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 72 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.

Kevin Henrikson and Jason Shafton hosts Founder Mode, a business show with 72 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 #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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  Episode #69

  Think Week is Now Build Week

  Aug 13, 202633 minS1

  EPISODE 69 Kevin and Jason go solo for an episode that started as a walk-and-talk and turned into a working session on leverage. Kevin opens with the "subject line trick," his habit of dropping an email subject into Claude and letting it read the whole thread before drafting a reply, and walks through three real uses of it: auditing a contractor's invoice line by line, catching two billing errors his accounting team missed, and generating a negotiation email so aggressive he hesitated to send it on a $20,000 lead gen deal. From there, the conversation turns to the new break-even math. Software is nearly free to build now, so Kevin argues founders should stop raising money to prove something they can prove themselves for $200 a month and a basic laptop, and stop advertising contracted ARR that never reaches the bank. Jason breaks down the week he blocked off for a Bill Gates-style think week and ended up shipping instead, including an iOS app built in a day and a new operating model he calls the forward-deployed marketing engineer, a marketer who builds a campaign end-to-end in Claude or Cursor and submits a PR the engineering team just reviews and ships. They close on team mechanics, Feelings Friday, and whether you can actually have it all, with a story about three generations waiting in a car outside a college dorm. CHAPTERS 00:00 – Cold open: you're not even willing to bet on yourself 01:35 – The subject line trick 02:12 – Three real examples: invoices, billing errors, and a $20K negotiation 06:00 – The new break-even math: why raise if software is nearly free? 08:40 – The VC anti-pattern and contracted ARR fantasy math 12:24 – Break-even math in services 15:06 – The think week that became a ship week 17:03 – The forward-deployed marketing engineer 19:29 – Year zero to Fortune 50 with AI video 21:09 – Your best people are still smarter than AI 23:19 – Feelings Friday and how to run the team meeting 25:33 – Can you have it all? 31:25 – Top five Founder Mode takeaways STAY CONNECTED Subscribe to the Founder Mode newsletter CONNECT WITH KEVIN LinkedIn • X/Twitter CONNECT WITH JASON LinkedIn • X/Twitter

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  Episode #68

  The Profit Whale with Jason Cohen

  Aug 6, 202630 minS1

  EPISODE 68 Jason Cohen has spent decades building companies including WP Engine, and nearly 20 years writing practical advice for founders at A Smart Bear. In this episode, he joins Kevin and Jason to unpack his new book, Hidden Multipliers, out August 10th, and the case that growth comes from a few well-chosen moves rather than more hustle. He explains why most things are going poorly most of the time even when a company is winning, and how a handful of small pricing and packaging changes at WP Engine in January 2012 took the business from one million to five million in ARR in a single year. He walks through the profit whale, the shape that shows why a small slice of customers drives most of your profit and why you can afford to spend twenty times more to acquire them, and he reframes the unprofitable tail as a product problem rather than a customer problem. He pushes back hard on the idea that people cancel over price, argues that churn sets a hard mathematical ceiling on how big any company can get, and lays out exactly how to run customer interviews that produce real answers instead of confirmation. The conversation closes on why he has no funnel, no cohort, and no master class, and why the work is better because it never had to make money. CHAPTERS 00:00 – It can't be the price 00:44 – Hidden multipliers and the case for leverage 01:38 – Why founders reach for paid ads too early 03:28 – Confusing effort with progress 06:07 – The camera comes into focus: WP Engine's pricing change 08:25 – The profit whale and your most valuable customers 11:47 – Every support call is a gift 13:44 – What your champion actually wants 15:25 – Inciting events and the real shape of a market 18:49 – The red herring of price and the growth ceiling 22:01 – How to interview customers without leading the witness 24:15 – It's not a funnel, it's a craft 26:54 – Where to find the book LINKS Get the book, out August 10th Hidden Multipliers • Free AI Skills Connect with Jason Cohen asmartbear.com • LinkedIn • X/Twitter Stay Connected with Founder Mode 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 #67

  Stop Chasing Plan A with Anthony Ng Monica

  Jul 30, 202627 minS1

  EPISODE 67 Anthony Ng Monica built and exited a global retail-tech company operating in forty countries, and in this episode he tells Kevin and Jason what that decade cost him and what he learned fixing it. He walks through the scrappy tactics that won his first enterprise clients with no network or funding, including a baby-sized football shirt that got him a meeting with John Lewis, then opens up about the breaking point: letting go of three co-founders, firing twenty people, and relocating countries in twenty-four hours, followed by nine months of seven-day weeks that ended with an empty barbell giving him an instant headache and an MRI that came back clean. From there the conversation becomes a practical playbook for founders who treat health as an afterthought, covering why he calls health rent rather than equity, why fitness was a genuine competitive advantage when only his fittest employees were left standing after thirty-six-hour Black Friday shifts, why you should buy a great bed before another tracker, and his gearing system for staying consistent instead of chasing the perfect plan and repeatedly falling back to Plan F. CHAPTERS 00:00 – The breaking point: an empty barbell and a clean MRI 03:32 – Winning first customers with no network or funding 06:22 – Why health is rent, not equity 09:55 – Buy a bed, not another tracker 12:22 – Fitness as a founder's competitive advantage 14:56 – Stop chasing Plan A, stop falling to Plan F 18:12 – The gearing system: dialing effort one to five 19:34 – Simple systems to start this week LINKS Connect with Anthony Ng Monica Website • LinkedIn • Instagram Special offer for Founder Mode listeners 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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