Startups for Good

Diane Yoo is a results-driven entrepreneur, venture capitalist and angel investor with more than 15+ years of experience. As an accredited investor, she has invested in 30+ companies and is passionate about empowering women and diversity investors and founders. With only 1% of Asian females leading as Partner or Founder in Venture Capital, Diane is the first woman General Partner for medtech and h...

Alexandre (Alex) Lazarow has spent his career working at the intersection of investing, innovation, and economic development in the private, public, and social sectors. He is the author of Out-Innovate: How Global Entrepreneurs - from Delhi to Detroit - Are Rewriting the Rules of Silicon Valley (HBR Press). Alex is a venture capitalist with Cathay Innovation, a global firm that invests across Afri...

Ben Chesler has been a social entrepreneur since before he really knew what the words meant.  He just liked solving problems.  While in high school he co-founded a non-profit that went on to raise $100,000+ to combat the child sex trade. In college, he started the Food Recovery Network to bridge the gap and recover food and donate it to food banks and shelters in the community.  Over the next 4 ye...

David is the Founder and CEO of Founders Pledge, a global community of entrepreneurs finding and funding solutions to big global challenges. Launched in 2015, Founders Pledge has raised more than $2 billion in pledges from 1400 entrepreneurs in 30 countries and seen $450 million donated to charity as a result. Their members include the people behind some of the most innovative companies in the wor...

Tara is founder & CEO of Rupa Health, an integrative health tech company that aims to make root cause medicine the standard of care. Their first product, Rupa Labs, is a lab ordering portal for telemedicine providers that turns 15 hours of weekly physician admin work into 15 minutes. Tara joins me today to discuss how she bridged her worlds to create Rupa. She shares with us about the early da...

Dean Karlan is the Frederic Esser Nemmers Distinguished Professor of Economics and Finance Kellogg School of Management, and co-director of the Global Poverty Research Lab at Northwestern University.  He is the Founder and President of Innovations for Poverty Action, a non-profit organization dedicated to discovering and promoting solutions to global poverty problems, and working to scale-up succe...

Josh Clemente, Founder of Levels, is a mechanical engineer and CrossFit-L2 trainer. At SpaceX, he led a team to develop life support systems that sustained astronauts Bob Behnken and Doug Hurley on their May 2020 trip to the International Space Station aboard Dragon Endeavor: the first new crew-carrying spacecraft since 1980. Josh has also spent time designing and building Hyperloop technology and...

Spencer is founder and CEO of Spark Wave , a startup foundry (a.k.a. company builder / startup studio) that creates new software companies from scratch, designed to help solve big problems in the world. He has a PhD in applied math from the Courant Institute of Mathematical Sciences at NYU, with his specialty being machine learning (sometimes referred to as “artificial intelligence”). He also has...

At the time of recording, Desiree Vargas Wrigley was the President of the Young Entrepreneurs Academy and the founder of Pearachute, a company that helps parents and children drop into the best family activities in town.  Prior to launching Pearachute, Desiree co-founded GiveForward, the world’s leading crowd giving platform for people facing a major life event. Under her leadership, the company h...

SFG12 - Nat Manning, CEO of Kettle Nathaniel is the co-founder and COO of Kettle, a machine-learning-powered reinsurer that protects people from increasing climate change crises. Nathaniel previously led Ushahidi, the world’s largest open source data platform for crisis response. There he helped scale the Ushahidi platform to over 200 countries gathering over 10M first hand reports. Previous to th...

Ralph Clark is a technology company CEO who is equally committed to shareholder value and making a meaningful societal impact. Leading ShotSpotter since 2010, he has been dedicated to helping law enforcement agencies provide equal protection for at-risk, underserved neighborhoods, reducing gun violence and restoring police as trusted guardians of the community. Clark led the transformation of Shot...

Tess Michaels founder and CEO Stride Funding which is a venture backed student financing company. Stride offers a more flexible financing option to traditional student loans using an income shared agreement. Tess is a serial entrepreneur and has worked in investment banking at Goldman Sachs and Vista Equity Partners. She is an alum of University of Pennsylvania and Harvard Business School  Tess jo...

Adam Rein oversees all aspects of CapShift’s operations, investments, and technology. Since 2014, he has served as a managing director for MissionPoint Partners, an impact asset managing firm. Previously, Adam co-founded Altaeros Energies, a startup launched out of MIT to bring low cost wind energy and tele-communications to the developing world. Adam is also a co-founder of Greentown Labs, the co...

Tiffany is the CEO & Cofounder at Remix ( remix.com ), a collaborative software platform for 350+ cities to plan their mobility future. Remix is backed by Sequoia Capital, Y Combinator, and Energy Impact Partners. Tiffany was a Fellow at Code for America, launched the UX practice at Zipcar, worked as an innovation consultant at Continuum, and wrote for Dwell. With a background in architecture...

Seth Sternberg, Founder of Meebo & Honor Honor is working to re-invent in-home care for parents. Honor is  on a mission to enable parents to live in their own homes for as long as they please! Honor has 300+ HQ employees, is operating in 6 states and has raised $220M+ in capital. At Google Seth was Product Management Director for Google+ Platform. They launched Google+ Sign-In, a great way for...

SFG06 - Mara Zapeda, Managing Director at Zebras Unite Mara Zepeda is the managing director at Zebras Unite . In 2013, she co-founded Switchboard, an engagement platform designed to be used by leaders in higher education and independent schools (including MIT, Williams, Oberlin, Reed, Willamette, University of Portland, and Buckingham, Browne & Nichols) and membership organizations. Switchboar...

Patrick is the co-founder of FreeWill, a social venture which has helped organizations raise nearly $2B in new planned gifts, stock gifts, and qualified charitable distributions. Patrick and his co-founder Jenny were recently named two of the Top 50 Philanthropists in the World by Town & Country.  Today on Startups For Good Patrick shares with us his journey to entrepreneurship from change.org...

Kanyi is a Managing Partner at Kindred Ventures. He served as a Partner at Collaborative Fund, where he was an early advisor to Tala and Walker & Co., and a board member at Buffer, Camino Financial, Spruce, and True Link. Kanyi is a co-founder at Heartbeat Health, and previously ran growth at One Block Off the Grid (acquired by $NRG) and was an early employee at Doostang (acquired by Universum...

Bart Houlahan, along with his partners, Jay Coen Gilbert and Andrew Kassoy, co-founded B Lab in 2006. B Lab is a non-profit organization serving a movement of people using business as a force for good. B Lab is redefining success in business by shining a light on leaders through a corporate certification (2500+ Certified B Corporations in 50+ countries), and then providing easy pathways for others...

Professor Lynn stout was a professor at Cornell Law School, where she was an internationally recognized expert in the field of corporate governance, securities, regulation, financial derivatives, law and economics.  Lynn discussed her book, Shareholder Value Myth . Recorded in 2015 Lynn shares with me more of the insights from her book. This book is short and easy to get through, but packed with a...

Andrew Yang is an American businessman, lawyer, book author and philanthropist, as well as a former 2020 Democratic presidential candidate. He is the founder of Venture for America which connects young professionals to innovative companies in economically challenged cities.  Andrew joins me today to discuss Venture for America and his 2015 book Smart People should Build Things. He shares his exper...

Miles shares with you his vision for the podcast and highlights upcoming guests and intention of the podcast The first four episodes will be: Andrew Yang, Venture for America Lynn Stout, Professor Cornell Law School Bart Houlan, B Lab Kanyi Maquebela, Kindred Ventures “Join us to hear their stories, join us to be inspired to be a founder or join to be a part of a community that believes startups c...