Strictly From Nowhere: A Podcast Experiment by Cause of a Kind

Public relations used to mean one shot at one placement in one publication and hoping it landed.In this episode of Forward to Extraordinary, Justin Abrams sits down with Steph Porter, founder of ink&iron PR. Steph started as a theater major, pivoted to communications on the advice of a campus counselor, and built a career running campaigns for brands like Walmart and Tim Hortons before leaving corporate to build her own shop in...

Before software as a service had a name, Jeremy Suriel was burning customer service software onto CDs and mailing it to enterprises.In this episode of CTO Confidential, Mike Rispoli sits down with Jeremy Suriel, cofounder and CTO of Kustomer. Jeremy has been building in this space since 1997, starting with chat servers for GeoCities and Lycos, then a widget company Mark Cuban backed and AOL acquired, then Assistly, which Salesforce...

What does it take to build one of the largest channels on YouTube without ever raising a dollar?In this episode of Forward to Extraordinary, Justin Abrams sits down with Ashkan Karbasfrooshan, Founder and CEO of WatchMojo. Ashkan bet on YouTube in 2006 when people at conferences thought he was out of his mind. He bootstrapped through a lawsuit, a cash crunch, and years of quiet building before the business ever broke even.This one ...

Mike sits down with Bart Lewin, a four decade technology veteran, serial entrepreneur with seven startup exits, and a consultant who helps small tech companies grow. Bart is building a practice around a model most founders have never considered. Non equity financing.The idea is simple and powerful. Instead of chasing tiny subscriptions while diluting your equity to raise venture capital, license the know how you already built to en...

Mike sits down with TJ Pitre, Product Architect for Design Systems and AI at Figma and the founder of Southleft, a design systems consultancy trusted by teams at NASDAQ, Caterpillar, Indeed, and IBM.TJ explains why sprinkling AI into a design system without proper context creates chaos rather than speed. His framing sticks with you. You are safe while you are walking the AI. The moment it gets ahead of you, you have lost the thread...

Mike sits down with Pete Sacco, founder and CEO of PTS Data Center Solutions, author of The Bridge and Living in Bliss, and an investor in frontier technology including Extropic and Lemurian Labs. Pete is an ex theoretical physicist turned electrical engineer who has spent nearly three decades designing and building data centers.Pete makes the case that two technologies will define this century. Artificial intelligence, and us. Mac...

Justin sits down with Chris Fenton, veteran Hollywood executive and author of Feeding the Dragon. Chris spent seventeen years as president of DMG Entertainment, produced or supervised twenty one films including Iron Man 3 and Looper, and teaches the business of cinematic arts at USC.Chris shares the philosophy that shaped his colorful career. Life is a lottery, so own as many tickets as you can. Every person, every lesson, and ever...

Justin sits down with Kiko Zang, cofounder and CEO of Chomp, a consumer technology company that captures anonymous human opinion to help people understand themselves and each other.

Drawing on a life across four continents and five industries, Kiko blends psychology, technology, and AI to build products rooted in real human behavior.

They dig into one of the biggest problems of the digital age. The person sitting next to you lives i...

Justin sits down with Kim Bode, founder and CEO of 8THIRTYFOUR, a communications and learning company, and the creator of Big Deal Energy. Kim is a Forbes Top 200 PR founder who built her entire company on one idea. People buy from people, not logos.They get into why the billable hour model is broken, how relationships beat transactions every time, and how to stand out without being eccentric. Kim shares the handwritten note habit ...

Justin and Mike welcome back JJ Kelley, part of the Strictly From Nowhere origin story ten years ago.

JJ is a five time Emmy nominated director, creative producer, and showrunner working across premium nonfiction, branded entertainment, and cinematic storytelling. His work spans National Geographic, Disney Plus, Netflix, Discovery, Prada, Apple, Outside, Delta Air Lines, and WSJ Magazine. He has directed on Deadliest Catch, shot for...

Justin sits down with Andrew Fine, co-founder and CEO of SEI, the premium content agency behind the Genius Series. Andrew's mission is simple and enormous. Replace useless content with useful content.

They get into what it actually takes to build the next TED. Andrew explains why clipping is a tactic and not a strategy, how his team over indexes on ideas and kills anything that does not clear their internal gates, and why he built r...

Justin sits down with James Hamilton, founder of Dubble and a software engineer by trade, to unpack clipping, the fastest rising strategy in digital advertising.

Clipping takes one long piece of content and turns it into hundreds of short clips that flood every feed.

A million views for a few thousand dollars instead of a Super Bowl spot for millions. James explains how the model works, how brands like Stake built empires on it, and...

The game is already over. You just do not realize it yet.

In this episode of CTO Confidential, Mike Rispoli sits down with Jim Kitchen, a fractional CPTO with three decades of experience building hardware, shipping standards, and managing successful exits. Jim has been in the trenches since 1998, working in telecom infrastructure, creating the TR-69 standard that still powers broadband provisioning, and co-founding the Matter IoT st...

Legal tech is still using keyword search. That is a massive waste of what AI can actually do.

In this episode of CTO Confidential, Mike Rispoli sits down with Lawrence Krubner, CTO of Score Lytics, to dig into the frontier problems that AI is now making possible to solve. Lawrence has been building on the web since 2002, and his perspective on how each generation dismisses the next is eye-opening.

We talk about why minimalism matters...

The model that worked for thirty years just died. And nobody wants to say it out loud.In this episode of Strictly From Nowhere, Justin Abrams and Mike Rispoli dig into the existential challenge facing every service business building software. AI has made delivery faster. Projects that used to take six months now take three weeks. But the sales cycle did not accelerate. The demand did not accelerate. So now you have a supply problem...

The most successful people in the world are not in college. They are learning from other people. The question is: where are you learning from?

In this episode of Forward to Extraordinary, [Justin Abrams](https://www.linkedin.com/in/cuzzinjustin/) sits down with [Josh Brown](https://www.linkedin.com/in/jkbrownofficial/ "Josh Brown"), a course creator, educator, and CTO who has worked across every vertical from technical theater to co...

The most important circle in any startup is demand. If you do not nail that, technical feasibility and business viability do not matter.

In this episode of Forward to Extraordinary, Justin Abrams sits down with Alex Salazar, CEO and co-founder of Arcade.dev, an AI agent orchestration platform for enterprises. Alex shares the playbook that works: spotting non-consensus opportunities, refusing to ask customers what they want, using fa...

The tools are the same for everyone now. So the winning strategy is to use them differently.

In this episode of Strictly From Nowhere, Mike Rispoli and Justin Abrams dig into how they are each using AI to overcome the barriers to shipping content and ideas. Mike shares his process of recording blog posts, using AI to edit and organize, then heavily hand-editing to preserve authenticity. Justin talks about building an omnichannel str...

The gap between what technology can do and what an organization will actually accept is where the real work happens.

In this episode of CTO Confidential, Mike Rispoli sits down with Jessi Szurek, Associate Partner at Synthesis, an AI native consulting firm focused on financial services and enterprise transformation. Over 17 years in technology consulting, Jessi has seen the industry shift from waterfall methodologies to agile, from ...