The human brain is one of the most complex objects in the known universe. But it didn't come with an instruction manual. And in school, we were told what to learn but no one ever taught us how to learn effectively. By combining today's unprecedented AI capabilities with the latest research in the science of how we learn most effectively, Julian Alvarez and David Glass are on a quest to invent the future of learning at Wisdolia. In this special episode, Julian is interviewed by his co-founder, Da...
Jul 07, 2023•46 min•Ep. 35
You've build something incredible but now you have to figure out how the hell you're going to find the first people that are going to use your product. So, how do you get your first 10, 100, and 1,000 users? And how do you bring in a consistent stream of users so that you can constantly get feedback on new product changes with a different cohort of users? In this episode, I spoke with Claudio Fuentes about how he and his startup, Leap, have gotten over 10k users in just over a month since launch...
Apr 20, 2023•25 min•Ep. 34
Shutting down your company is perhaps one of the most difficult experiences that almost every founder has to go through at least once. You usually only hear success stories of startups raising millions of dollars and getting millions of users but that is far from the common reality. More than 90% of startups fail. So how do you deal with this tough reality? How do you communicate the news to investors and employees? And what mindset should you adopt moving forward so that you can get back on you...
Apr 03, 2023•27 min•Ep. 33
We live in a world where the only constant is change. And the rate of change itself is accelerating. Things are moving really fast in this increasingly exponential world. With the exponential boom in AI, machines are becoming faster and more intelligent than ever. These advances in AI will bring an unprecedented world of abundance but AI is also likely to cause massive disruption. As AI continues to get smarter and more capable, it will continue to replace many of today’s jobs. This brings a lot...
Mar 19, 2023•32 min
We all start off with these wild dreams as kids — dreams of who we want to become, what we want to create, and what we want to achieve….. and some of us keep having those dreams. But for most of us, something happens and we end up not taking the path of fulfilling our dreams. Something gets in the way and instead we end up taking a very traditional path: get a degree, get a job, then keep climbing the career ladder. The traditional path makes sense because of Culture — e.g. “my mom will kill me ...
Jan 30, 2023•1 hr 14 min•Ep. 31
What if we created a world where we use our own data to augment our thinking, extend our memory, to automate our chores, and to track and improve important things in our lives? This is the vision of what a utopian future of responsible data usage looks like from the perspective of Michael Jelly, today’s guest. This vision is in stark contrast to the way the world works today, where data about us is predominantly used to manipulate our behavior for the benefit of third-parties. This utopia is the...
Dec 09, 2022•1 hr 53 min•Ep. 30
“ If you design your life to where you love it, you never need to escape it ” — This is the core life philosophy of Alex Schachne, today’s guest. Alex is a former college basketball players and a 2nd time founder. But Alex didn’t always have a clear idea of what path he wanted to take in his life. So Alex went on a quest to interview incredibly successful people and hearing each person's life & career story gave him a chance to see which paths truly resonated with him. These conversations ch...
Nov 10, 2022•1 hr 29 min•Ep. 29
“I’m more worried about other startups than AWS or Google” — Eric Jung After testing over 12 ideas and founding 3 companies, Eric Jung is currently focused on building Unreal Speech, a Text-to-Speech software service that he claims is better and 8x cheaper than AWS. The text-to speech uses an ultra realistic AI narrator that is trained to sound audiobook-esque. The software can for example read any piece of text in the voice of Jordan Peterson or Gary Vee. Eric is a South Korean founder living i...
Oct 21, 2022•57 min•Ep. 28
What would you do if you dropped out of college, pursued 12 different ideas but none of them worked, and only had $0.50 cents in your bank account at one point? Would you give up or persevere? Today’s guest, Arnav Bathla, decided to keep charging forward because he believes he was born to be an entrepreneur and he couldn’t possibly see any other option. Arnav is originally from India and after dropping out of college and booking a one-way ticket to San Francisco over 2 years ago, he played aroun...
Sep 23, 2022•1 hr 14 min•Ep. 27
After a 7 month hiatus, the ITF podcast is back!! 🚀 In this special comeback episode, Julian interviews his co-founder at Mindflow, David Glass . Julian and David quit their jobs (Meta & Cisco respectively) in April (4 months ago) to take the full plunge into the entrepreneurial journey and so far, it has been an incredibly rewarding journey filled with tons of challenges, lessons, and joy. In this episode, we cover things such as… What Mindflow is The problem that the company aims to solve...
