Social Good Podcast

Where Tu’s Anna Luzader on starting One Heart Africa in 2011 (1:15), learning to be adaptable (2:34), receiving 200K USD in annual donations through her non-profit (4:09), working with villages in Mozambique and navigating ethical challenges of employing and supporting community members (6:06), resorting to hiring out (8:04), focusing on being a good reporter and providing accountability for their...

Enterprise Nation and Girls in Movement’s Polly Dhaliwal on (1:05) supporting startups and small businesses through Enterprise Nation, (1:45) matching businesses with support in less than 3 clicks, (2:53) growing Enterprise Nation, (3:47) supporting female founders looking for funding, (4:15) how Enterprise Nation works and operates, (4:28) capturing data from small business applicants to present...

Ecopreneur's Philip Toussaint on (2:47) pivoting his business from a media platform, (4:57) gathering feedback for a volunteer tracking platform, (7:51) the role of volunteering in students' lives, (9:56) working with user feedback to improve the platform, (12:23) reforming the team and rebuilding the tech stack, (13:38) transitioning to a new tech stack, (15:30) leading his team in a linear manne...

Nora Chiu discusses (1:54) discovering the startup ecosystem in Korea, (4:05) bringing Lydia AI to the Asian market, (6:42) Lydia AI's product offering, (8:15) partnering with financial institutions, (9:13) analyzing the government health cloud in Asia including Taiwan, (10:50) comparing health insurance plans in the West vs. the East, (14:12) delivering the message of Lydia AI and educating consu...

Ashley Werhun of Mentorly discusses (1:15) starting her career as a ballet dancer, (2:36) her aspirations to be a ballet dancer as a child, (5:13) her transition into tech, (6:41) the seeds of Mentorly being planted through mentoring relationships with ballet students, (9:47) the evolution of Mentorly in the early years, (11:20) the pivot from a B2C to B2B product, (12:49) a defining encounter wit...

Josh Collin discusses (2:08) starting Crescent Health from his dorm room, (4:41) moving to a founder house called the Atmosphere House with his co-founder Jason, (10:24) picking up funding from angel investors, (11:40) building Crescent Health from scratch, (13:52) bringing on big name coaches to Crescent Health, (17:40) early growth, (19:04) building for two different marketplaces, (25:22) path t...

Ricardo Alanis describes his work at Nowports including (5:50) visibility with data in shipping logistics, (7:14) increasing trust in data points for his customers, (15:12) providing financial data like inventory financing, (17:40) representation of goods imported from and exported out of Latin America, (19:48) his role at Nowports, (21:10) the role of AI in his work, (22:30) the Nowports platform...

Cristina Vanko discusses her journey to building Arrow, an audio dating app. Cristina discusses (0:30) her upbringing and her early experience as a designer and advertiser on the agency side, (3:32) jumpstarting her freelancing career and how an article about handwriting her text messages went viral, (5:00)(32:20) getting picked up by Penguin Randomhouse to write books on handlettering and adultin...

Chris Baek discusses how he got to working to provide IoT software services for domestic electrical goods manufacturers in Japan with his company InCloud. He discusses (3:01) his beginnings and reinventing himself at USC, (8:53) his first experience at a corporate job after college and what it taught him, (12:02)starting InCloud and his relationship with his cofounder, (15:00) InCloud's IoT servic...

Alana Karen (@alanatkaren) discusses getting her start at Google, making a switch from sales and marketing to the engineering team, the scrappy go-getter mentality in the early days at Google and leading the Google Fiber and Search platform teams. She also discusses finding work-life balance and documenting stories of women in tech along with their successes and challenges in her book The Adventur...

Shriya Nevatia (@shriyanevatia) discusses joining On Deck with Erik Torrenberg in the early days and growing the On Deck community through the pandemic. Shriya talks welcoming the second cohort of the On Deck Catalyst program, learnings from the first cohort including hitting ceilings and growing from Build Weekend and catering to an ambitious and younger audience. Links: https://twitter.com/shriy...

