The Influence Economy Podcast with Shayna Davis

I hate to break it to you: most tech founders think if the product is strong enough, the rest takes care of itself. It doesn't. And today's guest has spent over three decades proving why.

I met Carole Robin at Human Tech Week earlier this year, sat in on a session she led, and knew immediately I needed her on the show. Carole is the co-founder of Leaders in Tech and formerly served as faculty director of the Interpersonal Dynamics for High Performance Executives program at Stanford's Graduate School of Business. She's also the co-author of Connect: Building Exceptional Relationships with Family, Friends, and Colleagues.

Students at Stanford nicknamed her course "touchy feely." Don't let that fool you. What she teaches is the hard skill most technical founders skip, and it's costing them more than they realize.

We get into why leadership is really about influence, why influence doesn't exist without connection, and why the mental models that got you through your early career might be the exact thing sabotaging you now. Carole also breaks down her Three Realities framework (intent, words, impact) and the one question that will tell you, immediately, whether what you meant to say is actually what landed.

What You'll Learn:

• Why "soft skills" are actually the hardest and most business-critical skills a tech leader can build
• The one question that closes the gap between your intent and how you're actually being received
• How the 15% rule helps you push past your comfort zone without oversharing or getting reckless
• What to actually do before a high-stakes investor, customer, or media conversation, and why there's no single shortcut

Resources Mentioned:

• Carole's free self-assessment: connectandrelate.com
• Leaders in Tech: https://www.leadersintech.org/
• Grab Carole's Book: Connect: Building Exceptional Relationships with Family, Friends, and Colleagues
• Connect with Carole on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/carole-robin/

Your Next Steps:

• Access the white paper: External Influence: The Currency Tech Leaders Can't Afford To Ignore: https://techinfluence.us
• Follow Shayna on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/shaynarattler/
• Visit our website: https://executivesignalsgroup.com

Let's keep it real. Great tech doesn't close rounds. Great tech doesn't win categories. And great tech definitely doesn't stop a competitor with a weaker product from eating your lunch. What closes the gap is credibility, and this week's guest has spent years building it for an entire region.

I sat down with Eric Moore, Chief Development Officer at Bio North Texas, to talk about what it actually takes to get investors, partners, and stakeholders to buy into your story. Eric leads strategic communications, partnerships, and marketing for one of the fastest growing biotech and lifesciences ecosystems in the country, and he's spent his career convening the founders, scientists, and investors who make that ecosystem credible.

This conversation gets into why VCs are betting on the founder more than the tech, why your internal messaging is quietly killing your external credibility, and why "what is your why" might be the most important question you're not asking yourself.

What You'll Learn:

• Why investors say they're almost never pitched a bad tech idea, and what they're actually evaluating instead
• The difference between talking to your team and talking to the market, and why founders confuse the two
• How to build one credible narrative that holds up across investors, customers, media, and your board
• Why proximity and community, not just product, are part of your credibility equation

Resources Mentioned:

• Bio North Texas: https://biontx.org
• Eric Moore on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/eric-b-moore-mba-0b076215/
• BioNTX's podcast featuring interviews with BioNTX's Rising Stars: https://youtu.be/CXfKks7tOmM?is=421YfCXtfBUGgYpm

Your Next Steps:

• Access the white paper: External Influence: The Currency Every Leader Must Carry. https://externalinfluence.us
• Follow Shayna on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/shaynarattler/
• Visit our website: https://executivesignalsgroup.com

Why the best tech doesn't always win, and what actually gets founders funded

Here's something I say often on this show: the best tech doesn't always win. What wins is the founder and the leadership team that can actually show up with credibility outside the four walls of the company. And nobody sees that pattern play out more than the person deciding whether to write the check.

That's why I brought Jason Kraus on the show. Jason is the founder and CEO of Prepare 4 VC, an investor readiness firm that has helped early stage founders raise more than $480 million in capital. He's also a venture investor through EQX Fund and Equity Venture Partners, chapter lead of Startup Grind Boston, and author of Win Forward: Lessons from Leaders. Jason sits on both sides of the table, as an entrepreneur and as an investor, which means he's seen exactly what separates the founders who get funded from the ones who don't.

We got into what it actually means to "bet on the jockey," why investors say there are no more bad ideas but plenty of founders who can't tell a good story, and why Jason's own firm puts more weight on soft skills like adaptability and coachability than almost anything else. We also got real about financial projections, why some of them are, in Jason's words, close to fiction, and what to focus on instead when you're building your pitch.

Let's keep it real: if you've ever wondered why a competitor with weaker tech keeps out-raising you, this episode is going to explain a lot.

What you'll learn:

• What "betting on the jockey" actually means and how investors evaluate a founder they've never met
• The real reason investors say they're rejecting founders right now, and it's rarely the tech
• How the story you need to tell shifts depending on your sector, whether that's consumer, marketing-heavy, or med device
• What separates a founder who gets funded in a downturn from one who doesn't

Resources and Links:

• Prepare for VC's Compass assessment and roadmap tool: Prepare4VC.com 
• Connect with Jason on LinkedIn

Your Next Steps:

Access the white paper: External Influence: The Currency Every Leader Must Carry. https://externalinfluence.us

Follow Shayna on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/shaynarattler/

Visit our website: https://executivesignalsgroup.com

Your technical advantage has an expiration date. And most founders aren’t doing the math on how soon it hits.

I’ve been in conversations with founders lately who are still building their entire competitive strategy around their tech. And I get it. You’ve poured real time, real ingenuity, and real money into what you’ve built. But here’s what I keep watching happen: the market isn’t waiting for founders to feel ready to compete on something other than the product.

