This week we’re mixing it up on Found and welcoming special guest cohost, Neesha Tambe, the TechCrunch Startup Battlefield Editor. And we happen to be talking with Sheeba Dawood, the co-founder and CEO of Minerva Lithium—the 2022 Startup Battlefield winner. Minerva Lithium is a clean energy technology that has developed a Nano Mosaic membrane filter system for critical materials extraction from non-traditional water resources. In this conversation, Sheeba speaks candidly about the struggles she’s faced as a woman of color trying to innovate in the mineral manufacturing industry and what’s next for the company coming off of several pitch competition wins.

This week Darrell and Becca are joined by Brex co-founder and co-CEO Henrique Dubugras to chat about his corporate credit card and expense management startup. Henrique talked about what made him and his co-founder (Pedro Franceschi) decide to launch the company and why the friends, who met online as teenagers, decided to be co-CEOs. Henrique also talks about how Brex navigated changes at the startup this year, and how he personally handled layoffs, all while Darrell and Becca do a questionable job of hiding their disdain for Brex’s legacy competitor.

Happy holidays! The found crew is taking a week off to relax so we are throwing it back to our anniversary episode. To celebrate our anniversary, we welcomed back four founders whose stories really stuck with us since we talked to them. In what Jordan called a “founder smoothie”, we talked with Brie Code from TRU LUV who was on our second episode, Earl Cole from SMART Tire Company who was on the following episode, as well as Aditi Shekar from Zeta, and Jelani Memory from A Kids Company About who joined us a few months later. They talk about perspective shifts they’ve experienced in the past year, their different takes on fundraising, and how they stay true to their respective core missions.

Take our listener survey for a chance to win a free year of TC+ at bit.ly/tcpodsurvey. Welcome back to found, the Stories behind the startups. This week co-hosts Darrell Etherington and Becca Szkutak talk with Alice Albrecht from Re:collect, a software tool that augments creativity by helping people focus, recall, and connect their ideas. The conversation covered a lot of ground from how to hone your pitch when your product is so cerebral, how technology can help creativity but Alice argues will never replace it, and how developing AI requires building safeguards from the jump.

Take our listener survey for a chance to win a free year of TC+ at bit.ly/tcpodsurvey. When Ceryl Sew Hoy had her first child, she discovered the importance of setting up infants with a good gut microbiome. As a research-driven entrepreneur, she learned everything she could about gut health and how to help infants avoid the chronic health issues that occur if they don’t receive the essential microbiomes from the mother. Tiny Health was started to fill a gap in OBGYN care and provide the first-ever gut health test for babies and toddlers along with educational materials needed to course correct and set up infants for optimal gut health.  Darrell, Becca, and Cheryl also talk about being a product-focused founder, building customer trust, and Darrell’s constant tummy aches.

We’re so excited to be back with new episodes of Found and to introduce you to our brilliant new co-host Becca Szkutak! In this episode, we talk with Valentina Milanova, the founder and CEO of Daye, a gynecological health company that’s working to close the gender pain gap and raise industry standards when it comes to women’s health products.

At last month’s TechCrunch Disrupt, Jordan sat down with Serena Williams and her co-founder Alison Rapaport Stillman to talk about their investment firm, Serena Ventures. The conversation was so interesting, we couldn’t help but share it on the Found feed. Serena, Allison, and Jordan talk about her approach to startup investing, how competitive she is both on and off the court, and how the French Open distracted her from the missed investment she regrets the most. And she shares how you can still expect to see her play tennis—if you’re able to snag an invite to come to her personal court.

Shanthi Rajan is a career-long entrepreneur so when she realized the construction industry was in need of disruption, she was ready to build a solution. Linarc is a cloud-based construction management software that helps teams stay on track by centralizing the data to share meaningful information on timelines, budgets, and everything that keeps projects on track. In this episode, Darrell, Jordan, and Shanthi discuss breaking into a slow-changing industry, building a team with talent across the globe, and working with customers to build the most useful product possible.

Telehealth startups had a boom during the pandemic and for certain marginalized communities not having to physically go onto a traditional doctor’s office allows them to access specialized high-quality care. That’s where this week’s guests come in. Jerrica Kirkley and Matthew Wetschler are the co-founders of Plume, a telehealth company that focuses on transgender care. After Jerrica spent time working in the non-profit world she realized that to enact the change she wanted to see, a VC-backed startup could be a more direct route. Along with providing great care, they’re also dedicated to combatting anti-trans legislation and gathering data on trans care that can help all physicians provide better holistic care. In this episode, they talk about their co-founder relationship, the importance of hiring a team that reflects the community they serve, and how they navigated fundraising in such a conservative environment.

This week Darrell and Jordan talk with Scott Gravelle, the CEO and co-founder of Attabotics, a robotics company that specializes in distribution and supply chain. Scott talks about how he was inspired by the Cutter Ants to design a vertical warehouse and create an automated system that was not human-centric but instead functioned as a world that was great for robots. They also spoke about caring for mental health as a founder and developing new leadership skills for a virtual world. If you love live conversations with founders, you'll love TechCrunch Disrupt in San Francisco from October  18-20. Use code FOUND for 15% off your ticket.

This time last year, we talked with Kiki Freedman the founder of Hey Jane, a virtual health care startup aimed at women with an initial focus on delivering remote abortion care. After the US Supreme Court's decision to overturn Roe V. Wade, access to abortion is in a more precarious position than ever. Listen back to how Hey Jane provides access to consultations with doctors, available 24 hours a day, and home delivery for FDA-approved abortion pills. And Freedman tells us about how her experience at Uber informed her founder mentality at Hey Jane, and how the startup hopes to change the healthcare industry.

