Mitch Reback, CFO of Sweetgreen, is one of the rising corporate financial stars who is helping to take their companies to the next level. When he started, Sweetgreen had 25 stores; today, there are more than 220—and Reback says the company is still in its “infancy.” In this podcast, part of the SAP-sponsored Growth Agents series, Reback takes a deep dive into his role as a growth agent. Capital is the engine that drives growth, and Reback says his job is to make sure the company has adequate cap...
Oct 10, 2023•12 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...
Sep 05, 2023•38 min
A new podcast episode reveals insights from Principal on how to help small and midsize businesses develop the culture, compensation, and other factors that matter to their team.
Aug 28, 2023•6 min
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...
Aug 21, 2023•47 min
Find out the importance of a business valuation-and how a small business can have it completed-in this new podcast segment from Principal.
Aug 14, 2023•5 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. ...
Aug 07, 2023•43 min
By the time he teamed up with Harvard geneticist George Church to found Colossal Biosciences, Ben Lamm had founded, built, and sold five companies. This one would be the most audacious yet: Its goal is to create disruptive conservation technologies, including, to de-extinct the woolly mammoth. Yes, it is actively working to edit elephant genes to create a cold-hearty herbivore to help decelerate melting of the arctic permafrost, and, thus, prevent release of 600 tons of carbon a year. It’s also ...
Jul 31, 2023•49 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...
Jul 24, 2023•29 min
We return to speaking to Joseph Haughney about his hopes for the Arpanet. We ask other founders how they feel about what the internet has become. We also speak to internet early founder Hans Werner Braun’s daughters about how they reconcile themselves the world their father helped create.
Jul 20, 2023•37 min•Season 1Ep. 6
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...
Jul 17, 2023•30 min
It is the late 1970s and early 1980s and the Arpanet is in decline. NSFnet is on the rise in its place. Why did the Arpanet get eclipsed by other networks, and is that OK?
Jul 13, 2023•42 min•Season 1Ep. 5
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...
Jul 10, 2023•18 min
Louis Pouzin is a French academic who some experts say really invented the Arpanet. But is that true, and should any one person be given all the credit?
Jul 06, 2023•42 min•Season 1Ep. 4
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...
Jul 03, 2023•44 min
It’s the 1970s and both the government and academia are doing everything they can to spread the word of the Arpanet. But as the Arpanet gains popularity everywhere after its 1972 coming-out ball in Washington, D.C., through its new phone book, it also faces detractors who don’t want it to be available to all.
Jun 29, 2023•37 min•Season 1Ep. 3
Christine Lagorio-Chafkin talks with Evan Horowitz and Geoffrey Goldberg, founders of the Los Angeles-based brand-marketing firm Movers+Shakers. Movers+Shakers is #78 on the 2021 Inc. 5000 list.
Jun 26, 2023•39 min
Many historians say the Arpanet (and ultimately the internet) was born on October 29, 1969. But is that really when the Arpanet began, and who should be given credit for this key moment in internet history?
Jun 22, 2023•44 min•Season 1Ep. 2
Christine Lagorio-Chafkin interviews Fawn Weaver, the CEO and founder of Uncle Nearest Premium Whiskey, bestselling author, and serial entrepreneur, about how she built her brand and company after setting out to tell the remarkable story of Nearest Green, the first known African-American master distiller and man who taught Jack Daniel how to make whiskey.
Jun 19, 2023•42 min
After World War II, the U.S. had to change the way it communicated if it was going to keep up with the Soviets in the Cold War, especially once Sputnik was launched. It was the vision of a Missouri boy called Lick that would solve those communication issues and spark the creation of the internet.
Jun 15, 2023•38 min•Season 1Ep. 1
In the summer of 2021, Christine Lagorio-Chafkin interviews Sarah LaFleur, founder and CEO of womenswear brand M.M. LeFleur. Sarah discussed how she started, the lessons she learned from her mother, how she grew her business, and guided it through Covid-19's most turbulent period.
