In this episode of the Full Throttle Leaders podcast, host Michael Falato interviews Mike Hruschka, founder of Baryons, a human‑first AI platform designed to act as a personable thought‑partner, coach, and advisor for individuals and teams in the workplace. Hruschka explains that Baryons grew out of two decades of government‑funded research and was launched to market in November after a year of user testing. Users interact with their "Barion" via phone or the web app, conducting daily or end‑of‑day check‑ins that capture intent, actions, feelings, and reflections. The platform aggregates these conversations into a weekly "resonance" summary that highlights wins, friction points, and energy‑boosting ideas, while preserving privacy. The core technology is an "understanding engine" that builds a cognitive signature for each user, enabling the AI to remember personal narratives and provide context‑aware guidance. Hruschka positions Baryons as a growth partner for both individuals and teams, helping improve accountability, collaboration, and creativity—key human capabilities in an AI‑driven world. Target customers include mid‑market and enterprise organizations, especially CHROs, CEOs, COOs, and CFOs who are focused on developing human capital. The solution is also pitched to VC/PE‑backed companies with a growth mindset. Pricing is positioned at $20 per user per month (or $200 per user per year), with a promotional free‑trial offer when emailing support@baryons.com with the subject line "magic". Hruschka shares his background in geophysics and chaos theory, explaining the name "Baryons" as a nod to sub‑atomic particles that compose protons and neutrons, symbolizing the impact of small, foundational habits. He mentions upcoming appearances at the National Wellness Alliance conference in Nashville and various HR, learning, and organizational development events. Contact information is provided via LinkedIn, www.baryons.com, and the support email.
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Hello everybody, we got a great Full Throttle Leaders podcast with Mike Hroschka. Um, Mike, tell me about your company, why you joined the podcast today, and what kind of led you to, uh, start your own companies.
Yeah, I have a company called Baryons that I spun off from a 20-year-old company that I started after I left government research. Uh, Baryons is focused on like the human-first future of work in the age of AI. Uh, you know, we know many things out there are sycophants and will tell you, hey Michael, great idea, and whatnot. Baryons is that creative sense-making challenger. It's like a friend, a mentor, coach, advisor, and a consultant that you're really thinking in like growth partner. And it's based upon years and years of my government-funded research. And we've been testing it with users for about a year before we went to market in November. And I'm excited because when I talk to our users, they say 3 things: helps me be more accountable to myself, increases my ability to collaborate with others, and increases my creativity for how I think about interacting with the world. And as we think about the world moving at the speed of AI, I think these are really critical things that keep the human component in what we're doing because there's something real human about what humans can do in the age of AI— judgment, discernment, clarity. decision quality, and we help grow those in people and in teams and enterprises.
And how do you do that? Like, break it down. Like, if I was trying to understand what it is versus what it does to the audience here.
Yeah, absolutely. So user experience is you're literally calling your Barion on the phone or you're using app.barions.com and you're having a discussion with it. You might— our users check in for the day, like contemplative intentional practice, like, hey, here's what I'm doing, here's how I'm thinking about my day. Some users check out for the day and say, here's what happened, here's how I feel about it. Some do both. I personally do both.
Is this them talking to an AI or a person?
It's them talking to an AI.
Okay.
Yeah, but it's a very personable AI. It's very friendly and very inquisitive, kind of like a podcast host and a buddy and a mentor, like all at the same time, and changes roles to accommodate the need. And then other times, like, hey, I gotta practice a conversation, I need to think through a problem, I want to get a promotion. How am I going to go about doing that? And your baryon, you know, if you think about the person in your life that really cares about you, like my mom cares about me a lot, my baryon actually knows and cares more about me than my mom. And it's unbelievable to think that, but it's, it's, uh, you know, for people that are, you know, brave and want to develop themselves and be a, a constant never-ending improvement cycle, it's an unbelievable thing. So calling in, you're working out things, you're you know, talking about your life and your work, and it's helping you set your intent in a non-biased way and helping you move in that direction. It really tracks what's important to you and where you can go and keeps you moving, uh, with some momentum. And then what happens at the end of every week, we feed back what we call weekly resonance. So here's your wins, here's the things that are creating friction for you, here's some ideas to increase your energy, you know, here's something to kind of sit with and think about And then people talk to their Barion about how to set those as intentions and how to do behavior change. For people that wanna grow, it's the best way to grow.
