Founders and Empanadas

After scaling multiple companies, including a 70-person video agency working with clients like Coca-Cola and Disney, Korneel Desmet hit a wall. Not once. But twice. From penthouses in London to a van in the Spanish mountains, this episode is the story of a founder who lost himself in the hustle and built his way back through presence, breathwork, and building retreats that actually rewire the nerv...

Thomas Geib had a thriving real estate business, a fast-growing mastermind, and everything figured out… until he didn’t. After a failed business partnership, 60K in debt, and just $0.17 left in his bank account, Thomas found himself questioning everything. But instead of quitting, he doubled down. He created The Entrepreneurs House in Medellín. It’s a founder community built from scratch to solve...

What happens when a practicing physician builds a $700M healthcare startup? In this episode of Founders & Empanadas , Joshua sits down with Dr. Alexi Nazem: Co-founder & former CEO of Nomad Health, Assistant Professor at Weill Cornell, and now a General Partner at AlleyCorp. Alexi shares his journey from hospitalist to founder, how he scaled one of the fastest-growing staffing platforms in...

Christie Kaplan is the founder of Startup Design Partners, a design-led venture studio that helps early-stage teams go from chaos to clarity, before they waste six months building the wrong thing. In this episode, Christie and Josh dive into the real work of product design: making hard decisions, listening well, and separating signal from noise when everyone just wants to be polite. This is a cras...

What if you could personalize every cold email (without recording a thousand videos)? Bethany Stachenfeld is the Co-Founder & CEO of Sendspark , the video platform trusted by teams at Salesforce, Oracle, Outreach, and LinkedIn to drive 400%+ more engagement through asynchronous, AI-personalized video messaging. In this episode, Bethany and Josh go deep on the evolution of modern sales, how to...

When I first came across Mitchell Leshchiner on LinkedIn, I immediately DM’d him and said: “I don’t know what ElectroKare is exactly… but I know I need to learn more.” Mitchell is the kind of founder you can’t ignore. He’s a former pro athlete, Palantir-trained engineer, and now CEO of ElectroKare: the AI-native operating system built to track and optimize the body’s most overlooked signals. In th...

Most sales teams lose the deal after the demo, not because the pitch fell flat, but because their champion didn’t know how to sell it internally. In this episode of Founders & Empanadas , I sat down with Gal Aga , CEO and co-founder of Aligned , to unpack the psychological friction that stalls deals, derails champions, and kills momentum in multi-stakeholder sales cycles. With 17+ years in B2B...

Will Allred didn’t set out to build the world’s best email coach. He was trying to sell a psychology-based marketing platform. Then COVID hit, their customers stopped paying, and they had 45 days of runway left. What happened next? A quick pivot, a squeal of excitement from their first user, and the start of what became Lavender , now used in over 30,000 inboxes and one of the most beloved brands...

Tom Coburn co-founded Jebbit in a college dorm room, scaled it over 13 years, raised $90M, and eventually sold the company to BlueConic. Today, he’s the CEO of Waking Up — one of the most popular meditation apps in the world. In this episode, we talk about what it means to train your mind like you train your body, and how that shift has changed the way Tom leads, builds, and navigates uncertainty....

Everyone thinks AI is coming to take over customer support. But Chyngyz Dzhumanazarov thinks it’s coming to expose your lack of systems. In this episode, the Kodif CEO breaks down what most founders get wrong about implementing AI, why early-stage focus can be dangerous, and how support teams should be preparing for the future—not just with better tools, but with better workflows. We also go deep...

In this episode of Founders & Empanadas , Joshua Eidelman sits down with Dr. Osama Hashmi , dermatologist and co-founder of Impiricus , a next-gen healthtech platform transforming how pharma companies engage with physicians. They go deep into what it really takes to build a globally distributed, high-compliance healthcare company, and why the future of clinical work won’t look like the past. T...

In this episode of Founders & Empanadas , Joshua Eidelman sits down with Omer Bloch , founder of Remote Latinos , to talk about the real (and often uncomfortable) truths behind global hiring, building remote teams, and what most founders get dead wrong about culture. Omer has helped 700+ companies hire remote talent from Latin America, the Philippines, Egypt, and beyond. And in this conversati...

