Tanya Van Court's professional career includes a lot of high-profile positions at Nickelodeon, ESPN, Discovery, and more. Despite her success working for others, she felt the need to create her own company in 2016 focused on something she saw as important to her own family, and to the world in general: Financial literacy. Goalsetter was born, and five years later it's going strong as a leading way for families to learn about and manage money together.

Jelani Memory's 'A Kids Book About...' series began with just one title he created because he wanted to answer a question one of this own kids had. Through that process, Jelani realized that not only was there a need for a lot more similar books that deal frankly with difficult, important issue, but also an opportunity to change the publishing industry from the ground up.

Hilary Coles co-founded telehealth startup hims & hers back in 2017, and the now-public company has expanded its focus considerably since then, including adding a full vertical dedicated to women's health. We talked to Hilary about building a healthcare brand focused on individual customer experience, with a brand designed to appeal to a new generation of healthcare recipients that haven't felt catered to by existing models.

Jenn Graham's startup Inclusivv looks very different from when it begins Civic Dinners in 2016. The idea back then was to take advantage of small group dynamics around in-person meetings — and dinners in particular — to foster important conversations around difficult topics, originally focusing on connecting government with the community. Inclusivv took that model, shifted it to digital in the wake of Covid, and expanded the mandate to help big brands and companies handle the topics their employees and users care most about, like sustainability, diversity and belonging.

Celine Halioua has spent much of her career focusing on life extension technology — but her own company started with a specific target of extending the lives of dogs, rather than humans. We hear from her why she wanted to start with canine companions, though her larger goals with her company Loyal include extending and improving our own lives, too.

Liya Shuster-Bier learned first-hand, twice over, that cancer care leaves a lot to be desired when it comes to everything beyond the basics, and it's incredibly hard to navigate not just for patients themselves, but also for their loved ones and care network. That inspired her creation of Alula, a platform designed to help consolidate the resources that cancer patients, survivors and their care networks need to face tough challenges together.

Clarisse Beurrier went right from school to a lab-grown meat startup called Higher Steaks, and both her experience during her education and that first job in the field left her feeling like more needed to be done at a fundamental level, linking the work happening in research labs and universities to the commercial meat industry. That was the genesis for Animal Alternative Technologies, a company she co-founded with the mission of providing a scalable, end-to-end cultured meat production system for food sellers large and small alike.

Amanda DoAmaral was an educator herself before she decided to found a tech company aimed at improving the education system. That's a surprisingly rare credential for a startup founder in this area to possess — despite the obvious benefits of real, first-hand experience. Her company, Fiveable, focuses on modernizing (including a remote-first approach) a key and often overlooked part of education for students: Building an active community of peers to share knowledge with. Hear how she took her dissatisfaction with an inadequate system and turned that into the motivation to build a venture-scale business outside of it.

Oleg Stavitsky and his founding team at Endel are not your conventional startup founders: This artists' collective has been working together for years across multiple projects, and it just so happens that their latest collaboration ended up being a venture scale technology company. Endel is all about creating personalized soundscapes to trigger desired emotional and mental states, and the story of how it came to be is hardly your typical consumer app origin tale.

Julie Bornstein has a storied career that includes spearheading the e-commerce transformations of some of the world's most popular and successful retail brands. She was also at Stitch Fix as COO during a pivotal time just ahead of the fashion startup's IPO, but her latest move was to become a founder and start her own company for the first time. The Yes is an e-commerce retail app that aims to please shoppers, providing a personalized digital store for every user that includes the best brands form all over the world. Hear how she wrangled luxe high fashion and everyday favorites into a single destination for all tastes.

Aditi Shekar's childhood ambitions included literal world domination, but she ended up as an unstoppable entrepreneur instead. She's the co-founder and CEO of Zeta, a new kind of financial services company that's designed from the ground up for "multiplayer" banking — be it with a spouse, a trusted partner or anyone else. Aditi tells us all about how she's revolutionizing money management thanks to her drive and focus.

Ashley Sumner's original concept for Quilt was all about meeting up in person — almost an Airbnb for conversations. But shortly after launch, the universe threw a wrench in the works, as a global pandemic shut down or severely limited in-person interaction almost everywhere, particularly among strangers connecting for the first time. Quilt made a pivot into the suddenly crowded social audio space, but Ashley explains how it kept its core focus and differentiation in the process.

Rob Schutz didn't expect to be working on a startup addressing the need for reliable, direct-to-consumer erectile dysfunction therapeutics, but that's where he ended up at Roman. The company has since pivoted to become 'Ro,' with a focus on digital health and telemedicine more broadly, as well as pharmacy services, but we talk to Schutz about how he went from Bark Box to human health, and what the experience of building his startup alongside his two cofounders was like.

