Keep Going

I first spoke with Ehren Cruz and felt something I do not get often in this space, grounded optimism. He runs a retreat center north of Asheville and guides people through psilocybin journeys with a process that looks more like a rite of passage than a thrill ride.

Here is how he works. He starts with a real assessment. Meds, mental health history, trauma, and whether he is the right person to help. Then a month of preparation. Sleep, food, time off the treadmill, and intention. He teaches basic emotional regulation so you are not surprised by your own mind. Only then do you sit. Music, instruments, careful facilitation, and a room that feels safe. Afterward comes the hard part, landing the craft. What did you learn. What will you change. Who do you need to forgive. How will you embody that tomorrow morning.

If the language around psychedelics feels too soft, Ehren can meet you in plain English. He talks about neuroplasticity and the way a wider thalamic filter lets you consider ideas that your habitual self would ignore. He also talks about something older. Fungi as a living partner, not a static compound. You bring your healing intelligence. The medicine brings its own. The work happens in the space between.

We talked about the fear of change. Many people know they need it but stay put. The familiar pain feels safer than the unknown. Ehren gave me a frame I like. Letting go happens when the risk of staying the same finally outweighs the risk of stepping into mystery. You do not need to force it. You prepare the ground and notice when the fruit is ready to drop.

You can do a lot without medicine. Ehren recommends patient practice, Vedic meditation, time with discomfort, and the discipline to ask what pain is trying to teach. Microdosing can help some people create capacity, but he is clear that the big session is not the only door. It is the deep end of the pool. You get dunked. You come out with an imprint you cannot unknow. Then you act.

Who should reach out. Curious people who feel stuck. People doing honest mental health work who want a held container. People hungry for individuation, not only symptom relief. He reminds everyone that a ceremony is a step in a longer arc. Not a miracle. Not a single ticket to awe. Part of a continuum of growth, supported by community.

If you want to learn more about Ehren’s work and his programs, he is at thesparc.co and active on LinkedIn. If you got something from this conversation, sit with it. Make one small change this week that your future self would thank you for.

Robots do not need pep talks. They need power. In the field, cables and careful hands are a liability. That is the problem Quaze is trying to solve, and it came through in my talk with Francis Roy, their Chief Strategy Officer.

Quaze’s pitch is simple. Turn big surfaces into charging points. Not small targets that demand perfect alignment. Broad mats that you can fold, carry, and drop on dirt or concrete. Plates you can mount on a vehicle so small drones can return, touch down, and sip energy. Panels you can fix at a pier so an underwater vehicle can press, recharge, and push off. If the machine makes contact, it takes power. Shape does not matter. Maker does not matter.

The mat is the first product in the wild. It accepts power from what you have on hand, a truck, a wall plug, a solar array. It gives that power back to whatever lands or rolls onto it. Useful, but the point sits deeper, in the electronics that make a surface act like a fuel pump for electrons.

That core is the Q6 module. One box, many uses. Mount it in a troop carrier to turn it into a mothership for small drones. Fix it near a net where quadcopters cycle through sorties. The receiver that rides on the aircraft is light, about forty grams in the demo Roy showed. It slots between battery and body. The cost and complexity live on the transmitter side, which keeps retrofit work on the airframe cheap and fast.

Numbers matter. Today the Q6 pushes roughly one hundred to two hundred fifty watts. Feed a one hundred watt hour pack at one hundred watts, plan on about an hour, in clean conditions. Field work is never clean, but the point holds. You want steady cycles, not lab trophies. Go, return, touch down, take power, go again. No human kneeling in the dust.

Adoption is under way. The mat has early buyers inside the NATO world for testing. That is a good first beachhead. After that, the real work starts, where concepts of operation rule. Where do you place the surfaces. How do vehicles queue. What fails over when a unit is soaked, iced, or shot. Quaze says it has nine integrations in two years with robot makers and prime contractors. That suggests teams can take the electronics, wire them in, and field something real.

