Startups Decoded

Founders do not know how to convert their network. Andy Walsh sits down with Kyle Kane, co-founder of onSpark AI, the world's first AI-powered partnership engine. Kyle Kane built $2B in partnership revenue for some of the biggest names in music and brands before realizing the same broken pattern kept killing deals: founders had the right relationships and no system to turn them into money.  K...

Brad Bowery sat down with Andy Walsh to unpack what founders should be thinking about as they begin hiring, and why the global talent pool is more accessible than most realize. Brad has built local teams as a founder and global teams as an operator at Zendesk and now Deel, where he leads Global VC and PE Partnerships. In this episode we explore; The real friction of global hiring: compliance, clas...

Most founders think IP protection is something they'll sort out once the business gets traction. That's exactly backwards. By the time it feels urgent, the work already matters, and you're behind. This conversation cuts through the abstraction. Maria Sinatra is an IP attorney at Venable LLP who works with startups and nationally recognized consumer brands on exactly this problem. Allison Luvera is...

Most companies believe they run on strategy. They actually run on conversations, and those conversations vanish the moment the call ends. David Shim watched this happen from the inside while running Foursquare, sitting in meetings where half the room was camera off, on mute, essentially absent. He called it Ghost Mode. That observation became the founding insight for Read AI, and it’s a sharper di...

Every line on your cap table is a promise. Most founders don’t know what they’ve signed. Andy Walsh sat down with Joris Delanoue, founder of Fairmint, to unpack why equity, the core of startup ownership, is still managed through systems built for a different era, and why that matters more now than ever. The central tension: companies are staying private longer, secondary markets are growing fast,...

Taryn Williams started her first business at 21 with no experience and no capital. Twenty years later, she’d built four companies and exited twice. Taryn Williams doesn’t talk about the dream. She talks about what it actually costs. Andy Walsh sat down with Taryn Williams — serial founder and multi-exit operator — to trace the full arc of building from scratch. From cold emailing at midnight to na...

Eric Ries, author of The Lean Startup , joins Startups Decoded to discuss his new book Incorruptible and why many successful companies slowly drift away from their founding ideals. Andy Walsh sat down with Eric to explore the forces that reshape organizations as they scale — from governance and incentives to leadership dynamics and investor pressure. Drawing on examples from companies like Costco...

Rachel ten Brink spent two decades inside Fortune 500 companies — P&G, Estée Lauder, L’Oréal — before co-founding Scentbird and scaling it past $300M in revenue. She got rejected by YC three times. Today, Scentbird is in their top 2% by revenue. Now she’s a GP at Red Bike Capital, investing in vertical AI, fintech, and digital health. This conversation is about what changes when you’ve been th...

We’re more connected than ever. More lonely than ever. Along the way, something broke. Michelle Parsons left ed-tech to build Lora — a platform using astrology as a framework for genuine human connection. The twist? The tech isn’t the point. The vulnerability is. Andy Walsh sat down with Michelle Parsons, co-founder of Lora, to unpack one of the most uncomfortable truths in tech: we built tools fo...

Most founders spend years building audiences on platforms they don’t control. Nathan Gwilliam watched a guy go from $96M a year to zero — because Amazon changed its mind. The lesson wasn’t about Amazon. It was about whose land you’re building on. Andy Walsh sat down with Nathan Gwilliam — serial entrepreneur and founder of PodUp — to pull apart one of the most dangerous assumptions founders make:...

Everyone told Milly her résumé didn’t make sense. She turned that confusion into a global community of 800+ people who felt exactly the same. Turns out, being hard to define is your biggest competitive advantage. Andy Walsh sat down with Milly, founder of Generalist World — a community of 800+ operators, founders, and career-builders who’ve stopped apologising for doing too many things well. This...

Most founders think branding is about what they look like. Jill Smith says it’s about how you behave , and most brands have no idea who they actually are.  Fix that first. Everything else follows! Andy Walsh sat down with Jill Smith, CEO of Iris, one of the US’s most respected integrated brand and demand agencies, to unpack what actually makes a brand stick. This isn’t a conversation about lo...

Most founders try to build a company. Sophie de Haën built one by accident. And she did it while she was still in college. Andy Walsh sat down with Sophie de Haën , founder of SDH Paints, to unpack one of the most unconventional founder journeys we’ve seen on Startups Decoded . Sophie didn’t start with a startup idea, a pitch deck, or a plan to raise money. She started painting during COVID and sh...

