In the past couple of years, TikTok has provided a platform for budding entrepreneurs to connect with their consumers. But how effective is this method, and can it lead to a new level for success for founders? In a panel discussion for Inc.’s Founders House at SXSW, Diana Ransom posed this question to FYSH Foods founder Zoya Biglary, Hot Take co-founder Gabrielle Brulotte, and Bloom Nutrition founder and president Mari Llewellyn. They discuss the importance of putting a face on your brand, being personable for your audience, and how TikTok is an effective marketing tool-provided your approach is on target.

Whether you’re crowdfunding, getting a bank loan, or seeking venture capital, you need to be able to pitch yourself and your business successfully. Today's episode features some of the biggest lessons learned from the founder of clean fragrance brand MOODEAUX, who has secured funding in an incredibly challenging market.

Karen Robinovitz and Sara Schiller had each been through multiple traumas when they found reinvention and joy through the unlikeliest of substances: slime. Yes, slime. They explain to hosts Diana Ransom and Christine Lagorio-Chafkin how they channeled their newfound joy, and passion for sensory play, into a business, the Sloomoo Institute. Sloomoo is a growing slime-museum business with four locations that makes some 600 gallons of slime each day. This episode was recorded live on-site in SoHo, New York, at the Sloomoo Institute Links: Inc.com article: www.inc.com/christine-lagorio/from-the-ground-up-sloomoo-institute-karen-robinovitz-sara-schiller-grief-as-startup-fuel.html Episode transcript: www.inc.com/transcript-from-the-ground-up-podcast-sloomoo-institute-founders-karen-robinovitz-sara-schiller.html The Sloomoo Institute: https://sloomooinstitute.com/pages/new-york-2-0?utm_source=google.com&utm_medium=organic Slime play and care (PSA about slime removal!): https://sloomooinstitute.com/pages/slime-care *note to listeners: The concepts of death and depression, are mentioned in this episode, as is the fact of a school shooting, though none are discussed in depth.

The impact of AI on finance departments will be huge.

How artificial intelligence is shaping the product journeys from procurement to end customers.

In this podcast, leaders in HR and AI reveal what it will take for businesses to get their staff on board.

The so-called “fifth quarter” could be your opportunity to give your business a competitive edge. Hear directly from successful small business owners Lauren Petrullo, of Mongoose Media, and John Wai of John Wai Martial Arts Academy about how they use the post-holiday season to grow their businesses. In this podcast, the entrepreneurs are joined by Meta executive Becky Bui to explain how this so-called “fifth quarter”—a period often overlooked by businesses as a slow season—can be the key to unlocking new cost-effective, quality leads that lead to sales, while building meaningful connections with customers.

The so-called “fifth quarter” could be your opportunity to give your business a competitive edge. Hear directly from successful small business owners Lauren Petrullo, of Mongoose Media, and John Wai of John Wai Martial Arts Academy about how they use the post-holiday season to grow their businesses. In this podcast, the entrepreneurs are joined by Meta executive Becky Bui to explain how this so-called “fifth quarter”—a period often overlooked by businesses as a slow season—can be the key to unlocking new cost-effective, quality leads that lead to sales, while building meaningful connections with customers.

Working together within a marriage can require give and take, but imagine working in the same company too. Melissa Ben-Ishay, co-founder and CEO of Baked by Melissa, and Adi Ben-Ishay, its director of technology and innovation, met by happenstance—to be honest, it was something out of a romance novel. Now, they're married with two kids and still running Baked by Melissa. How do they make this work? We sat down with them to discuss how they met, how they support each other, and how they iron out their disagreements while raising children and working to grow their business.

The company’s director of finance explains how her job goes well beyond accounting. Tina Hetzer, director of finance at Pink Lily, is one of the rising financial stars who are helping to bring their businesses to the next level. She built Pink Lily’s finance team from scratch and has helped the company become one of the fastest-growing retailers in the country. In this podcast, part of the SAP-sponsored Growth Agents series, Hetzer discusses the cash-flow challenges unique to fashion retailers and explains how working at a smaller, founder-run company can fuel greater collaboration across the organization.  

Diana Ransom and Scott Omelianuk talk with Stacy Spikes, Kathryn Minshew and Taryn Langer about how founders should approach dealing with the media. Stacy Spikes is the co-founder and CEO of MoviePass. Kathryn Minshew is the co-founder and former CEO of The Muse. Taryn Langer is the founder and president of Moxie Communications Group.

Duolingo’s freemium subscription model, beloved brand and strategic investments have allowed it to execute its educational mission and become a cultural touchstone. Matthew Skaruppa, CFO of Duolingo, is one of the rising financial stars who are helping to bring their businesses to the next level. Since he joined the company in 2020, Duolingo has grown its base of monthly active users by more than 80%. Each month, 75 million users hone their language skills on the Duolingo app. In this podcast, part of the SAP-sponsored Growth Agents series, Skaruppa discusses how his analytical background has allowed to him to be a more strategy-oriented CFO. For him, that has meant balancing big aspirations and finite resources, and turning the uncertainties of tomorrow into action today.

