Dynamic Decisions Podcast

ALIVE Podcast Network
ALIVE Podcast Network
  • 5.0 (1)
  • Entrepreneurship
  • Updated Weekly

🎙️ Welcome to Dynamic Decisions – where the best decisions start with great conversations. Hosted by Teasha Cable, CEO of CModel, this show dives into the stories, strategies, and decisions behind some of the most innovative leaders in business today. Each episode, we sit down with visionaries who are leveraging data to rethink the status quo, solve complex challenges, and create lasting impact in their fields. Tune in to discover how top leaders are using data to transform their businesses—and how you can too.  Learn more: cmodel.io

  1. 2d ago

    Backroom Lab? Sounds Scary...

    Sarina Pilaroscia didn't set out to build a skincare company. She set out to fix something for her father. He had lived with severe psoriasis for decades. While looking through her dad's medicines, she noticed a flammable warning label on a steroid foam. Whatever he was putting on his skin was so dangerous, it needed a warning label. "Why is this the only option?"That curiosity sent her deep into research mode, visiting libraries, building her own back room lab, followed by a two year Health Canada validated cohort study, all to prove that a far less "toxic" answer to psoriasis and eczema care could actually work. That question became Phoilex, a phytoactive skincare line proven in a two year Health Canada cohort study and published in peer reviewed dermatology and pharmacy journals. She's also co-founder of SSKN Skin Firm and a talent manager with Commission Entertainment Corp, so she clearly doesn't do anything halfway. Heres what we talked about: The flammable warning label that made Sarina stop and ask a question nobody else was askingWhy she skipped licensing someone else's formula and built her own R&D lab in the back of her mom's storeThe week her father's skin flared worse than ever, and the diagnosis that reshaped her mission: Topical Steroid WithdrawalThe overnight regulation change that forced her to rebuild her supply chain, and what it taught her about staying flexible This is a conversation about turning a family's worst years into clinical proof, and it might change how you think about the shortcuts your own family has been taking.   Who this is for: founders building in clinical or heavily regulated categories, anyone managing a chronic skin condition and looking for options beyond steroids, and entrepreneurs scaling a Canadian brand into the US market.   Listen now and subscribe to Dynamic Decisions for more conversations where empathy and evidence meet.

    Backroom Lab? Sounds Scary...

  2. 5d ago

    How to Outlast Your Biggest Employers

    Abraham Salinas, Economic Development Manager for the City of Pleasanton, California, built his career in the unglamorous work of turning zoning and code into real investment. From reviving an abandoned commercial corridor in Brentwood, CA., to positioning one of the Bay Area's strongest office marketsfor what comes after the AI "boom." In this episode, he explains how a small team competes without a big budget: How Brentwood turned an abandoned commercial corridor into a mixed-use district by pairing zoning changes with strategic city land sales to a medical provider and county services Why Pleasanton is diversifying into robotics, AI hardware, medical device manufacturing, and clean energy to reduce reliance on anchors like Workday and 10x Genomics How a single development agreement turned a vacant office building into 400 to 500 units of workforce housing, split between rent and for-sale Why cross-department data sharing, not expensive software, gave Pleasanton a free interactive site-selection map and business directory   Abraham takes our decision-making persona quiz live, and the results explain exactly why his projects keep getting built.

    How to Outlast Your Biggest Employers

  3. Jul 15

    The City With No Land Left...Is Still Winning at Economic Development

    Dallas Snow has sat on every side of the commercial real estate table: sixteen years running operations at Jones Commercial Interiors, then advising Fortune 500 companies on their office footprints at PDR, and now recruiting corporate investment for the City of Grapevine, Texas, a city of 53,000 people that pulls in 52 million visitors a year.   In this conversation:   Why Grapevine is down to its last 100 acres, and how that scarcity became its sharpest sales pitch Why attracting business to a city is a relationship game, not an incentives race How the city tracks whether growth actually helps residents, not just visitor counts What corporate real estate clients are prioritizing in 2026 that they weren't five years ago   If you work anywhere near site selection, commercial real estate, or economic development, don't miss this one.

    The City With No Land Left...Is Still Winning at Economic Development

  4. Jul 13

    Your AI Strategy Is Fairy Dust Until You Fix This One Thing

    Dr. Lorien Pratt didn't just watch the AI revolution happen, she helped build it. In the early 1990s, as a computer science professor, she invented transfer learning, the technique now running underneath every large language model and computer vision system in use today. Then she walked away from pure machine learning to found an entirely new discipline: decision intelligence.   In this episode, Lorien joins host Teasha Cable, her mentee, friend, and co-founder at OpenDI, for a conversation that skips past the AI hype and gets into what actually changes how organizations decide.   They dig into the last mile problem: why a trillion dollar resources company spent ten years and tens of millions of dollars building a digital twin that nobody ever deployed. Lorien explains why KPI dashboards function like a GPS that only says "there's traffic" instead of telling you where to turn, and why that gap between information and action is where most AI investment quietly disappears.   They also tackle the question everyone is asking in 2026: where does agentic AI actually belong? Lorien draws a sharp line between decisions that happen inside the digital world, where agents shine, and decisions with real world consequences, like hiring, contracts, and opening a new business, where she argues large language models remain fundamentally unreliable.   Along the way, Lorien walks through a real example of organizational silos derailing a government agency's building decisions, explains the authority and responsibility mismatch that drives leaders crazy, and takes Teasha's decision-making persona quiz live on air, with results that might surprise you.   If your organization has all the data and analytics money can buy but still can't seem to make a clear decision, this conversation names the problem and shows you the way through it. Listen now, and see where you'd land on the same persona test.