Alicia Teltz didn’t reinvent her life overnight. She made one decision. That step led to losing 84 pounds, leaving a 10-year relationship, walking away from a high-paying corporate career, and starting over. In this episode we unpack what really blocks people from change. Confidence rarely shows up first. Momentum follows action. Alicia shares the reality behind rebuilding your life, the mindset s...

AI has already changed how we create, search, and automate. The next step is prediction. In this episode, Vanja Josifovski joins Andy Walsh to explore how enterprises can use their own private data to forecast future outcomes, automate decisions, and move from analysis to action. As CEO and Co-Founder of Kumo, Vanja is building predictive intelligence systems that sit on top of enterprise data and...

Power in startups is rarely where founders think it is. Itamar Novick, Founder and GP at Recursive Ventures, has worked both sides of the table as a founder, operator, angel, and VC. He’s backed 150+ early-stage companies and helped founders raise over $500M, while also building companies like Life360 and Gigya from the inside. In this conversation, we unpack the real power dynamics between founde...

The fundraising hangover is real. Capital returned in 2025, but investors are now far more selective. Traction, revenue clarity, and capital efficiency matter more than vision decks. In this episode, Roei Samuel joins Andy Walsh to share how he raised $23M+ without giving up board seats, and why that decision shaped Connectd’s growth and governance. We unpack how founders retain leverage in a tigh...

In a world of shifting algorithms and AI noise, winners aren’t the teams with the most tools, but the ones with the best orchestration. Andy Walsh sits down with Brendan Tolleson, CEO of RevPartners and founder of Southbound. Brendan is focused on democratizing Revenue Operations (RevOps), turning it from a B2B luxury into a core growth engine for scaling companies. Aligned with Southbound 2026’s...

Alisa Cohn has spent decades coaching CEOs through the moments that define their leadership: rapid growth, board pressure, and the quiet isolation of the role. Named the #1 Startup Coach in the World by Thinkers50, Alisa has advised leaders at Venmo, Etsy, and Pfizer. In this episode, we explore why reactive management no longer works and how scaling CEOs must move from firefighting to proactive “...

AI is moving fast, but durable businesses aren’t built on models alone.  In this episode of Startups Decoded , Andy Walsh sits down with Frank Paz (Partner, Morrison Foerster) and Craig Alberino (Founder & CEO, LangSmart) to unpack what actually makes an AI company defensible and safe, as it scales. Craig brings the operator’s perspective on turning AI experimentation into governed, measu...

In this episode, Andy Walsh sits with Dr. Denise Bronner , a scientist-turned-strategist who has spent 15 years bridging the gap between the lab bench and the boardroom. As the founder of Empactful Ventures , Denise deconstructs the high-stakes reality of due diligence, transforming it from a “pop quiz” into a strategic mirror for operational maturity. Subscribe now The Conversation Andy and Denis...

Xaver Lehmann built two AI startups, sold one for $60M, and paid the price most founders don’t talk about until it’s too late. Burnout. Identity loss. The quiet crash after the win. In this conversation, we unpack the part of the founder journey that usually gets skipped in pitch decks and podcasts. What actually happens after the exit. Why success can feel emptier than expected. And how building...

Casey Woo has spent over two decades inside the engine room of real companies, scaling startups as a 6x CFO and 2x COO across SaaS, marketplaces, hardware, eCommerce, and beyond. After walking away from a successful career in public markets, Casey chose the harder path: joining early-stage startups, eating glass, and learning how companies actually get built under pressure. Along the way, he found...

Mike Adams has spent 30 years doing what most founders underestimate and then desperately need. Connecting people. Lead generation From HP to Apple to Zoom, and across 1,000+ events, Mike has built his career by understanding how trust, reputation, and introductions actually move deals forward. Now, as the founder of introstars, he’s turning referrals into the ultimate scalable lead-gen paradigm a...

Mike Ma doesn’t invest in decks. He invests in people. As Managing Partner and Head Coach at Sidecut Ventures , Mike works with what he calls “coachable superheroes”, early-stage, mission-driven founders tackling real problems in economic mobility, healthcare, climate, and education. In this conversation, we unpack what it actually means to be coachable as a founder, why most advice fails in pract...