PreVetted Podcast

Ohad Shaked, co founder and CEO of ThinkUp, explains how his early IoT startup spent months chasing the right vertical and customer, and how that frustration led him to build a digital accelerator for first time founders. ThinkUp focuses on the pre revenue phase and guides founders step by step through customer research, interviews, assumption testing, market and competitor analysis, value proposi...

Kim Hansen is CEO and co founder of Cake Equity, a platform that helps startups manage ownership for founders, employees, investors, and advisors with clarity and less legal and spreadsheet chaos. Kim shares the personal pain that sparked Cake, signing complex shareholder contracts he did not fully understand, and later watching employees miss out on ownership because equity felt too hard, expensi...

Adam Spector is a four time founder, CEO of Chore, early stage investor, and podcast host who believes execution beats strategy and focus compounds. In this conversation, Adam explains why founders lose momentum when they get buried in back office work and why delegating non core tasks is one of the fastest ways to buy back time, freedom, and clarity. Adam breaks down the idea behind Chore: startu...

Steve Tcherchian, CEO of XYPRO, explains how XYPRO protects mission critical systems that move money, run payments, settle trades, and support national infrastructure on HPE NonStop. He shares that most customers do not complain about hackers first. They complain about complexity: too many tools, dashboards, audits, and reports that create work without reducing risk. Steve breaks down common misco...

Eryn Anitavi is an autistic speaker, strategist, and author who helps leaders and neurodivergent visionaries build tactical systems that turn chaos into clarity. She is the founder of Sapphire Partners and the creator of the Clarity Matrix framework, a structured approach to aligning vision, priorities, and execution in both life and business. In this episode, Eryn shares how her autism discovery...

Philip Samuelraj is the Founder and CEO of Techjays. He argues that the real opportunity is workflow reimagination, not simple automation: agentic AI can handle repetitive work while humans move upstream into review, approval, audit, and higher level problem solving. Philip and Federico compare this shift to past disruptions like Excel replacing manual ledgers and ATMs changing banking roles. Phil...

Chanda Coston is a business coach and strategist who helps women, especially 40 plus “third quarter entrepreneurs,” turn long held ideas into real businesses through clarity, strategy, and consistent execution. She explains why the third quarter matters: after the career and family phase, many people feel urgency to pursue work that finally feels meaningful, and they bring the maturity to move fas...

Jimi Gibson is VP of Brand Communications at Thrive Agency and a longtime marketing strategist with more than 25 years helping brands cut through noise with clear messaging. In this episode of the Pre Vetted Podcast, Jimi explains why the biggest shift in marketing right now is not just new tools, but a new discovery path: buyers are moving from keyword searches to conversational AI questions, and...

Karthik Krishnamurthy is the CEO and Founder of Ascendion, an AI-native engineering company operating across 12 countries, including teams in Mexico, Brazil, and Colombia. Before starting Ascendion, he spent nearly two decades at Cognizant in senior leadership roles across digital, analytics, and AI. He is also the author of "AI Arbitrage Is The Next Frontier."In this episode, Karthik explains wha...

Dr. Alex Roher, MD is a board certified anesthesiologist who reinvented his career after falling out of love with anesthesia and built SD Botox into a fast growing aesthetics business. He shares how he started in 2012 with only one procedure, renting a room from an esthetician, then learned business by doing it. He explains the turning point when he acquired a struggling practice that became his P...

Khurram Hussain: Khurram Hussain is the founder and CEO of IRVINEi and Mojo Solutions and Services, and he is building OVAL, an edge AI home hub that brings compute, computer vision, and voice AI directly onto the device. In this conversation, Khurram explains why the future shifts from cloud to edge, with edge enabling lower cost, faster response, and stronger privacy because sensitive data can s...

David Dubinsky leads the Pomeroy Recreation and Rehabilitation Center in San Francisco, a true community benefit organization open seven days a week, from early morning to late evening. He explains how Pomeroy serves multiple groups in one shared space: around 225 adults with developmental disabilities who come daily for classes, community, and work support; about 85 children, many with autism, wh...

