How a 6th-Grade Dropout From Togo Built a $100M Fair Trade Brand With No VC

How a 6th-Grade Dropout From Togo Built a $100M Fair Trade Brand With No VC

Olowo-n'djo Tchala grew up sharing an 8x10 room with his mother and seven siblings in Togo (a family of 41 brothers and sisters, one of the world's poorest countries) and left school after the sixth grade. In 1996, a Peace Corps volunteer named Prairie Rose came to his village. They fell in love and moved to California. Later on with 17 women in West Africa, a shea nut tree, and student loans, he built Alaffia: a fair-trade beauty company that would reach $100M in sales, 250,000 lives touched in West Africa, and shelf space in Whole Foods nationwide. No outside investors. For twenty years. Then the investors arrived. Four months later, Olo resigned. He couldn't look the West African women in the eyes and tell them their wages were being cut. He watched Alaffia deteriorate from the outside. He built Ayeya from scratch… no capital, a changed market, everything to prove again. Then, in late 2025, he bought Alaffia back. What Brennan and Olo get into in this episode goes beyond any founder story NAP has told: Why Olo went 20 years without outside investors and what happened within 4 months of taking the money The specific moment "optimization" crossed from business decision to personal betrayal "I see all these women as my mother" and why that made the investor conversation impossible The community programs that can't be measured in EBITDA, including a woman who named her baby after the brand because it saved her life What two years of depression looked like after leaving a company woven into every wall of his home How he launched Ayeya with no capital, in a market that had changed, and decided to go all out because he had nothing left to lose Why buying Alaffia back felt like life and death, not a transaction His vision: West Africa needs to stop being a raw material producer His answer to the question he's always wanted to be asked: "What does healing look like in business?" His billboard: "Don't compromise the fire that you have in you." Subscribe to Not Another Podcast on YouTube, Spotify, and Apple Podcasts. Follow Infinity @infinityvc. Find Alaffia at alaffia.com [http://alaffia.com], available at Whole Foods stores nationwide.

The $500M Hedge Fund Where Every Single Employee Owns a Piece: Shamir Karkal

Shamir Karkal co-founded Simple in 2009, one of the first real digital-first banks in the US. When he sold it to BBVA for $117M in 2014, he and his co-founder fought their board to distribute $14.6M of the proceeds to roughly 100 employees, excluding the founders. He's applied that same principle at every company since, including his current AI fund, where every employee owns a stake in the fund itself. In the hedge fund world, that's almost unheard of. Today he's Co-founder and President of Aleph Invariance, an AI fund based in Portland with an intentionally low public footprint. He's also Co-founder and Chief Strategy Officer of Sila, the programmable money API platform that has raised $20M+. Before Sila, he built BBVA's Open Platform after the Simple acquisition, creating the API infrastructure that helped power a generation of embedded-finance startups in the US. In this episode: Why first movers do the hard work and second movers capture the upside How employees get screwed on options at acquisition, and how Shamir did it differently The $14.6M employee payout from Simple and the board fight behind it Why every Aleph Invariance employee owns a stake in the fund What PNC destroyed when they shut Simple down How to build a de novo AI fund when you've never worked in finance Why humanities majors are about to become more valuable than engineers If you know a founder who's ever wondered whether it's possible to build something great without leaving your team behind, send them this one. Subscribe for more episodes of Not Another Podcast every week!

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.