Miki Feldman Simon, is an executive coach, speaker, and the author of CORE Leadership: A Four-Step Framework to Lead Yourself, Grow Your Influence, and Amplify Your Impact . Miki's perspective on people, performance, and what it really takes to lead effectively across different environments was shaped by two different lenses. First, a wide range of leadership roles, including marketing, operations, and HR leadership in companies that went through successful mergers and acquisitions. Second, grow...

Kvon Tucker , founder of Consciously, was first on the podcast a few years ago , when Consciously was still closer to an idea than a fully formed organization. Since then, he has built the Consciously Collective into a growing community of coaches, counselors, and consultants who are aligned around a shared mission: helping leaders become more conscious, more loving, and more effective. I have joined Consciously as one of its co-creators, so part of this conversation is about the work we are bui...

Julie Kratz teaches organizational behavior, decision-making, leadership, and culture at the Kelley School of Business at Indiana University. She is also a leadership coach, trainer, speaker, and author whose work focuses on allyship — what it means to support people who are different from ourselves, and how leaders can use their power and influence to make workplaces more fair and more inclusive. We talked about her path from corporate life to academia, and how a childhood moment helped shape h...

Jimmy St Louis is a former NFL tight end and currently on his second successful venture leading innovative healthcare companies focused on solving unmet needs. He is the CEO of Agentis Longevity, a healthcare company specialized in performance and longevity medicine. In our conversation, we explored how his experiences in sports shaped his leadership philosophy, particularly his focus on discipline, resilience, and the importance of the journey over the destination. We also went deep into the ro...

Irina Cozma is an organizational psychologist and executive coach who has spent her career at the intersection of talent, fit, and workplace design. After a long path through academia, consulting, and senior roles at large organizations like Salesforce and Wells Fargo, she built her own practice focused on helping individuals and organizations create better alignment between people and the work they do. In our conversation, we talked about how early experiences shape our relationship with work, ...

Stephanie Chung is a C-suite leader and board member with decades of experience in aviation and the first Black person in U.S. history to run a private aviation company. Stephanie really paid her dues to get there: she started her career quite literally on the tarmac, parking airplanes and loading luggage at Boston Logan Airport, then went on to leadership in aviation sales, to president of JetSuite X and Chief Growth Officer and brand ambassador of a publicly traded aviation company. In our con...

"Michael Stausholm is the CEO and founder of Sprout World, the first plantable pencil. He started his career in shipping, spent over a decade working across Asia in the garment industry, and along the way developed a deep perspective on leadership, culture, and responsibility in business. Eventually, that journey led him to build Sprout World, a company built around a simple idea: what if the products we use every day didn’t become waste, but something new instead? In our conversation, we talk ...

Today's guest is Carlo Giannone, a graduate student and teaching assistant at the Harvard Kennedy School, researcher in geopolitics and economics, and founder of the podcast Finanza, Pizza e Mandolino . Carlo shares how growing up in Sicily shaped his early interest in economic inequality and public service, and how that led him to study economics at Bocconi, the London School of Economics, and Harvard. He reflects on the role of economics and policy in addressing structural challenges and creat...

Celeste Warren spent 28 years at Merck, where she rose to become Vice President and Chief Diversity and Inclusion Officer. Since retiring from Merck, she founded Celeste Warren Consulting, where she continues to advise organizations on leadership, culture, and inclusion. Together with her two children, she also co-founded Destination STEM, a nonprofit dedicated to supporting students pursuing careers in science, technology, engineering, and mathematics. Celeste has been widely recognized for her...

Today's guest is Miles Spencer is currently CEO and a founder of Reflekta.ai , a Soul Tech company that bridges generations through fully interactive digital legacies. A multi-exit entrepreneur, investor, and storyteller, he is the author of the Amazon bestseller A Line in the Sand, Founder of Kayak for a Cause and former co-host of PBS’s MoneyHunt . Miles has spent his career at the intersection of media, technology, and adventure and human-centered narrative. With Reflekta, he is pioneering a ...

Matei Zatreanu is the CEO and founder of System2, a data science firm that helps institutional investors make better decision. His family immigrated from Romania, but for the first few years, his parents had to leave him and his brother temporarily behind as they settled themselves in their new country. In our conversation, we explored how early hardship, like growing up separated by your parents, builds a “figure it out” mentality, why storytelling is one of the most underrated leadership skill...

Eric Stone is the CEO and founder of Clear Path Ventures and the author of Jumpstart Your Workplace Culture. Eric started as a management trainee at Enterprise Rent-A-Car and spent more than 25 years rising through the ranks to become a senior executive in one of the company’s top-performing regions. Along the way, he led large teams across retail and administrative environments, built high-performance cultures, and developed leaders who went on to succeed at every level of the organization. In ...

