Keep Going

John Biggs
  • 5.0 (7)
  • Entrepreneurship
  • Updated Weekly

When you're going through Hell, keep going." This is a podcast about failure and how it breeds success. Every week, we will talk to amazing people who have done amazing things yet, at some point, experienced failure. By exploring their experiences, we can learn how to build, succeed, and stay humble. It is hosted by author and former New York Times journalist John Biggs. Our theme music is by Policy, AKA Mark Buchwald. (https://freemusicarchive.org/music/policy/) www.keepgoingpod.com

  1. How to break free

    1d ago

    How to break free

    Melissa Banks spent 17 years in an abusive marriage before she rebuilt her life from scratch. No money. No plan. Two sons depending on her. What came next became a lesson in something most people miss when they talk about success. Success is rarely a clean break. It is usually a slow crawl out of fear. On this week’s episode of Keep Going, Melissa talks about leaving abuse, learning how to speak up again, and building an event planning business after losing everything. “I believed that I was nothing,” she said. “I believed that someone else had to control my mind because that was what I was told for over 17 years.” That damage does not disappear overnight. Melissa described the strange process of learning how to trust herself again. First she decorated rooms for family and friends. Then she started charging for it. Then she had to learn something even harder, valuing her own work. “Doing it for free was the easy part,” she said. “When you was trying to charge for it, it became a bit of a challenge.” What stood out in the conversation was how practical her advice became. There was no fantasy about instant success. She talked about systems. Contracts. Pricing. Schedules. Learning skills properly instead of pretending you already know everything. When she started her decorating company, she signed up for classes because she wanted to understand the work deeply. “Don’t just wing it,” she said. “Learn the industry.” Then the pandemic arrived and destroyed the in-person event business almost overnight. Instead of treating it as the end, she pivoted into virtual events, books, speaking, and media work. That shift became another lesson. The thing that feels like collapse is sometimes just a forced change in direction. One of the strongest parts of the interview came when Melissa described being a single mother with no place to live. She talked about asking for help, finding an apartment she did not want but turning it into a home, and writing down what she wanted her future to look like even when nothing around her matched it yet. That mattered because her story is not really about motivation. It is about momentum. She believes people wait too long for confidence before they act. Her argument is almost the reverse. You move first. Confidence follows later. “Don’t wait for everything to be perfect for you to take that step,” she said. “You will stumble. Forgive yourself for stumbling. And keep going.” Melissa’s upcoming memoir, The Life I Designed, comes out in October. The title fits the conversation perfectly. Her life was not handed to her in a finished form. She had to build it piece by piece, often while exhausted, scared, and unsure of what would happen next. A lot of people think reinvention belongs to younger people. Melissa’s story argues the opposite. Reinvention belongs to anybody willing to keep moving after the world tells them to stop. You can check out all of Melissa’s work on her jam-packed website and book some time with her here. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.keepgoingpod.com/subscribe

    21 min
  2. How to predict the future

    5d ago

    How to predict the future

    Daniel Burrus has spent decades talking about the future, but the most useful thing he said on Keep Going had nothing to do with AI or technology. It had to do with regret. Before he built six companies, before the bestselling books and the keynote stages, he was teaching biology and physics. He had an idea for an airplane design and wanted to turn it into a business. The problem was simple. He had never taken a business class in his life. He was scared of failing. But he realized something else scared him more. He did not want to become an old man who never tried. The fear of regret outweighed the fear of failure. That idea sits underneath almost everything he talks about now. Most people think entrepreneurs are fearless. They are not. They are just more afraid of standing still than moving forward. Burrus also said something I had never heard framed quite this way before. He said entrepreneurs usually have success metrics but almost never have failure metrics. He gave the example of hiring someone you know is not right for the role. Deep down you know it after a week, but you spend months trying to fix it before finally letting them go. You already saw the failure coming. You just delayed acting on it. That applies to almost everything. Businesses. Projects. Careers. Relationships. We hold onto broken things because motion feels harder than denial. A lot of the conversation focused on AI, which Burrus sees less as a replacement for people and more as an amplifier. He argued that companies are making a mistake by focusing only on the tools. First comes mindset, then skillset, then toolset. Most firms skip directly to the software and never rethink how they actually work. He also pushed back on the panic around AI replacing everyone. His point was simple. Jobs have always changed. The danger is not the technology itself. The danger is pretending your current role will stay frozen forever. One line stuck with me. “You can only coast downhill.” That feels true right now. A lot of people are waiting for stability to return before they adapt. But the stable version of the world they remember is probably not coming back. The people who do well over the next decade will likely be the ones willing to relearn things while everyone else argues online about whether change should exist at all. Burrus is relentlessly optimistic, sometimes almost aggressively so. Normally that kind of thing annoys me. But his optimism is grounded in systems and patterns, not motivational slogans. He studies technology, demographics, and behavior and asks what becomes inevitable once those things start moving together. His broader point was that most people underestimate the future because they spend too much time staring at the present. Burrus is a unique thinker in that he sees where the puck has gone and where it is going… years and years into the future. You can check out his books here and hire him at his website. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.keepgoingpod.com/subscribe

