What We Need to Grow.

A conversation series by 79 Development
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What We Need to Grow is a 79 Development conversation series with the people building what's next, hosted by Caleb Pedosiuk. Execution is getting cheaper. The scarce thing now is the clarity to know what's worth growing before you touch a single tool. Every conversation comes back to one question: not what can we do, but what should we be doing? We cover everything from mergers, acquisitions and private equity to regenerative agriculture, wellness and humanitarian work, and what it means to solve meaningful problems today. Who should we talk to next? Reach us at 79dev.com.

  1. 5h ago

    Ep. 071 | How to Buy Food Directly From Local Farmers and Ranchers | AJ Richards

    AJ Richards is the founder and CEO of From The Farm, an online marketplace that connects families directly with farmers, ranchers and food producers. He comes from a ranching family on the Arizona Strip, north of the Grand Canyon, served in Iraq with the Utah Army National Guard, and managed a USDA meat processing facility in Wyoming before launching From The Farm in March 2024, funded by a community round of 348 investors on Wefunder rather than venture capital. In this conversation with Caleb Pedosiuk, AJ explains why regenerative farming can't spread until the market pays producers for it, and how COVID exposed the fragility of a centralized food supply. He describes From The Farm as the Airbnb of local food: search by where you live or what you want, and buy from producers who are verified, some of them testing their meat for nutritional density. He walks through why food quality starts at the soil, why he raised from a community round instead of venture capital, and why he would rather turn money down than lose control of the mission. He also gives practical advice for newcomers: lease land instead of buying it, and change your food one item at a time. AJ is exactly the kind of founder, innovator, and problem solver this series exists to put a light on. He built a marketplace on the idea that buyers deserve to know the farmer is real, and checks every producer before they're listed. Authority works the same way. Trust goes to the people who make themselves easy to verify. Learn more about From The Farm: https://fromthefarm.orgFrom The Farm on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/from-the-farmInvestors: aj@fromthefarm.org What We Need to Grow is Caleb Pedosiuk's founder conversation series from 79 Development, on growth, judgment, and the thinking behind building great companies. It exists to shine a light on the founders, innovators, problem solvers, and pioneers building things that matter. Listen on Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/show/5O6IiwVl4tHyhegQafVZLa Podcast sponsored by 79 Development Inc | 79dev.com #localfood #regenerativeagriculture #farmtotable #soilhealth #homesteading #foodsystems #founders #podcast

  2. 1d ago

    Ep. 070 | How a Personal Trainer Built a Protein Bar Worth Eating | Sharon Chamberlin

    Sharon Chamberlin is the founder of Catalyst 4 Fitness, the fitness and nutrition company she started in 2009 after 20 years in the corporate world. An ACE certified personal trainer and NESTA fitness nutrition coach, she has grown the business from an in-person studio into online coaching, a line of supplements and the Catalyst Bar, a protein bar she specified herself. In this conversation with Caleb Pedosiuk, Sharon explains why she left a corporate career she was good at, and how a friend's suggestion she first called "the dumbest thing I ever heard" became her company. She walks through moving every client online during COVID, testing supplements on herself before selling them, and the brief she gave a manufacturer for a protein bar worth eating: whey protein isolate, real fiber, little sugar, no sugar alcohols, ingredients you can pronounce, and it had to taste good. She explains why people trying to eat well so often fail, and it isn't effort. It's who they're learning from. She also shares how she coaches the mind along with the body, from intake questions that keep asking why to the Friday check-in that gets clients ready for the weekend. Sharon is exactly the kind of founder, innovator, and problem solver this series exists to put a light on. She built a product because the ones on the shelf didn't hold up to a close look at the label. Authority works the same way. When the claims hold up to anyone who checks, people trust the brand, recommend it, and come back to it. Learn more about Catalyst 4 Fitness: https://catalyst4fitness.comSharon Chamberlin on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/sharonchamberlin/ What We Need to Grow is Caleb Pedosiuk's founder conversation series from 79 Development, on growth, judgment, and the thinking behind building great companies. It exists to shine a light on the founders, innovators, problem solvers, and pioneers building things that matter. Listen on Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/show/5O6IiwVl4tHyhegQafVZLa Podcast sponsored by 79 Development Inc | 79dev.com #nutrition #fitness #proteinbar #personaltrainer #healthyeating #smallbusiness #founders #podcast

