PreVetted Podcast

Kyle Bowman, Senior Technical Product Manager at Amazon leading the Climate Pledge-Friendly Program, joins host Federico Ramallo on the PreVetted Podcast for a wide-ranging conversation that starts with problem-solving in unfamiliar industries and quickly evolves into deeper topics. Kyle shares his diverse career path—from industrial engineering consulting and Amazon robotics to international avia...

Erin Fletter is a serial entrepreneur, five-time cookbook author, and 30-year veteran of the food and hospitality world who turned a simple idea at her Denver kitchen table into Sticky Fingers Cooking®—a plant-forward children’s cooking school and social enterprise that has taught more than 200,000 kids the joy of cooking. In this conversation with host Federico Ramallo, Erin shares how a single a...

Paola Marulanda joins the PreVetted Podcast to share how she went from seeing real estate as a “necessary evil” to becoming one of South Florida’s top luxury brokers and founder of Luxury Homes Connect. Paola grew up watching her mother rebuild their family through real estate after her grandparents’ development business. Though she initially aimed for law or banking with firms like J.P. Morgan, s...

John Weiss, founder of Human Design, joins Federico for a conversation on building brands that move people—not just markets—in an increasingly synthetic, AI-driven world. He shares the origin of Human Design, founded in 2013 to solve human problems through strategy, design, and storytelling. Over the years, the agency has helped nonprofits, startups, and major brands like Nike, Land O’Lakes, and T...

Nithin Thekkupadam Narayanan joins the show to unpack the craft of product management at scale—how to keep a mature platform stable while innovating fast. A Senior Principal PM (ex-AWS, ex-Remitly and an MIT SDM alum), Nithin shares pragmatic lessons from event-driven systems, cost/speed trade-offs, and the fast-moving AI landscape. We explore how to listen to customers without building one-offs,...

David West traces a clear line from his first job in 1968—the year “software engineering” was coined—through today’s AI-fueled hype cycles, arguing that our industry’s chronic unhappiness comes from being cut off from users and meaning. In this candid conversation, he recalls mainframes, 80-column cards, and 24-hour feedback loops that forced upfront thinking, then contrasts that era with modern “...

Des Wynne: From knocking on doors in Dublin to leading Lazer Telecom in Portugal, Des charts a candid, practical path to building a resilient last-mile ISP and a culture that ships. He starts with the early “turtle shell” he grew selling for Eircom and O2/Telefónica, then the sink-or-swim autonomy at Digicel across the Virgin Islands, Aruba, and Curaçao—where full P&L accountability became sec...

Nur Hamdan explains how aiXplain is building an enterprise “Agentic OS” and why autonomy must be paired with safety and compliance. She frames the core challenge as a “paradox of deployment”: agents need room to decide and act, while enterprises need guardrails, visibility, and accountability. Nur Hamdan walks through aiXplain’s layered approach: customer-facing agents hold business logic; micro-a...

Madhuri Somara, Senior Product Manager at Microsoft, joins Federico to unpack how she builds AI agents that actually help people, not just impress on paper. Fresh off being honored with the 2025 Product Leader Award by Products That Count, Madhuri traces her path from coding and business analysis to product leadership, and why empathy, rigorous evaluations, and clear user value are her north stars...

Kimberlee Carr, Chief Operating Officer of Real Estate and Managing Broker at TAWANI Enterprises, shares how a chance fill-in role sparked a career she’s grown into with grit, curiosity, and a love for challenge. In this conversation, Kimberlee traces her path from on-site property manager to executive leader, explaining why her core values never changed with the title: positivity, accountability,...

Kadamb Goswami: In this conversation, Kadamb traces a personal and professional journey shaped by resourcefulness, resilience, and a relentless focus on building things that tangibly help people. Growing up in a small Indian town, he watched his father—an educator—create low-resource systems so students could learn better. That early example of “impact through intent” led Kadamb to build a simple...

In this episode, Apurv Naman, Product Manager at NVIDIA, shares a heartfelt, visionary journey that starts with childhood cartoons—The Jetsons, Star Trek, Star Wars—and evolves into a career shaping physical AI: humanoids and self-driving cars. What began as wonder for machines you can “touch and feel” became a calling to work where hardware, software, and AI meet real-world impact. Apurv recalls...

