Default Alive
Hosted by Mike Vacanti & Tyler Tringas
Capital-efficient founder conversations, the explicit anti-blitzscaling pitch told from the operating chair.
Editorial take
Default Alive is the show for founders who've internalized that capital efficiency matters more in 2024-2026 than it did during the ZIRP years. Mike Vacanti and Tyler Tringas talk to founders running profitable, often small-team SaaS businesses, with explicit focus on revenue per employee, gross margin, and runway discipline. Newer show with smaller back catalog; the cadence is consistent. Useful corrective to grow-at-all-costs venture podcasts.
Last hand-checked 2026-05-15.
Listen if you …
- you're building a capital-efficient SaaS and want peer conversations
- you've concluded blitzscaling isn't the right model for your business
- you want practical conversations about profitability and unit economics
Skip if you …
- your strategy is venture-backed hypergrowth, less directly applicable
- you want a deep back catalog, show is newer
About the show
Default Alive is Mike Vacanti and Tyler Tringas's podcast on capital-efficient SaaS. The name references Paul Graham's distinction between default-alive and default-dead startups.
Guests are typically founders who've made profitability and capital efficiency explicit operating principles, with the conversations focused on how the business decisions follow.
Notable guests
- Jason Cohen
- Rob Walling
- Hiten Shah
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