The Human Connection Podcast

Karl Pontau
  • 5.0 (5)
  • Management
  • Updated Biweekly

Is your business’s growth stalled? Employee churn eating into your profits? Struggling with customer retention? You need stronger connections. Every Tuesday and Thursday, connect with an expert who’s sharing actionable advice for building stronger relationships with your customers, clients, and stakeholders. Hosted by Karl Pontau, a storytelling super-connector, content system strategist, and survivor of two childhood brain tumors, this podcast’s mission is to fix the underlying cause of workplace and societal dysfunction: the lack of human connection.

  1. 3d ago

    Stop Faking Scarcity | Barry Moline

    "If the customer misses that sale, there's just gonna be another sale in a few months. And the customers know that, and we know that." Barry Moline has spent nearly three decades as a CEO. He can tell influence from manipulation, and so can your buyers. In this episode of The Human Connection Podcast, Barry lays out a three-part test for ethical influence: it has to be true, it has to make sense, and it has to be wise. Wise means you'd recommend it to your own family. He explains why scarcity is the most misused persuasion principle, and why 25 handmade clay pitchers count as real scarcity while a Labor Day sale doesn't. He also describes how he structures deals so both sides have skin in the game. On the practical side, he shows how a single introduction ("meet Ginger, our couch expert") can do more for your sales team's credibility than any pitch. Barry is a Cialdini Institute certified trainer who teaches ethical influence and leadership. He's the author of the award-winning CONNECT! How to Quickly Collaborate for Success in Business and Life, and he speaks and consults nationwide on leadership, team building, and AI leadership strategy. What you'll get from this episode: A three-question test for whether your marketing and sales outreach builds trust or burns itWhy fake scarcity backfires, and what real scarcity actually looks likeHow structuring deals around shared outcomes turns vendors into partnersHow to establish authority for your team by how you introduce them, before anyone makes a pitchWhy your buyers skip straight to the one-star reviews, and what that means for social proof#HumanConnectionPodcast #H2H #B2BRelationships #StartupLeadership #BehavioralScience === You can connect with Barry Moline here: LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/barry-moline/ Website: https://barrymoline.com/ Email: barrymoline@gmail.com YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/@barrymoline6530 You can connect with Karl Pontau here: www.vouchedconnections.com www.thehumanconnectionpodcast.com https://www.linkedin.com/in/kpontau https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCUbf_bDWwB9KVrFn5Sj3u2w?sub_confirmation=1 Please like, subscribe, and share this episode with somebody you care about!

    Stop Faking Scarcity | Barry Moline

  2. 4d ago

    Your Hiring Team Agrees on 'Warmth.' Nobody Means the Same Thing. | Christina Seime

    "It's easy, ironically, to forget the human in hiring." Christina Seime has spent 20 years moving from writing code to sitting in the room where hiring decisions get made. Across that whole path, the same gap kept showing up. In this episode of The Human Connection Podcast, Christina explains why hiring teams keep screening for what's easy to find on a resume and miss what actually predicts whether someone will thrive. Her example is a consultancy with two core values, professional authority and warmth. Nobody could find warmth on a resume until the team agreed on what it looked like: workshops, conference talks, volunteer work. She also takes on a question most leadership teams haven't answered yet. If AI is now doing the intern work, how do you hire your future senior partners? Christina started as a software engineer and moved into product management, agile coaching, and organizational design. She became Head of People and Flow on the executive team at Spacemaker. Today she's CPO and co-founder of Soolv, where she's building the hiring tool she always wished she'd had. What you'll get from this episode: Why defining the signals for each trait before the job post goes up fixes alignment on large hiring teamsHow the same value word ("warmth," "experience," "team player") means something different to everyone in the room, and how to close that gapWhy structured, explicit criteria reduce unconscious bias better than trying harder to be objectiveWhere the "gold in your applicant pile" gets lost to surface-level ATS and AI screeningHow to hire for the human capabilities you'll need in five years, now that AI handles the grunt work#HumanConnectionPodcast #H2H #StartupLeadership #CompanyCulture #Hiring === You can connect with Christina Seime here: https://www.linkedin.com/company/soolv https://www.linkedin.com/in/christinakseime/ https://www.soolv.com/ You can connect with Karl Pontau here: www.vouchedconnections.com www.thehumanconnectionpodcast.com https://www.linkedin.com/in/kpontau https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCUbf_bDWwB9KVrFn5Sj3u2w?sub_confirmation=1 Please like, subscribe, and share this episode with somebody you care about!

