The Digital Executive

In this episode of The Digital Executive Podcast, host Brian Thomas sits down with David Cash, founder of CASH Labs, to explore the rapid evolution of Web3, NFTs, the metaverse, and emerging technology. David shares how the pandemic led him from entertainment and media into the world of NFTs, where his viral master’s thesis became the foundation for a career helping brands understand and apply emerging technologies. He discusses how Web3 has evolved beyond the hype into practical applications such as digital product passports, blockchain-based certificates of authenticity, and tokenized real-w

In this episode of The Digital Executive Podcast, host Brian Thomas sits down with Max Anderson, owner and CEO of OnlyFinder, to pull back the curtain on the surprisingly sophisticated data and search infrastructure powering creator discovery in one of the internet's fastest-growing economies. Max opens with an origin story rooted in SEO mastery — years of spending venture capital money at Porch figuring out what works, followed by a portfolio of ranked sites, a webcam affiliate payment that mysteriously 10X'd during the pandemic, and a pivot into OnlyFans discovery when the search volume made

In this episode of The Digital Executive Podcast, host Brian Thomas sits down with Vikul Gupta, CTO of Quality AI, to explore how AI is transforming quality engineering and why trust will be critical to moving AI from pilot projects into production. Vikul shares his journey from DevOps and engineering into AI-powered quality, explaining how AI can prevent defects, identify root causes, and uncover test coverage gaps through real customer journeys and production data. He also discusses the rise of AI-generated code, the growing need for AI assurance, and why quality engineering is evolving into

In this episode of The Digital Executive Podcast, host Brian Thomas sits down with Jesse Tayler, the Silicon Valley pioneer who invented the world's first App Store and personally demoed it to Steve Jobs in 1993, to explore why the man who helped build the modern internet is now dedicating the final chapter of his career to fighting the dangers it created. Jesse opens with the remarkable story of that 1993 demo — a Hail Mary at a San Francisco software trade show, a cold approach to Jobs in a crowded booth, and an unglamorous but consequential nod of approval that validated an idea the world w

In this episode of The Digital Executive Podcast, host Brian Thomas sits down with Daniel Ishag, Chief Commercial Officer at Bakkt, to explore why the financial infrastructure the world runs on was never designed for the speed, availability, or autonomy that the agentic AI era demands — and what it takes to build the layer that bridges the two. Daniel opens with a career defined by solving old problems through new frameworks: founding Europe's first performance-based ad network and merging it for $183 million, building water technology for underserved utility markets, and moving into digital a

In this episode of The Digital Executive Podcast, Brian Thomas sits down with Mike Lucas, co-founder of North Performance, to explore the growing world of performance longevity. Mike shares how decades of surfing, snowboarding, injuries, and recovery led him to build a science-backed wellness brand designed to help active people perform at their best for longer. He discusses simplifying daily supplementation, combining clinical expertise with elite athlete insights, and how wearables, diagnostics, and personalized nutrition could shape the future of recovery and healthy aging. If you liked w

In this episode of The Digital Executive Podcast, host Brian Thomas sits down with Mike Link, Chief Operating Officer at KamiVision, to explore how computer vision and AI are quietly transforming the way seniors are protected — not just in care facilities, but at home. Mike opens with a career path that wound through real estate, preventative health work in India, and go-to-market consulting before landing at KamiVision, where a personal connection to aging and loss made the mission feel like more than a business opportunity. He breaks down what makes Kami Care's fall detection different from

In this episode of The Digital Executive Podcast, host Brian Thomas sits down with Jason Hishmeh, co-founder of Variance and Aequit, to explore what it actually looks like to deploy AI inside a business responsibly — with security and compliance built in from the start rather than added as an afterthought. Jason opens with an origin story that begins in a corporate accounting department where nobody had a computer, and traces twenty-five years of compounding curiosity through ERP systems, infrastructure, application development, cybersecurity, and eventually AI entrepreneurship. The through li

