Founders and Empanadas

Jenna Reback can taste words. Her own name tastes like blueberries, which is why she named her company Blueberry. She has synesthesia, a rare neuro-sensory condition that made childhood disorienting and lonely, and forced her to become obsessed with one question: how do you make someone else understand something they've never experienced? That question led her to Hollywood, then to Silicon Valley, and eventually to building a brand messaging agency that works with founders at every stage.

On this episode, Jenna joins Joshua for empanadas to make the case that in the age of AI, storytelling is the last moat standing. She shares the three-question framework she developed in TV writers rooms, explains why the thing founders are most tempted to sand off is usually their best asset, and delivers a genuinely contrarian take on Silicon Valley's obsession with biohacking and optimization culture.

What you'll hear:

• Why Jenna has never lost a pitch, and the TV writers room framework behind it

• The three questions that every founder's story needs to answer

• How she helped a fintech founder win over VCs and restaurateurs at the same time (using the same story)

• Why great products no longer sell themselves, and why great stories still do

• Her hot take: how you do one thing is NOT how you do everything and why the ruthless optimization culture is "soulless"

• Why AI is making storytelling more valuable, not less

Subscribe to Founders & Empanadas on YouTube, Spotify, and Apple.

Most social apps were built to make you feel connected without requiring you to actually be. Sanjay Guruprasad has been building against that assumption for eight years. His thesis: the only online interaction that replicates the way humans have always built real relationships is playing games together.

Sanjay is the founder of Rune AI, a multiplayer game platform and engine that's been processing two billion minutes of voice chat and, now thanks to AI, lets anyone build a full multiplayer game in under an hour. He did his PhD at MIT's Media Lab studying social networks, then spent a decade learning everything the research got wrong when it met the real world.

This conversation covers the pivot that ended a half-million-user product, what Among Us teaches us about quality, and why Sanjay is actively hiring fresh grads while the rest of the tech industry isn't.

Highlights:

• How Rune solved the 45-second drop-off problem and why it changes everything in consumer social apps

• Why shutting down a product with 500,000 monthly active users was the right call, and what Sanjay looked for before pulling the trigger

• The platform shift Rune had been waiting eight years for, and what happened when they released an MCP the day AI got good enough

• Why games are the only online medium that actually deepens a friendship over time

• The Among Us lesson: what the most elegant game of the last decade teaches about quality in an era of AI-generated slop

• Why Sanjay is hiring fresh grads, and the specific mindset he looks for that experienced engineers often lose

Follow Founders & Empanadas on [YouTube / Spotify / Apple Podcasts]. Find Sanjay at @sanjaypojo on LinkedIn and Twitter, and explore Rune at joinrune.com.

Andrea Mazzocchi defended her PhD, applied to Y Combinator, and watched the country shut down for COVID all on the same weekend. That was May 2020. By the end of the year, she had a wet lab running, a seed round closing, and a company called Known Medicine using 3D tumor organoids to predict which cancer drugs would actually work for individual patients.

Three years later, she sold it. Then started over.

In this episode, Joshua sits down with Andrea, Co-Founder and CEO of Play Health (YC F25), to talk about what it really took to build two YC-backed companies from scratch, what she learned selling the first one, and the single most uncomfortable thing a technical founder has to face: great technology is not a business strategy.

In this episode:

• Starting a company the weekend COVID shut everything down

• What it actually feels like to go from founder to babysitter after an acquisition, and why she left

• The mistake technical founders keep making at the intersection of science and business

• Why founder-led is almost always better than bringing in the resume

• Radical prioritization: why if ten things are a priority, nothing is

• Her hot take on wearables and personal health data (you're probably not using 70% of it either)

• Building a 4-person team that punches above its weight

Subscribe and listen to this episode of Founders & Empanadas with Andrea everywhere you get your podcasts!

Starting in 2003, years before anyone was using the term, Yu-kai Chou began developing what would become the Octalysis Framework: a model of human motivation built around 8 core drives that influence every decision we make. He gamified his own life first. Then his companies. Then Fortune 500s. Then governments.

Now he's one of the most sought-after behavioral designers on the planet. He's been to Ukraine (during the war) to advise on gamification strategies for the country. He's the author of Actionable Gamification and 10,000 Hours of Play, his reframe of Malcolm Gladwell's famous concept. His clients include Google, Duolingo, and national governments.

