Do Hard Things Podcast

Do Hard Things Podcast

Gabe Lullo
Zemlja Sjedinjene Države
Žanrovi Posao
Jezik EN-US
Epizode 118
Najnovija 15.10.2026

The Do Hard Things Podcast features Gabe Lullo, CEO of Alleyoop, a sales development agency that works with companies such as ZoomInfo, Salesloft, and Adobe. With more than two decades in sales, marketing, and executive recruitment, Lullo has trained over 8,000 salespeople and personally hired and managed more than 1,500 SDRs. The show draws on that experience to discuss sales development, leadership, business growth, and the mindset required to tackle difficult challenges.

Epizode

  • Do Hard Things A Podcast With Gabe Lullo Ft. Melinda Yormick 15.10.2026 34min
    "If there's something I can do and should do, then I have a responsibility to do it. That is what I signed up for when I became a nurse." - Melinda YormickMelinda became an OR nurse after watching her grandfather go through a heart surgery, a second surgery to remove a retained sponge, and a stroke that left him bedridden for a decade. She spent 14 years in the OR across seven health systems, then moved into leadership as a surgical service manager.Then a patient died after an elective procedure. The surgery went fine. When the airway tube came out, the patient's airway collapsed, and the team couldn't find the emergency airway cart. The code team couldn't find the patient either. In a two-million-square-foot building, nobody knew where anything was.That night she went home and searched for something that could prevent it from happening again. Nothing on the market met healthcare's needs. She didn't quit the next morning. She spent months talking to frontline nurses and C-suite leaders, and once the case held up, she jumped. She built Clara, a spatial intelligence platform that shows hospital teams where people and equipment are in real time.Her hardest moment came long before any of this. At 19, she lost her dad suddenly and laid on her kitchen floor in Orchard Park, New York, thinking this wasn't supposed to happen. Getting up from that floor is the hardest thing she's ever done."If it's not hard, it's easy. And if it's easy, it's boring."
  • Do Hard Things A Podcast With Gabe Lullo Ft. Mary Crafts 12.10.2026 49min
    "It didn't matter what I had accomplished before, what I had achieved, what awards I had. None of that mattered. It only mattered what I brought that day." - Mary CraftsMary started Culinary Crafts in 1984 by pulling a little red wagon around the neighborhood with her two boys, selling cookies and bread door to door. She built it into Utah's largest off-premise catering company, named best in the state 28 times. She catered for Oprah, Elton John, and two US presidents, and earned a gold medal for catering at the 2002 Olympics.At 50, she found a photo of herself at 284 pounds and wept in a parking lot because she didn't recognize the person in it. She had spent decades chasing success to prove she was worthy of love. So she got a spiral notebook, wrote "fear" on one side and "action" on the other, and tracked the fear behind every habit. She lost 140 pounds, no surgery, no pills, just by healing what was underneath.Then she retired at 65 and climbed Kilimanjaro. Every fear she thought she'd beaten showed up on that mountain. At one point she told the mountain she was a big deal back home. Its answer was "I don't care."Now she works with 33 nonprofits and asks women one question: "What would you do if you weren't afraid?""Whatever you see in me already exists in you. Or you wouldn't see it in me."
  • Do Hard Things A Podcast With Gabe Lullo Ft. Alex Seiler 07.10.2026 38min
    "Don't make an assumption, ask the question. Ask your senior people two things: what's slowing you down, and what would make you consider leaving. That pattern is your real priority list." -  Alex SeilerAlex's HR career started with a job creating employee ID numbers by hand at Citigroup. Nobody dreams of being the employee ID guy, but he paid attention to what he was good at and let that pull him forward. He still respects the people who do the unglamorous work the whole company depends on.From there he worked across Citi, WeWork, and Control Risks, and he's blunt about what that taught him: every size of company has its own flavor of chaos. Bring startup speed to a battleship and you blow past every stakeholder. Bring the battleship process to a five-person startup and you bore everyone into quitting. The skill that transfers is judgment about pace, and diagnosing the environment before you prescribe anything.His rule for earning a seat at the table: lead with the business question, not the HR program. He doesn't pitch leadership development to a CEO as a way to lift engagement scores. He opens with the two VPs the company lost last year and what it cost to backfill them. As CPO, he brought recruiting in-house, saved $500K, and put $360K of it into better benefits.His hot take: companies buy engagement software to fix a management problem. The survey says people are unhappy with their manager, and the action plan is to run the survey again next quarter. The data was never missing. The willingness to have an uncomfortable conversation was."CEOs don't fund feelings. They fund downside protection and upside acceleration."
