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. 4d ago

    How a 6th-Grade Dropout From Togo Built a $100M Fair Trade Brand With No VC

    Olowo-n'djo Tchala grew up sharing an 8x10 room with his mother and seven siblings in Togo (a family of 41 brothers and sisters, one of the world's poorest countries) and left school after the sixth grade. In 1996, a Peace Corps volunteer named Prairie Rose came to his village. They fell in love and moved to California. Later on with 17 women in West Africa, a shea nut tree, and student loans, he built Alaffia: a fair-trade beauty company that would reach $100M in sales, 250,000 lives touched in West Africa, and shelf space in Whole Foods nationwide. No outside investors. For twenty years. Then the investors arrived. Four months later, Olo resigned. He couldn't look the West African women in the eyes and tell them their wages were being cut. He watched Alaffia deteriorate from the outside. He built Ayeya from scratch… no capital, a changed market, everything to prove again. Then, in late 2025, he bought Alaffia back. What Brennan and Olo get into in this episode goes beyond any founder story NAP has told: Why Olo went 20 years without outside investors and what happened within 4 months of taking the moneyThe specific moment "optimization" crossed from business decision to personal betrayal "I see all these women as my mother" and why that made the investor conversation impossibleThe community programs that can't be measured in EBITDA, including a woman who named her baby after the brand because it saved her lifeWhat two years of depression looked like after leaving a company woven into every wall of his homeHow he launched Ayeya with no capital, in a market that had changed, and decided to go all out because he had nothing left to loseWhy buying Alaffia back felt like life and death, not a transactionHis vision: West Africa needs to stop being a raw material producerHis answer to the question he's always wanted to be asked: "What does healing look like in business?"His billboard: "Don't compromise the fire that you have in you."Subscribe to Not Another Podcast on YouTube, Spotify, and Apple Podcasts. Follow Infinity @infinityvc. Find Alaffia at alaffia.com, available at Whole Foods stores nationwide.

    46 min

  2. May 26

    The $500M Hedge Fund Where Every Single Employee Owns a Piece: Shamir Karkal

    Shamir Karkal co-founded Simple in 2009, one of the first real digital-first banks in the US. When he sold it to BBVA for $117M in 2014, he and his co-founder fought their board to distribute $14.6M of the proceeds to roughly 100 employees, excluding the founders. He's applied that same principle at every company since, including his current AI fund, where every employee owns a stake in the fund itself. In the hedge fund world, that's almost unheard of. Today he's Co-founder and President of Aleph Invariance, an AI fund based in Portland with an intentionally low public footprint. He's also Co-founder and Chief Strategy Officer of Sila, the programmable money API platform that has raised $20M+. Before Sila, he built BBVA's Open Platform after the Simple acquisition, creating the API infrastructure that helped power a generation of embedded-finance startups in the US. In this episode: Why first movers do the hard work and second movers capture the upsideHow employees get screwed on options at acquisition, and how Shamir did it differentlyThe $14.6M employee payout from Simple and the board fight behind itWhy every Aleph Invariance employee owns a stake in the fundWhat PNC destroyed when they shut Simple downHow to build a de novo AI fund when you've never worked in financeWhy humanities majors are about to become more valuable than engineers If you know a founder who's ever wondered whether it's possible to build something great without leaving your team behind, send them this one. Subscribe for more episodes of Not Another Podcast every week!

    57 min

  3. May 19

    The Founder Who Runs Offsites for 500+ Companies Says Most Remote Teams Get This Wrong | Jared Kleinert

    Jared Kleinert is the Founder and CEO of Offsite, the company that handles end-to-end retreat and offsite planning for hundreds of companies, including Perplexity, HubSpot, Walmart, and Remote. Before building Offsite, he became one of the most connected people in the startup world, was named USA Today's "Millennial Influencer of the Year," and wrote books about building relationships and building companies. In this episode, Brennan and Jared get into why the bar to stand out as a job applicant is shockingly low (and what to actually do about it), Dan Martell's 10-80-10 rule for using AI without losing your voice, what actually builds remote work culture and what doesn't, why fundraising might be creating more risk than you think, and why the founders who do the service manually before they build the tech are almost always the ones who win. If you're hiring, building, or just trying to figure out how to use AI without becoming a copy-paste machine, this one's for you. Subscribe to Not Another Podcast wherever you get your shows.

