The Human Connection Podcast

“There’s a difference between sacrifice and disappearing.” — Peter Goldstein You’re proud that every key client relationship runs through you. A buyer calls that a discount. Peter has nearly 40 years as an entrepreneur. He has five founder exits, more than 100 capital markets and M&A transactions, and he’s Chairman and CEO of Nasdaq-listed Emmis Acquisition Corp. He’s also the author of Entrep...

“I don’t think anybody wants to be sold.” — Nancy Kay Coy Your intent data says they’re ready to buy. Nancy says nobody has asked them why. Nancy has spent 25+ years in patient financing, consumer lending, and business development. She has founded, scaled, and exited companies, and now runs FinVerified, a payment pathway compliance platform for healthcare and dental organizations. She’s the author...

“I think enablers are the most dangerous structure of all.” — Milena Stankovic Every company has a toxic boss story. Milena wants you to look at the people standing around that boss saying “that’s just how he is.” Milena spent 10+ years in gaming at Microsoft and Epic Games (yes, Fortnite) before she co-founded a mental health charity and ran recovery support groups seven days a week. Now she’s bu...

“Measure twice, prompt once… if we’ve thought about this up front, we can actually get a better result in less time.” — Chris Heuer You rolled out AI to your whole team. Nobody defined what “done” looks like. Now everyone’s iterating in circles and calling it productivity. Chris Heuer is founder and managing director of the Team Flow Institute. He has spent more than two decades helping organizati...

“Many leaders have a low-level depression just because of the stress of leadership… It doesn’t keep you from doing stuff. It just makes it harder.” — Josh Broward You’re running a real company and quietly checking LinkedIn job posts at 11pm. That isn’t a career strategy. It’s a signal. Josh Broward is CEO of Wisdom Partners, a leadership coaching firm built to help startup founders succeed. He hol...

“Any strength that we have, if it’s overused… can become kryptonite.” — Stan Gibson Your team already knows your kryptonite. They’ve just never said it out loud in a meeting. Stan Gibson spent 35+ years leading Fortune 500 companies. When his number came up in a 30% workforce reduction, he already had a book written, a coaching practice running, and a speaking career built. (He may have been the h...

“Faster or more efficient is not better when you’re trying to make that quality connection with other humans.” — Jennifer Griffin Schaeffer Your mission statement didn’t die in a boardroom vote. It died one “just this once” shortcut at a time. Your customers noticed before you did. On this episode of The Human Connection Podcast, Karl Pontau sits down with Jennifer Griffin Schaeffer: three-time fo...

“We’re gonna have to do that anyway, and that’s the hard part. So let’s do it first.” — Garrick Van Buren Your team spent six months building something nobody asked for. Now the hard part (finding people who’ll pay for it) is still waiting for you. It’s just more expensive. On this episode of The Human Connection Podcast, Karl Pontau sits down with Garrick Van Buren: four-time SaaS founder, former...

“Have you gotten so wrapped up in making profits that you forgot about making purpose?” — David Mammano Your product has a feature-for-feature twin somewhere. Your founder story might be the only thing they can’t copy. That only works if you stop telling the version where nothing went wrong. On this episode of The Human Connection Podcast, Karl Pontau sits down with David Mammano. David is a seria...

“They’re going to use the product until they don’t, and then they’re going to leave.” — Andrea Mulligan Your usage dashboard is green. Your NPS is fine. Your champion posts photos of her kids in your swag. None of that means they’re renewing. Full episode below. Andrea Mulligan is a chief customer officer with 20+ years leading customer success, services, and support at VC- and PE-backed B2B SaaS...

“Be more interested than interesting.” — Sandy Yu, Founder of Revenue Retention Advisors Your customer just renewed for the tenth year in a row. That might be the most expensive account you have. Full episode below. Sandy Yu spent two decades leading global go-to-market teams at Oracle, Cisco, and PwC. Now she works as a fractional customer growth executive for B2B SaaS companies doing 25M–100M AR...

“Because there’s so much noise, the trust level’s never been lower.” — David Zeff, CEO of Whistle Your team can ship a product in a weekend now. So can 400 of your competitors. Full episode below. Building a product has never been easier, and that’s exactly why it stopped protecting you. David Zeff runs Whistle, the world’s largest SDR company. Whistle supplies $16M in pipeline a month to 350+ B2B...

