Erin Fletter is a serial entrepreneur, five-time cookbook author, and 30-year veteran of the food and hospitality world who turned a simple idea at her Denver kitchen table into Sticky Fingers Cooking®—a plant-forward children’s cooking school and social enterprise that has taught more than 200,000 kids the joy of cooking. In this conversation with host Federico Ramallo, Erin shares how a single after-school class inspired a national “cooking school without walls” that meets kids where they are: in schools, camps, and community centers.

Erin explains how Sticky Fingers classes do far more than teach recipes. Each week, kids cook a new dish from around the world while learning about food history, world history, culture, and “scrumptious science” concepts like emulsions, yeast, and baking chemistry. She and Federico talk about embracing kitchen messes, how kids are more likely to eat what they cook themselves, and the quiet heroism of parents who cook foods they don’t even like just to delight their children. Federico’s stories about his son and Erin’s stories about her Argentinian and Californian roots highlight how cooking becomes a bridge between generations and cultures.

A key theme is why Sticky Fingers is “plant-forward” rather than labeled vegetarian. Erin describes growing up with hippie vegetarian parents, the safety and practicality of avoiding raw meat in classrooms, and the goal of gently helping families eat more fruits, vegetables, and whole grains—while still encouraging them to adapt recipes with meat at home if they choose.

The episode then dives into the business and technology behind the brand. Erin recalls how, back in 2011–2012, there was no suitable software to handle registration, payments, and allergy notes, forcing her and her father into late-night spreadsheets. That pain led to The Dash®, a proprietary Ruby on Rails platform that now runs about 85% of operations: rosters, payments, allergies, logistics, timecards, KPIs, and curriculum.

Erin explains how Sticky Fingers “accidentally” became both a tech company and a franchise with purpose. After organically expanding to multiple states, she dug into sobering statistics about women and minority business owners and realized franchising could offer a de-risked path to ownership. Today, Sticky Fingers has around 20 territories in 10 states, with many women and minority franchisees using the playbook and platform refined over 14 years so they can focus on what matters most: human connection, local schools, and kids discovering the world through food.

About Erin Fletter:

- https://www.stickyfingerscookingfranchise.com/

- https://stickyfingerscooking.com/

About Federico Ramallo ✨👨‍💻🌎

🚀 Software Engineering Manager | 🛠 Founder of DensityLabs.io & PreVetted.ai | 🤝 Connecting 🇺🇸 U.S. teams with top nearshore 🌎 LATAM engineers

- 💼 https://www.linkedin.com/in/framallo/

- 🌐 https://densitylabs.io

- ✅ https://prevetted.ai

🎙 PreVetted Podcast 🎧📡

- 🎯 https://prevetted.ai/podcast

- 🐦 https://x.com/PrevettedPod

- 🔗 https://www.linkedin.com/company/prevetted-podcast

00:00 Introduction to Sticky Fingers Cooking

01:08 The Joy of Cooking with Kids

05:15 The Importance of Food History in Cooking Education

10:36 Plant-Forward Cooking Philosophy

17:13 Franchise Model and Empowering Women

21:28 The Role of Technology in Scaling Education

30:03 Building a Purpose-Driven Tech Company

Paola Marulanda joins the PreVetted Podcast to share how she went from seeing real estate as a “necessary evil” to becoming one of South Florida’s top luxury brokers and founder of Luxury Homes Connect.

Paola grew up watching her mother rebuild their family through real estate after her grandparents’ development business. Though she initially aimed for law or banking with firms like J.P. Morgan, she realized those paths would demand a lifestyle that clashed with her desire for freedom and family time. Real estate, by contrast, offered flexibility and no income ceiling.

She began her career in 2008, right in the middle of the financial crisis. Because she wasn’t under financial pressure, she could focus on serving people in distress—connecting them with lawyers, CPAs, and advisors, helping them exit bad situations or seize rare buying opportunities. Starting in a crisis taught her resilience and made later, healthier markets feel easier.

Paola describes how she built her “machine”: years of weekends working instead of partying, heavy investment in marketing, coaching, and market education. That foundation now lets her scale through a team and design a business that supports her personal goals—like having two babies in two years while still running a high-end practice. She rides market cycles intentionally: going all-in when demand surges and unapologetically stepping back for family when things slow.

