Host
One night in the ER gave me a very dumb kind of clarity: I was scared, sure, but I was more annoyed that I still had not started the podcast I kept talking about. (Not my finest moment. Definitely an honest one.)
Ready Set Do came out of that night. I wanted a show about the ugly beginning: the part where someone is making a career change, launching a side project, building online for the first time, or finally letting themselves go before the story looks polished.
I host the show between Chicago and India. The guests have included engineers tied to SpaceX and Microsoft, recruiters with Amazon and TikTok on the resume, founders building AI startups, creators who started from zero, and international students figuring out OPT, H-1B, and the next move.
If you want my canonical home on the internet, start at namanpandey.me. This page is the Ready Set Do version of that story.
About Naman
I care less about the polished postgame speech. I care about the part where someone is still paying for the choice they made six months ago and can tell you what it actually felt like.
Every episode is another crack at the same question: what does it take to begin before you feel ready?
Founders, engineers, recruiters, artists, guides, and people you would never see in the same room somehow end up here.
Other podcasts, other rooms, same obsession with the first move.
What I keep coming back to
Recent activity
If Google or a human lands here and wonders what I have been doing lately, this is the cleanest answer.
Episode 107
Two years ago, Anas lost his full-time UK job. He went back to Upwork — the platform he'd already used to make over $80K while studying — and within months landed an 18-month Swedish contract that generated over $5M in client revenue.
Open episodeEpisode 106
Agentic AI hiring is already past the point where saying 'I use Claude' sounds impressive. Surya Kari works on Amazon's generative AI team, so this conversation gets into what actually matters now: customer judgment, data science fundamentals, model evaluation, and the proof that tells a hiring team you can ship inside a real business.
Open episodeEpisode 105
How do you go from running tuberculosis programs in rural Bihar to studying at Oxford and eventually working with WHO Africa? There is no clean answer — and that is sort of the point.
Open episodeEpisode 104
That's what Avi Pilcer actually shipped while most of us were still picking a domain name. He built an autonomous system called System Zero that does the heavy lifting for him.
Open episodeEpisode 103
Applied AI hiring can feel fake from the outside because the job market keeps asking for years of experience in tools that barely existed five minutes ago. Sowmya Podila, a senior data scientist at Target, walks through how Fortune 500 AI work actually gets staffed, what hiring teams look for, and how to build a story that sounds useful instead of buzzword-heavy.
Open episodeEpisode 102
Hari Prasad Renganathan got rejected from the H1B lottery three times. Most people in that situation spiral.
Open episodeInvite Naman
I made a page for this so neither of us has to improvise the basics in DMs. It covers what I talk about, what fits this show, and where to reach me.
Around the internet
Different app, same show. Pick the one you already open without thinking.
Podcast
If you just want to listen, start here.
Open appearancePodcast
Same show. Different app. No grand speech needed.
Open appearanceVideo
This is where the faces, clips, and full conversations live.
Open appearanceProfile
This is where I think out loud in public.
Open appearancePlaylist
If you already live inside YouTube, this is the easy button.
Open appearanceNaman goes on other podcasts too
You should not have to scroll half a mile to find this. Here is the short version, and the full trail lives on its own page.
Podcast appearance
This one gets into the double life a lot of ambitious people know too well: the day job paying the bills, the other thing pulling at you after hours, and what happens when you stop treating that second life like a hobby you have to apologize for.
Open appearancePodcast appearance
Aakash and I got into the messier side of AI product work, how PMs think when the tools keep changing under their feet, and why most people still overcomplicate the first move.
Open appearanceWhat keeps coming up