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TruthWorks

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Are you ready to dive deep into the world of work, culture and leadership? Join Jessica Neal and Patty McCord each week as they chat with expert guests and explore the issues affecting the workplace — from AI and mental health, to making layoffs and combating toxic cultures. Featuring global industry leaders and specialists that are passionate about reshaping the way work today. Listen in as we redefine the rules to work for us, not against us. Episode 1 of TruthWorks launches March 19! Subscribe wherever you get your podcasts.

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Tuesday · 37 min
Only 65,000 H-1B visas exist per year! This is what decides it - Jeff Joseph
For 30 years, Jeff Joseph has been one of the most influential lawyers in American immigration law — and he just joined Manifest Law, the AI-native immigration firm, as President of Immigration Strategy. On this episode, Jessica Neal sits down with him for a rare, no-spin look at how U.S. immigration actually works, who it works for, and why almost nothing about it has changed in decades. Jeff is the 79th President of the American Immigration Lawyers Association (AILA), the 18,000-member bar association for immigration attorneys. Before Manifest, he was a Partner at Berry Appleman & Leiden, where his litigation reshaped the rules employers hire under — including beating the State Department's COVID-era visa ban and the Department of Labor's H-1B wage rule. Jeff traces his path from a debate-team kid inspired by "To Kill a Mockingbird" to a public defender, to building a 25-year immigration practice with his wife, to leading strategy at a company betting AI can fix what Congress won't touch. Jessica — who ran global immigration programs as Chief Talent Officer at Netflix — pushes him on the parts of the system most people never see: why the H-1B lottery is decided by luck, not need; why new student visa rules are quietly shrinking the talent pipeline; and why nobody in Washington actually wants to fix the 65,000 cap. What we cover: – Jeff's path from public defender to 30-year immigration litigator – Why immigration is a "creature of the law" that Congress refuses to touch – Inside the H-1B lottery: why higher wages now mean better odds — and why that punishes small business – How new OPT and duration-of-status rules are cutting off the international student pipeline – Why the 65,000 H-1B cap hasn't moved in decades, and probably never will – A better model: allocating visas by real local labor data instead of one national number – What great companies get right about immigration as an employee benefit, from Jessica's own Netflix playbook – Inside Manifest Law's AI-native model: no equity partners, lawyers as owners, and why that changes who does the paperwork – How Manifest's AI learns from every filed case to predict a case's odds before it's submitted – The "sentiment meter": using AI to catch a stressed employee before it becomes an HR escalation – Why every immigration firm will adopt AI — and why in-house, native tech beats bolted-on tools This episode is brought to you by Manifest Law, the AI-native immigration law firm, real-time visibility, fast filings in 40+ countries, and straightforward pricing for startups through enterprise. Whether you run global mobility for a Fortune 500 or you're the one person in HR handling visas on the side, this conversation will change how you think about immigration as a talent strategy. 🎧 Subscribe to Truth Works for more honest conversations at the intersection of work, leadership, and the systems that shape our careers.
August 18 · 29 min
Rubrik CEO: From A $1,000-A-Month Garage In San Francisco To A Public Company
Bipul Sinha failed his first shot at India's hardest entrance exam. His father told him to drop out and try again — the only other option was selling tobacco on a street corner. Bipul is the co-founder, CEO and Chairman of Rubrik, the cybersecurity and data management company he took public on the NYSE in April 2024. Before Rubrik, he spent four years as a partner at Lightspeed Venture Partners, where he was a founding investor and board member of Nutanix and part of the team behind early bets on AppDynamics and Snap. Before venture, he was an engineer at Oracle, American Megatrends and IBM. In this episode of Truth Works (Part 1), he joins Jessica Neal and guest co-host Peter Clarke to trace the full arc: growing up poor in India, the exam he failed once and passed the second time, arriving in America with almost nothing, and the first 45 days at Rubrik when he couldn't hire a single person. ━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━ THE ORIGIN STORY Bipul grew up in a tier-4 city in India and wasn't a strong student. His father pulled him out of the local track and told him to prepare at home for the IIT entrance exam instead, an exam with roughly a 1% acceptance rate. He failed it once, passed it the second time, and studied electrical engineering at IIT Kharagpur. He took a job at Tata IBM to support his family, then moved to Atlanta for a hardware engineering role at American Megatrends before landing in Silicon Valley in 1999, at the height of the dot-com boom, where he and his wife paid $1,000 a month to live in a garage apartment. ━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━ FROM INVESTOR TO FOUNDER After seven years at Oracle, Bipul moved into venture capital at Blumberg Capital, then spent four years at Lightspeed under Ravi Mhatre, where he backed Nutanix, AppDynamics and Snap. He explains the theory that pushed him from investing to founding: investors operate from a "state of intellect," founders from a "state of will." He left to start what became Rubrik in 2014, sat through 45 days with zero hires, and camped outside the Google and YouTube offices with a pitch deck until he landed his first four. ━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━ TOPICS COVERED → Failing India's hardest entrance exam, then passing it the second time → Moving to Silicon Valley in 1999 and paying $1,000 a month to live in a garage → Leaving Oracle for venture capital, and the $10M check Lightspeed wrote off a slide deck → Early investing wins: Nutanix, AppDynamics, Snap → The "state of intellect vs. state of will" theory of investors vs. founders → Naming Rubrik after almost launching under a different name entirely → 45 days with zero hires, and the pitch deck that turned it around → Why the old world of cybersecurity is dead in the age of AI ━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━ Find Bipul: rubrik.com | LinkedIn: Bipul Sinha Truth Works is hosted by Jessica Neal & Peter Clarke. Part 2 of this conversation coming soon.
August 11 · 45 min
The Groupon PM Who Built A Supersonic Jet: "I Couldn't Find The Reason It Was A Bad Idea" | Blake Scholl
A former Groupon product manager set out to bring back supersonic passenger flight. Everyone told him it was a bad idea. He couldn't find a single reason they were right. Blake Scholl is the founder and CEO of Boom Supersonic, the company that built the first civil supersonic jet outside of a government or military, and then made the sonic boom disappear entirely. He joins Jessica Neal and co-host Peter Clarke on Truth Works for an honest conversation about audacious goals, telling the truth inside a company, and the leadership lessons he learned the hard way. Blake did not have the aerospace resume for this. He started his career at Amazon, spent years in startups, and was running internet coupons at Groupon when he decided to teach himself aerospace from textbooks and build a spreadsheet that said the whole world should be flying supersonic. A decade later, his airplane broke the sound barrier. In this episode he breaks down why supersonic flight really disappeared (hint: it was not the noise), how he rebuilt Boom's culture after hiring the wrong senior people, and why he now says he has learned to "love the riff." TOPICS COVERED → Organizing every idea by how happy you'd be if it worked → Choosing passion over resume, and why skills are more changeable than what you love → The real reason supersonic flight was banned in 1973 → Solving the sonic boom by accident, and going from breaking the sound barrier to a repeal of the ban in 115 days → Using supersonic technology to power AI data centers and bootstrap the company → The "talent distillery": how Boom grows its own senior leaders → Why he fired every direct report in one day, and what happened to morale → Learning to "love the riff" and saying goodbye without making it personal → The first-flight story and the safety rule: "I might say f**k, but I won't say f**k you" → Velocity over predictability, and why padding your timeline makes you later → Designing for tranquility, and the small details airlines ignore → The birthday his board told him to shut the company down Whether you are building something people call impossible, leading a team through a hard call, or just trying to tell the truth at work, this one will stay with you. New episodes of Truth Works every week. Subscribe so you don't miss what's next.
