Tech Can't Save Us

A podcast for tech founders and operators building the next generation of mission-driven tech companies. Each episode, host Paul David (Founder/CEO of Literal Humans) sits down with a CEO, founder, or innovator and digs into the key questions that separate companies that scale from those that stall: What's going on in your sector? What's your path to category leadership? How's your product? Do your customers truly love it? How sharp is your go-to-market (GTM) strategy + execution? Who are your senior leaders? How are their personal and professional experiences shaping your growth trajectory? Paul has led two B2B SaaS-focused growth consultancies (formerly, marketing agencies called Optimist and Literal Humans) and helped scale leading companies including Wise, Payoneer, Oura, Oyster, Chipper Cash, Remofirst, Playbook, and Grey — several to unicorn status. The throughline of every conversation: Stories from

Tech Can't Save Us is a business podcast hosted by Literal Humans, with 218 episodes on record and a Required Pod Score of 80.

Literal Humans hosts Tech Can't Save Us, a business show with 218 episodes published.

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  Episode #53

  S4 Ep53: Commercialising Earth’s Last Empty Orbit: Building Satellites for Very Low Earth Orbit with Anatolii Papulov, Founder & CEO of NewOrbit

  Oct 1, 202630 minS4

  This week on Tech Can’t Save Us, host Paul David is joined by Anatolii Papulov, Founder & CEO of NewOrbit, a Reading-based satellite manufacturer opening up a band of space that has been written off as too hostile for commercial flight for sixty years. NewOrbit is building the world’s first commercial satellites designed to operate reliably in Very Low Earth Orbit (VLEO), between 200 and 300km, powered by its own in-house air-breathing electric propulsion system. They discuss why VLEO has sat empty since the dawn of the space age, with aerodynamic drag, atomic oxygen and aerodynamic torque meaning a conventional satellite at that altitude survives weeks rather than years, and why an increasingly crowded, debris-heavy Low Earth Orbit makes the case for a self-cleaning orbit more urgent than ever. Anatolii explains why almost every subsystem has to be rebuilt from scratch to keep a satellite alive at 200km, and how NewOrbit’s AURA air-breathing thruster turns a few days in orbit into five years. He also makes the counterintuitive economic case: for the price of one conventional satellite, customers could fly a whole fleet of smaller VLEO satellites delivering up to 20x better imagery, alongside 5G direct-to-device connectivity and live HD video from space. The conversation covers what it takes to scale a European deep-tech company towards a first launch in 2028, from closing an oversubscribed $18.5 million Series A led by Voyager Ventures to hiring thirty scientists and engineers in a field where the skills barely exist as a category, and selling infrastructure rather than a consumer service. They explore the sovereignty argument for a UK-led VLEO capability at a time when Europe has none of its own. Anatolii also shares his journey from stargazing in rural Siberia to physics research in collaboration with MIT, how he and co-founder Ruslan Rakhimov split the work, and the conviction it takes to bet a career on unlocking a single orbit. Find more about NewOrbit here: https://neworbit.space/

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  Episode #52

  S4 Ep52: Navigating the Age of Attention Scarcity with Claire Coady, Founder of The Attention Practice

  Sep 24, 202627 minS4

  This week on Tech Can’t Save Us, host Paul David is joined by Claire Coady, Founder of The Attention Practice, a specialist communications consultancy built for what Claire calls the “Age of Attention Scarcity“. Drawing on more than 20 years of advising global brands, governments and NGOs, Claire and her team fuse brand and media strategy, audience research, information risk and the science of attention to help organisations cut through in an overwhelmed world. They discuss why attention should be treated as a finite resource, and why it now belongs on every CEO’s agenda rather than being left to the marketing team. Claire explains the tipping point that led her to found a practice dedicated entirely to attention, and how the battle for attention changes when the subject is complex or sensitive rather than commercial. She walks through her approach to designing strategies that sustain attention rather than simply capturing it, from applying behavioural change insights to building a brand’s defences against the attention hacks used to spread disinformation. The conversation covers the realities of scaling a human-first, research-led consultancy in an AI-driven information environment, including how generative AI is complicating the attention problem, how the “Can We Have Your Attention?” podcast and Claire’s Substack attract government and institutional clients, and how she bridges the cultural attention gap across Europe, Africa and the Middle East. Claire also shares what award-winning, high-budget campaigns and shoestring projects have each taught her about attention, how she thinks about risk and resilience, and how her commitment to social progress as a Fellow of the Royal Society of Arts shapes her day-to-day work. Find more about The Attention Practice here: https://www.theattentionpractice.com/ Follow Claire Coady here: https://uk.linkedin.com/in/clairecoady

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  Episode #51

  S4 Ep51: Taking Specialist Anxiety and OCD Care Off the Waitlist with Mona Potter, MD, Co-Founder and Chief Medical Strategy Officer of InStride Health

