Paola Marulanda joins the PreVetted Podcast to share how she went from seeing real estate as a “necessary evil” to becoming one of South Florida’s top luxury brokers and founder of Luxury Homes Connect.
Paola grew up watching her mother rebuild their family through real estate after her grandparents’ development business. Though she initially aimed for law or banking with firms like J.P. Morgan, she realized those paths would demand a lifestyle that clashed with her desire for freedom and family time. Real estate, by contrast, offered flexibility and no income ceiling.
She began her career in 2008, right in the middle of the financial crisis. Because she wasn’t under financial pressure, she could focus on serving people in distress—connecting them with lawyers, CPAs, and advisors, helping them exit bad situations or seize rare buying opportunities. Starting in a crisis taught her resilience and made later, healthier markets feel easier.
Paola describes how she built her “machine”: years of weekends working instead of partying, heavy investment in marketing, coaching, and market education. That foundation now lets her scale through a team and design a business that supports her personal goals—like having two babies in two years while still running a high-end practice. She rides market cycles intentionally: going all-in when demand surges and unapologetically stepping back for family when things slow.
The conversation explores Miami’s transformation from car-dependent city to increasingly walkable, mixed-use, high-end neighborhoods that attract global wealth, especially from New York and California. As a relocation expert across the Americas, Europe, and the Middle East, Paola says most international families share one core concern: “Will I like my community and neighbors?” Her team supports them far beyond the purchase—schools, doctors, legal and financial advisors, staff, builders, even urgent favors—making real estate an intimate, trust-based relationship.
Paola also explains why she treats condos and single-family homes very differently. Condos, with identical units, construction waves, and rising HOA costs, behave like volatile stocks; one distressed sale can drag values down. Single-family homes, by contrast, are unique assets with steadier appreciation. Her advice: if you might sell a condo soon, don’t wait; and for houses, “marry the home, date the rate”—you can refinance later, but great properties are limited.
About Paola Marulanda:
- https://www.instagram.com/paolamarulanda_miami/
About Federico Ramallo ✨👨💻🌎
🚀 Software Engineering Manager | 🛠 Founder of DensityLabs.io & PreVetted.ai | 🤝 Connecting 🇺🇸 U.S. teams with top nearshore 🌎 LATAM engineers
- 💼 https://www.linkedin.com/in/framallo/
- 🌐 https://densitylabs.io
- ✅ https://prevetted.ai
🎙 PreVetted Podcast 🎧📡
- 🎯 https://prevetted.ai/podcast
- 🐦 https://x.com/PrevettedPod
- 🔗 https://www.linkedin.com/company/prevetted-podcast
00:00 Introduction to Paola Marulanda
05:22 Balancing Family and Work
09:45 2008 Market Crisis Experience
12:22 Founding Luxury Homes Connect
16:50 Relocation and Zoning in Miami
23:05 Migration Trends and Market Dynamics
29:13 Relocating migrants
34:10 Condos vs. Single Family Homes
John Weiss, founder of Human Design, joins Federico for a conversation on building brands that move people—not just markets—in an increasingly synthetic, AI-driven world.
He shares the origin of Human Design, founded in 2013 to solve human problems through strategy, design, and storytelling. Over the years, the agency has helped nonprofits, startups, and major brands like Nike, Land O’Lakes, and Twitter uncover clarity, purpose, and emotional resonance.
Key themes explored in the episode:
- Human Design’s core values: creating work people want, feel, and value
- The difference between good design and human design
- Why great design solves both stated and unstated human needs
- Case studies, including IFAW’s Endangered Species Act campaign and Land O’Lakes’ farmer-focused brand transformation
- How timeless creative environments allow space for thinking, boredom, and originality
- Why critique—how leaders respond to creative work—shapes culture more than any slogan
- John’s biggest leadership lesson: vision + patience is greater than speed + decisiveness
- Why young designers should see themselves as holistic designers, not just UX or graphic specialists
- The importance of working the problem before creating solutions
- How AI and vibe coding help prototype quickly but risk collapsing essential design thinking
- Why core skills and clear vision matter even more in the AI era
John closes with optimism: The opportunity is to use new tools while staying rooted in what makes us human.
About John Weiss:
- https://humandesign.com/
- https://www.linkedin.com/in/johnweiss/
About Federico Ramallo ✨👨💻🌎
🚀 Software Engineering Manager | 🛠 Founder of DensityLabs.io & PreVetted.ai | 🤝 Connecting 🇺🇸 U.S. teams with top nearshore 🌎 LATAM engineers
- 💼 https://www.linkedin.com/in/framallo/
- 🌐 https://densitylabs.io
- ✅ https://prevetted.ai
🎙 PreVetted Podcast 🎧📡
- 🎯 https://prevetted.ai/podcast
- 🐦 https://x.com/PrevettedPod
- 🔗 https://www.linkedin.com/company/prevetted-podcast
00:00 Introduction to Human Design and Its Mission
02:40 The Values Behind Human Design
04:34 Switching to Human Design
09:16 Navigating the Digital Age: Being Human
11:21 The Difference Between Good and Human Design
14:02 Projects That Create Social Impact
18:12 Creating Originality in Creative Environments
19:30 Fostering Creativity and Safety in Teams
25:07 The Importance of Patience in Leadership
30:12 Holistic Design Thinking for Young Designers
34:25 Navigating Speed in Design and Technology
45:52 Embracing the AI Era in Design
Nithin Thekkupadam Narayanan joins the show to unpack the craft of product management at scale—how to keep a mature platform stable while innovating fast. A Senior Principal PM (ex-AWS, ex-Remitly and an MIT SDM alum), Nithin shares pragmatic lessons from event-driven systems, cost/speed trade-offs, and the fast-moving AI landscape.
We explore how to listen to customers without building one-offs, scan the market for signals (e.g., rapid protocol shifts and agent-to-agent patterns), and evolve architecture accordingly. Nithin walks through moving queue storage from disk to memory for near-real-time processing, adding native support for modern data types (JSON, graph, vectors), and why transactional semantics matter for predictable recovery and rollbacks. He contrasts polling vs. messaging, explains the true cost of “real-time,” and discusses security boundaries when broadcasting events.
On strategy, Nithin details how to prioritize when everyone has a compelling ask: bucket VOC requests, run roadmap-transparency reviews with engaged customers, and influence cross-org dependencies toward clear yes/no decisions (avoid “limbo”). We talk API versioning and deprecation with adequate heads-up, cloud vs. on-prem considerations, and the operational appeal—and risks—of converged database + built-in streaming patterns. A memorable GTM lesson: even dramatic cost savings won’t auto-adopt if workloads are mission-critical—peace of mind can trump price, so target segments and messaging accordingly.
What you’ll learn
- How to balance stability with rapid innovation on long-lived platforms
- When to favor events over polling—and how to price the latency you truly need
- The role of transactional guarantees in streaming (predictability, recovery, rollbacks)
- Security and access controls for broad event broadcasts
- Prioritization tactics: VOC bucketing, roadmap reviews, stakeholder influence
- API versioning, deprecation, and expectation-setting with customers
- GTM reality: why cost-saving features can see slow adoption—and how to target them
- Cloud vs. on-prem trade-offs and the appeal of converged architectures
- Leadership habits that build trust: empathy, clarity, and data-driven decisions
About Nithin Thekkupadam Narayanan:
- https://www.linkedin.com/in/nithin-thekkupadam-narayanan-0bbb4384/
About Federico Ramallo ✨👨💻🌎
🚀 Software Engineering Manager | 🛠 Founder of DensityLabs.io & PreVetted.ai | 🤝 Connecting 🇺🇸 U.S. teams with top nearshore 🌎 LATAM engineers
- 💼 https://www.linkedin.com/in/framallo/
- 🌐 https://densitylabs.io
- ✅ https://prevetted.ai
🎙 PreVetted Podcast 🎧📡
- 🎯 https://prevetted.ai/podcast
- 🐦 https://x.com/PrevettedPod
- 🔗 https://www.linkedin.com/company/prevetted-podcast
00:00 Introduction to Nitin Thekupadam Narayanan
00:50 Balancing Innovation with Established Products
03:22 The Evolution of Event-Driven Systems
07:04 The Cost of Speed in Technology
08:53 Security Considerations in Messaging Systems
12:00 Cloud vs On-Premise Solutions
13:14 The Challenge of API Changes
14:27 Insights from Customer Feedback
20:18 Prioritizing Features Amid Competing Demands
25:23 Balancing Customer Expectations and Team Capacity
28:01 The Impact of AI on Business Operations
30:58 Streamlining Data Management with Unified Solutions
35:33 The Future of Event Streaming and Database Integration
41:28 Leadership Lessons in Product Management
David West traces a clear line from his first job in 1968—the year “software engineering” was coined—through today’s AI-fueled hype cycles, arguing that our industry’s chronic unhappiness comes from being cut off from users and meaning. In this candid conversation, he recalls mainframes, 80-column cards, and 24-hour feedback loops that forced upfront thinking, then contrasts that era with modern “vibe coding,” where speed often replaces theory. West contends that most IT failures stem from treating business and technology as separate machines rather than a single complex adaptive system grounded in human integrity, shared context, and story.
