What Fuels You

Hosted by Fuel Talent

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Episodes

249

Latest episode

Aug 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

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.

April 7, 202655 min

Jennifer Worthington - Co-Founder and President of Two Dice

Jennifer Worthington is the Co-Founder and President of Two Dice, a new live experience company she's building with George Kliavkoff, with whom she shares a belief in the power of live experiences to create connection and lasting memories. She started her career at Jerry Bruckheimer Films, where she rose to senior vice president at age 23, working on some of the biggest films of that era: Armageddon, The Rock, Black Hawk Down, Pirates of the Caribbean. Then she walked away from Hollywood to open the Coyote Ugly Saloon on the Las Vegas Strip, which became the highest grossing bar per square foot in the country. Jennifer is the author of In the Spirit of Las Vegas for Assouline and the creator of Little Angels, a multi-platform entertainment franchise developed in partnership with Mark Burnett and Roma Downey and now part of Hearst Entertainment. Most recently, she served as CEO and Co-Founder of Play Social Inc., where she launched Play Playground, a next-generation experiential entertainment concept redefining social play for teens and adults. She holds a degree from New York University’s Tisch School of the Arts. See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

March 24, 202646 min

Ardie Sameti - Co-Founder and CEO of Scala

Ardie Sameti is the Co-Founder and CEO of Scala. Ardie is part of a new generation of Northwest leaders rethinking how AI can solve one of the biggest challenges in enterprise operations—the ability to act on customer data in real time. Scala is building an AI platform that unifies enterprise data and turns it into actionable intelligence, helping leaders see what's happening across their operations, respond faster, and empower their teams to perform at their best. Before co-founding Scala, Ardie spent nearly a decade at Accolade leading AI and Platform initiatives inside high-volume healthcare operations. Ardie and his wife Ali are raising their three young kids in Kirkland, and he remains deeply engaged in the Pacific Northwest startup and community ecosystem. See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

March 10, 20261 hr 7 min

Deborah Benton and Amanda Schutzbank - Founders of Willow Growth Partners

Amanda Schutzbank and Deborah Benton are Co-Founders and General Partners at Willow Growth Partners. Willow is an emerging growth fund providing early capital to entrepreneurs building next-generation, values-led consumer brands. They typically lead the first institutional round for companies generating $1-5 million in revenue, applying a disciplined approach to valuation, capitalization, and scaling for long-term success. See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

February 24, 20261 hr 13 min

Evan Zhao - Co-Founder and CEO of Pacagen

Evan Zhao is the Co-founder and CEO of Pacagen, using biotechnology to revolutionize consumer products. Before Pacagen, he served as Chief Science Officer at ODDITY, and previously built and sold Revela. He earned a PhD in Chemical Engineering from Princeton University, and completed work as a Schmidt Science Fellow at Harvard. See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.