Tiny Little Victories

On this rocking episode, I had the chance to talk with one of my favorite humans from my time working with startups in Estonia -- Blazej Wojtyla. Blazej is the kind of human who uses every facet of his brain. He always thinks quietly and thoughtfully, and the outcome is always something spectacular. Blazej is the the CEO and founder of Jazzy Innovations and Stream Sage is also the writer and creator of the one-man interactive stage show in Poland, How It Has to Be.

But let’s back up a little. As a successful entrepreneur, Blazej built Jazzy Innovations and Stream Sage in his native Poland. Stream Sage transforms content into a connected storytelling experience that engages customers. The technology he created lets users connect any content (video, live streaming, text, images, and storytelling) directly with their products/services, which offers a new way to unlock revenue and conversions and drive engagement.

But along the way, Blazej felt like he had a story to tell. He had grown up doing magic and was fascinated by the philosophical and problem-solving principles that empowered magicians.

So Blazej returned to his passion as a young adult and began developing a play about finding and recalibrating your instinct, letting go of programming, and challenging yourself to stand up for your path and the journey you are on.

He hired an acting coach, honed his playwriting skills and re-opened the door to his love of magic. After months of many twists and turns, defending his choice to focus on the show, How It Has To Be opened in October 2024 in Poland to rave reviews.

How It Has To Be challenges conventional thinking and encourages the audience to dig deeper into who they are and how they are defined. What’s not to love? 

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We are proudly hosted on the Acast platform. Tiny Little Victories is a ⁠⁠Storyology⁠⁠ ⁠production.

Please listen to, rate, comment on, and follow Tiny Little Victories on⁠ ⁠Acast, Spotify⁠, ⁠⁠⁠Apple Podcasts⁠⁠⁠, Amazon Music, and everywhere else you listen to podcasts. Connect and follow us on the socials at Tiny Little Victories ⁠⁠LinkedIn⁠⁠⁠.

⁠Tiny Little Victories is created, produced and hosted by ⁠⁠Jennifer Kite-Powell.

Our story producer is Terrie Barron, Head of Story and Strategy at Storyology.

Sound engineer, Dimitry Vleugel

Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Here's a fact you need to staple to your head: 70% of crops worldwide rely on bees. Yup, so that tomato is in your BLT, and it needs bees. That avocado that's about to be inedible needs bees. But with their increased mortality rates, your neighbour spraying toxins in the form of mosquitos being gone, and pesticides flooding the planet, these poor bees - who only make a teaspoon of honey in their entire short lifespan, are experiencing whole colony collapse. Without pollinators, we have no crops.

Beekeepers and farmers are facing increased financial strains, which makes it much harder to feed a growing global population—which, by the way, we need and are running out of food.

Enter Itai Kanot, the Co-founder and Chief Growth Officer at BeeHero, a technology company focused on precision pollination services to improve crop yields. He's a beekeeper, and he was part of his father's beekeeping business, Boaz Kanot Bees & Honey. He has been around bees (and stung by bees) since he was five years old.

Itai was on track to take over the family bee business, but his father gave him some good advice: Get out there and see what you want to do. So he did. Itai shares his story from beekeeper to entrepreneur and how he and his co-founders have created sensors for hives that help beekeepers understand what's happening in the hive through temperature, humidity, and even the nervousness of the queen.

Today, BeeHero and Itai are on a mission to help growers pollinate their crops with bees and ensure we all have a food future!

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Follow BeeHero on LinkedIn, Instagram and Facebook!

Watch this BeeHero video!

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We are proudly hosted on the Acast platform. Tiny Little Victories is a ⁠⁠Storyology⁠⁠ ⁠production.

Please listen to, rate, comment on, and follow Tiny Little Victories on⁠ ⁠Acast, Spotify⁠, ⁠⁠⁠⁠Apple Podcasts⁠⁠⁠, Amazon Music, and everywhere else you listen to podcasts.

Connect and follow us on the socials at Tiny Little Victories ⁠⁠LinkedIn⁠⁠⁠.

