Inc. Founders Project With Alexa Von Tobel

As crypto adoption ramps up, institutional investors are getting in on the action. And many of them are doing so through FalconX, one of the largest and fastest-growing digital asset brokerages, co-founded by Raghu Yarlagadda. An engineer by background, Raghu spent many years on Google's ChromeOS team, but an interest in the future of blockchain technology led him to a wholly new category. He launched FalconX in 2018 and has since scaled the company to a nearly $4B valuation with revenue growth of 30x year-over-year. Raghu shares why much of the world's value will be tokenized in the next five years, how FalconX reached its scale through word of mouth customer acquisition, and how entrepreneurship has become a shared language for his whole family.

What will the future of machine learning look like? According to Lukas Biewald, machine learning has the power to solve many of humanity's biggest problems. That's why he founded Weights & Biases, to build tools that help machine learning practitioners thrive. Weights & Biases is used and loved by over 100,000 practitioners to track their models, datasets and experiments. Lukas shares how the company works with partners like Toyota and Samsung, how he instilled a culture of product-led growth, and how the acquisition of his previous startup kicked off his daily yoga practice.

Gene Berdichevsky started Sila, the next generation battery materials company, over a decade ago. But, with an eye toward building a hundred-year company, he's just getting started. Gene started his career as the seventh employee at Tesla, where he engineered the Roadster battery. Now at Sila, he's focused on battery innovation in driving the larger shift toward renewables and electric vehicles. Gene shares how he fell in love with energy as an undergrad at Stanford, why having a huge impact depends on both breakthrough tech and an ability to scale, and how he had maintained patience through 55,000 experiments before Sila brought their product to market.

To build one successful startup is no easy feat, but to do it twice is even more impressive. It was a childhood spent in a small Turkish village that propelled Eren Bali's passion for working to solve problems of accessibility. First, he created Udemy to make education accessible, scaling it to over 10 million students worldwide. In 2016, he started Carbon Health to reimagine the healthcare experience from scratch. He's raised over $500M in venture funding and has ambitions to open 1,500 clinics across the country over the next few years. Eren shares why he believes the future is "omnichannel healthcare," how Covid went from a business threat to a major accelerant, and why he doubled down on communication skills in his second time around as a founder.

In 2011, Steve and his co-founders set out to build a company. They understood the power of a vertical strategy and realized that restaurants were ripe for innovation. Enter Toast, which powers restaurants with point of sale, front of house, back of house, and guest-facing technology. Toast has grown rapidly with a clear focus on their customers: restaurants. Toast has raised a whopping $850 million in venture capital and was recognized as the third fastest growing tech company in North America. Steve shares the secret to gauging product market fit before you build a product, how Toast won its first customers through competitive pricing, and why Covid pushed technology from a nice-to-have into a must-have.

At his core, Jack is a creator. While his musical group Pomplamoose had taken off on YouTube, he realized that the mechanism for turning his fans' attention into dollars was broken. So, he built Patreon, a membership platform that makes it easy for creators to earn salaries directly from their biggest fans. Since its launch in 2013, Patreon has paid out more than $1 billion to creators on its platform. Jack shares why the myth of the starving artist is over, why he's willing to work harder than the competition, and how all creators should think about engaging their fans.

As we all strive to increase our productivity, it's no wonder that productivity startup Notion has taken off. Since co-founder and CEO Ivan Zhao launched a prototype a few years ago, Notion has gained a cult following of over one million users. With a team of less than 30 employees, the company has already achieved a sky-high valuation of $800M. Ivan shares his approach to democratizing software, why he believes engineers are the scribes of our time, and why he moved to Kyoto to reboot the company in its earliest days.  Make sure to follow Ivan on social at @notionhq and @ivanhzhao.

What if there was a stock market for private companies? Carta is well on its way to realizing that vision. Henry Ward launched the company to 2012 under the name eShares. Fast-forward and Carta now manages over $575B in equity for 11,000+ companies and has a sky-high valuation of its own at $1.7 billion. Henry shares his vision for closing the wealth inequality gap, how he's hiring 50 new employees each month, and how his previous startup's failure led to Carta's success.

After meeting as freshmen at Georgetown, Jonathan and his two-cofounders set out to open a healthy fast food restaurant in a 500 square feet storefront. From those quaint beginnings, Sweetgreen has grown into a massive food platform, with over 100+ locations and 200+ outposts. Jonathan shares why authenticity is core to the brand, why their inexperience actually enabled innovation, and how he thinks about falling on the right side of this equation: as companies get bigger, they either get better or worse.

What if every American were an investor? At Robinhood, Vlad Tenev is on a mission to make the financial system work for everyone. He co-founded the company in 2013, and the fast-growing brokerage has become an investing giant. With over 13 million users and $1 billion in funding, it's no surprise incumbents have been influenced by Robinhood's model, which drove an industry-wide shift toward commission-free trades. Vlad shares why he decided to build Robinhood as a mobile-first platform, how Covid helped to accelerate user growth, and why waking up to an analog alarm clock is a critical part of his routine.

Growing up, David's grandmother instilled an important lesson: that the only thing someone can't take away from you is your education. So when a mentor of David's offered to back him as an entrepreneur, he decided to bring the joy back to education and build a school that everyone would want to attend. In 2015, he launched MasterClass, which now provides classes from 100+ of the world’s best practitioners (from Serena Williams to Martin Scorsese). MasterClass has grown into one of the largest online learning platforms in the world and was most recently valued at nearly $3 billion dollars. David shares why a childhood stutter impacted his entrepreneurial ambitions, why starting with the best teachers was critical to his business strategy, and the importance of getting two opinions (and no more) when making a hard decision. 

