Peter Lee is the founder of COBA Coffee (@coba.coffee), the makers of the coffee chocolate bar. His coffee experience started from building his own coffee roaster with a tripper and a pot to sourcing coffee in Latin American countries, and to date COBA has raised over $75,000 from crowdfunding campaigns. Prior to his coffee journey, Peter dropped out of high school as a straight-A student because a fire burned down his parents’ toy store. Peter has since been rebuilding his identity through v...
Joe Gagnon is a seasoned CXO executive and endurance athlete. He's consulted for companies in over 45 countries and, as a turnaround CEO, Joe has taken over from the founder on three occasions to restructure businesses and put them on a path to growth. As an athlete, Joe completed six Ironman Triathlons and over 80 marathon+ distance races — all after the age of 40. In 2017, he ran Six Marathons across Six Consecutive Days on Six Continents. He recently published his book Living the High Perf...
Shang is a personal finance influencer on Instagram @savemycents. She reached millionaire status in her 30s through frugal living, raising her income, and investing her savings, and is work optional today. She has a passion for teaching everyone to get financially fit and save for a retirement, no matter what background. In this episode, Shang shares her experience of hustling and saving in her 20s - as a management consultant by day and as a wedding photographer on nights and weekends...
Maria Eilersen is a PR coach and the founder of Be Conscious PR, helping conscious entrepreneurs and startups reach millions of people. With a journalism degree from NYU, global PR experience in the startup space and 300+ hours of yoga teacher training under her belt, Maria is on a mission to demystify PR for heart-led business owners. As a third culture kid, Maria was born in Denmark, grew up in Tokyo, and spent the last decade adulting in New York and London before calling Lisbon home. When...
To cap off Season 1, Severin from Episode 4 comes back to interview me, Jane Z.! We take a trip down through my multi-leg journey of entrepreneurship, from building a neighborhood piano school at age 13 to designing a student-run cafe at McGill University, building a clean tech startup community in Vancouver, to co-founding the first-ever classroom design platform. We also discuss my research on food systems, from growing tomatoes in urban greenhouses to making acorn tofu. Sev and I pul...
Vivienne Walz is a former Health Scientist at the CDC who worked on the 2018 Ebola Outbreak response in the DRC, where she focused on analyzing community feedback from Red Cross volunteers. Today, Vivienne supports the Covid-19 response as a community health liaison in the Kahnawà:ke First Nations reserve outside of Montreal. Vivienne holds an M.Sc. in Public Health and B.A.&Sc. in Cognitive Science, both from McGill University, and she’s built a career around community well-being, sustai...
Mark Pan is the Director of HR & Business Strategy at Newsela, an EdTech platform that delivers news-related content to students at different reading levels. After graduating from the University of Pennsylvania with a degree in Urban Education, Mark took his knowledge to the classroom, teaching English in San Jose, Hong Kong, and Malaysia. He then brought his teaching skills into the tech industry, where he managed partnerships at Coursera and later joined Newsela in business strategy and...
Carly James is the Executive Director of Global Development at ThinkPlace Global, a strategic design thinking firm that tackles the UN's Sustainable Development Goals. Carly is trained as a cultural anthropologist, and she’s worked on design research projects like behavior change in the health system for Somali women, disaster resilience in Myanmar, HIV testing in West Africa, and co-designing the future state of male contraceptives. Carly holds two Master's degrees — an MDes in Risk and Resi...
Shahil Patel (@shahilbollyx) is the Co-Founder and CEO of BollyX, a Bollywood-based fitness class that’s grown into a global movement. BollyX has been featured on Shark Tank and in 2009, Shahil led the first-ever Bollywood dance team to the final rounds of America’s Got Talent. Shahil has choreographed, produced, and led over 200 Bollywood performances and has performed alongside superstars such as Gloria Estefan, Jamie Foxx, Enrique Iglesias and Diana Ross! In this episode, we talk about how...
Chi Pham is a UX Designer at Google, a Masters of Public Health candidate at UC Berkeley, and an Ironman triathlete. Chi empowers over 120,000 women to embrace their badass selves through her Instagram account @fit_pham, where she’s been documenting her fitness journey over the years. Chi’s parents fled the Vietnam War and landed in San Diego, where Chi grew up and learned to swim, later swimming competitively all throughout college. In this episode, we talk about how we both transition...
