Founders and Empanadas

Hilary Mason was one of the most recognizable names in data science: chief scientist at bitly, founder of Fast Forward Labs, co-author of Ethics and Data Science . Then she walked away to build Hidden Door, a roleplaying platform where you step inside licensed story worlds with an AI narrator running the game. The catch? She calls herself a skeptic of most of the generative AI market, and she'...

Dr. Myra Ahmad graduated from medical school in 2022, looked at the system she'd just trained inside, called it dystopian, and decided to build something outside of it instead of starting a residency. Three years later, Mochi Health has served more than 500,000 patients across all 50 states. In this episode of Founders & Empanadas, Myra and Joshua get into the strategy behind the build: why we...

Rand Fishkin built Moz from a struggling web-design agency into a $60 million software company and watched venture capital quietly turn it from a business that served customers into one that served investors. His verdict, over pineapple empanadas: raising VC was the second-biggest mistake of his career. The biggest? Stepping down as CEO. Rand co-founded SparkToro after Moz and now builds "cus...

Jenna Reback can taste words. Her own name tastes like blueberries, which is why she named her company Blueberry. She has synesthesia, a rare neuro-sensory condition that made childhood disorienting and lonely, and forced her to become obsessed with one question: how do you make someone else understand something they've never experienced? That question led her to Hollywood, then to Silicon Val...

Most social apps were built to make you feel connected without requiring you to actually be. Sanjay Guruprasad has been building against that assumption for eight years. His thesis: the only online interaction that replicates the way humans have always built real relationships is playing games together. Sanjay is the founder of Rune AI, a multiplayer game platform and engine that's been processing...

Andrea Mazzocchi defended her PhD, applied to Y Combinator, and watched the country shut down for COVID all on the same weekend. That was May 2020. By the end of the year, she had a wet lab running, a seed round closing, and a company called Known Medicine using 3D tumor organoids to predict which cancer drugs would actually work for individual patients. Three years later, she sold it. Then starte...

Starting in 2003, years before anyone was using the term, Yu-kai Chou began developing what would become the Octalysis Framework: a model of human motivation built around 8 core drives that influence every decision we make. He gamified his own life first. Then his companies. Then Fortune 500s. Then governments. Now he's one of the most sought-after behavioral designers on the planet. He's...

Jessica Murrey won a Regional Emmy at 24 for an anti-child abuse campaign, then spent seven years training young activists and former extremists in countries recovering from genocide and civil war: Myanmar, Burundi, Nigeria, Colombia. She came home asking: how do you scale this? The answer was a video game. Jessica co-founded Wicked Saints Studios with a behavioral scientist and a former senior Po...

Sahin Boydas moved from Turkey to San Francisco in 2012 with no network, no warm intros, and a conviction that remote work was going to change everything, about a decade before COVID made it unavoidable. What followed was four companies, two exits (MovieLaLa to Gfycat, RemoteTeam.com to Gusto in 2021), 180+ angel investments including Anthropic and OpenAI, and a ranking as the #1 Most Active Angel...

Renee Gittins didn't take the conventional path. She built her own. She started as a biomedical engineer, then walked away from biotech at 21 to teach herself game development from scratch: moonlighting on her own game while working day jobs to pay the bills. That game, Potions: A Curious Tale , ended up on Steam, Switch, Xbox, and PS5 with 90%+ positive reviews. Along the way, she became Exec...

Adam Lieb sold his first gaming website to IGN at age 11. Before he could drive, he was earning $10,000 a week selling virtual goods in MMORPGs. Before he graduated college, he was running a 25-site gaming network doing multimillion-dollar revenue. He's never had a real job. He's never needed one. Today, Adam is the founder and CEO of Gamesight: a marketing intelligence platform that helps...

Tim Morten led production on StarCraft II at Blizzard before founding Frost Giant Studios. In this conversation, he breaks down the economic forces reshaping game development: from the oversaturation crisis (20,000+ games per year) to the post-pandemic VC correction that's forcing studios to do more with less. Tim has lived both sides. He shipped one of gaming's most successful RTSs with B...

Alex Stewart didn’t raise a round. He didn’t move to San Francisco. He didn’t “grind” 100 hours a week. He built Teamtown, a growing design agency, by doing things differently. This week on Founders & Empanadas , Joshua Eidelman sits down with Alex to unpack how he built a profitable, people-first business without losing his mind in the process. They dig into how he: Used SEO as his first grow...