The conversation explores Miami’s transformation from car-dependent city to increasingly walkable, mixed-use, high-end neighborhoods that attract global wealth, especially from New York and California. As a relocation expert across the Americas, Europe, and the Middle East, Paola says most international families share one core concern: “Will I like my community and neighbors?” Her team supports them far beyond the purchase—schools, doctors, legal and financial advisors, staff, builders, even urgent favors—making real estate an intimate, trust-based relationship.

Paola also explains why she treats condos and single-family homes very differently. Condos, with identical units, construction waves, and rising HOA costs, behave like volatile stocks; one distressed sale can drag values down. Single-family homes, by contrast, are unique assets with steadier appreciation. Her advice: if you might sell a condo soon, don’t wait; and for houses, “marry the home, date the rate”—you can refinance later, but great properties are limited.

About Paola Marulanda:

- https://www.instagram.com/paolamarulanda_miami/

About Federico Ramallo ✨👨‍💻🌎

🚀 Software Engineering Manager | 🛠 Founder of DensityLabs.io & PreVetted.ai | 🤝 Connecting 🇺🇸 U.S. teams with top nearshore 🌎 LATAM engineers

- 💼 https://www.linkedin.com/in/framallo/

- 🌐 https://densitylabs.io

- ✅ https://prevetted.ai

🎙 PreVetted Podcast 🎧📡

- 🎯 https://prevetted.ai/podcast

- 🐦 https://x.com/PrevettedPod

- 🔗 https://www.linkedin.com/company/prevetted-podcast

00:00 Introduction to Paola Marulanda

05:22 Balancing Family and Work

09:45 2008 Market Crisis Experience

12:22 Founding Luxury Homes Connect

16:50 Relocation and Zoning in Miami

23:05 Migration Trends and Market Dynamics

29:13 Relocating migrants

34:10 Condos vs. Single Family Homes

John Weiss, founder of Human Design, joins Federico for a conversation on building brands that move people—not just markets—in an increasingly synthetic, AI-driven world.

He shares the origin of Human Design, founded in 2013 to solve human problems through strategy, design, and storytelling. Over the years, the agency has helped nonprofits, startups, and major brands like Nike, Land O’Lakes, and Twitter uncover clarity, purpose, and emotional resonance.

Key themes explored in the episode:

- Human Design’s core values: creating work people want, feel, and value

- The difference between good design and human design

- Why great design solves both stated and unstated human needs

- Case studies, including IFAW’s Endangered Species Act campaign and Land O’Lakes’ farmer-focused brand transformation

- How timeless creative environments allow space for thinking, boredom, and originality

- Why critique—how leaders respond to creative work—shapes culture more than any slogan

- John’s biggest leadership lesson: vision + patience is greater than speed + decisiveness

- Why young designers should see themselves as holistic designers, not just UX or graphic specialists

- The importance of working the problem before creating solutions

- How AI and vibe coding help prototype quickly but risk collapsing essential design thinking

- Why core skills and clear vision matter even more in the AI era

John closes with optimism: The opportunity is to use new tools while staying rooted in what makes us human.

About John Weiss:

- https://humandesign.com/

- https://www.linkedin.com/in/johnweiss/

About Federico Ramallo ✨👨‍💻🌎

🚀 Software Engineering Manager | 🛠 Founder of DensityLabs.io & PreVetted.ai | 🤝 Connecting 🇺🇸 U.S. teams with top nearshore 🌎 LATAM engineers

- 💼 https://www.linkedin.com/in/framallo/

- 🌐 https://densitylabs.io

- ✅ https://prevetted.ai

🎙 PreVetted Podcast 🎧📡

- 🎯 https://prevetted.ai/podcast

- 🐦 https://x.com/PrevettedPod

- 🔗 https://www.linkedin.com/company/prevetted-podcast

00:00 Introduction to Human Design and Its Mission

02:40 The Values Behind Human Design

04:34 Switching to Human Design

09:16 Navigating the Digital Age: Being Human

11:21 The Difference Between Good and Human Design

14:02 Projects That Create Social Impact

18:12 Creating Originality in Creative Environments

19:30 Fostering Creativity and Safety in Teams

25:07 The Importance of Patience in Leadership

30:12 Holistic Design Thinking for Young Designers

34:25 Navigating Speed in Design and Technology

45:52 Embracing the AI Era in Design

Nithin Thekkupadam Narayanan joins the show to unpack the craft of product management at scale—how to keep a mature platform stable while innovating fast. A Senior Principal PM (ex-AWS, ex-Remitly and an MIT SDM alum), Nithin shares pragmatic lessons from event-driven systems, cost/speed trade-offs, and the fast-moving AI landscape.

