Liftoff with Keith: Conversations with Super Founders and Growth Experts sharing useful insights

Most businesses don't fail because they lack ideas.
They fail because they struggle to execute, communicate their value clearly, and connect with the right customers.
In this episode of Liftoff, Keith Newman sits down with Stephen Cozzolongo, Partner & CMO at Digital Position, to discuss growth marketing, customer acquisition, AI, business scaling, leadership, and the mindset required to build successful companies.
Stephen shares why trying to market to everyone is one of the biggest mistakes businesses make, how AI is transforming marketing workflows, why great marketers aren't being replaced by AI, and how discipline and consistency influence every aspect of business and life.
Whether you're a founder, marketer, entrepreneur, or business leader, this conversation is packed with practical insights on growth, execution, and long-term success.

Topics discussed:
Why most brands stop growing
The importance of customer segmentation and ICPs
How AI is changing marketing and advertising
The future of content creation
Paid media, SEO and growth strategies
Leadership and company culture
The mindset behind consistent execution
Why "How you do one thing is how you do everything"
Connect with Stephen Cozzolongo:
Website: https://www.digitalposition.com/
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/stephencozzolongo
Sponsor Info: We are strategic business advisors with decades of leadership experience and a proven track record of driving businesses’ growth. We specialize in creating custom-tailored strategies to introduce your company, drive growth, build leadership teams, and ensure companies implement appropriate compensation programs. Our mission is to utilize our expansive network to benefit your company https://www.compass-strategic-advisors.com/
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Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/show/3cFpLXfYvcUsxvsT9MwyAD?si=f5a14e779777487d
Apple Podcasts: https://podcasts.apple.com/ca/podcast/liftoff-with-keith-newman/id1560219589
Substack: https://keithnewman.substack.com/
Newman Media Studios: https://newmanmediastudios.com/
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/liftoffwithkeith
#Marketing #GrowthMarketing #BusinessGrowth #Entrepreneurship #DigitalMarketing #AI #Leadership #SEO #PaidMedia #BusinessPodcast #LiftoffPodcast

Healthcare costs continue to rise, employees have fewer choices than ever, and many employers are stuck navigating a system that feels increasingly unsustainable.
In this episode of Liftoff, Keith Newman sits down with Brandy Thompson, Founder & CEO of BenefitBay, to discuss the future of healthcare benefits, employee choice, leadership, entrepreneurship, and building a fast-growing company in one of the most complex industries in America.
Brandy shares why she believes employees should have greater control over their healthcare decisions, how transparency can improve outcomes, and why the future of benefits may look very different than today's one-size-fits-all model.
The conversation also explores founder lessons, leadership, raising six children while building a career, and what it takes to lead through growth and change.
About Brandy Thompson:
Brandy Thompson is the Founder & CEO of BenefitBay, a Kansas City-based company helping employers modernize healthcare benefits through Individual Coverage Health Reimbursement Arrangements (ICHRAs). BenefitBay recently announced an $18 million Series A funding round to expand its platform and infrastructure supporting personalized employee healthcare benefits.
Connect with Brandy Thompson:
Website: https://www.benefitbay.com/
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/brandy-thompson-24389536
Benefitbay just raised a series A, which will lend itself to really good growth questions: https://www.einpresswire.com/article/914114134/benefitbay-raises-18-million-series-a-led-by-ten-coves-capital-to-scale-its-broker-first-ichra-platform
Sponsor Info: We are strategic business advisors with decades of leadership experience and a proven track record of driving businesses’ growth.
We specialize in creating custom-tailored strategies to introduce your company, drive growth, build leadership teams, and ensure companies implement appropriate compensation programs. Our mission is to utilize our expansive network to benefit your company https://www.compass-strategic-advisors.com/
Subscribe for more founder insights and hit the bell for notifications! Follow us on our channels for exclusive startup content and behind-the-scenes insights from interviews like this one.
Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/show/3cFpLXfYvcUsxvsT9MwyAD?si=f5a14e779777487d
Apple Podcasts: https://podcasts.apple.com/ca/podcast/liftoff-with-keith-newman/id1560219589
Substack: https://keithnewman.substack.com/
Newman Media Studios: https://newmanmediastudios.com/
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/liftoffwithkeith
#Healthcare #Leadership #EmployeeBenefits #Entrepreneurship #FounderJourney #CEO #FutureOfWork #HealthInsurance #HealthcareInnovation #BusinessPodcast #LiftoffPodcast #BenefitBay

