#148 - Julia Austin: How Startups and Big Companies Turn Sparks Into Scale

Episode notes

Our guest today is Julia Austin - former senior leader at Akamai, VMware, and DigitalOcean, with decades of experience helping organizations make the leap from startup to scale. She’s also studied and guided countless founders as a professor at Harvard Business School. Julia now distills those lessons in her new book, After the Idea: What It Really Takes to Create and Scale a Startup . In this conversation you’ll discover what separates ventures that thrive from those that stall. Every company begins with a spark, but too often innovators fall in love with ideas, overbuild too soon, or underestimate the hard realities of scaling and culture. Julia draws from experience spanning tech giants and countless startups to reveal how leaders can move from inspiration to momentum - and sustain innovation even as complexity grows. You’ll learn practical frameworks and stories for transforming early insights into long-term impact. Whether you’re a founder, strategist, or innovator inside an established business, this conversation offers tools for approaching discovery, scaling, and culture design.

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