Why not sooner. Part of the answer is habit. With people hauling batteries and plugging cables, the problem can look solved. Once the people leave, your charge point must work on first contact. Large, forgiving surfaces cut out the alignment dance that kills missions.

There are limits. The current power band caps how big and how fast you can refill. Heavy platforms still want generators or pack swaps. Every charger you drop is another box to harden, maintain, and secure. None of that breaks the idea. It is the cost of turning electrons into a supply line.

The upside is plain. Uniform energy access across mixed fleets. Fewer hands at risk. Less babying of small drones. A path from one-off hacks to a standard practice that operators can trust.

If autonomy is going to move from demo to duty, edge power must be boring, rugged, and always there. Quaze is pushing in that direction. That is worth attention.

In this week’s Keep Going, I sat down with Steve Rad, founder and CEO of Abacus Brands and Backdrop.com, to talk about building two thriving companies from the ground up. His story starts not in a boardroom but in a Taco Bell parking lot, selling trade show displays out of the back of a car after the 2009 financial crash. What grew from those early hustles became Backdrop.com, a full-scale event display business that’s now introducing Backdrop Alive — a system that turns static backdrops into interactive, augmented reality experiences for trade shows and brand activations.

Steve isn’t just rethinking how companies connect with people in physical spaces. He’s also reshaping how kids connect with science and technology. His toy company, Abacus Brands, builds immersive learning kits that mix hands-on projects with virtual reality — from digging up dinosaur bones to exploring crystal caves. The company has already earned a Toy of the Year award and now has new lines launching with National Geographic, DK, and even ESPN.

We talked about bootstrapping, surviving the pandemic when trade shows disappeared overnight, and staying “lean and consistent” when everything feels unstable. Steve’s advice for founders is simple: stay in your lane, focus on what you can do exceptionally well, and don’t chase every shiny opportunity.

He calls himself a “Basecamp One” entrepreneur — far from the summit, but climbing. That mindset, the willingness to stay small, nimble, and hungry, runs through his entire story.

Listen to the full episode to hear how a Craigslist side hustle turned into a two-company career and why, for Steve Rad, making toys is still about wonder, not just sales.

We recorded late in Tokyo, and Evan Burkosky, CEO of Kimaru AI, laid out a claim that is both obvious and ignored. Most supply chains still run on spreadsheets. People glue together ERP exports, POS reports, CRM notes, and a flotilla of pivot tables, then hope the next week behaves like the last one. It rarely does.

Kimaru calls its approach decision intelligence. Strip away the hype, and you get a layer that sits above the systems of record, learns from the metrics the business already tracks, and proposes concrete actions that a human reviews before anything happens. Instead of looking backward at what sold last quarter, planners see forward, with specific guidance on replenishment, pricing, safety stock, and routes, all framed by the constraints that actually govern their work.

The company builds what they call a decision digital twin for each user and stakeholder. That twin encodes the choices a role can make, the outcomes that matter, and the limits that cannot be crossed. A set of software agents handles the tedious jobs that eat time, from connecting data and cleaning it, to reconciling mismatched fields across vendors and partners. Once that groundwork is in place, the system runs structured simulations and produces a single best recommendation. The user adjusts or approves, and the order flows back into the existing tools to open a purchase order or move a shipment. Nothing woolly, no free-running bot that buys five million widgets on a whim, and a clear circuit breaker that the user controls.

The need is plain in any complex chain. An electronics maker in Taiwan hunts for copper, chips, and specialty parts, sells into high-end audio, and now faces tariffs, shifting routes, and new suppliers in places like Vietnam. A missed signal upstream turns into idle inventory and missed revenue downstream. Many teams still try to manage this with manual reports that take days to compile. Kimaru’s pitch is that the same work can take half a minute once the model understands the business and the user’s risk tolerance.

