If you build it they will come is a popular myth in the startup ecosystem. Our guest, Cindy Fossouo, Founder & CEO of Information Systems Builder, loves solving the problem facing many tech founders: how to market their products and services to their ideal customers. Her San Francisco-based firm is a branding and marketing company providing services for tech startups seeking to differentiate their product and stand out in a crowded and noisy world. From competitor research to building a sale...
Jan 31, 2023•55 min
Innovative products, services and behavior changes are key ingredients for solving the world’s most pressing issues. Our guest, Lori van Dam, is the CEO of Hult Prize, an organization that inspires student entrepreneurs to solve the world’s biggest challenges through innovative social enterprises with positive global impact. Hult Prize was launched in 2009 by a group of Hult International Business School students with the support of the Hult family, founders and owners of EF Education First, and...
Jan 27, 2023•1 hr•Ep. 258
Founders - you will be INSPIRED by and UPLIFTED from this delicious conversation with global clean beauty brand founder Kim Roxie! Southern belle, seasoned makeup artist, licensed esthetician and member of the Cosmetic Executive Women, our guest – Kim Roxie – experienced firsthand how multicultural women have been overlooked in the clean beauty market. At the age of 21, with a $500 investment, she opened her own makeup shop that catered to multicultural women in her hometown of Houston, Texas. A...
Jan 24, 2023•1 hr 9 min•Ep. 257
Who’s ready for some tea from the leading source for LGBTQ+ business news, served with dignity and depth? Our guest, Travers Johnson (he/him), is the Founder & CEO of Queerency, an award-winning LGBTQ+ business media startup, and the Creator of LGBTQ+ Business Week, an annual 7-day celebration of queer-owned small businesses. The winner of the Google News Initiative Pitchfest and the Maynard Institute Media Entrepreneurship Award, Travers’ delicious delivery of the queer economy news through...
Jan 20, 2023•1 hr 12 min•Ep. 256
You’re never too old to realize a new dream and build an innovative tech business. Our guest, Danielle D. Duplin, is the Founder and President of FreeWind Productions, an award-winning public speaking coach, and an executive producer of strategic innovation programs. She’s also a beloved Mentor and Pitch Coach to hundreds of startups and scaleups via MassChallenge, FinTech Sandbox, Leading Cities Accelerator (Smart CitiesTech), TechStars, JETRO (Japan’s BioTech), AGENCY (AgeTech), and AARP AgeTe...
Jan 17, 2023•1 hr 4 min•Ep. 255
Menstruation is one of the many bodily issues women have been taught to suppress. Our guest, Rachael Kim, said “enough with the silence,” and is actively changing the social conversation around menstrual health. She’s the Co-Founder and CEO of My Comma—an organic period care subscription platform amplifying women/BIPOC led brands to menstruators, and powering new routines. My Comma represents the pause to take care of oneself, acknowledge the different facets of you, and the fact that it takes m...
Jan 13, 2023•1 hr 14 min•Ep. 253
What do you get when you combine beautiful dispensers, a sanitizer people love to use, and a commitment to doing business in a better way? A hand sanitizer system that prevents more plastics from polluting our planet and helps to remove existing plastics too! Our guest, Ashley Wayman, is the Founder of Shimmy – a customizable and eco-friendly hand sanitizer system elevating the way businesses provide this necessary consumable to their employees and customers. Built to last, Shimmy’s impeccably d...
Jan 10, 2023•1 hr 3 min•Ep. 250
Every woman, regardless of hair texture, deserves a wig that resembles the hair that she lost. Our guest, Pamela Shaddock, is Co-Founder and COO of Coils to Locs, a social impact, for-profit enterprise that addresses a healthcare disparity: the lack of coily, curly, ethnically inspired wigs at cancer center hospitals and medical hair loss salons that can be purchased with health insurance reimbursement if applicable. Pamela and her Co-Founder (and sister!) Dianne Austin are intimately aware of h...
Jan 06, 2023•1 hr 8 min•Ep. 252
Are you ready to say Hasta Luego to 2022 and Hello Gorgeous to 2023? Our guest, seasoned founder, mouthy activist, super opinionated blogger and Host of the popular $h!t We Don’t Talk About Podcast, Mia Voss, joined us again on the 3rd Annual Andelicious Startup Life LIVE Holiday and Solstice Celebration! Mia and I touch on so many topics, including: • Mia’s Year in Review – WOWZA • Glorification of entrepreneurship • White supremacy and capitalist hustle culture based on slavery per our friends...
Dec 22, 2022•2 hr 16 min•Ep. 248
Events are a great way to bring people together, and share a moment, message or idea with a captive audience. They do, however, take considerable time, effort, and organization to execute successfully. Our guest, Dr. Shanna M. Scott, has fine-tuned the art of event planning with her business, Shanna Scott PR & Events, removing the stress and effort from her clients’ shoulders. For 18 years Dr. Shanna and her team have produced luxury lifestyle and transformational events and messaging that l...
