Not Another Podcast

Infinity Constellation
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Hey, I’m Brennan Pothetes. I’ve raised millions, burned out hard, and learned that most startup advice is toxic BS. Hustle culture isn’t a superpower. It’s a fast track to burnout. So I’m starting Not Another Podcast. Each episode, I’m doing something fun, like building Legos or cooking spaghetti, while having raw, honest convos with founders. It’s part therapy, part teardown. All real talk. If you’re done with the hype and want sustainable success, this is for you.

  1. hace 5 días

    The Secret to Hiring People Who Never Leave | Shensi Ding @ Merge

    Silicon Valley says move fast and break things. Shensi Ding built Merge by doing the opposite: nine months of building with zero users, obsessing over margins while everyone else chased growth at any cost. Today the fastest-moving AI companies in the world, including Mistral and Perplexity, run on the infrastructure she refused to rush. Brennan sits down with the co-founder and CEO of Merge ($75M from Accel, NEA, and Addition) to talk about the unfashionable choices behind the connective layer of production AI. Shensi gets candid about the post-Series B hiring spree that felt like "an organ getting rejected," why she studies competitors like Sherlock Holmes, the stigma around Chinese open-source models, and the fertility numbers that made her rethink founder stress. Highlights: Why building for nine months with zero users meant launching with zero bugsThe over-hiring mistake, and the "fewer, better people" rule that came out of itHow one rogue AI agent can delete your entire Salesforce, and how to stop itChinese open-source models, and how American routers put a "surface" on top of themWhy model access based on citizenship is coming to your company"You can't fake margins forever": her case against AI financial engineering20 eggs, one embryo: the honest math of founder stress and fertility Subscribe to Not Another Podcast for more unfiltered conversations with founders building through the hype.Watch on YouTube, listen on Spotify and Apple Podcasts.Find Shensi on LinkedIn and X (@shensi) · merge.dev

  2. 14 jul

    Why This Stripe Engineer Quit to "Save the Internet” and Give Ownership Back to the Consumer

    For 25 years, you have been renting. Your photos, your files, your audience, your work… all of it lives on someone else's servers, in formats you can't touch, monetized by a handful of companies that can evict you anytime. Ben Guo thinks that's the great unspoken scam of the modern internet, and he left a nearly nine-year career at Stripe to do something about it. Ben was an early employee at Venmo and the founding engineer on Stripe Terminal. Now he's the co-founder of Zo Computer, a personal cloud computer he describes as "your home on the internet" and pitches, only half-joking, as "AWS for my mom." In this conversation with Brennan Pothetes, he makes the case that the next giant consumer wave isn't AI taking your job, it's AI finally letting ordinary people own a piece of the internet. It gets spicy. Ben argues SaaS needs to die, explains why he spent $9,000 on AI coding in a single month, breaks down "velocity coding" versus vibe coding, and tells the story behind the name Zo and his Pegasus logo. If you're tired of the same recycled AI-future takes, this one cuts in a different direction. In this episode: Why Ben says we've "never owned real property on the internet" and what that actually costs youThe "AWS for my mom" test, and how building for a biologist with no coding background shaped the productWhy he believes SaaS has to die and individuals become their own software providers"Velocity coding, not vibe coding": how he writes 500K lines in two months and barely reads codeThe $9,000 Cursor bill, and how he decides whether AI spend is actually workingWhy he built personal agents before OpenAI made them cool, and how OpenClaw became a tailwindWhere the name Zo comes from and why his logo is a Pegasus Subscribe for new episodes of Not Another Podcast with Brennan Pothetes.Watch on YouTube, listen on Spotify and Apple Podcasts.

  3. 7 jul

    How This Former Poker Pro Runs an AI Company With Just 1 Meeting Per Week

    George Kurdin spent years as a professional poker player before online poker was shut down overnight. The skill he carried into building a company wasn't the one you'd expect. It had nothing to do with reading faces across a table and everything to do with expected value, risk, and the discipline to iterate before you get crushed. Now George is co-founder and CEO of Monk, an AI-native accounts receivable platform automating the whole contract-to-cash lifecycle. He sat down with Brennan Pothetes to make the case for building in the least glamorous corner of AI, why "touching money" earns you the right to build something big, and why he's genuinely worried about the foundation model labs even as he builds in their blast radius. This one gets into the real mechanics of building an AI company in 2026: hiring 1 in 700, running on one meeting a week, what an "agent harness" actually is, and where defensibility still lives once the models are a commodity. Inside the episode: Why George says poker teaches risk and EV, not reading people, and how that maps to foundingThe principles he used to pick his market, including "don't get nuked by Satya and Sam"Why he believes you "earn the right to build a big business if you touch money"His spicy take on the labs, valuations, and the shift toward Chinese and open modelsWhat an "agent harness" is, explained through L4 self-driving cars and human-in-the-loopHow he hires (1 in 700) and runs the team with one weekly all-hands and no standupsWhere moats still exist in the AI app layer when the tech is no longer the advantage Subscribe for more conversations with the founders building what's next.Watch on YouTube, listen on Spotify and Apple.Follow George and Monk for more on AI-native finance.

