The Changeup

This week's guest is the CEO and Founder of Malida Advisors, Natasha Kehimkar. 

Malida Advisors is a strategic advisory firm, focusing on areas of diversity, equity, inclusion, organizational change, and scaling your HR function. 

We talk about her career journey in the Pharma world, to tech start-ups, to building her own thing. She also shares how during the pandemic she recorded her family's life story, interviewing her mom and dad daily for posterity. 

This week's guest is co-founder and CEO of Curacubby, Steven Khuong.

Curacubby is a next-generation, fin-tech, SAS platform that helps education, recreation, and family service programs save time and money by optimizing finance and business workflow functions. 

We discussed how a very personal family hurdle led to the creation of Curacubby, how his family moved from Hong Kong to Grand Rapids, Michigan, and his incredible stories about being a Bay Area hip-hop DJ and producer in the 1990s.

This week's guest is the founder of Farmer Nick, Nick Cutsumpas.

I met Nick when he was a sales executive at Thrive Global, where we hit it off due to his empathy and creativity and his love of baseball didn't hurt either.

Nick bet on himself and has grown a small empire focused on urban farming. His Farmer Nick Instagram account has over 169,000 followers, his plant coaching business is booming in both LA and New York and his new book "Plant Coach: The Beginners Guide to Caring for Plants and the Planet" is out now. 

This week's guest is Career Strategist, Executive Coach, and Consigliere, Jill Griffin. 

Before going out on her own, Jill was a senior executive at massive media agencies like Publicis, overseeing Fortune 500 branding, strategy, and media partnerships. 

We talk about how what was initially going to be a few months of consulting turned into a 6+ year career, her ongoing mission to help workforces build inclusive teams and embrace those with disabilities, and how she built her podcast "The Career Refresh".

This week's guest is the Founder of Press 2 for Espanol, Carmen Diaz. 

We talk about her journey from teaching in schools in Texas to teaching Spanish online. We discuss how she took her love of language and passion for helping others and turned it into a business, and her plans for growth to help her home country of Guatemala. 

This week's guest is Co-Founder of Bumper, Dan Misener. 

Bumper is a podcast growth agency that helps organizations reach their business goals through the power of audio. 

Dan is one of the sharpest minds in audio. We talk about the Faustian bargain some audio companies took to garner scale, what it means to focus on engagement versus download numbers, where he thinks the industry is headed, and how critical podcast strategy will be to it. 

This week's guest is the author and executive performance strategist, Laura Garnett. 

At Laura's firm, Garnett Consulting, Laura and her team work with highly driven, industry-leading executives and teams to achieve the impact and fulfillment they desire. 

We talk about her decision to leave one of the biggest companies in the world, executive burnout, and our psychology at work, as well as some key insights from her book "Find Your Zone of Genius". 

This week's guest is the founder of Schlaf & Co, Steve Schlafman. 

Steve was a venture capitalist who made the decision a few years back to leave the industry to focus on building his boutique leadership company that focuses on helping early-stage founders and VCs. 

He is also an avid reader and writer and something we explore during our conversation together is how he made it an intentional part of his life. We talk about leadership, forging your own path, and most importantly, creating a space to be present for your family while running a company. 

This week's guest is the Founder and CEO of Sparkfly, Catherine Tabor. 

Sparkfly is a retail technology solutions company that helps innovative retailers and merchants like Chipotle, Texas Roadhouse, and Great Clips leverage technology to create a meaningful connection to their customers

We talk about how she was able to win her first big client and turn that into her business, how vital consumer privacy is in the age of digital, and her awesome business perspective of if you can't get in the door, climb through a window. 

This week's guest is the creator of Shameless Acquisition Target, Laura Mayer. 

Laura and I worked together at the Slate group, where she was a producer at Panoply, also known as Megaphone, prior to its sale to Spotify. She has had a front-row seat to the podcast acquisition boom and helped launch dozens of award-winning shows. It has not punched her ticket to podcast millions, like some lucky people we know have.

That's where Shameless Acquisition Target comes in. It's a smart, funny and incisive examination of the internal machinations of the podcast industry, and it's one of my favorite shows of the year. We talk about its creation and its culmination with her sharing if the company was sold or not.