The Twin Project

Hosted by Marc Leisner, Lucas Leisner

Business Entrepreneurship

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Episodes

160

Latest episode

Nov 2026

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About the show

Identical Twins that love building Startups and nerd out on everything related to AI and business! When you go to a restaurant and immediately start counting the tables to see how much money they might make, you came to the right place. Join us on our journey from 0s to Startup heroes! 🦸 #ai #aitools #aistartups

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60 recent

November 10, 2026Episode 16155 min

AI Agents, the Future of Work & the Hidden Biases of AI — Nicole Donnelly

What happens when you give AI access to your entire business? And if AI makes everyone more productive, should we be working harder—or finally working less? This week on The Twin Project, we're joined by Nicole Donnelly, founder of AI Smart Ventures, entrepreneur, and former professional snowboarder. Nicole's journey started with an unexpectedly simple idea: turning old snowboard socks into baby leg warmers. Within three years, her business had expanded into 85 countries. Today, she helps organizations implement AI, build automated workflows, and understand how AI agents can transform everyday business operations. We get into the practical side of AI: how her assistant Jenny works, why her team stopped paying $25,000 annually for Jasper, and how one employee reduced ten hours of work to just one. But it's not all productivity and automation. Nicole believes AI should give people more time to be human, not simply create more work. She also shares some surprising experiences with AI bias, explaining why she believes the way AI communicates can reflect outdated assumptions. We explore AI agents, Claude vs ChatGPT vs Gemini, the psychology of AI adoption, privacy, automation mistakes, and why Nicole sometimes finds AI just as frustrating as the rest of us do. A conversation about building businesses, questioning the AI hype, and figuring out what the future of work should actually look like. Enjoy! — The Twin Project

November 3, 2026Episode 16058 min

The Voice Never Lies: Confidence, Emotions & Sound Therapy | Laur Fugère

Can you hear fear in someone's voice? Why do we sound different when we're nervous? And can changing our posture or the way we speak change how we feel? This week on The Twin Project, we're joined by Laur Fugère, a voice and sound therapist who spent more than 25 years working with Cirque du Soleil. Laur has a fascinating philosophy: the voice never lies. We explore the relationship between our voices, emotions, and confidence, from the way our posture influences how we sound to the inner conversations we have with ourselves every day. Laur also shares what she learned from world-class performers, why she encourages people to experiment with humming and vocal exercises, and a surprisingly practical way to deal with nervousness before speaking. We also dive into sound therapy, tuning forks, personal beliefs about energy, the connection between music and memories, and why some people immediately make us feel uncomfortable. It's a conversation about finding your voice—both the one people hear and the one inside your head. And naturally, we couldn't resist testing a few things ourselves. Enjoy the episode! — The Twin Project

September 29, 2026Episode 15948 min

Most AI Is Hype. Here’s What Actually Makes Money | Eric Bidinger

Episode #159: After 17 years in private equity, Eric Bidinger switched sides of the table and became a founder. And building companies turned out to be very different from analyzing them. In this episode, we sit down with Eric, founder of Ask Luca, to talk about the role luck really plays in business, how entrepreneurs can increase their "luck surface area," and what years in private equity taught him — and failed to teach him — about actually building a company. We also dive into the current AI boom: why Eric believes many of the flashiest AI use cases are overhyped, why some of the most boring applications are creating the most value, and how AI could eventually understand a business well enough to underwrite it better than a traditional bank. We get into: • Why great operators can still lose in bad markets • AI hype vs. AI reality • The boring AI applications that actually work • Using AI to understand cash flow and business performance • Why Ask Luca is moving toward business financing • What private equity may be getting wrong about AI roll-ups • Why clean data matters more than sophisticated AI • Increasing your luck surface area • Handling the extreme highs and lows of entrepreneurship • Why Eric is proud he chose something hard A conversation about AI, investing, entrepreneurship, luck, and what changes when you stop analyzing businesses and actually have to build one. The Twin Project with Lucas & Marc.

September 22, 2026Episode 15847 min

Melker Pasternak Ivarsson: When Software Becomes Free, What Businesses Survive?

Episode #158: If anyone can build an app, what happens to SaaS? Melker Pasternak Ivarsson joins us to discuss what happens when AI makes software dramatically cheaper and easier to create. We explore whether SaaS is actually dying, the rise of micro SaaS and one-person companies, and the three business moats Melker believes AI cannot easily reproduce: network effects, proprietary data and licenses or IP. We also get into why the traditional hierarchical company might be badly structured for the AI era. Melker explains Haier's “zero distance” model, where a huge organization operates more like a collection of autonomous startups, and we compare it with the flatter structures used by companies like Valve and Spotify. We talk about AI implementation inside existing companies, why frontline employees often have better AI ideas than management, why bureaucracy can kill innovation and what happens when employees can suddenly build their own internal software. Melker also explains what he's building with Ordana, why startup collaborations could become increasingly important as software markets fragment, and how one integration generated a 32% conversion rate before dropping when it began to look like a traditional affiliate offer. Later, we get into founder psychology, obsession, failure, why people spend too much time preparing instead of starting and why entrepreneurship is mostly about sucking slightly less each time you try. #AI #SaaS #Startups #Entrepreneurship #FutureOfWork

