Build Mode

After experiencing firsthand what Alzheimer’s does to patients and their families, Maria Shriver and Patrick Schwarzenegger, have launched MOSH, a nutrition company focusing on brain food. The mother and son duo combined her passion for advocacy with his experience in company building to create and a product and brand that will have people thinking about their brain health. They talk to Darrell an...

Kiki Freedman realized access to abortion care was already at risk long before Texas' SB8, and that was what inspired her to found Hey Jane, a virtual health care startup aimed at women with an initial focus on delivering remote abortion care. Hey Jane provides access to consultations with doctors, available 24 hours a day, and home delivery for FDA-approved abortion pills. Freedman tells us about...

After a legal career that included litigation experience at a big NYC law firm, as well as stops in both the Washington and Alaska Attorney General offices, Jackie Schafer realized that one of the major challenges in litigation is accurate and thorough review and citation of the mass of documents and prior judgements involved in a case. That's why she founded Clearbrief, which could help level the...

Job van der Voort knows a thing or two about running a remote company, as a long-time GitLab employee, the host of the Remote Work Podcast and the CEO and founder of a company literally named 'Remote.' We talk to him about shifts in how companies and employees are approaching remote work, and how that proved a great basis for the creation of a company that renders a lot of the fundamentals of the...

Tanya Van Court's professional career includes a lot of high-profile positions at Nickelodeon, ESPN, Discovery, and more. Despite her success working for others, she felt the need to create her own company in 2016 focused on something she saw as important to her own family, and to the world in general: Financial literacy. Goalsetter was born, and five years later it's going strong as a leading way...

Jelani Memory's 'A Kids Book About...' series began with just one title he created because he wanted to answer a question one of this own kids had. Through that process, Jelani realized that not only was there a need for a lot more similar books that deal frankly with difficult, important issue, but also an opportunity to change the publishing industry from the ground up. Links for this episode: A...

Hilary Coles co-founded telehealth startup hims & hers back in 2017, and the now-public company has expanded its focus considerably since then, including adding a full vertical dedicated to women's health. We talked to Hilary about building a healthcare brand focused on individual customer experience, with a brand designed to appeal to a new generation of healthcare recipients that haven't felt ca...

Jenn Graham's startup Inclusivv looks very different from when it begins Civic Dinners in 2016. The idea back then was to take advantage of small group dynamics around in-person meetings — and dinners in particular — to foster important conversations around difficult topics, originally focusing on connecting government with the community. Inclusivv took that model, shifted it to digital in the wak...

Celine Halioua has spent much of her career focusing on life extension technology — but her own company started with a specific target of extending the lives of dogs, rather than humans. We hear from her why she wanted to start with canine companions, though her larger goals with her company Loyal include extending and improving our own lives, too. Links for this episode: Loyal Connect with us: On...

Liya Shuster-Bier learned first-hand, twice over, that cancer care leaves a lot to be desired when it comes to everything beyond the basics, and it's incredibly hard to navigate not just for patients themselves, but also for their loved ones and care network. That inspired her creation of Alula, a platform designed to help consolidate the resources that cancer patients, survivors and their care ne...

Clarisse Beurrier went right from school to a lab-grown meat startup called Higher Steaks, and both her experience during her education and that first job in the field left her feeling like more needed to be done at a fundamental level, linking the work happening in research labs and universities to the commercial meat industry. That was the genesis for Animal Alternative Technologies, a company s...

Amanda DoAmaral was an educator herself before she decided to found a tech company aimed at improving the education system. That's a surprisingly rare credential for a startup founder in this area to possess — despite the obvious benefits of real, first-hand experience. Her company, Fiveable, focuses on modernizing (including a remote-first approach) a key and often overlooked part of education fo...

Oleg Stavitsky and his founding team at Endel are not your conventional startup founders: This artists' collective has been working together for years across multiple projects, and it just so happens that their latest collaboration ended up being a venture scale technology company. Endel is all about creating personalized soundscapes to trigger desired emotional and mental states, and the story of...

