Founders and Empanadas

He shot 500 shots a day, 7 to 8 in the morning, on a shooting machine in his high school gym. If he skipped it, the anxiety going into the weekend was unbearable. He still remembers his friend Adam offering to pick him up on a Friday night and having to say no because he had shots to get up. Looking back he calls it a little toxic. He also credits it for the one thing he thinks every founder has t...

Brian M. Green got laid off, and instead of going straight back into the market he asked himself what he was actually good at. He'd spent decades on the data side of things, a master's in urban planning he never practiced with, a PhD candidate in public policy and health, and a long habit of asking whether an intervention actually helped anyone. So he hung the consulting shingle back up an...

In 1993 the CEO of a paper mill in Portland, Maine came down to IBM Research and asked for help. Alok Aggarwal’s team told him the truth, which was that they had no idea how paper gets made. They spent three months learning, then built a scheduling system out of agents and meta-learning, words that would not become fashionable for another thirty years. The mill improved by about 1.5 percent, worth...

Almost everyone who climbs Kilimanjaro stops at Stella Point and calls it the summit. It isn't. The actual highest point in Africa is Uhuru Peak, roughly ten blocks further on, and Rishi Bhatnagar says that ten-block walk was the hardest forty minutes of his life. What kept him going was picturing his grandkids asking whether he made it, and having to tell them grandpa quit early. This is his...

Marco Benitez was preparing to move his family from Mexico to Switzerland for the next chapter of a successful Big Pharma career when his wife asked him four words: “Why are you so sad?” He already knew the answer. The small fitness product he was building outside work made him feel more alive than the career he had spent years creating. Marco left Roche and went all-in on RookMotion, a wearable a...

Matt Narciso started his career answering angry calls at a Dish Network help desk. Thirteen years later he was running the kind of company he once took calls for. In this episode of Founders & Empanadas, he sits down in Medellín with Joshua Eidelman (his friend and direct competitor in the outsourcing world) for a conversation two rival CEOs almost never have on the record. They get into the t...

At 26, Yusif Gurbanli has already worked at CERN, traded at J.P. Morgan, built aircraft for NASA, and finished a PhD reconstructing human knees with AI. Most people would call that scattered. Yusif calls it the whole strategy. Yusif is the co-founder and CFO of AIdMD, a clinical AI platform tackling one of healthcare's most stubborn problems: the hours of documentation doctors take home every...

Hilary Mason was one of the most recognizable names in data science: chief scientist at bitly, founder of Fast Forward Labs, co-author of Ethics and Data Science . Then she walked away to build Hidden Door, a roleplaying platform where you step inside licensed story worlds with an AI narrator running the game. The catch? She calls herself a skeptic of most of the generative AI market, and she'...

Dr. Myra Ahmad graduated from medical school in 2022, looked at the system she'd just trained inside, called it dystopian, and decided to build something outside of it instead of starting a residency. Three years later, Mochi Health has served more than 500,000 patients across all 50 states. In this episode of Founders & Empanadas, Myra and Joshua get into the strategy behind the build: why we...

Rand Fishkin built Moz from a struggling web-design agency into a $60 million software company and watched venture capital quietly turn it from a business that served customers into one that served investors. His verdict, over pineapple empanadas: raising VC was the second-biggest mistake of his career. The biggest? Stepping down as CEO. Rand co-founded SparkToro after Moz and now builds "cus...

Jenna Reback can taste words. Her own name tastes like blueberries, which is why she named her company Blueberry. She has synesthesia, a rare neuro-sensory condition that made childhood disorienting and lonely, and forced her to become obsessed with one question: how do you make someone else understand something they've never experienced? That question led her to Hollywood, then to Silicon Val...

Most social apps were built to make you feel connected without requiring you to actually be. Sanjay Guruprasad has been building against that assumption for eight years. His thesis: the only online interaction that replicates the way humans have always built real relationships is playing games together. Sanjay is the founder of Rune AI, a multiplayer game platform and engine that's been processing...

Andrea Mazzocchi defended her PhD, applied to Y Combinator, and watched the country shut down for COVID all on the same weekend. That was May 2020. By the end of the year, she had a wet lab running, a seed round closing, and a company called Known Medicine using 3D tumor organoids to predict which cancer drugs would actually work for individual patients. Three years later, she sold it. Then starte...

