Professional Jealousy Podcast: Founder Stories, Brands and Business Innovation

What if you could turn career envy into your superpower?Hosted by Natasha Jakubowski, Chief Innovation Officer at Anomaly, Professional Jealousy is a business and career podcast featuring honest conversations with world-class founders, creative innovators, and industry leaders. These are the people whose success makes us wonder: What's their secret?Each episode dives deep into the realities of entrepreneurship, leadership, and personal growth. Discover actionable career advice, inspiration, and lessons from the journeys of top business minds so you can elevate your own career.

Professional Jealousy Podcast: Founder Stories, Brands and Business Innovation is a business podcast hosted by Natasha Jakubowski, with 33 episodes on record and a Required Pod Score of 80. PitchCentric scores this show on Booking Probability, Listen Score, and live audience signals refreshed every 24 hours.

Natasha Jakubowski hosts Professional Jealousy Podcast: Founder Stories, Brands and Business Innovation, a business show with 33 episodes published.

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  Episode #33

  CEO of Unilever Prestige, on Building Brands That Last with MC Gasco-Buisson

  Aug 11, 202650 minS1

  MC Gasco-Buisson spent 23 years at P&G before becoming CEO of Pandora's design business, and now leads Unilever Prestige — the house of beauty brands behind Hourglass, K18, Dermalogica, Tatcha, and Paula's Choice. Natasha talks with MC about what actually makes a brand worth scaling, why emotion and storytelling matter even more in luxury than in CPG, how founder-led brands like Dermalogica get built right, and where she's applying AI in the business (and where she's deliberately not). They also get into MC's own career philosophy, and how she spent 23 years at one company without job-hopping, moving from chemical engineering into marketing, and the side business that didn't work out but taught her the most. Plus: her desert island beauty product, the best and worst career advice she's ever received, and who she's still professionally jealous of. Professional Jealousy is hosted by Natasha Jakubowski, Chief Innovation Officer at Anomaly. New episodes feature founders, CEOs, and creatives she admires — and is a little jealous of.

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  Episode #32

  From Celiac Diagnosis to 20,000 Grocery Stores: Feel Good Foods CEO Vanessa Phillips

  Jul 28, 202653 minS1

  Vanessa Phillips, co-founder and CEO of Feel Good Foods, joins Professional Jealousy to share how a celiac disease diagnosis in college — and a doctor's advice to give up on food entirely — became the origin story for one of the fastest-growing gluten-free frozen food brands in the country. Vanessa walks through her path from growing up in her family's New York bagel and Chinese restaurant business, to opening the gluten-free café Friedman's in Chelsea Market, to mailing homemade gluten-free pot stickers to Whole Foods in a Ziploc bag and landing a regional launch just months later. In this conversation, Vanessa gets candid about the early bootstrapped years demoing product in Whole Foods aisles for months on end, the manufacturing mistake that nearly derailed the brand's first production run, and how she built a company culture around grit, generalist skill-building, and staying close to the consumer. She also opens up about the mentor who shaped her mindset, the tools she uses to stay grounded as a founder, and who she's most professionally jealous of today. Whether you're building a CPG brand, working in food and beverage, or just love a founder story rooted in personal struggle turned purpose, this episode is packed with real, tactical lessons on category creation, scaling from founder to CEO, and building a brand that can grow with you instead of boxing you in. In this episode: Building a gluten-free frozen food brand from a personal health diagnosis Creating a new grocery category from scratch Bootstrapping a CPG brand without outside capital Lessons from a costly early manufacturing mistake Mentorship, mindset, and staying grounded as a founder How the gluten-free consumer has evolved into the mainstream "curious consumer" Who Vanessa Phillips is professionally jealous of Watch, subscribe, and follow Professional Jealousy on Spotify, Apple Podcasts, and YouTube for more conversations with founders, CEOs, and creatives redefining their industries.