Dr. John Rhee is a neurology resident at Mass General Brigham at Harvard Medical School and the co-founder of the podcast and platform The Hippocratic Forum. He has published articles on palliative care, physical-assisted suicide, and on loneliness at hospitals in the time of COVID (links below). He is also a devout Catholic and one of the smiliest people you will ever meet. In this episode, we talk about how John got over his fear of death by volunteering at a hospice, how his coursewo...
Natasha Jung is the Founder of Cold Tea Collective (@coldteacollective), a new media platform for stories from Asian millennials in Canada and the U.S. Today, the platform features stories across topics like arts and culture, food, career, and mental health, from over 30 contributors across North America. Natasha was inspired to found CTC when she attended the Vancouver Asian Film Festival a few years ago. She described it as the first time seeing herself on screen, and she wanted to share th...
Ryan Chen is the Co-founder of Neuro (@neurogum), a company that makes functional gum and mints to energize, calm, and focus your mind. On paper, Ryan might look like a familiar startup success — Forbes 30 Under 30, Shark Tank contestant, revenue in the millions, and an investor in other consumer startups. What these wins don’t capture is how Ryan had to literally rebuild his life from the bottom up. Over a decade ago when he was 19, Ryan shattered his spine in a bad snowboarding accide...
Dani Calleiro (@consciouscalleiro), formerly known as Dani Cimorelli, is a 20-year old YouTube Creator and former pop star. Dani grew up in a house of 10 siblings and sang in a band with her five sisters called Cimorelli. Their YouTube covers were an instant hit, and before long they garnered a fanbase of over 5.5 million subscribers. Dani was only 10 when she joined the band and they signed with Universal Music record label. Over the next decade, Dani got to live the Hannah Montana dream — C...
Harriet Kim and Mirae Lee are the Co-founders of Choa Magazine (@choamagazine), an online platform for Korean diasporic stories. Harriet is a photographer, writer, community arts organizer, and environmentalist. She co-created a portrait series called Dressed in Layers: A Hanbok Project and is the founder of the Korean Canadian Writers’ Collective. Mirae is a cultural producer, bilingual writer, translator, and illustrator. She has worked with various Tkaronto-based not-for-profit arts organi...
Stephen Sun is a Licensed Architect and CEO/Co-founder of Development Integration Group, or DIG. His team is building an AI-based “digital architect” that will eventually allow anyone to design their own fully-compliant home or building. One glance at Stephen’s LinkedIn profile will tell you he never stops learning — his job roles have spanned from Elementary School Teacher to Real Estate Developer, Adjunct Professor of Architecture, Urban Designer, all the way to Ice Cream Scooper (not liste...
Marsh Jean (@themarshajean) has been solo traveling the world since she was 18. In the past five years, she’s done things many would consider nuts — she’s hitchhiked alone from Iran through France, cycled solo through Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan, and Pakistan, and couchsurfed in places like Kandahar (former “capital” of the Taliban) and Iranian Baluchistan (one of the most dangerous places in the world, according to some Western governments). In this episode, Marsha speaks openly about how she ran...
Jero Beccar is an entrepreneur and filmmaker from Buenos Aires. After getting his B.A. in Visual and Media Arts at Emerson College, he worked for Warner Brothers and Walt Disney. While at Disney, he managed a crew of over 45 people to shoot Disney’s first Apple iTunes commercial. He then took his technical lighting experience back home to Argentina, where he co-founded an LED lighting company, producing fixtures for train stations and commercial clients like McDonalds, Starbucks, and Puma.&nb...
Viola Wang (@theblessingbucket) is best known for her travel blog, where she shares gorgeous photography alongside practical tips for travelers on a budget. An advocate of slow travel, Viola has traveled to 32 countries and spent time living in Australia, Japan, Mexico, Costa Rica, and Peru. She also completed her yoga teacher training in Rishikesh, India, considered the world capital of yoga. When Viola was 10 years old, she immigrated to Canada with her family from Chengdu, China. She...
Dan Levine is a PhD candidate at the MIT Media Lab in the Biomechatronics group. His work involves building better prosthetic limbs, and he was once part of a team that built a tongue-computer interface for people with spinal cord injuries. (That’s right, it's a computer you control with your tongue!) Dan holds Bachelors degrees in Mechanical Engineering and Computer Science from Cornell University, and a Masters degree from Cornell Tech’s Connective Media program. In this episode, we talk ab...