Inc. Executive Editor Diana Ransom and Editor-in-chief Scott Omelianuk pull back the curtain on the world of entrepreneurship with some of the most successful founders in the world. Inc. Uncensored features frank and unfiltered conversations about what makes business leaders tick, the trends founders need to know to be successful, and the secrets that nobody really tells you before you start a business.

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 capital to grow as well as determining how best to allocate it, including investments in stores, marketing, staff, and technology—or, as he puts it, to push innovation forward in a way that’s capital efficient.

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 ended up creating and selling in tiny, adorable glass apothecary jars online was Bite toothpaste bits. Over the years, she became committed to creating change for the planet, she tells host Christine Lagorio-Chafkin. Today, her company sells much more than sustainable toothpaste–including a whole suite of oral care, and even soap and deodorant–which went viral on TikTok. Today, the company, whose name stands for Because Its The Earth, has 10 employees and more than $10 million in sales.

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 is No. 232 on the 2022 Inc. 5000. Host Christine Lagorio-Chafkin speaks with Olso about her vision for the future of work, and how she built a truly inclusive, diverse workforce.

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 than 300 employees, and whose revenues have surpassed $100 million.

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 risk–or, as she calls it, “taking the first risk.” She explains to host Christine Lagorio-Chafkin how the company took many audacious leaps through its growth to 6 million customers–including one that shook Tala to its core during the pandemic. 

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. In June, it went public with help from a Richard Branson-backed SPAC. Host Christine Lagorio-Chafkin speaks with Landesberg about his journey, from struggling to keep the lights on to running a public company with hundreds of employees–and his promise to the future to be entirely plastic-free by 2025.

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 working with existing species-conservation efforts globally–and hopes to apply its technology to save animal populations from going extinct. But with the audacious mission comes a lot of questions–and many critics. Lamm told host Christine Lagorio-Chafkin that he learns more from his detractors than from his supporters–and he welcomes both hearing from them, and, in a couple cases, he’s actually hired them to work with him.

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 citizenship. To keep growing at its rate, Xiao maintains an “adapt and evolve” strategy, and realizes that perfection is sometimes the enemy of progress. He tells host Christine Lagorio-Chafkin that his company’s culture of fast-growth and constant change isn’t for everyone–just like black licorice. 

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.

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 she built a company of parents, by parents–with world-class benefits for employees.

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?

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: he’d been schooled in entrepreneurship by her family, which emigrated from Ecuador when she was little. She tells host Christine Lagorio-Chafkin what she’s learned about entrepreneurship along the way–and takes a bird’s eye view on what’s changed, and what hasn’t.

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?

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 about his innovative approach to branding, naming candles, and designing concepts that embrace complex dualities–and add up to a brand that’s helping to blur the gender binary in retail.

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.

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.

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?

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.

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.  

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. 

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, brand, growth was happening naturally–online, and off–and the level of control she had over it was not something she wanted to give up. Trinity told host Christine Lagorio-Chafkin about how she reacted when investors came calling–and when major retailers proposed deals. 

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 doubt, including when Hint’s biggest customer, Starbucks, canceled its orders, which amounted to 40 percent of the company’s sales.

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! 

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 learn about emotional fitness being a key to keeping their company healthy, too.

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.

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.

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 the story is deeply personal—her father, Joseph Haughney, was one of the internet’s founding fathers. By looking to the past, Computer Freaks dives into modern debates: Could we have prevented online harm from the start? What is the balance between free speech and online content moderation? How much human work should be delegated to technology and A.I.? And what direction should this growing labyrinthine network of computers take? Computer Freaks tells the dramatic, untold history of the internet straight from the mouths of its pioneering inventors: Len Kleinrock, Robert Kahn, Charley Kline, Steve Crocker, Vinton Cerf, and Bob Metcalfe, among many others. Exclusive interviews uncover hidden stories found nowhere else about the Arpanet, online harm, hacking, authentication, cybersecurity, Ethernet, TCP IP, packet switching, queuing theory, and the early contributions of women in tech.

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.

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-Chafkin speaks with Emily about the inspiration for, and challenges of starting up, Petite Plume, her fast-growing luxury sleepwear business.

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. 

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 than 300 employees, and whose revenues have surpassed $100 million.

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 before Allison was a DTC alt-soda sensation, she tells host Christine Lagorio-Chafkin, she was driving across the United States knocking on doors. She’s the kind of founder who, once she believes something, she goes for it–and this is how she built her brand and became a TikTok sensation.

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 after challenging days at work

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 to navigate a constantly changing regulatory environment, and about creating data-security that could protect patients from not just hackers–but also from hostile governments.

