After scaling multiple companies, including a 70-person video agency working with clients like Coca-Cola and Disney, Korneel Desmet hit a wall.
Not once. But twice.
From penthouses in London to a van in the Spanish mountains, this episode is the story of a founder who lost himself in the hustle and built his way back through presence, breathwork, and building retreats that actually rewire the nervous system.
Today, Korneel is the co-founder of Re-Treated, a high-touch retreat company that’s helped over 500 founders and executives shift from burnout to balance. In this conversation, he and Josh get brutally honest about what it really feels like when the success metrics say “you’ve made it” but your body says “you’re done.”
This episode of “Founders & Empanadas” is just two founders talking about what breaks us and how to rebuild a life worth living.
What we cover:
If you’re scaling a company, holding it all together, or quietly wondering “what’s the point?”, this episode is for you.
Listen wherever you get your podcasts!
Thomas Geib had a thriving real estate business, a fast-growing mastermind, and everything figured out… until he didn’t.
After a failed business partnership, 60K in debt, and just $0.17 left in his bank account, Thomas found himself questioning everything.
But instead of quitting, he doubled down.
He created The Entrepreneurs House in Medellín. It’s a founder community built from scratch to solve one deeply personal problem: loneliness.
In this in-person episode of Founders & Empanadas, we dive into:
It’s real and raw. And it might change the way you think about success.
Watch the full episode wherever you get your podcasts!
Timestamps:
00:00 – Intro and empanada banter
01:10 – Why Thomas created The Entrepreneurs House
03:45 – His first entrepreneurial spark (Minecraft YouTube!)
06:00 – Learning real estate from a stranger at Costco
08:30 – The startup that spiraled into 60K in debt
11:00 – The journal entry that changed everything
12:40 – Building a business to solve loneliness
14:00 – $0.17 in the bank and planning a $10K event
16:15 – How one connection led to a $100K day
18:00 – Why he shut down the co-living and built community instead
21:30 – The biggest mindset shift that made everything click
25:00 – Founders and mental health: how Thomas stayed grounded
27:40 – Why discipline might be overrated
30:00 – Tactical networking advice for every founder
33:00 – The book that changed how Thomas hires
35:00 – Why there’s no one right way to build a business
37:00 – Where to find Thomas and The Entrepreneurs House
What happens when a practicing physician builds a $700M healthcare startup?
In this episode of Founders & Empanadas, Joshua sits down with Dr. Alexi Nazem: Co-founder & former CEO of Nomad Health, Assistant Professor at Weill Cornell, and now a General Partner at AlleyCorp.
Alexi shares his journey from hospitalist to founder, how he scaled one of the fastest-growing staffing platforms in the world, and why being transparent (not invincible) is the most powerful leadership strategy during chaos.
We unpack:
This one’s a clinic on founder psychology, systems thinking, and scaling through uncertainty.
🎧 Highlights
00:00 – Intro + empanadas
01:00 – From physician to founder: the notebook that started it all
05:00 – Nomad’s origin story + early clinical pain points
07:30 – Solving the chicken-and-egg problem in marketplaces
10:00 – Why Nomad focused on clinicians first
13:00 – W2 vs. 1099: regulatory complexity as a moat
16:00 – Building a credentialing engine from scratch
18:00 – Why “let humans do what only humans can do” became a guiding principle
20:00 – Using AI to match clinicians to jobs with precision
21:45 – How Nomad automated away credentialing drudgery
24:00 – March 2020: Nomad pivots into PPE and COVID test logistics
26:00 – From survival to 10x growth: scaling Nomad under pressure
27:15 – Lessons from rapid growth: don’t trade tech for headcount
29:00 – Crisis leadership: be honest, be clear, and co-create solutions
31:00 – What medicine taught Alexi about leadership and scaling
34:00 – What doesn’t translate from medicine to startups
35:00 – Stepping down as CEO + the emotional side of transition
38:00 – Why he joined AlleyCorp to keep building and backing big ideas
39:30 – What startup founders get wrong about leadership style
41:00 – Final thoughts on kindness, team dynamics, and long-term impact
42:30 – Where to find Alexi online
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🎙️ Follow and subscribe to Founders & Empanadas to hear more untold founder stories from the trenches.
Christie Kaplan is the founder of Startup Design Partners, a design-led venture studio that helps early-stage teams go from chaos to clarity, before they waste six months building the wrong thing.
In this episode, Christie and Josh dive into the real work of product design: making hard decisions, listening well, and separating signal from noise when everyone just wants to be polite.
This is a crash course in how to lead with empathy, think like a researcher, and stop mistaking “busy” for “validated.”
