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PODCAST

Startups Decoded

Most startup podcasts are built for founders who"ve already figured it out. This one"s for the founder still in the middle of it.Startups Decoded covers the full founder operating system — from idea to Series A. Brand, fundraising, marketing, operations, finance, culture, storytelling. Everything a first-time founder needs to actually run the thing, not just pitch it.Host Andy Walsh has been in it — 4x founder, 2 exits, bootstrapped $10M ARR. He brings in founders and investors who"ve built real

business entrepreneurship

All Episodes

46:47

Ep#89: Why Most Founders Wait Too Long to Think Like...

Startups Decoded ·

2026/10/05

Most founders treat exit readiness as a phase you enter later, something a banker packages once the numbers are big enough to matter.Aaron Alpeter, founder and CEO of Izba Group, has helped founders realize more than $2.5B in exits, and he thinks that timeline is backwards. Buyers are grading the decisions you make at month six, from who makes your product and how it ships to whether the company still works when you step away.For a first-time founder, that reframe takes pressure off, because you

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46:12

EP#88: Why Most Founders Misread Their Own Traction....

Startups Decoded ·

2026/09/28

Vanessa Larco went from shipping product at Microsoft, Twilio and Box to most of a decade as a partner at NEA, and now runs Premise VC.She assumed moving into venture meant shelving her product brain. It turned out to be her edge. Founders and investors stare at the same signals of product market fit, and they often read them in opposite directions.Her sharpest idea is product curiosity fit. AI has made it easy to sign customers who are spending experimental budget, and that revenue looks like

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36:27

EP#87: Founders Obsess Over the Raise. Investors Care...

Startups Decoded ·

2026/09/21

Carina Cunha is an investment banker, founder, and advisor who's worked with over 100 companies from pre-seed to IPO. She helped build Crimson Education into a unicorn, then landed two offers on Dragons' Den UK for her own startup, Nosy, and pulled a billion views out of less than $5,000 in ad spend. Favikon now ranks her a Top 3 LinkedIn voice for sales.Here's the tension. Founders treat a raise as the win. Carina treats capital as fuel, not proof. Fundraising is just another sale, and the real

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43:43

Ep#86: Early Decisions That Define Your Startup...

Startups Decoded ·

2026/09/14

Founders treat early decisions like they're reversible.A board seat, a deal term, who gets hired first. None of it is as flexible as it looks. By the time a bad call costs you something, it's already baked in, and nobody tells you that on day one.Andy hosted a live panel in front of 60 plus founders for Startups Decoded Live, presented by J.P. Morgan. On stage: Elizabeth Vincent (J.P. Morgan Asset Management), Emma Usich (Girl Math Capital), and Breen Sullivan (The Fourth Effect).Two exits taught

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44:34

Ep#85: The Finance Skill Most Founders Never Learn -...

Startups Decoded ·

2026/09/07

Brett Turner has built four companies and sold three of them for a combined $500 million plus.His sharpest insight has nothing to do with pitch decks or growth hacks, it comes down to cash. Most founders treat treasury as a back office problem, something you hand off the moment you can afford a CFO. Brett spent over a decade as a CPA at Deloitte, ran corporate finance inside Amazon, then worked Controller and CFO roles across a string of startups before he ever founded one himself.This episode

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43:50

Ep #84: Why Most Founders Get Their Angel Round...

Startups Decoded ·

2026/08/31

Vadim Gordin has looked at more early cap tables than most of us have had coffees.He built a data set most founders never see: hundreds of first-person fundraising accounts, cross-referenced against years running accelerators at NYU. His numbers say the friends and family round is not a formality. It is where the mistakes that surface at Series A actually start.We walk through what a healthy angel funnel looks like stage by stage, why the shape of your earliest round predicts problems two years out,

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43:33

Episode #83: Why Founders Don't Actually Know Their...

Startups Decoded ·

2026/08/24

Most founders can describe their customer. Age, income, job title, maybe a lifestyle detail. What they can't describe is why that person buys, what they almost bought instead, or what finally tipped them over. That gap is where growth lives, and most companies never go looking.Bryan Alston has spent 15 years finding the customers and growth opportunities brands overlook, driving breakthrough growth for consumer brands including Magic Spoon, Our Place, Clove Shoes, Best Day Brewing, and Greater Than

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44:22

Ep#82: AI Was Supposed to Kill the Chief of Staff. It...

Startups Decoded ·

2026/08/17

Clara Ma was chief of staff to the CEO of Hugging Face back when it was a Series A company, years before most founders could spell LLM.She watched the role from the sharpest seat in the building, then built Ask a Chief of Staff, a 500-person community that has helped match CEOs with their right hand ever since.AI was supposed to make executive support obsolete. Instead, chief of staff postings more than doubled last year, salaries are hitting $400K, and the number of people holding the title has

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43:00

Ep#81: Where Did $18.8 Billion in AI Robot Investment...

Startups Decoded ·

2026/08/10

John Frankel has been funding this stuff since before it was fundable.He founded ffVC in 2008 after 21 years at Goldman, has backed more than 200 seed companies, and sits on over sixty boards. This year robotics pulled in $18.8 billion globally, already ahead of the $15 billion invested across all of 2025, and Frankel has a clear map of where that money actually landed, and where it hasn't. Value Add PulseHis answer isn't the humanoid story most people assume. Only 12% of Tesla owners with the

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49:37

EP#80: Why Smart Founders Keep Making the Same Bad...

