Inspired with Alexa von Tobel

What if workers could acquire new skills and training, without taking on debt? That’s the value Guild Education strives to provide. Guild Education unlocks opportunities for America’s workforce through education and upskilling and counts Fortune 500 companies (such as Chipotle, Disney, Walmart, and Taco Bell) among its partners. Since founding Guild in 2015, Rachel has scaled the business to reach...

As we all strive to increase our productivity, it's no wonder that productivity startup Notion has taken off. Since co-founder and CEO Ivan Zhao launched a prototype a few years ago, Notion has gained a cult following of over one million users. With a team of less than 30 employees, the company has already achieved a sky-high valuation of $800M. Ivan shares his approach to democratizing software,...

Do you know your neighbors? When Nextdoor was founded in 2008, 50% of Americans knew one or none of their neighbors. Fast-forward and Nextdoor now connects 81 million neighbors across 11 countries, building both digital and real-world connections. Sarah Friar joined Nextdoor as CEO in 2018 and took the company public in 2021 under the ticker symbol KIND. Sarah shares how her childhood in Northern...

Shivani Siroya started Tala not because she wanted to build a company, but because one problem consumed her thoughts: 4 billion people were excluded from the traditional banking system and lacked access to essential financial tools to help them use, protect, and grow their money. After conducting over 3,500 interviews with micro-entrepreneurs globally during her time at the UN Population Fund, she...

What does it take to disrupt a trillion-dollar industry? According to Paul Monasterio, Co-Founder and CEO of Kalepa, it starts with a fresh outsider’s perspective. In 2018, Paul launched Kalepa with its flagship product, an AI-powered copilot empowering commercial underwriters to write more profitable business, faster. And just a few years in, Kalepa has been recognized as one of the most innovati...

When serial entrepreneur Hari Ravichandran discovered that his credit score had taken a hit due to identity fraud, he realized that consumers were facing an increasing burden to protect their digital safety—and there wasn’t an existing product that provided a holistic solution. So, as an engineer by training and an entrepreneur by nature, he set out to solve this problem for consumers. In 2017, he...

While Trevor Martin was an undergraduate at Princeton, he decided on a whim to take a class called Integrated Science, a course dedicated to encouraging students gifted in physics, math, or computer science to pursue an academic focus in biology. Unbeknownst to him, this class would end up being the catalyst that led him to his successful career as a biotech entrepreneur. After receiving his PhD f...

As the world of work becomes increasingly global, how can technology fuel the transfer of funds around the world? In 2022, Nami Baral started Niural, on a mission to build a generational product that enables businesses to manage payroll, HR, benefits, payments and compliance in 150+ countries—all in one powerful system. Nami is no stranger to leveraging AI in financial services. Prior to Niural, N...

From selling everything he owned to meet payroll to achieving a $2.7 billion valuation, Jett McCandless' journey with leading logistics company—project44—has been a story of grit and determination. Founded in 2014, project44 now operates the world's most trusted end-to-end visibility platform that tracks more than 1 billion shipments annually for over 1,300 of the world’s leading brands across 170...

Growing up on a farm in Finland and training as a physicist, the path to entrepreneurship might not have been an obvious one for Sami Inkinen. But to date, he has founded two companies: Trulia, the online real estate marketplace that IPOed and eventually sold to Zillow Group in 2015, and Virta Health, the modern healthcare solution on a mission to reverse type 2 diabetes in 100 million people. If...

When Jes Wolfe was in highschool her dad and grandfather taught her how to invest. Fast forward to today, Jes contributes much of her success to that early encouragement that she belonged, and in fact, had a knack for business. After more than a decade of various finance and strategy roles, she set out on a new challenge as CEO of Rebel Girls: raise the most confident and inspired generation of gi...

Armed with a PhD in computational neuroscience, Naveen Rao has built not one, but two, AI companies at the forefront of his field. In 2014, he started deep learning company Nervana Systems, which was acquired by Intel. And in 2020, he started MosaicML to enable developers to maintain full control over the AI models they build. Just last year, Databricks acquired MosaicML in a $1.3 billion dollar t...