Dec 13, 2022•1 hr 4 min•Ep. 250
Did you know the fashion industry is responsible for over 4% to the global greenhouse gas emissions? And it’s not just a carbon impact, but water, chemicals, deforestation, textile waste, microplastics and more. The U.S. market presents a huge opportunity to systemically refashion apparel supply chains to localized demand chains. Our guest – Lisa Morales-Hellebro – is catalyzing this paradigm shift as CEO and Founder of REFASHIOND OS (rOS), automating on-demand manufacturing for the $2.7 trillio...
Dec 09, 2022•1 hr 9 min•Ep. 249
The exciting anticipation of launching a new business can quickly fade if a newly minted founder isn’t properly prepared for startup life. Born into an entrepreneurial family, Alejandra Santos is deeply empathetic to the struggles and challenges entrepreneurship presents. That’s why she launched Startup Tandem – to help entrepreneurs start their businesses off on the right foot! Startup Tandem’s finance and business services are curated specifically for startups, they fit all business needs at a...
Dec 06, 2022•1 hr 6 min•Ep. 248
A recent study reported the #1 reason people were quitting their jobs was due to a lack of career development and advancement. Serial entrepreneur Sandra A. Babu-Boateng is solving that problem with her new tech startup LegacyShift: a B2B market network platform that matches members with internal experts for skills training, mentorship and career support. Sandra personally experienced some of these issues during her corporate career, when she found herself unprepared to navigate corporate cultur...
Dec 02, 2022•1 hr
How do you instill a sense of resilience in students that allows them to look at adversity as a challenge and failure as a learning opportunity? You teach them entrepreneurship! On Tuesday, November 29, 2022, we celebrated National Entrepreneurship Month and Giving Tuesday by amplifying one of my favorite nonprofit organizations: BUILD. BUILD utilizes entrepreneurship education to help students develop ownership and agency over their own academic and career success, while addressing racial equit...
Nov 29, 2022•1 hr 3 min•Ep. 241
How does a founder know when it’s time to launch a PR campaign for their startup, and how do they get media prepared? Our guest, Sabrina Stocker, is a PR expert and founder of Two Comma PR, a unique public relations agency helping businesses get media exposure and quickly build their online brand presence. A former tennis coach and player, Sabrina studied for her MBA at Edinburgh Business School, where she became the youngest person ever to graduate. Combining her sports and business knowledge, ...
Nov 22, 2022•59 min•Ep. 245
How it started: co-hosting networking events and roundtables for founders. How it’s going: a Florida-based hybrid accelerator and seed VC fund helping early-stage startups scale! Our guest, Justis Mendez, was born in the Stockyard neighborhood of Cleveland. Raised by his grandparents and single mother, Justis went on to teach himself finance and build networks across the country. He founded startup Qu Parking, an "Airbnb for residential parking,” and led business development for Pinata, a fintec...
Nov 18, 2022•58 min•Ep. 244
For a brand-new startup and its first-time founders, an accelerator program is an ideal opportunity to get valuable peer, mentor and financial support. Our guest, Caroline Winnett, is the Executive Director of one of the world's leading accelerator programs and a global hub for entrepreneurship: Berkeley SkyDeck. Founded by UC Berkeley students, alumni, and faculty who were seeking to bring their scientific and technical discoveries to market, the program is ranked second to Stanford in producin...
Nov 15, 2022•56 min•Ep. 243
Improving systemic social and environmental challenges isn’t just for nonprofit agencies. Our guest, Pauline Koelbl, is a gender-lens/impact investor and a leading innovation expert in developing and emerging economies, with over 20 years’ experience in international affairs and venture philanthropy. She’s the Founder and Managing Partner of ShEquity, a fund providing smart investment to impactful, innovative, and scalable African female-led and owned businesses; and she’s the Founder/CEO of Afr...
Nov 11, 2022•1 hr 3 min•Ep. 242
Growing up an underestimated, first-generation Mexican-American daughter to immigrants, our guest, Lolita Taub, had a dream to give her family a better shot at life. Today Lolita is a General Partner at Ganas Ventures, where she invests in pre-seed and seed community-driven companies in the US and Latin America, with a mission of creating generational wealth in community. With 15 years working within the Silicon Valley ecosystem, she has accomplished $70M+ in sales and made 90+ investments as an...
Nov 08, 2022•41 min•Ep. 236
While not all entrepreneurs are artists, all artists are entrepreneurs. They have a product or idea to sell, and they need to approach their business as any entrepreneur would. Our guest, Sky Bergman, is an accomplished, award-winning photographer who recently made her directorial debut with Lives Well Lived, a film celebrating the incredible wit, wisdom and experiences of adults aged 75 to 100 years old. Sky’s fine art work is included in permanent collections at the Los Angeles County Museum o...