In this episode, Keith sits down with an AI infrastructure leader to unpack what is really happening behind the current AI boom.
While most conversations focus on models and hype, this discussion goes deeper into the engineering realities of building reliable AI systems at scale.
The conversation explores why observability, telemetry, debugging, and system architecture are becoming critical as enterprises move from experimentation to production AI.
They also discuss why terms like “agentic AI” are often misunderstood, why many AI projects end up being rebuilt from scratch, and why the future competitive advantage may come from the tooling built around models rather than the models themselves.
Topics covered include:
Why most AI systems fail due to poor observability
The real engineering challenges behind enterprise AI
Why “agentic AI” may be the industry’s most overused term
The shift toward commoditized foundation models
Why telemetry and debugging will define reliable AI systems
The underrated founder skill of ignoring distractions
What the AI stack could look like by 2028
This episode is a practical conversation about the difference between AI demos and real AI infrastructure.
Sponsor Info: We are strategic business advisors with decades of leadership experience and a proven track record of driving businesses’ growth. We specialize in creating custom-tailored strategies to introduce your company, drive growth, build leadership teams, and ensure companies implement appropriate compensation programs. Our mission is to utilize our expansive network to benefit your company https://www.compass-strategic-advisors.com/
Connect with Greg Whalen:
Website: https://prove.ai/
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/greg-m-whalen
Discord Server (Multi-Agent Systems Engineering Group) - https://discord.gg/sXpr2Hh
Subscribe for more founder insights and hit the bell for notifications!
Follow us on our channels for exclusive startup content and behind-the-scenes insights from interviews like this one.
Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/show/3cFpLXfYvcUsxvsT9MwyAD?si=f5a14e779777487d
Apple Podcasts: https://podcasts.apple.com/ca/podcast/liftoff-with-keith-newman/id1560219589
Substack: https://keithnewman.substack.com/
Newman Media Studios: https://newmanmediastudios.com/
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/liftoffwithkeith For sponsorship inquiries, please contact: sponsorships@wherewithstudio.com
#AI #ArtificialIntelligence #EnterpriseAI #MachineLearning #SoftwareEngineering #AIInfrastructure #StartupGrowth #Leadership #FounderMindset #TechLeadership

AI infrastructure is breaking the old data center model.
In this episode of Liftoff with Keith, I sit down with Lukas Gentele, CEO & Co-Founder of vCluster Labs, to unpack what it really takes to operate GPU infrastructure at scale in 2026.
As AI workloads explode and neoclouds race to meet demand, Lukas and his team are building the operational backbone for modern AI clouds — from managed Kubernetes and tenant isolation to automated node provisioning and GPU lifecycle management.
We discuss:
Why traditional data center assumptions are collapsing under AI pressure
What’s fundamentally changed since the VMware era
How an early partnership with CoreWeave shaped vCluster’s trajectory
And the one mistake AI cloud operators are making right now that could hurt them over the next 18 months
If you care about AI infrastructure, GPU economics, hyperscaler strategy, or building category-defining platforms — this conversation is essential.
Sponsor Info: We are strategic business advisors with decades of leadership experience and a proven track record of driving businesses’ growth. We specialize in creating custom-tailored strategies to introduce your company, drive growth, build leadership teams, and ensure companies implement appropriate compensation programs. Our mission is to utilize our expansive network to benefit your company https://www.compass-strategic-advisors.com/ Connect with Lukas Gentele:
Website: https://www.vcluster.com/
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/gentele/
Subscribe for more founder insights and hit the bell for notifications! Follow us on our channels for exclusive startup content and behind-the-scenes insights from interviews like this one.
Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/show/3cFpLXfYvcUsxvsT9MwyAD?si=f5a14e779777487d
Apple Podcasts: https://podcasts.apple.com/ca/podcast/liftoff-with-keith-newman/id1560219589
Substack: https://keithnewman.substack.com/
Newman Media Studios: https://newmanmediastudios.com/
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/liftoffwithkeith
For sponsorship inquiries, please contact: sponsorships@wherewithstudio.comFrom the Host:
A special shout-out to our Great Host of the Ignite Studios: https://www.ignitegtm.com/ and Producers of AI Infra5 @Plug and Play World, HQ in Sunnyvale, CA
Liftoff is sponsored by a strategic consulting firm and the M&A specialists at Compass Strategic Advisors - https://www.compass-strategic-advisors.com/ and The GTM Firm - https://www.thegtmfirm.com/