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)

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 himself. He tells host Christine Lagorio-Chafkin how he makes time to work on his personal health, including his nutrition and supplement habits, and how he unwinds with his family.

 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 paying members, and had more than $400 million in sales in 2021. It’s called Thrive Market, and he’s co-founder and CEO Nick Green.

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 many times, he admits.

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 company of its time.

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, which stands for Because It’s The Earth, and sells personal care items that are compostable, refillable, and plastic-free, she still finds inspiration way out in the deep.

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 ended up creating and selling in tiny, adorable glass apothecary jars online was Bite toothpaste bits. Over the years, she became committed to creating change for the planet, she tells host Christine Lagorio-Chafkin. Today, her company sells much more than sustainable toothpaste–including a whole suite of oral care, and even soap and deodorant–which went viral on TikTok. Today, the company, whose name stands for Because Its The Earth, has 10 employees and more than $10 million in sales.

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.

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 across the United States, and her philanthropic work has given more than $50 million to charities that benefit women and children. She’s also the author of a memoir, Born to Shine, which came out in 2022.

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 pen to paper.

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 getting back to his roots, and is listing a bedroom in his own home on Airbnb.

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 she built a company of parents, by parents–with world-class benefits for employees.

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: he’d been schooled in entrepreneurship by her family, which emigrated from Ecuador when she was little. She tells host Christine Lagorio-Chafkin what she’s learned about entrepreneurship along the way–and takes a bird’s eye view on what’s changed, and what hasn’t.

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, Athletic Brewing, is growing so fast it has been struggling to meet demand in the $109 billion craft brewery industry's fastest growing segment. Athletic Brewing grew 13,071 percent over the past three years, making it the 26th fastest growing company in the United States, as recognized by the Inc. 5000.

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 citizenship. To keep growing at its rate, Xiao maintains an “adapt and evolve” strategy, and realizes that perfection is sometimes the enemy of progress. He tells host Christine Lagorio-Chafkin that his company’s culture of fast-growth and constant change isn’t for everyone–just like black licorice. 

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 is No. 232 on the 2022 Inc. 5000. Host Christine Lagorio-Chafkin speaks with Olso about her vision for the future of work, and how she built a truly inclusive, diverse workforce.

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.

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)

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 her company–and all the publicity that comes along with it. She doesn’t love public speaking; she’d rather be heads-down solving a problem. But, she says, she’s found a silver lining.

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 risk–or, as she calls it, “taking the first risk.” She explains to host Christine Lagorio-Chafkin how the company took many audacious leaps through its growth to 6 million customers–including one that shook Tala to its core during the pandemic. 

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 like ours, like the Riveter and The Wing, and they go, ‘oh, like, they're really good at social media!’” No so, says Steinman, the co-founder and CEO of The Coven, a co-working and collaboration membership space in Minneapolis and St. Paul, Minnesota. She admits social media is not her strong suit. She doesn’t like keeping up with the algorithmic changes, or processing things via social networks’ endless scroll of content. Her takeaway: What’s good for the business might not be good for any given individual.

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-founder and CEO, Alex West Steinman, about how she and three friends launched their idea with backing from their community–and precisely how she built a sturdy business that withheld the pressures of the pandemic and the George Floyd protests, with a little help from that very community she nurtured.

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 naming the company’s candles–which is one of the most fun parts of his job.

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 about his innovative approach to branding, naming candles, and designing concepts that embrace complex dualities–and add up to a brand that’s helping to blur the gender binary in retail.

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.

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. In June, it went public with help from a Richard Branson-backed SPAC. Host Christine Lagorio-Chafkin speaks with Landesberg about his journey, from struggling to keep the lights on to running a public company with hundreds of employees–and his promise to the future to be entirely plastic-free by 2025.

The founder and CEO of Madison Reed, Amy Errett, started her career in finance, and before long, was managing large teams through sizeable changes. She’s become known as a leader who creates, and navigates, organizational change. Her secret isn’t in strategy–it’s in leading with love, and with an open heart. She explains to host Christine Lagorio-Chafkin how building a fast-growing company is like putting the right variables into a Petri dish and letting it flourish.

Amy Errett might be a natural leader, and an expert team-builder–but she wasn’t always a founder. She spent her early career in banking and investment companies, before turning to venture capital. But once she was at the table with startup founders, making decisions on who deserved funding infusions…she realized she wanted to be not in her seat…but rather, the CEO’s seat. She founded Madison Reed in 2013 out of San Francisco as a hair-color subscription brand. She’s grown it–even as the pandemic shut down 12 beauty bars she’d opened across the country–to a company that has raised more than $220 million, in part from Jay-Z’s Marcy Ventures. Now, she has her sights set on opening 20 more stores in 2022, and hiring up to 800 people. Amy spoke to host Christine Lagorio-Chafkin about her rich career and her thoughts on leading growing organizations through big changes–including navigating the unknown, seeing around corners, and helping large teams make dramatic shifts.