Nov 04, 2022•1 hr 5 min•Ep. 240
Bringing an MVP to life can be expensive, time consuming, and heartbreaking if the results aren’t customer and investor ready. Our guest, Ayush Singhvi, launched Byldd to address a gap he saw in software entrepreneurship: aspiring founders spending hundreds of thousands of dollars on ineffective developers or agencies without receiving a marketable product. Byldd is an MVP Development Company that helps founders build revenue-generating, scalable MVPs for under $10K using a combination of propri...
Nov 01, 2022•55 min•Ep. 239
Everyone needs a good headshot. EVERYONE. When our guest, Kevin Thai, learned he was having a son at the same time he was being laid off during the pandemic, he immediately turned to the business of headshot photography. Fortunately, classic headshots never go out of style, which makes professional headshot photography a stable, profitable niche … especially for a new Dad! Kevin quickly built his social capital on LinkedIn, focusing on Boston’s thriving startup community, and soon his photograph...
Oct 28, 2022•1 hr 2 min•Ep. 238
Female Founders and Leaders are changing the landscape of business every single day. Helping women leaders who are creating positive change, building their businesses and the legacies they want to leave behind is social entrepreneur and brand strategist Erika Brechtel’s Ikagi. She’s the founder of Élanoura, an organization that brings together and supports women by providing opportunities to explore a purpose bigger than themselves, connections outside of themselves and impact beyond themselves....
Oct 25, 2022•1 hr 2 min•Ep. 237
Digital marketing strategies look great on paper, right? But when it comes to implementing a startup’s social media presence, brand and content consistently, many founders get overwhelmed. Our guest, Janelle Jones, is the founder and CEO of Janelle and Co., a boutique consulting agency that takes service-based brands to the next level with growth-based holistic marketing strategies. The team at Janelle & Co. are on a mission to amplify change-makers’ services by providing innovative, customi...
Oct 21, 2022•1 hr 2 min•Ep. 236
Urban and indoor farming are the future, but traditional farming methods and tools won’t always translate from the field to the indoor farm. Our guest, serial entrepreneur Aja Atwood, is the Co-Founder and CEO of Trella Technologies Inc., an AgTech startup on a mission to create energy-efficient and globally scalable solutions to problems unique to the indoor farming industry. With fellow inventor and Co-Founder, Andres "Dre" Chamorro III, they prototyped, built, and built again, Trella's patent...
Oct 18, 2022•1 hr 1 min•Ep. 231
Founder and CEO Marcie Dickson is pursuing her vision to make arbitration and mediation more transparent, inclusive, and diverse. Leveraging nearly 20 years of business development experience – including as the only Black female Chief Marketing & Business Development Officer in ADR nationally and one of only a handful in the legal industry – Marcie now leads an experienced team and a prominent and diverse panel of neutrals at her company, Alterity ADR. Alterity ADR is the largest female and ...
Oct 14, 2022•59 min•Ep. 234
Over 7 in 10 pre-retirees say they want to work in retirement. It’s not always about the money, either. Many want to keep working because they are at the top of their game, to provide mental stimulation, to maintain friendships and connection, or to transition to something different. After running her own digital communications company for 30 years our guest, Victoria Tomlinson, noticed that a lot of senior employees were being recommended to her as they tried to create new roles for themselves ...
Oct 11, 2022•1 hr 7 min
Did you know a short-term rental owner can upsell products in their rentals from a pre-stocked pantry to the art on the walls? Our Guest, Annie Sloan, a former HGTV producer and today an avid traveler and a successful Airbnb host, is the Co-Founder and CEO of The Host Co., a digital commerce marketplace for short-term rentals. The company’s platform enables hosts to create an online store to sell anything in their property. Rental owners can offer pre-order services like a mid-stay cleaning to i...
Oct 07, 2022•1 hr 2 min
How do you take an innovative product idea, create a physical prototype, and then commercialize it? Our guest, Laura Teicher, is the Executive Director of FORGE, a nonprofit organization on a mission to help startups navigate the journey from physical prototype to scale. They work closely with startups to understand their business needs and connect them to the right type of manufacturer or supplier for the job. They also work closely with their extensive network of manufacturers, design firms, a...
Oct 04, 2022•1 hr 5 min
Everyone deserves to feel valued, included and set up for success during the hiring process. Despite being highly skilled in their professions, our guests, Joseph Williams and Cayelan Mendoza, were consistently overlooked for job opportunities and were often filtered out of application processes by systems that wouldn’t consider them because they didn't have degrees and came from non-traditional working backgrounds. So this dynamic duo created an AI-driven platform called Clu, a skills-first job...
Sep 27, 2022•1 hr 32 min