Ben Helland unpacks how strategy turns into outcomes for learners and employers at Western Governors University (WGU). As Principal Product Strategist, he partners with the Schools of Business and Health to design long-term roadmaps that serve working adults and an expanding 18–24 segment. He explains why WGU measures every big bet against three lenses—equity, completion, and return—and how a jobs...

Tifany Mazza joins us on The PreVetted Podcast for an inspiring conversation about building a meaningful career in digital marketing, transitioning into entrepreneurship, and staying relevant in one of the fastest-evolving industries in the world. With more than a decade of experience growing brands online, Tifany is the Founder and Digital Marketing Director of tykio., a Google-certified digital...

Yash Chaturvedi, Head of Product for Live Sports Ads at Amazon, joins Federico to unpack how AI, computer vision, and product management are reshaping streaming and advertising. Yash traces his path from early OCR projects at Staples to Prime Video, where he helped build long-form video understanding to automate global compliance and power features like maturity ratings and content descriptors. Th...

Nicholas E. Adams joins the PreVetted Podcast for a candid conversation about leadership, brand truth, AI’s role in communications, and why community partnerships are a growth strategy—not a side quest. Nicholas traces his inspiration to family values and early mentors from the agency world, grounding his leadership in ethics, transparency, and service. Operating from Silicon Valley—“a state of mi...

Priyank Mohan traces a candid journey from QA/testing and networking, through consulting at PwC and Accenture, to platform product leadership at Amazon—owning 0→1 builds that now serve a 2M+ workforce. In this conversation, he unpacks his current mission: enabling Amazon to uphold UN-aligned human rights standards across its global supply chain. Priyank explains how his team builds the underlying...

Leigh Monichon shares a deeply personal and practical roadmap for navigating special education—and why she built Aspire Advocacy to help families do it with confidence and compassion. In this conversation, Leigh traces the origins of her advocacy to her son’s journey with autism and the hard-won lessons that followed. What began as a parent’s “mama bear” instinct evolved into a calling: teaching f...

Dr. Ewelina Kurtys is a scientist-turned-entrepreneur pushing the frontier of bio-inspired computing. In this conversation, she traces her path from a PhD in neuroscience and 20+ peer-reviewed papers to commercializing deep-tech and advising startups. Curiosity pulled her beyond academia into fast-moving environments where she could turn technical knowledge into real-world impact. Ewelina explains...

Ken Pickering, CTO of Scripta Insights, joins Federico to unpack how his team is using AI and large-scale data to tackle the opaque, often unfair U.S. pharmacy pricing system. Ken explains why drug costs vary wildly person-to-person, how that opacity drives prescription “abandonment,” and where Scripta intervenes: ingesting messy plan documents, inferring benefits and conditions, modeling deductib...

Jason Fishman: In this episode, growth marketer, investor, and podcaster Jason Fishman traces his path from action-sports consultant and Gen-Y specialist to co-founder and SVP of Digital Strategy at Digital Niche Agency (DNA). He explains how early work across social gaming and mobile ad networks shaped his obsession with measurable, scalable acquisition—and why that lens ultimately pulled him int...

Danielle Costa-Nakano shares how, as Chief Product Officer at Grassroots Analytics, she’s leading a shift from data-as-a-service to software-as-a-service to help nonprofit and political organizations escape spreadsheet sprawl and tool fragmentation. Danielle explains why many teams still spend half their day importing/exporting CSVs across 7–10 systems and how a central data platform—with strong A...

Travis Summers brings a remarkable dual career journey to this episode of the PreVetted Podcast. With over 23 years of military service in the U.S. Army and more than 25 years of experience in human resources, Travis has dedicated his life to building high-performing teams, shaping organizational culture, and aligning people strategies with business goals. In this conversation, Travis shares how t...

Shiva Kumar is the Co-Founder & CTO of Dentulu, a health-tech platform unifying the fragmented world of dentistry into a single ecosystem for providers, offices, patients, and suppliers. In this conversation, Shiva shares how Dentulu evolved from mobile dentistry to a comprehensive telehealth platform—accelerated by COVID—and why meticulous, millimeter-level clinical workflows demand a very di...

Joey Brabo, co-owner, COO, and head editor of Respect My Region (RMR), joins the PreVetted Podcast to unpack how music, cannabis, and community intersect, and why thoughtful media can de-stigmatize an entire industry. Raised across Seattle, Indiana, and Texas and now based in Los Angeles, Joey traces his path from lifelong music fan to culture builder, sharing how personal health challenges, expos...