The co-founder and chief executive of Strava explains how storytelling is wrapped up in being able to take risks. He first ventured into the unknown in 1995, wanting to build a community of athletes. He didn’t know how that story would end–and it certainly wasn’t immediately successful. His company has grown to 100 million athletes in 200 countries–and he tells host Christine Lagorio-Chafkin that along the way he’s learned to take chances to “get to create the story.”

When Michael Horvath, the co-founder and CEO of Strava, meets with employees, he doesn’t just start saying what he’s thinking. Instead, the first thing out of his mouth is: “what’s on your mind?” His company, Strava, is an app that serves 100 million athletes, to help motivate their movement, connect them with a community, and improve their safety. And these days, it’s a company of more than 400 people–which has both informed, and necessitated, Michael’s leadership style–which is a lot about listening, and letting employees grow into their passions and skills.

The co-founder and chief executive of Colossal Bioscience is setting out to de-extinct the 4,000-years-extinct woolly mammoth. As his company grows fast, he has a goal to be totally transparent about the company’s audacious moon-shot mission–one that a lot of people think is impossible. To that challenge, he brings his skills as a diligent student, and a marketer, who can translate complex systems and concepts to a broad audience.

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 working with existing species-conservation efforts globally–and hopes to apply its technology to save animal populations from going extinct. But with the audacious mission comes a lot of questions–and many critics. Lamm told host Christine Lagorio-Chafkin that he learns more from his detractors than from his supporters–and he welcomes both hearing from them, and, in a couple cases, he’s actually hired them to work with him.

The co-founder and chief executive of Full Circle Brands manages three sustainability-minded international brands out of New York City. He tells host Christine Lagorio-Chafkin how he boost productivity by keeping his meetings short, and cramming them all into one day. Plus: When his team is in the office, he plays jazz–and orders comfort food. 

He and his co-founder dreamed up their company over an unconventional Thanksgiving dinner in Shanghai. In 2009, they launched Full Circle, a line of sustainable household goods–and set out to change consumer perception about “eco” products. Today, they run three brands, including Full Circle, For Good, a line of household disposables, like compostable bags, and Soma, a line of filtration, pitchers, and bottles. He spoke with host Christine Lagorio-Chafkin about building a sustainable supply chain, bootstrapping his business from the start, and why his companies’ giving-back pledges of profits are so meaningful to their teams.

If there was a super-simple way to tweak the whole way you think about an experience…would you do it? Serial entrepreneur Toni Ko, the woman behind NYX Cosmetics, Perverse Sunglasses, and, most recently, Bespoke Beauty Brands, explains to host Christine Lagorio-Chafkin how she changes her wording to change her perspective.

Her family emigrated from Korea when she was 13 years old, and serial entrepreneur Toni Ko has since founded three different–each totally fascinating–companies. Her first, NYX Cosmetics, made $4 million in its first year, and, within a decade, was in beauty aisles of Target nationwide. But with growth, came some sacrifices–and, within years, she sold it to L’Oreal for a reported $500 million. A non-compete agreement meant Ko was locked out of the beauty industry for five years, a time during which she learned some of her most important life and entrepreneurial lessons–including how to stop worrying and focus on finding simple solutions to her own complex problems. Host Christine Lagorio-Chafkin explores with Ko how she coped with selling her company, what she created (sunglasses company Perverse) in the meantime, and how she’s back with a new company that’s creating brand new cosmetics in partnership with influencers, celebrities, and designers. It’s called Bespoke Beauty Brands, and for Toni, building it came with its own new learning curve.

Trinity Mouzon Wofford founded superfood company Golde in 2017, and has grown it into a national brand that sells its drink mixes and face-mask blends direct-to-consumer and in national retailers like Target. She bootstrapped the business for years, doing everything from formulation to sales herself. One skill that helped her along the way was her ability to connect with others–to see things from a different perspective. She explains the radical empathy it takes to truly connect with someone new–even if it’s through a video screen.

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 explains 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, brand, growth was happening naturally–online, and off–and the level of control she had over it was not something she wanted to give up. Trinity tells host Christine Lagorio-Chafkin about how she reacted when investors came calling–and when major retailers proposed deals. 

Delane Parnell’s $400 million startup, PlayVS, builds a platform on which high school students can compete against one another in team-based video games, also known as esports. Host and “Ahead of the Game” author Kevin Ryan talks with Parnell about his journey from a violence-ridden neighborhood on Detroit’s west side to building one of the most important companies in the rapidly growing gaming industry.

Payal Kadakia, the founder of Classpass, which was valued at $1 billion before its acquisition by Mindbody in 2021, wasn’t always great at keeping track of her priorities. Sure, she had a calendar, and a schedule–but sometimes the big-picture goals would get pushed aside. She came up with a 20-minute-a-week way to stay focused–by setting her priorities for the week. And, as a bonus, she finds the whole thing pretty meditative.