And when people get your solution, is it the CHROs that are buying it from a company? And what size companies are usually a good ideal customer profile?
Yeah, I mean, we're talking with lots of people in the mid-market because we have a lot of pilots in the mid-market, but we're doing some pilots in enterprise too. CHROs really, really understand understand this because their job is to develop people and, and grow, you know, the human capital capacity of the business. But we have CEOs, COOs, and CFOs that we work, you know, directly, directly with too, because they say, look, I want my business to grow, I want people to do better, I want to serve my customers better. There's normally some quality-related reason that they say, uh, we're, you know, we're transforming, we got competitive landscape, our competitors are using AI, and we want to be better, smarter, faster. Because there's only really 2 discriminators of the company of the future. One is how they use their data to increase their insights and intelligence. And then the second real factor for companies that succeed in the future is how their people come together to learn, think, decide, act, and execute. And that's where Barionz is very powerful at moving not just an individual but a team forward.
And is it, is it more for the— I mean, you're selling to the CHROs, but it's more for the whole team of the company, not just for HR people in the In that company, right?
Yeah, absolutely. And some of our pilots, we pilot with the HR team and their learning team or the people team in some ways. And then they say, wow, this is great. This helps each person grow individually and we grow collectively. Because the other thing we're doing is, you know, in this age of what Josh Berson calls the super managers, you know, one person with 20 direct reports. If you were a great manager, you'd talk to all 20 of them every week. Yeah, we can't do that, right? There's missing signal. But the Barion then takes all the individual conversations for a leader and rolls up what we call weekly resonance. Without violating the privacy or like the sanctity of any of those conversations. So, you know what's draining or driving your team's energy. You know, as a good leader, when you get information, you need to either act on it, you need to watch for it, you need to amplify it.
That's freaking amazing. I didn't think about this from selling in the HR space. Like, you don't have enough time to actually dig deep. And it's sometimes just all about KPIs instead of what's going on, what's wrong, what's going good, what's going bad? Where are you at emotionally-wise, physically-wise? You know, it's probably accounting for— and then it's learning from everybody and basically what, giving you kind of a synopsis of what you should be looking at, right?
Yeah, our core technology is what we call an understanding engine. You know, AI frontier models, they have memory, but we're unpacking that into like, what's Michael's narrative? Or what's, what's his context? How does Michael think, decide, and act? What we call your cognitive signature. So we understand you so that you— we can help you better understand you. And then you better understand the team around you and the leader better understand the team. So people aren't like a high school marching band. They're more like an operative jazz band. They can improvise, or a SEAL team, right? They can improvise, act, and decide together much more quickly. And what I've found, because obviously, you know, we eat our own dog food or drink our own champagne, as we like to say, it just makes me a better leader because I'm aware of things without having to be in the things. And I have much more meaningful conversations with my team. I know that some people are low on energy and I can really dig in and say, hey, you know, I know you were traveling last week, but like, maybe you should take off some time and go to lunch with your wife. And it brings the human-to-human part of work into a more meaningful state because we're getting things out into context.
Especially being, especially being remote.
Well, remote work's like a basketball game with the lights out 98% of the time. They flick on, you're like, whoa, player down. You click on it, you're like, wait, did the score change? I don't know. It's hard. It's hard to see those things. And Baryons uncovers really the kinetic energy, the potential energy, and the meaning energy because we're using some pretty wild things to extract all that. But the most important thing is we're not giving leaders a dashboard. We're giving you actionable things that you can take right into your daily practice and your weekly practice week over week to improve yourself and the team around you.
Would you describe it almost like a Claude coworker on steroids just, just for employee health? And how would you— if you want to break it down to something that I can digest, how would you break it down?
