The Digital Executive

A Top Spotify Tech Podcast & US Verified Publication.

This issue of The Digital Executive explores what it means to build on your own terms. A CTO who walked away from a $2 billion enterprise to find his real work. A genomics platform reimagining what precision medicine can look like at scale. An entrepreneur who built a seven-figure company alone and calls freedom the only metric that matters. The leaders in this issue didn't follow the roadmap. They wrote a better one.

Stay informed and subscribe to The Digital Executive podcast. Like what you hear? Please leave a review on Apple or Spotify.

— The Digital Executive Team

GAME CHANGERS

Visionary Voices

A CONVERSATION WITH JOEL PEREZ

Joel Perez is a full-stack software engineer, technology leader, CTO, and Co-Founder of Mindful Software, where he focuses on building human-centered technology that helps people create meaningful change in their lives.

Joel’s path into software engineering was anything but conventional. In 2017, after accepting a role running server infrastructure for Apergy, a $2 billion enterprise, his wife Amy encouraged him to step away and spend a year traveling. During that trip, Joel revisited an old curiosity: software engineering. He had always been drawn to the creative freedom of being able to build almost anything, but had never believed it was the right fit for him. With the space to explore it again, he realized he didn’t just enjoy development—he wanted to reshape his career around it. In 2023, Joel felt another pull he couldn’t ignore: it was time to build his own product. He and Amy had both experienced the value of dream interpretation as a tool for reflection, clarity, and personal guidance. But the process was often slow, scattered, and difficult to sustain. Amy suggested turning that experience into an app, and myDream was born.

Visionary Voices

YOUR GENOME IS THE BLUEPRINT

A three-time founder with one prior exit, Mandi brings over 15 years of experience building and scaling technology companies across HealthTech and EdTech, from zero-to-one through commercialization. Her previous company, LubbDubb, was acquired in 2021. After that, she co-founded Enovone as COO, a venture that spun out of the Stanford Healthcare Innovation Lab. At Profile Health, Mandi leads a team built around deep clinical and scientific expertise, including Dr. Brenden Cochran (CMO), Dr. Tushar Chakravarty (CSO, UCSF), and Quinton Poncelet (CAIO, formerly of CERN). Together they’re building toward a future where genomics and longitudinal clinical data combine to power precision and longevity medicine at scale.

Mandi Bateman is the CEO and co-founder of Profile Health, a clinical intelligence platform for precision medicine, built for the rapidly growing cash pay healthcare vertical.

Visionary Voices

REVENUE IS VANITY, FREEDOM IS SANITY

Jason’s journey to becoming an entrepreneur and mentor began with nothing more than a laptop, a microphone, and a relentless curiosity about what was possible. From humble beginnings, he built and sold businesses across three continents, proving that you don’t need a huge team or endless resources to create extraordinary results. Over the years, Jason Allan Scott has raised >$2M through podcast-led storytelling, built a 7-figure company without staff, and worked with everyone from Olympic athletes to industry leaders. Jason has spoken on global stages, been featured in Forbes, and coached founders who’ve gone on to raise millions, land media appearances, and scale with confidence. What drives Jason isn’t just business success – it’s the freedom it creates. Freedom to spend time on what matters most, freedom to make an impact, and freedom to design a life on your own terms.

THE DIGITAL EXECUTIVE PODCAST

FEATURED STORIES

Innovation

EMERGING TECH

THE ACCESS LAYER: AI STRATEGY IS MORE THAN THE MODEL

The organizations quietly winning with AI have stopped asking “which model should we commit to?” and started asking a more durable question: “how do we make sure we can always use whichever model is best, without rebuilding anything?” The answer is an access layer, and it is becoming the most important architectural decision in modern software.

TOP REMOTE RECRUITMENT AND GLOBAL TALENT HIRING PLATFORMS FOR 2026

Remote recruitment and global hiring platforms help businesses access skilled professionals without limiting their search to one city or country. By comparing specialization, geographic coverage, candidate screening, compliance support, pricing structure, and post-hire services, businesses can select a provider that fits their remote hiring strategy for 2026.

THE IMPACT OF DASHCAMS AND WEARABLES ON INJURY CLAIMS

The dashcams stuck to your windshield, the watch on your wrist, the little camera over your porch — none of them were built to win a lawsuit. Yet they increasingly do exactly that. Injury claims that once came down to one person’s memory against another’s now come with timestamps, footage, and hard numbers attached, the strongest evidence often turns out to be the tech a client was already carrying. Here’s how to make this tech work in your favor instead of against you.

7 MISTAKES THAT BREAK dAPP LAUNCH AND HOW TO FIX THEM

According to Chainalysis, crypto-native hackers stole an estimated $2.2 billion from Web3 platforms in 2024. This is a 21% increase. Most of these incidents are traced back to bad engineering decisions made under launch pressure. If you’re planning on launching your own decentralized application, you should understand the most common dApp launch risks that could affect your performance. We asked several Web3 engineers about the most common mistakes, and here’s what they said.

Thank you for joining us in the intersection of innovation and leadership. The Digital Executive Newsletter exists to amplify the voices of changemakers shaping the future across industries and geographies. We hope the insights and stories featured in this issue have sparked new ideas and empowered you to elevate your own impact.