Starting in 2003, years before anyone was using the term, Yu-kai Chou began developing what would become the Octalysis Framework: a model of human motivation built around 8 core drives that influence every decision we make. He gamified his own life first. Then his companies. Then Fortune 500s. Then governments. Now he's one of the most sought-after behavioral designers on the planet. He's...

Jessica Murrey won a Regional Emmy at 24 for an anti-child abuse campaign, then spent seven years training young activists and former extremists in countries recovering from genocide and civil war: Myanmar, Burundi, Nigeria, Colombia. She came home asking: how do you scale this? The answer was a video game. Jessica co-founded Wicked Saints Studios with a behavioral scientist and a former senior Po...

Sahin Boydas moved from Turkey to San Francisco in 2012 with no network, no warm intros, and a conviction that remote work was going to change everything, about a decade before COVID made it unavoidable. What followed was four companies, two exits (MovieLaLa to Gfycat, RemoteTeam.com to Gusto in 2021), 180+ angel investments including Anthropic and OpenAI, and a ranking as the #1 Most Active Angel...

Renee Gittins didn't take the conventional path. She built her own. She started as a biomedical engineer, then walked away from biotech at 21 to teach herself game development from scratch: moonlighting on her own game while working day jobs to pay the bills. That game, Potions: A Curious Tale , ended up on Steam, Switch, Xbox, and PS5 with 90%+ positive reviews. Along the way, she became Exec...

Adam Lieb sold his first gaming website to IGN at age 11. Before he could drive, he was earning $10,000 a week selling virtual goods in MMORPGs. Before he graduated college, he was running a 25-site gaming network doing multimillion-dollar revenue. He's never had a real job. He's never needed one. Today, Adam is the founder and CEO of Gamesight: a marketing intelligence platform that helps...

Tim Morten led production on StarCraft II at Blizzard before founding Frost Giant Studios. In this conversation, he breaks down the economic forces reshaping game development: from the oversaturation crisis (20,000+ games per year) to the post-pandemic VC correction that's forcing studios to do more with less. Tim has lived both sides. He shipped one of gaming's most successful RTSs with B...

Alex Stewart didn’t raise a round. He didn’t move to San Francisco. He didn’t “grind” 100 hours a week. He built Teamtown, a growing design agency, by doing things differently. This week on Founders & Empanadas , Joshua Eidelman sits down with Alex to unpack how he built a profitable, people-first business without losing his mind in the process. They dig into how he: Used SEO as his first grow...

Most kids’ first interaction with the internet is lying about their age. Kieran Donovan is building the fix. Kieran left a top global law firm (he became one of the youngest partners at Latham & Watkins and is the only person to win “Privacy Lawyer of the Year” multiple times) to found k-ID. It’s a privacy-first identity layer that lets products adapt to a young user’s age and country automati...

Wilian Iralzabal didn’t leave Google to “be a Webflow guy.” He left because he wanted to design a business he could live with and then built one that ships at enterprise scale. Cuban immigrant at 8. Door-to-door sales at 14. Two startups acquired by Google. In 2019 he walked away, started small, and grew Zabal Media into a 33-person, 7-country no-code design & development agency serving Slack,...

Brianna Carney runs CrewBloom across 20+ countries and is building Betty , a voice AI that handles outbound qualification so humans can spend more time on higher-value work. Her operating system is disarmingly simple: work comes second, standards stay high, AI augments people, and leaders model the culture. She also happens to be the first person with a chronic condition to run a marathon on every...

From Zirtual’s Overnight Collapse to Adios: How Maren Kate Rebuilt and Bet on Reuse At 27, Maren Kate Donovan was running a 400-person remote company doing roughly $1M/month. Then, in a single day, Zirtual shut down. Instead of disappearing, she did the unglamorous work: a post-mortem, learning the finance she’d outsourced, a tour at Calm to study operating excellence, and a new thesis for her nex...

What happens when a hardcore operator decides to build for the physical world? Denis Lussault has scaled companies where things actually move: robots, vending machines, and industrial systems that keep the real world running. After 10 years in automotive and oil & gas, he joined Balyo to build autonomous forklifts and led its U.S. business from $0 to $5M in two years , eventually taking the co...