Still Human

4 episodes

Mental Resilience

Pressure, performance, and the inner work behind extraordinary achievement.

Episode 12 — Makarove Hong: Losing Money Is Normal in SaaS: Makarove Hong on 40+ Products, Two-Week MVPs, and Why Decomposition Beats ExecutionEP 12

Makarove Hong

Losing Money Is Normal in SaaS: Makarove Hong on 40+ Products, Two-Week MVPs, and Why Decomposition Beats Execution

Makarove Hong is the founder and CEO of FlyiDEA, a Taiwanese company that ships an MVP in two weeks with no-code and AI, acts as an outsourced CTO for small and mid-sized businesses, and takes a share of the product instead of a maintenance fee. He has built more than forty products. Over half of them lost money, and he calls that the normal ecology of SaaS. A Still Human conversation about running AI inside a working day, why the bottleneck in the AI era is decomposition rather than execution, and the two weeks of night shifts at Taipei 101 that ended with him falling down the stairs.

59 minSpotify
Episode 07 — Toby Corey: Toby Corey: Zentrepreneurship, Tesla’s Fake Solar Roof, and Building Trust in AIEP 07

Toby Corey

Toby Corey: Zentrepreneurship, Tesla’s Fake Solar Roof, and Building Trust in AI

Toby Corey has been at the center of three tech waves — the dot-com boom (USWeb, $3B valuation), the clean energy transition (SolarCity, Tesla Energy), and now AI. He testified under oath that Tesla’s Solar Roof tiles were never connected to the grid, laid off 4,000+ people, and created Zentrepreneurship — a 21-principle framework for building companies with consciousness, taught at Stanford for 11 years. Now he’s building BrandCapsule: verifying identity in an AI world where hallucinations are the default.

60 minSpotify
Episode 05 — Andrey Marey: Build Before You’re Ready: Andrey Marey on High-Agency, Discipline, and Refusing to Use AI With FriendsEP 05

Andrey Marey

Build Before You’re Ready: Andrey Marey on High-Agency, Discipline, and Refusing to Use AI With Friends

A 20-year-old serial founder on high-agency, why discipline beats motivation, and the one thing he refuses to ever let AI touch — covering NVIDIA, Vivora, FR8 Finland, and the framework that runs his career.

44 minSpotify
Episode 01 — Sean Wu: Execution Culture: How a Student Founder Raised $2M and Built Robotics for the Real WorldEP 01

Sean Wu

Execution Culture: How a Student Founder Raised $2M and Built Robotics for the Real World

Sean Wu raised over $2M for Synphony — a robotics startup tackling the sim-to-real gap — while finishing his junior year at Santa Clara. On execution culture, the wrestling lesson behind founder loneliness, and why most students never ship.

46 minSpotify