Large firms often have parts of this effort underway. Data lakes in Snowflake or Databricks. Early agents that score demand or smooth seasonality. Kimaru’s value is the connective tissue. The architecture keeps raw data on site through federated learning, shares patterns without moving sensitive records, and records actions for compliance. It plugs into the stack that already exists and tries to make it useful, rather than selling an expensive rip and replace.

Under the hood, the tools are not science fair novelties. They are the engines that have powered recommendations and prescriptive planning for a decade, from Monte Carlo to random forests to modern neural nets. The twist is in how those parts are arranged, how cross-company collaboration is modeled, and how the system learns from every correction a planner makes. Evan talked about chaos engines and fractal simulation from his CTO’s doctoral work, and even exploratory talks with quantum groups. The point is not to impress with jargon. The point is to give a planner a credible option on Tuesday morning that shortens a meeting and prevents a stockout.

This is not a product for crane operators. It serves the inventory lead at a regional grocer, the VP who sets policy for a chain of factories, the manager who runs a distribution center and needs to pick a lane now. Kimaru has spoken with hundreds of people in those seats. All of them admit they live in spreadsheets because the official systems cannot keep up with the chaos outside the building.

There is also the mood to consider. A wave of flashy pilots has soured many buyers on artificial intelligence. Reports claim that most generative pilots fail to produce value. Evan’s answer is blunt. Language toys are probabilistic by design, which makes them risky as a control surface. Operations need structure and memory. The decision layer gives the model something firm to run on, it narrows the error bars, and it keeps people in charge at the points that matter.

Kimaru just finished Alchemist, closed out a pre-seed, and is opening a seed round. Interest is strong because the problem is large, boring, and very expensive. The global supply chain ties up vast sums in safety stock to hedge against shocks, and wastes more when plans lag reality. Every hour pulled out of manual reconciliation is an hour that can move product or cut costs.

That is the theme worth noting. The most useful advances rarely sparkle. They remove friction that everyone has learned to tolerate. They give professionals a way to make the same decisions they make today, only faster, with clearer guardrails, and with less risk of groupthink. If Kimaru can turn the spreadsheet habit into a system that thinks ahead, it will not be glamorous. It will just be how the work gets done.

My guest this week was Ashley Manta, a certified sexologist and relationship coach. She works with high achieving women and with couples. Here focus is on pleasure, connection, honesty, and the habits that keep those things from drying out.

She says we have to start with stress. If you run a company or live inside one, you know the drill. You carry the day in your jaw, in your shoulders, in your gut. You tell yourself the strain is a tax for the life you chose. Then the bill shows up at home. You argue more. You touch less. You feel alone in a crowded room.

Ashley’s first instruction is not soft. Breathe, then unclench your pelvic floor aka your a*****e. On the exhale, let everything loosen. Jaw, hips, the place you never notice until someone reminds you it exists. The body follows the mind, the mind follows the body. If you can learn to relax on purpose, even for a moment, you can find your footing again.

From there, she asks basic questions. Where do you feel pressure in your body? What happens when you are alone? Are you checking out on a screen, or can you be present for yourself? With a partner, are you actually there, or are you mentally triaging tomorrow’s tasks while you go through the motions? Presence is not a poster on a wall. It is a skill, and you can practice it.

The next step is time. Most of us rush intimacy the way we rush email. We try to beat the clock. Ten minutes, quick kiss, lights out, then wonder why it all feels thin. Slow down. Breathe together. Make eye contact. Ask your body simple questions. Can you feel your right hand. Your left foot. Can you notice your partner’s breath without racing ahead to a finish line. If you treat your bedroom like a sprint, you will get sprint results. Slow work pays.

Many couples call their relationship sexless. That word hides more than it reveals. What do you mean when you say you want sex? Do you want pleasure? Do you want to feel wanted? Do you want a break from worry? Do you want a sense of control for a change? Those are concrete needs. You can meet them in many ways. Kissing. Touch. Time together without a screen in sight. Articulate the need, then design the time.

