Cotopaxi, the Salt Lake City-based outdoor-apparel company, wasn’t Davis Smith’s first business. But it was his first business inspired by a mission to do more than just sell stuff. In fact, the vision for giving back came before the company. And the mission to build a public-benefit corp with strong values came before he ever sold one technicolor backpack. He tells host Christine Lagorio-Chafkin about the inspiration for, and the making the “gear for good” company Cotopaxi, which now has more t...
Mar 13, 2023•49 min
Allison Ellsworth spent seven years on the road working in the oil and gas industry. It took a toll on her health. So she took her discontent to her own kitchen. She felt she was getting health benefits from drinking apple cider vinegar, but hated the taste. Could she concoct something fruity, low-sugar, and with prebiotics? She’s Allison Ellsworth, the founder and chief of brand at Poppi. You may have seen the bright-colored cans on grocery store shelves, or on Shark Tank, or on TikTok. But bef...
Mar 06, 2023•34 min
Kiki Freedman is co-founder and CEO of Hey Jane, a company changing the landscape for medicinal abortion–offering it with telehealth care, and sending pills by mail. In our regular episode, we talked about all the challenges her company faced launching and expanding in a hugely changing regulatory environment–and navigating an increasingly politically divisive one. In this bonus episode, host Christine Lagorio-Chafkin asks her about finding time for herself, and recharging her mind and body afte...
Feb 27, 2023•9 min
While in Harvard Business School, Kiki Freedman had an idea: What if she could work with clinicians and provide medication abortions to individuals through telemedicine, and through the mail? Professors were skeptical. So were investors. Regulations loosened up and the pandemic provided opportunity to launch–but then the Supreme Court changed everything for the future of her business. Freedman, the co-founder and CEO of Hey Jane, tells host Christine Lagorio-Chafkin about the resilience required...
Feb 20, 2023•42 min
In this flashback episode, Christine Lagorio-Chafkin talks with Kim and Tim Lewis, founders of Curl Mix, about their circuitous funding journey and landing at No. 93 on the 2021 Inc. 5000 after attaining more than 4,000 percent growth over the past three years. (Original Air Date 9-27-21)
Feb 13, 2023•48 min
Thrive Market sells hundreds of highly curated very-good-for you pantry staples, and more than 1.2 million people are subscribers. Thrive isn’t just aiming to get organic, healthy food into more peoples’ pantries and diets–it’s aiming at planetary health, too–going plastic-neutral this year, and carbon negative by 2025. While doing all this–and working in a traditionally low-margin business, trying to keep costs down for his customers, co-founder and CEO Nick Green needs to carve out time for hi...
Feb 06, 2023•10 min
My guest today is striving to change access to organic, healthy foods, at reasonable prices…while also taking on Amazon with a very un-Amazon model…in that thinks he can do it all sustainably. His company is going plastic-neutral this year, and carbon-negative by 2025, and supporting regenerative agriculture while already offsetting the company’s entire shipping footprint. If you know supply chains, you know this sounds barely possible? Well, his business is working: It has more than 1.2 million...
Jan 30, 2023•46 min
Stuart Butterfield, the CEO of Slack, has just begun his parental leave, and is also stepping back from his role leading the company he cofounded in 2009. Host Christine Lagorio-Chafkin asked him to look back at his time as CEO of Slack, to what worked really well, and what he knows best. Turns out, one of the things that helped the team at Slack during its years of hyper-fast growth was fostering a culture where debate and disagreement were welcome. Butterfield, himself, had his mind changed ma...
Jan 23, 2023•10 min
Stewart Butterfield, the co-founder and CEO of Slack is on the cusp of 50, and on the brink of stepping down as chief executive of the extremely popular communications-for-teams software company he built. Slack has more than 18 million active daily users, and was acquired by Salesforce in 2020 for $27.7 billion. Butterfield exclusively takes host Christine Lagorio-Chafkin through his fascinating career of building games, startups, abandoning ideas, and running the fastest-growing enterprise tech...
Jan 16, 2023•49 min
Lindsay McCormick started her business without really meaning to start a business. She just wanted to try to make a sustainable, healthy toothpaste, without the landfill-bound packaging, for herself and her friends. But then to pay expenses she started selling it–and it took off, with increasingly eco-conscious consumers. She was inspired in part by the nature she was surrounded by in Southern California–she was a snowboard instructor and a surfing instructor, too. Today, while running Bite, whi...
