The Builders

In this second conversation with Malcolm Reid Sr., Matt shifts from Malcolm’s remarkable life story to the business philosophy that’s helped him build a thriving coaching and consulting practice. Rather than relying on cold pitches or high-pressure sales tactics, Malcolm shares why the strongest businesses are built by leading with value, creating trust, and opening doors through genuine relations...

In this first part of Matt Levenhagen’s conversation with Malcolm Reid Sr., we explore an extraordinary journey from the streets of Baltimore to prison, and ultimately to a life dedicated to helping others build better businesses. It’s the story of how adversity shaped the builder behind the business. From dropping out of school and serving time in prison to discovering unexpected lessons in sales...

For nearly three decades, Drew Griffin worked in healthcare as a hyperbaric wound care nurse, helping patients navigate some of life’s most difficult medical challenges. Along the way, he developed a deep appreciation for solving problems, improving outcomes, and helping people regain control of their lives. That mindset eventually led him somewhere unexpected. After recognizing how smartphones co...

In this episode of The Builders Podcast, Matt Levenhagen sits down with Gary Gitelson, founder of Prohana, to explore a deceptively simple idea: some of the most important opportunities in life and business come from a surprisingly small number of relationships. Drawing on nearly three decades in engineering leadership, startups, and large technology companies, Gary shares how a carefully nurtured...

In this solo episode of The Builders Podcast, Matt Levenhagen introduces the theme behind the upcoming fourth season: What Built the Builder? Rather than focusing only on tactics, strategies, and business frameworks, the next season will explore the experiences, failures, influences, and turning points that shape the people behind the businesses we build. Using his own journey as an example, Matt...

In this episode of The Builders Podcast, Matt Levenhagen sits down with Shaun Modi, product designer, founder, and builder whose career has taken him from NASA and MIT to Google, Airbnb, startup studios, government projects, and ultimately the founding of Capitol AI. From designing lunar habitats with astronauts to helping shape products at Google during the rise of social computing and contributi...

In this episode of The Builders Podcast, Matt Levenhagen sits down with leadership coach, consultant, speaker, and podcaster Kim Miller-Hershon for a conversation about building businesses and teams around human strengths instead of forcing sameness.  Kim shares her journey from struggling to fit inside traditional corporate environments to discovering that her greatest strength was helping people...

In this episode of The Builders Podcast , Matt Levenhagen welcomes back William Holsten for a deeper conversation around the hidden behavioral patterns behind preventable business mistakes. After sharing his entrepreneurial journey and hard-earned lessons in Part I, William returns to explore how founders can reduce risk through simple systems, stronger habits, and better operational awareness. Th...

Bob Labbe has spent a lifetime building businesses, solving technical problems, and engineering practical solutions. From scaling air pollution control companies to developing a quantitative putting system for golfers, Bob approaches life with the mindset of a builder: observe the problem, test relentlessly, and keep refining until something works. In this episode, Bob shares the journey behind bu...

In this episode of The Builders Podcast, Matt Levenhagen sits down with William Holsten to explore the early journey behind his first product… and the business lessons that came from getting it wrong before getting it right. What started as a simple, fun idea quickly turned into a real opportunity. Demand showed up. The product sold. Everything looked like it was working… until it wasn’t. Once the...

As builders, we often think change requires a reset. A clean break. Starting over. But what happens when you feel the pull toward something new… and you’ve already built something that works? In this episode, Matt explores what it looks like to build a new path alongside an existing one without disrupting everything in the process. Drawing from his own experience returning to art while running an...

There’s a certain kind of builder who doesn’t follow a clear path… they discover it by walking it .  In this episode, we sit down with Silyana Bojilova, a serial entrepreneur and consultant whose journey spans survival, reinvention, and ultimately finding purpose through helping others build. From growing up in Bulgaria and navigating major life disruptions early on… to moving abroad, struggling t...

