Episodes
The Mikey G podcast goes beyond the pitch. Browse founder stories by person, turning point, and the questions that surface.
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Find guests by the topics, challenges, and ideas that interest you.
Chooses from your current results. A different guest each time, when available.
Editorial starting points from the published archive, independent of the filters above.
Personal turning points that explain the work that followed.
Alfredo describes immigration, a public mental-health crisis, and the patient work of rebuilding purpose and identity.
Open episodeConversations about what machines change and where human judgment still matters.
Igor explores explainability, multiple-model consensus, and governance at the boundary between machine speed and human judgment.
Open episodeReinvention after a plan, role, or identity stops working.
After a public crisis and professional losses, Alfredo rebuilt through therapy, reflection, and the practice of character strengths.
Open episodeCreative work shaped by taste, pressure, failure, and a clearer direction.
Film school, agency work, COVID, and industry strikes changed Sway’s plans. AI filmmaking helped him find a clearer direction with Absrrd.
Open episode38 conversations
Co-founder of Augmented Imagination and award-winning brand designer
Jonny Ashcroft traces how loss, mentors, music, and design shaped his creative work. With Mikey G, he examines the difference between being a designer and a founder, his search for focus, and why Augmented Imagination keeps an artist in the AI loop.
President and Executive Director, The AI Collective
AJ Green's athletic path ended after a weightlifting injury. In this archival conversation, he tells MikeyG how he redirected that drive toward AI and community building.
Chris Ross planned to wait until 2030 to build the company he'd carried for years. Then life changed the timeline. Chris was raised by his mum and grandma. They called themselves "the tripod. " Money was tight, but love, curiosity and the belief that he could build anything made him feel rich long before he had money.
Sean Weisbrot went to China because it was next to Japan. He planned to stay for 1 year, stayed for 10, learned Mandarin, and built an English-language event series that grew from 100 attendees to a 700-person cap. An entrepreneur in the audience eventually showed Sean the value of the network in the room.
Tessa James has spent more than two decades trying to understand why people flourish in some kinds of work and disappear inside others. Now, after a life shaped by grief, motherhood and repeated reinvention across three continents, she is building HireGains, an unproven marketplace for domain experts who want a role in the development of AI.
Sean Naderi doesn't romanticize entrepreneurship. Running a company can mean long hours, absolute chaos and waking up every day with nobody nearby to tell you what to do. His path to Aventus runs through growing up between countries, finance, Amazon, startup attempts that didn't work and a nihilistic stretch at university that forced him to rethink what mattered.
Technology can do a lot. It still has to earn trust. Dr. Omoruwa German is a community pharmacist and the founder of ChroniTrack Health. We get into the family discipline that shaped her, the illness that taught her to slow down and listen, the Web3 lessons she carried into healthcare, and the scrappy path from patient BP messages to a real monitoring product.
JT grew up in tiny Tasmanian towns, bounced through gap years in Europe and Canada, and spent 25 years building Mitchell Lake, one of Australia's first internet-focused executive search firms, surviving the dot-com bust and every hype cycle since. Now living in Spain, he's building socialmedium.
Doc spent 7 years as a Navy Corpsman, lived homeless in East Hastings Vancouver as a kid, and now runs Blue Box Gaming where every NFT ships with a physical comic to your door.
In this episode, we sit down with Parzival, a visionary in Web3, crypto, and AI. From exploring the intersections of ARGs (Alternate Reality Games) and AI agents to building Project 89 over two decades, Percival’s story is nothing short of inspiring. He shares insights into navigating creativity, decentralization, and the transformative potential of blockchain and AI technology.
Chris looks back on 15 years inside agency life and the choices that pushed him to build an AI-native creative company.
Mark failed school, hacked its network, and built a 3-decade cybersecurity career. The technology story starts with the kid behind it.
Igor talks about taking systems apart, rebuilding his own life, and why boredom may protect something deeply human.
A creator journey that starts with a microphone at age 4 and moves through failure, identity, and a new kind of filmmaking.
What up folks! Liviu Arsene grew up in northern Romania, less than 100 miles from the Ukraine border, with parents who didn't speak a word of English. Today he's spent two decades in cybersecurity, has more thoughts on AI than most people in San Francisco, and just announced he wants to get his pilot's license.
Danilo spent multiple years in Swiss banking, surviving the 2008 financial crisis at age 18 by fielding calls from furious clients. Then his wife said four words that changed everything: "We will not starve. " In this conversation, the CEO of The Miracle breaks down how he pivoted twice before landing integrations with MetaMask and Solflare wallets.
In this episode of The MikeyG Podcast Experience, entrepreneur and enterprise architect Joe Kristiansen shares his unique journey from 13 years in Canadian military search and rescue to creating CMEF, a model-agnostic measurement layer designed for large language models.
Join us for an inspiring founder story featuring Toufic, whose journey from seeking conditional love to authentic leadership shapes his mission to transform the world through DAOs, AI, and blockchain. This episode dives deep into the founder mindset-how personal experiences and societal challenges intersect with entrepreneurial drive.
In this episode, discover powerful founder stories through Austin's journey from a lower middle-class upbringing to pioneering authentic leadership in Web3. Austin challenges traditional extractive patterns, showcasing a founder mindset focused on community impact and innovative AI-driven creative studios.
