Gentle Power

Gerta joined John Sparks on the Accessible Paths to Financial Freedom podcast by Asset Acquisition Partners to talk about negotiation and power, and how clients at YourNegotiations.com have added hundreds of thousands of dollars to their compensation, including one who added $1.7 million. Gerta talks about growing up in Albania during a civil war with scarce resources, how that informed the kind o...

Mia Smithson is a renowned tech industry recruiter who has interviewed more than 5,000 people and hired more than 400. Amongst many achievements throughout her career, Mia joined a startup as its founding recruiter when it was around 50 people and helped grow it to a workforce of 700 across seven countries. Today, she is the Founding Head of Recruiting at a frontier AI company that hires 30 to 50...

We get a lot of questions we can't answer because we're negotiators and not lawyers. So we brought on Justin Clark of JLC Employment Law to answer them. Justin has been a lawyer for over 11 years, spending most of his career in employment law. He started on the defense side representing companies, moved in-house to handle employment litigation at two post-IPO tech companies, got laid off h...

Annija Eizenarma started her first business at 15 at a small school in the Latvian countryside, and from the age of 17 spent the next six years building a smart home company that was eventually acquired by one of Europe’s leading manufacturers in the building automation industry. Still hungry after the exit, she moved to San Francisco to find her next move. Every step of Annija’s career was negoti...

Most people think negotiation starts when the offer lands. Our guest, Soumya Maya, makes the case that for anyone changing careers, it starts far earlier, back when you decide to switch and begin figuring out your story. Soumya began her career in architecture, spent about a decade exploring different fields, and moved into product management at edtech startups before leaving to build an AI tool f...

Amanda Gustafson coaches leaders through conversations most managers dread: giving a co-worker constructive feedback, telling a direct report they’re underperforming, resetting expectations with a peer. She became a career coach via a very winding road, from a physics degree to running a theater at 23 years old, then to a master's in psychology to software consulting. In this episode: • Why de...

Professor Ofer Sharone has taught negotiations at MIT Sloan School of Management and currently at University of Massachusetts Amherst, and he happens to be one of Gerta’s earliest influences for her interest in negotiations. She took his Power and Negotiations class at MIT during undergrad, and over a decade later, we welcomed to our podcast! Professor Sharone’s path to teaching about negotiations...

Daniel Imberman was employee number 10 at Astronomer, the data company that went viral from a Coldplay kiss cam, and he helped grow it from 10 to 300 people. He then left to start his own consulting firm out of Mexico City, where he himself is the product. This career pivot massively flipped his experience with negotiations. He used to negotiate once every year or two as an employee. Now he negoti...

We hosted a live Q&A a few weeks ago for people recently laid off from several large tech companies, but we ran way over time and couldn't get to all the questions. So we brought our lawyer friend, Alex Daniels, back to the podcast to finish the convo around all things severance agreements. Alex Daniels is a corporate attorney who spent years at Cooley, one of Silicon Valley's top law...

Angela Liao has spent her career on both sides of billion-dollar manufacturing negotiations. She built her foundation on the supplier side in Asia, negotiating contracts on behalf of manufacturing companies with some of the world’s biggest tech companies as her customers. She later joined Tesla and then Google, where she now leads device strategy and supply chain partnerships, negotiating manufact...

Arben Malaj has had one of the most consequential economic careers in Albanian history. In the late 1990s, he served as Albania's Minister of Finance during the country's worst financial crisis: a wave of Ponzi schemes that wiped out the savings of roughly 60% of the population overnight. He later served as Minister of Economy, where he negotiated more than 30 free trade agreements. He&#39...

Paula Schwarz grew up as part of the Schwarz Pharma family, one of the largest pharmaceutical dynasties in Germany. She walked us through her background that led to her leaving all of that behind, spending years running technology platforms in refugee camps on the Greek island of Samos, building a co-living home network called Angel House now spanning Greece and San Francisco, and making the final...

Priyanka Upadhyay, aka Coach Pri, spent 18 years in tech (Google, Salesforce, ServiceNow) before founding Product With Pri, a coaching and training business for product managers navigating job searches, transitions, and high-stakes career conversations. She's also an ICF-certified coach who's taught PM programs at Stanford and Product School, and now runs intimate small group cohorts for PMs looki...