  4. 30 jun

    How $400 Billion Quietly Disappears Inside the $1 Trillion Insurance Industry Every Year with Rashmi Melgiri

    Americans spent roughly a trillion dollars on property and casualty insurance last year. Only about 60% of it came back as claims, and that number has been falling for decades. Rashmi Melgiri wants to know where the other $400 billion went, and why nobody seems to be measuring whether the industry is getting any better. Rashmi started as an antitrust economist at 21, modeling DOJ and FTC cases, before spending years in telecom and co-founding CoverWallet, which she raised $35M for and sold to Aon. Now she's the founder and CEO of Functional Finance, building the financial rails underneath insurance. Along the way she's developed a framework she calls "infrastructure of life," the idea that insurance, telecom, energy, and healthcare are a different class of industry, and that the only people left with the energy to reform them are founders, funded by a system that routes them right back to the incumbents they set out to beat. She and Brennan get into it: free markets versus regulation, why she went back to build a second company in the same industry she'd already exited, and what it actually felt like to sell to Aon. In this episode: Why only 60 cents of every insurance dollar reaches a claim, and where the rest goesThe "infrastructure of life" thesis: which industries we've stopped protecting, and whyHow selling to Aon showed her the reform path that ends inside the incumbentWhy she thinks founders, not government, are the last reform mechanism leftThe bankruptcy double standard between corporations and peopleWhat an antitrust economist sees in insurance that founders missWhy she started a second company partly to test if she could be the CEONew episodes of Not Another Podcast every week. Subscribe on YouTube and follow on Spotify and Apple Podcasts so you don't miss one.

  5. 23 jun

    How This Founder Turned Paranoia Into Her Superpower with Anastasia Leng

    Anastasia Leng's first company got everything a founder is supposed to want. Time named it a top 10 startup to watch. The press loved it. She still couldn't raise a dollar, and it died a slow, public death. What she built next, CreativeX, now works with Unilever, Heineken, and Google. This conversation with Brennan Pothetes is about the psychology that made the second time different: paranoia she repurposed as preparation, a hard refusal to chase validation, and the lesson that taught her to speak an investor's language without burning down the only company she has. She moved through five countries before she was 13 and learned English at 12. She talks about the fear that nearly kept her at Google, the investors who told her to quit, why she refused to wipe out her early angels, and the emotional game of building that almost no founder discusses honestly. In this episode: Why she trained herself to imagine the worst, and how it makes everything else feel steadyHow a "top 10 startup" with great press still couldn't raise, and what she learned from itThe difference between how a first-time and second-time founder talk to investorsWhy she refused the "clean cap table" every VC demanded, and how it paid off What she did when respected investors told her to shut the company downWhy being profitable is the only real leverage a founder hasWhat AI is quietly doing to judgment on her teamNew episodes of Not Another Podcast every week. Subscribe on YouTube, Spotify, and Apple Podcasts.

  6. 16 jun

    Why This Investor Says the Whole VC Model Is in Crisis | Jenny Fielding

    Jenny Fielding has returned three funds' worth of capital and backed two 2015 unicorns she's still holding 11 years later. So when she posted that early-stage VC's entire model might not survive the disruption cycles it's funding, founders listened… and almost no VCs commented. In this conversation with Brennan Pothetes, Everywhere Ventures' Managing Partner says the quiet part out loud: AI is collapsing tech innovation cycles faster than a 10-to-15-year fund can underwrite, the "tech moat" is mostly dead, and a founder just handed her back a Series A because he could see his own ceiling. They get into what's actually defensible now, why she runs 60-70 bets instead of 20, and why DPI is the only number that matters. It's a fast, spicy, no-spin look at where venture and company-building are headed from someone willing to bet her own portfolio on the answer. • Why the 10-year fund model is in an "existential crisis" no one will name• The real story behind the founder who returned a Series A check• The four things still defensible after AI: brand, data, integrations, distribution• Why she takes 60-70 bets when most early funds take 20-30• How small funds quietly out-earn the billion-dollar mega-funds on DPI• The "why then" slide every founder is missing in their pitch• Why she sat out Web3 and frothy AI rounds New episodes of Not Another Podcast drop every week. Subscribe so you don't miss the conversations other founders and VCs are too careful to have.

