Startups Decoded

EP#87: Founders Obsess Over the Raise. Investors Care About This More. With Carina Cunha

Carina Cunha is an investment banker, founder, and advisor who's worked with over 100 companies from pre-seed to IPO. She helped build Crimson Education into a unicorn, t

Ep#86: Early Decisions That Define Your Startup Forever. With J.P. Morgan Asset Management

Founders treat early decisions like they're reversible.  A board seat, a deal term, who gets hired first. None of it is as flexible as it looks. By the time a bad call c

Ep#85: The Finance Skill Most Founders Never Learn - Brett Turner, Trovata

Brett Turner has built four companies and sold three of them for a combined $500 million plus. His sharpest insight has nothing to do with pitch decks or growth hacks, i

Ep #84: Why Most Founders Get Their Angel Round Wrong. With Vadim Gordin.

Vadim Gordin has looked at more early cap tables than most of us have had coffees.  He built a data set most founders never see: hundreds of first-person fundraising acc

Episode #83: Why Founders Don't Actually Know Their Customer with Bryan Alston

Most founders can describe their customer. Age, income, job title, maybe a lifestyle detail. What they can't describe is why that person buys, what they almost bought ins

Ep#82: AI Was Supposed to Kill the Chief of Staff. It Made Them Indispensable. With Clara Ma.

Clara Ma was chief of staff to the CEO of Hugging Face back when it was a Series A company, years before most founders could spell LLM.  She watched the role from the sh

Ep#81: Where Did $18.8 Billion in AI Robot Investment Go in 2026? John Frankel - ff Venture Capital

John Frankel has been funding this stuff since before it was fundable.  He founded ffVC in 2008 after 21 years at Goldman, has backed more than 200 seed companies, and s

EP#80: Why Smart Founders Keep Making the Same Bad Call. Owen Fitzpatrick - Inner Propaganda

Owen Fitzpatrick has interviewed people in North Korea, Iran, and Afghanistan, trying to answer one question. Why do we believe what we believe? Ten books and thirty yea

Ep#79: The Startup Dream That Wasn't Hers - Ella Cook

Andy Walsh sits down with Ella Molony Cook, exited founder turned investor and Founder of Time Rich, a community of ambitious women thriving in the new world of AI. One

Ep#78: The Real Playbook for Scaling from $1M to $50M with Jordan DiPietro - Hiring OS

Most founders obsess over the first million. The real fight starts after it. Jordan DiPietro has scaled from every seat. Growth at The Motley Fool through several hundre

EP#77: The People Decisions That Built a $1B+ Sales Machine. Chris Lee — Deel

Chris Lee joined Deel when it was doing $1M ARR. Today it's past $1B+.  He didn't just watch that happen, he made hiring, firing, and org design decisions that either cl

EP#76: Your Network Has a Revenue Problem with Kyle Kane.

Founders do not know how to convert their network. Andy Walsh sits down with Kyle Kane, co-founder of onSpark AI, the world's first AI-powered partnership engine. Kyle K

Ep#75: The World Is Your Talent Pool. Here's How You Thrive. Brad Bowery - Deel

Brad Bowery sat down with Andy Walsh to unpack what founders should be thinking about as they begin hiring, and why the global talent pool is more accessible than most re

EP#74: Your Brand Is Worth Stealing. Is It Protected? With Maria Sinatra (Venable) and Allison Luvera (Juliet)

Most founders think IP protection is something they'll sort out once the business gets traction. That's exactly backwards. By the time it feels urgent, the work already m

Ep#73: The Digital Twin for Work — What Founders Don’t Understand with David Shim

Most companies believe they run on strategy. They actually run on conversations, and those conversations vanish the moment the call ends. David Shim watched this happen

Ep#72: Your Cap Table Is the Story of Your Company — Joris Delanoue, Fairmint

Every line on your cap table is a promise. Most founders don’t know what they’ve signed. Andy Walsh sat down with Joris Delanoue, founder of Fairmint, to unpack why equi

Ep#71: Launching at 21 With No Money and No Plan. Now 4 companies & 2 exits. With Taryn Williams.

Taryn Williams started her first business at 21 with no experience and no capital. Twenty years later, she’d built four companies and exited twice. Taryn Williams doesn’t

Ep#70 - Eric Ries. He wrote the rules. Now he's rewriting them.

Eric Ries, author of The Lean Startup, joins Startups Decoded to discuss his new book Incorruptible and why many successful companies slowly drift away from their foundin

Ep#69: The VC Who Got Rejected by YC — Then Built a $300M Company. Rachel ten Brink

Rachel ten Brink spent two decades inside Fortune 500 companies — P&G, Estée Lauder, L’Oréal — before co-founding Scentbird and scaling it past $300M in revenue. She got

EP#68: Why We're Lonelier Than Ever, And How to Fix It - Michelle Parsons

We’re more connected than ever. More lonely than ever. Along the way, something broke. Michelle Parsons left ed-tech to build Lora — a platform using astrology as a fram