For Starters with Alexa von Tobel
For Starters brings you the stories of the entrepreneurs building our future. Hosted by Alexa von Tobel (Founder/CEO of LearnVest and now Founder + Managing Partner of Inspired Capital), listen to the tales of guts, inspiration, and drive behind the people and companies at the forefront of technology. Each weekly conversation digs into each founder's professional playbook — and starts to uncover what makes them tick as people.
Episodes
May 1, 2024 • 30 mins
From selling everything he owned to meet payroll to achieving a $2.7 billion valuation, Jett McCandless' journey with leading logistics company—project44—has been a story of grit and determination. Founded in 2014, project44 now operates the world's most trusted end-to-end visibility platform that tracks more than 1 billion shipments annually for over 1,300 of the world’s leading brands across 170+ countries. Jet shares how global ...
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April 24, 2024 • 31 mins
Growing up on a farm in Finland and training as a physicist, the path to entrepreneurship might not have been an obvious one for Sami Inkinen. But to date, he has founded two companies: Trulia, the online real estate marketplace that IPOed and eventually sold to Zillow Group in 2015, and Virta Health, the modern healthcare solution on a mission to reverse type 2 diabetes in 100 million people. If that weren’t enough, Sami is an end...
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April 17, 2024 • 28 mins
When Jes Wolfe was in highschool her dad and grandfather taught her how to invest. Fast forward to today, Jes contributes much of her success to that early encouragement that she belonged, and in fact, had a knack for business. After more than a decade of various finance and strategy roles, she set out on a new challenge as CEO of Rebel Girls: raise the most confident and inspired generation of girls the world has ever seen. With J...
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April 10, 2024 • 29 mins
Armed with a PhD in computational neuroscience, Naveen Rao has built not one, but two, AI companies at the forefront of his field. In 2014, he started deep learning company Nervana Systems, which was acquired by Intel. And in 2020, he started MosaicML to enable developers to maintain full control over the AI models they build. Just last year, Databricks acquired MosaicML in a $1.3 billion dollar transaction. Naveen shares his frame...
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April 3, 2024 • 31 mins
There are a special few founders whose contributions are so prolific that they are better known as inventors. Melissa Bernstein is one of those founders. She spent 30 years at the helm of iconic toy company, Melissa & Doug, where she designed over 5,000 innovative products for children of all ages and sold billions of dollars of toys around the world. Having been bit by the bug of a mission a second time around, she is now Co-Found...
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April 1, 2024 • 47 secs
After five seasons, sometimes a rebrand is in order. Join host and repeat entrepreneur Alexa Von Tobel for a new season of podcasts with a new title: What was The Founders Project is now For Starters with Alexa von Tobel.
You can expect the same deep-dive into the journey of being a founder, from future insights to "pinch me" moments to big wins.
Join us each Wednesday. New episodes start on April 3. And if you haven’t already, s...
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December 20, 2023 • 32 mins
Shiza's career path has been one of pivots: she went from a childhood in Pakistan to college at Stanford. Post-college, she started off at McKinsey, but left for the non-profit world, co-founded the Malala Fund with Nobel Prize winner Malala Yousafzai. And then in 2019, she co-founded Our Place,a mission-driven startup reimagining kitchenware for the modern, multiethnic, global kitchen. Our Place’s designs have resulted in more tha...
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December 13, 2023 • 31 mins
As the co-founder of Atomic, a venture fund that builds new companies, Andrew was no stranger to being a founder. But starting Hims in 2017 proved to be his biggest swing yet. He launched Hims to tackle the largest industry in the country that had not yet been touched by modern technology: healthcare. Today, Hims and Hers is a leading consumer health platform powering nearly 9 million medical visits and enabling access for millions...
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December 6, 2023 • 29 mins
What does it take to build the fastest-growing insurance brokerage in industry history? According to Greg Williams, it’s all about thinking three to four years ahead. When he cofounded Acrisure in 2005, he initially questioned the need for another insurance broker. Yet, by bringing his vision of the future into the day-to-day, Acrisure is now the sixth-largest insurance broker globally and the largest independent real estate servic...
