Failure - the Podcast

Who knew?

Join Innovation Blab/Failure - the Podcast in a double-header.  A two-fer.  “Episode 80 - Broken Down Cars” and “Episode 81 - The Singularity is Nigh.”  Our special guests are … well … special.

Sydney Robinson is CEO and co-founder of Vessl Prosthetics, an Ontario-based startup that is hellbent on improving the lives of below-knee amputees and on proving that not all orthopedic startups end up like broken down cars along the road to success.  We think they’ve got a shot at both.  If Sydney can survive 45 minutes of our drivel, she should have no problem navigating the tough medical industry market.

Who knew that podcasts could be so much better than a presidential debate between octogenarians?

Catch them on a good day, and we suspect that many an entrepreneur would say that bootstrapping a business is like a bowl of cherries, pits and all.  Leaving aside the independently wealthy, that more traditional approach may destine the enterprise to slower, bounded growth.  A lifestyle business.  One that’s likely to yield more pits than flesh early on, but that with the right mix of hard work, pivots and luck can be fruitful in the long run.

Nasty, brutish and short might be what you hear of startup life from founders who took outside investment.  Not all of them.  Not all of the time.  But, we bet they skew more that way on the spectrum than do the lifestyle-istas.  What would you expect?  Take on an angel investor and there’s one more mouth to feed.  Take on venture capital and it can be a vicious, gaping one.

Join the Innovation Blab in a conversation with Thomas Collet, a serial entrepreneur who’s on his seventh startup.  Would Thomas describe his experiences as bowls of cherries or nasty, brutish and short?  Listen to today’s episode and you may find out.

Ask an entrepreneur: “what keeps you up at night?”  They’ve heard The Question before and have an answer at the ready.  But they’ll make you wait through a feigned moment of reflection before they launch into it.

Investors play the game, too.  Get a group of them together and, invariably, one of them will pose The Question whenever an entrepreneur does a pitch.  All present will nod knowingly as the collective’s secret weapon is unleashed.  The entrepreneur’s perfectly timed pause, then, answer (the latter, offered with the gravity of a Churchill wartime address) only add to the excitement.  Theatrics and reality merge, and all present will walk away convinced of the truth of the seemingly revelatory moment.

Join the Innovation Blab in a discussion with Jamie Magrill and Anna Frumkin of DECAP Research and Development, Inc., a Canadian startup that aims to change the way hospital and healthcare workers dispose of syringes.  Don’t worry, we don’t pose The Question to Jamie and Anna.  We do get close, however, and some may find the discussion that ensues amusing.  Have a listen …

Election fever.  With all the news, who can avoid it?  Not a news ticker scrolls by without a mention of Biden's age, Trump's trials and RFK's betrayals.   We're not immune to it.  So when a scheduled guest went AWOL, we figured we'd talk about the first thing that came to mind.  Suffice it to say that MAGA conservatives aren't the only ones who hang out in echo chambers.

Join us in a discussion with Diane Bouis, director of MedTech Innovator, the world’s largest life science startup accelerator program.

Not that we have a vested interest, but we’d suggest that Joe Biden make a go at it with a blue baseball cap sporting the acronym MIGA.  You know, “make innovation great again!”  Speaking of innovation, today’s guest is John Daniels, a tinkerer turned entrepreneur who is daring fate by joining the Innovation Blab in a discussion of his latest venture.  It’s developing a rapid diagnostic kit to test for Covid and whatever else ails mankind. With a bit of luck, he’ll launch the product before Kari Lake returns to Arizona politics following a two-year break.

Welcome to Innovation Blab, a new series of podcasts (…keep fingers crossed…) offering the B-side to Failure - the Podcast. Yes, Mark will be back, and we hope to put up both Innovation and Failure posts in the coming days (months, more likely), but as they say about the alleged clandestine romantic relationship surrounding appointment of the special prosecutor in the Georgia election interference cases, we shall see.

Can’t say that much has been made of the B-side of late.  Baby boomers are probably the last to have given it much thought, but in its heyday, the B-side was pretty much the tomalley of 45 RPM, 7-inch vinyl records.  (Don’t know tomalley?  Ask a lobster.)  Aficionados looked forward to it.  Everybody else, not so much.

The B-side could grow on you, though.  Take Elvis’s “Hound Dog,” the Beatles’ “I Am the Walrus,” the Rolling Stones’ “You Can’t Always Get What You Want.”  The list goes on.  So does the beat.

To the armchair intellectual, the A-side and the B-side are like yin and yang.  There’s no need to drag Eastern philosophy into an LA marketing gimmick, though.  Two sides of the same coin is more like it.  The only philosophy here is KISS:  keep it simple stupid.

Speaking of innovation and failure (were we?), maybe they’re like yin and yang.  We asked ChatGPT, and we got a qualified “sort of.”  It felt a little like the prize every kid gets at soccer, win or lose.  Yes, the AI said, innovation and failure can be complementary forces, but no, they are not interconnected and interdependent opposites.  Just to check that, we asked the electric savant the same of Donald Trump and the news media.  We pretty much got the same answer.  Consistency doesn’t prove correctness, but it’s a start.

