Startups Decoded

Most founders think IP protection is something they'll sort out once the business gets traction. That's exactly backwards. By the time it feels urgent, the work already matters, and you're behind.

This conversation cuts through the abstraction. Maria Sinatra is an IP attorney at Venable LLP who works with startups and nationally recognized consumer brands on exactly this problem. Allison Luvera is the founder of Juliet Wine, a category-creating consumer brand that got copied by a company 300 times its size, and had the receipts to do something about it. Together they make the case that your brand is not a marketing asset. It's infrastructure, and you need to own it before someone else does.

Venable LLP is a supporter of Startups Decoded: Venable LLP is a national law firm of 900-plus professionals, with deep expertise in IP law, trademarks, copyright, patents, and brand protection for startups and consumer brands.

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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 this season for good reason. LEARN MORE.

Maria Sinatra

Is a Partner at Venable LLP specializing in trademark, copyright, and brand protection for startups and nationally recognized consumer brands. She advises companies on protecting and scaling their IP as they grow.

Allison Luvera

Founder and CEO of Juliet Wine and an award-winning entrepreneur and brand builder with 15 years of experience across consumer goods, media, and luxury beverage brands. Her work spans companies including Perrier-Jouët, Martell, Chivas Regal, Vogue, and InStyle.

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

Access All Areas.

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• Connect: LinkedIn
• Web: startupsdecoded.com 
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Music Credit

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

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.

Most companies believe they run on strategy. They actually run on conversations, and those conversations vanish the moment the call ends.

David Shim watched this happen from the inside while running Foursquare, sitting in meetings where half the room was camera off, on mute, essentially absent. He called it Ghost Mode. That observation became the founding insight for Read AI, and it’s a sharper diagnosis of organizational dysfunction than most founders ever put into words.

What David built isn’t just a note-taker. It’s a system of action, one that captures decisions, tracks follow-through, and over time builds a working model of how you think and operate. The digital twin concept he walks through here is the logical endpoint of that: an AI that knows your priorities, your patterns, and your blind spots, and starts filling the gaps before you even notice them.

For founders, the practical takeaway is immediate. Every conversation your team has is institutional memory, and right now most of it is leaking out of your company every single day. This episode is about what it looks like when you actually stop that.

EPISODE OUTLINE

1. From stock ticker to stockbroker at 17 

2. Placed, Snap, and the location data bet 

3. Foursquare and understanding human behavior at scale

4. The Ghost Mode problem and the founding of Read AI 

5. Institutional memory, digital twins, and the system of action 

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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.

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.

David Shim

Co-Founder and CEO of Read AI, an AI productivity platform that turns meetings, emails, and messages into searchable insights and action. Previously CEO of Foursquare and founder of Placed, acquired by Snap, Shim has spent his career building data and AI-driven companies focused on helping organizations make better decisions.

Access All Areas.

• Subscribe: Substack
• Connect: LinkedIn
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• Web: startupsdecoded.com

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.

Music Credit

“Neptuno” – Phondupe (Album: Onykia)

Every line on your cap table is a promise. Most founders don’t know what they’ve signed.

Andy Walsh sat down with Joris Delanoue, founder of Fairmint, to unpack why equity, the core of startup ownership, is still managed through systems built for a different era, and why that matters more now than ever.

The central tension: companies are staying private longer, secondary markets are growing fast, and the infrastructure holding it all together is, in many cases, still a spreadsheet.

Joris has spent two decades on both sides of this, as a founder frustrated by the cost and complexity of bringing people onto his cap table, and as an angel investor watching his capital sit trapped in paper with no clear path to liquidity. That frustration became Fairmint.

This episode goes deep on what a cap table actually is, what it costs when it’s mismanaged, and what programmable equity infrastructure looks like when it’s built correctly from day one.

Topics covered:

• Why cap tables are still broken 
• The standardization movement that changed early fundraising
• How blockchain turns equity into a programmable asset
• Why liquidity is infrastructure, not an exit event

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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.

