I Have Some Questions...

Danny Chazonoff, an OG of online payments, breaks down why “Pay Now” is really a high-stakes, multi-handshake system. From early online gambling and wallet innovations to issuer-acquirer conversations, fraud controls, and chargeback risk, he explains how payment processors built infrastructure for speed, trust, and reliability. He also shares the mindset that helped his teams scale and diversify into a multibillion-dollar outcome.

👤 About the Guest

Danny Chazonoff is President/COO and co-founder of KORT Payments. He has decades of experience building and scaling specialized payment infrastructure, including founding roles in early online wallet solutions, and a track record of building and selling payment processing businesses that reached north of $4B in value. His focus blends technology, risk underwriting, and deep customer listening.

🧭 Conversation Highlights

• Payments feel simple to consumers, but the back end is complex: issuer vs acquirer, plus multiple validation and risk “handshakes.”
• Early online gambling and ticket sales exposed gaps in credit card approval, driving wallet innovation and higher conversion.
• Payment processors take underwriting risk (often tiny per-transaction margins vs large chargeback exposure), so they build safeguards and controls.
• Danny’s growth principles: strategically opportunistic, integrity and accountability, listening to what clients need, and diversifying beyond one vertical.

💡 Key Takeaways

• “Seamless” payments are engineered: many internal checks happen so the user experiences one fast click.
• Fraud and chargebacks determine economics, not just technology, so risk management is core product design.
• Diversification is not optional in payment categories where regulation and demand can shift quickly.
• The best platforms scale by replicating the 85 to 95 percent that is common across verticals, while isolating nuance in dedicated components.

❓ Questions That Mattered

• Why did online payments become so complicated as commerce moved off the physical, synchronous store experience?
• What really happens in the background between issuer and acquirer, and where does the processor “stand in the middle”?
• How do you build a payments company without over-indexing on one risky vertical like gaming?
• If payments were built from scratch today, what would you re-engineer given legacy infrastructure constraints and new tech like AI?

🗣️ Notable Quotes

• “To the end consumer, you want it to be as seamless as possible. You just wanna eat the hotdog.”
• “On a fifty-dollar transaction, I may make fifty cents. If that transaction goes bad and it was fraud and there’s a chargeback, I’m responsible for the fifty bucks.”
• “We were strategically opportunistic. We didn’t go and build stuff that we thought would be cool and hope and pray that customers would come.”
• “We’re gonna build the best online payments platform, period. And whether your transaction requirement is for gaming or something else, you can use our platform.”

🔗 Links & Resources

• Follow Danny Chazonoff on LinkedIn
• Contact Danny at [email protected]
• Check out KORT Payments’ Website

Colby Wegter shares how he grew audience and trust without “performing,” why he thinks the customer must lead marketing, and how he rebuilt his life around gut-driven decisions. From agency ethics and “winning the first 48 hours” to parenting as repair work, he ties everything back to self-trust, discernment, and never outsourcing belief.

👤 About the Guest

Colby Wegter is a former agency operator and newsletter writer who helps people who “look good on paper” but feel hollow. After serving 1,200+ clients, he stepped back to rebuild a life aligned with his values, centering self-trust, candid reflection, and curiosity.

🧭 Conversation Highlights

• His social media approach is private and values-first: audience comes last, and shipping requires utility and sincere belief.
• He reframes marketing and hiring as empowerment, not lack, using trust earned in “drips,” not “buckets.”
• He challenges outsourced certainty: ask better internal questions, filter what you consume, and trust what holds up under questioning.
• He treats parenting and growth as ongoing discovery, with conflict followed by repair and clarity as respect.

💡 Key Takeaways

• Audience comes last: ship what you believe and what serves others, not what maximizes reach.
• Winning the first 48 hours builds retention when promises come with education, boundaries, and earned trust.
• Need is often a disguised want: ask why until it survives questioning, then act from conviction.
• Greatness is a trade-off: being misunderstood is often part of doing work you truly believe in.

❓ Questions That Mattered

• What criteria do you use to decide what to publish, sell, or commit to?
• Why do people say they “need” something, and what are they not admitting underneath?
• How do you build self-trust when the world tells you to rely on systems, experts, or desire?
• What does “being great” actually cost, and is it even the right goal for everyone?

