Founders and Empanadas

Most kids’ first interaction with the internet is lying about their age. Kieran Donovan is building the fix.

Kieran left a top global law firm (he became one of the youngest partners at Latham & Watkins and is the only person to win “Privacy Lawyer of the Year” multiple times) to found k-ID. It’s a privacy-first identity layer that lets products adapt to a young user’s age and country automatically. No creepy surveillance. No fake birthdays. Just age-empowered design that lets kids participate safely and parents stay in control.

k-ID sits inside apps and games, toggling features like chat, ads, time limits, loot boxes, and even AI NPC dialog based on rules that change by region and age. Why Kieran? The mission is personal. He’s a survivor who testified in court as a child and later asked, “What am I doing with this?” He chose to build the tech he wished existed.

In this episode, we cover:

• Why age gates teach kids to lie and what replaces them

• How k-ID’s “compliance engine” adapts features on the fly (loot box odds, modding, social, ads, AI)

• The global rulebook: COPPA, AADC, Australia’s under-16 rules, Korea’s disclosure decimals, and more

• Compliance → product → moat: turning regulation into UX and scale

• Remote done right: Singapore as hub, customers and teams across US/EU/Asia

• AI’s trap: the demo is easy; production is a mountain (latency, tests, guardrails, policy)

• The day-0 sprint every founder should run (structure, IP, data, agreements)

If you build products used by minors, run a global team, or want to turn “red tape” into product advantage, this conversation is a masterclass in doing well and doing good.

Wilian Iralzabal didn’t leave Google to “be a Webflow guy.” He left because he wanted to design a business he could live with and then built one that ships at enterprise scale.

Cuban immigrant at 8. Door-to-door sales at 14. Two startups acquired by Google. In 2019 he walked away, started small, and grew Zabal Media into a 33-person, 7-country no-code design & development agency serving Slack, Discord, Webflow, Burger King without raising a dollar. He still prototypes at night (“If you unplug completely, you get desensitized”), and he’ll tell you the months that nearly finished him… and the systems that kept his team from paying the same price.

What we cover (and how you’ll use it):

• Start small → publish → compound

  
  

  The One Minute Designer micro-brand that created escape velocity (and how to build your own surface area).

  
  

• No-Code at enterprise scale (without the QA nightmares)

  
  

  Where Webflow wins for speed and governance, where DIY/AI projects quietly explode (PM debt, QA), and how to avoid the “built it in a week” trap.

  
  

• The Problem Adoption method

  
  

  Recognize the daily problems behind an outcome, borrow them in a 2-week sprint, adopt only if you can live with them at scale.

  
  

• The identity rip: from maker to CEO

  
  

  “Fire yourself from every job” - a quarterly cadence to replace yourself role by role without losing the scent of success.

  
  

• Practitioner > pretender

  
  

  Why he spends 30–60% of his week researching, prototyping, and building tiny tools (including prompting on a Vision Pro at 11 PM) to empathize better, sell better, and unblock teams faster.

  
  

• Mental health and the breakthrough

  
  

  The months of 7 AM–4 AM days, panic-like episodes, and the one belief that pulled him through (“one more day”)

  
  

• Systems over heroics

  
  

  Global payroll, compliance, and contracts streamlined, freeing 30–40 hours/month (~$100k/year of founder time) and removing the “death by a thousand admin cuts.”

  
  

• Feed your competitors. Win long-term.

  
  

  Why he refers misfit deals to agencies he respects, and how that compounding reputation sends the next Fortune-level lead back.

  
  

Who this is for: founders, operators, designers, and anyone building with no-code who wants frameworks—not vibes—for speed, scale, and sanity.

Listen to Founders & Empanadas with Wilian Iralzabal on YouTube, Spotify, and Apple Podcasts.

Brianna Carney runs CrewBloom across 20+ countries and is building Betty, a voice AI that handles outbound qualification so humans can spend more time on higher-value work.