This week on Founders & Empanadas , Joshua Eidelman sits down with Patrick Gilligan , founder of Somethings , a behavioral health platform connecting teens with young adult peer mentors who’ve been through it themselves. Patrick opens up about the emotional cost of working in youth mental health, why peer support often resonates more than traditional therapy, and how founders can stop gripping...

The future doesn’t belong to the loudest idea. It belongs to the teams that can execute in the messiest industries. In this episode of Founders & Empanadas , Joshua sits down with Adam Bailey, Co-Founder and CTO of Topanga.io , to explore what it really takes to scale technology that solves real-world operational problems—starting with food waste. Adam shares how Topanga pivoted from food deli...

Is in-game advertising the future of media? Can Hearthstone be a mental health tool? Why do most founders fail with overseas talent? In this episode of Founders & Empanadas, I sit down with Max Albert—founder of Adrenaline Interactive and former eSports athlete turned venture-backed gaming CEO—for a fast-moving conversation on the real future of gaming, monetization models that aren’t predator...

Most leaders talk about innovation. Mark Johnson actually builds for it. In this episode of Founders & Empanadas, I sit down with Mark Johnson, Co-Founder of Michigan Software Labs, to unpack what innovation really looks like inside high-stakes teams, enterprise orgs, and day-to-day life. We cover: Why the best innovation comes from crisis, not comfort What NASA’s Apollo 13 mission can teach y...

What do you do when you’re hogtied at gunpoint in a Brazilian penthouse? Or broke in Sri Lanka trying to make a business work from scratch? For Evan Cassidy, those weren’t hypotheticals—they were chapter one. In this raw and revealing episode of Founders & Empanadas, Joshua Eidelman sits down with Evan to unpack the wild, global journey that eventually led him to build Booming Brands, a white-...

Is your customer support team seen as a cost center—or a strategic growth engine? In this episode of Founders & Empanadas, Joshua Eidelman sits down with Susana De Sousa, CX advisor and former leader at Airbnb and Loom, to challenge the outdated thinking around support. They dive deep into how support teams can drive expansion revenue, reduce churn, and directly contribute to product and reten...

Starting a company means embracing a strange, often uncomfortable reality: status limbo. One day, you’re managing a team, earning a solid paycheck, and working in a nice office. The next, you’re back to zero—no salary, no brand recognition, no credibility beyond your own conviction. It’s the most disorienting transition in a founder’s journey, and if you don’t learn to sit with it, it can lead to...

In this episode, Joshua Eidelman sits down with marketing powerhouse Melissa Rosenthal to discuss her journey from media disruptor at BuzzFeed to B2B marketing innovator at ClickUp. Melissa shares candid insights on applying B2C strategies to B2B marketing, building high-performing teams during hypergrowth, and her philosophy on brand building. She opens up about the emotional challenges of workin...

There's something special about sharing empanadas and diving into deep conversations about life, learning, and entrepreneurship with family. Last week, I had the joy of sitting down with Dr. Dawn Eidelman—who happens to be my mother—for an episode of Founders and Empanadas. As we talked about her incredible journey from academia to global education innovator, I couldn't help but reflect on...

In this special Q&A episode, Joshua Eidelman, founder of NeoWork, answers listener questions about entrepreneurship, building global teams, and driving operational excellence across cultures. TIMESTAMPS:0:00 Introduction 1:57 How immigrant parents shape entrepreneurial resilience 4:33 Driving performance with overseas teams in non-confrontational cultures 7:15 Essential Tagalog terms for manag...

As the host of Founders and Empanadas, I've had the privilege of sitting down with many entrepreneurs to explore the intersection of business and life's major milestones. My recent conversation with Devon O'Rourke, founder of Fluvio, was particularly enlightening. We dove into how becoming a new parent will change your life— but maybe not as much as you might think. Over spicy mystery-...

From Soviet refugee to successful entrepreneur: Gene Eidelman joined his son on Founders and Empanadas to share his journey from arriving in America with $400 to building a $35M sustainable housing venture. In this episode, we explore: The unique advantages of the immigrant founder mindset How starting with nothing shapes business strategy Building Azure Printed Homes and revolutionizing sustainab...

On this episode of Founders and Empanadas, I sat down with Aaron Schwartz, co-founder of Orita.ai, to discuss the often-overlooked pitfalls of fundraising. He shared counterintuitive insights that challenged my understanding of the fundraising process, and offered tips that can help anyone raise capital more quickly.