The Way In

He built a better alternative to crutches for himself. Then he spent years figuring out how to bring it to everyone else.After a serious car accident and 13 surgeries, Reid invented XLEG, a mobility device designed to make walking with a leg injury easier. In this episode, Reid shares what it takes to turn a personal solution into a medical device business, from years of engineering and manufacturing challenges to finding customers, reducing costs, and making the product accessible to more people.Reid also shares what he learned from years of iteration and why sometimes, you just need to put your MVP out there and see what happens.

New New Patch was named in TIME’s Best Inventions of 2026 Special Mentions.Prue spent 18 years in product marketing before becoming a founder herself. New New Patch started with a very ordinary parenting problem: what do you do when your kids’ clothes are stained?Her answer was a peel-and-stick patch that makes repairing and personalizing clothes as easy as putting on a sticker. But turning that simple idea into a real product took three years, dozens of adhesive samples, countless tests, and plenty of people telling her it wouldn’t work.In this episode, Prue talks about going from product marketer to founder, building a physical product from scratch, and the moment she realized, “I am this entrepreneur. This is my business.”We also talk about building New New Patch while raising two young kids, auditioning for Shark Tank just months after giving birth, what she learned about pitching, and why sustainable choices need to be frictionless if we actually want families to adopt them.Lastly, Prue shares what has surprised her most about being a founder, what she finds hardest about building a business, and her bigger vision for helping families keep what they already have for longer.

Tim, founder of Bonsai Bar, discovered bonsai while working in software and eventually started wondering not just how he could make a living from bonsai, but how he could help grow the economy around the hobby.That idea eventually became Bonsai Bar. What started with small workshops in Boston has grown into a business operating across 18 states, with roughly 200 part-time instructors and more than 200,000 people having planted a bonsai through Bonsai Bar.In this episode, Tim shares what those first workshops looked like, how he figured out pricing, and why he had to throw out some of his earliest assumptions almost immediately. As Bonsai Bar scaled, the challenge became much bigger than teaching people how to make a tree. Tim talks about the surprisingly complicated supply chain behind keeping hundreds of workshops stocked with living plants, and why that operational complexity can actually become part of the business’s defensibility.Tim's journey is about finding a business opportunity inside a niche hobby, learning by doing, and figuring out how to scale something that had never really been scaled before.

AI tools for investment research have exploded over the past year, but more information doesn't necessarily make research easier. In fact, it can make it harder to know what to pay attention to.In this episode, I talk to Tiffany Qiu, founder of Oxbridge Economics and the company behind FinFAST, an AI platform that turns unstructured macro and policy data into quantitative, decision-ready signals.Before founding Oxbridge Economics, Tiffany spent more than a decade as an economist at Goldman Sachs and the Hong Kong Monetary Authority. We talk about what she saw in traditional research workflows that could be automated, how the company evolved from research projects into a platform, and what she's learned from early users.Tiffany shares how she thinks about the growing AI research landscape, the difference between general and vertical AI, and what she believes economists and analysts will need to learn as these tools become more capable.We wrap up with her experience balancing research and entrepreneurship, what building a company has taught her that academia didn't, and her advice for the next generation of economics students and founders.

Natasa Tuohy grew up in Yugoslavia, moved to Florence at 19 to study architecture, and made her way to New York, where she spent nearly a decade working in architecture before starting her own studio in 2019.In this episode, we talk about that journey from Florence to New York, what she learned working inside established architecture firms, and what changed when she became responsible for not just the design, but the business behind it.We also talk about building a business where growth isn't necessarily about taking on more work, how she thinks about success today, and why she created the North Brooklyn Women Collective to bring together women entrepreneurs in her Greenpoint community.