    Your Hiring Team Agrees on 'Warmth.' Nobody Means the Same Thing. | Christina Seime

  3. 5d ago

    Leadership Presence: Your Team Knows You're Not Listening | Vikas Prasanna

    "If I'm spending time with you, I'm going to be with you 100%." Vikas Prasanna learned this from his 11-month-old son. Then he noticed it was working on his customers too. In this episode of The Human Connection Podcast, Vikas talks about what it's like to be a first-time dad while building a dental SaaS company in Ireland. The company is five years old, has raised a seed round, and is on its third pivot. He and his wife are immigrants with no family nearby. His shift to a commercial role meant a heavy travel quarter, and one of those trips came while his son was sick at home. Along the way he stopped holding three conversations in his head at once, and his commercial relationships got better because of it. Vikas is a product leader with deep experience building healthcare and SaaS products. He's also a product mentor at Udacity, coaches early-stage startups, and holds an MSc in Digital Innovation from UCD Michael Smurfit Graduate Business School. What you'll get from this episode: Why work-life balance for startup leaders is something you average over weeks, not a line you hold every dayHow running a startup on both a macro plan and micro execution translates directly to raising a kid (and back again)Why "this is a phase" is a real operating principle, whether you're in a pivot or a sleep regression at 3amHow being fully present in conversations built stronger business relationships once Vikas moved into salesWhy your team can tell when you're only half-listening, and what that costs you in trust#StartupLeadership #HumanConnectionPodcast #H2H #HealthTech #BusinessRelationships === You can connect with Vikas Prasanna here: https://www.linkedin.com/in/vikasnagprasanna/ www.smilegeniusdental.com You can connect with Karl Pontau here: www.vouchedconnections.com www.thehumanconnectionpodcast.com https://www.linkedin.com/in/kpontau https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCUbf_bDWwB9KVrFn5Sj3u2w?sub_confirmation=1 Please like, subscribe, and share this episode with somebody you care about!

    Leadership Presence: Your Team Knows You're Not Listening | Vikas Prasanna

  4. Sep 24

    The Human Skills AI Can't Replace: A Leadership Advantage | Mohan Nair

    "Be the place where the machine cannot reach, because the machine cannot read the future when it's unstructured. Because it looks at the future by defining the past." — Mohan Nair You bought the AI tools to buy your leadership team some time. Somewhere between the first automated workflow and this quarter's board deck, that time got spent making the same work faster. (Speeding up a process that never made sense just gets you to the wrong place sooner.) In this episode of The Human Connection Podcast, Mohan Nair breaks down leadership in the AI era for executives caught between fear and obsession. Mohan is the author of Unreachable: How Not to Lose Your Mind in an AI-Obsessed Era, CEO of the advisory firm Emerge Inc., an Edmund Hillary Fellow, and a former healthcare Chief Innovation Officer who helped create eight startups. His argument: being the best AI person in the room isn't enough. Be the best human transformational leader in it. What you'll get from this episode: The three ways leaders react to AI (afraid, obsessed, enabled), and why the middle path beats both extremesWhy "AI frees up time for relationships" only works if leaders spend that time on people and not on optimizing the business modelWhat machines can and can't do: Mohan's take on Go's Move 37, and why he says AI looks at the future by defining the pastKarl's case that speed burns bridges at scale: flooded inboxes, samey automated outreach, and a TAM going up in smokeWhy insight ends up on the side, with an innovation team and beanbags, and how Mohan's teams started from inspiration before ROI (the egg and the golden goose)The "first opinion" test: what happens to your thinking when you offload it, plus why he wants a nutrition label on AI, not a warning labelWhy the "soft skills" leaders were told to delegate are now the real differentiatorsNo matter if your business is B2B or B2C, it's H2H: human to human. Happy connecting. #H2H #HumanConnectionPodcast #StartupLeadership #CompanyCulture #RelationshipDrivenGrowth === You can connect with Mohan Nair here: MohanNair.com www.LinkedIn/in/mohanemerge You can connect with Karl Pontau here: www.vouchedconnections.com www.thehumanconnectionpodcast.com https://www.linkedin.com/in/kpontau https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCUbf_bDWwB9KVrFn5Sj3u2w?sub_confirmation=1 Please like, subscribe, and share this episode with somebody you care about!

