Join Laura Nicol (your host) as she dials into the stories of startup operators in the trenches of building and scaling companies. Together, we master the art of ‘building the plane while flying it', drawing on insights from leaders and rising stars at companies like Tracksuit, Canva, Culture Amp, Atlassian, me&u, Airwallex, Eucalyptus, and more. Laura's day job is Chief of Staff to Maxine Minter﹢Co Ventures—all views shared on this podcast are her own.
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Applying A Growth Mindset To Leadership And Scaling Podcasts
In Scaling New Heights: Leadership at the Next Level, we guide business leaders and entrepreneurs from overwhelm and “stuck” to new heights of success and achievement. Through insightful interviews, expert advice, and actionable strategies, this podcast is your go-to resource for breaking out of chaos and elevating your leadership. Whether you’re navigating tough decisions, managing fast growth, or striving for work-life balance, we help you unlock your potential and develop the mindset need ...
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Join us in listening to the experienced experts discuss cutting edge challenges in the world of DevOps. From applying the mindset at your company, to career growth and leadership challenges within engineering teams, and avoiding the common antipatterns. Every episode you'll meet a new industry veteran guest with their own unique story.
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From Intent to Impact: Mastery Comes Through Habits and Practice
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This episode of 'Scaling New Heights: Leadership at the Next Level' dives into the importance of habits and deliberate practice for leadership, personal growth, and long-term success. Host Nick Sellers explains how good habits, when practiced diligently, lead to unconscious competence, freeing up mental space for strategic thinking and creativity. …
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Ep 48. Paul Redfern on Growth, Scale and Staying Human
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Today, I'm connecting with Paul Redfern, Chief Operating Officer at Big Picture Medical. He’s someone who’s spent most of his career toggling between product and operations, and getting pretty good at living in the grey. And becoming “reasonably okay-ish” in a whole bunch of different worlds. This episode is all about a tension every operator knows…
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Embracing Neurodivergence in the Workplace: A Conversation with Katie Manasse
36:34
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Today, host Nick Sellers is joined by fellow coach Katie Manasse to discuss the surge in late diagnoses of neurodivergent conditions among adults and its impact on the workplace. Katie shares her experiences and expertise in coaching neurodivergent individuals, highlighting common traits and adjustments that can enhance productivity and well-being.…
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Should We Be Using Kubernetes: Did the Best Product Win?
1:06:35
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Episode Sponsor: PagerDuty - Checkout the features in their official feature release: https://fnf.dev/4dYQ7gL This episode dives into a fundamental question facing the DevOps world: Did Kubernetes truly win the infrastructure race because it was the best technology, or were there other, perhaps less obvious, factors at play? Omer Hamerman joins Wil…
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Intentional Leadership: Dealing with Impulses and Applying Self-Control
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In this episode of Scaling New Heights: Leadership at the Next Level, Nick delves into the crucial distinction between impulse control and self-control and their impact on effective leadership. Through relatable examples and practical insights, Nick explains how impulse control serves as an in-the-moment brake pedal, while self-control functions as…
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Mastering SRE: Insights in Scale and at Capacity with Aimee Knight
1:17:55
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In this episode, Aimee Knight, an expert in Site Reliability Engineering (SRE) whose experience hails from Paramount and NPM, joins the podcast to discuss her journey into SRE, the challenges she faced, and the strategies she employed to succeed. Aimee shares her transition from a non-traditional background in JavaScript development to SRE, highlig…
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Ep 47. The Water Cooler Chat with Gaby Howard & Laura Nicol
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Today, I’m joined by a co-host: the wonderful Gaby Howard, Head of Growth and Operations at Carted. Gaby’s no stranger to the podcast—she first appeared on Ep 23. Gaby Howard on Navigating the Shift from Founder to Operator in Tech: Insights from Carted and Flaunter, where the wonderful Paloma interviewed her about her journey from founder to opera…
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The Transformative Power of Coaching: Nuno Soares on Mindset and Business Growth
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Today, host Nick Sellers interviews Nuno Soares, an associate coach with New Level Results, to discuss his journey from computer programmer to business coach. Nuno shares his experiences of starting IT companies in Portugal and the UK, facing the challenges of entrepreneurship, and eventually transitioning into coaching. Nuno emphasizes the importa…
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Exploring MCP Servers and Agent Interactions with Gil Feig
1:04:57
