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Rise From The Ashes
"Burnout to Brilliance: Great CEOs, No Burnout"
Leadership is tough. Burnout makes it tougher.
But it doesn’t have to be that way. Rise From The Ashes is the ultimate podcast for visionary CEOs and executives who refuse to let burnout rob them of their brilliance, legacy, and impact.
Hosted by Baz Porter, this show isn’t just about surviving leadership it’s about transforming it. Each week, we delve deep into the art and science of thriving at the top, combining actionable strategies, spiritual alignment, and raw truths that reignite your purpose and optimize your energy.
Here’s what you’ll get:
- Bold Frameworks: Learn the exact steps to conquer decision fatigue, streamline your mental energy, and reclaim control of your leadership.
- Spiritual Awakenings: Explore the intersection of purpose, alignment, and success to lead with clarity and connection.
- Transformational Insights: Hear unfiltered stories and practical wisdom from world-class leaders who’ve turned their burnout into brilliance.
This isn’t just a podcast it’s a revolution for leaders ready to rise, inspire, and leave a legacy that outlasts them.
Rise From The Ashes
Obsessed with Space at 10, Built Her Empire at 50
What childhood obsession did you bury that's still calling your name?
Most of us silence that voice. We call it 'being realistic.' We tell ourselves we're too old, too late, too far gone. But what if that buried obsession isn't dead what if it's your empire waiting to be built?
Sarah Pousho thought the same thing. At 10, she was obsessed with space staring at the stars, dreaming of rockets, devouring Carl Sagan's Cosmos like it was her bible. Then life happened. Thirty years of detours, practical choices, and buried dreams.
But here's the thing about buried dreams they don't stay buried forever.
At 50, Sarah didn't just rediscover her space obsession. She turned it into SpaceBridge Partners, the company she wished existed when she was that starry-eyed 10-year-old. Now she's not just watching space happen she's making it accessible to dreamers, not just billionaires.
This isn't just about rockets. It's about what happens when you stop running from who you really are and start building the empire that's been waiting inside you all along.
If You’ve Been Hooked on These Episodes… This Is for You
If this podcast has been landing deep… if each story feels like it’s peeling back something raw and real in you… then don’t ignore that.
Every guest you’ve heard made the same decision: to stop performing and start healing.
Now it’s your turn.
Take the Silent Collapse Diagnostic. It’s not a quiz. It’s a wake-up tool for women who are done pretending they’re fine.
No fluff. No journaling prompts. Just a straight-up mirror into where you’re silently collapsing behind the mask of success.
If you're serious about reclaiming your energy, your clarity, your life start there.
Because breakthrough doesn’t begin with doing more. It begins with finally seeing what’s been stealing your power.
Learn more about Baz Porter at www.bazporter.com
Ladies and gentlemen, welcome to another episode of Arise from the Ashes. I am honored to be in front of my next guest, Sarah. Sarah, how are you Please say hello to the world and tell the world what you do and a bit about who you are.
Speaker 2:Thanks for having me, baz. I'm Sarah Pujo, co-founder and CEO of SpaceBridge Partners, and I'm doing really well. I'm talking to you from near San Francisco and in the middle of starting up this company, which I launched a little over 15 years ago with my or 15 years, 15 months ago with my co-founders.
Speaker 1:You wish it was 15 years, right? So that's a bit about your company. Tell me about you. Obviously, you're in San Francisco. Are you Bay-born or did you come there from other means?
Speaker 2:I was actually born in Detroit and, yeah, I wasn't there very long. My parents moved when I was six months old to Arizona first, and then Southern California, where my brother was born and my sister. So I consider home Santa Barbara. That's where I grew up and then I came to the Bay Area to go to college. I went to University of California at Berkeley and then moved back to Santa Barbara and got a job that moved me to Virginia. So I lived there a couple of years and then Indiana. I lived there about five years and then moved back to Northern California a long time ago, 98.
Speaker 1:That wasn't a long time ago. Come on, you make me feel old. When you said Detroit, it reminds me of an 80s film, beverly Hills Cop, because the first ones to come out was him in Detroit, when he was a cop in Detroit and he went anyway. That's what the first one comes to mind. Love that movie. So you went to Berkeley. What did you study at Berkeley and what was your passion back then?