In this episode of The Digital Executive Podcast, host Brian Thomas sits down with Luis Derechin, founder and CEO of Nir-Yu and author of The Offshore Team Death Trap, to break down why international hiring fails so consistently — and what it actually takes to get it right. Luis opens with the origin story: a young entrepreneur who raised venture capital for Mexico's first US-funded tech startup, quickly realized American salaries would burn through the runway, and turned to a blended US-Latin America team that cut costs by seventy to eighty percent without sacrificing quality. That necessity

In this episode of The Digital Executive Podcast, host Brian Thomas sits down with Vanessa Slowey, President and CEO of TelyRx, to explore what happens when a lifetime of lessons about access, infrastructure, and trust finally converge in one mission. Vanessa opens with a story that begins above a small-town pharmacy in Sligo, Ireland, where her father's philosophy was simple: if someone needs medication, you figure out how to get it to them. That instinct followed her through a career building mobile networks across some of the world's most challenging terrain — Papua New Guinea, the Caribbea

In this episode of The Digital Executive Podcast, host Brian Thomas sits down with Justin and Travis Maderia, fourth-generation lobstermen and co-founders of Lobster Boys, for a conversation about resilience, integrity, and what it actually takes to fight a broken food system from the bottom up. Justin opens with a story that is equal parts loss and determination — watching his family's fishery collapse over 25 years due to poor regulation, pesticide use, and unsustainable practices, then rebuilding by fishing the waters of Grand Manan, Canada, where better regulations produced visibly better

In this episode of The Digital Executive Podcast, host Brian Thomas sits down with Tatiana Aleksandrova, co-founder and CEO of Subsense, to explore one of the most ambitious bets in deep tech — a non-surgical brain-computer interface that could eventually allow humans to communicate directly with AI, each other, and the digital world using nothing but thought. Tatiana opens by explaining why she founded her second BCI company: her first taught her that fully non-invasive approaches lack the signal precision needed for truly transformative applications, while surgical implants will never scale

In this episode of The Digital Executive Podcast, host Brian Thomas sits down with Jerry Zhang, co-founder of Lemma, to explore one of the most underappreciated problems in enterprise AI deployment — agents that appear to work but silently degrade the moment they hit real-world production. Jerry opens with the founding story: two college friends who met as freshmen at USC's startup incubator, went off separately to build AI agents at companies on opposite ends of the industry — healthcare and chip design — and came back together after realizing they had been solving the exact same frustrating

In this episode of The Digital Executive Podcast, host Brian Thomas sits down with Shenbo Xu, MIT PhD and co-founder of Kapnova, to make a distinction that most business leaders have heard but rarely internalized — and that costs companies millions when they get it wrong. Shenbo opens by tracing his path from MIT's AI lab through quantitative research at Point72 and foundational model training at Scale AI, explaining that each stop sharpened the same core insight: prediction tells you what will happen, but causal inference tells you what happens if you actually do something about it. Those are

In this episode of The Digital Executive Podcast, host Brian Thomas sits down with Katrina Purcell, growth operations consultant and former chief of staff, to explore the messy, often overlooked work that actually makes scaling companies succeed. Katrina opens with a career that wound through media, project management, and an executive MBA before landing her in the chief of staff role at IAS — where guiding a company through its IPO taught her that her real gift was bringing people along for the ride, not just building the strategy. She explains why she took that skill set independent: compani

In this episode of The Digital Executive Podcast, host Brian Thomas sits down with Adam J. Schwartz, founder and CEO of DocumentReview.law, to explore what happens when a practicing attorney gets frustrated enough with existing tools to teach himself JavaScript and build a better one. Adam opens with the breaking point that sparked everything: a case with a few hundred documents where every existing platform was built for millions, making it both overkill and cost-prohibitive for the client. So he sat down in his converted garage in Los Angeles, dusted off his JavaScript knowledge, and spent t

In this episode of The Digital Executive Podcast, host Brian Thomas sits down with Aidan McCarty, co-founder and co-CEO of Verified, to make the case that the way we prove who we are on the internet is about to look as dated as the fax machine — and that a phone number is the identity primitive that survives what comes next. Aidan opens with the Stripe analogy at the heart of Verified's thesis: Stripe didn't make payments better, it made payments disappear, and that is exactly what Verified is doing for signup. Where a typical fintech onboarding flow takes 161 seconds, 16 clicks, and loses for