August 4 · 45 min
The CEO Who Saved Homebuyers A Billion Dollars: Why Founder Mode Is A Lie | Glenn Kelman
Glenn Kelman ran Redfin for 20 years. He says the most important thing he learned had nothing to do with software. Glenn joins Jessica Neal and co-host Jeff Markowitz on Truth Works for an unusually honest conversation about love, leadership, boards, and the handful of decisions that actually decide a company's fate. Glenn is not your typical tech CEO. At 21 he tried to write a novel, got nowhere, and his girlfriend broke up with him for being unemployed too long. He nearly went to medical school twice. He co-founded Plumtree Software in 1997 and took it public, then almost got fired from the company he started. He joined a nearly dead real estate website that a Seattle VC had put $500,000 into, and spent the next two decades turning it into Redfin, a business that saved consumers roughly a billion dollars in commissions before Rocket acquired it for $1.75 billion. In this episode, Glenn traces the whole thing back to his older brother's struggle with alcohol, the emergency room doctors who kept fighting for a patient any business person would have written off, and the moment he decided he wanted to be good like that. He is candid about the parts most CEOs edit out. The board meeting where he quoted Yeats and Colonel Jessup from A Few Good Men. The walk with a Greylock partner that reset his entire relationship with his board. The rentals acquisition he financed with debt in 2021, right before the music stopped. Rewriting a single email 83 times because he could not figure out how to disagree with his new parent company's CEO. Jeff and Jessica bring two decades of executive search experience to the hiring question Glenn admits he never fully solved, including the advice from Jeff that gave Glenn permission to walk away from a candidate he had already taken to dinner, drinks, and references. ━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━ TOPICS COVERED FINDING THE WORK → Why writing alone in a room made him depressed, and why business is just being creative with other people → Working for three founders barely older than him and realising he could do it too → Picking the big idea over the small one, and why ambition makes recruiting easier → His brother's addiction, the ER doctors, and the decision to do something good inside business HIRING AND JUDGEMENT → Jeff's method: go in looking for every reason the person is wrong → Never hiring someone you are not genuinely excited about, even when you have come too far to stop → What negotiating severance reveals about a candidate before they start → Why subjectivity is a feature, not a bug, and the Peter Chernin story behind it BOARDS AND CEO GROWTH → How a fraught, adversarial board became one of his greatest assets → Blaming the board when the real problem is the product → The one question that turns a board meeting from a performance into a working session → Why $50M seed rounds at $400M valuations have made honest board conversations harder LEADERSHIP AND THE HARD CONVERSATION → Being too kind for too long, and the cost of hints instead of clarity → Writing down what you need to say, then throwing the paper away and saying it anyway → Getting nearly fired at Plumtree in a 30-second conversation, and the turnaround that followed → Why founder mode has a real insight buried inside a bad excuse → Making the call people disagree with, then calling them afterwards to replay their argument back WHAT HE ACTUALLY LEARNED → Working 15-hour days when four or five one-minute decisions created more value than all of them → Why he stopped trying to be the smartest person in the room → Real estate agents, a sea of love, and how they changed how he sees business → His closing gift to listeners: if people feel the love, they will forgive almost anything ━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━ Subscribe for more honest conversations with the people who have actually built things.
July 28 · 56 min
$40B Canva CHRO: How Canva Actually Builds Culture & Why they open source their Playbooks!
What does it actually take to build the people function at a company that went from a design tool to a global platform of 5,500 people? Jennie Rogerson, Chief People Officer at Canva, joins Jessica Neal and co-host Peter Clarke on Truth Works for a conversation about culture as an operating system, not a perk. Jennie's path into the role is one of the more unlikely ones in tech. She came up through hospitality, running restaurant floors where 220 covers a night meant 220 individual experiences to manage. She moved into hospitality tech, then got dragged to an after-work Canva workshop on making better presentations — and walked out convinced she had to work there. She applied. She didn't get the jobs. A colleague told her to look elsewhere. She ignored the advice. When the executive assistant role for co-founders Melanie Perkins and Cliff Obrecht opened up, thousands of people applied, and Jennie had no experience in the domain. So instead of a resume, she built a website. Canva launched Canva Websites the night before she planned to send it, so she rebuilt the entire thing on the product overnight. Then she spotted a line in Cliff's LinkedIn bio — "you're great, we're hiring" — and sent it to him directly. The interview process was two live challenges and a lot of real-time pushback. By the end of it, the role had been rewritten into something new: Leadership Operations, a chief-of-staff seat between the founders and the leadership team. Eighteen months later, Cliff called on a Sunday to offer her the top people job. Her first response was to ask if he'd lost his mind. She took it as an interim role. It's been years. Jennie is refreshingly clear that Canva hasn't figured everything out, especially around parental leave re-onboarding, which she says most companies get wrong and hers is still actively learning. But what they have built is worth studying: managers are called coaches, performance reviews are called Growth and Impact, and every employee can anonymously submit to the Fix It Form, which has been running for roughly eight years and asks two questions — what's broken, and what's your solution. The conversation also gets into the support playbooks Canva built for grief and loss, family and domestic violence, and cancer and long illness — written with the employees who lived through those moments, and then open-sourced so any company can use them. One of them started as a single Fix It Form submission from someone who had lost their wife. And on hiring: Canva's CMO started as a communications intern. One of their AI researchers was found on a Discord community while he was stocking supermarket shelves. Those sit alongside senior hires from Zoom, Uber and Google — because the blend is where the value is. TOPICS COVERED: - Why hospitality is underrated training for building a people function - Getting hired with a website instead of a resume - The interview challenge that turned into a brand new role - Being offered the top people job with no HR background - Why culture is everyone's accountability, not the people team's - The Fix It Form — anonymous, always on, and it requires a solution - Why Canva calls managers "coaches" and reviews "Growth and Impact" - What a performance cycle looks like when it isn't a box-ticking exercise - Season openers and building public accountability into the calendar - Parental leave re-onboarding and why nobody has solved it yet - Building and open-sourcing the Grief and Loss guide - Talking about family and domestic violence at work - The risk of not talking about hard things - Finding talent internally and hiring for curiosity over pedigree - Using AI to draft the process, then keeping humans in the loop Most of this episode comes back to one idea. Jennie was hired into a role she was unqualified for on paper, by people who were looking for something other than a track record. Everything she has built since runs on the same logic — the AI researcher on Discord, the intern who became CMO, the engineers she invites to tear apart her own processes because they're the ones actually living inside them. Her closing challenge cuts both ways. If you're running an organization, the person who could take the next big step is probably already inside it, waiting for someone to bet on them. And if you're the one looking for what's next, the most interesting move might not be the logical one on paper — it might be the thing you're genuinely curious about. Which is why the line she keeps returning to isn't really about Canva at all: You don't join Canva to experience the culture. You join Canva to be the culture. Truth Works is hosted by Jessica Neal, former Chief Talent Officer at Netflix, now in the business of telling the truth about how work really works.
