Prerna Gupta is a serial entrepreneur who entered the tech spotlight when her Songify app hit #1 in the app store. She’s gone on to co-found several startups focused on music, dating, and short stories, and in 2011 Fast Company named her one of the most influential women in technology. She hasn’t slowed down since. Gupta is currently the CEO of Telepathic Inc., which developed the Hooked app. Hooked boasts a list of star-studded investors including Lebron James, Steph Curry, Ashton Kutcher, Jami...
Aug 11, 2021•53 min
Ashik Ahmed doesn’t like the term “tech unicorn.” As the CEO and cofounder of Deputy, a homegrown workforce management solution, Ashik’s priority is creating impact for their customers. To date, the company has partnered with 250,000 workplaces across 100 countries. Ashik is aiming for more. In this episode of the Foundr podcast, Nathan Chan chats with Ashik to discuss: Why Deputy’s goal is to have 1 million on their platform by 2023 How to get investors to chase you Why founders are like LeBron...
Aug 04, 2021•44 min
Labeled the “Steve Jobs of Investing” , Ray Dalio is easily one of the most successful investors of our time. The Principles: Work & Life author is the larger-than-life mentor we all need in our day-to-day life. It’s incredible to learn that the founder of Bridgewater Associates, the world's biggest hedge fund firm which manages roughly $150 billion, began his investment journey at the age of 12 using his pocket money to buy stocks. Listen as we delve deep with the living legend himself to h...
Jul 28, 2021•54 min
Full of wonderful ideas but don’t know how to make them a reality? Our next guest had the same problem…until he managed to turn them into MULTIPLE startups, most of which he’s sold. Paul English bought and sold his first business Boston Light Software for $33.5 million, within just 7 months of its founding. Paul went on to co-found the popular travel site Kayak, which he sold to Priceline for a whopping $1.8 billion. So what has Paul learned through all this? Well, we asked him. In this episode ...
Jul 21, 2021•54 min
What do you get when you mix Daymond John, cozy toes, and a charitable mission? Bombas. That's right, you get the world's best sock company. Foundr CEO Nathan Chan recently sat down with Randy Goldberg and David Heath to learn how Bombas went from a growing ecommerce business to a Shark Tank sensation. Randy and David talk about growing Bombas from heel to toe, including: Why they bootstrapped as long as possible How preparing for Shark Tank helped them boost their business—even before they got ...
Jul 13, 2021•54 min
What does a savvy entrepreneur do when she sells her startup for $125 million? She starts another business, of course. Radha Agrawal, cofounder of Thinx, has launched another passion project: Daybreaker. Daybreaker is a wellness community that offers sober dance parties in 100 countries around the world. With events at the top of the World Trade Center, Sydney Opera House, and even the White House, Daybreaker is quite literally on top. And now Daybreaker is offering virtual and hybrid options to...
Jul 06, 2021•59 min
How do you raise capital for your startup? Well, if you ask the co-founder of Airbnb Joe Gebbia, he’ll tell you what worked for him: Cereal. That’s right, the company that started with a single air mattress and grew to a $100 billion empire was kept afloat by selling custom cereal boxes. It was bizarre but it worked. Gebbia muses in this episode of the Foundr podcast: “We made $20,000 in breakfast cereal, and we're able to basically pay off our credit card debt...The cereal, funnily enough, was ...
Jun 29, 2021•51 min
Tommie Powers is a legend in digital paid advertising. He's consulted on $100+ million in ad spend, including $30 million on YouTube ads alone. So when Tommie talks about paid YouTube ad strategies, we listen. In a recent interview on the Foundr podcast, Tommie talked with us about everything from diversifying ad spend to crafting a powerful message to calculating ROAS (spoiler: most people are calculating ROAS all wrong). Check out the latest episode of the Foundr podcast as Tommie tells us how...
Jun 22, 2021•54 min
Inc. Magazine called her the most important entrepreneur on the planet. Fast Company called her the "brand whisperer." Emily Heyward of Red Antler is a master at helping a brand stand out from the crowd. Heyward has elevated some of the biggest brands on the planet, including Casper, Yumi, Four Square, BirchBox, and All Birds. In this episode of the Foundr Podcast, she reveals her creative process and tells us how she got started in the industry. If you want a new perspective on building a brand...
Jun 15, 2021•39 min
In this episode of the Foundr podcast, we speak with Omaze’s Matt Pohlson to discuss how a near-death experience taught him a powerful lesson about optimism—and how it changed his perspective on business forever. Pohlson is cofounder and CEO of Omaze, an online fundraising platform that supports causes by offering once-in-a-lifetime experiences. Some of the experiences they offer include top-tier influential figures like Michelle Obama or George Clooney, or million-dollar prizes like cars and pr...
