Jamin's Podcast

Jamin Brazil
  • 5.0 (4)
  • Management

Twenty-minute conversations with founders and operators about what actually happened. Scaling, systems, career. One guest, one confession, one thing you can use Monday morning. Hosted by Jamin Brazil, 3x founder with 4 exits, who's sat in the founder seat, the CEO seat, and the COO seat, and knows which questions get an honest answer instead of a rehearsed one.

Episodes

  1. Oct 6

    My attorney said don't call him. I called. | Kai Fuentes, CEO of Ebony Marketing Systems

    Kai Fuentes founded Ebony Marketing Systems in 2011 and runs it as CEO. She sits on the boards of the Insights Association and AAPOR, and she is a second-generation researcher who learned the business from the back of her mother's Volvo, dropping off surveys and picking them up. Ask her what most CEOs running insights firms are missing and you get one word, three times: systems. The confession. A client she had been following up with for five years finally said yes, and asked EMS to staff transit intercept work in three new states. She said yes, hired fast, and skipped the HR function she had decided was too expensive. An interviewer who had been in the field with her for ten years took the firm to the Department of Labor for $35,000. Her attorney told her not to call him. She called him. The cost. Four months of waiting. A paperwork reconstruction to prove EMS was not the employer the claim said it was. A client experience that slipped while she was distracted, which she describes as going from making ten crepes to a thousand crepes that don't taste as good. And a secret she kept from her own team through the entire scaling push so morale wouldn't crack. The letter came on Christmas Eve. Closed with no assessment, no citation, no further action. She still keeps it. The takeaway. Easter eggs. In a year when the work is falling from the sky, check the pipeline at the six-month mark. If the next two quarters look thin, move one month of payroll into a nine-month CD and don't touch it. She has put four away in a single good year and has spent them covering payroll when clients went slow. Two more from her: block 45 minutes of notification-free work time three times a day, and put your own mask on before anyone else's. Also in this one: why a bad accountant is like a bad dentist, why you don't keep terminates in a focus group or on your payroll, and the order of operations she would follow if she were starting EMS over today. Find me: https://www.linkedin.com/in/jaminbrazil/ Listen and follow: https://pod.link/6798471198

    My attorney said don't call him. I called. | Kai Fuentes, CEO of Ebony Marketing Systems

  2. Sep 22

    Disruption hits you at your strongest | Jeffrey Cole, Disrupters at the Gate

    Jeffrey Cole founded the World Internet Project in 1999 and has tracked what technology does to daily life ever since, 27 years across 35 countries. He directs the Center for the Digital Future at USC Annenberg, and his new book with Harlan Lebo, Disrupters at the Gate, is out now. He has spent three decades telling companies what was coming for them. The confession: he got the predictions right and the timelines wrong. Fifteen years bullish on driverless cars, and we are still not there. In his words, "I've been really right in my predictions, but not as good in my timeline of predictions." The cost: not money, time. He kept underestimating how hard people resist a change that is better for them. The ATM card, online banking, telemedicine. Every one arrived years after it should have, and the delay was human, not technical. The insight that reframes the rest: disruption does not find you when you are weak. It finds you at your peak. Kodak was one of the two most recognized brands on earth when digital photography hit. The music industry's best year ever was 1999, and then Napster came. The takeaway: stay out of the bubble. The financial press, the business school stage, the celebrity of being a CEO. That is where you lose track of who your customers actually are, and that is where the disruptor finds room. Jeff's book, Disrupters at the Gate: https://www.simonandschuster.com/books/Disrupters-at-the-Gate/Jeffrey-Cole/9781646872909 Center for the Digital Future: https://www.digitalcenter.org Find me: https://www.linkedin.com/in/jaminbrazil/ Listen and follow: https://pod.link/6798471198

    Disruption hits you at your strongest | Jeffrey Cole, Disrupters at the Gate

  3. Sep 4

    Two hours is the whole workday | Steve August, ADHD Entrepreneur Accelerator

    Steve August founded Revelation, an early digital and mobile qualitative research platform, grew it to twenty people in Portland, and sold it to FocusVision in 2014. He was diagnosed with ADHD at 54, after the startup, after the exit, after building a coaching practice. Today he runs the ADHD Entrepreneur Accelerator. The confession: he built a pure software company for a market that wanted service, and he wasn't the operator his own business needed once it passed twenty people. The cost: he found out standing in a hallway at Procter & Gamble. A client raved about the project, so he asked what was coming next. "Oh no, we've got everything we need for years now." A competitor that embraced being a tech-enabled service instead took off. His own exit, in his words, balanced itself out, but he can see the more lucrative outcome he didn't take. The takeaway: the two-hour workday. You get about two hours of peak executive function. Put the most important thing there, shield it, and even if you only get one of the two hours, you've won the day. Everything else is negotiable. The question for your team this week, his: does everybody know what their most important thing is, and does it map to the most important thing for the company? Steve on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/steve-august-b2b-adhd-business-founder-coach/ ADHD Entrepreneur Accelerator: https://adhd-accelerator.com Find me: https://www.linkedin.com/in/jaminbrazil/ Listen and follow: https://pod.link/6798471198

