s Keep Going, she made a simple point that explains why so much of the media business is changing. “Every creator can become an...

Starting and running a business can be one of the most rewarding experiences, but knowing when and how to shut it down is equally crucial. In this post, we’ll explore key insights from Dori Yona , CEO and co-founder of Simple Closure , on navigating the often daunting process of business closure. You’ll learn about the common pitfalls, best practices, and how to ensure a smoother transition during...

Keith Wyche has had the kind of career that looks clean from the outside. Bell. IBM. Pitney Bowes. Grocery. Walmart. Board seats. Books. Big jobs. Big teams. The sort of resume that makes people assume there was always a plan and that the climb was smooth. It was not. Wyche told me something on Keep Going that I think a lot of ambitious people need to hear. Early in his career, he was getting resu...

Everybody has heard the promise by now. AI is going to save time, reduce costs, and help businesses get more done. The problem is that most people still don’t know where to start. That’s the challenge Will Ruben is trying to solve with WorkClaw, a new product from Workmate Labs that turns AI agents into something closer to digital employees. Ruben describes WorkClaw as “an AI team for your team.”...

Josh Knutson and Ryan Thill are building Lium for a problem that sits just outside the usual AI demo. Most AI tools are very good at text, code, and spreadsheets. Lium is focused on the messier stuff, the huge physical-world data sets that sit inside farms, climate labs, energy systems, logistics networks, and other operations where the answers are buried under terabytes of data. Knutson, the CEO...

Most of us spend a lot of time thinking about what we want. A better job. More money. A nicer house. More freedom. Less stress. Very few of us spend much time thinking about what a successful life actually looks like. That question came up during a conversation with Perry Atwal , a lecturer at the University of British Columbia and author of the upcoming book Wisdom for Life . After teaching more...

Everybody has heard the promise by now. AI is going to save time, reduce costs, and help businesses get more done. The problem is that most people still don’t know where to start. That’s the challenge Will Ruben is trying to solve with WorkClaw, a new product from Workmate Labs that turns AI agents into something closer to digital employees. Ruben describes WorkClaw as “an AI team for your team.”...

Andrew Reid has seen the supplements business from both sides, as a founder and as an operator inside a very large company, and he thinks the next step is personalisation that does not feel like homework. Reid is the CEO of Claer AI . The product is an AI-driven supplement regimen builder that asks for your health profile, matches it against a large library of peer-reviewed studies, then turns the...

Angelo Sotira built DeviantArt at nineteen, and then spent the next two decades watching the internet grow up, get rich, and get mean. When he joined me on Keep Going, he was not doing the victory lap thing. He was trying to name what changed, and what it means for anyone trying to build something creative right now. He described the early internet as directed. People knew what was missing. They w...

Most people think of music as entertainment. Rachel Francine thinks of it as infrastructure for the brain. On this episode of Innovators, I spoke with the SingFit co-founder and CEO about how her company is using therapeutic music to help people with dementia, traumatic brain injuries, and speech loss. The idea sounds almost deceptively simple. People who lose the ability to speak can often still...