    The Human Skills AI Can't Replace: A Leadership Advantage | Mohan Nair

  5. Sep 23

    You're Not Jensen Huang. Stop Pitching Like It | Jonathan Koifman

    "Even if you have a big multi-million dollar or euro revenue company behind you, you're still not Jensen Huang. […] People are not coming to you. You've come to them." — Jonathan Koifman Your platform can do nineteen things. The buyer across the table has one problem, and it keeps them up at night. (Guess which list your website is written from.) In this episode of The Human Connection Podcast, Jonathan Koifman breaks down stakeholder-focused communication for founders and executives who keep pitching a platform and getting polite nods. Jonathan is the US-born, Swiss-bred CEO and co-founder of FrostForge, building a cooler future by turning heat into cold. After years of building relationships across continents to deploy renewable tech, he now sells that technology one specific customer problem at a time. What you'll get from this episode: Why "platform" language loses the room, and the supermarket test: buyers walk in wanting chocolate milk, not a huge nebulous idea of ESGThe one-sentence product pitch ("I have a box, you give it heat and on the other side you get cold") and why nobody needs the ammonia-and-salt chemistryA simple rule for pitch Q&A: answer the question first, defend yourself afterward, plus the notepad trick that keeps you out of the weedsHow pride in "your baby" quietly wrecks early pitches, and why walking in as far from the smartest person in the room makes people like you and listenSame technology, two products: cold energy sold by the kilowatt hour to a utility with off-grid users, and a chiller that pre-cools water for a data center (Jonathan's figure: 20–30% off the electric bill)Why messaging matters more now that AI can build your website in a day, and why finding a buyer's pain is still a human jobNo matter if your business is B2B or B2C, it's H2H: human to human. Happy connecting. #H2H #HumanConnectionPodcast #StartupLeadership #B2BRelationships #RelationshipDrivenGrowth === You can connect with Jonathan Koifman here: https://www.linkedin.com/in/jonathankoifman https://www.linkedin.com/company/frostforge https://www.frostforge.ch You can connect with Karl Pontau here: www.vouchedconnections.com www.thehumanconnectionpodcast.com https://www.linkedin.com/in/kpontau https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCUbf_bDWwB9KVrFn5Sj3u2w?sub_confirmation=1 Please like, subscribe, and share this episode with somebody you care about!

    You're Not Jensen Huang. Stop Pitching Like It | Jonathan Koifman

  6. Sep 22

    You Don't Need a New ERP (Yet). You Need Your Departments to Agree | Augie Santa Maria

    "A lot of companies will think that they need to replace an ERP system. And when I go in and talk to them, I often find that there's a lot of misalignment across the business units." — Augie Santa Maria You've got the budget for the new system and a slide about AI. What you may not have is one agreed version of how your departments actually do the work. (The software was never going to settle that argument for you.) In this episode of The Human Connection Podcast, Augie Santa Maria breaks down company culture transformation strategies for leaders about to bet big on technology. Augie is an ERP and systems modernization advisor and the founder of Cognogent Services, with 20+ years across business intelligence, data analytics, and ERP modernization. He's learned that the technology usually reveals the real problem before it solves anything. What you'll get from this episode: Why "we need a new ERP" is often a misdiagnosis, and the cross-department misalignment that surfaces the moment someone asks about the technologyThe change-management framing that earns buy-in: only this part is changing, everything else stays the sameWhat stakeholder-focused communication takes: clear messaging, real training, and back-and-forth between leadership and employees on their questions and concernsA case study: joining two cost systems into one dataset, automating reconciliation, and getting accounting and finance out of manual work with accuracy near 100%What happens when repetitive work comes off your team's plate: time to learn the new system, connect with each other, and come up with better ideasWhere to start as an executive: find out how work really happens day to day, and check whether a process document exists at allNo matter if your business is B2B or B2C, it's H2H: human to human. Happy connecting. #H2H #HumanConnectionPodcast #StartupLeadership #CompanyCulture #B2BRelationships === You can connect with Augie Santa Maria here: LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/florida-augie Website: https://cognagentservices.com You can connect with Karl Pontau here: www.vouchedconnections.com www.thehumanconnectionpodcast.com https://www.linkedin.com/in/kpontau https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCUbf_bDWwB9KVrFn5Sj3u2w?sub_confirmation=1 Please like, subscribe, and share this episode with somebody you care about!

