by Infinity Constellation
Hey, I’m Brennan Pothetes. I’ve raised millions, burned out hard, and learned that most startup advice is toxic BS. Hustle culture isn’t a superpower. It’s a fast track to burnout. So I’m starting Not Another Podcast. Each episode, I’m doing something fun, like building Legos or cooking spaghetti, while having raw, honest convos with founders. It’s part therapy, part teardown. All real talk. If you’re done with the hype and want sustainable success, this is for you.
Language
🇺🇲
Publishing Since
10/21/2025
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July 7, 2026
<p><strong>George Kurdin</strong> spent years as a professional poker player before online poker was shut down overnight. The skill he carried into building a company wasn't the one you'd expect. It had nothing to do with reading faces across a table and everything to do with expected value, risk, and the discipline to iterate before you get crushed.</p><p><br></p><p>Now George is co-founder and CEO of Monk, an AI-native accounts receivable platform automating the whole contract-to-cash lifecycle. He sat down with Brennan Pothetes to make the case for building in the least glamorous corner of AI, why "touching money" earns you the right to build something big, and why he's genuinely worried about the foundation model labs even as he builds in their blast radius.</p><p>This one gets into the real mechanics of building an AI company in 2026: hiring 1 in 700, running on one meeting a week, what an "agent harness" actually is, and where defensibility still lives once the models are a commodity.</p><p><br></p><p><strong>Inside the episode:</strong></p><p><br></p><ul>Why George says poker teaches risk and EV, not reading people, and how that maps to founding</ul><ul>The principles he used to pick his market, including "don't get nuked by Satya and Sam"</ul><ul>Why he believes you "earn the right to build a big business if you touch money"</ul><ul>His spicy take on the labs, valuations, and the shift toward Chinese and open models</ul><ul>What an "agent harness" is, explained through L4 self-driving cars and human-in-the-loop</ul><ul>How he hires (1 in 700) and runs the team with one weekly all-hands and no standups</ul><ul>Where moats still exist in the AI app layer when the tech is no longer the advantage</ul><p><br></p><p>Subscribe for more conversations with the founders building what's next.<br>Watch on YouTube, listen on Spotify and Apple.<br>Follow George and Monk for more on AI-native finance.</p>
June 30, 2026
<p>Americans spent roughly a trillion dollars on property and casualty insurance last year. Only about 60% of it came back as claims, and that number has been falling for decades. Rashmi Melgiri wants to know where the other $400 billion went, and why nobody seems to be measuring whether the industry is getting any better.</p><p>Rashmi started as an antitrust economist at 21, modeling DOJ and FTC cases, before spending years in telecom and co-founding CoverWallet, which she raised $35M for and sold to Aon. Now she's the founder and CEO of Functional Finance, building the financial rails underneath insurance. Along the way she's developed a framework she calls "infrastructure of life," the idea that insurance, telecom, energy, and healthcare are a different class of industry, and that the only people left with the energy to reform them are founders, funded by a system that routes them right back to the incumbents they set out to beat.</p><p>She and Brennan get into it: free markets versus regulation, why she went back to build a second company in the same industry she'd already exited, and what it actually felt like to sell to Aon.</p><p><br></p><p><strong>In this episode:</strong></p><ul>Why only 60 cents of every insurance dollar reaches a claim, and where the rest goes</ul><ul>The "infrastructure of life" thesis: which industries we've stopped protecting, and why</ul><ul>How selling to Aon showed her the reform path that ends inside the incumbent</ul><ul>Why she thinks founders, not government, are the last reform mechanism left</ul><ul>The bankruptcy double standard between corporations and people</ul><ul>What an antitrust economist sees in insurance that founders miss</ul><ul>Why she started a second company partly to test if she could be the CEO</ul><p>New episodes of Not Another Podcast every week. Subscribe on YouTube and follow on Spotify and Apple Podcasts so you don't miss one.</p><p><br></p>
June 23, 2026
<p><strong>Anastasia Leng</strong>'s first company got everything a founder is supposed to want. Time named it a top 10 startup to watch. The press loved it. She still couldn't raise a dollar, and it died a slow, public death.</p><p>What she built next, CreativeX, now works with Unilever, Heineken, and Google. This conversation with Brennan Pothetes is about the psychology that made the second time different: paranoia she repurposed as preparation, a hard refusal to chase validation, and the lesson that taught her to speak an investor's language without burning down the only company she has.</p><p>She moved through five countries before she was 13 and learned English at 12. She talks about the fear that nearly kept her at Google, the investors who told her to quit, why she refused to wipe out her early angels, and the emotional game of building that almost no founder discusses honestly.</p><p>In this episode:</p><ul>Why she trained herself to imagine the worst, and how it makes everything else feel steady</ul><ul>How a "top 10 startup" with great press still couldn't raise, and what she learned from it</ul><ul>The difference between how a first-time and second-time founder talk to investors</ul><ul>Why she refused the "clean cap table" every VC demanded, and how it paid off</ul><ul> What she did when respected investors told her to shut the company down</ul><ul>Why being profitable is the only real leverage a founder has</ul><ul>What AI is quietly doing to judgment on her team</ul><ul><br></ul><p>New episodes of Not Another Podcast every week. Subscribe on YouTube, Spotify, and Apple Podcasts.</p><p><br></p>
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Hey, I’m Brennan Pothetes. I’ve raised millions, burned out hard, and learned that most startup advice is toxic BS. Hustle culture isn’t a superpower. It’s a fast track to burnout.
So I’m starting Not Another Podcast. Each episode, I’m doing something fun, like building Legos or cooking spaghetti, while having raw, honest convos with founders.
It’s part therapy, part teardown. All real talk.
If you’re done with the hype and want sustainable success, this is for you.
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