Today, we have a special guest on the podcast, Kate Lowry, CEO coach, author and comedian. She is a long time startup founder, spent time in VC, is leading a values driven coaching and advising firm called Scaleheart, and recently, just published a book. The title of the book is Unbreakable: How to Thrive Under Fear-Based Leaders, and is a tactical guide to help smart, caring people get unstuck to they thrive under fear based leadership.

In our conversation today, Kate is going to enlighten us on what fear based leadership is, how to use the predictability of fear based leaders to your advantage, and why its having (another) moment in the tech ecosystem today.

Questions:

• Tell me about your startup journey as a serial founder.
• You've been around the block in the tech industry. From your vantage point in startups, big tech, and VC, why is this new leadership style hitting now?
• How does this type of culture show up in startups, versus larger companies like Meta?
• How does it manifest in investing?
• Why is fear-based leadership antithetical to innovation?
• If it's so bad for innovation, why do people keep choosing it anyway?
• What makes leaders like this so predictable?
• How can people use that predictability to their advantage?
• How has the type of issues you work on with your CEOs changed as this leadership style comes into vogue?
• What are the most common ways that you help founders in your coaching practice?
• What are three ways CEOs can make sure fear-based leadership doesn't take root in their corner of the tech ecosystem?
• How has the AI boom affected all of this?

Links

• https://www.katelowry.com/
• https://www.scaleheart.co/
• https://www.linkedin.com/in/katherinejlowry/
• https://a.co/d/bwmLGAS

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Marlena Sarunac is a first generation American, her family being from Croatia. She started her career at Mastercard, left to travel around Europe (before it was cool to do so), and then came back to join her first startup. During her travels, she figured out that she was truly an American, as she prefers the entrepreneurial pace of life. Her path has been in marketing, but she also has an engineering degree, which gives her a unique edge. Outside of tech, she is married to a chef, with a 2 year old daughter and a rescue dog. They live in Rhode Island, in the Bristol area.

Marlena and her now co-founder met at a prior company, and worked well together promoting that brand. The built a playbook, and always dreamed of starting their own thing to push those playbooks. The stars aligned later in life, and they decided to give it a go.

This is the creation story of The Company Advice.

Sponsors

• Equitybee
• Alcor

Links

• https://www.thecompanyadvice.com/
• https://www.linkedin.com/in/marlenasarunac/

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Today, we are another episode in our series, sponsored by our good friends at Railsware. Railsware is a leading product studio with two main focuses - services and products. They have created amazing products like Mailtrap, Coupler and TitanApps, while also partnering with teams like Calendly and Bright Bytes. They deliver amazing products, and have happy customers to prove it.

In this series, we are digging into the company's methods around product engineering and development. In particular, we will cover relevant topics to not only highlight their expertise, but to educate you on industry trends alongside their experience.

In today's episode, we are chatting with Julia Starun, Product Director at Railsware with over 17 years of experience in product management, business process automation and optimization. Julia will share her insights into where an MBA helps you manage a product team - and where it doesn't.

Questions:

• What was your story before MBA, and what motivated your decision to pursue it?
• What real-world gaps between MBA theory and product management practices did you discover at Railsware?
• Does MBA training help with the "people management" side of leading product teams?
• How can the tools and frameworks you learned during your MBA help with uncertainty – or overcomplicate things – when creating products?
• How does understanding "business stuff" – like P&L, unit economics, financial modeling, etc. – change how you approach product decisions?
• Does MBA business strategy training help product managers think beyond features to market positioning?
• For someone already managing product teams, when does pursuing an MBA make sense versus other learning paths?
• What's your biggest surprise about how MBA education did (or didn't) change the way you approach the realities of product team leadership?

Links

• https://railsware.com/
• https://www.linkedin.com/in/julia-starun/

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Marco Rodrigues was born and raised in Canada, but now lives in the Bay Area. His tech genesis was around the time when the internet came out, when he spent an entire summer indoors, worrying his mother. He eventually attended university in Toronto, and went to work for Juniper Networks. Past that, he went towards the startup world - running product teams, and taking part in the ownership and selling of solutions and service offerings. Outside of tech, he is married with twin girls in the Naval Cadet Core. He is a big hockey nut, rooting for the Edmonton Oilers, and enjoys taking his kids to hockey rinks all over the world.

Marco spent many years watching his teams drown in data and tooling. The situations were more complex, but the outcomes weren't getting better. He started to consider the advent of AI, and asked the question - how do we solve these sorts of problems with an agentic SOC platform?