Her operating system is disarmingly simple: work comes second, standards stay high, AI augments people, and leaders model the culture. She also happens to be the first person with a chronic condition to run a marathon on every continent. She has a “marathon, not sprint” mindset that shows up everywhere in how she leads.

In this conversation, we get practical about hiring, firing, retention, burnout, global compliance, and where AI actually belongs in staffing.

Here are our favorite bits from the episode:

• Why “work comes second” raises performance

• How to fire faster without losing humanity

• The retention cadence: human huddles, buddy calls, transparent growth talks

• Delegation that works: train well + define 30/60/90 + write the why

• Stop modeling burnout… no 9pm emails, visible calendar boundaries

• Where AI fits now (outbound SDR) and next (inbound)

• Global hiring playbook: compliance first, then capability

• The “eighth chance” mistake and how to avoid it

If you lead distributed teams, hire globally, or want to use AI without breaking trust, this episode gives you a field kit you can put to work tomorrow.

Listen to this episode of ‘Founders & Empanadas’ with Brianna Carney everywhere you get your podcasts.

From Zirtual’s Overnight Collapse to Adios: How Maren Kate Rebuilt and Bet on Reuse

At 27, Maren Kate Donovan was running a 400-person remote company doing roughly $1M/month. Then, in a single day, Zirtual shut down. Instead of disappearing, she did the unglamorous work: a post-mortem, learning the finance she’d outsourced, a tour at Calm to study operating excellence, and a new thesis for her next decade: build less, waste less, and scale with discipline.

Today Maren is building Adios, a reuse startup in Austin. She started with a logistics pilot (“Goodbye Bags”) that validated consumer demand but not the margins. So she pivoted. Now she’s building a personal inventory app powered by vision AI so people can see what they own, know what it’s worth, and buy better.

This episode is about second chances (and the secondhand movement) told by a founder who earned both.

What we cover:

• The Zirtual post-mortem: services + venture, unit economics you must feel, and the two line items she’d never outsource again
• Calm’s influence: why narrow focus beats “Amazon-of-X” dreams for most of us
• Delegation that actually works in remote teams (train well, define 30/60/90, write the why)
• What the “Goodbye Bag” pilot proved, and why Adios moved from trucks to software
• The personal inventory bet: pricing data, eBay solds, and when parts are worth more than the whole
• Why hyper-local reuse sells better than “impact,” and how logistics ROI shortens sales cycles
• The resale boom: Savers’ IPO, brand partnerships, Gen Z’s secondhand shift — and what founders can build on top of it

If you’re rebuilding after a hit, or you’re excited about the business of reuse and the behavior change behind it, you’ll get a playbook you can use tomorrow.

🎧 Listen to Founders & Empanadas with Maren Kate Donovan on YouTube, Spotify, and Apple Podcasts.

What happens when a hardcore operator decides to build for the physical world?

Denis Lussault has scaled companies where things actually move: robots, vending machines, and industrial systems that keep the real world running.

After 10 years in automotive and oil & gas, he joined Balyo to build autonomous forklifts and led its U.S. business from $0 to $5M in two years, eventually taking the company public. Then, at Vecna Robotics, he led deployment of self-driving warehouse robots during the pandemic automation boom.

Today, he’s the Co-Founder and Chief Product Officer of Kadeya: a climate-tech startup reinventing hydration with a closed-loop vending system that washes and refills bottles on-site.

In this episode, we dive into how Denis keeps choosing the hardest possible arenas and what it really takes to build physical products that work at scale.

We cover:

• Why most “impact startups” fail to sell and how Kadeya fixed its pitch in one sentence

• How Balyo turned unscalable pilots into a scalable robotics business

• The messy reality of building across hardware, software, and supply chains

• What founders get wrong about global teams (and why trust > tech)

• Denis’ controversial take: most startups don’t need a CTO

• How to hire curious people (and why it matters more than skill)

This episode is a crash course in real-world entrepreneurship: where code meets concrete, and leadership means eating complexity so your team doesn’t have to.