Startups Decoded ·

2026/08/03

Owen Fitzpatrick has interviewed people in North Korea, Iran, and Afghanistan, trying to answer one question. Why do we believe what we believe?Ten books and thirty years later, his answer is uncomfortable for founders. The story running your business decisions was never fact checked. It was just repeated enough times that it started to feel true.His framework is simple and brutal. A belief has to feel right, fit your identity, and only then does it need to make sense. Founders think they're

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54:28

Ep#79: The Startup Dream That Wasn't Hers - Ella Cook

Startups Decoded ·

2026/07/27

Andy Walsh sits down with Ella Molony Cook, exited founder turned investor and Founder of Time Rich, a community of ambitious women thriving in the new world of AI.One exit. Seven figures raised. Three companies she still holds equity in. Multiple failures, which she talks about more freely than the wins. She dropped out of high school, built a retreat business in Australia before she knew the word startup, and sold to the buyer who could grow it rather than the one with the highest number.Then came

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44:21

Ep#78: The Real Playbook for Scaling from $1M to $50M...

Startups Decoded ·

2026/07/20

Most founders obsess over the first million. The real fight starts after it.Jordan DiPietro has scaled from every seat. Growth at The Motley Fool through several hundred million in revenue, The Hustle through its HubSpot acquisition, and Hampton from zero to $10M as CEO. Now he coaches founders and CEOs building from $5M to $50M.Through his career he observed a genuine disconnect in how Founders hired good people. He just launched Hiring OS — the opinionated hiring system for growth-stage founders

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47:47

EP#77: The People Decisions That Built a $1B+ Sales...

Startups Decoded ·

2026/07/13

Chris Lee joined Deel when it was doing $1M ARR. Today it's past $1B+.He didn't just watch that happen, he made hiring, firing, and org design decisions that either cleared the path or slowed everything down. That's what this conversation is really about.Most founders build their sales team reactively. They wait until it hurts, then hire fast and hope for the best. Chris runs a 600-person sales org with 65+ managers and 14 direct reports — and in 5.5 years, he hasn't had a single director leave

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47:06

EP#76: Your Network Has a Revenue Problem with Kyle...

Startups Decoded ·

2026/07/06

Founders do not know how to convert their network.Andy Walsh sits down with Kyle Kane, co-founder of onSpark AI, the world's first AI-powered partnership engine. Kyle Kane built $2B in partnership revenue for some of the biggest names in music and brands before realizing the same broken pattern kept killing deals: founders had the right relationships and no system to turn them into money.Kyle breaks down what a partnership engine actually looks like, why most founders confuse networking with revenue

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46:35

Ep#75: The World Is Your Talent Pool. Here's How You...

Startups Decoded ·

2026/06/29

Brad Bowery sat down with Andy Walsh to unpack what founders should be thinking about as they begin hiring, and why the global talent pool is more accessible than most realize.Brad has built local teams as a founder and global teams as an operator at Zendesk and now Deel, where he leads Global VC and PE Partnerships.In this episode we explore;The real friction of global hiring: compliance, classification, and when contractor status blows upPEO versus EOR, explained plainlyWhat a 10-person startup

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48:14

EP#74: Your Brand Is Worth Stealing. Is It Protected?...

Startups Decoded ·

2026/06/22

Most founders think IP protection is something they'll sort out once the business gets traction. That's exactly backwards. By the time it feels urgent, the work already matters, and you're behind.This conversation cuts through the abstraction. Maria Sinatra is an IP attorney at Venable LLP who works with startups and nationally recognized consumer brands on exactly this problem. Allison Luvera is the founder of Juliet Wine, a category-creating consumer brand that got copied by a company 300 times

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46:52

Ep#73: The Digital Twin for Work — What Founders...

Startups Decoded ·

2026/06/15

Most companies believe they run on strategy. They actually run on conversations, and those conversations vanish the moment the call ends.David Shim watched this happen from the inside while running Foursquare, sitting in meetings where half the room was camera off, on mute, essentially absent. He called it Ghost Mode. That observation became the founding insight for Read AI, and it’s a sharper diagnosis of organizational dysfunction than most founders ever put into words.What David built isn’t just

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46:30

Ep#72: Your Cap Table Is the Story of Your Company —...

Startups Decoded ·

2026/06/08

Every line on your cap table is a promise. Most founders don’t know what they’ve signed.Andy Walsh sat down with Joris Delanoue, founder of Fairmint, to unpack why equity, the core of startup ownership, is still managed through systems built for a different era, and why that matters more now than ever.The central tension: companies are staying private longer, secondary markets are growing fast, and the infrastructure holding it all together is, in many cases, still a spreadsheet.Joris has spent two

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43:23

Ep#71: Launching at 21 With No Money and No Plan. Now...

Startups Decoded ·

2026/06/01

Taryn Williams started her first business at 21 with no experience and no capital. Twenty years later, she’d built four companies and exited twice. Taryn Williams doesn’t talk about the dream. She talks about what it actually costs.Andy Walsh sat down with Taryn Williams — serial founder and multi-exit operator — to trace the full arc of building from scratch. From cold emailing at midnight to navigating a multi-continent exit process she’d been quietly preparing for years, this is a conversation

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59:46

Ep#70 - Eric Ries. He wrote the rules. Now he's...

Startups Decoded ·

2026/05/25

Eric Ries, author of The Lean Startup, joins Startups Decoded to discuss his new book Incorruptible and why many successful companies slowly drift away from their founding ideals.Andy Walsh sat down with Eric to explore the forces that reshape organizations as they scale — from governance and incentives to leadership dynamics and investor pressure.Drawing on examples from companies like Costco and FedMart, Eric explains how culture, trust, and long-term thinking are often eroded by systems designed

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