Claudia Green went from agoraphobic teen to boiler-room recruiter, then hit absolute rock bottom in 2019—job gone, relationship over, family illness.

Lying beside her sick grandma, she registered “Scaling Up,” a fractional talent & HR firm that now supports VC-backed start-ups across Europe.

In this episode, we cover:

• Why burnout + “nothing to lose” can be the best launchpad
• The two founder traits, Claudia says, predict low attrition and high output
• Agency-recruitment war stories (holes-in-shoes firings, anyone?)
• Her biggest founder mistake: kindness that crippled the team
• How to be both a decent human and an authoritarian leader—no, it’s not easy

Raw talk on resilience, people problems and paying maternity out of your pocket.

Two totally different routes, one very real destination: founder reality.

• Sydney de Arenas grew up around family businesses, quit a soul-crushing sales job at 23 and never looked back—until a bad hire in Paris almost wiped her out.
• Audrina went from pro Latin-ballroom dancer to VP at a performance-marketing startup—then a shock lay-off pushed her straight into Summit Chasers and, eventually, co-founding Hive with Sydney.

Together they unpack:

• The myth of the “glamorous” founder life—and why their bank balances said otherwise.
• Why early wins can be dangerous (including the car Audrina wishes she’d never bought).
• Sydney’s jaw-dropping investor meeting that turned into a personal-space assault—and how she rebuilt her fundraising strategy.
• A Guatemalan hostel “fridge scam,” tornado-dodging sales calls, and other moments you truly can’t make up.
• What not to do next: overspending, saying yes to every client, and building a company that can’t survive without you.

Raw, practical and occasionally ridiculous—exactly what this show is about.

Luke Davis went from “employee #31” at a fast-growing tech scale-up to co-founder of Diversifying.io, a job board tackling workplace diversity long before it was headline news.

In this conversation we cover:

• Bootstrapping in real life – why Luke still hasn’t taken VC money and how that forces “creative discipline.”
• Fund-raising vs. reality – the hoops a Black female-led team still has to jump through (including an invoice-financing deal that disintegrated the moment ID was requested).
• The $20,000 domain lesson – how ignoring the “.com” cost Luke’s team a chunk of runway.
• Life-threatening illness mid-startup – Luke’s colon-cancer battle, what it did to his mental health, and the power of therapy and marathon training in the aftermath.
• Why “hire another person” is not the default answer to every scaling problem.

If you’ve ever wondered what it really feels like to juggle growth, cash-flow panic and a health crisis—while the market mood swings on diversity—Luke lays it all out.