In this episode of The Digital Executive Podcast, host Brian Thomas sits down with Jen Grogono, founder and CEO of uStudio, to explore why the future of enterprise training and internal communications looks a lot more like Spotify than a company intranet. Jen opens with the founding story of ON Networks in 2006, where the challenge of syndicating original content across a hundred different endpoints — each with different metadata, formats, and technical requirements — planted the seed for what would become uStudio. When she saw enterprises building massive libraries of training and marketing c

In this episode of The Digital Executive Podcast, host Brian Thomas sits down with Kevin Pickhardt, Executive Chairman of Pharos Systems International, to make the case that one of the most overlooked vulnerabilities in enterprise IT is sitting right there in the corner of every office floor — the printer. Kevin opens with a career that began at Xerox forty years ago and traces the surprisingly consistent thread through every transformation since: printing never went away, but the infrastructure managing it never kept up. He explains why printing has been uniquely resistant to modernization —

In this episode of The Digital Executive Podcast, host Brian Thomas sits down with Shannon Flanagan, founder and CEO of Retail Women in Tech, to make a case that the most important thing missing from most AI transformation efforts isn't better technology — it's the right people in the room. Shannon opens with a career that started at 18 folding jeans and evolved through merchandising, consulting at Accenture, and leadership roles at Gap, Lands' End, and Macy's, shaped throughout by a single question she discovered at 25: what does it take to create the conditions where people love what they do

In this episode of The Digital Executive Podcast, host Brian Thomas sits down with Allen Dine, Chief Business Officer at Care2You, to explore what it actually takes to deliver emergency and hospital-level care inside someone's home — and how AI is making that possible at scale across one of the most complex urban environments in the world. Allen opens by tracing a career defined by a refusal to wait for someone else to solve the problem, from learning SQL to build his own data warehouse to deploying AI voice agents for patient intake — because in home care, if you want change, you have to buil

In this episode of The Digital Executive Podcast, host Brian Thomas sits down with Furkat Kasimov, London-based entrepreneur, angel investor, and author, to explore what it takes to build and invest wisely in the AI era — before the crowd figures it out. Furkat opens with a origin story that predates the current AI boom by a decade, tracing his first investment to an InsureTech conference where he spotted a deepfake detection company called PinDrop Security and recognized that every dangerous technology creates a market for its antidote. That insight became the founding logic of Applayerai, a

In this episode of The Digital Executive Podcast, host Brian Thomas sits down with Edwin Miranda, founder of Konsultora, to explore what it actually means to build an organization for the AI era — not just one with more tools, but one with less distance between a signal, a decision, and an action. Edwin opens by tracing the common thread across his career in advertising, political strategy, and customer experience: competition and decision-making. Every domain is ultimately about understanding what is changing, making better decisions faster, and adapting before your competitors do. AI, he arg

In this episode of The Digital Executive Podcast, host Brian Thomas sits down with Antonio Mallia, founder and CEO of Seltz.ai, to explore one of the most overlooked infrastructure questions in the AI era: what happens to web search when the user is no longer a human? Antonio opens with a career that runs from the University of Pisa's information retrieval tradition through a PhD at NYU to research roles at Amazon, Pinecone, and Bloomberg — and traces the moment the idea for Seltz crystallized while building Alexa's question answering engine, when it became clear that the next consumer of sear

In this episode of The Digital Executive Podcast, host Brian Thomas sits down with Harvey Liu, CEO of LevX Exchange, to explore what happens when traders stop using exchanges and start building their own. Harvey opens with his origin story — one of the first Bitcoin investors in China in 2013, conducting due diligence on early exchanges like Huobi and OKCoin from a VC firm at a time when blockchain was still the Wild West, and nobody on an investment committee wanted to hear about it. Over the following decade, he tracked the industry, moved to Singapore, reviewed over fifty Web3 projects, and

