Startups for Good

Chris Fredericks founded Empowered Ventures, serves as president & CEO, and is a member of the board of directors. Chris has a diverse background in management, accounting and finance, business valuations, mergers and acquisitions, operations, people development, and strategy. In 2010, he proposed and led the acquisition of TVF ( www.tvfinc.com ) on behalf of the employees using an employee st...

Jeannie founded Funding U to provide a responsible loan option for academically achieving, low income students who needed last gap funds to complete college, but for whom the only available options were high interest rate credit cards. Her drive to solve this problem came from a decade of working in education nonprofits in Atlanta and an understanding that a mother’s education level holds the sing...

David Blake operates at the intersection of the future of work and the future of politics. David Blake has spent his career innovating in formal education and lifelong learning. He is on a mission to future proof our workforce and use learning and skills to enable everyone to fulfill their personal missions.  David is the co-founder and CEO of Degreed. Millions of individuals and hundreds of organ...

Nikhil is the technical cofounder of Hearth. Hearth was founded to give home improvement contractors and businesses the tools to achieve the American Dream. Hearth does this by providing an all-in-one tool suite for owners to manage their operations covering: lead management, quoting, customer financing options, invoicing, contracts, payments, and checking accounts. Nikhil has operated the busines...

Normally on Startups For Good, we interview external guests. Today, we turn the mic back around and focus on Purpose Built and what we're up to. Recently, we did a webinar called “Ready to Build. How do I know if I'm ready to be a startup founder?”  Have you had a nagging feeling that you'd one day like to start a company or have people told you they want to work with you or for you? Perhaps you'r...

Adam Jackson is the co-founder and CEO of Freelance Labs, builders of Braintrust, the first user-controlled talent network that provides enterprises with the highly skilled technical and design talent they need. Prior to founding Braintrust, Adam co-founded Doctor on Demand, the popular video telemedicine provider, with daytime talk show personality Dr. Phil, as well as his son Jay McGraw. Other n...

Shannon Farley is an experienced social entrepreneur. She was the founding Executive Director of Spark, the world's largest network of Millennial philanthropists. Prior to joining Spark, Shannon helped start The W. Haywood Burns Institute, a MacArthur Award-winning juvenile justice reform organization. Shannon holds a BA in American Studies from Georgetown University and an MS in Gender and Social...

Anna Counselman is co-founder at Upstart (NASDAQ: UPST), a leading AI lending marketplace that partners with banks to improve access to affordable credit. Upstart helps millions of consumers who don’t have access to credit, pay too much for it, or take on credit they can’t ultimately afford. Anna leads business operations where she drives focus on operational scalability, employee experience, and...

Before coming to YU, Noam was a professor at Harvard Business School for 13 years.  He was also the founding director of the Founder Central initiative at the University of Southern California and the Lemann Chair in Entrepreneurship there.  He won the MBA teaching awards at both Harvard and USC, and has written two bestselling books, The Founder’s Dilemmas (2012) and Life Is a Startup (2018). Noa...

Entrepreneur and investor with a love of learning, a passion for making dreams become reality and having a positive impact on the world. Husband, father and book addict. Miles is founder/CEO of Purpose Built Ventures Studio where he co-founds winning mission-driven companies with passionate entrepreneurs. Miles is an Investor in early-stage startups. As Founding Partner of Purpose Built Ventures,...

Jon has over 15 years of experience in energy investing and project finance. Prior to launching Carbon Direct, he was the Founder and Chief Investment Officer of BBL Commodities, a commodity hedge fund. Jon started his career at J. Aron, the commodities division of Goldman Sachs where he managed a large proprietary trading book across global macro markets with an emphasis on commodities. Jon was t...

Rafi Levi, BSc. Mechanical (Technion, Israel), MSc. N.A.M.E (University of Michigan, USA), has over 35 years of Engineering, project management, business development, and business management experience, in Israel and worldwide. Rafi joins me today to talk about how much fertilizer is wasted and turns into pollution because farmers don't have the data. The difference between agriculture tech and cl...

