Founder Mode

Founder Mode is a podcast for builders—whether it’s startups, systems, or personal growth. It’s about finding your flow, balancing health, wealth, and productivity, and tackling challenges with focus and curiosity. Each week, you’ll gain actionable insights and fresh perspectives to help you think like a founder and build what matters most.

Founder Mode is a business podcast hosted by Kevin Henrikson and Jason Shafton, with 75 episodes on record and a Required Pod Score of 80.

Kevin Henrikson and Jason Shafton hosts Founder Mode, a business show with 75 episodes published.

Our AI reads these to draft pitches. Use them as grounding for a pitch that cites a real guest and a specific topic.

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  Episode #76

  Was Yoda Right About AI? with JJ Zhuang

  Oct 1, 202633 minS1

  EPISODE 76 JJ Zhuang, co-founder and CEO of Pretty Good AI, returns to Founder Mode to answer for the predictions he made on the show over a year ago. Kevin and Jason had Claude grade all ten, and JJ defends his record on hiring generalists over specialists, how much code AI is really writing, why taste is the one thing you can't train into a model, and why slide decks are dead when you can just build the thing. He finishes 6.5 for 10, which beats the weatherman, and points to the release of Opus 4.6 as the moment things that used to not work suddenly started working. In the second half, JJ looks ahead: why Pretty Good AI is skipping the "sell the same widget a thousand times" playbook to become the AI team for healthcare practices, how to build guardrails around AI that's confidently wrong, why the human work that's left will be 100% hard work, how the team keeps protected patient data away from AI agents, and how a lean team can win a crowded healthcare AI market. CHAPTERS 00:00 – Cold Open: Why Not Just Solve All Your Problems? 00:31 – JJ Returns: Grading 10 Predictions One Year Later 01:58 – Generalists vs. Specialists: Who Should You Hire? 04:39 – Is AI Really Writing Half of All Code? 07:28 – Taste, Comprehension, and the Human Edge 09:58 – Instant Prototypes, Fast Software, and the Death of Slide Decks 12:39 – Directing AI and the Most Overhyped Buzzword 14:32 – Overhyped or Underestimated? The Opus 4.6 Moment 17:09 – The Scorecard: 6.5 for 10 18:00 – Pretty Good AI's Big Bet: Solve Every Problem 20:02 – What Success Looks Like: Becoming Your Customers' AI Team 20:39 – Designing Around AI That's Confidently Wrong 22:20 – Where the Line Between AI and Humans Moves Next 24:09 – Building on Models That Change Every Few Months 25:58 – Compliance When Your Team Is Agents 28:23 – What Patients Notice First 30:17 – How a Lean Team Wins a Crowded Market LINKS Connect with JJ Zhuang Pretty Good AI • LinkedIn • X/Twitter Stay Connected with Founder Mode Subscribe to our newsletter Connect with Kevin LinkedIn • X/Twitter Connect with Jason LinkedIn • X/Twitter

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  Episode #75

  The $1 CRM Killer

  Sep 24, 202624 minS1

  EPISODE 75 Kevin and Jason go solo on the week AI stopped asking permission. Jason opens with a Claude Code session that sent a Slack message to a client's CEO instead of drafting it, complete with a "sent from Claude" tag at the bottom, then offered to file a bug report about itself. That kicks off a run through what founders are actually paying for now: Jason's $800-a-month HubSpot bill and his plan to swap it for Dharmesh Shah's $1-a-month USpot, levels.io running a multi-million-dollar business on hand-coded PHP and a single server, and why the "SaaSpocalypse" is more nuanced than Twitter thinks. Kevin traces the freemium playbook back to Zimbra, where 98% of users never paid and the top 2% funded the company, and asks the question that hangs over the whole episode: how do you build trust in a market where everything can be free? They also get into Jason's agentic agency experiment, why succession is really about handing off jobs rather than titles, why nobody has built a marketing agent with taste yet, and the biological age scores every app is suddenly handing out, each one conveniently favoring its own algorithm. CHAPTERS 00:00 – The Slack message Claude sent by itself 00:39 – A dozen AI tools in a single day 03:46 – $800 a month for a CRM 04:26 – Dharmesh's $1 CRM and the SaaSpocalypse 08:03 – Freemium after vibe coding: the Zimbra lesson 10:32 – Building an agentic agency 13:20 – Succession: hand off jobs, not titles 16:33 – What AI still can't do in marketing 19:18 – Biological age scores and walled-garden health data 22:22 – Founder Mode top five LINKS Stay Connected with Founder Mode Subscribe to our newsletter Connect with Kevin LinkedIn • X/Twitter Connect with Jason LinkedIn • X/Twitter