Catherine Winfield (@winfield_c) discusses her transition from architecture to design, working in healthcare design to take care of people with chronic health conditions and creating opportunities for students to thrive in education design. She gives us the scoop on what inspires her day-to-day design work, her philosophy on design leadership, measuring success in a nonprofit plus building Along,...

Julian Rachman (@julrach) discusses Two Sigma Ventures’ investment in Remote including the benefits of remote hiring in companies like managing data governance and healthcare across countries. He also touches on data-driven companies working to improve everything from autonomous vehicles to collaborative machine learning principles and open source data projects, as well as data privacy issues vs t...

Taylor Burton (@TBurton86) discusses creating smarter spenders through a collaborative banking app for kids. He talks over (3:05) how his experience with his first lease motivated him to create an app that increases your credit history, (15:45) creating an app that releases financial agency from parent to child, (17:58) partnering with banks to hand off teenagers in the Launch Offers Market after...

Atin Batra (@batraatin) talks about reevaluating the current education system through investing in edtech startups that cultivate different modes of learning including peer-based learning and cohort-based education; (21:50) receiving funding from the government and nonprofits to sponsor students from underserved populations; (26:52) investing in a startup that helps you learn languages through the...

Sharath Kuruganty (@5harath) talks about gaining experience from building Naval Ravikant’s website, helping startups launch on ProductHunt, tips for building in public and his journey building @shoutoutso_ from inception to launch and gives tips on how to grow your customer list with Shoutoutso’s Wall of Love. Links: https://twitter.com/5harath http://twitter.com/shoutoutso_ www.shoutout.so Contac...

Juan Salas (@jmzlx) of Celerative (@celerative) discusses his route to growing a distributed software team, the turbulence he has faced during Covid and an unexpected growth trajectory since 2020. Juan lays out what makes a remote team really work. Links: https://twitter.com/jmzlx http://twitter.com/celerative www.celerative.com Contact Me: www.twitter.com/soojunghan_ www.twitter.com/_socialgoodpo...

Paige Hewlett (@paigehewlett) of Margo (@call_margo) talks about the importance of the customer experience and journey in marketing and how everything ties back to the customer and meeting them where they are. In this episode, Paige touches on companies addressing diversity and inclusion in marketing to represent the communities they serve and creating an effective feedback loop between listening...

Mustafa Khundmiri (@mkhundmiri) describes his early journey and experience from building RSS feeds for websites at RapidFeeds, competing with FeedBurner and moving on from a data crash and his time at Plugmatter in the 2010’s building early-on plugins and providing WordPress support. Mustafa also provides perspective on social media today and building Wordew, his new collaborative blogging platfor...

Iris Guo (@IrisGuoo) shares her journey as the founder of Neutrify informing consumers about decreasing their carbon footprint through food choices. She describes her current journey managing a growing team, seeking partnerships with grocery stores and food startups and exploring different ways to align people with health consciousness through her product including nutritional information, purchas...

Kurt Daniel (@kurtodaniel) of Ubersmith reflects on his experiences at Kearney, Microsoft and MongoDB leading to his role as CEO of Ubersmith, a subscription business management solution for the cloud. Kurt discusses the evolution of the cloud services market, shares his insights on effective leadership styles and proactive ways to incorporate social responsibility in the workplace and be an inclu...

Gemma Bull (@GemmaCBull) and Tom Steinberg (@steiny) address the challenges that modern grantseekers and grantees face in the grant application process including website accessibility, an open and equitable application process and open data for the grantmaking process. Drawing on their own experience, they wrote Modern Grantmaking to address the lack of advice in the field that can cause the preve...

Chloe Duckworth (@duckworthchloe) comes on to talk about her work creating a product to help neurodivergent people communicate at Valence Vibrations. She got her start doing an internship at Stanford during high school and participating in a contest run by David Eagleman of Neosensory (@neosensory). Valence Vibrations is an iPhone app that operates on the Neosensory wristband to augment emotional...

Philip Toussaint (@ecopreneurphil) comes on the first episode of the show to talk about his work with Ecopreneur Media. We have an excellent discussion covering: his mission for leveraging media (particularly video content) as a platform for environmental activism, working with brands to create incentivized activism, sustainable fashion as a hot industry, the appeal for environmentalism in marketi...