    Two hours is the whole workday | Steve August, ADHD Entrepreneur Accelerator

  4. Aug 28

    Customers don't change when you're right | Stephen Mugford, former head of strategy at Capital One

    Stephen Mugford was there in the early days at Capital One, spent 21 years there deciding which outside research was worth paying for, and now, as co-founder and CEO of Flashpoint AI, he is building the thing he used to buy. The confession: he has always overestimated how fast customers will change their behavior, and underestimated how long it takes. The cost: value propositions with unarguable economics that went nowhere. The same wall showed up again at Flashpoint, twenty-five years later, when a client team loved the work and still couldn't sell it upstairs because leadership wanted crosstabs. The takeaway: ask it one person at a time, never in a group. If we had $100 million in funding, what would we be investing in right now that is going to bite us when we don't? Push past the first answer. Stephen on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/stevemugford/Flashpoint.AI: https://www.flashpoint.ai/Find me: https://www.linkedin.com/in/jaminbrazil/ Listen and follow: https://pod.link/6798471198

    Customers don't change when you're right | Stephen Mugford, former head of strategy at Capital One

  5. Aug 21

    Annual contracts hide the truth for 11 months | Rob Snyder, author of The Power of Pull

    Rob Snyder is the author of The Power of Pull and a Fellow at the Harvard Innovation Labs. His argument is that most founders spend years pushing a product at a market that was never pulling, and that almost everything taught about early customer discovery trains you to look for the wrong signal. Rob followed the playbook for two years. Customer interviews, discovery research, all of it. Nothing worked. Then his company took off for reasons he couldn't explain, going from zero to a few million in revenue in two years, and he's been reverse-engineering why ever since. The confession: when customers started closing fast, thousands of dollars after a single sales call, he read it as product-market fit and poured on the gas. He wasn't looking at retention. And because he was selling annual contracts, the earliest he could have found out whether he was right was eleven and a half months later. The cost: he got lucky. A second product landed and bought the company another year. He's watched friends' startups post entire quarters at zero percent retention after their Series A. The takeaway: stop measuring time to value, because a customer can get real value from you and still leave. Measure time to not going to churn. And go back to the last customer who bought strangely fast, then listen to what they said in the first few minutes about why they were talking to you that day. Rob on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/rsnyder1/ The Power of Pull: https://a.co/d/0ildfsrD Find me: https://www.linkedin.com/in/jaminbrazil/ Listen and follow: https://pod.link/6798471198

    Annual contracts hide the truth for 11 months | Rob Snyder, author of The Power of Pull

  6. Aug 16

    What current product should we kill? | Rohit Bhargava, author of Non-Obvious

    Rohit Bhargava, three-time Wall Street Journal bestselling author of ten books and founder of the Non-Obvious Company, on why seeing what others miss is a learnable habit, not a talent. Before the bestseller lists and keynotes in 32 countries, Rohit spent 15 years leading marketing strategy at Ogilvy and Leo Burnett. In this episode he breaks down the SIFT method behind his upcoming CRC keynote, explains why he killed a trend report that was still working after ten straight editions, and gets honest about the part of the journey that didn't go to plan. The confession: At the agency, the side gig of speaking on stage grew into something his day job couldn't hold. He did the honest thing and went to his bosses to offer a split of the fees. They told him the holding company's accounting made that impossible, and to just take a day off for each gig and keep the money instead. What nobody accounted for is that the big events book three to ten months out. He locked in a date, the date landed on top of a $20 million pitch, and the question stopped being whether he was moonlighting and became whether he was working for them at all. The cost: It cost him his job. He also thinks it cost him time he could have spent building his own business earlier. He is careful about the regret, though. He wouldn't change the timing, only the empathy he showed the colleagues who picked up his slack. The takeaway: Change the question. Insights work almost always points at what to build next, so ask the opposite instead. Based on this data, what current product should we kill? What is already dying in two years whether we act or not? Same data, different insight. And a habit for outside the data: pick up a magazine that isn't for you, and read the advertising as closely as the articles, because the ads tell you who that audience actually listens to. Rohit is keynoting "How To Be A Non-Obvious Thinker (And See What Others Miss)" at the Insights Association's Corporate Researchers Conference, September 15–17 in Chicago. Grab your ticket: [jamins-ia tracked link, confirm before publish]CRC: https://www.insightsassociation.org/Events/CRC-September-15-17-Chicago Get the book: Non-Obvious Thinking: https://www.amazon.com/dp/1646871618?lv=shuf&channelId=500&plpRedirect=mhFallbackHis Non-Obvious Substack: https://nonobvious.substack.com/ The trend scorecard he mentions: https://nonobvious.com (trends section) Connect with Rohit: https://www.linkedin.com/in/rohitbhargava/  Find me: https://www.linkedin.com/in/jaminbrazil/ Listen and follow: https://pod.link/6798471198

