Keep Going

This week on Keep Going I talked with Nelly Mendoza, the founder of Nelly Creative Studios. She has been making jewelry for about ten years, and her story is not a clean startup arc. It starts with her walking into a class in the basement of her college art center, kind of by accident, and finding the one thing she kept coming back to, even while she was majoring in economics.

The part that stuck with me was how practical she is about an “impractical” career. She did not raise outside money. She took a few fellowships, one was about $5,000 after graduation, and used it to buy materials, mainly gold, and get herself set up. After that, she kept the loop tight, money from projects went back into materials and equipment. There is no magic here. It is repetition, reinvestment, and staying alive long enough to get better.

She also talked about the part people skip when they say “follow your passion.” In a creative business there is no set path. There is no job ladder. It is trial and error, and it can be lonely. She described those stretches where sales slow down and you start asking if you should turn around and do something safer. She had those moments. She also knew that if she took the safe route too early, she might never leave it. So she learned to measure progress in small wins, one new client, one new piece, one new idea, and keep moving.

On the growth side, she did the work that actually gets attention. She built a consistent online presence, wrote blogs, kept a “jewelry journal,” and made her brand for both men and women, not just women. She leaned on word of mouth because jewelry is visual, people see it, ask about it, and that conversation sells better than an ad. Then she added something a lot of online brands miss, physical experiences. Last year she rented a gallery, invited people she trusted, and let them handle the pieces in person. No storefront, so she created the moment herself. She is planning another pop-up, and she is careful about safety and about building a real community around the work.

One more choice mattered. She took a job at Tiffany, in their innovation studio, for four years. Not to quit her business, but to buy time and learn. She called it a kind of second degree. It gave her skills, contacts, and more confidence in how the industry works. Then she left when she felt the job was taking too much time away from the thing she wanted to own. That is a hard call, and she made it without pretending it was romantic. It was about control and focus.

Her economics degree shows up in how she thinks about pricing and tradeoffs. She does not price from feelings. She prices from materials, opportunity cost, and the reality that gold has gotten expensive enough that old prices do not work anymore. She is now thinking about entry-level pieces for younger followers, using different materials, without turning the work into disposable trend-chasing.

If you want the lesson from this episode, it is this. Making your own way is slow and it is messy. You do not need a dramatic leap. You need enough runway to learn, enough discipline to reinvest, and enough patience to stick with the lonely parts. Allie built her business the old-fashioned way, one piece at a time, one customer at a time, and one decision at a time. That is still how it works.

Transcript:

Welcome back to Keep Going, podcast about success and failure. I’m John Biggs. The other show we have Nelly Mendoza. She’s the founder of Nelly Creative Studios, your jewelry maker. Nelly, welcome. Yeah, so you’ve been doing this for 10 years. I think you’re the first person I’ve talked to who is actually making jewelry or some kind of like

Nelly (00:58.162)

Thank you.

Nelly (01:02.184)

I have closed ears now, yep.

John Biggs (01:09.728)

or accessories, etc. So this is a this is a new one for me. So why don’t you just tell me about the business and how you started.

Nelly (01:15.45)

Yeah, so I started in college kind of by accident. Just enjoyed making jewelry, just walked in into a class one day into like the basement of the art center and then started making jewelry that way. And then I was an econ major, kind of went back and forth in terms of careers, but the one consistent thing was always jewelry. And then once it was time to pick a career, you know, last...

last semester or last quarter of school, I decided to try jewelry. I got, yeah, so I started that way. At first, I wasn’t sure what it would look like and how the future would pan out. But as time continued, I kind of figured things out a little bit more.

John Biggs (02:04.536)

So what was the driving force behind this decision? I mean, you had an economics degree and making jewelry is, I suspect, fairly difficult thing because it’s fashion-based and I can’t imagine that it’s cheap to get started.

Nelly (02:23.694)

No, it’s not cheap for sure. You have to be creative in terms of, know, I never got any external funding just because I know what that means. It’s like giving up control of who you are and the type of work you’re working on. So the only funding I got was a few fellowships. Like post-graduation, I got like $5,000 to just buy materials. So I just bought gold and a few other things. And then I was

kind of set up in terms of a studio space. I used the space in the college for a bit. And then that was my first kind of funding. And then after that, I continued to self-fund whatever projects I would get, I would just kind of put back into my work. So I would just go back into buying gold or materials or equipment.

John Biggs (03:14.926)

So tell me about the process. How do you start a jewelry business? What were some of the things that you faced?

Nelly (03:24.04)

The reason I started was because there was really nothing else that I wanted to do. No, you know, it’s, difficult at first. You’re like, okay, I want to do this career, but how do you do it? It’s not as easy as, okay, I want to work in investment banking. Let me apply for different roles. And then I’ll go through these application process, you know, application rounds and interview rounds. It’s more of, okay, you want to do this. You have a goal, but how do you get there? It’s not.

Like someone has done that already and laid a path for you. So it’s a lot of trial and error in terms of how do you get to where you want to be right from you. It was always having control of my own work, being independent and just making beautiful things and having people buy by them as well. Right.

John Biggs (04:12.794)

Mm-hmm. How do you get attention as an artist in that way? mean, obviously, you need to build a fan base. You need to build folks that are repeat customers. But you also have to capture people who are just going to come off the street and say, hey, I like this. What did you do to get started?

Nelly (04:31.558)

Yeah, so I definitely made sure I had a strong presence online. So all of my socials and whatever I was putting out very consistent. So I would always write blogs and I have a jewelry journal just based on, okay, like this is, you know, what the trends are happening for men. And, you know, and I always focused on having serving both men and women as opposed to just doing jewelry for women.

and just having that consistent product, right? So I started my first clients where people I went to school with and then just kind of started telling their friends. And fortunately, jewelry is a very visual product. you know, people see it on you and they’re like, I like it, it’s easy to sell in that way. So you always, you know, I have the work that I wear, but I also, the best people,

Are my best clients or those who wear it and kind of tell their friends? So it’s a lot of word of mouth. And then how do you get it to the wider public? Last year I had my first show. So I rented out a gallery and I just invited friends, friends of friends and, and so on. And a few people who walked in, but it was a closed event, private, just kind of getting, you know, it’s like, people have kind of known me for a bit, but don’t really know who I am and letting them interact with my.

product, especially since I don’t have a store or anything like that. Just having the physical aspect has also helped. So that’s kind of like the next phase of my business, just continuing those pop-up ideas. So I have one planned for this year, for example, somewhere in SoHo again, and just letting people interact with the product. And this will be for a bigger client base. First one was mostly for people already knew.

Obviously you’re dealing with jewelry. You don’t want just anyone walking in. I want people to feel safe when they’re in there as opposed to someone randomly walking in and being a safety thing. So I’m always careful about who I invite and making sure they’re interested just to create, because I’m not just making jewelry or selling jewelry. I also want a good community of people who enjoy my work or who enjoy the arts.

Nelly (06:54.648)

and as opposed to just, you know, it’s just something I sell.

John Biggs (07:00.206)

Was there ever a moment when you said, I should probably get back into investment banking?