Pain and disconnection are real for many women. Ashley talked about plant medicine and the bedroom, not as a cure all, as a set of tools. Some people do not want pills. Some want options that work with their bodies. Be cautious, be informed, talk to real clinicians, then test what helps. The point is agency. Do not outsource your body.

We touched the culture too. The grind has become a religion in some rooms. Wear the hours like rank. Build a wall between the self at the office and the self who wants to be known. In other rooms, there is bitterness, the online stew that curdles into contempt. If you are marinating in that mess at three in the morning, there is work to do before you date anyone. If you are simply lost in your calendar, the fix is harder than a quote on a fridge, and still simple. Set boundaries. Delegate. Hire someone to take a shift so you can be a person, not a dashboard.

Screens numb. Bodies need air and motion. Touch a tree. Touch water. Lift something heavy and set it down. Watch a sunset without filming it. This is not a lifestyle trend. It is maintenance. When you remember you are alive, you become easier to be with. You are kinder to yourself. You are more open to other people.

Ashley runs retreats, workshops, and private coaching. She keeps a Substack where the theme is joy. She travels, a lot. She meets people where they are, online and off. Her end state is clear. A world with more pleasure. Not a cheap slogan. A society where adults feel safe in their bodies, where couples choose each other on purpose, where the half smile on a city street is not rare.

I like the plain frame she uses. Pleasure is not a luxury. It is a sign of health. Connection is not a trend. It is an anchor. Sex is not a scoreboard. It is a language. Learn to speak it with care.

We keep the show focused on success and failure. Here is the hard truth. If you succeed at work and fail at home, you did not win. You traded one kind of hunger for another. The fix starts with a breath. Relax the muscles you forgot you have. Slow down. Ask for what you want. Give what you can. Put the phone away.

Until next week.

In this episode of The Innovators, I spoke with Pablo Zegers, Chief AI Officer at Kaspix, a company that’s turning everything we think we know about artificial intelligence upside down. Zegers and his team are building analog AI—systems that don’t need transistors, GPUs, or data centers. Their technology runs intelligence directly in hardware, even when that hardware has physical imperfections.

Pablo describes it this way: they’ve found a way to make AI work inside the circuitry itself. Instead of relying on digital computation, their system performs the same matrix calculations that underpin modern AI through electrical relations—voltage, current, resistance—executed at the speed of light. It’s artificial intelligence without the silicon.

The implications are enormous. Imagine a world where every sensor in a car, every industrial machine, or even every household device could process information locally, without having to beam endless data to the cloud. In Zegers’ words, “you could have a tire that knows when it’s about to fail.” By putting intelligence on the edge—literally in the sensor—systems can predict, react, and self-correct without lag or dependence on distant servers.

This isn’t theory. Kaspix is already working with design partners to integrate the technology into real-world applications. The promise goes beyond efficiency and energy savings. If AI runs locally in analog hardware, it becomes nearly impossible to hack, since the intelligence lives in static circuits rather than a centralized, updatable database. In that world, your personal AI could live on your desk—private, secure, and entirely yours.

Zegers has been chasing this vision for four decades, and it’s finally real. As he puts it, “In fifty years, all artificial intelligence will be run on this kind of technology.”

I spoke with David Carvalhão in Lisbon. He is the CTO at IH Care and sits on a few boards. He has started more companies than most people will ever work for. Twenty six. Some hit. Some missed. Then he lost sixteen in one blow when a partner moved assets out from under him. He fought in court for years. He now calls that a mistake. He says he should have let go sooner.

What he works on now is simple in goal and hard in practice. Hospital acquired infections kill about 90,000 people a year in Europe. IH Care is trying to push that number down. They build a device that lets staff give real showers to bedridden patients. They make bed linens that repel water and are antibacterial and antiviral. They coat surfaces in rooms so that when bugs land, they go biologically inactive. Not dead, just quiet. No arms race. No resistant strain winning the day.

He put it plainly. Kill and you select for the strongest. Inactivate and nothing new learns to fight back.