Sep 01, 2022•52 min•Ep. 26
The pandemic completely shifted the nature of how we work. The abrupt changes brought by the pandemic either destroyed companies or forced them to radically adapt. In this episode, Julian speaks with Kian Gohar about the leadership principles, culture changes, and new rules of work that are required to thrive in this new age. ❓ Who is Kian? Kian Gohar inspires the world’s leading organizations to harness innovation and moonshots to solve complex problems. 💥 Kian is the co-author of “Competing i...
Feb 17, 2022•59 min•Ep. 25
In this special episode, we celebrate ITF’s one-year birthday, which happens to be Julian’s birthday as well! To celebrate, Julian gets personal, vulnerable, and deep. We usually interview next-level entrepreneurs on this podcast but with this episode, you’ll get the opportunity to know Julian better as he tells the story of three of the most transformative experiences in his life. The three stories consist of... The recognition of Julian’s privilege The discovery of Julian’s purpose The biggest...
Jan 27, 2022•31 min•Ep. 24
How can you capture the knowledge buried inside conversations and convert them into actions? After graduating early from UPenn in 2015, Krish Ramineni dove headfirst into Microsoft as a Product Manager. Krish enjoyed his job and he was learning a lot but he realized that he was making incremental improvements to existing products instead of being truly innovative and building new products. When graduate school at Cambridge was right around the corner a year later, a fateful meeting with Sam Udot...
Jan 13, 2022•41 min•Ep. 23
This was a monumental year for NFTs. The most expensive NFT was sold for $69.3 million. The market cap (total money in NFTs) of NFTs went from $17 million in January to $3.25 billion in August (19,000% increase in 8 months). The trading volume went from $4.75 million to $6.5 billion in the last year (141,000% increase). And finally, this year, the number of people that own an NFT went from 1 million to 25 million. This is truly insane exponential hockey stick type growth, and things are just get...
Dec 20, 2021•31 min•Ep. 22
This was a monumental year for NFTs. The most expensive NFT was sold for $69.3 million. The market cap (total money in NFTs) of NFTs went from $17 million in January to $3.25 billion in August (19,000% increase in 8 months). The trading volume went from $4.75 million to $6.5 billion in the last year (141,000% increase). And finally, this year, the number of people that own an NFT went from 1 million to 25 million. This is truly insane exponential hockey stick type growth, and things are just get...
Dec 20, 2021•28 min•Ep. 22
The companies that end up going bankrupt do so because they fail to disrupt themselves. In other words, they generate such an insane amount of revenue that they develop a corporate immune system that will attack any idea that poses a threat to the company's core business. It was during his time at Singularity University that Salim did his seminal research on the attributes that the fastest growing companies in the world had in common. Salim compiled this research to write his popular book, Expon...
Dec 03, 2021•49 min•Ep. 21
Due to the countless barriers to innovation, many people never choose to innovate or bring their ideas to life. And the grand majority of those who do try to innovate end up failing. How do you lower the cost of innovation and maximize the probability of success? Henrik Stamm Kristensen is a serial entrepreneur who has founded five companies, four of which are food technology companies and one of which is a communications platform. After 35 years in the food industry, he is now the Founder and C...
Nov 04, 2021•58 min•Ep. 20
Cryptocurrency is the fastest growing technology in history. Its current growth rate is 113% annually and it's the first asset to have gone up 2 million percent since its inception. It's accelerating twice as fast as the Internet did during the dot-com boom. Visualize this: 140M crypto users exist today, but this number will scale to 1B by 2024. Matthew Chivers and Micah Baylor are propelling this movement forward through Mage, a blockchain consulting company that provides a range of services to...
Oct 14, 2021•1 hr 10 min•Ep. 19
Most people simply view money as a means of satisfying their material desires. For Mar, having power over one's finances tasted like freedom. She believed it would make her happy, but it didn't. Now what? At 21, Mar became a financial trader in a Wolf of Wall Street-esque environment in London. After reaching the peak of her career half a decade later, Mar acquired her Master's degree in Economics at Schumacher college and embarked on a personal and spiritual growth journey by traveling the worl...
Sep 23, 2021•46 min•Ep. 18
Since childhood, Norris was passionate about making the world feel smaller through faster transportation. After studying aerospace engineering at UCLA, he worked in the aerospace industry as a propulsion engineer for three years on vehicles that break the sound barrier. At Stanford's Graduate School of Business, he realized low-boom supersonic travel was the future. As in, what if you could travel at supersonic speeds that are 2 or 3 times faster than the average plane? When a 12-hour flight pre...