July 21 · 43 min
He 2x'd Instagram's valuation in 3 Days: Why Nothing About AI Is Settled Yet || John Lilly
John Lilly has had a front row seat to almost every major shift in technology over the last thirty years, and he has sat in almost every chair while it happened. He was a Senior Scientist at Apple in 1997, when the market cap was two billion dollars and most people assumed the company was finished. He co-founded Reactivity, later acquired by Cisco. He became CEO of Mozilla and led Firefox past 450 million users, running an open source nonprofit at a time when nobody else in Silicon Valley was doing anything like it. Then he spent over a decade as a General Partner at Greylock, where he led investments in Instagram, Dropbox, Figma, Tumblr and Quip. He sits on the boards of Figma, Duolingo and Nuro, and recently joined Gigascale Capital as an Advising Partner, backing companies rebuilding the physical economy. In this conversation with Jessica Neal and co-host Jeff Markowitz, John walks through what he actually saw in the founders everyone else missed. He tells the story of chasing Kevin Systrom for six months, wiring the money on a Thursday, and getting the call three days later that Instagram was selling to Facebook. He explains the moment a friend showed him Instagram and what clicked was not the filters, it was the distribution. And he describes meeting a 19 year old Dylan Field at a Starbucks in Palo Alto, telling him his product did not matter, and then spending the next decade watching him prove it wrong. He is also honest about the parts that are harder to hear. Why some partners at Greylock wanted Dylan replaced. Why he thinks micromanaging the right things is a feature of good leadership, not a flaw. Why he does not tell CEOs anything, and what he does instead. And why, at a moment when OpenAI and Anthropic are pulling talent out of every company on earth, the answer is not matching the money. He closes with something a colleague at Mozilla told him years ago that he still carries: we had a chance to make the world we wanted, and we did it. ━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━ WHAT WE COVER ━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━ THE FOUNDER QUESTION → How John spotted Dylan Field at 19 → Why recruiting senior people is the strongest early signal → The trait every great founder shares: relentless about getting help → Why non-defensiveness beats raw intelligence → The lunch where they told Dylan he had to build a go to market THE INVESTMENTS → Chasing Kevin Systrom for six months → The underwater photographer who explained Instagram to him → Why the network mattered and the filters did not → The four day flip to Facebook and what he told his LPs → The Adobe Killers that came before Figma and why this one was different LEADERSHIP AND SCALE → Going from 12 people to a quarter of the internet at Mozilla → Why he never learned the delegation lesson everyone teaches → Larry and Sergey reviewing every resume and what that signals → Learning to be simpler in your message as you grow → Deciding you would rather be successful than comfortable THE TALENT WAR → Why every great person is now a free agent → The spreadsheet exercise he gives every CEO → Tour of duty and the bilateral deal between company and employee → Never making an offer until you know it will be accepted → Why money is rarely the only reason people leave THE CURRENT MOMENT → Why leadership now means stability without pretending anything is stable → The collision of faster scaling and total vulnerability → Why org size no longer scales with impact → Alpha nerds, Tim O'Reilly, and following the most technical people around → Investing in transformers, copper recycling and rare earth supply chains → Why none of the AI future is settled and it is all still to play for ━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━ CONNECT WITH JOHN LILLY LinkedIn: linkedin.com/in/johnlilly ━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━ Truth Works is hosted by Jessica Neal, former Chief Talent Officer at Netflix, with co-host Jeff Markowitz.
July 14 · 48 min
What Netflix got Right and Why Most companies are built WRONG for AI! - Dr. Mik Kersten
What if your teams became 10x more productive — and your business got nothing out of it? Dr. Mik Kersten has the data to prove it's already happening. After studying more than 8,000 value streams across enterprises, he found that only 8% of end-to-end delivery time is teams actually creating value. The rest disappears into planning, approvals, reviews, and coordination. Which means you can multiply team productivity by 2x or 10x with AI, and deliver nothing faster to your customers. Mik started his career as a research scientist at Xerox PARC, completed his PhD in Computer Science, and founded Tasktop, which he led as CEO until its acquisition by Planview in 2022. He's the creator of the Flow Framework and the bestselling author of Project to Product. His new book, Output to Outcome: An Operating Model for the Age of AI, launches July 14, and it argues that the constraint on knowledge work is gone. What's left is your organizational structure. And for most companies, it's the thing standing in the way. In this episode, Mik joins Jessica Neal and co-host Peter Clarke to break down why AI productivity gains aren't showing up in business results, what happens to companies that spend big on tokens without rewiring how they work, and why the future of leadership means every manager becomes a maker again. You'll learn: - Why only 8% of enterprise delivery time is actual value creation — and where the other 92% goes - Why 10x team productivity means nothing if your organization can't absorb it - The four competing structures inside most companies: org chart, value streams, incentives, and architecture - What Netflix got right about aligning technology, teams, and leadership - The "outcome tree": one unified structure replacing the matrix - Why humans should keep reporting to humans — even as agents join teams - How incentives quietly sabotage transformation (and why Mik wrote half a chapter on them) - Why outputs are easier to measure than outcomes — and why that's now a fatal trap - The dark factory thought experiment: what happens when production cost trends toward the price of electricity - Zero bonuses for engineers: what Mik learned from the experiment - Why planning still matters — but on weekly and monthly cadences, not annual - Managers to makers: why the first-line manager role is changing completely - The middle managers whose roles are gone — and the new role that replaces them - Why companies that get this right are hiring more people, not fewer Mik's message to leaders: get hands-on with the latest models now. The only way to make AI work for your teams — instead of the other way around — is to lean in. Output to Outcome: An Operating Model for the Age of AI is available now wherever books are sold. Truth Works is hosted by Jessica Neal, former Chief Talent Officer at Netflix.
