Startup Stories with Fexingo: Conversations About Founders, Funding, and Building Companies from Zero

In this episode of Startup Stories, Lucas and Luna explore how Canva went from a Perth dorm room to a $40 billion valuation by targeting non-designers. They break down the key numbers: how Canva reached 100 million monthly active users by focusing on the 99% of people who don't use Adobe products, and how its freemium model generated $1.7 billion in annual recurring revenue. The hosts discuss Canv...

Lucas and Luna dig into Duolingo's unusual path to IPO — a company that turned language learning into a mobile game and somehow made it work as a business. They focus on a single surprising number: Duolingo's 2025 revenue hit roughly $750 million, with a compound annual growth rate above 40 percent since 2020. The conversation traces how founder Luis von Ahn, a Carnegie Mellon computer science pro...

In this episode of Startup Stories, Lucas and Luna unpack how Notion built a billion-dollar productivity platform by refusing to compete head-on with established players like Microsoft or Google. They explore the company's counterintuitive product strategy, its unique community-led growth model, and the specific metrics that made investors believe a notes app could be worth $10 billion. Lucas brea...

In this episode of Startup Stories, Lucas and Luna unpack how Plaid, a company born out of a Y Combinator pivot in 2013, became the invisible plumbing behind fintech. They trace the journey from founders Zach Perret and William Hockey building a budgeting app called Tally to discovering that the real problem was access to bank data. Lucas explains how Plaid solved the screen-scraping trust gap by...

In this episode of Startup Stories, Lucas and Luna dive into the founding story of ZoomInfo, the B2B data intelligence company that went from a scrappy lead-gen tool to a $6 billion public company. They explore how founder Yonatan Stern discovered a goldmine in public business data—SEC filings, press releases, and website scrapes—and turned it into a subscription product that 35,000 companies pay...

In this debut episode of Startup Stories, Lucas and Luna unpack the moment Stripe crossed $1 trillion in total payment volume — a milestone that reveals how the company quietly became the financial plumbing for the internet. They walk through Stripe's origin story: how Irish brothers Patrick and John Collison dropped out of Harvard and MIT to build developer-first payments, why their bet on APIs o...