After Pitch with Joanna Trojak

Israel Diaz spent a decade leading creative teams in advertising. On paper everything looked successful, yet he kept asking, "Is this all there is?" In this conversation with Joanna Trojak, he explains how that question led him to build a framework for understanding what drives people. In this episode: - Why we rarely say what we mean, and how the "supposed to" beliefs we absorb early shape our co...

The exhausting part was never the room. It was the audition. Joanna Trojak shares the moment she finally stopped trying to prove she belonged and realized self-acceptance changes everything - especially if you’re neurodivergent, tired of masking, or done contorting yourself for spaces that were never built for you. What starts as a San Francisco startup community invite quickly becomes a deeper re...

The startup world rewards people who mistake trauma for ambition—and this episode says the quiet part out loud. Joanna Trojak breaks down how founders get trained to ignore red flags, over-give, and call self-erasure “grit,” before revealing the boundaries that help her spot traps faster now. She starts with a venture capitalist’s claim that he wants founders who are “psychotic and unhinged,” then...

Successful men are often told to keep achieving, stay composed, and push through - but what happens when the version of success that got them here no longer feels like enough? Susan Popoola reveals why so many men hit a quiet breaking point: the career, status, and outward performance are all there, yet fulfillment, identity, and peace still feel out of reach. If you care about men’s wellbeing, le...

Episode Description Perfect isn’t the goal—it’s the trap. Melinda Jacobs explores why the human qualities that matter most are often the first ones product teams, AI systems, and startup culture try to optimize away. If you’re building products, leading teams, or thinking about how to stay meaningfully human in an AI-shaped world, this conversation offers a fresh perspective on optimization, play,...

What if the thing you spent your whole life trying to hide was the exact thing that finally made people pay attention? Joanna Trojak reveals how years of masking, rejection, and being labeled the weird one led to a shocking shift in status, visibility, and self-trust. After surviving a co-founder breakup, reclaiming her startup, a cardiology ward stay, and a complete identity reset, Joanna is clos...

What if the problem isn’t that you aren’t paying attention to your feelings—but that there’s too much happening at once to name any one thing? In this episode, Joanna explores alexithymia, the communication gap many autistic people navigate, and why AI has become a meaningful accessibility tool in her life. From drafting difficult messages to untangling overthinking and finding language for emotio...

In this episode, Joanna talks to Jürgen Allen, a filmmaker and creative director with sixteen years behind the camera on films, music videos, and commercials, now building Weird Protocol and Weird Cafe — an attempt at a different kind of infrastructure for creative work. Jürgen traces his path back to a childhood 16mm projector on his ninth birthday, through music videos in the golden MTV era, and...

In this episode, Joanna talks to Shaz Bhola, a strategy director and human-centered researcher whose work spans adolescent and caregiver research in Turkey, trauma-informed work in West Africa, and projects on child protection, vaccine hesitancy, and emotional support. Shaz explains why direct questions so often fail — asking someone "have you experienced abuse?" or "do you believe in vaccines?" i...

In this episode, Joanna traces a pattern through a lifetime of special interests she never thought to connect: Shakespeare's Rosalind, more herself in disguise as Ganymede than as herself. Gombrowicz's argument that the masks others press onto us become the self. Sherlock Holmes, who "sees but does not observe" the way everyone else does, and processes the world without the social editing that mak...

In this episode, Joanna opens with a story: someone once asked if she was hot right now. She said no, there's a window open. It was the correct answer to the question they asked, and completely the wrong answer to the question they meant. From there, she walks through a lifetime of missing double meanings — and, just as often, accidentally producing her own. A man tasting her name in his mouth on...

In this episode, Joanna talks to Adrien Sala, founder of WikiSleep, about what happens when standard sleep advice — clear your mind, do a body scan, breathe — simply doesn't work for a brain that won't stop running. Adrien built WikiSleep out of his own insomnia during a period of overlapping crises: a breakup, a job change, a project ending badly. What worked for him wasn't meditation apps or mel...