So what does any of that have to do with today’s podcast?  Have a listen and judge for yourself.  Our guest is Stefan Koehler, director of therapeutics licensing at the University of Michigan.  We didn’t ask him about yin and yang, nor about failure — though, he did give some insights into licensing that would make Jim Harbaugh proud.  (Sorry, Stefan, wrong department, but you catch our drift).

It's not often the team from Failure - the Podcast gets serious.

Sure, there was the time Mark stole an air mask from Jet Blue and hooked it to a canister of helium. He was impersonating Marjorie Taylor Green for our "Fly Me to the Moon" episode, but forgot to put oxygen in the mix. Thankfully, the EMTs had a spare pig's brain on board for the transplant.

And, how about when Mic hired Rudy Giuliani to defend "the team" in Joe Rogan's trademark infringement suit.

It's times like these you realize that some things are serious. Mark turning blue while impersonating Greene. Serious. Handing over your defense to Rudy. Serious (mistake). Just ask Donald.

Speaking of Donald, the porcine frontal cortex (Mark's, not Donald's) drifts to yellow raining down on the sheets in Moscow. And, from there, to yellow and blue flags flapping in a nuclear breeze. Now, we are at serious. Ukraine serious. Even the segue there from humor (or, in our case, faux humor) seems a crime. Though, to put things in perspective, Zelensky made the transition and proved a true hero.

Which, the reader will be relieved to learn, brings us to the topic of today's podcast. Zelensky? Not directly. More like Putin in Ukraine. A bull in a china shop, but add enmity and cluster bombs. Not a pretty thing.

So, how did we get here? Join the team from Failure - the Podcast in a conversation with Daniel Barenboym, a Boston-area entrepreneur with roots in Eastern Europe, and Sam Bendett, an expert on the Russian military with the Washington D.C.-based think tanks CNA and CNAS.

No, it's not the ice cream. It's the podcast. This one, and you can be sure it's in bad taste. But, hey, don't be too disappointed. Before reality sunk in, we did offer you the briefest glimmer of hope. That's more than a certain congressperson from Georgia has done for you.

What is today's podcast, other than the usual meaningless banter? There is that, of course. But, there is more, too. Coffee. Yep, you guessed it, and what a genius you are! The coffee business, to be more precise. And, because we failed, yet again, in finding a guest who didn't, it's about a coffee business that's prospering. Go figure.

How much do you know about coffee — we mean really know? The Team from Failure - The Podcast has been imbibing for nearly 100 years, collectively. (Get your mind out of the gutter. We mean coffee.) And, that's only two of us. Add, Mic and ... well, you'd need to go to scientific notation. So, we thought we knew a thing or two about coffee. Just like many of you think you know a thing or two about wine, beer, or you name it. But, how much do you really know, other than where to buy them and what salesperson has you wrapped around his/her finger?

So we brought in a coffee pro. We would say he was a pro from Dover, but unless you saw M*A*S*H, the movie (starring Elliot Gould and Donald Sutherland), you really wouldn't get it. But we did bring in a pro. He was the seventh hire at one of the region's largest full-service coffee distributors. And what a success story he was. He rose from janitor to CEO in a matter of years. Many of them. And, in reality, he didn't quite come in as a janitor nor did he exit as a CEO, but you get the point.

Anyway, you want to learn about coffee? Listen to this podcast. Erik Modahl, coffee curator and founder of BeanTrust Coffeebar, has something to say, even if it means talking over the knuckleheads that are Failure — the Podcast.

Sounds promising: fun with numbers. If not the mathematicians and physicists, certainly the accountants might get something from this podcast. And, if not them, the actuaries will have a field day. Think about it: a podcast even an actuary could love. Stultifying.

Well, not so fast. If you’ve not learned anything from the last four years, it’s that labels can be deceiving. Take “Super Happy Fun America,” a Massachusetts-based nonprofit that, from the looks of it, should be more fun than a barrel of monkeys. Dig a little deeper, and it’s clear that this group is about anything but fun. Super happy? We doubt it, not with the post-insurrection arrests.

But, it’s not just the far right that is loose with labels. In fact, the team from Failure - the Podcast would hazard to guess that those of all political persuasions are guilty as charged. (Ya’ think?! Hey, give us a break, here. We’re just trying to meet our word quota on this blurb). Hell, even this podcast has been known to stretch the truth from time to time — and we are as about apolitical as it gets. Ha!

So, fun with numbers. Not so much. But you can’t fault us for trying. After all, our guest was with one of the Big Four accounting firms. Admittedly, he was working as a lawyer, not an accountant. And, whether he actually saw a single number during his tenure is left for the imagination. Certainly, the team from Failure - the Podcast didn’t ask him. That would have taken advance preparation, and you know how we eschew that. Moreover, who would have thought months ago, when we recorded this, that we’d ultimately call it “fun with numbers”? Surely, you expect too much of us.

Our guest? Why, it’s none other than Tony DaSilva. Lawyer to the stars … or, at least, the accountants. And, what an absolute wit. He lulled the team from Failure - the Podcast into believing that they were asking good questions, and that he was answering them. In fact, it was the same drivel as the last 71 episodes. You know the old saying: same stuff, different day. Well, we promise you only the latter. And, speaking of stepping in it, please don’t forget to wipe your shoes on Matt Goetz … er, the mat … before you leave.