The Founders and Leaders Series

Mike Stevens of Insight Platforms interviews the tech entrepreneurs and business leaders building the future of research, insights and analytics.

The Founders and Leaders Series is a business podcast hosted by Mike Stevens, Insight Platforms, with 14 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.

Mike Stevens, Insight Platforms hosts The Founders and Leaders Series, a business show with 14 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 #14

  Episode 14: Lewis Reeves, Walr

  May 13, 202634 minS1

  <p>Episode Overview</p><p>Lewis Reeves, founder and CEO of Walr, on building a data infrastructure platform that powers market research agencies at scale.</p><p>Episode Highlights</p><b>Agentic workflows in practice:</b> Walr has built over one hundred AI agents; one example is a two-agent, one-human pipeline for survey programming where one agent builds the survey, a second verifies it, and a human reviews only the flagged exceptions. Project volumes managed per person have roughly doubled in six months.<b>Democratising AI beyond engineering:</b> Over half of Walr's 100+ internal agents were built by operations staff...

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  Episode #13

  Episode 13: Samuel Cohen, Fairgen

  Apr 27, 202627 minS1

  <p><b>Episode Overview</b></p><p>Fairgen founder Samuel Cohen on synthetic data, digital twins and how AI is making market research more accessible to more organisations.</p><p><b>Episode Highlights</b></p><b>A taxonomy of synthetic data</b> — Samuel maps the space across two axes: methodology (directional to foundational) and stakes (low to high), showing why different approaches suit different research contexts.<b>Why "boosting" has become standard</b> — Fairgen's augmentation technology is now used by brands including T-Mobile and L'Oréal to dramatically expand the number of segments they can reliably report on, with three years...

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  Episode #12

  Episode 12: Kathy Cheng, inca

  Mar 20, 202637 minS1

  <p><b>Episode Overview</b></p><p>Kathy Cheng, founder and CEO of inca, on why better survey experiences produce better data — and what the industry needs to change.</p><p><b>Episode Highlights</b></p><b>From qual to quant — by accident.</b> Kathy built inca out of frustration with traditional surveys, bringing qualitative thinking — projective techniques, conversational flow, participant engagement — into quantitative research at scale.<b>The participant experience problem.</b> Poor data quality is not the fault of respondents. It is the result of survey designs that have barely changed since the 1930s. Improving the experience improves the data...

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  Episode #11

  Episode 11: Ange Taylor - AddMaple

  Mar 4, 202639 minS1

  <p><b>Episode Overview</b></p><p>Angelique Taylor, founder of AddMaple, shares how frustration with fragmented data tools inspired a visual-first exploration platform built for insights teams.</p><p><b>Episode Highlights</b></p><b>From UX researcher to founder:</b> Ange's background in user research — spanning qualitative interviews, SQL data, and survey analytics — led her to build a tool that bridges the gap between different data types in a single visual interface.<b>What AddMaple does:</b> AddMaple is a visual-first data exploration platform that ingests survey data, online reviews, customer support tickets, social media feedback, and data lake...

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  Episode #10

  Episode 10: Frederic-Charles Petit, CEO, Toluna

  Feb 22, 202628 minS1

  <p><b>Episode Overview</b></p><p>Frédéric-Charles Petit, Founder and CEO of Toluna, on building a 25-year-old consumer insights company for the age of AI.</p><p><b>Episode Highlights</b></p><b>Four pillars, one platform.</b> Toluna's model combines a global consumer panel, proprietary technology, specialist methodology, and people to deliver integrated consumer insight at scale for enterprise brands.<b>Synthetic personas grounded in real data.</b> Toluna's AI-driven synthetic personas were built on a foundation of first-party panel data and machine learning developed from 2019 — well before the generative AI boom — enabling fast, high-correlation answers to rea...

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