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Why this path. Family. He lost a grandfather and a grandmother to infections after hospital stays. He had worked in AI and software for years. In 2015, after the business collapse, he decided to spend his time on social problems. He still builds tech. He just points it at different targets. One project measures carbon stored in forests from satellite images to issue better credits. Another estimates emissions from huge events so organizers can offset with some basis in fact.

His mind runs hot. He knows it. He likes to start things. He also knows the cost. In 2022, as the war began in Ukraine, he spun up an NGO to help refugees get to Portugal and settle. It scaled fast. A call center. Hundreds of volunteers. Twelve thousand people moved through the system. The work won an award from the European Commission. On stage in Stockholm, he broke. Memory gone. Seven months to recover.

He did not dress it up. The first three months he mostly slept. Long and short term memory both took hits. Then the urge to work came back before the brain was ready. He wrote a book to keep himself steady. In time, he felt whole again.

So how does he keep from spinning out now. The answer is boring in the best way. Strict time blocks. He schedules family time and treats it as hard law. He meditates ten minutes a day. He journals for five minutes. Once a month he vanishes for a weekend with an old Nokia, no apps, no feed, no news. He sits. Walks. Rests. Thinks. Monday comes and he knows what matters for the next four weeks.

He also faced the standard investor critique. Too many projects. Lack of focus. He agrees it is a fair shot. His response is practice, not talk. He spends most of his time on IH Care. He delegates the rest. He is clear about his edge. He is best at creating and launching products. Others scale them.

There is a line he repeats from his grandfather. Leave the world a little better than you found it. It is not a slogan for him. It is a filter. Hospital infections. Carbon math. Refugee work. If it makes a dent and he can help, he leans in, but now with guardrails.

I like guests who do not make excuses. David does not. He names the failures and the cost, then keeps going. If you want the short version, here it is. Build for something larger than your own scorecard. Put fences around your time. Rest on purpose. Then do the work.

I invited Shay Levi on because I wanted to separate the AI that writes emails from the AI that moves a business. He is the co-founder and CEO of Unframe, and his pitch is simple. Tell us the pain. We come back in five days with a production-ready solution. If it moves a real metric, you subscribe. If not, you walk.

He calls ChatGPT the gold standard for generic tasks. Drafting notes, tidying a paragraph, that kind of thing. Unframe is about the gnarly stuff inside big companies. Think underwriting, lease management, complex workflows that touch five or six systems and a mess of data. You do not want a prompt window for that. You want something that plugs into your stack and quietly does the work.

Here is how they do it: They have built a shelf of reusable components, the Lego bricks you always end up writing from scratch. They assemble those into a tailored app for a single business need. No long scoping phase. No hostage-style SOW. Data can stay inside the customer’s perimeter. Then the team hands the keys to the business users and measures impact. Pay only if it works.

That model feels like a Fiverr analogy for the Fortune 500. Wish for an application, try it, then decide. The difference is risk. You are not paying up front for a maybe. You are testing a live tool on your data.

Shay has done this before. His last company, Noname Security, grew from zero to 250 people in four years and sold to Akamai. He left before the papers were signed because he could not shake the feeling that enterprises were about to drown in point solutions and half-baked build attempts. In his words, the ground in AI moves every morning. Someone had to give value, not just sell more consultants.

He is honest about the limits. We still need engineers. Code generation got better, but it did not make software teams obsolete. He also thinks the research gap is wider than people expected. More GPUs alone are not going to deliver a sudden leap. Until we get a new idea, the near term is a man-machine partnership. Humans to define the goal and guardrails. Machines to push the work.

One tension I asked about was the in-house IT team. Nobody wants to walk into a department with twenty years of relationships and say your tools will be here in five days. Shay’s answer is practical. Internal teams build the top five, core use cases. Everything else goes to a long wish list. That is where Unframe lives, and it is where most DIY projects stall. If Unframe can ship a working tool in a week, the business moves faster. Nobody gets ripped out. The company gets a head start.