Sep 09, 2021•35 min•Ep. 17
By 2050, our globe will face the colossal challenge of accommodating 10 billion people. The million-dollar question is: how are we going to feed them? And how are we going to do it in a sustainable manner without killing the planet and without harming the animals that we share this planet with? Paul Shapiro is the CEO of The Better Meat Co., the author of the national bestselling book, Clean Meat: How Growing Meat Without Animals Will Revolutionize Dinner and the World , a 4x TEDx speaker, and t...
Aug 26, 2021•46 min•Ep. 16
If you could live forever, would you? Combining the forces of science and technology, a leader for the movement towards immortality has emerged. Zoltan was reporting frontline for National Geographic in war zones, even enduring a near-death experience with a landmine in Vietnam. This enlightened him to the value behind surpassing the limitations of terminal flesh and improving the human being and therefore the human experience. Zoltan Istvan is the American-Hungarian Owner and President of ZI Ve...
Aug 12, 2021•34 min•Ep. 15
At 13, she taught herself programming. And ever since the robotics club in middle school captured her interest, her vigor for driving pivotal change and solving hard technical problems, has been unstoppable. By 15, her technological bandwidth expanded to machine learning and blockchain. From developing platforms to track counterfeit medication in developing countries to reducing the cost of prosthetics, she was deservingly awarded the “Young Innovator to Watch” by the Consumer Technology Associa...
Jul 29, 2021•42 min•Ep. 14
Sit back for an overdue reflection on Julian’s recent transition from college to Silicon Valley, where he recently moved to start his career at Facebook as a Software Engineer. Julian graduated from college in December 2020 and took 7 months off before he started working at Facebook. During this 7 month journey, he started this podcast, worked relentlessly on his startup, Vize, traveled to South America for a month (and did Ayahuasca), and invested a significant amount of time into building syst...
Jul 15, 2021•37 min•Ep. 13
Machines can replicate processes, but they can’t detect quality. Human beings are the mindful drivers that define meaning, and that is what sets us apart. Caitlin is an explorer in the worlds of technology, innovation, and well being. She is an author of two books named Designing Wonder and Mindful by Design , a professor at Stanford teaching classes such as “Digital Wellbeing: Healthy Relationships with Technology”. After teaching for two decades, Caitlin founded MindWise, a storytelling and ex...
Jul 01, 2021•44 min•Ep. 12
If not me, then who? At an Uber Elevate Summit in 2018, JR realized that no one was taking initiative to bring flying cars to Canada. In a room filled with aviation experts, JR felt an overwhelming amount of imposter syndrome. Why would a 27 year old with almost no experience in aviation think he has what it takes to bring electric flying vehicles to Canada? While he grew up in Calgary’s energy hydrocarbon center, his wanderlust led him to live in Toronto, Barcelona, Hong Kong, and Shanghai. As ...
Jun 17, 2021•48 min•Ep. 11
Most employees don’t value themselves enough to put in the work they need to achieve their goals. In fact, 80% of employees experience work-related stress and anxiety and depression costs companies over $1T globally every year. But what if you could solve these problems by going to the gym for your mindset? After a degree in commerce with a focus on Human Resources & Organizational Behaviour, Lucy Born hopped on the self-development train. She has also studied Organizational Leadership and E...
Jun 03, 2021•53 min•Ep. 10
When his Professor presented a $10,000 dollar award for the best entrepreneurial robotic solution, Francois was all ears. Inspired by a frustrating Airbnb experience where the key for the home was frozen under the mat, the host was unresponsive, and he was fined five thousand dollars for leaving a window open, Francois used his frustration to fuel his inspiration for what is now Enso Connect. In studying computer and cognitive science, he drove his idea to completion in his University of Toronto...
May 20, 2021•44 min
A few months after he joined a startup out of college, the dotcom bubble burst in April of 2000. Thereafter, Tanvir set aside his stockbroker dreams to found two companies as his entrepreneurial career took flight. In a world of uncertainty, Tanvir thrived as an entrepreneur. Tanvir Aman is a lifelong serial entrepreneur and is currently the Founder and CEO of Dunyha. He came up with the idea for Dunyha while he was managing his own Airbnb and realized that customer satisfaction from guests and ...
May 06, 2021•50 min
At 18, Jay Olenicz decided to break a world record. Four years later, Jay and his brother embarked on the 48-day journey across the Atlantic that would earn them three Guinness World Records. After several near-death experiences and countless hours of reflection, Jay conducted a reassessment of his life. This profound experience inspired him to quit his management consulting job in Bristol, UK, and start a travel tech startup in early 2020. Jay is the CEO and Co-founder of Staze , a travel app t...
Apr 22, 2021•44 min