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  Episode #31

  Creating A Luxury Brand Dedicated to Radical Pleasure

  Jul 14, 20261h 3mS1

  In this episode I chat with Richard Christiansen, the founder of Flamingo Estate. Richard shares his journey from running Chandelier, a high-end fashion and luxury advertising agency in New York City, to building a global lifestyle brand almost by accident. After facing severe burnout, Richard escaped to Los Angeles just as COVID-19 hit. What started as a chaotic effort to help a local farmer sell her vegetables out of his bookstore quickly transformed into a thriving bath, body, and agricultural empire. Richard discusses the grueling reality of raising capital, the deliberate choice to choose pleasure over his successful marketing business, and what it takes to protect the intimacy and authenticity of a brand as it scales. As we chatted, I was inspired and also increasingly convinced that Richard is savvily building a new type of luxury lifestyle brand that could become of force globally. Key Themes: 1. Fiercely "Acting Small - Big brands often lose their magic because they get too self-conscious and safe. Richard keeps Flamingo Estate intimate by writing all company copy himself, rejecting AI in customer service, and managing operations internally. Staying intentionally small protects the brand's soul. 2. Selling Pleasure, Not Sustainability - Consumers quickly tune out dry environmental lectures. Flamingo Estate uses strict regenerative sourcing, but hooks customers through design, hedonism, and sensuality. The brand wins by framing pleasure—not sustainability—as a basic human right. 3. Rewriting the Scaling Playbook - Scaling a business that mixes low-margin agriculture with high-margin beauty means ignoring traditional venture capital advice. Richard survived 162 investor rejections, triple-mortgaged his home, and ignored pressure to drop the food items to protect his multi-dimensional vision. Richard was professionally jealouse of Jane Goodall who met after reading her book and cold-calling her foundation to offer her pro-bono services. Richard admired her work, and how she ran a massive global organization dedicated to changing the world, all while leading with unparalleled grace, kindness, and quiet power. In fact, it was Jane Goodall who delivered the final push for Flamingo Estate, telling Richard to take everything he learned from "selling people shit they don't need" and use it to do something genuinely good for the planet. Check out https: https://flamingoestate.com/

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  Episode #30

  How She Built a $40M Bootstrapped Brand From Her Garage | Megan Trottier (Oh My Mahjong)

  Jun 30, 202650 minS1

  How do you turn a traditional tile game into a $40,000,000 business without taking a single dollar of venture capital? In this episode of Professional Jealousy, Natasha Jakubowski (Chief Innovation Officer at Anomaly) chats with Megan Trottier, the entrepreneurial force behind Oh My Mahjong (OMM). Megan shares her blueprint for scaling an ultra-fast-growing consumer brand. From realizing a product failed because it was ahead of its time, to building an army of local brand ambassadors that unlocked the wholesale market, this is a masterclass in modern brand building, marketing, and the art of the business pivot. If you are a founder, creator, or marketeer looking to understand how to build authentic demand and a lifestyle category from scratch, this episode is for you. 🔔 Subscribe for more deep dives into business innovation and founder stories! Check out Oh My Mahjong: https://ohmymahjong.com/

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  Episode #29

  Beyond Doom-Scrolling: How The States Project Built a Movement Around Grassroots Social Networks

  Jun 16, 202652 minS1

  If you are completely exhausted by national political noise and panic-driven fundraising spam, you are looking at the wrong political map. On this episode of Professional Jealousy, Anomaly’s Chief Innovation Officer Natasha Jakubowski sits down with Daniel Squadron (former NY State Senator, Co-founder and Executive Director of The States Project, and author of the new book The Fourth Branch) and Melissa Walker (Head of Giving Circles at The States Project) to explore how true political power can be reclaimed from the ground up. As Melissa puts it: "We work not where the glamour is, just where the power is." 💡By bypassing traditional, top-down political gatekeepers and focusing directly on community grassroots, The States Project has engineered a model that allows everyday friend circles to completely shift the balance of power in state capitols. They have taken complex, intimidating political systems and turned them into a simple, collaborative math problem that trusted social networks can solve together. Tune in to discover how a former state lawmaker and a novelist teamed up to demystify power, break right-wing supermajorities on razor-thin margins, and prove that real change starts right within your own social circle. Key topics include: 00:00 – Intro: The Illusion of Federal Power 04:15 – Why Daniel Left the State Senate to Build a Movement 11:30 – Enter Melissa Walker: Translating Politics into Human Stories 18:45 – What is a Giving Circle? (And Why It Beats Traditional Campaigns) 27:10 – The ROI of Grassroots Dollars: State vs. National 36:15 – Overcoming Cynicism: How to Build a Brand People Trust 44:30 – Outro & How to Take Action Check out: https://statesproject.org/ And look for 'The Fourth Brand: How State Governments Can Save Our Union' by Daniel Squadron, Co-Founder of The States Project https://statesproject.org/fourthbranch/

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