In this episode of Founders & Empanadas, we get into:

• Why he tells founders to "optimize for failure" and why it might be the most counterintuitive success strategy you'll hear

• The VC pattern he experienced 4-5 times: being called "crazy" and "stupid" before the world finally caught up

• Why older generations actually respond better to gamification than younger ones, and what that means for product design

• The dark side of gamification: how Black Hat mechanics tap into your survival instincts and trap users into addiction

• What 10,000 Hours of Play really means and how to apply it to your work and life right now

• What happens every time a big company acquires a startup and why it ends the same way almost every time

• How he went from a kid struggling in a Taiwanese school to advising the president of a country at war

Yu-kai is sharp, funny, and genuinely one of the most interesting people I've sat down with. This one will change how you think about your time.

🎙️ Listen on Spotify, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.

📺 Watch on YouTube.

Jessica Murrey won a Regional Emmy at 24 for an anti-child abuse campaign, then spent seven years training young activists and former extremists in countries recovering from genocide and civil war: Myanmar, Burundi, Nigeria, Colombia. She came home asking: how do you scale this?

The answer was a video game.

Jessica co-founded Wicked Saints Studios with a behavioral scientist and a former senior Pokémon GO engineer. They raised $5M+ from Riot Games, Precursor Ventures, and Reid Hoffman, putting Jessica among fewer than 100 Black women in history to cross the $1M venture threshold. Their game, World Reborn, runs on one mechanic no other game uses: you can't buy progress. You earn it by doing real things in the real world. Brands like e.l.f. Beauty and Discord are integrated not as ads, but as quests. In an industry where brand click-through rates average under 1%, World Reborn is hitting 31%.

In this episode:

• Why peacebuilding in conflict zones and mobile gaming for Gen Z are solving the same problem

• What the "Tattoo Method" is and why it works when traditional behavior change doesn't

• The fundraising reality of being a Black woman founder (0.3% of VC went to Black women in 2023)

• How World Reborn broke the brand ROI model that's stumped the rest of the gaming industry

• The question about startup culture she never gets asked: does "more money and more power" actually make your life better?

• A three-step conflict framework from the warzones, built for co-founder disputes, fractured teams, and difficult investors

One of the most unusual founder backgrounds Joshua has ever encountered on this show. Worth every minute.

🎙️ Listen on Spotify, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.

📺 Watch on YouTube.

Sahin Boydas moved from Turkey to San Francisco in 2012 with no network, no warm intros, and a conviction that remote work was going to change everything, about a decade before COVID made it unavoidable.

What followed was four companies, two exits (MovieLaLa to Gfycat, RemoteTeam.com to Gusto in 2021), 180+ angel investments including Anthropic and OpenAI, and a ranking as the #1 Most Active Angel Investor in 2024. He's now building Levy, an AI-native neobank for startups and he has zero interest in giving you soft takes.

What we covered:

• How he sold RemoteTeam.com to Gusto and what actually kept him there for 3.5 years after the deal closed

• Why post-exit founders are the single most reliable predictor of building a unicorn (the Super Founders data is wild)

• Why he thinks 90% of desk jobs are gone and why he's weirdly optimistic about it

• His rule: if an employee says AI doesn't give them good results, fire them immediately

• Why empathy (not hustle, not grit) is the #1 skill every founder actually needs

• How AI just handed every founder outside Silicon Valley access to the knowledge the Valley spent decades hoarding

• Why founders who ask for permission to go to the dentist have already missed the point

If you're building something, this episode of Founders & Empanadas is worth your full attention. Subscribe wherever you get your podcasts!

Renee Gittins didn't take the conventional path. She built her own.

She started as a biomedical engineer, then walked away from biotech at 21 to teach herself game development from scratch: moonlighting on her own game while working day jobs to pay the bills. That game, Potions: A Curious Tale, ended up on Steam, Switch, Xbox, and PS5 with 90%+ positive reviews.

Along the way, she became Executive Director of the IGDA, representing 10,000+ game developers worldwide and advocating for them in front of the FTC. Now she's running Stumbling Cat full-time, building her next game, and writing The Bad Boss Witch Guide to Rule Your World: a book on Stoic leadership for people who actually need it.

