Former Journalist, Startup + GTM exec Keith Newman
131 episodes listed below
PRESS PLAY
Former journalist turned Silicon Valley dealmaker and entrepreneur Keith Newman talks with Founders, Innovators and Influencers who share their stories of success, pain and impact with a bit of humor and nostalgia mixed in. Hear from Maverick Mark Cuban, SuperAngel Ron Conway, Ann Winblad, Mitch Kapor, Steve Blank and Founders of GameStop, Ancestry, JotForm, Fry's, Intuit, and many more. Find 80+ Episodes https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/the-look-back-a-free-flowing-interview/id1560219589
Based on 6 episodes we listened to · June 2026
Liftoff makes startup execution legible through venture, sales, staffing, Amazon seller, climate tech, and product conversations grounded in practical business tradeoffs.
Liftoff with Keith Newman is a Business & Finance interview show about building companies when the pressure is real. The sampled episodes move through climate tech, Amazon seller economics, venture screening, cold outreach, remote staffing, and a medtech product trying to…
You want the founder pitch slowed down until the growth model starts sweating.
Press play if you want
Short reviews from the PlayNext desk, based on the episodes we processed.
A practical founder conversation about making meetings into a useful AI workflow layer.
Keith and Fireflies CEO and founder Krish Ramaneni frame the company around a plain problem: meetings take time, and the important parts fade fast once people leave the room.
A founder story about cutting wine-market friction through direct sourcing and traceability.
Liftoff with Keith Newman gives the episode a clean read on a wine business built around middlemen, provenance, and trust. Devin Ferreira lays out CruTrade as a way to shorten the distance between winemaker and collector by buying directly from producers, selling to collectors,…
A grounded founder story about turning a niche clothing idea into a fast-scaling brand.
Justin Baer makes a straightforward founder story feel sharp and grounded: Collars & Co went from an unknown e-commerce brand to $75 million in about three years, and the hard-collar shirt is framed as a product that found room in a crowded market.
AI as collaborator, not oracle, is the real lesson here.
Arshavir Blackwell makes a solid case for AI as a working partner, not just a prompt box. Keith Newman keeps the interview moving where it matters, nudging it from general talk into the practical questions around cooperative work, product thinking, and the next 24 months.
A grounded look at private markets, their plumbing, and the rules that shape them.
Keith Newman and Corinne Schneider spend the episode unpacking private markets from the ground up: who gets access, why cap tables and equity splits matter, and what breaks when a market grows beyond spreadsheets and email.
A clear look at how a pain device company tries to break into a market shaped by bigger rivals.
This episode follows the business and regulatory path for a pain treatment device, with Dr. Steven Falowski explaining how Synerfuse is moving from a proof of concept study to a separate implant for its real U.S. launch.
A grounded look at adoption, measurement, and the enterprise barriers around AI agents.
Michael Palmer brings the discussion down to earth by shifting attention from what AI agents might do in theory to what changes when companies try to make them useful in practice.
A practical founder-tax conversation about protecting upside before it turns messy.
This conversation stays on the money side of growth, with equity, ordinary income, long term capital gains, trusts, estate planning, and the firewalls wealthy operators need once they draw attention.
Rob Walling on bootstrapped SaaS growth, plateaus, and exits — with founders who lived them.
Abbey Ashley's playbook for turning your job skills into a virtual assistant business.
Naval Ravikant on epistemology, startups, and crypto, from David Deutsch to Vitalik Buterin.
Alex Theuma interviews SaaS founders and investors on scaling to $10M-plus ARR.
Guy Raz traces founders' origin stories and fields live advice-line calls from entrepreneurs.
Alex Blumberg interviews guests like Megan Phelps-Roper and Shane McAnally about failure and reinvention.
David Hornick talks about how seasoned venture investors decide what is worth their time.
Casey Woo defines scaling as “the art of creating leverage” and says a scaler works horizontally across a company, not just inside one function.
Anya Cheng says Taelor AI serves busy men who hate shopping and laundry by using AI to pick outfits instantly, then sending real clothes to rent.
Raj Kapoor traces a path from FitMob, Snapfish, and Lyft to Climactic, linking his startup experience to climate investing and urban decarbonization.
Keith Newman welcomes Corinne Schneider, founding partner of Compass Strategic Advisors, and quickly sets the conversation in private markets, where 98% of people do not qualify to invest.
Keith Newman talks with Fireflies founder Krish Ramaneni about how a 10-year build turned a meeting pain point into a new AI category.
Keith Newman opens by framing Collars & Co as an e-commerce business that grew from zero to $75 million in three years, and Justin Baer explains that the idea came from hating a dress shirt under a sweater in New York.
Luis Trechin, CEO of Near You, says Latin America can cut U.S.
Shane Barker, CEO and founder of TraceFuse, says Amazon review issues can move pricing, PPC costs, and profitability, and he claims some clients lose 10% to 50% of sales after a 4.3-star rating slips to 4.2.
Michael Palmer, CEO and Chief Scientist of Talos Research Corporation and author of Agentify: The Art, Science, and Engineering of Successful AI Agents, says current AI tools are still “agents without agency” because they mostly wait for prompts.
BP's Castrol thermal management leaders discuss why liquid cooling has shifted from optional enhancement to mandatory infrastructure requirement for AI data centers.
Arshavir Blackwell, an AI expert, discusses the current state of AI, arguing it lacks true agency and consciousness while highlighting economic disruptions and the rise of local large language models for privacy and cost efficiency.
Back pain sets the stakes quickly.
Keith jumps straight into cold outreach.
Pat Kondo, serial founder and CEO of Seeker Technologies, discusses the evolution of his 40+ year tech career from aerospace engineering to founding a company focused on explainable AI for mission-critical environments.
David Politis traces BetterCloud's growth back to an immigrant father from Greece, early business exposure in Harlem, China, Russia, and Nigeria, and a first startup that ended with him and one engineer left running the company.
Kelli Rivers describes a pivot from a 30-year sales career to coaching after a 2008 session led her into inner child work, tapping, NLP, ayahuasca, and a long period of personal development.
Amos Bar-Joseph, co-founder and CEO of Swan AI, tells Keith Newman why he thinks 2026 is the year businesses stop equating scale with headcount.
The host brings on Neil Jasani and sets him up as the person founders call when growth gets serious and tax mistakes get expensive.
Keith Newman speaks with Hooli Duque, CEO of Homeschools2Go, about how homeschooling fits a future shaped by AI, decentralized work, and changing expectations for college and careers.
Cree Trade starts with provenance.
Keith Newman interviews Jimmy, a former magician turned marketing expert, about founder authority as the new SEO and adapting to AI-driven search.
Host Keith Newman interviews Anthony Blattner of SpeedWorks Social about how B2B companies can achieve growth through a crawl-walk-run approach to LinkedIn organic posting and paid ads.
Keith Newman interviews ZoomInfo founder Henry Shook about the company's journey from SaaS to AI and the differences between a data company and traditional SaaS.
Keith Newman interviews Sridhar Petaneni, CEO of GTM Buddy, about his entrepreneurial journey and insights on AI in the application layer.
Keith Newman interviews Claudio, Chief AI Officer, about the security challenges of AI agentic systems and LLMs.
Host Keith Newman interviews Bloomberg reporter Kurt Wagner about his book on Twitter's history and the Elon Musk acquisition.
Keith Newman interviews Walter Mossberg about his career pivot from journalism to technology column writing.
Keith Newman interviews Christina about her career journey from music major to consumer technology executive, reflecting on industry changes.
Host Keith Newman interviews entrepreneur Philippe about their first meeting and the early days of the tech industry.