Best Applying A Growth Mindset To Leadership And Scaling Podcasts (2025)

1
Ep 54. Betting On People with Mahesh Muralidhar 1:11:49

Play Pause

1h ago1:11:49

1:11:49

Laura Nicol dials into Mahesh Muralidhar. From day one, Mahesh has been obsessed with making a difference. He was early in Sydney’s startup scene in the 2010s post-MBA—first chasing his own idea, then finding impact (and peace) in helping others build. What followed? A career that reads like three lifetimes in one. Inside: The romantic, messy-beaut…

1
The Unspoken Challenges of Deploying to Customer Clouds 52:41

6d ago52:41

52:41

This episode we are joined by Andrew Moreland, co-founder of Chalk. Andrew explains how their company’s core business model is to deploy their software directly into their customers’ cloud environments. This decision was driven by the need to handle highly sensitive data, like PII and financial records, that customers don't want to hand over to a t…

1
Ep 53. Savannah Black on Range, Hypergrowth & ADHD 1:02:35

15d ago1:02:35

1:02:35

Laura Nicol dials into Savannah Black. For Savannah, being a startup operator is about making the company work in the real world. All the forward planning, mission, and vision stuff is important. That’s the on-paper part. But being an operator is about making it actually work. You can see it in action at Crypto Tax Calculator: four roles, three pro…

1
How to build in Observability at Petabyte Scale 45:31

16d ago45:31

45:31

We welcome guest Ang Li and dive into the immense challenge of observability at scale, where some customers are generating petabytes of data per day. Ang explains that instead of building a database from scratch—a decision he says went "against all the instincts" of a founding engineer—Observe chose to build its platform on top of Snowflake, levera…

1
Ep 52. Operational Leadership with Alexey Mitko 58:36

28d ago58:36

58:36

Laura Nicol dials into Alexey Mitko. Alexey’s career has been all about operational leadership. Finance, HR, legal — he’s held the keys to the gritty, foundational work that lets startups scale without falling apart. He puts it simply: “When the startup community has been so generous in teaching me how to see the world differently as a 20-something…

1
The Open-Source Product Leader Challenge: Navigating Community, Code, and Collaboration Chaos 59:26

30d ago59:26

59:26

In a special solo flight, Warren welcomes Meagan Cojocar, General Manager at Pulumi and a self-proclaimed graduate of “PM school” at AWS. They dive into what it’s like to own an entire product line and why giving up that startup hustle for the big leagues sometimes means you miss the direct signal from your users. The conversation goes deep on the …

1
Ep 51. Falling in Love with Startups and Running—Phoebe Pincus 54:55

1M ago54:55

54:55

Laura Nicol dials into Phoebe Pincus, COO at Startmate and Co-Founder at Cheeky Run Club. We cover a lot. Learning to lead when you've never had female leadership role models. Being the opposite of a perfectionist. Her career journey from psychology student to general manager to chief of staff to COO. We also get into starting Cheeky Run Club, bala…

1
FinOps: Holding engineering teams accountable for spend 55:07

2M ago55:07

55:07

In this episode of Adventures in DevOps, we dive into the world of FinOps, a concept that aims to apply the DevOps mindset to financial accountability. Yasmin Rajabi, Chief Strategy Officer at CloudBolt, joins us to demystify, as we acknowledge the critical challenge of bringing together financial accountability and engineering teams who often are …

1
Ep 50. Emer McCann on Building People Functions & Scaling Orgs 55:39

2M ago55:39

55:39

Laura Nicol dials into Emer McCann, Head of People & Chief of Staff at Simply Wall St. Emer scaled Deputy’s people and culture through hypergrowth (70 to 350 employees) before joining Simply Wall St as employee #15 to build from zero. She’s the quiet force behind the chaos. The puppeteer, the glue, the phrasebook for hard conversations. Inside this…

1
The Auth Showdown: Single tenant versus Multitenant Architectures 53:24

2M ago53:24

53:24

Get ready for a lively debate on this episode of Adventures in DevOps. We're joined by Brian Pontarelli, founder of FusionAuth and CleanSpeak. Warren and Brian face off by diving into the controversial topic of multitenant versus single-tenant architecture. Expert co-host Aimee Knight joins to moderate the discussion. Ever wondered how someone beco…