In this episode of The Digital Executive Podcast, host Brian Thomas sits down with Michael Ashoori, founder and president of Ashoori Law, to cut through the confusion that surrounds U.S. immigration for entrepreneurs, investors, and skilled professionals. Michael opens with the personal foundation of his practice — as the first American-born member of an immigrant family, he brings an empathy to client relationships that goes beyond legal expertise, drawing directly on his parents' experience of building a life and a business in a new country. He then tackles the most common misconceptions he

In this episode of The Digital Executive Podcast, host Brian Thomas sits down with Tarek Saab, CEO of Texas Precious Metals, to explore why where your gold sits matters more than most investors have ever stopped to consider — and what it took to build the infrastructure to do something about it. Tarek opens with the founding story of Texas Precious Metals in 2011, when the precious metals industry was still largely offline and shipping high-value packages safely across the country was a logistical and insurance puzzle nobody had cracked. He traces the company's growth from a pioneering e-comme

In this episode of The Digital Executive Podcast, host Brian Thomas sits down with Sahil Aggarwal, founder of Von, to make a blunt case that the go-to-market function has been left behind while every other part of the business got transformed by AI — and that the window to fix it is now. Sahil opens with a decade of conviction built from doing B2B sales himself, building software for it, and advising large pharma companies on sales efficiency: the deals were never won because of the product or the CRM. They were won because of the workflow around it, and that workflow has always been broken. H

In this episode of The Digital Executive Podcast, host Brian Thomas sits down with Gary S. Michel, former Chairman and CEO of JELD-WEN and author of Decomplify, to explore why the most dangerous thing a leader can do is mistake busyness for progress. Gary opens by tracing his path from mechanical engineer to global CEO, noting that he never set out to run a company — he just kept chasing bigger problems, until he realized the hardest ones were never technical. They were organizational. That insight became the foundation of his leadership philosophy and his book, which centers on a single uncom

In this episode of The Digital Executive Podcast, host Brian Thomas sits down with Dr. Christopher Sprague, CEO and co-founder of Enluma Leadership Group, to make the case that one of the most valuable investments a company can make has been locked behind a velvet rope for decades. Chris opens with an unlikely origin story — a high school calculus teacher who created an environment where students worked harder than they thought possible and actually loved doing it — and traces how that memory followed him through a PhD in toxicology, twenty years of leading complex transformations across Fortu

In this episode of The Digital Executive Podcast, host Brian Thomas sits down with Pedro Andrade, VP of AI at Talkdesk, to challenge everything the industry thinks it knows about AI in the contact center. Pedro opens by drawing a straight line from the dot-com boom to today's AI wave — both rewarded the same thing: speed of execution, willingness to experiment, and relentless focus on customer value. He then breaks down Talkdesk's Customer Experience Automation framework — a discover, build, orchestrate, and measure cycle that starts not with a vendor pitch but with a company's own data, ident

In this episode of The Digital Executive Podcast, host Brian Thomas sits down with Mohan Gulati, CEO and co-founder of Thinkrr.ai, to explore how voice AI is quietly transforming one of healthcare's most overlooked touchpoints — the independent pharmacy. Mohan opens with the moment that pushed him out of the enterprise world: watching Fortune 500 companies freeze in the face of AI while smaller businesses were eager to move fast and get started. That energy drew him toward SMBs, and eventually toward independent pharmacies, where a group of progressive owners reached out looking for a solution

In this episode of The Digital Executive Podcast, host Brian Thomas sits down with Dr. Peter Carnochan, psychologist, psychoanalyst, executive coach, and author, to explore what happens when three decades of deep clinical work meets the high-stakes world of Silicon Valley leadership. Peter opens by tracing his unusual path from studying Nietzsche at Harvard to working with troubled youth, explaining that philosophy and therapy were never separate pursuits for him — both were attempts to get to the bottom of things. He then unpacks countertransference, the central concept of his book Looking fo