Some things you’ll learn in this episode:
Christie’s not only a designer. She’s a venture strategist, a founder psychologist, and an artist capturing the emotional truth of startup life.
If you’re a founder, product lead, or operator building through the fog, this one will hit home.
Listen now on Spotify, Apple, YouTube, or wherever you get your podcasts.
What if you could personalize every cold email (without recording a thousand videos)?
Bethany Stachenfeld is the Co-Founder & CEO of Sendspark, the video platform trusted by teams at Salesforce, Oracle, Outreach, and LinkedIn to drive 400%+ more engagement through asynchronous, AI-personalized video messaging.
In this episode, Bethany and Josh go deep on the evolution of modern sales, how to build a capital-efficient SaaS company, and what most startups get wrong about product-led growth. Whether you’re scaling an SDR team, testing pricing models, or just trying to avoid burnout, this conversation is packed with practical frameworks and honest founder lessons.
What you’ll learn:
This episode is a playbook for founders, sales leaders, and product-minded operators who want to do more with less, without losing their soul in the process.
When I first came across Mitchell Leshchiner on LinkedIn, I immediately DM’d him and said: “I don’t know what ElectroKare is exactly… but I know I need to learn more.”
Mitchell is the kind of founder you can’t ignore. He’s a former pro athlete, Palantir-trained engineer, and now CEO of ElectroKare: the AI-native operating system built to track and optimize the body’s most overlooked signals.
In this conversation, we dive deep into the future of health tech and the uncomfortable truth behind most wearables.
I’m so excited to have Mitchell on Founders & Empanadas because this isn’t just another chat about “wellness” or quantified self hype. This is a masterclass in how to build and scale smarter, more responsible tools in healthcare—without falling for the noise.
You’ll learn:
This episode will shift how you think about wearables, AI, and what it really means to build for human performance.
If you care about health, product quality, or building something that actually works—you’re going to love this one.
🎧 Listen on Spotify, Apple Podcasts, or YouTube now.
Most sales teams lose the deal after the demo, not because the pitch fell flat, but because their champion didn’t know how to sell it internally.
In this episode of Founders & Empanadas, I sat down with Gal Aga, CEO and co-founder of Aligned, to unpack the psychological friction that stalls deals, derails champions, and kills momentum in multi-stakeholder sales cycles.
With 17+ years in B2B SaaS leadership (including roles as CRO and VP of Sales), Gal built Aligned to solve the messy, buyer-led chaos that plagues modern selling. His POV? The best AEs offer Buying Process as a Service.
We dig into:
This one’s a must-listen for anyone selling into fast-growing companies, multi-threaded accounts, or C-suites with competing agendas.
Listen now wherever you get your podcasts.
Will Allred didn’t set out to build the world’s best email coach. He was trying to sell a psychology-based marketing platform. Then COVID hit, their customers stopped paying, and they had 45 days of runway left.
What happened next? A quick pivot, a squeal of excitement from their first user, and the start of what became Lavender, now used in over 30,000 inboxes and one of the most beloved brands in B2B sales.
In this episode, Will joins Founders & Empanadas to break down:
If you care about cold email, go-to-market strategy, or scaling a culture that doesn’t feel like every other SaaS company — this one’s a must-listen.
🎧 Founders & Empanadas is live now on Spotify, Apple, and YouTube.
Tom Coburn co-founded Jebbit in a college dorm room, scaled it over 13 years, raised $90M, and eventually sold the company to BlueConic. Today, he’s the CEO of Waking Up — one of the most popular meditation apps in the world.
In this episode, we talk about what it means to train your mind like you train your body, and how that shift has changed the way Tom leads, builds, and navigates uncertainty.
We cover:
If you’re a founder navigating stress, uncertainty, or burnout — and want a different lens to approach it — this episode is for you.
🎧 Listen now on Founders & Empanadas.
Everyone thinks AI is coming to take over customer support.
But Chyngyz Dzhumanazarov thinks it’s coming to expose your lack of systems.
In this episode, the Kodif CEO breaks down what most founders get wrong about implementing AI, why early-stage focus can be dangerous, and how support teams should be preparing for the future—not just with better tools, but with better workflows.
We also go deep on Chyngyz’s personal journey:
If you’re thinking about automation, scaling a support team, or just trying to stay sane through startup chaos—this one hits on all of it.
Watch if you care about:
– The future of BPOs
– Human-AI collaboration
– Resilient founder mindset
– AI tooling vs. AI readiness
– Building companies from a place of joy, not fear
Subscribe to follow along with Founders & Empanadas.
