For Starters with Alexa von Tobel

A three-time entrepreneur and seasoned product leader, Todd Olson is on a journey to build software that makes software better. At Pendo, his Raleigh-based company, he's helped over 2,300 customers—from Salesforce to Toast—build product-led organizations. Nearly a decade into building Pendo, Todd feels he's finally found the entrepreneurial success he's been striving for throughout his career. Todd shares how he got his first customers through community-driven events, why companies should have separate product and engineering leaders, and how he incorporates his family into the company, often cooking for investors and customers in his home.

With the rise of fintech apps, consumers find themselves with accounts scattered across institutions and brands. But what if there was one financial superapp that functioned on a global scale? Enter Revolut, the company Nik Storonsky co-founded in 2015 that is transforming the way we do all things money. The app has seen exponential growth with more than 18 million customers across 35 countries, earning it a valuation over $33B. Nik shares how the company went from a single card product to a one-stop financial solution, how a great product scaled the company entirely by word of mouth for the first five years, and why the secret to his management philosophy is rooted in the math of hiring exceptional people.

When a consumer adds an AppleCare warranty to their purchase, it adds a layer of trust and protection. What if you could insure most purchases you make online? In 2019, Woody Levin co-founded Extend to modernize the warranty industry. As Covid accelerated the e-commerce, Extend's business has seen rapid growth, working with customers from Sur La Table to Peloton. Woody shares how his aha moment for Extend came from losing a fantasy football bet, why it was like to hire 350 employees in one year, and how he's used career failures as fuel.

In 2015, Ariel co-founded TripActions to transform business travel. In the classic Blockbuster vs. Netflix analogy, TripActions set out to be the latter—replacing travel agents and complex expense reports with a best-in-class digital experience. The company's tremendous growth came to a screeching halt in 2020, when Covid stopped business travel altogether. But TripActions adapted and came back even stronger, now boasting over 9,000 customers and a valuation north of $7B. Ariel shares how a disastrous business trip to Ukraine was one of his aha moments, what it was like to lose all revenue in a two-day span when the pandemic hit, and why distributed teams have now unlocked a new category of business travel.

When Kate Ryder founded Maven in 2014, to reimagine healthcare for women and families from the ground up, she was ahead of the curve. With virtual care delivery at its core, she's grown Maven into the largest telehealth network for women's and family health globally. Maven's growth started with a "boots on the ground" marketing strategy and was accelerated in recent years by Covid. Today, the company has a thriving B2B model that supports over 10 million families in 175 countries. Kate shares why her earlier career as a journalist makes her a stronger founder, how summers in the Adirondacks sparked her imagination and self-reliance, and how she created a new category in healthcare to fill in all the moments outside of the doctor's office.

Glen Tullman, CEO of Transcarent, shares his insights on the future of healthcare, including the rise of self-insurance and the importance of unbiased information and easy access. He discusses the role of tech players like Apple and Amazon, predicts a consumer-directed healthcare system centered around the home, and emphasizes the goal of providing basic healthcare for everyone.

In 2015, Amit Bendov was not looking to start a company. But he was looking for a way for his sales team to more automatically capture CRM data. He and his co-founder started Gong to help sales teams have better conversations with customers and win more deals. Gong quickly found product-market fit, which only accelerated when Covid pushed all sales calls to the digital format. Gong has grown to over 2,000 customers with a valuation north of $7B. Amit shares why he charged early customers a high price to stay in the beta, why he believes autonomous applications are the way of the future, and why you learn more from successes than failures.

Across the United States, there are 50 million people who have a bad credit score because of medical debt. That's just one of the many reasons Florian and his co-founder started Cedar in 2016. At Cedar, they are combining the best of fintech, healthcare, and consumer products into a unified platform that helps patients pay bills with ease. The company is valued at over $3 billion dollars and has helped over 12 million patients to date. Florian shares how he's overcome the slow velocity of the healthcare system, how he learned to show vulnerability as a leader, and why he believes M&A is undervalued by most startups.

What would it look like to better everyday life through robotics? That's the question Dave Ferguson and Jiajun Zhu set out to answer in 2016. After working as the machine learning and computer vision lead at Waymo, Dave co-founded Nuro to focus on autonomous vehicles that deliver goods (not people). The company's focused approach—on transporting everything from produce to prescriptions—aims to cut down on the 100 billion vehicle trips we take to run errands each year. Nuro's vehicles have been piloted across Texas, Arizona, and California, and the company is valued at over $8B. Dave shares what it means to design a passenger-less vehicle, how Nuro supports a more sustainable relationship to consumption, and why he aims to make Nuro a company where employees do the best work of their careers.

Across the globe, a trove of healthcare data is being created and amassed at scale, but how can the health system leverage this data to create better outcomes? In 2014, Arif Nathoo—with AM, MD, and MPA degrees from Harvard—took the humbling leap from healthcare executive at McKinsey to founder of Komodo Health. He and his cofounder set out to reduce the burden of disease with data-driven insights and powerful software applications. Today, Komodo Health works with everyone from pharmaceutical manufacturers to payers to startups, and the company is valued at over $3B. Arif shares why Covid was a watershed moment in utilizing healthcare data, why the future of healthcare will be fully centered on the patient, and what it was like to hire more people in the last year than the company hired in the first seven years total.