Claim OwnershipFrom Start-Up to Grown-Up
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© 2025 From Start-Up to Grown-Up
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One of the top startup coaches in the world, Alisa Cohn, talks to founders, creators, advisors, investors and builders of all kinds about their insights and experiences in growing from Start-up to Grown-up.
102 Episodes
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Nick Huber is an entrepreneur and real estate investor who resides in Athens, Georgia, with his wife and three children. He owns Somewhere.com, Bolt Storage, RE Cost Seg, and several other businesses. His real estate portfolio currently includes sixty-eight self-storage properties, covering two million square feet. His portfolio of companies employs over 325 people and makes over $35 million annually. He’s the author of “The Sweaty Startup: How to Get Rich Doing Boring Things.” Where ...
Arvind Jain is the founder and CEO of Glean, the Work AI platform that connects to all your company’s data so you can find, create, and automate anything. In this episode, Arvind shares his journey as a second-time founder and first-time CEO, reflecting on the challenges of moving from a deeply technical role into leading an organization. He talks about why selling is one of the most important skills for founders, the importance of hiring for desire and cultural fit, and how company culture a...
Naveen Verma is a professor of electrical and computer engineering at Princeton and the co-founder and CEO of EnCharge AI, a startup building radically energy-efficient computers for artificial intelligence. In this episode, Naveen shares how his academic research into in-memory computing evolved over six years into a venture-backed company that’s rethinking the physical limits of AI computers. Naveen explains why traditional computing models can’t keep up with the energy demands of AI, how i...
Craig Walker is the founder and CEO of Dialpad, a business communications platform powered by AI. A former M&A lawyer turned serial entrepreneur, Craig previously co-founded GrandCentral (acquired by Google and relaunched as Google Voice) and sold his prior company to Yahoo. In this episode, Craig shares how his career unfolded from door-to-door dictation sales to running a 1,500-person company, and how AI became central to Dialpad’s strategy long before the hype cycle. Craig opens up abo...
Brad Feld has spent over 40 years building companies, mentoring founders, and investing in the startup ecosystem. He’s the co-founder of Techstars, a prolific venture capitalist, and the author of nine books. In this episode, Brad opens up about the mental reset that came with turning 60, why he stopped chasing “more,” and what led him to dust off a book draft about mentorship that had been sitting on the shelf. We go deep into his new book Give First, his belief in non-transactional ge...
David is the creator of Ruby on Rails, Co-Owner of 37signals, best-selling author, Le Mans class-winning racing driver, antitrust advocate, investor in Danish startups, frequent podcast guest, and family man. He writes regularly on HEY World and speaks on The REWORK Podcast. Hundreds of thousands of programmers around the world have built amazing applications using Ruby on Rails, an open-source web framework he created in 2003, and continues to develop to this day. Some of the more famo...
Bob Young co-founded Red Hat, the first company to build a successful business around open source software, and helped shape the modern internet in the process. In this episode, Bob shares the story of how Red Hat went from a CD in a Ziploc bag to a billion-dollar business that inspired GitHub, Coinbase, and much of the cloud infrastructure we use today. But this conversation is about more than just software. Bob opens up about betting his family’s finances on Red Hat, the moment he realized ...
Jonathan Wolf is the co-founder and CEO of ZOE, the science-based nutrition company using data to transform how people eat. In this candid conversation, he joins Alisa to explore what it takes to build a mission-driven company, how to lead with more clarity and transparency, and why the way we eat is more broken and more fixable than most people think. ZOE’s origin story is as unconventional as it is inspiring. After scaling Critéo into a billion-dollar business, Jonathan stepped away with no...
Kass and Mike Lazerow are serial entrepreneurs, seasoned investors, and co-authors of the upcoming book Shoveling Sh!t: A Love Story About the Entrepreneur’s Messy Path to Success. They join Alisa to share an unfiltered look at what it really takes to build companies, navigate chaos, and stay married through it all. Known for founding Golf.com and Buddy Media, which they sold to Salesforce for $745 million, Kass and Mike have also backed more than 100 early-stage startups. Their portfolio inc...
David Ko is the CEO and board member of Calm, the #1 app for sleep, meditation, and mindfulness. A former healthcare executive and tech operator, David previously served as COO of Zynga, held senior roles at Yahoo!, and founded a healthtech company acquired by Calm. He is the bestselling author of Recharge, and has been recognized by TIME, LinkedIn, RockHealth, and NYU Stern for his leadership in digital health. What you’ll learn: How David transitioned from gaming to healthcare through miss...
