Today’s episode, NonProfitPalooza, might better be titled “How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love Overachievers.” Our guests are Marissa Fayer and Brody Galloway, both of whom founded and actively run MedTech nonprofits. Were that not enough, they also hold day jobs. Marissa Fayer is the founder and CEO of HERhealthEQ, an organization dedicated to reducing the equity gap in access to healthcare for women around the world — or, more simply put, deploying medical equipment to maternal health pati...
Jan 08, 2025•49 min•Season 6Ep. 13
This episode of the "5-Minute Update" extends our discussion of ethically-informed licensing to enterprise software customer data. That's a mouthful. Let us explain. As our dedicated listener(s) will appreciate, the "5-Minute Update" recently explored whether technology licensing agreements might prove a viable mechanism for right-sizing the growth of AI from a risk/benefit perspective. The particular focus of Episode 85 was on the ethics of AI and how it might inform drafting those agreements f...
Jan 03, 2025•26 min•Season 6Ep. 12
Whether for autonomous vehicles or “smart” consumer products, government regulation may be too little and too late when it comes to right-sizing the growth of AI from a risk/benefit perspective. Can the private sector do better — and, if so, could technology and data licensing agreements provide a viable mechanism for regulating AI in consumer products? Join a panel discussion on the ethics of AI and how it might inform drafting those agreements as this new technology takes hold in the marketpla...
Jan 03, 2025•52 min•Season 6Ep. 11
Our Guest: Suman Lal
Oct 06, 2024•43 min•Season 6Ep. 10
We’d thought we’d learned from a prior guest to this august podcast that Big Pharma could provide cures for more diseases, if only flaws in America’s third-party payor health care system could be fixed. Today’s guest is not so sure of that. Dr. Seth Powsner, a professor at Yale and a practicing ER physician, says that it’s really a question of will: the collective will of a nation to solve a problem. That’s especially true when it comes to curing diabetes. Sure, a cure might be around the corner...
Sep 15, 2024•1 hr•Season 6Ep. 9
Join the team from Failure - the Podcast (a/k/a Innovation Blab) as they stumble upon the dark underbelly of Big Pharma. Our guest, Imran Nasrullah, has 25+ years of experience in the industry, specializing in drug licensing and business development. He tell tales that few know or want to believe. One in ten thousand, for example: 9,999 candidate drugs tested and rejected for one that makes it to the next stage-gate. Few drugs make it through all the hurdles, but a surprising number that do are ...
Jul 29, 2024•Season 6Ep. 8
Who knew? Join the Innovation Blab (a/k/a Failure - the Podcast) in a double-header. A two-fer. “Episode 80 - Broken Down Cars” and “Episode 81 - The Singularity is Nigh.” Our special guests are … well … special. Milind Sawant is an AI guru, currently with Siemens Healthcare and leading a team of 50 engineers and a $15M budget to drive AI integration into medical systems. It’s no surprise that Milind is a big fan of AI and the promise it brings to healthcare. That shone through despite Jeff’s pr...
Jul 13, 2024•45 min•Season 6Ep. 8
Who knew? Join Innovation Blab/Failure - the Podcast in a double-header. A two-fer. “Episode 80 - Broken Down Cars” and “Episode 81 - The Singularity is Nigh.” Our special guests are … well … special. Sydney Robinson is CEO and co-founder of Vessl Prosthetics, an Ontario-based startup that is hellbent on improving the lives of below-knee amputees and on proving that not all orthopedic startups end up like broken down cars along the road to success. We think they’ve got a shot at both. If Sydney ...
Jul 13, 2024•45 min•Season 6Ep. 5
Catch them on a good day, and we suspect that many an entrepreneur would say that bootstrapping a business is like a bowl of cherries, pits and all. Leaving aside the independently wealthy, that more traditional approach may destine the enterprise to slower, bounded growth. A lifestyle business. One that’s likely to yield more pits than flesh early on, but that with the right mix of hard work, pivots and luck can be fruitful in the long run. Nasty, brutish and short might be what you hear of sta...
Jun 28, 2024•1 hr 3 min•Season 6Ep. 6
Ask an entrepreneur: “what keeps you up at night?” They’ve heard The Question before and have an answer at the ready. But they’ll make you wait through a feigned moment of reflection before they launch into it. Investors play the game, too. Get a group of them together and, invariably, one of them will pose The Question whenever an entrepreneur does a pitch. All present will nod knowingly as the collective’s secret weapon is unleashed. The entrepreneur’s perfectly timed pause, then, answer (the ...
Jun 13, 2024•1 hr 27 min•Season 6Ep. 5
Election fever. With all the news, who can avoid it? Not a news ticker scrolls by without a mention of Biden's age, Trump's trials and RFK's betrayals. We're not immune to it. So when a scheduled guest went AWOL, we figured we'd talk about the first thing that came to mind. Suffice it to say that MAGA conservatives aren't the only ones who hang out in echo chambers.
