This episode is brought to you by Lightspeed. From fiber maxxing and liver health to GLP-1 support and protein-packed everything, wellness trends are evolving faster than ever. For retailers, the challenge isn’t just keeping up, it’s helping customers separate hype from lasting habits. In this episode of Retail Remix, Kate Robertson sits down with Sharon…
James Cowdale is the co-owner and marketing director at &Sons, a fashion BCorp brand selling vintage style clothing, primarily menswear. Founded in 2016 they now sell via their Shopify site, 2 stores in the UK, and wholesale, doing 8 figures in sale a year. In this episode, James shares how &Sons has grown from…
August 16, 2026LeeUncategorizedComments Off on Cutting RAG inference costs 6x starts with deciding what never reaches the LLM
Most teams building retrieval augmented generation (RAG) systems for high stakes classification make the same architectural bet: Route every ambiguous case straight to the language model and trust the retrieved context to sort it out. This works fine in a demo. It falls apart the moment the system has to survive an audit, a regulator,…
August 16, 2026LeeUncategorizedComments Off on DeepSeek’s top-ranked V4 Flash stumbles on real agent tasks as its prices surge
DeepSeek’s V4 Flash has topped model leaderboards and been hailed by developers as a “total monster” since its rollout. But in real-world testing, it completed just 53.8% of a batch of complex agent tasks. Composio ran the model through eight different agent harnesses, including Claude Code, Codex, and OpenCode, on 30 deliberately difficult, multi-step tasks…
August 15, 2026LeeUncategorizedComments Off on An eval harness found what qualitative review couldn’t: AI models are most confident when wrong
There is a step in the development process for large language model (LLM)-assisted tooling that most teams skip because it’s tedious, time-consuming, and doesn’t produce results visible to end users: Verifying that what the model is saying is actually correct. Not fluent, not coherent, not topically relevant — correct in the sense of accurately identifying…
For many founder-led brands, the transition from a scrappy, bootstrapped startup to a major retail player is the ultimate test of sustainable growth. For some, that means taking on more debt or venture capital; for others, it means bringing on private equity investors to shoulder the costs. This week, senior reporter Gabi Barkho is joined…
August 14, 2026LeeUncategorizedComments Off on GLM-5.3 is here with advanced cyber capabilities — and reportedly already found a ‘serious vulnerability’ in Cursor
Chinese AI startup Z.ai, known internationally for its growing lineup of powerful, largely open source GLM series of language models, today released GLM-5.3 with substantial gains in long-horizon coding and a more consequential — and potentially sensitive — jump in cybersecurity capabilities. Already, GLM-5.3’s cyber capabilities have found a “potentially serious vulnerability in Cursor,” the…
Jeromy Sonne is a Facebook ads pro turned fraud detection expert. His firm, Daypart, advises agencies and big-spend advertisers on the accuracy and legitimacy of their campaigns. Ad fraud, he says, can mean billed bot impressions, scam offers, and even money laundering, adding that the problem is worse on programmatic networks than on siloed platforms…
https://directtoconsumer.typeform.com/DTC-Brand?utm_source=podcast-637&utm_medium=podcast Subscribe to DTC Newsletter – https://dtcnews.link/signup pilothouse.co Every year around this time, Eric and Jacob record some version of this episode. This is their seventh Black Friday together, and the through-line hasn’t changed: brands sprint through summer, look up at the end of October, and realize the Halloween sale and Black Friday are on…
What does it take to make sustainable furniture more accessible — without compromising on style, comfort, or quality?
On today’s episode, we welcome Phantila Phataraprasit, CEO and Co-Founder of Sabai — an AAPI and female-founded sustainable furniture brand rethinking what we bring into our homes. A Forbes 30 Under 30 honoree, Apartment Therapy Changemaker, NYU Law graduate, and board member of the Sustainable Furnishings Council, Phantila brings a unique perspective to one of the most complex and overlooked consumer categories: furniture.
Inspired in part by her early experience working in her mother’s eco lodges in Thailand, Phantila built Sabai to address a major blind spot in the sustainability and non-toxic living conversation. We think carefully about what we eat, what we put on our skin, and what we clean with — but often know very little about the materials inside the furniture we live with every day.
In this episode, Phantila shares how Sabai is challenging the traditional furniture model through thoughtful material choices, modular design, and programs that extend the life of each piece. We discuss the challenges of producing sustainable furniture in a category known for waste, hidden materials, long supply chains, and high price points. Phantila also explains how Sabai’s definition of sustainability has evolved from recycled and upcycled materials toward more natural, lower-toxin options, including the brand’s Elevate Natural Collection made with materials like coconut fiber, cotton, latex, muslin, and jute.
We also talk about Sabai Revive, the company’s national furniture buyback program, its Repair Don’t Replace program, and the launch of Fabric by the Yard to make sustainable fabrics more accessible to customers and designers. Phantila shares what it takes to build trust in a category where customers cannot always see what is inside a product, and how Sabai designs furniture that feels elevated and stylish — not overly “eco.”
If you’re interested in sustainable design, circularity, non-toxic living, consumer trust, or building a mission-driven brand in a hard-to-disrupt category — this episode is for you. Tune in now on The Kara Goldin Show.
Are you interested in sponsoring and advertising on The Kara Goldin Show, which is now in the Top 1% of Entrepreneur podcasts in the world? Let me know by contacting me at karagoldin@gmail.com. You can also find me @KaraGoldin on all networks.
To learn more about Phantila Phataraprasit and Sabai:
https://www.sabai.design/
https://www.instagram.com/sabaidesign/
https://www.linkedin.com/company/sabai-design/
https://www.tiktok.com/@sabaidesign
https://www.linkedin.com/in/phantila-phataraprasit/
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Check out our website to view this episode’s show notes: https://karagoldin.com/podcast/878