1
Ep 49. Liani Strauss on Keeping Tracksuit on Track 1:02:01

2M ago1:02:01

1:02:01

Laura Nicol connects with Liani Strauss, Chief of Staff at Tracksuit. Liani’s background in industrial engineering gave her structure. Startups gave her speed. Today, she works at the intersection of strategy, systems, and people—helping shape how Tracksuit scales from the inside out. Inside the conversation: Early days of BizOps at Tracksuit: “We …

1
Ep 48. Paul Redfern on Growth, Scale and Staying Human 53:37

3M ago53:37

53:37

Laura Nicol connects with Paul Redfern, Chief Operating Officer at Big Picture Medical. He’s someone who’s spent most of his career toggling between product and operations, and getting pretty good at living in the grey. And becoming “reasonably okay-ish” in a whole bunch of different worlds. This episode is all about a tension every operator knows …

1
Should We Be Using Kubernetes: Did the Best Product Win? 1:06:35

3M ago1:06:35

1:06:35

Episode Sponsor: PagerDuty - Checkout the features in their official feature release: https://fnf.dev/4dYQ7gL This episode dives into a fundamental question facing the DevOps world: Did Kubernetes truly win the infrastructure race because it was the best technology, or were there other, perhaps less obvious, factors at play? Omer Hamerman joins Wil…

1
Mastering SRE: Insights in Scale and at Capacity with Aimee Knight 1:17:55

3M ago1:17:55

1:17:55

In this episode, Aimee Knight, an expert in Site Reliability Engineering (SRE) whose experience hails from Paramount and NPM, joins the podcast to discuss her journey into SRE, the challenges she faced, and the strategies she employed to succeed. Aimee shares her transition from a non-traditional background in JavaScript development to SRE, highlig…

1
Ep 47. The Water Cooler Chat with Gaby Howard & Laura Nicol 55:27

3M ago55:27

55:27

Laura Nicol connects with today's co-host: the wonderful Gaby Howard, Head of Growth and Operations at Carted. Gaby’s no stranger to the podcast—she first appeared on Ep 23. Gaby Howard on Navigating the Shift from Founder to Operator in Tech: Insights from Carted and Flaunter, where the wonderful Paloma interviewed her about her journey from found…

1
Exploring MCP Servers and Agent Interactions with Gil Feig 1:04:57

3M ago1:04:57

1:04:57

In this episode, we delve into the concept of MCP (Machine Control Protocol) servers and their role in enabling agent interactions. Gil Feig, the co-founder and CTO of Merge, shares insights on how MCP servers facilitate efficient and secure integration between various services and APIs. The discussion covers the benefits and challenges of using MC…

1
No Lag: Building the Future of High-Performance Cloud with Nathan Goulding 1:00:38

4M ago1:00:38

1:00:38

Warren talks with Nathan Goulding, SVP of Engineering at Vultr, about what it actually takes to run a high-performance cloud platform. They cover everything from global game server latency and hybrid models to bare metal provisioning and the power/cooling constraints that come with modern GPU clusters. The discussion gets into real-world deployment…

1
Ground Truth & Guided Journeys: Rethinking Data for AI with Inna Tokarev Sela 52:45

4M ago52:45

52:45

Inna Tokarev Sela, CEO and founder of Illumex, joins the crew to break down what it really means to make your data “AI-ready.” This isn’t just about clean tables—it’s about semantic fabric, business ontologies, and grounding agents in your company's context to prevent the dreaded LLM hallucination. We dive into how modern enterprises just cannot bu…

1
Ep 46. Operators and Burnout with Laura Nicol—Solo Reflections 56:00

4M ago56:00

56:00

Today, I’m turning the mic inward for my first-ever solo episode of Calling Operator. I’m Laura Nicol, your host and Chief of Staff at Co Ventures—and in this conversation, we’re talking burnout. The kind that creeps up. The kind that hits hard. The kind that startup operators know all too well. It comes up on the pod all the time—for a reason. I'm…

1
Incident Vibing: The Self-Healing System - DevOps 242 1:10:05

4M ago1:10:05

1:10:05

Sylvain Kalache, Head of Developer Relations at Rootly joins us to explore the new frontier of incident response powered by large language models. We dive into the evolution of DevRel and how we meet the new challenges impacting our systems. We explore Sylvain's origin story in self-healing systems, dating back to his SlideShare and LinkedIn days. …

