Inc. Founders Project With Alexa Von Tobel

While a sophomore at Harvard, James Hirschfeld put lots of time into planning his 21st birthday party—but when it came time to figure out invitations, there was no option that spoke to him, between expensive stationery and clunky online tools. He started Paperless Post in 2009 along with his sister, Alexa, and has since reimagined the experience of sending and receiving invitations for over 175 million users. James shares why it was an uphill battle convincing investors that consumers wanted premium tools for digital communication, how they turned the business impact of the pandemic (the worst thing that could happen to a company centered on events) into an investment in the future, and why user trust and loyalty is sacred.

In 2012, George Fraser teamed up with his lifelong friend, Taylor Brown, to build Fivetran. Their initial vision was completely different from what Fivetran is today: a fully managed automated data integration provider, valued at over $5 billion. But the two listened to customer conversations and realized that they could build a viable business around a singular pain point. Fivetran now serves thousands of customers and hundreds of leading brands across the globe. George shares how his PhD in Neurobiology impacts his style as a founder, why fear of failure is an underrated motivator, and why they got creative with a major acquisition in order to build a full-spectrum offering overnight. 

Allon Bloch is no stranger to starting companies, but when he launched K Health, he was new to healthcare. Before K Health, he was the CEO of website publishing platform Wix and car retailer Vroom. But his father's health struggles inspired him to turn his focus to delivering high quality medicine at scale. He co-founded K Health in 2016 and has scaled the platform into the #1 downloaded app in the medical category, covering over 6 million people. Allon explains how K Health leveraged AI early on to teach a machine the language of medicine, why he believes it's a great time to be a healthcare entrepreneur, and why he attributes his success to the partnership of strong co-founding teams.

Nearly twenty years ago, Anthony Casalena was a student at the University of Maryland who wanted to build himself a website. Finding no easy platform in the market, he created his own. Today, Squarespace is an all-in-one website building and ecommerce platform used by more than 4.2 million people. Anthony worked as a team of one for the first few years, but now has over 1,800 employees and took Squarespace public in 2021. Anthony shares how he got his idea off the ground with a $30,000 investment in servers and Google AdWords, why it still feels surreal to see a Squarespace ad at the Super Bowl, and how running a public company is completely different than what he expected.

Growing up, Ara saw firsthand how hard his father worked as a contractor running a trade business. When he met Vahe Kuzoyan, a fellow Armenian immigrant whose family worked in the trades, they saw an opportunity to help their own families work more efficiently and grow their businesses. Over time, word spread and they decided to go all in on building ServiceTitan. With a valuation over $9B, ServiceTitan helps thousands of customers in the trillion dollar trade industry. Ara shares how his dad wandering the aisles of Barnes & Noble kicked off his coding skills, why the two victories of B2B software are making customers money or saving them money, and how he and Vahe strive to cultivate a winning culture.

Co-founder dynamics can be notoriously challenging. But Waseem Daher and his co-founders, Jeff Arnold and Jessica McKellar, are now building their third business together. Their most recent company is Pilot, which they started in 2016 to solve a pain point they experienced as founders: how time-consuming it can be to manage company finances. Pilot is now the largest startup and SMB bookkeeper in the United States, serving over 1,900 clients. Waseem shares why speed is the most critical advantage for startups to leverage, how he learned to delegate in later stages, and why a founder's strongest ethical obligation is to their customers and team. 

What if brands were empowered to deliver personalized experiences online, just as well as they could do in a store? That's the idea that underpins Klaviyo, the leading customer and marketing automation platform. Andrew Bialecki cofounded Klaviyo in 2012 and now serves over 100,000 brands, helping them generate $28 billion in revenue for its customers in 2021 alone. Andrew shares why he bootstrapped the business until profitability, how early partnerships can be a key to efficient customer acquisition, and why he feels like he's only achieved 1% of Klaviyo's potential.

After business school, David Velez moved to Latin America to become a venture capitalist. But after finding a dearth of startups to invest in, he founded one of his own. Since then, Nubank has grown into the largest independent digital bank in the world. The Brazil-based company has over 39 million users and a valuation north of $25 billion. David shares how Nubank built a waitlist of over a million people in just 18 months, why the company's first product was a purple credit card, and how waking up at 5am every day makes him a better founder. (Original Air Date: Jun-9-2021)

In 2013, a team of academics at UC Berkeley was working to solve massive data challenges that were impacting the tech companies in their backyard. Fast-forward and that team now represents the co-founders of Databricks, a data and AI company used by more than 5,000 organizations worldwide. In 2016, Ali Ghodsi stepped into the CEO seat and the company is now valued at $28 billion. Ali shares why he prioritizes building leaders over making decisions, how he sees the future of AI, and how he navigates the unique experience of having six co-founders. (Original Air Date: 3-17-2021)

Just a year into medical school at Harvard, Sean Duffy decided to pursue a new route toward healthcare delivery. In 2011, he started Omada Health to explore how design and technology could make a difference in healthcare. Today, Omada Health is a virtual-first care provider that blends clinical protocols with behavior science to help people with chronic conditions achieve long term improvements. The company now serves over 700,000 members and has facilitated over 13 million messages between members and care teams. Sean shares why Omada chose to focus on in-between-visit care, how the pandemic accelerated digital adoption by a matter of years, and why his most helpful read as he started a company was The Entrepreneur's Guide to Business Law.