  • Do Hard Things A Podcast With Gabe Lullo Ft. Cris D'Annunzio 05.10.2026 44min
    "I wasn't making myself an NFL player. I was making myself behave like an NFL player before anybody believed that I could do it." - Cris D'AnnunzioCris spent three years buried on Princeton's depth chart, bitter and barely playing, to the point of calling Joe Paterno to ask about transferring to Penn State. He stayed only because he'd never quit anything in his life. Once the hope of football working out left the room, his ego left with it, and he started writing everything down, tracking every input, with no expectation it would lead anywhere.It led to an honorable mention All-Ivy League season and a shot in the NFL. Then Wall Street, managing over $500 million in client assets. Then thirty years as a working actor (American Gangster, Seinfeld, Animal Kingdom) in an industry that rejects you more than nine times out of ten. Then high-ticket sales, where he still closes every week.His conclusion after all four arena's: talent was never the gap. The gap is whether you keep the process intact when nobody's watching and everything in you wants to negotiate it away. It's the premise behind Metal and Method: you don't know what you actually do every day, you know what you think you do, and your mind lies to you most in moments of duress."At some point you will actually break. You can't do it yourself. This is why validation is so important."
  • Do Hard Things A Podcast With Gabe Lullo Ft. Dave Slagle 30.09.2026 45min
    "Be authentic and tell the truth. In the end, people buy from people they know, like, and trust. Trust is the one thing our industry doesn't have a lot of." -  Dave Slagle, Founder of ICONDave grew up in Berkeley in the '70s, around parents who treated nutrition and supplements as normal, and spent his teenage years as a competitive powerlifter. He landed his first supplement industry job almost by accident, hired at one of the earliest Whole Foods Markets in the early '90s because of his grocery background, not his health science degree.Thirty years later, he's worked every link of the supplement supply chain, retail counter, raw materials, contract manufacturing, clinical trials, and now runs a nonprofit built to defend one ingredient… creatine. His reason is blunt. The industry is full of marketing puffery around creatine gummies, bars, and drinks with no public data proving the creatine survives heat, moisture, or shelf life, layered on top of decades-old myths that creatine is a steroid or causes weight gain. So he partnered with an independent testing lab to certify batch-level purity, because he wasn't willing to accept purity claims he considered mathematically impossible without proof.He calls himself an "ageless athlete," borrowing the term from a philosophy he says most people get backwards: health span and strength span matter more than lifespan, and America is good at keeping sick people alive but bad at keeping healthy people healthy."If you want a recurring customer base and a good reputation in this industry, be authentic. Tell the truth. You may not close every deal, but you'll build one that lasts."
  • Do Hard Things A Podcast With Gabe Lullo Ft. Brian Martynowicz 28.09.2026 26min
    "Companies are built by people, a lot of people, who care. Name me the five key employees responsible for Amazon. You can't. That's actually kind of problematic." - Brian MartynowiczBrian spent nearly two decades in enterprise technology, working as the family IT guy turned pre-sales engineer, watching a familiar pattern. Technical people who thought little of everyone else, and everyone else who thought technology was out of reach. He didn't see a skills gap. He saw a communication problem, and he became the guy who could bridge it.He went full-time on his personal content AI company in January, but not entirely by choice. He'd just helped a cybersecurity company raise nearly $20 million, then got fired for "performance reasons." With a side project already in motion, he gave himself six months to make it real or go back to the workforce.That project became Latitude, built around what he calls GTM engineering, the discipline of keeping a product's story intact as it passes through more and more hands without turning into a game of telephone. His own results: engagement up 1,100% this year, not from better writing, but from consistency. He's blunt about the tradeoff for that consistency: transparency, posting his MRR and his failures to thousands of strangers, which he admits is uncomfortable but has been "undeniable" for the business."People don't buy software for features. They buy it because it solves a problem for them, and they stay because of why it exists."
