Inspired with Alexa von Tobel

What if every American were an investor? At Robinhood, Vlad Tenev is on a mission to make the financial system work for everyone. He co-founded the company in 2013, and the fast-growing brokerage has become an investing giant. With over 13 million users and $1 billion in funding, it's no surprise incumbents have been influenced by Robinhood's model, which drove an industry-wide shift toward commis...

Most startups set out to tackle massive problems, but working to develop a low-cost, long-duration energy storage solution that will enable the electric system to be 100% renewably powered? That's a big one by any standard. At Form Energy, Mateo Jaramillo and his co-founders are working to bring that very vision to life, leveraging the smartest minds in the energy storage space. Mateo shares why h...

What if you could perform like a superhuman at work? That's the idea behind Forethought, the AI company on a mission to bring intelligence to every single workflow. Co-Founder Deon Nicholas is building technology to augment—not replace—workers, starting with an AI for customer support. Since launch, Forethought has resolved over 500,000 customer support claims automatically, won TechCrunch Disrupt...

Topping the app store charts is a once-in-a-lifetime experience—unless you're a mobile entrepreneurship genius, like Prerna Gupta. She and her husband created hit music apps, like AutoRap, that have been downloaded by 350 million people. Now, Prerna is at the helm of Hooked, building a new television network for Gen Z that has already reached an astronomical number of viewers around the world. Hoo...

Upon reading that most successful founders start their companies by age 37, David Rubenstein decided to join them. A lawyer who worked in the Carter administration, David set out to start a private equity firm based in Washington DC. He co-founded Carlyle in 1987, and the firm has grown to become an industry giant that manages over $221 billion. David is an avid reader-turned-author who interviewe...

The story behind Slack—the communication platform used by millions around the globe—is almost a happy accident. Cal Henderson and his co-founders had been toiling away on a gaming startup, Glitch, when they realized the product of most value within their organization were the tools they'd hacked together to collaborate across locations. That collaboration tool spun off into Slack, which IPOed in 2...

What if you could get a life insurance policy in just 3 minutes, 24/7? That's now a reality, thanks to Peter Colis and his digital-forward life insurance startup, Ethos. Ethos is a next-gen InsureTech company that puts accessibility front and center, underwriting applicants in real-time via proprietary algorithms. To date, the company has raised $100M in venture capital and serves people ages 18-8...

Parts of our financial system are so deeply ingrained that innovation seems impossible. But after realizing how archaic the credit score was, Jason Gross set out to fix it. He launched Petal to reinvent the credit card and leverage banking data to democratize credit scoring. He's long been committed to fairness in financial services, having served on the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau’s Cons...

Building a business is a team sport. No one understands that better than Josh Reeves and his co-founders at Gusto. Since 2012, they have been hard at work building the leading people platform that empowers small businesses to take care of their hard-working teams. With a valuation of nearly 4 billion, Gusto now helps over 100,000 companies with payroll, health insurance, HR, and more. Josh shares...

Dr. Paul Judge is a serial entrepreneur through and through. After stumbling into coding as a kid, he has spent his career as an expert in information security issues. With a Ph. D. and 30 patented technologies in his name, he's co-founded three companies that have been acquired and is currently the co-founder of Pindrop, which has raised over $100 million in funding. Now, he's paying it forward t...

In 2011, Steve and his co-founders set out to build a company. They understood the power of a vertical strategy and realized that restaurants were ripe for innovation. Enter Toast, which powers restaurants with point of sale, front of house, back of house, and guest-facing technology. Toast has grown rapidly with a clear focus on their customers: restaurants. Toast has raised a whopping $850 milli...

Chris Bennett grew up in Miami, and out of his 31 first cousins, he was the first to go to college. Looking back, he realized it was his access to early childhood education that set him on his trajectory—to a degree from Wharton and a job in private equity. So, he launched Wonderschool with an aim to provide high quality early education to every child. The education marketplace has already matched...

At 15, Dylan Diamond built an app to help his high school classmates manage their schedules. The simple tool was an instant hit, with over 90% of the campus using the app daily. Fast-forward to college: Dylan met Max, and the two decided to go all-in on Saturn. They are working to build community around the calendar in high schools, with a big vision fueling them: to own the time layer of the inte...