July 7 · 54 min
Google, Shopify..."Stay Away From The Badge Hunters": The Hiring Rule That Built Public.com
Everything breaks in a startup. Culture is what kicks in when it does. Leif Abraham and Jannick Malling are the co-founders and co-CEOs of Public, the agentic brokerage putting AI agents to work directly inside your portfolio. They started in late 2019 by bringing their two former teams back together, and have since watched every market cycle twice: from launch, to the GameStop chaos of January 2021, to the AI shift they're now building on top of. In this episode, they sit down with Jessica Neal and Peter Clarke to unpack how they actually run the company. They break down their 10 open-sourced operating principles ("Honesty kills bullshit," "Find a way," "Move fast through organised speeding"), why they treat culture as capitalistic tooling rather than fluffy values, and the moment Principle 10 drove a small engineering team to scale the trading system overnight when GameStop doubled their user base in a week, a decision that still compounds into Public's reputation for uptime today. They also make the case for the co-CEO model most investors say never works. The trick, they argue, is that they don't share a job, only a title: Jannick lives inside product and engineering, Leif runs growth, and they only converge on the 1% of existential decisions where more perspectives actually matter. It lets them stay deep in their craft and install one C-level hire at a time instead of scaling leadership in risky staircases. On hiring, they get pointed. Avoid the "badge hunters" who collect logos and optimise their LinkedIn, and instead find people who had to fight for their growth at companies you've never heard of. Be "truth-seeking to an uncomfortable degree" in interviews, because technical ability is table stakes, but motivation is the thing that actually predicts fit. Plus Jannick shares how he generates 20K a month selling covered calls, why AI agents are about to compress trading strategies into a single prompt, and how the pair are betting the next decade of investing will be about resourcing individuals, not just granting them access. 00:00 Intro 02:00 What Public is: the agentic brokerage 06:00 Selling covered calls on autopilot 11:00 Access vs resources: the next 10 years of investing 16:00 Building culture from two merged teams 20:00 Principle 1: Honesty kills bullshit 27:00 Culture as the operating system, principles as the tools 33:00 The GameStop scaling story and Principle 10 39:00 Making the co-CEO model actually work 48:00 Disagreement as a feature, not a bug 53:00 Hiring: stay away from the badge hunters 1:00:00 Truth-seeking in interviews 1:05:00 Closing: problems, purpose, and health first This episode is not investment advice. #TruthWorks #Public #Investing #AgenticAI #Startups #Founders #CoCEO
June 30 · 52 min
The Modern-Day Napoleon Hill: Why Most People Don't Believe in Themselves! Evan Carmichael
Evan Carmichael believes the world's biggest problem is that people don't believe in themselves enough. He has spent the last 15 years trying to fix it. Evan joins Jessica Neal and co-host Jeff on Truth Works for an honest conversation about self-belief, building a movement as an introvert, and why serving one person matters more than reaching millions. Evan is not your typical YouTuber. At 19 he built and sold a biotech software company. At 22 he was a venture capitalist raising $500k to $15M. Then he started making videos on YouTube in 2009, long before entrepreneurs were a category there, and for five years almost nobody watched. His first year online he had three comments, two of them from his own family. Today his #Believe channel has over 4 million subscribers, he has written four books, and Ed Mylett has called him the modern-day Napoleon Hill. In this episode, Evan breaks down the "believe walk" he does every morning, why he thinks your purpose comes from your pain, and how a mentor named Steve pushed him from 9,000 subscribers to millions by making him film the same foundation story 40 times. He gets candid about the hardest day of his life, the one day in 15 years he could not bring himself to turn on the camera, and what it taught him about being human. He also shares the systems behind the work: the eliminate, automate, delegate framework, why he themes every day of his week, and the "CEO day" he uses to make the calls he keeps avoiding. Plus why he leads his 60-person team with directness rooted in love, the difference between pushing someone and hugging them, and how to know which one a person needs. TOPICS COVERED - Why lack of belief is the world's number one problem - The "believe walk" and curating what goes into your head every morning - How an introvert built a movement without wanting to be famous - Why your purpose comes from your pain - The five-year grind from 0 to a couple thousand subscribers - Asking for help and why most people wait too long to do it - Big Y vs little Y: staying motivated by serving one person - Why successful entrepreneurs take action immediately - Eliminate, automate, delegate: scaling yourself out of the work - Theming your week and the "CEO day" thought exercise - Leading with love: when to push someone and when to hug them Evan's books, including Your One Word and Built to Serve, are available now. Truth Works is hosted by Jessica Neal and Jeff, two leaders pulling back the curtain on how great companies and people are really built.
June 23 · 50 min
"AI Is Quietly Killing Your Curiosity! - No.1 Coaching Expert | Michael Bungay Stanier
What if AI is quietly making you a worse leader, and you can't even feel it happening? Michael Bungay Stanier (MBS) is the bestselling author of The Coaching Habit, one of the most widely read leadership books of the last decade, now re-released in a 10-year anniversary edition. He is the founder of Box of Crayons and the host of the Change Signal podcast. In this episode of Truth Works, he joins Jessica Neal and guest co-host Peter Clarke to ask an uncomfortable question: is AI making us worse leaders? His answer is yes. ━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━ THE CORE ARGUMENT AI seduces us into speed, certainty, and the half-decent answer, at the exact moment leadership demands the opposite. MBS argues curiosity is being chipped away in all of us, and the leaders who survive the AI era will treat it as a discipline they practice, not a trait they assume they have. At the center of the conversation is his framework for what leadership now requires: → Clarity over certainty → Context over content → Connection over cocooning → Courage over collusion He and Jessica unpack why judgment and taste, not big teams, budgets, or functional expertise, are the skills that actually scale when everyone has the same information and the same tools. ━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━ INSIDE NETFLIX Jessica draws on her years at Netflix, where the company interviewed for curiosity, treated big decisions as "bets" instead of life-or-death calls, and reframed failure as data. She tells the story of the $100M House of Cards bet, admits most of Netflix's decisions were actually bad ones, and explains how a culture of small experiments and honest trade-offs is what let the company take the swings that built it. ━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━ ALSO IN THIS EPISODE → Why data is political, not neutral → Why courage is the real differentiator behind every great founder → The strategy question: "If we say yes to this, what must we say no to?" → The deeper gift of coaching that has nothing to do with having the answer: helping people feel seen, heard, and encouraged ━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━ TOPICS COVERED → Why AI is deadening curiosity more than fostering it → The 4 C's of leadership in the AI era → Why judgment and taste beat big teams and budgets → The Netflix $100M House of Cards bet → Why most of Netflix's decisions were bad ones, and why that was fine → Building a culture of small experiments → Why data is political, not neutral → Why courage is the differentiator behind every great founder → The strategy question → The deeper gift of coaching ━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━ Find Michael: MBS.works | boxofcrayons.com | The Coaching Habit (Amazon) Truth Works is hosted by Jessica Neal & Peter Clarke.