In this episode of The Digital Executive Podcast, host Brian Thomas sits down with Allie Kline, interim CEO of Innovation Labs at Identity Digital, to tackle one of the most urgent and overlooked problems in the AI era: accountability. Allie opens by drawing a through line across her career — from AOL's separation from Time Warner to the Yahoo integration — arguing that every major technology shift creates a moment where foundational infrastructure either gets built or gets retrofitted painfully later. AI accountability is that moment right now. She explains why the current gap is so dangerous

In this episode of The Digital Executive Podcast, host Brian Thomas sits down with Rory Blundell, CEO of Gravitee, to explore why the infrastructure built for the API economy is fundamentally unprepared for the agentic era — and what it will take to fix that before the risks outpace the rewards. Rory opens with the story of joining Gravitee during the pandemic, taking a fifty percent pay cut to bet on a four-person company he believed in after using the software himself, and scaling it to over 180 employees and forty million in revenue. He then makes a sharp argument: traditional API gateways

In this episode of The Digital Executive Podcast, host Brian Thomas sits down with Mandi Bateman, CEO and co-founder of Profile Health, to explore what happens when whole genome sequencing, longitudinal patient data, and clinical intelligence come together to give physicians a complete picture of who their patient really is. Mandi opens with hard-won lessons from her previous startups — most importantly, that precision medicine direct to consumer is a race to the bottom, and that the right path to scaling this kind of complex, data-heavy care is through the hands of physicians who have the tra

In this episode of The Digital Executive Podcast, host Brian Thomas sits down with Alfredo González Briseño, policy innovator, author, and founder of fAIrly Simple, to explore why the biggest gap in AI governance isn't what governments are regulating — it's how they're doing it. Alfredo opens by drawing a direct parallel between building a successful business and building effective regulation: both require a managed life cycle, stakeholder input, evidence-based decisions, transparency, and ongoing review. Skip the process and you get what he calls weekend rules — surprise announcements that no

In this episode of The Digital Executive Podcast, host Brian Thomas sits down with Jason Allan Scott, serial entrepreneur, nine-time exit veteran, and founder of the Soul Method, for a masterclass in building businesses that create freedom instead of obligation. Jason opens with two defining moments: a childhood film that planted the belief that what one person can do, another can do too — a mantra that carried him out of poverty and civil unrest — and a later realization that he had been measuring the wrong thing entirely. Chasing revenue, he discovered, builds golden handcuffs. Chasing optio

In this episode of The Digital Executive Podcast, host Brian Thomas sits down with Dr. Chirag Patel, physician, founder, and ESPN injury analyst, to explore what happens when clinical precision meets elite sports, investment strategy, and the drive to democratize access to world-class care. Chirag opens with a deceptively simple insight — the foot is the body's smallest lever with the largest downstream effect — and traces how following that constraint led him from podiatry to professional sports medicine to enterprise development. The moment that crystallized everything was two patients with

In this episode of The Digital Executive Podcast, host Brian Thomas sits down with Brian Trzupek, Senior Vice President of Product at DigiCert, to explore what it means to build digital trust in a world where AI agents are multiplying faster than anyone can track them. Brian opens with a career arc that spans founding Creduware, fighting cybercrime at Trustwave, and testifying before Congress on the 2013 Target breach — experiences that sharpened his ability to translate deeply technical security concepts for non-technical audiences, from policymakers to boardrooms. He then unpacks DigiCert's

In this episode of The Digital Executive Podcast, host Brian Thomas sits down with Moody Abdul, co-founder and CEO of Klarify, to explore how a deeply personal journey through therapy — and a family shaped by the Lebanese Civil War — became the foundation for a company built to give mental health professionals their time back. Moody shares how his own therapist's frustration with documentation tools sparked the idea for Klarify, and how that insight led him to leave his previous startup and build something that could give back to the people who had given so much to him. He breaks down the fund

In this episode of The Digital Executive Podcast, host Brian Thomas sits down with Angie Lillie, Chief Compliance Officer at Mentavi Health, to explore what it actually takes to build trust in a digital-first mental health company operating across all 50 states. Angie opens by reframing what compliance really means — not bureaucracy, but protection and accountability, the foundation that lets clinicians walk into patient encounters knowing the environment around them is safe and ethical. She then breaks down how Mentavi's AI support tool, the Mentavi Concierge, handles intake and administrativ