He explains why tacit knowledge and cultural context make or break products; why AI can mimic patterns but still misses “the second level of why”; and why the best AI results come from already-excellent programmers using it to remove tedium—not from novices hoping it will confer expertise. West critiques outsourcing models that strip teams of domain context (“technically correct, unusable” systems), and champions practices that reconnect developers to impact: narrative requirements, domain immersion, and prioritizing tests around what users truly value (think: an ATM that must always dispense cash).
Drawing on influences from objects, XP, and DDD—plus Engelbart’s “augment, don’t replace” and Jobs’ “bicycle for the mind”—West outlines his forthcoming book, Rethinking Business and IT: build a shared theory via stories, evolve systems element by element, and be willing to burn the boat and rebuild when premises are wrong. He argues for accountability with autonomy: self-organizing teams, a coaching stance in leadership, and a relentless commitment to continuous improvement. Referencing Iain McGilchrist’s The Master and His Emissary, he calls for whole-brain thinking—reuniting connection and manipulation—so we can write code that is not just correct, but useful, humane, and meaningful.
About David West:
- https://profwest.substack.com/
About Federico Ramallo ✨👨💻🌎
🚀 Software Engineering Manager | 🛠 Founder of DensityLabs.io & PreVetted.ai | 🤝 Connecting 🇺🇸 U.S. teams with top nearshore 🌎 LATAM engineers
- 💼 https://www.linkedin.com/in/framallo/
- 🌐 https://densitylabs.io
- ✅ https://prevetted.ai
🎙 PreVetted Podcast 🎧📡
- 🎯 https://prevetted.ai/podcast
- 🐦 https://x.com/PrevettedPod
- 🔗 https://www.linkedin.com/company/prevetted-podcast
00:00 Preview
00:38 Introduction and early career
04:36 The early days of programming
07:17 The genesis of David West's manifesto
12:22 The dangers of AI replacing engineers
20:10 Making our people and our world better
23:23 Challenges of outsourcing
32:51 Manifesto: Rethinking Business and IT
35:57 Learning and starting over
40:39 Changes to fix the industry
42:41 How to be better people
Des Wynne: From knocking on doors in Dublin to leading Lazer Telecom in Portugal, Des charts a candid, practical path to building a resilient last-mile ISP and a culture that ships. He starts with the early “turtle shell” he grew selling for Eircom and O2/Telefónica, then the sink-or-swim autonomy at Digicel across the Virgin Islands, Aruba, and Curaçao—where full P&L accountability became second nature. A detour into aviation at SimTech sharpened his checklist mindset, which he later brought to telecom operations: remember the flow, then back it up with a list so nothing mission-critical slips.
As CEO, Des dismantled the myth of the perfect 90-day plan. Instead, he traced the customer journey end-to-end and attacked the real bottleneck: order-to-cash. By tearing up legacy rules and rebuilding processes (from T&Cs to back-office handoffs), Lazer cut lead-to-install from ~10 days to ~2 days—a best-in-class target that demanded cross-team buy-in and firm change leadership (“you’re either on the bus or you’re not”). Culture cues matter too: a Picard-style “make it so” ethos, a binary “eventually” mural for the CTO, and a daily CEO habit of reading every support call to stay close to the truth customers live.
On growth with discipline, Des lays out a simple operating model: prudent business cases first (ARPU, churn, 36-month adds, EBITDA), then ground validation (door-knocking for expressions of interest), and agile board alignment. Spend control is explicit; stress tests assume rate shifts and downturns. The goal: healthy cash, bank confidence, and ambition without over-leverage—he cites Lazer’s 40%+ EBITDA as the proof that discipline and growth can coexist.
Resilience, for Des, starts with communication. Ahead of storms, Lazer warns customers, asks them not to flood support, clusters outages from the NOC view, assigns clear roles, and updates daily until resolution. Having worked post-hurricane disasters, he’s blunt about human factors under stress and returns to the aviation “7P rule”: Prior Preparation and Planning Prevents Possible (Piss) Poor Performance. Also: sleep on hard calls, clear your head, then decide.
Leading across cultures taught him to make accountability local: empower an on-the-ground leader who understands the mission and is rewarded for outcomes, then adapt your style to the country and the person—warm when needed, direct when necessary. Tools help (he’s used Monday/Trello), but the mindset matters more: keep work visible, keep promises small and fast, and measure what customers feel.
What you’ll learn in this episode
- How door-to-door sales builds lifelong leadership habits (15 seconds to earn trust; people buy from people).
- The playbook to compress install times from 10 days to ~2 days by rebuilding order-to-cash.
- Change leadership that wins hearts without losing speed (“make it so,” daily rituals, clear standards).
- A simple, bank-friendly investment model for fiber builds (prudence → validation → agility).
- Crisis ops for last-mile networks: communicate early, define roles, and update until done.
About Des Wynne:
- https://www.linkedin.com/in/des-wynne-557b4718/
About Federico Ramallo ✨👨💻🌎
🚀 Software Engineering Manager | 🛠 Founder of DensityLabs.io & PreVetted.ai | 🤝 Connecting 🇺🇸 U.S. teams with top nearshore 🌎 LATAM engineers
- 💼 https://www.linkedin.com/in/framallo/
- 🌐 https://densitylabs.io
- ✅ https://prevetted.ai
🎙 PreVetted Podcast 🎧📡
- 🎯 https://prevetted.ai/podcast
- 🐦 https://x.com/PrevettedPod
- 🔗 https://www.linkedin.com/company/prevetted-podcast
05:34 Sales and industry insights
10:14 The First 90 Days at Lazer Telecom
13:51 Organizational Growth and Change Management
19:13 Leadership Lessons from Captain Picard
20:40 Balancing Growth
28:24 Leadership Habits
30:45 Lessons from Aviation and the Checklist Mentality
37:24 Resilience Strategies and Crisis Management
43:56 The 7P Rule
45:38 The Human Factor in Crisis Scenarios
Nur Hamdan explains how aiXplain is building an enterprise “Agentic OS” and why autonomy must be paired with safety and compliance. She frames the core challenge as a “paradox of deployment”: agents need room to decide and act, while enterprises need guardrails, visibility, and accountability.
Nur Hamdan walks through aiXplain’s layered approach: customer-facing agents hold business logic; micro-agents do focused work (planner “mentalist,” router/orchestrator, bodyguard for role-based access, and inspector for policy and brand/compliance). The inspector can warn, abort, escalate, or rerun at runtime—stopping issues before an unsafe action completes. Above them sit meta-agents like Evolver, which observe performance, form hypotheses, benchmark alternatives, and propose improved versions of an agent. Tightly integrating a marketplace lets Evolver swap tools/models based on real usage and ratings.
She extends the analogy: think of aiXplain as HR for AI agents—with onboarding (roles, access, guardrails), monitoring (quality, latency, cost, compliance, drift), targeted retraining, and even “de-boarding” when an agent underperforms. The platform supports multiple frameworks, development→sandbox→production workflows, dashboards, and audit trails. Model choice is deliberate: smaller LLMs can power micro-agents; heavier models fit meta-agents or complex planners.
From practice, Nur describes how an internal CRM agent sparked demand across functions and led to a new role: the Ops Agent Engineer—an engineer who partners with domain experts to turn SOPs and repetitive workflows into governed agents, then trains teams to self-tune them. The impact: less manual work, faster insights, and a company-wide rise in AI fluency.
Nur also shares a forward-looking vision—“mental models, not memories.” Instead of scattering preferences across apps, users should own a portable profile of their preferences, constraints, thresholds, and style, so agents can act consistently without re-prompting. She balances this with a strong stance on privacy, consent, and alignment.
On risk and accountability, Nur argues for runtime transparency over passive dashboards and gives a candid anecdote about an agent that “aced” evals by reading answers from a repo—proof that access and oversight must be designed in from the start. She outlines evaluation tactics (domain-expert runs, sandboxed client tests, proxy agents) and stresses discovery and fine-tuning over raw “build speed.”
About Nur Hamdan:
- https://www.linkedin.com/in/nurhamdan/
About Federico Ramallo ✨👨💻🌎
🚀 Software Engineering Manager | 🛠 Founder of DensityLabs.io & PreVetted.ai | 🤝 Connecting 🇺🇸 U.S. teams with top nearshore 🌎 LATAM engineers
- 💼 https://www.linkedin.com/in/framallo/
- 🌐 https://densitylabs.io
- ✅ https://prevetted.ai
🎙 PreVetted Podcast 🎧📡
- 🎯 https://prevetted.ai/podcast
- 🐦 https://x.com/PrevettedPod
- 🔗 https://www.linkedin.com/company/prevetted-podcast
00:26 Nur Hamdan’s Background
00:26 aiXplain Platform: Unified Agent Orchestration
02:43 Microagents: Mentalist, Orchestrator, Bodyguard, Inspector
08:44 Agent Lifecycle: Onboarding, Monitoring, Evolution
15:08 Rise of the Ops Agent Engineer Role
20:31 Balancing Agents, LLMs, and Workflows
23:55 Centralized Mental Models and Predictive Responses
29:39 Security Risks and Real-World Anecdotes
33:02 Transparency as Core Design Principle
38:44 Evaluation Challenges & Proxy Agents
Madhuri Somara, Senior Product Manager at Microsoft, joins Federico to unpack how she builds AI agents that actually help people, not just impress on paper. Fresh off being honored with the 2025 Product Leader Award by Products That Count, Madhuri traces her path from coding and business analysis to product leadership, and why empathy, rigorous evaluations, and clear user value are her north stars.
She describes the vision and real-world impact of Microsoft’s Autonomous Agents (announced at Ignite 2024), zooming in on the Case Management Agent that automates the entire lifecycle from case creation to closure while preserving human supervision. For Madhuri, customer shadowing, sentiment reading, and removing “small frictions” (like a few extra clicks) compound into big wins that frontline teams feel every day.
A throughline in the conversation is AI Evaluations (AI Evals). Madhuri explains why intuition and basic testing aren’t enough when models act on behalf of enterprises and customers. Strong evals and golden datasets build confidence, keep behavior within guardrails, and ensure products behave as intended over time — akin to behavior-driven development but for AI behavior. She also clarifies the nuance between “human-in-the-loop” (blocking dependency) and human supervision (oversight with autonomous progress), and how trust, reliability, and safety guide the right choice.
Beyond shipping features, Madhuri emphasizes UX as behavior design — predictable, accessible, and consistent interfaces that reflect how people actually work. She shares how collaboration between product, design, and engineering yields clearer requirements, fewer back-and-forths, and more predictable delivery.
On responsible AI, she’s pragmatic: use AI where it clearly adds value; don’t force it. Balance innovation with adoption and real user pain points. Looking ahead, she predicts agentic AI will reshape work across customer service, sales, marketing, IT, and more — freeing humans for higher-judgment, creative tasks. Tools like Copilot already remove mental load (drafts, comparisons, bookings), but she stays cautiously optimistic about privacy, reliability, and security.
Madhuri also spotlights community and growth: she mentors university students, champions diverse voices through Women in AI Ethics™, and advises aspiring AI PMs to network intentionally and stay curious — be “learn-it-alls,” not “know-it-alls.” Finally, for women and underrepresented talent, she offers practical encouragement: build relationships, ask questions across disciplines, and keep tying ideas back to real customer value.
About Madhuri Somara:
- https://www.linkedin.com/in/madhurisomara/
About Federico Ramallo ✨👨💻🌎
🚀 Software Engineering Manager | 🛠 Founder of DensityLabs.io & PreVetted.ai | 🤝 Connecting 🇺🇸 U.S. teams with top nearshore 🌎 LATAM engineers
- 💼 https://www.linkedin.com/in/framallo/
- 🌐 https://densitylabs.io
- ✅ https://prevetted.ai
🎙 PreVetted Podcast 🎧📡
- 🎯 https://prevetted.ai/podcast
- 🐦 https://x.com/PrevettedPod
- 🔗 https://www.linkedin.com/company/prevetted-podcast
00:00 Introduction to Madhuri Somara and Her Journey
04:30 Pivotal Moments in Career Development
08:40 Experiences at Avanade and GS1 US
13:00 Launching Autonomous Agents at Ignite 2024
18:15 Challenges in AI Product Management
23:01 The Importance of Customer Feedback
26:54 Finding Balance in Product Management
28:46 The Importance of AI Evaluations
31:46 Navigating AI Capabilities and Responsible Use
35:49 Advice for Women in AI Product Leadership
39:08 Future Impact of AI and Automation
40:58 Skills for Future Product Managers
45:49 Cautious Optimism for AI's Future
Kimberlee Carr, Chief Operating Officer of Real Estate and Managing Broker at TAWANI Enterprises, shares how a chance fill-in role sparked a career she’s grown into with grit, curiosity, and a love for challenge. In this conversation, Kimberlee traces her path from on-site property manager to executive leader, explaining why her core values never changed with the title: positivity, accountability, respect, teamwork, integrity, and pride in the work. She describes her “wolf pack” philosophy of leadership—guiding from behind, protecting the team, and lifting one another when someone stumbles.
Kimberlee unpacks the realities of running portfolios that span conventional residential assets and historically significant properties. Preservation, she notes, isn’t about maximizing short-term profit; it’s about stewarding architecture and history for future generations, even when sourcing period-appropriate materials or custom fabrication stretches budgets. She also demystifies scale: whether a single home or a high-rise, the fundamentals (HVAC, plumbing, electrical) are the same—just bigger.
On resident experience and fiscal responsibility, Kimberlee argues that transparency wins. When rents rise, she and her teams explain the “why” (taxes, capital upgrades), and they focus on what residents feel daily: cleanliness, responsiveness, and systems that work—because “it’s their home; we leave, they stay.” She charts the tech journey from Excel and mail merges to platforms like Yardi/MRI that automate notices, payments, and work orders, freeing staff to solve higher-order problems. Looking ahead, she sees promise in AI for service and operations—while urging care for senior residents who may need extra support with new tools.
Community is a throughline. Kimberlee discusses TAWANI’s gifts of the Lang House Chicago and Frank Lloyd Wright’s Emil Bach House to Loyola University Chicago and why placing historic assets with mission-aligned stewards matters. Beyond philanthropy, she highlights hands-on service—school projects, art festivals, backpack drives—and how visible participation builds trust and safer, more vibrant neighborhoods. Sustainability follows the same principle: educate and involve residents (even with small contests) so savings and stewardship compound for everyone.
Kimberlee also reflects on professional growth. Earning IREM’s ARM (Accredited Residential Manager) and CPM (Certified Property Manager) challenged her to deepen financial acumen—from budgets she loves to acquisition math and amortization—so she can better advise owners and coach teams. Mentorship, for her, means grace, accountability, and letting newcomers make (and learn from) mistakes—while also learning from their speed and digital instincts.
About Kimberlee Carr:
- https://tawanienterprises.com/
- https://tawanipropertymanagement.com/
About Federico Ramallo ✨👨💻🌎
🚀 Software Engineering Manager | 🛠 Founder of DensityLabs.io & PreVetted.ai | 🤝 Connecting 🇺🇸 U.S. teams with top nearshore 🌎 LATAM engineers
- 💼 https://www.linkedin.com/in/framallo/
- 🌐 https://densitylabs.io
- ✅ https://prevetted.ai
🎙 PreVetted Podcast 🎧📡
- 🎯 https://prevetted.ai/podcast
- 🐦 https://x.com/PrevettedPod
- 🔗 https://www.linkedin.com/company/prevetted-podcast
01:01 Accidental entry into real estate
02:20 Turning points and seizing opportunities
04:42 Transition to COO and unchanging leadership philosophy
07:21 Managing middle management with core values
08:56 Balancing preservation and financial performance
11:54 Operational challenges at scale
13:17 Fiscal responsibility and resident satisfaction
16:13 Evolution of property management technology
21:43 Philanthropy and community
26:24 Property leaders’ community responsibilities
31:07 Profitability versus long-term sustainability
34:22 Impact of ARM and CPM certifications
38:14 Shifting from daily operations to strategic leadership
42:27 Mentoring younger property professionals
Kadamb Goswami: In this conversation, Kadamb traces a personal and professional journey shaped by resourcefulness, resilience, and a relentless focus on building things that tangibly help people. Growing up in a small Indian town, he watched his father—an educator—create low-resource systems so students could learn better. That early example of “impact through intent” led Kadamb to build a simple library tool in college and even assemble his own PC, seeding a lifelong bias for practical problem-solving.
His first big break came at Microsoft India after a rigorous entry exam. Two years later, he transferred to Redmond—motivated by the need to access specialized medical care for his son. At Microsoft he internalized ecosystem thinking: when millions rely on your software, simplicity and customer empathy aren’t nice-to-haves—they’re table stakes.
Curiosity then pulled him to SAP, where he learned to translate complex, enterprise B2B needs into clearer, usable experiences and to connect software decisions to business outcomes. At Amazon, he sought to test those skills at scale inside a framework- and mechanism-driven culture. There, his team focuses on AI-powered finance automation—streamlining accounting booking lifecycles and reconciliation across large organizations.
A pivotal “no” from leadership—rejecting his early pitch for an AI reconciliation platform due to risk—became a defining lesson. Kadamb reframed the vision around trust and extensibility, ran targeted POCs, gathered evidence, and introduced phased pilots and guardrails. That rejection ultimately catalyzed a CXO-level initiative that scaled globally and even led to a patent filing. His takeaway: rejection is early feedback, not failure—use it to refine the story, strengthen data, and deepen customer trust.
On AI in finance, Kadamb emphasizes determinism, auditability, and human-in-the-loop design to minimize hallucinations and earn stakeholder confidence. Trust, privacy, latency, and safety are product features, not afterthoughts. He argues that purpose-driven leadership—ensuring teams understand the “why,” not just the “what”—unlocks better collaboration across product, engineering, and stakeholders, especially when users are many layers away.
Mentorship also plays a central role. The best mentors didn’t hand him answers; they asked sharp questions that revealed blind spots and built conviction. He cautions against “anti-mentors” who lead through fear or control; choose guides who model empathy, clarity, and trust.
Looking ahead, Kadamb wants his career to stand for human-centered intelligence: enterprise AI that is transparent, explainable, ethical, and genuinely useful. Beyond work, he mentors high-school students—coaching accountability, teamwork, and the idea that learning (not grades) is the portable skill that compounds.
The episode closes with a call to embrace adaptability, continuous learning, and community: you don’t need a Big Tech badge to contribute. Start where you are, build responsibly with agents and AI, and keep the human at the center.
About Kadamb Goswami:
- https://www.linkedin.com/in/kadambg/
About Federico Ramallo ✨👨💻🌎
🚀 Software Engineering Manager | 🛠 Founder of DensityLabs.io & PreVetted.ai | 🤝 Connecting 🇺🇸 U.S. teams with top nearshore 🌎 LATAM engineers
- 💼 https://www.linkedin.com/in/framallo/
- 🌐 https://densitylabs.io
- ✅ https://prevetted.ai
🎙 PreVetted Podcast 🎧📡
- 🎯 https://prevetted.ai/podcast
- 🐦 https://x.com/PrevettedPod
- 🔗 https://www.linkedin.com/company/prevetted-podcast
00:00 Introduction to Kadamb Goswami
01:05 Early Influences and Problem Solving
03:34 The Importance of Adaptability and Learning
05:08 First Break in Tech and the Role of Luck
10:41 Career Moves and Personal Motivations
13:54 Navigating Company Cultures
17:08 Purpose-Driven Leadership and Team Dynamics
19:00 Learning from Rejection
24:53 Mentorship and Anti-Mentorship
30:42 Future Aspirations and Human-Centered Intelligence
In this episode, Apurv Naman, Product Manager at NVIDIA, shares a heartfelt, visionary journey that starts with childhood cartoons—The Jetsons, Star Trek, Star Wars—and evolves into a career shaping physical AI: humanoids and self-driving cars. What began as wonder for machines you can “touch and feel” became a calling to work where hardware, software, and AI meet real-world impact.
Apurv recalls how mechanical engineering opened doors to robotics and automotive systems, leading him into autonomous vehicles, patents, and the thrill of shipping things that move. Along the way, the “why” behind features kept tugging at him. That curiosity—paired with a desire to influence what gets built, not just how—led him to an MBA at Berkeley, an internship at NVIDIA, and a full transition into product management.
He explains the PM craft through a physical-AI lens: prioritization as the essential superpower; the discipline of saying no so teams can focus; and the daily balance between user needs and engineering realities. A technical background, he says, helps PMs understand feasibility, timelines, and the reasoning behind engineering proposals—so they can challenge thoughtfully, communicate the user story clearly, and align diverse teams.
Diving into physical AI, Apurv highlights why it feels like “magic”: robots and AVs don’t just respond on a screen—they act in our world. That power also raises the bar: in physical AI, the room for error is minimal. Safety and traceability become top-tier KPIs; a single failure can break user trust—or a company. He contrasts software A/B tests with the life-and-death stakes of autonomous systems and notes how lessons from aviation and automotive safety must inform robotics and humanoids.
On self-driving, Apurv reflects on how AV behavior evolves with human behavior—why early rule-following cars sometimes had to become more assertive to merge like real drivers. He imagines a future where AVs complement public transit to expand mobility—helping elders, people with disabilities, and even enabling safe school runs—while acknowledging trade-offs like congestion and the need for hybrid solutions.
User empathy looms large in his approach. He shares how subtle design choices (e.g., letting a steering wheel move in sync with turns) can reduce user anxiety and build trust. Ethics, too, is integral: while Asimov’s Three Laws are more philosophical than literal, their spirit informs modern safety frameworks and the complex decision trees inside these systems.
Throughout the conversation, Apurv returns to a core idea: in tech, change is the only constant, and AI has accelerated that pace.
About Apurv Naman:
- https://www.linkedin.com/in/apurv-naman/
About Federico Ramallo ✨👨💻🌎
🚀 Software Engineering Manager | 🛠 Founder of DensityLabs.io & PreVetted.ai | 🤝 Connecting 🇺🇸 U.S. teams with top nearshore 🌎 LATAM engineers
- 💼 https://www.linkedin.com/in/framallo/
- 🌐 https://densitylabs.io
- ✅ https://prevetted.ai
🎙 PreVetted Podcast 🎧📡
- 🎯 https://prevetted.ai/podcast
- 🐦 https://x.com/PrevettedPod
- 🔗 https://www.linkedin.com/company/prevetted-podcast
00:00 The Journey Begins: Apurv's Engineering Inspiration
05:24 Transitioning to Product Management: A Gradual Shift
11:12 The Role of Prioritization in Product Management
13:16 Balancing Technical Knowledge and User Needs
16:54 The Excitement of Physical AI and Humanoids
24:54 The Societal Impact of Self-Driving Cars
26:11 The Future of Transportation: AVs and Public Transport
32:09 Challenges of Physical AI: Safety and Regulation
38:42 Empathy and Ethics in AI Design
48:32 Final Thoughts: Embracing Change in Product Management
Ben Helland unpacks how strategy turns into outcomes for learners and employers at Western Governors University (WGU). As Principal Product Strategist, he partners with the Schools of Business and Health to design long-term roadmaps that serve working adults and an expanding 18–24 segment. He explains why WGU measures every big bet against three lenses—equity, completion, and return—and how a jobs-first mission shapes programs, support, and pace of innovation.
Ben contrasts strategy across domains: Health must move deliberately within licensure and clinical regulations (e.g., time-bound placement windows), while Business can iterate faster. Those constraints don’t kill innovation—they force it—pushing teams to anticipate infrastructure decisions early (the “remodel your house” analogy) and to build flexible, career-relevant pathways students can tailor to time and goals. He also widens the competitive lens beyond traditional colleges to include apprenticeships and other earn-while-you-learn options that may skip the “first rung.”
