How one founder is taking on the customer knowledge gap in the cannabis industry

The co-founder of Dutchie, Ross Lipson, talks to Jordan and Darrell about stepping into the cannabis space, taking the hits as they come and growing a business in a highly regulated and brand new industry. His positive outlook on business and life may be contagious, so pessimists, nihilists and fatalists beware. Take our listener survey […]

How one founder built the gold standard in office guest sign-in, then shifted the business for COVID

The way COVID-19 has changed the way we work comes up a lot, founders have had to pivot and innovate to build companies during lockdown but the workplace restrictions seemed to spark inspiration for this week’s guest, Larry Gadea, founder, and CEO of Envoy. Envoy started in 2013 as a guest sign-in platform to make […]

How one founder tapped lasers to automate and scale stem cell production

Not only is this week’s guest the TechCrunch Disrupt 2021 Battlefield winner, but Nabiha Saklayen is also democratizing access to life-saving cell therapies by using — you guessed it — lasers. Saklayen is the co-founder and CEO of Cellino, which is a company developing the tech to automate stem cell production that will lower the […]

How one founder turned painful personal experience into the solution for a huge gap in healthcare

A lot of startup founders think there’s a dire need for their product in the market, but Liya Shuster-Bier knew for sure that there was one, because she’d required it herself prior to building it — yet nothing like it existed. Liya’s company Alula provides a new kind of shopping platform, organized based on treatment […]

How one founder aims to bring researchers and food producers together around cultured meat

When Clarisse Beurrier was getting her education in Chemical Engineering and Biotechnology, she already knew she wanted to make a difference; hence her participation in Effective Altruism Cambridge, an organization dedicated to helping smart and capable people target their philanthropic urges at the problems that will have the biggest actual impact on the world. She’s […]

How one founder identified a gap in education working as a teacher and built a startup to fix it

Amanda DoAmaral was an educator herself before she decided to found a tech company aimed at improving the education system. That’s a surprisingly rare credential for a startup founder in this area to possess — despite the obvious benefits of real, first-hand experience. Her company, Fiveable, focuses on modernizing (including a remote-first approach) a key […]

How one founder bucked the data-driven trend and created a startup based on inspiration

When Oleg Stavitsky and his co-founders started Endel, they didn’t necessarily expect for it to become a venture-backed business with the likes of Amazon’s Alexa Fund as investors. Stavitsky and his founding team describe themselves as a “collective of imaginative creatives and artists,” and the group had previously developed a unique set of apps for […]

How one founder turned her extensive retail experience into an entirely new kind of shopping

The Yes founder and CEO Julie Bornstein helped some of the world’s biggest and best-loved brands develop industry leading e-commerce operations, and also served as COO at Stitch Fix, arguable one of the top success stories of digital-first fashion. The Yes is her first foray into entrepreneurship, however, and we got the chance to talk […]