When Phil Libin co-founded Evernote he spent tons of money making the perfect working environment with chic offices, a shuttle bus, and headphones to block out all of his employees' distracting co-workers. He’s since seen the work-from-home light and co-founded mmhmm to make working remotely more efficient and even more fun. In this episode, Phil breaks down his pyramid of communication, explains how embracing asynchronous videos changed everything about meetings at mmhmm, and why he will never go to work in the metaverse. If you love live conversations with founders, you'll love TechCrunch Disrupt in San Francisco from October  18-20. Use code FOUND for 15% off your ticket.

Welcome back to another bonus episode of Found. This week, producer Maggie catches up with Kathy Hannun from Dandelion Energy. Since we last talked, Dandelion’s team has grown, and through a new deal, their heat pumps are being installed in brand-new housing developments along with their retrofit business. Kathy and Maggie talk about this growth, how Kathy has found joy in her job again by stepping into the head of product role, and how the economic downturn has been a reminder to prioritize profitability.

After graduating college, co-founders Amar Shah and Sonia Nigam were bored with at their first ”real jobs” so through trial and error they came up with the idea to develop an API that processes donations called Change. They talk with Darrell and Jordan about getting their first customers by literally knocking on shop doors, growing the company while maintaining the close-knit culture, and why incorporating crypto payments was a key part of their growth.

We spoke to Figma founder and CEO Dylan Field earlier this year, and while we didn’t know at the time that the startup would be entering into a deal to be acquired by Adobe for north of $20 billion, the lessons that Field shared around his journey building Figma and bringing on the right investors are definitely extra resonant now that the acquisition has been announced. Please enjoy this ‘greatest hit’ in light of the news!

We talk to a lot of healthtech founders on this show because there are countless ways the healthcare system, particularly in the US, needs to be disrupted. This week, we talked to Kelsey Mellard who founded Sitka with the goal of implementing value-based care and helping primary care physicians make more thoughtful referrals to specialists. She talks with Darrell and Jordan about playing the long game to change how people receive care in the US and incentivize providers to give high-quality care instead of a high volume of care. If you love live conversations with founders, you'll love TechCrunch Disrupt in San Francisco from October  18-20. Use code FOUND for 15% off your ticket.

This week on Found Live Darrell and special guest host and co-host of Chain Reaction, Anita Ramaswamy, talk to Christine Quinn who you probably know from Selling Sunset and her husband Christian Dumontet about their new company RealOpen. The couple talks about why buying a home using crypto is the real estate of the future, how to balance being co-founders, and parents, and maintain their relationship, and yes Christine talks a bit about her time on Selling Sunset.

In this mini-sode we catch up with one of the first founders we spoke to, Hana Mohan from MagicBell. Since we talked to Hana last,  MagicBell’s business and team have grown and she talks to our producer Maggie about landing their first enterprise client, the importance of staying in touch with other YC founders and maintaining that community, and how she is continually re-learning the challenges of managing a growing team.

This week’s guest Shiv Rao founded Abridge after experiencing how unnerving it can be to go through a medical emergency with a loved one—even for a practicing doctor like him. So he and the Abridge team created an app that doesn’t just transcribe a conversation between doctor and patient but can summarize the important parts, pull out the next steps, and even define any medical terms that were said so the patient walks away with all the information they need. The same technology helps doctors take better notes and alleviate the “pajama time” burnout by recording what happened in the appointment and synthesizing it in a format that is useful to a doctor. Darrell, Jordan, and Shiv talk about the importance of making an impact at scale in the medical field.

Super Troopers premiered at Sundance to a receptive, giggling crowd but if you judged it based on its Rotten Tomato score and reviews, you’d think it flopped. Writer, director, comedian, and recent founder Jay Chandrasekhar never felt right about the critiques from random strangers online. So he set about creating Vouch Vault, an app in which friends can recommend media, restaurants, and products to each other and users can trust those reviews because they’re coming from people with similar tastes. He talks with Darrell and Jordan about using a Hollywood approach to funding a tech company and how he is thinking about changing user behavior.

Darrell and Jordan joined the Equity crew to try to answer the questions: Despite all the dollars and deals out there, does a drop in activation energy change how many entrepreneurs we'll see in the early-stage market?

We all have a right to clean air but chances are you aren’t getting accurate air quality data—Davida Herzl the co-founder and CEO of Aclima is looking to change that. In this episode, she talks with Jordan and Darrell about the struggles she faced trying to start a climate company right after the clean tech bubble burst, how she’s stayed laser-focused on her mission, and how working with state governments is paramount for her company and measuring air-quality at scale.

Comics are the foundation for so many movies, TV shows, and video games however creators still struggle to be fairly compensated for their material. Chris Giliberti founded Zestworld, a creator-centered platform that offers solutions for the artist to publish their work, manage commissioned artwork, and own their IP and licensing. In this episode Chris and Darrell nerd out about upcoming projects, the best ways to monetize digital custom art, and building a community online that feels like walking through your local comic book store. Jordan is also there, just not nerding out because she has yet to find the comic book for her.

Welcome to the first bonus episode of Found. In this mini-sode we catch up with the very first founder we had on, Iman Abuzeid from Incredible Health. Since we talked to Iman last, Incredible Health has experienced rapid growth and she talks to our producer Maggie about learning to scale after you’ve reached market fit and how they're using proprietary data to improve their product for the next generation of nurses.

Nikki Pechet and her co-founder started Homebound after a wildfire ripped through Northern California and thousands of people were put on years-long waiting lists to build their homes to make building a home simpler. On this episode, she talks with Darrell and Jordan about creating an online flow that makes buying a home almost too easy, how her experience at Thumbtack helped her think through the labor logistics, and why she isn’t nervous about the impending economic downturn.