  • Do Hard Things A Podcast With Gabe Lullo Ft. Julian Treasure 23.09.2026 46min
    "Everybody's listening is unique. Almost nobody understands that. Everybody goes around thinking, well, everybody listens like I do. No, they don't." - Julian Treasure, Sound and Communication ExpertJulian's relationship with sound started at six years old, and through years of playing in bands he developed multi-track listening, paying close attention to everything around him at once. He spent years running a magazine company working with brands like Lexus and Microsoft, noticing the whole time that none of them ever thought about how they sounded. When he sold the company in 2002, he built an audio branding agency around that exact question.Years later, giving one of his five TED Talks, the real insight hit him: companies don't think about sound because they're full of people who don't listen. Research now puts the global cost of workplace disengagement from not listening at $8.8 trillion a year.He draws a hard line between hearing and listening. Hearing is passive. Listening takes four things: consciousness, commitment, compassion, and curiosity, and most people skip all four."The highest performing salespeople listen twice as much as they speak. The lowest performing salespeople speak twice as much as they listen."Julian also just launched his first app, Master Conscious Communication. Our audience gets 20% off the first payment!
  • Do Hard Things A Podcast With Gabe Lullo Ft. Ryan Frey 21.09.2026 25min
    "Everything we do as entrepreneurs is risk. But you can take educated guesses and educate yourself on how to do it." - Ryan FreyRyan started his career in the Peace Corps, building rural water systems in Bolivia, barely speaking the language and with no money to do it. In two and a half years, he finished one project. What he actually learned wasn't construction, it was how to find funding, design something from nothing, and grind projects out no matter how long they take.He brought that grinder mentality into 25 years of real estate development in Missoula, Montana: infill housing, multifamily, industrial, large-scale residential, whatever deals came his way in a market of 120,000 people. He recently entitled a 300-unit build-to-rent project and sold it rather than building it out himself, a decision he credits less to strategy and more to staying unattached to any single project and taking the right offer when it came.Now he's focused on solving Montana's housing affordability gap with factory-built homes, 20-30% cheaper than stick-built construction, targeting the growing space between renters and first-time buyers priced out by the state's post-COVID, post-"Yellowstone effect" boom. He's walked away from deals that looked perfect on paper over a single detail, like insufficient parking, that would have broken the project regardless of the numbers."Most of us, it's easy to create the vision and then just not take action. My advice: get in there and grind it out. You'll get it done."
  • Do Hard Things A Podcast With Gabe Lullo Ft. Brooke Leone Shipman 16.09.2026 25min
    "The day I finally stopped pretending was the day I realized I wasn't performing anymore. I was just surviving. And that wasn't something I was willing to keep calling success." - Brooke Leone Shipman, Founder of CEO WomanBrooke was the first in her family to graduate college, raised without much structure but with a lot of drive.As a sophomore in high school, after being screamed at on the drive to school, she looked in the mirror and decided she got to choose who she was, not her environment. That decision carried her from straight A's to a scholarship to a climb from executive assistant to chief of staff at one of the largest fintech companies in the world.For eight years, she was trusted with everything behind the scenes and invisible in front of it. "So lonely, and also incredibly formative," she calls it. Underneath the climb, she was performing a persona at work that clashed with who she actually was, telling herself she was fine for longer than she'd like to admit, because stopping meant admitting something wasn't working.A close friend saw something in her before she saw it herself, and kept following up: what are your next steps, what do you need. That's what cracked open a door she couldn't close. She left her senior role with no outside capital and built CEO Woman, a personal growth platform for ambitious women, deliberately positioned as a luxury brand, not for the price point, but for the standard of women in the room."Redefining success never means asking less of yourself. It means getting honest about which standards are actually yours, and which ones were handed to you by someone else's agenda."
  • Do Hard Things A Podcast With Gabe Lullo Ft. Kyle Lucey 14.09.2026 46min
    “Failure was never really an option, nor was it accepted.” -  Kyle LuceyWhen Kyle entered financial advising in 2012, the odds were not exactly in his favor. Roughly 89% of new advisors wash out within the first few years.From day one, the expectation was simple: work.Half-days, five days a week. Six to eight hours on weekends. Keep going until you built a successful practice.And despite joining his father’s business, Kyle didn’t get an easier path.He got a higher standard.His father told him it would take six to eight years to develop the technical proficiency needed to truly master the business. Kyle initially took that personally.Eventually, he realized his father was right.That same philosophy now shapes how Kyle works with his own clients.He doesn’t start the first meeting by talking about investments.He starts by getting to know the person.Are they a good fit? Can he serve them well? Can they build a relationship based on trust?He even refuses referral business from the CPAs and attorneys he sends his clients to, a decision that once left a CPA firm asking:“What’s the catch?”There wasn’t one.For Kyle, the business is ultimately about service, relationships, discipline, and doing what’s right for the client, even when there’s a short-term cost.And his advice to anyone thinking about their financial future?“Don’t wait.”You don’t need millions saved to start planning. You don’t need to have everything figured out.You just need to start making the right decisions early.
