What Fuels You

Hosted by Fuel Talent

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Episodes

253

Latest episode

Oct 2026

Language

EN-US

About the show

Shauna Swerland, CEO of Fuel Talent, launches the What Fuels You podcast, where she sits down with influential, interesting and successful leaders to learn from them. She digs into the stories and choices that made them who they are today, with the goal of sharing the inspiration, perseverance and stories of resilience that are normally only shared within an inner circle. You'll walk away feeling fueled by each episode as Shauna uncovers things like personal hardships and failures, what it’s like to become an entrepreneur and tips on building a successful career.

Listen to episodes

60 recent

October 13, 20261 hr 5 min

Jacob Colker - Co-Founder and Managing Director at AI House

Jacob Colker is Co-Founder and Managing Director of the AI House, based at Pier 70 in Seattle, where he focuses on turning cutting-edge AI research into real-world companies. He specializes in the zero-to-one phase where ideas become teams, products, and businesses. Over his career, Jacob has personally raised or helped his teams raise more than $500 million in capital, and helped create over $2 billion in startup valuation, partnering with exceptional founders to help them build their dreams. See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

September 29, 20261 hr 2 min

Tushar Garg - Co-Founder and CEO of Flyhomes

Tushar Garg is the Co-Founder and CEO of Flyhomes, a next-generation residential real estate financial solutions company that empowers agents and loan officers with exclusive buy-before-you-sell solutions, enabling buyers to move before they sell with less stress and more certainty. He has led Flyhomes through multiple funding rounds to Series D, evolved the company from a D2C model to a B2B2C platform, and expanded into innovative financial products and nationwide wholesale lending. Prior to founding Flyhomes, Tushar held roles at Microsoft and McKinsey. See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

September 15, 202644 min

Prem Kumar - Co-Founder and CEO of Humanly

Prem Kumar is the Co-Founder and CEO of Humanly, a Bellevue-based hiring technology company built to fix something he saw up close: two people interviewing for the exact same job with the exact same panel getting treated completely differently. Before Humanly, Prem spent about a decade at Microsoft and led product and design at TinyPulse. Humanly went through Y Combinator and has raised roughly $52 million to date—most recently a $25 million Series B. See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

September 1, 20261 hr 0 min

Francois Ajenstat - Founder and CEO of Golden Analytics

Francois Ajenstat is the Founder and CEO of Golden Analytics, an AI-native business intelligence platform. He launched the company from stealth in April 2026 after nearly three decades building other people's analytics products. He was CPO at Tableau from the early startup days through its IPO and Salesforce acquisition, then CPO at Amplitude. Now he's founder and CEO of Golden Analytics. Francois believes the best products are love letters to the people who use them. He's been in the industry long enough to know what's broken, and Golden is his answer. Visit https://www.goldenanalytics.com/ to learn more. See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

August 4, 202639 min

Mike Kropp - Founder & CEO of Iridius

Mike Kropp is the Founder and CEO of Iridius, a Seattle-based company building compliance-ready AI infrastructure for highly regulated industries like pharma and biotech. A technology executive with over 25 years of leading engineering teams at Microsoft and AWS, Mike has played a crucial role in developing innovative products and expanding their global business adoption. Mike uses a collaborative, working backward approach to deliver products that help customers innovate and create high-impact solutions for their companies. See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

July 21, 202646 min

Kavian Mojabe - Founder and CEO of MediScan AI

Kavian Mojabe is the Founder and CEO of MediScan AI, the AI back office for independent medical evaluators. These are the licensed physicians whose opinions decide the outcome of workers' compensation, personal injury, and disability cases. MediScan's best-in-class record review engine does in minutes what used to take weeks, helping physicians optimize chart reviews to help patients faster and more effectively. Before MediScan, Kavian was a founding engineer at two startups acquired by Amazon and Adobe. But this one is personal—his father is an independent medical evaluator in Southern California, and Kavian grew up watching the toll the busy work took on a doctor who just wanted to practice medicine. MediScan is his answer: give that time back and let people like his father stay independent. See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

July 7, 202655 min

Ian Wong - Co-Founder and CEO of Summation

Ian Wong is the Co-Founder and CEO of Summation, where he's building AI analysts for finance and operations teams. Ian previously co-founded Opendoor and served as CTO, and before that was the first data scientist at Square. His career has centered on one question: How can technologists use data and AI to create meaningful change in the real world? See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

June 2, 202646 min

Victoria Thain Gioia - Co-Founder and CEO of Perelel

Victoria Thain Gioia is the Co-Founder and CEO of Perelel, the first OBGYN-founded vitamin company offering doctor-formulated, research-backed supplements designed to meet the unique needs of women at every stage of their hormonal journey. Before founding Perelel, Victoria worked in investment banking and private equity, then moved into finance and operating roles at The Honest Company, Olive and June, and Carbon38. In 2018, while pregnant with her second child, she learned her daughter would be born with a cleft lip—often linked to nutritional deficiencies—despite taking all of the recommended vitamins. That experience led her to partner with OBGYN Dr. Banafsheh Bayati to bring real medical rigor to prenatal nutrition. Perelel launched in 2020 as a direct answer to the one-size-fits-all model that had dominated women's healthcare for far too long. See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

May 5, 202655 min

Greg Davidson - Co-Founder and CEO of Lalo

Greg Davidson is the Co-Founder and CEO of Lalo, a modern baby and toddler brand built around the idea that new parents deserve better: better design, better guidance, and products that actually grow with their kids. Greg's path to founding a baby brand is not what you'd expect. He came up through a series of fast-growing startups in sales and go-to-market roles at Elastic, Krossover, WayUp, and Artsy before co-founding Lalo in 2017 with his former WayUp colleague, Michael Wieder. Neither of them had kids at the time. His first child was born in 2020, just after officially launching the business in 2019 and right before a global pandemic. They were somehow still able to grow 400% that first year. Lalo has since raised a $10.1 million series A, and expanded into Target, Babylist, Pottery Barn Kids and beyond. Greg is based in Miami and is a dad of three. See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

April 21, 202643 min

Ross Goodhart - Founder and Co-CEO of Jupiter

Ross Goodhart is Co-CEO and a Founder of Jupiter—the new standard in dandruff care, delivering clean, elevated, and seriously effective dandruff care products. He was born and raised in Hawaii, and received his B.B.A from the University of Michigan School of Business in 2002, with an emphasis in Finance, Accounting and Entrepreneurship. From 2002 to 2015, Ross worked in investment banking at Peter J. Solomon Company and then private equity at Siguler Guff & Company, managing funds focused on consumer and tech investments in emerging markets. See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.