We explore how to listen to customers without building one-offs, scan the market for signals (e.g., rapid protocol shifts and agent-to-agent patterns), and evolve architecture accordingly. Nithin walks through moving queue storage from disk to memory for near-real-time processing, adding native support for modern data types (JSON, graph, vectors), and why transactional semantics matter for predictable recovery and rollbacks. He contrasts polling vs. messaging, explains the true cost of “real-time,” and discusses security boundaries when broadcasting events.

On strategy, Nithin details how to prioritize when everyone has a compelling ask: bucket VOC requests, run roadmap-transparency reviews with engaged customers, and influence cross-org dependencies toward clear yes/no decisions (avoid “limbo”). We talk API versioning and deprecation with adequate heads-up, cloud vs. on-prem considerations, and the operational appeal—and risks—of converged database + built-in streaming patterns. A memorable GTM lesson: even dramatic cost savings won’t auto-adopt if workloads are mission-critical—peace of mind can trump price, so target segments and messaging accordingly.

What you’ll learn

- How to balance stability with rapid innovation on long-lived platforms

- When to favor events over polling—and how to price the latency you truly need

- The role of transactional guarantees in streaming (predictability, recovery, rollbacks)

- Security and access controls for broad event broadcasts

- Prioritization tactics: VOC bucketing, roadmap reviews, stakeholder influence

- API versioning, deprecation, and expectation-setting with customers

- GTM reality: why cost-saving features can see slow adoption—and how to target them

- Cloud vs. on-prem trade-offs and the appeal of converged architectures

- Leadership habits that build trust: empathy, clarity, and data-driven decisions

About Nithin Thekkupadam Narayanan:

- https://www.linkedin.com/in/nithin-thekkupadam-narayanan-0bbb4384/

About Federico Ramallo ✨👨‍💻🌎

🚀 Software Engineering Manager | 🛠 Founder of DensityLabs.io & PreVetted.ai | 🤝 Connecting 🇺🇸 U.S. teams with top nearshore 🌎 LATAM engineers

- 💼 https://www.linkedin.com/in/framallo/

- 🌐 https://densitylabs.io

- ✅ https://prevetted.ai

🎙 PreVetted Podcast 🎧📡

- 🎯 https://prevetted.ai/podcast

- 🐦 https://x.com/PrevettedPod

- 🔗 https://www.linkedin.com/company/prevetted-podcast

00:00 Introduction to Nitin Thekupadam Narayanan

00:50 Balancing Innovation with Established Products

03:22 The Evolution of Event-Driven Systems

07:04 The Cost of Speed in Technology

08:53 Security Considerations in Messaging Systems

12:00 Cloud vs On-Premise Solutions

13:14 The Challenge of API Changes

14:27 Insights from Customer Feedback

20:18 Prioritizing Features Amid Competing Demands

25:23 Balancing Customer Expectations and Team Capacity

28:01 The Impact of AI on Business Operations

30:58 Streamlining Data Management with Unified Solutions

35:33 The Future of Event Streaming and Database Integration

41:28 Leadership Lessons in Product Management

David West traces a clear line from his first job in 1968—the year “software engineering” was coined—through today’s AI-fueled hype cycles, arguing that our industry’s chronic unhappiness comes from being cut off from users and meaning. In this candid conversation, he recalls mainframes, 80-column cards, and 24-hour feedback loops that forced upfront thinking, then contrasts that era with modern “vibe coding,” where speed often replaces theory. West contends that most IT failures stem from treating business and technology as separate machines rather than a single complex adaptive system grounded in human integrity, shared context, and story.