Nelly (07:05.339)

that’s very interesting. would say, yes, definitely a few moments where you’re just like, okay, like I’m not selling as much jewelry. just, you know, the creative, the creative career is so interesting because it’s very lonely. You go through these moments where you’re just walking a path and you’re like, this is the right path. Or is it time for me to turn around? I would say once I was past those dark moments of doubt,

I was like, all right, I just have to keep going and things, you know, you have to build slowly. And for me, like the reason I didn’t go until one of those traditional careers starting off is because I knew I would get trapped in that safety net very early on. And it’s once you’re in that, it’s so difficult to leave. So at least for me, it’s like, all right, I had to celebrate the small wins. All right. I have a new client. have a new project, a new idea. I just have to like, put all my focus on there. So.

for very brief amount of time, but I think for me, I just knew this is kind of what I had to do. And if I didn’t do it at a younger age, as opposed to waiting, things just get more difficult. And for jewelry, you kind of have to have mentors and you have to just kind of out in the field and explore and figure things out.

John Biggs (08:28.952)

Did you feel you were able to do it because you did have that backup of an economics degree? I mean, this is like the age-old question, right? Do you go to school for something practical and then do your art on the side, or do you kind of fall in completely? What was your thinking when you were in that position?

Nelly (08:51.56)

You know, having an economics degree definitely made me more confident in terms of, all right, this is how you manage money a little bit more. I think as an artist, like before college for me, I had no idea how money worked. No idea about the stock market, you know, like the value of money, the opportunity cost of something, right? Like if you do X as opposed to Y, what happens? So it definitely taught me to think in a very analytical way.

you know, yes, do I regret sometimes not going into straight up just art, you know, an art degree occasionally, but then I look back at the big picture and it’s like, no, it’s better that I have both the analytical and the artistic because then I can look at something and figure out what it should be priced at as opposed to just the emotional side of, it’s just beautiful.

So yes, it’s an interesting question you ask, like which one came, you know, it’s like, what do you do, right? I don’t think I even thought an arts degree was gonna be something that would help me just when I was in school, but looking back at it, I think I would have been fine either way, but definitely the economics gave me a lot of confidence to just go into my career with full faith, if that makes sense.

If everything failed, I would have that. Sorry, that’s my dog right there. Yeah, I would have, you know, I would have something to fall back on. Yeah, I don’t know if I did a good job answering your question, but.

John Biggs (10:24.352)

Hahaha

John Biggs (10:30.478)

interesting.

No, think that’s, I mean, look, I think you’re honest about it. I think a lot of people would say that, no, I burned my bridges, I burned the boats, and I just decided I’m not going back. I’m not even going to follow the idea of becoming not an artist.

Nelly (10:46.308)

Yeah, yeah, I mean, that’s, that’s interesting. Yeah, for me, I just knew that it’s a time sensitive thing. I think in college, you have the benefit of, you know, you’re still a student and people are like, okay, like, what do you want to do with your life? And you’re almost allowed to play a little bit more, as opposed to what I see now with

A lot of my friends are just like very fixed in their career, very serious career and so on. Here, let me just take care of my... He’s... I think he just... He’s not used to seeing me on calls. All right, let me just give him a little treat.

John Biggs (11:18.606)

Yeah, sounds like somebody wants out of the hole.

Nelly (11:33.244)

or this early on, here, sit. All right. He’s a little shiba, so he’s very demanding of attention. He’s very much like, give me attention. He’s like a little baby. Yeah, I think for me, just knowing that very early on that I had that room to just play and if you fail, it’s not gonna be like, you have a mortgage, you have kids, and what are you doing with your life?

John Biggs (11:41.453)

Hmm.

Nelly (12:04.156)

So that’s what I mean by time sensitive.

John Biggs (12:07.018)

What would you say to someone who’s starting out in this industry?

Nelly (12:11.752)

to be patient. And you you can’t just, you can’t wait for things to just come to you. You just have to kind of go for it and get it. You know, like for me, it’s just, whenever I had moments of darkness and just being like, all right, what am I doing? Just, okay, it’s like, you know, you have the talent, you have the skill, and you can’t think about what you don’t have. You really have to think about, okay, what are the things that I can offer?

Because for me, was like, you know, totally self-funded, like buying materials, gold, everything, just kind of figuring that out. You know, I can be complaining of, I don’t have this or that, but it’s just, it’s, you know, to be in a creative career, it means figuring it out with whatever resources you have, if you really want to make it work.

John Biggs (13:01.358)

I mean, if you really want to make it work, does it mean to really want to make it work? Again, is it a burning your boats kind of situation? You wanted this. I think what I’m trying to say is when you told the story, the beginning of the story, you almost fell into the thing. You went down to the basement. You did some work in the student art lab or whatever.

Nelly (13:26.81)

Yeah, the Hopkins Center up in New Hampshire at Dartmouth. So it’s just like very random, right? Like completely random. And then here we are today. Yeah, so really making it work because here’s the thing, you can definitely make a living doing things that are easier. You know, you can go and again, traditional career and not worry about, you know, when is your next, you know, big project? Is something going to be done right?

John Biggs (13:32.311)

Mm-hmm.

John Biggs (13:35.949)

Yeah.

Nelly (13:56.956)

You know, like if you have a big client, how are you going to make sure, you know, like to follow through with them to deliver like the best product that you can. And it’s a lot of back and forth. And I would say for other stuff, it’s like, all right, you do your task and you go home. You know, there’s no such thing as like, I need to follow up with my client. need to follow up with my, my stone setter. I need to follow up with this other person. It’s just so many different links.

that I have to work with on a daily basis as opposed to just, I’m gonna just finish whatever I’m told and do that. And I spent a few years at Tiffany, actually my last day was just last year. And part of the reason I was working there in their innovation studio. So again, making it work at a point where I was like, all right, I have this job offer.

John Biggs (14:52.834)

Mm-hmm.

Nelly (14:56.496)

and I’m gonna have some time to just kind of keep figuring things out. And this was two years out of school. And I was like, okay, this sounds amazing. I can learn a lot. And I took that job, it’s like the financial security was great, but also I knew I had to go into the world and learn a little bit more just so I had more experience and again, more confidence. I think it’s all about building that.

creative confidence too.

John Biggs (15:27.662)

So you basically took, yeah, you took a gig to work with Tiffany to just, but that was to expand your line, right? Just to have your experience.

Nelly (15:34.94)

Yeah, expand my line, expand my work, my experience. I spent four years there, but towards the end, was like, you know, it’s time again to go back into my business full time. I’m not dedicating as much time into it as I would like. And for me, it’s just, again, having that, you know, authority of this is the work I want to be working on and these are the projects I want to be doing. I think that’s what really drives me.

John Biggs (16:04.502)

No, so this is, I’m looking at the, I’m looking at the site now, nellycreativestudios.com. So it’s a little rich for my blood, but I’m a watch guy. I’d spend a lot on it.

Nelly (16:08.912)

Yeah.

Nelly (16:13.704)

I know I, yeah, I mean, it’s all, you know, with the price of materials nowadays, it’s, it’s incredible how much jewelry has like, appreciate it. You know, I had some stuff on there that, you know, now I can’t even keep those old prices because it would just be more in the gold. So it’s yeah, it’s definitely appreciated. And then, you know, that affects everything because again,

John Biggs (16:21.784)

Mm-hmm.

