Not Another Podcast

Infinity Constellation
  • 5.0 (6)
  • Entrepreneurship
  • Updated Weekly

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. 1d ago

    A 56-Minute Masterclass on Manifestation for Skeptics | Sarah Perl @ Stella

    Sarah Perl had fewer than 150 followers when a tarot video she posted as a college sophomore went viral overnight. Three years later she'd made over a million dollars in courses, paid off the student debt she took on for a teaching degree everyone told her not to get, and left Brooklyn for LA. This year she shipped Stella, an AI app she designed the front end of herself using Claude Code, on no venture funding. Brennan sits down with her not as the internet's manifestation girl, but as what she actually is: a distribution-first, bootstrapped, AI-native operator with 4.5 million followers and a very specific theory of why founders win. Her framing for this audience is blunt. Manifesting is the For You page. Where you put your attention is where your life ends up going, and belief is the highest-leverage, lowest-effort thing you can work on. They get into the parts she almost never gets asked about: why she'd only hire neurodivergent people, what her ADHD has actually cost her, the Twitter thread full of guys planning to build her app that pushed her to ship, and the launch week when her own users turned on her pricing. In this episode: Why she optimizes for obsession instead of strategy, and how that shapes what gets builtThe exact origin of "I get paid to exist," said years before it was remotely trueHow she reframes ADHD and anxiety as an operating system rather than a defectWhat building the front end of a real app with Claude Code on her phone actually looked likeThe Twitter thread that made her stop planning and shipWhy lottery winners lose the money, and what that has to do with your revenue ceilingThe biggest regret of her life, and why she still wouldn't change it Subscribe for new episodes every week.Watch on YouTube, listen on Spotify and Apple Podcasts.Find Sarah at @hothighpriestess and download Stella on the App Store.

  2. Aug 4

    How a Brain Surgeon Scientist Learned to Spot Fake AI | Afsheen Afshar

    Afsheen Afshar has one of the strangest résumés in tech: an MD and a PhD who built brain-machine interfaces that helped paralyzed patients type using only their thoughts, then walked away from medicine to become Wall Street's first Chief Data Science Officer at J.P. Morgan. So when he says most of the AI being sold today is "theater," he has the standing to mean it. In this conversation with Brennan Pothetes, Afsheen (Founder Managing Partner of Pilot Wave Holdings) draws a hard line between what's real about AI and what's a very expensive branding exercise. He explains why LLMs are just "the most multidimensional autocomplete ever devised," why AI projects fail on culture and never on the math, and why he's quietly buying boring Main Street companies while everyone else chases the next San Francisco demo. It gets spicy: the pair debate whether trading your data for "free" services is capitalism working or a rigged barter, why the foundational-model labs are losing the public, and what a brain scientist thinks machines still can't copy. Highlights: How to tell real AI from "theater" in under a minuteThe prompt trick a doctor uses to get expert-level answers from any modelWhy "data is the new oil" is a warning about who owns your futureWhat Wall Street's first AI chief saw inside the big banksThe VC line about small business that sent a chill down his spineWhy he says AI is "plenty dangerous" without ever being consciousThe one thing the human brain does that no model comes close to Subscribe to Not Another Podcast for unfiltered conversations with the founders and operators actually building the future. Watch on YouTube. Listen on Spotify and Apple Podcasts.

  3. Jul 28

    How I Launched 8 AI Companies in 1 Year with Infinity | a Q&A with Brennan

    Brennan Pothetes built eight companies in a single year and just closed a $24M raise for Infinity Constellation. So when listeners flooded him with questions, he did what most founders won't: he answered them straight, including the ones that expose his own contradictions. In this solo AMA, Brennan breaks down the exact first move Infinity makes before anyone writes a line of code, why he no longer believes in tech moats, and what selling his last company (Butter) taught him about ignoring external validation. Then it gets honest. Asked which part of the "toxic" Silicon Valley playbook he still runs, he admits he grinds harder than anyone he knows, emails at all hours, and chases being the fastest to reply, before conceding, one layer deeper, that the whole ethos is a pipe dream. For founders drowning in hustle-culture advice from people who never cop to the cost, Brennan's candor is the point. In this episode: The one-page memo Infinity writes before building anything, and why it beats a business planWhat selling Butter taught Brennan that a win never couldWhy he stopped believing tech moats are durable, and what he trusts insteadWhether his AI bill is really cheaper than headcount (and the exact math)His advice to 22-year-olds deciding between a job and going all-inHow to run a side company without handing your employer the IPThe hustle habit he genuinely can't quit, and the moment he admits it's a pipe dreamSubscribe for more unfiltered founder conversations on Not Another Podcast.Watch on YouTube, listen on Spotify and Apple Podcasts.Follow Brennan and Infinity for what's next.

  4. Jul 21

    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

  5. Jul 14

    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.

  6. Jul 7

    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.

  7. Jun 30

    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.

  8. Jun 23

    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.

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5
out of 5
6 Ratings

About

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.

Information

  • Creator
    Infinity Constellation
  • Years Active
    2025 - 2026
  • Episodes
    36
  • Rating
    Explicit
  • Copyright
    © Infinity Constellation
  • Show Website
    Not Another Podcast

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