PreVetted Podcast

Joseph Argiro shares how he accidentally found his way into product, finance, and go-to-market by building an “Uber/Airbnb for college tours” startup in college—an early trial-by-fire that taught him failure, distribution, and the realities of customer acquisition. He explains Iron Key Capital’s core approach as a venture studio: start with a clear thesis, validate it through customer discovery, iterate fast, and only then build—be...

Dr. Priyadarshi Panda is the founder and CEO of International Battery Company (IBC), a lithium-ion product company that works “from molecule to working product.” In this episode, he and Federico explore how his journey from small molecules and particle materials to 22 nm chip problems at Intel led him to building batteries that power the energy transition.

Dr. Panda explains why chemical engineering attracted him early: it touch...

Zach Mabe, Senior Product Manager at Amazon, shares insights on creating intuitive products that delight customers. He emphasizes the 'hammer' analogy—building simple, self-explanatory tools that solve problems effortlessly. Drawing from his experience, Zach discusses how product managers act as professional decision-makers, constantly grounding decisions in customer needs and expectations.

The conversation explores why ...

Dominique Roddier is a naval architect, ocean adventurer, and CEO of Ocergy, a company developing sustainable offshore solutions for clean energy. In this episode, recorded dockside in a Northern California marina on a strangely warm November day, Dominique and Federico use the ocean as a lens to explore global warming, human humility, and the future of renewable energy.

Dominique shares how he fell in love with the sea growing ...

Kyle Bowman, Senior Technical Product Manager at Amazon leading the Climate Pledge-Friendly Program, joins host Federico Ramallo on the PreVetted Podcast for a wide-ranging conversation that starts with problem-solving in unfamiliar industries and quickly evolves into deeper topics.

Kyle shares his diverse career path—from industrial engineering consulting and Amazon robotics to international aviation supply chains and now softw...

Erin Fletter is a serial entrepreneur, five-time cookbook author, and 30-year veteran of the food and hospitality world who turned a simple idea at her Denver kitchen table into Sticky Fingers Cooking®—a plant-forward children’s cooking school and social enterprise that has taught more than 200,000 kids the joy of cooking. In this conversation with host Federico Ramallo, Erin shares how a single after-school class inspired a nation...

Paola Marulanda joins the PreVetted Podcast to share how she went from seeing real estate as a “necessary evil” to becoming one of South Florida’s top luxury brokers and founder of Luxury Homes Connect.

Paola grew up watching her mother rebuild their family through real estate after her grandparents’ development business. Though she initially aimed for law or banking with firms like J.P. Morgan, she realized those paths would de...

John Weiss, founder of Human Design, joins Federico for a conversation on building brands that move people—not just markets—in an increasingly synthetic, AI-driven world.

He shares the origin of Human Design, founded in 2013 to solve human problems through strategy, design, and storytelling. Over the years, the agency has helped nonprofits, startups, and major brands like Nike, Land O’Lakes, and Twitter uncover clarity, purpose,...

Nithin Thekkupadam Narayanan joins the show to unpack the craft of product management at scale—how to keep a mature platform stable while innovating fast. A Senior Principal PM (ex-AWS, ex-Remitly and an MIT SDM alum), Nithin shares pragmatic lessons from event-driven systems, cost/speed trade-offs, and the fast-moving AI landscape.

We explore how to listen to customers without building one-offs, scan the market for signals (e.g...

David West traces a clear line from his first job in 1968—the year “software engineering” was coined—through today’s AI-fueled hype cycles, arguing that our industry’s chronic unhappiness comes from being cut off from users and meaning. In this candid conversation, he recalls mainframes, 80-column cards, and 24-hour feedback loops that forced upfront thinking, then contrasts that era with modern “vibe coding,” where speed often rep...

Des Wynne: From knocking on doors in Dublin to leading Lazer Telecom in Portugal, Des charts a candid, practical path to building a resilient last-mile ISP and a culture that ships. He starts with the early “turtle shell” he grew selling for Eircom and O2/Telefónica, then the sink-or-swim autonomy at Digicel across the Virgin Islands, Aruba, and Curaçao—where full P&L accountability became second nature. A detour into aviation ...

Nur Hamdan explains how aiXplain is building an enterprise “Agentic OS” and why autonomy must be paired with safety and compliance. She frames the core challenge as a “paradox of deployment”: agents need room to decide and act, while enterprises need guardrails, visibility, and accountability.

Nur Hamdan walks through aiXplain’s layered approach: customer-facing agents hold business logic; micro-agents do focused work (plann...

Madhuri Somara, Senior Product Manager at Microsoft, joins Federico to unpack how she builds AI agents that actually help people, not just impress on paper. Fresh off being honored with the 2025 Product Leader Award by Products That Count, Madhuri traces her path from coding and business analysis to product leadership, and why empathy, rigorous evaluations, and clear user value are her north stars.

She describes the vision and r...

Kimberlee Carr, Chief Operating Officer of Real Estate and Managing Broker at TAWANI Enterprises, shares how a chance fill-in role sparked a career she’s grown into with grit, curiosity, and a love for challenge. In this conversation, Kimberlee traces her path from on-site property manager to executive leader, explaining why her core values never changed with the title: positivity, accountability, respect, teamwork, integrity, ...

Kadamb Goswami: In this conversation, Kadamb traces a personal and professional journey shaped by resourcefulness, resilience, and a relentless focus on building things that tangibly help people. Growing up in a small Indian town, he watched his father—an educator—create low-resource systems so students could learn better. That early example of “impact through intent” led Kadamb to build a simple library tool in college and even as...

In this episode, Apurv Naman, Product Manager at NVIDIA, shares a heartfelt, visionary journey that starts with childhood cartoons—The Jetsons, Star Trek, Star Wars—and evolves into a career shaping physical AI: humanoids and self-driving cars. What began as wonder for machines you can “touch and feel” became a calling to work where hardware, software, and AI meet real-world impact.

Apurv recalls how mechanical engineering opene...

Ben Helland unpacks how strategy turns into outcomes for learners and employers at Western Governors University (WGU). As Principal Product Strategist, he partners with the Schools of Business and Health to design long-term roadmaps that serve working adults and an expanding 18–24 segment. He explains why WGU measures every big bet against three lenses—equity, completion, and return—and how a jobs-first mission shapes programs, sup...

Tifany Mazza joins us on The PreVetted Podcast for an inspiring conversation about building a meaningful career in digital marketing, transitioning into entrepreneurship, and staying relevant in one of the fastest-evolving industries in the world.

With more than a decade of experience growing brands online, Tifany is the Founder and Digital Marketing Director of tykio., a Google-certified digital partner based in Silicon Valley....

Yash Chaturvedi, Head of Product for Live Sports Ads at Amazon, joins Federico to unpack how AI, computer vision, and product management are reshaping streaming and advertising. Yash traces his path from early OCR projects at Staples to Prime Video, where he helped build long-form video understanding to automate global compliance and power features like maturity ratings and content descriptors. That same foundation inspired his wor...