Founder's Fridge

Send us Fan Mail "I could eat fried food every day, man. Fried chicken, shrimp, fish, french fries." Michael Conward, co-founder of MyLÚA Health, on what he gave up for 75 Commit while building an AI maternal healthcare platform that won the NIH RADx Maternal Health Challenge and landed a partnership with IBM. This conversation gets real about what founders actually eat. Michael went fro...

Send us Fan Mail "I've been eating ramen like several times a week since I was seven. It's kind of a miracle that I don't have scurvy." Isabelle Kent, head of Startup Leaders and founder of behavioral intelligence platform Gigsaw, on the convenience food that's followed her from childhood to founder life. In this episode of Founders Fridge, host Heidi Knoblauch talks...

Send us Fan Mail "I'm a huge fruit snacks person. I don't really do much candy anymore, but I love fruit snacks." Jonathan Bateman, secure-software developer and founder of deepfake detection platform Real Recognizes Real AI, on the one childhood food obsession he never outgrew. In this episode of Founders Fridge, host Heidi Knoblauch talks with Jonathan about building technolo...

Send us Fan Mail "I ate Count Chocula every day for breakfast. I'm not kidding. Every day. From when I started chewing food until I was twenty-one." Leanne Linsky, comedian turned entrepreneur and founder of live online comedy platform Plauzzable, on the cereal that defined her childhood and the letter she wrote to General Mills when there weren't enough marshmallows. In this e...

Send us Fan Mail "Food is a pharmacy. If you have premium gas, you're able to get more from your workouts, more gains." Kamal Singh, cofounder and COO of Halitra, on why he treats food like fuel for startups—and why he won't buy anything if he can't pronounce what's on the label. In this episode of Founders Fridge, host Heidi Knoblauch sits down with Kamal to talk abo...

Send us Fan Mail “I have a one-page manifesto called The Book of Uri . Rule one: no cheese unless it’s on pizza. Rule two: nothing purple.” In this episode of Founder’s Fridge , host Heidi Knoblauch sits down with Uri Geva , CEO of Cookie Dough Bliss , to talk about what it means to build a dessert franchise empire while eating like a kid. From buying and scaling franchise locations to leading a n...

Send us Fan Mail "I stockpile food as a comfort. I'm never out of any type of pasta. Never." Courtney Zaugg, founder of VentureVets—a 501(c)(3) accelerator supporting veteran and military spouse entrepreneurs—and co-owner of The Contractors, a general contracting company in Indianapolis, on why her pantry drawers won't close and why she made thirty different freezer meals in on...

Send us Fan Mail What do selling wild fruit in Albania and building a global tech company have in common? In this episode of Founders Fridge , host Heidi Knoblauch sits down with Arbër Kadia , Co-founder of Patoko , to talk about growing up in a resourceful family, learning entrepreneurship through necessity, and turning that same creativity into a company building a “super app” for everyday life....

Send us Fan Mail What if staying connected to home means filling your entire trunk with Chinese food and driving it three hours north? In this episode of Founders Fridge , host Heidi Knoblauch sits down with Jane Chen , founder and CEO of Letterly , to talk about what happens when you can't just eat any food. You need the food from your childhood to keep going. Jane grew up in Forest Hills, Q...

Send us Fan Mail What does startup life look like when your boardroom is a barn and your coworkers are three donkeys named Sassy Ass, Sir Assalot, and Total Ass? In this episode of Founder’s Fridge, host Heidi Knoblauch sits down with Hailee Greene, founder and Chief Everything Officer of GreeneAcres Processing, which aims to become New York’s first full-scale industrial hemp processing company. H...

Send us Fan Mail What if the meal you grew up with is what gets you through the hardest parts of building a company? In this episode of Founders Fridge , host Heidi Knoblauch sits down with Sumorwuo Zaza , co-founder of nicklpass , to explore how childhood meals and family traditions can shape the way founders lead and persevere. Zaza grew up in a Liberian household where “food is medicine.” Meals...

Send us Fan Mail In our debut episode, I sit down with Amy Gurske, founder and CEO of sayhii, to explore the roots of her entrepreneurial journey. From cleaning horse stalls as a child to selling trained horses to pay for college, Amy’s early ventures shaped the resilient, creative mindset that drives her work today. We talk about the founding of sayhii, her experience with burnout, and the reset...

Send us Fan Mail Nine years ago, host Heidi Knoblauch opened an oyster bar in a small town in upstate New York—fresh off a PhD from Yale and against all conventional wisdom. That leap into entrepreneurship revealed something she has carried with her ever since: food sits at the center of the founder journey. In this introductory episode, Heidi shares her path from running a restaurant to launching...