Inc. Founders Project With Alexa Von Tobel

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.

Throughout his career, Dan worked at tech giants Amazon, Microsoft, and Google. In 2015, he set out to build a tech giant of his own: Convoy. Convoy is a digital trucking network that is transforming the trillion-dollar global trucking industry. Dan went from interviewing truckers on the side of the road to building a business that works with over 300,000 trucks across the country. Dan shares how the rise of mobile technology was an accelerant to his business, how he used YouTube to learn the language of trucking, and the pivotal advice Jeff Bezos gave him about building a leadership team.

Today, millions of homes across the country have installed solar panels. But that was not the case when Ed Fenster co-founded Sunrun in 2007. Since starting the company with his business school classmate, Sunrun has grown to become the leading home solar and storage company. Ed is driven by a deep mission to power the planet through the sun, and Sunrun, which went public in 2015, now operates in 23 states. Ed shares how he recognized a huge opportunity on the residential side of the market, how his successful business partnership was fueled by an alignment in ethics and decision-making, and why his secret to unwinding is playing blues piano.

In 2009, Adi and her husband Alon Cohen embarked on a home renovation. They quickly realized how challenging it was to find both inspiration and qualified home professionals, so they started a side project to bring technology into the home design space. Organically, the Houzz community blossomed to hundreds of thousands of users before Adi decided to take on outside capital and make Houzz her day job. Today, Houzz is the leading platform for home renovation and design and has over 65 million users. Adi shares how she overcame knowing no one when she first moved to Silicon Valley, how she built a thriving two-sided marketplace through word of mouth, and why she loves building the company alongside her husband.

In 2010, over a sushi dinner with a friend, Jason sparked an interest in what would become his next entrepreneurial adventure: transforming modern card issuing. With a deep intellectual curiosity for how credit cards work, Jason built Marqeta to bring game-changing card products into the world. Marqeta now works with customers in 39 countries, has a team of nearly 900 employees, and IPOed in 2021. Jason shares how he almost moved to Australia to start a Jamba Juice-style chain before Marqeta, how he persevered after nearly running out of money in 2015, and why he's fueled by the challenge of people not believing in him.

Family farmers, who are the backbone of the food and agricultural system globally, represent fast-growing small businesses looking to innovate. That's why Amol Deshpande left his career as an investor to start Farmers Business Network (FBN), the global farmer-to-farmer network and agtech company. FBN is on a mission to power the prosperity of family farmers around the world and now supports over 43,000 farmers responsible for over 80 million acres in the U.S., Canada, and Australia. Amol shares why—despite the stereotype—farmers are tech-forward, how his upbringing instilled an appetite for risk-taking, and why it's critical to invest time with your children consistently, just as you show up consistently at work.

In 2011, Jay Kreps was an engineer at LinkedIn, leading the platform's search, recommendation engine, and social graph. In an effort to figure out how to make real-time streams of data useful to organizations, he started an open-source project called Kafka, and it took off. Realizing a major business opportunity, Jay took the leap into entrepreneurship and started Confluent in 2014. Today, over 70% of Fortune 500 companies use Kafka, and he took Confluent public in 2021. Jay shares what it means to process "data in motion," why it's daunting to go from being a software engineer to CEO, and why he only spent one year in a traditional high school before deciding to teach himself. 

Growing up in Alabama, Josh Tetrick dreamed of being an NFL player. But when that dream didn't come true, he set his sights on a wholly new endeavor: to make a better version of an egg. He started Eat Just, a food technology company working to build a healthier and more sustainable food system. Since then, Eat Just has created America’s fastest-growing egg brand, which is made entirely of plants, and the world’s first-to-market meat made from animal cells. Josh shares how he got his plant-based eggs into nearly every major retailer, how he's overcome the challenge of scaling from a lab to national distribution, and why thinking about death helps him frame the urgency of his priorities.

In 2019, with a belief that work was becoming increasingly borderless, Alex Bouaziz and his cofounder Shuo Wang started Deel. They built a global compliance and payroll solution that helps businesses hire anyone in over 150 countries. Fueled by a shift to distributed work unlocked by the pandemic, Deel has experienced unprecedented growth: the company has raised over $600M in funding, scaled to over $100M in ARR, and now has over 1,000 employees in 75 different countries. Alex shares why he holds two KPIs sacred (monthly growth and customer satisfaction), the importance of keeping money in the bank and spending like you're a round earlier, and why larger companies are beginning to think more about output than input.

If you've heard of NFTs (non-fungible tokens), it's likely thanks to the work of Roham Gharegozlou. Roham is the Co-Founder and CEO of Dapper Labs, the NFT company that has created some of the most viral brands out there, from CryptoKitties to NBA Top Shot. Through his venture studio Axiom Zen, he started looking into crypto back in 2014. With a mission to bring play to crypto, Dapper Labs has been named one of the most innovative gaming companies by Fast Company and has created some of the most broadly used applications in the history of crypto. Roham shares how NBA Top Shot scaled to over one million users, why he thinks of NFTs as the next evolution of social media, and why entrepreneurship requires a healthy balance of optimism and paranoia. 

In 2011, when Pat Brown took a sabbatical from his position as a biochemistry professor at Stanford, he had already spent decades making a positive mark on the world. He had developed a technology that made it possible to monitor the activity of all the genes in a genome, a huge development in cancer research. But during his sabbatical he decided to address the environmental impact of animal farming. Enter Impossible Foods, which is now available in thousands of grocery stores and restaurants across the country. Pat shares why he's on a mission to completely replace the use of animals in food technology by 2035, why their initial go-to-market strategy centered on top chefs, and how trail running and large amounts of coffee fuel his entrepreneurial journey.

While working at a small sales intelligence firm in Las Vegas, Henry saw an opportunity to leverage technology to unlock opportunity for go-to-market teams. In 2007, he started DiscoverOrg from his law school dorm. Brick by brick, he scaled DiscoverOrg, leading the company through 11 acquisitions (including of Zoom Information, from which the business takes its name). Thirteen years after founding the company, ZoomInfo became the first tech company to go public during the Covid-19 pandemic. Henry shares why he believes in the American dream, what it was like to take a company public in a fully remote environment, and why the practice of gratitude journaling makes him a better founder.

As a serial cybersecurity entrepreneur and operator, Michael found himself investigating a $200M bitcoin hack that happened in 2017. As he dug into it, he realized there was a big opportunity to help companies manage digital assets securely. In 2018, he co-founded Fireblocks, the leader in digital assets and cryptocurrency custody, transfer, and issuance technology—or in Michael's words, "Shopify for crypto." Fireblocks now works with over 1,200 financial institutions and supports over 850 tokens. Michael shares how Fireblocks built up a referral network that drives a third of inbound inquiries, how serving on an elite military technological unit gave him a refuse-to-lose mentality, and why he believes NFTs will transform how people do business on the internet.

What does it take to grow a company from zero to over $10 billion of value in just five years? In the case of Nikil Viswanathan's Alchemy, the answer comes down to speed and hustle. Nikil and his cofounder are both Stanford-educated serial entrepreneurs who set out to build a company that would change the world. They see web3 as a major paradigm shift and business opportunity, and the duo has scaled Alchemy into the world's leading blockchain developer platform (think: Microsoft for web3). Nikil shares why 22 of the company's first 27 hires were former founders, why he believes NFTs will be the first web3 iteration to be mass-market friendly, and why he and his cofounder celebrate big wins with a trip to the gym.