    What current product should we kill? | Rohit Bhargava, author of Non-Obvious

  7. Aug 14

    Why your best work dies in the deck | Jenny Wood

    Jenny Wood, New York Times bestselling author of Wild Courage: Go After What You Want and Get It and a former Google executive who spent eighteen years going from an entry-level job to running operations, on why the barrier to business impact isn't a lack of insight, it's the hesitation to act on it. Along the way Jenny founded Own Your Career, one of Google's largest internal career-development programs, built as a side project while she held a full operations role. In this episode she gets into the three fears that stop people from acting, the difference between a truth and a tale, and the moment on a Boulder road at night when she realized something had to give. The confession: She wanted Wild Courage to be a New York Times bestseller badly enough that she went full tilt for the year to eighteen months around the launch and couldn't see past it. It worked. She still says the juice probably wasn't worth the squeeze, because of what the obsession took from her family. The cost: Her son was waiting in the car while she finished one last email, one last piece of book marketing, always one last thing. He got out, came back into the house, and told her why he didn't think she was coming: "Mom, because all you ever do is work." She calls it a dagger, and it's the thing that made her ask whether she was actually voting with her calendar. Two days later he dragged a friend into her office to show off the book cover, proud of her. Both things were true at once. The takeaway: Stop opening with the spreadsheet. Use GRAB on your first slide when you need a decision from a stakeholder. Goal, Request, Action, Benefit. The ask belongs at the top, not on slide forty, so nobody spends thirty minutes wondering whether you want budget, a decision, or a shoulder to cry on. Jenny is speaking on "Wild Courage: The Confidence to Act Before You Have All the Answers" at the Insights Association's Corporate Researchers Conference, September 15 through 17 in Chicago. Her session is Wednesday the 16th, 9:10 AM CT. CRC: https://www.insightsassociation.org/Events/CRC-September-15-17-Chicago Connect with Jenny: https://www.linkedin.com/in/jennyilles/ Get the book: https://wildcouragebook.com/ Find me: https://www.linkedin.com/in/jaminbrazil/ Listen and follow: https://pod.link/6798471198

    Why your best work dies in the deck | Jenny Wood

  8. Aug 7

    Most research dies in the darkness | Joe Lazer, author of Super Skill

    Joe Lazer, best-selling author of The Storytelling Edge and Super Skill, on why storytelling gets more valuable as AI gets better, and what to do differently the next time you present research nobody acts on. Joe was an early leader at Contently, where the inbound engine his team built drove over 90% of revenue as they scaled to 50 million in annual sales. His newsletter on storytelling and AI reaches nearly 200,000 subscribers, and his workshops have helped Marriott, Chase, Caseware, and Dell put their own storytelling to work. The confession: As Contently scaled and he was getting pulled into strategy and client work, he couldn't let go of the small things. Copy editing the print magazine so there'd be no typos. Reviewing newsletter subject lines before they went out. Meanwhile he'd be in three hours of back-to-back meetings, holding his own team up. The cost: His team's trust, autonomy, and growth. He calls helping your team grow the highest responsibility a leader has, higher than the results you report to the board. He found out from direct feedback, including his longtime editor Jordan telling him plainly: you made me editor-in-chief, let me be editor-in-chief. The takeaway: Open hot. Dr. Paul Zak's research on the neuroscience of storytelling says people don't have short attention spans so much as short consideration spans, so get into a narrative that exemplifies your data within the first fifteen seconds instead of winding up to it. Then stop letting good research die in the darkness. Chop it into pieces that speak the grammar of the channel you're publishing on. Joe's Substack, The Storytelling Edge: https://storytellingedge.substack.com/ Joe is running a hands-on workshop at the Insights Association's Corporate Researchers Conference, September 15 through 17 in Chicago, on why storytelling is the superpower of the AI age. Grab your ticket: bit.ly/jamins-crc26 Connect with Joe: https://www.linkedin.com/in/joe-lazer/Listen and follow: bit.ly/jamins-lazerFind me: https://www.linkedin.com/in/jaminbrazil/

