This week, Persefoni co-founder and CEO, Kentaro Kawamori is joining us this week not only to talk about his climate tech startup that aims at helping asset managers, banks and other financial institutions measure their financial emissions footprint and purchase offsets. But he is also sharing his spicey takes on the fundraising landscape and what he thinks stands the best chance of combatting the climate crisis. Darrell, Jordan and Kentaro get into the importance of building the team that’s a perfect fit for the industry you’re disrupting and the Web 3 company “Holy Smokes” they’re all launching together. RSVP for Found Live at https://tcrn.ch/3ox8iS1

We’re in the business of talking to very impressive people who are working to solve incredibly tough problems— but Elizabeth Ruzzo, founder and CEO of adyn, may be one of the most impressive yet. Not only did she develop the only test for women to ensure they are prescribed the birth control that will be the least likely to have detrimental side effects, she also founded the company and fundraised as the sole employee of the company. She talks to Darrell and Jordan about the challenges she faced as a solo founder/employee raising money for a solution for birth control, why she decided to leave academia, and the complicated regulatory maze she had to navigate to get adyn off the ground.

We’re talking to serial founder Julian Green whose most recent startup, Headroom is using AI to hack human conversation—starting with meetings. Julian’s goal is to make meetings and virtual communication feel closer to talking in the real world. Come to hear a very smart founder talk about his experience in startups and at Google, stay for Jordan pitching sound effects for every time Darrell mentions Canada.

This week Darrell and Jordan talk with Real CEO and Founder, Ariela Safira. Real is a therapy platform that aims to make mental healthcare more accessible by offering group sessions and curriculums a user can engage with any time. While in college, Ariela had her first encounter with the mental health care system and realized that people were only seeking help for their mental health when they were in crisis. She then spent years studying the ways people seek care and how therapy could be more accessible and effective. In this conversation as they dive into everything from the research that lead her to found Real to religion to the merits of Goop. CW: suicide and attempted suicide.

Liz Young remembers when her family became homeowners, even at six years old she understood it was a big deal. That sparked a fascination with real estate and the home-owning experience. While working at Bloomberg, she discovered the importance of data-driven decisions in the housing market. She wanted to give the power of data to the average homeowner so she founded Realm which helps homeowners prioritize renovation projects to increase the value of the home and use their time and money wisely. Darrell, Jordan, and Liz talk about the tricky housing market, how powerful localized data is for homeowners, and how Darrell can renovate his basement dungeon gym for the greeted ROI.

As COVID-19 cases spike many people enter 2022 in some kind of quarantine, a conversation about community and connecting across a digital space feels like just what the doctor ordered. 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.

While owning and operating studio gym spaces in New York, Alexandra Bonetti knew that it shouldn’t have to be this hard to establish processes for issues all gyms have like recruiting new members, hiring qualified talent, and getting substitutes for classes, to name a few. So she founded The Talent Hack which is a platform geared towards helping experts working in the fitness and wellness industry achieve tangible success. In this episode, she discusses her philosophy that everyone has superpowers and she is passionate about discovering those talents and making them work for the individual and how to be nimble as a new company in a complicated industry.

Yusuf Sherwani saw the value in remote mental healthcare long before COVID sent everyone into video therapy sessions. He is the CEO and one of three doctor/co-founders of Quit Genius, an app that uses CBT therapy and other proven methods to help patients tackle their addiction. He talks with Darrell and Jordan about starting a telehealth company before COVID and the regulatory hurdles they had to navigate and how they convinced investors that it was crucial to be research-led when it comes to building a patient-focused product.

This week we're re-releasing Jordan and Darrell's conversation with Aditi Shekar, the co-founder and CEO of Zeta. As the year comes to a close and we look toward 2022, we thought everyone could use inspiration to get new year, new financial habits in order. Plus Aditi's unstoppable tenacity and drive are undeniably inspiring. Aditi'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.

Co-founder of Dutchie, Ross Lipson talks to Jordan and Darrell about stepping into the cannabis space, taking the hits as they come, and growing a business in a highly-regulated and brand new industry. His positive outlook on business and life may be contagious so pessimists, nihilists, and fatalists beware.

Carolyn Mooney wants you to make your decision-making process code. She is the co-founder and CEO of Nextmv which helps companies make efficient decisions on a mass scale—think Amazon distributing packaging or Uber plotting a route for an uber pool. In this week’s episode, she talks with Darrell and Jordan about Nextmv’s software that doesn’t just optimize decision making and route planning but also enables engineers to work on many different types of teams. Plus she talks about how coaching high school volleyball has made her a better leader and forced her to prioritize a work-life balance.

The way COVID-19 has changed the way we work comes up a lot, founders have had to pivot and innovate to build companies during lockdown but the workplace restrictions seemed to spark inspiration for this week's guest, Larry Gadea, founder, and CEO of Envoy. Envoy started in 2013 as a guest sign-in platform to make offices safer and more efficient. Over the past 18 months, they've created new products to solve for many of the new issues offices have as they adapt to the new and frequently changing office safety protocols. Larry talks about how remote work affected company culture, his work-life balance philosophy, and how his leadership style has grown with the company.

Not only is this week's guest the TechCrunch Disrupt 2021 Battlefield winner, but Nabiha Saklayen is also democratizing access to life-saving cell therapies by using—you guessed it—lasers. Nabiha is the co-founder and CEO of Cellino which is a company developing the tech to automate stem cell production that will lower the cost of cell therapies and increase the yield of viable cells. In this episode, Nabiha tells Jordan and Darrell how she built a start-up beginning with the tech and finding a business fit, her evolving leadership style, and why this work is crucial to the biomedical field.

This week we talk to the runner-up in Tech Crunch Disrupt's Startup Battlefield: Megan O'Connor from Nth Cycle. Megan first found out about the impending shortage of materials used in batteries, phones, electric vehicles, and many of the products needed for a more sustainable green economy while studying at Yale and immediately began working towards a solution. She co-founded Nth Cycle which has developed a technology to help mining and recycling companies recover every bit of critical minerals from their operations by more efficiently recycling the materials and working to fill the gaps in the supply chain.

After experiencing firsthand what Alzheimer’s does to patients and their families, Maria Shriver and Patrick Schwarzenegger, have launched MOSH, a nutrition company focusing on brain food. The mother and son duo combined her passion for advocacy with his experience in company building to create and a product and brand that will have people thinking about their brain health. They talk to Darrell and Jordan about how having a co-founder who is also your mother can have some additional stress, how they view health-food brands and the lofty promises of so many brands, and why we should all be thinking about our brain health no matter how old you are.

Kiki Freedman realized access to abortion care was already at risk long before Texas' SB8, and that was what inspired her to found Hey Jane, a virtual health care startup aimed at women with an initial focus on delivering remote abortion care. Hey Jane provides access to consultations with doctors, available 24 hours a day, and home delivery for FDA-approved abortion pills. 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.

After a legal career that included litigation experience at a big NYC law firm, as well as stops in both the Washington and Alaska Attorney General offices, Jackie Schafer realized that one of the major challenges in litigation is accurate and thorough review and citation of the mass of documents and prior judgements involved in a case. That's why she founded Clearbrief, which could help level the playing field for small legal firms and unlock major efficiencies in the public justice system. Also, she's an amazing singer!

Job van der Voort knows a thing or two about running a remote company, as a long-time GitLab employee, the host of the Remote Work Podcast and the CEO and founder of a company literally named 'Remote.' We talk to him about shifts in how companies and employees are approaching remote work, and how that proved a great basis for the creation of a company that renders a lot of the fundamentals of the model easy and repeatable.

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.