Today's guest is Lily Zheng, a strategist and consultant who has spent the last decade working with organizations of every size — from small nonprofits to Fortune 500 companies — helping them build workplaces that actually work for everyone. In a field often clouded by ideology, misinformation, and polarization, Lily brings something refreshingly different: data, systems thinking, and practical results. They were a guest on the podcast before, so today we just focus on their new book, Fixing Fai...

This is part 2 of our conversation with Thiago Da Costa , serial entrepreneur and founder and CEO of a Datagrid AI, a company that creates agent and connectors to help companies work more efficiently. In part one we explored Thiago’s journey as a serial founder, and what it takes to scale companies from zero to meaningful revenue. In this second part, we go deeper into what truly separates great CEOs from dangerous ones. We talk about transparency, capital discipline, customer obsession, and the...

Today's guest is Thiago Da Costa, a serial entrepreneur with multiple exits and decades of experience building deeply technical companies. His latest venture, Datagrid AI is an enterprise agentic solution that connects data and automates workflows across tools, files, and systems, Thiago brings a rare combination of technical depth, founder instinct, and hard-earned perspective on what it really takes to start, scale, and survive as an entrepreneur. We talk candidly about the realities of founde...

My guest today is an old friend, Nicolas Darveau-Garneau. We met in business school a long time ago, and he went on to become Google's chief evangelist. In that role he advised over a thousand CEOs. He condensed all that wisdom in a brand new book that's called Be A Sequoia Not A Bonsaoi. The book explains how the top 5% of companies beat their competitors. Before becoming Google's chief evangelist, Nick also started and sold 4 companies. In this conversation, we talk about how to figure out if ...

Cat Holt is a marketer, brand strategist, and business consultant whose path has woven together creativity, psychology, digital innovation, and a relentless curiosity for how people think and behave. She is also the CEO of Coologee, the marketing firm I co-founded with her. Cat started out as a painter, a musician, and a psychology major fascinated by human behavior. That combination eventually took her into the world of advertising during the dot-com boom, where she became the rare strategist w...

Today's guest is is Miles Veth , a fourth-generation entrepreneur, founder of the Veth Group, a marketing ans sales services firm. After starting his career at EMC and learning how large companies can scale while still keeping a culture of warmth, he used that influence to shape the ethos of his own company: love your people, serve your customers well, and reinvest in the community. In our conversation, Miles shares how he integrates faith and business, what it means to build a company that tith...

Today's guest is Sasha Schrode , CEO of FEMSelect, a women’s health company on a mission to improve quality of life for women around the globe. Sasha survived a cancer diagnosis at age 31, and that crisis pushed her to leave corporate comfort and embrace entrepreneurship. She described in brutal honesty what being diagnosed with cancer at such an early age felt like and how that experience changed her priorities and her life. We talked about how that experience reshaped her leadership philosophy...

Neri Karra Sillaman is the embodiment of what it means to blend intellectual rigor with entrepreneurial grit. A refugee-turned-entrepreneur, she’s the founder of Neri Kara, a luxury leather goods brand celebrating its 25th year—and she’s also an academic with a PhD from Cambridge. In our conversation, Neri shared her incredible journey: from building a business with her family using discarded Italian leather, to walking away from it to pursue her true calling in academia. We talked about what it...

Today's guest is is David Price, founder and CEO of the David Price Group, a virtual insurance agency that sells high volumes of insurance across all 50 states. But David’s story is about much more than entrepreneurship—it’s a story of reinvention and resilience. David grew up on welfare and spent many years in jobs that didn’t fulfill him. In his mid-thirties, he realized he needed to make a bold move to pursue the freedom and success he had always dreamed of. What followed was a powerful perso...

Greg Morley spent almost 30 years as an HR leader for major global companies like Disney, Hasbro and Moet Hennessy. He’s lived and worked on three continents and currently calls Paris home. He is also the author of BOND: Belonging and the Keys to Inclusion and Connection a book aimed at helping organizations reframe how they approach diversity, equity, and inclusion by opening up the conversation to everyone—especially those in the majority. In our conversation, Greg shared powerful insights abo...

All the answers to the question: "What business jargon drives you crazy?" from the 6 months of the podcast. These are the featured guests: Jay Sapovits Jolynn Ledgerwood Ron Browning Greg Larkin Robyn Bolton Justin Buonomo Delaney William Ricardo Regalado Jennifer Langton Neta Weiner Elitzur Bar-Asher Siegal Dina Denham Smith Joseph Rainone Natasha Braginsky Mournier Rick Culleton Haley Forest Rishad Tobaccowala Audrey Wisch Contact Dino at: dino@al4ep.com Websites: al4ep.com Additional Guest Li...

Jay Sapovits is the founder and CEO of Ink’d Stores. Jay started his career behind the counter of a dry cleaner’s in Las Vegas, where he learned some of the most important lessons of his life. From there, he moved through a string of unlikely but formative roles—radio engineer, sports talk host, golf course cart manager—that ultimately prepared him for a career in entrepreneurship. In our conversation, Jay shares how betting on relationships (instead of gambling) changed his life, how a dry clea...