There is ambition behind all of this. He does not want to sell the company. He wants to see if this model can scale across industries. If it does, he thinks it is bigger than his last win. If it does not, he will know because customers will cancel. The contract structure forces the truth.

What I like here is the focus on time to value. Five days is a claim you can test. You either reduce days outstanding in receivables, or you do not. You either shorten lease onboarding, or you do not. In a space full of big talk, that concreteness is refreshing.

If you run a team with a backlog full of good intentions, this is worth a look. Start with one stubborn workflow. Define the metric. See what a week buys you. Worst case, you learn how to scope the next attempt. Best case, you cross something off the list and move to the next one.

We will keep watching this model. If Unframe proves you can repeatedly turn messy enterprise needs into working tools in days, that is a real shift. Not a demo. Not a deck. Software that shows up and does the job.

I met Cesar Marin at a psychedelics event in Denver. I watched him on stage. He had a calm ease that carried across the room. Today he tells the story behind that calm.

Cesar spent twenty five years at CNN as a producer. He built live shows. He chased breaking news. He lived inside a clock. Then the layoffs came. He was fifty five. The title that shaped his life was gone.

Plant medicine had arrived in his life just before that fall. He did not come to it for healing. He was curious. He tried psychedelics once and felt a sharp shift. He started reading. He found communities. He learned how people use these tools for depression, anxiety, trauma, and habit change. He began to microdose with intent. He says it helped him change a hard relationship with cannabis. It also forced a question he had avoided. If the old job ends, what comes next.

His answer is Cultivating Wisdom. He built an apparel line that does one thing. It starts plain talk about psychedelics without the tie dye costume. He wanted a shirt you could wear under a blazer. He wanted words that open a conversation in a grocery line. He told a story about a woman who walked up to him, saw the word “microdosing” on his chest, and shared how small, planned doses helped her stop finishing a bottle of wine every night. One shirt. One talk. No stigma.

He also built microdosingover50.com. The site is for people who want clear, adult guidance. He does not prescribe. He does not diagnose. He shares what worked for him. He points to research. He asks people to read, ask questions, and go slow. No mystery bars from a gas station. Pick intent first, then protocol, then support.

We spoke about work and age. The market does not care about your years of service. It cares about cost and speed. If you are midlife and worried, his advice is simple. Take inventory. Write down what you know well. Turn that into assets that teach. Give something away. Build a course. Speak to people who know less than you, not to the few who know more. That is a sober way forward in a loud time.

He is now shaping the Summit Within. It is a small, private container for senior leaders. Five or six people at a time. The plan is to use legal plant work where allowed, breathwork, and other tools to improve focus, care, and honesty. Leave the status gear at the door. Bring your real problems. Learn how to run a company and still be a decent parent, partner, and neighbor. He calls it a move from “F-you wealth” to “love-you wealth.” Make enough to care for your family. Use the rest to make more people smile. That is the entire pitch.

We covered risk. We covered the old fears. He agrees that no one should treat this like a toy. Read the science. Talk to a doctor if you have a condition or take meds. Respect the law where you live. Do not do this alone if you can avoid it. These are tools. Tools can help. Tools can also hurt.

Cesar’s story is not tidy. He lost a career. He built a new one from scratch. He did it with help, and he says that out loud. Mentors showed up. Friends told the truth. His partner said the quiet line that kept him steady. “The universe has you where it needs you.” He believed it. He worked. He kept going.

If you want to learn more, go to cultivatingwisdom.net for the apparel and stories. Go to microdosingover50.com for his courses and community. He set up a 20 percent discount for our listeners. Use code KG20 at checkout. If you buy something and post a photo, he says he will send a bigger code you can share with your friends.

The Innovators is a new show about how people actually build. Not slogans. Not hype. The work. Each episode starts with a pitch, then gets into the choices that make or break a young company. We ask basic questions that most founders avoid. Who pays you. Why do they stay. What broke. What did you fix. The goal is simple, help real builders sharpen their story and pressure-test their plan, while giving listeners a clear view of how a business grows from zero.

