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Previous ve-CAST Episodes:
"I won my MBA-class business plan contest — and I thought, now's the time. Why wait?" That's Jamie Crosbie on the moment she walked away from a VP-of-Sales seat at CareerBuilder and launched ProActivate. Twenty years later, it's still going strong.
In this episode of the Vendux VE-Cast: The Next Stage CEO, host Henning Schwinum sits down with Jamie Crosbie, founder & CEO of ProActivate, for a candid look at building a sales and marketing talent firm from a one-woman calling sprint to a global, referral-driven business.
"I was the first person across the company who had ever carried a quota." That's Gregg Carman on landing at Qblox to build the Dutch quantum-computing leader's North American business from a literal cold start.
In this episode of the Vendux VE-Cast: The Next Stage CEO, host Henning Schwinum sits down with Gregg Carman — General Manager and Head of North America at Qblox — for an unusually candid look at what it takes to plant a flag in the US for a 170-person, Netherlands-born quantum company, and grow it to 25 people and more than half of global revenue in under a year.
"There are only 84,000 startups in the US — and 33 million small businesses." That's the moment Yoni Rubin realized he was selling a $200-a-month financial-modeling tool to the wrong market. The pivot turned MRGN into the AI brain for restaurants.
In this episode of the Vendux VE-Cast: The Next Stage CEO, host Henning Schwinum sits down with Yoni Rubin, CEO & co-founder of MRGN (mrgn.ai), to unpack how a cloud financial-modeling startup became an AI platform that reads data from POS systems like Toast, Square, and QuickBooks, blends in outside signals (weather, traffic, competition, even tariffs and concerts), and tells restaurant operators exactly what to do next.
"Most marketing data today is garbage and broken on privacy." That's the conviction that pulled Jay Mandel out of a 20-year corporate career at Mastercard and IBM — and turned him into the co-founder of Dāginty.
In this episode of the Vendux VE-Cast: The Next Stage CEO, host Henning Schwinum sits down with Jay Mandel — author of "Brand Strategy in Three Steps," founder of the Marketing Accountability Council, and co-founder of Dāginty — for a candid look at building a values-led, clean-data startup in an era when most marketing AI is being fed by surveillance.
The #1 most-watched video on Deb Dietz's free streaming platform isn't a movie. It's "Pregnancy: The First Trimester" — and the audience is women in sub-Saharan Africa. That's when she knew she was onto something bigger than a consulting practice.
In this episode of the Vendux ve-Cast: The Next Stage CEO, host Henning Schwinum sits down with Deb Dietz — founder & CEO of SMB Value Partners — for the inside story of how a 2015 management consultancy became an EdTech and digital media company, complete with a free ad-supported streaming TV platform (Futee.TV), a "Circle of Life" curriculum, and a first capital raise after a decade of bootstrapping.
"The little fish ate the big fish." That's how Natasha Jeshani describes the moment, in the middle of COVID, when she had to choose between buying the rest of her larger business partner's company or giving everything back.
In this episode of the Vendux ve-Cast: The Next Stage CEO, host Henning Schwinum sits down with Natasha Jeshani — president & CEO of Career Contacts, a Vancouver-based, fully bootstrapped one-stop HR shop spanning recruitment and fractional HR for clients across Canada and the US — for a candid look at building a people-first services firm the hard way.
"You can't vibe-code a good relationship." Harold Mann has been in the IT services business for 34 years — and he thinks that one sentence might be the most important lesson in the AI era.
In this episode of the Vendux ve-Cast: The Next Stage CEO, host Andrew Miller sits down with Harold Mann — San Francisco native, founder & president of Mann Consulting (since 1991), and co-founder of ClickTime, one of the web's earliest SaaS time-and-expense platforms (launched 1998 and still running) — for a rare 34-year look inside founder-led growth.
"There's no fairness in business — that's an illusion. Everything has to be earned." Paul Anthony Claxton is not here to sell you the Silicon Valley fairytale.
In this episode of the Vendux ve-Cast: The Next Stage CEO, co-host Andrew sits down with Paul Anthony Claxton — Marine veteran, serial entrepreneur, and founder/general partner of Digerati Investments, a Seed/Series A AI-first fund based in LA — for an unusually candid look at what it actually takes to build a venture firm from scratch.
"Marketing in a silo isn't marketing — it's just spending money." That's the gap Nida Ateeq saw in 2023, and built her company on closing.
In this episode of the Vendux ve-Cast: The Next Stage CEO, host Henning Schwinum sits down with Nida Ateeq, founder & CEO of Anagar Media, a Toronto-based AI-powered RevOps agency she launched in June 2023 and has scaled to a 12-person team in under three years.
"Either you ride the wave or you get washed away at sea." That's Stacie Sussman on the AI shake-up coming for consulting — and her plan to ride it.
In this episode of the Vendux ve-Cast: The Next Stage CEO, host Henning Schwinum sits down with Stacie Sussman, founder & Chief Revenue Officer of RevUp Advisory, to unpack how she went from 17 years in corporate sales — starting at the back of New York magazine selling classified ads — to running a Miami-based consultancy that's worked with 100+ B2B scale-ups.
"It's me." That's Arnaud Saint-Paul's two-word answer when host Henning Schwinum asks where the real bottleneck to growth lives — and it sets the tone for one of the most honest founder conversations of the season.
In this episode of the Vendux ve-Cast: The Next Stage CEO, Henning sits down with Arnaud Saint-Paul, founder & CEO of Tapuat, to talk about building a business around something most companies still treat as a soft topic — and making it measurable.
"I went from six million to zero in two months." That's John Barrows on what 2023 did to JB Sales — and why he's rebuilding the whole company from scratch around AI.
In this episode of the Vendux ve-Cast: The Next Stage CEO, host Henning Schwinum sits down with John Barrows, founder & CEO of JB Sales and one of the most recognized B2B sales trainers in the world, for a brutally honest conversation about how sales actually works now.
"Lead gen" has become a dirty word — so what do you replace it with?
In this episode of the Vendux ve-Cast: The Next Stage CEO, host Henning Schwinum sits down with Michael Falato, founder & CEO of GTM Full Throttle, to break down how he turned 25+ years of enterprise sales into a repeatable, scalable go-to-market machine.
What if the biggest threat to your strategy isn't the market — it's the silent fear inside your own team?
In this episode of the Vendux ve-Cast: The Next Stage CEO, host Henning Schwinum sits down with Zen Benefiel, founder of Be The Dream, to unpack the "execution chasm" — the gap between the strategy leaders set and what actually gets done on the ground.
"Profitability at any cost" built the internet we have. What if the next one was built for dignity instead?
In this episode of the Vendux ve-Cast: The Next Stage CEO, host Henning Schwinum sits down with Lubna Dajani — futurist, systems thinker, and founder & managing director of The Allternet — to reimagine the digital economy from the ground up.