Jan 09, 2023•10 min
Lindsay McCormick found inspiration in her pristine surroundings, back when she’d teach snowboarding in the winter and surfing in the summer. Respect for nature, where she spent so much of her time, led her to try to eliminate plastics and other landfill- or ocean-bound waste from her life, and to find healthy options. While traveling, she realized she was using a lot of tiny toothpaste tubes, and became fixated on trying to find a better way to brush, free from non-recyclable waste. What she en...
Dec 19, 2022•40 min
The founder of her eponymous jewelry brand, Kendra Scott, has built her business into a robust online operation and more than 130 locations. But from the early days of running her business, she knew she didn’t want to manage the books. Scott tells host Christine Lagorio-Chafkin how she hired strategically, from an accountant to a comptroller, to a CFO–so she could focus on the creative and design work she loves.
Dec 12, 2022•6 min
Kendra Scott founded her eponymous jewelry line in 2002, and opened her first retail store in the height of the recession, in 2008, in Austin, Texas. She’d bootstrapped the company, balancing the books with credit card debt. She tells her story to host Christine Lagorio-Chafkin–including how she built a parent-friendly company culture, and a focus on developing relationships with her customers, using something she calls “The Sister Rule.” Today, Kendra Scott has more than 130 retail stores acros...
Dec 05, 2022•40 min
Airbnb co-founder and chief executive Brian Chesky never thought of himself as a “businessperson.” That’s because he was educated as a designer, and has a degree in industrial design from the Rhode Island School of Design. To him, staying creative and keeping good design top-of-mind are key to his role at the helm of a public, 6,000-person, international corporation. He explains to host Christine Lagorio-Chafkin how he nurtures his own creativity--by engaging with his own curiosity and putting p...
Nov 28, 2022•10 min
When the global Covid-19 pandemic hit, Airbnb’s core business all-but ground to a halt. It lost 80 percent of business in eight weeks. The company’s co-founder and CEO Brian Chesky explains in candid conversation with host Christine Lagorio-Chafkin precisely how he restructured the company’s teams, and put the company on one radically simplified calendar-based product-launch plan, and then released it all to the world…as the 6,000-person global business prepared for its IPO. And today, Chesky is...
Nov 21, 2022•43 min
When the U.S. baby formula shortage hit, Bobbie was still a startup, scaling its own operations and customer-base. But it had to make its most important decision: How to answer that crisis for its own customers. It decided to stop growing, in favor of serving its existing subscribers. Turns out: It wasn’t the first crisis the young startup had overcome. Host Christine Lagorio-Chafkin interviewed Bobbie co-founder and CEO Laura Modi about how she made that extremely challenging decision–and how s...
Nov 14, 2022•33 min
Nina Vaca is the chairperson and CEO of Pinnacle Group, an IT and staffing firm based in Dallas, which has grown so fast it has made the Inc. 5000 list of fastest-growing companies thirteen times. It was named the fastest-growing woman-owned business in the United States by the Women Presidents Organization in 2015–when her company crossed a billion dollars in revenue, and again in 2018. Nina founded it 25 years ago, when she was just out of college, with just $300. In part, it seemed natural: h...
Oct 31, 2022•20 min
Bill Shufelt was a trader at a hedge fund who got tired of drinking. It was doing nothing for his performance at work–or while trail running. So he decided to start a non-alcoholic craft brewery. Not that anyone else believed in his mission. He tells host Christine Lagorio-Chafkin how he struggled for years to find a co-founder, and met with 120 investors before putting together enough money to start his own brewing facility–because no other brewery wanted to work with him. Now, his company, Ath...
Oct 24, 2022•25 min
His company grew 1,131 percent over the past three years–and he realizes that kind of fast pace isn’t for everybody, even with an important mission in mind. Xiao Wang in 2017 had founded Boundless Immigration, a Seattle-based tech company that helps individuals and families navigate immigration paperwork and processes through data, and through its online platform. Today its process has a 99 percent success rate, and the company has helped more than 70,000 individuals file for green cards or citi...
Oct 17, 2022•31 min
After the birth of her second daughter, she began feeling marginalized in the workplace–even though she was a seven-figure sales exec. Stephanie Nadi Olson felt the drive to create a legacy for herself and for her daughters–and named her new flexible-employment community We Are Rosie after her youngest. That was 2018, and since, the company has grown to a platform with 17,000 flexible workers signed up, more than 60 full time employees, and a three-year growth rate of 2,267 percent. We Are Rosie...
