Midwest Moxie

Shane Farritor and Josh Riedy have small town roots and big tech attitudes.

Matt Rubin and Gordon Daily are using their technical skills to build growing businesses.

Jake Joraanstad knew about row crops and grain elevators. Julia Regan understood getting patients on specialty medications. Both saw an opportunity to digitize a paper process and seized it.

Mike Evans turned a desire to order take-out food more easily into Chicago-based GrubHub, which raised $200 million in a 2014 IPO. Now, Evans' insights are informing his latest startup, Fixer.

The first season of Midwest Moxie produced a treasure trove of tips from experienced founders about how to be an entrepreneur. The problem is we didn’t get to air all of them, so this special episode brings you tips from some of the founders ranging from startup finances to company culture and vision.

Jon Pearce got an internship with a startup while still in college, setting his path toward becoming a founder. Valarie King-Bailey spent more than 20 years working for other companies before starting one of her own. Despite different timelines, both found their calling.

Mo Faisal set out to build better and more energy efficient semiconductor chips. Lindsay Tjepkema wanted to update the business-to-business marketing playbook. Both founded startups to do it.

Niko Skievaski and his co-founders started building an interface for accessing health data so members of their coworking space could more easily grow their tech companies. But the interface itself turned out to be the basis for a scalable tech business that would provide a platform developers can use to build and distribute software that is revolutionizing healthcare.

Sridhar Deivasigamani knew the world was ready for smarter, more efficient water heaters. Zach Halmstad knew businesses needed more software tools to manage their Apple devices. It turns out that both of them were right.

Brian Wiegand started his first company in the early days of the internet, which he’s been mining ever since. Craig Markovitz found his success with medical technologies. They share one important characteristic: A willingness to take risks — over and over again.

Alisyn Malek has impacted sustainability as an engineer and innovation leader at General Motors, as co-founder of self-driving shuttle startup May Mobility and now as head of the nonprofit Coalition for Reimagined Mobility. Her work has influenced not only how new transportation technologies are being developed, but how they are being integrated into our social fabric.

Ankur Gopal struck out into the world but returned home to Kentucky to start his companies. Michael Chambers stayed in North Dakota and built a high-growth company right there in his own backyard. Both of their home states have benefitted.

Christopher Day grew up in rural Indiana without much visibility into any career. Tom Gajewski grew up in Chicago with his eye on a medical career. Both became serial entrepreneurs.

Jim McKelvey was a nationally known glass blower, but blew past that accomplishment to grow an even bigger reputation with Square. The company Jim co-founded forever changed the credit card industry, and perhaps even more amazingly, successfully fended off competition from Amazon.

Taralinda Willis never imagined she would start a company; Norman Sadeh never imagined he wouldn’t. Despite those different perspectives, both founded startups and built them into successful businesses.