  • Do Hard Things A Podcast With Gabe Lullo Ft. David Robinson 09.09.2026 39min
    "Every business owner takes all this advice from bigger companies to grow, but when it comes to technology, they suddenly think they know better and try to do it themselves." - David Robinson, Founder of StratosDavid’s career started as a lighting technician for concerts featuring Katy Perry, Tiesto, Jay-Z and others.Then unexpected fatherhood pushed him into "a real job."A family connection brought him into healthcare technology, where he helped build one of the first electronic medical record systems for reproductive endocrinology.The catch?He’d never done anything like it before.So he figured it out through weeks of sleepless nights.Then came a chance conversation at a pool bar in Palm Springs.David approached WebMD’s former CFO and somehow knew enough about his struggling company to get his attention.That conversation led to a job offer in New York, and eventually to working alongside the Big Four consulting firms.That experience became the blueprint for Stratos:Take the technology, expertise, and infrastructure that Fortune 500 companies spend millions on, and make it accessible to the mid-market businesses that are often overlooked.David has a pretty blunt take on those businesses.They'll follow proven advice from bigger companies when it comes to banking, sales, hiring, and structure.Then they get to technology and think:“This is the one area I can figure out myself.”So they hand it to a nephew.So they hand it to a nephew, a freelancer, someone "good with computers." A few years later, they're paying for that decision.David’s filter for business is simple:“If we’re not helping you make money or save money, it’s probably not a good thing to be involved in.”His view on AI is just as pragmatic.Vibe coding isn’t going away.But it can’t vibe-code compliance.Deploying an AI-built tool without a technical partner behind it is rolling the dice, and for most regulated companies, that’s a bet they can’t afford to make.
  • Do Hard Things A Podcast With Gabe Lullo Ft. Anne Freedman 08.09.2026 33min
    "Whenever you're doing a speech or a presentation, you've got to say the lines out loud as you're doing it. If you wait till you're all done, you're going to have twice as much work." - Anne FreedmanAnne started as a journalist before becoming a speaking coach, and assumed a speech was a speech, until an early client bombed a presentation she'd written for him. It read perfectly on the page. Out loud, from him, it was a disaster. That's when she realized writing for the eyes and writing for the mouth aren't the same skill at all.She founded Speak Out in 1990 and has spent thirty-five years since working with people who are wildly accomplished by every measure and still terrified to stand up and talk. She doesn't treat that fear as a character flaw, she treats it as a skill gap: structuring the content, controlling your body and voice while delivering it, and being ready for the law of averages, because the mic will cut out or the coffee will spill eventually.Her practice method cuts against instinct: rehearse a speech out of order, closing first, then opening, then the middle. Only in the last few run-throughs do you go start to finish, timed. And she's blunt about what separates people who break through from those who avoid the podium their whole career: they actually rehearse instead of trusting decades of expertise to carry them through unprepared."Keeping all this knowledge to yourself instead of sharing it is being selfish."
  • Do Hard Things A Podcast With Gabe Lullo Ft. Jeremy Levine 02.09.2026 32min
    "Stop talking about AI. Start talking about value. This is our product, this is the value we drive, and if you want to understand how we do it, we'll show you.” - Jeremy LevineJeremy's career didn't start in sales, it started in art school, which teaches you everything except how to make money as an artist. He waited tables, moved to Israel, and worked call centers just to survive before finally breaking into tech. At 41, he applied to every SDR, AE, and CSM role he could find and got exactly one callback: WalkMe. Even that turned into a rejection email, "looking for somebody a little more junior." He wrote back one line, signed off "forever young at heart" with a winky emoji. Ten minutes later, he had a contract.That decision kicked off five years at WalkMe during hypergrowth and an IPO, where he built outbound motions that landed logos like United Airlines, Walmart, and Home Depot.He was eventually named one of Sales Hacker’s Top 50 sales professionals in the world.Now, as CRO at an AI marketing technology company, he's blunt about the noise in his own category: every SaaS company has bolted AI onto its pitch, and almost none of them sound different because of it. His answer isn't to out-hype the market, it's to stop competing on the buzzword and talk about what the product actually does. He's candid that most AI messaging is aimed at investors, not customers, and confusing the two is exactly how companies end up sounding like everyone else."Nobody's cutting through by out-AI-ing the next guy. You cut through by going back to the product and the value."
