Claim OwnershipInspired with Alexa von Tobel
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Inspired with Alexa von Tobel dives headfirst into conversations with the most ambitious people on the planet. Host Alexa von Tobel, Founder and Managing Partner of Inspired Capital, gets under the hood of guests’ ambitions, from pivotal childhood moments to the critical advice that shaped their life paths. What does it take to be a true visionary, one who stares down monumental challenges with grit and resilience? Learn directly from those builders and problem-solvers whose determination is shaping a brighter, more inspired future.
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Shivani Siroya started Tala not because she wanted to build a company, but because one problem consumed her thoughts: 4 billion people were excluded from the traditional banking system and lacked access to essential financial tools to help them use, protect, and grow their money. After conducting over 3,500 interviews with micro-entrepreneurs globally during her time at the UN Population Fund, she witnessed firsthand the vast purchasing power overlooked by traditional financial institutions. So in 2011, she founded Tala, the first holistic financial platform designed uniquely for the global majority. Today, Tala is responsible for originating over $5 billion in credit access to a population that was previously blocked from traditional banking resources. Shivani shares how she reimagined traditional credit underwriting to serve a new population, why user experience needs to be at the heart of product development, and how Tala gained the trust of a population that was traditionally turned away.
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.
To build one successful company is a major achievement—particularly in an industry as complex as healthcare delivery. But Glen Tullman has done it time and time again. He digitized electronic prescriptions, led a hospital resource management company, and built the first at-scale digital health company to empower people with chronic conditions. He led his last company, Livongo, through the largest consumer digital health IPO in history. With Transcarent, he's back in the CEO seat, building a better healthcare experience for employees of self-insured companies. Glen shares why "telehealth" should just be called "health," why he'd rather be building a business than sleeping, and what role tech players like Apple and Amazon will have in the future of healthcare.
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.
If you've heard of NFTs (non-fungible tokens), it's likely thanks to the work of Roham Gharegozlou. Roham is the Co-Founder and CEO of Dapper Labs, the NFT company that has created some of the most viral brands out there, from CryptoKitties to NBA Top Shot. Through his venture studio Axiom Zen, he started looking into crypto back in 2014. With a mission to bring play to crypto, Dapper Labs has been named one of the most innovative gaming companies by Fast Company and has created some of the most broadly used applications in the history of crypto. Roham shares how NBA Top Shot scaled to over one million users, why he thinks of NFTs as the next evolution of social media, and why entrepreneurship requires a healthy balance of optimism and paranoia.
As a fourth-generation founder, René Lacerte's passion for helping small businesses is deep-seated. That passion has empowered him to grow Bill.com, the leading provider of cloud-based software that transforms the way businesses pay and get paid, into a massive success. Bill.com went public in 2019 and now has a market cap over $20B. Beyond the metrics of success, René's work is driven by his values and in the value he hopes to bring to the SMB community. René shares how patience has been a vital tool in his 15-year journey at Bill.com, why he took a horizontal approach to building his business, and why all small businesses need to leverage technology to stay ahead of the curve.
For the 10 million plus users of Expensify, the company's origin story will likely come as a surprise. In founder David Barrett's mind, Expensify was a fictional startup concept that he pitched to banks to gauge their reaction for an idea he had to solve homelessness in San Francisco. But when David lost his job in 2007, he decided to turn this fictional idea for Expensify into a real business. Expensify is known to most as an expense management app, but since going public in 2021, the company continues to throttle toward a broader vision: to be a platform that facilitates conversations that accomplish things in the real world. David shares how he's kept headcount to 140 while generating over a million dollars of revenue per employee, how an employee-first acquisition model was their key to growth, and how an async work culture means the sun never sets on the Expensify empire.
1It was his first visit to an apple orchard that gave Abhi Ramesh his aha moment. Seeing all of the misfit apples that were going to be discarded, it was impossible to ignore the inefficiencies in the food supply chain. So it 2018, at just 26 years old, he started Misfits Market. In a crowded online grocery delivery space, he is building an entirely new food value supply chain that fixes the many inefficiencies across the food system. Last year, Misfits Market rescued 228 million pounds of food and earned a valuation over $2B. Abhi shares how the company is bringing grocery delivery to the tens of millions of Americans who live in food deserts, why he believes grocery delivery will become more mainstream post-Covid, and why being a little bit naive is a positive for founders.
