Show Notes
For episode six, we riff through a multi-dimensional, deeply human conversation with my friend and former colleague Jason Baer. Jason is the CEO of SYPartners, a transformation consultancy that has spent more than 30 years helping leaders and organizations navigate moments of consequential change.
Jason joined SYP in 2013 and became CEO in 2026 after serving as Managing Partner, Chief Client Officer, and President. He has advised senior leaders at organizations including AARP, NBCUniversal, Alphabet, Coach, Verizon, and Paramount. In our broad and fluid conversation we discuss purpose, organizational resilience, leadership, the pace of change, some of the books and ideas that have shaped Jason—and what he’s learning now that he’s sitting in the CEO chair himself.
More from The Change Resilient
Episode #7 gets deep into building, transforming, and growing software-centric businesses. Dan Van Tran is the CTO of Collectors, a technology company that helps people authenticate, grade, vault, and sell collectibles. Dan is a technology executive, engineering leader, and CTO advisor who has spent his career building and evolving complex software organizations and production systems. At Collectors, Dan has led engineering through a period of significant growth and modernization, balancing the realities of legacy technology with the need to move quickly, improve reliability, and build for the future. He also advises CTOs and technology leaders on architecture, organizational design, engineering effectiveness, and navigating large-scale change. I’ve had the good fortune to work with Dan twice as a customer and I’ve always appreciated his combination of deep technical judgment, pragmatism, curiosity, and willingness to get into the deep details of how software systems—and the teams behind them—actually work. This is an episode packed full of pragmatic wisdom for the realities of building and operating software systems here in late 2026. Yet, even if you're not a technologist, you'll enjoy Dan's stories of his family's migration from Vietnam, his approach to leadership, and how he finds resilience in the face of AI-fueled change.
Episode Five features the amazing, thoughtful, fun, and precise, Courtney Nash. Courtney is the co-founder and CEO of The VOID, where she researches system safety, resilience, and failure in complex sociotechnical systems. She’s also vice president of the board of the Resilience in Software Foundation. A former cognitive neuroscientist, Courtney has spent much of her career exploring how people learn, make decisions, and respond when complex systems behave in unexpected ways. Over the past two decades, she’s held roles at organizations including Verica, Fastly, O’Reilly, Microsoft, and Amazon. Today Courtney is one of the more influential voices in resilience engineering and modern incident analysis.
For episode four, I sit down for a mind-expanding conversation with futurist and author, Byron Reese. Byron is a longtime serial entrepreneur who holds numerous technical patents and has started a half dozen companies over the past thirty years. He is currently CEO of a startup called PhotoOp AI. Byron is also the author of several bestselling science books, including We are Agora. His AI book, The Fourth Age, sold 500K copies in 14 languages. He and his wife have resided in an old Victorian home in Georgetown, Texas for a quarter of a century where they homeschooled their four children. Our conversation covers building technology companies, using AI in our personal lives, the joys of beekeeping, the possibilities that human structures like cities operate as superorganisms, and much, much more.
For episode three, we take a deep journey of open source software history, currents, and projections with Chris Aniszczyk. Chris is an open source technologist with a passion for building a better world through open collaboration. He's currently a CTO at the Linux Foundation focused on infrastructure and developer experience while running the Cloud Native Computing Foundation (CNCF). Furthermore, he's a Partner at Capital Factory where he focuses on mentoring, advising and investing in open source and infrastructure focused startups. He has a strong passion for supporting open source focused founders and entrepreneurship. For disclosure, Chris is an investor Autoptic.
Brett Hurt is a serial software entrepreneur who has built seven successful companies. He founded Coremetrics which was acquired by IBM, co-founded and led Bazaarvoice through its IPO, and most recently co-founded and led data.world, which was acquired by ServiceNow in 2025. Brett is also an investor, a Henry Crown Fellow, and the author of The Entrepreneur’s Essentials. His newest chapter is Love Conquers Fear—a USA Today best selling book, podcast, and broader mission exploring what happens as AI and other key technologies accelerate, with the goal of helping humanity make it to the Age of Abundance for All.