In this episode of Founders & Empanadas, Joshua Eidelman sits down with Dr. Osama Hashmi, dermatologist and co-founder of Impiricus, a next-gen healthtech platform transforming how pharma companies engage with physicians.
They go deep into what it really takes to build a globally distributed, high-compliance healthcare company, and why the future of clinical work won’t look like the past.
This conversation is a masterclass in:
Whether you’re a healthtech operator, systems builder, or founder trying not to lose your mind—this one’s for you.
🎧 Listen to the latest Founders & Empanadas episode.
In this episode of Founders & Empanadas, Joshua Eidelman sits down with Omer Bloch, founder of Remote Latinos, to talk about the real (and often uncomfortable) truths behind global hiring, building remote teams, and what most founders get dead wrong about culture.
Omer has helped 700+ companies hire remote talent from Latin America, the Philippines, Egypt, and beyond. And in this conversation, he doesn’t hold back.
They cover:
If you care about team building, remote culture, or the future of work, this episode is a must.
This week on Founders & Empanadas, Joshua Eidelman sits down with Patrick Gilligan, founder of Somethings, a behavioral health platform connecting teens with young adult peer mentors who’ve been through it themselves.
Patrick opens up about the emotional cost of working in youth mental health, why peer support often resonates more than traditional therapy, and how founders can stop gripping the wheel so hard just to survive. From building trust with teens to modeling vulnerability as leaders, this conversation is a masterclass in empathy, emotional self-awareness, and building things that actually help.
Topics covered:
Listen in and subscribe if you care about mental health, leadership, or building systems that actually meet people where they are.
The future doesn’t belong to the loudest idea. It belongs to the teams that can execute in the messiest industries.
In this episode of Founders & Empanadas, Joshua sits down with Adam Bailey, Co-Founder and CTO of Topanga.io, to explore what it really takes to scale technology that solves real-world operational problems—starting with food waste.
Adam shares how Topanga pivoted from food delivery to building a kitchen intelligence platform used by universities, hospitals, and senior living communities across North America.
They dig into what founders get wrong about market sizing, why human-in-the-loop AI outperforms pure automation, and how tiny shifts in workflow design can create massive financial and environmental wins.
Topics include:
This isn’t just a conversation about sustainability. It’s a conversation about designing systems that actually work at scale.
📌 Timestamps:
0:00 – Intro and empanadas
1:00 – Early pivots: from food delivery to container tracking
5:00 – Unlocking the reusable container model for universities
8:00 – Scaling into senior living and healthcare
10:00 – StreamLine: How Topanga built smarter AI + human workflows
15:00 – Go-to-market motion: Word-of-mouth and strategic partnerships
24:00 – Mental health and operational intensity in startups
30:00 – Why zero food waste isn’t the goal (and what the real target is)
35:00 – Financial impact of small waste reductions
38:00 – Adam’s advice on market analysis beyond TAM
40:00 – Final reflections on building for impact
Is in-game advertising the future of media? Can Hearthstone be a mental health tool? Why do most founders fail with overseas talent?
In this episode of Founders & Empanadas, I sit down with Max Albert—founder of Adrenaline Interactive and former eSports athlete turned venture-backed gaming CEO—for a fast-moving conversation on the real future of gaming, monetization models that aren’t predatory, and the personal story behind how gaming helped him recover from depression and drop back into life.
We cover:
If you’ve ever wondered what gaming can teach you about product, performance, and personal growth—this episode delivers.
📌 Timestamps:
0:00 – Intro and first empanada
4:30 – Max’s founding story: NFL games, Ford, and quitting
6:00 – Why gaming’s future is female
9:30 – Ethical monetization vs. ad spam
13:00 – Blockchain gaming: genius or grift?
15:00 – Open vs. closed game economies
18:00 – What Activision Blizzard got right
20:00 – The “stagnation” myth in gaming
22:00 – Virtual product placement explained
26:00 – Hardest roles to hire for in gaming
28:00 – Why most overseas teams fail (and how to fix it)
29:00 – The Ukraine story that changed Max’s perspective
34:00 – Using gaming to manage anxiety
37:00 – Escapism vs. empowerment in Gen Z
41:00 – The Hearthstone-to-CEO mindset
44:00 – Funniest failed startup ideas Max ever heard
47:00 – Max’s hot take: love before legacy
49:00 – Story beats data: how he raised $2M
Most leaders talk about innovation. Mark Johnson actually builds for it.
In this episode of Founders & Empanadas, I sit down with Mark Johnson, Co-Founder of Michigan Software Labs, to unpack what innovation really looks like inside high-stakes teams, enterprise orgs, and day-to-day life.
We cover:
If you’re building during uncertain times—or trying to evolve your team from order-takers to product thinkers—this episode delivers real strategies you can apply immediately.