⁠Tiny Little Victories is created, produced and hosted by ⁠⁠Jennifer Kite-Powell.

Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Soil isn't sexy. Even Martha Stewart, in her new commercial for organic soil from Miracle Grow, is out stumping for soil, calling herself a 'dirt nerd.' Good for you, Martha. But while Martha is making our backyard soil healthier, we need to think about making the food that grows our food healthier. 

Soil has a microbiome. And here's one for trivia night: there are more soil microorganisms in a teaspoon of healthy soil than there are people on the Earth. Sadly, our soil is dying; it's a non-renewable resource, and healthy, well-managed soil can take carbon out of the atmosphere.

Meet Kathryn Radovan, Co-founder and Senior vice president of business operations at Terra Vera. Terra Vera created an amino acid that uses nature to treat and fertilize soils. Terra Vera is a first-of-its-kind agriculture technology company using an amino acid platform to prevent crop loss and safely improve crop quality. Let's not forget about the bees. Their new company, ApiVera, is going to help commercial beekeepers in so many ways—and if the bees are healthy and happy, so are our crops!

Kathryn talks about the importance of creating sustainable agriculture, how the best discoveries can lead to a new way of thinking, and how her time growing up around the wetlands of Florida changed her perspective on the world.

Check out their upcoming crowdfunding campaign to help the bees: Indiegogo Pre-Launch (Coming soon!) 

ApiVera by Terra Vera 

Twitter: @terraveratweets

Instagram: @tryterravera

LinkedIn: @terravera

ApiVera Social Media:

Instagram: @ApiVera

Facebook: @ApiVera

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Tiny Little Victories is a Storyology production.

Listen on the Acast platform, Spotify, Apple Podcasts and Amazon Music

Follow the show on our website and LinkedIn or Jennifer's X account

Created, produced and hosted by Jennifer Kite-Powell

Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

On this show, we dive into a topic that people either love or hate: Needles. Needles aren't new to the world—50,000 years ago, they found evidence of bird bone needles. Needles went from bones to metal to plastic over decades. In the 1960s, the US military gave vaccine needle-free injections with high-powered compression. But it wasn't simple. You had to stand still while the compression gun was applied as the technician pulled the trigger.

Now, consider this: imagine all the waste that plastic needles make: the needle, the syringe, the little plastic coffin it lives in, and the latex gloves needed for each injection. Try Googling the cost of a needle's lifecycle, and you won't be able to find it. Medical waste is a global problem. Earth.org reported that the COVID-19 pandemic was a public health crisis and an environmental crisis. An estimated eight million metric tons of plastics enter the ocean annually. According to a WHO report, the medical waste accumulated during the pandemic increased plastic pollution in the oceans tenfold. 

Our guest, Lea Milovich, CEO and co-founder of Flowbeams, knows we can do better and says it's time for a new way to inject micro fluids—needle-free injection using lasers. Lea shares her journey from business innovator to CEO, her never-ending curiosity, and her desire to ensure great technology gets out into the marketplace.

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Tiny Little Victories is a Storyology production.

Listen on the Acast platform, Spotify, Apple Podcasts and Amazon Music

Follow the show on our website and LinkedIn or Jennifer's X account

Created, produced and hosted by Jennifer Kite-Powell

Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Here's a shocking fact: 11% of all greenhouse gas emissions come from materials in the construction industry. What if you could shift that number? Imagine you could do that with fungi and a mycelial network.

In this episode of Tiny Little Victories, meet concerned citizen and entrepreneur Joanne Rodriguez, CEO and founder of MycoCycle. She is tackling the construction waste problem with fungi. Joanne shares her journey on her discovery and idea of using fungi to break down construction waste to remove toxins from construction waste and transform it into valuable low-carbon, bio-based construction materials. Think about it: roofing material being dumped and just sitting there rotting. Then along comes fungi, which do their natural thing of reducing the toxicity of materials and transforming what they consume through biosorption, bioconversion and biodegradation. Joanne shares why she founded the company, how she never stops learning about what fungi can do and how she believes that a bio-circular economy can change our world. 

