There’s Silicon Valley’s playbook…and then there’s Trinity Mouzon Wofford’s radical bootstrapping. The founder of Golde, the maker of superfood powders that can be blended to make lattes or facemasks, and which is sold at Target and Goop, as well as direct-to-consumer. Trinity explained how she built her company herself, mixing turmeric lattes in her kitchen, and pounding the pavement of New York City trying to get her self-designed pouches of blends onto cafe shelves. As a super-small, scrappy, brand, growth was happening naturally–online, and off–and the level of control she had over it was not something she wanted to give up. Trinity told host Christine Lagorio-Chafkin about how she reacted when investors came calling–and when major retailers proposed deals. 

When Kara Goldin launched her fruit-flavored water company, Hint, in 2005, she’d worked in media and tech--but never in consumer products, much less beverage creation or distribution. But armed with curiosity and verve, when she lacked know-how, she asked the right questions. And perhaps what she didn’t know was the most valuable asset of all--because the immense challenges that would come didn’t seem impossible. Goldin chatted with host Christine Lagorio-Chafkin about her biggest moments of doubt, including when Hint’s biggest customer, Starbucks, canceled its orders, which amounted to 40 percent of the company’s sales.

Is AI coming for our jobs?? ‘Fast Company’ senior staff editor Max Ufberg explains that it is . . . but that it’s not all bad news.And Yaz chatted with Loom CEO Joe Thomas—Loom is essentially TikTok for business, which sounds crazier than it is—about how video conferencing is here to stay.Also, a special thanks to Marfa Public Radio for helping us out with some recording on this episode! 

The five-time founder and author of Happier and The Awesome Human Project is known both for her public speaking and her research into what truly makes us happy. But when she was building her last company, she herself was anything but happy. Instead, she was prioritizing everything and everyone aside from herself–and that led to her spiraling into a really dark place. She spoke to host Christine Lagorio-Chafkin about how she learned to rebuild her emotional health–and what other founders can learn about emotional fitness being a key to keeping their company healthy, too.

We're taking a look back on our interview with Emily Hikade. Host Christine Lagorio-Chafkin spoke with Emily about the inspiration for, and challenges of starting up, Petite Plume, her fast-growing luxury sleepwear business.

Here's a look back at Christine Lagorio-Chafkin's interview with Jesslyn Rollins. Rollins' dad created a product in secret. She brought it to the masses. What would it take for him to let her run the company? They chatted about the electrolyte beverage company, Biolyte, that saw a remarkable three-year growth rate of 1,052 percent. The first in our season series exploring the stories behind fascinating companies that made the 2022 Inc. 5000 list of America’s fastest-growing businesses.

This is the untold history of how the internet almost didn’t happen. It’s an ode to fathers and daughters. And it’s a tale about the origins of the man-computer symbiosis that’s still profoundly relevant to our society today.Host Christine Haughney Dare-Bryan, an editor-at-large at Inc., is a James Beard Award-winning journalist who has worked for NBC News as well as three of the nation’s largest newspapers, and who created the Emmy-nominated Netflix series Rotten. Dare-Bryan’s connection to the story is deeply personal—her father, Joseph Haughney, was one of the internet’s founding fathers.By looking to the past, Computer Freaks dives into modern debates: Could we have prevented online harm from the start? What is the balance between free speech and online content moderation? How much human work should be delegated to technology and A.I.? And what direction should this growing labyrinthine network of computers take?Computer Freaks tells the dramatic, untold history of the internet straight from the mouths of its pioneering inventors: Len Kleinrock, Robert Kahn, Charley Kline, Steve Crocker, Vinton Cerf, and Bob Metcalfe, among many others. Exclusive interviews uncover hidden stories found nowhere else about the Arpanet, online harm, hacking, authentication, cybersecurity, Ethernet, TCP IP, packet switching, queuing theory, and the early contributions of women in tech.

Christine Lagorio-Chafkin interviewed Melissa Bernstein, the co-founder of $500 million toy company Melissa & Doug and the author of a new book about mental health, LifeLines, about her own journey to building a company while suffering from depression.

Emily Hikade is not a household name. That’s by design. She couldn’t be, for years. That’s because no one, not her family, not her friends, knew her actual job. It wasn’t until recently, after she’d started her own company, and after she’d had her cover lifted that they found out she’d been a case officer for the Central Intelligence Agency. And it was while she was a case officer abroad that she had a near-death experience that inspired her to start her own business. Host Christine Lagorio-Chafkin speaks with Emily about the inspiration for, and challenges of starting up, Petite Plume, her fast-growing luxury sleepwear business.

Davis Smith, the co-founder and CEO of Cotopaxi, founded his Salt Lake City-based outdoor apparel and gear company in 2014. He already had started a family–and he not only set out to found a company with a purpose…but with a sense of balance for himself and his employees. In this bonus episode, I ask him about heading out into the wilderness…and getting into survivalist mode–and he explains how he makes his family the priority, so his colleagues know they can feel comfortable doing the same.