If you’ve ever wondered what it’s like to build something you can touch, not just deploy, this one’s for you.

🎧 Listen to the full episode of Founders & Empanadas with Denis Lussault, available now on YouTube, Spotify, and Apple Podcasts.

After scaling multiple companies, including a 70-person video agency working with clients like Coca-Cola and Disney, Korneel Desmet hit a wall.

Not once. But twice.

From penthouses in London to a van in the Spanish mountains, this episode is the story of a founder who lost himself in the hustle and built his way back through presence, breathwork, and building retreats that actually rewire the nervous system.

Today, Korneel is the co-founder of Re-Treated, a high-touch retreat company that’s helped over 500 founders and executives shift from burnout to balance. In this conversation, he and Josh get brutally honest about what it really feels like when the success metrics say “you’ve made it” but your body says “you’re done.”

This episode of “Founders & Empanadas” is just two founders talking about what breaks us and how to rebuild a life worth living.

What we cover:

• What burnout actually feels like on the inside (and why we hide it)

• The habits that separate successful founders from fulfilled ones

• How to use altered states to find clarity (without psychedelics)

• Why apathy is more dangerous than anxiety and how to escape it

• The myth of founder discipline and what to focus on instead

• What happens when 12 strangers go 7 days without phones

If you’re scaling a company, holding it all together, or quietly wondering “what’s the point?”, this episode is for you.

Listen wherever you get your podcasts!

Thomas Geib had a thriving real estate business, a fast-growing mastermind, and everything figured out… until he didn’t.

After a failed business partnership, 60K in debt, and just $0.17 left in his bank account, Thomas found himself questioning everything.

But instead of quitting, he doubled down.

He created The Entrepreneurs House in Medellín. It’s a founder community built from scratch to solve one deeply personal problem: loneliness.

In this in-person episode of Founders & Empanadas, we dive into:

• What most founders get wrong about emerging markets

• Why discipline is overrated

• How to turn your lowest moment into your biggest opportunity

• The tactics behind building a thriving community

• And why some of the most successful entrepreneurs you know… are doing things you’d never expect.

It’s real and raw. And it might change the way you think about success.

Watch the full episode wherever you get your podcasts!

Timestamps:

00:00 – Intro and empanada banter

01:10 – Why Thomas created The Entrepreneurs House

03:45 – His first entrepreneurial spark (Minecraft YouTube!)

06:00 – Learning real estate from a stranger at Costco

08:30 – The startup that spiraled into 60K in debt

11:00 – The journal entry that changed everything

12:40 – Building a business to solve loneliness

14:00 – $0.17 in the bank and planning a $10K event

16:15 – How one connection led to a $100K day

18:00 – Why he shut down the co-living and built community instead

21:30 – The biggest mindset shift that made everything click

25:00 – Founders and mental health: how Thomas stayed grounded

27:40 – Why discipline might be overrated

30:00 – Tactical networking advice for every founder

33:00 – The book that changed how Thomas hires

35:00 – Why there’s no one right way to build a business

37:00 – Where to find Thomas and The Entrepreneurs House

What happens when a practicing physician builds a $700M healthcare startup?

In this episode of Founders & Empanadas, Joshua sits down with Dr. Alexi Nazem: Co-founder & former CEO of Nomad Health, Assistant Professor at Weill Cornell, and now a General Partner at AlleyCorp.

Alexi shares his journey from hospitalist to founder, how he scaled one of the fastest-growing staffing platforms in the world, and why being transparent (not invincible) is the most powerful leadership strategy during chaos.

We unpack:

• How Nomad cracked supply-side growth in a cold-start marketplace

• The tech engine behind W2 credentialing and nationwide compliance

• How Alexi’s team became a PPE distributor in 2020 overnight

• Why vulnerability is underrated in executive leadership

• What he looks for now as a healthcare investor

This one’s a clinic on founder psychology, systems thinking, and scaling through uncertainty.

