In this episode of Founder@50, Jeremy Toeman sits down with Neha Tiwari, whose career spans the golden days of Web 2.0 in San Francisco to leadership roles at CNET, IGN, YouTube, and Fandom. Neha is a gamer, storyteller, and media executive who now runs her own consultancy helping highly productive people get even more done.

She shares how she built a career that bridges creative vision with business results while championing underrepresented voices in gaming and media. She’s also the only person who can go toe-to-toe with him on quoting Arrested Development and somehow weaving them into everyday conversation.

The conversation ranges through candid reflections on leadership, inclusion, and finding the right balance between career ambition and personal values.

We cover:

* What made the Bay Area’s Web 2.0 scene so special and why trust in tech felt different then

* Her path from Cal’s Media Studies program through internships at TechTV and Current TV

* Lessons learned at CNET, Revision3, Justin.tv, IGN, and YouTube Gaming

* Why diversity in leadership is essential for creative and business success

* Building her consultancy during the pandemic to support women, BIPOC, and mission-driven brands

* How empathy, integrity, and cultural context can transform storytelling

* That there’s always money in the banana stand!

Whether you work in media, gaming, or are navigating your own career pivot, Neha’s story blends inspiration, practical insights, and sharp industry perspective.

In this episode Jeremy Toeman sits down with peer, mentor, and parenting friend Leslie Fine. Leslie is a behavioral scientist turned product leader/coach who’s been a Chief Scientist at Crowdcast and a VP Products at Salesforce. They discuss…

• How Leslie’s background in behavioral economics shaped her approach to product and team building

• Lessons from building B2B products that prioritize user empathy over feature bloat

• Why she believes understanding user psychology is the most underrated skill in tech

• How becoming a founder later in life helped her apply decades of experience with a fresh perspective

• The importance of asking better questions in product discovery and leadership

• What she’s learned from navigating high-growth environments and finding the right problems to solve

You’ll also hear how Leslie applies frameworks from behavioral science to everything from hiring to startup pivots and why slowing down might be the fastest way to get it right.

In this episode, Jeremy Toeman talks with Michael Stern, Managing Director at Kintegral Asset Management, about his journey from a programmer in a Los Alamos chemistry lab to being a startup founder to socially driven investor.

• How early work in chemical modeling led to DE Shaw, startups, and eventually socially responsible investing

• What happened when Michael had to choose between product market fit and personal values

• How he helped expose corporate fraud and turned it into one of his biggest trades

• Why he invests in story driven startups like Pi-Lit and Street Smarts VR• Why investing in stories matters more to him than spreadsheets and how he finds purpose driven startups with real world impact

• How his firm uses data and algorithms to generate market outperformance while maintaining strict environmental and social standards

You’ll also hear what climbing Mount McKinley taught him about discomfort, drive, and decision making and why he believes success means doing work you never have to apologize for.

In this episode, Jeremy Toeman catches up with longtime friend Tami Arnowitz who shares how she transformed five distinct careers into a consulting business that blends mission, strategy, and heart.

• How she moved from product management to mortgages to launching Good Questions Consulting

• Why each career shift was guided by values like autonomy, meaning, and flexibility

• How she helps Jewish nonprofits apply business thinking to mission-driven work

• What it means to reinvent yourself while raising four kids and staying relentlessly curious

• The power of saying yes before you're ready and the “oh well” mindset that helped her navigate risk and change• What she learned managing everything from baby product lines to market research and vocational education strategy

You’ll also hear how Tami leverages her Columbia MBA, coaching skills, and lived experience to guide organizations toward clarity, confidence, and better questions.

In this episode Jeremy Toeman sits down with David Cohn a lifelong storyteller who went from a philosophy and rhetoric student at UC Berkeley to shaping the future of news through product thinking and platform design. Today they discuss :

• How a Wired internship and a Craigslist blog gig sparked a 20 year friendship with Jeremy and a career in digital media.

• Why David pivoted from traditional journalism into product innovation before product was even a term in newsrooms.

• The story behind Spot Us the pre Kickstarter platform that crowdfunded journalism and how it earned David a 350 thousand dollar grant from the Knight Foundation.

• How David turned editorial instincts into product vision from Circa’s modular news app to viral video models at AJ+ and now generative AI solutions in local news with AdvanceLocal.

