CEOs and ABCs

In this episode, Linda Bethea shares her journey of balancing a successful executive career with motherhood, emphasizing the importance of authenticity, vulnerability, and intentionality in leadership and parenting. She discusses her experiences with work-life integration, supporting working parents, and fostering strong relationships with her daughter.

From Frito-Lay to PepsiCo to Diageo to CMO of Danone, Linda built one of the most decorated careers in food and beverage marketing while navigating divorce, single motherhood, and the quiet pressure to keep her personal life out of the office. She refused. She became the role model she never had, openly leaving early for school pickups, bringing her daughter to the office when childcare fell through, and taking a three-month sabbatical at the height of her divorce because her daughter needed her more than the business did.

She also went through fertility treatments to have that daughter. Then spent 133 days on the road the year she turned one.

The reckoning was inevitable. And when it came, it changed how Linda led, how she built teams, and how she thought about what success was actually for. Now she and her daughter Finley co-host a podcast together, speak on stages together, and just got back from Cannes.

This is a conversation about work-life integration, asking for help before you desperately need it, and what it looks like when vulnerability stops being a risk and starts being the point.

In This Episode, You'll Learn:

Top Takeaways:

About Linda Bethea:
Linda Bethea is a former CMO of Danone and has held senior marketing roles at Diageo, PepsiCo, and Frito-Lay. Named a Forbes Top 50 Entrepreneurial CMO in 2025, she sits on the board of the Make-A-Wish Foundation and co-hosts the Brand New Perspectives podcast alongside her daughter Finley.

If this episode made you rethink leadership, career growth, work-life balance, or working parenthood, subscribe to the CEOs & ABCs Podcast for more conversations with CEOs, founders, and global executives.

Share this episode with a colleague navigating work-life balance, and comment below with the biggest lesson you took from Linda Bethea.

Follow Linda Bethea:
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/linda-bethea/ 
Brand New Perspective Podcast: https://www.youtube.com/@brandnewperspective3

Follow our host Kevin Rice on:

LinkedIn: LinkedIn/KevinMRice
Website: ceosandabcs.com
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In this episode of CEOs & ABCs, Kevin sits down with Isabelle Brenton, former Chief Communications Officer at IPG Mediabrands and recipient of the 2026 Working Mother of the Year award from She Runs It, to explore what it actually costs to hide a part of yourself at work and what becomes possible when you finally stop.

Isabelle spent the early years of her career in fast-paced agency and media environments, motivated by external validation and driven to prove herself at every level. When she became a mother, she did not slow down. She had two children 20 months apart, returned from both maternity leaves as quickly as she could, traveled to Asia when her son was five months old, and spent years removing her wedding ring before job interviews and moving family photos out of her background on calls so no one could tell she had children. She was not hiding her family because anyone told her to. She was hiding them because of a story she was telling herself about what ambition was supposed to look like.

The shift came slowly, then all at once. A culture change at Meta where colleagues openly led meetings by talking about their kids. Then COVID, which put her children literally in the background of every Zoom call and made concealment impossible. Then a layoff, right after receiving one of the most meaningful professional honors of her career, which forced a different kind of reckoning entirely.

Kevin and Isabelle trace the full arc: from people-pleaser to senior executive, from compartmentalized mother to someone who told her kids she was laid off the same night it happened, cried through the conversation, and made it a lesson in resilience. This is a conversation about identity, the hidden cost of not bringing your whole self to work, and what it means to model the things you most want your children to learn.

In This Episode, You'll Learn:

Top Takeaways:

About Isabelle Brenton:

Isabelle Brenton is a communications executive with nearly two decades of experience leading corporate communications, brand strategy, and marketing across major holding companies, global platforms, and agency networks. She served most recently as Chief Communications Officer at IPG Mediabrands, where she led B2B communications through one of the most consequential periods in the company's history. Before that she held senior communications roles at Essence and spent two years at Meta as Industry Marketing Lead. She was recognised as Working Mother of the Year in 2026 by She Runs It. She lives in the suburbs of New York with her husband and their two children

Share this episode with a colleague navigating work-life balance, and comment below with the biggest lesson you took from Isabelle Brenton.

