Inspired with Alexa von Tobel

In 2009, Adi and her husband Alon Cohen embarked on a home renovation. They quickly realized how challenging it was to find both inspiration and qualified home professionals, so they started a side project to bring technology into the home design space. Organically, the Houzz community blossomed to hundreds of thousands of users before Adi decided to take on outside capital and make Houzz her day job. Today, Houzz is the leading platform for home renovation and design and has over 65 million users. Adi shares how she overcame knowing no one when she first moved to Silicon Valley, how she built a thriving two-sided marketplace through word of mouth, and why she loves building the company alongside her husband.

In 2010, over a sushi dinner with a friend, Jason sparked an interest in what would become his next entrepreneurial adventure: transforming modern card issuing. With a deep intellectual curiosity for how credit cards work, Jason built Marqeta to bring game-changing card products into the world. Marqeta now works with customers in 39 countries, has a team of nearly 900 employees, and IPOed in 2021. Jason shares how he almost moved to Australia to start a Jamba Juice-style chain before Marqeta, how he persevered after nearly running out of money in 2015, and why he's fueled by the challenge of people not believing in him.

Family farmers, who are the backbone of the food and agricultural system globally, represent fast-growing small businesses looking to innovate. That's why Amol Deshpande left his career as an investor to start Farmers Business Network (FBN), the global farmer-to-farmer network and agtech company. FBN is on a mission to power the prosperity of family farmers around the world and now supports over 43,000 farmers responsible for over 80 million acres in the U.S., Canada, and Australia. Amol shares why—despite the stereotype—farmers are tech-forward, how his upbringing instilled an appetite for risk-taking, and why it's critical to invest time with your children consistently, just as you show up consistently at work.

Jay Kreps, Co-founder of Confluent and creator of Apache Kafka, discusses the significance of real-time data, the challenges businesses face in accessing it, and the transition from batch processing to real-time continuous processing. He shares his unique childhood and unconventional career path, as well as the struggles of transitioning from a tech leader to a CEO of a publicly traded company. The chapter also covers their IPO journey, interest in sustainable energy, and a recommendation to check out Confluent.io.

Growing up in Alabama, Josh Tetrick dreamed of being an NFL player. But when that dream didn't come true, he set his sights on a wholly new endeavor: to make a better version of an egg. He started Eat Just, a food technology company working to build a healthier and more sustainable food system. Since then, Eat Just has created America’s fastest-growing egg brand, which is made entirely of plants, and the world’s first-to-market meat made from animal cells. Josh shares how he got his plant-based eggs into nearly every major retailer, how he's overcome the challenge of scaling from a lab to national distribution, and why thinking about death helps him frame the urgency of his priorities.

In 2019, with a belief that work was becoming increasingly borderless, Alex Bouaziz and his cofounder Shuo Wang started Deel. They built a global compliance and payroll solution that helps businesses hire anyone in over 150 countries. Fueled by a shift to distributed work unlocked by the pandemic, Deel has experienced unprecedented growth: the company has raised over $600M in funding, scaled to over $100M in ARR, and now has over 1,000 employees in 75 different countries. Alex shares why he holds two KPIs sacred (monthly growth and customer satisfaction), the importance of keeping money in the bank and spending like you're a round earlier, and why larger companies are beginning to think more about output than input.

If you've heard of NFTs (non-fungible tokens), it's likely thanks to the work of Roham Gharegozlou. Roham is the Co-Founder and CEO of Dapper Labs, the NFT company that has created some of the most viral brands out there, from CryptoKitties to NBA Top Shot. Through his venture studio Axiom Zen, he started looking into crypto back in 2014. With a mission to bring play to crypto, Dapper Labs has been named one of the most innovative gaming companies by Fast Company and has created some of the most broadly used applications in the history of crypto. Roham shares how NBA Top Shot scaled to over one million users, why he thinks of NFTs as the next evolution of social media, and why entrepreneurship requires a healthy balance of optimism and paranoia. 

In 2011, when Pat Brown took a sabbatical from his position as a biochemistry professor at Stanford, he had already spent decades making a positive mark on the world. He had developed a technology that made it possible to monitor the activity of all the genes in a genome, a huge development in cancer research. But during his sabbatical he decided to address the environmental impact of animal farming. Enter Impossible Foods, which is now available in thousands of grocery stores and restaurants across the country. Pat shares why he's on a mission to completely replace the use of animals in food technology by 2035, why their initial go-to-market strategy centered on top chefs, and how trail running and large amounts of coffee fuel his entrepreneurial journey.

While working at a small sales intelligence firm in Las Vegas, Henry saw an opportunity to leverage technology to unlock opportunity for go-to-market teams. In 2007, he started DiscoverOrg from his law school dorm. Brick by brick, he scaled DiscoverOrg, leading the company through 11 acquisitions (including of Zoom Information, from which the business takes its name). Thirteen years after founding the company, ZoomInfo became the first tech company to go public during the Covid-19 pandemic. Henry shares why he believes in the American dream, what it was like to take a company public in a fully remote environment, and why the practice of gratitude journaling makes him a better founder.

As a serial cybersecurity entrepreneur and operator, Michael found himself investigating a $200M bitcoin hack that happened in 2017. As he dug into it, he realized there was a big opportunity to help companies manage digital assets securely. In 2018, he co-founded Fireblocks, the leader in digital assets and cryptocurrency custody, transfer, and issuance technology—or in Michael's words, "Shopify for crypto." Fireblocks now works with over 1,200 financial institutions and supports over 850 tokens. Michael shares how Fireblocks built up a referral network that drives a third of inbound inquiries, how serving on an elite military technological unit gave him a refuse-to-lose mentality, and why he believes NFTs will transform how people do business on the internet.