In this episode of Founders & Empanadas, we get into:

• Why she spends one hour every day doing absolutely nothing and why it's her best creative tool

• How walking away from biotech at 21 set her up for everything that came after

• The Kickstarter mistake she'd fix if she did it over

• Why taking personal blame for every team failure completely changed her culture

• The one move that boosted her game's Steam conversion rate by 500% (it costs nothing)

• What running a $300K/year org for 10,000+ developers taught her about doing more with less

• How her dad, who was an Olympic 400m hurdler, wired her for grit, reflection, and daily growth

• Why tying your identity to your work is a trap and how she's actively undoing it

Renee is sharp, honest, and surprisingly funny. This one's for any founder who wants to build something real without losing themselves in the process.

🎙️ Listen on Spotify, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.

📺 Watch on YouTube.

Subscribe to Founders & Empanadas for new episodes every week.

Adam Lieb sold his first gaming website to IGN at age 11. Before he could drive, he was earning $10,000 a week selling virtual goods in MMORPGs. Before he graduated college, he was running a 25-site gaming network doing multimillion-dollar revenue. He's never had a real job. He's never needed one.

Today, Adam is the founder and CEO of Gamesight: a marketing intelligence platform that helps game studios run influencer campaigns, track player acquisition, and actually understand what's driving (or killing) their game's performance in market.

He's seen the industry from every angle: as a kid writing cheat guides on AOL boards in the 90s, as a VC-backed founder who built the "LinkedIn for gamers" before pivoting hard into B2B software, and now as CEO of a 55-person globally distributed company working with some of the biggest publishers in the world.

In this conversation on ‘Founders & Empanadas,’ he breaks down what most studios get wrong about building and marketing games and the leadership lessons that come from doing this for over two decades.

Here are some of our biggest takeaways:

• The two-variable formula: why studios are great at creative vision OR market opportunity, but rarely both and what Path of Exile got right that most don't

• Why best-practice marketing kills good games: horror dominates TikTok for a specific psychological reason most studios never think about

• How Twitch and YouTube replaced the Nintendo Hotline as the modern "try before you buy"

• What COVID actually did to the industry: release windows, E3, brick-and-mortar and what still hasn't recovered

• Going from 9 people in a Seattle office to 55 across the globe and the specific rituals (Lunch Roulette, annual all-hands) keeping culture alive

• The counterintuitive take: most startup advice is a coin flip, and the smarter move is to ignore it entirely

Tim Morten led production on StarCraft II at Blizzard before founding Frost Giant Studios. In this conversation, he breaks down the economic forces reshaping game development: from the oversaturation crisis (20,000+ games per year) to the post-pandemic VC correction that's forcing studios to do more with less.

Tim has lived both sides. He shipped one of gaming's most successful RTSs with Blizzard's unlimited resources, then bootstrapped an indie studio through the most challenging market conditions in decades. The contrast reveals what's really happening in the industry.

Here are some of our biggest takeaways:

• The oversaturation math: Why 80%-rated games now fail to recoup

• How VC funding shifted from "games are too hits-driven" to seed/growth only

• Building across 5 countries: Poland, Egypt, Australia, China, South Africa

• What AAA support systems actually cost (cinematics, QA, Battle.net, analytics)

• The "Frank Pearce boss battle" and why honesty beats pandering

• Budget compression: From double-A to 1/10th the spend

• Why RTS is positioned for a resurgence (like space sims)

• The contrarian take: Sometimes you need to pivot, not persevere

Alex Stewart didn’t raise a round. He didn’t move to San Francisco. He didn’t “grind” 100 hours a week. He built Teamtown, a growing design agency, by doing things differently.

This week on Founders & Empanadas, Joshua Eidelman sits down with Alex to unpack how he built a profitable, people-first business without losing his mind in the process.

They dig into how he:

• Used SEO as his first growth engine (and why founders shouldn’t hire an agency too early)

• Thinks about leadership energy transfer and building team culture remotely

• Keeps his mental health strong through community, self-reward, and better boundaries

• Rethinks hustle culture and why starving yourself as a founder is self-sabotage

• Built Teamtown without chasing a “massive” problem, but by solving a simple one really well

If you’re building a remote team, bootstrapping a business, or just tired of pretending burnout is a badge of honor… this episode is for you.

Listen now to Alex’s story, and take away grounded lessons on growth, leadership, and mental health that actually scale.