Startups Decoded

Vadim Gordin has looked at more early cap tables than most of us have had coffees. 

He built a data set most founders never see: hundreds of first-person fundraising accounts, cross-referenced against years running accelerators at NYU. His numbers say the friends and family round is not a formality. It is where the mistakes that surface at Series A actually start.

We walk through what a healthy angel funnel looks like stage by stage, why the shape of your earliest round predicts problems two years out, and what a messy F&F cap table costs you later. The goal is not just closing the round, it is closing it in a way that does not quietly sabotage you down the line. F

or anyone staring down their first raise, this is the funnel math nobody hands you.

Visit Healing Healthtech - Vadim's Substack.

Episode outline:

1. Why the F&F round gets treated as an afterthought, and why that is a mistake
2. Inside the data: what a healthy angel funnel looks like stage by stage
3. The Mighty Middle thesis, and why $50M to $150M exits change the fundraising math
4. Cap table mistakes that do not hurt until Series A
5. Reducing human suffering as an investment filter
6. What to build before you are ready to raise from anyone

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Vadim Gordin - https://www.linkedin.com/in/vadimgordin/

Vadim ran a venture studio inside NYU Tandon that turned under $500K in deployed capital into hundreds of millions in enterprise value, working with teams like Ataraxis, Vital Audio, and CaroRhythm. He now runs Mighty Middle Ventures, a fund and studio backing healthtech founders building toward the $50M to $150M exits traditional VC ignores.

Andy Walsh
2× exited founder and host of Startups Decoded (750,000 downloads + Top 2% globally).
https://www.linkedin.com/in/anwalsh/

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Music Credit.

“Neptuno” – Phondupe (Album: Onykia) https://phondupe.bandcamp.com/album/air-conditioning-vol-2

Disclaimer.

The views and opinions shared on Startups Decoded are for informational purposes only and do not constitute investment or legal advice. Always consult a qualified professional before making any financial or legal decisions.

Most founders can describe their customer. Age, income, job title, maybe a lifestyle detail. What they can't describe is why that person buys, what they almost bought instead, or what finally tipped them over. That gap is where growth lives, and most companies never go looking.

Bryan Alston has spent 15 years finding the customers and growth opportunities brands overlook, driving breakthrough growth for consumer brands including Magic Spoon, Our Place, Clove Shoes, Best Day Brewing, and Greater Than. At Greater Than, that approach uncovered breastfeeding mothers as an unexpected customer for a CrossFit-focused sports drink, helping pioneer a new category worth $10M+ annually.

Now, as founder and CEO of MOST, Bryan is turning that methodology into technology designed to systematically discover overlooked customers and new paths to growth.

EPISODE OUTLINE

1. The illusion of knowing your customer: why demographic data feels like insight and isn't
2. The invisible buyer: how to spot customers who are already there but off your radar
3. Greater Than case study: from sports hydration to a category for breastfeeding mothers
4. The triggers you're missing: what actually drives a purchase, versus what you assume
5. Building a discovery process: the practical method for testing adjacent customer groups
6. What changes when you find the real customer: repositioning, messaging, category

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Andy Walsh 2x exited founder and host of Startups Decoded (Top 2% globally). Andy helps founders sharpen judgment and integrate brand, product, and growth into a clear path to scale. 

Bryan Alston spent fifteen years finding the customers other brands ignore, working with Magic Spoon, Our Place, Clove, Best Day Brewing, and Greater Than. He built that process into software with his company, Most, helping consumer brands turn overlooked segments into profitable growth. 

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Music Credit "Neptuno" – Phondupe (Album: Onykia) https://phondupe.bandcamp.com/album/air-conditioning-vol-2

Disclaimer.

The views and opinions shared on Startups Decoded are for informational purposes only and do not constitute investment or legal advice. Always consult a qualified professional before making any financial or legal decisions.

Clara Ma was chief of staff to the CEO of Hugging Face back when it was a Series A company, years before most founders could spell LLM. 

