How Startups Grow with other

Vinny Fisher is the co-founder of Fully Accountable and founder of multiple businesses including Leading Health Supplements, which does $1.3 million in gross monthly revenue. His approach focuses on building quarterback/project manager operators within businesses to scale without being trapped in day-to-day operations, allowing him to maintain majority or senior minority interests across three operating businesses while also maintaining a personal coaching practice generating $5-10k monthly per client with 10-20 active clients.

Bundlepost is a patented social content management system co-founded by Robert Caruso, a Forbes-listed top 40 social media marketer. The platform uniquely aggregates RSS feeds and content sources to enable users to curate, schedule, and manage social content 80% more efficiently than traditional methods. After building the company to scale over several years while working 80-hour weeks, Caruso promoted his CTO to CEO and transitioned to focus on building his personal brand in the digital marketing space.

Jenny Wen, Head of Design at Anthropic's Claude Codebase, discusses how AI is fundamentally transforming the design process and the role of designers. Rather than traditional gatekeeping and lengthy design processes, designers now focus on execution support, vision-setting, and rapid iteration with engineers shipping features at unprecedented speed. Claude Codebase's successful launch exemplifies this new paradigm, combining extensive prototyping exploration with rapid final execution and continuous post-launch iteration based on user feedback.

This is an interview with G2 Patel, Chief Product Officer and President at Cisco, discussing how Cisco is positioning itself as critical infrastructure for the AI era. Rather than a startup traction story, this is a narrative about how a 90,000-person enterprise company is transforming its culture and strategy to be AI-first, focusing on networking GPUs and providing infrastructure for large-scale AI systems. The content discusses organizational strategy, leadership philosophy, and Cisco's role in the AI buildout rather than traditional startup metrics.

This is a podcast interview with Matt McGinnis, Chief Product Officer (formerly COO) at Rippling, a $16 billion+ enterprise software company with 5,200+ employees. McGinnis discusses leadership philosophy, product management frameworks, and lessons from building a successful enterprise platform, contrasting his experience at Rippling with his nine-year journey at Inkling (2009-2018) where he struggled to achieve product-market fit.

LinkedIn, under CPO Tomer Cohen, is piloting the Full Stack Builder model—a radical reimagining of how product gets built at scale. The program empowers builders across any function to own the entire product development lifecycle (idea to launch) by automating everything except vision, empathy, communication, creativity, and judgment. With custom-built AI agents (trust, growth, research, analyst) and re-architected platforms to work with AI, early adopters are saving hours per week while maintaining or improving quality, with top performers showing the most enthusiasm.

Sundial is an AI-powered data analyst tool founded by Julie Zhuo, former head of design at Meta and author of 'The Making of a Manager.' The company helps organizations like OpenAI, Gamma, and Character AI automate data analysis and make better product decisions by diagnosing problems with data and treating solutions with design. Julie's unique trajectory from design leadership to data-obsessed founder reflects a broader trend where AI empowers individual contributors to do more with smaller, more nimble teams.

Chip Conley, founder of Joie de Vivre (the second-largest boutique hotel chain in the US), was recruited by Brian Chesky at age 52 to join Airbnb as head of global hospitality and strategy. His near-death experience from an allergic reaction led him to sell his hotel company and pivot to founding the Modern Elder Academy, the world's first midlife wisdom school with campuses in Baja and Santa Fe, addressing the value of intergenerational collaboration and age diversity in tech.

Sierra is an AI startup founded by Brett Taylor, legendary product leader and builder who previously co-created Google Maps, invented the like button at FriendFeed, built Quip (sold to Salesforce for $750M), and served as CTO at Facebook and co-CEO at Salesforce. The company is building AI agents to help with customer service, sales, and enterprise operations, positioning itself at the forefront of what Taylor believes is the inevitable shift toward agent-based software and outcome-based pricing models.