🗣️ Notable Quotes

• “To be great is to be misunderstood.”
• “Who do you spend every second of your life with? It’s yourself. Wouldn’t you want that to be the person you trust the most?”
• “Winning the first forty-eight hours.”
• “If something’s wrong, you can’t just sit with it.”

🔗 Links & Resources

• Follow Colby Wegter on LinkedIn
• Check out Colby’s Website
• The Creative Act by Rick Rubin
• Self-Reliance by Ralph Waldo Emerson
• Millionaire Next Door by Thomas J. Stanley and William D. Danko

Justin Coats joins Erik for another take of their weekly issue of the AI Questions section. This time, joined as well by Rebecca Maloney, Director of IT at Hayden Homes. She shares how they drove real AI adoption by starting with process and culture, building governance and training before expanding tools, and using human conversations to unlock faster handoffs across the home-building chain.

🧭 Conversation Highlights

• AI adoption at Hayden started with where work is getting duplicated across handoffs, not with chasing an AI feature.
• Clean data and clean process matter equally, otherwise dashboards and automation become “rendered useless.”
• Cross-functional process discussions in the same room reduced cycle time because teams reworked steps they had always kept.
• Their trust approach is transparency about change, security-first standards, and training so people feel safe and capable.

💡 Key Takeaways

• Start with process and communication gaps. AI is often the accelerator, not the fix.
• Treat data hygiene and security as prerequisites, not afterthoughts.
• Governance works when it is business-case driven, inclusive, and paired with an easy way to submit ideas.
• Trust is built through honest conversations, not reassurances. Focus on enabling people, plus human oversight.

❓ Questions That Mattered

• Where do duplicate entries and broken handoffs create the real drag, and how can communication be streamlined instead of just adding tools?
• What governance and fundamentals training are necessary before broader tool access?
• How do you evaluate go/no-go early when outcomes are uncertain, without stifling innovation?
• How do you reduce fear about job impact while still being honest about roles changing?

🗣️ Notable Quotes

• “It’s not necessarily what the tool is, it’s the process.”
• “If the data that we’re pointing to is not clean… it’s kind of rendered useless.”
• “The job is gonna change… we’re here to make sure that you have the tools and the training.”

🔗 Links & Resources

• Listen To Other Episodes Co-Hosted With Justin

Erik and Alli Murphy reunite after a month-long hiatus and dig into why high-performing women (and increasingly everyone) are moving toward “analog” habits. They connect the trend to burnout fatigue, attention capture from devices, and a desire for creativity and real presence, then unpack what boundaries look like in practice without harming career momentum.

🧭 Conversation Highlights

• Alli describes the push toward paper books, printed recipes, and even flip phones as a reaction to constant connectivity and the “infinite workday.”
• They compare two approaches to boundaries: external forcing functions (brick phones, screen blockers) versus internal experiments and team alignment.
• Erik and Alli explore the appeal of “romanticizing” older, simpler ways of living, including doing tactile activities like watercolor.
• Alli shares what she is seeing with clients: reclaiming life outside work can coexist with career growth, promotions, and leading larger programs.

💡 Key Takeaways

• Analog habits often function as a practical escape hatch from attention traps and 24/7 work reach.
• For some people, a physical barrier makes the behavior change easier; for others, experiments and clear agreements work better.
• The fear that boundaries will tank a career is frequently not supported by Alli’s client experience.
• Analog is not just nostalgia. It is a way to re-create focus, creativity, and presence in the middle of high achievement.

❓ Questions That Mattered

• What does it say about how hard it is to build boundaries if people feel they need a physical forcing function (like a brick or flip phone) instead?
• Are these analog shifts being driven by new content and coaching, or is the trend emerging organically from people seeking quiet and space?
• If you get your life back, does your career suffer, or does it actually change how you lead and perform?
• What “analog” practice could genuinely interrupt work-mode thinking for a person who struggles to turn their brain off?

🗣️ Notable Quotes

• “I was working on my book earlier today, and I was looking at Microsoft’s 2025 Workplace Trends Index… about this infinite workday.”
• “The forcing function is external, I think, is easier, especially when it comes to things like social media apps.”
• “The clients that I have… most of the time… the opposite is true. Getting your life back doesn’t mean your career tanks.”
• “If you’re learning to knit, you can’t really think about your KPIs… because you have to think about your stitch.”

