Recent Posts
-
Burn The Map: Branding That Converts in the Age of AI w/ Kate DiLeo
We talk to Kate DiLeo about why you can’t just prompt your way into a brand people actually care about. Kate breaks down the difference between cranking out content and building messaging that genuinely moves people to act. She walks through how she rebuilt her business for the AI era without turning herself into a SaaS founder, why so many companies end up with bland, forgettable positioning after letting ChatGPT take the wheel, and why the real edge still comes from human judgment, clear methodology, and a deep understanding of how people make decisions. If your brand sounds fine but isn’t converting, this one will hit a nerve.
-
Burn The Map: Turning AI Into Operational Leverage w/ Brad Groux
We talk to Brad Groux about practical AI, automation, and the gap between flashy demos and systems that actually survive real work. As Co-Founder and CEO of Digital Meld, Brad operates like a builder first: cloud, workflow, Microsoft integrations, agent orchestration, and the messy reality of getting AI to do useful things inside a business. We get into his obsession with making AI operational instead of ornamental, why most teams are chasing optics instead of outcomes, and how his work across Digital Meld, OpenClaw, and Veritas Kanban reflects a bigger belief: the future belongs to people who can turn complexity into working systems.
-
Burn The Map: The Real Cost of Shipping AI Without Guardrails w/ Gabriela Bar
We talk to Gabriela Bar about why AI governance is no longer a side conversation for lawyers and compliance people—it’s becoming the dividing line between products that actually deserve trust and products that are basically theater. Gabriela breaks down what businesses get wrong when they rush to say they’re “using AI,” why most teams still don’t ask nearly enough questions about how these systems actually work, and how the European approach to regulation is trying to protect human rights without choking innovation. She also gets concrete: from GDPR and the EU AI Act to rescue robots, biased training data, black-box models, and the messy reality of building systems that are explainable to the people whose lives they affect. The throughline here is simple: if an AI system can shape access, opportunity, safety, or freedom, “trust us” is not good enough.
-
Burn The Map: AI Is Making SaaS Weird, Pricing Hard, and Authenticity Non-Negotiable w/ Kelly Pronek
We sit down with Kelly Pronek, go-to-market operator, pricing obsessive, and former Pricefx leader, for a conversation that starts with AI tooling and quickly turns into something bigger: how modern software businesses are being rebuilt in real time. Kelly breaks down why pricing is still one of the hardest jobs in business, why most companies are rolling out AI like a preschool teacher dumping instruments on the floor, and why the real value in the next wave of software may not be the platform at all — it may be the taste, judgment, and specificity of the people using it. This one moves from usage-based pricing and CRM sprawl to dyslexia, neurodivergence, implementation chaos, AI “employees” with hangovers, and the growing premium on real voice in a market flooded with sameness. It’s a sharp conversation about what happens when software gets easier to build, harder to differentiate, and a lot more personal.
-
Burn The Map: Why AI Won’t Fix a Leadership Problem w/ Angeley Mullins
We talk to Angeley Mullins about what it actually takes to scale in a market where the ground keeps moving under your feet. She gets into the brutal gap between founder-led sales and real product-market fit, why most teams think they have a tech problem when they actually have a leadership problem, and why AI is exposing weak judgment faster than ever. From brand and content to org design and digital leadership, this conversation is a sharp look at what modern go-to-market really demands when speed, scrutiny, and automation are all turned up to eleven.
-
Burn The Map: Let the AI Do the Work, Let Humans Be Human w/ Chris Singel
We talk to Chris Singel about comedy, marketing, AI, media trust, and the quietly unnerving future of work. Chris has spent more than 20 years making people laugh — teaching improv, sketch, and stand-up, and spending nearly a decade at Funny or Die — so he’s got a sharp read on what actually lands with an audience versus what just tries too hard. His core idea: you probably can’t teach someone to be funny, but you absolutely can help them understand what they find funny and how to make other people come along for the ride. From there, the conversation gets bigger fast. We get into why crowd work is exploding, why authenticity is both powerful and dangerously easy to fake, and how AI is already good enough to change the way creative work gets made. Chris doesn’t do the usual techno-utopian fantasy or anti-AI panic spiral. He’s more interesting than that. He’s asking the messier question: if machines increasingly handle the labor, what exactly are humans supposed to do with themselves — and are we ready for the answer?
-
Burn The Map: Build the Bot, Break the Bot, and Fix the System w/ Bradford Carlton
We talk to Bradford Carlton about what happens when a former attorney gets obsessed with automation, agentic systems, and the uncomfortable truth that most businesses have no idea how their own work actually gets done. Bradford walks through his shift from running a law firm to building AI-powered workflows, dashboards, bug-reporting bots, homeschool tools, and what’s basically a personal operating system for his life. This conversation gets into the difference between AI that looks impressive and AI that actually works. Bradford is blunt about the part most people skip: the real value isn’t in generating code or spinning up 600 workflows—it’s in the debugging, the testing, the logic, and the discipline to break work down into tasks a machine can actually execute. If you’re trying to use AI inside a business without drowning in hype, this one’s for you.
-
Burn The Map: Random Acts of Marketing Are Killing Your Growth w/ Michael “Buzz” Buzinski
We talk to Michael “Buzz” Buzinski about what it takes to build a company that can actually grow without the founder becoming the bottleneck, the brand, and the burnout point all at once. Buzz breaks down why so many B2B founder-led businesses get stuck in what he calls random acts of marketing—a messy cycle of reactive decisions, scattered messaging, and growth that depends way too much on the owner staying in the middle of everything. We also get into why B2B buying is still emotional no matter how much people pretend it’s rational, why most “AI experts” are sprinting way ahead of reality, and why judgment, context, and lived experience are only getting more valuable as the cost of content drops toward zero. It’s part growth strategy, part anti-hype AI conversation, and part founder therapy session.
-
Burn The Map: Digital Twins, Human Judgment, and AI That Actually Works w/ Stephanie Sylvestre
We talk to Stephanie Sylvestre about what it means to build AI that actually helps people instead of just adding more noise, risk, and technical debt to the pile. She’s been working in this space long before the current AI hype cycle, and her perspective is refreshingly grounded: useful AI should remove busywork, expand human capacity, and still keep a human in the driver’s seat. Stephanie walks through the accidental origin story behind AvatarBuddy, her belief that mentorship is really a supply chain problem, and why digital twins could make guidance, support, and opportunity available at a scale the real world has never been able to offer. We also get into the less sexy—but way more important—side of AI: responsible implementation, secure systems, bloated code, fake experts, and why “faster” is not the same thing as “better.”
-
Burn The Map: Why Human-First AI Wins w/ Mike Montague
We talk to Mike Montague about what it looks like to use AI without becoming lazy, robotic, or completely unbearable. Mike’s the founder of Avenue9, a marketer-who-codes, a broadcaster-turned-podcaster, and one of the few people talking about AI in a way that doesn’t sound like either a doomer spiral or a LinkedIn hallucination. His core bet is simple: AI should make humans better at building trust, not better at faking it. Mike breaks down why so much “agentic AI” still feels more like a magic trick than true autonomy, why most companies are using personalization in the dumbest possible way, and why the real opportunity is in removing friction—not replacing human judgment. He and Dan also get into cognitive overload, AI burnout, context engineering, the small-business advantage, and why average work is about to have a very hard time hiding. This is a sharp one for anyone trying to figure out how to use AI to get more human, not less.