"All too often, early-stage leaders assume silence is the absence of conflict. Much of the time, that silence is really evidence of avoidance." — Dr. Jonathan Thorp You ended the all-hands with "any questions?" Nobody said a word, and you logged it as alignment. At a 150-person Series B, that silence is the loudest signal in the room, and you just walked past it. (Turns out "any questions?" isn't...

"We don't say we reach potential, because that doesn't make sense to me. You just golf the rest of your life and then you're done." — Mark Talaga You've been "the founder" since the first Slack message. It's on your LinkedIn, it's how you introduce yourself at dinner, and it's quietly holding up your entire sense of self. So what happens when the company stalls, gets acquired, or AI starts doing h...

"When data is not an issue anymore, the final control and the privacy will become a huge defining moment." — Jing Kuang At a Series B–D company, your most valuable client relationships live in three people's heads and a CRM nobody updates. Then someone walks into a meeting and asks a question the other person already answered last time. (Karl did exactly this the day after a trip. Humbling.) In th...

"If the customer misses that sale, there's just gonna be another sale in a few months. And the customers know that, and we know that." Barry Moline has spent nearly three decades as a CEO. He can tell influence from manipulation, and so can your buyers. In this episode of The Human Connection Podcast, Barry lays out a three-part test for ethical influence: it has to be true , it has to make sense...

"It's easy, ironically, to forget the human in hiring." Christina Seime has spent 20 years moving from writing code to sitting in the room where hiring decisions get made. Across that whole path, the same gap kept showing up. In this episode of The Human Connection Podcast, Christina explains why hiring teams keep screening for what's easy to find on a resume and miss what actually predicts whethe...

"If I'm spending time with you, I'm going to be with you 100%." Vikas Prasanna learned this from his 11-month-old son. Then he noticed it was working on his customers too. In this episode of The Human Connection Podcast, Vikas talks about what it's like to be a first-time dad while building a dental SaaS company in Ireland. The company is five years old, has raised a seed round, and is on its thir...

"Be the place where the machine cannot reach, because the machine cannot read the future when it's unstructured. Because it looks at the future by defining the past." — Mohan Nair You bought the AI tools to buy your leadership team some time. Somewhere between the first automated workflow and this quarter's board deck, that time got spent making the same work faster. (Speeding up a process that ne...

"Even if you have a big multi-million dollar or euro revenue company behind you, you're still not Jensen Huang. […] People are not coming to you. You've come to them." — Jonathan Koifman Your platform can do nineteen things. The buyer across the table has one problem, and it keeps them up at night. (Guess which list your website is written from.) In this episode of The Human Connection Podcast, Jo...

"A lot of companies will think that they need to replace an ERP system. And when I go in and talk to them, I often find that there's a lot of misalignment across the business units." — Augie Santa Maria You've got the budget for the new system and a slide about AI. What you may not have is one agreed version of how your departments actually do the work. (The software was never going to settle that...

"The sales reps are doing the work that should have been done before the product was launched. I call it rolling a boulder uphill versus rolling a pebble uphill." — Craig T. Ingram Karl talks with healthcare commercialization strategist Craig Ingram about the single most common — and most expensive — mistake venture-backed MedTech and health tech startups make right after they close a round: hirin...

"If a capital raise is gonna take place next year, start building relationships now... it always amazes me how so many founders, so many CEOs, so many teams think, 'we're gonna start marketing the raise once the raise is live.'" — Jason Fishman Karl talks with Jason Fishman, CEO of Digital Niche Agency, about why founders lose capital raises before they ever open a pitch deck — because they treat...

"We're told the lone wolf is the most powerful person out there — that's what we're aspiring to be. I think it's done us more disservice as men than almost anything else... We may have a large company. We may not be connected at all." — Mark Platten Karl sits down with author and leadership guide Mark J. Platten to name the thing most C-suite leaders won't say out loud: the subconscious patterns w...

"We're a lot easier to fire if you don't have a personal connection to who we are." That's Jared Harman naming the quiet math behind every churned account: nobody leaves a company they have a relationship with. They leave a vendor. Most leaders build their retention strategy around the brand, the deck, the "differentiated service" — when the thing actually keeping a client is the person who picks...