Follow Isabelle Brenton:

LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/isabelle-brenton/

Follow our host Kevin Rice on:

LinkedIn: LinkedIn/KevinMRice

Website: ceosandabcs.com

Instagram: Instagram/ceosandabcs

Follow the CEOs & ABCs Podcast and stay updated:

Subscribe to the CEOs & ABCs Podcast:

Newsletter: CEOs and ABCs Newsletter

LinkedIn: LinkedIn/ceosandabcs

Website: ceosandabcs.com

YouTube: Youtube/ceosandabcs

Spotify: Spotify/ceosandabcs

Apple Podcasts: Apple/ceosandabcs

In this episode of CEOs & ABCs, Kevin sits down with Anthony Valletta, CEO of BarTaco, to explore what two decades in hospitality taught him about making people feel like a priority, and how long it took him to bring that same thinking home.

Anthony has built his career across Michelin-starred dining rooms, fast casuals, and everything in between. Today he leads BarTaco with a single filter: does this decision make the guest feel like we're thinking about them first? It is a deceptively simple question that runs through every menu decision, every hire, and every conversation in the business.

But getting here cost something. Anthony spent two years as a COO living in hotels 240 nights a year, missing his son's first steps, and coming home to a five-year-old who had learned not to get too excited when dad walked through the door. He describes standing in his own driveway on the verge of tears before driving back to the airport, knowing something had to give.

Kevin and Anthony trace what it actually took to rebuild that connection, one blocked calendar entry, one bedtime affirmation, one bouquet of flowers at a gymnastics meet at a time. They get honest about the Disneyland Dad trap, the impossibility of disciplining kids you barely see, and why presence is not about volume of time. It is about not being in two places at once when you are in one of them.

This is a conversation about career ambition, the cost of getting it wrong, and the small rituals that quietly add up to a life.

In This Episode, You'll Learn:

Top Takeaways:

About Anthony Valletta:
Anthony Valletta is CEO of BarTaco, a fast-casual hospitality brand known for its guest-obsessed culture. He has spent two decades in the industry spanning Michelin-starred dining to fast casuals, building a career around the belief that a guest-first business is the only sustainable kind. He lives in Connecticut with his wife and three kids, coaches all three of them across multiple sports, and is still working on leaving the calendar blank long enough to think.

If this episode made you rethink leadership, career growth, work-life balance, or working parenthood, subscribe to the CEOs & ABCs Podcast for more conversations with CEOs, founders, and global executives.

Share this episode with a colleague navigating work-life balance, and comment below with the biggest lesson you took from Anthony Valletta.

Follow Anthony Valletta:

Follow our host Kevin Rice on:

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In this episode of CEOs & ABCs, Kevin sits down with Desiree Motamedi, Chief Marketing Officer of Salesforce's NextGen platform, to explore what happens when AI stops being a work tool and starts becoming a way of life, at the office and at home.

Desiree has built her career across Adobe, Google, Meta, and Shopify before landing at Salesforce, where she now oversees a 12 billion dollar portfolio and is building the infrastructure to scale AI agents safely across her entire organisation. She walks Kevin through what AI maturity actually looks like beyond a chat interface: governance, hosting, access controls, and the discipline required to keep experimentation from becoming chaos.

But the real heart of this conversation is what happens when that same curiosity comes home. Desiree built her own personal operating system, uploading her bloodwork, her finances, and her calendar into an AI agent that nudges her to drink water and caught a missing beneficiary on her retirement accounts. Her 12-year-old son built a paper trading agent with a college mentor and turned 100,000 dollars into 168,000. Together they are building an AI-generated YouTube channel about cereal box characters.

Kevin and Desiree also get honest about the harder parts: the early-career fear of stepping away during maternity leave, the boundaries she had to learn the hard way, and the one thing she insists AI will never replace, the simple act of looking another person in the eye.

This is a conversation about curiosity, governance, and what it means to raise kids who are fluent in AI and still deeply human.

In This Episode, You'll Learn:

Top Takeaways:

About Desiree Motamedi:
Desiree Motamedi is Chief Marketing Officer of Salesforce's NextGen platform, where she leads a 12 billion dollar portfolio and is building the company's infrastructure for scaling AI agents across the organisation. Before Salesforce, she held senior marketing leadership roles at Adobe, Google, Meta, and Shopify. She lives in the Bay Area with her husband and two sons.