Most kids’ first interaction with the internet is lying about their age. Kieran Donovan is building the fix. Kieran left a top global law firm (he became one of the youngest partners at Latham & Watkins and is the only person to win “Privacy Lawyer of the Year” multiple times) to found k-ID. It’s a privacy-first identity layer that lets products adapt to a young user’s age and country automati...

Wilian Iralzabal didn’t leave Google to “be a Webflow guy.” He left because he wanted to design a business he could live with and then built one that ships at enterprise scale. Cuban immigrant at 8. Door-to-door sales at 14. Two startups acquired by Google. In 2019 he walked away, started small, and grew Zabal Media into a 33-person, 7-country no-code design & development agency serving Slack,...

Brianna Carney runs CrewBloom across 20+ countries and is building Betty , a voice AI that handles outbound qualification so humans can spend more time on higher-value work. Her operating system is disarmingly simple: work comes second, standards stay high, AI augments people, and leaders model the culture. She also happens to be the first person with a chronic condition to run a marathon on every...

From Zirtual’s Overnight Collapse to Adios: How Maren Kate Rebuilt and Bet on Reuse At 27, Maren Kate Donovan was running a 400-person remote company doing roughly $1M/month. Then, in a single day, Zirtual shut down. Instead of disappearing, she did the unglamorous work: a post-mortem, learning the finance she’d outsourced, a tour at Calm to study operating excellence, and a new thesis for her nex...

What happens when a hardcore operator decides to build for the physical world? Denis Lussault has scaled companies where things actually move: robots, vending machines, and industrial systems that keep the real world running. After 10 years in automotive and oil & gas, he joined Balyo to build autonomous forklifts and led its U.S. business from $0 to $5M in two years , eventually taking the co...

After scaling multiple companies, including a 70-person video agency working with clients like Coca-Cola and Disney, Korneel Desmet hit a wall. Not once. But twice. From penthouses in London to a van in the Spanish mountains, this episode is the story of a founder who lost himself in the hustle and built his way back through presence, breathwork, and building retreats that actually rewire the nerv...

Thomas Geib had a thriving real estate business, a fast-growing mastermind, and everything figured out… until he didn’t. After a failed business partnership, 60K in debt, and just $0.17 left in his bank account, Thomas found himself questioning everything. But instead of quitting, he doubled down. He created The Entrepreneurs House in Medellín. It’s a founder community built from scratch to solve...

What happens when a practicing physician builds a $700M healthcare startup? In this episode of Founders & Empanadas , Joshua sits down with Dr. Alexi Nazem: Co-founder & former CEO of Nomad Health, Assistant Professor at Weill Cornell, and now a General Partner at AlleyCorp. Alexi shares his journey from hospitalist to founder, how he scaled one of the fastest-growing staffing platforms in...

Christie Kaplan is the founder of Startup Design Partners, a design-led venture studio that helps early-stage teams go from chaos to clarity, before they waste six months building the wrong thing. In this episode, Christie and Josh dive into the real work of product design: making hard decisions, listening well, and separating signal from noise when everyone just wants to be polite. This is a cras...

What if you could personalize every cold email (without recording a thousand videos)? Bethany Stachenfeld is the Co-Founder & CEO of Sendspark , the video platform trusted by teams at Salesforce, Oracle, Outreach, and LinkedIn to drive 400%+ more engagement through asynchronous, AI-personalized video messaging. In this episode, Bethany and Josh go deep on the evolution of modern sales, how to...

When I first came across Mitchell Leshchiner on LinkedIn, I immediately DM’d him and said: “I don’t know what ElectroKare is exactly… but I know I need to learn more.” Mitchell is the kind of founder you can’t ignore. He’s a former pro athlete, Palantir-trained engineer, and now CEO of ElectroKare: the AI-native operating system built to track and optimize the body’s most overlooked signals. In th...

Most sales teams lose the deal after the demo, not because the pitch fell flat, but because their champion didn’t know how to sell it internally. In this episode of Founders & Empanadas , I sat down with Gal Aga , CEO and co-founder of Aligned , to unpack the psychological friction that stalls deals, derails champions, and kills momentum in multi-stakeholder sales cycles. With 17+ years in B2B...