Hello listeners. Today we have a special guest on the podcast, Kate Lowry, CEO, coach, author, and comedian.

She is a longtime startup founder, spent time in VC, is leading a values-driven coaching and advising firm called Scaleheart, and recently just published a book.

The title of the book is Unbreakable, How to Thrive Under Fear-Based

Leaders and is a tactical guide to help smart, caring people get unstucked so they can thrive

under fear-based leadership. In our conversation today, Kate is going to enlighten us on what

fear-based leadership is, how to use the predictability of fear-based leaders to your advantage,

and why it's having

another moment in the tech ecosystem today.

Well, Kate, thank you for being on the show today. Thank you for being on Code Story.

Betcha. Thank you for having me. Absolutely. Really excited to dive into your book today.

Congratulations on the big release. It's a lot of work to

write a book, especially, you know, dialing in all of your experience. Tell me about you and your

startup journey, kind of as a serial founder, right? Give me the story there, me and my audience,

the story about you. So I've been in the startup space for a long time. I started my first

company, gosh, about 17 years ago now, and it was in the music space. I had trained as a

conservatory musician and noticed a gap in the market relating to French horns. And so I found

a company serving front horn players, which was really fun and really cool.

And then later on, I started companies in retail and in peer-to-peer lending, applying AI to

lending markets before I joined McKinsey to try to sharpen my toolkit to make sure I had even more to offer

startups. And then I spent many years in the startup world and an AI startup and big tech and

meta and most recently at Insight Partners in Venture where I did a lot of AI strategy for the fund and worked one-on-one

with hundreds of startup founders. And I found that being in VC is a little bit of a conflict

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