    You Don't Need a New ERP (Yet). You Need Your Departments to Agree | Augie Santa Maria

  7. Sep 17

    77% of MedTech Startups Don't See Year 10. Here's the Root Cause Nobody Fixes. | Craig Ingram

    "The sales reps are doing the work that should have been done before the product was launched. I call it rolling a boulder uphill versus rolling a pebble uphill." — Craig T. Ingram Karl talks with healthcare commercialization strategist Craig Ingram about the single most common — and most expensive — mistake venture-backed MedTech and health tech startups make right after they close a round: hiring a sales team before anyone outside the building has heard of them. Craig breaks down why revenue is a lagging indicator, why "just increase activity" is bad advice, and the five-point framework he uses to turn a sales team's job from pushing a boulder into rolling a pebble. Craig T. Ingram is a healthcare business strategist and commercialization advisor, and Co-Founder of Int'l Commercialization Growth Partners. He was named MedTech and HealthTech Advisor of the Year (2024) by IAOTP, and works with MedTech, biopharma, and digital health startups to fix go-to-market strategy before it becomes a hiring problem. What you'll get from this episode: Why hiring sales reps right after a raise is "the worst decision" a startup can make — and what to build instead before the first cold callThe 5-point framework (awareness → attention → attraction) that turns your sales team's job from pushing a boulder into rolling a pebbleWhy revenue is a lagging indicator of effective commercialization — and what the leading indicators actually look likeThe 8-to-10-year survival data on MedTech and HealthTech startups, and the root cause behind itWhy "consultative selling" is the comfortable habit sales leaders default back to under pressure — and why it's costing them the dealWhat separates the rare companies that hit $10M in revenue from everyone else chasing the same market#MedTechStakeholderEngagement #HealthTechClientSuccess #B2BRelationshipTactics #KarlTheBridge #HumanConnectionPodcast === You can connect with Craig T Ingram here: www.linkedin.com/in.craigtingram @craigtingramofficial (instagram) You can connect with Karl Pontau here: www.vouchedconnections.com www.thehumanconnectionpodcast.com https://www.linkedin.com/in/kpontau https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCUbf_bDWwB9KVrFn5Sj3u2w?sub_confirmation=1 Please like, subscribe, and share this episode with somebody you care about!

    77% of MedTech Startups Don't See Year 10. Here's the Root Cause Nobody Fixes. | Craig Ingram

  8. Sep 16

    You Started Marketing Your Raise the Day It Went Live. That Was Too Late. | Jason Fishman

    "If a capital raise is gonna take place next year, start building relationships now... it always amazes me how so many founders, so many CEOs, so many teams think, 'we're gonna start marketing the raise once the raise is live.'" — Jason Fishman Karl talks with Jason Fishman, CEO of Digital Niche Agency, about why founders lose capital raises before they ever open a pitch deck — because they treat relationship-building as a launch-week activity instead of infrastructure they should've built a year earlier. Jason and Karl dig into why investors fund the person before the product, why hiding your personal life costs you trust, and why the founders who raise fastest are the ones who started earliest. Jason Fishman is the co-founder and CEO of Digital Niche Agency (DNA), an investor-acquisition marketing agency that's worked with hundreds of brands raising capital through equity crowdfunding, and hosts the Test. Optimize. Scale. podcast. What you'll get from this episode: Why "B2I" — business-to-investor — marketing fails the same way B2B does when it skips the human relationship-building stepThe exact timing mistake that kills a raise before it starts: waiting until the round is live to begin marketing yourself, not just the dealWhy investors invest in you by first name, not your logo — and what that means for how you show up in a pitch videoThe overlooked leverage of sharing your personal life (family, hobbies, milestones) as fundraising infrastructure, not distractionHow third-party validation and social proof compress the trust-building timeline investors actually needWhy rushing the "nice lunch" straight to a term sheet reads as suspicious — and what a seeded relationship looks like instead#StakeholderEngagementStrategies #RelationshipDrivenGrowth #StartupLeadership #KarlTheBridge #HumanConnectionPodcast === You can connect with Jason Fishman here: https://www.linkedin.com/in/jafishman/ You can connect with Karl Pontau here: www.vouchedconnections.com www.thehumanconnectionpodcast.com https://www.linkedin.com/in/kpontau https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCUbf_bDWwB9KVrFn5Sj3u2w?sub_confirmation=1 Please like, subscribe, and share this episode with somebody you care about!

    You Started Marketing Your Raise the Day It Went Live. That Was Too Late. | Jason Fishman
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Is your business’s growth stalled? Employee churn eating into your profits? Struggling with customer retention? You need stronger connections. Every Tuesday and Thursday, connect with an expert who’s sharing actionable advice for building stronger relationships with your customers, clients, and stakeholders. Hosted by Karl Pontau, a storytelling super-connector, content system strategist, and survivor of two childhood brain tumors, this podcast’s mission is to fix the underlying cause of workplace and societal dysfunction: the lack of human connection.

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