The Start Listening Podcast

Andrew Hannon runs a whole-animal butchery, an Italian grocery, a pasta shop, a sandwich counter, a charcuterie program, and now a rotating wall of local artists' work — out of 675 square feet in the corner of Raleigh's Transfer Co. Food Hall, with no hood system, three induction burners, a toaster oven, and an electric pizza oven that turns out roughly 600 loaves of ciabatta a week. He opened five months before the world shu...

Elisha Baskin opened an English-language bookstore with a café inside it in Lourmarin, a Luberon village of roughly a thousand people where Albert Camus is buried and where a 1980s memoir turned the place into a destination for foreigners. She was clear from the start that it had to be that village. Four kilometers down the road in either direction would not have worked.

Two months in, the shop is running, and the reason is legible ...

Alicia Nagel asked if she could interview me on my own show. It took us the better part of a year to actually schedule it, and then she turned up with better questions than I ask my own guests.

Alicia is a brand-first marketing consultant who has worked with over 150 brands, and she spends her days on the part of this that I don't — uncovering what a brand actually is and then translating that into work that lands. We met in a...

This episode is a week late. I was sick, twelve hours into a different time zone, and I spent that week hating myself over a deadline nobody set but me.

Then I had two conversations with founders. One opened with "sorry about my voice, I'm fighting a cold" and waved off my offer to reschedule — we don't get days off, do we. The other couldn't take his wife's advice to enjoy an afternoon in the city between meetings. Both o...

In the right restaurant, every plate arrives with its provenance — the farm, the fisherman, the name of the cheese. Fashion tells you none of that. Most brands can't tell you where their own fabric comes from.

Co-Founder Natalia Mazzaia can name every hand hers passes through, because she called each one. Fibers spun from seaweed, soy, and milk. A supply chain traced backward one phone call at a time. A brand built slow, o...

In this conversation, Cat explores the systemic hierarchical structures that have shaped our economy and society over thousands of years. The discussion delves into the concentration of wealth, the myths surrounding funding and business structures, and the evolving landscape of marketing in the modern economy. Cat emphasizes the importance of founders making deliberate choices to preserve their values and independence in a world in...

Most companies treat accessibility like a compliance checkbox. A ramp here, an updated HR policy there. Disability Lead has spent years watching what happens when companies think they're done — and what they're missing is almost always the same thing: they never thought about who gets to lead.

Emily Blum and Clare Killy are the CEO and Director of Programs at Disability Lead, a Chicago-based nonprofit that develops and connect...

This is Part Two of How the Hell Did We Get Here? And Can We Do Anything About It?

Most people who defend systems that are hurting them aren't stupid. They aren't weak. They aren't uniquely susceptible to propaganda. They're human — and the human brain was wired, across hundreds of thousands of years of evolution, to accept existing power structures because challenging them was genuinely dangerous. It still is.

This epi...

Everybody has a version of the path they were supposed to take. The degree, the company, the title, the ladder. Most people follow it long enough to realize it was never actually theirs — and then stay anyway.

This episode is Cat's account of what happens when you stop. Not the inspirational version of that story — the actual one. Three months of swinging between hyper-focus and couch rot. A network that needed rebui...

The room was full. Christine was nodding. And somewhere in the middle of a presentation about tax shelters for kids and leaving legacy for family, she realized she hadn't actually agreed with a single thing.

That moment is the founding story of Lady No Kids — and the business case hiding inside it. Women living without children represent a market that could reach 40% of North American women by 2030. There is almost no infr...

The metrics being sold to you as success indicators were designed to be easy to show, easy to screenshot, and easy to feel good about. Feeling good and being healthy are not the same thing.

More damaging than flattery metrics are the blame metrics. 10x the ROI per employee in the next 90 days — there's 30 to 70% untapped capacity sitting inside your current team right now." This is what's flooding founder feeds. Metrics th...

"You Can't Fake What We're Doing Here."

The restaurant industry runs on fear. Fear of a bad month, fear of turnover, fear of what happens if you pay people what they're actually worth. Most operators make every decision from that place – they think they're maintaining the product but they're quietly hollowing it out. The customer feels it before the owner does.

Jennie and Andrew built The Judith on the opposite premise ...

Most businesses never sell. The ones that do are almost always undervalued — not because the business wasn't good enough, but because the owner never built it to be bought.

Brett Banchek started Fenwick Partners after trying to buy a business and realizing the same thing every serious buyer eventually realizes: the gap between what a business is worth and what it sells for isn't a negotiation problem. It's a structural pro...

If you think Corporate Buraucracy is bad you're not going to want to hear this -there is a five thousand year old system running you and your business right now.

You started your company to be free. Free from someone else's agenda, someone else's timeline, someone else's definition of what your work is worth. That part's true.

What's also true: the structure you stepped into is five thousand years old. And it has never needed your pe...