Startups Decoded

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: ...

Everyone told Milly her résumé didn’t make sense. She turned that confusion into a global community of 800+ people who felt exactly the same. Turns out, being hard to define is your biggest competitive advantage.

Andy Walsh sat down with Milly, founder of Generalist World — a community of 800+ operators, founders, and career-builders who’ve stopped apologising for doing too many things well.

This one’s for any...

Most founders think branding is about what they look like. Jill Smith says it’s about how you behave, and most brands have no idea who they actually are. 

Fix that first. Everything else follows!

Andy Walsh sat down with Jill Smith, CEO of Iris, one of the US’s most respected integrated brand and demand agencies, to unpack what actually makes a brand stick.

This isn’t a conversation about logos or color palettes...

Most founders try to build a company.

Sophie de Haën built one by accident.

And she did it while she was still in college.

Andy Walsh sat down with Sophie de Haën, founder of SDH Paints, to unpack one of the most unconventional founder journeys we’ve seen on Startups Decoded.

Sophie didn’t start with a startup idea, a pitch deck, or a plan to raise money. She started painting during COVID and sharing her work online. What b...

Alicia Teltz didn’t reinvent her life overnight. She made one decision.

That step led to losing 84 pounds, leaving a 10-year relationship, walking away from a high-paying corporate career, and starting over. In this episode we unpack what really blocks people from change. Confidence rarely shows up first. Momentum follows action.

Alicia shares the reality behind rebuilding your life, the mindset shift that comes with taking con...

AI has already changed how we create, search, and automate. The next step is prediction.

In this episode, Vanja Josifovski joins Andy Walsh to explore how enterprises can use their own private data to forecast future outcomes, automate decisions, and move from analysis to action. As CEO and Co-Founder of Kumo, Vanja is building predictive intelligence systems that sit on top of enterprise data and help companies improve revenue, red...

Power in startups is rarely where founders think it is.

Itamar Novick, Founder and GP at Recursive Ventures, has worked both sides of the table as a founder, operator, angel, and VC. He’s backed 150+ early-stage companies and helped founders raise over $500M, while also building companies like Life360 and Gigya from the inside.

In this conversation, we unpack the real power dynamics between founders and investors. We get into w...

The fundraising hangover is real.

Capital returned in 2025, but investors are now far more selective. Traction, revenue clarity, and capital efficiency matter more than vision decks.

In this episode, Roei Samuel joins Andy Walsh to share how he raised $23M+ without giving up board seats, and why that decision shaped Connectd’s growth and governance. We unpack how founders retain leverage in a tighter market, where progress must...