Not Another Podcast

Infinity Constellation
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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. 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

  2. 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

  3. 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

  4. 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

  5. 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

  6. MAR 23

    Your Intuition Is Always Right: Zach Resnick’s Operating System for Founders Who Think Differently

    Most travel companies measure success by bookings. Zach Resnick measures it by how many clients never leave. Ascend (formerly FlyFlat) is a travel concierge for frequent travelers and it has a 100% 18 month retention rate. Most SaaS companies would die for those numbers. Zach got there by building Ascend around one principle: your time is sacred, full stop. Before Ascend, Zach played jazz trumpet at Oberlin Conservatory, became a professional poker player, manufactured over $100 million in credit card spend as a college student through Visa gift card arbitrage, and ran Unbounded Capital, a crypto fund built on a contrarian Bitcoin bet that didn't pan out. He then bootstrapped Ascend to over $1M ARR without a single dollar of outside capital and then raised $1.5M from FJ Labs, and eventually brought in Bessemer Venture Partners. He's a Nassim Taleb disciple. He lives in Lisbon. And he has a rule about red-eye flights that changed how Brennan thinks about his own time. In this episode, Brennan and Zach go deep on: → Why Zach bootstrapped to $1M ARR before talking to VCs, and how to raise from a position of strength instead of desperation → How he describes "Delusional chips" as the resource that every contrarian founder needs and how to build it→ The intuition framework: your gut is always right → The red-eye rule and what it actually means to value your own time as a founder → Losing his father at 24 and how grief changed his life → How Ascend built 94% retention at 12 months with 22-second average response times and 60+ employees → The "let it go" framework of when to detach from outcomes and how to know the difference between quitting and releasing → The manufactured spend playbook: what opening 300+ credit cards and engineering $100M in spend taught him about systems, edge, and pattern recognition → How to interview candidates the way poker players read hands He also shares the one question he asks himself every time he faces a hard decision and why the answer is always already there. If you're a founder, operator, or anyone who refuses to play someone else's game: this one is for you.

    42 min

  7. MAR 17

    The Most Important Founder Skill Everyone Forgets: Alfia Ilicheva’s User Research Obsession

    Alfia Ilicheva came to the U.S. at 12 without speaking English, after her father died suddenly. That experience turned into a founder operating system: wake up, look in the mirror, and ask, “Is this the life I want?” She always leads with values and mission-aligment first. Today she’s the CEO and founder of Formulary Financial, building AI-native fund administration in a world where, according to her, most private market firms quietly run parallel “shadow books” because they don’t trust their administrator’s data. Previously she was a product leader at Bridgewater Associates and the CEO/co-founder of Edna Technologies (incubated inside Apollo). She also co-founded WIN: Women in Innovation and serves on the national board of the Girl Scouts of the USA. We also get tactical on how she does user research when customers don’t tell the blunt truth, including her “magic wand” question and the difference between functional benefits (data access) and emotional benefits (sounding smart in the meeting). In this episode: • The shadow-books reality in private markets • How to cut through customer theater • Why “systemization” beats “automation” • Leadership lessons from Presidents Bush and Clinton • Her spiciest advice: find where trust is still required Subscribe for more episodes of Not Another Podcast. If you know someone building in fintech, private markets, or enterprise AI, send them this one.

    58 min

  8. MAR 10

    The Operating System for Water: Building Where Silicon Valley Won't Go with Ravi Kurani

    Ravi Kurani has two exits to his name, and he used both of them as a running start toward harder problems. As the founder of Sutro, a smart pool chemistry device that he sold to Sani Marc in an acquisition that happened before the product was fully built. And before that, he founded ImpactSpace: the "CrunchBase for impact investing," acquired by ImpactAlpha in 2015. Ravi has lived through the full founder arc twice over. The technical builds, the manufacturing chaos, the emotional weight of handing something you created to someone else, and the strange clarity that comes after. Now he's doing it again, at a scale that most founders wouldn't attempt: rolling up blue-collar pool service routes through acquisitions as COO of Poolify, while simultaneously building Standard Water Corp as what he calls "the operating system for the water industry." His thesis, which he's been developing for over a decade, is something he calls the Blue-Collar Billion: the idea that the next massive economic opportunity isn't in another SaaS product or AI wrapper. It's in the physical infrastructure civilization runs on (water systems, service routes, industrial hardware) that Silicon Valley has avoided because the timelines are long, the margins are complicated, and you can't fake progress when the pipes either hold water or they don't. In this episode, Brennan and Ravi go deep on: → The emotional reality of selling a company you built→ The Superhuman PMF methodology→ The first-gen hardware trap→ What Ravi saw in China that convinced him the US is decades behind on physical and digital infrastructure→ Why water is the most underpriced resource on earth→ Selling a startup pre-prototype This is one for the founders who are tired of the digital hype and ready to think about building something real.

    50 min
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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
    24
  • Rating
    Explicit
  • Copyright
    © Infinity Constellation
  • Show Website
    Not Another Podcast

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