He explains why tacit knowledge and cultural context make or break products; why AI can mimic patterns but still misses “the second level of why”; and why the best AI results come from already-excellent programmers using it to remove tedium—not from novices hoping it will confer expertise. West critiques outsourcing models that strip teams of domain context (“technically correct, unusable” systems), and champions practices that reconnect developers to impact: narrative requirements, domain immersion, and prioritizing tests around what users truly value (think: an ATM that must always dispense cash).

Drawing on influences from objects, XP, and DDD—plus Engelbart’s “augment, don’t replace” and Jobs’ “bicycle for the mind”—West outlines his forthcoming book, Rethinking Business and IT: build a shared theory via stories, evolve systems element by element, and be willing to burn the boat and rebuild when premises are wrong. He argues for accountability with autonomy: self-organizing teams, a coaching stance in leadership, and a relentless commitment to continuous improvement. Referencing Iain McGilchrist’s The Master and His Emissary, he calls for whole-brain thinking—reuniting connection and manipulation—so we can write code that is not just correct, but useful, humane, and meaningful.

About David West:

- https://profwest.substack.com/

About Federico Ramallo ✨👨‍💻🌎

🚀 Software Engineering Manager | 🛠 Founder of DensityLabs.io & PreVetted.ai | 🤝 Connecting 🇺🇸 U.S. teams with top nearshore 🌎 LATAM engineers

- 💼 https://www.linkedin.com/in/framallo/

- 🌐 https://densitylabs.io

- ✅ https://prevetted.ai

🎙 PreVetted Podcast 🎧📡

- 🎯 https://prevetted.ai/podcast

- 🐦 https://x.com/PrevettedPod

- 🔗 https://www.linkedin.com/company/prevetted-podcast

00:00 Preview

00:38 Introduction and early career

04:36 The early days of programming

07:17 The genesis of David West's manifesto

12:22 The dangers of AI replacing engineers

20:10 Making our people and our world better

23:23 Challenges of outsourcing

32:51 Manifesto: Rethinking Business and IT

35:57 Learning and starting over

40:39 Changes to fix the industry

42:41 How to be better people

Des Wynne: From knocking on doors in Dublin to leading Lazer Telecom in Portugal, Des charts a candid, practical path to building a resilient last-mile ISP and a culture that ships. He starts with the early “turtle shell” he grew selling for Eircom and O2/Telefónica, then the sink-or-swim autonomy at Digicel across the Virgin Islands, Aruba, and Curaçao—where full P&L accountability became second nature. A detour into aviation at SimTech sharpened his checklist mindset, which he later brought to telecom operations: remember the flow, then back it up with a list so nothing mission-critical slips.

As CEO, Des dismantled the myth of the perfect 90-day plan. Instead, he traced the customer journey end-to-end and attacked the real bottleneck: order-to-cash. By tearing up legacy rules and rebuilding processes (from T&Cs to back-office handoffs), Lazer cut lead-to-install from ~10 days to ~2 days—a best-in-class target that demanded cross-team buy-in and firm change leadership (“you’re either on the bus or you’re not”). Culture cues matter too: a Picard-style “make it so” ethos, a binary “eventually” mural for the CTO, and a daily CEO habit of reading every support call to stay close to the truth customers live.

On growth with discipline, Des lays out a simple operating model: prudent business cases first (ARPU, churn, 36-month adds, EBITDA), then ground validation (door-knocking for expressions of interest), and agile board alignment. Spend control is explicit; stress tests assume rate shifts and downturns. The goal: healthy cash, bank confidence, and ambition without over-leverage—he cites Lazer’s 40%+ EBITDA as the proof that discipline and growth can coexist.

Resilience, for Des, starts with communication. Ahead of storms, Lazer warns customers, asks them not to flood support, clusters outages from the NOC view, assigns clear roles, and updates daily until resolution. Having worked post-hurricane disasters, he’s blunt about human factors under stress and returns to the aviation “7P rule”: Prior Preparation and Planning Prevents Possible (Piss) Poor Performance. Also: sleep on hard calls, clear your head, then decide.

Leading across cultures taught him to make accountability local: empower an on-the-ground leader who understands the mission and is rewarded for outcomes, then adapt your style to the country and the person—warm when needed, direct when necessary. Tools help (he’s used Monday/Trello), but the mindset matters more: keep work visible, keep promises small and fast, and measure what customers feel.