June 16 · 40 min
Stanford Professor: Why 85% of People Freeze Up while speaking and 15% might be Lying!
The Communication Expert: The No.1 Skill AI Can't Replace | Matt Abrahams Matt Abrahams has spent nearly two decades teaching the one skill almost no one is formally trained in: how to communicate. He's a lecturer in Strategic Communication at Stanford's Graduate School of Business, the bestselling author of "Think Faster, Talk Smarter" and "Speaking Up Without Freaking Out," and the host of the "Think Fast, Talk Smart" podcast. In a world racing toward AI, Matt makes a counterintuitive case: the more capable our machines become, the more our human ability to connect, persuade, and be understood will decide who thrives and who gets left behind. In this episode, Jessica Neal and Jeff Marquitz sit down with Matt to unpack the science and the practice of communication. They get into the "authenticity crisis" and the "empathy paradox" emerging as we hand our hardest conversations to AI, why up to 85% of people freeze in high-stakes moments, and the exact, repeatable techniques to manage that anxiety in real time. Matt doesn't speak in abstractions. He breaks communication down into mindset and messaging, shares the only three ways anyone actually gets good at it, and walks through how to build a personal "anxiety management plan" you can use before your next big meeting or talk. He also explains why most companies treat communication as an afterthought, and how founders can turn it into a genuine competitive advantage. If you've ever gone silent in a room full of people who intimidate you, or felt your body betray you on stage, this conversation is a practical playbook for showing up clearer, calmer, and more human. ———————————————————— TOPICS COVERED – Why AI makes human connection more important, not less – The "authenticity crisis": when perfect words stop feeling like yours – The "empathy paradox" and the risk of empathy atrophy – The evolutionary reason public speaking terrifies us – The three sources of speaking anxiety: audience, situation, and goal – Physical techniques to calm nerves in the moment – The only three ways to get good at communication: repetition, reflection, feedback – How to build your own anxiety management plan – Why communication should be taught in schools and modeled at work – Mindset and messaging: why you can't separate the two – Building a "communication infrastructure" inside a company – Why "getting it out" is not the same as being understood – Giving vs. getting: how the goal changes the conversation – Matt's nightly journaling practice for improving over time ————————————————————
June 9 · 50 min
Fortune 500 work with this CEO building a $1billion dollar company with 100 people - Siobhan Savage.
What if the reason the world's biggest companies keep failing at AI has nothing to do with the AI itself? Siobhan Savage is the co-founder and CEO of Reejig, the Work Operating System helping the most complex organizations on earth move work to worker in the age of AI. She works with Fortune 500 companies across banking, pharmaceutical, and retail, and she is building a billion-dollar company on a single conviction: opportunity belongs to the builder, not the platform. ━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━ HER STORY One of twelve children. Canadian born, Irish raised, 15 years in Sydney, now in New York. She built her career in workforce strategy on multi billion dollar projects, obsessing over one question: how do you move work to the right worker and make a business run at high velocity? She never imagined agents would become a form of worker. Now that future is arriving, and the Fortune 500 calls her to make sense of it. ━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━ WHAT THIS EPISODE EXPOSES In this episode of Truth Works, Jessica Neal and co-host Jeff Markowitz sit down with Siobhan to reveal what is really happening inside enterprise AI. Most large companies have turned AI into transformation theatre: 12 month programs, enormous consulting bills, prompt training that changes nothing, and tools that get switched on then quietly switched off when the ROI never shows up. The problem is not the technology. It is that almost no one has actually looked at how the work runs. Reejig spent $40 million mapping how work actually works, building a view of tasks, subtasks, and skills before large language models were even real. That map is why Siobhan can walk into a company and understand 80% of its work without touching a single system. She also draws a hard line on responsibility. Being Bold AND Responsible is not a slogan for her, and she refuses to design a world where two iPads interview each other in a boardroom. Then it gets personal: raising "baby builders," the mom guilt of 16 hour days, and the human skills she believes will matter most in the careers of the future. ━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━ TOPICS COVERED THE BACKSTORY → One of twelve children, Canadian born, Irish raised, 15 years in Sydney → Starting out in workforce strategy and the obsession with moving work to worker → Recruiting as the ultimate training ground for resilience and connection THE ENTERPRISE AI REALITY → The real reason enterprise AI is failing, and why it is not the AI → Transformation theatre: long programs, consulting bills, prompt training that changes nothing → Why tools get switched on then switched off when the ROI never appears → Making invisible work visible without plugging into emails or calendars → How Reejig spent $40 million mapping work before large language models were real → Understanding 80% of a company's work without touching a single system VALUE OVER COST → The shift from cutting cost to unlocking value and growing margin → How an invoice that took five hours can be reduced to 45 minutes → Why your job is made of tasks, and how AI quietly removes parts of them → Emerging and declining skills, and the danger of "jobs of the future" courses → Stealth change management and the iPhone upgrade approach to adoption THE BIGGER QUESTIONS → What it means to be Bold AND Responsible when jobs are on the line → The leaders harvesting people out of jobs while paying consultants millions → How the CHRO role is about to fundamentally change → Managing a workforce of both humans and agents → The handcrafted human experience making a comeback, even at AI companies THE PERSONAL SIDE → Raising "baby builders" and teaching kids to use AI early → Why human to human skills become more valuable, not less → Mom guilt, 16 hour days, and choosing to build → Why opportunity belongs to the builder, Jane in accounts, not just the PhDs ━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━ This is a conversation for anyone trying to understand what work becomes next, whether you lead a Fortune 500 company or you are figuring out your own place in the AI era. ━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━ Guest: Siobhan Savage, co-founder and CEO of Reejig Hosts: Jessica Neal and Jeff Markowitz
June 2 · 49 min
$10B Gusto CEO: "Imagine Describing Your Idea The 10,000th Time, Will You Still Be Excited?"