    27 min
  3. The Innovators: Meet the company that is managing the Internet's most precious resource

    6d ago

    The Innovators: Meet the company that is managing the Internet's most precious resource

    Paulius Judickas spends a lot of time thinking about something most people never notice, IP addresses. The internet runs on them, every server, every phone, every AI endpoint, every connected device. But there are only so many IPv4 addresses left, and the strange economics around that scarcity have created a new kind of market. On this episode of Innovators, I spoke with Judickas, VP of Strategic Alliances at IPXO, a company building what is essentially a marketplace for internet infrastructure. IPXO leases IPv4 addresses from companies that have large unused reserves to startups, hosting firms, telecoms, and AI companies that need them to operate. It sounds obscure at first, but the deeper we got into the conversation, the more it started to resemble real estate. Back in the early days of the internet, engineers assumed 4.3 billion IPv4 addresses would be more than enough. Instead, the modern internet burned through them. Companies that arrived early, IBM, Apple, major telecoms, ended up sitting on massive blocks of addresses, while newer firms often struggle to get even a few hundred. Judickas explained how IPXO emerged from that imbalance. The founders originally ran a hosting company and began leasing their own unused IP addresses to customers. Demand exploded almost immediately. That experiment eventually became a global marketplace that now manages millions of addresses. What makes the story interesting is that the business is not really about software alone. It is about trust. Judickas described the challenge of convincing large enterprises that the IP addresses sitting idle on their books could become a revenue stream. In many cases, companies did not even realize those assets had value. We also talked about the strange half-finished migration from IPv4 to IPv6. For decades, the industry has talked about replacing IPv4 entirely, yet much of the internet still depends on it. Judickas sees a world where both systems coexist for years to come, especially as AI systems and connected devices increase demand for network infrastructure. The conversation eventually turned toward AI. Every AI endpoint needs connectivity. Every distributed system needs addresses. Judickas believes the next wave of infrastructure demand will come not from traditional hosting companies but from AI firms gathering data, training systems, and deploying agents across the web. There is something almost invisible about this market. Most people never think about the plumbing underneath the internet until it starts running short. But scarcity changes behavior. IPXO is betting that IP addresses will increasingly behave less like technical resources and more like financial assets, leased, managed, and traded much like commercial property. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.keepgoingpod.com/subscribe

    16 min
  4. Keep Going: "No one's going to come save you."

    May 25

    Keep Going: "No one's going to come save you."