John Biggs (16:36.174)

Wow.

Nelly (16:42.93)

figuring out like, okay, still want to offer. So actually that’s something that I’m working on now, just offering more affordable work as an entry point for people. Because I have a lot of younger followers who don’t necessarily have the budget to afford a solid gold or a solid platinum bracelet. So are offering alternating materials that haven’t been as popular.

aren’t as popular yet and you’re kind of the first mover that makes sense making it popular and offering something different. I think, yeah.

John Biggs (17:23.064)

What do you want to say to somebody who is just discovering your work? Why should they pick up one of your pieces versus somebody else’s? I don’t know, go down to Tiffany, right?

Nelly (17:34.286)

is it’s always going to go out or go up in value in terms of, know, it’s like as I’ve gotten, you know, more experience and exposure, my work has only gained popularity. So something I see a lot now is a lot of, you know, brands who just kind of make stuff trendy. And they’re like, all right, this is trendy for now. It’s kind of following a similar path of like that, like fashion. And I hate to say this, but fast fashion in a way.

of like make something that’s trendy and then it’s not going to hold that beauty or value in the long term. So for me, it’s like making stuff that you can have and be proud of for 20 years, know, 20 years from now, like something you can give to your kids or your grandkids. and with Tiffany, you know, it’s their stuff is, you know, their bread and butter. You have the designs very consistent. but you can get that any, any other time, right? It’s not something that you can only get.

once in a lifetime. for a lot of my clients, do, especially when I do like a one of one piece, it’s something that they treasure and they keep and they wear almost like a piece of artwork that they’re wearing. Yeah.

John Biggs (18:48.494)

All right, so we’re going to send folks over to Nelly Creative Studio. Everybody’s going to buy all your jewelry, and you’re going have to make some more. So that might be a nice problem to have.

Nelly (18:57.562)

Yes. Yeah, exactly. And you know, the nice thing, you know, about having that Tiffany experience now, I just have so many people on my court in terms of the skills they offer, you know, and I didn’t have that before, like coming from a liberal art school, you don’t really have those connections. So I would say like spending those few years at Tiffany is almost like my second degree. And you were talking about an art degree, like I would consider that

John Biggs (19:16.556)

Mm-hmm.

Nelly (19:27.016)

kind of like my art degree in a way.

John Biggs (19:28.686)

All right, very cool. Well, Nelly, Nelly Mendoza, Nelly Creative Studios, go check it out. And tell us, I guess, tell us what they especially like. I like the angel pendant. Yeah, I like that. It’s like degraded, of, which is pretty cool.

Nelly (19:32.765)

Thank you.

Nelly (19:42.053)

the angel. Yes, those are. Yes.

Nelly (19:48.206)

Yeah, just for my show, I had a few different pendants with again with granulation with the 22 karat. And it was based on the gods. The theme of my show is Ambrosia, who are the gods. So I had, you know, those up pendants. It’s Aphrodite and then Apollo and then Hermes and then a few other gods. But those are always fun to me.

John Biggs (19:59.085)

Mm-hmm.

John Biggs (20:03.48)

Sure.

Nelly (20:16.2)

Those do very well for men as well.

John Biggs (20:19.116)

Mm-hmm. Yeah, I should become a jewelry guy. I never became a jewelry guy.

Nelly (20:21.946)

Yeah, yeah, I mean the path, you know, the line between like watches are jewelry for men. And, you know, hopefully in the next few years, I’ll get to design more watches. That’s definitely a goal of mine. So yeah, one of one would be would be really fun.

John Biggs (20:28.663)

Mm-hmm.

John Biggs (20:38.936)

right, very cool.

John Biggs (20:44.238)

All right, well thank you for joining us. I this has been fascinating.

Nelly (20:46.684)

Thank you. Hopefully I answered all your questions. Thank you.

John Biggs (20:48.844)

No, I think you did. This has been Keep Going. I’m John Biggs. We’ll see you next week.

Nelly (20:56.38)

Thank you.

This week on Keep Going, I sat down with Karl Alomar, Managing Partner at M13, and former COO of DigitalOcean.

Carl’s career, when you say it fast, sounds like a highlight reel. He came to the US from England with an engineering background, started his first company in California in the late 90s, sold it in 2000, got an MBA at Columbia, built a global fintech business to real revenue and exited in 2010, then joined DigitalOcean and helped take it from early product days to IPO. Now he invests at M13.

I pushed him on the part people skip, the moment where it almost breaks.

He told a story from his first company that still makes my stomach drop. They were raising a big round for the time, about $20 million. Closing day. Fire alarm. Everyone in the parking lot. He gets a call on a brick of a phone. The lead investor tells him the bottom just fell out, they cannot close, they do not know if they ever will. That is not a small problem. That is the whole floor giving way.

Carl had to make choices fast. Cut the team in half. Slash spend. Decide whether to try to patch the round together without a lead, which is close to impossible when the mood turns. He had been approached by potential buyers earlier, and in a hot market those talks feel optional, almost annoying. In a cold market, those talks are the only door that still opens. He took the door. In about two months they got an exit. Not the dream outcome, but a real outcome. People got returns, everyone lived to fight again.

What stuck with him was not the deal mechanics. It was the loneliness.

He said he had no deep bench. No real board support, no real advisor bench, no system around him when the air went out of the room. He was young, the pressure was on him, and he felt like an island. His lesson was blunt. Never go into battle without an army. In plain terms, build a support network before you need it. Investors, board members, mentors, peers, people who can tell you the truth, and keep you steady enough to make good calls.

I asked him what that looks like in real life. He was clear that it is not some magic fix. For him it is not a yogi. It is the people you choose to take money from, the board you build, the mentors you keep close, the peers you can call when you are scared and tired and tempted to lie to yourself. He also noted that the culture has changed. Coaching is normal now. Mental health is talked about more openly. In the late 90s, money was just money, and nobody asked what came with it.

Then we moved into the question sitting in the room with all of us right now. AI. Are we headed for another crash, another 2000.

Carl pushed back on the timing in a way I found useful. He thinks we are closer to 1996 or 1997 than 2000. Early. The “killer” product is not fully settled. He used the browser era as a frame. People thought browsing was the point, but search was the point, and Google won by solving that. His take is that AI still has not found its final shape, not in a way that locks the category down. We have chat tools and model access, but the big lasting system, the one that makes the next giants, is still coming into view.

He also pointed out something practical that founders feel every day. Building in AI is still expensive and hard. The tools and the cost curve have not flattened the way cloud did for web builders. If cloud made it cheap to ship software, what makes it cheap to ship AI. Better access to compute, better tools around data and GPUs, better infra. He is excited about the boring part, the picks and shovels that let more people build.

I asked the other side of it, the part people whisper about. If you are a regular worker and a wave is coming, what do you do. Carl did not pretend he could map the next 20 years. But he did say the labor market shifts, it does not just vanish. Some work gets automated, other work shows up, and the shift is not overnight. He brought up the growth of gig work, the rise of people building independent lives outside big firms, and the simple fact that lots more people now want to build things than they did decades ago. He sees that trend getting stronger as tools get better.

