Builders & Doers

Rob Cross is an executive coach and leadership advisor with 25 years of experience working with leaders across industries and cultures. After a career that began in the British Air Force and took him through executive ranks before becoming a full-time coach, Rob has spent the last quarter century helping people answer the questions that sit beneath the surface of every important decision they make...

Anne-Maartje Oud is a workplace behavior specialist with more than two decades of experience, the founder and CEO of The Behaviour Company in Amsterdam, and a certified behavior analyst trained by former FBI agent Joe Navarro (the only person to have completed his five-year apprenticeship program). She has trained over 9,000 people across 10+ countries, worked with Fortune 500s like Mercedes-Benz,...

Rick Ton is a 20-year veteran of growth and go-to-market, having spent his career scaling revenue at companies like Meta, Sam's Club, Walmart, Under Armour, Walgreens, and several high-growth startups. He was a founding team member on Sam's Club's Scan & Go — a self-checkout app that grew from zero to roughly a third of Sam's Club's total revenue (an estimated $30 billion r...

Blair Huddy is the co-founder of a mission-based PR agency she runs with her husband, focused on companies and projects that help people and the planet. After 15+ years in the corporate marketing world — including a tenure leading the rebrand and growth of a $7B affordable housing company that later sold for over $700M — she went out on her own and took the Clean Creatives Pledge, refusing to work...

Chris Kille is a Boston-based entrepreneur, author, and operations expert with four profitable exits behind him — including a payments business he scaled more than 10x in five years using just one domestic employee and four remote office assistants. After a cardiac event caused by burnout, he founded EO Staff, a premium remote staffing company that places elite virtual assistants into fast-growing...

Angela Cox is an executive coach, founder of Purseda 360, and host of the Leader Unmasked podcast. After more than a decade running lean transformation at Lloyds Banking Group, change management at Barclays, and strategy for a half-billion-pound business at Compass Group, she moved into coaching full-time — bringing the operational rigor of root-cause analysis into a profession she felt was still...

Barbara Salopek is an economist, author, and innovation consultant who grew up in Croatia and built her career in Norway. She teaches at BI Norwegian Business School, advises companies on bringing ideas to market, and is the author of an Amazon bestseller on innovation that scored 8/10 with getAbstract editors. Her work sits at the intersection of individual psychology, group dynamics, and the sys...

Dr. Torkil Færø is a Norwegian general practitioner and emergency physician with 26 years of clinical experience, the author of five bestselling books, and the writer behind The Pulse Cure — translated into 10 languages and the only book to date dedicated to using consumer wearables for preventative healthcare. After his father died at 73, Torkil realized his own lifestyle had him on track for an...

Fay Niewiadomski is the founder and CEO of ICTN (International Consulting and Training Network), a strategic intervention and executive coaching firm she's run for over three decades from offices in Beirut, Amman, and New York. A pioneer of strategic intervention in the Middle East, Fay has worked with leadership teams across 40+ nationalities, helping them uncover the values, beliefs, and uns...

Matt and Jack are co-founders of HeySquibb, an AI research lab modeling human psychology to build digital twins that run your social media. After Matt built an AI therapy clone in 2023 and saw the impact a digital representation of someone could have, the team came together around a bigger thesis: that within a year or two, having a digital twin will be as ordinary as having an email address. They...

Jon Basford is the founder of Lateral Solutions, a consulting firm that helps founders, CEOs, and nonprofit leaders build the internal operations their growth actually depends on. After a career that took him from law school to association management to the startup world as a fractional COO, Jon now runs operational audits that unpack the gap between what leaders think is working and what their te...

Dr. Emily Anhalt is a clinical psychologist, co-founder of Coa (the gym for mental health), and author of Flex Your Feelings: Train Your Brain to Develop the 7 Traits of Emotional Fitness. After interviewing 100 psychologists and 100 entrepreneurs, she identified the seven traits emotionally healthy people are working on all the time — and built a practice around helping founders, leaders, and tea...

Mitch Weisburgh is an educator, author, and founder of MindShifting, a framework built on three capacities he believes the world urgently needs more of: resourcefulness, resilience, and collaboration. After nearly four decades at the intersection of education and technology, a 2017 email from a university in Niger sent him on a new path: pulling together insights from neuroscience, cognitive scien...

