Leap Academy with Ilana Golan
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Leap Academy with Ilana Golan is a podcast for ambitious professionals who know they're capable of more and want their next move to be bigger, whether that's a C-suite role, a board seat, an advisory role or a portfolio career. Every week, Ilana talks with founders, CEOs and executives about the leap that changed their career, what pushed them to make it and how they made it work. Guests have included Shopify President Harley Finkelstein, Peloton co-founder Tom Cortese, Richard Branson and Gary Vaynerchuk. Ilana is a tech executive, entrepreneur, board director and investor in more than 100 companies, and she won Startup of the Year in 2023. She asks her guests about moves she has made herself. New episodes every Tuesday.
189 Episodes
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Communication skills and sales pitching: Dr. Forbes Riley explains how a painful, isolated childhood gave her the instincts behind $2.5 billion in sales. Fitted with braces, headgear, and a tongue thruster for eight years, Forbes had no friends and communicated by writing and pointing. Television became her only window to human connection, and that solitary study built a pitch instinct she later carried into nearly 200 infomercials. Host Ilana Golan and Forbes cover the psychology of making...
Founders and executives: Stacy Brown-Philpot traces her path from Detroit to Google, TaskRabbit CEO, and a $172M debut venture fund. Stacy spent nearly a decade at Google, growing from a 14-person team to leading over 1,000 people in India. She later became CEO of TaskRabbit and sold it to IKEA after launching it into four new countries. To build Cherryrock Capital, she met 366 investors over two years and closed 83 of them, including Goldman Sachs, JP Morgan, and the Ford Foundation. Her c...
This episode is dedicated to food creators and entrepreneurs: how Carleigh Bodrug built PlantYou into a bestselling cookbook brand while privately grieving her mother's lung cancer death. Carleigh grew PlantYou to 13 million followers while filming recipe videos from chemo waiting rooms. She signed her second book deal two weeks before her mom's diagnosis and kept the ordeal off social media. Her debut cookbook sold out in two days and hit the New York Times list. She also covers the infogr...
We’re bringing back one of our favorite conversations from the Leap Academy podcast with Shopify President Harley Finkelstein. Harley Finkelstein didn’t set out to be an entrepreneur. He had no choice. With his father out of the picture, he had to pay for university and support his mother and sisters. So, he turned to his go-to problem-solving tool: entrepreneurship. Starting a t-shirt business changed his life, eventually leading him to Shopify, where he became one of their first merchants a...
We’re bringing back one of our favorite conversations from the Leap Academy podcast with digital marketing expert and entrepreneur Neil Patel.
Neil’s story shows how hard work, persistence, and learning from failure lead to success. As a teenager, he started businesses, including building websites, but struggled with ineffective marketing agencies. This pushed him to learn digital marketing, and by 16, he helped a client make $20M, marking the start of his career. After facing challenges wi...
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