Julie Bornstein has a storied career that includes spearheading the e-commerce transformations of some of the world's most popular and successful retail brands. She was also at Stitch Fix as COO during a pivotal time just ahead of the fashion startup's IPO, but her latest move was to become a founder and start her own company for the first time. The Yes is an e-commerce retail app that aims to ple...

Aditi Shekar's childhood ambitions included literal world domination, but she ended up as an unstoppable entrepreneur instead. She's the co-founder and CEO of Zeta, a new kind of financial services company that's designed from the ground up for "multiplayer" banking — be it with a spouse, a trusted partner or anyone else. Aditi tells us all about how she's revolutionizing money management thanks t...

Ashley Sumner's original concept for Quilt was all about meeting up in person — almost an Airbnb for conversations. But shortly after launch, the universe threw a wrench in the works, as a global pandemic shut down or severely limited in-person interaction almost everywhere, particularly among strangers connecting for the first time. Quilt made a pivot into the suddenly crowded social audio space,...

Rob Schutz didn't expect to be working on a startup addressing the need for reliable, direct-to-consumer erectile dysfunction therapeutics, but that's where he ended up at Roman. The company has since pivoted to become 'Ro,' with a focus on digital health and telemedicine more broadly, as well as pharmacy services, but we talk to Schutz about how he went from Bark Box to human health, and what the...

Sara Spangelo's startup Swarm now has nearly 100 of its satellites in orbit, but the journey to get here has had plenty of challenges. After a track record that included working at Google X, NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory and plenty more, Sara realized with her co-founder Ben that including low-bandwidth network capabilities on tiny satellites was not only possible, but offered massive cost-savi...

Cory Siskind founded Base Operations after realizing that the enterprise operations security market lagged behind its equivalent information security departments in terms of tech and innovation. She tells us how she went from being dropped into a heap of responsibility for assessing street-level threats in Mexico City right out of school for large global companies, to creating a scalable, tech-pow...

After realizing there was a serious lack of options for sports fans who happen to be women, or who just don't fit the typical mould addressed by the existent industry, Roslyn McLarty and her two co-founders created The GIST, a sports newsletter that has since grown into a podcast and a website, too. The GIST doesn't shy away from the human side of sports, nor does it treat sports like a secret clu...

Leigh Honeywell has spent her career trying to prevent bad things from happening to people on the internet. She’s spent time at Slack, Heroku, and Microsoft, and is well-versed on both the technical and human sides of online harassment, and has seen first-hand how it can escalate to hacking or worse. That’s how she came up with Tall Poppy, a platform that helps organizations with a public-facing w...

As a career marketer, Lindsay Tjepkema was used to trying a lot of different strategies and seeing what works. She started to see one type of marketing consistently paying off, however — particularly for B2B brands. That's how she came up with the idea for Casted, a B2B podcast platform that makes it easy technically and in tiers of content for enterprise companies to create their own podcasts to...

After starting her career as part of Drake's management team, founder Courtne Smith has gone on to create a couple of different apps aimed at capitalizing on new and emerging behavior in online social interaction. Her latest venture, NewNew, is a bit like a stock market mixed with a crowdsourcing platform for the decision-making of creators, artists, and even just everyday, ordinary people. We tal...

We're joined by Dandelion co-founder and President Kathy Hannun on this week's show. Kathy tells us how her time at Google X led her to creating Dandelion, a startup focused on making geothermal energy accessible to all. She shares what it's like to work at Google's famous moonshot factory, how she came to pursue a moonshot of her very own, and how she grappled with the realization that her startu...

This week, our guest is Hana Mohan. Hana is the co-founder and CEO of MagicBell, a startup tackling the monumental task of solving notifications for other software products. We spoke to Hana about her path to entrepreneurship, being labelled 'a high-maintenance employee,' taking part in Y Combinator, and what it's like transitioning in the startup world, and being a proud transgender woman founder...