Welcome back to Liftoff with Keith, the show where we sit down with the founders, operators, and industry leaders building the future in real time.
Today’s guest is one of the most respected voices in digital infrastructure — Dean Nelson.
Dean has spent nearly four decades at the center of the internet economy, helping build more than $10 billion in digital infrastructure across four continents for companies like Sun Microsystems, eBay, PayPal, and Uber.
He’s also the founder of Infrastructure Masons, a global community uniting the builders of the digital age, now celebrating its 10-year anniversary.
In this episode, we unpack the explosive growth happening across AI infrastructure and data centers — including staggering projections that the industry could spend $500 billion this year alone, scale toward $3 trillion by 2028, and potentially hit $7 trillion by 2030.

The conversation explores:
Why the industry could spend $7 trillion by 2030
The explosive rise of AI infrastructure
The shift toward inference and edge computing
Community and environmental pressures facing data center growth
The labor and construction challenges slowing deployment
Why Texas has become ground zero for AI infrastructure expansion
And how power availability may become the defining constraint of the AI era
If compute scaled like this but power didn’t… are we effectively bottlenecking the AI era on energy infrastructure?
This is a fascinating conversation about the future of AI, data centers, infrastructure, and the physical systems powering the next generation of innovation.

Let’s lift off.
Connect with Dean Nelson:
Website: https://imasons.org/
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/deannelson/
Publication: https://imasons.org/publications/
Sponsor Info: We are strategic business advisors with decades of leadership experience and a proven track record of driving businesses’ growth. We specialize in creating custom-tailored strategies to introduce your company, drive growth, build leadership teams, and ensure companies implement appropriate compensation programs. Our mission is to utilize our expansive network to benefit your company https://www.compass-strategic-advisors.com/
Subscribe for more founder insights and hit the bell for notifications!
Follow us on our channels for exclusive startup content and behind-the-scenes insights from interviews like this one.
Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/show/3cFpLXfYvcUsxvsT9MwyAD?si=f5a14e779777487d
Apple Podcasts: https://podcasts.apple.com/ca/podcast/liftoff-with-keith-newman/id1560219589
Substack: https://keithnewman.substack.com/
Newman Media Studios: https://newmanmediastudios.com/
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/liftoffwithkeith
From the Host:
A Special Shout out to our Great Host of the Ignite Studios: https://www.ignitegtm.com/ and Producers of AI Infra5 @ Plug and Play World HQ in Sunnyvale, CA
Liftoff is Sponsored by - Strategic Consulting firm and the M&A specialists at Compass Strategic Advisors - https://www.compass-strategic-advisors.com/ and The GTM Firm - https://www.thegtmfirm.com/
#AIinfrastructureexpansion #Digitalinfrastructuretrends #Datacentergrowth #Powerandenergyconstraints #Waterstewardship #Skilledlaborshortages #Communitypushback #Digitalsovereignty #dgecomputingandAIinference #PrivateAImodels #Largescaleinfrastructureconstruction