He is not an AI cynic. He thinks cynicism is a way to lose twice, first by missing what is real, then by refusing to adapt. He is optimistic, but he keeps a realist’s eye on the losers that come with any big wave.

As we wrapped, I asked what he looks for when he sees the fiftieth “Fitbit for dogs.” He laughed, because he has seen it. His answer was old school. He starts with the founder. Can he work with this person for years. Do they have vision, and can they explain it. Can they hire. Can they raise. Can they steer when the first plan fails. He brought up Slack’s origin story, a good reminder that a strong founder can turn a weak start into a real company.

That is the episode in a line. Big waves come, and they always feel obvious after. In the moment, they are confusing, loud, and full of bad copies. The way through is still the same. Keep your head. Build your people around you. Make choices you can defend in the morning.

Some talks stick under your skin. This one did.

On this week’s Keep Going I sat down with Mechele Dickerson, a law professor at the University of Texas at Austin School of Law. Her new book is called “The Middle Class New Deal: Restoring Upward Mobility in the American Dream.” It comes out in January 2026.

I picked up the pitch because I have the same nagging feeling everyone else has. The middle class we grew up hearing about feels thin now. Like an old photograph in a cracked frame.

Mechele has spent more than a decade trying to write this book. That part alone makes her a good guest for a show about success and failure.

She started years ago with a book on homeownership. While she worked on that, she kept seeing a larger pattern. Families were not just locked out of houses. They were locked out of everything we used to connect with a stable life. She saw people who made a decent wage yet could not do basic “middle class” things without strain.

So she built a bigger project. She sold the first version of the book to a press. The idea was clear. It is harder than ever for lower and middle income people to become and stay middle class. It is even harder if you are not white. Then the world started shifting under her feet.

The 2016 election hit. Commentators suddenly cared about “middle class anger” and “anxiety.” She did not buy the story as it was told, but she knew she had to respond to it. So she rewrote the book to fit that moment.

Then 2020 arrived. A pandemic tore through the same families she had been studying. You cannot write about money, housing, and work in this country and ignore those years. She rewrote again. That second rewrite blew up. Reviewers tore it apart. The publisher walked away. A decade of work, gone in one email.

This is the point where many people quietly give up. Mechele did something different. She took the hit, walked away for a season, enjoyed Thanksgiving and Christmas, then came back and started from page one. A third draft. New press. New title. Same core idea.

That alone is a lesson. Sometimes the work is right and the timing is wrong. Sometimes you are right and the gatekeeper is wrong. You rest. You come back. You keep going.

The rest of the talk dug into what “middle class” even means. Mechele uses a simple income band, roughly seventy five to one hundred thirty thousand dollars a year. She picked it for a practical reason. It is the range many universities use when they hand out tuition breaks to families they see as “middle income.” It also adjusts over time, which matters.

She is quick to note that income does not land the same in each place. That money looks one way in Abilene, Texas, and another in Austin. Still, the markers are familiar. A home you can afford. A job with health care and some sort of retirement plan. The ability to send your kids to college without wrecking your own future. Maybe a bit put aside for shocks.

Her bluntest point is simple. We did not arrive here by magic. The old middle class was built by policy. The GI Bill sent people like my dad to college. New mortgage rules turned owning a house from a rich person’s trick into something workers could reach. Employers built health and pension plans when they could not raise wages during the war.

We treat those pieces as background now. They are not. They were choices. They could be made again in new forms.

Instead, college costs have climbed far faster than inflation since the eighties. Need blind admission is fading. “Merit” scholarships tilt money toward kids from richer families who look good on paper. Employers use a bachelor’s degree as a filter, so a diploma has become a ticket to even knock on the door.

On housing, the ladder keeps moving up. The average age for first time homebuyers is rising. People float the idea of fifty year mortgages, which Mechele, quite correctly, calls “rent” with different branding. If you buy at forty and pay for fifty years, do the math.

She walked through how zoning locks people out. Large minimum lot sizes. Rules that make it hard to put up multifamily units. Homeowners’ associations that wrap it all in “protecting values” while making sure cheaper units never appear. At city level, at state level, we have built a system that slowly pushes normal families away from the places where opportunity sits.

I pushed the conversation toward entrepreneurship, because the show often goes there. For a lot of kids, the fantasy now is that a startup will be their scratch off. You cannot count on a steady wage to get the markers. So you dream of building the next app, or site, or whatever, to leap straight over the grind.

She agreed with the feeling, but brought it back to ground. Starting a business takes capital. Capital comes from family wealth, or from a house you can borrow against, or from a system that lends to people with no cushion. If your parents do not have money and you do not own a home, you are playing with thinner odds. That does not mean you should never try. It does mean we should be honest about the risk.

Near the end I told a story about my own family. My grandparents in Ohio, steel town on the edge of West Virginia. They had a house. They had food on the table. My cousins had pools, big televisions, a couple of cars in the drive. All on a worker’s paycheck or a small business. Nothing lavish. Just steady.

Standing in modern Chicago or New York, you do not feel that world anymore. The core feels like a stage set for the very rich. Everyone else services it from the outside.

So I asked the question out loud. Can we go back. Or is that period gone for good.

Her answer was measured. We cannot rewind time. But we can recognize that the old middle class was a choice. It came from rules and programs that treated stability as a public goal. We can make new choices. Tighter rules around predatory loans. Better ways to fund college so a degree is not a lifetime chain. Zoning that lets builders put up real housing, not just luxury towers and big lots.

None of this is easy. None of it fits on a bumper sticker. It is easier to bark about culture than to rework tax codes or housing law. That is why very little changes. But the path is not mysterious. We have done it before.

As we wrapped, she circled back to why she kept going with the book. She is not writing for one side. She wants people in both parties to see that a strong middle class is not just a feel good phrase. It is the base of a stable country. It is who buys the toaster ovens, the cars, the fridges. It is who keeps the lights on in the real economy.

For me, this conversation lit up a vague anger I have carried since walking those polished streets in big cities. The feeling that something is off, that the store window that used to be for everyone is now for a tiny slice at the top. Mechele’s work gives that feeling names and numbers and a path forward.

Her book is “The Middle Class New Deal: Restoring Upward Mobility in the American Dream.” It lands in January 2026. When it does, I think it will give a lot of people language for what they see and cannot quite explain.

In the meantime, the lesson is simple and personal. If she can drag a book through three full rewrites, one public rejection, and a changing world, the rest of us can take one more swing at whatever hard thing is sitting on our desk.

Most people meet plant cell culture in the grocery store without knowing it. You see it in the perfect row of blueberries, the identical bananas, the white orchids that look the same every single year. You do not see the lab bench and the flask behind them.

On The Innovators, I talked with Yoni Kalin, CEO of Plant Cell Technology, about the quiet infrastructure under all of that. His company has been working in plant tissue culture since 1993. What started as a small family business selling “pet plants” in jars has grown into a Utah based factory, a catalog of more than 500 products, and a bridge between plants, animal cells, fungi, and the people who work with them.

