Most founders don’t have an ideas problem. They have an action problem. Jason Durkee, President of Idea Development in Tokyo, shares what it really takes to grow a business past its first success.

Jason Durkee moved to Japan for university, joined a corporate training startup while still in college, and in 2003 founded Idea Development in Tokyo. More than 20 years later, his firm serves 130+ clients a year, including many of Japan’s best-known companies. He named his company after ideas, then learned the ideas were never the hard part.

In this episode, Jason and Matt talk about:

• Why action comes before the plan, not after
• How to get unstuck when your signature offer has become a hamster wheel
• Why existing clients give you the chance to build something new
• How to sell a service clients can’t see yet
• Casting a team of specialists instead of hunting for the perfect hire
• Losing 90% of a year’s revenue in two weeks, and rebuilding
• What non-Japanese managers at Japanese-owned companies need to know about headquarters

About Jason Durkee
Jason is President of Idea Development, a workplace learning and performance consulting firm in Tokyo, and a director of ATD Japan. Since the 1990s he has designed and delivered innovation, communication, and cross-cultural programs for more than 40,000 participants across Asia.

Connect with Jason
Idea Development: http://www.ide-development.com/
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/jason-durkee-idea-development/

The Bigger Stage
Conversations with founders and builders about what it takes to step onto a bigger stage.
https://thebiggerstage.com

Everyone told Mylena Maulepes not to bother applying to Harvard. She applied anyway. Now she helps companies beat burnout by fixing how the work is designed, not by asking people to be more resilient.

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Everyone told Mylena Maulepes not to bother applying to Harvard. She was Brazilian, English wasn't her first language, and she already had offers from other schools. She turned them down and applied anyway. A few months later, an email arrived at work: "Welcome to Harvard."

Mylena started out as a mechanical engineer on a truck engine line, went on to earn a master's in industrial-organizational psychology at Harvard, and came home to Brazil with a better question. Companies keep asking how stressed their people are. She asks what's making them stressed in the first place.

In this episode:
- The night she gave up the sure thing to take a shot at Harvard
- Why an engineer's habit of asking "why" became her edge in psychology
- Why well-being spending isn't moving the needle, and what does
- Crocodiles in the pond: fix the environment, not the swimmer
- What younger generations want from work, and why founders should pay attention
- Selling culture work to numbers-first buyers
- What her eight-month-old son is teaching her about leadership
- The mentor who believed in her before anyone else did

Chapters
00:00 Cold open
00:46 Meet Mylena Maulepes
04:28 The girl who wanted to fix engines
08:01 Why engineering wasn't enough to lead
11:08 When everyone says your dream is too big
13:25 "Welcome to Harvard"
18:06 An engineer in a psychology world
23:25 Stop fixing people. Fix the work.
25:46 Crocodiles in the pond
28:18 What's actually working
29:13 What clients ask for vs. what they need
32:20 Selling culture work with numbers
36:05 Becoming a mom, and a new lens on work
40:13 Why you need a mentor
45:35 Advice for your bigger stage
47:12 Where to find Mylena

Follow Mylena
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/mylena-maulepes
Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/mylenamaulepes
TikTok: https://www.tiktok.com/@maulepes

If this episode was useful, share it with a founder who's trying to build a team people want to stay on.

A former ABC News correspondent explains why AI didn't kill earned media — it made it the asset most founders are ignoring. T.J. Winick on how ChatGPT, Claude, and Perplexity now decide how you're described, the reporter's playbook for getting covered, and how to turn a crisis around in a single news cycle.

SHOW NOTES

For twenty years, T.J. Winick built stories from the inside — six of them as a correspondent for ABC News. Now he helps founders survive the same machine he used to run.

His argument in this episode cuts against the grain: AI didn't make earned media less important. It made it the asset most founders are ignoring at exactly the wrong moment. For decades, being found meant ranking on Google — SEO, a clean website, owned channels, with press coverage treated as a bonus on top. That's flipped. The people you want are now asking ChatGPT, Claude, and Perplexity the questions they used to type into a search bar, and those tools don't crawl your website or read your press release. They synthesize answers from published, credible, third-party coverage — which is earned media, and it's now the raw material AI uses to describe you to the world. T.J. calls it GEO: generative engine optimization.

From there, he opens the reporter's playbook from the other side of the desk — why a story that can't answer "why should anyone care?" in the first ten seconds dies on the spot, how to build a hook reporters can't ignore, and why authenticity beats polish every time. We get into the crisis case study at the heart of his book — the employee fired for using a weapon against a robber — and what it takes to turn a story like that around without spinning. We close on how any founder can become a genuine thought leader, and exactly how to vet and hire the right PR partner.