In this episode of The Digital Executive Podcast, host Brian Thomas sits down with Itai Green, global innovation strategist and author of Innovation or Elimination, to make the case that in today's AI-accelerated world, innovation is no longer a competitive advantage — it's a survival requirement. Itai opens with a perspective only a founder-turned-advisor can offer: corporations that want to partner with startups must learn to speak startup, move at startup speed, and respect the very real financial stress that most founding teams are operating under. He then explains why the stakes have fund

In this episode of The Digital Executive Podcast, host Brian Thomas sits down with Joe Ochal, founder and CEO of The Chimney Scientist, to explore how a microbiology graduate turned a part-time chimney cleaning gig into one of the fastest-growing home services companies in the United States. Joe shares the moment the math clicked — staring down $250,000 in medical school debt versus a blue-collar business he actually loved — and choosing the path that made more sense on paper and in practice. He breaks down what separates The Chimney Scientist from the rest of the industry: not just better too

In this episode of The Digital Executive Podcast, host Brian Thomas sits down with Dr. Ashwin Rao, Executive Vice President of Next Gen AI at o9 Solutions, to explore why large language models alone are not enough to power the autonomous enterprise — and what it will actually take to get there. Ashwin opens by tracing the common thread across his career on Wall Street, at Stanford, and in retail supply chains: every domain ultimately comes down to translating messy business problems into clean mathematical models, then building software to solve them. He then makes a compelling case for neuros

In this episode of The Digital Executive Podcast, host Brian Thomas sits down with Mitchell Amador, founder and CEO of Immunefi, to pull back the curtain on the escalating cybersecurity battle playing out across the blockchain ecosystem. Mitchell explains how founding Immunefi in 2020 was less about certainty and more about conviction — recognizing that DeFi's explosive growth was creating security gaps that criminal networks would exploit at the same viral speed that made crypto successful in the first place. His answer was to corral the global white hat security community into a crowdsourced

In this episode of The Digital Executive Podcast, host Brian Thomas sits down with Mahesh Thakur, executive coach and former product leader at Microsoft, Amazon, Intuit, and GoDaddy, to explore what it truly takes to lead in a world where AI is rewriting the rules faster than most organizations can keep up. Mahesh opens with the turning point that shifted his career from building products to developing leaders — a high-performing Fortune 100 team with every advantage imaginable that kept stalling, not because of strategy or resources, but because trust between leaders had broken down. That exp

In this episode of The Digital Executive Podcast, host Brian Thomas sits down with Joel Perez, CTO and co-founder of Mindful Software, to explore how a deeply personal experience with dream interpretation sparked the creation of My Dream — an AI-powered app designed to help people decode what their subconscious is trying to tell them. Joel shares how a year off traveling with his wife Amy, followed by a career pivot from IT infrastructure to software engineering, shaped the resourcefulness and curiosity that now drives his work. He explains how Amy's own life-changing dream — one that finally

In this episode of The Digital Executive Podcast, host Brian Thomas sits down with John Sampogna, CEO of Wondersauce, to explore what it really takes to build a brand that outlasts any ad budget. John reflects on scaling Wondersauce from a two-person shop to a hundred-person agency, crediting much of that early success to the "optimistic naivety" of not knowing enough to be afraid — a mindset he says is surprisingly hard to recapture once experience loads you down with risk filters. He breaks down what makes Wondersauce different from a traditional agency: a relentless focus on business outcom

In this episode of The Digital Executive Podcast, host Brian Thomas sits down with Neil Marley, CEO of Neologik, to unpack why so many mid-market companies are stuck in AI pilot purgatory — and what it actually takes to break through to real transformation. Neil shares how an early encounter with ChatGPT convinced him that AI would reshape information worker roles and that mid-market companies, more agile than large enterprises but more resource-constrained, stood to gain the most from moving fast. He explains why governance and scaffolding matter as much as automation — because businesses nee