    Your AI Strategy Is Fairy Dust Until You Fix This One Thing

  5. Jun 25

    She Used Data to Add More Love to the World. It Closed the Achievement Gap.

    Dr. Bernadette Howlett has spent her career at the intersection most people don't think about: where data science, machine learning, and human-centered education meet.  As Operations Analytics and Experiential Product Director at Western Governors University, she leads a team using predictive modeling and decision intelligence to help students finish the credentials they started faster, with better outcomes, and with less debt.   Her mission has a name: Stop the drop with debt Because a student who leaves without a credential but with loan payments is the worst possible outcome and it's preventable.   In this conversation, Dr. B breaks down how WGU deploys a 78-feature predictive mode to:  Flag student momentum Surface personalized faculty outreach through a language model called FOME (Faculty Outreach Message Engine) Uses social norming principles to nudge students toward action The faculty always reviews and can modify before anything goes out.  The human is always in the loop.   She also shares the lesson that almost derailed the whole system: well-intentioned SLA dashboards that faculty loved in theory and resented in practice because managers turned them into performance metrics.  The fix? Remove the dashboard entirely when they launched decision intelligence.   Other highlights from the conversation: How WGU reduced accreditation reporting from weeks to hours without removing human verification The employer who stood up in a meeting and said flatly, "We don't trust you" and why Dr. B thinks he was right Her decision-making persona breakdown: 50% values, 30% strategy, 10% contrarian, 10% evidence-based Why she calls evidence-based practice "the vessels that feed the heart"   If you work in higher ed, workforce development, or anywhere humans are trying to use data to help other humans, this one's for you. cmodel.io

    She Used Data to Add More Love to the World. It Closed the Achievement Gap.

  6. Jun 22

    Paul Revere Didn't Follow the Playbook

    Lexington, Massachusetts is the birthplace of American Liberty and home to nearly three million square feet of life sciences space a sector now decentralizing and forcing a hard rethink of the town's economic future. Sandhya Iyer, Tourism and Economic Development Director, joins host Teasha Cable to talk about leading economic development where history is both a competitive asset and a complicating factor. In this episode: why converting vacant lab space to workforce housing is a long-term play, not a concession; the difference between historic preservation and historic character; and why competing with neighboring communities by copying them is a losing strategy. Sandhya also walks through her decision-making persona: 40% values-driven feeler, 30% data interpreter, 20% long-range planner, 10% assumption challenger. Her core belief: it's not the numbers that tell the story, it's how you narrate them to your community. If you work in economic development, municipal leadership, or regional strategy, this one will make you rethink what a "win" actually looks like.

    Paul Revere Didn't Follow the Playbook

  7. Jun 18

    Founder Drag Is Killing Your Growth. Here's the Fix.

    Jason Jackson has spent more than two decades walking into companies that have built something real and then gotten stuck. As founder and operating partner at Redwood Ridge Strategies, he specializes in diagnosing the operational constraints that prevent growth-stage SaaS companies from scaling past product-market fit. And more often than not, the constraint has a title: Founder. In this episode, Jason joins Teasha Cable to unpack what he calls "founder drag," the invisible pattern where the very behaviors that built a company begin to cap its growth. He shares real examples, including a founder answering customer emails at 1am with the wrong name on them, and explains how he helps leaders see the bottleneck they've become, then systematically build the systems and team capability to grow without them. The conversation covers: How Jason used an LLM-based support system at Suzy to cut $1.5 million in annual overhead, while simultaneously moving team members into higher-value, higher-growth roles instead of eliminating their jobs.Why the per-seat SaaS pricing model is losing relevance and how to gather the willingness-to-pay data you actually need to build a pricing philosophy that fits today's market.The difference between sales-led and product-led growth, and why PLG demands a fundamentally different relationship between your product and your customer.What sustainable consulting actually looks like, including why Jason deliberately builds clients who don't need him anymore. If you lead a growth-stage company, or advise one, this episode will reframe how you think about where your real constraints live.

    Founder Drag Is Killing Your Growth. Here's the Fix.

  8. Jun 15

    Why You Should Stop Paying Venture Capital Management Fees

    Ryan Baird is third-generation Silicon Valley. His grandfather held patents with Lockheed. His parents retired from HP.  And Ryan spent his career managing $50M+ clients at Morgan Stanley, running a hedge fund, raising $35M for his own startup in Southeast Asia, and eventually building Baird Augustine an investment bank working with 38 family offices deploying over $20 billion annually. In this episode of Dynamic Decisions, host Teasha Cable sits down with Ryan for a candid conversation about institutional finance, and why so much of what people assume about investing is flat-out wrong. Here's what they dig into: Venture capital is the hardest asset class Velocity of capital beats yield Recycling management fees is a philosophy, not a tactic Curating for quality changes everything  Ryan's investor community Focus on Risk, and the annual Silicon Valley Economic Forum, exist because most startup events are built for founders, not investors. The solution wasn't better marketing. It was inverting the model entirely. If you're in capital markets, economic development, or just trying to understand how serious institutional money actually moves, this conversation is essential listening.

    Why You Should Stop Paying Venture Capital Management Fees
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About

🎙️ Welcome to Dynamic Decisions – where the best decisions start with great conversations. Hosted by Teasha Cable, CEO of CModel, this show dives into the stories, strategies, and decisions behind some of the most innovative leaders in business today. Each episode, we sit down with visionaries who are leveraging data to rethink the status quo, solve complex challenges, and create lasting impact in their fields. Tune in to discover how top leaders are using data to transform their businesses—and how you can too.  Learn more: cmodel.io

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