Inc. Founders Project With Alexa Von Tobel

What if workers could acquire new skills and training, without taking on debt? That’s the value Guild Education strives to provide. Guild Education unlocks opportunities for America’s workforce through education and upskilling and counts Fortune 500 companies (such as Chipotle, Disney, Walmart, and Taco Bell) among its partners. Since founding Guild in 2015, Rachel has scaled the business to reach working learners in all 50 states and has helped prevent over half a billion dollars in student debt. Rachel shares how COVID-19 has accelerated the future of work, why she decided to make Guild a Certified B Corporation instead of a nonprofit, and what she learned from working on political campaigns.

What if we could make farming faster, safer, and more sustainable? Meet Bowery Farming, the largest vertical farming company in the United States. Irving Fain started the company in 2015 and has overseen the growth of a proprietary operating system—Bowery OS—which leverages AI, robotics, and computer vision systems to allow its farms to grow traceable produce at 100 times the rate of traditional agriculture. Today, Bowery Farming produce is sold in over 800 stores across the United States. The company has raised over $472 million to date and is valued at over 2 billion dollars. Irving shares how Bowery Farming grew during the pandemic, why he believes indoor farming is the future of the agriculture landscape, and why listening to skeptics can strengthen your business. 

In 2015, after selling his first company Meraki for over $1B to Cisco, Sanjit Biswas set out to bring the latest in technology to the world of operations. He re-joined forces with his Meraki co-founder and started Samsara: a company that makes it easier and more affordable for businesses that depend on physical operations to harness IoT data. Samsara has raised over $930 million in venture capital to build a suite of solutions that includes driver safety, mobile workflow and compliance, asset tracking, and industrial process controls. They have grown to serve more than 20,000 customers across North America and Europe. Sanjit shares what his first startup taught him about being a founder, why listening to the customer feedback loop is essential, and why allocating your time is the key to staying sane as a founder.

While mowing his lawn in Colorado, Jack Morrison had an aha moment: what if he could apply the latest robotics technology he was so familiar with to the challenge of caring for the outdoors? He teamed up with two co-founders to create Scythe Robotics, a company building autonomous robotics solutions for the $105 billion dollar commercial landscaping industry. Scythe Robotics has emerged from stealth with over $18M in funding and an all-electric, fully autonomous mower. Jack shares how robotics is helping an industry-wide labor shortage, why they decided to start mowing in the most challenging state (Florida), and why spending time outdoors is the best way to manage the rollercoaster of being a founder.

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.

From the time she was a child in East London, Emma Grede knew she wanted to work in fashion. After a long career at the intersection of fashion and entertainment, Emma now sits at the helm of Good American, the fashion label she co-founded with Khloe Kardashian in 2016. The first fully inclusive fashion brand kicked off with the largest denim launch in history, bringing in $1M on day one, and has evolved to include ready-to-wear, swim, shoes and activewear. Emma shares what it was like to experience the roller coaster of launch day, why the ability to understand what customers want is a superpower, and why she thinks in-person retail experiences will be here for decades to come.

In 2015, after working at a high-growth startup, Jack Altman realized that companies were in need of technology to better serve their most important customers: employees. In an employee market, it falls on companies to engage and retain their talent. Enter Lattice: the leading people management platform for businesses with people-first cultures. Since its launch, Lattice has grown to support over 2,500 companies and was most recently valued at one billion dollars. Jack shares why performance feedback should be ongoing, how the journey of being a founder is an ultramarathon, and why he started a program to invest in Lattice alums who become founders.

Medicaid spends $10,000 on average for a hospitalization in NYC. What could you do if you had that money to prevent a hospitalization? That's the fundamental question Iyah and Toyin set out to answer at Cityblock Health. They have built the first tech-driven provider to bring better care to neighborhoods that have historically had poor access to quality, affordable healthcare. As a healthcare policymaker and a family medicine doctor respectively, these co-founders have quickly built Cityblock into a unicorn that serves over 70,000 members across the east coast. Iyah and Toyin share why they hope for a revolution in healthcare, how their unique approach is driving high NPS and avoiding unnecessary hospitalizations, and why founders must accept that they'll make mistakes every day.

API requests represent an astounding 83% of all web traffic, and Kong is the startup on a mission to power these connections. Founded in 2017 by Augusto "Aghi" Marietti and Marco Palladino, Kong's open source API platform has been downloaded more than 220 million times. Aghi and Marco started out in a garage in Italy and moved to Silicon Valley to pursue their dream, crashing with new friends like Travis Kalanick of Uber and Brian Chesky of Airbnb. Now, Kong has raised $171 million and was named to the Inc. 5000 list of fastest-growing companies. Aghi shares why a successful startup requires a "good wave, a good surfboard, and a good surfer," how acting as VP of Sales for a few quarters taught him empathy, and why seeing the early days of Airbnb made him prioritize design and community.