Follow Desiree Motamedi: 

Follow our host Kevin Rice on:

Follow the CEOs & ABCs Podcast and stay updated:

If this episode made you rethink leadership, career growth, work-life balance, or working parenthood, subscribe to the CEOs & ABCs Podcast for more conversations with CEOs, founders, and global executives.

Share this episode with a colleague navigating work-life balance and comment below with the biggest lesson you took from Desiree Motamedi.

In this episode of CEOs & ABCs, Kevin sits down with Jennifer Kattula, Global CMO of Microsoft Advertising, to explore what happens when a systems thinker applies the same rigour she uses to lead AI transformation at scale to the way she designs her family life at home.

Jennifer's path to one of the most senior marketing roles in tech started in chemical engineering, wound through the early days of Meta, and landed at Microsoft, where she is now leading one of the most ambitious AI adoption programmes in enterprise marketing. But the more interesting story is what happened when she became a mother. She did not plateau. She accelerated. And she has a clear theory about why.

Kevin and Jennifer dig into how she is building AI agents that save her team hundreds of hours a week, why she never starts her morning in email, and what it actually means to spend your time only on the things only you can do. Then the conversation turns to something equally ambitious: the family brand. Jennifer and her husband wrote a one-pager before they even got married, run a yearly family visioning session with wine and spreadsheets, and have built five house rules their kids can actually recite. She has since turned that entire framework into an application called House Rules, designed to help any family build their own manifesto with intention.

This is a conversation about AI, ambition, design thinking, and what it looks like to treat your family with the same strategic seriousness you bring to work.

In This Episode, You'll Learn:

- Why the only thing that prepares you for AI disruption is getting your hands dirty with the tools now
- How Jennifer is leading AI transformation at Microsoft Advertising and what enterprise adoption actually requires beyond usage numbers
- What it means to spend your time only on what only you can uniquely do, at work and at home
- Why becoming a mother made Jennifer more focused, not less, and how ambition and parenthood can compound
- How she and her husband built a shared family vision before they got married and why they still revisit it every year
- What a family brand actually is and how to build one using the same frameworks that make companies great
- How the House Rules app works and why the people who have used it say they feel seen
- Why structure and frameworks create more freedom, not less, especially at home
- How Jennifer thinks about AI and kids: what she is protecting, what she is introducing, and what she does not have figured out yet
- What robots cannot replace and why leaning into your weirdness is a genuine competitive advantage

Key Takeaways:

- Spend your time on what only you can uniquely do. Everything else is a delegation or outsourcing decision.
- AI adoption does not equal AI effectiveness. Role-specific solutions and clean data underneath are what make it actually work.
- Becoming a parent forced a focus that ambition alone never did. Constraints, used well, are a creative advantage.
- Families need a brand: a mission, values, operating principles, and a shared sense of how you show up in the world.
- Structure is not the enemy of presence. It is what makes presence possible.
- You cannot lead a transformation you are not personally inside of. Model the behaviour, do not just mandate it.
- The best question in any interview right now: what are you building?

About Jennifer Kattula:
Jennifer Kattula is Global CMO of Microsoft Advertising, where she leads brand, demand generation, and AI transformation across one of the world's largest advertising platforms. Before Microsoft, she spent nearly 12 years at Meta, building and scaling marketing functions from the ground up across a range of disciplines. A trained chemical engineer turned marketer, Jennifer brings systems thinking to everything she touches, including her family life. She is the creator of House Rules, an AI-powered app that helps families build their own mission, values, and manifesto. She lives in Atlanta with her husband and two young children.

Connect with Jennifer Kattula:

In this episode of CEOs & ABCs, Kevin sits down with Becca Chambers, Chief Marketing Officer of Scale Venture Partners and one of LinkedIn's most followed voices on authentic leadership, to explore what happens when you stop trying to fit a mold that was never made for you.