  7. 9 jun

    How a 6th-Grade Dropout From Togo Built a $100M Fair Trade Brand With No VC

    Olowo-n'djo Tchala grew up sharing an 8x10 room with his mother and seven siblings in Togo (a family of 41 brothers and sisters, one of the world's poorest countries) and left school after the sixth grade. In 1996, a Peace Corps volunteer named Prairie Rose came to his village. They fell in love and moved to California. Later on with 17 women in West Africa, a shea nut tree, and student loans, he built Alaffia: a fair-trade beauty company that would reach $100M in sales, 250,000 lives touched in West Africa, and shelf space in Whole Foods nationwide. No outside investors. For twenty years. Then the investors arrived. Four months later, Olo resigned. He couldn't look the West African women in the eyes and tell them their wages were being cut. He watched Alaffia deteriorate from the outside. He built Ayeya from scratch… no capital, a changed market, everything to prove again. Then, in late 2025, he bought Alaffia back. What Brennan and Olo get into in this episode goes beyond any founder story NAP has told: Why Olo went 20 years without outside investors and what happened within 4 months of taking the moneyThe specific moment "optimization" crossed from business decision to personal betrayal "I see all these women as my mother" and why that made the investor conversation impossibleThe community programs that can't be measured in EBITDA, including a woman who named her baby after the brand because it saved her lifeWhat two years of depression looked like after leaving a company woven into every wall of his homeHow he launched Ayeya with no capital, in a market that had changed, and decided to go all out because he had nothing left to loseWhy buying Alaffia back felt like life and death, not a transactionHis vision: West Africa needs to stop being a raw material producerHis answer to the question he's always wanted to be asked: "What does healing look like in business?"His billboard: "Don't compromise the fire that you have in you."Subscribe to Not Another Podcast on YouTube, Spotify, and Apple Podcasts. Follow Infinity @infinityvc. Find Alaffia at alaffia.com, available at Whole Foods stores nationwide.

  8. 26 may

    The $500M Hedge Fund Where Every Single Employee Owns a Piece: Shamir Karkal

    Shamir Karkal co-founded Simple in 2009, one of the first real digital-first banks in the US. When he sold it to BBVA for $117M in 2014, he and his co-founder fought their board to distribute $14.6M of the proceeds to roughly 100 employees, excluding the founders. He's applied that same principle at every company since, including his current AI fund, where every employee owns a stake in the fund itself. In the hedge fund world, that's almost unheard of. Today he's Co-founder and President of Aleph Invariance, an AI fund based in Portland with an intentionally low public footprint. He's also Co-founder and Chief Strategy Officer of Sila, the programmable money API platform that has raised $20M+. Before Sila, he built BBVA's Open Platform after the Simple acquisition, creating the API infrastructure that helped power a generation of embedded-finance startups in the US. In this episode: Why first movers do the hard work and second movers capture the upsideHow employees get screwed on options at acquisition, and how Shamir did it differentlyThe $14.6M employee payout from Simple and the board fight behind itWhy every Aleph Invariance employee owns a stake in the fundWhat PNC destroyed when they shut Simple downHow to build a de novo AI fund when you've never worked in financeWhy humanities majors are about to become more valuable than engineers If you know a founder who's ever wondered whether it's possible to build something great without leaving your team behind, send them this one. Subscribe for more episodes of Not Another Podcast every week!

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Hey, I’m Brennan Pothetes. I’ve raised millions, burned out hard, and learned that most startup advice is toxic BS. Hustle culture isn’t a superpower. It’s a fast track to burnout. So I’m starting Not Another Podcast. Each episode, I’m doing something fun, like building Legos or cooking spaghetti, while having raw, honest convos with founders. It’s part therapy, part teardown. All real talk. If you’re done with the hype and want sustainable success, this is for you.

Información

  • Creador
    Infinity Constellation
  • Años de actividad
    2025 - 2026
  • Episodios
    33
  • Clasificación
    Explícito
  • Copyright
    © Infinity Constellation
  • Mostrar sitio web
    Not Another Podcast

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