Inspired with Alexa von Tobel

The last decade has brought a wave of direct-to-consumer healthcare companies. Instead of building another, Sid Viswanathan and his co-founder Umar Afridi set out to create technology that could fuel the consumerization of healthcare. In 2016, they started Truepill with a focus on the pharmacy industry. Now, they power an end-to-end healthcare experience, have filled over 7 million prescriptions,...

If you asked how ubiquitous electric vehicles would be a decade ago, it's hard to imagine their current rise into the mainstream. So what's next for clean energy innovation? Kathy Hannun, co-founder of Dandelion Energy, believes the next frontier is geothermal heat pumps. At Dandelion, she's working to bring geothermal technology, an energy-saving way of heating and cooling homes, to households ac...

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...

What if we could make farming faster, safer, and more sustainable? Meet Bowery Farming, the largest vertical farming company in the United States. Irving Fain started the company in 2015 and has overseen the growth of a proprietary operating system—Bowery OS—which leverages AI, robotics, and computer vision systems to allow its farms to grow traceable produce at 100 times the rate of traditional a...

In 2015, after selling his first company Meraki for over $1B to Cisco, Sanjit Biswas set out to bring the latest in technology to the world of operations. He re-joined forces with his Meraki co-founder and started Samsara: a company that makes it easier and more affordable for businesses that depend on physical operations to harness IoT data. Samsara has raised over $930 million in venture capital...

While mowing his lawn in Colorado, Jack Morrison had an aha moment: what if he could apply the latest robotics technology he was so familiar with to the challenge of caring for the outdoors? He teamed up with two co-founders to create Scythe Robotics, a company building autonomous robotics solutions for the $105 billion dollar commercial landscaping industry. Scythe Robotics has emerged from stea...

After business school, David Velez moved to Latin America to become a venture capitalist. But after finding a dearth of startups to invest in, he founded one of his own. Since then, Nubank has grown into the largest independent digital bank in the world. The Brazil-based company has over 39 million users and a valuation north of $25 billion. David shares how Nubank built a waitlist of over a milli...

From the time she was a child in East London, Emma Grede knew she wanted to work in fashion. After a long career at the intersection of fashion and entertainment, Emma now sits at the helm of Good American, the fashion label she co-founded with Khloe Kardashian in 2016. The first fully inclusive fashion brand kicked off with the largest denim launch in history, bringing in $1M on day one, and has ...

In 2015, after working at a high-growth startup, Jack Altman realized that companies were in need of technology to better serve their most important customers: employees. In an employee market, it falls on companies to engage and retain their talent. Enter Lattice: the leading people management platform for businesses with people-first cultures. Since its launch, Lattice has grown to support over...

Medicaid spends $10,000 on average for a hospitalization in NYC. What could you do if you had that money to prevent a hospitalization? That's the fundamental question Iyah and Toyin set out to answer at Cityblock Health. They have built the first tech-driven provider to bring better care to neighborhoods that have historically had poor access to quality, affordable healthcare. As a healthcare poli...

API requests represent an astounding 83% of all web traffic, and Kong is the startup on a mission to power these connections. Founded in 2017 by Augusto "Aghi" Marietti and Marco Palladino, Kong's open source API platform has been downloaded more than 220 million times. Aghi and Marco started out in a garage in Italy and moved to Silicon Valley to pursue their dream, crashing with new friends like...

At this very moment, you might be wearing a device to track your heart rate, your steps, or how well you slept. But what if you wear a device that impacted how you felt? That's the vision behind Feelmore Labs, and their debut product, Cove — a scientifically proven new wearable device that improves sleep and cancels stress. Cove's co-founder, Francois Kress, comes from the world of luxury fashion,...

Blockchain, NFTs, ethereum—the world of crypto is wildly complex for most consumers. But Flori Marquez and her cofounder Zac Prince had a vision to bridge traditional finance and blockchain technology through their startup, BlockFi. With a range of products, like a credit card that lets you earn bitcoin in lieu of reward points, BlockFi is bringing crypto to the mainstream. Since launching in 2017...