This is the creation story of Exaforce.

Sponsors

• Incogni
• NordProtect
• Vention
• CodeCrafters helps you become a better engineer by building real-world, production-grade projects. Learn hands-on by creating your own Git, Redis, HTTP server, SQLite, or DNS server from scratch. Sign up for free today using this link and enjoy 40% off.
• Full Scale
• Paddle.com
• Sema Software
• PropelAuth
• Postman
• Meilisearch

Links

• https://www.exaforce.com/
• https://www.linkedin.com/in/marcorodrigues1/

Our Sponsors:
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Today, we have a special episode correlated with Fraud awareness week, and brought to you by our friends at SEON - the command center for fraud prevention and AML compliance. SEON connects first party data signals to show you what other solutions can't - by enriching data, understanding context, and taking action from one place... to prevent fraud.

In this episode, we are talking with Husnain "HB" Bajwa, SVP of Product & Risk Solutions. He has been a fraud and risk leader for 30+ years, and leads innovation in fraud prevention and compliance at SEON. HB is going to touch on important topics in the fraud detection and prevention space, such as AI, regulatory pressures, and the perspectives of startups that can get them into trouble.

Questions:

• You’ve spent a lot of time in the world of fraud and compliance. What first drew you to solving these kinds of problems?
• Startups often focus on growth first and worry about fraud later. What’s the hidden risk in that mindset?
• Why do you believe fraud prevention and AML compliance are converging, and what are the benefits of them living in the same system?
• AI gets talked about a lot, but in your view, what are the real, practical ways it’s improving fraud and AML work today?
• We’re seeing more regulatory pressure globally. How can organizations prepare for 2026 to ensure they are taking a risk-based approach to compliance?
• I know your team’s been working on some big innovations, including a new compliance suite built on top of your fraud prevention stack and new AI-driven tools. How are these helping investigators connect the dots faster and uncover hidden relationships, especially when it comes to complex cases?
• What advice would you give to early-stage startups that might think they’re ‘too small’ to be targeted by fraudsters?

Links

• https://seon.io/
• https://seon.io/editions/flexible-analysis/
• https://www.linkedin.com/in/hbajwa/

Our Sponsors:
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Praveen Ghanta recently turned 47 and started to look at the things he wanted to do - but potentially couldn't do in the future. He's married with 3 teenage kids, and has been into running for quite some time. So much so, that he attempted to run a 5 minute mile... and almost made it. Also, he recently signed up for soccer classes, after having been beat by some eighth grade kids, who helped him realize he needed training in his ball handling skills.

In his prior startup, Praveen and his team stumbled upon a new approach to hiring that fueled the building of this startup, all the way through exit. After that success, he decided to make this approach available to others, and form a business around this very thing - fractional talent for your startup.

This is the creation story of Fraction and DevHawk.

Sponsors

• Vention
• CodeCrafters helps you become a better engineer by building real-world, production-grade projects. Learn hands-on by creating your own Git, Redis, HTTP server, SQLite, or DNS server from scratch. Sign up for free today using this link and enjoy 40% off.
• Full Scale
• Paddle.com
• Sema Software
• PropelAuth
• Postman
• Meilisearch

Links

• https://www.hirefraction.com/
• https://www.devhawk.ai/
• https://www.linkedin.com/in/pghanta/

Our Sponsors:
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Today, we are another episode in our series, sponsored by our good friends at Railsware. Railsware is a leading product studio with two main focuses - services and products. They have created amazing products like Mailtrap, Coupler and TitanApps, while also partnering with teams like Calendly and Bright Bytes. They deliver amazing products, and have happy customers to prove it.

In this series, we are digging into the company's methods around product engineering and development. In particular, we will cover relevant topics to not only highlight their expertise, but to educate you on industry trends alongside their experience.

In today's episode, we are speaking with Nika Tamayo Flores, Product Lead at Railsware, specifically for the Coupler product. She's been leading complex data-driven products for over eight years, and will enlighten us on conversational analytics, and how they can change a data focused product.

Questions:

• Before we jump to the topic, let’s define what exactly conversational analytics is. How does it differ from traditional dashboard-based data analysis?
• You’ve been integrating AI capacities into Coupler, Railsware’s product focused on data analytics. How would you describe data analytics in pre-AI and AI era?
• What were the key challenges to embedding conversational analytics into Coupler?
• And what’s the result? You’ve already released AI Insights – how do they transform user experience for data exploration?
• How do you ensure conversational analytics provides accurate and reliable insights?
• How does conversational analytics change who can be a "data user" in an organization?
• What's the learning curve like for organizations adopting conversational analytics?
• Where do you see conversational analytics heading - will it eventually replace traditional BI tools, or complement them?