Follow Joanne at Green Girl Now on LinkedIn.

Watch: Transforming Waste with Fungi on Re:TV 

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Tiny Little Victories is a ⁠⁠Storyology⁠⁠ ⁠production.

We are proudly hosted on the Acast platform. Please listen, rate, comment and follow Tiny Little Victories on⁠ ⁠Acast, Spotify⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠, ⁠⁠⁠Apple Podcasts⁠⁠⁠ , and everywhere you listen to podcasts.

Connect and follow us on the social at Tiny Little Victories ⁠⁠⁠on ⁠⁠⁠LinkedIn⁠⁠⁠.

⁠Tiny Little Victories is created, produced and hosted by ⁠⁠Jennifer Kite-Powell. ⁠⁠

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Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

On this episode of Tiny Little Victories, Briar Prestidge, CEO of the Prestidge Group, drops by for a chat about the future. From a small town in New Zealand to a Web3 evangelist, Briar is an entrepreneur like no other. She is an advisor for Interpol on their investigations and forensics team; she made an award-winning documentary, 48 Hours in the Metaverse; she has an avatar fashion line on Roblox, the Hyperscale podcast, a new reality-style docu-series, Cyborg to Be, and ... wait for it ... an RFID chip implanted in her hand. 

She believes that no answer lasts forever, and that's why we have to ask questions to get answers that lead us to the future. 

You can follow Briar on her socials: 

LinkedIn, Twitter, Instagram

Hyperscale podcast [watch]

Cyborg to Be

Wraps for Oculus Quest

Oltair World

48 Hours in the Metaverse [watch]

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Tiny Little Victories is a Storyology production.

Listen on the Acast platform, Spotify, Apple Podcasts and Amazon Music

Follow the show on our website and LinkedIn or Jennifer's X account

Created, produced and hosted by Jennifer Kite-Powell⁠⁠

Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Help me, André Smith, you're my only hope. Nothing is more iconic than the most famous hologram of all time—Star Wars, when Princess Leia was projected through R2D2, pleading for help from Obi-Wan Kenobi.

In this show, we explore the power of holograms and how they can create more human connections. André Smith, co-founder and CEO of Holoconnects, shares how his company is making Holo technology user-friendly.

Their Holoboxes are used in leading hotel chains for guest check-in and healthcare facilities like Crescent Regional Hospital in Dallas, Texas, which uses a Holobox to ensure patients in underserved areas have access to doctors. The company recently partnered with the UN to elevate the voices of people in emergency situations organized by CERF.

André shares his story of the journey to create their incredible Holobox in a way that keeps the human connection alive.

Read more about how Holoconnects is using holographic technology.

Follow Holoconnects on LinkedIn, YouTube and Facebook and Instagram.

Follow André on LinkedIn.

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Tiny Little Victories is a Storyology production.

Listen on the Acast platform, Spotify, Apple Podcasts and Amazon Music

Follow the show on our website and LinkedIn or Jennifer's X account

Created, produced and hosted by Jennifer Kite-Powell

Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Shalene Gupta is a Minnesota-grown Boston-based writer with Chinese-Indonesian and Indian roots. She’s the author of The Cycle: Confronting the Pain of Periods and PMDD (Flatiron, 2024). She’s also the co-author of The Power of Trust: How Companies Build It, Lose It, Regain It (Public Affairs, 2021). The Power of Trust was nominated for a Thinkers50 Breakthrough Idea award.

In 2022, Shalene was identified as a thinker to watch out for and made the Thinkers50 Radar list. She’s also the host of the Trustonomy podcast, which the Ambies nominated for excellence in podcasting.

But that’s not all; Shalene is also a journalist. Her work has appeared in Fortune, The Atlantic, ESPN, Harvard Business Review, and TIME. She’s currently a frequent contributor to Fast Company.