Mar 24, 2024•1 hr 3 min•Season 6Ep. 4
Join us in a discussion with Diane Bouis, director of MedTech Innovator, the world’s largest life science startup accelerator program.
Feb 27, 2024•1 hr 15 min•Season 6Ep. 3
Not that we have a vested interest, but we’d suggest that Joe Biden make a go at it with a blue baseball cap sporting the acronym MIGA. You know, “make innovation great again!” Speaking of innovation, today’s guest is John Daniels, a tinkerer turned entrepreneur who is daring fate by joining the Innovation Blab in a discussion of his latest venture. It’s developing a rapid diagnostic kit to test for Covid and whatever else ails mankind. With a bit of luck, he’ll launch the product before Kari La...
Feb 01, 2024•52 min•Season 6Ep. 2
Welcome to Innovation Blab , a new series of podcasts (…keep fingers crossed…) offering the B-side to Failure - the Podcast . Yes, Mark will be back, and we hope to put up both Innovation and Failure posts in the coming days (months, more likely), but as they say about the alleged clandestine romantic relationship surrounding appointment of the special prosecutor in the Georgia election interference cases, we shall see. Can’t say that much has been made of the B-side of late. Baby boomers are pr...
Jan 12, 2024•54 min•Season 6Ep. 1
It's not often the team from Failure - the Podcast gets serious. Sure, there was the time Mark stole an air mask from Jet Blue and hooked it to a canister of helium. He was impersonating Marjorie Taylor Green for our "Fly Me to the Moon" episode, but forgot to put oxygen in the mix. Thankfully, the EMTs had a spare pig's brain on board for the transplant. And, how about when Mic hired Rudy Giuliani to defend "the team" in Joe Rogan's trademark infringement suit. It's times like these you realize...
Apr 09, 2022•1 hr 6 min•Season 5Ep. 2
No, it's not the ice cream. It's the podcast. This one, and you can be sure it's in bad taste. But, hey, don't be too disappointed. Before reality sunk in, we did offer you the briefest glimmer of hope. That's more than a certain congressperson from Georgia has done for you. What is today's podcast, other than the usual meaningless banter? There is that, of course. But, there is more, too. Coffee. Yep, you guessed it, and what a genius you are! The coffee business, to be more precise. And, becau...
May 25, 2021•1 hr 5 min•Season 4Ep. 3
Sounds promising: fun with numbers. If not the mathematicians and physicists, certainly the accountants might get something from this podcast. And, if not them, the actuaries will have a field day. Think about it: a podcast even an actuary could love. Stultifying. Well, not so fast. If you’ve not learned anything from the last four years, it’s that labels can be deceiving. Take “Super Happy Fun America,” a Massachusetts-based nonprofit that, from the looks of it, should be more fun than a barrel...
Apr 05, 2021•1 hr 8 min•Season 4Ep. 2
It took a little doing, but the team from Failure - the Podcast think they found the first use of that magical phrase "testing, testing one, two, three.....". No, it wasn't in 2010, when Biden dropped the F-bomb on an open mic while introducing then-President Obama's eponymous health care bill. Nor, was it when Sleepy Joe muttered "God save the queen" at the close of the 115th Congress in 2017, after announcing that The Donald had won the electoral college. Had Joe prefaced these utterances with...
Feb 26, 2021•56 min•Season 4Ep. 1
Yup, the team from Failure – the Podcast has been busy, too. End of year, and all that. When we weren’t worrying about systemic election fraud, it was that “undemocratic coup“ that the New York Post was railing about. But, with vaccine distribution started, the pandemic relief bill signed and the defense bill ... well … we’ll just see…, it’s time to move forward. We might’ve been busy, but that doesn’t mean that rednose from the north, the old guy and his minions, or even Harry (yeah, you rememb...
Dec 29, 2020•1 hr 15 min•Season 3Ep. 19
Fintech intelligentsia light up when they hear about new payment processing platforms, sometimes referred to as "rails." It's an allusion to moving goods via railway with tracks, switches, sidings and all those other things grandpa used to reminisce about but that you've never actually seen in person — save for that one harrowing flight out of Midway Int'l in January 2015, when you swore you could count the rivets on boxcars at the Corwith railyard. Only difference is that payment rails can move...
Dec 09, 2020•50 min•Season 3Ep. 18
Some things just take a long time. The campaigning. The lawsuits. The voting. The lawsuits. The counting. The lawsuits. The re-counting. The lawsuits. The certifications. The lawsuits. It’s a process. And, after all, nobody said democracy was easy. In fact, had the 19th-century German statesman Otto von Bismarck had the foresight, he might well have said that democracy, like sausages, is best not seen in the making. Walking is the same way. It’s a process. You put your left foot in. You put your...
