Category: podcast

Feel stuck on a decision? Try interrogating the question.

Pam Scott and Di Tompkins have been solving hard problems together for decades, and their first move is almost always to question whether someone is solving the right problem. As co-founders of The Curious Company, they bring outside perspective to mission-driven leaders who’ve hit a wall: a different color to paint with, a reframed question, and the kind of honest conversation most organizations aren’t having internally.

On this episode of The Cred Podcast, Mack sits down with two genuinely curious women who listen for a living, challenge with warmth, and have built a 26-year partnership by celebrating what makes them different. It’s a conversation about creativity, decision-making, and what happens when you finally stop trying to answer the wrong question.

In this episode of The Cred Podcast, Lana Kerr joins Mack McKelvey for a candid conversation about decision-making as a founder, CEO, and leader. From trusting instinct in the early stages of growth to learning when to slow down and bring in more voices, Lana reflects on how her approach has evolved over time. She talks about the difference between making business decisions and people decisions, the importance of starting with the desired outcome, and why culture fit is just as important as credentials. The result is a thoughtful look at what it really means to lead: making the call, owning the consequences, and keeping the team moving with momentum in the same direction.

As Lana puts it, leadership is often 80% psychology and 20% strategy because a team’s mindset and energy shape outcomes just as much as the plan itself.

Bill Shafton spent nine years as the legal backbone of Grindr, navigating a Chinese acquisition, a national security divestiture, and a Wall Street IPO. In this episode, he breaks down his philosophy on decision-making: how research sets the boundaries, but instinct drives the performance.

Tune in to learn how Bill operates in the gray areas, making high-risk decisions with incomplete data, and why “technical correctness” doesn’t shield you from reputational fallout. If compliance is the baseline, trust is the real metric.

He also shares why the legal function is less like a gatekeeper and more like an institutional liver (not glamorous, but essential to keeping the whole body running).

In this episode of The Cred Podcast, Mack talks with Steven Rosenblatt, co-founder and General Partner at Oceans, about how decisions really get made when you’re building companies, backing founders, and choosing what to stand behind before the outcome is obvious.

Steven reflects on the early mobile days, helping Apple launch iAd, and his time at Foursquare, where survival meant rethinking the business entirely. Those experiences now shape how he invests at Oceans: why it’s all about the people, how he evaluates founders,  and why consensus can be dangerous in venture investing.

More than anything, Steven makes clear that early-stage decision-making is about backing people and committing to the call.

On this episode of The Cred Podcast, Tess Michaels, Founder and CEO of Clasp, joins Mack McKelvey to talk about making decisions while building a new category at the intersection of education, healthcare, and workforce retention,  where there is no established playbook to follow.

Tess breaks down how customer signals shape better decisions, why pattern recognition beats perfect data, and how learning when to say no is critical to scaling without distraction. Listen in on a  sharp conversation on leadership, focus, and navigating the gray.

Rafat Ali doesn’t take notes.

And he makes decisions on instinct.

In this episode, the founder and CEO of Skift breaks down how he actually makes decisions as a global operator, committing to a choice, avoiding second-guessing, and never falling in love with a single option. He explains how visualization helps him pressure-test hires, products, and acquisitions, why early yellow flags almost always turn red, and the defining mistake early in his career when he sold his first company.

Rafat looks for two signals when decisions are being made. First, is there a clear owner who will carry it forward once the conversation ends, or is it drifting in a sea of shared responsibility? When no one is clearly on the hook, progress slows and things slip. Second, he pays attention to how people handle details as a gauge for decision readiness. The people who think through implications and follow through are usually the ones prepared to make the call, not just weigh in.

Tune in for a candid conversation about instinct, ownership, and what it really means to decide.