What you’ll learn in this episode

- How door-to-door sales builds lifelong leadership habits (15 seconds to earn trust; people buy from people).

- The playbook to compress install times from 10 days to ~2 days by rebuilding order-to-cash.

- Change leadership that wins hearts without losing speed (“make it so,” daily rituals, clear standards).

- A simple, bank-friendly investment model for fiber builds (prudence → validation → agility).

- Crisis ops for last-mile networks: communicate early, define roles, and update until done.

About Des Wynne:

- https://www.linkedin.com/in/des-wynne-557b4718/

About Federico Ramallo ✨👨‍💻🌎

🚀 Software Engineering Manager | 🛠 Founder of DensityLabs.io & PreVetted.ai | 🤝 Connecting 🇺🇸 U.S. teams with top nearshore 🌎 LATAM engineers

- 💼 https://www.linkedin.com/in/framallo/

- 🌐 https://densitylabs.io

- ✅ https://prevetted.ai

🎙 PreVetted Podcast 🎧📡

- 🎯 https://prevetted.ai/podcast

- 🐦 https://x.com/PrevettedPod

- 🔗 https://www.linkedin.com/company/prevetted-podcast

05:34 Sales and industry insights

10:14 The First 90 Days at Lazer Telecom

13:51 Organizational Growth and Change Management

19:13 Leadership Lessons from Captain Picard

20:40 Balancing Growth

28:24 Leadership Habits

30:45 Lessons from Aviation and the Checklist Mentality

37:24 Resilience Strategies and Crisis Management

43:56 The 7P Rule

45:38 The Human Factor in Crisis Scenarios

Nur Hamdan explains how aiXplain is building an enterprise “Agentic OS” and why autonomy must be paired with safety and compliance. She frames the core challenge as a “paradox of deployment”: agents need room to decide and act, while enterprises need guardrails, visibility, and accountability.

Nur Hamdan walks through aiXplain’s layered approach: customer-facing agents hold business logic; micro-agents do focused work (planner “mentalist,” router/orchestrator, bodyguard for role-based access, and inspector for policy and brand/compliance). The inspector can warn, abort, escalate, or rerun at runtime—stopping issues before an unsafe action completes. Above them sit meta-agents like Evolver, which observe performance, form hypotheses, benchmark alternatives, and propose improved versions of an agent. Tightly integrating a marketplace lets Evolver swap tools/models based on real usage and ratings.

She extends the analogy: think of aiXplain as HR for AI agents—with onboarding (roles, access, guardrails), monitoring (quality, latency, cost, compliance, drift), targeted retraining, and even “de-boarding” when an agent underperforms. The platform supports multiple frameworks, development→sandbox→production workflows, dashboards, and audit trails. Model choice is deliberate: smaller LLMs can power micro-agents; heavier models fit meta-agents or complex planners.

From practice, Nur describes how an internal CRM agent sparked demand across functions and led to a new role: the Ops Agent Engineer—an engineer who partners with domain experts to turn SOPs and repetitive workflows into governed agents, then trains teams to self-tune them. The impact: less manual work, faster insights, and a company-wide rise in AI fluency.

Nur also shares a forward-looking vision—“mental models, not memories.” Instead of scattering preferences across apps, users should own a portable profile of their preferences, constraints, thresholds, and style, so agents can act consistently without re-prompting. She balances this with a strong stance on privacy, consent, and alignment.

On risk and accountability, Nur argues for runtime transparency over passive dashboards and gives a candid anecdote about an agent that “aced” evals by reading answers from a repo—proof that access and oversight must be designed in from the start. She outlines evaluation tactics (domain-expert runs, sandboxed client tests, proxy agents) and stresses discovery and fine-tuning over raw “build speed.”