At the core, Plant Cell Technology makes the media and tools that keep cells alive and dividing. In the plant world that means the gel or liquid that feeds tiny cuttings, the nutrients that turn one node into a full clone. In the animal world that means the formulas that keep mammalian cells healthy in dishes and flasks. You can think of them as the food and basic kit that every lab needs before any vaccine or seedling can exist.

For the first thirty years they stayed in the plant lane. Last year they bought a manufacturing facility and stepped into mammalian cell culture. Now they blend media for human, animal, and insect cells as well. That move puts them inside the engine room of pharma and biotech, where the same cell lines are used for decades to test drugs and make biologic medicines.

Yoni gave a simple example. CHO cells, Chinese hamster ovary cells, have been in use since the middle of the last century. The original cells came from one animal. That line has been split and expanded for more than eighty years. Those cells are a standard test bed. If you want to grow a protein drug or check how something behaves, you feed those cells and watch. That kind of work used to mean a lot of live animal testing. The more you can do in culture, the less you have to do in a whole animal.

Plant cell culture is less visible but just as important. Instead of planting a seed and accepting whatever mix of traits comes back, growers take a cutting from a known plant, usually a meristem or small node, and regrow it in sterile media. The result is an exact clone of the parent. Every plant you make that way has the same genetics and the same performance.

If you are a berry grower, that consistency matters. It is the reason the box of blueberries you pick up in January tastes like the one you bought in July. If you are a greenhouse operator selling fancy houseplants, it means you can produce a thousand copies of the one pink variegated plant everyone wants instead of hoping more seeds turn out the same way. In orchards, forests, and replanting projects, it means you can fill a hillside with trees that all have the traits you need for that climate.

It is also the reason you can walk into a store like Trader Joe’s or Home Depot and see the same orchid color and shape every year. Orchid seeds are rough to work with. Cloning them in tissue culture lets growers keep exact copies of the best lines in circulation.

Plant Cell Technology sits in that supply chain as a “picks and shovels” vendor, to borrow Yoni’s phrase. They do not sell the fruit or the orchids. They sell the media, the bioreactors, the lab gear, and the training that lets growers and researchers do the work.

That education piece is important and it is where things get interesting outside the pure lab. Until a few years ago, if you wanted to learn plant tissue culture, you went to a university or a big corporate lab. You paid tuition or you got hired. Everyone else was on the outside.

Around 2020, while people were learning to bake sourdough and dance on short videos, Plant Cell Technology started posting long form instructional content. They now have hundreds of free videos that cover the basics, from aseptic technique to plant physiology to step by step protocols for setting up a small lab. On top of that they run in person and online master classes that focus on practical scale, not just textbook purity. Their goal is to teach you how to produce ten million banana plants, not just how to pass a midterm.

That effort has pulled in a new crowd, hobbyists and small entrepreneurs who want to clone rare plants at home. Anyone who has wandered into a trendy plant shop and seen a single cutting selling for forty or fifty dollars knows the appeal. With basic gear, a clean space, and the right media, you can take a small piece of that plant and grow hundreds of copies. That can feed a side business or just fill your home with green.

The same idea applies to fungi. Mycology is booming, and tissue culture is a good way to preserve and expand mycelium strains. It is easier in some ways, since many fungal media formulas are simple, often just agar and sugar. Yoni sees that as a gateway for people who might later move into more complex plant or mammalian work.

Behind the scenes, the company is pushing on automation. Tissue culture has been labor heavy for decades. A tech sits at a clean bench, cuts, transfers, seals jars, and repeats. That is slow and expensive.

Plant Cell Technology’s answer is a low cost bioreactor they call the BioCoupler, paired with an automated system called BioTilt. Instead of growing plantlets on gel in jars, they suspend plant cells or tiny explants in liquid and cycle them through soaking and draining. Soak, let them breathe, soak again. That simple rhythm gives the plant material full contact with nutrients, then air, which speeds up growth. Yoni says they see multiplication rates many times higher than on static gel media.

The cost drops too. Gel agents like agar and gellan gum are not cheap. A single kilogram can run close to a couple hundred dollars. A liquid system needs less of that. The BioTilt handles timing and immersion automatically. Sensors and software can watch the process, adjust schedules, and log data in a way a human tech with a clipboard cannot match.

The vision is clear. Larger labs and commercial houses will bring in robotics that can cut and move plant material. Bioreactors will handle the growth phase. AI systems will watch sensors, track contamination, and refine conditions. That kind of setup already exists at the very high end. Yoni wants to drag it into the middle of the market and make it less exotic.

When I asked him if this was the future of agriculture, he pushed back a bit. This is the present, he said. Seeds are not going away. Fields and barns are not going away. What he sees coming is a stack. At the bottom, a tissue culture lab where farmers keep their own genetics and do their own breeding. Above that, nursery space. Above that, growing and harvest.

Vertical farming has been a buzzword for a while. Tissue culture gives it teeth. You can stack genetics in a small lab that would need vast acreage outside. You can build local food systems that rely less on long chains of seed companies and middlemen. You can give farmers some control over the varieties they plant, instead of locking them into sterile seed contracts that keep them dependent.

Plant Cell Technology has moved a long way from a single “pet plant” in a jar. Under Yoni’s leadership, the company has turned into a small ecosystem, part manufacturer, part educator, part guide into a field that is usually hidden behind white coats and controlled access doors.

If you are a researcher who needs media, a grower who wants to scale, or a curious person who just wants to clone a favorite houseplant instead of buying three more, their site at plantcelltechnology.com is a place to start. The tools that shape our food and forests are no longer reserved for the biggest labs. They are slowly moving into reach, one flask at a time.

I am writing this with an Audigo mic sitting next to a hulking broadcast preamp on my desk. The old rig is a nest of cables and knobs. The Audigo is a small square that looks like it fell out of the future and landed in my hand. That contrast is the whole story.

On this episode of Keep Going I talked with Armen Nazarian, founder and CEO of Audigo. He is a drummer who took a long detour through engineering and Tesla before circling back to sound. His company makes a small wireless mic and app that lets musicians record real multitrack audio straight to their phones without feeling like they are engineering a studio every time they press record.

If you grew up on tape decks and four tracks, the promise of the phone era was simple. Recording would get easier. Sharing would get easier. What Armen found when he came back to music was that a lot of the gear companies had not moved very far. The boxes looked nicer, the apps were shinier, but the basic problem was the same. If you were a musician and you wanted decent sound, you needed a pile of equipment and spare hours to set it up.

At Tesla, his job was to sit in the middle of hardware and software and make them feel like one thing. He saw what happens when one team owns the whole stack. The car feels simple even when the system under it is anything but. That experience ruined him for lazy product work. When he picked up a drumstick again and tried to record, he could not stop thinking about the gap. We have supercomputers in our pockets and yet most people still sound like they are playing in the bottom of a well.

So he did the mad thing. He walked away from a great job at one of the most famous companies on earth and started a tiny hardware company in 2020, which is about as bad as a calendar can get for that move. Chip shortages. Travel bans. Factories with shutdowns you could not predict. Parts with twelve week lead times suddenly slipping to sixty five.