🎧 Highlights

00:00 – Intro + empanadas

01:00 – From physician to founder: the notebook that started it all

05:00 – Nomad’s origin story + early clinical pain points

07:30 – Solving the chicken-and-egg problem in marketplaces

10:00 – Why Nomad focused on clinicians first

13:00 – W2 vs. 1099: regulatory complexity as a moat

16:00 – Building a credentialing engine from scratch

18:00 – Why “let humans do what only humans can do” became a guiding principle

20:00 – Using AI to match clinicians to jobs with precision

21:45 – How Nomad automated away credentialing drudgery

24:00 – March 2020: Nomad pivots into PPE and COVID test logistics

26:00 – From survival to 10x growth: scaling Nomad under pressure

27:15 – Lessons from rapid growth: don’t trade tech for headcount

29:00 – Crisis leadership: be honest, be clear, and co-create solutions

31:00 – What medicine taught Alexi about leadership and scaling

34:00 – What doesn’t translate from medicine to startups

35:00 – Stepping down as CEO + the emotional side of transition

38:00 – Why he joined AlleyCorp to keep building and backing big ideas

39:30 – What startup founders get wrong about leadership style

41:00 – Final thoughts on kindness, team dynamics, and long-term impact

42:30 – Where to find Alexi online

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🎙️ Follow and subscribe to Founders & Empanadas to hear more untold founder stories from the trenches.

Christie Kaplan is the founder of Startup Design Partners, a design-led venture studio that helps early-stage teams go from chaos to clarity, before they waste six months building the wrong thing.

In this episode, Christie and Josh dive into the real work of product design: making hard decisions, listening well, and separating signal from noise when everyone just wants to be polite.

This is a crash course in how to lead with empathy, think like a researcher, and stop mistaking “busy” for “validated.”

Some things you’ll learn in this episode:

• Why most founders fake validation without realizing it

• How to use the Five Whys to uncover real user pain

• The biggest misconception about product-market fit that founders get wrong

• What Christie means when she says “design is an investor’s greatest insurance policy”

• How to course-correct founders who are building the wrong thing (without killing their momentum)

• The biggest emotional trap early-stage teams fall into

• Why user surveys are almost always misleading—and what to do instead

• The truth about founder mental health, decision fatigue, and building an MVP that actually resonates

Christie’s not only a designer. She’s a venture strategist, a founder psychologist, and an artist capturing the emotional truth of startup life.

If you’re a founder, product lead, or operator building through the fog, this one will hit home.

Listen now on Spotify, Apple, YouTube, or wherever you get your podcasts.

What if you could personalize every cold email (without recording a thousand videos)?

Bethany Stachenfeld is the Co-Founder & CEO of Sendspark, the video platform trusted by teams at Salesforce, Oracle, Outreach, and LinkedIn to drive 400%+ more engagement through asynchronous, AI-personalized video messaging.

In this episode, Bethany and Josh go deep on the evolution of modern sales, how to build a capital-efficient SaaS company, and what most startups get wrong about product-led growth. Whether you’re scaling an SDR team, testing pricing models, or just trying to avoid burnout, this conversation is packed with practical frameworks and honest founder lessons.

What you’ll learn:

• Why “The Mom Test” is Bethany’s favorite product-market fit framework and how to use it correctly

• The surprising reason Sendspark ditched its freemium model (and what happened next)

• How to hire high-leverage global talent without bloating headcount or losing culture

• The #1 mistake founders make when building GTM motion (and how Bethany avoided it)

• How she defines a non-burnout culture that still drives serious results

• A simple mindset shift to make enterprise implementations less chaotic

• Why “selling yourself” isn’t just for founders, it’s a skill every teammate should master

This episode is a playbook for founders, sales leaders, and product-minded operators who want to do more with less, without losing their soul in the process.