Meet Denica Riadini-Flesch, a former economist turned entrepreneur, who was so saddened by the struggles of traditional artisans and farmers in rural Indonesia that she created a company to help change their lives. SukkhaCitta is a farm-to-closet fashion brand that puts power back in the hands of the women who make our clothes. Its mission: to end the exploitation of women and simultaneously regenerate the planet. Balancing purpose and profit while fighting society’s demand for fast fashio...
Mar 11, 2025•15 min•Season 4Ep. 17
Meet Wyclife Omondi, co-founder of BuuPass , a company committed to tackling one of Africa’s biggest challenges: transportation inefficiency. The solution seemed simple enough – digital ticketing – but making it happen took persistence, adaptation, and plenty of strategic pivots. Learn about Omondi’s entrepreneurial journey as he scales to include other modes of transportation and expands across the African continent. Born and raised in Kenya, Omondi studied in Singapore and the United States, a...
Feb 18, 2025•15 min•Season 4Ep. 16
Meet Santhoshi Sushma Buddhiraju, CEO and cofounder of Autocracy Machinery, a heavy machinery manufacturing company located in southern India. The idea for her company began with a simple question: Why is India, the world’s largest consumer, so reliant on imported machinery? Answering that question entailed bold risks, fearless leadership, and personal sacrifice. Santhoshi had a strong foundation to start a business, even one that was extremely male-dominated. She got a world class education at ...
Jan 29, 2025•12 min•Season 4Ep. 15
Meet Sumit Sinhal, founder and director of Kin’s Health, a growing healthcare company located in West Bengal, India, at the foot of the Himalayas. While most entrepreneurs would see obstacles in delivering care to this remote region, Sinhal’s passion, innovation, leadership, and strategic vision are creating opportunities — for both patients and doctors. India is infamously known as the diabetic capital of the world with over 80 million people suffering from the disease and an equal number...
Jan 07, 2025•14 min•Season 4Ep. 14
Welcome to Grit & Growth’s masterclass on sales, featuring Celine Duros, a woman who started her career in sales at 16 and is now both an experienced sales director in emerging markets and consultant to entrepreneurs seeking the secrets to successful sales – whether you’re pitching yourself, managing teams, or selling a specific product. Celine Duros sold earrings at a holiday market in France, transitioned to men’s fashion, and only realized after business school that sales was her true cal...
Dec 19, 2024•38 min•Season 4Ep. 13
Welcome to Grit & Growth’s masterclass on the do’s and don’ts of pitching VCs, featuring Zach George, general partner at Launch Africa Ventures, one of the leading early-stage venture capital funds on the continent. Sitting in the investor seat gives George valuable insights on what entrepreneurs should and shouldn’t do to attract the right kind of investment for their company. After earning a master’s degree at Stanford University and spending over a decade on Wall Street, Zach George turne...
Nov 26, 2024•37 min•Season 4Ep. 12
Welcome to Grit & Growth’s masterclass on downsizing with Esi Ansah, executive director of the Center for Leadership at Ashesi University and founder of Axis Human Capital, an organizational development consulting firm. From managing team morale to ensuring your downsizing plan is data driven, Ansah provides a clear blueprint for leaders facing tough HR decisions. Without a doubt, downsizing is one of the most dreaded tasks – for CEOs and employees alike. Which is why Esi Ansah tries to prep...
Nov 05, 2024•39 min•Season 4Ep. 11
Welcome to Grit & Growth’s masterclass on strategic HR with Rokhaya Ndiaye, CEO and founder of Ro&Partners , a human capital consulting firm. Gain valuable insights and strategies for shaping your organization’s long-term goals and aligning your people strategies to meet future challenges. When it comes to dealing with humans, whether growing a talent base in a global marketplace or downsizing to meet long-term goals, Rokhaya Ndiaye (who goes by Ro) recommends employing empathy, us...
Oct 16, 2024•31 min•Season 4Ep. 10
Welcome to Grit & Growth’s masterclass on leadership with Collins Dobbs, a Stanford Graduate School of Business lecturer in leadership and a seasoned executive coach. According to Dobbs, becoming a truly phenomenal leader requires a deeper understanding of both yourself and your team, enabling you to navigate tough conversations, develop real connections, and create a culture where people feel safe to offer real feedback. As an executive coach, Collins Dobbs has worked with senior leade...
Sep 24, 2024•32 min•Season 4Ep. 9
Every entrepreneur understands the critical importance of sales to business success. But often, in the early stages of growth, teams tend to focus on marketing without having a strategic plan or process for how to turn leads into sales. Yann Le Beux, co-founder of a research and design firm in Senegal, and Zia Yusuf, a senior advisor at Boston Consulting Group and Stanford Seed consultant, share their experiences and strategies for building and strengthening your sales strategy. Yann Le Beux’s c...