In this episode, Joanna sits down with Joanna Montgomery, founder of Little Riot and creator of Pillow Talk — a device born as a university project that lets you hear a loved one's heartbeat through your pillow, wherever they are. What started as an exploration of how technology could feel more like real human presence than a scheduled Skype call went viral overnight and, almost accidentally, beca...

In this episode, Joanna traces three men who moved through her founder life performing the same role: the warm, generous connector who disappears the moment generosity requires an actual Tuesday afternoon. A former athlete turned tech influencer who confesses "I'm pretty lonely, guy" mid-consulting-call, then ghosts after two sessions. A LinkedIn podcaster who praises her "personal brand" and vani...

In this solo episode, Joanna walks through three "proposals" she received from people who had already cast her in a story before she ever agreed to a role — a LinkedIn stranger looking for a technical co-founder, growth specialist, and fundraiser all in one; a classmate promising to "make a difference" in an industry she never named; and a manifestation coach who diagnosed her demons as a backpack...

In this episode, Joanna sits down with David Ault — voice actor, science communicator, and self-described lifelong lover of numbers and stars — to explore what happens when a childhood fascination becomes a lifelong compass. David traces his path from mental arithmetic and backyard stargazing through an astrophysics degree, a stint teaching in university labs, and eventually into voice acting and...

Kate Assaraf built Dip, a seven-figure haircare company, without pitching to Amazon, without VC money, without paid influencers — and she intentionally sends customers away from her own website to small, women-owned refill shops, even when it costs her sales. In my very first interview for After the Pitch, Kate and I talk about why VCs will never love a product designed to make people buy less, wh...

A child gets a cello instead of a diagnosis, learns to perform "normal," and spends two decades getting good at it — through a needy friend, a co-founder who ran textbook love-bombing and gaslighting, and a body that eventually refused to keep up the act with headaches, vomiting, and asthma it couldn't explain. This episode traces one founder's path from masking to an autism diagnosis to a redefin...

A new season, a new name, and a completely different reason to record. Joanna Trojak — autistic founder, hospital patient, serial restarter — explains why she quit scripting herself into someone acceptable and what it costs to spend years pitching your way into rooms that were never yours.

When growth stalls and doubt gets loud, most founders push harder—or walk away. In this vulnerable solo episode, Joanna Trojak shares how a stretch of unsettling silence revealed not burnout, but disconnection —and how one pivotal book (Rob Fitzpatrick’s The Mom Test ) plus nine honest user conversations changed her roadmap for Heart Renew from isolated journaling to shared solitude and gentle, no...

What happens when the glossy promise of an event collides with the gritty truth of reality? In this deeply honest episode, Joanna Trojak takes us to Ericeira, Portugal, where she pitched her startup Heart Renew —not with perfect slides, but with a clear why . What began as a retreat that looked stunning online but fell short in real life became an unexpected masterclass in clarity, resilience, and...

s a Saturday night alone a red flag—or a research-backed power move? In this episode, Joanna Trojak unpacks the neuroscience and psychology behind self-dating and explains why chosen solitude is fundamentally different from loneliness. We dig into polyvagal theory, self-compassion research, and attachment science to show how intentional time with yourself lowers stress, boosts creativity, and buil...

What truly happens when a founder decides to show everything — the wins, the doubts, and the messy middle? In this deeply personal episode, Joanna Trojak , founder of a self-dating app, shares seven powerful lessons from over 100 days of building in public — a journey that began as an experiment in transparency and evolved into a practice of self-awareness, consistency, and authentic connection. T...

Most startups don’t end with headlines—they fade with a flicker. In this candid episode, Joanna Trojak shares the slow, quiet signs that her first company was failing and the psychology that kept her pushing long after the data (and her gut) said “stop.” We unpack sunk-cost fallacy, loss aversion, confirmation bias, identity fusion, and why intermittent wins can make founders addicted to “one more...

What if success in tech meant helping people log off ? In this thought-provoking episode of Founder Unfiltered , host Joanna Trojak challenges one of Silicon Valley’s most sacred metrics: retention. She explores the radical idea of building digital products that respect attention instead of hijacking it. Joanna introduces her concept of Healing-Focused UX — a design philosophy that prioritizes use...