Inspired with Alexa von Tobel

In 2021, Dave Rogenmoser got access to the OpenAI beta. He quickly spotted a giant opportunity: using GPT-3 to help people write great content more quickly. He co-founded Jasper and in under two years, scaled the company to over 100,000 users and a valuation of $1.5 billion. Today, Jasper is an AI-powered content platform working with increasingly large enterprises. Dave shares how AI-powered content became a must-have for companies, why he believes the world won't be dominated by a singular language model in the future, and why his next entrepreneurial swing after Jasper may be found on the golf course.

Over the course of her career, Divya Gokulnath has gone from teacher to cofounder of the world's largest edtech company. In 2011, she co-founded BYJU'S with her husband, Byju Raveendran, to create a world where every student can learn better. By harnessing technology, BYJU'S has scaled to educate over 150 million students around the world, and the company has become India's most valuable startup. Divya shares why her biggest strength comes from starting as a teacher, how BYJU'S assesses every acquisition through three specific parameters, and why being the founder of a hyper-growth company is like being "an elephant with wings."

John Berkowitz's default is to be in problem-solving mode. So after selling his first company Yodle for $340 million, he was ready to get back in the ring. In 2015, John started OJO, an industry-leading real estate technology company that partners with the top real estate teams and agents to deliver value for millions of consumers. OJO was early to use AI to help people navigate the world of real estate. John shares how the company delivers personalization at scale, why it's important to stay curious, and why he treats OJO as a family business and considers his wife and four kids as an extension of his executive team.

Over lunch with a nurse friend, Heather Hasson realized that the whole experience of buying scrubs—from the shopping process to product quality—was subpar. So she and co-founder Trina Spear set out to create a direct-to-consumer brand dedicated to modern healthcare professionals: FIGS. They went from selling scrubs out of a car in 2013 to going public in 2021 at a valuation of over $5 billion. FIGS was the first company led by two female co-founders to ever be taken public. Trina shares how the company quickly pivoted during Covid to produce protective gear, how leading a public company forces improvements in areas that are not working, and what she learned from her first job as a waitress at Johnny Rockets.

What if lawyers could work 10x more efficiently? That's the problem Jason Boehmig set out to solve in 2014 at Ironclad, a leading legal software provider that helps businesses create and manage contracts. But as AI's capabilities have grown, Jason now has his sights set on making legal work 1,000x more efficient. Jason transitioned from corporate attorney to founder, and Ironclad now has over 1,000 customers and a $3.2 billion valuation. Jason shares why Ironclad invested in the legal community early on, how the company is closing the "access to justice gap," and why he starts off every year by reading a poem to the whole company.

Today, Webflow is a company valued at over $4 billion. But it took Vlad and his cofounders repeated attempts to get the company off the ground. In 2012, they started gaining steam for their vision to allow people to create websites with no coding experience. The company now brings the power of software engineering to designers through an intuitive visual interface and has grown to over 3.5 million users. Vlad shares how Webflow has made its user community a superpower, why having two kids when he started the company gave him extra motivation to succeed, and how he predicts no-code and generative AI will intersect. 

While in business school, Jeff Raider co-founded Warby Parker and watched the iconic glasses company take off. So when his friend, Andy Katz-Mayfield, G-chatted him one day with an idea to reimagine mens' razors, Jeff was intrigued. In 2013, the duo started Harry's to create exceptional shaving and personal care products that better meet the needs of modern men. The company has since reached tens of millions of people and become the #2 men's shave brand in the country. Jeff shares how they signed on a German factory to manufacture a million blades before writing a business plan, how their first referral program led to over 100,000 email sign-ups in a week, and how he found the silver lining when the FTC blocked a planned acquisition of Harry's in 2020.

At fourteen, Reese Witherspoon’s acting career kicked off. In the ensuing decades, she has become an A-list star, earning an Academy Award for her performance in Walk the Line and starring in iconic films like Legally Blonde and Election. But despite her success, she found herself underwhelmed by the quality of roles for women. In 2016, she started Hello Sunshine, a cross-platform media brand and content company, to drive the production of female-centric content. Hello Sunshine was named one of Time Magazine’s 100 Most Influential Companies and was acquired for $900M in 2021. Reese shares why female collaboration fuels creativity, how Hello Sunshine has found success across so many media platforms, and what she learned from her first business (a custom barrette company in the third grade). 

Jyoti Bansal is a serial entrepreneur, through and through. In 2008, he first made the leap from startup engineer to CEO with AppDynamics, a company that was acquired by Cisco for $3.7 billion just under a decade later. After giving retirement a shot, he returned to the founder seat: he started software delivery unicorn Harness, cybersecurity platform Traceable, startup accelerator BIG Labs, and VC firm Unusual Ventures—and has more than 25 US patents under his name. Jyoti shares his simple formula for finding product-market fit, why ringing the Nasdaq closing bell was part of his Cisco negotiation, and how he's learned not to stress about things outside of his control.

Over his decade-plus at Microsoft, Eugenio Pace became an expert in cloud computing and identity management, co-authoring several books on the topic. His drive to solve the problem of identity management for fellow developers inspired him to start a company of his own, Auth0, in 2013. Over eight years, he scaled the company into a trusted global brand, leading to a 2021 acquisition by Okta in a $6.5 billion dollar deal. Today, Eugenio is the President of Customer Identity at Okta, serving Auth0's and Okta's combined customer base. Eugenio shares why they decided to offer parts of Auth0 for free, why he attributes his success to a CEO development program, and why he felt like it was the right moment to sell his company—even though Okta started courting him years prior.