In this episode, Shalene tells us about her circuitous path to her successful career as a nonfiction writer, which includes giving up on writing fiction, getting lost in Malaysia, being lost on her return to the US, and stepping into her superpower—writing. She shares her feelings on what it means to be a writer today and comes full circle—writing her first fiction novel.

If you have period pain or have been diagnosed with PMDD, you can buy Shalene's book and connect with her on her social channels if you want to share your story.

⁠The Cycle: Confronting the Pain of Periods and PMDD⁠⁠ Connect with and follow Shalene on her social channels:

On LinkedIn

At Shalene Gupta

On Twitter

On ⁠Instagram⁠

Buy her non-fiction book: The Power of Trust: How Companies Build It, Lose It, Regain It

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Tiny Little Victories is a Storyology production.

Listen on the Acast platform, Spotify, Apple Podcasts and Amazon Music

Follow the show on our website and LinkedIn or Jennifer's X account

Created, produced and hosted by Jennifer Kite-Powell

Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

On this episode Pankaj Srivastava⁠, CEO of Renaissance Park, dropped in to talk with us about an ancient crop that can heal our soil, make stronger products, is recyclable, and helps bees pollinate better (who doesn't love that?). We're talking about a world where everything starts and ends with the benefits of what this crop has to offer the planet -- industrial hemp.

Pankaj is considered to be one of the most analytical minds in the business, a gifted raconteur, a modern philosopher, and just a downright good human being who the world needs right now.

In this episode, Pankaj shares his philosophy on why ‘yes’ is the way forward, how he judges his success by the amount of opposition he gets and how industrial hemp will make the world a better place. (there's also talk of a family trip to a tattoo parlour)

But first, some hemp talk. Farming hemp uses less water (psst, we are in the midst of a water scarcity epidemic), it is more cost-efficient than cotton and it can be used to make bio-based plastics and construction materials. Hemp is stronger and more durable than wood, it’s recyclable and is priced lower than glass. In 1941, Mr. Henry Ford made a bioplastic Model T of hemp, flax, wheat and spruce pulp, making it lighter than fiberglass and ten times tougher than steel. So why aren’t we using it more? He's got the answer for that and you won't like it. (involves fat-cat industrialists, fear and greed)

Grab a drink, kick back and enjoy his passion for why we have to change the status quo and how we think about industrial hemp.

It all starts and ends with hemp. 

Get in the game and connect with Pankaj

Pankaj Srivastava, CEO of Renaissance Park Corp.

• LinkedIn

Renaissance Park Corporation:

• LinkedIn 
• X
• Instagram: Let's Hemp It

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Tiny Little Victories is a Storyology production.

Listen on the Acast platform, Spotify, Apple Podcasts and Amazon Music

Follow the show on our website and LinkedIn or Jennifer's X account

Created, produced and hosted by Jennifer Kite-Powell

Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

In this episode of Tiny Little Victories, Rosa Schmidt, Founder of the Defem Agency in London, talks about why she wanted to help companies change the narrative on complex issues facing the world today.

But for Rosa, her journey to storyteller was a byproduct of her quest to find meaning in her life.

Guess what she did? Supported by her partner, family and friends, she packed up and moved to Thailand to learn Thai Boxing. Through that experience, this petite firecracker of a human being walked herself back into the stream and found her purpose. (And back in London, she is still boxing- fierce!)

For Rosa, storytelling is more than changing a company's voice; it is about creating a story that connects with people’s humanity. Her belief is that we don’t have to keep doing what we have done in the past to make genuine connections between a company and its customers.

Listen to this authentic conversation with a woman about her mission to bring more emotion to the world.

Follow Rosa on LinkedIn and Instagram.

Follow Defem Agency on LinkedIn

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Tiny Little Victories is a Storyology production.

Listen on the Acast platform, Spotify, Apple Podcasts and Amazon Music

Follow the show on our website and LinkedIn or Jennifer's X account

Created, produced and hosted by Jennifer Kite-Powell

Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.