Becca opens with a story most high-performers will recognise but rarely say out loud: she started her career with a failed startup, a falling out with her co-founder, and a chip on her shoulder that quietly became her fuel. From there she built some of the highest-retention teams in the industry, not through metrics and mandates, but through psychological safety, a no-assholes rule, and the willingness to absorb the hard stuff so her team never had to.

What makes this conversation different is where that instinct came from. Becca went to a progressive Bay Area elementary school that invented the concept of EQ and taught emotional intelligence from kindergarten on. That foundation shaped everything: how she leads, how she parents a neurodivergent son who is now one of the most self-aware kids you will ever meet, and how she thinks about building environments where people can actually show up as themselves.

Kevin and Becca also get honest about the season she is in right now: too much on her plate, not enough in the tank, and still finding the pockets of presence that will actually matter. No tidy resolution. Just real.
This is a conversation about authenticity, emotional intelligence, and the quiet power of building a world where round pegs do not have to apologise for being round.

In This Episode, You'll Learn:

Top Takeaways:

About Becca Chambers:

Becca Chambers is Chief Marketing Officer of Scale Venture Partners and a LinkedIn Top Voice known for candid, high-engagement content on authentic leadership, psychological safety, and showing up as your whole self at work. She has built and led some of the highest-retention marketing and communications teams in the industry across cybersecurity, enterprise tech, and venture. She lives in the Bay Area with her husband and two kids, and is a vocal advocate for neurodivergent employees and children.

In this episode of CEOs & ABCs, Kevin sits down with Shachar Orren, co-founder and Chief Revenue Officer of EX.CO, to explore what it really costs to build something from nothing and what becomes available when family arrives after you have already built yourself.

Shachar spent over a decade growing EX.CO from six people to a 115-person global company, helping publishers and media companies survive and grow in an industry being reshaped by AI. That journey required years of pivots, a full rebrand, and the kind of relentless focus that leaves little room for much else. She describes EX.CO as her first child and means it.

But the story behind the story is harder to tell. A marriage, a divorce, a move back to Tel Aviv, a new relationship, becoming a bonus mother to a seven-year-old, and then having her son Max at 40 while navigating a company at full tilt and a war breaking out in Israel the day after she flew home from receiving a Working Mother of the Year award.
Kevin and Shachar trace the real cost of ambition, why the hustle years actually gave her something, what maternity leave forced her to confront about her leadership, and what it means to build a life on your own timeline when the world has a different plan in mind.

This is a conversation about reinvention, timing, and the unexpected gift of doing things out of order.

In This Episode, You'll Learn:

Top Takeaways:

About Shachar Orren:

Shachar Orren is co-founder and Chief Revenue Officer of EX.CO, a video and revenue platform helping publishers and connected TV companies grow in an AI-driven media landscape. She joined the company as employee number six and helped lead the pivot and rebrand that defined its current identity. Before a decade in tech, she was a senior journalist at two of Israel's largest newspapers. She was recently recognized as Working Mother of the Year by She Runs It and splits her time between New York and Tel Aviv.

In this episode of CEOs & ABCs, Kevin sits down with Matt Eisenacher, Chief Brand Officer at First Watch, to explore what it actually takes to become a leader of leaders and why the hardest part isn't learning new skills, it's letting go of old ones.

Matt opens with a story most high-performers will recognise: the moment you realise your presence in the room is the problem. From removing himself from creative meetings to learning when not to give the answer, Matt shares how the leap from operator to executive demands a fundamentally different relationship with control, credit, and trust. He explains why the strongest vision is the one that makes your team feel empowered enough to fail and why stepping back is sometimes the most powerful leadership move you can make.

But this conversation goes deeper than the boardroom. Matt and Kevin trace the same instinct across parenting three kids at wildly different stages, a cross-country move that upended a near-perfect life in Ohio, and a spouse who, more than once, saw what he couldn't. Whether it's reading a 17-year-old's need for space or a direct report's need for acknowledgement, Matt's core insight is the same: the people around you need different things, and your job is to figure out what that is before you try to lead them.

This is a conversation about presence, permission, and the quiet discipline of knowing when to speak and when to listen.

