Our guest in this episode is Jacqueline Basulto, Founder and CEO of SeedX, a global digital consulting and marketing firm. A Forbes 30 Under 30 honoree, Jacqueline turned a $200 investment into over a billion dollars of tangible client impact. She specializes in empowering organizations to find the balance between high-tech growth and human-centric connections. We explore building culture across a distributed global team, the responsible use of AI as a tool (not a crutch), and why accepting help, both at work and at home, is a leadership skill, not a weakness.Key points discussed include:* Build a distributed team culture by hiring in regional clusters, encouraging paid trial projects, and investing in in-person meetups.* Use AI as a thinking partner: brainstorm, check your work, and challenge your ideas, but never just copy-paste the output.* Accepting help and delegating is not a sign of weakness; it creates room for others to grow and for you to lead.Listen to the podcast to find out more.Show Notes from this episode with Jacqueline Basulto, SeedXIt was a genuine pleasure to welcome Jacqueline Basulto, Founder and CEO of SeedX, to the Innova.buzz podcast. Jacqueline brings a rare combination of scrappy entrepreneurial grit and deeply considered human values. Our conversation ranged from the nuts and bolts of building a 70-person distributed team across multiple continents, to the philosophical question of how AI reshapes (or doesn’t) the fundamentals of human connection.Jacqueline opened by sharing what drives her: a desire for direct, tangible impact. Early in her career, she found herself in a role where she couldn’t see the effect of her work on people, and that disconnect pushed her toward marketing and entrepreneurship. Today, that drive extends beyond clients to her own team. She wants the people at SeedX to thrive, to be happy, to grow. It’s a holistic view that many founders talk about but few genuinely embody.From $200 and a Dream: Building a Global Team Out of NecessityJacqueline started SeedX at 22 with literally $200, probably negative money once you factor in student loans. She needed talent she couldn’t afford locally, so she looked globally. Her third hire, Vlad, was a UI designer from Ukraine, and he’s still on the team years later, now a close friend. What began as a financial necessity evolved into a genuine philosophy: talented, great people exist everywhere. Before COVID made remote work fashionable, SeedX was already operating across continents, turning time zones from a logistical headache into a competitive advantage. When one team logs off, they prepare a handoff for the next time zone. Clients have noticed, particularly those expanding internationally, that someone is always awake and ready to respond.Culture Without a Headquarters: Hiring, Trust, and In-Person ConnectionI was curious how Jacqueline builds culture when team members may never share a physical office. Her approach is layered. Many hires come through referrals from trusted team members. Beyond that, SeedX uses paid trial projects, a common practice in the remote world, where candidates work on a small engagement before either side commits. It gives both parties a genuine sense of work style, communication, and expectations. Jacqueline also emphasized the need for self-motivated, independent people; in a remote environment, nobody is looking over your shoulder, and that has to be a feature, not a bug.That feeling of watching someone build a global team from $200 and a Ukrainian designer named Vlad, and then figuring out how to keep the human thread alive across four continents, is also the exact starting point for the rest of our fascinating conversation, and for the deeper work I’m exploring.This podcast is the beginning of the conversation, but the personal reflections, the “why” behind what was said, are where the real journey begins.If you’d like to read the rest of this post, where Jacqueline shares her hard-won lessons on delegation, the real cost of mistakes (and why they’re worth paying for), and her refreshingly grounded take on AI as “just human behaviour in a new form,” I’d love to invite you to become a paid subscriber.A subscription unlocks these full, detailed show notes, but more importantly, it welcomes you into a quieter space. It’s where I share my private reflections on these conversations about AI, the “behind-the-lens” stories from my photography, and the personal meditations that connect them all. It’s a place for the curious, and I’d be honoured to share it with you.On the in-person side, SeedX now hires in regional clusters, Argentina, Spain, Kenya, so that local teams can meet up regularly. The entire team gathered once in Barcelona during Jacqueline’s wedding week, which says something about the closeness of the group. The early employees, who shared that scrappy “building something together” feeling, are now the leaders carrying that culture ...
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