She watched the role from the sharpest seat in the building, then built Ask a Chief of Staff, a 500-person community that has helped match CEOs with their right hand ever since.

AI was supposed to make executive support obsolete. Instead, chief of staff postings more than doubled last year, salaries are hitting $400K, and the number of people holding the title has tripled since 2021. More automation created more chaos, not less, and one human who can synthesize across every team just got more valuable, not less. 

We get into what the role actually does day to day, why it's splitting into admin work AI eats and strategic work AI can only amplify, and how the best chiefs of staff are quietly becoming the AI adoption engine inside their companies. For founders who can't afford the hire yet, Clara breaks down exactly which parts to automate and which parts still need a human in the room.

Episode outline:

1. What a chief of staff actually is, and why the org chart still can't agree on it
2. Inside Hugging Face: what Clara learned running the role at an AI unicorn
3. The split: admin chief of staff versus intelligence director, and which side survives
4. The tools the best chiefs of staff run daily, and where AI stops being useful
5. The matchmaking problem: why pairing the right chief of staff with the right CEO is so hard
6. When to hire one, and what to build yourself before you can afford to

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Clara Ma - https://www.linkedin.com/in/clarama/

Founder of Ask a Chief of Staff, the go-to community and placement platform for the role, with 500+ members worldwide and 50+ CEO matches made. She was previously Chief of Staff to the CEO of Hugging Face, where she saw the AI wave from the inside before most of us knew it was coming.

Andy Walsh
2× exited founder, advisor, and host of Startups Decoded (850,000 downloads + Top 2% globally).
https://www.linkedin.com/in/anwalsh/

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Music Credit.

“Neptuno” – Phondupe (Album: Onykia) https://phondupe.bandcamp.com/album/air-conditioning-vol-2

Disclaimer.

The views and opinions shared on Startups Decoded are for informational purposes only and do not constitute investment or legal advice. Always consult a qualified professional before making any financial or legal decisions.

John Frankel has been funding this stuff since before it was fundable. 

He founded ffVC in 2008 after 21 years at Goldman, has backed more than 200 seed companies, and sits on over sixty boards. This year robotics pulled in $18.8 billion globally, already ahead of the $15 billion invested across all of 2025, and Frankel has a clear map of where that money actually landed, and where it hasn't. Value Add Pulse

His answer isn't the humanoid story most people assume. Only 12% of Tesla owners with the hardware use supervised self-driving, even after 380,000 autonomous miles logged. Home robots are stuck behind a comfort problem, not a capability one. Meanwhile, the practical stuff, farm carts, factory totes, drone delivery, is already deployed and already making money. The episode traces the actual path of the capital, what's working today versus what's still a bet, and what that split means for anyone building in physical AI right now.

Episode outline

1. From Goldman's trading floor to founding ffVC in 2008, and why he stopped marking his angel bets to market.
2. The $18.8B robotics headline, and a real map of where the money is going.
3. Tesla's numbers: 380,000 autonomous miles logged, and only 12% of drivers who actually use it.
4. Home robots versus factory robots, and why comfort sets the real timeline, not capability.
5. The point solutions already working: Borough's farm and factory carts, Manna's drone deliveries at a dollar a drop.
6. Reshoring the physical world: labor is now 15% of cost, not 70%, and what that changes for hardware founders.

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Andy Walsh: 2x exited founder and host of Startups Decoded (Top 2% globally). Andy helps founders sharpen judgment and integrate brand, product, and growth into a clear path to scale. https://www.linkedin.com/in/anwalsh/

John Frankel: John Frankel founded ff Venture Capital in 2008 and has backed more than 200 seed-stage companies, taking board seats at over sixty, after a long career at Goldman Sachs. He invests early and with a tight filter, funding less than 0.5% of the 3,000 deals ffVC sees a year, with a current focus on applied AI across drones, robotics, and financial services.

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Music Credit "Neptuno" – Phondupe (Album: Onykia) https://phondupe.bandcamp.com/album/air-conditioning-vol-2

Disclaimer: The views and opinions shared on Startups Decoded are for informational purposes only and do not constitute investment or legal advice. Always consult a qualified professional before making any financial or legal decisions.