  3. 2d ago

    Ep. 069 | Why Satisfaction Scores Don't Predict Brand Loyalty | Robert Passikoff

    Robert Passikoff is the founder and president of Brand Keys, the New York research consultancy he started in 1984 to measure what actually predicts customer loyalty. Brand Keys publishes the annual Customer Loyalty Engagement Index, the Loyalty Leaders list and the Most Patriotic Brands survey, now in its 25th year. Robert is the author of Predicting Market Success, and New York University's communication school named him the most-quoted brand consultant in the United States. In this conversation with Caleb Pedosiuk, Robert explains why customer satisfaction stopped telling brands apart. Once the quality movement made most products roughly equal, satisfaction became table stakes and the brand became the only real difference. Loyalty moved from transactional to behavioural to emotional. He describes how the public web let consumers talk to each other before they talked to the brand, why customer expectations keep rising faster than brands improve, and how a single company's promise, like Zappos and free returns, spreads into every other category. He also gives a measured view of AI: useful for scale, and so far mostly historical when it comes to understanding loyalty. Asked what he needs to grow, he names a change in the industry: get rid of the 10-point scale and kill the legacy measures that only look back. Robert is exactly the kind of founder, innovator, and problem solver this series exists to put a light on. He has spent four decades arguing that a brand has to stand for something specific in the mind of the customer. Authority works the same way. A brand people can clearly describe is a brand the systems they now ask for answers can describe too. Learn more about Brand Keys: https://brandkeys.comRobert Passikoff on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/robertpassikoff/ What We Need to Grow is Caleb Pedosiuk's founder conversation series from 79 Development, on growth, judgment, and the thinking behind building great companies. It exists to shine a light on the founders, innovators, problem solvers, and pioneers building things that matter. Listen on Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/show/5O6IiwVl4tHyhegQafVZLa Podcast sponsored by 79 Development Inc | 79dev.com #brandloyalty #branding #customerexperience #marketresearch #brandstrategy #marketing #founders #podcast

  4. 3d ago

    Ep. 068 | How a Fractional CFO Gets a Software Company Ready to Raise | Charles Solomon

    Charles Solomon is the founder and managing partner of Centripetal Advisors, the New York firm he launched in 2018 to give B2B software companies an institutional quality finance function on a fractional basis. Centripetal helps founders decide how to finance growth through debt or equity, installs the metrics investors look for, benchmarks performance against the market, and guides companies to the funds they fit, in engagements that average about two and a half years. Charles holds an MBA from Columbia Business School and a BA in economics, magna cum laude, from Tufts. In this conversation with Caleb Pedosiuk, Charles explains how he gets a software company ready to raise: back-solving from the capital a founder wants to the milestones funds expect, and refusing to help anyone game the numbers. Cutting customer success to flatter margins can win a term sheet and then lose the deal in diligence when customers churn, so he fixes margin with packaging and pricing instead. He makes the case for long engagements over short ones and for a firm's network coming with the hire rather than being billed on top. He also answers Caleb's question about vendors taking equity instead of cash: possible, uncommon, and almost always in need of cleanup when founders do it without help. Charles is exactly the kind of founder, innovator, and problem solver this series exists to put a light on. His whole practice rests on one discipline: know what good looks like, and when you're there, take credit for it. Authority is earned the same way. You build something worth talking about and keep an honest, specific account of it, and that is what makes a firm understood, trusted, and findable by the systems people now ask for answers. Learn more about Centripetal Advisors: https://centripetaladvisors.comCharles Solomon on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/solomoncharles/ What We Need to Grow is Caleb Pedosiuk's founder conversation series from 79 Development, on growth, judgment, and the thinking behind building great companies. It exists to shine a light on the founders, innovators, problem solvers, and pioneers building things that matter. Listen on Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/show/5O6IiwVl4tHyhegQafVZLa Podcast sponsored by 79 Development Inc | 79dev.com #fractionalCFO #SaaS #startupfunding #venturecapital #B2Bsoftware #startupfinance #founders #podcast

  5. 4d ago

    Ep. 067 | Why Software Asset Management Tools Don't Fix Compliance | Rory Canavan