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Joris Delanoue

Founder and operator with over two decades of experience building and scaling companies across tech and finance. Co-founder and CEO of Fairmint, a platform rethinking how companies raise capital and manage equity, using software and blockchain to modernize the cap table from incorporation to IPO. 

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

Access All Areas.

• Listen: Apple || Spotify || YouTube
• Subscribe: Substack
• Connect: LinkedIn
• Web: startupsdecoded.com
• Socials: TikTok || Instagram || X

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.

Taryn Williams started her first business at 21 with no experience and no capital. Twenty years later, she’d built four companies and exited twice. Taryn Williams doesn’t talk about the dream. She talks about what it actually costs.

Andy Walsh sat down with Taryn Williams — serial founder and multi-exit operator — to trace the full arc of building from scratch. From cold emailing at midnight to navigating a multi-continent exit process she’d been quietly preparing for years, this is a conversation about the real mechanics of building: cash flow, culture, capital, and the decisions nobody prepares you for.

Taryn was 21, still modeling, cold emailing production companies at midnight. She made one promise she couldn’t afford: models get paid in seven days. Industry standard was 90. She didn’t pay herself for two years to keep it. That decision built loyalty that became referrals that became a 20-year business. Then she spotted a bigger problem, built a marketplace, accidentally walked into a VC term sheet, scaled across APAC, and exited in 2023. Now she’s building again.

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.

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Who Should Listen

Founders in the early chaos. Anyone approaching a first raise or first exit. People who need to hear that the dream version and the real version of building can both be true — just not at the same time.

Taryn Williams

Taryn Williams is an entrepreneur at the intersection of talent, media, and technology. She is the founder of WINK Models and theright.fit, a talent-brand marketplace that was successfully acquired. Today she is the co-founder of #Gifted, a board director, investor, and frequent speaker on startups.

Andy Walsh

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

Access All Areas.

• Listen: Apple || Spotify || YouTube
• Subscribe: Substack
• Connect: LinkedIn
• Web: startupsdecoded.com
• Socials: TikTok || Instagram || X

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.

Music Credit

“Neptuno” – Phondupe (Album: Onykia) 

Eric Ries, author of The Lean Startup, joins Startups Decoded to discuss his new book Incorruptible and why many successful companies slowly drift away from their founding ideals.

Andy Walsh sat down with Eric to explore the forces that reshape organizations as they scale — from governance and incentives to leadership dynamics and investor pressure.

Drawing on examples from companies like Costco and FedMart, Eric explains how culture, trust, and long-term thinking are often eroded by systems designed for short-term outcomes.

This episode examines why success can quietly corrupt company purpose — and what founders must do to build organizations that remain principled as they grow.

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

What We Cover

• The legacy and influence of The Lean Startup
 • Why companies drift away from their founding purpose
 • The hidden forces that shape corporate culture
 • The founder-to-CEO transition and shifting power dynamics
 • Governance, incentives, and long-term decision making
 • Lessons from Costco and the collapse of FedMart
 • How founders can design companies that stay mission-driven

Get Incorruptible: Order here

Eric Ries

Eric Ries is the author of The Lean Startup, one of the most influential books in modern entrepreneurship. His work has shaped how startups and large companies approach innovation, product development, and experimentation. 

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

Access All Areas.

Listen: Apple || Spotify || YouTube

Subscribe: Substack

Connect: LinkedIn

Web: startupsdecoded.com 

Socials: TikTok || Instagram || X

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.

Rachel ten Brink spent two decades inside Fortune 500 companies — P&G, Estée Lauder, L’Oréal — before co-founding Scentbird and scaling it past $300M in revenue. She got rejected by YC three times. Today, Scentbird is in their top 2% by revenue. Now she’s a GP at Red Bike Capital, investing in vertical AI, fintech, and digital health.

This conversation is about what changes when you’ve been the client, the founder, and the investor — and why that sequence matters more than most people admit.

