How Success Happens

Daina is one of the co-founders of Health-Ade, a kombucha company, that you might have seen at Whole Foods or on the shelves of one the more than 10,000 stores it’s available at in all 50 states. But five years ago, before its first or its second plant, before the $25 million in funding, it was just a side hustle started in her apartment with some friends and $600. Today, Daina will talk about tho...

Alfa Demmellash is a co-founder of Rising Tide Capital, a non-profit in New Jersey that provides education, training and support for underserved entrepreneurs. Alfa founded Rising Tide in part thanks to her mother’s example, a woman who left her native Ethiopia and worked long hours as a waitress and entrepreneur to bring Alfa to the States to have a better life. Alfa will share how this example s...

Michael Hyatt is a bestselling author whose latest book "Your Best Year Ever: A 5 Step Plan for Achieving Your Most Important Goals" uses the latest research to help us take control of our time and our dreams to build the lives we want. He’ll talk to us about the 25,000 people who helped inspire this book as well as the simple ways we all get off track and what we need to do instead.

You might know Cards Against Humanity as profane, dark and politically tinged party game. You might also know it for its pranks, like the Super Bowl ad that featured only a potato with the word “advertisement” written on it. But you might not know the company funds a scholarship for women pursuing STEM careers and has raised millions for causes like internet privacy and government transparency. It...

Nathan Kontny, the CEO of Highrise, is a tech leader whose career has followed a somewhat unconventional path. He was trained as a nuclear chemist and discovered a love for software programming when a broken ankle kept him from working in the lab during a summer internship. He’d would go on to found not one, or two but three companies, including a ‘Zynga for advertisers’ and Draft, the writing sof...

Joy Mangano is one of the most well-known female inventors of our time bringing us products like the Miracle Mop and Huggable Hangers and selling nearly $3 billion in product across her career. But not long ago she was a mom of 25 who needed to build a new life for herself and her three young children. She'll tell us about a simple mindset that helped her re-invent her life -- what you can do to u...

Adrian Ballinger, founder of Alpenglow Expeditions, is an expert climber who'd summited Mount Everest multiple times. But after a failed attempt to summit without supplemental oxygen, he realized he'd need to change how he trained and worked. At the heart of this new shift was a simple solution -- asking for help. He learned how to depend on the support and advice of both a team of experts he'd as...

Author Daniel Coyle spent 4 years researching military units, professional basketball teams, comedy troupes and even a gang of jewel thieves to better understand how great groups make big things happen. The result is his book, The Culture Code: The Secrets of Highly Successful Groups which has unearthed the importance of unsung skills that tap into the power of our social brains to spark collabora...

Melinda Richter of JLABs never imagined she’d run a health sciences incubator. But a near-death experience inspired her to tap into a new purpose -- helping entrepreneurs in the health sciences. The shift would require her to rebuild her life and tap into every experience she'd been exposed to, from her tech background to her humble upbringing growing up with 8 brothers and sisters in rural Canada...

Is there a shortcut to feeling good, handling difficult people and situations, and, in short, having a good day? Maybe. Caroline Webb, the founder of Sevenshift, studies how behavioral science can boost effectiveness and productivity. She has packed many of these strategies into her book, How To Have a Good Day, a sort of Manual for your Head packed with science-based shortcuts that work across cu...

How do you convince top authors to write books that won't be read for 100 years? Or a city to give you the forest to provide the paper for those books? Anne Beate Hovind does all this and more for this and a number of public art projects in her native Norway. It's a role that has her straddling the art and development worlds, working with artists, architects, city officials and even foresters to d...

What lies at the heart of humanity's ability to create? That's just what composer Anthony Brandt and neuroscientist David Eagleman set out to understand with their new book The Runaway Species: How Human Creativity Remakes the World. Brandt joins us to chat about how innovation really happens -- and how it's been used to remake business and our lives. He'll discuss -- and what we should all unders...

As the founder of Uplevel Security, a first-of-its kind cybersecurity platform, Liz Maida knows risk. She’ll talk to us about why we should consider a sharing economy for cybersecurity and what’s standing in its way. She’ll also explain why the conversation needs to change about everything from security hacks to more everyday failures -- and risk management’s role in making that happen.

Karen Young was likely born an entrepreneur. When other kids were drawing unicorns, she designed a street sweeper -- and the company she'd found to run it. Today, she's using that practical tenacity at Oui Shave, a beauty company she founded selling razors she designed. She’ll explain how persistence is more than just trying -- and how to see a ‘no’ as a both a ‘not yet' and a 'get ready.' She’ll...

Jim Davies knows creativity. A cognitive scientist, he’s the director of the Science of Imagination Laboratory at Carleton University, in Ottawa Ontario. He’s been called the next Malcolm Gladwell and he’s used scientific findings to explain everything from how we portray aliens on TV to why religion makes us feel one with the universe. He’s also a professional artist, swing dancer, calligraphist...

Witold Rybczynski an architect, professor and writer whose books often study the everyday things we sometimes take for granted, from the humble screwdriver to the ubiquitous plastic patio chair. He’ll talk to us about what we learn when we take time to study the things we might otherwise overlook -- and how an outsider’s perspective can give anyone an advantage.

Several years ago, kayaker and small apartment dweller Anton Willis became obsessed with origami. He had tapped the ancient art of paper folding to solve a unique problem -- designing a collapsible boat that could be stored in a closet. This obsession eventually became a business, and this architect became the founder of Oru Kayak. In this podcast he’ll talk about the long nights he spent tinkerin...

Ever work hard for something only to realize you don't want it anymore? Robin Arzon, a former corporate litigator, knew she needed a change and transformed herself into an ultra marathoner, cycler, best-selling author and one-woman fitness brand. She'll explain how she made the change -- and other crucial decisions -- by being her own mentor and with the help of some simple but powerful inner mant...

Matt Jozwiak is a chef by trade who knows the high quality ingredients left at the end of a restaurant dinner service often go to waste. It’s part of the reason he launched Rethink Food, a non-profit that transforms food that would otherwise be thrown away into delicious meals for hungry people. He'll tell us about why this simple solution required long chats with lawyers and the FDA and how his s...

Justin Schneider is an industrial designer who took the skills he honed designing athletic shoes for New Balance and Adidas to found Wolf & Shepherd, a line of performance dress shoes for men -- shoes that recently set an unofficial half marathon record at 1 hour 17 minutes. He’s also a decathlete who competed in track and field events while in college at Notre Dame. He’ll talk about the uniqu...

"Courage is just fear that held on a minute longer." That's the philosophy for Lissa Young, a former army aviator and current West Point professor. Her courage has guided her through a wide ranging career that has included flying Chinook helicopters in the Denali mountains, helping build a rum distillery in Massachusetts, shaping her own doctoral program at Harvard and coming back from a curveball...

Kyle Nel runs Lowe's Innovation Lab but he's not your typical tech guy. He's a behavioral scientist who uses his knowledge of how people work together (or don't) to get big changes to happen. His methods are non-traditional -- like giving comic books to execs. But they've helped build exosuits, holorooms and get a 3D printer into space. He'll explain the importance of behavior and and story to mak...

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