Mimir

Neha Shah built her business on speaking her truth. When she emigrated from India to the US, her body stopped cooperating. Her digestion suffered, she broke out in cystic acne, and for a while she thought she'd simply become a bad cook. The doctors weren't much help. They sent her to one specialist for her skin and another for her gut, found nothing, and handed her a pamphlet about eating...

Lauren Kleban started her career as a professional dancer. She moved to Las Vegas and booked a show at the Paris Hotel. But like every Vegas dancer, that wasn't her only gig. She was stacking five jobs at once, showing up to a 10am audition after a job that ended at 3am. As a dancer, no one hands you drive. No one teaches you to read your own call sheet, or to advocate for yourself, or how to pivo...

It's been a long time coming. For 100 episodes I've sat across from founders and asked them how they built their businesses. For this one, it's just me, looking back at three years of doing this and asking the question I've been asked a million times: what was it all for? When I started Mimir in my San Francisco apartment three years ago, I had a sticky note on my desk that said in...

Ashley Presti never set out to build a company. But Blended Bond grew out of a problem she was actively living, blending two families under one roof. Unsurprisingly, her business succeeded for the same reasons her family did: she asked the hard questions, stayed intentional, leaned on the people around her, and let it happen on its own timeline instead of forcing it. The heart of this episode is t...

Today’s episode is a real pinch me moment. I was a Three Ships customer before I knew Connie Lo's name. I absolutely love their Jelly Drops for the most amazing glow and their soft serve lip balm before bed. I found Three Ships at Credo Beauty, one of my favorite places for truly clean products. As someone whose allergic to almost everything, finding products that are safe, let alone work is f...

Colin McIntosh started Sheets and Giggles in 2017 and scaled it to $1.4 million per month by 2020. Last November, after eight years of building through COVID, supply chain crises, and a 2025 tariff shock that killed his first acquisition deal three days after Liberation Day, he sold the company. I couldn’t wait to talk to Colin. I came with pen and paper in hand poised to document his meteoric ris...

I don’t know about you guys but 2026 for me is certainly earning it’s title as year of the fire horse. I truly feel like I’ve been riding a fire breathing horse bareback at full speed. I’m just here holding onto the mane for dear life and he’s burning down what use to be. If you feel the same way, then this episode is for you. Last week I sat down with Allie Stark and it ended up being one of the...

Today I'm sitting down with Danielle Brooks, the founder of Honey Truck, a boutique honey brand. Danielle and I met through a podcast matching platform. In her pitch to me she told me that Honey Truck was built in the margins of her life. She didn't have the luxury of building fast, so she had to learn how to build intentionally. It felt like she was speaking directly to me. I mean she was...

If you’re a female founder then you’ll probably know this feeling all too well. You’re trying to launch a business but you’re also thinking about getting married, starting a family and it feels like the sand is slipping through the hourglass knowing that neither is going to stop and wait for you. I’m right there with you. I’m getting married next year and my fiance and I are talking about kids. Bu...

Most founders sit down to post on social media and go completely blank. But I have good news! You don’t actually have a content problem, you have a clarity problem. At my 9-5 creating content is easy because someone handed me the mission, I’ve learned the market well enough to know exactly what pain points we need to address and how our product solves them. The content writes itself. That infrastr...

Rashmi Aimiuwu moved from Canada to Silicon Valley. The literal epicenter of tech, and spent months quietly wondering if she had any business being there. No engineering degree. No startup experience. Just 17 years in commercial real estate marketing and a growing frustration with birthday parties. That frustration became GIVA, a gift-giving platform that just launched in beta. And in this episode...

Today’s conversation is about the uncomfortable truths of entrepreneurship. Something every early stage founder needs to get familiar with. I’m sitting down with Irene Saliendra, a serial founder who has built across multiple industries, from sustainable fashion to women’s health tech, and now runs Digital Flow. So many founder stories get told in hindsight. But when you’re in it, the reality is a...