In This Episode, You'll Learn:

- Why removing yourself from creative decisions is one of the most powerful leadership moves you can make
- How to build psychological safety without losing accountability
- The difference between setting a vision and steering the outcome
- What the Florida move taught one family about adversity, resilience, and what comfort really costs
- How youth sports becomes one of the best leadership classrooms available
- Why the same DISC framework that shapes your team management applies directly to parenting
- What modelling behaviour actually looks like and why your team is watching more closely than you think
- How to read what your kids need versus what they're asking for
- Why the 9 o'clock conversation is the one that matters most
- What it means to let someone fail, at work and at home, and when to step in anyway

Top Takeaways:

- When you become a leader of leaders, your job is enabling, not doing. Most people know that. Few make the change.
- If you constantly step in, the problem is usually your vision, not your team's capability.
- Hide your own failures and your team has no permission to have theirs.
- Your team won't follow your words. They will follow your choices.
- Observe before you act. The parent and manager who does this will always outperform the one who leads with solutions.
- Adversity is a gift you can give your kids. Comfort has a cost that doesn't always show up until later.
- At home, efficiency is a liability. The conversation your child needs to have will not happen on your schedule.
- Hard limits and guardrails are not the same thing. Knowing which one a moment calls for is most of the job.

About Matt Eisenacher:
Matt Eisenacher is Chief Brand Officer at First Watch, the daytime dining brand he has helped grow from 200 to over 500 locations, including through a successful IPO. Before First Watch, Matt held senior marketing and brand roles across the restaurant and food industry, building high-performing creative teams grounded in trust, clarity, and culture. Known for his directness, his instinct for talent, and his commitment to family, Matt brings the same values to his team in Bradenton that he brings home to his wife Brooke and their three children.

In this episode of CEOs & ABCs, Kevin sits down with Eliot Hamlisch, Chief Commercial Officer at Amtrak, to explore what it really means to lead with humanity, at work and at home.

From transforming customer experience at some of the world’s biggest brands to raising two children while balancing a demanding executive career, Eliot shares the mindset shifts, rituals, and values that have shaped both his leadership and fatherhood.

Together they unpack why success without happiness isn’t success at all, how to compartmentalize work to become more present with family, and why some of the best leaders are simply great listeners.

Eliot also reflects on career-defining moments that pushed him far beyond his comfort zone, including being unexpectedly asked to lead teams and functions he’d never managed before.

This conversation is a masterclass in leadership, optimism, parenting, resilience, and building a life you actually enjoy living.

In this episode:

Key Takeaways:

About Eliot Hamlisch:
Eliot Hamlisch is the Chief Commercial Officer at Amtrak, where he is leading a customer experience transformation rooted in hospitality and human connection. Throughout his career, including leadership roles at American Express, Wyndham, AMC Theatres, and Deloitte, he has built a reputation for understanding consumer psychology, driving growth, and leading through change.

What if the future of leadership isn’t about control, authority, or climbing higher… but about creating environments where people genuinely feel seen, trusted, and valued?

In this episode of CEOs & ABCs, Kevin sits down with Rachel Wallis Andreasson, former CEO of a multi-billion-dollar family business, leadership expert, and author of The Sixth Level. Rachel shares her extraordinary journey from working outside her family company at PepsiCo, to eventually leading Wallis Companies, a business founded by her father that grew from one gas station on Route 66 into a billion-dollar enterprise.

Rachel opens up about the realities of succession in family business, navigating grief after losing key leaders, stepping into the CEO role, and ultimately making the difficult decision to step away for the greater good of the company’s future.

Together, Kevin and Rachel explore why traditional command-and-control leadership is failing, how trust and transparency create resilient organizations, and why the same principles that build thriving workplaces also create stronger families and deeper parent-child relationships.

This conversation is filled with wisdom on leadership, parenting, legacy, emotional capacity, and the simple human skills we often forget matter most.

If you lead a business, a team, or a family, this episode will challenge how you think about success.

In This Episode:

Key Takeaways:

About Rachel Wallis Andreasson:

Rachel Wallis Andreasson spent over two decades in leadership roles at Wallis Companies, a family-owned fuel and convenience business founded by her father. After rising through multiple roles across the organization, she became CEO in 2017. Today, Rachel is an author, speaker, and advocate for a new leadership paradigm focused on trust, care, mutuality, and human potential through her framework, The Sixth Level.