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In this episode, we delve into the concept of MCP (Machine Control Protocol) servers and their role in enabling agent interactions. Gil Feig, the co-founder and CTO of Merge, shares insights on how MCP servers facilitate efficient and secure integration between various services and APIs. The discussion covers the benefits and challenges of using MC…
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No Lag: Building the Future of High-Performance Cloud with Nathan Goulding
1:00:38
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Warren talks with Nathan Goulding, SVP of Engineering at Vultr, about what it actually takes to run a high-performance cloud platform. They cover everything from global game server latency and hybrid models to bare metal provisioning and the power/cooling constraints that come with modern GPU clusters. The discussion gets into real-world deployment…
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Leadership Growth: The Power of Remedial and Generative Coaching
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Host Nick Sellers delves into the differences between remedial and generative executive coaching. He breaks down common misconceptions about executive coaching, emphasizing that having a coach signifies strength and readiness to grow, not weakness. Nick defines coaching as forward-looking and strengths-based, explaining that both remedial and gener…
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Ground Truth & Guided Journeys: Rethinking Data for AI with Inna Tokarev Sela
52:45
52:45
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Inna Tokarev Sela, CEO and founder of Illumex, joins the crew to break down what it really means to make your data “AI-ready.” This isn’t just about clean tables—it’s about semantic fabric, business ontologies, and grounding agents in your company's context to prevent the dreaded LLM hallucination. We dive into how modern enterprises just cannot bu…
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Ep 46. Operators and Burnout with Laura Nicol—Solo Reflections
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Today, I’m turning the mic inward for my first-ever solo episode of Calling Operator. I’m Laura Nicol, your host and Chief of Staff at Co Ventures—and in this conversation, we’re talking burnout. The kind that creeps up. The kind that hits hard. The kind that startup operators know all too well. It comes up on the pod all the time—for a reason. I'm…
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Embracing the Digital Age: Marketing Insights with Steve Gillson
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Steve Gilson, a digital marketing expert and coach, is Nick's guest in this episode of 'Scaling New Heights Leadership'. Steve shares his journey from a corporate sales and marketing director in the UK to a stay-at-home dad and digital marketing teacher in France. He discusses the challenges of starting a self-branded business, particularly in the …
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Incident Vibing: The Self-Healing System - DevOps 242
1:10:05
1:10:05
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Sylvain Kalache, Head of Developer Relations at Rootly joins us to explore the new frontier of incident response powered by large language models. We dive into the evolution of DevRel and how we meet the new challenges impacting our systems. We explore Sylvain's origin story in self-healing systems, dating back to his SlideShare and LinkedIn days. …
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Choosing to Sacrifice: A Leader's Investment in Success
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Sacrifice is typically associated with loss and losing out. But this need not be the case and, for leaders, sacrifice is the intentional letting go of something as we pursue others. In this episode of Scaling New Heights Leadership, host Nick Sellers explores the concept of strategic sacrifices necessary for leadership growth and professional devel…
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Decentralized Chaos: Web3 Infra, NodeOps, and the Art of Blockchain Load Balancing - DevOps 241
1:16:25
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This week, Paul Marston from Ankr joins the crew to unpack the madness that is modern blockchain infrastructure. From his wild career transition out of financial services into 24/7 node ops for Web3, Paul shares the brutal truth about uptime expectations, decentralization challenges, and why hard forks are more like enterprise schema upgrades with …
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Ep 45. Scale and Soul: Anitta Krishan on Leading People and Culture Transformation at trivago, Grab, TikTok & Hoogly AI
1:12:59
1:12:59
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Today, I'm connecting with Anitta Krishan, Chief Culture Officer at Hoogly AI. We begin with a breath—a literal nervous system–balancing pause—followed by people-first perspectives from a former Trivago, Grab, and TikTok executive now shaping the future of work through an AI-powered Culture OS. Inside the episode: Operating mindfully: breathing, sl…
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Scaling New Heights: Embracing WIIFM for Successful Change
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In this episode of 'Scaling New Heights Leadership at the Next Level,' host Nick Sellers delves into the critical question of 'What's In It For Me?' (WIIFM) that stakeholders always think but don't ask during times of change. Sellers explains how failing to address this question can derail change initiatives, causing resistance and higher costs. He…
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Observability in the CI/CD Pipeline with Adriana Villela - DevOps 240
1:21:08
1:21:08
