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 move from the corporate world into a startup

    6d ago

    How to move from the corporate world into a startup

    Andrew Reid has seen the supplements business from both sides, as a founder and as an operator inside a very large company, and he thinks the next step is personalisation that does not feel like homework. Reid is the CEO of Claer AI. The product is an AI-driven supplement regimen builder that asks for your health profile, matches it against a large library of peer-reviewed studies, then turns the recommendations into a practical plan, starting with sachets you can mix, and aiming later at a single personalised powder. He describes it as using AI like a nutritionist, then following that logic through a supply chain he already knows well. His origin story is straightforward. Reid says he built and sold a social media analytics company to Comscore, then later ended up running one of the world’s largest supplement companies as part of a small executive team. That role changed his view of supplements, not as gym culture products, but as widely applicable compounds with strong safety profiles and real evidence behind them. He uses his own experience as the hook, after adding basic products like protein and creatine, he says he saw a clear change in strength and mobility as he aged. The gap he wants to fix is trust and confusion. Reid calls the industry large but fragmented, and he points to consumer confusion as a driver. His claim is that people do not stick with one brand because the space feels like a Wild West, and they worry about doing something wrong or wasting money. Claer’s AI is meant to create a long-term relationship that adapts over time, including using biometrics from wearables and adjusting the regimen so users do not have to think about it constantly. The most concrete feature he described is interaction checking. A common fear is that a supplement will clash with a medication or another intervention. Reid says Claer uses a “currently updated” evidence base to flag these issues, and he thinks that capability has applications beyond supplements, especially anywhere medication regimens shift often. On funding, Reid says the company started self-funded, went through the ERA accelerator in New York, and that the health tech environment is active enough that fundraising is not the core problem. He frames the business model as bundles with solid margins and higher cart values, plus better retention because of the personalised front end. He also splits the company into two stages, first prove the commerce and retention dynamics, then raise larger funding later to personalise the manufacturing itself and deliver the single powder vision. Reid also made a broader point that fits the Innovators beat. He argues that AI lowers the cost of running an “antiquated” industry by replacing a stack of specialised SaaS tools across the whole value chain. He says that in his prior role he spent millions per year on specialised software, and he expects a large share of those tools to become unnecessary as teams build from basic AI primitives and open source components. 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

    15 min
  2. Creative people adapt

    Jun 8

    Creative people adapt

    Angelo Sotira built DeviantArt at nineteen, and then spent the next two decades watching the internet grow up, get rich, and get mean. When he joined me on Keep Going, he was not doing the victory lap thing. He was trying to name what changed, and what it means for anyone trying to build something creative right now. He described the early internet as directed. People knew what was missing. They wanted communities, comments, and places to post work, and they built them from scratch because the infrastructure did not exist yet. Now, he says, you can recreate 95 percent of those platforms in a weekend. The hard part is not building the tool, it is making it matter. That is where his argument gets uncomfortable. Virality used to ride on something raw and human, and he thinks AI breaks the default assumption that what you are seeing is real. His view is that we are moving into a world where you should assume media is inauthentic until it is proven otherwise. That shift changes what spreads, what people trust, and how creators feel about putting work into the world. Layer is his response. It is a hardware company, a digital art display built to treat generative and kinetic art like fine art, not like a TV on a wall. He told me the idea grew out of an identity crash after leaving DeviantArt, and a simple desire, he wanted the best digital art on his own wall, presented correctly. He went looking for a product that did it, and he says he could not find one, so he built it. He also does not sugarcoat how hard hardware is. He told me getting a manufacturing partner is harder than raising venture capital, because the manufacturers that can actually deliver are not built for startups, and you have to earn your way into their calendar. That challenge is part of what pulled him back into building in the first place. He missed meeting people, the artists, the founders, the operators in labs, the whole human mess that comes with making something real. The Keep Going part of this episode is not “follow your passion.” It is more specific. Angelo is making a bet that digital art is going mainstream, and that the people who will survive this AI wave are the ones who adapt their craft to what the medium is good at. He said still images should often be printed, because printing is already excellent. Displays should be used for work that moves, especially generative work that does not loop in a way your brain gets tired of. He thinks that kind of work will define the century. He is not naïve about the cost. He said illustrators are suffering and that many jobs are gone, and he widened it to the broader creative class, designers and builders getting hit by tools that shrink teams overnight. Still, he ended with the only kind of optimism that counts, the practical kind. Creative people adapt. They always have. 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

    33 min
  3. The Innovators: This app makes music therapy accessible to everyone

    Jun 3

    The Innovators: This app makes music therapy accessible to everyone

    Most people think of music as entertainment. Rachel Francine thinks of it as infrastructure for the brain. On this episode of Innovators, I spoke with the SingFit co-founder and CEO about how her company is using therapeutic music to help people with dementia, traumatic brain injuries, and speech loss. The idea sounds almost deceptively simple. People who lose the ability to speak can often still sing. Music activates multiple regions of the brain at the same time, creating pathways that normal speech sometimes cannot access. SingFit turns that principle into software. The platform recreates part of what music therapists do in clinical settings. Songs include lyric prompts, guided vocal tracks, and structured timing designed to encourage participation and cognitive engagement. The result is something that can be used not just by trained therapists, but by caregivers, nursing assistants, and families at home. Francine said the company now operates in more than 10,000 skilled nursing and senior living centers across the United States. The company recently launched a caregiver-focused version with AARP aimed at helping families support loved ones at home. One of the more interesting parts of the conversation was how deeply personal the company’s origin story is. The original idea came from Francine’s father, an inventor and former opera student who was fascinated by the role of lyric prompters in live performance. He imagined a system that could feed people lyrics in real time long before the technology existed to build it. Years later, Francine’s brother became a music therapist after seeing a friend recover from a traumatic brain injury and emerge from a coma mouthing the words to “Wish You Were Here.” That combination of therapy, family history, and technology became the foundation for SingFit. Francine also made an important point about startups in healthcare and assistive technology. Too many founders start with technology instead of problems. Her advice was direct. Find a real problem first, then build the system around solving it. In SingFit’s case, the company focused on one issue inside dementia care: social isolation. Patients often begin withdrawing socially as their condition progresses, which can accelerate decline and increase care costs. The platform was designed to create engagement, connection, and routine through music. The broader issue she kept returning to was aging. Dementia care, caregiver support, and cognitive decline remain massively underserved compared to other parts of healthcare. Francine pointed out that only a handful of dementia drugs have been approved over the past century while cancer treatments continue advancing rapidly. Music may not solve dementia. But the company is betting that engagement, memory, rhythm, and emotional connection can improve quality of life in ways that medicine alone often cannot. And honestly, there is something refreshing about hearing a founder talk about care instead of scale for once. 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

    14 min
  4. How to break free

    Jun 1

    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
  5. How to predict the future

    May 28

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

    May 27

    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
  7. 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
  8. 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
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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
    175
  • Rating
    Clean
  • Copyright
    © John Biggs
  • Show Website
    Keep Going