As crypto adoption ramps up, institutional investors are getting in on the action. And many of them are doing so through FalconX, one of the largest and fastest-growing digital asset brokerages, co-founded by Raghu Yarlagadda. An engineer by background, Raghu spent many years on Google's ChromeOS team, but an interest in the future of blockchain technology led him to a wholly new category. He launched FalconX in 2018 and has since scaled the company to a nearly $4B valuation with revenue growth of 30x year-over-year. Raghu shares why much of the world's value will be tokenized in the next five years, how FalconX reached its scale through word of mouth customer acquisition, and how entrepreneurship has become a shared language for his whole family.
What will the future of machine learning look like? According to Lukas Biewald, machine learning has the power to solve many of humanity's biggest problems. That's why he founded Weights & Biases, to build tools that help machine learning practitioners thrive. Weights & Biases is used and loved by over 100,000 practitioners to track their models, datasets and experiments. Lukas shares how the company works with partners like Toyota and Samsung, how he instilled a culture of product-led growth, and how the acquisition of his previous startup kicked off his daily yoga practice.
Gene Berdichevsky started Sila, the next generation battery materials company, over a decade ago. But, with an eye toward building a hundred-year company, he's just getting started. Gene started his career as the seventh employee at Tesla, where he engineered the Roadster battery. Now at Sila, he's focused on battery innovation in driving the larger shift toward renewables and electric vehicles. Gene shares how he fell in love with energy as an undergrad at Stanford, why having a huge impact depends on both breakthrough tech and an ability to scale, and how he had maintained patience through 55,000 experiments before Sila brought their product to market.
To build one successful startup is no easy feat, but to do it twice is even more impressive. It was a childhood spent in a small Turkish village that propelled Eren Bali's passion for working to solve problems of accessibility. First, he created Udemy to make education accessible, scaling it to over 10 million students worldwide. In 2016, he started Carbon Health to reimagine the healthcare experience from scratch. He's raised over $500M in venture funding and has ambitions to open 1,500 clinics across the country over the next few years. Eren shares why he believes the future is "omnichannel healthcare," how Covid went from a business threat to a major accelerant, and why he doubled down on communication skills in his second time around as a founder.
In 2011, Steve and his co-founders set out to build a company. They understood the power of a vertical strategy and realized that restaurants were ripe for innovation. Enter Toast, which powers restaurants with point of sale, front of house, back of house, and guest-facing technology. Toast has grown rapidly with a clear focus on their customers: restaurants. Toast has raised a whopping $850 million in venture capital and was recognized as the third fastest growing tech company in North America. Steve shares the secret to gauging product market fit before you build a product, how Toast won its first customers through competitive pricing, and why Covid pushed technology from a nice-to-have into a must-have.
As we all strive to increase our productivity, it's no wonder that productivity startup Notion has taken off. Since co-founder and CEO Ivan Zhao launched a prototype a few years ago, Notion has gained a cult following of over one million users. With a team of less than 30 employees, the company has already achieved a sky-high valuation of $800M. Ivan shares his approach to democratizing software, why he believes engineers are the scribes of our time, and why he moved to Kyoto to reboot the company in its earliest days.
Make sure to follow Ivan on social at @notionhq and @ivanhzhao.
What if there was a stock market for private companies? Carta is well on its way to realizing that vision. Henry Ward launched the company to 2012 under the name eShares. Fast-forward and Carta now manages over $575B in equity for 11,000+ companies and has a sky-high valuation of its own at $1.7 billion. Henry shares his vision for closing the wealth inequality gap, how he's hiring 50 new employees each month, and how his previous startup's failure led to Carta's success.
After meeting as freshmen at Georgetown, Jonathan and his two-cofounders set out to open a healthy fast food restaurant in a 500 square feet storefront. From those quaint beginnings, Sweetgreen has grown into a massive food platform, with over 100+ locations and 200+ outposts. Jonathan shares why authenticity is core to the brand, why their inexperience actually enabled innovation, and how he thinks about falling on the right side of this equation: as companies get bigger, they either get better or worse.
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this CEO/co-founder has an amazingly awesome 👍 Dad happy Father's Day 😄