    Stephen Gillen told me something during this week’s Keep Going that stuck in my head long after we finished recording. “No one’s going to come save you,” he said. “And neither should they.” It sounds harsh at first. But the more he talked, the more it made sense. Gillen’s life did not begin in anything close to stability. He described being abandoned as a child in Ireland during the violence of the Troubles before being moved to London’s East End, where he was eventually pulled into organized crime at a young age. He spent years in prison, including long stretches in solitary confinement. Today he runs companies, advises brands, works in television and film, and moves through circles that would have seemed impossible from the position he started in. What interested me most was not the redemption arc. Everybody loves a redemption story because it makes life feel orderly. The thing that interested me was how practical his thinking is now. He talks less like a motivational speaker and more like somebody who learned survival the hard way and simply translated it into business. At one point he described entrepreneurship as the most powerful form of personal growth he knows. Not because business is glamorous, but because it forces you to confront yourself constantly. Your habits matter. Your discipline matters. Your ability to finish things matters. That word kept coming up. Finish. He said many people are not finishers. They get excited at the beginning, panic during the middle, and disappear before the hard part is over. Gillen’s view is that finishing is not really about talent. It is about deciding there is no acceptable path backward. He also had a line that felt brutally accurate. “Challenge is only growth trying to happen.” Most people interpret resistance as a sign to stop. A failed deal, a bad quarter, rejection, debt, embarrassment. His argument is almost the opposite. Resistance is often proof that you are finally pushing against something real. There was also something interesting in the way he talked about criminal life. He did not romanticize it at all. In fact he sounded exhausted by it. He described it as people searching for survival, belonging, and identity in the wrong place. The money and status look attractive from the outside, especially when you are young and broke, but he was clear that it only leads to bad endings. The strangest part of the conversation was hearing him move seamlessly between stories about prison and stories about working with Sean Bean and Orlando Bloom on television projects. But maybe that is the point. People are rarely one thing forever. A life can split hard in another direction if somebody decides to keep moving long enough. And honestly, that may be the real theme of Keep Going anyway. Not perfection. Not reinvention. Just motion. Some people stop where they started. Others refuse to. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.keepgoingpod.com/subscribe

    29 min
  5. The Innovators: This bracelet helps you remember everything

    May 20

    The Innovators: This bracelet helps you remember everything

    AI systems are getting better at answering questions, but they still forget almost everything that happens outside the screen. Elisa Lu thinks that’s the missing piece. Lu is the co-founder and COO of Memoket, a startup building what she describes as a “context layer” between the physical world and AI. The company’s product combines a wearable recording device with software that tracks conversations and projects across time. Instead of generating isolated meeting summaries, Memoket tries to reconstruct relationships, decisions, and discussions as they evolve. “The core idea is not just summarizing one meeting after another,” Lu said on The Innovators podcast. “What we want to provide is the full picture.” The system works by recording conversations throughout the day, then using AI to organize and connect information over weeks or months. If a salesperson meets a client multiple times, the AI can track changes in requirements and priorities. If a founder interviews ten customers, the software can compare responses automatically instead of forcing someone to read ten separate reports. Lu said the idea came from frustration with current AI note-taking tools, which often treat every conversation as a separate event. “In the past, the AI note takers would give me ten reports,” she said. “I had to read through them and piece everything together myself.” The company also sits in the middle of a growing debate over AI, privacy, and always-on recording. Lu argues that AI systems need better access to real-world context if they are going to become more useful over the long term. At the same time, she acknowledged the sensitivity of recording personal information and said users control whether data is uploaded or analyzed. One use case Lu described involved helping her mother keep track of conversations with doctors. “My mom is not able to repeat all that information to me word by word,” she said. “So I have her record the conversation.” Unlike many AI tools built entirely around smartphones or laptops, Memoket also includes custom hardware. The wearable device can be worn as a wristband, pendant, or clip and allows users to start recording with a single button press. Lu said the hardware became necessary because many important conversations happen away from screens. “Sometimes I’m driving and an investor calls,” she said. “I wish I could record that, but I’m not going to risk my life reaching out to the phone.” Memoket is currently recruiting beta users ahead of launch and they just launched their ProductHunt where you can find more info. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.keepgoingpod.com/subscribe