  • Do Hard Things A Podcast With Gabe Lullo Ft. Josh Gratsch 31.08.2026 37min
    "You cannot lead someone beyond the parts of yourself you refuse to look at." - Josh Gratsch Josh joined Ascend Innovations in 2016 as a data scientist, no leadership training, no formal path. When the company's original business model failed within its first two years, he stepped into strategy and operations simply because he was willing to take initiative. Six years later, he was CEO, promoted by leaders who saw a capability in him he hadn't yet connected to himself.Then reality hit. He'd spent his whole 20s chasing the title, achieved it, and felt nothing. Within the first six months, a spinout company he chaired collapsed and a business development process he'd trusted without accountability measures turned into a cash flow crisis that cost three leadership team members their jobs."I told myself the most effective leaders are optimistic. What I quickly understood was I didn't balance the equation. Hope is not a strategy."The real shift came from turning the lens inward, tracing his default reactions, defensiveness, control dressed up as ownership, back to where they actually came from. He noticed the gap first at home, wondering why he could stay curious with his team but lose patience with his own kids.That work reshaped how he leads now. Setting direction but actively inviting his team to tell him when he's wrong, because a team that can't have honest conflict can't truly commit to anything together.
  • Do Hard Things A Podcast With Gabe Lullo Ft. Vel Johnson 26.08.2026 36min
    "When you know to do better, you do better." - Vel JohnsonVel grew up an Army brat, moving every two to three years, unpacking just long enough to start making friends before her father's next assignment came through. Her late father earned a Bronze Star across two tours in Vietnam, and the discipline he ran the household with became the discipline she'd later run a business with. What could have been destabilizing instead taught her to build community fast, wherever she landed, a skill that turned out to be the whole job once she got into PR.She left a stable career in Florida's legislative arena, sold her house, and started Vasaj Communications in a city where she knew no one, at the start of the Great Recession. No plan B. Within two years, Black Enterprise magazine profiled her as "The Small Business Catalyst," unpaid, unsolicited, just a phone call she almost mistook for a prank.Two decades later, she led statewide bicentennial celebrations with over 200 events and got authors flown overseas off a single press release. But the hardest thing she's done wasn't a campaign. In 2024, while running the Tallahassee-Leon County Bicentennial for 300,000 residents, her mother passed away. She buried her, drove five hours back, and was at work the next Monday. Months later, she had hip replacement surgery and kept working through recovery, because the mission wasn't done."I had to put the grief on hold. But we all have to decide whether we're going to keep showing up. That's what I decided to do."
  • Do Hard Things A Podcast With Gabe Lullo Ft. Michael Hanson 24.08.2026 31min
    "AI will make good salespeople better and bad salespeople worse. It just accelerates every trend." - Michael Hanson, CEO and Founder of Cosmic GrowthMichael studied politics, not sales, cutting his teeth on an election campaign in South Africa before drifting into an account manager role at a London tech company. He never chased sales for the money. What pulled him in was the communication itself, and the version of himself it forced him to become: a better listener.He later ran growth for an outsourced BDR company with 300 reps in Colombia, watching sales teams book meetings his clients still couldn't close. That gap is why he started training salespeople in 2019.His research keeps landing on the same number: only 18% of buyers trust salespeople, and most of what looks like a skills gap is really a lack of curiosity about the other person, whether that shows up as a copy-paste demo, a generic cold email, or a script read the same way to everyone.His framework opens with a lesson from Superman comics: sales dropped in the '70s once he became too invincible to relate to, and picked back up once writers gave him kryptonite. Michael tells sales teams the same applies to them. Being upfront about what you're not good at builds trust; pretending you're the best at everything doesn't."Most sellers don't have a skills problem. They have a spiritual problem."He uses AI for research and editing, never for writing the whole pitch, because a fully AI-written post always ends up sounding like everyone else's.
  • Do Hard Things A Podcast With Gabe Lullo Ft. Marc Anthony Longwith 19.08.2026 31min
    "Everybody wants to be the hero. Nobody wants to walk the hero's journey." - Marc Anthony Longwith, Founder of Evolved EntrepreneurMarc grew up surrounded by addiction, the only person in his immediate family to graduate high school. What pulled him out was martial arts, starting at 12, taking two buses and walking a mile to the gym on his own, becoming a black belt and coaching other fighters by 14. That discipline became the identity everything else was built on.He worked his way from busboy to sommelier through some of the toughest kitchens in Las Vegas, then co-founded a brewpub that became one of downtown Vegas's top spots, backed in part by Tony Hsieh. Then 2020 hit. In a compressed window, he lost both parents, a relationship he thought would end in marriage, and the business, nearly all at once. He calls what followed "the sacred collapse," not a motivational turnaround, just survival, day by day, for the better part of a year.What came out the other side was two seven-figure brands built and exited, real sobriety, and a coaching philosophy built on subtraction instead of addition: most people aren't missing a framework, they're carrying old patterns that block the skills they already have."Some of us are just built a little different. But resilience isn't something you're born fully loaded with, it's built in layers, little by little, or you crush people before they're ready."
