Leap Forward

This summer, Leap Forward is going on a short break. We’ll be back this fall with more episodes. Listen for a look back on Season 1 and a taste of what’s next, including a family crisis over a wiped thesis, and some very big ambitions to change the way we think about energy.

Live streaming feels inevitable now. But it started as what Michael Seibel called a "dumb idea."In this episode, Michael traces the unlikely path from a post-Yale road trip to a 24-hour streaming experiment called Justin.tv. Years of pivots and spin-outs later, it grew into Twitch and created the $100 billion live streaming market that's now part of daily life. But first, it had to survive: the swattings, the stretches with only weeks of cash left, and a reality show built around one man's life that was quietly failing.We also hear from Justin Kan, his close friend and cofounder, about the early days and the moment everything turned: when they shut off the camera, handed the platform to anyone who wanted it, and finally watched it reach its true potential.

When Sean Duffy was a medical student interning at IDEO, he came face to face with a hard truth: millions of Americans with chronic disease weren’t getting the support they needed to actually get healthier. In this episode, Sean tells the story of how an unlikely mix of medicine and design thinking led him to spend a year refining an idea that would eventually become Omada - a company that’s since helped over a million people and gone public.We also talked to his former boss at IDEO, David Webster, about the intern application that fell on the floor, and the rare combination of expertise that Sean brought to a huge problem. It’s a story about how ideas don’t arrive fully formed, but get found, tested in strangers’ living rooms, and built through steady commitment.

Scribd took off fast - then hit a wall that nearly broke the company. In this episode, Trip Adler tells the story of building the “Netflix for books,” only to face the moment every founder dreads: when everything comes tumbling down, as growth stalled and much of the team walked away. But while others quit, Trip stayed - spending years rebuilding the company and eventually growing it to more than $300 million in revenue.We also talked to his dad, John Adler - an entrepreneur himself - about the question at the heart of it all: how do you decide if a company is still worth fighting for? Trip’s journey, from Scribd’s hard earned success to starting Created by Humans, shows that sometimes making it simply comes down to not giving up.

It’s common for a tech startup employee to start their own tech startup. It’s rarer for a startup employee to go on to build a baby formula company. When Laura Modi showed up at Walgreens at 11pm to buy baby formula for the first time, she felt ashamed and afraid. So she started a company that didn't just create a healthier formula, but built a community, participated in activism, and made business decisions that didn't sell more, but grew trust. Bobbie became the fastest growing formula company since the 1980s. And a major source of Laura’s business savvy? Her time at Airbnb, under the hospitality legend Chip Conley, who transformed her understanding of a “product.”In this episode, the unusual story behind a fast-growing startup that built a deeper social movement.