What Nobody Tells You About Life After Being CEO
June 5, 2026
AI sales, founder identity, and the emotional reality of building a second startup. In this episode 52 of the Get Paid podcast, host Manny Medina sits down with Amanda Kahlow, Human CEO and Founder of 1mind, to share what happens after you step away from the company you built and what it takes to come back and do it all over again. From painting bold portraits of women during her time on the bench to convincing a team building a Snowflake competitor to join her, Amanda shares the raw, unfiltered journey of building two venture-backed companies.
● AI-powered sales and the rise of autonomous superhumans
● Founder's identity crisis and life after stepping down as CEO
● Building a startup before the technology catches up to the vision
● Enterprise go-to-market strategy and selling top-down
● Second-time founder lessons and avoiding repeat mistakes
● Investor relationships, board dynamics, and learning to trust
● Category creation in B2B SaaS
● Customer obsession vs. revenue obsession
AI sales, founder identity, and the emotional reality of building a second startup. In this episode 52 of the Get Paid podcast, host Manny Medina sits down with Amanda Kahlow, Human CEO and Founder of 1mind, to share what happens after you step away from the company you built and what it takes to come back and do it all over again. From painting bold portraits of women during her time on the bench to convincing a team building a Snowflake competitor to join her, Amanda shares the raw, unfiltered journey of building two venture-backed companies.
What You’ll Learn:
- How to transition from founder obsession to balanced leadership
- Why rejecting market feedback is sometimes the right move
- The emotional toll of losing relevance overnight
- Why Amanda believes the right startup idea has to find you
- How motherhood, meditation, and hard self-reflection reshaped Amanda into a different kind of founder the second time around
Amanda Kahlow is a serial Founder and CEO known for pioneering category-defining AI and data intelligence platforms. With 16 years of leading a data consulting services business before founding 6sense, she brings deep expertise in transforming complex technical capabilities into scalable products. Now CEO of 1mind, Amanda is building the future of AI-powered sales engagement through conversational AI agents that handle the full customer lifecycle. Her work has helped enterprise teams modernize go-to-market strategies while improving customer experiences, making this conversation essential for SaaS leaders navigating AI transformation and organizational evolution.
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If you enjoyed this episode, make sure to subscribe, rate, and review it on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, and YouTube Podcasts. Instructions on how to do this are here.
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