AI didn’t just change how fast you can build. It changed how fast everyone else can catch up. What used to take a competitor eighteen to twenty-four months now takes months. Sometimes weeks. Which means the moat you’ve been counting on isn’t buying you the time you think it is. And the founders who figure that out now, while they still have a head start, are the ones who’ll have something to stand on when a bigger, better-funded player walks into their category.

In this episode, I’m making the case for why credibility is the only competitive advantage AI cannot replicate, and why the founders building it now are quietly banking something that will matter when everything else looks the same.

What you’ll learn:

Your Next Steps:

A few weeks ago, I was in a room with 5,000 builders, enterprise leaders, and investors at Human+Tech Week in San Francisco. I went expecting to spend five days deep in conversations about AI, the future of work, and where technology is headed.

And those conversations happened. But that’s not what I kept noticing.

What I kept noticing — what nobody was naming out loud — was a live credibility audit happening in real time. Founders pitching. Leaders taking the stage. People walking into investor conversations and networking rooms full of people who could change the trajectory of their companies. And almost none of them realized they weren’t being evaluated on their technology. They were being evaluated on their ability to signal that their technology is worth betting on. Those are two very different things. Let’s fix that.

The gap I watched play out in San Francisco isn’t a pitch problem or a product problem. It’s a credibility signal problem. And most founders won’t see it until a round takes longer than expected, a key hire chooses a competitor, or a category conversation happens in the press and their company isn’t mentioned. By then, the trust ledger has already been overdrawn for months. Let’s keep it real — you can’t sprint your way back to credibility. You build it consistently, or you lose it quietly.

What you’ll learn in this episode:

Your Next Steps:

Your deck is not the problem.

I know that’s not what you want to hear when you’re three weeks out from investor meetings and you’re still tweaking your competitive slide. But let’s keep it real: the deck is the last ten percent. What happens in the ninety percent before it is what actually determines whether you walk out of that room with a term sheet or a polite pass.

In this solo episode, I’m breaking down the credibility gap that’s quietly killing funding conversations for early-stage founders — and why the investors you’re trying to impress have already started making a decision before you say a single word. I’ve watched this play out inside boardrooms and pitch meetings at the moments where everything is on the line. Two founders. Same stage. Same market. Same technology. Completely different outcomes. The difference wasn’t the deck. It was the signal one of them sent before the meeting ever started.

What you’ll learn in this episode:

Your Next Steps:

Most founders walk into high-stakes rooms — investor meetings, client pitches, panel stages — and lead with the wrong thing. They lead with the product. The features. The data. The roadmap. And the room stays flat.

Let’s keep it real: that’s not a pitch problem. That’s a story problem. And in this episode, I’m breaking down exactly why technical founders default to product-first communication, what it costs them, and how to fix it with a framework that’s straightforward but most founders never fully execute.

This isn’t about being charismatic. It’s not about having some emotional origin story that makes investors cry. It’s about closing the gap between what you say and what actually moves people — and understanding that data is evidence, not a story. Evidence only lands when someone already cares. The story is what makes them care first.

What you’ll learn in this episode:

Your Next Steps:

There’s a question I don’t think enough leaders are asking themselves — and it’s not about strategy, headcount, or even product roadmap. It’s simpler than that, and it’s also more urgent than most leadership teams realize: If someone went looking for you right now, what would they find?

That question is the heart of this episode. Because we are in the middle of one of the most significant shifts in the history of leadership — and it has nothing to do with the next product release or the next funding round. AI is absorbing the execution layer. The tasks, the analysis, the operational workflows that leaders have spent entire careers mastering — technology is coming for all of it. And that leaves one question on the table that most senior leaders haven’t answered: if what you do can eventually be automated, what’s left that only you can do?

The answer is representation. And let’s keep it real — most leadership teams have never been told that showing up externally was part of the job. It’s not in the job description. It’s not in the performance review. And so leaders default to what they know: execution. Which is internal. Which is invisible to the market.

In this solo episode, I break down exactly why the shift from execution to representation is no longer optional — and what it actually looks like in practice.

What you’ll learn:

Your Next Steps:

Most leaders walk into high-stakes external conversations thinking the goal is to win the argument. It’s not. And if that’s your approach, you’re already losing.

In this episode, I sit down with Jeff Wetherhold — a behavioral science researcher, change management expert, and faculty member with the Institute for Healthcare Improvement — to break down what’s actually happening when leaders face pushback from external audiences. Jeff holds a master’s in education from Harvard University and brings over twenty years of experience training leaders to navigate the high-pressure conversations that determine whether trust is built or broken. His approach is grounded in motivational interviewing, adapted specifically for the moments that matter most — media interviews, investor conversations, client engagements, and public-facing leadership.

Let’s keep it real: the stakes for leaders communicating outside their organizations have never been higher. And most of them are not prepared. Not because they don’t know their product or their company — but because they don’t know how to listen, how to respond to skepticism without amplifying it, and how to help someone talk themselves into believing what they’re saying is worth listening to. Let’s fix that.

What you’ll learn in this episode:

Resources Mentioned:

Your Next Steps:

Your comms strategy is only as strong as the leaders delivering it. And if you’ve been doing damage control after panels, media interviews, or enterprise sales conversations — you already know this.

In this episode, I’m naming the pattern that most comms leaders and marketing executives are too close to the problem to say out loud: your technical leaders are stepping into external moments every single day, and they are not prepared for them. Not because they aren’t brilliant. They are. But brilliance in execution and influence in external communication are not the same skill — and nobody has ever built that skill in them.

Let’s fix that.

What You’ll Learn:

Your Next Steps: