Not Another Podcast

The Founder Who Runs Offsites for 500+ Companies Says Most Remote Teams Get This Wrong | Jared Kleinert

Jared Kleinert is the Founder and CEO of Offsite, the company that handles end-to-end retreat and offsite planning for hundreds of companies, including Perplexity, HubSpot, Walmart, and Remote. Before building Offsite, he became one of the most connected people in the startup world, was named USA Today's "Millennial Influencer of the Year," and wrote books about building relationships and building companies. In this episode, Brennan and Jared get into why the bar to stand out as a job applicant is shockingly low (and what to actually do about it), Dan Martell's 10-80-10 rule for using AI without losing your voice, what actually builds remote work culture and what doesn't, why fundraising might be creating more risk than you think, and why the founders who do the service manually before they build the tech are almost always the ones who win. If you're hiring, building, or just trying to figure out how to use AI without becoming a copy-paste machine, this one's for you. Subscribe to Not Another Podcast wherever you get your shows.

The PhD Founder Who Left the Lab to Fix What Science Got Wrong: Liisi Laaniste

Liisi Laaniste spent over a decade studying one of the deadliest brain cancers in the world, glioblastoma, which kills most patients within 15 months and hasn't seen a meaningful change in standard treatment since 2005. She published in top journals. She ranked first in her class at Uppsala University. She earned her PhD in Computational Systems Biology at Imperial College London. And then she decided that publishing papers wasn't going to be enough to actually save anyone. So she left academia and co-founded CoSyne Therapeutics: a vertically integrated AI drug discovery company building precision medicines for brain diseases that pharma has largely walked away from. CoSyne has raised $7.8M from Amino Collective, Backed VC, Phoenix Court, and Meltwind Advisory and has built the world's largest single-cell CRISPRi perturbation dataset, generated entirely from real patient tumor tissue. In this episode, Brennan and Liisi go deep on the gap between what science discovers and what actually reaches patients and what it takes to close it. In this episode: - The 70% reproducibility crisis: most published biology and chemistry research cannot be replicated in a lab (and AI is being trained on all of it) - How AI is cutting the drug development timeline from 16 years to 2 - The "publish or perish" system that actively disincentivizes scientists from checking each other's work - What a squid in Japan, an octopus, and a jellyfish can teach us about curing disease - Why "you can just do things" is the most important lesson academia never taught her - The co-founder as the real moat and why finding the right one is the unicorn event of any startup - Bryan Johnson: legitimate longevity experiment or something else entirely? Subscribe for more episodes of Not Another Podcast. If you know anyone building at the intersection of AI and life sciences, send them this one.

The 12 Most Important Founder Frameworks For 2026

Six months. 21 episodes. Conversations with hardware founders, AI journalists, sex therapists, repeat unicorn builders, and the people training the robots that might change everything. In this special solo episode of Not Another Podcast, Brennan Pothetes sits down alone and riffs on the clips that hit hardest, the takes that got the most heat, and what he's actually learned from the guests he's hosted over the last six months. Brennan revisits Nicole Maffeo's claim that hardware is the only moat, Natassia Miller on why communication in the bedroom translates to the boardroom, Brandon Arvanaghi on why one B player can sink a company, Dave Blakely on founder self-sabotage, Dane Atkinson on the weight of raising friends-and-family money, Jess Mah on why 996 is bullshit, Alex Konrad on how entrepreneurship gets over-glamorized, Anto Patrex on robots and the future of work, Ravi Kurani on the heartache of selling a business, Marty Ringlein on playing power law, and Alfia Ilicheva on what it means to live every day like life is finite. Thanks to every guest who came on, every listener who DM'd, and every founder who saw themselves in these clips. Here's to the next six months.

Nicole Maffeo Returns: The Case Against Humanoid Robots (From a Robotics Founder and Former Google AI Research Lead)

Nicole Maffeo was the very first guest on Not Another Podcast. She's back, and the conversation picks up right where we left off. Nicole is a former Bridgewater investor, ex-Google AI research leader, and co-founder of Gambit Robotics, where she's building specialized robots for the home. In Part 1, she gave us the thesis: the only real moat left in AI is hardware, and the global AI race is really 8 battles happening at once. In Part 2, she updates that thesis and goes further. In this episode, Brennan and Nicole break down: • Why humanoid robots are the wrong bet for your home, and why specialized, distributed robotics wins • How the AI race has shifted from horizontal competition (best model) to vertical stack dominance, with different countries owning different layers • Why OpenAI buying a podcast network is a vertical integration play, not a content play • Why people hate big tech, and how 20 years of social media toxicity broke public trust • Nicole's experience as one of the only women in every room she's walked into, from competitive chess at age 6, to Bridgewater, to Google AI, to crypto, to robotics • The mentors who championed her, and why she pays it forward at every company she works at Subscribe for more episodes of Not Another Podcast. If you know a founder building in AI, robotics, or deep tech, send them this one. Check out Nicole's company, Gambit Robotics: https://www.gambitrobotics.ai [https://www.gambitrobotics.ai]

Why Hardware Is One of the Last Real Moats, with Eric Litman

Eric Litman grew up on Saint Thomas in the US Virgin Islands, graduated high school at 15, and landed at NeXT working alongside Steve Jobs while still in college. Since then he's co-founded Proxicom, built Viaduct, founded Medialets (acquired by WPP), and managed WashingtonVC, an early-stage venture fund in DC. Today he's the Founder and CEO of Aescape, a robotics company building AI-powered, fully automated full-body massage systems. He's also 52 and says he's in the best shape of his life, leaner, stronger, and sharper than he was at 35. I had to ask how. In this conversation, Eric walks through the system he's built to track his own biology over decades, why he thinks longitudinal data is the missing piece in how most people approach their health, and why the "four pillars" of wellness aren't enough on their own. We also go deep on where AI and robotics actually stand right now. Eric has built through the internet wave, the mobile wave, the social wave, and now AI. He makes the case that this one is fundamentally different because the technology has agency, the ability to make its own decisions. In this episode: • Why intelligence is becoming a purchasable commodity and what that means for software founders • The real gap between humanoid robot demos on YouTube and what those machines can actually do today • His prediction that the concept of "apps" starts to break down once real AI lives on your phone • How he tracks every biomarker, lab result, and doctor visit to build a longitudinal health profile • Emergent AI behaviors: why Claude is getting "sassy" and what that signals about where we're headed Eric has seen more tech waves than almost anyone I've talked to on this show, and his perspective on what's coming next is worth hearing. Subscribe for more episodes of Not Another Podcast. If you know a founder, operator, or anyone building in AI, robotics, or health tech, send them this one.