    13 min
  6. Keep Going: How to predict the future

    May 18

    Keep Going: How to predict the future

    Daniel Burrus has spent decades talking about the future, but the most useful thing he said on Keep Going had nothing to do with AI or technology. It had to do with regret. Before he built six companies, before the bestselling books and the keynote stages, he was teaching biology and physics. He had an idea for an airplane design and wanted to turn it into a business. The problem was simple. He had never taken a business class in his life. He was scared of failing. But he realized something else scared him more. He did not want to become an old man who never tried. The fear of regret outweighed the fear of failure. That idea sits underneath almost everything he talks about now. Most people think entrepreneurs are fearless. They are not. They are just more afraid of standing still than moving forward. Burrus also said something I had never heard framed quite this way before. He said entrepreneurs usually have success metrics but almost never have failure metrics. He gave the example of hiring someone you know is not right for the role. Deep down you know it after a week, but you spend months trying to fix it before finally letting them go. You already saw the failure coming. You just delayed acting on it. That applies to almost everything. Businesses. Projects. Careers. Relationships. We hold onto broken things because motion feels harder than denial. A lot of the conversation focused on AI, which Burrus sees less as a replacement for people and more as an amplifier. He argued that companies are making a mistake by focusing only on the tools. First comes mindset, then skillset, then toolset. Most firms skip directly to the software and never rethink how they actually work. He also pushed back on the panic around AI replacing everyone. His point was simple. Jobs have always changed. The danger is not the technology itself. The danger is pretending your current role will stay frozen forever. One line stuck with me. “You can only coast downhill.” That feels true right now. A lot of people are waiting for stability to return before they adapt. But the stable version of the world they remember is probably not coming back. The people who do well over the next decade will likely be the ones willing to relearn things while everyone else argues online about whether change should exist at all. Burrus is relentlessly optimistic, sometimes almost aggressively so. Normally that kind of thing annoys me. But his optimism is grounded in systems and patterns, not motivational slogans. He studies technology, demographics, and behavior and asks what becomes inevitable once those things start moving together. His broader point was that most people underestimate the future because they spend too much time staring at the present. Burrus is a unique thinker in that he sees where the puck has gone and where it is going… years and years into the future. You can check out his books here and hire him at his website. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.keepgoingpod.com/subscribe

    27 min
  7. The Innovators: This agriculture start up brings water where plants need it most

    May 13

    The Innovators: This agriculture start up brings water where plants need it most

    Arthur Chen is trying to do something boring on purpose. Chen is the co founder and CEO of Verdi Agriculture, and he describes the company as “physical AI for farm infrastructure,” starting with irrigation. The pitch is not about tractors or drones. It is about the pipes, valves, pumps, and filter stations that farms rely on every day, and that most farms still run by hand. Chen says about 95 percent of farms still operate this stuff manually, with workers walking fields to check equipment and turn things on and off. Verdi’s approach is retrofit. Instead of asking a farm to rip out infrastructure and install a bespoke automation system, Chen says Verdi builds modular devices that sit on top of what is already there and make it “smart.” The same core idea can be applied across equipment, from pipes and valves to filter stations and even sulfur burners. The benefit is not just efficiency. It is reducing repetitive field work that eats time and labor. I asked what makes this hard, because the parts sound like commodity hardware. Chen’s answer was that the hardware is only half the story. The real complexity is in the software and firmware that lets devices act as a fleet. Irrigation is not as simple as flipping a valve. He pointed to hydraulic constraints, open a valve too early or too late and you can run out of water, or blow something up. Verdi’s system coordinates sequences so farms can automate without breaking infrastructure. The reason he cares is personal. Chen said the founding team comes from farming families, and that the work is driven by what they have seen up close, rising labor costs, water scarcity, and extreme weather that makes farming less predictable. His view is that the point of better infrastructure is resilience, keeping food production stable even as conditions get worse. Hardware is also a fundraising problem, so I asked how they raised. Chen framed the product as “digital labor,” a substitute for human labor on repetitive operational tasks. He said Verdi has shown enough adoption in a tough market to bring in investors, including hard tech and climate focused funds. Verdi is working in a corner of agriculture that Chen says has been overlooked. John Deere and others are heavily digitized, but in mobile machinery. Irrigation infrastructure is still mostly analog, and even where automation exists it has tended to be expensive and custom, which is why adoption is low. Chen said there are a couple of companies building into this segment, but he sees the 95 percent of farms that are not automated as the real market. A big part of the strategy is usability. Farmers and farm operators are not sitting in front of spreadsheets all day. They are dealing with immediate problems in the field. Chen said Verdi is built for the everyday operator, not the farm engineer. The product is meant to offload the constant equipment checking and troubleshooting so people can focus on the work that actually needs human judgment. On go to market, Chen said agriculture is still relationship driven, but door to door selling and trade shows do not scale. Verdi uses outbound sales built around registries and databases to target the growers where they can have the most impact. He also said they use satellite data to enrich lead targeting and understand needs by region. At the same time, he said inbound demand matters because growers want agency, they want to choose tools, not be shoved into them. When I asked what success looks like, Chen said he expects farms to look different in ten years. Not just irrigation, but every piece of infrastructure, processing buildings, power systems, and basic plumbing, will be smart in some way. He pointed to the size of the agricultural equipment market to make the case that infrastructure can support a very large company, and he wants Verdi to be that company on the infrastructure side. He also has a second obsession, finance. Chen said agriculture lacks the kind of project finance and structured financing instruments that helped scale clean energy. He thinks there is room for fintech built specifically for agriculture, to finance the upgrade cycle that resilience requires. Verdi is currently focused on the west coast of North America, the US and Canada, and is expanding across the continent, into Mexico, and into Latin America later this year. Chen said sales grew about 16x over the past year. He said the company is not raising right now and expects to raise a Series A in early 2027. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.keepgoingpod.com/subscribe