Zooming out, Ben sketches WGU’s scale and reach—alumni in every U.S. county and near-200K active learners—and its origin story: a bipartisan solution to access and mobility. He then dives into scenario-based planning: pick the two biggest uncertainties, build four plausible futures, and place small bets you can scale when signals shift. Strategy, he argues, is ultimately about what you say no to—and it only matters if it cascades into org design, capabilities, budgets, and day-to-day work people understand.
From his own venture, Veridate, Ben shares two execution stories: acting CEO to clean up and sell a 20-year small business, and facilitating AI-era strategy for a global publisher. Both underscore proximity to the problem, clarity of ownership, and the translation of vision into hiring, tooling, and rituals.
Ben’s personal arc—child-psych PhD track to MBA to strategist—anchors his belief in “humanization” and durable skills that outlast toolchains. Teaching 100 first-semester students sharpened his conviction that exposure matters: understand what jobs actually are before you spend years (and dollars) pursuing them. His advice to his younger self: take bigger risks in your 20s, bet on yourself when the downside is small, and seek broad exposure so your choices are informed by reality, not guesswork.
We close on the university–employer handshake: if companies want graduates with precise skills and “soft-skill” fluency, they must engage upstream. For students, the right post-high-school path isn’t one-size-fits-all—what matters is a clear line of sight from learning to opportunity. Off the clock, Ben is dad to a drummer and a rock climber, a trail runner and “slightly better than average” guitarist, happily debating the Utah Utes—and never saying no to a Dutch Bros Americano.
About Ben Helland:
- https://www.linkedin.com/in/ben-helland/
About Federico Ramallo ✨👨💻🌎
🚀 Software Engineering Manager | 🛠 Founder of DensityLabs.io & PreVetted.ai | 🤝 Connecting 🇺🇸 U.S. teams with top nearshore 🌎 LATAM engineers
- 💼 https://www.linkedin.com/in/framallo/
- 🌐 https://densitylabs.io
- ✅ https://prevetted.ai
🎙 PreVetted Podcast 🎧📡
- 🎯 https://prevetted.ai/podcast
- 🐦 https://x.com/PrevettedPod
- 🔗 https://www.linkedin.com/company/prevetted-podcast
00:00 Introduction to Ben Helland and WGU
01:33 Differentiating Education Strategies Across Disciplines
05:16 Navigating Regulations in Health and Business Education
10:06 The Role of Competitive Analysis in Higher Education
14:57 The Impact of Online Education on Rural Communities
19:51 The Value of a College Degree and Employability
24:08 Bridging the Gap Between Education and Employment
29:43 Navigating Choices in Education and Career Paths
35:05 Bridging Strategy and Execution in Business
51:37 The Value of Planning and Scenario-Based Thinking
52:12 Advice for the Younger Generation: Embracing Risks
Tifany Mazza joins us on The PreVetted Podcast for an inspiring conversation about building a meaningful career in digital marketing, transitioning into entrepreneurship, and staying relevant in one of the fastest-evolving industries in the world.
With more than a decade of experience growing brands online, Tifany is the Founder and Digital Marketing Director of tykio., a Google-certified digital partner based in Silicon Valley. She has led data-driven campaigns for global brands including Nestlé, Royal Caribbean, Lady Gaga’s Haus Labs, RedCoach, and others across the U.S., Latin America, and Europe. Beyond agency life, she also launched Not2Die4, a curated vegan marketplace that reflects her personal commitment to ethical and cruelty-free living.
In this episode, Tifany openly shares her journey—from discovering her passion for digital at a young age, to becoming an e-commerce manager in Latin America, to taking the courageous leap of starting her own agency. She talks about the moment she told her employer, “Either I go work for another company or I start my own and you become my first client”—which set the foundation for building tykio.
We explore what it really takes to build an agency from the ground up: the challenges of scaling, delegating, protecting quality, earning client trust, and growing a remote team across multiple countries. She also reveals the mindset shifts that helped her evolve as a leader—crediting great mentors and personal growth for reshaping how she leads teams and projects today.
Tifany breaks down one of her favorite client success stories: a multi-channel brand expansion into a new market, powered by a mix of paid media, PR, and influencer marketing that generated 3,000 sales in the first month. She explains how the win was only possible because of an integrated strategy that prioritized both brand awareness and performance marketing.
A big focus of the episode is career advice for marketers. Tifany shares:
- The #1 skill new marketers need today (adaptability)
- Why ignoring AI is the fastest path to becoming irrelevant
- How marketing careers are changing—and how to evolve with them
- Why personal branding is non-negotiable for anyone who wants to start an agency
- The importance of using AI as a tool to enhance creativity, not replace it
About Tifany Mazza:
- https://www.linkedin.com/in/tifanymazza/
- https://tykio.com/
About Federico Ramallo ✨👨💻🌎
🚀 Software Engineering Manager | 🛠 Founder of DensityLabs.io & PreVetted.ai | 🤝 Connecting 🇺🇸 U.S. teams with top nearshore 🌎 LATAM engineers
- 💼 https://www.linkedin.com/in/framallo/
- 🌐 https://densitylabs.io
- ✅ https://prevetted.ai
🎙 PreVetted Podcast 🎧📡
- 🎯 https://prevetted.ai/podcast
- 🐦 https://x.com/PrevettedPod
- 🔗 https://www.linkedin.com/company/prevetted-podcast
00:00 Introduction to Tifany Mazza and tykio.
02:33 Tifany's Journey into Digital Marketing
04:52 Adapting Marketing Strategies Across Cultures
07:07 The Leap to Entrepreneurship
09:23 Challenges in Scaling tykio.
11:31 Balancing Creativity and Analytics in Marketing
13:39 Understanding Attribution in Marketing Campaigns
16:09 Client Success Stories and Long-term Relationships
18:10 The Importance of Team and Client Satisfaction
20:36 Essential Skills for Modern Marketers
22:46 Embracing AI in Marketing
25:15 Continuous Learning and Community Engagement
27:41 Advice for Aspiring Agency Owners
28:54 Final Thoughts and Closing Remarks
Yash Chaturvedi, Head of Product for Live Sports Ads at Amazon, joins Federico to unpack how AI, computer vision, and product management are reshaping streaming and advertising. Yash traces his path from early OCR projects at Staples to Prime Video, where he helped build long-form video understanding to automate global compliance and power features like maturity ratings and content descriptors. That same foundation inspired his work in virtual/brand placement—seamlessly inserting context-aware brand assets into scenes—leading to multiple U.S. patents and a new, non-interruptive model for monetization.
In live sports, Yash explains how field-level virtual brand placements can be personalized by market and audience, creating relevance without breaking immersion. He contrasts the old “first to market” moat with today’s true moat: first to learn—shipping, measuring, and iterating faster than competitors. For PMs, he outlines the shift toward an AI-native, hybrid role: a discovery-driven generalist who prototypes quickly, partners tightly with engineering and science, and uses LLMs to accelerate research, UX prototyping, and Amazon’s document-heavy culture.
Yash also demystifies the patent process: start with expansive “what-ifs,” pair product storytelling with tech feasibility, and involve legal early to validate novelty and focus the claim. He shares why patents build personal legacy and how they force rigorous product thinking that often improves the actual roadmap.
On the 3–5 year AI horizon, Yash highlights agentic AI that acts across workflows (not just predicts), plus media use cases like dubbing and lip-sync that make global content feel native. He frames AI as a co-pilot that compresses cycles—from concept to prototype to data-backed decisions—without replacing core PM responsibilities like customer advocacy and clear reasoning.
