Founder Rising

Running a startup is full of challenges, and Jenny Fielding — serial entrepreneur, investor, and Managing Director of Techstars New York — has seen them all. In each episode, Jenny talks with a founder to explore their entrepreneurial journey, especially the make-or-break moments where everything either comes together… or collapses. Join Jenny and her guests for an inside look at the messy yet thrilling process of founding and running a high growth company. These are the real stories of how founders rise to the challenge.

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Episodes

Building and Knowing When to Step Away – with Ken Nguyen

Republic cofounder Ken Nguyen made the unlikely journey from general counsel and a law career to entrepreneur. In creating an investment platform for individual small investors, he seeks to democratize wealth. His company partners with Techstars and other investment platforms to connect startups with capital, one investor at a time. It’s a mission that he and every member of his team is passionate about. “When it comes to hiring,” explains Ken, “it's about how much that person sitting across the...

Dec 09, 2020•21 min

Succeeding in Your Startup with the Support of Your Crew – with Tiffany Dufu

The Cru founder Tiffany Dufu has dedicated her life to “advancing women and girls,” harnessing their ingenuity and talent for global benefit. The Cru matches circles of women who collaborate, both online and in person, to meet their life goals. Tiffany was lucky to have her own crew of supportive women around her and she wanted to create this kind of network for fellow women entrepreneurs. “At the end of the day,” says Tiffany, “the most important part of my journey was a crew. It was recognizin...

Nov 18, 2020•29 min

Know the Problem That You’re Trying to Solve — with Jonathan Levin

As a startup in the frontier market of cryptocurrency, Chainalysis made a name for themselves as a government investigation service for cryptocurrency. Graduates of the New York Barclays Accelerator, powered by Techstars , they now provide cryptocurrency analysis that helps organizations manage risk in cryptocurrency markets to expand its possibilities. Cofounder Jonathan Levin explains that the key to startup growth is to “double down on where you're finding that product market fit in the early...

Oct 28, 2020•25 min

Finding Motivation by Battling Yourself – with Shastri Mahadeo

When Unioncrate cofounder Shastri Mahadeo struggled with predicting demand for his specialty tea and matcha import business, he discovered that this was a common supply chain management problem among suppliers of consumer packaged goods (CPG). He met a developer at a Techstars Startup Weekend, and their solution led to the founding of Unioncrate. Their supply chain platform simplifies operations and demand planning for consumer goods companies. “What keeps me going,” says Shastri, “is that I'm i...

Oct 13, 2020•20 min

Hacking Resilience by Celebrating Small Wins — with Laura Spiekerman

In 2015, Alloy’s empath founders saw the need to speed up the payment rails to improve financial services onboarding. With funding assistance as a Techstars Barclays Accelerator grad, they developed an identity operating system that banks and FinTechs use to manage their AML/KYC operations and fraud detection. The key to founder resilience, as Laura explains, is to focus on “the little things that are going well and celebrate them” and to share those wins with your team. Listen for Laura’s story...

Sep 29, 2020•22 min

Live Recording: Take All Advice With a Grain of Salt — with Christie Horvath

Founders — especially first time founders — need to walk a careful line with advice. They need lots of it in order to make good decisions, but ultimately, every decision is theirs to make. Christie Horvath, founder of Wagmo, says her biggest tip to other founders is to “take everyone’s advice with a grain of salt — especially if you’re a female founder, you’re going to get a lot of advice and most of it’s going to be wrong.” Early on, she doubted herself and hired “some dude with a fancy resume”...

Sep 23, 2020•31 min

Customer Love — with Ben Uretsky

DigitalOcean took on Amazon Web Services (AWS) and grew his company from a five-founder startup in the Techstars Boulder accelerator to a unicorn and highly successful cloud infrastructure provider. “Customer love” in Ben’s words — the feedback from developers that DigitalOcean met their needs in a way that AWS did not — was what kept Ben and his team going, and kept skeptical investors interested. Listen for Ben’s insights into pleasing both customers and investors, and much more. Techstars per...

Sep 16, 2020•26 min•Season 1Ep. 1

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