In this episode:

• Why AI search made earned media more valuable, not less (GEO explained)
• The client who moved a $20K/month Google Ads budget into PR — and why
• How reporters actually choose stories in the 10 a.m. editorial meeting
• The hook: timeliness, tension, data, and finding a "real person"
• The rule of seven and building an omni-channel narrative
• Newsjacking with a contrarian take to get picked up fast
• A crisis case study on empathy, truth, and the one-news-cycle goal
• How to find, vet, and hire the right PR partner

About the guest: T.J. Winick is the founder of Essex Strategies, a Boston-based strategic and crisis communications firm, and the author of Reputation Capital: How to Navigate Crises and Protect Your Greatest Asset (Berrett-Koehler), winner of a 2023 Independent Publisher Book Award. Before crossing over, he spent two decades in broadcast news, including as a correspondent for ABC News across Nightline, World News, and Good Morning America.

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📘 Reputation Capital: https://a.co/d/0dTRDwvl
🌐 essexstrategies.com
🔗 LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/tjwinick/
📱 TikTok @tjwinick · Instagram @essexstrategies
🎙️ The Bigger Stage — conversations with founders and builders. Subscribe wherever you listen.

Jacqueline Wales stopped believing in "fearless" a long time ago. After a financial collapse at 54 wiped out the life she'd built, she excavated a different idea — fear isn't something to kill or outrun, it's data. In this conversation she breaks down Fear Intelligence, the F.E.A.R. framework, the TEDx talk that nearly broke her, and the one question she puts to CEOs that nobody else asks. For any founder staring down a bigger stage, this is about making the fear the thing that moves you forward.
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Jacqueline Wales built a career on a move most people never learn: don't kill the fear, read it.

At 54, she watched the life she'd built vanish in the 2008 crash — fortune gone, four kids still looking to her. Most people would call that the end. She called it research. What she excavated became Fear Intelligence, the work she now brings to founders, CEOs, and executive teams worldwide.

In this episode, Jacqueline and Matt get into the difference between being fearless and being fear smart, and why she now calls the first one a fantasy. She walks through her F.E.A.R. framework — Face, Explore, Act, Rise — and the idea underneath all of it: fear is data, not disaster. Read it, and it becomes the sharpest signal you have.

We also get into:

- The TEDx talk ("Unleash the Power of Fear") that nearly broke her — the dress-rehearsal that fell apart, and what she did the morning of
- Why "what other people are thinking is none of your business"
- The four fears every founder carries: inadequacy, rejection, uncertainty, and loss
- The question she puts to CEOs that stops them cold: what decision are you avoiding right now?
- The 90-second rule for catching yourself before fear runs the show
- Why the world feels more afraid now — and where to point your attention instead
- Black belt at 49, CrossFit at 63, and the driver behind all of it

Her closing message is the whole episode in one line: analyze the fear, notice the fear, and do it anyway.

— CHAPTERS —
00:00 Cold Open
00:00 Welcome to The Bigger Stage
02:47 The Signature Red
03:23 Fearless Is a Fantasy
04:16 Fear as Data — The F.E.A.R. Framework
06:40 You Weren't Born Afraid
11:21 The TEDx Talk That Nearly Broke Her
19:20 The Physical Tells of Fear
29:14 Black Belt at 49, CrossFit at 63
30:30 The Question CEOs Never Get Asked
36:32 The 90-Second Rule
40:07 Why the World Feels More Afraid Now
46:18 Where to Find Jacqueline
51:00 Analyze the Fear. Do It Anyway.

— ABOUT JACQUELINE WALES —
Four-time author, TEDx speaker, and a black belt who earned it at 49. She teaches Fear Intelligence not from theory, but from the floor she had to climb up off of.

Website & free Fear Intelligence Assessment: https://fearintelligence.co
Daily Insights email: sign up at https://fearintelligence.co
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/jacquelinewales/

— ABOUT THE SHOW —
The Bigger Stage is a show for founders, operators, and builders — conversations about the moves that get them to bigger stages. Hosted by Matt Stone.

New episodes on a rolling basis. Follow the show so you don't miss one.

A 20-year banker walked away from a senior VP title to buy a 33-year-old mom-and-pop HVAC company that wasn't even for sale. Eric Light on calculated risk, a brutal first year, and the rule he's built two careers on.

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Eric Light spent nearly two decades in banking, working his way up to senior vice president, embedded in the Chester County, PA business community — exactly where he was supposed to stay. Then he bought an HVAC company.

It wasn't a detour. Eric took everything he'd built — the relationships, the trust, the front-row view of how hundreds of businesses actually work — and bet it all on Precision Air Heating & Cooling, a 33-year-old shop in West Chester that technically wasn't for sale. In his words: "One day I was a banker, and the next morning I woke up president of this company."