Mercury is a fintech company that evolved from a single core banking product to a multi-product platform in 2024, launching personal banking, bill pay, invoicing, spend controls, and employee reimbursement features. The company scaled from zero product managers at 400 employees to 30 PMs by focusing on quality and user experience as a competitive differentiator in the 'boring' financial services space. Their approach to multi-product development emphasizes intentional organizational structure and craft-driven design.

Enjoy the Work is a founder advisory and mentoring firm run by Jonathan Lowenhard that helps founders transition from being great entrepreneurs to becoming effective CEOs. The firm teaches frameworks and skills around CEO failure modes, M&A strategy (the Magic Box Paradigm), hiring, planning, and leadership development to help founders scale their companies successfully.

Arise AI is an observability and evaluation platform for artificial intelligence that helps AI engineers understand model performance and impact. Founded on the evolution from machine learning models to large language models, Arise provides tools for the nascent AI ecosystem to evaluate and understand AI system behavior.

Ultra Speaking is a public speaking workshop and course created by Tristan DeMontebello, a world champion public speaker. The program teaches conversational speaking through gamified exercises and deliberate practice, moving away from the typical "public speaking voice" that makes people sound unnatural. The core methodology focuses on treating speaking as a subconscious flow-oriented skill rather than a conscious process, with games like Conductor and Triple Step designed to build confidence through low-stakes, high-turbulence practice scenarios.

Ben Lausier is a marketplace and product expert who has built and scaled multiple billion-dollar marketplaces at Lyft and Thumbtack. He recently started Nura, a healthcare navigation company that connects users with care advocates. The source material focuses primarily on Ben's insights on marketplace strategy rather than Nura's specific traction metrics.

Core Sciences, founded by serial entrepreneur Evan LaPointe (4x founder, previously built Satellite, acquired by Adobe), teaches organizations how the brain works to improve team performance, product development, and decision-making. The company uses neuroscience-based frameworks to help leaders understand personality differences, optimize meetings, develop vision strategy, and create high-functioning team environments. LaPointe focuses on reducing the gap between what neuroscience knows works and what businesses actually do.

Open Door is a digital platform for buying and selling real estate that offers all-cash offers to sellers seeking simplicity and certainty. Led by Brian Tolkin (Head of Product and Design), the company operates with a vertically integrated model combining product, operations, pricing, and capital markets expertise. Open Door has pivoted during challenges like COVID-19 to virtualize home-buying processes and now partners with platforms like Zillow to expand reach.

Working Backwards, LLC is a consulting firm founded by Bill Carr and Colin Breyer, co-authors of the book 'Working Backwards.' The firm helps growth-stage and public companies implement Amazon's proven management practices and innovation processes, including single-threaded leadership, the PRFAQ process for product development, disagree-and-commit culture, and input/output metrics. The company synthesizes 15+ years of experience from Amazon (1999-2014), where Carr was VP of Digital Media overseeing Amazon Music, Prime Video, and Amazon Studios.

Latitude is a venture platform co-founded by Gina Godhill dedicated to building the next generation of iconic tech startups in Latin America. The company organized a 5,000+ person conference across two days with 70+ speakers including Ben Horowitz, bringing together top entrepreneurs, operators, and investors from across Latin America and the US. Gina emphasizes the importance of recognizing both the 'A-side' (highlights) and 'B-side' (failures and struggles) of entrepreneurial journeys, with the thesis that Latin America represents significant untapped opportunity in tech.

ChatPRD is an AI-powered tool for product managers built by Claire Vo, a veteran CPO with experience at Color, Optimizely, and LaunchDarkly. Built on nights and weekends, it has become the single most popular AI PM-specific tool on the market. The tool helps PMs accelerate their work, though Vo emphasizes it will complement rather than replace PM skills, which will evolve as AI adoption increases.

SixEastern is a PR agency founded by Emily Gerber that has worked with over 100 tech companies from stealth startups to publicly traded companies. The agency specializes in helping startups get press coverage, build awareness, and develop PR and communications strategy by taking a tactical, direct approach to media outreach that focuses on clear messaging, understanding publication preferences, and leveraging second-order effects of press coverage like credibility signals and content reuse.