Not Another Podcast

George Kurdin spent years as a professional poker player before online poker was shut down overnight. The skill he carried into building a company wasn't the one you'd expect. It had nothing to do with reading faces across a table and everything to do with expected value, risk, and the discipline to iterate before you get crushed. Now George is co-founder and CEO of Monk, an AI-native acco...

Americans spent roughly a trillion dollars on property and casualty insurance last year. Only about 60% of it came back as claims, and that number has been falling for decades. Rashmi Melgiri wants to know where the other $400 billion went, and why nobody seems to be measuring whether the industry is getting any better. Rashmi started as an antitrust economist at 21, modeling DOJ and FTC cases, be...

Anastasia Leng 's first company got everything a founder is supposed to want. Time named it a top 10 startup to watch. The press loved it. She still couldn't raise a dollar, and it died a slow, public death. What she built next, CreativeX, now works with Unilever, Heineken, and Google. This conversation with Brennan Pothetes is about the psychology that made the second time different: para...

Jenny Fielding has returned three funds' worth of capital and backed two 2015 unicorns she's still holding 11 years later. So when she posted that early-stage VC's entire model might not survive the disruption cycles it's funding, founders listened… and almost no VCs commented. In this conversation with Brennan Pothetes, Everywhere Ventures' Managing Partner says the quiet part...

Olowo-n'djo Tchala grew up sharing an 8x10 room with his mother and seven siblings in Togo (a family of 41 brothers and sisters, one of the world's poorest countries) and left school after the sixth grade. In 1996, a Peace Corps volunteer named Prairie Rose came to his village. They fell in love and moved to California. Later on with 17 women in West Africa, a shea nut tree, and student lo...

Shamir Karkal co-founded Simple in 2009, one of the first real digital-first banks in the US. When he sold it to BBVA for $117M in 2014, he and his co-founder fought their board to distribute $14.6M of the proceeds to roughly 100 employees, excluding the founders. He's applied that same principle at every company since, including his current AI fund, where every employee owns a stake in the fu...

Jared Kleinert is the Founder and CEO of Offsite, the company that handles end-to-end retreat and offsite planning for hundreds of companies, including Perplexity, HubSpot, Walmart, and Remote. Before building Offsite, he became one of the most connected people in the startup world, was named USA Today's "Millennial Influencer of the Year," and wrote books about building relationship...

Liisi Laaniste spent over a decade studying one of the deadliest brain cancers in the world, glioblastoma, which kills most patients within 15 months and hasn't seen a meaningful change in standard treatment since 2005. She published in top journals. She ranked first in her class at Uppsala University. She earned her PhD in Computational Systems Biology at Imperial College London. And then she...

Six months. 21 episodes. Conversations with hardware founders, AI journalists, sex therapists, repeat unicorn builders, and the people training the robots that might change everything. In this special solo episode of Not Another Podcast, Brennan Pothetes sits down alone and riffs on the clips that hit hardest, the takes that got the most heat, and what he's actually learned from the guests he&...

Nicole Maffeo was the very first guest on Not Another Podcast. She's back, and the conversation picks up right where we left off. Nicole is a former Bridgewater investor, ex-Google AI research leader, and co-founder of Gambit Robotics, where she's building specialized robots for the home. In Part 1, she gave us the thesis: the only real moat left in AI is hardware, and the global AI race is really...

Eric Litman grew up on Saint Thomas in the US Virgin Islands, graduated high school at 15, and landed at NeXT working alongside Steve Jobs while still in college. Since then he's co-founded Proxicom, built Viaduct, founded Medialets (acquired by WPP), and managed WashingtonVC, an early-stage venture fund in DC. Today he's the Founder and CEO of Aescape, a robotics company building AI-power...

Before Money20/20 and the book and NASA, she was busing tables at Ruby Tuesday's in Times Square. Scarlett Sieber graduated from Fordham with an accounting degree she never really wanted, spent a semester abroad in Beijing, came back with one clear realization: "life is short, and accounting is not it.” And then she spent the next year clearing dishes while her classmates climbed the corp...