Our first guest is Dani Dufresne, founder of Aux Co. Think of Aux Co as a plugged-in production brain for small agencies and brand teams. Not a vendor line item you add at the end. A team you invite in at the start. Dani came up through film and commercial production, then spent years inside big agencies. She saw a pattern. Small, sharp creative shops had ideas worth making, but not the overhead for full-time producers. Big holding company shops had budgets, politics, and habits that dragged the work off course. The result was friction, waste, and flat outcomes.

Aux Co is her answer. The firm embeds early, helps shape the creative into something that can be made on time and on budget, then brings the right crew to the table. Agencies keep the client relationship. Aux Co supplies an executive producer mindset and a deep bench. It is white label when needed. It is visible when that helps. The goal is the same in both cases, protect the idea, spend money where it matters, and keep the quality bar high.

Dani’s view on incentives is blunt. A freelancer takes a brief and gets it done. An in-house EP at a big shop might default to the same three vendors. Both paths can work, but both can settle. Aux Co set itself up to question decisions early, to tell a client when the plan is off, and to push for better options that fit the money and the clock. That only works if you get in the room before the pitch goes out. So they do that, often without charging for pitch support, and earn their keep in production.

The model scales in a quiet way. Retainer clients get producers embedded in Slack, in email, in the office when needed. When a brief lands, Dani assigns specialists for that job, not whoever is idle. She oversees the start, then steps back while her team runs the shoot, the event, the build. That frees creative teams to focus on the idea, not vendor whack-a-mole. It also keeps the work fresh, since the roster is wide and curated. The firm avoids the bad habit of reusing the same production company out of comfort.

We talked about the risk in this kind of service. It looks like staff, it acts like staff, but it is not headcount. Finance teams want cost clarity. Dani keeps pricing simple, hourly or flat packages, small retainers that roll over, production fees that track the real job. The promise is speed and fit. You get the right director or developer in days, not months, because the list is already built. You pay for what you use. You keep quality up because the team can say no when something does not line up with the mission you stated at kickoff.

There is also a cultural point. Aux Co looks for clients who see questions as care, not conflict. That matters. A lot of work fails because no one raises a hand when the plan drifts. Dani builds teams that ask why, tie choices back to the brief, and hold the line. It sounds small. It is not. It is the difference between a film that lands and a film that sits in a drive.

Where is this going. Dani sees brands moving back into the world. Less empty feed. More real life. Community events. Collabs with local groups. Experiences that get people to close the laptop and do the thing the brand stands for. That shift needs producers who can work across formats, from a quick social shoot to out of home to a live build. It also needs partners who can move fast without cutting corners. That is the lane Aux Co lives in.

Why start The Innovators with this story. Because it shows the point of the show. A clear pitch. A simple problem, the gap between idea and execution. A practical fix, bring senior production into the room before the sell, keep it lean, keep it honest. You can argue with the approach. You cannot say it lacks a plan.

If you run a small agency, this episode will help you rethink when you call production. If you run a brand team, it will help you weigh headcount against access. If you are a founder, it will push you to name your edge and the tradeoffs you refuse to make. That is the tone we want every week. Take the pitch. Pull on it. Find the weak points. Leave with a tighter story and a better path to revenue.

New episodes will follow the same line. Founders, operators, and makers walk us through what they sell, how they sell it, and how they keep clients. We keep the talk plain. We push for numbers when it counts. We respect craft, but we do not hide behind it. We ask about the first ten customers, the hardest hire, the month that almost killed the company, the new plan that kept the lights on. We want lessons you can use on Monday morning.

If you want to learn more about Aux Co, visit theaux.co, or look up Dani Dufresne on LinkedIn. If you want to pitch on The Innovators, send a short note with what you build, who buys, and why they stay. Keep it tight. Keep it real. We will bring questions. You bring proof.