In Episode 50, we celebrate a major Unlearn milestone: 50 conversations about what business leaders need to rethink.

Saqib Sheikh joins the show to break down how Workday is building its partner ecosystem across strategic partnerships, ISVs, benefits, payroll, and Workday Marketplace. This is a practical conversation about what happens when partnerships move from “nice to have” to a real growth motion with revenue, operations, product, and customer experience behind it.

We cover:
• Why Workday works with more than 1,500 partners, but focuses deeply on a smaller set of strategic relationships
• How benefits and payroll partners extend Workday’s platform for employees
• Why marketplaces cannot stop at search and listings
• How Workday Marketplace moved from discovery to transactions
• Why customer context matters: industry, geography, company size, and maturity stage
• What it takes to run a marketplace across product, partner ops, finance, sales ops, and marketing
• Why partner teams should own real metrics like sourced revenue, co-sell, and revenue share
• How Workday thinks about co-sell attribution and partner revenue
• Why AI can help customers browse and decide, but payroll, benefits, and finance still need deterministic systems
• Why the best AI strategy is not replacing people, but helping them work differently

50 episodes in, one lesson keeps showing up:
partnerships matter most when they are tied to customer outcomes and business outcomes.

If you want to understand how a company like Workday thinks about marketplace strategy, partner revenue, and AI, this episode is worth listening to all the way through.

In Episode 49, we sit down with Connor Jeffers, Founder of Aptitude 8 and CEO of Hapily, to explore what it takes to build an AI-native company. After scaling one of HubSpot’s leading services partners and launching a venture-backed SaaS business, Connor shares how AI is changing software development, marketing, partnerships, and the way startups compete.

We cover:

* Why AI is making small teams dramatically more productive

* Lessons from building both a services company and a SaaS company

* How HubSpot’s ecosystem created opportunities for founders

* Why product design is becoming more valuable than engineering capacity

* Building software for in-person events and customer engagement

* The future of partnerships in an AI-first world

* Where AI is creating the biggest productivity gains—and where it isn’t

If AI allows companies to operate at two or three times their previous scale, what does that mean for the future of teams, products, and competition?

Whether you’re a founder, operator, partnership leader, or executive navigating AI, this episode offers practical insights into how the next generation of companies will be built.

In Episode 48, we break down a hard truth about AI: the companies that win will not be the ones with the best models. They will be the ones with the best partner strategy.

Alan Chhabra joins the show to unpack the AI stack and why distribution, not product, is becoming the real advantage.

We cover:

• Why AI is a stack game and no company can win alone

• The AWS x Cerebras partnership and what it signals about the future of infrastructure

• Why hiring sales before building a partner ecosystem is a mistake

• The shift from hundreds of partners to a few high leverage relationships

• How AI deals are now sold top down to executives, not bottom up

• Why inference speed is critical to unlocking real AI adoption

• The emergence of neo clouds and the global race for compute capacity

• How partner leaders are becoming more important than ever in this market

Is AI a technology revolution or a distribution war?

The answer is both.

But most companies are still operating like it is just a product problem.

If you want to understand how the AI market is actually being won, this episode is for you.