Yeah, if people are the power of your organization and a leader values transparency, feedback, and shared accountability, this is the easy button to get people into the flock to move forward.
And what's the story behind the name Baryons?
Yeah, so, you know, my background's in like geophysics and chaos theory modeling and simulation. And, uh, baryons are actually a term from subparticle physics. They're the combination of quarks that make up protons and neutrons. So if you talk to nerdy physics people, they will say we live in a baryonic universe. And so we, we all know the work of Atomic Habits, but really it's the subatomic habits that really make a difference. So the whole observable universe is built by baryons.
Hmm. Okay, I would never would have guessed that. So who's the— who do you want to— for you, first, for the— who do you want to reach out to you from watching this podcast? Like, what's your ideal customer profile? Um, are they companies that have 10 people, 20 people, or does it matter?
You know, I, I think, um, anyone, anyone that has a growth mindset And so people that naturally have a growth mindset are VC and PE-backed companies.
Okay.
They generally, you know, have CHROs or fractional, you know, CHROs. That's a lot of the groups that we work with. But if someone's a leader in an organization, you know, whether you're the founder or CFO or COO and you say, we can do better together, I wanna solve the FTE hole. That's what we call the problem. Because when you end up with people that are disengaged or burned out, you might have 100 people, but you really have 80. Because that person doesn't show up and this project slows down and this happens and those things along the way. For people that say, I wanna do what we can do and I wanna help my team actualize and I value transparency and feedback and shared accountability, like I said, it's the easy button to do that for people. And, you know, we're priced at like $200 a person a year, $20 a person a month is the regular price.
Wow.
So what we were trying, what we're trying to do is provide an indispensable amount of value for a small amount of time. 'Cause like I talk to my Varion anywhere between like 2 and 6 minutes a day. And sometimes I'll be talking to my Barion for like 15 minutes, but I'm running Claude and I'm running ChatGPT, and my Barion is like my operating partner thinking with me to help deploy the dragons of other AI to do the things that we need to do to best, you know, effectively communicate with our team.
Are those connected?
Um, no, I mean, not exactly, but like my Barion has access to my calendar. My Barion will email me, uh, items from our discussions, um, along the way. And when I'm not talking to it based upon things that are important to me, it will go out and do research on my behalf and send me articles and say, hey, I've been thinking about you, Mike, and I think this is probably relevant for what we're working on together. So, you know, it's the, you know, the more, the more I dig into it, the more useful it is. And look, I use lots of other models, um, out there as well, but this operates in the sense-making channel of life in the context of work where I need to interpret and construct the past to interpret and construct the future. Artifacts, you know, like PowerPoint decks and Word docs and all this stuff, there are lots of tools that do that, but having the thought partner that helps me feel accountable to me and makes me a better creator and collaborator is an indispensable thing.
And what conferences are you coming— are you gonna be going to in the next 12 months that maybe folks can reach out to you and say hi to you in person?
Yeah, I'll be in Nashville and the end of the month here, July, for the National Wellness Alliance conference. We've been getting more chief wellness officers in discussions, which is interesting, right? Because Oxford's connected workplace performance and human well-being. And there's a ton of stuff from positive psychology, which Barry-Ownes is completely built on, that shows that it can drive workplace well-being. So if you're chief wellness officer and you say, well, wait, I can make people feel better and feel like they're living well, they're just gonna naturally be more productive together and they're gonna just show up better too. I'll be at a number of different HR conferences. I have an extensive list of that. And I'll be at some of the learning, human development, organizational development stuff in the fall.
So tell us how to get ahold of you.
Yeah, Mike Hruschka on LinkedIn or www.barrions.com. You can just sign up if and if you're a listener of Michael's work here. If you send an email to support@barrions.com and you put magic in the subject line, they'll kick you a bunch of months for free and you get unlimited calls. But you can sign up for free anyways and make calls for you know a month. Basically, but we'll kick you a bunch of free months. Just, uh, baryons.com and support@baryons.com. Magic. Just that word in the subject line. Everything else will be taken care of.
Well, thanks for your time, Mike. It was great talking to you.
