Keep Going

I spoke with David Carvalhão in Lisbon. He is the CTO at IH Care and sits on a few boards. He has started more companies than most people will ever work for. Twenty six. Some hit. Some missed. Then he lost sixteen in one blow when a partner moved assets out from under him. He fought in court for years. He now calls that a mistake. He says he should have let go sooner. What he works on now is simpl...

I invited Shay Levi on because I wanted to separate the AI that writes emails from the AI that moves a business. He is the co-founder and CEO of Unframe , and his pitch is simple. Tell us the pain. We come back in five days with a production-ready solution. If it moves a real metric, you subscribe. If not, you walk. He calls ChatGPT the gold standard for generic tasks. Drafting notes, tidying a pa...

I met Cesar Marin at a psychedelics event in Denver. I watched him on stage. He had a calm ease that carried across the room. Today he tells the story behind that calm. Cesar spent twenty five years at CNN as a producer. He built live shows. He chased breaking news. He lived inside a clock. Then the layoffs came. He was fifty five. The title that shaped his life was gone. Plant medicine had arrive...

The Innovators is a new show about how people actually build. Not slogans. Not hype. The work. Each episode starts with a pitch, then gets into the choices that make or break a young company. We ask basic questions that most founders avoid. Who pays you. Why do they stay. What broke. What did you fix. The goal is simple, help real builders sharpen their story and pressure-test their plan, while gi...

This is a free preview of a paid episode. To hear more, visit www.keepgoingpod.com When you talk to Diane Yu , you hear the mix of humility and steel that makes a founder stand out. She’s the co-founder and CEO of Tidal Wave , an AI company that is trying to modernize one of the most entrenched and slow-moving sectors out there: mortgages. Her take is simple. We live in a world where everything el...

Most of us know Anker as the little black brick that saved our phones when the battery dipped into the red. What’s less known is how Steven Yang built the company. He started as a Google software engineer, left a stable life, and moved into hardware without any real experience. That leap, and the mistakes along the way, tell us a lot about what it takes to keep going. 1. Curiosity is stronger than...

I sat down with Lisa Gralnek , Managing Director for the U.S. and Global Head of Sustainability and Impact at iF Design . She also hosts Future of XYZ podcast. We talked about awards, values, and the hard work of keeping design honest. Here is what matters. iF Design is not a new project. It started in 1953. It is a nonprofit in Germany. The award is large, global, and serious. Entries come from s...

On the latest episode of Keep Going , I spoke with Neil Markey , CEO of Beckley Retreats , about how he went from combat deployments and corporate burnout to guiding people through psilocybin retreats in Jamaica and the Netherlands. Carrying Forward Amanda Feilding’s Legacy Beckley Retreats is the living continuation of Amanda Feilding’s work. For decades, Feilding ran the Beckley Foundation, a no...

When I started Keep Going , I wanted to talk to people building things with care. Not the VC-fueled wrecking balls chasing unicorn status, but the ones trying to solve real problems without leaving a crater behind. Nicki Sprinz , CEO of digital product studio ustwo , fits that bill. In a startup world that still fetishizes disruption, Nicki is pushing a different message: stop disrupting, start ca...

We live in a world obsessed with velocity. Founders are supposed to scale fast, pivot often, and raise money like their lives depend on it. But not every success story fits that mold. Some companies are built slowly, deliberately, and on their own terms. Reedsy is one of them. I first wrote about Reedsy back in 2014. It was a small, strange idea at the time: a marketplace for authors to find edito...

When Max Buchan launched Valarian in 2020, he wasn’t building the next messaging app or enterprise dashboard. He was building infrastructure—systems that sit under the surface of apps, institutions, and, more recently, battlefields. Valarian didn’t start as a defense company. It started as an enterprise software venture aimed at helping organizations control where and how their data moved. But the...

We talk a lot on Keep Going about mental health. About reinvention. About trying again when everything feels broken. But this week, something deeper came through. Justice Leak —an actor, a seeker, and now the founder of Therapod —joined the podcast to talk about his mother, her Alzheimer's, and the way psychedelics changed their lives. Not in theory. Not in some lab. In a small town in Georgia, on...