We cover:

• Why Fortune 500 experience is an underrated training ground for founders
• What enterprise clients actually evaluate before they say yes — and it’s not your product
• How Scentbird pivoted three times before hitting product-market fit
• The real cost of fundraising too long — and what to do instead
• How Red Bike Capital helps founders land their first enterprise clients

If you’re building toward your first enterprise deal, thinking about raising, or just want to understand how operators think differently — this one’s 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 this season for good reason. LEARN MORE.

Subscribe now

Rachel ten Brink

Rachel ten Brink is General Partner and co-founder of Red Bike Capital, an early-stage VC fund investing in Vertical AI, Fintech, and Health & Wellness. Previously co-founder and CMO/CRO of Scentbird — a YC-backed subscription she scaled to $300M+ in revenue and top 2% of all YC companies — she spent two decades before that building billion-dollar brands at P&G, Estée Lauder, and L’Oréal.

Andy Walsh

2× exited founder, brand, growth, GTM, 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.

Access All Areas

• Listen: Apple || Spotify || YouTube
• Subscribe: Substack
• Connect: LinkedIn
• Web: startupsdecoded.com
• Socials: TikTok || Instagram || X

Music Credit

“Neptuno” – Phondupe (Album: Onykia) 

We’re more connected than ever. More lonely than ever. Along the way, something broke.

Michelle Parsons left ed-tech to build Lora — a platform using astrology as a framework for genuine human connection.

The twist? The tech isn’t the point. The vulnerability is.

Andy Walsh sat down with Michelle Parsons, co-founder of Lora, to unpack one of the most uncomfortable truths in tech: we built tools for connection and ended up more isolated.

Michelle is a product leader (Kayak, Netflix, Spotify) who spent years watching personalization shape content discovery — and started asking why we weren’t applying that thinking to how people find each other. Lora is her answer.

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

What We Cover:

• Why social media broke the promise of connection — and why it’s structural
• Astrology as an onboarding framework for vulnerability (yes, really)
• The difference between shallow engagement and meaningful relationship
• How Lora uses personalization to facilitate depth, not just retention
• What community impact looks like when you measure connection, not clicks

Michelle Parsons

A product leader who’s built and scaled at Kayak, Spotify, Netflix, and Hinge — where she served as CPO and tripled both the user base and revenue. Most recently, she co-founded Lex, a queer-first social platform named one of Fast Company’s Most Innovative Companies. Now she’s building Lora, a platform for deeper, more authentic human connection.

Andy Walsh

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

Access All Areas.

• Listen: Apple || Spotify || YouTube
• Subscribe: Substack
• Connect: LinkedIn
• Web: startupsdecoded.com
• Socials: TikTok || Instagram || X

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.

Music Credit

“Neptuno” – Phondupe (Album: Onykia) 

Most founders spend years building audiences on platforms they don’t control. Nathan Gwilliam watched a guy go from $96M a year to zero — because Amazon changed its mind. The lesson wasn’t about Amazon. It was about whose land you’re building on.

Andy Walsh sat down with Nathan Gwilliam — serial entrepreneur and founder of PodUp — to pull apart one of the most dangerous assumptions founders make: that reach equals ownership.

After building Adoption.com into the world’s most visited adoption platform and watching founders lose everything to platform policy shifts, Nathan has spent two decades on one question: what does it actually mean to own your audience?

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Presented by Deel

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

Insight

Most founders think about distribution as a growth problem. Nathan reframes it as an ownership problem. This conversation covers first-party data, passion-based community, and why the next big shift in marketing isn’t AI — it’s credibility.

What We Cover

• Why third-party platforms are rented land
• Toyota’s Five Whys applied to audience and ICP
• Passion-based vs. brand-based marketing
• First-party data as a strategic asset
• The credibility marketing shift replacing ads

Nathan Gwilliam

A serial entrepreneur, platform strategist, and founder of PodUp, an AI-powered podcasting platform. Over the past two decades he has built and sold multiple ventures, created Adoption.com, the world’s most visited adoption site, and helped media brands grow audiences into the hundreds of millions. Today, he helps entrepreneurs and business leaders build platforms they own.

