For this week’s Modern Retail Podcast, co-hosts Gabriela Barkho and Melissa Daniels were joined by Katie Thomas from the Kearney Consumer Institute to discuss how shoppers’ financial stress is showing up in their shopping habits. KCI recently released its latest Consumer Stress Index, which monitors 24,000 consumers across 12 countries. It looks not only at…
Read More
Dario Amodei is not the kind of CEO who talks loosely about numbers. The Anthropic co-founder and chief executive, a former VP of research at OpenAI with a PhD in computational neuroscience from Princeton, has built a reputation for measured public statements — particularly around the financial performance of a company that, until recently, disclosed…
Read More
Voice agents have been expensive to run and painful to orchestrate, not because the models can’t handle conversation, but because context ceilings forced enterprises to build session resets, state compression, and reconstruction layers into every deployment. OpenAI’s three new voice models are designed to reduce that overhead, and they change how engineers can think about…
Read More
Most enterprise security programs were built to protect servers, endpoints, and cloud accounts. None of them was built to find a customer intake form that a product manager vibe coded on Lovable over a weekend, connected to a live Supabase database, and deployed on a public URL indexed by Google. That gap now has a…
Read More
Patrick Coddou is my COO and business partner at AJF Growth. Follow and connect with him on X at https://x.com/soundslikecanoe. FOLLOW UP WITH ANDREW X: https://x.com/andrewjfaris Email: podcast@ajfgrowth.com Work With AJF Growth: https://ajfgrowth.com BEHIND THE SCENES STUDIO Work with the same Meta Ads creative production team that Andrew does with Behind The Scenes Studio, a…
Read More
A CEO’s AI agent rewrote the company’s security policy. Not because it was compromised, but because it wanted to fix a problem, lacked permissions, and removed the restriction itself. Every identity check passed. CrowdStrike CEO George Kurtz disclosed the incident and a second one at his RSAC 2026 keynote, both at Fortune 50 companies. The…
Read More
Just a few weeks after announcing Claude Managed Agents, Anthropic has updated the platform with three new capabilities that collapse infrastructure layers like memory, evaluation, and multi-agent orchestration, into a single runtime. This move could threaten the standalone tools that many enterprises cobble together. The new capabilities — ‘Dreaming,’ ‘Outcomes,’ and ‘Multi-Agent Orchestration’ — aim…
Read More
We've hit a plateau at Beardbrand, the direct-to-consumer business I launched 15 years ago. Our revenue is down from its peak. We've made mistakes. The beard care space has dried up. We've moved from a blue ocean of growth and opportunity to a red ocean of fierce competition. If Beardbrand grows, a competitor loses, and…
Read More
Subscribe to DTC Newsletter – https://dtcnews.link/signup Meta attribution has changed, and most brands are still reading performance the same way they were a year ago. Jacob, Head of Socials at Pilothouse, walks through what’s different now. Click-only attribution, incremental measurement, and how those shifts affect the way conversions show up in your dashboard. If you’ve…
Read More
What does it take to start a company at 20 years old — and scale it into a platform used by tens of millions before selling it for hundreds of millions?
On today’s episode, we welcome David Rusenko, Founder and former CEO of Weebly — one of the earliest platforms to make it possible for anyone to build a website without coding. Long before “no-code” became a movement, David and his co-founders set out to simplify the internet for small businesses and entrepreneurs. After joining Y Combinator in its early days, they built Weebly into a company with over 350 employees, hundreds of millions in revenue, and more than 50 million users worldwide — ultimately leading to its $365 million acquisition by Square.
In this episode, David shares the real story behind building Weebly from a college project into a global platform, including the scrappy early days, the challenges of scaling a team and culture, and the evolution of his leadership as CEO. We dive into the realities of hypergrowth, what it takes to maintain human connection while scaling, and the lessons learned from serving millions of small business owners. David also opens up about the acquisition process — how the deal with Square came together, what it felt like to sell, and the emotional and psychological transition that comes after stepping away from something you’ve built for years.
If you’re interested in early-stage hustle, scaling a company, navigating an exit, or what founders don’t talk about after the deal closes — 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 David Rusenko:
https://www.linkedin.com/in/drusenko
https://x.com/drusenko
https://www.instagram.com/davidrusenko/
Sponsored By:
LinkedIn Jobs – Head to LinkedIn.com/KaraGoldin to post your job for free.
Warby Parker – Get 15% off + Free Shipping when they buy 2 or more pairs of prescription glasses at WarbyParker.com/KARAGOLDIN
OneSkin – For a limited time, try OneSkin with 15% off using code KARAGOLDIN at OneSkin.co/KARAGOLDIN
Check out our website to view this episode’s show notes: https://karagoldin.com/podcast/836
Read More