🔗 Links & Resources

• Listen To Other Episodes Co-Hosted With Alli
• Check out Alli's Skool Community
• Microsoft 2025 Workplace Trends Index

🧠 Erik’s Take

Erik treated this as a short, high-signal recap of his deeper conversation with Logan Yonavjak, but the “takeaway” that kept reappearing was about measurement itself. He realized the real question was not only how to measure leadership readiness, but how easily businesses confuse what they can measure with what they actually need. He also connected Logan’s product challenge to a broader selling problem: you cannot move past the analytics until the customer agrees the underlying concept is measurable and meaningful.

🎯 Top Insights from the Interview

• Businesses lean on proxies like résumés, references, and personality tests, but availability does not guarantee relevance.
• The better measurement question is always tied to the decision you are trying to make, not the tool you can deploy.
• Many leadership-readiness tools are static and snapshot-like, even when the real environment and role demands differ.
• The Readiness Engine’s positioning becomes clearer when it connects leadership capabilities and gaps to business outcomes rather than vague development goals.

🧩 The Personal Layer

Erik admitted that he is not anti-assessment. He has personally benefited from tools like StrengthsFinder and the Core Values Index, so his tension is not with measurement, but with mismatched intent. He also recognized himself in Logan’s investor-pitch reality, where people happily accept analytics for companies but retreat to “experience and pattern recognition” when evaluating the humans inside the system. For Erik, that mismatch is the core friction: selling the ideology first, then the methodology.

🧰 From Insight to Action

• Before choosing any metric, write down the exact decision it must inform, such as readiness for team size, complexity, or strategic scope.
• Audit your inputs: list the proxies you use and ask what question each proxy actually answers, then remove anything that only sounds useful.
• Design assessments to reflect context and change, since fixed snapshots can fail when roles and situations evolve.
• When pitching or scaling, translate leadership development into capability gaps and connect them to outcome expectations the business can track.

🗣️ Notable Quotes

• “Availability isn’t the same thing as relevance.”
• “Before you get excited about the metric, get really clear about the decision you’re trying to make.”
• “Until somebody agrees with the underlying idea, they don’t really care how your solution works.”
• “Leadership development starts to look a lot less like a soft, discretionary expense and a lot more like an operating lever.”

🔗 Links & Resources

• Listen to Logan Yonavjak's Episode

Logan Yonavjak and Erik unpack why leadership “readiness” has been so hard to assess, and how Readiness Engine connects leadership traits like capacity, strategy, and adaptive intelligence to outcomes teams can act on. They discuss why traditional assessments fail (static, self-reported snapshots), the role of shared language, coaching interventions, and how product and category differentiation matters in crowded markets.

👤 About the Guest

Logan Yonavjak is co-founder and CEO of The Readiness Engine. She previously worked in institutional investing across climate and natural capital strategies, and now focuses on leadership intelligence that links measurable readiness variables to business performance. She holds an MBA and MF from Yale and lives in Durham, North Carolina.

🧭 Conversation Highlights

• Why promotions rely on “experience” while readiness needs predictive signals for complexity, pressure, and team scale
• Where common leadership assessments break: static self-reporting, blind spots, no developmental trajectory
• How Readiness Engine frames readiness with leadership axes, themes, and a data-backed variable model (strategy, capacity, execution, and more)
• How readiness results should be communicated as growth and capacity building, not fixed judgments, plus coaching modules and even “get-along” filtering

💡 Key Takeaways

• Experience shows where someone has been, but readiness predicts where they can go.
• Soft skills can be measured when the question is clear and the model is designed to be developmental, not static.
• A shared language reduces bias and makes feedback and promotion conversations more rigorous.
• Leadership readiness can be tied to financial outcomes via leadership team composition and context-specific emphasis.

❓ Questions That Mattered

• When did Logan realize the gap in measuring leadership readiness, beyond resumes and gut feel?
• What assessment approaches fail to predict readiness for bigger, more complex roles?
• How should “readiness” avoid being squishy and instead be translated into teachable, actionable variables?
• How do you balance ideology and methodology when selling a new category of leadership intelligence?

🗣️ Notable Quotes

• “Experience tells you where they’ve been, and readiness tells you where they can go.”
• “Most leadership assessments are static… a snapshot of you that’s self-reported.”
• “These are not final judgments.”
• “In the beginning, you’re selling yourself because you’re selling trust.”

