Path Found

Send us Fan Mail This compilation closes out the AI & Careers series by bringing six of its guests into one room and listening for what they have in common. They could not look more different on paper — a community newspaper publisher, a brand designer, a marketing creative, a Hollywood studio operations executive, a plaintiff-side employment lawyer, and a management consultant. But asked the...

Send us Fan Mail Jason Dobbie never chose cooking. He was a quiet kid from Fergus, Ontario, a math whiz who lost interest in school, and at fifteen he took a dishwashing job because a friend passed it along. Over 26 years, one opportunity after another carried him into Ontario's top kitchens: an apprenticeship, a sous chef role at 24, and eventually head and executive chef positions across Ni...

Send us Fan Mail Christina Searing didn't set out to work in AI. She set out to build "portable" business skills, inspired by her father, and let a love of travel steer her into consulting, where every three-to-eighteen months a new project felt like a new job. Over 23 years, she found her calling as a "translator" between what a business is trying to accomplish and the te...

Send us Fan Mail For our 50th episode, the person who’s quietly shaped every one of the previous forty-nine finally steps in front of the mic. David Strutt has edited Path Found from the very beginning, and in a year of working together, he and Monica had never actually spoken until this conversation. David’s path to the editor’s chair was anything but direct. A hyperactive kid in Dublin who could...

Send us Fan Mail Leon Kazandjian never had a linear career, and he’d tell you that’s the point. The son of a car mechanic, he grew up taking things apart just to understand them, a habit that survived a mediocre school record and a teaching degree he abandoned almost immediately. What followed was a reinvention marathon: an aircraft mechanic’s license earned with a 4.0 and a Golden Wrench Award, a...

Send us Fan Mail Chris Davis didn't know what he wanted at eighteen, and he still didn't know at twenty-one, a fact he admitted out loud, in an interview, to a partner at a law firm. That honesty got him gently shown the door and pointed him toward a year of service work in San Francisco that he now credits with shaping his values. Three decades later, he runs his own employment law firm...

Send us Fan Mail Elizabeth didn't set out to be a designer. She spent the early part of her career in nonprofits, organizing, grant writing, and communications, and kept noticing that the tasks she liked best were the ones involving presentation and visuals. After two successive jobs disappeared to cutbacks, she decided she'd rather have her livelihood in her own hands. She started build...

Send us Fan Mail Brian DeAngelis knew by about age ten that he wanted to make movies. Getting there took a lot longer than that. He didn't get into a single film school he applied to out of high school, so he went to UC Santa Cruz and built his own program out of whatever he could find and joined a fraternity, mostly because he was an introvert and knew he needed an obligation that would get...

Send us Fan Mail Pete Stiefel has adapted to more technological upheaval than almost anyone in marketing. He began his career building print artwork by hand, with T-squares, boards, and film strippers, then helped lead his company into the desktop publishing era when he convinced them a Macintosh would cut typesetting costs by 80%. He was right. He also watched that same revolution put an entire i...

Send us Fan Mail Peter Weinberger has spent his career at the intersection of community and journalism, first as a photojournalist and, for the past two decades, as the publisher and owner of the Claremont Courier, a family institution since 1955 and one of the oldest papers still publishing in the greater LA area.  In this episode, Peter talks about what it really means to run a local newspaper i...

Send us Fan Mail What does it take to build a real life in Yellowstone, not as a visitor, but as someone who stays? MacNeil Lyons grew up crisscrossing the country, from Colorado to the eastern shore of Maryland, to California, and never lost his pull toward wild, open places. In this episode, he traces a career that moved through nine years of National Park Service seasonal and term positions, a...

Send us Fan Mail Elise Barrow had it mapped out: Johns Hopkins, medical school, doctor. Her father held a PhD; college was never a question, and medicine was the destination. Her first semester didn't change the direction so much as the certainty. She moved from biology to public health, concentrated in international health and psychology, and finished in four years, because that's simpl...

Send us Fan Mail What does it actually take to build something of your own? In this compilation episode, we bring together eight voices from the Path Found archive — eight women who started businesses without a playbook, an MBA, or anyone’s permission. Their seeds were rarely what you’d expect: a friend’s move during COVID, a whisper at a niece’s birth, a bike commute in uncomfortable jeans, a jou...

