Shift & Thrive Podcast:
CEO Insights on Driving Change

What if the reason your go-to-market isn't working has nothing to do with your tactics and everything to do with how your leadership team defines, owns, and executes it in the first place? In this Re-air episode of Shift & Thrive, host Natalie Nathanson is joined by Sangram Vajre, Co-Founder and CEO of GTM Partners, bestselling author of Move, and pioneer of account-based marketing, for a candid conversation on what it really means to build go-to-market as a company-wide operating system. Together, they explore why GTM must live at the CEO level, how the eight-question GTM operating system drives clarity across every stage of business growth, and what it looks like when AI is layered on top of strategic foundations versus used as a shortcut around them.

What happens to a founder's mental performance when the company is winning on paper but quietly unraveling from the inside, and what does neuroscience say about fixing it? In this episode of Shift & Thrive, host Natalie Nathanson sits down with Kevin Bailey, CEO and Co-Founder of Dream Fuel and a three-time Inc. 500 founder, to explore the intersection of leadership, mental performance, and neuroscience. Kevin opens up about hitting a wall as a first-time CEO scaling past 100 employees, and how a chance encounter with a neuroscientist transformed not just his leadership style, but the foundation of his next company. Together, they unpack how the same psychological tools used with elite athletes apply directly to tech founders and executive teams, why the leader's mental state is the ceiling on a company's performance, and what concepts like non-dual awareness actually mean for the way you show up every single day.

What does it actually take to build a market category that doesn't yet exist, and how do today's go-to-market leaders use AI to accelerate that process without losing the human edge? In this Go-To-Market Deep Dive episode of Shift & Thrive, host Natalie Nathanson sits down with Kat Wendelstadt, CMO at Electric Twin and a three-time CMO with a track record of scaling venture-backed startups to billion-dollar valuations. Kat unpacks the discipline behind category creation, from naming and seeding language through PR to reading the market signals that tell you it's working. She shares how she approaches ICP discovery in brand-new markets, why she pushes back on the AI-replaces-everything narrative, and how she has structured lean but effective marketing teams in a world where AI handles more of the execution. The conversation also covers her own AI tool stack, a freelancer-first hiring philosophy, and the career pivot from large corporates to high-growth startups that shaped how she thinks about building.

What does it actually take to reach buyers in a world where AI has flooded every inbox, gated white papers have lost their pull, and generic personalization is table stakes? In this special compilation episode of Shift & Thrive, host Natalie Nathanson brings together five of the sharpest go-to-market minds from previous episodes to tackle one of the biggest disruptions in B2B today. Kerry Cunningham dismantles the "blank slate fallacy" and explains how LLMs are reshaping mid-funnel evaluation. Kristina McMillan shares how one portfolio company used deep research AI to deliver CEO-to-CEO custom market reports at scale. Jacki Leahy makes the case that the bar for outreach has been permanently raised and argues for visceral empathy over automation. Sajag Chikarsal walks through how to build custom GPTs that compress days of BDR research into minutes, and Yossi Carmon makes a bold prediction: the next go-to-market frontier is authenticity, and old-school, high-touch tactics are making a comeback.

What does it take to transform a venture-backed startup into a profitable, predictable business after acquisition by a public company? In this episode of Shift & Thrive, host Natalie Nathanson sits down with David Axler, CEO of Occupier and seasoned tech executive, to unpack the mechanics of leading high-stakes transformation. David draws on his experience guiding Wave through its post-acquisition evolution under H&R Block, where he orchestrated a simultaneous shift in business model, strategy, and company culture. He and Natalie explore how leaders can build the right diagnostic team, make courageous bets without complete data, and balance consensus with decisive action. They also dig into David's current work at Occupier, a venture-backed proptech company modernizing commercial lease management, and how his team is deploying AI not as a replacement for expertise, but as a force multiplier for a small, high-output team.