Christy Turlington Burns is known around the globe as a model. She's been featured on thousands of magazine covers and was named one of Time's 100 Most Influential People. But Christy is also a repeat founder—of yoga lifestyle brand Nuala, skincare line Sundari, and for the last decade, not-for-profit Every Mother Counts. After experiencing a childbirth related complication of her own, Christy fou...

As Certified Financial Planner, Stephany has long had a passion for helping families manage their money. And as a seasoned tech executive, Stephany realized that the most effective way to help hundreds of millions of families was to build new fintech infrastructure from the ground up. In 2019, she started Orum to make money movement smart and real-time—working to improve upon the 50-year-old syste...

As a freshman at MIT, Alexandr was struck by his classmates' interest in AI. But he realized that despite all that AI technology could solve, there was no solution for managing AI-related data. So, at 19, he dropped out of college and started Scale AI. Scale now helps customers like Pinterest and Toyota accelerate the progress of AI and has grown to a valuation of $3.5B. Alexandr shares how AI is...

Armon was on the PhD path, poised to become an academic. But he and his college friend Mitchell Hashimoto realized they had an opportunity ahead of them: building technology to support cloud infrastructure. They founded HashiCorp in 2012 and have grown to more than 80 million open source downloads per year, with a company valuation over $5 billion. Armon shares how a stint at a San Francisco start...

In 2007, a year before the Recession hit, Ken Lin set out to offer free credit scores and bring transparency to the credit industry. His startup, Credit Karma, now serves more than 100 million members around the globe and has continued to roll out free, consumer-first tools to help members manage the entirety of their financial lives. The industry took note of Credit Karma's exponential growth, an...

In 2013, a team of academics at UC Berkeley was working to solve massive data challenges that were impacting the tech companies in their backyard. Fast-forward and that team now represents the co-founders of Databricks, a data and AI company used by more than 5,000 organizations worldwide. In 2016, Ali Ghodsi stepped into the CEO seat and the company is now valued at $28 billion. Ali shares why he...

What if technology could make us safer in the real world? That's the problem Andrew Frame, founder of Citizen, set out to solve. The Citizen app, which combines location information with 911 intelligence, is now used by over seven million people across 25 cities. Andrew is a serial entrepreneur and tech whiz who is creating a fundamentally new category: safety. Andrew shares why he considers Citiz...

Alyssa had booked the perfect camping trip, but when she arrived, she realized the campsite was the ideal surfing spot—if only she’d known to bring her board. She decided to leverage the power of technology to make getting outdoors more accessible. In 2013, she founded Hipcamp, which has grown into the most comprehensive resource for unique outdoor stays. Since launching, Hipcamp has raised nearly...

Tristan Handy did not set out to build a venture-scale startup, backed by the likes of Andreessen Horowitz and Sequoia. But that's precisely the journey he's on after founding Fishtown Analytics back in 2016. The company started as a consulting firm, but Tristan soon realized that their core technology—dbt—was a powerful tool in the budding field of modern analytics engineering. Today, dbt is used...

After growing up in Eastern Kentucky coal country, Kiran Bhatraju is no stranger to the energy industry. But as the founder of Arcadia, Kiran is on a mission to make renewable energy accessible for everyone. To combat climate change, he's starting with most people's largest carbon footprint: the home energy bill. With a new model, Arcadia is working to transform an industry by going direct-to-cons...

75% of American adults are overweight or obese—and that number is only growing. Enter Calibrate, the modern, medical metabolic health business that is changing the way the world treats weight. Isabelle Kenyon founded Calibrate when her mom came to her for advice. Isabelle realized that the science around weight loss was clear, but the industry was lacking a consumer-first approach to helping peopl...

In 2020, the idea of attending an event virtually became commonplace. But Johnny Boufarhat came up with the idea for Hopin, the online platform that's redefining virtual events, years prior. After becoming immunocompromised in 2015, Johnny was searching for a way to enable networking digitally. He started Hopin in 2019, and in less than a year, scaled the company to over 3.5 million users and 50,0...