Our guest today is Julia Austin—former senior leader at Akamai, VMware, and DigitalOcean, with decades of experience helping organizations make the leap from startup to scale. She’s also studied and guided countless founders as a professor at Harvard Business School. Julia now distills those lessons in her new book, After the Idea: What It Really Takes to Create and Scale a Startup.

In this conversation you’ll discover what separates ventures that thrive from those that stall. Every company begins with a spark, but too often innovators fall in love with ideas, overbuild too soon, or underestimate the hard realities of scaling and culture. Julia draws from experience spanning tech giants and countless startups to reveal how leaders can move from inspiration to momentum—and sustain innovation even as complexity grows.

You’ll learn practical frameworks and stories for transforming early insights into long-term impact. Whether you’re a founder, strategist, or innovator inside an established business, this conversation offers tools for approaching discovery, scaling, and culture design.

In this episode we cover:

• Four types of scrappy experiments every innovator should run: ethnographic, “be the bot,” Wizard of Oz, and low fidelity prototypes
• How to know if there’s really a there there in your market
• Balancing beachheads and total addressable markets while keeping unit economics in check
• Building competitive advantages through team, domain expertise, and partnerships
• How to design org structures and cultures that reward experimentation and embrace productive failure

Episode Timeline:

00:00 — Highlight from today’s episode
01:18 — Introducing Julia Austin and today’s topic
04:45 — “If you really know me…” Julia’s art background
06:30 — Julia’s definition of strategy as a “living, breathing map”
09:15 — Lessons from Akamai and VMware on scaling from startup to global enterprise
14:50 — The importance of discovery: why slowing down helps you go faster
21:05 — Four types of experiments: ethnographic, be the bot, Wizard of Oz, low fidelity
33:40 — Testing markets: TAM, beachheads, and unit economics
42:20 — Building competitive advantage beyond the idea
49:15 — Designing cultures that keep innovation alive at scale
55:45 — Why celebrating failure fuels long-term breakthroughs
01:02:10 — Julia’s book After the Idea and how to connect with her

Additional Resources:

• Book Website: https://www.aftertheideabook.com/
• Julia Austin's LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/juliaaustin

Thank you to our guest, our executive producer Zach Ness, our editor James Pearce, and the Outthinker team. If you enjoyed this episode, please follow, download, and subscribe. I’m your host, Kaihan Krippendorff—thank you for listening.

Follow us at outthinkernetworks.com/podcast

Martin Reeves is Chairman of the BCG Henderson Institute and author of The Imagination Machine and his newest book, Like: The Button That Changed the World. A prolific strategist and researcher, Martin is known for uncovering practical lessons from unexpected places and helping leaders rethink innovation for the real world.

In this conversation, we trace the surprising story of the “like” button—how a few lines of JavaScript, cultural quirks, and serendipitous accidents reshaped business models, advertising, and even human behavior. Martin reveals why most groundbreaking ideas don’t emerge from lone geniuses, but from messy communities, chance encounters, and recombinations of old ideas into something new.

Whether you’re leading innovation at scale or just curious about the unintended consequences of technology, this episode will change how you think about creativity, feedback, and the ripple effects of small decisions.

In this episode we cover:

• Why the “like” button is the ultimate case study in serendipitous innovation
• How social signals scale beyond social media into CX, commerce, and B2B services
• The role of culture, language, and naming in shaping adoption and meaning
• Why second-order effects of innovation often matter more than first-order ones
• A practical lens for spotting and leveraging serendipity inside organizations

Episode Timeline:
00:00 – Introduction
02:00 – Guest Introduction
03:45 – Toaster Projects and Innovation
06:13 - Origins of the Like Button
08:25 - Cultural History of the Thumbs Up Gesture
14:31 - Multiple Inventors and Facebook's Role
34:27 - Inside the Code: How Likes Work
36:11 - Future Implications of Like Technology

Additional Resources:

• Book Website: LikeBook.org
• Martin’s LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/martin-reeves
• Book: Like: The Button That Changed the World

Thank you to our guest, Martin Reeves, our producers, and the Outthinkers team. If you enjoyed this conversation, please follow, download, and subscribe. I’m your host, Kaihan Krippendorf — see you next time on The Outthinkers Podcast.

Follow us at outthinkernetworks.com/podcast

Thank you to our guests, thank you to our executive producer, Karina Reyes, our editor, Zach Ness, and the rest of the team. If you like what you heard, please follow, download, and subscribe. I'm your host, Kaihan Krippendorff. Thank you for listening.

Follow us at outthinkernetworks.com/podcast

Kurt Miscinski is the co-founder, CEO, and President of Cerity Partners, one of the fastest-growing firms in the wealth management space. Today, Cerity manages over $130 billion in client assets—but it started with a different vision: to create the first truly global, enduring professional services firm in wealth, drawing inspiration from firms like McKinsey and Deloitte, but applying it in a field that historically hasn’t operated that way.

In this conversation, Kurt shares how that vision came to life—not through consolidation, but through a partnership ethos and a language shift that reframed everything from equity to culture. This is a story of architecture: how to build a firm that scales without losing its soul, and how to align incentives, ownership, and strategy to fuel long-term value.

In this episode, we discuss:

• How Kurt went from being a CPA and Deutsche Bank executive to founder of a firm redefining wealth advisory
• Why Cerity’s operating model borrows more from McKinsey than Morgan Stanley—and how that unlocks scale
• The strategic philosophy behind reinvesting 100% of profits and how it shaped the firm’s culture of ownership
• How they use mergers to create a better firm, not just a bigger one—and why that distinction matters
• The role of language in shaping culture, from avoiding the word “employee” to framing every merger as a partnership

Episode Timeline:
00:00—Highlight from today's episode
00:55—Introducing Kurt + the topic of today’s episode
02:42—If you really know me, you know that...
05:30—What's your definition of strategy?
06:19—Creating Cerity—the founding story
08:57—Deutsche Bank and McKinsey as inspirations for a services-based business model
16:33—How has Cerity created a culture of partnership within the firm?
26:34—What is Cerity's model for capital allocation?
30:21—Where does the strategy office sit within the organization?
33:33—What are some of the principles that form your competitive differentiators?
37:03—How do you balance and maintain the coordination of the various services offered, as your clients evolve and grow?
41:03—What is your process for reevaluating and expanding your client services?
45:08—Closing

______________________________________________________________
Additional Resources:
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/kurtmiscinski
Cerity website: https://ceritypartners.com/

Thank you to our guests, thank you to our executive producer, Karina Reyes, our editor, Zach Ness, and the rest of the team. If you like what you heard, please follow, download, and subscribe. I'm your host, Kaihan Krippendorff. Thank you for listening.

Follow us at outthinkernetworks.com/podcast