Most travel companies measure success by bookings. Zach Resnick measures it by how many clients never leave. Ascend (formerly FlyFlat) is a travel concierge for frequent travelers and it has a 100% 18 month retention rate. Most SaaS companies would die for those numbers. Zach got there by building Ascend around one principle: your time is sacred, full stop. Before Ascend, Zach played jazz trumpet...

Alfia Ilicheva came to the U.S. at 12 without speaking English, after her father died suddenly. That experience turned into a founder operating system: wake up, look in the mirror, and ask, “Is this the life I want?” She always leads with values and mission-aligment first. Today she’s the CEO and founder of Formulary Financial, building AI-native fund administration in a world where, according to...

Ravi Kurani has two exits to his name, and he used both of them as a running start toward harder problems. As the founder of Sutro, a smart pool chemistry device that he sold to Sani Marc in an acquisition that happened before the product was fully built. And before that, he founded ImpactSpace: the "CrunchBase for impact investing," acquired by ImpactAlpha in 2015. Ravi has lived throug...

Most e-signature companies charge you to sign a contract. Marty Ringlein is giving it away for free. Marty is the CEO and co-founder of Agree.com , a fintech-forward agreement platform that collapses the signing → invoicing → payment chain into a single motion and monetizes on the money movement, not the signature. Think Stripe, but the on-ramp is a contract. This is his fourth company. He's a...

Most startup founders don't make it past year three. Bo Jiang is entering year twelve. As the CEO and co-founder of Lithic, Bo has lived what feels like two completely different startup journeys in one company. He launched Privacy.com in 2014 as a consumer app helping people create virtual credit cards for safer online shopping. After issuing over 10 million cards, he hit a wall… legacy paymen...

Nathan Stoll helped build the modern internet. Literally. He was an early product manager at Google before the IPO. He worked on the systems that powered Google’s ad revenue. He helped scale Google News globally. He even launched Google Suggest: the autocomplete feature billions of people use every day. And yet… this conversation wasn’t really about tech. Nathan has built and sold two companies (t...

After 12 years at Forbes, Alex Konrad walked away from one of the most prestigious seats in tech journalism. He ran the Midas List. Co-created the Cloud 100. Wrote cover stories on the biggest names in tech. And then he left… to build his own media company from scratch. In this episode, Alex joins me to talk about what happens when you go from covering founders to being one . We get honest about e...

Most founders spend years asking the wrong questions. “How fast can this grow? How big could this be? What’s the smartest next move?” But the questions that actually shape your life usually come much later… often after you’re already exhausted, anxious, or stuck on a path that doesn’t feel right anymore. In this episode of Not Another Podcast , Brennan sits down with Evan Walden , CEO and co-found...

Most of the AI world is obsessed with chatbots, agents, and software abstractions. Anto Patrex thinks that’s a distraction. Anto is the founder and CEO of CosmicBrain AI, a former NASA robotics engineer, and an early member of Elon Musk’s xAI team where he helped build Grok. In this episode of Not Another Podcast , Anto makes the case that the real AI revolution won’t live on your screen. It will...

Startup culture loves extremes. Grind harder. Sleep less. Push through. Don’t complain. And if you’re struggling, the assumption is simple: you’re not cut out for it. In this solo Q&A episode of Not Another Podcast, Brennan Pothetes flips that narrative on its head. After months of thoughtful DMs from founders, operators, and investors, Brennan sits down to answer the questions people usually...

Dane Atkinson has lived just about every version of the founder story. He started his first company at 18. He’s been the CEO of Squarespace in its early years. He’s founded and exited multiple companies, including SumAll. He’s raised roughly $750 million across his career. He’s built businesses that employed thousands of people and created billions in equity value. And about half of his companies...

While other fintechs raised huge rounds, hired armies, and announced half-baked features, Brandon Arvanaghi built Meow into a billion-dollar business with ~12 people, no hype cycles, no vanity metrics, and a culture so high-ownership that one wrong hire can collapse the whole org. This is not another “sort of intense” founder interview. This is a blueprint for anyone who actually wants to build a...

Dave Blakely is one of the most quietly influential operators in Silicon Valley. He’s the kind of operator that founders don’t realize they’re learning from because his fingerprints are on so many iconic products, teams, and innovation programs. For decades he helped lead IDEO , the most legendary design and innovation firm on the planet. His work there shaped billions of dollars in enterprise val...