In this episode of The Victory Show, Travis Cody interviews John Montague, a mission-driven healthcare entrepreneur and serial founder focused on improving healthcare systems for patients and providers. John shares how his entrepreneurial journey began out of necessity after his mother’s illness created financial hardship for his family, pushing him to develop early side businesses and solve real-world problems from a young age.

He discusses building businesses by identifying unmet needs, starting ventures in high school, and later partnering with major institutions like the Mayo Clinic to develop scalable healthcare solutions. John also shares insights on innovation in healthcare, scaling companies, and leading organizations toward meaningful impact — including successfully guiding companies through acquisition by UnitedHealthcare.

The conversation highlights resilience, purpose-driven entrepreneurship, and the importance of building businesses that create measurable impact in healthcare.

#HealthcareLeadership #StartupLife #BusinessStrategy #EntrepreneurLife #GrowthMindset #HealthcareSolutions #Founders

In this episode of The Victory Show, Travis Cody interviews My-Ngoc “Menop” Nguyen, CEO of Secured IT Solutions and a cybersecurity leader with over 25 years of experience. She shares her journey from starting in IT before cybersecurity was widely recognized to becoming a trusted expert helping government agencies, businesses, and nonprofits manage digital risk.

Menop discusses how effective cybersecurity is both a technical and human challenge, emphasizing strategic decision-making, resilience, and leadership in an evolving threat landscape. She also highlights her work mentoring future professionals as a principal instructor at the SANS Institute and stresses the importance of discipline, clarity, and adaptability in protecting organizations from growing cyber threats. The conversation explores career growth, industry evolution, and the mindset needed to succeed in cybersecurity leadership.

#InformationSecurity #WomenInTech #CyberDefense #LeadershipLessons #StartupLeadership #CareerGrowth #CyberStrategy

In this episode of The Victory Show, Travis Cody sits down with Sanjog Patel, Director of Product Management for Casualty Solutions Group at Enlight, to explore his journey from the U.S. Army to leading product innovation in the insurance technology space. Sanjog shares insights on his leadership philosophy, emphasizing empathy, people-first thinking, and the importance of earning trust from your team. He also discusses fostering growth through stretch assignments, embracing failure as part of learning, and hiring for hunger and motivation over experience. The conversation dives into his role at Enlight, driving product-led growth in a highly regulated insurance industry, and his advice for young professionals: focus on human skills like empathy and vision—qualities that AI can’t replace.

#LeadershipLessons #ProductManagement #TheVictoryShow #CareerGrowth #TechLeadership #PeopleFirst #Innovation #AIProofSkills

In this episode of The Victory Show, host Rachel League sits down with Ed Soo Hoo—Lenovo Field C-Suite business alliances lead, former teamster, startup operator (seed to IPO to buyout), and UC Berkeley CET industry fellow—to explore what it really means to lead transformation at the intersection of technology, business models, and human behavior. Ed unpacks why he calls himself a connector, catalyst, and storyteller, and how “fortune telling” is really about reading people, shaping behavior, and laying out opportunity landscapes others don’t see. He shares vivid lessons from blue-collar work, startups, enterprise ecosystems, and advisory roles—then translates them into practical frameworks for leaders: asking the right left-brain vs right-brain questions, spotting the tiny “gaps” that cripple performance, balancing effectiveness vs efficiency, and building teams that think “two up, two down, two left, two right.”

In this episode of The Victory Show, host Rachel League sits down with Joti Balani, founder and managing director of Fresh River.AI, to unpack what it really takes to deliver mission-critical results with generative AI—long before “GenAI” became mainstream. With 25+ years across engineering, product, and systems thinking, Joti shares why AI isn’t like traditional software, why deterministic thinking breaks in this era, and why emotionally, ethically, and economically intelligent AI requires the same kind of humans building it. Joti walks through the early days of Fresh River.AI as a team of one—taking hundreds of executive calls, educating leaders who didn’t yet have a vocabulary for AI, and learning firsthand why many chatbot pilots produced little value. That learning became a repeatable framework: extract the right use cases, design with human-centered guardrails, and deploy enterprise-grade solutions that respect security, privacy, and regulation. After ChatGPT shifted the market, Joti and her co-founder built an agentic AI platform focused on owned intelligence—precision tools trained to specific business problems instead of “one giant model for everything.” Today, Fresh River.AI contracts for outcomes, delivers in 90 days, and helps enterprises identify the few high-leverage use cases that create cascading value downstream—reducing costs, increasing affordability, and unlocking measurable impact.

In this episode of The Victory Show, host Rachel League sits down with Ed Lynes, managing partner at Woden, to explore how strategic storytelling becomes the real engine of growth—especially when markets get noisy and products start to feel commoditized. Ed shares his “fail forward” path from bouncing between college majors to building and selling multiple businesses, and the moment he realized something shocking: the difference between struggling and scaling wasn’t the product—it was the story. Ed explains how a customer-centric narrative can erase pricing objections, tighten the buying journey, and pull the “95%” of buyers who aren’t actively shopping into a decision. He breaks down Woden’s evolution from a churn-heavy digital marketing model into a productized storytelling consultancy built around Story Kernel, plus a suite of offerings that help leaders align messaging across marketing, sales, product, and customer experience. You’ll also hear Ed’s practical view of scaling services: productize everything, sell outcomes (not hours), refuse price negotiation, and build a team that can deliver the work without the founder being the bottleneck. Ultimately, Ed defines victory as watching the brand—and the team—win independently of him.

In this episode of The Victory Show, host Rachel League sits down with Laura Lee Elliot—journalist turned tech entrepreneur and founder of Dauntless XR—to explore how storytelling, grit, and smart execution can build real traction in frontier tech without raising venture capital. Laura shares how her journalism career led her into technical writing on multi-billion-dollar infrastructure projects, where she discovered a brutal truth: cutting-edge engineering was still run on paper, binders, and shipping containers full of printed documentation. That firsthand pain became the catalyst for Dauntless XR. Laura breaks down the scrappy early days—crafting a pitch deck, pitching everywhere (including a “ladies coloring night” that accidentally produced her co-founder), grinding through startup events and accelerators, and landing an equity-free commercialization grant through Magic Leap’s independent creator program. Instead of getting trapped on one platform, her team built with portability in mind—then faced the pandemic right as commercial construction pilots were ramping up. Rather than stall, Dauntless XR pivoted into government innovation programs, winning two SBIR/STTR contracts on their first submission and using contract funding to bring the founding team full-time—without diluting ownership. Laura also shares how they think about hiring in cyclical contract environments, the reality of splitting time before payroll, and what’s next: expanding dual-use tech into commercial markets (including a pilot training app), continuing high-leverage project work, and exploring M&A of legacy businesses where modern tech can unlock new growth.

In this episode of The Victory Show, host Rachel Lee sits down with Rajesh Iyengar, Founder and CEO of Lincode Labs, to unpack how AI and machine learning can transform traditional manufacturing into truly intelligent factory floors. Rajesh shares his journey from data centers and cybersecurity into building multiple AI startups—and how a handful of conversations with manufacturers revealed a massive, underserved opportunity in surface defect detection. He explains why manufacturing is fundamentally different from healthcare or retail, why one-size-fits-all AI models fail on factory floors, and how Linode Labs built a repeatable platform that adapts to unique environments without sacrificing scale. From retrofitting AI into live production lines to balancing hardware, software, and human inspection, this conversation dives deep into what it really takes to productize deep tech, build teams across disciplines, bootstrap before raising capital, and define victory as a series of hard-earned breakthroughs—not overnight wins.