• His unique “career as albums” metaphor and how each chapter from freelance hustle to experimental newsroom builder reflects a remix of technology and storytelling.

You will also hear how Digg and Netscape shaped his early web literacy how being a top contributor taught him about online communities and why David believes the CMS is still the most important editor in modern journalism.

In this episode Jeremy Toeman sits down with Barbara Basbanes Richter, and they discuss how she…

• Turned a Smith and Tufts French degree and a decade of public school teaching into a ghostwriting career

• Leveraged her family’s book legacy to launch DIY Book an affordable do it yourself writing platform

• Learned to write client voices by mining her own process and creating scaffolded storytelling prompts

• Pivoted again to cofound Hello Hans a playful AI driven platform helping kids write share and publish with confidence

You’ll also hear how joining the Element46 accelerator in Westchester County helped Barbara expand her network refine her pitch and blend her passion for teaching with her vision for tech based storytelling.

David Arnett’s career proves that the best job description is the one you write yourself. A Wharton grad who taught tennis and chess before digitizing the world’s first TV ad archive he spent 16 years inventing his own roles in market research and product management. His chess champion mindset became his secret weapon for breaking down startup problems. In early 2020 a weekly virtual poker game sparked his next pivot: Chuck, a sport fan community & engagement app built to let friends talk sports one-on-one instead of shouting into the stadium. David’s story offers practical takeaways on embracing uncertainty leaning into your unique talents and making the leap from corporate ladder to founder life.

In this episode, Jeremy Toeman talks with his former boss Mark Larkin, who began as an unpaid CNET intern at age 27 and rose through 15–20 different roles to become president of CNET’s portfolio under CBS. Mark lays out the exact behaviors that got him noticed early (showing up before anyone else, volunteering for extra tasks) and how he translated producer skills into leadership by learning to speak the languages of editorial, engineering, and product. He explains why he said yes to a coast-to-coast stretch running CBS News Digital (living on airplanes for three years), how he managed each promotion (from segment producer to SVP/GM of CNET), and why he ultimately chose to sell CNET back when CBS divested non-core brands. Along the way, he offers real talk on imposter syndrome, balancing “the grind” with work-life health, and what it means to leave a legacy for future teams.

If you’ve ever wondered how to turn a low-level internship into a multi-decade career or how to build cross-functional empathy in a fast-moving digital media environment, Mark’s journey is full of practical takeaways.

In this episode Jeremy Toeman sits down with Mark Ely.

Mark Ely’s journey from answering support calls to founding a consumer streaming startup shows that endurance outlasts perfect plans. Over two decades at Sonic Solutions he moved into leadership by mastering the technology product and strategy then applied those lessons to SimpleTV’s hardware and software pivots. Along the way he discovered that true innovation starts with loving the work not just chasing funding and that mentoring via Score.org keeps the spark alive for both mentor and mentee. This conversation offers practical takeaways on building skills patiently, knowing when to scale and why giving back is part of every founder’s toolkit.

Mark shares how he:

* Climbed the ladder at Sonic Solutions over 19 years from tech support to president of strategy

* Used early business school lessons to speak the language of investors and run global product teams

* Founded SimpleTV in his 40s to stream free broadcast television to any device and the pivots that followed

* Learned why you must love what you build and how to decide when to raise money or stay scrappy

* Mentors small business owners through Score.org and why giving back keeps curiosity alive

Tune in for honest stories about career persistence the joy of deep technical curiosity and what it really takes to turn a sideline hobby into a startup.

And if you’re playing the drinking game at home, this week’s word is “tinkering”.

In this episode, Jeremy Toeman sits down with John Biggs whose career spans from hand-coding HTML at Carnegie Mellon to writing over 11,000 posts for TechCrunch, to founding startups and hosting the Keep Going podcast. John explains how he learned to pivot from tech journalism into building products of his own, why he believes in testing ideas quickly (even if they fail), and how he turned countless “side experiments” into actionable lessons. You’ll hear:

* How early web tools at CMU taught him to build fast and fail fast

* The story behind launching CrunchGear at TechCrunch and scaling into a separate gadget site

* What prompted him to leave full-time journalism to become a startup founder

* Why he launched Keep Going, and how recording hundreds of founder interviews reshaped his view of “success”

No hype here, just honest talk about learning through failure, leaning into your network, and staying curious in a world where everything changes overnight.