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November 29, 2023 • 28 mins
What does it take to start one of the fastest-growing consumer marketplaces? According to repeat founder Grant LaFontaine, it starts with an open mind. When he and his co-founder Logan Head launched Whatnot in 2019, they went into it know that their starting place and ending place would be completely different. The team opted to be customer-centric instead of vision-driven. Today, Whatnot is a live shopping marketplace that enables...
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November 22, 2023 • 32 mins
In 1976, Jim McCann had spent a decade working in a group home for boys and was bartending on the side. A customer at the bar gave him a tip that there was an opportunity to buy a flower shop for $10,000. Jim took the leap and turned that single flower shop on Manhattan's East Side into a billion-dollar omni-channel retailer. He grew store by store, turning on a franchise model, expanding into new gifting categories (from The Popco...
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November 15, 2023 • 33 mins
Capital One is such an iconic brand that it is hard to imagine a time before it. But when Nigel Morris co-founded the business in 1994, it was wildly innovative—from the products it introduced to the market (like secured credit cards) to a data-driven approach to customer segmentation to an emphasis on team culture. Today, Capital One is one of the largest retail banks in the United States, serving more than 100 million customers a...
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November 8, 2023 • 31 mins
Harley Finkelstein first encountered Shopify as a user. Back in 2006, while in law school, he was one of the first merchants to use the platform. He joined the company in 2010 and now serves as President, helping to scale Shopify to millions of daily active users across 175 countries driving $444B in global economic activity. Today, Shopify is the all-in-one commerce platform to start, run, and grow a business—and is second only to...
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November 1, 2023 • 30 mins
Approaching a new industry as an outsider and as a team of one would be daunting for most founders. But Chen Amit, Founder and CEO of Tipalti, was a repeat entrepreneur building in a new arena. In the past 13 years, he has scaled Tipalti— a finance automation suite focusing on global payments and accounts payable—into one of the most highly valued privately-held fintech companies in the globe. With a valuation of $8.3B, Tipalti pro...
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October 25, 2023 • 31 mins
Over the past 13 years, Warby Parker has become synonymous with offering stylish eyewear at revolutionary prices. The company was born back at Wharton in 2010, when a group of classmates—including co-CEO Neil Blumenthal, came together around an idea they couldn't get out of their heads. Since then, Warby Parker has grown to over 200 brick and mortar locations and went public in 2021. They've also hit a giant milestone: distributing...
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The company’s director of finance explains how her job goes well beyond accounting. Tina Hetzer, director of finance at Pink Lily, is one of the rising financial stars who are helping to bring their businesses to the next level. She built Pink Lily’s finance team from scratch and has helped the company become one of the fastest-growing retailers in the country. In this podcast, part of the SAP-sponsored Growth Agents series, Hetzer...
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October 18, 2023 • 32 mins
In 2014, as an engineer at a delivery startup, Daniel Yanisse identified an opportunity to improve a part of the HR tech world that was known to be high on friction. He co-founded Checkr to leverage technology to transform the world of background checks. Today, Checkr is a leading HR tech company that processes over 30 million background checks annually—and has earned a valuation of $5B. Daniel shares why the company is committed t...
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Duolingo’s freemium subscription model, beloved brand and strategic investments have allowed it to execute its educational mission and become a cultural touchstone. Matthew Skaruppa, CFO of Duolingo, is one of the rising financial stars who are helping to bring their businesses to the next level. Since he joined the company in 2020, Duolingo has grown its base of monthly active users by more than 80%. Each month, 75 million users h...
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October 11, 2023 • 32 mins
Athena Calderone is a multi-hyphenate creator through and through. She is widely known as an interior designer, author, chef, and entertaining expert. Since she launched EyeSwoon in 2012, she's grown the brand from editorial platform into an e-commerce destination and hit major milestones along the way: earning over a million Instagram followers, writing two best-selling books, and launching a collaboration with Crate and Barrel th...
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October 10, 2023 • 12 mins
Mitch Reback, CFO of Sweetgreen, is one of the rising corporate financial stars who is helping to take their companies to the next level. When he started, Sweetgreen had 25 stores; today, there are more than 220—and Reback says the company is still in its “infancy.” In this podcast, part of the SAP-sponsored Growth Agents series, Reback takes a deep dive into his role as a growth agent. Capital is the engine that drives growth, and...
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