TruthWorks

Jessica Neal and co-host Peter Clarke sit down with Gagan Biyani, co-founder of Udemy, founder of Sprig, and now co-founder and CEO of Maven, the live cohort-based learning platform reshaping how the world's top operators learn from each other.
Gagan started his first business at 13, teaching speech and debate to kids in his living room while his parents went through a divorce and his family rode out multiple tech recessions. By his senior year, that summer camp had 150 students and was financing the trips of every student on his school's debate team.
In this conversation, Gagan walks Jessica and Peter through the unlikely path that took him from a Fremont kid with no idea startups existed, to obsessively reading TechCrunch four hours a day from a government consulting desk, to becoming the business co-founder of Udemy after a single Skype call with two Turkish immigrants who didn't even know they wanted to run the company yet.
He talks openly about getting pushed out of Udemy, raising $60 million for Sprig and watching it crash and burn, and the years of self-doubt that followed before Maven finally clicked. He shares why his habits get stricter the more pressure he's under, why a status-oriented social network is the most dangerous thing that can happen to a founder, and the friend group from high school speech and debate that has kept him grounded for two decades.
Then he and Jessica get into the part of the conversation that should make every leader sit up. Why most AI rollouts fail in week three. Why "just give people the tools" is the laziest mistake HR teams keep making. Why Maven has already restructured its engineering pods from 4.5 engineers per PM down to 2, and is asking whether that ratio still needs to shrink further.
He explains why universities will be the single biggest laggards in the AI transition, why the education gap is about to widen dramatically, and what he'd actually do if he had a six-year-old in the public school system right now.
Topics covered:
Starting his first business at 13 during his parents' divorce
The Stanford summer camp that became a $50K business with 150 students
Why he was a terrible boss as a teenager
How TechCrunch and one comment from a friend changed his life trajectory
Becoming Udemy's business co-founder after a single Skype call
Getting pushed out of his own company and starting over
Raising $60M for Sprig, burning out, and shutting it down
Why founders need friend groups that aren't status-oriented
The counterintuitive habit pattern: stricter routines under more stress
Why product-market fit is the #1 job, and recruiting is #2
Why Maven exists, humans still have a place in modern learning
Restructuring engineering pods because of AI: 4.5 engineers per PM down to 2
Why most AI rollouts fail in week three
The biggest mistake HR leaders are making with AI right now
Why universities will be the laggards in the AI transition
The Alpha School model and the future of K-12 education
This is one of those episodes where a founder you might not have heard of teaches you more about building, leading, and surviving in the next decade than most of the household names ever will. Gagan is honest about the failures, generous with the frameworks, and clear-eyed about what's coming.

What if illness was optional?
Naveen Jain has built seven companies. He was on top of the world running Moon Express, the first private company ever granted permission to leave Earth orbit, with a $2.6 billion NASA contract to mine the moon, when his father was diagnosed with stage 4 pancreatic cancer and given three months to live.
He got exactly that.
That moment broke something open. Naveen walked away from space and started asking a different question: if we can land on the moon, why are we still finding cancer by a dentist running a finger across someone's gum?
In this episode, Naveen sits down with Jessica to share the framework behind every company he builds: why this, why now, why me.
That framework led him from helium-3 mining to founding Viome, the company now running 1.5 million tests, sitting on 400 quadrillion biological data points, and holding FDA Breakthrough Device designation for detecting stage 1 oral and throat cancer with 95% specificity.
A stage 1 pancreatic cancer test launches in the next three months.
Jessica and Naveen go deep on:
The three questions every founder must answer before starting anything
Why DNA testing companies are asking the wrong question, and what RNA reveals instead
The 100 trillion microbes producing 99.9% of the genes expressed in your body
How a classified Los Alamos biological defense project became the foundation of Viome
Why cancer immunotherapy works for 1/3 of patients, and what changes when you fix the gut
The double-blind data: HbA1c down 0.42 in 90 days, IBS reversal in 64% of patients, anxiety down 50%
Building a culture where loyalty shifts from the founder to the mission
Why Naveen, at 66, still believes he owes a debt to his fellow humans
The advice he'd give every leader: dream so big people think you're crazy
A masterclass in first-principles thinking, mission-driven leadership, and the radical idea that chronic disease isn't a feature of aging.
It's a signal we've been ignoring.

Truth Works is hosted by Jessica Neal, former Netflix CHRO, here to interrogate what actually works in leadership and life.
If this conversation shifted how you think about your health, your work, or what you're capable of building, share it with someone who needs to hear it.

She built one of the first podcasts in the world.
She turned down the CEO job after twenty years.
And she wants you to ask yourself one question: if not now, when?

In this episode of Truth Works, Jessica Neal and co-host Peter Clarke sit down with Debbie Millman, the founder and host of Design Matters, the longest-running design podcast in the world, now in its twentieth year. 

Over two decades, Debbie has interviewed more than 700 of the world's most creative people, written eight books, and shaped some of the biggest consumer brands on the planet, including Burger King, Häagen-Dazs, Star Wars, Tropicana and the No More campaign. 

She co-founded the world's first Masters in Branding program at the School of Visual Arts, is President Emeritus of AIGA, and in 2024 was named an Executive Fellow at Harvard Business School.
This conversation goes way deeper than the résumé. Debbie talks about failing as an artist, writer, and designer before stumbling into branding by accident. 