Today’s guest is Samantha Diamond, co-founder of Bird&Be, a reproductive health company built alongside fertility doctors to help people be proactive about their fertility — from “trimester zero” through pregnancy and postpartum. What I learned from Sam is that empathy, when embedded into how you build, becomes a competitive advantage — especially in stagnant industries. Fertility, and female...

I originally wrote this piece as a Substack essay, but as we head into 2026, aka the season of vision boards and productivity hacks, I wanted to bring it to the podcast too. This topic has been sitting with me for a long time because I think so many of us struggle with the same fear: Why am I not reaching my goal fast enough? And even when we do hit a milestone, why does the joy disappear almost i...

I once heard one of my favorite founders say that despite her huge social following, the channel that actually moves her business forward is her email list. Most of us already know email matters. But how many of us truly understand why? I brought Kieryn Wang, Founder of ALLMOST, to the podcast to help answer two questions: Why should founders treat email as a core growth channel? And how do you ac...

If you’re building something mission-driven, you know the real challenge isn’t choosing between purpose and profit, it’s learning how to honor both at the same time. We talk about “values” and “purpose” like they’re complicated strategies. But one of the things that really landed for me in this conversation is how simple the right decisions become when your mission is real. Who you are as a person...

Jon Levesque spent three years posting every single Tuesday and Thursday without missing a day. If he had vacations, he’d plan ahead. If he wanted a break, he built a backlog. That level of consistency grew into a global community and a career at Microsoft and DocuSign. But what happens when the community builder decides to start over? After getting laid off in 2025, Jon went all in on his startup...

Something I’ve come to learn about founders is that, for most of them, even if this path wasn’t their first choice, they’d still tell you they wouldn’t trade it for anything. They’ll also be the first to admit it’s really hard — that this path asks more of them than they thought they had to give. But there’s something in that discomfort that makes them feel alive. And for some founders, comfort is...

Dinner dishes soaking in the sink, kids tucked into their routines — that’s where my conversation with Tamara Laine began. Which felt fitting, because so much of her story is about weaving the everyday chaos of life with the wild, exhilarating act of building something new. Before she was a founder, Tamara spent 15 years digging into other people’s stories as a journalist and documentary filmmaker...

Some businesses begin with a market analysis or a spreadsheet. Verdant began with a friendship, a love of lingerie, and a belief that what we wear closest to our skin should move with us through every version of ourselves. My guest today, Eleanor, co-founded Verdant in New York alongside her friend Michelle — Verdant is their own story of resilience, craftsmanship, and confidence stitched into sil...

In this episode, I sit down with Shahd Asaly founder of Blue Meets Blue, a slow-fashion line that employs refugee artisans and weaves humanitarian values into every stitch. Shahd’s journey, from a background in psychology and trauma research to building a purpose-driven fashion company, quickly opened into something bigger: how business can be a tool for healing, for connection, and for challengin...

I am passionate about entrepreneurship because business is more than a product or chasing profit. I believe entrepreneurship is a vehicle for shaping the world we want to live in — because every choice we make as founders, from the products we create to the cultures we build, has a ripple effect. What we prioritize doesn’t just shape our companies, it shapes markets, communities, and even the expe...

This episode is about what happens when you trust yourself enough to do things differently. At the most fundamental level — your body, your intuition, your customers — it’s all about trust. I’m sitting down with Arielle Loupos. Her founder journey is a masterclass in restraint and trust. Where other founders might’ve rushed an MVP to market, she spent two years testing her product by hand — learni...

If you’re tuning in today and you’re feeling stuck, heavy, or unsure about your next step… this conversation could change it all. And I’m not saying that to be hyperbolic. That’s exactly what Carolyn Cooper did for me. Carolyn is a love-inspired leader — and when I say that, I don’t mean it in the fluffy, Instagram-quote kind of way. She literally leads with love. It’s the foundation of how she li...

It started as a small kitchen operation, hand-delivering meals to local dog owners in the Texas heat. No fancy warehouse. No marketing team. No plan to take on the billion-dollar pet food industry. Then, in an instant, everything changed. Amy Zalneraitis found herself holding the keys to a business she’d never planned to run — in one of the most complex, unforgiving categories in DTC: cold chain l...