Three friends. One closet. A company now valued at $10 billion, serving over 400,000 small businesses. Josh Reeves is the co-founder and CEO of Gusto, the payroll, benefits, and HR platform now valued at roughly $10 billion. But he didn't grow up dreaming of building HR software — nobody does. The son of two teachers who were the first in their families to go to college, Josh studied electrical engineering at Stanford during the dot-com collapse, when the conventional wisdom was that the internet was finished. He ignored it. After a stint as a product manager at Zazzle and a first startup he now describes as "stealth mode" — his polite way of saying he had no idea what he was doing — Josh walked away with the most important lesson of his career: never start a company just because your friends are. In 2011, he and two co-founders started Gusto to fix something genuinely broken. Payroll, benefits, and the systems that quietly reduce people to ID numbers and acronyms — especially in small businesses, where two-thirds of U.S. employers have fewer than five people and every hire is a real human being, not a line item. They set one rule: they wouldn't pay themselves until they could do it through their own product. They launched in December 2012 with 100 small businesses. One co-founder spent four months sleeping on an air mattress in a roommate's closet — it had a skylight, for the record, and the roommate's clothes were still hanging inside. Fourteen years later, Gusto has grown from three people in a Palo Alto house to over 3,000 employees ("Gusties") across Denver, San Francisco, New York, and Scottsdale — with no headquarters, by design. In this episode, Josh sits down with Jessica to unpack how he protected culture at scale, why he deliberately left revenue on the table to launch in all 50 states the right way, and the framework he uses to resist Silicon Valley's growth-at-all-costs gospel. You'll learn: - Why second-time founders have an edge — and why Josh had role, responsibility, and ownership conversations on day one - The weekly feedback walks the three founders started when they were just three people, and still do 14 years in: three things working, three things to improve - Why most systems treat people like transactions — and what changes when you build for the human moments instead - The values-and-motivation interview Gusto uses to hire for what makes someone tick, not just what's on their résumé - Why interviewing is a skill every leader should practice obsessively — and how the best interviewers dig past the first and second answer to what's really underneath - How to scale culture without freezing it: "we're not a museum" — what should persist, and what should always be allowed to change - The "no headquarters" home-base model, and why Josh personally interviewed Denver's first 10-15 hires to make it as important as San Francisco - Why "doing things that don't scale" early can build the momentum that scales later - Why he deliberately left revenue on the table to cover all 50 states comprehensively, instead of launching half-built - The three checks-and-balances Josh runs against growth: product quality and compliance accuracy, unit economics, and team retention - Why there are over 10,000 payroll rules in the U.S. — and why the business owner should never have to become the expert - How AI is a tailwind, not a threat — making Gusto more of a teammate and partner to the small business owner - Why work should be more than a paycheck: purpose, community, and impact, when the alignment is there - The thought experiment every founder should run before committing: the 10,000th time you describe your idea, will you still be excited? Whether you're starting a company, scaling one, or just trying to do work that means something, Josh's philosophy is the throughline — the one he repeats to his four kids and to every founder who'll listen: In our family, we do hard things. Truth Works is hosted by Jessica Neal, former Chief Talent Officer at Netflix, now in the business of telling the truth about how work really works.
May 26 · 47 min
$0 to $750M - From Starting Hotel Empire at 11 to Biggest Raise in Legal Tech - Dan Mishin
At 11 years old, Dan Mishin convinced his grandmother to move in with his parents so he could turn her apartment into a backpacker hostel. The idea came to him in Berlin, where his mom's wallet had just been stolen and they were stranded overnight in a hostel full of laughing 20-year-olds speaking a language he didn't understand. He made two decisions on the train ride home: learn English, and open a place just like it. That summer project became the largest hostel chain in Eastern Europe — 13 countries, 3,500 guests a night — and the start of one of the most unlikely founder journeys you'll hear this year. In this episode, Dan sits down with Jessica Neal to walk through all of it. Starting a company at 11 in post-Soviet Ukraine, a place he describes as the Wild West, with no functioning law enforcement and entire generations of savings wiped out overnight by government decisions. Sleeping in his car for six months when the business almost went bankrupt. Signing 100-year leases with personal guarantees at 18 because Ukrainian law had no concept of bankruptcy protection. Raising a $100M term sheet that same year. Buying a yellow Porsche he now calls a total douchebag move. Ballooning to 280 pounds on a diet of Snickers and Red Bull. And eventually getting on a flight to the US with a single phone number — only to walk away from a 10-minute call with a $100K check at a $5M valuation. After building Joon Homes to $300M and 250 employees, Dan hit a wall most founders don't talk about: he was building something valuable, but he didn't believe in it anymore. So he walked away to start Manifest — an AI-native legal company that's raised $60M to fix one of the most broken industries in America. The US has 1.3 million lawyers, ten times more per capita than most countries in the world, yet 80% of Americans can't afford one. Dan thinks he knows why, and he's rebuilding the entire system starting with immigration. The conversation also goes deep on what it actually means to run an AI-native company — how Dan hires, why he believes generalists are winning, the applied AI engineers he embeds in every team, and the one-year severance policy he introduced to take the fear out of automating yourself out of a job. A conversation about volatility, reinvention, and what it actually takes to build something that matters. ━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━ 📌 TOPICS COVERED ▸ Growing up in post-Soviet Crimea and the night in Berlin that started it all ▸ Convincing his grandmother to give up her apartment so he could open a hostel at 11 ▸ Building the largest hostel chain in Eastern Europe as a teenager ▸ What it's like to sign 100-year leases at 18 with no bankruptcy protection ▸ Sleeping in his car for 6 months before raising $100M ▸ The yellow Porsche, 280 pounds, and the Snickers-and-Red-Bull years ▸ Landing in the US with one phone number and walking away with a $100K check ▸ Scaling Joon Homes to $300M and 250 employees ▸ Why he walked away from a high-growth business to start Manifest ▸ Why the US has 1.3M lawyers but 80% of Americans can't afford one ▸ How Manifest is rebuilding immigration law with AI from the ground up ▸ Why immigration is a hiring and retention lever most companies underuse ▸ Running an AI-native company: hiring, autonomy, applied AI engineers ▸ Why generalists are beating specialists in the AI era ▸ The 1-year severance policy that made AI adoption psychologically safe ▸ What to do when senior leaders refuse to adapt to AI ▸ His advice to over-thinking founders who won't take real risk ▸ Why this is the most exciting time in history to be building
May 19 · 49 min
Ex-Google HR Boss & CHRO At Oura: Why Most Companies get People Completely Wrong!
This week on Truth Works, my co-host Jeff Markowitz and I sit down with Judy Gilbert, the Chief People Officer of Oura, the company behind the Oura Ring. Judy is not a typical HR leader. She started her career at McKinsey, moved into executive search at Egon Zehnder, and then spent 12 years inside Google's People Operations team, helping scale the company from roughly 3,000 employees to 70,000. Along the way she ran learning and development, ran performance management, and served as head of HR for both YouTube and Google's moonshot factory, Google X. After Google, she became Chief People Officer at the biomanufacturing company Zymergen, where she helped build the team, took the company public, and then navigated its sale and wind-down. She tried to retire. It didn't last. The pull of being on a team trying to do hard things brought her to Oura. In this episode, we get into the difference between HR as an order-taker and HR as a genuine strategic partner, and why so many chief people officers get "organ rejected" within a year of joining. We talk about the danger of arriving with a fixed playbook, the chemistry that has to exist between a founder and their people leader, and why the job is really about being the one person willing to tell the emperor he has no clothes. Judy also shares the exact questions she asks before taking any role, how she pressure-tested Oura's CEO Tom Hale by sparring with him over compensation philosophy, and why a company's soul has to already exist before anyone can help it grow. In this conversation, we discuss: - The "I don't want to know" fear that stops people tracking their health - Whoop vs Oura, and how much data is actually useful - Why strategic HR is a competitive advantage most companies waste - The three questions Judy asks before joining any company - Why chief people officer turnover is so brutally high - The "toolkit" mistake that gets HR leaders fired - Being the person who has to tell the CEO he has no clothes - Glass balls vs rubber balls, and what to drop when you're building - How to protect a company's soul while running a hard business - Why clear cultures keep people and confused ones lose them - Why every CHRO is now the company's AI strategist This is a candid look at the work behind the work, from someone who has built the people function at three very different companies and seen what separates the ones that scale from the ones that stall. If this conversation changed how you think about culture, leadership, or the people who quietly hold a company together, share it with someone who needs to hear it. Full episode of Truth Works with Judy Gilbert out now.