Most of us would have taken that as a sign from God to go back to work on electric cars.

Instead, Armen and his small crew started building the first hundred units by hand. They would write code and design boards during the day, then sit and assemble devices at night. Solder, test, pack, repeat. They did not have the luxury of flying to Shenzhen and living on the factory floor. That meant they had to understand every part of their own build before they could trust anyone else with it.

Hardware is hard in a very literal way. If a component changes, you cannot ship a patch. If a factory shuts down, your product line stops. Investors know this. When Armen started raising money, he was doing it at a time when everyone in venture still had the ghost of Juicero in their minds. Add to that the normal suspicion of solo founders and you have a nice little wall in front of you.

His Tesla badge helped a bit. It told people he knew what a production line looked like and that he had lived through at least one intense product culture. It did not make money fall from the sky. He still had to convince people that a small box with some mics in it was worth taking seriously.

Before he left Tesla he did something I respect a lot. He took a week off, told people he was going on an international trip, and stayed home. He had a short list of ideas. He gave each one a full day. He looked at cost, market, and his own stomach. Could he live with this idea for ten years. Could he wake up every day and care about it.

Most people skip that part. They leave out of rage or boredom and then try to figure it out on the fly. He treated that week like a tiny private lab. No slides. No pitch deck. Just him, a notebook, and the question of where to spend the next decade of his life. Audigo is the one that would not let go.

He also reframed the risk in a way I wish more people would. Around him, at Tesla, people were quitting to go to business school or grad school. They were about to drop a small house worth of money on an education and walk away from a salary for two years. He looked at that and thought, I could do the same thing and call it a startup. No salary, but no tuition either. Two years of hard learning that no case study could match.

That is how you move from theory to action. You do not pretend the risk is small. You set it beside other risks you have already accepted and see it in scale.

What I like most about Audigo is not some spec sheet. It is what it does to the slope between idea and first take. Most musicians are already drowning in gear. They have pedals, interfaces, cables, and mics that live in drawers and crates. Every extra step between them and the record button is a chance to give up and scroll instead.

Armen built for two very different people. On one side there are signed artists who can fly to any studio they want. They use Audigo because it fits in a pocket and lets them grab song ideas, backstage runs, and live clips without hauling a rig. On the other side there are people in their seventies who have played their whole lives and never once recorded a proper track. For them, this is the first time their voice or guitar sounds like it does in the room.

Those are very different use cases. The thread is the same. Less friction. Less shame over bad phone audio when you post. More chances to actually hear yourself and send that sound out.

The company is not done of course. They are rolling out an Android app now and a web experience next, so people can log in from a browser, pull up projects, and share them. You can feel where this goes. A small piece of hardware and a cloud that holds your sketches, takes, and mixes, whether you are on a phone, a laptop, or in a van on tour.

I asked if I should throw out my big Electro Voice setup and live on this thing alone. He laughed and gave the honest answer. Use it more. See where it fits. Tell us what breaks. The product today is tuned for music, not talk radio. Podcasting is on the horizon, not the core yet.

That kind of answer is rare. Most founders will tell you their thing replaces everything you own and will also fix your marriage and your sleep. Armen is more careful. They picked a lane, musicians, and they are staying in it long enough to get the details right.

So what does all this mean for you if you are stuck in a big company with an idea in your pocket.

The first lesson is boring. Give your idea actual time. Not ten minutes between meetings. Take a real block of days. Work through the numbers and the story and your own limits. Some ideas are fun to talk about and horrible to live with.

The second lesson is that “safety” is often just a story you tell yourself. The people you see going back to school are taking a huge financial swing. You just do not flinch because the path is familiar. Starting something of your own feels foolish, but the math is often not that different.

The third is that the hardest years are the ones no one claps for. No audience sees you sitting in a room, hand building the first hundred units of anything, wondering if the next part shortage is going to kill you. That is the part of “keep going” that this show is really about. Staying with the work when the timing is bad, the market is cold, and your old job looks very warm and safe in the rearview mirror.

Audigo will live or die on the same thing every creative tool lives or dies on. Does it actually help people make more work they care about. From what I have seen, it does. It turns social clips from a chore into a quick side effect of playing. It gives shy players a way to hear themselves without booking a studio. It gives pros a way to stay honest when the hotel room starts to feel like a cage.

If you are holding an idea that keeps tapping you on the shoulder, take a page from Armen. Step back from the noise. Study it like an engineer. Feel it like a musician. Give it a week of real thought. Then, if it still will not leave you alone, accept that there is no perfect time, only the time you have right now, and keep going.

My guest is Sudheesh Nair, co-founder and CEO of Tinyfish. He has done this before. Early at Nutanix through IPO. Then six years running ThoughtSpot. He left both without drama. Not because of ego or boredom. Because the rooms filled with the same talks about price and discount. Because he wanted to build again, from first principles, and be accountable as the one in the chair.

Tinyfish is an AI shop by label, but the pitch is plain. Make the web act like a person with a browser, at scale, and do work that matters to a customer. Do not sell buzzwords. Sell outcomes. On their site the story is a small hotel in rural Japan, eight rooms, not wired into any fancy API. An agent signs in like a human, checks dates and room types, reads the price and availability, and updates Google Hotels so the listing shows live numbers, not “call for rate.” The hotel changes nothing. Google shows richer results. A traveler gets a real choice. That is the point. Not the model size. Not the paper count. A change you can see.

We talked about leaving public companies. He said it straight. Loyalty is not a slogan. A company is a set of contracts, with investors, customers, and employees. You should fight for the mission while you are in the seat. You should also remember who picks you up when you fall. Family. We forget that when things go well. We dump on them when things go bad. If you want to build a place worth working at, draw clean lines, hold purpose and professionalism together, and be all in, until you are not.

What drives him now is less shine, more fit. Call it Ikigai if you like. What you are good at. What pays. What the world needs. Cut the romance. Cut the cosplay. Be honest about your limits. Then pick the work where your strengths meet a real need, and grow the pie so others win with you.

We also covered the noise around AI. Every site sings the same chorus. He refuses to sell that. The team tells a clear story instead. His co-founders make sense of that stance. Keith was a Wall Street Journal and Bloomberg reporter, Pulitzer finalist on Hong Kong. Shu Hao is a deep browser thinker. One believes in lowering barriers to information. The other believes the browser can be a bridge, not a wall. Sudheesh comes from analytics and knows this truth, fresh data starts on the open web, but most stacks mangle it before it’s useful. So they send agents to do the reading, sort the signal, and return only what helps. Less plumbing. More proof.

Under it all sits a worry I share. We moved from blue links to feeds to one answer in a chat box. Power pools at the top. If we let that stand, the best coffee or the best small hotel stays invisible, not for lack of quality, but for lack of API glue and ad spend. An outcome-first web is one answer. Do the task. Show the result. Lift the tiny fish, not only the whales.

Hire for that mindset. He likes journalists for a reason. Curiosity. Hard questions. Pattern sense. In a field this young, certainty is a tell. The honest posture is study and ship.

If you want to see the idea land, go to tinyfish.ai and look at the hotel case. Eight rooms, now visible. Simple, not easy. The kind of fix that bends the web a little closer to fair.

