Maya Collins

Maya Collins spent a decade in product, most recently leading a team of designers and researchers at a consumer software company. Her favourite part of the job was always the customer interview: the long silence after a good question, and what people say when they fill it.

She left product to coach first-time founders and now works with a handful of early-stage teams each year. Off the mic, she runs a small community of 3,000 independent creators who share numbers, drafts and the occasional crisis.

How she interviews

Maya prepares for every episode by reading or listening to everything a guest has published, then throws most of it away. She looks for the gap between the public story and the private one — the decision that never made it into the press release.

On the show

Maya leads most of the long-form interviews and hosts the quarterly live Q&A for Podcast Plus members. She is also the reason every episode ends with the question listeners quote back to us most: “What would you tell yourself on the worst day?”