Growing up in New Jersey, Payal Kadakia found a passion for Indian dance. As an adult living in New York City, she founded her own dance troupe, Sa Dance. But when it came to finding fitness classes, she was at a loss. She created a boutique-class-search-engine–which went through many, many, iterations, before becoming the $1 billion company ClassPass. Christine Lagorio-Chafkin speaks with Payal about all the ups and downs along the way to building one of New York City’s unicorns–and her difficult decision to step back from the CEO role she’d held for so long in 2017. Along the way, she learned to not hide her feelings, or her passions, in the workplace–and instead, bring her full self to her job.

The founder and CEO of autonomous vehicle company Cruise is busy testing his company’s driverless robotaxis on the streets of San Francisco. And managing more than 1,000 employees. But that doesn’t mean he’s too busy to get into the back seat. Here’s how he allocates his time every week to put himself in a user’s shoes–and why he thinks it’s so important that leaders make the time to understand even the smallest pain points for customers in using their product.

The founder and CEO of self-driving car company Cruise has finally done it: His company’s robo-taxis are picking up passengers in San Francisco. It’s been almost a decade since he founded his company with the audacious vision to take on Google and create autonomous driving vehicles. He and cofounder Dan Kan pursued that vision–one small step at a time. He spoke with host Christine Lagorio-Chafkin about his lifelong passion for robotics, the “leap of faith” he took when deciding to sell Cruise to GM, and leading a company of more than 1,000 people–plus, how the driverless taxi experiment is going in San Francisco.

The Golden Globe Award-winning actress is also a three-time founder of companies. More than a decade ago, she launched Fabletics, the membership-model activewear brand, and more recently, she’s launched King St. Vodka and wellness-supplement brand In Bloom. But before becoming an entrepreneur, Hudson did plenty of endorsement deals–and wanted more out of them than just being a salesperson. She thought: “What happens if I bet on myself?” and began taking a stake–and an active role in–the companies she chose to work with. In a wide-ranging and candid conversation with host Christine Lagorio-Chafkin, she explains how she builds missions of sustainability and wellness into her brands, and how she thinks about democratizing high-end products, which sometimes becomes a game of tight margins.

On this week’s episode of Woman Inc., I sat down with Tala Akhavan, COO of Pietra, a platform that makes it possible to launch the brand you've always dreamt of. Tala, a former Uber executive, joined the creator economy platform with the mission to democratize access for female entrepreneurship via the platform’s capabilities.     As a first time mother, Tala talked about the struggle of wanting to give her all to motherhood as well as her professional trajectory. While giving birth in the height of the pandemic, she made the uncharacteristic choice to not return to her secure job at Uber when her maternity leave ended. Leaving to become a full-time, stay-at-home mom, Tala experienced first hand that current workplace models and policies are not structured to support women who seek fulfillment in both areas.    There has been a spike in female entrepreneurship coming out of the pandemic, but at present, there is little transparency across markets to launch a product in a financially feasible and time efficient manner. Tala discusses her role as a COO who followers a value-first philosophy and how she thinks through major decisions.  After the recording stopped, Tala told me something that I believe is incredibly powerful. She told me that when she was offered the role at Pietra, she was actually offered the same role at a different company for double the salary. She turned it down because they weren’t as accommodating to her musts of being able to be a present mom. I share this, with her blessing, because I believe that is the definition of being in your worth, and as Tala mentions, holding the line. Make sure to tune in to hear the full story and subscribe to Woman Inc. so that you never miss an episode. Now, let's get over to my conversation with Tala. By:  Jenna Todey, Host of Woman Inc.

The author of The Awesome Human Project and CEO of Happier is a natural at public speaking. Known for her TED talks and corporate speaking engagements, as well as coaching, she’s not one to usually experience stage fright. But she does have a secret to calming nerves before large speaking engagements, which she explains to host Christine Lagorio-Chafkin. First: Don’t tell yourself not to be nervous. Second: Do tell yourself this one key thing.

Stacey Abrams is known as a politician, a lawyer, and a voting rights activist. Her voter rights organizing in Georgia has been credited with increasing turnout in the state, including during the 2020 presidential election, in which President Biden narrowly won Georgia. Abrams is also a three-time founder–and author of three New York Times bestsellers. In her latest book (Level Up: Rise Above the Hidden Forces Holding Your Business Back), she puts together the lessons she’s learned in business–along with her co-founder Lara Hodgson. Host Christine Lagorio-Chafkin talks with Abrams and Hodgson about what they’ve learned along the way to founding three companies together.

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 speaks to host Christine Lagorio-Chafkin about how she learned to rebuild her emotional health–and what other founders can learn about emotional fitness being a key to keeping their company healthy, too.

