Aspire with Emma Grede

Vanessa Van Edwards has spent nearly twenty years studying what makes some people easy to talk to. Her argument is that conversation is a skill rather than a personality, and that most of us are simply out of practice. She joins Emma to talk about how to prepare for the conversations that matter, what to say when you meet someone who could change your career, and how to handle feedback and disagre...

Ari Emanuel is one of the most powerful people in entertainment and the real-life inspiration for Ari Gold on Entourage. He started in the CAA mailroom before co-founding Endeavor with three other agents and very little money. Over the next three decades, he merged the company with William Morris, acquired IMG and UFC, and helped reshape the modern entertainment business. In this conversation, Ari...

Diane von Furstenberg created the iconic wrap dress in her twenties and built her namesake company DVF into one of the most recognizable fashion brands in the world. More than fifty years later, as she approaches 80, she's entering a new chapter — with a lifetime of lessons to share. In this episode of Aspire, Emma sits down with her longtime friend and idol for a deeply personal conversation abou...

On this special birthday solo of Aspire, Emma Grede shares 44 rules for life, business, and success—her personal operating system for nearly everything. This is everything she knows to be true about money, work, marriage, and motherhood, plus the beliefs she actually uses to make decisions, build companies, and recover from her mistakes. In this episode, you’ll learn: Why taking responsibility for...

Andrew Rosen has spent nearly five decades building, investing in, and shaping some of the most influential brands in American fashion. As the co-founder of Theory and an early investor in brands like TWP, rag and bone, Veronica Beard, Alice + Olivia, Good American and SKIMS, he’s also one of Emma's closest mentors.  His advice comes from doing the work — and learning what happens when things...

Durana Elmi knows how to build a business. Before Cymbiotika, she built and exited four companies. She then took a wellness brand with one employee, one product, and almost no infrastructure and helped scale it into a $150 million business alongside her husband Shahab. In this episode of Aspire, Emma sits down with Durana to unpack the decisions behind that growth. They also get candid about...

It's easier than ever to launch a beauty brand—and harder than ever to make it last. In this first-ever Aspire founders roundtable, Danessa Myricks (Danessa Myricks Beauty), Dianna Cohen (Crown Affair), and Amy Liu (Tower 28) get honest about what it actually takes to build and scale a brand people believe in. These aren’t early ideas—they’re Sephora-scale businesses: Tower 28, launched in 2019, n...

There’s a lot of dopey financial advice out there. Jill Schlesinger is here to call it out, answer your questions, break down the financial news that actually matters, and help you manage your money without losing your mind. No jargon. No judgment. Just clear, actionable financial guidance about saving, investing, buying a home, managing your career, and deciding how to spend your hard-earned doll...

Arthur C. Brooks believes we are living through an age of emptiness—a time when more people feel distracted, disconnected, and unsure of what will actually make their lives meaningful. In his latest book, The Meaning of Your Life, the Harvard professor and New York Times bestselling author examines why so many of the things we chase in pursuit of happiness can leave us feeling unsatisfied once we...

Jennifer Garner is an award-winning actor, producer, longtime Save the Children ambassador, and co-founder of Once Upon a Farm, an organic children’s food brand. After rising to fame on Alias, she built a career spanning more than three decades before entering entrepreneurship at 45 and helping grow Once Upon a Farm into a $724 million publicly traded company. Jennifer joins Emma to talk about the...

In this solo episode, Emma shares how she thinks about money, from the lessons she learned growing up in East London to the principles she uses today. She gets into her personal financial priorities, why your earning power can matter more than your savings, how to negotiate from a position of strength, and why no woman should ever outsource the understanding of her own finances. In this episode, y...

Emma sits down with Krissy Cela, founder and creative director of Oner Active, for an honest conversation about building a bootstrapped business on track to generate close to $300 million this year. Before Oner, Krissy spent a decade building a fitness audience and business from a student laptop, long before either was considered a conventional career path. Today, she owns 50 percent of one of the...