    38 min

  4. May 6

    The PhD Founder Who Left the Lab to Fix What Science Got Wrong: Liisi Laaniste

    Liisi Laaniste spent over a decade studying one of the deadliest brain cancers in the world, glioblastoma, which kills most patients within 15 months and hasn't seen a meaningful change in standard treatment since 2005. She published in top journals. She ranked first in her class at Uppsala University. She earned her PhD in Computational Systems Biology at Imperial College London. And then she decided that publishing papers wasn't going to be enough to actually save anyone. So she left academia and co-founded CoSyne Therapeutics: a vertically integrated AI drug discovery company building precision medicines for brain diseases that pharma has largely walked away from. CoSyne has raised $7.8M from Amino Collective, Backed VC, Phoenix Court, and Meltwind Advisory and has built the world's largest single-cell CRISPRi perturbation dataset, generated entirely from real patient tumor tissue. In this episode, Brennan and Liisi go deep on the gap between what science discovers and what actually reaches patients and what it takes to close it. In this episode: - The 70% reproducibility crisis: most published biology and chemistry research cannot be replicated in a lab (and AI is being trained on all of it) - How AI is cutting the drug development timeline from 16 years to 2 - The "publish or perish" system that actively disincentivizes scientists from checking each other's work - What a squid in Japan, an octopus, and a jellyfish can teach us about curing disease - Why "you can just do things" is the most important lesson academia never taught her - The co-founder as the real moat and why finding the right one is the unicorn event of any startup - Bryan Johnson: legitimate longevity experiment or something else entirely? Subscribe for more episodes of Not Another Podcast. If you know anyone building at the intersection of AI and life sciences, send them this one.

    55 min

  5. Apr 28

    The 12 Most Important Founder Frameworks For 2026

    Six months. 21 episodes. Conversations with hardware founders, AI journalists, sex therapists, repeat unicorn builders, and the people training the robots that might change everything. In this special solo episode of Not Another Podcast, Brennan Pothetes sits down alone and riffs on the clips that hit hardest, the takes that got the most heat, and what he's actually learned from the guests he's hosted over the last six months. Brennan revisits Nicole Maffeo's claim that hardware is the only moat, Natassia Miller on why communication in the bedroom translates to the boardroom, Brandon Arvanaghi on why one B player can sink a company, Dave Blakely on founder self-sabotage, Dane Atkinson on the weight of raising friends-and-family money, Jess Mah on why 996 is b******t, Alex Konrad on how entrepreneurship gets over-glamorized, Anto Patrex on robots and the future of work, Ravi Kurani on the heartache of selling a business, Marty Ringlein on playing power law, and Alfia Ilicheva on what it means to live every day like life is finite. Thanks to every guest who came on, every listener who DM'd, and every founder who saw themselves in these clips. Here's to the next six months.

    27 min

  6. Apr 21

    Nicole Maffeo Returns: The Case Against Humanoid Robots (From a Robotics Founder and Former Google AI Research Lead)

    Nicole Maffeo was the very first guest on Not Another Podcast. She's back, and the conversation picks up right where we left off. Nicole is a former Bridgewater investor, ex-Google AI research leader, and co-founder of Gambit Robotics, where she's building specialized robots for the home. In Part 1, she gave us the thesis: the only real moat left in AI is hardware, and the global AI race is really 8 battles happening at once. In Part 2, she updates that thesis and goes further. In this episode, Brennan and Nicole break down: • Why humanoid robots are the wrong bet for your home, and why specialized, distributed robotics wins• How the AI race has shifted from horizontal competition (best model) to vertical stack dominance, with different countries owning different layers• Why OpenAI buying a podcast network is a vertical integration play, not a content play• Why people hate big tech, and how 20 years of social media toxicity broke public trust• Nicole's experience as one of the only women in every room she's walked into, from competitive chess at age 6, to Bridgewater, to Google AI, to crypto, to robotics• The mentors who championed her, and why she pays it forward at every company she works atSubscribe for more episodes of Not Another Podcast. If you know a founder building in AI, robotics, or deep tech, send them this one. Check out Nicole's company, Gambit Robotics: https://www.gambitrobotics.ai

