Curiosity, creativity and Maine's startup scene

Frank Gruber has spent more than two decades at the intersection of technology, media and entrepreneurship, and Dr. Lisa Belisle and Dr. Jeff Barkin open the conversation by asking what connects it all. Gruber describes curiosity as the constant thread, from his early days as a blogger and contributor to TechCrunch, through co-founding the media company that became Techco, to running his current innovation firm, Established. Barkin draws a parallel to Dr. Arthur Brooks and his book From Strength to Strength, noting that both men have built careers that resist the conventional expectation of a single, linear path. Gruber pushes back against the habit of reducing a person to a job title or a geography, arguing that better questions, ones about what someone is working on or thinking about, reveal more than the standard "what do you do." The co-hosts, who each carry multiple professional identities themselves, find common ground with a guest who has lived across Chicago, Las Vegas, San Francisco and Washington before settling in Maine.

Established, the firm Gruber leads as co-founder and CEO, helps corporations, nonprofits and government agencies move from innovation goals to working programs, handling strategy, marketing and program management. Among its clients are the Small Business Administration, whose America's Seed Fund umbrella covers federal early-stage R&D investment across agencies including NASA and the Air Force, and Established has produced large-scale events and ongoing engagement programming for that work. Gruber also runs the Startup of the Year program through the Established Network, which has connected early-stage companies with hundreds of mentors and potential partners across the country. The conversation turns to artificial intelligence, with Barkin noting that many workers in Maine, the oldest state by median age, find AI tools unfamiliar, and Gruber argues that the barrier is lower than it appears: adoption follows the same pattern as earlier waves of technology, and many people are already using AI without recognizing it. Both co-hosts and Gruber agree that the advice for AI adoption mirrors the advice for starting a company: begin, experiment and learn from the process. Gruber also describes his role on the steering committee for Maine Tech Week, organized by Liam Sullivan, and points to organizations including Startup Maine and the Maine Technology Institute as part of a growing but still sparse innovation network that requires entrepreneurs in rural areas to be deliberate about seeking out connections.

The final stretch of the conversation moves to music, personal loss and the question of how people sustain their health over time. Gruber took up guitar lessons in circumstances he describes as accidental, and the daily discipline of practice became, in his words, therapeutic, particularly as he and his family navigated losses during the pandemic years, including the death of his friend and mentor Tony Hsieh, the longtime CEO of Zappos. One of his songs, "Dopamine," addresses phone addiction directly, and Barkin, speaking as a psychiatrist, frames compulsive device use as a serious issue of time displacement that affects both mental and physical well-being. Gruber has also rethought his approach to alcohol and diet, citing the science on aging and drawing on The Longevity Diet to guide his food choices, while acknowledging that rigidity has its own costs. On investing, he says the earliest bets are fundamentally bets on the founder, not the idea, and that the quality he looks for most is the refusal to stop.