Nov 13, 2020•46 min•Season 3Ep. 17
It certainly seemed that the team from Failure - the Podcast went into Covid-induced hibernation these past few months. We might say that we spent them on a promotional tour to shore up flagging subscriptions in Wisconsin, Michigan and Pennsylvania. Unfortunately, with Joe Rogan putting the last few bricks into his “blue wall” of podcast fame in those hotly-contested markets — a wall, we will note, is rumored to have been funded by the Mexican government — we’d have to walk back that claim. We m...
Nov 02, 2020•50 min•Season 3Ep. 16
Before starring as the criminal mastermind, Wo Fat, in the CBS television series Hawaii Five-O , Mark Dacascos emceed the Food Network hit, Iron Chef America . Though he probably never uttered the words himself, Dacascos will forever be associated with the iconic opening line “if memory serves me correctly …” that launched the Iron Chef brand into camp TV lore. If memory serves us correctly, it was a sage podcast that brought you the trials and tribulations of a travel startup in the post-pandem...
Aug 31, 2020•1 hr 1 min•Season 3Ep. 15
Have you ever looked out over the Midwest farmlands while taking a cross country flight? Just another pretty view, you ask? The guests of today’s podcast think not. Whether the swamp lands in our nation’s capital or a cornfield in the Midwest, a picture can be worth a whole lot. Sure, a satellite photo might give you some insight into the corruption that is Washington DC, but a cornfield from on high is the real money shot. Imagine, if you could identify rows of maze ripening ahead of schedule o...
Aug 12, 2020•46 min•Season 3Ep. 14
It takes a lot to rile the team from Failure - the Podcast — especially, when they’re recording an episode. So much so that one wonders whether they spend more time listening to themselves than to their guests. (Yeah, we get it. It’s a process, and at Mark’s age, a slow ship to turn.) But riled they were. In fact, Dave almost had a conniption arguing the benefits of angel investing over, what, equity crowdfunding? Whose heard of that? Come on raise your hands. Higher, please…. There. That proves...
Jul 18, 2020•1 hr 29 min•Season 3Ep. 13
We were curious. Just what is a skeeter? In the midwest it’s slang for mosquito. Perhaps, everywhere. Wikipedia thinks so. It lists “skeeter” as one of the top off-book expressions for the little disease-carrying buggers. Regardless, nobody seems to like them. Nobody, except the birds and the bats. Fish and frogs, too —- though, the latter might not be with us much longer, if the chytrid fungus has its way. So, forget the frogs. Turtles like skeeters, and so do dragonflies. None of these little ...
Jul 05, 2020•41 min•Season 3Ep. 12
Jennie Nigrosh’s epic failure on ABC’s “Shark Tank” in 2013 is the stuff of legends. The rising entrepreneur and founder/CEO of eco-friendly laundry-bag maker The Green Garmento got her legs cut out from under her during taping of the ABC reality show. Though she walked away without a penny from “the sharks,” her business took off. The Green Garmento, a multi-use alternative to plastic dry cleaning bags, is used by dry-cleaners and hotels worldwide. Why Jennie deigned to take the call — much les...
Jun 20, 2020•58 min•Season 3Ep. 11
This episode has nothing to do with Amy Cooper. In fact, it doesn’t mention any Karens or their victims. Amy’s dog was named Henry. He’s not in this podcast. Last we heard, he was back with the cocker spaniel rescue league. They are not mentioned in today’s episode, either. This episode has nothing to do with coronavirus. Nor, vaccines, anti-vaxxers or Betsy DeVos. In fact, although the episode was recorded at socially-acceptable distances on the order of miles (and, in the case of our guest, a ...
Jun 01, 2020•36 min•Season 3Ep. 10
So, let’s talk Internet. For sure, it had a beginning. Conventional wisdom says Al Gore gets the credit. The facts say otherwise — but who listens to them anymore. Haven’t you ever wondered how the Internet got started? The team from Failure - the Podcast hasn’t either. Given the number of times we repeat that old saw about Veep Gore, we really should, though. Our guest, for today’s travesty … er, episode … is Tim Horgan, the former web services guru of Digital Equipment Corporation. Haven’t hea...
May 15, 2020•54 min•Season 3Ep. 9
Abby Hoffman would not be pleased. The Vietnam War-era activist and author of the iconic work, Steal this Book, had values after all. So why might today’s episode of Failure - the Podcast have Hoffman rolling in his grave? Perhaps, it’s because Hoffman was anti-establishment, whereas our guest, Jason Kraus, is an investor and author of Prepare 4 VC. He is a capitalist. Worse yet — we’re channeling Hoffman, here — he’s a capitalist who’s intent on spawning others through his writing. Join the tea...
May 10, 2020•48 min•Season 3Ep. 8