She explains why she turned down the CEO offer at Sterling Brands. She shares what hundreds of interviews have taught her about confidence, insecurity, and reinvention. And she gets refreshingly clear-eyed about AI, and what it is quietly doing to the next generation's brains.

TOPICS COVERED
Failing as an artist, writer and designer before finding branding
Becoming the rainmaker at Interbrand and Sterling Brands
Why she turned down the CEO offer after four months of deliberation
How Design Matters began in 2005 as a paid internet radio show
What hundreds of interviews taught her about insecurity and legacy
Career advice for creatives and knowing your value proposition
Marrying Roxane Gay and acquiring The Rumpus together
Writing Love Letter to a Garden
Why AI should have a drinking age
The one question she now asks herself every day: if not now, when?
What makes this episode hit differently is not the résumé. I
t is the reminder that even the most accomplished people on the planet built their lives the same way the rest of us have to, one brave decision at a time, often with no clue what was coming next. 
Debbie's story is proof that reinvention is always available, that confidence is built and never gifted, and that the best chapters of a life can absolutely come after sixty. If you take one thing from this conversation, let it be her question. 
Whatever you have been waiting to start, finish, or finally claim as yours, ask yourself honestly: if not now, when?

He joined when Snowflake had 0 customers, no CEO, and no website. The company was in stealth mode, he wasn't even allowed to list where he worked on LinkedIn.
Twelve years later, Snowflake was doing well north of $4 billion in annual revenue.
Chris Degnan was Snowflake's first sales hire and spent over eleven years as its founding Chief Revenue Officer, growing the company from zero to one of the fastest-scaling enterprise software businesses in history. He joined in November 2013 as employee number 13 and spent the early days cold-emailing thousands of people a week just to get meetings.
He is now semi-retired, sitting on seven boards, and advising companies across Silicon Valley.
Denise Persson joined Snowflake in May 2016 as employee number 120, when the company had $3 million in ARR and fewer than eight people on the marketing team. She had never worked at a company that small.
She is still Snowflake's CMO today.
Together, they have one of the longest CRO-CMO partnerships in the history of enterprise technology. They survived three CEO transitions together, multiple executive team overhauls, a global pandemic IPO, and a company that grew from a handful of believers to over 8,000 employees.
They wrote a book about it. It's called Make It Snow.
In this episode of Truth Works, host Jessica Neal sits down with Chris Degnan and Denise Persson to pull apart exactly how they built the sales and marketing alignment that most companies never achieve — and why most people in those roles don't last long enough to find out.
They discuss:
How Chris joined with no customers, no website, and no CEO — and why two French founders were the reason he said yes
What Denise did on day one that built more credibility with the sales team than her entire resume had
Why Snowflake was always a customer-led company, not a sales-led or marketing-led one — and why that distinction changes everything
The 3am text message, the new CEO, and why every executive on the team was getting fired except the two of them
How they gave each other feedback that most colleagues would never survive — and why acting on it was the only way to keep getting it
Why heads of sales typically last 18 to 24 months — and what made this partnership last over a decade through four CEOs
What the book Make It Snow gives founders, CMOs, and CROs that most go-to-market frameworks completely miss
Chris Degnan and Denise Persson are proof that the tension between sales and marketing is not inevitable. It is a leadership failure — and it is entirely fixable.

Guy Kawasaki: Don't Pitch What You Can't Believe In
Guy Kawasaki: Apple's original software evangelist, Chief Evangelist at Canva, host of the Remarkable People podcast, and bestselling author of Think Remarkable, Wise Guy, and his upcoming Everybody Has Something to Hide , joins Jessica Neal on Truth Works for a conversation that goes everywhere you didn't expect.
Guy didn't have a plan. He fainted on his first day of a pre-med hospital tour, dropped out of law school after two weeks, and ended up counting and shipping diamonds in the jewelry business after his MBA. That jewelry job taught him how to sell, and selling taught him how to evangelize. Everything else followed from there.
At Apple in the 1980s, Guy's job was simple: convince developers to build for Macintosh. That was the birth of tech evangelism as we know it. Today, as Chief Evangelist at Canva, he's still doing the same thing — spreading the good news of tools that make people better communicators and creators.
In this episode, Guy and Jessica go deep on what separates remarkable people from everyone else, why most founders are building the wrong way, what AI is actually going to do to humanity, and why the single most powerful thing you can do in a pitch is show a product that works.
Topics covered:
What evangelism actually means — and why you simply cannot pitch something that isn't great
His non-linear path: pre-med dropout → law school quitter → jewelry salesman → Apple → Canva
The three traits every remarkable person shares: Growth, Grit & Grace — and why the third one matters most
The "Guy's Golden Touch" rule and why it applies to everything you build or sell
Why founders who build products they personally want to use almost always outperform those who build from market research
Why he openly uses AI in his writing process — and why every author should
AI as the biggest shift since the industrial revolution — and his theory on where it actually came from
Privacy in the age of AI: Signal, encryption, and his new book Everybody Has Something to Hide
Women in leadership — the numbers, the reasons, and why Guy thinks women should run everything
The F-16 pitch framework: how to get off the deck in 38 seconds or drown
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