The bestselling author and business advisor Daniel Pink has written about everything from human motivation to the powerful negative emotion, regret. He has lots of ideas. The one for his latest book, The Power of Regret, How Looking Backward Moves Us Forward, came to him while he was already contracted to write an entirely different book. How does he keep track of his ideas? He explains his system to our host, Christine Lagorio-Chafkin.

The bestselling author didn’t intend to write about the powerful negative emotion, regret, but then he experienced it himself and dug in. He explains to host Christine Lagorio-Chafkin what his worldwide study on regret illuminated–and how it has a place in your company, both culturally, and in the way leaders connect on a personal level.

The co-founder and CEO of Eventbrite is a visual thinker. She tells Christine Lagorio-Chafkin how she uses her abilities to visualize data points to solve problems or find places to innovate within her online event-ticketing company.

She co-founded the event-ticket site Eventbrite in 2006, took the role of CEO 10 years later, and then did what few women leaders have done: took her company public. Then, the pandemic hit–and with live events canceled globally, she stared into a terrifying future. Julia Hartz explains to host Christine Lagorio-Chafkin how she led her team through a harrowing crisis, as well as her unique view of company culture as “more of a living, breathing organism than a bug stuck in amber.” She explains that workplace culture can’t be stuck in time–nor can it always be happy or pleasant. But it can be strong, and self-healing and help workplaces get through even the toughest times.

The founder and CEO of Lively left Victoria’s Secret–and took it on with her inclusive intimates brand. These days, she does a lot of media and big meetings, and her secret to preparing is to not overdo it. She explains to Christine Lagorio-Chafkin. 

In order to launch her intimates and loungewear brand, Lively, Michelle Cordeiro Grant decided to do everything a little differently. In fact, some of her strategy turned convention on its head. She built up a community of fans and advocates before she had a product to sell–and made several other counterintuitive business decisions along the way to an $85 million acquisition very early in her startup’s life. She explains her motivations, inspirations, and the company’s turning points to host Christine Lagorio-Chafkin.

The co-founder and President of LTK, the influencer-shopping ecosystem, Amber Venz Box, works with a personal assistant. But that hasn’t always been seamless, she tells Christine Lagorio-Chafkin. Her simple collaboration tool was right under her nose.

Christine Lagorio-Chafkin talks with Amber Venz Box--co-founder and president of LTK--about being an introvert, founding a company with her significant other, and the power of delegating.

Christine Lagorio-Chafkin talks with Gary Vaynerchuk, CEO of VaynerMedia and chairman of Vayner X.

Christine Lagorio-Chafkin continues her conversation with Ryan Breslow and asks him about how he interviews potential employees.

Christine Lagorio-Chafkin talks with the founder and CEO of the company that ranked No. 64 the 2021 Inc. 5000, Ryan Breslow. The company is called Bolt, and it is one-click checkout for retailers. Ryan started Bolt in 2014 as an offshoot of his cryptocurrency research at Stanford, and after years of product development and fundraising and slow growth, the company has hit an inflection point and is growing wildly, with over 10 million shoppers on the Bolt network.

This week, Kara Goldin, the founder and CEO of Hint Water, explains how her ability to put herself in another person’s shoes--even when that person has a completely different set of needs and desires than her--helped her learn to negotiate

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 tells host Christine Lagorio-Chafkin about her biggest moments of doubt, including when Hint’s biggest customer, Starbucks, canceled its orders, which amounted to 40 percent of the company’s sales. Goldin learned, though that and other challenges, that it’s to be expected that you’ll get some “no”s as you build your business. Whether you keep growing is up to whether you continue your journey of learning.

Christine Lagorio-Chafkin talks with Michael Dell about how to secure a huge customer in this segment of What I Know BEST.

One of America’s best-known entrepreneurs, Michael Dell, founded his eponymous company out of a University of Texas dorm room. More than three decades later, he’s led his company through multiple transformations, including taking it private, and taking on $50 billion in debt to complete a major acquisition. Dell Technologies is in a new phase of its life--and Dell explains his leadership philosophies that have shaped it all in his new book, Play Nice But Win. Christine Lagorio-Chafkin interviews him about the early growth of his computer company, how his thinking and actions as a leader have changed over the years, and how he’d advise entrepreneurs to reconceptualize their risk-taking.

Our new segment, What I Know Best, hones in on a superpower of the founders and thought leaders from our biweekly, longform interviews. This week, Kim Lewis, the CEO and cofounder of CurlMix, explains how to sell anything, when face to face with a potential customer.

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.

Christine Lagorio-Chafkin talks with Rosie Mattio, founder and CEO of Mattio Communications, about saying yes and taking a risk on a burgeoning industry.

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.

To celebrate the launch of the 2021 Inc. 5000 list of America’s fastest growing private companies, Christine Lagorio-Chafkin interviews the co-founder and chief executive of Carbon Health, the startup aiming to make health-care more accessible and affordable--and which earned the No. 2 spot on the Inc. 5000 list with $45 million in 2020 revenue and an astounding 39,734 percent three-year growth rate.