Mike Seckler is a two-time entrepreneur and tech startup founder who led a company through the dot-com boom and bust, and now leads the charge as CEO of Justworks, the HR tech company focused on uplifting small businesses. In this conversation, he shares hard-earned lessons from building one of the earliest SaaS HR startups, navigating turbulent markets, and guiding Justworks through major transitions. We dive into founder resilience, building high-functioning boards, scaling culture in a hyb...
Jeff Byers is the co-founder and CEO of Momentous, a high-performance wellness company delivering science-backed products used by elite athletes, military operators, and high-performers worldwide. A former NFL player and two-time USC football captain, Jeff brings both personal and professional insight to optimizing performance and building values-driven companies. What you’ll learn: Why Jeff says effort and attitude are the only things you can control—and how they ground him in tough momentsT...
Kevin Evers is a Senior Editor at Harvard Business Review, where he shapes groundbreaking research and develops award-winning and bestselling books on high performance, creativity, innovation, marketing, and digital disruption. He’s also written popular essays on brain science, persuasion, unpredictability, and the power of storytelling. Kevin holds degrees in English and Film Studies, and his forthcoming book with HBR Press, There’s Nothing Like This, offers a strategic analysis of Taylor Sw...
Eddie Kim is the CTO and cofounder of Gusto, which serves 400,000+ small and medium-sized businesses nationwide by helping them onboard, pay, insure, engage, and provide benefits for their teams, in one integrated, friendly, and easy-to-use platform. Eddie’s career has been shaped by chance encounters, a passion for software, and a deep commitment to growth. Before Gusto, he launched his first company—an experience that ultimately led him to reconnect with his future co-founder, Josh Reeves. ...
In this episode of From Start-Up to Grown-Up, host Alisa Cohn sits down with Daniel Yanisse, co-founder and CEO of Checkr, to discuss the exhilarating rise and the challenges of sustaining a high-growth company. Checkr revolutionized the background check industry, scaling from a $1M revenue run rate in just three months to processing millions of background checks annually. But with hypergrowth came intense operational, cultural, and leadership challenges. Daniel shares how he navigated: Hirin...
Peter Attia, MD, is the founder of Early Medical, a medical practice that applies the principles of Medicine 3.0 to patients with the goal of lengthening their lifespan and simultaneously improving their healthspan. He is the host of The Drive, one of the most popular podcasts covering the topics of health and medicine. Dr. Attia received his medical degree from the Stanford University School of Medicine and trained for five years at the Johns Hopkins Hospital in general surgery, where he was...
Isabelle Freidheim is the founder and managing partner of Athena Capital. She is the youngest chairman of a publicly traded company in the U.S. In her role as managing partner of Athena Capital, Freidheim oversees the company's strategic direction and leads its efforts in identifying and investing in technology companies. Freidheim is an entrepreneur and investor with more than 15 years of experience in venture capital, private equity, SPACs and IPOs. She founded Athena in 2020. Athena Capit...
During his 15+ years at Amazon, Ethan Evans helped invent Prime Video, Amazon Video, Amazon Appstore, Merch by Amazon, Prime Gaming (formerly Twitch Prime), and Twitch Commerce. He led global teams of over 800 and holds more than 70 patents. Ethan has reviewed 10,000+ resumes, conducted 2,500+ interviews, made 1,000+ hires, and was an Amazon Bar Raiser and Bar Raiser Core Leader, responsible for training and maintaining Amazon's group of interview outcome facilitators. Ethan helped advocate ...
Chip is the founder of the Modern Elder Academy (MEA), where a new roadmap for midlife is offered at a beautiful oceanfront campus in Baja California Sur, Mexico, and forthcoming campuses in Santa Fe, NM. His five books have made him a leading authority at the intersection of psychology and business. Chip had tons of wisdom to share in this talk, including how to use regret as fuel for the future, what founders can learn when they shift their identities, how to manage people older than...
Gary Vaynerchuk, also known as "GaryVee," is a serial entrepreneur, the Chairman of VaynerX, and 5x New York Times Best Selling Author. He is a leading global mind on what's next in culture, relevance, and the internet. Gary possesses an uncanny ability to recognize trends and patterns early to help others understand how these shifts impact consumer behavior. He is one of the most forward-thinkers in business. Gary's approach sits at the intersection of business and culture. He keenly underst...
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