At this very moment, you might be wearing a device to track your heart rate, your steps, or how well you slept. But what if you wear a device that impacted how you felt? That's the vision behind Feelmore Labs, and their debut product, Cove — a scientifically proven new wearable device that improves sleep and cancels stress. Cove's co-founder, Francois Kress, comes from the world of luxury fashion, but he brings a lifelong passion for science. Cove is already showing great results, with 90% of people who used Cove for 30 days experiencing 41% less stress. Francois shares why the future of self-care is active wearables (not passive ones), what he learned from opening a Louis Vuitton store on the island of Saipan, and why he still starts every day with a well-organized to-do list.

Blockchain, NFTs, ethereum—the world of crypto is wildly complex for most consumers. But Flori Marquez and her cofounder Zac Prince had a vision to bridge traditional finance and blockchain technology through their startup, BlockFi. With a range of products, like a credit card that lets you earn bitcoin in lieu of reward points, BlockFi is bringing crypto to the mainstream. Since launching in 2017, BlockFi has grown to manage over $15B in assets, scaled its team to over 500 employees, and hit a $3B valuation. Flori shares why they started by building the hardest product first, why it was difficult to raise their first round of venture capital as a crypto startup, and how her Argentinian roots impact how she thinks about financial security.

Christy Turlington Burns is known around the globe as a model. She's been featured on thousands of magazine covers and was named one of Time's 100 Most Influential People. But Christy is also a repeat founder—of yoga lifestyle brand Nuala, skincare line Sundari, and for the last decade, not-for-profit Every Mother Counts. After experiencing a childbirth related complication of her own, Christy founded EMC to make pregnancy and childbirth safe, respectful, and equitable and has invested $21M globally across 29 programs in 9 countries. Christy shares why she became a global health advocate when she became a mom, how she thinks about the use of storytelling in EMC's work, and why lobbying for legislative change is more accessible than it looks.

As Certified Financial Planner, Stephany has long had a passion for helping families manage their money. And as a seasoned tech executive, Stephany realized that the most effective way to help hundreds of millions of families was to build new fintech infrastructure from the ground up. In 2019, she started Orum to make money movement smart and real-time—working to improve upon the 50-year-old system of ACH. Stephany shares why the self-driving wallet is coming sooner than we think, how Orum will lower the $11B consumers currently pay in overdraft fees each year, and why her secrets to success as a founder include Whoop and ice cream.

As a freshman at MIT, Alexandr was struck by his classmates' interest in AI. But he realized that despite all that AI technology could solve, there was no solution for managing AI-related data. So, at 19, he dropped out of college and started Scale AI. Scale now helps customers like Pinterest and Toyota accelerate the progress of AI and has grown to a valuation of $3.5B. Alexandr shares how AI is changing software development, why he believes in surrounding yourself with optimistic people, and how he learned to get comfortable with not being able to do everything at once.

Armon was on the PhD path, poised to become an academic. But he and his college friend Mitchell Hashimoto realized they had an opportunity ahead of them: building technology to support cloud infrastructure. They founded HashiCorp in 2012 and have grown to more than 80 million open source downloads per year, with a company valuation over $5 billion. Armon shares how a stint at a San Francisco startup led to his aha moment, how HashiCorp decided on an open-source model and enterprise customer, and why the company was remote-first long before Covid.

In 2007, a year before the Recession hit, Ken Lin set out to offer free credit scores and bring transparency to the credit industry. His startup, Credit Karma, now serves more than 100 million members around the globe and has continued to roll out free, consumer-first tools to help members manage the entirety of their financial lives. The industry took note of Credit Karma's exponential growth, and in 2020, the company was acquired by Intuit for $8.1 billion dollars. Ken shares why doing right by consumers is his guiding principle, how he beat imposter syndrome in the CEO seat, and why an IPO was never his end goal.

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.

What if technology could make us safer in the real world? That's the problem Andrew Frame, founder of Citizen, set out to solve. The Citizen app, which combines location information with 911 intelligence, is now used by over seven million people across 25 cities. Andrew is a serial entrepreneur and tech whiz who is creating a fundamentally new category: safety. Andrew shares why he considers Citizen a mission instead of a product, how he approaches the burden of responsibility for building tech that impacts our psychology, and why he opts for poetry and philosophy over business books.

Alyssa had booked the perfect camping trip, but when she arrived, she realized the campsite was the ideal surfing spot—if only she’d known to bring her board. She decided to leverage the power of technology to make getting outdoors more accessible. In 2013, she founded Hipcamp, which has grown into the most comprehensive resource for unique outdoor stays. Since launching, Hipcamp has raised nearly $100M in venture capital and partnered with private landowners to unlock new outdoor experiences. Alyssa shares why “nights outside” is Hipcamp’s north star metric, why she’s been organizing people to create change since 2nd grade, and how she creates space to listen to her intuition.

Tristan Handy did not set out to build a venture-scale startup, backed by the likes of Andreessen Horowitz and Sequoia. But that's precisely the journey he's on after founding Fishtown Analytics back in 2016. The company started as a consulting firm, but Tristan soon realized that their core technology—dbt—was a powerful tool in the budding field of modern analytics engineering. Today, dbt is used by over 3,000 companies to organize, catalog, and distill knowledge from their data warehouses. Tristan shares how he built dbt's community and grew through an organic flywheel, why the next generation of knowledge workers will increasingly work in code, and why working within time constraints makes him a more mature founder.