Subscriptions sound simple… until you try to build them. In this episode, we sit down with a builder who turned one of the most frustrating parts of app development into a platform now powering monetization for tens of thousands of apps. From early days growing up in Spain to taking a leap into Silicon Valley, this is a story about following curiosity, taking risks, and recognizing when a problem...

AI tools are moving fast… but governance isn’t keeping up. In this episode, Matt sits down with AI strategist Jill Heinze to explore what happens when generative AI moves from experimentation into real-world deployment. From chatbots in regulated industries to internal productivity systems, the conversation focuses on the risks that emerge once AI starts interacting with real users and real data....

Michael Haynes shares his journey from large corporate strategy roles to building a practical go-to-market approach for small and mid-sized B2B firms. After years working in banking, consulting, and telecommunications, he saw firsthand how structured growth strategies helped large organizations scale. But when he transitioned to working with smaller professional service firms, he realized those sa...

What makes people actually use a product… and keep coming back? In this episode, Matt sits down with Tetiana Kobzar to explore behavioral design, gamification, and what it really takes to create products people love to use. Drawing from her background in development and product design, Tetiana explains how understanding human behavior can dramatically change how products are built, moving teams be...

Many great software tools begin with a simple starting point: a manual process that works. In this episode, Matt welcomes back Joel Salomon to talk about the journey of turning his proven stock-screening framework into a scalable software system. After years of teaching clients his five-step process for evaluating companies, Joel began exploring how technology could help automate the research and...

In this solo episode of The Builders , Matt Levenhagen reflects on a discovery that took him back more than three decades. While organizing old notebooks, artwork, and personal archives from the early 1990s, he uncovered a series of audio journals he recorded between 1991 and 1993. Listening back to those recordings today offers a rare glimpse into the mindset of his younger self, a 20-year-old tr...

In this episode of The Builders, Matt sits down with Jill Heinze, founder of Saddle-Stitch Consulting, to explore an unexpected but deeply logical career evolution: from research librarian to AI governance architect. Jill’s journey began with a love of history and archival research. That passion led her into academic librarianship, where she discovered that modern libraries are not just about book...

In this episode of The Builders Podcast , Matt sits down with Dan Daly to unpack how a $600M automotive growth playbook became the foundation for an international real estate fund built around Portugal’s Golden Visa program. Dan shares how scaling an automotive startup from a single dealership to nearly $600M in annual revenue wasn’t about chasing more leads. It was about obsessing over customer e...

Lee Rossey is the CTO and co-founder of SimSpace, and he’s spent the last 25 years building in the deep end of cybersecurity, including 15 years at MIT Lincoln Laboratory. His worldview is refreshingly practical: if you can’t measure it, you don’t really understand it… and if you can’t test it under pressure, you don’t actually trust it. In this episode, we dig into what “proving grounds” means in...

Most builders don’t fail because they lack skill or effort. They struggle because the lessons that matter most only reveal themselves over long stretches of time. In this episode, Tyler Dane joins the show to reflect on the winding path of building. From early career pivots and high-stress on-call roles to indie product experiments and hard-earned clarity, the conversation traces what it actually...

In this episode of The Builders Podcast , Matt Levenhagen sits down with cybersecurity expert and security educator Robert Siciliano to unpack what it really means to build security in a world that defaults to trust. What begins as a conversation about cybersecurity quickly turns into a deeper exploration of human behavior, denial, and why most people only take security seriously after something g...

In this solo episode of The Builders Podcast , Matt Levenhagen reflects on what it really means to become a builder without shortcuts. Drawing from his early years as a self-taught artist in the pre-internet era, Matt explores how learning through books, libraries, and trial and error shaped more than just technical skill. It built patience, discipline, and the ability to stay in the work when pro...

In this episode of The Builders , Matt reconnects with Lorraine Ball , nearly 200 episodes after her first appearance, for a deep conversation on what it really means to build effective teams inside agencies. Rather than focusing on hiring hacks or org charts, Lorraine walks through the foundational thinking that separates high-performing teams from groups that simply execute tasks. Drawing from h...