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  Episode #73

  The Accountant vs. QuickBooks Test with Mohammad Moahid

  Sep 10, 202626 minS1

  EPISODE 73 Mohammad Moahid has operated multiple companies across e-commerce, consumer electronics distribution, and real estate, and competed for Team Canada as an equestrian. He argues the gap between companies talking about AI and companies actually running on it comes down to ops, not technology. In this episode he explains why leaders are structurally cut off from on-ground reality, why a 5,000-person firm is still managing a hundred active projects out of email threads while million-dollar invoices get written by hand, and where the MIT Nanda study's 95% failure rate really comes from (hint: it's the people layer, not the software). He walks through the "chief agent officer" model, an AI chief of staff coordinating specialist agents across zoning, leasing, acquisitions, and legal. He covers the four pillars he uses to diagnose any business, and the pricing thesis behind what his team calls outcome as a service: you don't pay an accountant for software, you pay so you never think about your books again. Plus what happens to agencies and professional services firms when outcomes get cheaper, and the one thing Mo says humans have to keep owning completely. CHAPTERS 00:35 – AI as the operating system, not another tool 04:37 – What competing for Team Canada taught Mo about execution 05:23 – Why leaders are always removed from on-ground reality 07:26 – Million-dollar invoices, still written by hand 08:33 – Being his own first customer 09:49 – Why 95% of AI implementations fail 10:45 – The command brief and the four pillars 12:49 – The chief agent officer and the 80/20 rule 14:57 – Outcome as a service: accountant vs. QuickBooks 19:05 – Employee fear, and why agencies should be worried 21:17 – What humans still have to own completely 22:41 – Building your own harness LINKS Connect with Mohammad Moahid zerotoagent.com • LinkedIn • Instagram Stay Connected with Founder Mode Subscribe to our newsletter Connect with Kevin LinkedIn • X/Twitter Connect with Jason LinkedIn • X/Twitter

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  Episode #72

  13 Agents Watching 76 Agents

  Sep 3, 202628 minS1

  EPISODE 72 No guest and no notes on Jason's side, so Kevin runs the board for once. The two dig into the question underneath every pricing decision: what unit of value are you actually selling? Jason retraces underpricing his agency in the early days and the shift from billing hours to building productized services with near-zero marginal cost, while Kevin walks through losing a deal to a competitor selling raw phone minutes, where the buyer admitted the product was worse and bought it anyway. From there they get into using AI to reconcile invoices against vendor spend down to the penny, a sweep that turned up 23 fraudulent charges and an education in BIN enumeration. They cover the strange state of the market, where a public company doing $275M gets taken private at 2x forward revenue while venture-backed startups raise at 100x. And they close on the AI back office: Kevin's 76 scheduled agents, the 13 supervisor agents he built to watch them, and the eight days of automations that reported success, success, success while quietly writing results to a directory that didn't exist. CHAPTERS 00:32 – No guest, no notes: a solo episode 00:51 – What unit of value are you actually selling? 02:24 – "I did what most people do and I underpriced" 04:26 – Losing a deal to phone minutes 08:50 – Letting AI reconcile your invoices and vendor spend 12:41 – 23 fraud charges and BIN enumeration 15:02 – Weave goes private: 2x revenue vs. 100x rounds 17:09 – The private and public markets dance 19:21 – 76 agents, 13 supervisors, and "successfully failing" 21:57 – Most people are bad managers 25:34 – DHH's Linux distro and talking to your OS 26:50 – Founder Mode top five LINKS Stay Connected with Founder Mode Subscribe to our newsletter Connect with Kevin LinkedIn • X/Twitter Connect with Jason LinkedIn • X/Twitter

