Startups Decoded

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, it comes down to cash. Most founders treat treasury as a back office problem, something you hand off the moment you can afford a CFO. Brett spent over a decade as a CPA at Deloitte, ran corporate finance inside Amazon, then worked Controller and CFO roles across a str...

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 accounts, cross-referenced against years running accelerators at NYU. His numbers say the friends and family round is not a formality. It is where the mistakes that surface at Series A actually start.

We walk through what a healthy angel funnel looks like stage by s...

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 instead, or what finally tipped them over. That gap is where growth lives, and most companies never go looking.

Bryan Alston has spent 15 years finding the customers and growth opportunities brands overlook, driving breakthrough growth for consumer brands including Mag...

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 sharpest seat in the building, then built Ask a Chief of Staff, a 500-person community that has helped match CEOs with their right hand ever since.

AI was supposed to make executive support obsolete. Instead, chief of staff postings more than doubled last year, sal...

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 sits on over sixty boards. This year robotics pulled in $18.8 billion globally, already ahead of the $15 billion invested across all of 2025, and Frankel has a clear map of where that money actually landed, and where it hasn't. Value Add Pulse

His answer isn't the...

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 years later, his answer is uncomfortable for founders. The story running your business decisions was never fact checked. It was just repeated enough times that it started to feel true.

His framework is simple and brutal. A belief has to feel right, fit your identity, and...

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 exit. Seven figures raised. Three companies she still holds equity in. Multiple failures, which she talks about more freely than the wins. She dropped out of high school, built a retreat business in Australia before she knew the word startup, and sold to the buyer wh...

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 hundred million in revenue, The Hustle through its HubSpot acquisition, and Hampton from zero to $10M as CEO. Now he coaches founders and CEOs building from $5M to $50M.

Through his career he observed a genuine disconnect in how Founders hired good people. He just launched ...

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 cleared the path or slowed everything down. That's what this conversation is really about.

Most founders build their sales team reactively. They wait until it hurts, then hire fast and hope for the best. Chris runs a 600-person sales org with 65+ managers and 14 di...

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 Kane built $2B in partnership revenue for some of the biggest names in music and brands before realizing the same broken pattern kept killing deals: founders had the right relationships and no system to turn them into money. 

Kyle breaks down what a partnership en...

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 realize.

Brad has built local teams as a founder and global teams as an operator at Zendesk and now Deel, where he leads Global VC and PE Partnerships.

In this episode we explore;

• The real friction of global hiring: compliance, classification, and when contractor st...

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 matters, and you're behind.

This conversation cuts through the abstraction. Maria Sinatra is an IP attorney at Venable LLP who works with startups and nationally recognized consumer brands on exactly this problem. Allison Luvera is the founder of Juliet Wine, a categ...

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 from the inside while running Foursquare, sitting in meetings where half the room was camera off, on mute, essentially absent. He called it Ghost Mode. That observation became the founding insight for Read AI, and it’s a sharper diagnosis of organizational dysf...

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 equity, the core of startup ownership, is still managed through systems built for a different era, and why that matters more now than ever.

The central tension: companies are staying private longer, secondary markets are growing fast, and the infrastructure ho...

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 talk about the dream. She talks about what it actually costs.

Andy Walsh sat down with Taryn Williams — serial founder and multi-exit operator — to trace the full arc of building from scratch. From cold emailing at midnight to navigating a m...

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 founding ideals.

Andy Walsh sat down with Eric to explore the forces that reshape organizations as they scale — from governance and incentives to leadership dynamics and investor pressure.

Drawing on examples from companies like Costco and FedMart, Eric explains how c...

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 rejected by YC three times. Today, Scentbird is in their top 2% by revenue. Now she’s a GP at Red Bike Capital, investing in vertical AI, fintech, and digital health.

This conversation is about what changes when you’ve been the clie...

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 framework for genuine human connection.

The twist? The tech isn’t the point. The vulnerability is.

Andy Walsh sat down with Michelle Parsons, co-founder of Lora, to unpack one of the most uncomfortable truths in tech: we built tools for connection and end...

Most founders spend years building audiences on platforms they don’t control. Nathan Gwilliam watched a guy go from $96M a year to zero — because Amazon changed its mind. The lesson wasn’t about Amazon. It was about whose land you’re building on.

Andy Walsh sat down with Nathan Gwilliam — serial entrepreneur and founder of PodUp — to pull apart one of the most dangerous assumptions founders make: ...