The Herding Squirrels Podcast!

Louie Celiberti of E27 Technology Solutions explains why AI pilots fail and how an architecture-first approach builds lasting enterprise capability.

Stephen Szypulski leads post-acquisition integration at Fitch Learning, part of Fitch Group and Hearst Corporation, where the business serves more than 100,000 learners across over 100 countries. In this episode of Herding Squirrels, he walks through why so many M&A deals lose value after close, what actually breaks first when an integration plan meets reality, and why the work of integration is fundamentally about shepherding velocity without pushing the organization into shock. If you are leading change, integrating teams after an acquisition, or running an AI rollout that is starting to look like a merger, this conversation will give you a clearer way to think about people, culture, and the parts of the deal that never show up in the model.

What actually happens to people after an acquisition closes? Anne-Marie Mills has lived it twice — first as HR lead when Algorithmia was acquired in 2021, and again in a more recent transition spanning teams from Seattle to Eastern Africa. In this episode, Anne-Marie walks through both experiences with real honesty: the early excitement, the culture shock six months in, the attrition nobody stopped, and what she wished leadership had done differently. If you work in people operations, run a team through any kind of organizational change, or have ever wondered why the talent you acquired seems to quietly disappear, this conversation is the post-mortem you didn't know you needed.

Frédéric Rivain is the CTO at Dashlane, a leading cybersecurity company — which means when AI coding tools started flooding the market, his team had more reasons to be skeptical than most. In this episode of Herding Squirrels, Frédéric walks us through how Dashlane built real AI adoption across an engineering org that had legitimate security concerns about the tools, why the hardest part of the rollout was never the technology, and what leaders get wrong when they treat AI adoption as a deployment problem instead of a people problem. If you’re leading a team through an AI transition right now, this conversation is the honest version of what that actually looks like from the inside.