May 12 · 46 min
The 6 Second Trick That Wins Every Negotiation: FBI's Hostage Negotiator || Chris Voss
Chris Voss is the former lead international kidnapping negotiator for the FBI. For seven years, his job was to talk people out of the worst decisions of their lives. He's the reason a bank robber walked out of a Manhattan branch after an eight-hour standoff and surrendered to him personally on the sidewalk. A teammate named Jamie Sedania passed Chris two notes at critical moments. Those two notes ended the standoff. But Chris didn't start there. He grew up in a small town in Iowa, the son of an entrepreneur who put every kid to work the moment they could carry trash. He joined the Kansas City police, then the FBI, then the New York Joint Terrorist Task Force. He applied for the hostage negotiation team and got rejected. The woman in charge told him to go volunteer on a suicide hotline first. He did. That decision changed everything, because tactical empathy doesn't get built in simulation rooms. It gets built in conversations where the stakes are someone's life. Today Chris is the founder of the Black Swan Group, named after Nassim Taleb's book on the impact of the highly improbable. He's the author of Never Split The Difference, a book that has sold millions of copies and still ranks #1 in negotiation a decade after release. In this episode of Truth Works, he sits down with Jessica Neal and Peter Clark to unpack how the skills that brought hostages home alive close million-dollar deals, win raises, and transform hiring conversations. This is not a tactics episode. It's a conversation about what happens inside the human brain when someone feels heard, and why coachability is the rarest and most expensive trait in any room. What you'll learn: The 6 second silence rule that triggers oxytocin and serotonin, and why most people destroy it by speaking too soon Why "negotiate your career, not your salary" is the only raise strategy that actually works, and the exact opening line to use with your boss The 3 negotiator types (assertive, analyst, accommodator) and how the same silence lands differently with each How to spot when you're the fool in the game (20% of the time, you are) Why Stephen Covey got "seek first to understand" wrong, and the small correction Chris makes The tactical empathy framework, why it was rebranded from plain "empathy," and the neuroscience underneath it The single observation Chris makes at the grocery store that turns a produce clerk into a personal tour guide The Robert Greene charmer principle that explains why some people make you feel like the most interesting person in the room Why coachability is the rarest trait in any room, and the man on a plane who proved it in 10 seconds The bank robbery story, the swap negotiator tactic, and the two notes that ended an eight-hour standoff The 22 second silence Elon Musk held with Lex Fridman, and what came out the other side Learn more about Chris, his Professional Dealmaker Day on May 15th, and his upcoming salary negotiation course at blackswanltd.com. Truth Works is hosted by Jessica Neal, former Chief Talent Officer at Netflix. New episodes drop weekly. Subscribe for more honest conversations on leadership, work, and what needs to change.
May 5 · 58 min
$29 Billion CPO Reveals how they Manage 70,000 Employees - Michael Bowes
What does it actually take to lead 70,000 people through one of the biggest cultural resets in beauty history? Michael Bowes, Chief People Officer of The Estée Lauder Companies, joins Jessica Neal on Truth Works for a candid conversation about stepping into the top HR seat at an iconic 80-year-old company in the middle of a billion-dollar restructure, the courage it takes to disagree with your CEO without breaking the partnership, and why the loneliness of the role is real but the work is worth it. Michael walks through his path from Saks Fifth Avenue in the early 90s, to Nike, to Tommy Hilfiger, to Coach and Tapestry, and a brief detour into executive search before joining Estée Lauder in 2015. He spent almost ten years in talent before being promoted into the Chief People Officer role. He is honest about the fact he was not chasing the title. He took it because he believed in the new CEO Stefan's vision for the next 80 years of the company. Then the conversation gets into what is actually changing inside Estée Lauder under the new Beauty Reimagined strategy. A culture that used to default to no is now committing to say yes. Over 1,000 different bonus calculations across business units have been consolidated into nine. Brands that used to operate in silos are now rowing in the same direction with one shared set of goals. Michael also opens up about the realities of the CPO seat that no one prepares you for. The loneliness. The board dynamics. The added complexity of working inside a family-majority-shareholder company. The fact that everyone thinks they can do your HR job until you actually have to do something hard. And the running joke that the only people who tell you they would never want your job are the ones who just watched you do it. The episode closes with how Estée Lauder is approaching AI as a tool rather than a threat, including how the company is mining 80 years of prestige beauty consumer data in ways no competitor can match. Plus the rise of K-beauty, why Dr. Jart sits inside the portfolio, the China R&D centre that is reversing the old east-to-west flow of trends, and the philosophy that has guided how Michael hires for the last decade: hire the player, not the playbook. Topics Covered: How The Estée Lauder Companies scaled from a kitchen in Queens to a global prestige beauty portfolio Why 87% of the workforce is women and how that shapes consumer decisions Travel retail as a multi-billion dollar growth channel Michael's career path from Saks to Nike to Tommy Hilfiger to Coach to Estée Lauder Being part of the CEO succession conversation before being promoted himself Taking the Chief People Officer role in the middle of a global billion-dollar restructure The Beauty Reimagined strategy and its five pillars Shifting the culture from "protect by saying no" to "we say yes" Consolidating 1,000+ bonus calculations into nine business units The loneliness of the CPO seat and why CEO chemistry is non-negotiable How to disagree with your CEO and still own the decision publicly Navigating board dynamics and family-majority shareholders AI as a tool, not a threat, and how Estée Lauder is embedding it across R&D and consumer insight 80 years of prestige beauty data and what AI can unlock from it The K-beauty wave, Dr. Jart, The Ordinary, and the China R&D centre The biggest hiring mistake organisations make by default Why the right hire is the player, not the playbook The piece of advice from Michael's grandmother that he still lives by Truth Works is hosted by Jessica Neal, former Chief Talent Officer at Netflix.