Christine Lagorio-Chafkin talks to John Christakos and Maurice Blanks--two of the three founders of Blu Dot Furniture--about how they used their design thinking to build a business.

​​When she had the idea for an organization to elevate women in leadership roles and entrepreneurship, Cate Luzio didn’t even intend to start a company. Three years later, she’s built Luminary, a thousands-strong networking and career-coaching company that’s weathered the pandemic--and taken the opportunity to expand digitally and globally. She tells Christine Lagorio-Chafkin about the challenges she faced, and what she’s learned along the way.

On this episode, Christine Lagorio-Chafkin interviews Sarah LaFleur, founder and CEO of womenswear brand M.M. LeFleur.

Garry Tan is known for his investments in Coinbase and Instacart--but before cofounding and managing his fund, Initialized Capital, he was a partner at Y Combinator, where he advised more than 700 startups. He’d been down that road before--founding two of his own companies. Christine Lagorio-Chafkin interviews Tan--now a thought-leader with a popular YouTube channel, about his journey from food-insecurity in the Bay Area to student to founder to investor, and what he’s learned along the way to shaking up venture capital and managing the flow of early-stage money to young companies.

Ryan Petersen founded Flexport in 2013, when he decided to break into and transform part of the global-shipping industry by bringing reliable data and tracking to even the smallest companies. Now he has more than $1 billion in revenue and 2200 employees globally--and the industry is facing an unprecedented challenge in the wake of the pandemic. Christine Lagorio-Chafkin interviews Petersen about what he’s learned this year--and through the early chaotic days of scaling his company fast--about finding a balance between too much order and too much disorder when starting up.

On today's episode, Christine Lagorio-Chafkin interviews Sallie Krawcheck. Sallie is the co-founder and CEO of Ellevest, the digital financial advisor that focuses on the money needs of women. She founded it in 2016, after spending decades as an analyst and executive on Wall Street.

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.

Christine Lagorio-Chafkin interviews 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.

Christine Lagorio-Chafkin talks with Ashley Mills and Mark Mullett, the founders of Obé Fitness, about how the former adversaries founded their company--and how when the pandemic hit they reacted with creativity, sending the company into a period of wild growth.

Christine Lagorio-Chafkin talks to Matthew Inman and Elan Lee--founders of Exploding Kittens--about how they founded their company, when to give up on a potentially good idea, and the $1 million dollar meow.

Christine Lagorio-Chafkin interviews the founder of Crowned Marketing and Communications about how she turned $500 in pageant winnings into a thriving company that advises big brands on inclusive marketing. She’s also an expert on Gen Z, who has researched their consumption habits for her book FutureProof: The Blueprint for Building a Brand Gen Z and Millennials Love.

Christine Lagorio-Chafkin talks to Jack Dangermond, co-founder of ESRI, about starting his business with little over $1000 in personal savings and turning that into a billion dollar, privately held business.

Part 2 of Christine Lagorio-Chafkin's conversation with Jim Collins.

Christine Lagorio-Chafkin talks with Jim Collins--author of best selling books Good to Great and Built To Last--about his three decades of research and writing about the skills and practices that make strong, lasting companies

Christine Lagorio-Chafkin talks to Eric Kinariwala--founder and CEO of Capsule--about disrupting the prescription drug industry.

A look back at some of the best moments of the year on What I Know

Christine Lagorio-Chafkin speaks with Blake Mycoskie, the serial entrepreneur best known for founding Toms Shoes, about the inspiration behind Toms' giving model, plus his mental-health struggles and the revelation that led to his new company, Madefor.

On today's episode, Christine Lagorio-Chafkin talks to Phil Libin, the serial entrepreneur and investor known for co-founding Evernote, about starting what he's learned since starting his fifth company, Mmhmm. They also delve into the ills of the social-media ecosystem, and why Libin says he'll never touch an indirect-funding model again.

Christine Lagorio-Chafkin talks to Daina Trout, co-founder and CEO of Health-Ade Kombucha, about starting a company with her husband and best friend, running a company during the pandemic, and managing relationships with investors.

Christine Lagorio-Chafkin talks to Matthew Prince, co-founder of Cloudflare, about transparency as leader, election security and how his company has grown over the past decade.

Christine Lagorio-Chafkin talks to Steve Huffman, founder and CEO of Reddit, about the rise of the community The_Donald, political disinformation online, and running a 700-person company through this pandemic.

Christine Lagorio-Chafkin talks to tennis star Maria Sharapova about starting a company while in the midst of an entirely different career, finding balance in the pandemic, and her passions for design and branding.

On today’s episode, Christine Lagorio-Chafkin talks with Supergoop founder Holly Thaggard about changing an industry to break into it, being your brand’s visionary and spokesperson, and taking every meeting you can to get off the ground.