Erin and Sara Foster have spent more than 15 years working across television, fashion, media and investing. Today, they are behind the hit Netflix series Nobody Wants This, the fashion brand Favorite Daughter, a production company, a venture fund and a growing slate of projects—but their success did not arrive according to a master plan. In this episode, they join Emma to unpack the failures, pivo...

Every woman should understand the partnership she's entering before a crisis forces her to. This episode is that conversation. Laura Wasser has spent 32 years as one of the country's most sought-after divorce attorneys. She’s the person people call when a marriage is ending. But what makes this conversation so valuable is that almost everything she knows matters long before anyone gets divorced. T...

Emma Chamberlain started posting videos at 16, before anyone fully understood what the creator economy would become. Within a couple of years she’d become one of the most watched people on YouTube with over 12 million subscribers, ambassador deals with Louis Vuitton, Cartier and Lancôme, and a Spotify-exclusive podcast. She helped define a new kind of fame, built one of the most recognizable perso...

Reshma Saujani a leading advocate for women’s economic power, the founder of Girls Who Code and Moms First, and the force behind the new documentary No Country for Mothers. After helping change the culture around girls in technology, she has turned her attention to the policies and assumptions that continue to push women—especially mothers—out of the workforce. In this conversation, she joins Emma...

Kristin Cavallari became a household name before she'd even graduated high school, and spent the next two decades building a life, a business, and a family under constant public scrutiny. But this conversation isn't just about the version of her life you've seen on screen. In this episode, Kristin sits down with Emma for a candid conversation about money, financial independence, and what it actual...

In today’s solo episode, Emma dives into real listener questions: the actual mechanics of building from nothing, starting a business with no capital, why having no money can be an advantage, plus more nuanced questions about navigating your career, handling tricky mentors, and knowing when to quit. She also gets into more personal reflections about her marriage, what her life looked like in her tw...

Alicia Lyttle is the CEO of AI InnoVision and one of the clearest voices teaching entrepreneurs and operators how to actually use AI to make money. Her clients run from solo founders to Fortune 500 companies and US government agencies. She's been teaching people how to build online for 25 years, long before the current AI wave. People call Lyttle the Queen of AI for good reason. The AI conversatio...

Patrick Ta built one of the most successful beauty brands in the world after dropping out of high school, filing for bankruptcy at 21, and spending years building his career one client at a time. What started with a makeup kit and a dream eventually led to working with some of the biggest names in the world, launching Patrick Ta Beauty, and becoming one of the most influential makeup artists of hi...

Julia Collins has spent much of her life chasing big goals,first to prove herself and then to save the planet.  The path took her from restaurant kitchens in New York City to Silicon Valley boardrooms, where she became the first Black woman to co-found a unicorn and raised more than $450 million in venture capital. But it also came with heartbreak, burnout, a co-founder fallout, and years spent tr...

Jackie Aina has been building in public for 17 years. She didn't just grow an audience, she helped define what it meant to be a Black woman with a voice in the beauty industry. But influence was never the end goal. After nearly two decades as one of YouTube's most recognized creators, Jackie took $250,000 of her own money and started a fragrance brand. Not a makeup line — a fragrance brand. Her ch...

Hiring is the single most consequential thing you do when you're building anything. Get it right and it compounds. Get it wrong and it costs you years. In today's episode, Emma is sharing the thing she's come to believe is true: the team you build is the most honest reflection of how well you know yourself. This is the real version of what Emma's looking for when she's sitting across from a candid...

Gary Vaynerchuk has spent the last two decades understanding where culture and consumer behavior were headed long before the rest of the world caught up. He was early to YouTube, Twitter, TikTok, creator commerce, and live shopping. But this conversation is about more than algorithms and internet trends. In this episode, Gary sits down with Emma to talk about the real reason most people stay stuck...

Bethenny Frankel turned a TikTok account into a $20-million-a-year business without a plan or a brand of her own. She had a vision and a set of deal terms that no one in the industry has been able to replicate, or get her to explain, until now.  In this conversation, Emma gets Bethenny to do the thing she never does: open her playbook. Bethenny shows the work behind it all—the deal structures, the...