In 2012, Vishal Garg and his wife tried to buy a home and quickly realized how inefficient the mortgage process was. As Vishal puts it, the mortgage industry acted as though the internet didn't exist. So in 2016, he founded Better to build an all-in-one platform to take customers through the entire home-buying process, from finding an agent, to securing a mortgage, to shopping for insurance. Five years in, Better has funded over $30.9B in home loans and last year alone, the company grew revenue by 850%. Vishal shares why his first move was applying for a mortgage nearly everywhere, why he believes home ownership will shift to a fractional model, and how the best way to grow is to center your customer relationship on utility.

After watching his wife—a Nurse Practitioner—struggle to keep up with patient notes, Andrew Hines had an idea. What if he could apply his engineering training to architect a better EMR (electronic medical record) to power our healthcare system? In 2015, he started Canvas Medical to shift the paradigm of what an EMR can and should be. Today, Canvas is the only complete software platform for value-based care. Designed to empower clinicians, administrators and even software developers building the next generation of healthcare platforms, Canvas is a simple solution to a complex problem. Andrew shares why he tries to maintain a student's mindset, how Canvas is equipping developers with game-changing APIs, and how he launched his first startup (a surfboard company) as a teenager.

In 2007, Kristo and his friend Taavet were two Estonian friends living and working in London. They quickly realized how expensive it was to exchange money between Pounds and Estonian Euros. Their hack to this problem ended up becoming the foundation for their startup, Wise, which they founded in 2011. Today, Wise allows people to hold 56 currencies, move money between countries, and spend money abroad. Not only is Wise one of the world's fastest-growing tech companies, it was recently listed on the London Stock Exchange in a direct listing that valued the company at $11 billion. Kristo shares why demand for Wise is still growing at a rapid clip, why he's personally eager to get back to the office, and why saying thank you is critical. 

Joe Ariel went to college in Nashville, where he fell in love with local delicacies like Nashville hot chicken. Living in New York, he had a craving and wondered if his favorite restaurants could ship food to him. Thus, the idea for Goldbelly was born. Founded in 2013, Goldbelly is an ecommerce platform that empowers the best restaurants and small food makers to ship nationwide. Recognized as one of the top 50 websites in the country, Goldbelly now works with over 850 restaurants and covers all 50 states. Joe shares how Covid accelerated Goldbelly's growth, why restaurants are excited to open up a new online sales channel, and why a phone call from chef and restaurateur Jose Andres was Joe's most meaningful moment to date.

There is a major nursing shortage plaguing the US healthcare system. By 2024, we're on track to be short over one million nurses. Yet, for working nurses looking for a new job, the industry average job search lasted 90 days. Incredible Health, co-founded by Iman Abuzeid in 2017, has brought that search time down to under 20 days. Incredible Health is the fastest growing venture-backed career marketplace for healthcare workers. The company has partnered with over 500 hospitals to offer its proprietary matching software and play an integral role in supporting nurses throughout their careers. Iman shares why she picked the entrepreneurship path after graduating from medical school, how her grandfathers' experience as founders make her comfortable with risk, and why a CEO support group is essential.

In 2014, Mathilde Collin moved from France to California to take part in Y Combinator and to bring her vision for a better email platform closer to her target customers. Today, Front is the leading Customer Communication Platform that serves more than 6,5000 customers, including Shopify, Airbnb, and Hulu. Mathilde has raised over $138 million in funding, and through it all, has taken an open-book approach to sharing her journey of entrepreneurship—including making all of her fundraising decks public. Mathilde shares why she obsessively communicates Front's revenue metric across the company, how she's worked to build a low ego culture, and why she has no work apps on her phone.

The last decade has brought a wave of direct-to-consumer healthcare companies. Instead of building another, Sid Viswanathan and his co-founder Umar Afridi set out to create technology that could fuel the consumerization of healthcare. In 2016, they started Truepill with a focus on the pharmacy industry. Now, they power an end-to-end healthcare experience, have filled over 7 million prescriptions, and facilitate over 50,000 telehealth visits per week. Just three years after launch, Forbes named them to their Next Billion-Dollar Startup list. Sid shares the LinkedIn outreach strategy that led him to Umar, how bootstrapping Truepill in year one impacted their strategy, and why he believes founding teams should be able to launch with only internal resources.

If you asked how ubiquitous electric vehicles would be a decade ago, it's hard to imagine their current rise into the mainstream. So what's next for clean energy innovation? Kathy Hannun, co-founder of Dandelion Energy, believes the next frontier is geothermal heat pumps. At Dandelion, she's working to bring geothermal technology, an energy-saving way of heating and cooling homes, to households across the country. Along the way, Bill Gates' firm led her Series B, and she's been recognized as one of Fast Company’s Most Creative People in Business. Kathy shares why she was a reluctant founder at first, why she believes the adoption of geothermal is inevitable, and how she harnesses a constant need to innovate.

What if workers could acquire new skills and training, without taking on debt? That’s the value Guild Education strives to provide. Guild Education unlocks opportunities for America’s workforce through education and upskilling and counts Fortune 500 companies (such as Chipotle, Disney, Walmart, and Taco Bell) among its partners. Since founding Guild in 2015, Rachel has scaled the business to reach working learners in all 50 states and has helped prevent over half a billion dollars in student debt. Rachel shares how COVID-19 has accelerated the future of work, why she decided to make Guild a Certified B Corporation instead of a nonprofit, and what she learned from working on political campaigns.