Speaker 2:My passion back then was my passion for most of my life, which is space. I wanted to be an astronaut since I was a little girl, so I went to Cal to study astronomy. That was my goal, and when I graduated I was going to go work for NASA and discovered very quickly that I would not be able to graduate if I stayed with an astronomy degree. Yeah, all the math and everything that went along with that, even though I was a stellar student in high school, was tough at UC Berkeley. So I switched majors to rhetoric and graduated with a rhetoric major, which most pre-law people did. I was not going to go into law school, so I wasn't sure what I was going to do after I graduated.
Speaker 1:You said you mentioned earlier you lived in South Bay, whereabouts.
Speaker 2:I lived in Southern California, so I was in Santa Barbara, but in the Bay Area I've either lived in Fremont or Berkeley or Sausalito. Now I'm currently in Richmond, which is like Northeast Bay yeah.
Speaker 1:I know I've traveled quite extensively Awesome, I know these sort of areas. The reason I ask is because my wife and I we lived in Redondo Beach for a while. I had an office in Palos Verdes for two or three years.
Speaker 2:There's nothing like Southern California. I definitely miss it. And, of course, now we bought our house it's a beautiful house overlooking the ocean. I should say my parents when I was a kid for I don't know $35,000 or something crazy, and now it's worth $4 million.
Speaker 1:So it's phenomenal. It just got so that your upbringing was coming from West Coast to East Coast, east Coast to West Coast. You graduated through Berkeley. You changed, pivoted. What was the driving force behind being an astronaut? Because space, I love it, universe, etc. I've always had a fascination. Never really understood fully what it is and how. The expanse of it is a work in progress always. What was your passion for space? What intrigued you at a very early age?
Speaker 2:A couple things. One is I was born the year before we set foot on the moon, and so I think I grew up around just seeing that in the news a lot. And the second was my parents were very strict when it came to television. We were only allowed to watch PBS or the news, and then we or we could had to highlight the TV guide to show which shows we wanted to watch. We got two hours of non-news and non-PBS a week, so I watched Cosmos a lot, which, of course, carl Sagan, lots of educational shows, and so, yeah, I think that sort of intrigued me.
Speaker 2:Whenever I had a chance in grade school and high school to write a paper that I got to choose the subject, it was always something to do with space, like, especially habitats. I was always fascinated with living off of planet earth. And what would that look like? How do you make gravity? Could things grow? Science was always my favorite subject, so going down those rabbit holes was always fascinating to me and I just thought, oh my gosh, if I could go into space and seeing pictures of the earth rise and like to be able to like I'm giving myself goosebumps right now to be able to experience that myself someday. I haven't been to space yet, but that's on my bucket list for sure.
Speaker 1:Now I've got an interesting question for you. Do you think space travel is possible in our lifetime?
Speaker 2:Yes, 100%.
Speaker 1:Can you back it up or can you elaborate, because I'm curious now.
Speaker 2:Yeah, right now a little bit of the hurdle is finances. But I'll give you an example on Inspiration4. I had the pleasure of chatting with Chris Zambroski, who was one of the civilian astronauts that was on that mission. That just happened a couple months ago that Jared Isaacman funded. Jared Isaacman made a lot of his money through financial services company that he founded and he had a contest for all these businesses that used his service apply and you could basically for a lottery to go into space.
Speaker 2:And chris zambroski I think he's he's in one of the trades like carpentry or plumbing or something like I'm embarrassed to say I cannot remember, but he applied and won the lottery and he got to go up in space and now he's oh my god, I'm a space ambassador. It was so incredible and I'm the first question out of my mouth when we chatted was like I'm super embarrassed to ask you this, but I just got it Like how was it? What was it? Like he goes. I will never stop being able to answer that question Cause it was so amazing, I loved it so much. It was one of the best things in my life.
Speaker 2:So there's ways to get in with if you don. But and I know you probably have heard about the all women trip from blue origin and all the backlash they got from that, but the thing I took away from it, aside from blue origin, could have probably done a better job pr wise on that was holy smokes. Six women, or six people, can go into space whenever we want to right now, and it took, in today's dollars, $280 billion to get three guys to the moon in the 60s. That's just crazy, the progress that we've made and it's speeding up exponentially with AI and with more and more billionaires and trillionaires contributing to the space ecosystem, that I think it's just a foregone conclusion that in our lifetimes we'll have the opportunity to go to space I love these conversations and this is why because people who are passionate about what they do and love light up and hear it.