    Most research dies in the darkness | Joe Lazer, author of Super Skill

  9. Aug 7

    Companies don't transform, people do | Rishad Tobaccowala

    Rishad Tobaccowala, best-selling author of Rethinking Work and Restoring the Soul of Business and former Global Chief Strategist and Growth Officer at Publicis Groupe, on why we've crossed from transformational times into tectonic ones, and why the leaders who thrive will be the most human, not the most technological. Over nearly four decades at Publicis, across two eras and a dozen companies, Rishad helped the world's biggest brands navigate change from the inside. In this episode he lays out the five tectonic shifts reshaping business, three reasons leaders get the technology question wrong, and why companies don't transform, people do. The confession: The biggest mistake he and his team made scaling Publicis was pouring their energy into the fast parts of change, strategy, M&A, and reorganization, and not leaving enough time for the people part. It's easy to do a reorg. It's hard to bring people along, and that's the part that actually determines whether anything changes. The cost: Get the people part wrong and you can lose market share, sometimes the whole company. You lose world-class talent before you fix it. And your credibility as a leader can get damaged past the point of being taken seriously anywhere else. The takeaway: Block one hour a day to learn, and steal it from your work hours, not your family or your sleep, because when the leader stops learning, the company stops transforming. Then, every so often, put your team on the opposite case: if you had to destroy your own company, how would you do it? It's the fastest way to see how to build it. Ask Rishad's writing directly, free, no ads, no signup: https://rishad.aiHis newsletter, The Future Does Not Fit in the Containers of the Past: https://rishad.substack.com Rishad is speaking on "How to Thrive in Tectonic Times" at the Insights Association's Corporate Researchers Conference, September 15 through 17 in Chicago. Grab your ticket: bit.ly/jamins-crc26 Connect with Rishad: https://www.linkedin.com/in/rishadtobaccowala/Listen and follow: bit.ly/jamins-rishadThe 2:1 Test: Did you fund the decision and starve the landing? https://bit.ly/jamins-test21Insights Assocication's CRC Event: https://www.insightsassociation.org/Events/CRC-September-15-17-Chicago

    Companies don't transform, people do | Rishad Tobaccowala

  10. Aug 7

    You make more than $25 an hour | Kristin Luck

    Kristin Luck, founder and board chair of Women in Research and President of ESOMAR from 2021 to 2023, on the work founders keep doing that nobody is paying them to do. Kristin has spent two decades building and selling research companies, and now sits on the other side of the table advising the founders coming up behind her. In this episode she gets specific about what it costs to be the person who can't stop doing everything, and what to ask your team when you finally decide to stop. The confession: You make more than twenty-five dollars an hour. Why are you cleaning the bathroom? The cost: Sleep, stress, sanity. The bill comes due in the things you stop noticing. The takeaway: Ask every person on your team how they specifically contribute to the success of the business, or how they help it grow. The answers tell you who understands their job and who is just doing tasks. Kristin and I co-led a CEO coaching cohort together for three years, so this one is a conversation between people who already know each other's scar tissue. Connect with Kristin: https://www.linkedin.com/in/kristinluck/Listen and follow: bit.ly/jamins-luck

    You make more than $25 an hour | Kristin Luck

  11. Aug 6

    Welcome to Jamin's Podcast

    Twenty-minute conversations with founders and operators about what actually happened. Scaling, systems, career. Every episode is one guest, one confession, and one thing you can use Monday morning. No highlight reels, no frameworks invented after the fact. Just the part where it went sideways and what it cost. Hosted by Jamin Brazil, 3x founder with 4 exits, who's sat in the founder seat, the CEO seat, and the COO seat. First episodes drop August 18.

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About

Twenty-minute conversations with founders and operators about what actually happened. Scaling, systems, career. One guest, one confession, one thing you can use Monday morning. Hosted by Jamin Brazil, 3x founder with 4 exits, who's sat in the founder seat, the CEO seat, and the COO seat, and knows which questions get an honest answer instead of a rehearsed one.

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  • Creator
    Jamin Brazil
  • Years Active
    2026
  • Episodes
    11
  • Rating
    Explicit
  • Copyright
    © 2026 Jamin's Podcast
  • Show Website
    Jamin's Podcast

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