Jim Lose is a Marine Corps veteran and the CEO of The Military Veteran, a firm that places veteran executives into high-growth companies. Before moving into recruiting, Jim was a Marine Corps intelligence officer, including a tour at the Pentagon where, at 25, he regularly briefed the Commandant of the Marine Corps and had authorization to contact the White House Situation Room. After the military...

This week, Alex and Gerta react live to a short viral video from Alex Hormozi about a discount negotiation tactic. No guest, just the two of them watching the clip and breaking it down in real time. This episode is honest, funny (Alex shares his most embarrassing moment), and gets into something that comes up a lot in our negotiation work: why memorized tactics tend to backfire when it actually ma...

Tallulah Le Merle spent nearly seven years negotiating deals as a management consultant at Kearney, worked as a fractional COO and advisor for AI scale-ups, and is now a partner at Fifth Era, a conscious-tech investment firm. She's also a writer and speaker working on her upcoming book, The Case for Hope in the Age of AI. And she has a lot to say about negotiations. In this episode, we get into ho...

In this episode, we invited Surina Diddi, who spent nearly a decade in finance, from equity research at UBS to investment banking at Lazard and Scotiabank to private equity in the renewable energy and energy storage space. We talk through Surina’s experience negotiating an additional $50K on top of her MBA scholarship at Chicago Booth School of Business. We get into how scholarship pools actually...

What if negotiation isn’t just about tactics, scripts, and numbers? In this episode, we sit down with Julia Martin and Melanie Bettis to explore the intersection most people ignore: mindset and strategy. Julia comes from the world of manifestation and intentionality. Melanie brings deep experience in job search strategy, interviewing, and salary negotiation. Together, they make a compelling case f...

In this episode of Gentle Power, we talk with Sam Liu, founder of AI startup Fergana Labs and former Stanford PhD student in decision making. We originally invited Sam on because we love both PhD dropouts and decision making science. What we didn’t expect was how many of his insights about negotiation had less to do with neat frameworks and more to do with how messy real decisions actually are. Ou...

We get this question a lot: “Have you trained an AI on your negotiation framework?” or “Can I just follow a template?”The appeal is obvious. A clean script would be easier for everyone involved and much easier to scale. The problem is that negotiation doesn't really work that way. Every negotiation is different. Different people. Different incentives. Different timing. Different pressure points. D...

In this episode, we welcomed Yehong Zhu, founder and CEO of Zett AI. Yehong is a former Forbes reporter, a Harvard philosophy graduate, and a former product manager at X (formerly Twitter). We explored how her background across media, tech, and startups shapes the way she thinks about negotiation, decision making, and building companies that last. We covered:  The “worst alternative” to a deal and...

This week on Gentle Power, we sat down with Morgan Snyder for a candid conversation about executive content, personal brand, and the quiet factors that contribute to negotiation outcomes before a call even starts. We also get into what’s actually working on LinkedIn right now, why long-form still matters, and how to build relationships in a way that doesn’t feel like performance art, even though M...

This week on Gentle Power, we sat down with Mark Mirra, CEO and co-founder of Aligned Negotiation, for a deep (and very practical) conversation on how to make negotiation feel less like “combat” and more like a normal life skill you can build over time.  We covered: Why Mark thinks negotiation should be treated like a lifestyle activity, not a scary, high-stakes “event” Why internal negotiations (...

In this episode of Gentle Power, we sat down with Kenko Ueyama, cofounder of Tsubasa AI, an AI advisory agency that helps enterprise teams define their AI strategy and then actually build it. Kenko is also a senior advisor at Harvard Applied AI Institute, where he helps design AI coursework and leads executive workshops on navigating AI-driven change. We covered: How underpricing yourself lowers n...

In this episode of Gentle Power, we talk about “no deal” scenarios. Not as failures, but as real and often necessary outcomes that people tend to misunderstand, resist, or personalize. Most negotiation advice focuses on how to get to a deal. But a big part of negotiating well is knowing when there isn’t one. We explore why no deal happens, how to think about it strategically, and how zooming out c...