Oct 10, 2022•29 min
Jesslyn Rollins’s dad created a product in secret. She brought it to the masses. What would it take for him to let her run the company? Christine Lagorio-Chafkin speaks to the CEO of the electrolyte beverage company, Biolyte, that saw a remarkable three-year growth rate of 1,052 percent. The first in our season series exploring the stories behind fascinating companies that made the 2022 Inc. 5000 list of America’s fastest-growing businesses.
Oct 03, 2022•35 min
In this flashback episode, Christine Lagorio-Chafkin talks with Rosie Mattio, founder and CEO of Mattio Communications, about saying yes and taking a risk on a burgeoning industry. (Original Air Date: Sept 13, 2021)
Sep 26, 2022•48 min
Being chief executive doesn’t mean doing everything–or, necessarily, being good at every little thing your company does. In “What I Don’t Know,” What I Know host Christine Lagorio-Chafkin asks founders to explain a skill or task they just aren’t good at. Maybe it’s the first thing they delegated once they hired staff–or something they would like to get off their plate. On this week’s bonus episode, Shivani Siroya, the founder and CEO of Tala, talks about her relationship with being the face of h...
Sep 12, 2022•10 min
Shivani Siroya had worked in microfinance around the world for major banks–and saw a lot of structural issues with lending to unbanked or non-traditional entrepreneurs in small doses. Before launching her own company to fix those, she went back to school–and also worked in Kenya, for the UN Population Fund. It was there she began lending her own money to small-business owners–and learned firsthand how to establish trust in lending. When she founded Tala in 2013, she also learned the value of ris...
Sep 05, 2022•47 min
Being chief executive doesn’t mean doing everything–or, necessarily, being good at every little thing your company does. In “What I Don’t Know,” What I Know host Christine Lagorio-Chafkin asks founders to explain a skill or task they just aren’t good at. Maybe it’s the first thing they delegated once they hired staff–or something they would like to get off their plate. On this week’s bonus episode, Alex West Steinman says: “People look at a business like ours or see the category of businesses li...
Aug 29, 2022•9 min
The past few years have been catastrophic for many coworking spaces. WeWork’s dramatic crash was the most well known–but spaces created by and for women, too, hit walls due to pandemic lockdowns and leadership crises. But in Minneapolis, there was a holdout. It’s called The Coven, and it is a coworking space with virtual and in-person memberships, designed to be inclusive and welcoming to all types of entrepreneurs, creatives, and workers. Host Christine Lagorio-Chafkin spoke with The Coven’s co...
Aug 22, 2022•47 min
When Matthew Herman quit his job in L.A.’s fashion industry to work full time on his brand, Boy Smells, he’d been pouring wax and formulating fragrances for candles in the evenings in his kitchen for more than a year. Since growing his brand into retail and direct-to-consumer sales, he’s maintained his creative vision–and still is the brand’s creative director. He explains to host Christine Lagorio-Chafkin how his creative mind works, including plotting out mood boards for new fragrances, and na...
Aug 08, 2022•10 min
It started as a side-hustle, pouring wax for candles at his dining-room table in the evenings. But what Matthew Herman began selling was soon attracting the attention of major fragrance houses…and customers around the world. In building his brand, Herman burned through his savings in 18 months…and that was before the pandemic hit. But during it, direct-to-consumer sales took off. But so much interest all of a sudden almost broke the business. Host Christine Lagorio-Chafkin spoke with Matthew abo...
Aug 01, 2022•47 min
Stu Landesberg, The co-founder and CEO of Grove Collaborative, describes why he has gratitude for his job and puts positive energy into everything that he does.
Jul 25, 2022•8 min
Since he was a grade-schooler, Stu Landesberg dreamed–as odd as it sounds–of starting a sustainable home-products company. When he founded it, in 2012, he called it ePantry, and it didn’t exactly soar. Investors were lukewarm–and customers hard to come by. But with a rebrand and reshaped strategy in 2016, Grove Collaborative started finding lots of eco-minded consumers online and over social media. This year, as the San Francisco-based company turned 10 years old, it was valued at $1.5 billion. ...
Jul 18, 2022•46 min
