Inspired with Alexa von Tobel

From the time she was a child in East London, Emma Grede knew she wanted to work in fashion. After a long career at the intersection of fashion and entertainment, Emma now sits at the helm of Good American, the fashion label she co-founded with Khloe Kardashian in 2016. The first fully inclusive fashion brand kicked off with the largest denim launch in history, bringing in $1M on day one, and has evolved to include ready-to-wear, swim, shoes and activewear. Emma shares what it was like to experience the roller coaster of launch day, why the ability to understand what customers want is a superpower, and why she thinks in-person retail experiences will be here for decades to come.

In 2015, after working at a high-growth startup, Jack Altman realized that companies were in need of technology to better serve their most important customers: employees. In an employee market, it falls on companies to engage and retain their talent. Enter Lattice: the leading people management platform for businesses with people-first cultures. Since its launch, Lattice has grown to support over 2,500 companies and was most recently valued at one billion dollars. Jack shares why performance feedback should be ongoing, how the journey of being a founder is an ultramarathon, and why he started a program to invest in Lattice alums who become founders.

Medicaid spends $10,000 on average for a hospitalization in NYC. What could you do if you had that money to prevent a hospitalization? That's the fundamental question Iyah and Toyin set out to answer at Cityblock Health. They have built the first tech-driven provider to bring better care to neighborhoods that have historically had poor access to quality, affordable healthcare. As a healthcare policymaker and a family medicine doctor respectively, these co-founders have quickly built Cityblock into a unicorn that serves over 70,000 members across the east coast. Iyah and Toyin share why they hope for a revolution in healthcare, how their unique approach is driving high NPS and avoiding unnecessary hospitalizations, and why founders must accept that they'll make mistakes every day.

API requests represent an astounding 83% of all web traffic, and Kong is the startup on a mission to power these connections. Founded in 2017 by Augusto "Aghi" Marietti and Marco Palladino, Kong's open source API platform has been downloaded more than 220 million times. Aghi and Marco started out in a garage in Italy and moved to Silicon Valley to pursue their dream, crashing with new friends like Travis Kalanick of Uber and Brian Chesky of Airbnb. Now, Kong has raised $171 million and was named to the Inc. 5000 list of fastest-growing companies. Aghi shares why a successful startup requires a "good wave, a good surfboard, and a good surfer," how acting as VP of Sales for a few quarters taught him empathy, and why seeing the early days of Airbnb made him prioritize design and community.

At this very moment, you might be wearing a device to track your heart rate, your steps, or how well you slept. But what if you wear a device that impacted how you felt? That's the vision behind Feelmore Labs, and their debut product, Cove — a scientifically proven new wearable device that improves sleep and cancels stress. Cove's co-founder, Francois Kress, comes from the world of luxury fashion, but he brings a lifelong passion for science. Cove is already showing great results, with 90% of people who used Cove for 30 days experiencing 41% less stress. Francois shares why the future of self-care is active wearables (not passive ones), what he learned from opening a Louis Vuitton store on the island of Saipan, and why he still starts every day with a well-organized to-do list.

Blockchain, NFTs, ethereum—the world of crypto is wildly complex for most consumers. But Flori Marquez and her cofounder Zac Prince had a vision to bridge traditional finance and blockchain technology through their startup, BlockFi. With a range of products, like a credit card that lets you earn bitcoin in lieu of reward points, BlockFi is bringing crypto to the mainstream. Since launching in 2017, BlockFi has grown to manage over $15B in assets, scaled its team to over 500 employees, and hit a $3B valuation. Flori shares why they started by building the hardest product first, why it was difficult to raise their first round of venture capital as a crypto startup, and how her Argentinian roots impact how she thinks about financial security.

Christy Turlington Burns is known around the globe as a model. She's been featured on thousands of magazine covers and was named one of Time's 100 Most Influential People. But Christy is also a repeat founder—of yoga lifestyle brand Nuala, skincare line Sundari, and for the last decade, not-for-profit Every Mother Counts. After experiencing a childbirth related complication of her own, Christy founded EMC to make pregnancy and childbirth safe, respectful, and equitable and has invested $21M globally across 29 programs in 9 countries. Christy shares why she became a global health advocate when she became a mom, how she thinks about the use of storytelling in EMC's work, and why lobbying for legislative change is more accessible than it looks.

As Certified Financial Planner, Stephany has long had a passion for helping families manage their money. And as a seasoned tech executive, Stephany realized that the most effective way to help hundreds of millions of families was to build new fintech infrastructure from the ground up. In 2019, she started Orum to make money movement smart and real-time—working to improve upon the 50-year-old system of ACH. Stephany shares why the self-driving wallet is coming sooner than we think, how Orum will lower the $11B consumers currently pay in overdraft fees each year, and why her secrets to success as a founder include Whoop and ice cream.

As a freshman at MIT, Alexandr was struck by his classmates' interest in AI. But he realized that despite all that AI technology could solve, there was no solution for managing AI-related data. So, at 19, he dropped out of college and started Scale AI. Scale now helps customers like Pinterest and Toyota accelerate the progress of AI and has grown to a valuation of $3.5B. Alexandr shares how AI is changing software development, why he believes in surrounding yourself with optimistic people, and how he learned to get comfortable with not being able to do everything at once.

Armon was on the PhD path, poised to become an academic. But he and his college friend Mitchell Hashimoto realized they had an opportunity ahead of them: building technology to support cloud infrastructure. They founded HashiCorp in 2012 and have grown to more than 80 million open source downloads per year, with a company valuation over $5 billion. Armon shares how a stint at a San Francisco startup led to his aha moment, how HashiCorp decided on an open-source model and enterprise customer, and why the company was remote-first long before Covid.