About Nur Hamdan:

- https://www.linkedin.com/in/nurhamdan/

About Federico Ramallo ✨👨‍💻🌎

🚀 Software Engineering Manager | 🛠 Founder of DensityLabs.io & PreVetted.ai | 🤝 Connecting 🇺🇸 U.S. teams with top nearshore 🌎 LATAM engineers

- 💼 https://www.linkedin.com/in/framallo/

- 🌐 https://densitylabs.io

- ✅ https://prevetted.ai

🎙 PreVetted Podcast 🎧📡

- 🎯 https://prevetted.ai/podcast

- 🐦 https://x.com/PrevettedPod

- 🔗 https://www.linkedin.com/company/prevetted-podcast

00:26 Nur Hamdan’s Background

00:26 aiXplain Platform: Unified Agent Orchestration

02:43 Microagents: Mentalist, Orchestrator, Bodyguard, Inspector

08:44 Agent Lifecycle: Onboarding, Monitoring, Evolution

15:08 Rise of the Ops Agent Engineer Role

20:31 Balancing Agents, LLMs, and Workflows

23:55 Centralized Mental Models and Predictive Responses

29:39 Security Risks and Real-World Anecdotes

33:02 Transparency as Core Design Principle

38:44 Evaluation Challenges & Proxy Agents

Madhuri Somara, Senior Product Manager at Microsoft, joins Federico to unpack how she builds AI agents that actually help people, not just impress on paper. Fresh off being honored with the 2025 Product Leader Award by Products That Count, Madhuri traces her path from coding and business analysis to product leadership, and why empathy, rigorous evaluations, and clear user value are her north stars.

She describes the vision and real-world impact of Microsoft’s Autonomous Agents (announced at Ignite 2024), zooming in on the Case Management Agent that automates the entire lifecycle from case creation to closure while preserving human supervision. For Madhuri, customer shadowing, sentiment reading, and removing “small frictions” (like a few extra clicks) compound into big wins that frontline teams feel every day.

A throughline in the conversation is AI Evaluations (AI Evals). Madhuri explains why intuition and basic testing aren’t enough when models act on behalf of enterprises and customers. Strong evals and golden datasets build confidence, keep behavior within guardrails, and ensure products behave as intended over time — akin to behavior-driven development but for AI behavior. She also clarifies the nuance between “human-in-the-loop” (blocking dependency) and human supervision (oversight with autonomous progress), and how trust, reliability, and safety guide the right choice.

Beyond shipping features, Madhuri emphasizes UX as behavior design — predictable, accessible, and consistent interfaces that reflect how people actually work. She shares how collaboration between product, design, and engineering yields clearer requirements, fewer back-and-forths, and more predictable delivery.

On responsible AI, she’s pragmatic: use AI where it clearly adds value; don’t force it. Balance innovation with adoption and real user pain points. Looking ahead, she predicts agentic AI will reshape work across customer service, sales, marketing, IT, and more — freeing humans for higher-judgment, creative tasks. Tools like Copilot already remove mental load (drafts, comparisons, bookings), but she stays cautiously optimistic about privacy, reliability, and security.

Madhuri also spotlights community and growth: she mentors university students, champions diverse voices through Women in AI Ethics™, and advises aspiring AI PMs to network intentionally and stay curious — be “learn-it-alls,” not “know-it-alls.” Finally, for women and underrepresented talent, she offers practical encouragement: build relationships, ask questions across disciplines, and keep tying ideas back to real customer value.

About Madhuri Somara:

- https://www.linkedin.com/in/madhurisomara/

About Federico Ramallo ✨👨‍💻🌎

🚀 Software Engineering Manager | 🛠 Founder of DensityLabs.io & PreVetted.ai | 🤝 Connecting 🇺🇸 U.S. teams with top nearshore 🌎 LATAM engineers

- 💼 https://www.linkedin.com/in/framallo/

- 🌐 https://densitylabs.io

- ✅ https://prevetted.ai

🎙 PreVetted Podcast 🎧📡

- 🎯 https://prevetted.ai/podcast

- 🐦 https://x.com/PrevettedPod

- 🔗 https://www.linkedin.com/company/prevetted-podcast

00:00 Introduction to Madhuri Somara and Her Journey

04:30 Pivotal Moments in Career Development

08:40 Experiences at Avanade and GS1 US

13:00 Launching Autonomous Agents at Ignite 2024

18:15 Challenges in AI Product Management

23:01 The Importance of Customer Feedback

26:54 Finding Balance in Product Management

28:46 The Importance of AI Evaluations

31:46 Navigating AI Capabilities and Responsible Use

35:49 Advice for Women in AI Product Leadership

39:08 Future Impact of AI and Automation

40:58 Skills for Future Product Managers

45:49 Cautious Optimism for AI's Future