Jun 08, 2021•53 min
As the CEO and founder of TrendHunter, Jeremy Gutsche is at the forefront of trendspotting, innovation, and creating the future. In this ground-breaking interview, the New York Times Bestselling author reveals everything he knows about entrepreneurship and ideas. Gutsche’s TrendHunter is the world's largest, most popular trend spotting firm with billions of views, and over 10,000 projects for almost every major brand on the market, from Samsung and Disney, to RedBull and even NASA. The ultimate ...
Jun 01, 2021•47 min
In this episode of the Foundr podcast, Nathan Chan speaks with Jeff Raider and Andy Katz-Mayfield to find out how they scaled Harry’s into a $20 million brand, and how they created other multiple million-dollar brands. The idea for Harry’s came about after Katz-Mayfield had a disappointing late-night shopping experience at the chemists, and noticed that all the men’s razors were overpriced and overdesigned. Almost 8 years later, Raider and Katz-Mayfield have multiple channels, over 1000 employee...
May 26, 2021•52 min
Quitting her promising job at Google, Heidi Zak decided to take the plunge and launch ThirdLove, an ecommerce brand for women’s underwear. Today, thanks to Zak’s masterful approach to scaling, ThirdLove is the third biggest ecommerce lingerie brand in America with no signs of slowing down. Zak’s journey into the entrepreneurial space began after she moved to the West coast and got swept up in the startup world. Launching as a small bootstrapped brand, she never thought that she one day be compet...
May 18, 2021•55 min
This week’s podcast is a deep dive with Schmidt Natural’s co-founder, author, and investor Jaime Schmidt. Building her brand from a side hobby to a 7-figure annual income didn’t happen overnight, but Schmidt refused to let fear hold her back. Although Schmidt says she has had 22 previous jobs, Schmidt Naturals was her very first business. Living off $35k joint-income with a new baby, Schmidt first started creating her all-natural products at home, selling them at farmer’s markets. After years of...
May 11, 2021•44 min
Joseph Einhorn is no stranger to entrepreneurialism. With almost 25 years of startup experience under his belt, Einhorn knows the ins and the outs of the game. In this interview with Nathan Chan, Einhorn discusses his incredible journey from becoming a self-taught engineer for Capital IQ, launching and selling the global ecommerce phenomenon Fancy.com, and how his life-long love for comic books evolved into founding Loot. With a penchant for satiating curiosity and deep respect for creators the ...
May 04, 2021•45 min
As someone who always knew they had a passion for fashion, Tamara Mellon has come a long way from working in a PR firm. As founder of luxury shoe brand Jimmy Choo, founder of a new direct-to-consumer brand bearing her own name, and author of In My Shoes, Mellon is a game-changer in the fashion industry. In this interview, Nathan Chan sits down to speak with one of the most influential figures in the fashion industry to discuss every step of her journey in the fashion industry. Not only has Mello...
Apr 27, 2021•45 min
In this episode of the Foundr podcast, CEO and founder of eToro Yoni Assia sits down to discuss how he built his empire, getting dinner with Warren Buffett, and how he scaled the world's largest social media investment network. As someone who has always been passionate about connecting finance and technology, Assia says that he was always someone who loved the intersection between technology and finance. As his second startup, eToro was created to simplify the user experience to make trading and...
Apr 20, 2021•50 min
After launching 9 companies, Jon Oringer didn’t really think that his 10th company Shutterstock would be the one to stand out from the crowd. Started as a side-hustle, Oringer launched the stock photography business with $10k. Today, his estimated net worth is sitting at $1.5B. Safe to say that Oringer’s journey has been pretty impressive. Based out of New York, Shutterstock is a global provider of stock photography, stock footage, stock music, and editing tools used by the world over. In this F...
Apr 13, 2021•40 min
In this digital age, music streaming and subscriptions have quickly become the norm. This week at Foundr, we were lucky enough to speak to an entrepreneur who was there for the rise of streaming and the music-tech space: Ola Sars. Before he was founder and CEO of the fastest growing B2B music streaming service, Soundtrack Your Brand, Ola was co-founder and COO of Beats Music, acquired by Apple and transformed into Apple Music, as well as the co-founder of Pacemaker, the world's first DJ driven m...