Owen Fitzpatrick has interviewed people in North Korea, Iran, and Afghanistan, trying to answer one question. Why do we believe what we believe?

Ten books and thirty years later, his answer is uncomfortable for founders. The story running your business decisions was never fact checked. It was just repeated enough times that it started to feel true.

His framework is simple and brutal. A belief has to feel right, fit your identity, and only then does it need to make sense. Founders think they're reasoning their way to decisions. Most of the time, they're defending a conclusion their gut already reached under pressure. Pause, ask what would have to be true, and only then move.

Episode outline

1. What inner propaganda is and why your brain runs it without asking permission
2. Feels Right, Fits In, Makes Sense: the three gates a belief has to pass before it changes
3. Why culture and identity fusion make people defend beliefs that hurt them
4. The Petrov story: how one engineer avoided nuclear war by pausing to ask "does this make sense"
5. The belief audit: the one question that actually tests whether a belief is serving you
6. Emotional granularity: practical tools for founders under pressure

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Presented by Deel

If you're at the stage of making your first or fiftieth hire — and doing it across borders — Deel is worth knowing about. They're supporting Startups Decoded. LEARN MORE.

Inner Propaganda: Stop letting your brain talk you out of your success.  Order now

Owen Fitzpatrick

Owen has spent thirty years studying why we believe what we believe. His book Inner Propaganda, argues the biggest threat to any leader isn't strategy or execution, it's the unconscious beliefs running every call they make.

Andy Walsh
Three-time founder with two exits who bootstrapped to $10M ARR, now host of Startups Decoded (top 2%, 850k+ downloads) and advising founders on growth through consulting and his podcast.

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Music Credit.

“Neptuno” – Phondupe (Album: Onykia) 

Disclaimer.

The views and opinions shared on Startups Decoded are for informational purposes only and do not constitute investment or legal advice. Always consult a qualified professional before making any financial or legal decisions.

Andy Walsh sits down with Ella Molony Cook, exited founder turned investor and Founder of Time Rich, a community of ambitious women thriving in the new world of AI.

One exit. Seven figures raised. Three companies she still holds equity in. Multiple failures, which she talks about more freely than the wins. She dropped out of high school, built a retreat business in Australia before she knew the word startup, and sold to the buyer who could grow it rather than the one with the highest number.

Then came the raise she calls the most punishing experience of her life, and the realization that the company she was grinding toward was her business partner's dream. We cover capital, secondaries, the liquidity nobody plans for, and the thesis behind Time Rich Club: women should hold 20% of the capital table, not 2%.

Episode outline

1. Bali to an exit at 23 — a passion project turns into a business, then an acquisition on her terms.
2. The validation trap — accelerators, VC approval, and why permission drains founder energy.
3. What the raise cost — the punishing version of fundraising, and the case for family offices.
4. Liquidity nobody explains — secondaries, fake buyers, equity employees cannot move.
5. The mask — identity collapse after an exit, and building someone else's ambition.
6. Time Rich — health, community, AI, and the 20% thesis.

Presented by Deel If you're making your first or fiftieth hire — and doing it across borders — Deel is worth knowing. They're supporting Startups Decoded for good reason. LEARN MORE. 

Listen: Apple || Spotify || YouTube

Andy Walsh 2x exited founder and host of Startups Decoded (Top 2% globally). Andy helps founders sharpen judgment and integrate brand, product, and growth into a clear path to scale.

Ella Cook 4x companies founded, one bootstrapped exit, seven figures raised, and four years building across the US market. She founded Time Rich Club, a community for women. Her work sits at the systems layer: helping founders, family offices, and GPs run better pipelines, source smarter deal flow, and keep the human layer that makes private capital actually work.

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Music Credit "Neptuno" – Phondupe (Album: Onykia) https://phondupe.bandcamp.com/album/air-conditioning-vol-2

Disclaimer. The views and opinions shared on Startups Decoded are for informational purposes only and do not constitute investment or legal advice. Always consult a qualified professional before making any financial or legal decisions.