Sep 03, 2024•31 min•Season 4Ep. 8
Welcome to Grit & Growth’s masterclass on cross-cultural dynamics with Michele Gelfand, Stanford Graduate School of Business professor in organizational behavior. Gain new insights and strategies for understanding your company’s culture – from tight to loose – and how you can use that knowledge to build cultural intelligence in your organization, navigate interactions, enhance company-wide innovation, and drive business growth. Companies and countries can be a lot like people. Some are...
Aug 13, 2024•30 min•Season 4Ep. 7
Is AI part of your business strategy? Well, if it’s not, it probably should be. Ethan Mollick, Wharton School professor of innovation and entrepreneurship, and Arun Jagannathan, two-time entrepreneur, enthusiastically agree on that. In this episode you’ll gain strategic insights and practical tools from an AI visionary and hear how one intrepid entrepreneur is pushing himself and his company to embrace AI. Arun Jagannathan is the founder of not one, but two, startups in India. CrackVerbal helps ...
Jul 23, 2024•26 min•Season 4Ep. 6
Welcome to Grit & Growth’s masterclass on going global – a guide for expanding your business beyond borders. Steve Ciesinski, Stanford Graduate School of Business lecturer in entrepreneurship, walks you through the pitfalls and possibilities of making the move from local venture to global enterprise. It goes without saying that having an outstanding product or service is key to business success. But that’s just the tip of the iceberg when you want to expand your business – regionally and/or ...
Jul 02, 2024•32 min•Season 4Ep. 5
Welcome to Grit & Growth’s masterclass on AI — a practical guide for experimenting and engaging with artificial intelligence. Ethan Mollick, Wharton School associate professor of innovation and entrepreneurship, AI visionary, and best-selling author walks us through the hype, fears, and potential of this transformative and complex technology. AI is reshaping business, society, and education with unprecedented speed. Ethan Mollick urges business leaders and educators to get in there and...
Jun 11, 2024•33 min•Season 4Ep. 4
Meet Acha Leke, senior partner and chairman of McKinsey Africa and co-founder of the African Leadership Academy. Leke has been analyzing the economic prospects of the continent for decades, so he’s the perfect person to share insights on its future, from productivity and digital transformation to the impact of Africa’s youth boom and how to plan proactively for job growth. The economic landscape in Africa has shifted dramatically in recent years. In 2010, McKinsey's " Lions on the Move " r...
May 21, 2024•31 min•Season 4Ep. 3
Starting a business and growing it are challenging enough. But expanding globally, across the entire African continent with 54 very different countries, increases the difficulty exponentially. That’s what Taha Jiwaji, CEO and founder of Beem, is experiencing first hand. Hear what it takes to create a Pan-African business and gain strategic insights on going global from Steve Ciesinski, who teaches entrepreneurship at Stanford Graduate School of Business. After attending college in the Unit...
Apr 30, 2024•32 min•Season 4Ep. 2
Welcome back to Grit & Growth from Stanford Graduate School of Business. In Season 4, you’ll hear tales of entrepreneurial trials and triumphs, obstacles and opportunities, and, of course, plenty of grit and growth. Plus, we share insights from Stanford faculty and global experts on how to avoid the pitfalls of growth and achieve success. We’ll talk to entrepreneurs from Africa and South Asia and hear their impressive stories of business growth despite a host of challenges, including poor in...
Apr 16, 2024•2 min•Season 4Ep. 1
Meet Mir Shahrukh Islam, cofounder and CEO of Bondstein Technologies Ltd. in Bangladesh. He created his IoT, or internet of things, company at a time when very few in Bangladesh even knew the term. Today, that future-focused, risk-taking spirit still defines and inspires his entrepreneurial journey. Taking bold risks is part of almost every entrepreneur’s DNA. Shahrukh demonstrated that trait from the get-go when he chose his company name, Bondstein, a mashup of James Bond and Einstein. “Daring ...
Apr 02, 2024•7 min•Season 3Ep. 17
Meet Raj Prakash, cofounder of Zifo, a science informatics company in India. While growing revenues is on almost every entrepreneur’s mind, Prakash believes building a thriving culture should be too. Hear how creating a great place to work is helping his company achieve great results. Zifo is one of the largest global pure play science informatics companies, with over 1,800 employees. And it counts many of the largest global bio-pharma companies among its customers. The company focuses on techno...
Mar 12, 2024•8 min•Season 3Ep. 16
Meet Grace Macharia, a speech and language therapist and founder of SLT Support in Nairobi, Kenya. She created a social enterprise with a mission to support not only her patients, but also the profession of speech therapy in Kenya as a whole. “In 2011 there were about five speech therapists in Kenya, and all of them were trained out of the country. Can you imagine only five speech therapists for a population of 21 million?!” she recounts. When Macharia eventually found her true career call...