He and Matt get into the calculated-risk framework Eric used to coach owners for years and now lives himself, the brutal first 90 days, why he still gets out of bed "a little bit scared" four years in, and the rule he's built two careers on since 2008: chase honest, passionate, successful people, and the business follows.

If you're a founder sitting on a leap you haven't taken yet, start here.

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CONNECT WITH ERIC
Email: elight@precisionairhc.com
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/ericlight/
Precision Air: https://precisionairhc.com

ABOUT THE SHOW
The Bigger Stage is the show for founders, operators, and builders chasing a bigger vision. Follow in your podcast app so new episodes land automatically.

Bobby Umar has done TEDx five times. In this episode, he breaks down how to actually get accepted, what makes a talk land, and the leverage move almost nobody makes after the applause dies down — plus the night he walked off the TEDx stage mid-talk and why he did it on purpose.

SHOW NOTES:

He walked off the TEDx stage mid-talk — slides broken, screen blank, audience watching. Then he went back out and delivered the talk that became one of his best.

Bobby Umar has stood on the TEDx stage five times, coached founders and executives on how to turn their story into stage-ready authority, and built a 25-year speaking career out of four careers that didn't fit. In this episode, he walks through what actually gets a TEDx application accepted, why most pitches get rejected, how to mine your own life story for the idea worth pitching, and the three-part framework almost no one completes: land it, deliver it, leverage it.

You'll hear:

• What separates a TEDx idea that gets accepted from one that gets ignored
• How to turn your life story into a pitch-ready TEDx concept
• Why the application itself is where most people lose the opportunity
• The full story of the night Bobby walked off a TEDx stage — and why
• How to build buzz around a talk before it's even live
• Where founders should be putting their energy beyond TEDx in 2026

Bobby Umar is a 5x TEDx speaker, Inc. Magazine Top 100 Leadership Speaker, and two-time LinkedIn Top Voice with 1,000+ keynotes across four continents.

Connect with Bobby Umar:
Website: https://raeallan.com
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/bobbyumar/
Substack: https://substack.com/@bobbyumar

From tech lawyer to Warner, Meta, and CEO of Merlin — now Chief Commercial Officer at Suno. Jeremy Sirota on never being the smartest person in the room, the book he'd never talked about, and why AI can't help you if you've got nothing to say.

FULL DESCRIPTION

"I've never been the smartest person in the room. So I've always had to pull at something else."

Jeremy Sirota has a career that refuses to sit on a straight line. Tech lawyer at Morrison & Foerster. Record exec at Warner Music. Global licensing deals at Meta. CEO of Merlin, where he took annual revenue from $900M to $1.8B. Now Chief Commercial Officer at Suno, one of the most-watched generative AI music companies on the planet.

But he didn't talk his way in — he worked his way in. The through-line was never the title. It was a way of operating: build the room where genius happens instead of trying to be the genius in it. It took his ten-year-old daughter cutting him off mid-lecture — "Dad, no more TED Talks today" — to make that click.

In this conversation, Jeremy gets into the class that nearly ended his law career, the book he'd never talked about publicly until now, why he keeps a "captain's log" of half-formed ideas, the "make this worse" game he uses to break a room open, and the one thing AI can't do for you: have something to say.

For founders, operators, and builders working the move from operator to authority to icon — this one's worth your time.

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Guest: Jeremy Sirota, Chief Commercial Officer at Suno Host: Matt Stone

Millions of people drive, deliver, and hustle to power the American economy — and most of them are invisible to the financial system that's supposed to serve them.

Ricky Michel Presbot, co-founder and CEO of Ualett, decided to do something about it.

In this episode, Ricky shares how a failed early venture, a cab ride from JFK, and a chance encounter at a funeral led to the creation of a bilingual fintech platform now serving gig workers across the United States — with a $150 million credit facility to grow nationwide.

We go deep on the idea of the "multi-hustler economy," why niche is the X factor for any business, what Ricky learned driving Uber for three months before building his product, and why the company's central value isn't "believe in us" — it's "we believe in you."

This is a story about trust, dignity, and building something for people who've been left behind.

Topics covered:

• The cab ride from JFK that revealed a $150M opportunity
• Why the gig economy is everyone's economy
• The "multi-hustler" — a new category beyond the gig worker
• How Ualett works (and why it's not a predatory cash advance)
• The funeral pitch that started everything
• Building company values from a mentor relationship
• Why going to the field is non-negotiable before building a product
• What "we believe in you" actually means as a business model

Connect with Ricky: Ualett — https://ualett.com LinkedIn — https://www.linkedin.com/in/ricky-michel-presbot-14964472