Inspired with Alexa von Tobel

Joe Ariel went to college in Nashville, where he fell in love with local delicacies like Nashville hot chicken. Living in New York, he had a craving and wondered if his favorite restaurants could ship food to him. Thus, the idea for Goldbelly was born. Founded in 2013, Goldbelly is an ecommerce platform that empowers the best restaurants and small food makers to ship nationwide. Recognized as one of the top 50 websites in the country, Goldbelly now works with over 850 restaurants and covers all 50 states. Joe shares how Covid accelerated Goldbelly's growth, why restaurants are excited to open up a new online sales channel, and why a phone call from chef and restaurateur Jose Andres was Joe's most meaningful moment to date.

There is a major nursing shortage plaguing the US healthcare system. By 2024, we're on track to be short over one million nurses. Yet, for working nurses looking for a new job, the industry average job search lasted 90 days. Incredible Health, co-founded by Iman Abuzeid in 2017, has brought that search time down to under 20 days. Incredible Health is the fastest growing venture-backed career marketplace for healthcare workers. The company has partnered with over 500 hospitals to offer its proprietary matching software and play an integral role in supporting nurses throughout their careers. Iman shares why she picked the entrepreneurship path after graduating from medical school, how her grandfathers' experience as founders make her comfortable with risk, and why a CEO support group is essential.

In 2014, Mathilde Collin moved from France to California to take part in Y Combinator and to bring her vision for a better email platform closer to her target customers. Today, Front is the leading Customer Communication Platform that serves more than 6,5000 customers, including Shopify, Airbnb, and Hulu. Mathilde has raised over $138 million in funding, and through it all, has taken an open-book approach to sharing her journey of entrepreneurship—including making all of her fundraising decks public. Mathilde shares why she obsessively communicates Front's revenue metric across the company, how she's worked to build a low ego culture, and why she has no work apps on her phone.

The last decade has brought a wave of direct-to-consumer healthcare companies. Instead of building another, Sid Viswanathan and his co-founder Umar Afridi set out to create technology that could fuel the consumerization of healthcare. In 2016, they started Truepill with a focus on the pharmacy industry. Now, they power an end-to-end healthcare experience, have filled over 7 million prescriptions, and facilitate over 50,000 telehealth visits per week. Just three years after launch, Forbes named them to their Next Billion-Dollar Startup list. Sid shares the LinkedIn outreach strategy that led him to Umar, how bootstrapping Truepill in year one impacted their strategy, and why he believes founding teams should be able to launch with only internal resources.

If you asked how ubiquitous electric vehicles would be a decade ago, it's hard to imagine their current rise into the mainstream. So what's next for clean energy innovation? Kathy Hannun, co-founder of Dandelion Energy, believes the next frontier is geothermal heat pumps. At Dandelion, she's working to bring geothermal technology, an energy-saving way of heating and cooling homes, to households across the country. Along the way, Bill Gates' firm led her Series B, and she's been recognized as one of Fast Company’s Most Creative People in Business. Kathy shares why she was a reluctant founder at first, why she believes the adoption of geothermal is inevitable, and how she harnesses a constant need to innovate.

What if workers could acquire new skills and training, without taking on debt? That’s the value Guild Education strives to provide. Guild Education unlocks opportunities for America’s workforce through education and upskilling and counts Fortune 500 companies (such as Chipotle, Disney, Walmart, and Taco Bell) among its partners. Since founding Guild in 2015, Rachel has scaled the business to reach working learners in all 50 states and has helped prevent over half a billion dollars in student debt. Rachel shares how COVID-19 has accelerated the future of work, why she decided to make Guild a Certified B Corporation instead of a nonprofit, and what she learned from working on political campaigns.

What if we could make farming faster, safer, and more sustainable? Meet Bowery Farming, the largest vertical farming company in the United States. Irving Fain started the company in 2015 and has overseen the growth of a proprietary operating system—Bowery OS—which leverages AI, robotics, and computer vision systems to allow its farms to grow traceable produce at 100 times the rate of traditional agriculture. Today, Bowery Farming produce is sold in over 800 stores across the United States. The company has raised over $472 million to date and is valued at over 2 billion dollars. Irving shares how Bowery Farming grew during the pandemic, why he believes indoor farming is the future of the agriculture landscape, and why listening to skeptics can strengthen your business. 

In 2015, after selling his first company Meraki for over $1B to Cisco, Sanjit Biswas set out to bring the latest in technology to the world of operations. He re-joined forces with his Meraki co-founder and started Samsara: a company that makes it easier and more affordable for businesses that depend on physical operations to harness IoT data. Samsara has raised over $930 million in venture capital to build a suite of solutions that includes driver safety, mobile workflow and compliance, asset tracking, and industrial process controls. They have grown to serve more than 20,000 customers across North America and Europe. Sanjit shares what his first startup taught him about being a founder, why listening to the customer feedback loop is essential, and why allocating your time is the key to staying sane as a founder.

While mowing his lawn in Colorado, Jack Morrison had an aha moment: what if he could apply the latest robotics technology he was so familiar with to the challenge of caring for the outdoors? He teamed up with two co-founders to create Scythe Robotics, a company building autonomous robotics solutions for the $105 billion dollar commercial landscaping industry. Scythe Robotics has emerged from stealth with over $18M in funding and an all-electric, fully autonomous mower. Jack shares how robotics is helping an industry-wide labor shortage, why they decided to start mowing in the most challenging state (Florida), and why spending time outdoors is the best way to manage the rollercoaster of being a founder.

After business school, David Velez moved to Latin America to become a venture capitalist. But after finding a dearth of startups to invest in, he founded one of his own. Since then, Nubank has grown into the largest independent digital bank in the world. The Brazil-based company has over 39 million users and a valuation north of $25 billion. David shares how Nubank built a waitlist of over a million people in just 18 months, why the company's first product was a purple credit card, and how waking up at 5am every day makes him a better founder.