On today's episode, Christine Lagorio-Chafkin talks to Melissa Ben-Ishay, founder and CEO of Baked by Melissa, about tiny cupcakes, combatting imposter syndrome and stepping into the role of CEO at her company.

On today's episode, Christine Lagorio-Chafkin talks to John Mackey, founder and CEO of Whole Foods Market. They discuss company culture, learning from mistakes and his new book Conscious Leadership: Elevating Humanity Through Business.

Christine Lagorio-Chafkin talks to Scott Svenson--co-founder, chairman and CEO of MOD Pizza--about the purpose behind his company’s existence and balancing that motivating mission with fiscal sustainability.

From Inc. Magazine, Book Smart brings to light the books beloved by prominent entrepreneurs, founders, and notable figures across the spectrum of industry. If you love What I Know, be sure to subscribe to Book Smart wherever you listen to podcasts. In this episode, Jim Damian talks to our host, Cameron Albert-Deitch, about his Book Smart pick, Nine Lies About Work: A Freethinking Leader’s Guide to the Real World by Ashley Goodall and Marcus Buckingham

Christine Lagorio-Chafkin talks to Rich Kleiman, co-founder of Thirty Five Ventures, about his partnership with NBA superstar Kevin Durant, his time at Roc Nation, and how to break out of complacency.

Christine Lagorio-Chafkin talks to Michael Acton Smith, co-founder and co-CEO of Calm, about executing on the day-to-day work of starting a business, serial entrepreneurship and digital monsters.

Christine Lagorio-Chafkin talks to Neil Blumenthal, co-founder and co-CEO of Warby Parker, about mitigating risk, preparing for business after COVID-19 and a food dehydrator informercial that sparked Neil's entrepreneurial spirit as a child.

Christine Lagorio-Chafkin talks to Sandra Oh Lin, founder and CEO of KiwiCo, and leadership during COVID-19,

Christine Lagorio-Chafkin talks to Tariq Farid, founder and CEO of Edible Arrangements, about mentorship, growing a business with a franchise model and how his company has handled the economic crisis brought on by COVID-19.

The founder of the iconic clothing brand Eileen Fisher built a company rooted in creative values and radical simplicity of design. Over the years, the vision frayed--especially when she became less involved in maintaining it. She explains to Christine Lagorio-Chafkin how she found her voice and is using it to bring her brand back to its roots while calling on the industry to adopt sustainability

Zola CEO and co-founder Shan-Lyn Ma speaks with Christine Lagorio-Chafkin about why building and fortifying her vision for a wedding-registry company took four years. Only then was it time to branch out into new products and services.

Julia Cheek, founder and CEO of Everlywell, talks to Christine Lagorio-Chafkin about being a first time entrepreneur, facing uncertainty and believing in your ideas even when no one else does.

On this episode, Deirdre Quinn talks about her partship with Shun Yen and Ida Siu, Lafayette 148's founding and how they are making it through the current economic crisis

Nir Eyal, author of Hooked: How to Build Habit-Forming Products and Indistractable: How to Control Your Attention and Choose Your Life, talks to Christine Lagorio-Chafkin about distraction. Subscribe to What I Know on Apple Podcasts, Spotify or wherever you listen. 

Scott Harrison is the founder and, therefore, chief fundraiser for Charity:Water. Charity: Water is a non-profit that has raised money for and executed more than 50,000 projects that have provided safe and clean drinking water to more than 11 million people. Christine Lagorio-Chafkin talks to Scott about how he uses storytelling, including his own compelling personal history, to grow his company. Subscribe to What I Know on Apple Podcasts, Spotify or wherever you listen. 

In 2001, Rebecca’s career as a fashion designer and founder started, in some ways, by chance. She had been designing her own clothes on the side and one piece she had made was an altered version of the iconic “I Love NY” t-shirt. She sent that shirt to actress Jenna Elfman on September 9th, 2001. Elfman wore that shirt on The Tonight Show with Jay Leno two days after 9/11. Rebecca’s t-shirt would end up in the pages of magazines like Glamour, In Touch and Us Weekly. That was the catalyst for nearly two-decades of success in the world of fashion. Rebecca Minkoff's continued success is due, in large part, to her embracing change. Subscribe to What I Know on Apple Podcasts, Spotify or wherever you listen. 

Captain Scott Kelly is a retired NASA astronaut who spent almost a year on the International Space Station. Over four flights, he’s spent more than 500 days in space, and, while commanding the ISS, made the single longest space mission by an American. Host Christine Lagorio-Chafkin talks to Capt. Kelly about facing uncertainty and doing so while keeping your health and mental health in check while being socially isolated.

The greatest businesses weren’t born from moments of genius. They emerged after years of discovery--and often after years of failure. What I Know from Inc. magazine takes you inside the messy, painful, and --every so often -- transcendent journey of starting a company. Through candid interviews, Inc. senior writer Christine Lagorio-Chafkin draws out the real grit and true lessons behind innovative companies and remarkable brands.