September 15, 2026Episode 15755 min

Why You Keep Self-Sabotaging (Even When You Know Better) | Jenifer Merifield

Episode #157: Why do we self-sabotage even when we know exactly what we should be doing? Jenifer Merifield joins us to unpack the psychology behind self-sabotage, procrastination, identity and behaviour change. We explore how your subconscious and nervous system can influence decisions before your conscious mind gets involved, why stepping outside your comfort zone can feel “wrong,” how childhood experiences and your environment shape your perception of the world, and how to tell the difference between genuine intuition and simple unfamiliarity. Jenifer also explains why information alone rarely changes us, why becoming a different version of yourself may need to come before achieving different results, and why the other side of discomfort is often freedom. We also somehow end up talking about identical twins, raisins, eating frogs, cold calling, “Can we talk?”, AI wombs and a few other places we definitely didn't expect the conversation to go. Jenifer Merifield is an Excellence Mentor and Master Integration Coach and the creator of the Extraordinary Life Process™ and Extraordinary Edge Collective™. #SelfSabotage #Psychology #Mindset #PersonalDevelopment

September 8, 2026Episode 15659 min

Adam Spector: The AI Race, Future of Work & Why We’re Not Ready

Episode #156: Adam Spector is back six months after our first conversation, so we decided to check which of his AI predictions actually came true. We talk about why AI may make the best workers of the future look more like managers than specialists, with individuals potentially coordinating dozens of digital workers simultaneously. Adam explains why generalists could become increasingly valuable, why AI is making creation dramatically cheaper while verification becomes more important, and why many software businesses could become increasingly difficult to defend. We also explore one of the most interesting second-order effects of the AI boom: what happens if more and more of the world's capital starts flowing toward compute? If companies like Meta, Anthropic and OpenAI can generate enormous returns from additional computing power, they may be willing to pay more for capital than homeowners, businesses and even governments — potentially reshaping the entire economy. Then we get into the AI race itself: systems breaking out of intended constraints, why companies struggle to slow down even when they believe the technology is dangerous, AI regulation, job displacement, robotics, self-driving cars and whether society is actually prepared for what's coming. We also discuss Chore, managing AI agents, Cursor, China, hardware startups, Waymo, Wispr Flow, venture capital, longevity and Adam's predictions for the next six to twelve months. Adam Spector is a four-time founder, founder of Chore and an investor in more than 200 startups. #AI #FutureOfWork #AIAgents #Startups #Technology

August 20, 2026Episode 15556 min

He Helped Fix Twitter. Now He’s Building AI Infrastructure (William Morgan)

In this episode, we sit down with William Morgan, founder and CEO of Buoyant, to talk about how he turned Linkerd into a successful open source business and what it takes to build infrastructure for the next wave of AI. We cover the Twitter chaos that inspired Linkerd, why Rust was the right choice for a mission-critical system, and how Buoyant figured out the hard way which features companies will actually pay for.We also get into the future of AI infrastructure, including why running models inside company environments matters, how enterprises think about compliance and control, and what changes are coming as GPU costs shift. If you’re interested in open source, Kubernetes, AI infrastructure, or founder lessons from the trenches, this one is packed with insights. #aiinfrastructure #opensource #buoyant #ai

July 14, 2026Episode 15444 min

Cory Blumenfeld On Why AI Alone Won’t Build Your Business

Episode #154: Cory Blumenfeld has built five companies across industries he did not know going in, from driveway repair to healthtech, fintech, outsourcing, customer success, and LinkedIn personal branding. He exited CoHealth to ACTO, co founded Caribou, raised over $3M, and now runs BlueMoso and Linked Agency remotely from Playa del Carmen. In this episode, we talk about the big mistake many founders are making right now: thinking AI means they do not need a team. Cory explains why AI can make founders faster, but also turns them into the bottleneck even quicker once traction hits. We discuss what founders should delegate first, how to build with virtual assistants, why outsourcing often fails, and why the real challenge is not operational. It is emotional. We also cover founder ego, remote teams, personal brand, LinkedIn ghostwriting, building in unfamiliar industries, and what it actually means to build a company that does not depend on you doing everything yourself. #AI #Startups #Entrepreneurship #Outsourcing #Delegation #FounderLife #RemoteTeams #BusinessPodcast #NFtwins

June 3, 2026Episode 15351 min

Her Invention Was Stolen by a Billion $ Company | Amanda Sima

In this episode (153), the twins talk to Amanda Sima. Amanda Saima is a serial founder, inventor, and entrepreneur who has built businesses in collegiate apparel, consumer products, and now media. In this episode, Amanda shares how a vintage Ohio State sweater inspired her first company, how she got into the complex world of collegiate licensing, and what she learned from sourcing products internationally. Then the conversation turns into a full founder thriller: Amanda explains how she created a patented disposable kids’ cup lid, why she believed it could be a billion-dollar idea, and how a major corporation allegedly copied it after she shared the concept with a manufacturer. We talk about patents, copycats, lawsuits, founder resilience, and why entrepreneurs have to turn pain into progress. #founderstory #startup #patents

May 18, 2026Episode 15238 min

Why Most FinTech Startups Fail: Rejection, AI & Distribution | Vince Solo

Most founders love building. Fewer love selling. And according to Vasyl “Vince” Soloshchuk, that’s exactly where many startups go wrong. In this episode, we talk about why rejection is one of the most valuable forms of startup data, why founders need to talk to customers earlier, and why traction beats a smart-sounding idea every time. We also dive into FinTech, AI, distribution, data infrastructure, investor red flags, burn rate mistakes, and why execution matters more than vision. A practical episode for founders, operators, and anyone trying to build something real instead of just building something impressive-looking.