Ben Dietz convenes Casey Lewis (After School), Daisy Alioto (Dirt), and Erica Chen (Media Futures Group, WPP) on the collapse of the wall between editorial and commerce. Publishers are shipping perfume, brands are hiring writers, and the relationship forming in your inbox isn’t human-to-human anymore.
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Legacy infrastructure, not the models themselves, is what’s actually slowing AI agents down. That was the shared conclusion of three infrastructure leaders — from LinkedIn, Walmart, and Zendesk — at VB Transform 2026. The panel brought together Animesh Singh, senior director of AI platform and infrastructure at LinkedIn, Desiree Gosby, SVP of corporate technology services…
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OpenClaw has become one of the most widely adopted agentic frameworks, but it has yet to prove itself at enterprise scale. Agents need real credentials — API keys, OAuth tokens, service accounts — to work effectively, and Brex found that traditional guardrails couldn’t contain what those agents were doing with them. Brex set out to…
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Sean Stone advises ecommerce merchants to adopt a one-two punch for growth. Punch one is developing a profitable, branded website. Punch two is converting the likely spillover traffic on Amazon. That tactic inspired the name of Sean’s latest agency, Spillover Commerce. He’s a longtime Amazon consultant who now says brands should focus on their own…
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Subscribe to DTC Newsletter – https://dtcnews.link/signup Jordan Gordon runs CRO and retention at Pilothouse and hosts TWBERP, The World’s Best Email and Retention Podcast. He has audited somewhere in the range of 400 to 500 brands and been inside more Klaviyo accounts than almost anyone in DTC. In this All Killer No Filler episode he…
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On today’s episode, we welcome Rick Rosenfield, Co-Founder of California Pizza Kitchen and author of The California Pizza Kitchen Story: How Two Federal Prosecutors Changed the Way America Eats Pizza. Before helping create one of the most recognizable restaurant brands in the world, Rick built a successful career as a federal prosecutor, handling major criminal cases and organized crime matters. But in 1985, he and his longtime friend and fellow attorney, Larry Flax, made an unexpected decision: leave the legal profession behind and open a pizza restaurant in Beverly Hills.
What followed was one of the most remarkable brand-building stories in modern restaurant history. California Pizza Kitchen didn’t just create a successful restaurant—it helped redefine what pizza could be, pioneered California-style pizza, and reshaped the casual dining experience. From barbecue chicken pizza to open kitchens and elevated dining, CPK became a category-defining brand that grew from a single location into a global phenomenon.
In this episode, Rick shares the lessons behind that journey, including the risks they took, the challenges of rapid growth, and the importance of building both a brand and a business. We discuss the culture-first philosophy that became the foundation of CPK, the ROCK values—Respect, Opportunity, Communication, and Kindness—and why culture ultimately matters more than product. Rick also reflects on entrepreneurship, leadership under pressure, partnerships, private equity, loss of control, and what happens when the company you built evolves beyond your hands.
This conversation is packed with insights for entrepreneurs, operators, restaurant leaders, and anyone interested in building an enduring brand. Rick’s story is a reminder that some of the biggest opportunities come from taking an unconventional path—and having the courage to follow it.
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 Rick Rosenfield and The California Pizza Kitchen Story:
https://www.rickrosenfield.com/
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https://www.linkedin.com/in/rick-rosenfield/
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Check out our website to view this episode’s show notes: https://karagoldin.com/podcast/866
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How can you build an eCommerce business that lasts for decades, not just the next algorithm update? In this episode, Edward Wimmer IV, co-founder of ROAD iD, shares how a near-fatal accident inspired a business that’s now helped save lives while growing into a thriving eight-figure brand. You’ll hear how he and his father started…
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Most ecommerce brands head into Q4 carrying too much inventory and not enough cash, and those two problems are directly connected. In this episode, Richard Gaffin sits down with Anmar Anmar Abdul Jawad, Director of Profit Engineering at CTC, to walk through the Cashmas in July framework, a four-step process for liquidating slow-moving inventory in…
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Moonshot AI, the Beijing-based artificial intelligence startup backed by Alibaba, on Thursday released Kimi K3 — a 2.8-trillion-parameter model that the company says is now the largest open-source AI model in the world, and one that benchmarks show performs neck-and-neck with the most powerful proprietary systems from Anthropic and OpenAI. The release, timed to land…
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Across 107 enterprises, AI infrastructure spending is accelerating well ahead of the ability to see or steer its economics. Most organizations run their AI on a familiar base of hyperscalers and model-provider APIs, yet the next dollar is aimed at specialized compute almost none of them use today; a majority intend to switch or add…
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