Most founders obsess over the first million. The real fight starts after it.

Jordan DiPietro has scaled from every seat. Growth at The Motley Fool through several hundred million in revenue, The Hustle through its HubSpot acquisition, and Hampton from zero to $10M as CEO. Now he coaches founders and CEOs building from $5M to $50M.

Through his career he observed a genuine disconnect in how Founders hired good people. He just launched Hiring OS — the opinionated hiring system for growth-stage founders. The goal is to help founders go from open role to signed A-player in 6–8 weeks.

This conversation covers why companies stall in the messy middle, the hedging that ruins ICPs and job descriptions, and the two bottlenecks Jordan sees in every stuck company: the founder and the team. He shares his role design process, the 30-minute stack rank exercise that keeps A players loyal, and how to tie AI to real business outcomes instead of anxiety.

If you're past $1M and growth feels harder than it should, this one's your map.

Presented by Deel

If you're making your first or fiftieth hire — and doing it across borders — Deel is worth knowing. They're supporting Startups Decoded for good reason. LEARN MORE. 

Listen: Apple || Spotify || YouTube

Andy Walsh
2x exited founder and host of Startups Decoded (Top 2% globally). Andy helps founders sharpen judgment and integrate brand, product, and growth into a clear path to scale.

Jordan DiPietro

Former CEO of Hampton and former VP of HubSpot Media. Jordan has spent more than two decades building media, subscription, and community businesses, including leadership roles at The Motley Fool and The Hustle. Today he works with founders and CEOs scaling companies from $2M to $50M while sharing insights through his writing and coaching.

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Music Credit

“Neptuno” – Phondupe (Album: Onykia)

https://phondupe.bandcamp.com/album/air-conditioning-vol-2

Disclaimer

The views and opinions shared on Startups Decoded are for informational purposes only and do not constitute investment or legal advice. Always consult a qualified professional before making any financial or legal decisions.

Chris Lee joined Deel when it was doing $1M ARR. Today it's past $1B+. 

He didn't just watch that happen, he made hiring, firing, and org design decisions that either cleared the path or slowed everything down. That's what this conversation is really about.

Most founders build their sales team reactively. They wait until it hurts, then hire fast and hope for the best. Chris runs a 600-person sales org with 65+ managers and 14 direct reports — and in 5.5 years, he hasn't had a single director leave regrettably. That number tells you everything about how he thinks about people.

Episode outline

1. The $1M ARR starting point: What the early Deel sales motion looked like.
2. Hiring philosophy at scale: Why great people hire great people.
3. Fire fast: The real cost of keeping the wrong person in place too long.
4. Scaling through thresholds: What breaks at $10M, $500M, and $1B ARR.
5. AI and the future sales org: How systems thinking is becoming the defining skill for sales leaders.
6. The Pitch: How 10 global startups won $1M in investment from Deel
7. The Ghostbuster role: The emerging function nobody has a title for yet, finding broken things and fixing them.

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Presented by Deel: If you're at the stage of making your first or fiftieth hire — and doing it across borders — Deel is worth knowing about. They're supporting Startups Decoded for good reason. LEARN MORE.

Chris Lee - https://www.linkedin.com/in/techcontrarian/

Chris was one of Deel’s earliest sales hires. He helped build the revenue engine that took Deel to $1B+ ARR in under three years. Today he runs Sales for the Americas. He's seen every stage of that growth from the inside into the machine it became.

Andy Walsh - https://www.linkedin.com/in/anwalsh/
2× exited founder and host of Startups Decoded (750,000 downloads + Top 2% globally).

Access All Areas.

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Music Credit

“Neptuno” – Phondupe (Album: Onykia) 

Disclaimer

The views and opinions shared on Startups Decoded are for informational purposes only and do not constitute investment or legal advice. Always consult a qualified professional before making any financial or legal decisions.

Founders do not know how to convert their network.