🔗 Links & Resources

• Follow Logan Yonavjak's LinkedIn

Shawn Busse, founder of Kinesis, explains how his studio arts background shaped his approach to innovation, marketing, and business resilience. We connect art and entrepreneurship through ideation, prototyping, and iteration. Then we dig into why “creativity” gets crushed by measurement and attribution, how to lead with kindness and still tell hard truths, and why the next era requires “innovate it out” instead of waiting out disruption.

👤 About the Guest

Shawn Busse is the founder of Kinesis, a Portland-based growth studio that helps businesses compete on creativity instead of conformity. He brings a contrarian perspective grounded in years of working with owner-operators. Originally an artist and educator, he translates maker intuition into business problem-solving, culture, and brand-led growth.

🧭 Conversation Highlights

• How art thinking becomes business thinking: problems to solve, prototyping as sketching, and “business is the hardest art project ever.”
• Why values and mission must be authentic, not poster-deep, and how that authenticity attracts employees, customers, and word-of-mouth.
• The Great Recession pivot: building recession-proof for the last war, then learning disruption is ongoing and must be met with faster innovation.
• Why modern digital marketing feels like a factory: measurement certainty, attribution games, and AI accelerating the content ceiling.

💡 Key Takeaways

• Creativity and innovation depend on cultural permissions: challenge, candid conversations, and rejecting status quo as the default.
• Brand, mission, and values work when they reflect real identity and show up in how decisions get made, not just in what gets marketed.
• Digital marketing optimization can drift into certainty seeking, which reduces creativity and accelerates commoditization.
• To handle disruption, stop relying on the past. Make small bets, kill losers quickly, and create a separate “studio space” for ideas to survive.

❓ Questions That Mattered

• What does an artist mindset change about how entrepreneurs lead, prototype, and iterate?
• How do you separate creativity from “doing good,” and still build a culture that accepts disruption?
• How do you spot whether an organization’s structure can support innovation, based on its org chart?
• What lessons from the Great Recession apply to today’s multi-shock business landscape?

🗣️ Notable Quotes

• Business is the hardest art problem ever.
• Prototyping in business is sketching in art, just different worlds.
• It isn’t wait it out. It’s innovate it out.
• Attribution wants to get it down to one touch point because they can supposedly influence that by throwing more money on it.

Erik and Justin unpack why the “AI wrote it” controversy hit so hard, and what “human-in-the-loop” should realistically mean going forward. They land on traceability, disclosure, and an explicit “human floor” rather than moral panic or blind purism.

🧭 Conversation Highlights

• They separate the question of content quality from the authorship and disclosure expectations behind high-trust publishing.
• Justin argues responsible AI use is fine when the human guides, edits, and owns the intent, but he dislikes copy-paste AI delegation.
• Erik pushes toward a falsifiable standard: traceability and audit logs that prove what human direction happened and when.
• They compare the outrage to other accepted “delegation” norms like editors, ghostwriters, and influencer marketing, and discuss where the line should be.

💡 Key Takeaways

• The real tension is not “AI exists,” it is what level of human involvement we require to consider the work genuinely owned or accountable.
• Copying AI output without meaningful iteration feels different from co-creating, even if both produce polished text.
• A likely path to legitimacy is disclosure plus auditability, similar to version control and chain-of-custody for documents.
• Expect social norms to shift toward standard AI role disclosures, like “human-written” or “AI-written with human editing,” rather than perpetual purity tests.

❓ Questions That Mattered

• What is the minimum acceptable “human floor” for AI-assisted writing, and how do we define it without hand-wavy vibes?
• If society expects disclosure, how much is enough, and how do we make “enough” falsifiable?
• Do market forces alone resolve “AI slop,” or does legitimacy require transparency and accountability mechanisms?
• Why is this controversy so loud when many other editorial and delegation practices already shape what audiences receive?

🗣️ Notable Quotes

• “If you're involved in the process of the creation… you're guiding it, you're talking to it, you're editing it… then there's no issue with that.”
• “Is this another form of censorship? I don't think so. The author is working and using the technology they have.”
• “AI plagiarism… did they actually work back and forth with it?”

🔗 Links & Resources

• Listen To Other Episodes Co-Hosted With Justin

🧠 Erik’s Take

This short review episode stayed with Erik because Vincent holds two truths that usually get treated as opposites. Vincent is relentlessly optimistic about what people can do, while also being blunt about reality. Erik hears that as a philosophy of ambition that refuses entitlement. The episode is not really a victory lap about hustle. It is a conversation about what happens when someone wants big things and then does the unglamorous work of making “possible” less abstract. Erik’s own takeaway is that optimism only becomes durable when it gets tethered to specifics and acceptance.