    16 min
  8. Keep Going: How to survive a war

    May 11

    Keep Going: How to survive a war

    You keep hearing that success is about vision. That is not wrong, but it misses the harder truth. Vision is easy. Living with the consequences of your decisions is the work. I spoke with Jae Lee, a founder on his eighth startup, and what stayed with me was not the wins. It was the pattern. He did not begin with some grand plan. He saw problems that were right in front of him. A school without a website. A publisher with a bad one. He built something. Then he did it again. And again. That sounds clean when you say it fast. It is not clean when you live it. Four of his companies failed. Not soft failures. Real ones. Money lost. Time gone. Teams broken. And the cause was not market timing or tech. It was people. Bad hires. Missed signals. Ignored warnings. The kind of mistakes that do not show up in pitch decks but end companies all the same. He said something worth sitting with. Feedback is a gift. You do not have to like it. But you should ask who gave it and why. Most founders say they want honesty. Few actually take it when it costs them something. There is also this idea that founders are always right. He believes that. I think he is half right. The founder makes the call. That is the job. But being right in that sense just means you own the outcome. It does not mean the call was good. Then the world steps in. He was building in the Gulf. Deals in motion. Meetings lined up. Real traction. Then conflict hit the region. Plans stopped. Movement slowed. Momentum broke. He was not even in the blast zone, but it did not matter. The system around him changed. That is the part people do not like to admit. You can do everything right and still get knocked sideways. So what do you do when the ground shifts? You adjust. Not in a dramatic way. Not with some heroic pivot story. You narrow the focus. You pick a tighter problem. In his case, from general building management to data centers. Same direction, smaller target. You keep moving. That is the through line here. Not brilliance. Not luck. Endurance with small corrections. I asked him why he keeps doing this. Why not take the safe route. He gave a simple answer. One life. One shot. He wants to leave something behind that shows he helped people move forward in their work. Not money. Not status. Influence in the practical sense. You can agree with that or not. But it explains the behavior. Most people want control. Founders learn, slowly, that control is thin. You do not control markets. You do not control timing. You barely control your own reactions some days. What you control is whether you keep going when the easy path is to stop. That is the job. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.keepgoingpod.com/subscribe

    18 min
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Ratings & Reviews

5
out of 5
7 Ratings

About

When you're going through Hell, keep going." This is a podcast about failure and how it breeds success. Every week, we will talk to amazing people who have done amazing things yet, at some point, experienced failure. By exploring their experiences, we can learn how to build, succeed, and stay humble. It is hosted by author and former New York Times journalist John Biggs. Our theme music is by Policy, AKA Mark Buchwald. (https://freemusicarchive.org/music/policy/) www.keepgoingpod.com

Information

  • Creator
    John Biggs
  • Years Active
    2022 - 2026
  • Episodes
    172
  • Rating
    Clean
  • Copyright
    © John Biggs
  • Show Website
    Keep Going