Send us Fan Mail Tom Miller* grew up Catholic, careful, and certain that college wasn't for him. After losing his mother to leukemia at 18, and spending that summer as her primary caregiver, he drifted into a 24-year career in commercial printing, doing skilled work that paid well and meant nothing to him.   At 40, on a vacation to Savannah, Georgia, he told his wife: I can't do this any...

Send us Fan Mail William Combs always assumed he'd run his own business. He just didn't know it would be a Subway franchise in Orange County. In this conversation, William traces his path from a kid who scraped by as a B student, through Cal Poly Pomona's hotel and restaurant management program, into management roles at Islands and Jamba Juice, and eventually into a multi-year stint...

Send us Fan Mail Five guests. Five very different lives. One thing in common: every one of them dropped out, failed out, got kicked out, or walked away, and built something meaningful anyway. In this compilation, a deputy attorney general, a congressional staffer, an Amazon AI policy leader, a med-school admissions director, and a serial entrepreneur share how their worst setback became the start...

Send us Fan Mail What do investment banking, a Jewish farming fellowship, and New York City's trash have in common? For Anna Sacks, known to hundreds of thousands of followers as The Trash Walker, they're all stops on the winding road to her life's work.  In this episode, Anna shares the honest story of her career search: the years of trying art galleries, finance, and rotations thr...

Send us Fan Mail Six guests. Two truths.  There is no single right path. And you cannot do this alone.  In this special compilation episode of Path Found, I weave together conversations with David Camarena, Coach Christian, Michael Harley, Taylor Rabe, John Sayers, and Sierra Emrick — six people who took wildly different roads and arrived somewhere they never expected.  What they all share: the pl...

Send us Fan Mail Justin Rufa grew up in a small Rust Belt town on the St. Lawrence River with one clear thought: I'm leaving. What followed was nearly 24 years in the Air Force — aeronautical engineering, a master's, a PhD from Michigan, teaching calculus at the Air Force Academy, space launch operations in El Segundo — and then retirement at 42 with no clear next step. Two months in Kan...

Send us Fan Mail Eleanore Guthrie didn't set out to disrupt the fashion industry. She set out to find a pair of shorts that looked good on a bike. What followed was more than a decade of building Knorts, a brand built entirely on knit denim - from weekend photo shoots in her parents' driveway to Revolve partnerships, a Lady Gaga placement, a Kendall Jenner moment, a collaboration with Ur...

Send us Fan Mail Steven Kerns grew up in Long Beach, California, dropped out of high school at seventeen, and eventually made his way through the Army Infantry, Long Beach City College, Cal State Long Beach, Harvard Law School, and on to the California Department of Justice. Today, he works as a deputy attorney general, representing land-use and energy regulatory agencies, including California&apo...

Send us Fan Mail Alex Mitchell didn’t have a plan when he graduated from high school. No one in his family had gone to college, and he didn’t apply to a single university. He started at community college, changed his major five times, and it wasn’t until a political science professor connected history to present-day policymaking that something finally clicked.   Then the pandemic hit. Alex decided...

Send us Fan Mail Virginia Ross has one of those careers that sounds impossible until she explains exactly how each step led to the next — and even then, it barely seems planned. Because it wasn't.   After getting kicked out of college twice, pivoting from government consulting to culinary school to a startup acquired by a Utah telecom company, Virginia landed at Amazon's Ring, and accide...

Send us Fan Mail What does it actually mean to go to college? If your honest answer is “get a degree so I can get a job,” Ned Johnson and Scott Carlson want to complicate that, in the best possible way. In this conversation, the authors of Hacking College: Why the Major Doesn't Matter - and What Really Does, break down why the major is far less important than the experience students build aro...

Send us Fan Mail In her first round interview, Alicia Rose was asked about her dream job. She told the truth: she wanted to be an ambassador. The interviewer told her on the spot she wasn't getting the position, and explained exactly why that was the right call.  What followed was a 30-plus-year career at a single global professional services firm, not because Alicia stayed in one lane, but b...