Apr 06, 2021•58 min
In this delicious interview, Nathan Chan sits down with CAULIPOWER founder Gail Becker to find out how she took her ecommerce company from $0 to $100M in just 3 years. Becker takes us on her tasty food brand journey, from her experience in corporate life as a marketer, to branching into the unknown to create something she wanted to see on the market: more food options for celiacs. Listen in as she discusses the process of getting her product into 25,000 stores on her first try and the future of ...
Mar 30, 2021•50 min
Coming from a long line of shoemakers, it seemed only natural that Joe Foster follow in his family’s footsteps, but instead Foster decided to push his horizons even further and create a brand that would become a legacy. Listen in as Foster shares his incredible journey through generations of shoemakers to bring us the global brand we know today: Reebok. Foster’s entrepreneurial journey is nothing short of inspiring, as he took the company through ups and downs, broke into competitive markets, an...
Mar 23, 2021•1 hr 9 min
When his 10 year old daughter was upset by negative comments posted about her artwork, Hovhannes Avoyan decided to do something about it. Almost a decade later, over 1 billion app downloads and 150 million active monthly, PicsArt has become a global movement. Before founding PicsArt, Hovhannes Avoyan was already a successful entrepreneur with five startups that he sold to Lycos, Bertelsmann, GFI, TeamViewer, and HelpSystems. With a strong understanding of the market, scaling, and what it takes t...
Mar 16, 2021•49 min
Power up, level up, and get ready to take your business to the extreme, with this incredible interview with Single Grain’s Eric Siu. A former pro-gamer, Siu has been on the quintessential entrepreneur’s journey. He’s faced scaling issues, failure, and trying to do too much at once, and now he is ready to reveal why he believes gamers make the best entrepreneurs. In this electrified interview with Foundr, Siu discusses why every founder needs to have a good understanding of marketing, essential l...
Mar 09, 2021•44 min
How does someone launch a $200 million beverage company with zero experience and four children under the age of six? Just ask super-mom, author, and Hint Water empire CEO and Founder, Kara Goldin. Goldin was first inspired to launch her beverage company as an alternative to other unhealthy drinks on the market. Not only did Goldin manage to build a company that is now the largest privately owned non-alcoholic beverage company in America, but she placed Hint on the shelves of her local Whole Food...
Mar 02, 2021•59 min
Feb 23, 2021•1 hr
In 2011, Hiroki Takeuchi launched his first business GoCardless with his co-founders. Just under one decade later, they are processing over $15b in payments every year! Takeuchi’s first business began as a service to help streamline the messy process of collecting payments informally. Over the next several years, funding, scaling, and pivoting led him to create a simple service that helped collect recurring and one-off payments from customers. Takeuchi’s approach to business is inspiring. Not on...
Feb 16, 2021•49 min
Building partnerships and mailing lists as an entrepreneur can be one of the trickiest and most elusive parts of the game. Targetting the right people, understanding brand identity - it’s all a delicate ecosystem to navigate. The good news is, when it comes to mailing lists and partnerships, we have all the answers you need from the mastermind and guru himself: Colin Darretta. Co-founder of a number of successful companies including WellPath, a health and wellness plan) and DojoMojo, a software ...
Feb 09, 2021•51 min
For Sarah Leary, entrepreneurship has always been in her blood. Growing up in a household of small-business owners including her grandmother who was also an entrepreneur, she knew she would eventually be one, too. She remembers that even when she was working for Microsoft as part of the founding team for Microsoft Office, she knew that being a business owner was her future. From her development, launch, and successful scaling of Nextdoor into the world’s largest private social network for neighb...
Feb 02, 2021•1 hr 3 min
When Alli Webb founded Drybar in 2010, it started as one small salon in Brentwood, California that was designed to do one thing and do it well: blowouts. Today, her brand has grown to over150 stores in 33 states, a hair care product line that she sold for over $250 million, her own podcast Raising The Bar , and a NY Times best-selling book Good Hair For All . Best of all, Webb is Foundr magazine’s cover girl for issue 95 (check it out, it’s a good one!) Guess you could say that Alli Webb is an e...
Jan 26, 2021•53 min
If you want to start a business, you sure as hell better be made of the right stuff. Because Joe De Sena is here to tell you that in business, “anything that can go wrong, will go wrong”, and you need to be mentally tough enough to handle it. In this Foundr interview like no other, Nathan Chan speaks with Spartan Race creator, best-selling author, and badass CEO Joe De Sena on why you need manufactured adversity. De Sena has faced mountains of failure in business and continues to rise, everythin...
Jan 19, 2021•37 min