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In this episode, Will and Warren welcome Adriana Villela — CNCF ambassador, Dynatrace advocate, and host of the Geeking Out podcast — for a wide-ranging conversation on observability in CI/CD pipelines. Adriana shares her journey from “On Call Me Maybe” to her own podcast, her work with OpenTelemetry, and why observability isn’t just for SREs anymo…
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Building Engineering Excellence with Ganesh Datta of Cortex - DevOps 239
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In this episode, I (flying solo today!) sat down with Ganesh Datta, the CTO and co-founder of Cortex, to explore what it really means to drive engineering excellence at scale. And spoiler: it’s not just about better dashboards or fancy developer tools—it’s about treating software development like the competitive advantage it is. We went deep into t…
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Ep 44. Scaling Hnry with Karan Anand—Inside the Chief Strategy Officer Role, His Operating Philosophy, Abductive Logic
1:07:25
1:07:25
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Today, I'm connecting with Karan Anand, Chief Strategy Officer & Managing Director, Australia at Hnry. We trace his journey from 13 years in consulting to becoming Hnry’s first hire in Australia, exploring what it really means to lead without ego, think in systems, and be a force multiplier for founders. Inside the episode: His experience as a new …
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Modern DevOps Challenges: Automation, AI, and Scaling in 2025 - DevOps 238
1:18:49
1:18:49
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In this episode of DevOps 238, we sat down with Zach Lloyd to dive into what’s really happening in the world of modern DevOps—from automation and AI to scaling systems and maintaining team culture in fast-paced environments. We talked about the evolving role of DevOps engineers, the shift toward platform engineering, and why tool sprawl is becoming…
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Mastering Leadership: The Intersection of Confidence, Competence, and Wisdom
9:16
9:16
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In this episode of 'Scaling New Heights: Leadership At the next level,' host Nick Sellers explores the distinct yet interrelated attributes of confidence, competence, and wisdom in leadership. He elucidates how each plays a unique role in effective leadership, particularly during uncertain times. The episode covers how confidence manifests under pr…
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Ep 43. Sophie McKay on Launching Tech Brands Across Asia-Pacific—Qualtrics to Notion
45:36
45:36
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**Join us at our first-ever podcast meetup in Sydney. Info below** Today, I'm connecting with Sophie Mckay, Head of Marketing, Asia Pacific and Japan at Notion. Sophie’s career has been all about scaling tech brands across the Asia-Pacific region (APAC). Before joining Notion six months ago, she spent almost a decade at Qualtrics—starting as the fi…
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Leadership Team Alignment and Development in Uncertain Times with Alec Pearson
34:24
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In this episode of 'Scaling New Heights Leadership at the Next Level,' host Nick Sellers interviews Alec Pearson, a leadership coach with a passion for talent development. Alec shares insights from his journey starting in 2007, moving from managing teams in IT to becoming a full-time coach. The discussion focuses on the challenges teams face during…
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From Learning Curves to Leadership Peaks: 20 Episodes Strong and Climbing
3:37
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In this bonus episode of Scaling New Heights Leadership, host Nick Sellers celebrates the podcast's 20th episode milestone and reaching an impressive number of subscribers ahead of his birthday this month. Nick reflects on the learning curves he faced in podcasting, from understanding technology to engaging audience interests, and emphasizes the im…
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From Flat Tyre to High Performance: Nurturing the Wheel of Life
10:29
10:29
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In this episode of Scaling New Heights Leadership, host Nick Sellers delves into the 'Wheel of Life' concept—a tool used to visually assess and improve effectiveness in the different roles we each fulfil in life. Nick explains how individuals are occupy multiple roles, from family responsibilities to professional duties, and how identifying and rat…
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Ep 42. Culture Drivers with Olivia Panzic—Leading Marketing Communications and Building High-Performing Teams at TikTok ANZ
47:56
47:56
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**Join us at our first-ever podcast meetup in Sydney. Info below** Today, I'm connecting with Olivia (Liv) Panzic, Head of Marketing Communications at TikTok ANZ. A core part of Liv’s belief system? Look after people. And it shows. Her colleagues and mentors describe her leadership at TikTok as “people-centric,” “human-first,” and “transformative f…
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Unlocking Career Potential through New Perspectives with Laura Parker
33:27
33:27
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In this episode of Scaling New Heights Leadership, host Nick Sellers is joined by Laura Parker, an employee retention coach, to discuss innovative approaches to career development. Laura introduces the concept of 'career shapes'—different letters like T, N, V, and M that represent various paths for professional growth. The discussion covers how emp…
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