📌 Timestamps:
00:00 – Origin story of Michigan Labs
03:00 – Hiring mistakes and early lessons
06:00 – Mark’s TED Talk recap: innovation, crisis, and courage
08:30 – The story behind M&Ms and building through rejection
11:00 – How to innovate in your personal life
15:00 – Empowering your team to speak up
16:30 – Getting engineers to think like product owners
18:00 – Avoiding a surveillance culture while maintaining accountability
19:30 – How AI is changing client demand and staffing
22:00 – The 10-20-70 rule for successful AI adoption
25:00 – Managing client expectations when AI becomes a buzzword
26:30 – Mental health and the agency business model
29:30 – The hardest conversation Mark’s ever had with a client
32:30 – Loneliness in agency life and lessons on resilience
36:00 – Mark’s hot take on the best way to innovate today
What do you do when you’re hogtied at gunpoint in a Brazilian penthouse? Or broke in Sri Lanka trying to make a business work from scratch?
For Evan Cassidy, those weren’t hypotheticals—they were chapter one.
In this raw and revealing episode of Founders & Empanadas, Joshua Eidelman sits down with Evan to unpack the wild, global journey that eventually led him to build Booming Brands, a white-labeled video editing agency now producing 4,000+ videos per month.
They cover:
If you’ve ever wondered whether to keep pushing—or finally let go—this conversation will hit home.
📌 TIMESTAMPS:
0:00 – Intro + Empanadas
2:00 – Leaving corporate life for Brazil
4:30 – The home invasion story
9:30 – Faith, fear, and navigating chaos
12:00 – Moving to Sri Lanka + freelancer years
16:00 – Failed course launch + debt
17:30 – Iterating into Booming Brands
22:00 – Traits that don’t scale from founder to CEO
26:00 – Leadership mistakes that haunt you
29:00 – Picking yourself up after failure
32:00 – Final hot take: Don’t diversify too soon
🎧 Full episode available on Spotify, Apple Podcasts, and wherever you get your shows.
Is your customer support team seen as a cost center—or a strategic growth engine?
In this episode of Founders & Empanadas, Joshua Eidelman sits down with Susana De Sousa, CX advisor and former leader at Airbnb and Loom, to challenge the outdated thinking around support. They dive deep into how support teams can drive expansion revenue, reduce churn, and directly contribute to product and retention strategy.
Susana shares hard-won lessons from scaling support at hypergrowth startups, how to build automation without losing the human touch, and why CSAT might be the most misleading metric in your dashboard. She also gives tactical frameworks for tying support performance to business outcomes—and why now is the best time ever to lead a support team.
Whether you’re a founder, CX leader, or just tired of fighting for headcount, this episode will change the way you think about support.
📌 Topics Covered:
🎧 Listen in and learn how to scale customer support without sacrificing quality—or your sanity.
Starting a company means embracing a strange, often uncomfortable reality: status limbo.One day, you’re managing a team, earning a solid paycheck, and working in a nice office. The next, you’re back to zero—no salary, no brand recognition, no credibility beyond your own conviction. It’s the most disorienting transition in a founder’s journey, and if you don’t learn to sit with it, it can lead to some really bad decisions.In the latest Founders & Empanadas episode, Joshua Eidelman sat down with Patrick Rafferty, co-founder of UserHub, to unpack the mental game of startup life, the role of AI in software businesses, and the often-overlooked challenge of communicating across cultures.
In this episode, Joshua Eidelman sits down with marketing powerhouse Melissa Rosenthal to discuss her journey from media disruptor at BuzzFeed to B2B marketing innovator at ClickUp. Melissa shares candid insights on applying B2C strategies to B2B marketing, building high-performing teams during hypergrowth, and her philosophy on brand building. She opens up about the emotional challenges of working 20-hour days at a rocket ship startup, her approach to hiring and managing talent, and her current venture OutLever, which turns companies into their own media publications. Don't miss Melissa's hot takes on founder mindset, including why friction causes movement and why brand means different things at different stages.TIMESTAMPS:
1:58 - From media disruption to B2B SaaS: Melissa's career journey
4:48 - Bringing B2C marketing strategies to B2B at ClickUp
7:27 - Wild stories from the early BuzzFeed days
11:16 - Scaling marketing teams while maintaining culture
15:31 - The reality of work-life balance at hypergrowth companies
19:07 - Identifying when early hires aren't right for the next phase
22:01 - The dangers of promoting great ICs to management roles
25:26 - Balancing data-driven decisions with creative intuition
29:25 - OutLever: Turning companies into their own media publications
34:05 - Why brand means different things at different stages