    49 min

  7. Apr 7

    Why Hardware Is One of the Last Real Moats, with Eric Litman

    Eric Litman grew up on Saint Thomas in the US Virgin Islands, graduated high school at 15, and landed at NeXT working alongside Steve Jobs while still in college. Since then he's co-founded Proxicom, built Viaduct, founded Medialets (acquired by WPP), and managed WashingtonVC, an early-stage venture fund in DC. Today he's the Founder and CEO of Aescape, a robotics company building AI-powered, fully automated full-body massage systems. He's also 52 and says he's in the best shape of his life, leaner, stronger, and sharper than he was at 35. I had to ask how. In this conversation, Eric walks through the system he's built to track his own biology over decades, why he thinks longitudinal data is the missing piece in how most people approach their health, and why the "four pillars" of wellness aren't enough on their own. We also go deep on where AI and robotics actually stand right now. Eric has built through the internet wave, the mobile wave, the social wave, and now AI. He makes the case that this one is fundamentally different because the technology has agency, the ability to make its own decisions. In this episode: • Why intelligence is becoming a purchasable commodity and what that means for software founders • The real gap between humanoid robot demos on YouTube and what those machines can actually do today • His prediction that the concept of "apps" starts to break down once real AI lives on your phone • How he tracks every biomarker, lab result, and doctor visit to build a longitudinal health profile • Emergent AI behaviors: why Claude is getting "sassy" and what that signals about where we're headed Eric has seen more tech waves than almost anyone I've talked to on this show, and his perspective on what's coming next is worth hearing. Subscribe for more episodes of Not Another Podcast. If you know a founder, operator, or anyone building in AI, robotics, or health tech, send them this one.

    1h 6m

  8. Mar 31

    How Scarlett Sieber Built a Career at the Top of FinTech Without Playing the Usual Game

    Before Money20/20 and the book and NASA, she was busing tables at Ruby Tuesday's in Times Square. Scarlett Sieber graduated from Fordham with an accounting degree she never really wanted, spent a semester abroad in Beijing, came back with one clear realization: "life is short, and accounting is not it.” And then she spent the next year clearing dishes while her classmates climbed the corporate ladder. Today, she's the Chief Strategy and Growth Officer at Money20/20, the world's largest fintech gathering in three continents, 100+ countries, and the entire global fintech ecosystem in one room. She's a Wiley bestselling author ("Embedded Finance: When Payments Become An Experience"), a Senior Advisor to NASA, a Forbes contributor, a former SVP at BBVA, Chief Innovation Officer at an $8B bank, and one of the most strategically connected people in global finance. And she got there by doing something almost no one talks about: she stopped trying to get into the room. She built it. In this episode, Brennan and Scarlett get into all of it: the career origin story most people don't know, the networking philosophy that actually works, what it takes to get on the world's biggest fintech stage, and the honest truth about what innovation looks like from the inside of a massive organization. What we cover: → The real origin story: a small-town Colorado girl, an accounting degree she hated, a semester in Beijing, and a year busing tables in Times Square before any of the titles came → Why "owning your unique thing" is your single biggest career weapon, even when you're standing next to a billionaire → The #1 networking mistake Scarlett sees constantly: leading with the ask instead of the offer and how to flip it → The blunt truth about speaker pitches at major conferences: why your PR agency is probably killing yours (and what to say instead) → Why the "5-year plan" might be holding you back and why the most powerful thing you can do is stay flexible → What it's really like to be a corporate innovator inside a big institution (hint: lonelier than anyone talks about) → Why big banks don't have to move fast and what that should actually teach every fintech founder about how they build → The moment Scarlett still comes back to: busing tables at Ruby Tuesday's, looking out those big Times Square windows, and thinking: "I can't believe this is my life. I've made it." Scarlett Sieber is one of the most deliberately constructed careers in all of financial services. She's never been the product. She builds the room the product lives in. And she came to play on this one. New episode of Not Another Podcast, out now on YouTube, Spotify, and everywhere you listen.

    41 min
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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
    27
  • Rating
    Explicit
  • Copyright
    © Infinity Constellation
  • Show Website
    Not Another Podcast

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