🎯 Top Insights from the Interview

• “Why not me?” is permission to stop shrinking dreams to match current circumstances, then confront the harder question of what has to change.
• A seemingly unreasonable recovery goal becomes achievable when it is translated into relearned capabilities and repeated practice.
• Vincent’s five realities create grounded optimism: things won’t go as planned, it is a long game, the world does not owe you, people are not focused on you, and life is difficult.

🧩 The Personal Layer

Erik’s mind kept coming back to how often people use “believe in yourself” as a substitute for the work. Vincent’s framing feels different because it demands an honest accounting of reality without collapsing into pessimism. Erik also wrestled with the phrase “people don’t care about you.” His pushback softened into a useful reframe: people are busy with their own story. That realization creates emotional breathing room. It also challenges Erik to be less invested in imaginary juries and more invested in the controllable steps right in front of him.

🧰 From Insight to Action

• Take one goal that feels impossible and rewrite it as: what must be true about my skills, knowledge, habits, and practice for it to happen?
• Replace one vague deadline with a plan of relearnable capabilities, then practice them repeatedly before checking for external results.
• Practice acceptance of difficult realities as a tool for clarity: identify what is fixed, then redirect energy to what is controllable.
• Do a quick “entitlement check” on your ambition: if you want something big, what concrete work will you do that nobody can do for you?

🗣️ Notable Quotes

• Why not me? sounds different from believe in yourself because it forces you to ask what your current situation would have to become.
• His goal wasn’t enough. What mattered was what came next: capabilities, practice, and repetition.
• Life is going to be difficult sometimes. Acceptance isn’t resignation, it is a way to get clear about what you can control.
• You’re not the star in everybody else’s movie. That’s freeing, because most people move on fast.

🔗 Links & Resources

• Listen to Vincent Van der Broeck's Episode

Vincent Van den Broeck, founder of the UID Club and author of Everything Feels Impossible Until It’s Done, shares how hospitality sparked his creative drive, and how a life-threatening accident became a mirror for building resilience, non-negotiables, and daily “doing” instead of waiting for motivation. We explore grit, reframing failure, alignment in health and finances, and why believing “why not me” starts with accountability to yourself.

👤 About the Guest

Vincent Van den Broeck is an entrepreneur and hospitality veteran who built his life around creating and serving. After a near-fatal accident and a prolonged recovery, he transformed his mindset into a mission: help people stop living on autopilot. He’s the founder of UID Club and author of the upcoming book Everything Feels Impossible Until It’s Done, coaching members through practical systems, “

🧭 Conversation Highlights

• Vincent’s origin in hospitality: creativity through never cooking the same thing twice, plus the thrill of multitasking under pressure
• A reframing of “the accident”: it didn’t teach him, it revealed what was already in place and forced decision-making with no plan B
• Turning point: non-negotiables like family time, solved by building systems that make presence possible
• UID Club as a holistic accountability framework (sleep, movement, nutrition, finances, direction, planning, execution) plus community to stay aligned

💡 Key Takeaways

• Set one unreasonable goal and build a plan, then act and iterate through the process
• Create alignment through systems, because if one area slips, the rest tends to slip too
• Stop asking “why me” and start asking “why not me” by telling yourself the truth and doing daily
• The hardest part is not effort, it’s going against the grain when people doubt you or dismiss your dreams

❓ Questions That Mattered

• Where did Vincent’s drive for food and hospitality come from, and why does creative pressure energize him?
• If the accident is not the lesson, what did it cause him to see differently about decisions and resilience?
• How do you responsibly change priorities without declaring them, and what systems make that possible?
• For someone without lived grit, how can they onboard a mindset that feels unreal until it’s done?

🗣️ Notable Quotes

• “Why not me? … Instead of why me, why not me.”
• “The accident in itself didn’t teach me anything. It reminded me though of everything.”
• “There’s no plan B. … That’s why survival was literally the bare minimum.”
• “Not being where you wanna be right now is never failure, but not working towards where you wanna be today is always failure.”

🔗 Links & Resources

• Follow Vincent Van den Broeck's LinkedIn
• Pre-order Vincent's Book, releasing October 11th
• Follow Vincent on Instagram
• Check out the UID Club's Website: www.theuidclub.com