Today, millions of users know Noom as the most-installed weight loss app of 2020. But it took countless pivots and many years for the consumer-led digital health company to turn its mission—of helping people live healthier, happier lives—into a product users are obsessed with. Saeju's intense desire to help people dates back to childhood in South Korea, growing up in a family of doctors. He started working on what would become Noom in 2007, but it took nearly a decade for the company to hit its stride. Saeju shares why he's hyper-focused on preventative healthcare, why he would have been shocked as an early founder to learn he'd be in the weight loss business, and how becoming a father made him realize the value of his parents' unconditional love.

Harley Finkelstein first encountered Shopify as a user. Back in 2006, while in law school, he was one of the first merchants to use the platform. He joined the company in 2010 and now serves as President, helping to scale Shopify to millions of daily active users across 175 countries driving $444B in global economic activity. Today, Shopify is the all-in-one commerce platform to start, run, and grow a business—and is second only to Amazon as the largest online retailer in the US. Harley shares why the future of e-commerce is just the future of commerce, why his favorite motto is "how you do anything is how you do everything," and how being a power extrovert has made him a stronger leader.

It has been nearly two decades since Sebastian Siemiatkowski started Klarna, based on the simple idea of enabling customers to pay how they'd like. Today, Klarna is a fintech giant on a mission to revolutionize the retail banking industry. Headquartered in Sweden, Klarna is now a fully licensed bank operating across 45 markets. The company has scaled to over 150 million active consumers and over 450,000 merchant partners. Sebastian shares why he thinks of Klarna as a digital assistant that saves people time and money, why he thinks the banking industry will shrink (making Klarna a larger player in a smaller industry), and how growing up as a Polish immigrant in Sweden gave him a hunger for entrepreneurship. 

How do retailers find brands to feature in their stores? For years, trade shows were the default option. Until Faire entered the scene. Max Rhodes started Faire in 2017 as an online marketplace where retailers discover their next bestsellers from independent brands across the globe. Today, the company supports over half a million retailers in 15,000 cities and connects them to over 70,000 brands around the world--earning the company a $12B valuation. Max shares what it felt like when he realized Faire had reached product-market fit, why he thinks solely direct-to-consumer brands will go away, and why being a college athlete at Yale felt like entering the working world four years early.

Amidst a fintech boom over the past decade, Acorns has continued to scale dramatically. The app which allows consumers to save and invest has grown to serve over 11 million customers and has helped its users invest over $15 billion to date. Noah's path into the CEO seat was an unusual one: he's a 4x entrepreneur and former DJ for Jennifer Lopez. But growing up in New York City gave him a life and career purpose to help level the playing field. Noah shares how he thinks of Acorns as a financial wellness system, why behavioral economics have helped the company make an emotional connection with users, and why he's inspired by the quote "the process is the prize."

Three years after the first human genome was sequenced, Anne Wojcicki cofounded 23andMe. After a decade on Wall Street investing in healthcare, Anne started a new career chapter as a founder working to empower people with direct access to genetic information. Fast-forward and 23andMe has become the only personal genetic test with FDA authorization to deliver health information directly to consumers. To date, over 12 million people have taken a 23andMe DNA test kit. Anne shares why she adopted a low-margin and high-volume business strategy, why she believes personalized medicine is the future, and how figuring out time management was one of her biggest hurdles.

As an expert in global payroll and global workforce management, it was only a matter of time before Eynat took the leap to close the industry's technology gap. In 2016, she started a revolution in global payroll management when she co-founded Papaya Global. As the pandemic accelerated the growth of global teams, Papaya has scaled to work with over 700 companies, managing over $3B in total payroll. Eynat shares how customer discovery sessions impacted Papaya's product roadmap, why she believes in worst-case-scenario planning, and why she stayed the course with an aggressive growth plan in 2020.

In 2012, as a Ruby programmer, Sid Sijbrandij encountered GitLab, an open source technology that sparked his interest. Soon after, he decided to build a company on top of GitLab and has since scaled the DevOps platform to an estimated 30 million+ registered users from startups to global enterprises alike. A decade after the first GitLab code was written, the company went public at a valuation of $11B. Sid shares how their pricing model is based on end user, the value of starting a CEO shadow program, and why he decided to make the company's 2,000 page employee handbook public.

In 2007, Emmett co-founded a live streaming service called Justin.tv along with his childhood friend and neighbor, Justin. That first entrepreneurial spark grew into Twitch, an interactive livestreaming service that spans gaming, entertainment, sports, music, and more. Today, at any given moment, more than 2.5 million people globally are engaging with Twitch. While Twitch was acquired by Amazon in 2014 for nearly $1 billion, Emmett has stayed on as CEO and continued to scale. Emmett shares why the company's hardest engineering challenge was scaling live video, why the future of the creator economy is "micro-patronage," and the role Twitch plays in combating loneliness. 

When repeat founder Brian Long set out to build a text communication platform for businesses, he soon realized that the first version of his product didn't have the market pull he was looking for. After a pivot, Brian found himself building Attentive, the comprehensive mobile messaging platform for brands. Six years in, Attentive has become a major player in the e-commerce space and counts thousands of major brands as customers, from CB2 to Michaels. On average, Attentive drives 20% of total online revenue for its customers. Brian shares how he managed hypergrowth in 2020 as customers grew by 270%, why he always asks for quantitative feedback in every customer conversation, and why his unusual trick to destress at work is through reading World War II books.