Jun 12, 2023•55 min
There’s Silicon Valley’s playbook…and then there’s Trinity Mouzon Wofford’s radical bootstrapping. The founder of Golde, the maker of superfood powders that can be blended to make lattes or facemasks, and which is sold at Target and Goop, as well as direct-to-consumer. Trinity explained how she built her company herself, mixing turmeric lattes in her kitchen, and pounding the pavement of New York City trying to get her self-designed pouches of blends onto cafe shelves. As a super-small, scrappy,...
Jun 05, 2023•40 min
When Kara Goldin launched her fruit-flavored water company, Hint, in 2005, she’d worked in media and tech--but never in consumer products, much less beverage creation or distribution. But armed with curiosity and verve, when she lacked know-how, she asked the right questions. And perhaps what she didn’t know was the most valuable asset of all--because the immense challenges that would come didn’t seem impossible. Goldin chatted with host Christine Lagorio-Chafkin about her biggest moments of dou...
May 29, 2023•51 min
Is AI coming for our jobs?? ‘Fast Company’ senior staff editor Max Ufberg explains that it is . . . but that it’s not all bad news. And Yaz chatted with Loom CEO Joe Thomas—Loom is essentially TikTok for business, which sounds crazier than it is—about how video conferencing is here to stay. Also, a special thanks to Marfa Public Radio for helping us out with some recording on this episode!
May 24, 2023•26 min
The five-time founder and author of Happier and The Awesome Human Project is known both for her public speaking and her research into what truly makes us happy. But when she was building her last company, she herself was anything but happy. Instead, she was prioritizing everything and everyone aside from herself–and that led to her spiraling into a really dark place. She spoke to host Christine Lagorio-Chafkin about how she learned to rebuild her emotional health–and what other founders can lear...
May 22, 2023•46 min
We're taking a look back on our interview with Emily Hikade. Host Christine Lagorio-Chafkin spoke with Emily about the inspiration for, and challenges of starting up, Petite Plume, her fast-growing luxury sleepwear business.
May 15, 2023•33 min
Here's a look back at Christine Lagorio-Chafkin's interview with Jesslyn Rollins. Rollins' dad created a product in secret. She brought it to the masses. What would it take for him to let her run the company? They chatted about 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.
May 08, 2023•33 min
This is the untold history of how the internet almost didn’t happen. It’s an ode to fathers and daughters. And it’s a tale about the origins of the man-computer symbiosis that’s still profoundly relevant to our society today. Host Christine Haughney Dare-Bryan, an editor-at-large at Inc., is a James Beard Award-winning journalist who has worked for NBC News as well as three of the nation’s largest newspapers, and who created the Emmy-nominated Netflix series Rotten. Dare-Bryan’s connection to th...
May 04, 2023•2 min
Christine Lagorio-Chafkin interviewed Melissa Bernstein, the co-founder of $500 million toy company Melissa & Doug and the author of a new book about mental health, LifeLines, about her own journey to building a company while suffering from depression.
May 01, 2023•38 min
Emily Hikade is not a household name. That’s by design. She couldn’t be, for years. That’s because no one, not her family, not her friends, knew her actual job. It wasn’t until recently, after she’d started her own company, and after she’d had her cover lifted that they found out she’d been a case officer for the Central Intelligence Agency. And it was while she was a case officer abroad that she had a near-death experience that inspired her to start her own business. Host Christine Lagorio-Chaf...
Mar 27, 2023•35 min
Davis Smith, the co-founder and CEO of Cotopaxi, founded his Salt Lake City-based outdoor apparel and gear company in 2014. He already had started a family–and he not only set out to found a company with a purpose…but with a sense of balance for himself and his employees. In this bonus episode, I ask him about heading out into the wilderness…and getting into survivalist mode–and he explains how he makes his family the priority, so his colleagues know they can feel comfortable doing the same.
Mar 20, 2023•9 min