Feb 20, 2024•13 min•Season 3Ep. 15
If/Then is a new podcast from the Stanford Graduate School of Business that we think will be of great interest to Grit & Growth listeners. This episode features Stanford GSB Professor Jonathan Levav analyzing the premise, “If we want to generate better ideas, then we need to get people back to the office.” To Zoom or not to Zoom? That is the question on many leaders’ minds, nearly four years after the COVID-19 pandemic emptied offices around the world. While remote work has become the new no...
Jan 30, 2024•33 min•Ep. 1
Meet Sakshi Kapahi, head of Omam Consultants, an HR consultancy in India, and a mother on a mission to balance home and work life for herself and her employees. Hear about Kapahi’s journey — the hurdles and highlights — as she grew both her family and the business her father started over 40 years ago. In India, a country where only 14 percent of entrepreneurs are women, Sakshi Kapahi has had to grapple with all the familiar obstacles that working mothers face … and then some. “You always get the...
Jan 09, 2024•13 min•Season 3Ep. 14
Welcome to Grit & Growth’s masterclass on friction — the good, the bad, and the ugly. Robert Sutton, Stanford professor in the School of Engineering and best-selling author, has stories and strategies to help you identify the causes of friction, eliminate it, and even learn how to use friction intentionally to create more space for success. Friction, according to Bob Sutton, “ is simply putting obstacles in front of people that slow them down, that make their jobs more difficult a...
Dec 12, 2023•37 min•Season 3Ep. 13
Welcome to Grit & Growth’s masterclass on growth mindset and psychological safety and how they can empower employees to speak up, fail fast, and fail smart — with accountability but not retribution. Sarah Soule, Stanford Graduate School of Business professor in organizational behavior, has tips and tricks for leaders to help build a culture that encourages healthy debate and out-of-the-box thinking. Failure happens … whether you like it or not. Yet, almost every entrepreneur would agre...
Nov 21, 2023•26 min•Season 3Ep. 12
Does your company have a culture where people are truly free to speak their minds … without fear of retribution? At the start of the pandemic, Elikem Tamaklo, managing director for Nyaho Healthcare in Ghana, realized that the answer was no. Hear how he changed his company’s culture and his own behavior to lead his team through COVID-19 and beyond. Also, gain strategic insights from Sarah Soule, professor at Stanford Graduate School of Business, on the process and benefits of creating an environm...
Oct 31, 2023•35 min•Season 3Ep. 11
We're excited to announce that Stanford Seed has a new advisory board member: Andreata Muforo. We are thrilled to have Andreata on our team! To celebrate, we're bringing back one of our favorite episodes from Season 1, "Raising Capital in Africa: It's Not Just About the Money", which featured Andreata as a guest. Enjoy! Original Show Notes: Meet Elo Umeh, Managing Director and CEO of Terragon Group, a Nigerian digital marketing and data insights company, and Andreata Muforo and Ido Sum from TLco...
Oct 10, 2023•45 min•Season 3Ep. 10
Welcome to Grit & Growth’s masterclass on spontaneous communication — those unplanned moments when you’re called on in a meeting, asked to give feedback, or introduced to a potential investor. Matt Abrahams, Stanford Graduate School of Business lecturer in strategic communications, has tips and tricks to overcome anxiety, gain confidence, and make sure you’re ready to speak when you least expect it. Matt Abrahams speaks a lot in public, whether he’s teaching MBAs at Stanford or hosting...
Sep 19, 2023•37 min•Season 3Ep. 9
Creating a compelling strategy is step number one for every business. But almost no one gets it right on the first try. Aniket Doegar and “Guns” Ganapathy, co-founders of the Indian social enterprise Haqdarshak, pivoted multiple times while remaining focused on financial sustainability and their mission: eliminating generational poverty in India through access to social security. India, with a population of 1.4 billion, has about a billion people dependent on some form of social security, accord...
Aug 29, 2023•36 min•Season 3Ep. 8
Welcome to Grit & Growth’s masterclass on strategy, featuring Jesper Sørensen’s insights on how to build a strategy for success and accept the inherent uncertainty of it all. This Stanford Graduate School of Business professor tells you what you need to know: from defining what a strategy is — and is not — to deciding who to involve and how to debate constructively. Every entrepreneur understands that their business needs a well-thought-out strategy to succeed. But the gap between know...
Aug 08, 2023•28 min•Season 3Ep. 7
Almost every entrepreneur dreams of becoming a market leader. But a business's greatest potential for success happens with market creation. Andela, led by co-founder and CEO Jeremy Johnson, did just that by unlocking access to a global labor market — for both job seekers and companies in need of great talent. Hear Andela’s market-making journey and gain insights on this kind of disruptive innovation from Efosa Ojomo, director of Global Prosperity at the Christensen Institute and co-author of The...
Jul 18, 2023•35 min•Season 3Ep. 6
