Playbook by Michael morgenstern

Chelsea Zhang leads commerce investing at Equal Ventures and runs the Commerce Capital Summit — which means she sees nearly every AI commerce pitch in the market and every incumbent's counter-move. That vantage point makes her one of the sharpest voices on what's real and what's noise in commerce right now. In this episode, Chelsea and Michael Morgenstern get into the agentic commerce debate — who...

Nina Khoury joins the Playbook Podcast to discuss her journey from representing Australia in field hockey to consulting at Bain, helping scale SKIMS, and now building Sportiv, a supplement brand designed specifically for women who train. In this episode, we dive into women's fitness, strength training, supplements, protein, recovery, healthy aging, entrepreneurship, and why the wellness industry c...

$48 trillion. That's the AI market David Blumberg has been quietly positioning for, since before most people knew it existed. David Blumberg is the founder and managing partner of Blumberg Capital, one of the most enduring early-stage venture firms in the world. Since founding the firm in 1991, he's backed companies from seed to IPO across North America, Israel, and Europe including first checks i...

What does it actually take to build a company from zero with your own money and sell it to a global brand? In this episode of Playbook, Michael sits down with Adam Garfield, Miami-born founder of SpeedyTab, a mobile ordering platform he bootstrapped from a bar idea in Boston all the way to an acquisition by Wix in 2021. Adam then served as VP of Restaurants at Wix, overseeing product, engineering,...

Seven exits. Fortune 500 CTO. Now building the infrastructure for AI in a deglobalizing world. Peter Yared sits down with Michael Morgenstern to unpack 25 years of hard-won lessons from the trenches of enterprise tech, from the early days of the internet to the AI era reshaping everything. Peter sold companies to Oracle, Sun Microsystems, and Citrix. He ran technology at CBS Interactive, deciding...

Build the business investors chase, not the other way around. Matthew Vega-Sans, co-founder of Gail AI, sits down with Michael Morgenstern to break down how a kid from a Kendall farm dropped out of college, got rejected 526 times, hit rock bottom at $2,800 in the bank, and then raised $60M by doing one thing differently. Filmed inside Gail's brand new offices in Miami, Matthew shares the raw truth...

In 2014, Fred Voccola told investors he was building a multi-billion dollar software company in Miami. They said his employees would stare out the window and party all day. Today Kaseya has 2,000+ employees in the city. $1.5B ARR. $15B valuation. Over 150 marriages between staff. Liquid millionaires—not paper, liquid—running to Fred’s office crying because they just bought their parents their firs...