In this insightful episode, Shannon Smith, former Microsoft and entrepreneur, shares her founder story and reveals how authentic leadership can transform sales success for founders and entrepreneurs. Drawing from her extensive research on the neuroscience of trust and rejection, she explains why mastering your mindset is crucial for thriving in today’s competitive landscape.
Kevin Denman is building Agent Graph, a marketplace connecting AI engineers with enterprises that know they need AI but have no clue where to start. In this conversation, he shares lessons from Deloitte to bootstrapped startups, the co-founder dynamics that make or break companies (Jobs/Wozniak vs co-CEO models), and why the fastest-growing AI role is the forward deployed engineer.
Explore an inspiring founder story as Jesse shares his incredible journey from a dyslexic kid in special education to directing the world's biggest bands and leading creative ventures.
Brian grew up in suburban Maryland obsessed with Math and Science and learning that cold 6 AM swim practices taught grit more than competition ever could. After MIT's collaborative culture shock and a brief stint as a bond trader at Morgan Stanley, he spent years in high-frequency trading before co-founding Glider.
In this episode, I sat down with Michal, founder of Onchain AG, academic professor, bass player, and book author. This conversation hit far deeper than Web3. From his parents teaching him that attention is the true currency of love, to his discovery that passion only matters when it creates impact for others, Michal shares lessons that resonate far beyond business.
In this episode, we dive into Karn’s path from a creative childhood in Mumbai to building Rage Effect, India’s first AAA cross-play shooter. Karn opens up about resilience, creativity, and how surrounding himself with the “greats” shaped his mindset.
In this episode of The MikeyG Podcast Experience, Jordan shares his journey from designing skyscrapers in Southeast Asia to pioneering a new category of applications - InfoFi - through Reply Corp. We dive into the intersection of creativity, AI, and community, exploring how distribution and personal branding are becoming the real currencies of the digital age.
What happens when a late bloomer takes on Web3 with a vengeance? MikeyG and Daniel (Founder of NOMU) unpack the inner fire that led from ECB (European Central Bank) to building in Web3. A deep dive into identity, ego, fear, finding purpose and flipping the script!
Sudu and Red, lifelong friends from Sri Lanka, turned a bond formed over video games into a mission to build Hapi3 - a blockchain project rooted in fun, community, and real impact. From daring motorcycle rides at 300 km/h to organizing grassroots events for kids without opportunities, their story weaves curiosity, competition, and resilience into a vision bigger than themselves.
Saushank, angel investor in Polygon and MemeLand and founder of PitchPilot, joins Mikey G for a raw and thoughtful conversation about childhood, ambition, and identity in a world shaped by pressure and performance. Together, they unpack the impact of boarding school, participation trophies, and how creativity thrives even in rigid systems.
What does it take to stay human while building in Web3?Join MikeyG and Starlordy as they dive deep into AI, authenticity, and the harsh truths of being a founder in this evolving digital frontier.
Jonah, co-founder of DYLI, shares how childhood curiosity and social intelligence paved his path to Web3. From early passions to navigating Deloitte and working with the biggest brands in the space like Goblintown, he shows that risk doesn’t have to be reckless. Tune in for a grounded, thoughtful conversation on purpose-driven innovation in crypto.
Logan’s entrepreneurial mindset started early - shaped by his upbringing, college hustle, and a hunger for impact.He discovered crypto before most of his peers, founded a Bitcoin club, and began working at top companies before 22.Now at Abstract, he’s helping shape the future of Web3 infrastructure with heart, insight, and a generational lens.
What does it take to build a global movement at the edge of AI and Web3?In this episode, MikeyG sits down with Sander, founder of Perxify and BananaConf, to explore commerce innovation, distributed trust, and the grit behind building future-forward tech from South Africa to Silicon Valley.If you're curious about the Agentic Web, founder resilience, or redefining loyalty, this one’s for you.
Join MikeyG and Dith as they explore childhood creativity, intellectual honesty, and building GigaVerse from 0 to 20,000+ players.🎮 A conversation about long-term vision, community, and building in the bear
What happens when you build AI that works for you-not against you?Join MikeyG and Mikey Anderson, Co-Founder of Think, as they dive deep into personal agency, decentralized tech, and why your intelligence deserves sovereignty.
How do technology and human curiosity intersect to shape the future MikeyG sits down with Nik co-founder of Memetic to explore his childhood dreams of invention, the impact of free play, and his innovative journey in AI and Web3.
Join Mikey G in a fascinating conversation with Rohan, a trailblazer in AI agent video creation and Web3. In this episode, we delve into the evolution of meme culture, the role of AI in reshaping creativity, and the socio-technical interplay of decentralization. Rohan shares his unique journey-from prank calls and studying internet cultures to becoming one of the first hires on Polkadot’s growth team.
Creator of the Eliza AI agent framework and open-source developer in the ai16z ecosystem
In this deeply engaging episode, Shaw, an AI pioneer and creator of the Eliza framework, shares his extraordinary journey. Shaw’s story begins with a unique upbringing in a single-parent household surrounded by New Age culture, where his mother’s resilience and work ethic became foundational to his character.