Sara Spangelo's startup Swarm now has nearly 100 of its satellites in orbit, but the journey to get here has had plenty of challenges. After a track record that included working at Google X, NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory and plenty more, Sara realized with her co-founder Ben that including low-bandwidth network capabilities on tiny satellites was not only possible, but offered massive cost-savings vs. the usual way of doing things. But our talk focuses on the challenges of being a first-time founder and CEO, and creating a whole new business model.

Cory Siskind founded Base Operations after realizing that the enterprise operations security market lagged behind its equivalent information security departments in terms of tech and innovation. She tells us how she went from being dropped into a heap of responsibility for assessing street-level threats in Mexico City right out of school for large global companies, to creating a scalable, tech-powered solution that finally brings the industry out of the 70s.

After realizing there was a serious lack of options for sports fans who happen to be women, or who just don't fit the typical mould addressed by the existent industry, Roslyn McLarty and her two co-founders created The GIST, a sports newsletter that has since grown into a podcast and a website, too. The GIST doesn't shy away from the human side of sports, nor does it treat sports like a secret club you need years of specialized knowledge to access.

Leigh Honeywell has spent her career trying to prevent bad things from happening to people on the internet. She’s spent time at Slack, Heroku, and Microsoft, and is well-versed on both the technical and human sides of online harassment, and has seen first-hand how it can escalate to hacking or worse. That’s how she came up with Tall Poppy, a platform that helps organizations with a public-facing workforce, like media orgs, actively prevent this type of escalation. The Tall Poppy model turns what would be an unscalable business into a fast-growing startup.

As a career marketer, Lindsay Tjepkema was used to trying a lot of different strategies and seeing what works. She started to see one type of marketing consistently paying off, however — particularly for B2B brands. That's how she came up with the idea for Casted, a B2B podcast platform that makes it easy technically and in tiers of content for enterprise companies to create their own podcasts to reach their clients and potential customers.

After starting her career as part of Drake's management team, founder Courtne Smith has gone on to create a couple of different apps aimed at capitalizing on new and emerging behavior in online social interaction. Her latest venture, NewNew, is a bit like a stock market mixed with a crowdsourcing platform for the decision-making of creators, artists, and even just everyday, ordinary people. We talk to Courtne about her path to entrepreneurship, and what's happening in social that's changing how people want to engage.

We're joined by Dandelion co-founder and President Kathy Hannun on this week's show. Kathy tells us how her time at Google X led her to creating Dandelion, a startup focused on making geothermal energy accessible to all. She shares what it's like to work at Google's famous moonshot factory, how she came to pursue a moonshot of her very own, and how she grappled with the realization that her startup needed to significantly change gears to serve its target market.

This week, our guest is Hana Mohan. Hana is the co-founder and CEO of MagicBell, a startup tackling the monumental task of solving notifications for other software products. We spoke to Hana about her path to entrepreneurship, being labelled 'a high-maintenance employee,' taking part in Y Combinator, and what it's like transitioning in the startup world, and being a proud transgender woman founder.

On this week's show, we welcome Earl Cole, winner of Survivor: Fiji, but more importantly, the CEO and co-founder of The SMART Tire company. His startup is working with NASA to commercialize metal tire technology first developed to provide future Mars rovers with nearly indestructible wheels for tackling the toughest terrain, and Cole tells us all about how his background as a serial entrepreneur, and the first unanimous Sole Survivor, helped him navigate NASA's bureaucratic network.

This week's guest is Brie Code, founder and CEO of TRU LUV. In Brie's own words, TRU LUV is building "ritual and emotionally-conscious AI," which sounds ambitious and potentially world-changing because it is. Brie's background as a game developer led her to explore alternate types and motivations for game-like experiences, and that resulted in constructing AI in a mobile app that espouses a "tend-and-befriend" approach.

On the premiere of Found, hosts Darrell Etherington and Jordan Crook interview Iman Abuzeid, the co-founder and CEO of Incredible Health. Iman's founder story includes going through medical school, and getting her MBA, all in service of pursuing a family legacy of entrepreneurship. She used her combined experience and expertise to tackle one of the biggest problems in healthcare in the U.S. — or anywhere: The talent gap in nursing. You'll hear how she came up with the idea for Incredible Health, and how she used a bold vision, backed by practical planning, to build a category-defining business and raise venture capital.

Join us weekly as we talk to founders from around the world, about why they took the leap into starting a company, what kinds of problems they ran into, and how they solved them — or maybe didn’t! We cover everything from pitching VCs, to focusing your product development plans, to what surprised people most about the founding experience. Subscribe now, and come back to hear our first full episode on April 9!