GUT with Christianne

Christianne
  • 5.0 (3)
  • Society & Culture
  • Updated Biweekly

Ambition, pressure, taste, instinct. GUT decodes how the best builders actually think and decide — the gut-feel behind the companies that work. Long-form founder conversations, hosted by Christianne, a former comms & media banker who traded the deal desk for the mic.

Episodes

  1. He Quit a Top Ad Agency to Bet on a Category That Didn't Exist | Rei Lalo, TRIHARD

    May 15

    He Quit a Top Ad Agency to Bet on a Category That Didn't Exist | Rei Lalo, TRIHARD

    If you've been telling yourself you'll start the thing "when you're ready," this episode is for you. Rei Lalo had a stable job at McCann — one of the biggest ad agencies in the world. He'd been promoted twice in three years. He had a clear ten-year trajectory, a real salary, and the kind of resume that opens doors for the rest of your career. He walked away from it. With no college degree, no credibility in the industry he wanted to enter, and some savings, he started building TRIHARD — a hair and skincare brand for athletes. Six years later, it's in over Dick's Sporting Goods stores across the country, used by Olympic swimmers, and has raised ~$5M. In this conversation, we get past the highlight reel. Rei tells us about the rounds that almost didn't close and what it really took to break free from corporate. The voice in his head that is against playing it safe — and the question he asks himself every time he's tempted to hold back. If you're in the comfortable job dreaming about the uncomfortable one, this is the conversation you didn't know you needed and the best use of your time. In this episode, you'll learn: How to know when it's time to quit a stable jobHow to fundraise without experience or a track recordHow to take action before you feel readyHow to build a brand in a category that doesn't exist yetHow to make the worst-case scenario work for you instead of against youHow to think about financial risk when you're starting from scratchHow to keep going when investors push backHow to build resilience from injury, setback, or rejectionHow to listen to your gut when everyone around you says to play it safeHow to live with a decision that scares youThree takeaways for the founder you might become: The "right time" doesn't exist and is a story your fear tells youYour worst case is almost never as bad as you thinkRegret compounds faster than money doesConnect:Rei Lalo: on LinkedInTRIHARD: trihard.com / @wetrihard Follow GUT for conversations with founders about the calls they made that no one else would have.

    1h 23m
  2. Hedge Fund to Founder: Building Lasso in 11 Months, Clarke Pennington

    May 4

    Hedge Fund to Founder: Building Lasso in 11 Months, Clarke Pennington

    Clarke Pennington spent a decade in finance: investment banking, Columbia MBA, a consumer hedge fund. Then he left to build Lasso, a better-for-you gelatin cup with protein and fiber that no one had been able to manufacture before. He gave himself 12 months. He did it in 11 — with six failed production runs, a co-manufacturer who wouldn't return his calls for four months, and stress so severe his hair started falling out. We talk about what it's like to leave a career everyone envies, what happens when the people who raised you to always perform your best become your investors, and the line between relentlessness and self-destruction. "As long as you don't kill yourself in the process." @eatlasso on Instagram and TikTok Claim Your Complimentary Career Clarity Session: https://www.wellthbykirsten.com/booking-calendar/complimentary-consultation?referral=book_button_widget

    22 min
  3. VP at BlackRock to Quitting With No Plan | Kirsten Breidenbruch, Wellth by Kirsten

    Feb 17

    VP at BlackRock to Quitting With No Plan | Kirsten Breidenbruch, Wellth by Kirsten

    Kirsten Breidenbruch spent a decade at BlackRock. She made VP. She was making great money. From the outside, she had everything figured out. From the inside, she was waking up two hours early every day just to calm herself down enough to walk to work. Her feet felt like cinder blocks. Her body was rejecting the life she built. In this conversation, Kirsten takes us inside the war between the identity she spent years constructing and the person she was becoming underneath it, the panic attacks she masked, the mindfulness sessions she led at work while quietly falling apart, the spreadsheet she made to see if she could afford to quit (and then ignored for months), and the walk on the beach with her dad where she finally said it out loud. She talks about what it actually feels like to dismantle a life that looks perfect, why she wore a white Anthropologie dress to her quitting meeting, and the moment her boss called an hour after she resigned and said "I'm kinda jealous." This is for anyone who has everything they're supposed to want and still feels like something is fundamentally wrong.

    52 min
  4. George Foreman — Reinvention, Identity, and Letting the Old You Die

    Feb 11

    George Foreman — Reinvention, Identity, and Letting the Old You Die

    George Foreman built an identity the way entrepreneurs build empires, with brutal focus and no room for weakness. But the man he constructed to dominate was deeply sensitive underneath, and that fracture nearly destroyed him. This is what happened when the persona he'd engineered to survive his childhood became the cage that broke his championship, his marriages, and his relationship with his daughter. Then he spent 30 years rebuilding, not just as a fighter, but as a father, preacher, and businessman who understood something most ambitious people never do: the identity that got you here might be exactly what stops you from going further. For anyone building something big and wondering if the foundation is actually solid.