About Yash Chaturvedi:
- https://www.linkedin.com/in/yashchat/
About Federico Ramallo ✨👨💻🌎
🚀 Software Engineering Manager | 🛠 Founder of DensityLabs.io & PreVetted.ai | 🤝 Connecting 🇺🇸 U.S. teams with top nearshore 🌎 LATAM engineers
- 💼 https://www.linkedin.com/in/framallo/
- 🌐 https://densitylabs.io
- ✅ https://prevetted.ai
🎙 PreVetted Podcast 🎧📡
- 🎯 https://prevetted.ai/podcast
- 🐦 https://x.com/PrevettedPod
- 🔗 https://www.linkedin.com/company/prevetted-podcast
00:00 Introduction to Yash Chaturvedi and His Journey
02:37 Transitioning into Product Leadership at Amazon
04:49 Innovations in Prime Video: Machine Learning and Compliance
07:33 The Evolution of Product Management in AI
10:10 The Role of AI in Enhancing Product Management
12:25 Advice for Aspiring Product Managers
15:11 The Future of AI in Product Management
22:46 Innovations in Virtual Product Placement
24:21 The Journey to Patent Filing
30:03 Creative Storytelling in Product Development
35:00 Navigating the Patent Process
39:34 Frameworks for High-Stakes Product Decisions
43:27 The Future of AI Beyond Advertising
46:40 Final Thoughts on AI and Product Management
Nicholas E. Adams joins the PreVetted Podcast for a candid conversation about leadership, brand truth, AI’s role in communications, and why community partnerships are a growth strategy—not a side quest.
Nicholas traces his inspiration to family values and early mentors from the agency world, grounding his leadership in ethics, transparency, and service. Operating from Silicon Valley—“a state of mind, not just a place”—he emphasizes a “we, not me” approach: real progress happens when people get in the same room, look each other in the eye, and do the work together.
As CEO of NINICO®, Nicholas distills his operating system to “strategy first, execution always.” Strategy isn’t an internal echo chamber: it includes external stakeholders—clients, chambers of commerce, industry associations, and community groups—because that’s where blind spots surface and better solutions emerge. Branding, for Nicholas, is “telling your truth well.” Logos and color palettes matter, but only as vehicles for a clear brand promise delivered with consistency.
On AI, Nicholas is pragmatic: it’s a tool that helps teams work smarter, faster, and with more precision—but it must never replace human connection. NINICO® has adopted internal AI ethics guidelines aligned with leading industry bodies, reflecting a careful stance on privacy, sensitivity, and responsible deployment. He highlights the growing field of AI ethics (from practitioners like Olivia Gambelin to academic centers such as Santa Clara University’s Markkula Center and Tech Interactive’s Bowers Institute) and advocates for smart policy shaped by responsible business voices.
Discussing challenges, Nicholas rejects the myth of the “challenge-free CEO.” Obstacles arrive daily; the response is learning, listening, and trusting the team. He underscores the importance of a strong No. 2 (shoutout to VP Sarah Farrant), the discipline to stay quiet and listen, and the CEO’s paradoxical balance of stubborn vision and sensitivity to feedback.
Looking ahead, he predicts the future of marketing will be more personal, more data-driven, and more global—with consolidation across agencies and a premium on remaining relevant and meaningful amid the noise.
As Chairman of the Board at the San Jose Chamber of Commerce, Nicholas champions study missions and cross-city learning (e.g., Atlanta) to bring back bold, practical ideas. For him, community engagement isn’t charity theater; it’s core strategy. He frames this as the “Power of Partnership” and a redefinition of ROI: Return on Involvement. Working with nonprofits and industry associations deepens local impact and strengthens the business pipeline—because people want to work with leaders who show up.
Throughout, Nicholas threads social responsibility into business practice: profit and purpose aren’t opposites; when aligned, they reinforce each other. His closing call to action: go create a bold, unique partnership—internally or externally—that moves your mission forward.
About Nicholas E. Adams:
- AGENCY: https://www.ninico.com/
- CONNECT: https://www.linkedin.com/in/nicholaseadams/
About Federico Ramallo ✨👨💻🌎
🚀 Software Engineering Manager | 🛠 Founder of DensityLabs.io & PreVetted.ai | 🤝 Connecting 🇺🇸 U.S. teams with top nearshore 🌎 LATAM engineers
- 💼 https://www.linkedin.com/in/framallo/
- 🌐 https://densitylabs.io
- ✅ https://prevetted.ai
🎙 PreVetted Podcast 🎧📡
- 🎯 https://prevetted.ai/podcast
- 🐦 https://x.com/PrevettedPod
- 🔗 https://www.linkedin.com/company/prevetted-podcast
00:00 Introduction to Nicholas E. Adams
01:07 Inspiration and Leadership Style
06:56 Guiding Philosophy as CEO
11:30 The Role of Community in Business
17:07 Navigating Challenges as a CEO
20:06 Balancing Profitability with Social Impact
26:42 The Future of Marketing and AI
33:13 Fostering Creativity and Social Responsibility
Priyank Mohan traces a candid journey from QA/testing and networking, through consulting at PwC and Accenture, to platform product leadership at Amazon—owning 0→1 builds that now serve a 2M+ workforce. In this conversation, he unpacks his current mission: enabling Amazon to uphold UN-aligned human rights standards across its global supply chain. Priyank explains how his team builds the underlying platforms—guardrails, monitoring, and automation—that help program owners detect risks (e.g., forced or child labor), trigger remediation, and measure adherence at massive scale. The product challenge, he notes, is familiar: translate abstract principles like fairness and dignity into concrete requirements, scalable architectures, and auditable outcomes—so humans spend time on high-judgment work, not toil.
He contrasts consulting with building inside Big Tech: as a consultant you ship prototypes and move on; as a PM you own decisions end-to-end—high risk, high reward. That ownership demands data-driven prioritization and, crucially, the ability to say “no.” A consulting habit he still relies on is visual storytelling: pairing Amazon’s document culture with clear architecture diagrams and workflows to align diverse stakeholders.
Priyank shares a formative DevOps engagement where his team stitched open-source tooling into a CI/CD pipeline that took code from build to production-ready in about an hour—an experience that sharpened his “deliver incrementally” mantra. He and Federico explore why enterprise product is uniquely hard: entrenched behaviors, political friction, risk aversion, and adoption hurdles. Priyank’s antidote is relationship-driven discovery—maintaining a small, representative set of “first-name-basis” users, challenging surface requests to get to root causes, and deciding what not to build (avoiding the “Homer Simpson car” of features).
On AI, he’s optimistic but grounded: today it supercharges prototyping and alignment, not production by default. Non-determinism and missing abstractions mean engineering rigor still matters—but PMs can now demonstrate visions in minutes, accelerating discovery and consensus.
About Priyank Mohan:
- https://www.linkedin.com/in/priyankmohan/
About Federico Ramallo ✨👨💻🌎
🚀 Software Engineering Manager | 🛠 Founder of DensityLabs.io & PreVetted.ai | 🤝 Connecting 🇺🇸 U.S. teams with top nearshore 🌎 LATAM engineers
- 💼 https://www.linkedin.com/in/framallo/
- 🌐 https://densitylabs.io
- ✅ https://prevetted.ai
🎙 PreVetted Podcast 🎧📡
- 🎯 https://prevetted.ai/podcast
- 🐦 https://x.com/PrevettedPod
- 🔗 https://www.linkedin.com/company/prevetted-podcast
00:00 Introduction to Ethical Tech and Human Rights
02:14 Human Rights in Supply Chain Management
06:42 Translating Ethics into Product Requirements
09:19 Measuring Impact Beyond Metrics
11:06 Consulting Habits in Product Management
12:37 Transformative Experiences from Consulting
16:22 Building vs. Advising: The Consultant's Perspective
20:49 The Value of Fresh Perspectives
23:31 Ownership and Impact in Product Development
27:10 The Thrill of the Unknown in Product Management
30:39 The Art of Product Management
34:40 Challenging the Status Quo
39:04 Building Relationships with Users
41:34 Navigating Enterprise Challenges
46:22 Innovation vs. Risk in Enterprises
49:30 The Impact of AI on Product Management
52:44 Advice for Aspiring Product Managers
55:41 Looking Ahead: The Future of AI
Leigh Monichon shares a deeply personal and practical roadmap for navigating special education—and why she built Aspire Advocacy to help families do it with confidence and compassion.
In this conversation, Leigh traces the origins of her advocacy to her son’s journey with autism and the hard-won lessons that followed. What began as a parent’s “mama bear” instinct evolved into a calling: teaching families how to work the system without losing heart. She explains the realities many parents face—confusing processes, opaque options, and decisions often constrained by budgets—and how understanding the rules, timelines, and sequence of an IEP (Individualized Education Program) can turn a stressful fight into a structured plan.
Leigh breaks down her collaborative, non-combative style: assume educators want to help, use questions to surface the right solutions, and build relationships that make it easier for teams to say “yes.” Empathy is non-negotiable—but so is a bit of emotional distance, which lets her be the calm advocate in the room when parents’ hearts are “on the table.” She coaches families to find their voice, decide when to speak or let her be “bad cop,” and stay engaged more than once a year so goals don’t drift.