Andy Walsh 

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

Access All Areas.

• Listen: Apple || Spotify || YouTube
• Subscribe: Substack
• Connect: LinkedIn
• Web: startupsdecoded.com
• Socials: TikTok || Instagram || X

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.

Music Credit

“Neptuno” – Phondupe (Album: Onykia) 

Everyone told Milly her résumé didn’t make sense. She turned that confusion into a global community of 800+ people who felt exactly the same. Turns out, being hard to define is your biggest competitive advantage.

Andy Walsh sat down with Milly, founder of Generalist World — a community of 800+ operators, founders, and career-builders who’ve stopped apologising for doing too many things well.

This one’s for anyone who’s ever struggled to answer “so, what do you do?” without a paragraph-long explanation.

Milly grew up milking cows on a farm in New Zealand. She was supposed to become a teacher. Instead, she became a tour guide, a wine tour co-founder, a hostel co-owner, a writer for Tourism Japan, a film producer in Canada, and the Director of Miscellaneous at a tech company — before eventually landing on a remote island in Scotland, wondering why she felt like she didn’t fit anywhere.

That feeling became a LinkedIn post. That post became a community. That community now spans 800 members, 150,000 social followers, and 60,000 email subscribers — built entirely without a cent of paid marketing.

The twist? She started with 300 LinkedIn connections and absolutely no plan.

Listen: Apple || Spotify || YouTube

What We Cover:

• Why generalism is a return, not a trend
• The “top 10% in three things” framework for positioning yourself
• How Milly built Generalist World from a LinkedIn post
• Why resumes are becoming obsolete — and what replaces them
• The real reason communities are about to have their moment
• Why every founder must be willing to sell (yes, even you)
• How AI is accelerating the case for breadth over depth

Milly Tamati

Milly is a New Zealand-born founder and community builder behind Generalist World, a global network for builders, operators, and curious career generalists. After 15 years as both an early employee and founder across multiple startups, she now helps 100,000+ people design unconventional, interesting careers beyond traditional paths.

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

Access All Areas.

Listen: Apple || Spotify || YouTube

Subscribe: Substack

Connect: LinkedIn

Web: startupsdecoded.com

Socials: TikTok || Instagram || X

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.

Most founders think branding is about what they look like. Jill Smith says it’s about how you behave, and most brands have no idea who they actually are. 

Fix that first. Everything else follows!

Andy Walsh sat down with Jill Smith, CEO of Iris, one of the US’s most respected integrated brand and demand agencies, to unpack what actually makes a brand stick.

This isn’t a conversation about logos or color palettes. It’s about identity, community, and why the brands that win long-term are the ones that behave like people, including owning their mistakes.

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Jill Smith

Jill’s spent her career in two worlds that most people keep separate: the art world and advertising. That unusual path gave her something most agency CEOs don’t have, a real eye for what’s culturally real versus what’s just noise.

Her take: the brands that last are the ones that know exactly who they are, and behave accordingly, consistently, even when it’s uncomfortable.

Insight

This episode sits at the intersection of brand clarity and founder identity, which is exactly where most early-stage founders get stuck. Jill’s framework isn’t theoretical. It’s operational. Know who you are. Know your community. Behave like a person. Own your mistakes before the internet does it for you.

What We Cover:

• Why “being different” is a dead end — and what being unique actually means
• How to find your high-value audience using data, AI, and synthetic personas
• The power of micro-communities over mass marketing
• What Liquid Death, Elf Beauty, and California Pizza Kitchen get right about brand behavior
• How to turn a brand mistake into a 25% sales increase (the mac and cheese story)
• The case for long-form content and experience spend in a world drowning in noise

Who Should Listen:

• First-time founders trying to find their brand footing
• Operators building community around an early product
• Founders who’ve been told to “build a brand” but have no idea where to start

Andy Walsh

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

Access All Areas.

• Listen: Apple || Spotify || YouTube
• Subscribe: Substack
• Connect: LinkedIn
• Web: startupsdecoded.com
• Socials: TikTok || Instagram || X

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.