    26 min
  5. Marcus Aurelius: How to Lead Through Collapse

    Feb 3

    Marcus Aurelius: How to Lead Through Collapse

    Winter, 169 AD. The most powerful man on earth is sitting in a freezing tent on the battle frontier, covered in mud, surrounded by dead soldiers. Rome is collapsing. A plague is killing 2,000 people a day. The economy has crashed. Marcus Aurelius has just buried his co-emperor. He's watching his own children die. By all accounts, everything is falling apart. That night, by torchlight, he dips his pen in ink and writes a single sentence: Death smiles at us all. All one can do is smile back. This episode is a case study in survival. We deconstruct the mind of a man who stared into the abyss for two decades. War, plague, betrayal, death, and came out not bitter, not broken, but something else entirely. The meditations weren't written in a marble library. They were written in a war zone, by a man trying to hold it together. What stands in the way becomes the way. The obstacle is the curriculum. Fire feeds on obstacles. This is the story of how Marcus Aurelius built a mind that could take the worst life had to offer and turn it into something useful. Content note: This episode contains mentions of death, war, and mature themes.

    28 min
  6. Arsh Toor: Her Dad Would Have Killed for the Job She Quit

    Jan 25

    Arsh Toor: Her Dad Would Have Killed for the Job She Quit

    Arsh Toor's dad moved from India to Canada as an engineer and ended up taking whatever work he could find to support a family on a single income. The message was clear: work hard, get good grades, get a steady job. Arsh did exactly that. She got into an impressive school, landed in investment banking, and spent five years at two different shops in New York. Then she quit to make pistachio butter. Arsh talks about what it felt like to look at the seniors on her team and realize she didn't want their life. About logging back on at 9 p.m. and knowing that was never going to change. About telling her parents she was leaving the career they would have done anything to have. And about what it's actually like to go from building financial models to tracking inventory, running Instagram, and putting everything on the line for a product she and her partner made in a blender. Arsh is the co-founder of Stesh, a pistachio butter brand built on the idea that what you eat should bring you a second of joy in your day. Topics: investment banking, quitting corporate, first-generation immigrant, entrepreneurship, food startup, pistachio butter, Stesh, career change, burnout, founder life GUT is hosted by Christianne. New episodes weekly.

    40 min
  7. Beethoven: The Man Who Couldn't Hear His Own Masterpiece

    Jan 24

    Beethoven: The Man Who Couldn't Hear His Own Masterpiece

    In 1824, Beethoven stood on a podium conducting a symphony he couldn't hear. The orchestra had been told not to look at him. He was flailing at a tempo that existed only in his mind, several bars behind when the music ended. A singer had to walk over and turn him around so he could see the five standing ovations. He heard nothing. We tell the story everyone skips past. The abusive father who beat music into him as a child. The six years he kept his deafness a secret, terrified someone would speak to him and he wouldn't answer. The night he almost ended his life in a quiet village outside Vienna. The nephew he tried to control so completely that the boy put a pistol to his own head. And the final years, when Beethoven stopped writing for the crowd and started writing music so strange that critics called it incomprehensible — music it took the world a century to catch up to. This is a historical deep-dive episode of GUT, examining what grit can build, what brute force can destroy, and what happens when the tools you spent your life mastering break. Content warning: this episode includes descriptions of childhood abuse, suicidal ideation, and a suicide attempt. Topics: Beethoven, classical music, deafness, Ninth Symphony, Heiligenstadt Testament, grit and resilience, perfectionism, trauma, late string quartets, historical biography GUT is hosted by Christianne. New episodes weekly.

    30 min
  8. Maya Angelou: How to Find Your Voice

    Jan 19

    Maya Angelou: How to Find Your Voice

    At three years old, Maya Angelou was put on a train to Arkansas with a tag on her wrist and no adult to watch her. At eight, she was sexually assaulted. She believed her voice killed a man, and she stopped speaking for nearly five years. The woman who read a poem at a presidential inauguration in front of 20 million people spent her childhood in silence. This episode traces the full arc: the abandonment, the assault, the years of silence, and the woman who smashed fine china to get herself fired, lied her way into a Creole cooking job she'd never done, invented herself as a Cuban calypso singer, and eventually wrote one of the most important memoirs in American history. Maya Angelou didn't wait for permission or credentials. She just kept moving. This is a historical deep-dive episode of GUT, exploring how the worst things that happened to her became the raw material for everything she built. Content warning: this episode includes descriptions of childhood sexual abuse, racism, abandonment, and violence. Topics: Maya Angelou, I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings, childhood trauma, post-traumatic growth, resilience, performing arts, civil rights, memoir, survival, historical biography GUT is hosted by Christianne. New episodes weekly.

    26 min
  • 8 Episodes

5
out of 5
3 Ratings

About

Ambition, pressure, taste, instinct. GUT decodes how the best builders actually think and decide — the gut-feel behind the companies that work. Long-form founder conversations, hosted by Christianne, a former comms & media banker who traded the deal desk for the mic.

Information

  • Creator
    Christianne
  • Years Active
    2K
  • Episodes
    8
  • Rating
    Clean
  • Copyright
    © Christianne
  • Show Website
    GUT with Christianne