She got FDA clearance for a transparent surgical mask in March 2020. Two months later, ClearMask was shipping worldwide — and her four co-founders still had day jobs.

Elyse Heob is the founder behind two healthcare exits: a corporate wellness company acquired in 2016, and ClearMask, which she grew from zero to $45M without ever taking outside investment (19 million masks worldwide). Now she coaches early-stage founders on the parts of the job nobody puts on the highlight reel.

In this Ops or Die conversation with Katie Whitcraft and Maria Pienaar, Elyse breaks down how founders keep underpricing time when they buy tools, why a regulated-industry mindset is what separates founders who cross $1M to $10M from ones who stall, and how "Swiss Army knife" hires kept ClearMask agile at a fraction of its peer headcount. She and the hosts also dig into founder blindness (why you cannot see your own product), business continuity during fundraising, and why titles should bend to fit the people you have.

If you have been telling yourself you'll fix ops later, this is the episode that will change your mind.

Key topics: startup operations, healthcare startups, FDA regulatory strategy, non-dilutive fundraising, accelerators, hiring for aptitude, business continuity, founder resilience, fractional COO, SmartOps

Guest: Elyse Heob — Founder, ClearMask

Hosts: Katie Whitcraft and Maria Pienaar

Want smarter ops? Visit scalespark.ai

What if the culture problem you keep chasing is actually a signals problem?

Nathalie Brochstein has spent over a decade inside Fortune 100 companies untangling the mess that happens when leaders say one thing and teams hear something completely different. Now, as the founder of Karibu, she’s bringing those lessons to startups that are scaling fast and watching their alignment fall apart in real time.

In this episode, Nathalie joins Katie and Maria to lay out what culture actually is: how effectively messages move through your organization. They dig into the onboarding mistakes that kill retention before day 30, the green dashboards that mask total system failure, and why the popular advice to “hire smart people and get out of the way” quietly drives your best hires toward the door. Nathalie also walks through her organizational DNA framework, makes the case for keeping a human in the loop on AI, and offers a simple test any founder can run today to find out whether their team is actually aligned.

Key topics: culture as signal flow, scaling communication, onboarding and time to competency, the forgetting curve, false-positive metrics, operational documentation, AI in operations, human-in-the-loop, inclusion as operational infrastructure, test-driven operations

Guest: Nathalie Brochstein, Founder of Karibu (Karibu.ai)

Hosts: Katie Whitcraft and Maria Pienaar

Want smarter ops? Visit scalespark.ai

This week on Ops or Die, Katie Whitcraft and Maria Pienaar sit down with Lenica Stephen, founder and CEO of IBOSS (Interactive Business Optimization Services), to talk about the thing most founders avoid until it’s expensive: operational debt.

Lenica spent over fifteen years building and running PMOs inside corporate environments before she started doing the same work for founders directly. Her take is blunt: operational debt rarely starts as one bad decision. More often, it’s a slow pile-up of shortcuts, undocumented calls, and “we’ll fix it later” moments that build up while a business is busy growing.

In this episode, Lenica breaks down her Five Pillars framework for finding where that debt is hiding

• Purpose ➣are your priorities and strategy actually written down anywhere, or do they just live in your head?
• Products➣ what is your business actually selling, and would your whole team give the same answer?
• Processes➣if you got hit by a bus tomorrow, could someone else pick up where you left off?
• People➣does your team, and your clients, know what’s expected of them?
• Performance➣ if you can’t measure it, are you sure it’s actually happening?

Also covered: the I Love Lucy chocolate factory scene as the perfect metaphor for operations that can’t keep pace with growth, why pivoting a business is a lot like redirecting a cruise ship mid-voyage, how to find the one friction point (the “bleeding neck”) that’s costing you the most right now, and a candid conversation about AI in operations, including why garbage in, garbage out still applies no matter how good the model is.

Lenica’s challenge to listeners: pick one piece of operational debt in your business and commit to fixing it, one quarter at a time.

Connect with Lenica Stephen:

• LinkedIn: Lenica Stephen
• Website: interactiveboss.com
• Instagram: @interactiveboss

Ops or Die is hosted by Katie Whitcraft and Maria Pienaar of ScaleSpark.ai.