1
Decentralized Chaos: Web3 Infra, NodeOps, and the Art of Blockchain Load Balancing - DevOps 241 1:16:25

4M ago1:16:25

1:16:25

This week, Paul Marston from Ankr joins the crew to unpack the madness that is modern blockchain infrastructure. From his wild career transition out of financial services into 24/7 node ops for Web3, Paul shares the brutal truth about uptime expectations, decentralization challenges, and why hard forks are more like enterprise schema upgrades with …

1
Ep 45. Scale and Soul: Anitta Krishan on Leading People and Culture Transformation at trivago, Grab, TikTok & Hoogly AI 1:12:59

4M ago1:12:59

1:12:59

Laura Nicol connects with Anitta Krishan, Chief Culture Officer at Hoogly AI. We begin with a breath—a literal nervous system–balancing pause—followed by people-first perspectives from a former Trivago, Grab, and TikTok executive now shaping the future of work through an AI-powered Culture OS. Inside the episode: Operating mindfully: breathing, sle…

1
Observability in the CI/CD Pipeline with Adriana Villela - DevOps 240 1:21:08

4M ago1:21:08

1:21:08

In this episode, Will and Warren welcome Adriana Villela — CNCF ambassador, Dynatrace advocate, and host of the Geeking Out podcast — for a wide-ranging conversation on observability in CI/CD pipelines. Adriana shares her journey from “On Call Me Maybe” to her own podcast, her work with OpenTelemetry, and why observability isn’t just for SREs anymo…

1
Building Engineering Excellence with Ganesh Datta of Cortex - DevOps 239 51:01

5M ago51:01

51:01

In this episode, I (flying solo today!) sat down with Ganesh Datta, the CTO and co-founder of Cortex, to explore what it really means to drive engineering excellence at scale. And spoiler: it’s not just about better dashboards or fancy developer tools—it’s about treating software development like the competitive advantage it is. We went deep into t…

Applying A Growth Mindset To Leadership And Scaling Podcasts

1
Calling Operator with Laura Nicol

Laura Nicol

1
Adventures in DevOps

Will Button, Warren Parad

1
Ep 54. Betting On People with Mahesh Muralidhar 1:11:49

1
The Unspoken Challenges of Deploying to Customer Clouds 52:41

1
Ep 53. Savannah Black on Range, Hypergrowth & ADHD 1:02:35

1
How to build in Observability at Petabyte Scale 45:31

1
Ep 52. Operational Leadership with Alexey Mitko 58:36

1
The Open-Source Product Leader Challenge: Navigating Community, Code, and Collaboration Chaos 59:26

1
Ep 51. Falling in Love with Startups and Running—Phoebe Pincus 54:55

1
FinOps: Holding engineering teams accountable for spend 55:07

1
Ep 50. Emer McCann on Building People Functions & Scaling Orgs 55:39

1
The Auth Showdown: Single tenant versus Multitenant Architectures 53:24

1
Ep 49. Liani Strauss on Keeping Tracksuit on Track 1:02:01

1
Ep 48. Paul Redfern on Growth, Scale and Staying Human 53:37

1
Should We Be Using Kubernetes: Did the Best Product Win? 1:06:35

1
Mastering SRE: Insights in Scale and at Capacity with Aimee Knight 1:17:55

1
Ep 47. The Water Cooler Chat with Gaby Howard & Laura Nicol 55:27

1
Exploring MCP Servers and Agent Interactions with Gil Feig 1:04:57

1
No Lag: Building the Future of High-Performance Cloud with Nathan Goulding 1:00:38

1
Ground Truth & Guided Journeys: Rethinking Data for AI with Inna Tokarev Sela 52:45

1
Ep 46. Operators and Burnout with Laura Nicol—Solo Reflections 56:00

1
Incident Vibing: The Self-Healing System - DevOps 242 1:10:05

1
Decentralized Chaos: Web3 Infra, NodeOps, and the Art of Blockchain Load Balancing - DevOps 241 1:16:25

1
Ep 45. Scale and Soul: Anitta Krishan on Leading People and Culture Transformation at trivago, Grab, TikTok & Hoogly AI 1:12:59

1
Observability in the CI/CD Pipeline with Adriana Villela - DevOps 240 1:21:08

1
Building Engineering Excellence with Ganesh Datta of Cortex - DevOps 239 51:01