Travis Pomposello shares the biggest lesson from his career across MTV, Nickelodeon, The Late Show with David Letterman, Discovery, and as a co-founder of Epix: a great career now depends on noticing change early and being willing to pivot with it, not resist it. He explains why the old “company person” path is no longer the default, and why managing your career today means staying flexible, takin...

Stewart Gandolf explains how Healthcare Success helps healthcare organizations grow through integrated marketing across digital, brand, patient experience, referrals, and PR. He shares why he started the agency in 2006 as a “hobby” after years consulting with small practices, and how early bets on content, blogging, and SEO helped them build the business. Stewart contrasts the past, when many doct...

Suze Yalof Schwartz is the Founder and CEO of Unplug, a secular meditation studio in Los Angeles and a global meditation app built for busy people who feel stressed, anxious, distracted, overwhelmed, or unable to sleep. In this conversation, Suze shares how a simple three minute breathing exercise taught by her mother in law changed her life and sparked her 2012 quest to make meditation easy and p...

Aaron Gaeir is the CEO and owner of GDX Studios in San Diego. In this conversation, Aaron explains how GDX Studios operates in the experience business and why he believes the future is “fidgital” where the physical and the digital become seamless. He shares the idea that people see thousands of ads a day, but decisions are driven by emotion, and the best way to evoke emotion is through real experi...

Takashi Kokubun is a Staff Developer on the Ruby JIT team at Shopify, where he works on ZJIT, the next-generation Just-In-Time compiler for Ruby that shipped with Ruby 4.0. Before going deep on compilers full time, he worked on distributed systems and infrastructure, and along the way earned a Master of Science in Computer Science from Georgia Tech while working full time in the United States. His...

Joseph Kao is the CEO and co founder of Magnefy, a Stanford spin out building predictive monitoring for critical power assets like transformers, inverters, and power cables. He explains how Magnefy uses high frequency magnetic sensing, similar to an ECG for electrical equipment, to listen to the “heartbeat” of the grid and detect early anomalies months in advance. Joseph shares why this matters no...

Ray Smith: Ray grew up on a 3500 acre dairy farm in South Dakota, where hard work, community, and resilience were daily lessons. That early exposure to uncertainty, like storms wiping out crops after months of effort, shaped his drive for a more predictable path and pushed him toward entrepreneurship. He started young, selling long distance phone service at 18, then moved into subprime credit card...

Ryan Baird joins Federico Ramallo on the PreVetted Podcast to explain how he operates across three business units and why each one starts with the same principle: focus on risk. Ryan leads Baird Augustine, a Silicon Valley cross border investment bank working with 33 family offices deploying about 20 billion dollars annually, and helps founders through “corporate development as a service,” from ca...

Carmine Paolino is an AI builder and founder based in Berlin. He co-founded Freshflow to help supermarkets reduce food waste, built RubyLLM, an open source library that makes working with LLMs in Ruby feel simple and elegant, and is now building Chat with Work, a workplace knowledge assistant that connects tools like Google Drive and Slack so teams can find answers without guessing where informati...

Bryan Wish unpacks the long game of personal branding, storytelling, and building systems that scale. Bryan shares how his early project Wish Dish began in college as a way to create a collective platform for vulnerable stories, community, and self expression, and how that “soulful” experiment taught him media, content, and community, even before he knew how to monetize it. From there, Bryan expla...

Saranyaa Parthikumar shares her journey from Java developer to MBA, then Lead Business Analyst, and finally Product Manager. She explains how the switch happened through an internal move: raising her hand, talking to managers, taking on junior PM style projects, and building confidence by representing the customer and guiding delivery. Saranyaa describes the kind of products where she shines: B2C...

Tom Milar shares how he’s building Equista, a platform for equity management and valuations—and why he believes the private markets need better pricing infrastructure before liquidity can truly scale. Tom explains how the company evolved from stock issuance and cap table administration into a valuation engine that aims to price private companies in real time, from early-stage startups to unicorns....

Arun Seelam is the co-founder and CEO of Boson Motors, building rugged, affordable electric utility vehicles for agriculture, ranches, and commercial use. In this conversation, Arun shares how his experience as an ex-Google database engineer—watching early autonomy and Android Auto—sparked a different mission: bring practical automation to underserved off-road markets where labor shortages are ris...