Links

• https://railsware.com/
• https://www.linkedin.com/in/veronica-tamayo-flores/
• https://coupler.io

Our Sponsors:
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Chris Wallis lives in London, and grew up on a farm in the UK. He was the kid running around the countryside climbing trees - until his parents bought a computer when he was 15. Past that point, he didn't leave the house much, learning to code and digging into ethical hacking. Outside of tech, he is into tennis, swimming, alpine skiing and surfing. He finds himself in phases with these sports, and rotates them often.

In the past, Chris was an ethical hacker, and spent a long time busting into big name systems. Eventually, he moved into one of those companies - and he realized that the tooling out there to discover attack surface weaknesses were lagging. He decided to build a platform that got the job done.

This is the creation story of Intruder.

Sponsors

• Vention
• CodeCrafters helps you become a better engineer by building real-world, production-grade projects. Learn hands-on by creating your own Git, Redis, HTTP server, SQLite, or DNS server from scratch. Sign up for free today using this link and enjoy 40% off.
• Full Scale
• Paddle.com
• Sema Software
• PropelAuth
• Postman
• Meilisearch

Links

• https://www.intruder.io/
• https://www.linkedin.com/in/chris-wallis/

Our Sponsors:
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Erez Druk grew up in Israel, but has been in the Bay Area for many years. He has a common theme in his life of obsessing over his current thing. In the 4th grade it was the saxophone, and later on it was being Israel's board game champion, and then - he became obsessed with startups. Outside of tech, he is married and expecting his first child. He's into exercising, reading and coffee. His favorite is going to a coffee shop with his wife, and having a cappuccino and a pastry - but at home, he leans towards his aeropress.

Eight years ago, Erez met his wife who was heading into medical school. He got to see first hand how folks in the healthcare system work, and how hard their jobs are. After wrapping up his prior startup, he started down the path of building a solution that improved the lives of these clinicians.

This is the creation story of Freed.

Sponsors

• Vention
• CodeCrafters helps you become a better engineer by building real-world, production-grade projects. Learn hands-on by creating your own Git, Redis, HTTP server, SQLite, or DNS server from scratch. Sign up for free today using this link and enjoy 40% off.
• Full Scale
• Paddle.com
• Sema Software
• PropelAuth
• Postman
• Meilisearch

Links

• https://www.getfreed.ai/
• https://www.linkedin.com/in/drukerez/

Our Sponsors:
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Today, we are another episode in our series, sponsored by our good friends at Railsware. Railsware is a leading product studio with two main focuses - services and products. They have created amazing products like Mailtrap, Coupler and TitanApps, while also partnering with teams like Calendly and Bright Bytes. They deliver amazing products, and have happy customers to prove it.

In this series, we are digging into the company's methods around product engineering and development. In particular, we will cover relevant topics to not only highlight their expertise, but to educate you on industry trends alongside their experience.

In today's episode, we are talking again with Sergiy Korolov, Co-CEO of Railsware and Co-founder of Mailtrap. In my conversation with Sergiy, we dive into how Railsware delivers value - not just features - by following their BRIDGeS framework, enabling their team to focus on value delivery.

Questions:

• Railsware is proud of its product development approaches, so let’s pave the way to our topic through one of your prominent cases. In its early days, Calendly reached out to you to deliver their product – with a tight budget and a large set of requirements. You’ve said earlier that several of those initial expected features remained unfulfilled. This leads me to the question: to you, what's the difference between shipping features and delivering value, and why do so many product teams get this wrong?
• You’ve been working on several client products, as well as on Railsware’s own. How do you identify what "value" actually means for different stakeholders?
• Railsware is known for its BRIDGeS framework, a useful tool to bring the team on the same page and set the product process straight. Can you walk us through the BRIDGeS framework and how it helps teams focus on value delivery?
• What role does user research and validation play in the BRIDGeS approach?
• Can you share a specific example where applying BRIDGeS helped a team pivot from building the wrong features to delivering real value?
• What's the biggest challenge teams face when transitioning from feature delivery to value delivery?

Links

• https://railsware.com/
• https://www.linkedin.com/in/sergiykorolov/
• https://railsware.com/bridges-framework/
• https://mailtrap.io/

Our Sponsors:
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