What if you could discover what diseases you're genetically predisposed for? That's the problem Othman Laraki set out to solve at Color, with a tech-forward approach to genomics. Since launching in 2013, Color's aim has expanded to building public health infrastructure (making it no surprise that Color is one of San Francisco's biggest Covid-19 test providers). With degrees from Stanford and MIT a...

When Brynne moved to Bogota, Colombia after graduating from Harvard Business School, she quickly realized that there was no tech solution for finding a home. In 2019, she teamed up with co-founder Sebastian Noguera to tackle the $10 trillion Spanish Latin American real estate market with the launch of Habi. In just the past year, Brynne and Sebastian have positioned Habi as Colombia's largest home...

Trying to get a diagnosis for a myriad of symptoms she was experiencing, Julia Cheek ended up spending thousands of dollars on lab testing bills for results she never even saw. Julia saw an opportunity to transform the 25 billion dollar lab testing industry, so in 2015, she founded Everlywell. With 30+ types of at-home lab tests, Everlywell has scaled to tens of millions in sales and is sold in Ta...

When Olivier and his co-founder launched Datadog in 2010, they didn't write a single line of code for the first six months—despite having backgrounds as engineers. Out of the gate, they have made it their mission to listen to customers and understand what problems they can solve for them. Fast-forward a decade: Datadog is the essential monitoring platform for cloud applications and a true DevOps p...

When Daniel Gross was 18, he traveled from Jerusalem to Silicon Valley to join Y Combinator as the youngest founder ever accepted at the time. In just a few short years, his search engine startup, Cue, was acquired by Apple. Now, he's at the helm of Pioneer, a fully remote accelerator that backs unconventional startups from around the world—no matter the founder's zip code. Daniel shares why commu...

Why is it so hard to stay on top of your email? After building Rapportive, the first Gmail plugin to scale to millions of users, Rahul Vohra was ready to tackle the problem of email itself. In 2014, he started Superhuman with the goal of building the fastest email experience in the world. If his waitlist of over 300,000 people is any indication, he's done just that. Rahul shares why domain experti...

At his core, Jack is a creator. While his musical group Pomplamoose had taken off on YouTube, he realized that the mechanism for turning his fans' attention into dollars was broken. So, he built Patreon, a membership platform that makes it easy for creators to earn salaries directly from their biggest fans. Since its launch in 2013, Patreon has paid out more than $1 billion to creators on its plat...

Why isn't it easy to securely prove your identity online? That's the big question Blake Hall is working to solve with ID.me, the next-generation digital identity network, that is now used by government agencies, healthcare organizations, and retailers alike. A third-generation soldier, Blake started his post-college life leading a reconnaissance platoon in Iraq, for which he was awarded two Bronze...

Julie Bornstein is a seasoned e-commerce executive, who has spent her career building major retailers online, including Nordstrom, Sephora, and Urban Outfitters. After scaling Stitch Fix to over $1 billion in revenue as COO, Julie has launched The Yes - the digital department store of the future. Julie shares what it's been like to launch during COVID, how she has gained the confidence to set out...

After their day jobs wrapped, Wade and his co-founders spent their nights building what would eventually become Zapier, the workflow automation tool. Originally based in Missouri, they decided to put their full focus onto their budding startup by joining the Y Combinator accelerator. Zapier is now one of the highest valued companies to come out of the program. Today, it has millions of users and c...

When he was a child, he set up a stand in front of his house to sell his mom's clothes. In college, he ran an airline miles business with 17 friends working out of his apartment. And post-college, he started Brightstar, which became the world's largest global wireless distribution company, with over $10 billion in revenue. Marcelo Claure's career accomplishments run deep. He led Sprint through its...

When each member of his family grappled with a life-threatening illness—himself included—Zach Reitano found his mission as an entrepreneur: to provide personalized health care to everyone on the planet. In 2017, Zach and his co-founders started Ro. With offerings that span Roman (for men's health) to Rory (for women's health), Ro quickly took off and, in 2019, it was named one of the world's most...