Inspired with Alexa von Tobel

It has been nearly two decades since Sebastian Siemiatkowski started Klarna, based on the simple idea of enabling customers to pay how they'd like. Today, Klarna is a fintech giant on a mission to revolutionize the retail banking industry. Headquartered in Sweden, Klarna is now a fully licensed bank operating across 45 markets. The company has scaled to over 150 million active consumers and over 450,000 merchant partners. Sebastian shares why he thinks of Klarna as a digital assistant that saves people time and money, why he thinks the banking industry will shrink (making Klarna a larger player in a smaller industry), and how growing up as a Polish immigrant in Sweden gave him a hunger for entrepreneurship. 

How do retailers find brands to feature in their stores? For years, trade shows were the default option. Until Faire entered the scene. Max Rhodes started Faire in 2017 as an online marketplace where retailers discover their next bestsellers from independent brands across the globe. Today, the company supports over half a million retailers in 15,000 cities and connects them to over 70,000 brands around the world--earning the company a $12B valuation. Max shares what it felt like when he realized Faire had reached product-market fit, why he thinks solely direct-to-consumer brands will go away, and why being a college athlete at Yale felt like entering the working world four years early.

Amidst a fintech boom over the past decade, Acorns has continued to scale dramatically. The app which allows consumers to save and invest has grown to serve over 11 million customers and has helped its users invest over $15 billion to date. Noah's path into the CEO seat was an unusual one: he's a 4x entrepreneur and former DJ for Jennifer Lopez. But growing up in New York City gave him a life and career purpose to help level the playing field. Noah shares how he thinks of Acorns as a financial wellness system, why behavioral economics have helped the company make an emotional connection with users, and why he's inspired by the quote "the process is the prize."

Three years after the first human genome was sequenced, Anne Wojcicki cofounded 23andMe. After a decade on Wall Street investing in healthcare, Anne started a new career chapter as a founder working to empower people with direct access to genetic information. Fast-forward and 23andMe has become the only personal genetic test with FDA authorization to deliver health information directly to consumers. To date, over 12 million people have taken a 23andMe DNA test kit. Anne shares why she adopted a low-margin and high-volume business strategy, why she believes personalized medicine is the future, and how figuring out time management was one of her biggest hurdles.

As an expert in global payroll and global workforce management, it was only a matter of time before Eynat took the leap to close the industry's technology gap. In 2016, she started a revolution in global payroll management when she co-founded Papaya Global. As the pandemic accelerated the growth of global teams, Papaya has scaled to work with over 700 companies, managing over $3B in total payroll. Eynat shares how customer discovery sessions impacted Papaya's product roadmap, why she believes in worst-case-scenario planning, and why she stayed the course with an aggressive growth plan in 2020.

In 2012, as a Ruby programmer, Sid Sijbrandij encountered GitLab, an open source technology that sparked his interest. Soon after, he decided to build a company on top of GitLab and has since scaled the DevOps platform to an estimated 30 million+ registered users from startups to global enterprises alike. A decade after the first GitLab code was written, the company went public at a valuation of $11B. Sid shares how their pricing model is based on end user, the value of starting a CEO shadow program, and why he decided to make the company's 2,000 page employee handbook public.

In 2007, Emmett co-founded a live streaming service called Justin.tv along with his childhood friend and neighbor, Justin. That first entrepreneurial spark grew into Twitch, an interactive livestreaming service that spans gaming, entertainment, sports, music, and more. Today, at any given moment, more than 2.5 million people globally are engaging with Twitch. While Twitch was acquired by Amazon in 2014 for nearly $1 billion, Emmett has stayed on as CEO and continued to scale. Emmett shares why the company's hardest engineering challenge was scaling live video, why the future of the creator economy is "micro-patronage," and the role Twitch plays in combating loneliness. 

When repeat founder Brian Long set out to build a text communication platform for businesses, he soon realized that the first version of his product didn't have the market pull he was looking for. After a pivot, Brian found himself building Attentive, the comprehensive mobile messaging platform for brands. Six years in, Attentive has become a major player in the e-commerce space and counts thousands of major brands as customers, from CB2 to Michaels. On average, Attentive drives 20% of total online revenue for its customers. Brian shares how he managed hypergrowth in 2020 as customers grew by 270%, why he always asks for quantitative feedback in every customer conversation, and why his unusual trick to destress at work is through reading World War II books.

Throughout his career, Dan worked at tech giants Amazon, Microsoft, and Google. In 2015, he set out to build a tech giant of his own: Convoy. Convoy is a digital trucking network that is transforming the trillion-dollar global trucking industry. Dan went from interviewing truckers on the side of the road to building a business that works with over 300,000 trucks across the country. Dan shares how the rise of mobile technology was an accelerant to his business, how he used YouTube to learn the language of trucking, and the pivotal advice Jeff Bezos gave him about building a leadership team.

Today, millions of homes across the country have installed solar panels. But that was not the case when Ed Fenster co-founded Sunrun in 2007. Since starting the company with his business school classmate, Sunrun has grown to become the leading home solar and storage company. Ed is driven by a deep mission to power the planet through the sun, and Sunrun, which went public in 2015, now operates in 23 states. Ed shares how he recognized a huge opportunity on the residential side of the market, how his successful business partnership was fueled by an alignment in ethics and decision-making, and why his secret to unwinding is playing blues piano.