Most companies are letting AI make decisions it shouldn't and missing the simple moves that would actually save them time and money. Peter Swimm has spent 30 years in tech, from Chicago libraries to Microsoft, and he's built a smarter way to think about conversational AI, autonomous agents, and what it really means to own your company's brain. Find Peter: peterswimm.com Builders & Doers is pro...

Zarina Bahadur is the founder and CEO of 123 Baby Box, a subscription box company she launched as a student at UC Irvine after spotting an exhausted mom struggling in a Target baby aisle. She's since grown the business 245% in a single year, closed an oversubscribed $1.2M pre-seed, and been featured in Forbes, Business Insider, BuzzFeed, and NASDAQ. She's also a Harvard Startup Partners, M...

Jen Ostrich is an executive coach, Enneagram expert, and founder of Grow Collective. After a career in advertising and brand leadership, she trained at the Hudson Institute and has spent the last decade and a half helping leaders understand the "why" behind how they think, feel, and act. She's certified in Integrative Nine (IEQ9), co-created the Shift Positive 360 feedback process, a...

Fifteen years ago David Price was battling addiction, sleeping on couches, and had no car. Today he runs a thriving insurance agency and mentors hundreds of agents across the country. His path from rock bottom to building a business that grows without him is a masterclass in grit, long-term thinking, and knowing when to stop believing the lies. Find David: youtube.com/@DavidPriceOfficial Builders...

Liz Weber is a certified management consultant, executive advisor, and author ranked among the top 30 global gurus on leadership. After building a career helping founder-led and family-owned businesses navigate succession, strategy, and leadership development, she's become the person owners call when the hard decisions can't wait. In this conversation, Liz walks us through the number one m...

Veronica Deraleau is an opera singer, Army Reserve veteran, financial coach, and author of Making Money is Simple. After graduating with an MBA and staring down six figures of student debt, she applied commercial real estate underwriting techniques to her personal finances and paid it all off in three years on a starter salary. In this conversation, Veronica walks us through her ARIA money model,...

Karen Alexander, founder of XR Women and co-founder of the Academy of Immersive Arts and Sciences, joins David and Becky to explore why extended reality is approaching a tipping point in adoption. From her unconventional journey out of academia and literature into immersive technology, Karen shares where XR is being quietly adopted across enterprise, education, and healthcare, the real risks compa...

At 50, John Mitchell was making $200–300K a year and felt stuck. Three months later, he discovered what he calls the full secret of Think and Grow Rich, developed a 12-minute daily technique around it, and within four years had 25x'd his income. John now teaches the Science of Success at the University of Texas (rated a top-5 business school by U.S. News), licenses his methodology to coaches,...

Glenn Gow has coached CEOs for decades and served as a venture-backed CEO for 25 years. In this conversation, we explore the hidden neural pathways that drive CEO behavior, why the habits that got you here won't get you there, and what it actually takes to scale yourself alongside your company. Glenn shares how he helps leaders break through blind spots, reframe success, and build culture thro...

Goutam Challagalla is a professor at IMD Business School, where he directs the Strategy Governance for Boards program. His new book, Clean Winners, studied hundreds of companies and found that the vast majority are approaching sustainability backwards: putting it at the center of strategy instead of using it as an engine for customer value and innovation. The conversation started with a single quo...

Nik Kinley has spent 35 years studying human behavior, from prison therapy rooms to Fortune 500 boardrooms. He's assessed over 1,500 senior leaders, coached CEOs of national banks, heads of national security, and Formula One team managers, and written nine books on leadership. In this conversation, Nik breaks down how childhood wires your leadership instincts, why "power corrupts" is...

Minyang Jiang (MJ) is the Chief Strategy Officer at Credibly, where she runs marketing, sales, tech innovation, and corporate strategy. Before FinTech, she spent nearly a decade at Ford Motor Company launching commercial vehicles with $95M budgets, and before that worked in human rights. She's the youngest member of Credibly's C-suite and a fiction writer who draws on Rilke for leadership...