Bill Shafton spent nine years as the legal backbone of Grindr, navigating a Chinese acquisition, a national security divestiture, and a Wall Street IPO. In this episode, he breaks down his philosophy on decision-making: how research sets the boundaries, but instinct drives the performance.

Tune in to learn how Bill operates in the gray areas, making high-risk decisions with incomplete data, and why "technical correctness" doesn't shield you from reputational fallout. If compliance is the baseline, trust is the real metric.

He also shares why the legal function is less like a gatekeeper and more like an institutional liver (not glamorous, but essential to keeping the whole body running).

In this episode of The Cred Podcast, Mack talks with Steven Rosenblatt, co-founder and General Partner at Oceans, about how decisions really get made when you're building companies, backing founders, and choosing what to stand behind before the outcome is obvious.

Steven reflects on the early mobile days, helping Apple launch iAd, and his time at Foursquare, where survival meant rethinking the business entirely. Those experiences now shape how he invests at Oceans: why it's all about the people, how he evaluates founders, and why consensus can be dangerous in venture investing.

More than anything, Steven makes clear that early-stage decision-making is about backing people and committing to the call.

On this episode of The Cred Podcast, Tess Michaels, Founder and CEO of Clasp, joins Mack McKelvey to talk about making decisions while building a new category at the intersection of education, healthcare, and workforce retention, where there is no established playbook to follow.

Tess breaks down how customer signals shape better decisions, why pattern recognition beats perfect data, and how learning when to say no is critical to scaling without distraction. Listen in on a sharp conversation on leadership, focus, and navigating the gray.