  • Do Hard Things A Podcast With Gabe Lullo Ft. Ryan O'Hara 17.08.2026 37min
    "The worst thing you could do is go look at what your competitors are doing and try to replicate what they just said on your website. You're just going to look like everybody else.” - Ryan O'HaraRyan started as a video production intern at Dyn, hoping to make ads before pivoting into cold prospecting instead, becoming the company's first BDR. He helped scale the sales team from three reps to over a hundred before Oracle acquired the company for north of $600 million.He carried the same instinct through LeadIQ: business messaging didn't have to be boring. While the sales tech space drowned in "hit your number" energy, Ryan sent music videos to prospects and made 90s-style jingle ads for target accounts like Zoom and Logitech, then watched those videos rack up thousands of organic views from inside the exact companies he was trying to reach.His first Pitchfire venture nearly ended when his sole investor passed away from cancer mid-round. He rebuilt it into a new company, investment infrastructure for VC firms still running deal flow through Typeform and Google Docs instead of anything built for it. His read on outreach in the AI era hasn't changed: reply rates have crashed, AI-written pitches all sound the same, and what still breaks through is a real detail two humans actually have in common, not a value prop."Be yourself the whole time. If you're an SDR who makes music, put music into your prospecting. Life doesn't have to be one octave lower just because you're at work."
  • Do Hard Things A Podcast With Gabe Lullo Ft. Michael Assraf 12.08.2026 41min
    "There's software replacing software, and now there's software taking over services. I don't think we've seen anything like this since the Industrial Revolution." - Michael Assraf, Founder of FlamingoMichael started in the Israeli infantry, then moved to logistics, managing budgets in the hundreds of millions at 18 years old with nothing but Excel macros to automate it. That early responsibility, thrown at him before he was remotely ready, became the foundation for everything after. He co-founded a cybersecurity startup in 2016, took nearly five years to find product-market fit, raised $60 million, and walked away as CEO after nine years, right as he felt AI was about to change what software even meant.His new company, Flamingo, targets a market most VCs don't even understand.Managed service providers, a $105 billion, deeply fragmented industry where 75 percent of MSPs run under $3 million in revenue with fewer than five people. He'd learned firsthand that MSPs pay twice for the same problem, once to software vendors and once to technicians. Flamingo was built to zero out the tooling cost using open-source infrastructure instead.Before shipping a single feature, he launched a free community and vendor directory called Open MSP. No pitch, no sales ask, just a better way for MSPs to see what open-source alternatives existed for the tools they were already overpaying for. It crossed 2,000 MSPs on the waitlist before the product even existed."People are always suspicious when you give them something for free. But that's exactly the customer profile I was looking for: the ones willing to adopt open source."
  • Do Hard Things A Podcast With Gabe Lullo Ft. Yaron Vorona 10.08.2026 32min
    "It's easy to father a child. It's hard to be a dad. It's easy to be a founder. It's hard to be a leader." - Yaron Vorona, Founder Coach and Former VC    Yaron has a physics degree and an MBA from London Business School, an unusual pairing that came from wanting to build technologies that lead to a better future. He's since founded and backed companies in cybersecurity, AI, blockchain, and defense across three continents, made most of the classic first-time-founder mistakes, ran a company out of cash, and eventually crossed to the VC side before coming back to work directly with founders.    His diagnosis after years on both sides of the table… What looks like a strategy problem or a team problem is almost always a leadership problem underneath. The hardest tension he sees founders wrestle with isn't delegation or speed, it's fear. Founders usually already know the right decision the moment they're faced with one. Fear is what sends them looking for evidence to justify what they're already scared into believing.    He calls himself a "dad venturer" on purpose. A founder who can't manage their relationship with their family or their own body can't lead a company at full capacity either. Nutrition, movement, sleep, and the people at home aren't separate from the job, they're the foundation of it.    "No founder has ever looked back on what they built and said, 'I wish I had spent less time with my family.'"