What if the most effective therapy for stress, burnout, and anxiety didn’t come from a pill or a practitioner, but from a room full of puppies? Francesca Albo is betting on it, and the market agrees. Today on The Angel Nest, Francesca joins David to talk about Puppy Sphere, North America’s leading puppy wellness company, which is on track to top $6 million in revenue this year across 13 profitable locations in the U.S. and Canada, all bootstrapped without outside investment.

Francesca and her co-founder Leia met in a dog park. Both were escaping corporate burnout, both wanted to build something in the pet space, and both had tried and failed at earlier pet startups before landing on puppy yoga. What made Puppy Sphere different wasn’t the concept — puppy yoga already existed — but the execution. Francesca describes their working relationship as a clean split: she brings the big vision and the bold bets, Leia builds the systems and protocols that make scale possible. The result is $14 million in all-time revenue across locations that are profitable, not just open.

The episode gets into the operational realities of running a business around live animals. Puppy Sphere doesn’t keep dogs on site. It partners with local shelters and breeders who bring puppies in for each class and take them home after. Staff are certified in pet first aid and trained through a proprietary Puppy First program. Every guest signs a waiver. There are escalation protocols for anxious animals. The liability question comes up, and Francesca handles it directly.

Now the founders are ready to scale and looking at what that actually requires. The business runs on two tracks: public classes, memberships, and class packs make up about 80 percent of revenue, while corporate wellness events, bringing puppies to offices at companies like Google, TikTok, and Amazon, account for the other 20. That corporate side generates millions with no outbound marketing spend at all, entirely on inbound demand. Francesca walks through the investment thesis, the unit economics across markets, and what she plans to do with capital as the company moves beyond its bootstrapped roots.

You can find contact information for Francesca Albo and learn more about Puppy Sphere at theangelnest.com, where you can also reach David with suggestions, story ideas, or questions about the show.

Preterm birth affects one in ten babies in the United States, and for the smallest and most fragile among them, what they are fed in those first critical weeks can determine whether they survive and how well they thrive. The science has long pointed to mother’s own milk as the gold standard. The problem has been concentration: preterm infants need more nutrients than full-term milk provides at standard volume, and the current solution, adding formula fortifiers, introduces the very risks it is meant to solve. On this New York Angels edition of The Angel Nest, we meet Beth Schinkel, a neonatal intensive care nurse and nutritionist who spent years watching babies get sick from formula fortifiers and decided to build a better answer. Her company, Mother’s Milk is Best, has developed a passive osmotic device that concentrates a mother’s own milk without adding anything foreign to it. The FDA has granted breakthrough technology designation. Clinical trials are underway. And the New York Angels, co-led by member Ray Farrell, have backed her seed round. Ray’s involvement is personal in a way that does not happen often in angel investing. He and his wife raised 26-week-old quadruplets in the NICU, born between a pound and a half and two pounds, navigating the exact risks that Beth’s device is designed to prevent. He heard her pitch and recognized the problem from the inside. Together Beth and Ray discuss how a passive osmotic device works and why its simplicity is a feature rather than a limitation, how Beth secured millions in non-dilutive NIH and SBIR funding before approaching angels and why the angel capital was still essential to unlocking it, what a billion-dollar total addressable market looks like when your initial customer is a NICU, and what early-stage investors actually contribute beyond the check. Staying with us after the main conversation is Peter Bodenheimer, the new Executive Director of the New York Angels, who brings a rare perspective to the role: he has been a founder, an investor, and an accelerator partner. He shares where he is focusing first, why he believes angel groups get a bad reputation for wasting founders’ time, and what he thinks it takes to make an investor-founder relationship genuinely useful after the money is wired.

Learn more about Mother’s Milk is Best and about joining or applying to the New York Angels at newyorkangels.com. Reach us with comments or questions at theangelnest.com.

Higher education is under pressure. Budgets are strained, research funding is being cut, and the gap between what business schools teach and what industry actually needs grows wider every year. Executive education is the one corner of the university that has always had to face the market directly. Now it is also becoming the place where AI may finally close that gap for good. Today on The Angel Nest, we meet Volute, an AI-powered platform that is reimagining how business schools deliver executive education by creating live, real-time communities that connect industry leaders with faculty, alumni, and peers to solve the challenges they are facing right now, not six months from now in a classroom. We speak with Michael Croft, Volute's founder, Jean Hammond, one of his lead investors and a partner at LearnLaunch, one of the few venture firms in the country exclusively focused on edtech, and Elmer Almachar, Managing Director of the Kellogg Global Network and Executive MBA Program at Northwestern University, who is not only an early adopter of Volute but one of the pioneers helping to prove what this model can do. Together they explore why executive education is what Jean calls an island of profitability in a sea of challenged higher ed, how Volute's community-based AI differs fundamentally from content-based AI platforms, why business schools are both the most resistant and the fastest-following institutions when it comes to adopting new technology, and what it means to extend the learning beyond the classroom into the real moments when leaders most need answers. What makes this conversation particularly compelling is that Elmer joins not as a commercial partner but as a believer. Northwestern's Kellogg School is launching with Volute this fall, and what Elmer describes is not just a technology adoption but a rethinking of what a business school is actually for. Learn more about Volute at volute.education. Reach us with comments or questions at theangelnest.com. There, you can also catch up on dozens of past episodes.