Speaker 1:You can feel it, you can see it, and this tells me that not you only, not only genuine about what you do, but what you do is real and it also impacts lives, and this is what this podcast is about, because the listeners love to hear your story, your origin story, where you come from and also what your aspirations are. Things become possible that were once deemed impossible. People like yourself make them possible. Ten-year vision for yourself. Where do you want to be? What do you want to be doing in ten years? Retire to Saturday Beach in Florida, or just giving it all into your business and getting people to the moon and beyond?
Speaker 2:10 years from now. I don't think I'll ever officially retire. I like working, especially. It's something I like which isn't really work.
Speaker 2:10 years from now, my goal would be to be back living in Santa Barbara and to be involved in a few different businesses. One is somebody else will probably be running Space Bridge Partners. I want to be in charge of the philanthropic arm that I want Space Bridge Partners to eventually evolve. We're hoping to generate enough revenue to where we can give back to. My passion's always been science, so how can I encourage more science and education missions and even pay for them, either personally or as the company, and then just be involved in a lot of things that I care about animal welfare, animal welfare and a lot of underserved communities that I've experienced over the course of my lifetime and how can I give back to them? My whole goal, for obviously I would like to have enough money to not have to worry about things, but mostly I want to be able to generate enough money to where I have plenty to give back to these organizations and services and people that really need it.
Speaker 1:That's interesting. You say that because that's to do with compounding, and compounding helps not only yourself but the ripple effect for the future.
Speaker 2:Giving back, paying it forward. Those are so important, and not just in the US. I love to travel and I love experience in other cultures and I'm sure there's a bunch of underserved communities I don't even know about, and so being able to go see them for myself and then figure out how I can help would be awesome.
Speaker 1:What's your passion when it comes to underserving communities? You mentioned the underserved, but what specifically?
Speaker 2:I'm personally passionate about women in STEM fields, so if I could start there, that would be great. Like finding budding scientists all over the world and help them somehow either paying for education or putting them into paying for their school's science projects or space projects or things like that. That's one way. Another is universities or countries that want to do some space related scientific study but don't have the funds to get their project into space. How can I help them? And that's that's also a goal for my company space partners eventually too. So those are the two key points. I love mentoring as well, so I'd love to to have a kind of a mentoring not really a business, but program especially for young women, but also for older women, cause I transitioned in my fifties from a completely different career. So if I could help somebody do that, I don't really need to be a coach, but if anybody wants some inspiration, I'd love to just be an ear for them and figure out how I could help them do that.
Speaker 1:Listen, no matter what you do, and work how you. My cat seems to come up and say hello.
Speaker 2:I have the same problem. I locked her out.
Speaker 1:This one broke in I love cats. Max, come on. No, we're not doing that. Come on, get down. The struggle is real. What you're building isn't just for now, it's actually setting up for the future. But, more importantly, why I like people like yourself, sarah, is because you want to give back and help other people. And that's important for two or many reasons. One you said earlier is because it leaves a legacy In an ideal world. You want to go to space. You want to give back.
Speaker 2:How are you serving yourself. One is by creating my dream job. I think that's a big one. You talk about me lighting up when I talk about it. I've never done that in my 30 years in a different career, so I know I'm in the right spot but also understanding the people that I choose to spend time with, the people that I choose to support, and my work-life balance, which is such a cliche, but I always thought I knew what it was until now, and now I feel like I really get it, and I think also part of that is building the company that I always wanted to work for has been really enlightening personally, because I also thought I knew what that looked like and, as now I'm getting to start from scratch and define company policies and what are. Even our website looks like and things like that really has directed my own personal journey as well, and it's been really enlightening. So I think those are a few ways that I've been serving myself.
Speaker 1:Love that If you could give the audience one piece of advice about starting up a business in this day and age. You're going through it and you have gone through it. What's the one piece of advice you would give the audience about starting the business?
Speaker 2:It's hard to narrow that down to one. Make sure you have the financial means to stick it out. That's the one thing. And whatever you think, that number is double it Great, that's great advice From my audience.
Speaker 1:thank you very much for listening, sarah. We will see you on part two. This is Royce Mignacci's podcast. My guest Sarah Parushi. I'm sorry if I took too short, I do apologize, it's terrible. Anybody who listens to this will say I'm credibly nasty at names and I hate any of that. All good, all good, but my audience. Thank you very much. Please share the message, enjoy, change someone's life and I'll see you on part two.
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