How Startups Grow with other

Ada Chen-Reiki is the co-founder of Notejoy and an executive coach who helps founders scale themselves. The podcast interview focuses on her framework called 'Curiosity Loops' for making better decisions, her career journey from Microsoft to SurveyMonkey (where she was SVP of Marketing) via a LinkedIn-acquired startup, and her coaching philosophy centered on values alignment rather than external metrics.

Tom Conrad is the CEO of Zero Longevity Science, focused on extending human lifespan and healthspan. As an experienced product leader who previously served as CTO of Pandora (grew to 80M users), VP of Product at Snap, and CPO at Quibi, Tom brings decades of lessons from both major successes and notable failures to his new venture.

Outpace, founded by Ravi Mehta (former CPO at Tinder, Product Director at Facebook, VP Product at TripAdvisor), is a coaching platform designed to make expert-driven coaching more accessible. After spending 18 months as an entrepreneur-in-residence at Reforge helping build product leadership and strategy programs, Ravi identified a gap: while many learning resources exist (podcasts, blogs, cohort courses), one-on-one coaching remains largely inaccessible. Outpace combines product design, systems, content structure, and AI to scale expert coaching.

The New York Times is a major news organization with a 150+ year history that has successfully transformed from print to digital and built a thriving subscription business. Under Chief Product Officer Alex Hardiman, the company is executing an ambitious bundling strategy combining news, games (including Wordle), cooking, sports, audio, and shopping products, targeting 15 million subscribers by 2027 from the current 9+ million. The organization uniquely embeds editors within product teams to ensure journalism quality while maintaining editorial independence from the business side.

Barbara Gago is building Pando, an opinionated employee progression platform designed to replace traditional performance reviews. Drawing on her experience as CMO at Miro (where she helped create the visual collaboration category) and VP Marketing at Greenhouse, she's applying lessons in category creation, branding, and opinionated software design to address systemic bias in how companies evaluate and progress employees.

DeepMind is an AI research company founded by Demis Hassabis to develop artificial general intelligence. Starting with game-playing AI that learned from minimal instruction, the company achieved landmark breakthroughs including AlphaGo defeating world Go champion Lee Sedol with unprecedented move 37, and AlphaFold solving the 50-year protein folding problem in one year, reaching 90% accuracy and enabling revolutionary drug discovery.

This is a transcript of a long-form interview/conversation about hiring, leadership, and entrepreneurship featuring the founder/operator of Acquisition.com, a business with a media brand and advisory practice. The founder discusses talent acquisition strategies, frameworks for evaluating intelligence and competence, scaling principles, and personal reflections on ambition versus life balance following major personal and professional milestones.

Creator Camp is an Austin-based accelerator/studio founded by a YouTuber with 800,000 followers that identifies and funds emerging creators making cinematic, scripted short-form video content. The company aims to produce high-quality films and videos on $100,000-$200,000 budgets that can achieve millions of views and theatrical distribution, capitalizing on the growing trend of professionally produced, acted-out content on platforms like YouTube, TikTok, and Instagram.

Mike Novogratz is a veteran trader and investor who made his first million at Goldman Sachs and later became a billionaire at age 40 through Fortress Investment Group, a publicly-traded hedge fund and private equity firm co-founded with Pete Brigger and Wes Edens. He now leads Galaxy Digital Holdings, a crypto and data center company with 600 employees, having invested significantly in Bitcoin since 2012-2013 when it was trading at $96.

NFX is a venture capital firm founded by James Currier with approximately $1.6 billion under management. The firm specializes in identifying and investing in companies built on network effects, having identified 17 mathematical principles underlying network-driven businesses. Currier shares insights on founder characteristics ("savage founders"), technology windows, and the importance of language and network dynamics in building world-changing companies.

Ryan Peterson built Flexport into a multi-billion dollar logistics company after experiencing firsthand the pain points of freight forwarding and customs brokerage while running a scooter/motorsports importing business. Before Flexport, he bootstrapped ImportGenius, a profitable search engine for shipping manifests that still generates millions in EBITDA, demonstrating his ability to extract value from public data and build sustainable businesses.

Cover is a weapons detection hardware startup founded by Brett Adcock that uses NASA-licensed high-frequency radar imaging technology to detect hidden guns, knives, and bombs through clothing and bags at distances up to 50 meters. The startup has about 12 people and licensed all intellectual property from NASA's Jet Propulsion Lab, with the first system expected to be operational within 30 days of the interview. While the founder is framing schools as the initial use case due to personal motivation, he acknowledges the larger commercial opportunity lies in stadiums, hospitals, airports, and other high-security venues.

Co-Fertility is a marketplace that bundles egg freezing with egg donation to solve the affordability problem in fertility services. By offering free egg freezing to women who agree to donate half their eggs, and charging $13,700 to recipients seeking eggs, the company creates a two-sided marketplace addressing a growing market (20,000 US women froze eggs in the prior year) with a controversial but strategic business model designed to generate earned media.

Shaan Puri, founder of the education platform Teachable (sold for $250M when he was 31), is now building Carry, a tax optimization platform centered on solo 401k accounts and wealth-building strategies. The company helps entrepreneurs and business owners leverage tax code advantages like QSBS (Qualified Small Business Stock), solo 401k contributions, and real estate depreciation to reduce their tax liability.

VPN Bear Performance Nutrition is a fitness and nutrition company founded by Nick Bear, a multi-disciplinary athlete and fitness influencer with millions of followers across Instagram and YouTube. The company generates approximately $60 million in annual revenue through performance nutrition products. Nick is known for his exceptional athletic achievements, including running a marathon in 2:39 while maintaining a bodybuilder physique, combined with his rigorous approach to training, nutrition, and recovery.

Late Checkout is a creative studio and holding company founded by Greg Eisenberg that builds businesses with audiences and communities. Operating as a combination studio and agency, it focuses on profitable, cash-flowing businesses rather than pursuing venture capital. Eisenberg has shifted from the traditional Silicon Valley VC path to building lifestyle businesses that prioritize sustainable profitability and quality of life for founders and teams.

After.com is a cremation-as-a-service platform founded by Mormons based in Provo, Utah. The company handles the full logistics of cremation—from lead capture to tracking—similar to Domino's Pizza Tracker, allowing customers to pre-plan or arrange services after death. The business was built on recognizing a major demographic trend: cremation in the US rose from 10% to over 50-70% of end-of-life choices in the past 20 years, a 'one chart business' opportunity.

Billy McFarland, infamous for the failed Fyre Festival, is attempting a comeback with Pyrate, a platform that hosts small groups (6-15 people) on private island adventures while livestreaming experiences to virtual audiences who can interact and influence real-world events in real-time. The venture aims to generate revenue through micro-transactions (e.g., $0.20 per action) from millions of virtual viewers, with aspirations to exceed the Bahamas' annual tourism numbers through virtual attendance.

Deets is a review platform launched by serial entrepreneur Paul English to challenge Yelp's outdated model. Instead of relying on reviews from strangers with different preferences, Deets surfaces recommendations from friends, influencers you follow, and algorithmically similar users using machine learning, inspired by TikTok's recommendation engine. English launched it two weeks before this interview and positioned it as a potential billion-dollar opportunity.

Play.ht is an AI audio generation platform with a side project called Podcast.ai that creates synthetic podcast episodes by training AI models on biographical content and voice recordings. The company demonstrates the capabilities of right-brain AI by generating realistic audio conversations, such as a 25-minute interview between Joe Rogan and Steve Jobs, showcasing both technical achievement and the emerging creative applications of AI.