Erin Levine is the CEO & Founder of Justice Tech company, Hello Divorce. After 16 years as a divorce lawyer, Erin knows just how broken, toxic, wildly inefficient and unreasonably expensive the family law system is - with Americans spending 30 billion a year on legal fees alone. No longer wanting to be a complicit participant in a process that routes spouses through war, Erin set out to revolu...

Dr. Seth Feuerstein is the Founder and CEO of Oui Therapeutics. He has expertise across multiple areas of medicine, technology and business. . He is a founding board member of the Center for Biomedical and Interventional Technology at Yale and Executive Director of the Center for Digital Health, Innovation and Excellence. He teaches at the medical school and is the faculty advisor for Innovation i...

Jeff is a Co-Founder and CEO of Fig Tech. Fig creates onramps for underbanked Americans to repair their credit score and regain access to traditional financial services. Fig started as a collaboration with the United Way in Houston and became the first fintech to be both B Corp certified and a US Treasury recognized Community Development Financial Institution (CDFI). Fig's investors include Techst...

Born to immigrant parents in poverty, Jonathan and his family quickly learned the value and need for community (something he discovered later on was very hard to come by for folks on the street). Receiving an opportunity to study at the University of Michigan, Jonathan earned a degree in Informatics, specializing in UX design. After producing a documentary on social change ("Talim" on Amazon), Jon...

Misha is the founder of Effective Government California. He believes government is a vitally important institution, and that our responsibility as citizens is to help improve it. Today Misha will make the case that startup skills are partially transferable into the political and policy domain and encourages you to consider it when it's the right time. And perhaps some issues will be better served,...

Millennial, Immigrant, Uber driver (36000 mi) turned Techstars fintech startup founder @Line Financial. Previously Product Leader @PayPal (75 consumer fintech patent publications). Dad, Husband, Brother, Proud son of parents who came from extreme poverty, worked hard to give us great education, tolerant values and culture.  Akshay joins me today to discuss his company, the product and how it works...

After working in private equity and investment banking, Jacob Sills’s passion for criminal justice reform led him to start Uptrust, a communication and engagement platform focused on ending mass incarceration. To date, Uptrust has helped over 300,000 people across 22 states navigate the criminal justice system and avoid violations that could send them to jail or prison. Jacob received his B.A. fro...

Adena Hefets is the co-founder & CEO of Divvy Homes, a proptech company on a mission to make homeownership accessible to everyone. Today, Adena is one of the few female founders to reach double unicorn status and to be valued at approximately $2 billion. Adena set out to solve a problem she saw in the market: fewer people can afford to purchase a home today than two decades ago. To solve this,...

Thomson Nguyen is the founder and CEO of Nearside, a financial services provider and neobanking platform built on the belief that starting a business should be easier. A data scientist turned entrepreneur, Thomson focuses on providing an estimated 60 million entrepreneurs, micro-SMBs, freelancers, gigsters, and unbanked individuals with fair financial products, including free small business checki...

Alex's entrepreneurial journey started long before he ever knew the concept of a business plan. In fact, he did not realize it at the time, but his earliest experiences in childhood gave him the background and understanding of a problem (and how to solve it) that would lead Alex down the entrepreneurial path. Alex has since served in leadership positions at numerous social enterprises and technolo...

Tony Huang is the Co-founder & CEO of Possible Finance, a consumer fintech company focused on improving the financial health of lower-income Americans. Since 2019, Possible has provided small dollar installment loans to over 500,000 Americans to help them cover emergency expenses and build credit history. Recently, Possible announced the Possible Card, an unsecured credit card without interest...

Jens is the founder of NewImpact, a humanity benefit nonprofit based in Seattle, WA.  NewImpact is seeking to change the way the world finds opportunities and solves problems by pioneering the field of Tri-Sector Innovation.  NewImpact inspires and enables innovators and organizations to design solutions and business models that repurpose and realign the best resources available within the private...

Arna Ionescu Stoll has deep expertise developing complex, multi-touchpoint healthcare products that integrate seamlessly into people’s lives. As the Chief Executive Officer at Wavely Diagnostics, she is guiding Wavely’s technology through development and into viable commercial markets based on her decades of experience developing high impact, innovative healthcare products that solve real human ne...