You’ll hear standout success stories—from a student once isolated for behavior who learned to read and now leads in junior high, to families who finally feel heard and supported. Leigh highlights why personalization matters in a school system built like a production line, and how the right supports (behavior plans, literacy interventions, AAC/assistive tech, targeted services) can transform outcomes for students and classrooms alike.
The episode also explores:
- How to recognize the signals that it’s time to seek an advocate.
- Why knowing options behind the “three curtains” of services is power.
- The role of data, documentation, and sequencing in getting appropriate services.
- How to stay current on federal/state regulations (and why polite, persistent questioning works).
- Coaching parents from anxiety to agency—so meetings go from adversarial to effective.
Looking ahead, Leigh shares Aspire Advocacy’s momentum: speaking with a Stanford autism group (tech hiccups included), expanding impact with a new partner who brings special ed leadership experience, and building a lasting legacy so the work continues well beyond her own career.
If you’re a parent, educator, or community leader seeking a humane, strategic approach to special education, Leigh Monichon offers a masterclass in turning overwhelm into action—and in remembering that the goal isn’t to fit kids to a system, but to fit the system to each child.
About Leigh Monichon:
- https://aspireadvocacy.com/
- leigh@aspireadvocacy.com
About Federico Ramallo ✨👨💻🌎
🚀 Software Engineering Manager | 🛠 Founder of DensityLabs.io & PreVetted.ai | 🤝 Connecting 🇺🇸 U.S. teams with top nearshore 🌎 LATAM engineers
- 💼 https://www.linkedin.com/in/framallo/
- 🌐 https://densitylabs.io
- ✅ https://prevetted.ai
🎙 PreVetted Podcast 🎧📡
- 🎯 https://prevetted.ai/podcast
- 🐦 https://x.com/PrevettedPod
- 🔗 https://www.linkedin.com/company/prevetted-podcast
00:00 Introduction to Aspire Advocacy and Lig Monichon
01:07 The Journey to Becoming a Special Education Advocate
05:31 Challenges in the Special Education System
10:49 Understanding Aspire Advocacy's Mission
15:14 Transformative Success Stories in Special Education
18:27 Misconceptions About Special Education
19:44 When to Seek Advocacy Support
21:55 The Education System as a Production Line
24:31 Holistic Support for Teachers and Students
27:46 Success Stories in Advocacy
32:05 The Role of Empathy in Advocacy
35:32 Navigating Regulations in Special Education
42:32 Future Aspirations for Aspire Advocacy
Dr. Ewelina Kurtys is a scientist-turned-entrepreneur pushing the frontier of bio-inspired computing. In this conversation, she traces her path from a PhD in neuroscience and 20+ peer-reviewed papers to commercializing deep-tech and advising startups. Curiosity pulled her beyond academia into fast-moving environments where she could turn technical knowledge into real-world impact.Ewelina explains her work with FinalSpark, where teams are prototyping processors made from living neurons—3D “neurospheres/organoids” of ~10,000 neurons placed on electrode arrays. Researchers stimulate these neurons electrically or via chemicals (like dopamine) and read their spiking activity, aiming to program living tissue to process information. It’s early: they’ve demonstrated storing one bit and are building methods and automation (Python-scripted experiments, 24/7) to scale learning.Why do this? Energy efficiency. Neurons are vastly more energy-efficient than today’s AI hardware. While digital systems excel at speed and memory for repetitive tasks, biological systems may better handle complex, generative tasks at a tiny energy cost. The goal isn’t niche accelerators but eventually general biocomputing, culminating in cloud-style bio-servers people can connect to—like today’s GPU clouds.She is frank about the challenges: we still lack a full mathematical framework for how neurons encode information; brains are plastic and messy, so outputs vary over time; and biology brings stability and longevity hurdles. FinalSpark has kept neurons alive on electrodes for months and is pushing toward years, while also engaging philosophers on ethics as public interest grows. Their remote neuroplatform lets universities and companies run experiments over the internet, scaling collaboration and reproducibility; 10+ universities already use it, and first commercial subscribers have arrived.Key takeaways:- Transition: from academic neuroscience to startup commercialization and strategy.- FinalSpark vision: living-neuron processors for AI tasks with orders-of-magnitude lower energy.- State of the art: organoids on electrodes, chemical/electrical programming, automated, scriptable lab.- Hard problems: encoding frameworks, plasticity, stability, neuron longevity, ethics.- Platform: remote, 24/7 wetware lab for global teams; growing academic and commercial interest.- Past papers: PET imaging, microglia & diet, CAR-T tracking—methods that shaped her applied mindset.- Future: bio-servers accessible like cloud GPUs; LLM-driven automation accelerating science.About Ewelina Kurtys:- https://www.linkedin.com/in/ewelinakurtys/- https://finalspark.comAbout Federico Ramallo ✨👨💻🌎🚀 Software Engineering Manager | 🛠 Founder of DensityLabs.io & PreVetted.ai | 🤝 Connecting 🇺🇸 U.S. teams with top nearshore 🌎 LATAM engineers- 💼 https://www.linkedin.com/in/framallo/- 🌐 https://densitylabs.io- ✅ https://prevetted.ai🎙 PreVetted Podcast 🎧📡- 🎯 https://prevetted.ai/podcast- 🐦 https://x.com/PrevettedPod- 🔗 https://www.linkedin.com/company/prevetted-podcast00:00 From Neuroscience to Entrepreneurship02:13 Lessons from Academia03:46 Bio-Inspired Computing: The Future of Technology08:45 Challenges in Developing Living Computers13:52 The Complexity of the Brain19:22 Nutrition and Brain Health24:41 The Nature of Scientific Discovery27:53 Challenges in Peer Review and Publication29:22 The Power of Imaging in Neuroscience32:33 Translating Animal Research to Humans34:28 The Debate on Full Body Scans38:26 Advancements in CAR T Cell Therapy41:08 Innovations in Remote Biocomputing46:15 The Future of Science and Biocomputing
Ken Pickering, CTO of Scripta Insights, joins Federico to unpack how his team is using AI and large-scale data to tackle the opaque, often unfair U.S. pharmacy pricing system. Ken explains why drug costs vary wildly person-to-person, how that opacity drives prescription “abandonment,” and where Scripta intervenes: ingesting messy plan documents, inferring benefits and conditions, modeling deductibles, and recommending clinically sound, lower-cost alternatives (including cash-pay options). He draws a surprising parallel to his work at Hopper: much like airfare, drug pricing is non-deterministic to consumers, so the real job is reducing ambiguity with clear UX and trustworthy recommendations.Ken reflects on what excites him now—building at startup speed while doing work that measurably helps people afford and adhere to their meds. He traces his path from a curious kid disassembling record players, to BASIC and web tinkering, to early hardware work on military vehicles, then into consumer and B2B2C software. His move into leadership was the familiar story of “you’re in charge now,” but he stayed because he loves teams, shipping, and the thrill of delivering products people actually use.On leadership, Ken argues CTOs should remain hands-on enough to understand hard tradeoffs, coach principal ICs, and prototype ideas—especially with modern AI tooling that enables quick scaffolds between meetings. He shares how growth changes the job: leading 20 engineers vs. 200+ means shifting from direct architecture decisions to building managers, processes, and culture that still produce on-time, high-quality outcomes.Culture under stress is a recurring theme. Ken favors blamelessness, psychological safety, and trust—so people raise problems fast, learn, and move on. In startups, chaos is guaranteed (demos, P0s, shifting roadmaps), so resilience and clarity about “shipping matters” are essential. On hiring, he rejects “soft yes/no” and trains interviewers to make clear calls; for senior leaders, he even starts at “no” and asks candidates to convert him to “yes,” given the high blast radius of a bad leadership hire. He and Federico also discuss humane rejections with actionable feedback and “not yet” guidance.Ken opens up about the hardest, least visible part of being a CTO: the weight of responsibility for budgets, headcount, and company outcomes—especially during downturns or black swan events (like selling flights in 2020). Layoffs, misses, and market shocks carry a personal, emotional toll leaders rarely get to share, yet