    Rory Canavan founded SAM Charter in 2012 after a career through the Royal Navy, Compaq, HP and the Federation Against Software Theft. He sits on WG21, the ISO working group that writes the ISO/IEC 19770 IT asset management standards, and The ITAM Review named him ITAM Professional of the Year. His work starts at the moment a vendor like Microsoft, Oracle or IBM asks an organization to prove what it has installed against what it has paid for. In this conversation with Caleb Pedosiuk, Rory explains why buying a software asset management tool does not make a company audit ready. The report everyone wants is the last step of a lifecycle, not a product. "Even if they do have that SAM suite or ITAM suite in place to be able to generate that report, they don't have an idea of how to get the report better. It's garbage in, garbage out." His metaphor for it is the one listeners will remember: "it's like a gym membership that doesn't get used." He explains why he says change is the enemy, and why processes exist to corral data drift rather than to create paperwork. He then points the same discipline at AI spend, a problem he calls tokenomics, describing organizations that threw tokens across the workforce and expected a productivity jump in three days, and a developer he says burned roughly $10,000 of credits a month on an AI out-of-office reply that Outlook already does for free. Software asset management, he argues, is a treasure map with coordinates on it. AI is a map that tells you where to dig but not how deep, or whether there is gold in the casket. He closes on the use case nobody expects from this category: hidden IT liabilities that move the final number in a merger, the "snakes and snurglies" a buyer finds after handing over ninety percent of the price. Rory is exactly the kind of founder, innovator, and problem solver this series exists to put a light on. He helped write the standard his field runs on and has spent fifteen years making an unglamorous argument that keeps turning out to be right. That is what earned authority sounds like: doing the work that sets the benchmark and keeping an honest account of it, which is what makes a brand understood, trusted, and findable by the systems people now ask for answers. Learn more about SAM Charter: https://www.samcharter.comRory Canavan on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/rorycanavan/ITAM process kits, built with Kylie Fowler: https://www.itamaccelerate.com What We Need to Grow is Caleb Pedosiuk's founder conversation series from 79 Development, on growth, judgment, and the thinking behind building great companies. It exists to shine a light on the founders, innovators, problem solvers, and pioneers building things that matter. Listen on Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/show/5O6IiwVl4tHyhegQafVZLa Podcast sponsored by 79 Development Inc | 79dev.com #itam #softwareassetmanagement #compliance #aigovernance #finops #enterpriseit #mergersandacquisitions #podcast

  6. 6d ago

    Ep. 066 | How to Know If Your Contrarian Idea Is Real | Lance Cottrell

    Lance Cottrell founded Anonymizer in 1995, the world's first consumer internet privacy service, after leaving an astrophysics doctorate five years in. He had been working with the Hubble Space Telescope and was online early enough to see what the data collection would mean. He grew Anonymizer to a million active users and 100,000 paying subscribers, survived the dot-com collapse, then pivoted the company after 9/11 into platforms for online undercover operations for the intelligence community, which is where he says it finally found product-market fit. He sold it to Ntrepid and stayed on as chief scientist. He now runs the free founder education channel Feel the Boot, is president of the North Bay Angels, and coaches a small number of founders directly. In this conversation with Caleb Pedosiuk, Lance explains how a founder can tell a genuine insight from a comfortable one. The test is that you believe it passionately, you keep arguing about it, and almost nobody agrees with you yet. "One of the things to look for is when you discover that something that you passionately believe in is contrarian." Then comes the part most founders skip: "validate the heck out of that." He is blunt about where the current market's money is going, inverting the Gretzky line to say investors are skating to where the puck just was, and he argues the real opportunities sit one or two steps past the models everyone is funding. He walks through why founders who come to him for help raising money almost never have a fundraising problem, explains the returns math that makes angel investing look greedy until you do it, and gives the most honest answer the show has had to its closing question: he knows he has picked a terrible market, and he picked it on purpose. Lance is exactly the kind of founder, innovator, and problem solver this series exists to put a light on. He built a category that did not exist, waited years for a market that was not ready, and now spends his time making other founders' thinking sharper rather than louder. That is what earned authority sounds like: building things worth talking about and keeping an honest account of the work, which is what makes a brand understood, trusted, and findable by the systems people now ask for answers. Learn more about Feel the Boot: https://www.feeltheboot.comLance Cottrell on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/lancecottrell/One-to-one founder coaching: https://founderquest.comFeel the Boot on YouTube: free content on startups and fundraising What We Need to Grow is Caleb Pedosiuk's founder conversation series from 79 Development, on growth, judgment, and the thinking behind building great companies. It exists to shine a light on the founders, innovators, problem solvers, and pioneers building things that matter. Listen on Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/show/5O6IiwVl4tHyhegQafVZLa Podcast sponsored by 79 Development Inc | 79dev.com #startups #fundraising #angelinvesting #venturecapital #founders #podcast #productmarketfit #startupadvice

  7. Oct 25

    Ep. 065 | Pioneering World-Class Experiences Through a Pop-Up Gelato Cart | Michael Franano