  Sep 17, 202625 minS4

  This week on Tech Can’t Save Us, host Paul David is joined by Mona Potter, MD, Co-Founder and Chief Medical Strategy Officer of InStride Health, an insurance-based virtual provider of specialty anxiety and OCD treatment for young people aged 7 to 26. Founded by two Harvard-trained clinicians who spent over a decade building intensive anxiety programmes at McLean Hospital, InStride delivers a purposefully time-bound course of care, typically four to eight months, through a dedicated three-person team of therapist, exposure coach and psychiatrist. They discuss why treatment with decades of evidence behind it still fails to reach most families, blocked by long waitlists, a shortage of specialists and geography rather than by any gap in the science. Mona explains the InStride model: cognitive behavioural therapy with exposure at its centre, delivered virtually so that practice happens in the places where anxiety actually shows up, at school, in a restaurant, at home, rather than in a clinician’s office. She points to the outcomes InStride publishes every year, including 97% of graduates showing clinical improvement and fewer than 1% being hospitalised in the year after finishing the programme. The conversation covers what it takes to scale specialty care without thinning it out: going in network with major commercial insurers, expanding state by state, and using technology, including AI trained on InStride’s own clinical data, to support care teams while every clinical decision stays with a clinician. Mona also shares what nearly two decades inside the Mass General, McLean and Harvard Medical School system taught her about the distance between care that works and care families can actually get, and why she left to build something that closes it. Find more about InStride Health here: https://www.instride.health/ Follow Mona Potter, MD here: https://www.linkedin.com/in/mona-potter-md-28ba2179/

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  Episode #50

  S4 Ep50: How Proofed is Humanizing AI and Creating a Better Editorial Model with Adam Harvey and Kiran Chauhan, Co-Founders of Proofed

  Sep 10, 202628 minS4

  This week on Tech Can’t Save Us, host Paul David is joined by Adam Harvey and Kiran Chauhan, Co-Founders of Proofed, the editorial partner behind some of the fastest-moving content teams in the world. Proofed combines a global network of hand-picked expert editors with proprietary technology, giving businesses a fully managed editorial desk that scales with their content volume rather than their headcount. They discuss how the editorial landscape has been reshaped by generative AI, and why volume without quality control has become one of the biggest risks facing content teams. Adam and Kiran explain what humanising AI-generated work actually involves in practice, from stripping out the flatness and repetition that makes readers disengage to catching the bias, insensitivity and quiet factual errors that LLMs introduce. They also unpack the mechanics of the model itself: a dedicated editorial team matched to the client’s subject matter, overseen by a Service Delivery Manager, running 24/7 and costing less than a single in-house editor. The conversation covers what it takes to scale a service that depends on top-tier human expertise, including the bottlenecks of recruiting and training editors, staying ahead of good enough AI tools, and building a trans-Atlantic company across the US and UK while serving clients from early-stage startups to Fortune 500 teams. Adam and Kiran also share the personal side of the story: Kiran’s route into editorial via computer science, building surveying and large-scale event operations, Adam’s pivot out of a technology career at American Express, and how both approach the balance between scaling a startup and family life. Find more about Proofed here: https://proofed.com/ Follow Adam Harvey here: https://www.linkedin.com/in/adamjohnharvey/ Follow Kiran Chauhan here: https://www.linkedin.com/in/kiran-chauhan/

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  Episode #49

  S4 Ep49: Revolutionizing Retirement for Small Businesses with Dan Beck, CEO & Co-Founder of 401GO

  Sep 3, 202629 minS4

  This week on Tech Can’t Save Us, host Paul David is joined by Dan Beck, CEO & Co-Founder of 401GO, a fintech platform that uses integration and automation to deliver affordable, simple and accessible retirement savings for small and medium-sized businesses. Founded in 2017 after Dan tried and failed to find a workable 401(k) for his own team, 401GO has built its technology in-house to strip out the administrative burden that has long kept smaller employers out of the market. They discuss why the traditional 401(k) model still fails smaller employers. Financial services follows assets, advisers are compensated on them, and a plan starting near zero carries higher fiduciary risk than almost any other product an adviser can sell, so the incentives never line up. Dan explains how automation inverts that maths, taking a set-up process that averages six to seven weeks industry-wide down to minutes, and replacing pricing that needs a decoder ring with a structure an owner can actually read. He also makes the case that a 401(k) is a culture tool rather than just a benefit, and that the hardest part of saving is what he calls the first dollar hurdle, which an employer match exists to clear. The conversation covers how 401GO scales without losing the people-matter ethos behind it, from payroll integrations and strategic partnerships to the harder problem of reaching small business owners who have no spare hour to spend learning about retirement plans. Dan gives his read on whether larger financial institutions moving into the small-plan market is a threat or a validation of the model. He also reflects on a route into fintech that ran through more than a dozen startups and exits including TekMat and HydroBlu, what a private pilot’s discipline lends to running a company, and how he decides when an idea is worth pursuing and when it is time to move on. Find more about 401GO here: https://401go.com/ Follow Dan Beck here: https://www.linkedin.com/in/danielgbeck/

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