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  Episode #70

  The Internet Isn't Dead

  Aug 20, 202627 minS1

  EPISODE 70 Kevin and Jason go guest-free for a wide-ranging conversation about what happens when AI starts sounding like you, posting for you, and filling up your inbox. They open by admitting they ran this very episode through an AI video podcast generator and got back a 31-minute clip where neither of them blinked once, then dig into the dead internet theory and why Kevin's real objection isn't that the internet is dead but that it was never trustworthy to begin with — including the moment he discovered more than half of what Perplexity was feeding his research agent came from scraper sites. From there they get practical: why founder thought leadership almost always fails on time rather than talent, the four ways to run it without writing every post yourself, why going viral off a Sam Altman hook produces friends texting you instead of pipeline, and the uncomfortable truth that your actual buyer may be a physician standing at a hot desk logged in under somebody else's name. The back half turns to the mess AI leaves behind — the rise of the "agent inbox," an agent that apologized for taking the weekend off, and why both of them default to the most expensive model available and treat the bill as tuition rather than overhead. CHAPTERS 00:00 – The $200 brain 00:40 – We made an AI version of this podcast 02:39 – The dead internet theory 04:39 – When Perplexity poisons your own research 05:49 – Watermarks, fingerprints, and who owns your writing 06:55 – Founder thought leadership: worth the time? 09:26 – Four ways to do it without doing it all yourself 12:00 – The rise of the course boi 14:31 – Fish where the fish are 17:11 – The agent inbox 20:49 – Token maxing 25:01 – Founder Mode top five LINKS Stay Connected with Founder Mode Subscribe to our newsletter Connect with Kevin LinkedIn • X/Twitter Connect with Jason LinkedIn • X/Twitter EPISODE 70 Kevin and Jason go guest-free for a wide-ranging conversation about what happens when AI starts sounding like you, posting for you, and filling up your inbox. They open by admitting they ran this very episode through an AI video podcast generator and got back a 31-minute clip where neither of them blinked once, then dig into the dead internet theory and why Kevin's real objection isn't that the internet is dead but that it was never trustworthy to begin with — including the moment he discovered more than half of what Perplexity was feeding his research agent came from scraper sites. From there they get practical: why founder thought leadership almost always fails on time rather than talent, the four ways to run it without writing every post yourself, why going viral off a Sam Altman hook produces friends texting you instead of pipeline, and the uncomfortable truth that your actual buyer may be a physician standing at a hot desk logged in under somebody else's name. The back half turns to the mess AI leaves behind — the rise of the "agent inbox," an agent that apologized for taking the weekend off, and why both of them default to the most expensive model available and treat the bill as tuition rather than overhead. CHAPTERS 00:00 – The $200 brain 00:40 – We made an AI version of this podcast 02:39 – The dead internet theory 04:39 – When Perplexity poisons your own research 05:49 – Watermarks, fingerprints, and who owns your writing 06:55 – Founder thought leadership: worth the time? 09:26 – Four ways to do it without doing it all yourself 12:00 – The rise of the course boi 14:31 – Fish where the fish are 17:11 – The agent inbox 20:49 – Token maxing 25:01 – Founder Mode top five LINKS Stay Connected with Founder Mode Subscribe to our newsletter Connect with Kevin LinkedIn • X/Twitter Connect with Jason LinkedIn • X/Twitter

  ListenShow Notes

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