The RSS Feed From The Future
An Ode To Forward Thinking Founders
I want to congratulate a former podcast guest, Dhaval Patel, on having Lotus featured in TIME Magazine as one of the Top 100 Inventions of 2025. Lotus is a wearable ring that controls objects at home by pointing. We had Dhaval on Forward Thinking Founders in 2023, and it was great to see this news pop in my inbox late last week.
Over the years, I’ve interviewed more than 950 founders on Forward Thinking Founders. I’ll admit—I’ve done a poor job of sharing their stories beyond the original conversations. That’s a shame, because so many of these founders have gone on to build great things.
Alex Bouaziz, CEO of Deel, came on the podcast back in 2019—long before it became a $12.6B company.
Immad Akhund, CEO of Mercury, joined when Mercury only had a handful of early adopters as customers and about a dozen employees.
Scott Wu, now CEO of Cognition, came on when he was CTO of Lunchclub—a company he was building before starting Cognition and creating Devin, the AI engineer we all know today.
Daniel Gross—before he joined Meta as an exec, co-founded AI Grant with Nat Friedman, and briefly co-founded SSI—was running a project called Pioneer. I captured that moment more than five years ago.
When I look back, Forward Thinking Founders might be the most prescient RSS feed in tech—an archive of future unicorns and world-changers before they broke out. And I’ve realized it’s time to start shining a light on those stories again.
If you’re not subscribed to Forward Thinking Founders, you can do so on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or Youtube. New interviews are coming out every week or two, and I will also be re-sharing some oldies/goodies as well. I hope you find some of the inspirational and a guide for the future. I know I do.