Work talk with teeth.
Work with Erika Ayers Badan mixes conversations, workplace advice, work-related news, and reflective segments about career momentum. It is sharp, conversational, and comfortable moving from fundraising basics to relationship imbalance, sobriety, AI bias, and the emotional cost of reinvention.
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Work with Erika Ayers Badan frames work as something bigger than a job title. It is about ambition, money, identity, confidence, relationships, and the strange emotional math of building a life around professional drive. The show moves quickly. One episode may follow Emily Tisch-Sussman through a career pivot shaped by motherhood, identity loss, and a need to keep working. Another may turn a Slack question about partner jealousy into a broader conversation about emotional imbalance in relationships. Founder interviews keep the business spine clear. Danielle Fetty explains a medical device company and regenerative medicine in plain, curious language, while Ariana Ferwerda talks about Half Days, real customer need, outdoor-industry gatekeeping, and the false split between technical gear and fashion-forward design. The show likes people who build. It also likes the unglamorous parts of building: decks written on planes, fundraising basics, sales repetition, and the moment a story has to survive contact with numbers. Segments give the feed texture. Net/Net brings work-related news and business commentary. Underlined uses a quote or idea, such as narrative versus numbers, as a way into modern work. Unsolicited Advice answers workplace and life questions with more candor than polish. The Work Like a Girl orbit adds a strong thread of women talking about pay, sobriety, AI bias, community, and career growth. The tone is fast, personal, and occasionally abrasive, but the purpose is clear. It takes business seriously without pretending business happens apart from bodies, families, partners, bias, exhaustion, or taste. Listeners get practical lessons, but they also get the human friction around those lessons. That is the point. Work with Erika Ayers Badan is for people who want the career conversation to include the whole person, not just the resume line.
Made for: For ambitious professionals, founders, and career-switchers who want frank talk about business and the life wrapped around it. It especially fits listeners interested in women’s workplace realities, money, and reinvention.
What sets it apart: The show blends business mechanics with personal stakes, moving naturally from EBITDA, fundraising, and product need to sobriety, parenting, gender bias, and partner dynamics. Its edge comes from treating those subjects as connected, not separate lanes.
WORK Podcast offers real, and relatable insights into work, leadership, and culture from someone who’s been there and done that (mistakes included). Through interviews, commentary, and listener questions, Erika provides a funny, unfiltered and unapologetic look at how to be yourself and be successful. erikaayersbadan.substack.com
Short reviews from the PlayNext desk, based on the episodes we processed.
A founder connects product-market fit with technical, fashion-forward outdoor clothing and a more welcoming mountain culture.
Halfdays founder Ariana Ferwerda makes a practical case that willing buyers are not enough; a brand also needs a real problem to solve. In women's ski and outdoor apparel, she saw fashion-forward colors and details treated as if they could not coexist with technical performance.
A flight scramble leads into a grounded discussion of FP&A, generational knowledge, and junior-executive judgment.
A 10:30 a.m. customer meeting in Minneapolis gives the episode its practical opening: the host sorts through how to get there from New York City after Jessica Rose finds a 6:05 flight, with the hour time change and an hour-early arrival turning a simple trip into a planning…
A year-end mashup turns public experimentation, client-call instincts, and imperfect timing into practical business lessons.
Work 2025 In Review treats a year-end mashup as a practical look at a year spent trying things in public. The episode circles back through the launch of Work Like a Girl and a Substack, a podcast move, an experiment with Lemonada, and the slower work of finding a clearer voice,…
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.
Erika Ayers Badan opens with a travel planning mishap for a Minneapolis meeting, highlighting Midwest logistics.
Max Shaw discusses his new company Windmill, which aims to revolutionize HR by using AI to streamline performance reviews and administrative tasks.
A mother-daughter duo discusses their careers, relationship, and new plant-based cookbook.
Erika Ayers Badan hosts a year-end mashup episode reflecting on the podcast's growth, including launches like Work Like a Girl and a Substack.
Emily Tisch Sussman discusses her podcast 'She Pivots' and her personal journey of pivoting from a high-level political career to embracing vulnerability and integrating personal life into professional decisions.
The host discusses handling jealousy from a partner and the emotional imbalance in relationships, using examples from her Barstool experience and the Work Like a Girl community.
Danielle Fette, co-founder and CEO of FetTech, explains her medical device company's regenerative medicine product that helps the body heal naturally after injury.
A discussion on fundraising and capital raising, featuring insights from David Rubenstein on building a private equity firm and the fundamentals of selling.
A discussion on how narrative drives numbers early in a business or personal journey, and numbers drive narrative later, based on a quote from Aswath Damodaran's book 'Narrative and Numbers'.
Ariana Ferwerda explains how she and former Olympic skier Kylie launched Half Days in November 2020 after finding women's ski wear too masculine, ill-fitting, and technically uninspiring.
Erika Ayers Badan and Kat Gazarian discuss why Gen Z employees repeatedly asking “why” can expose pointless workplace habits and improve decisions.
Erika Ayers Badan reviews Work’s 2025 launches, including Work Like a Girl, Substack, and the move to Lemonada, while examining how the show developed its voice and mission.
Keri Rosenthal tells Erika Ayers Badan how work at the Dutch children’s brand Oylily, raising three children, painting, and designing roughly 60 to 100 homes led to an integrated lifestyle business.
Kathy Ireland tells Erika Ayers Badan how selling painted rocks at age four preceded modeling, a sock business launched in 1993, and a broader consumer-products company.
Cynthia Pong, a former public defender who runs the 14,000-client coaching firm Embrace Change, tells Erika Ayers Badan why three years of trial work led to burnout and therapy.
Two guests discuss sobriety as a superpower in the workplace and AI's gender bias in salary recommendations.