There are a special few founders whose contributions are so prolific that they are better known as inventors. Melissa Bernstein is one of those founders. She spent 30 years at the helm of iconic toy company, Melissa & Doug, where she designed over 5,000 innovative products for children of all ages and sold billions of dollars of toys around the world. Having been bit by the bug of a mission a seco...

After five seasons, sometimes a rebrand is in order. Join host and repeat entrepreneur Alexa Von Tobel for a new season of podcasts with a new title: What was The Founders Project is now For Starters with Alexa von Tobel. You can expect the same deep-dive into the journey of being a founder, from future insights to "pinch me" moments to big wins. Join us each Wednesday. New episodes start on April...

Shiza's career path has been one of pivots: she went from a childhood in Pakistan to college at Stanford. Post-college, she started off at McKinsey, but left for the non-profit world, co-founded the Malala Fund with Nobel Prize winner Malala Yousafzai. And then in 2019, she co-founded Our Place,a mission-driven startup reimagining kitchenware for the modern, multiethnic, global kitchen. Our Place’...

As the co-founder of Atomic, a venture fund that builds new companies, Andrew was no stranger to being a founder. But starting Hims in 2017 proved to be his biggest swing yet. He launched Hims to tackle the largest industry in the country that had not yet been touched by modern technology: healthcare. Today, Hims and Hers is a leading consumer health platform powering nearly 9 million medical visi...

What does it take to build the fastest-growing insurance brokerage in industry history? According to Greg Williams, it’s all about thinking three to four years ahead. When he cofounded Acrisure in 2005, he initially questioned the need for another insurance broker. Yet, by bringing his vision of the future into the day-to-day, Acrisure is now the sixth-largest insurance broker globally and the lar...

What does it take to start one of the fastest-growing consumer marketplaces? According to repeat founder Grant LaFontaine, it starts with an open mind. When he and his co-founder Logan Head launched Whatnot in 2019, they went into it know that their starting place and ending place would be completely different. The team opted to be customer-centric instead of vision-driven. Today, Whatnot is a liv...

In 1976, Jim McCann had spent a decade working in a group home for boys and was bartending on the side. A customer at the bar gave him a tip that there was an opportunity to buy a flower shop for $10,000. Jim took the leap and turned that single flower shop on Manhattan's East Side into a billion-dollar omni-channel retailer. He grew store by store, turning on a franchise model, expanding into new...

Capital One is such an iconic brand that it is hard to imagine a time before it. But when Nigel Morris co-founded the business in 1994, it was wildly innovative—from the products it introduced to the market (like secured credit cards) to a data-driven approach to customer segmentation to an emphasis on team culture. Today, Capital One is one of the largest retail banks in the United States, servin...

Harley Finkelstein first encountered Shopify as a user. Back in 2006, while in law school, he was one of the first merchants to use the platform. He joined the company in 2010 and now serves as President, helping to scale Shopify to millions of daily active users across 175 countries driving $444B in global economic activity. Today, Shopify is the all-in-one commerce platform to start, run, and gr...

Approaching a new industry as an outsider and as a team of one would be daunting for most founders. But Chen Amit, Founder and CEO of Tipalti, was a repeat entrepreneur building in a new arena. In the past 13 years, he has scaled Tipalti— a finance automation suite focusing on global payments and accounts payable—into one of the most highly valued privately-held fintech companies in the globe. Wit...

Over the past 13 years, Warby Parker has become synonymous with offering stylish eyewear at revolutionary prices. The company was born back at Wharton in 2010, when a group of classmates—including co-CEO Neil Blumenthal, came together around an idea they couldn't get out of their heads. Since then, Warby Parker has grown to over 200 brick and mortar locations and went public in 2021. They've also...

The company’s director of finance explains how her job goes well beyond accounting. Tina Hetzer, director of finance at Pink Lily, is one of the rising financial stars who are helping to bring their businesses to the next level. She built Pink Lily’s finance team from scratch and has helped the company become one of the fastest-growing retailers in the country. In this podcast, part of the SAP-spo...

In 2014, as an engineer at a delivery startup, Daniel Yanisse identified an opportunity to improve a part of the HR tech world that was known to be high on friction. He co-founded Checkr to leverage technology to transform the world of background checks. Today, Checkr is a leading HR tech company that processes over 30 million background checks annually—and has earned a valuation of $5B. Daniel sh...