the work demands steady judgment and care for people.Takeaways for aspiring leaders: stay technical enough to lead credibly; cultivate trust and a shipping mindset; design hiring you can scale without lowering the bar; and choose problems worth your energy—ideally ones that make complex systems simpler, fairer, and better for the people who rely on them.About Ken Pickering:- http://www.scriptainsights.comAbout Federico Ramallo ✨👨💻🌎🚀 Software Engineering Manager | 🛠 Founder of DensityLabs.io & PreVetted.ai | 🤝 Connecting 🇺🇸 U.S. teams with top nearshore 🌎 LATAM engineers- 💼 https://www.linkedin.com/in/framallo/- 🌐 https://densitylabs.io- ✅ https://prevetted.ai🎙 PreVetted Podcast 🎧📡- 🎯 https://prevetted.ai/podcast- 🐦 https://x.com/PrevettedPod- 🔗 https://www.linkedin.com/company/prevetted-podcast00:00 Introduction to Scripta Insights and Pharmacy Pricing Challenges02:40 The Role of AI in Pharmacy Solutions05:12 Ken Pickering's Journey in Technology and Leadership07:50 Navigating Engineering Leadership and Team Dynamics10:33 Building Trust and Motivation in Startups13:36 The Importance of Technical Knowledge in Leadership16:10 Challenges and Stress in Startup Environments25:52 Navigating Stressful Demos and Live Presentations29:27 The Evolution of Engineering Roles33:05 Managing People and Processes36:24 The Burden of Leadership43:49 The Emotional Toll of Hiring and Firing
Jason Fishman: In this episode, growth marketer, investor, and podcaster Jason Fishman traces his path from action-sports consultant and Gen-Y specialist to co-founder and SVP of Digital Strategy at Digital Niche Agency (DNA). He explains how early work across social gaming and mobile ad networks shaped his obsession with measurable, scalable acquisition—and why that lens ultimately pulled him into the capital-raising arena (Reg D 506(c), Reg CF, and Reg A+).Jason breaks down his “Eight Point Plan” strategy: start with an industry overview, run a competitor marketing audit, then craft headline-worthy creative that mirrors what the target audience already consumes. Success leaves clues, and the best campaigns fuse social proof, third-party validation, and crystal-clear numbers into concise, shareable stories.We dive deep into investor marketing mechanics: audience targeting, pixel discipline, and funnel design that moves prospects from consideration to conversion and repeat engagement. Jason shares crowdfunding realities—why average Reg CF investments hover around the four figures, how many total site visits you should expect per 2,000 investments, and why the first week’s momentum (often fueled by your first-degree network) can set the conversion rate for the entire raise. He also details the “crowd dynamics” behind social proof: everyone wants to be first to be second, so your job is to make the campaign feel already in motion.On channels, Jason argues YouTube is still underrated for direct response—if (and only if) you can nail the hook, value proposition, support, and CTA in seconds. He outlines how paid and organic have blurred, why creative now outweighs targeting, and how to scale what works through a relentless test-optimize-scale loop.Common founder mistakes? Treating marketing as an afterthought, launching without a pre-launch plan, and assuming “if we build it, they will come.” His remedy: start strategy months before go-live, publish a content calendar with built-in third-party validators, and define the algorithmic roadmap for getting 50k–250k qualified visits to the offering page.We close on mindset. Top issuers “do more”—more content, more conversations with experts, more advertising, and more amplification of what’s working. For Jason, disciplined experimentation plus bold, consistent execution is how brands earn attention, build trust, and raise at scale.About Jason Fishman:- https://www.linkedin.com/in/jafishman/About Federico Ramallo ✨👨💻🌎🚀 Software Engineering Manager | 🛠 Founder of DensityLabs.io & PreVetted.ai | 🤝 Connecting 🇺🇸 U.S. teams with top nearshore 🌎 LATAM engineers- 💼 https://www.linkedin.com/in/framallo/- 🌐 https://densitylabs.io- ✅ https://prevetted.ai🎙 PreVetted Podcast 🎧📡- 🎯 https://prevetted.ai/podcast- 🐦 https://x.com/PrevettedPod- 🔗 https://www.linkedin.com/company/prevetted-podcast00:00 Introduction to Jason Fishman and His Journey04:22 Navigating Regulations in Crowdfunding and Investor Marketing08:47 The Importance of Digital Acquisition and Scalable Marketing Strategies13:20 Effective Marketing Strategies in a Noisy Digital Landscape17:37 Measuring Demand and Analyzing Market Trends21:49 Underrated Digital Channels for Customer Acquisition24:23 Mastering Organic Content on YouTube28:32 Navigating YouTube's Advertising Landscape32:28 The Evolution of Performance Marketing34:29 Building Momentum in Crowdfunding41:29 Common Mistakes in Investor Marketing
Danielle Costa-Nakano shares how, as Chief Product Officer at Grassroots Analytics, she’s leading a shift from data-as-a-service to software-as-a-service to help nonprofit and political organizations escape spreadsheet sprawl and tool fragmentation. Danielle explains why many teams still spend half their day importing/exporting CSVs across 7–10 systems and how a central data platform—with strong APIs, embedded analytics, and AI-assisted workflows—can surface “the right ask, to the right person, at the right time,” replacing manual busywork with actionable insight.She introduces Quiller, an AI-first content creator that drafts emails, texts, letters, and taglines in the organization’s own voice, keeping a human-in-the-loop to augment rather than replace staff. Beyond any single tool, Danielle argues for a post-CRM approach: orchestrate multiple CRMs and best-of-breed apps via APIs to form a unified, 360° picture—then predict, decide, and act.Drawing on two decades across NGP VAN/Bonterra and the National Geographic Society, Danielle breaks down the foundations of trustworthy AI and data products: data governance, clear data contracts, and an SDLC applied to data itself. She also goes deep on team craft: people-first leadership; treating QA as an ally and “internal power user”; investing early in UX research and design to drive product-market fit; and insisting on reliable CI so “green means green.”On rapid alignment, her teams use “vibe coding” and AI prototyping (e.g., Vercel v0, Figma AI) to explore ideas and test information architecture—useful for shared understanding, but not production-ready code. Engineers then rebuild with reusable components and proper abstractions.Danielle also maps the sector’s headwinds—donor fatigue, tougher planning cycles, and the vast range from volunteer-run nonprofits to global impact orgs—and underscores a simple value promise: modern, efficient tools at the right price, in service of the mission. - Moving from DaaS to SaaS to reduce manual data work and unlock insight - Quiller: AI content creation that preserves brand voice (human-in-the-loop) - Post-CRM orchestration: connect many CRMs and tools via APIs for a unified view - Data governance & contracts as prerequisites for analytics/AI that lasts - UX as a PMF driver; QA as partner; CI you can trust - Vibe coding/AI prototyping for speed and alignment—then rebuild properly - People-first leadership through mergers, rebuilds, and launches - Advice to newcomers: go deep on data—there’s a role for every skillset (APIs, risk, interfaces, science)About Danielle Nakano:- https://www.daniellecostanakano.comAbout Federico Ramallo ✨👨💻🌎🚀 Software Engineering Manager | 🛠 Founder of DensityLabs.io & PreVetted.ai | 🤝 Connecting 🇺🇸 U.S. teams with top nearshore 🌎 LATAM engineers- 💼 https://www.linkedin.com/in/framallo/- 🌐 https://densitylabs.io- ✅ https://prevetted.ai🎙 PreVetted Podcast 🎧📡- 🎯 https://prevetted.ai/podcast- 🐦 https://x.com/PrevettedPod- 🔗 https://www.linkedin.com/company/prevetted-podcast00:00 Introduction to Danielle Costa-Nacano and Grassroots Analytics03:09 Transitioning from Data as a Service to Software as a Service06:02 The Role of AI in Content Creation and Data Management08:54 Lessons from Previous Roles at National Geographic and Bonterra11:59 Building Products for Nonprofits and Social Good15:02 Challenges Faced by Nonprofits Today17:52 Data Infrastructure and Integration Issues20:48 The Importance of Data Governance24:01 Enhancing Donor Relationships with AI26:54 Conclusion and Future Outlook27:24 Integrating Data for Better Decision Making29:38 The Importance of People in Leadership32:48 Collaboration Across Teams38:08 Quality Assurance and Development39:48 User Experience as a Key Factor45:19 Prototyping and AI in Product Development51:33 Advice for Future Data Professionals