    Michael Franano is the owner and founder of Gelatano, the Nashville artisan gelato and sorbetto company he and his wife Caroline built around a custom Italian-made cart that serves weddings, corporate events and luxury car showrooms. He spent most of a career in hospitality and live events, including five years in Abu Dhabi with Etihad Airways, where he and Caroline produced the airline's events worldwide, before a Netherlands-based software firm role ended in June 2023 and Caroline talked him into gelato instead of another corporate job. Three years on he has crested 90 recipes, doubled his event count year over year by mid-August, and grown 57% on last year with no paid marketing and no outside funding. In this conversation with Caleb Pedosiuk, Michael explains why he deliberately moved toward something local and tactile at the exact moment everything else was moving the other way. "We decided to go the other direction." He walks through the market research that came before the product, mocking up the cart and the pricing and then taking it to every caterer, wedding planner and meeting planner in Nashville and asking them directly, and the consistent answer he got back. He is precise about the process he chose and what it cost him, cooking the bases first and ageing them 24 to 48 hours on imported Carpigiani machines that ran about double the price, and about why repeat business rather than revenue is the number he watches. Asked the show's closing question, he gives the most practical answer of the series so far: a 450-square-foot storefront in a high foot traffic part of East Nashville, pushed in the slow January and February window, with an announcement targeted for Memorial Day, and a customer base of thousands already built through events so the shop opens into demand rather than waiting 12 to 18 months for it. Michael is exactly the kind of founder, innovator, and problem solver this series exists to put a light on. He built something hard to copy, in public, in front of the people who book it, and the growth came from them coming back. That is what earned authority sounds like: building things worth talking about and keeping an honest account of the work, which is what makes a brand understood, trusted, and findable by the systems people now ask for answers. Learn more about Gelatano: https://www.gelatano.comMichael Franano on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/michael-franano-2322909/Gelatano on Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/gelatano_gelato/ What We Need to Grow is Caleb Pedosiuk's founder conversation series from 79 Development, on growth, judgment, and the thinking behind building great companies. It exists to shine a light on the founders, innovators, problem solvers, and pioneers building things that matter. Listen on Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/show/5O6IiwVl4tHyhegQafVZLa Podcast sponsored by 79 Development Inc | 79dev.com #gelato #nashville #eventcatering #foodbusiness #smallbusiness #brickandmortar #founders #podcast

  8. Oct 24

    Ep. 064 | Showing Up in AI Search Takes More Than an SEO Checklist | Jesse McFarland

    Jesse McFarland is the founder of SpearPoint Marketing, the Denver B2B SEO and AI search agency he launched in January 2022 after roughly seventeen years in digital marketing, including CMO and head-of-growth roles across cybersecurity, SaaS, legal and healthcare. He works mostly with B2B professional services, software and manufacturing companies, and he built the in-house dashboard his team uses to audit a brand's AI visibility against its competitors. In this conversation with Caleb Pedosiuk, Jesse argues that the industry has gone backwards. Buyers spent a decade learning to stop asking where they rank and start asking what it earned them, and in the last year they have reverted to asking about a rank, this time in ChatGPT. He puts the question back to them plainly: is the goal to type one phrase into ChatGPT and see whether you come up, or is the goal to increase revenue. He is just as blunt that most of the change is overstated, that roughly 80% of the work is the same system SEO has always used, and that the real difference is strategic rather than technical, usually a brand claim that is too general to be chosen. He walks through how his team finds gaps by auditing competitors rather than guessing, why a gap only counts when it maps to something the client actually sells, and why the middle of the funnel, the comparisons and the price and feature questions, is the most open ground available to a mid-sized company and the ground most of them are too timid to take. Jesse is exactly the kind of founder, innovator, and problem solver this series exists to put a light on. He sells into the same transition this show's sponsor does, and he spends the conversation talking buyers out of the metric that would be easiest to sell them. That is what earned authority sounds like: building things worth talking about and keeping an honest account of the work, which is what makes a brand understood, trusted, and findable by the systems people now ask for answers. Learn more about SpearPoint Marketing: https://www.thespearpoint.comSpearPoint Marketing on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/spearpoint-marketingJesse co-hosts the Brands and Brews marketing podcast: https://brandsandbrews.com What We Need to Grow is Caleb Pedosiuk's founder conversation series from 79 Development, on growth, judgment, and the thinking behind building great companies. It exists to shine a light on the founders, innovators, problem solvers, and pioneers building things that matter. Listen on Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/show/5O6IiwVl4tHyhegQafVZLa Podcast sponsored by 79 Development Inc | 79dev.com #aisearch #seo #b2bmarketing #aivisibility #contentstrategy #agencygrowth #founders #podcast

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About

What We Need to Grow is a 79 Development conversation series with the people building what's next, hosted by Caleb Pedosiuk. Execution is getting cheaper. The scarce thing now is the clarity to know what's worth growing before you touch a single tool. Every conversation comes back to one question: not what can we do, but what should we be doing? We cover everything from mergers, acquisitions and private equity to regenerative agriculture, wellness and humanitarian work, and what it means to solve meaningful problems today. Who should we talk to next? Reach us at 79dev.com.

Information

  • Creator
    A conversation series by 79 Development
  • Years Active
    2026
  • Episodes
    71
  • Rating
    Clean
  • Copyright
    © A conversation series by 79 Development
  • Show Website
    What We Need to Grow.