I recorded this episode in an old hoodie, unshaven, feeling more “survival mode” than “thriving.” Which is exactly why I wanted to talk to Jon Rosemberg.

Jon is the co-founder of Anther and the CEO of Strongpoint Group. He also has a background in positive psychology and a new book coming out, A Guide to Thriving, from Wiley on November 25. On paper he is the kind of person my inner cynic wants to roll its eyes at. In reality, he is someone who has thought very hard about how to keep going when the world feels like it is sliding sideways.

We started with a simple point. If you and I were living a hundred years ago, there is a good chance we would already be dead. No antibiotics. No clean water on demand. No modern surgery. No cheap food from the supermarket. By almost every hard metric, life expectancy, infant mortality, access to education, we are in a far better spot than our grandparents.

Jon calls this a kind of golden age. I pushed back with a Matrix joke, because of course I did. But he is not naive about it. His argument is that we confuse the state of the world with the state of our feeds. We stare at screens that are tuned to keep us twitchy and outraged, and we start to believe that this is the full story.

He gave a small, sharp example. If you buy all your clothes on Amazon and Amazon only shows you three types of shirts, you live in a world of three shirts. You feel like you are choosing, but someone else quietly narrowed the menu. That is what he means by a loss of agency. We are letting algorithms make the first cut on our options, then telling ourselves we are free.

Agency is the core of his book. Not in the motivational poster sense. In a very specific way. Agency, the way he defines it, is the capacity to make an intentional choice, backed by a real belief that the choice matters, that it will have an effect on your life and the people around you.

I asked him the question that keeps coming up on this show. What about the project manager who gets replaced by an AI agent. What about the media worker whose “email job” is now a prompt in a chatbot. Do you tell that person to open a bakery, move to the country, become a monk.

He refused the easy answer. Instead he walked through a simple framework he uses, AIR, which stands for awareness, inquiry, and reframe.

Awareness is the first step. When you get fired, the only thing you can see is the disaster in front of you. He used a Rubik’s Cube as a prop during our talk. When it is right up against your eye, all you see is one little red square. Awareness is the act of moving it away just enough to see that there is a whole cube there. More colors. More faces. More moves than you first thought.

Inquiry is the second step. That is where you start to turn the cube. You test ideas. You ask what skills you really have, who is in your network, what resources you can use. You look for more than one path out of the mess. Not fantasies. Actual options.

Reframe is the third step. It is not magic. It does not make the pain go away. It is the moment where you admit that your story is not “my life is over because I lost this job.” It becomes something closer to “this is a hard change, and here are three real things I can try next.” That shift sounds small on the page. In practice it is the difference between being frozen and taking a step.

This is where AI enters the conversation in a serious way. We are in a very strange time. You can feel the temptation inside big companies. Fire the person making two hundred and fifty grand. Hire a vendor. Drop in an AI system. Call it innovation. Cash the savings.

Jon does not pretend to have a script for the next five years. He compared AI to fire. It will be used for good things and for stupid, cruel things. But he pointed to one solid data point. Companies that treat employee well-being as a real priority tend to outperform the ones that do not. Markets are not kind, yet even in that cold space, looking after people seems to pay off.

None of that solves the feeling a lot of us have right now. We are living longer. We have more calories, more streaming shows, more everything. And at the same time, depression and anxiety are everywhere. The basic needs are met, and yet we feel like we are coming apart.

His answer there is not new, but it is backed by a lot of research. Social connection shifts almost every health outcome we care about. Live longer. Less heart disease. Lower risk of stroke. Better immune response. Lower odds of dementia. You could describe it as the closest thing we have to a real life “miracle drug” that is free.

So what do you do with that if you are stuck in a small apartment in a big city, working a job you are scared to lose, scrolling yourself numb at night. You do not fix it in one sweep. You do not suddenly find a tribe by Tuesday. You start with one intentional move toward another human. A regular coffee with one friend. A club. A class. A weekly call with someone who is not part of your household. It sounds tiny. It is not.

We also talked about small towns, where you see the same faces every day and still feel alone because everyone is on their phones. He kept returning to the same word. Choice. Not in a “you can do anything if you try” way. In a quieter way. You can choose to put the phone down for an hour and talk to someone. You can choose to ask for help. You can choose to listen.

He brought up Viktor Frankl, who wrote Man’s Search for Meaning after surviving the camps. Frankl’s claim was stark. Even in terrible conditions, there was still one last human freedom, the ability to choose how to respond inwardly. Jon is careful here. Some people really do not have options, because of health, war, or poverty. But many of us have more room than we think, and we convince ourselves we have none.

That is really the heart of this episode for me. Keep Going is a podcast about success and failure, but it is really about this thin strip between the two, the place where you decide to take one more step or not. Jon’s work is about widening that strip. Creating a bit more space between “everything is ruined” and “I have at least one move.”

If you want to go deeper into his ideas, his book is called A Guide to Thriving. It is split into small sections so you can chew on one topic without committing to a big reading project.

In the meantime, if today feels like survival mode, try AIR. Notice what is actually happening. Ask a few hard questions about your options. See if you can tell yourself a slightly different story about where you are and what comes next. It will not fix the world. It might help you keep going long enough to see the next door that opens.

Most people never think about the battery until it dies. Charlie Welch has spent his whole career thinking about nothing else.

On The Innovators, he walked me through what he is building at Proper Voltage. Before this, he was doing applied research in battery chemistry at Northrop, trying to get “interesting and exotic” chemistries into real military systems, from underwater gear to aircraft to special operations kits. The problem he kept hitting was not physics. It was integration.

Every new battery team heard the same thing from the customer. “We’d love to use your tech, if you redesign it for our system.” Every big OEM said the opposite. “We’d love to use your battery, if you redesign your system for us.” No one wanted to move first. No one wanted to touch legacy hardware. That standoff kept better chemistries on the shelf instead of in the field.

Proper Voltage is his attempt to cut through that. The company is not betting everything on one magic chemistry. Instead, they are building a kind of battery operating layer that sits between the cells and the product. They work with sodium ion, lithium titanate, niobium and other “odd” chemistries that each have their own strengths. Then they add a hardware and software block they call a voltage command unit. That unit makes voltage a programmable interface. One pack can now present itself as whatever the device expects, without the device designer having to rip up their boards or add twice as many cells.

He gave a clear example. Standard lithium ion cells sit around 3.7 volts. Many sodium ion cells sit closer to 2.3. If you try to drop sodium into a system that expects lithium and do nothing else, you need almost twice as many cells in series. That means more size, more cost, more weight, and energy you do not actually need. With a programmable voltage layer, the system sees what it expects. The chemistry can change underneath without touching the rest of the stack. The product team gets to pick sodium for safety and life, not walk away because the nominal voltage is “wrong.”

This matters a lot in defense and aerospace. There are standard formats like the 6T battery for vehicles or the soldier’s small tactical universal battery. There are missiles and aircraft that went through years of testing and certification. No one wants to open those designs just to squeeze in a new pack. Welch told me the only way that community moves is if the new unit is truly drop in. Same form factor, same pins, same expectations. If Proper Voltage can let new chemistries look and behave like the old packs from the outside, while giving better power and life on the inside, that is a real wedge.