This week on Keep Going , I sat down with Miist —an artist whose story is as powerful as her music. She's the first native Chinese artist to break into Billboard’s Top 25 on the AC chart, and she’s worked with legends like Santana and Curtis Williams of Kool & the Gang. But her path to that stage started much earlier, and much harder. Miist didn’t grow up thinking she’d be a singer. Until late 202...

On this episode of The Startup Show , I spoke with Katie Kuo, CEO and co-founder of Atomistic Insights , a biotech startup working to speed up drug discovery using physics-based machine learning. Born out of Georgia Tech and currently part of the Alchemist Accelerator, Atomistic Insights is trying to fix a known problem: new drugs take too long and cost too much. Think $2.6 billion and up to 15 ye...

On this week’s episode of the Startup Show, I sat down with Jayashree Dutta —Jaya for short—the co-founder and CEO of Atronous AI . Jaya’s background in retail tech runs deep, with previous stints leading data teams at Walmart and The RealReal. Now she’s building something designed to shake up how product catalogs get created in e-commerce. The problem? Only a small percentage of products ever mak...

Sometimes on Keep Going , I talk to people who have failed a few times and got up again. Other times, I talk to people who were hit so hard that getting up again was the entire story. Lizzie Snider is one of those people. On paper, Lizzie was doing everything right. She was applying to PhD programs in psychology, doing research on child development and psychopathology. Then she was in a car accide...

Most people don't think about engineering managers until something breaks. Code slows down. Tickets pile up. Meetings drag on. Then someone asks, “Who’s managing all this?” John Kennedy , CEO of Actual AI, knows that problem better than most. He’s building software for the people holding the tech world together — engineering managers who plan, coach, and report across teams but are often stuck doi...

This week on Keep Going , I talked to Trevor Longino from CrowdTamers , a repeat guest and someone who’s made a career out of iterating through failure. Trevor doesn’t just tolerate failure—he plans for it. He opens every client engagement with a $100 ad test that’s designed to fail. Why? Because failure, early and cheap, tells you what not to do. But here’s the thing: not everyone wants to hear t...

Most of us don’t think twice about how we use computers. We move a mouse, type in a form, click a button. We’ve built up decades of patterns and habits, and the machines have evolved to meet us halfway. But what if the next evolution wasn’t a new interface—but the same one, just used by something that’s not us? That’s what Ang Li is working on. He’s the co-founder and CEO of Simular , a company bu...

NOTE: This podcast discusses adult themes but we are careful not to describe too much. It’s mostly about tariffs. Every founder hits a wall. For Brian Sloan , the guy behind AutoBlow —a high-tech, internet-connected sex toy for men—that wall came in the form of a 145% tariff. This wasn’t his first rodeo. He’s been in the game 16 years. He lived in China, built deep relationships with his factory,...

I spoke with Bille August recently, and what struck me most wasn’t just his long, decorated career as a director, but the way he described why he’s still doing it. After nearly 45 years, he’s not chasing relevance or acclaim. He’s chasing those short, fleeting moments of magic on a set—when everything clicks, when the actors and script and crew fall into rhythm—and you know it can never be repeate...

This week on Keep Going , I talked with Benjamin Wallace — author of The Billionaire’s Vinegar and, more recently, The Mysterious Mr. Nakamoto . We didn’t focus on plot or spoilers. Instead, we talked about what it means to write for a living right now, in a world that’s drowning in content and racing toward automation. Wallace is one of those writers who makes it look easy. But he’s honest: it’s...

Founded by journalist and engineer Arikia Millikan , CTRL+X is a startup building a blockchain-based licensing system to help independent journalists protect, distribute, and monetize their work. Millikan started working on the idea nearly a decade ago, when she saw firsthand how media companies neglected digital infrastructure and treated editorial content as disposable. With the collapse of lega...

This week on Keep Going , I sat down with Scott Stevenson , CEO of Spellbook , a company that started with a frustrating legal bill and turned into one of the most widely used AI tools in the legal world. Scott’s story isn’t a straight line. He started building video games. Then musical instruments. None of them took off. But what stuck with him was the pain of trying to build something creative a...

I’ve been working on a book called Shroomies —a straightforward look at how mushrooms are helping people. Not the flashy kind of help. The real kind. People coming off SSRIs. People showing up for their kids. People remembering how to laugh again. When I started talking to Tracey Tee, founder of Moms on Mushrooms , I realized this conversation was exactly the kind of thing that should be on Keep G...