PreVetted Podcast

Justin Marcucci is President of Apexon, a digital engineering services firm backed by Goldman Sachs and Everstone Capital, where he leads the global commercial organization. In this PreVetted Podcast episode, Justin Marcucci traces a rare path through digital engineering, founder, design-led operator, and executive at scale, and what it actually takes to build and lead teams that own outcomes.

Justin started and ran Nickelfish, an i...

Aligning your home with your life is the difference between a house that quietly drags you down and one that supports who you're becoming. Kim Costa breaks down her eight-dimension Wheel House Method.

In this PreVetted Podcast episode, Kim Costa — Top 5% realtor, author of Live in Your Wheel House, and podcast host — shares how she went from two decades as a CFO and controller to building a movement around home-and-life ...

JJ Friedman is the Director of Product Engineering at PLACE (formerly Remine), and this conversation is a clinic on engineering leadership in the AI era. In this PreVetted Podcast episode, JJ and Federico Ramallo dig into what actually moves a team forward: judgment over syntax, trust over control, and treating embedded engineers as long-tenure teammates rather than disposable project labor.

JJ took an unusual route into engineering...

Engineering leadership quietly breaks the day you stop touching the code. Vasu Raj Jain leads at Amazon Ads without ever leaving the codebase, and in this PreVetted Podcast episode he and Federico Ramallo turn that habit into a full playbook for staying technical, building trust, and putting AI agents in their place.Vasu is a Senior Software Engineer and Engineering Lead at Amazon Ads, where he owns the architecture for ad-serving ...

Mike Hess is the Founder and Executive Director of the Blind Institute of Technology (BIT), and his core message is simple: technology is the greatest equalizer for people with disabilities. In this PreVetted Podcast episode, Mike and Federico Ramallo dig into digital accessibility, WCAG, and workforce development, and why accessibility is also a real business advantage.

BIT is a pan-disability workforce development organization. It...

Ashwin Gopinath is the Co-Founder and CEO of Sentra, where he is building organizational memory for what he calls Enterprise General Intelligence (EGI). His thesis is that AGI will be commoditized, and the real differentiator will be how well a team retains and compounds its own knowledge, since every re-litigated decision is a memory failure. Before Sentra, Ashwin was an Assistant Professor at MIT, a research scientist at Caltech ...

Alex Treiner is the Founder and CEO of Make Offshore, the Independent Sales Representative for Foxconn Baja California, and the author of "Sherlock DNA: A Startup Saga," a #1 New Release on Amazon based on his nearly nine years inside Illumina. A two-time immigrant and self-described serial reinventor, Alex went from electrical engineer to manager, inventor, and founder of multiple startups, including Tailio, which he sold to Nestl...

Anton Pleshivtsev spent over eight years at Bravado, climbing from Head of Engineering to VP, before stepping into a new chapter as Director of Engineering at Sendblue in the San Francisco Bay Area. He talks about the pivot from hands-on engineer to engineering leadership, what it's like to join a small, fast-moving startup after a long tenure at one company, and how he scaled, coached, and developed engineering teams as Bravado gr...

Jonathan Hernandez is an Information Security and Risk professional at Nationwide Children's Hospital and a CISSP-certified cybersecurity expert with experience across governance, risk, compliance, and ethical hacking. He is also a public speaker and a Master of Divinity student at Southern Seminary, and in this episode he shares the story behind the credentials, starting with the day he arrived from the Philippines at nineteen, lo...

Adrian Ferrero is the Co-Founder and CEO of Biome Makers, where for eleven years he has used DNA sequencing to read the communities of microbes living in soil and turn them into a functional picture of soil health. An economist by training who calls himself an innovator, Adrian sold an earlier DNA diagnostics company with his childhood friend Alberto Acedo, then reinvested everything to bring the personalized medicine concept into ...

Rich Thomson is the Founder and CEO of Dreamliner Luxury Coaches and Caprice Capital Partners. He spent 20 years in banking and lending at GE Capital, Citibank, and Brightwood Capital before making a pivotal decision: to stop financing other people's companies and start building his own.

In this episode, Rich shares what it actually takes to run two very different businesses at the same time, a luxury transportation company serving ...

Kirk Welsh is a licensed architect turned entrepreneur and coach based in Detroit. After more than 12 years in architecture and over 150 million dollars in constructed projects, he walked away from corporate life to build HouseWarming, a commercial flooring company, and then went deeper to create the Architect of Alignment, a framework that helps high performing professionals build the internal structure they need before chasing ex...

Leslie Espinola has spent more than 35 years in the dental industry, but that was never the plan. She studied forensic science and wanted to join the FBI, then took a job in her father's dental practice while she figured out her life, and never left. Today she is a Dental Executive Coach, Fractional COO, and founder of High Peak Dental Advisors, helping practices grow through better leadership, healthier culture, and smarter operat...

Brent Hagan is the Chief Supply Chain Officer at Lob, the direct mail automation platform whose tech-enabled network delivers hundreds of millions of personalized mailpieces every year at 99% on-time reliability. In this episode, Brent joins Federico Ramallo to explain how he built that logistics engine from the ground up using entirely third-party manufacturing and fulfillment, with no fixed manufacturing cost, and how AI now sits...

Harshit Kohli is a Senior Technical Account Manager at AWS, where he serves as a trusted advisor to enterprise customers on cloud strategy, architecture, and AI adoption. He started his IT career in 2010 at Infosys in India, built his way through Tech Mahindra, HPE, and Cloudera, moved to the US in 2016, and joined AWS in 2022. He is currently completing a PhD in AI, has published over a dozen research papers on mental health predi...