We also talked about the state of the art. Phone batteries have been roughly the same “spicy pocket brick” for a long time. The gains are slow. Roughly a few percent each year in energy density. The reason you do not feel a huge leap is that every time battery teams squeeze out another watt hour, the chip and software teams spend it on more compute, more video, more background tasks. The pack improves. Your day of use feels about the same.

The big jumps happen when you change chemistry outright. Welch mentioned a humanoid robot project that switched from its old pack to a lithium titanate system. Charge time dropped from three hours to about six and a half minutes. Peak power went up by a factor of four. That is not a small tweak. That is a new class of behavior for the machine. Proper Voltage sits in the middle of moves like that, making sure the robot still sees smooth, stable voltage even when it is sprinting or jumping. When robots do high dynamic moves, voltage usually swings all over the place. Their system flattens that, so the robot sees the same “fuel” from full to empty. There is a small efficiency hit in the power electronics, but because the device can use more of the pack’s range without tripping over low voltage issues, you often end up with more usable energy, not less.

The near term focus at Proper Voltage is not sci fi robots, though that work is clearly a proving ground. The team is leaning into three markets. First is infrastructure, backup power for telecom sites, data centers, LNG plants, all the places that still sit on old lead acid banks. Sodium ion and other chemistries are well suited there, and Welch likes that the United States has the raw materials to build a domestic supply chain around them. Second is defense, from 6T vehicle batteries to drones and soldier gear. Third is “industrial” in the plain sense, robotics and machines where power, charge time, and lifetime are the difference between a lab demo and a real business.

There is a quiet lesson in how he talks about all this. We like big claims about a single breakthrough that will rewrite the rules. Proper Voltage is going after something more boring and more important. The connective tissue. The thing that lets new battery chemistries plug into old systems without fifteen rounds of redesign and risk. If they pull that off, we will not see it in a flashy consumer product first. We will see it in a Humvee that has reliable backup power, a cell tower that stays up during an outage, a robot that can run all shift without a fragile pack.

The future of batteries will not arrive as one perfect cell that solves everything. It will come as a lot of different chemistries, each strong in its own narrow way, finally getting a path into real hardware. Proper Voltage is betting that if you want that future, you need to fix the link between the lab and the product. That is not a hot topic on social media. It is the kind of ugly, necessary work that moves the field forward, one pack swap at a time.

I used to think my job was to judge founders. Now I ask people to tell me what broke and what they did next. I call it a podcast. It is also penance.

This episode is with Dr. Rod Berger. He is a writer, consultant, and the author of The Narrative Edge. We talked about story. Not the fake kind. The real kind.

Rod’s view is simple. Story is how people survive each other.

You get pulled over for speeding. Before the cop gets to the car, you’re already building your story. You’re trying to make yourself forgivable.

First date. Job interview. Getting caught stealing cookies when you’re six. Same act. What can I say so I don’t get dropped. We learn this young. We never stop.

Rod says leaders pretend story is optional. It isn’t. It is the only thing that makes you human to other people.

Most CEOs are bad at this. I’ve interviewed them. You ask, When did you screw up. They answer, We’re very excited about our platform. Dead air. No blood. No point.

Rod says that comes from fear. Since childhood, most of us are still asking, Am I going to get picked. No one wants to tell a story that might make them sound weak. They’re afraid they’ll lose status if they’re honest. So they default to talking points. They seal themselves shut. You can’t connect with that. You can barely stay awake.

He told me about someone he interviewed a few times across a few years. Total lockdown. Polished. No air. He finally told her PR rep, Don’t call again. There was nothing human left to work with.

So how do you fix that.

This is what he does in his consulting work. He sits people down off the record. He interviews them. Long form. He makes them walk through their own past, moment by moment. What happened. Then what. Then what. He watches what they avoid and what they rush to tell. Then he shows them the transcript. He shows them how they actually sound in public. He shows them the gaps.

A lot of them hate hearing it. Good. Hate is honest. Hate means they finally heard themselves. After that, most of them want more. He said it can feel like a drug. Once someone feels what it’s like to be listened to for real, they want to keep going. They start to open up. They start to risk.

That is the start of being a storyteller. Not branding. Not performance. Just saying what really happened, and how it felt, without flinching.

He said something else worth keeping. Story lives in the pause. Not in the slide deck. Not in the press release. In the quiet moment between floors on the elevator, where you admit to yourself what actually happened.

He also said this. Life is a series of at bats. You might miss three curve balls. Fine. Next time you see the pitch a little earlier. That’s how you get better at talking like a person. You stand in. You swing. You listen.

Rod’s book is The Narrative Edge. If you lead people, or you want to, you probably need what he’s teaching.

I spoke with Mikhail Baklanov, CEO and founder of Donkit, about a problem every enterprise AI team hits sooner or later, retrieval augmented generation that is accurate enough for production. The numbers he quotes are familiar. Companies spend heavily and still spend 18 months experimenting with indexes, chunking, embeddings, evaluators, and guardrails. Accuracy is often not good enough at the end.

Donkit’s pitch is simple. Give their “RAG ops” agent your goal and your data. One engineer sets it loose. It runs hundreds of experiments and returns a production ready configuration in about two days. The team pivoted to this idea in March. By August they had a closed alpha. A dozen enterprise teams are piloting it now.

Baklanov frames RAG like a library, with indexes, storage, and a librarian. Donkit is a library factory. Instead of hand tuning for months, the agent explores the space of options, evaluates on your data, and converges on what works. The promise is less art project, more systematized process for context engineering and memory management.

Their buyer is the head of AI, or a principal AI engineer with a mandate to ship internal assistants and agents. Donkit is not for small teams standing up a single chatbot. It is for accuracy sensitive use cases where error compounds across steps. As Baklanov puts it, if your RAG layer is 80 percent accurate and an agent queries it five times in a chain, the final step’s effective accuracy can collapse. That is why enterprises throw so much effort at squeezing out the last five to ten percent.

One pilot sits inside a large retailer’s HR call center. Fifty three specialists support three thousand employees across time zones. Routine questions can take thirty minutes in SAP. Donkit’s approach augments the specialist in real time, first through typed suggestions, then by listening to calls and surfacing answers on screen. It is a clear ROI case that lives or dies on reliable retrieval.

Baklanov has talked with more than eighty heads of AI. He sees the same adoption gap. People do not understand how AI works or how to use it. The wins show up in augmentation, not replacement. In software development he says the job is already shifting from hand coding to tasking and reviewing AI generated code. Speed of iteration trumps the debate over organic versus AI code.

Donkit has raised $470,000 in angel funding and is preparing an institutional seed. The site is donkit.ai. If you are a larger organization with a head of AI, running agents that depend on trustworthy retrieval, they want to talk.

RAG is where a lot of AI projects stall. Everyone has a demo. Few have a system that survives contact with real data and real users. If Donkit can consistently compress the tuning loop from 18 months to two days and do it with one engineer instead of a roomful, that changes the economics. It also sets a higher bar for what “production ready” means.