We are two women - Gretchen Rodriguez and Trish Burgess - with deep experience in building, launching and growing digital products, specially in the eCommerce, FinTech and digital identity spaces.
If you are interested in creating digital experiences that will benefit the person using them, building communities, the creator and gig economies, Web3, blockchain, AI or how diversity enriches products - this podcast is for you.
Of course, if we find people or companies or technologies outside of these areas that are creating waves, and that we find intriguing, we will also tackle those!
We are immensely curious, and the best way that works for us to learn, to connect the dots, and have new ideas, is by connecting with others. This is already a big part of what we do, so with this podcast, we are just trying to bring this to a more public forum, so that others can come along in our journey.
This is also the origin of the name of the podcast. Ikigai roughly means ‘the thing that you live for’ or ‘the reason you get up in the morning’. A big part of what gets us up in the morning is making those human connections, to collaborate, to build together. Really, to be curious together. This is ‘Ikigai Curious’.
Our plan is to have conversations with friends and acquaintances about topics that they, and us, are passionate about. Maybe it is about the company they founded, a major industry trend that is disrupting their business, their design philosophy, or their personal journey. Our goal is for you, and us, to learn while having fun, and to deepen our connections.
We aim to release a podcast every two weeks, with each episode lasting around 30 minutes - the time of a short walk, or the commute to work. We hope the content will make you think, and sometimes laugh, but it will be easy enough to let you multitask. We are new at this, we are trying out different types of software, different ways of recording, even different ways of leading the conversations… We expect to get better at this over time.
Something interesting that you will quickly notice about this podcast series is that some of the episodes will be in English, and some will be in Spanish. We are lucky enough to be fluent in both languages, and want to be a bridge between both worlds. Having said this, we would like for everybody to enjoy any episode that they might find interesting, so we are looking into ways to create and post the translation of the episodes. We will not have this available from day 1, but we are working on it.
Now that you know that we are launching a podcast because we want to bring people along as we connect and learn from interesting humans, you may be wondering: But who are Gretchen and Trish? Good question!
We met in February of 2020, at an internal event that Gretchen had organized at the company where we both worked. I made some annoying comments to Gretchen during the conference, so we did not keep in touch after, but a year later we were thrown together into the same team.
Somehow, we overcame that rough beginning, and became really close collaborators and friends. A friendship that endured through career changes, geographical moves, personal challenges… We have been looking to do something together for quite a while, and have discussed many different options and alternatives. Ikigai Partners is the outcome of all of that evolution, and Ikigai Curious, this podcast, is a part of it.
Ikigai Partners intends to build a community of curious people that want to connect and create opportunities together. We intend to do this by sharing interesting content via this podcast and blogs posts, and also organizing online and in-person events where we get the chance to connect directly with each other, and in a very organic, but tangible way we collaborate and help each other move ahead with our plans and and projects. We will keep our website updated to share all the different things that we are thinking and doing.
https://www.ikigaipartner.com