Andy Walsh sits down with Kyle Kane, co-founder of onSpark AI, the world's first AI-powered partnership engine. Kyle Kane built $2B in partnership revenue for some of the biggest names in music and brands before realizing the same broken pattern kept killing deals: founders had the right relationships and no system to turn them into money. 

Kyle breaks down what a partnership engine actually looks like, why most founders confuse networking with revenue strategy, and how OnSpark is using AI to fix the part of the funnel nobody wants to talk about. The conversation covers borrowed gravity, partnership autopsies, and the one mindset shift that separates founders who close from founders who collect contacts.

EPISODE OUTLINE

1. From Shakira tours to Samsung deals — Kyle's path from signed songwriter at seventeen to driving $2B in brand partnership revenue
2. Networking is not a growth strategy — why collecting handshakes produces nothing measurable 
3. The two wounds that kill deals — lack of self-worth and lack of trust
4. Borrowed gravity — how founders without celebrity access can use the same logic
5. The Drake tour that almost ended him — eight million dollars, 26,000 pre-sold tickets, and a promoter who disappeared with the refund

Presented by Deel If you're making your first or fiftieth hire — and doing it across borders — Deel is worth knowing. They're supporting Startups Decoded this season for good reason. LEARN MORE. 

Listen: Apple || Spotify || YouTube 

Andy Walsh 

2x exited founder and host of Startups Decoded (Top 2% globally). Andy helps founders sharpen judgment and integrate brand, product, and growth into a clear path to scale.

Kyle Kane 

Co-founder of onSpark AI — the world's first AI-powered partnership engine, backed by Martell Ventures. Kyle has driven over $2B in partnership revenue for clients and brands, and now builds the tools that make that possible at scale. He works with founders, creators, agencies, and operators who want to stop chasing cold leads and start building partnerships that actually convert.

Access All Areas. 

Subscribe: Substack 

Connect: LinkedIn 

Socials: TikTok || Instagram || X 

Web: startupsdecoded.com

Music Credit "Neptuno" – Phondupe (Album: Onykia) 

The Studio  : Filmed on location at 28th&Park. A content & production studio for New York's visionary Builders, Investors, Artists, Musicians, & Creators to amplify their voice & share bold stories. Use the code "Decoded" for 25% off your first booking.

Brad Bowery sat down with Andy Walsh to unpack what founders should be thinking about as they begin hiring, and why the global talent pool is more accessible than most realize.

Brad has built local teams as a founder and global teams as an operator at Zendesk and now Deel, where he leads Global VC and PE Partnerships.

In this episode we explore;

• The real friction of global hiring: compliance, classification, and when contractor status blows up
• PEO versus EOR, explained plainly
• What a 10-person startup can learn from how the fastest-growing companies think about talent infrastructure

If your next hire could define the next 18 months, this one is worth your time.

Listen: Apple || Spotify || YouTube

Presented by Deel: If you’re making your first or fiftieth hire, and doing it across borders — Deel is worth knowing. They’re supporting Startups Decoded for good reason. LEARN MORE.

Subscribe now

Brad Bowery

Brad Bowery has spent his career at the intersection of startups and scale — founder, operator, and now head of Global VC and PE Partnerships at Deel. Before Deel, he scaled Zendesk’s startup program. Prior to that, he co-founded two renewable energy startups, SRECTrade (acquired by Xpansiv) and Pace Avenue, and later took on roles leading people operations at the drone startups Lily Robotics. Stanford MBA. Brown grad. Still holds the school pole vault record.

Andy Walsh
2× exited founder and host of Startups Decoded (500,000 downloads + Top 2% globally).

The Studio

​Filmed on location at 28th&Park. A content & production studio for New York’s visionary Builders, Investors, Artists, Musicians, & Creators to amplify their voice & share bold stories. Use the code “Decoded” for 25% off your first booking. Find out more!

Access All Areas.

• Listen: Apple || Spotify || YouTube
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• Connect: LinkedIn
• Web: startupsdecoded.com
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Music Credit

“Neptuno” – Phondupe (Album: Onykia)