April 28 · 53 min
Ex-LinkedIn CHRO: The Whiteboard Exercise That Built LinkedIn's Culture & The Question That Empowers Her Every Day
Pat Wadors, CHRO at Intuitive (the company behind the da Vinci surgical robot), the architect of LinkedIn's Diversity, Inclusion and Belonging framework known as DIBs, and the author of the 2024 Wiley book Unlock Your Leadership Story, joins Jessica Neal and Peter Clarke on Truth Works. From losing her mother during her freshman year of college and getting diagnosed with dyslexia in a career center conversation at LSU, to declaring at nineteen that she was going to run HR, Pat traces the unlikely path that took her from a fine art major in Louisiana to one of the most respected CHROs in Silicon Valley. She walks through the moment Jeff Weiner called her in the middle of a staff meeting at Plantronics to come fix LinkedIn at three thousand employees, the whiteboard exercise in her first five weeks that forced the executive team to admit they were not actually being "open and constructive," and the 3am realisation that became DIBs. She talks openly about why John Donahoe pursued her for ServiceNow with a now legendary line about marriage, and the comment from a head of product that has stuck with her for years, telling her she was the dentist while the rest of the executive team were just dental hygienists. She then opens up about her Personal Scorecard, and the moment her son devastated her by pointing out that if she actually stuck to her own scorecard, she would only see her grandchildren seventy two times by the time they turned eighteen. In this episode, Jessica, Peter and Pat discuss: The art show story that taught Pat at eighteen that she only sold to people she actually liked The three year clock she runs in her head to avoid getting pigeon-holed in any role What joining LinkedIn at three thousand employees was actually like The whiteboard exercise that became the foundation of LinkedIn's culture Why she gave DIBs to the world rather than keep it inside LinkedIn The dinner with John Donahoe that turned into a marriage proposal for a job Why she thinks of HR as a product with agile development methodology What a CHRO actually needs to learn about the business to earn a real seat at the table Why she had a hysterectomy with the da Vinci robot and was ready to cook dinner that night The Personal Scorecard framework and how her son broke her heart with it Goldilocks, the Three Pigs, the Tortoise and the Hare, and Mulan as leadership lessons The one question she keeps on her desktop that empowers her every day Pat's book, Unlock Your Leadership Story: How to Build Understanding and Motivate Teams Using Fables and Folktales, is available now on Amazon, patwadors.com and as an audiobook.
April 21 · 53 min
'Most People Are MISSING The AI Revolution!' Gagan Biyani On Why Universities Are LAGGING Behind
Jessica Neal and co-host Peter Clarke sit down with Gagan Biyani, co-founder of Udemy, founder of Sprig, and now co-founder and CEO of Maven, the live cohort-based learning platform reshaping how the world's top operators learn from each other. Gagan started his first business at 13, teaching speech and debate to kids in his living room while his parents went through a divorce and his family rode out multiple tech recessions. By his senior year, that summer camp had 150 students and was financing the trips of every student on his school's debate team. In this conversation, Gagan walks Jessica and Peter through the unlikely path that took him from a Fremont kid with no idea startups existed, to obsessively reading TechCrunch four hours a day from a government consulting desk, to becoming the business co-founder of Udemy after a single Skype call with two Turkish immigrants who didn't even know they wanted to run the company yet. He talks openly about getting pushed out of Udemy, raising $60 million for Sprig and watching it crash and burn, and the years of self-doubt that followed before Maven finally clicked. He shares why his habits get stricter the more pressure he's under, why a status-oriented social network is the most dangerous thing that can happen to a founder, and the friend group from high school speech and debate that has kept him grounded for two decades. Then he and Jessica get into the part of the conversation that should make every leader sit up. Why most AI rollouts fail in week three. Why "just give people the tools" is the laziest mistake HR teams keep making. Why Maven has already restructured its engineering pods from 4.5 engineers per PM down to 2, and is asking whether that ratio still needs to shrink further. He explains why universities will be the single biggest laggards in the AI transition, why the education gap is about to widen dramatically, and what he'd actually do if he had a six-year-old in the public school system right now. Topics covered: Starting his first business at 13 during his parents' divorce The Stanford summer camp that became a $50K business with 150 students Why he was a terrible boss as a teenager How TechCrunch and one comment from a friend changed his life trajectory Becoming Udemy's business co-founder after a single Skype call Getting pushed out of his own company and starting over Raising $60M for Sprig, burning out, and shutting it down Why founders need friend groups that aren't status-oriented The counterintuitive habit pattern: stricter routines under more stress Why product-market fit is the #1 job, and recruiting is #2 Why Maven exists, humans still have a place in modern learning Restructuring engineering pods because of AI: 4.5 engineers per PM down to 2 Why most AI rollouts fail in week three The biggest mistake HR leaders are making with AI right now Why universities will be the laggards in the AI transition The Alpha School model and the future of K-12 education This is one of those episodes where a founder you might not have heard of teaches you more about building, leading, and surviving in the next decade than most of the household names ever will. Gagan is honest about the failures, generous with the frameworks, and clear-eyed about what's coming.
April 14 · 43 min
"I Came To America With $5": The Billionaire Detecting Stage 1 Pancreatic Cancer Before Symptoms Appear
What if illness was optional? Naveen Jain has built seven companies. He was on top of the world running Moon Express, the first private company ever granted permission to leave Earth orbit, with a $2.6 billion NASA contract to mine the moon, when his father was diagnosed with stage 4 pancreatic cancer and given three months to live. He got exactly that. That moment broke something open. Naveen walked away from space and started asking a different question: if we can land on the moon, why are we still finding cancer by a dentist running a finger across someone's gum? In this episode, Naveen sits down with Jessica to share the framework behind every company he builds: why this, why now, why me. That framework led him from helium-3 mining to founding Viome, the company now running 1.5 million tests, sitting on 400 quadrillion biological data points, and holding FDA Breakthrough Device designation for detecting stage 1 oral and throat cancer with 95% specificity. A stage 1 pancreatic cancer test launches in the next three months. Jessica and Naveen go deep on: The three questions every founder must answer before starting anything Why DNA testing companies are asking the wrong question, and what RNA reveals instead The 100 trillion microbes producing 99.9% of the genes expressed in your body How a classified Los Alamos biological defense project became the foundation of Viome Why cancer immunotherapy works for 1/3 of patients, and what changes when you fix the gut The double-blind data: HbA1c down 0.42 in 90 days, IBS reversal in 64% of patients, anxiety down 50% Building a culture where loyalty shifts from the founder to the mission Why Naveen, at 66, still believes he owes a debt to his fellow humans The advice he'd give every leader: dream so big people think you're crazy A masterclass in first-principles thinking, mission-driven leadership, and the radical idea that chronic disease isn't a feature of aging. It's a signal we've been ignoring. Truth Works is hosted by Jessica Neal, former Netflix CHRO, here to interrogate what actually works in leadership and life. If this conversation shifted how you think about your health, your work, or what you're capable of building, share it with someone who needs to hear it.

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