Forward Thinking Founders

Updated: 05 Nov 2025 • 969 episodes
ftf.transistor.fm

Forward Thinking Founders is a founder podcast where we interview high potential founders from networks like Y Combinator, The Thiel Fellowship, Product Hunt, Twitter, etc. and brings to light what they're building for the world. Think of it like the opposite of How I Built This, where we interview founders before they are successful, then if they are, we have a moment in time we can look back on in the early days. Does the model work? Look at our early interviews and you'll have your answer.

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Mat Sherman catches up with Connor Waslo, co-founder/CEO of Caddy, a desktop voice interface that keeps you in flow by turning spoken intent into real work across tools like Linear, Slack, Calendar, Gmail, and Notion. Connor shares the origin story with cofounder Rajiv, hard pivots, and craft standards for their privat

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In this episode of Forward Thinking Founders, Mat Sherman chats with Jared Lerner, co-founder and CEO of Nappr, a marketplace redefining hotel stays by letting travelers book rooms for short, flexible durations. Jared shares how his own struggles with sleep sparked the idea, what it takes to build trust with hotels, an

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In this episode of Forward Thinking Founders, Mat Sherman chats with Mahdi Nouri, co-founder and CEO of CatDoes, a no-code AI mobile app builder empowering anyone to create apps without writing code. Mahdi shares the story behind CatDoes, the product decisions that shaped its growth, and how he’s navigating the fast-ch

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In this episode of Forward Thinking Founders, Mat Sherman interviews Adam Cohen Hillel, co-founder of Dafdef, the company behind AI Key—a groundbreaking device that plugs into your phone and allows AI to directly control it. Adam discusses the development journey of AI Key, the importance of privacy and security, and t

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In this episode of Forward Thinking Founders, Mat Sherman talks with Nikhil Yadala, cofounder and CEO of Helome, a company building AI copilots to help people slow their aging. Nikhil shares how Helome uses advanced “aging clocks”, AI models trained on blood biomarkers, to measure biological age and guide people toward

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In this episode, we dive into one of the most pressing conversations in technology today: the balance between innovation and security in artificial intelligence. The discussion with Will Preble of Covenant Labs unpacks why maintaining control over AI models is critical, the looming risks tied to data security, and the

35 min
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