Inc. Founders Project With Alexa Von Tobel

Dylan Taylor, founder and CEO of Voyager Technologies, is building the infrastructure that will define humanity's future in space. Through defense, space solutions, and Starlab, Voyager is working on some of the most ambitious aerospace projects of our generation. In this conversation, Dylan takes us from watching Star Trek as a kid in Idaho to becoming a publicly traded space company CEO. He shares what it's actually like to reach space aboard Blue Origin, why we're living through the biggest space boom in human history, and how space will transform our global economy. What You'll Learn: Why space isn't an industry but humanity's eighth continent His experience going to outer space How perfect real-time information about Earth will create trillions in economic value Projects that Voyager is working on How ambition shifted from personal glory to reflected glory through leadership Predictions for the space industry The frontier innovations that will enable humans to live and work in spac

Axion founder Daniel First is building the command center for American manufacturing that detects product failures before they reach customers. His AI-powered observability platform links IoT data, technician reports, and customer feedback across aerospace, medical devices, and consumer products to identify emerging issues manufacturers don't even know exist. Born from watching enterprise AI pilots fail at McKinsey, Axion is architecting customer-centric manufacturing where products iterate in real time based on what's breaking in the field. What You'll Learn: The trillion-dollar quality crisis plaguing American manufacturing and how AI is solving it Why most enterprise AI fails and what makes the rare successes different The future of American manufacturing competing on speed of customer learning How real-time field data is transforming product development cycles Unconventional founder habits that enable exceptional speed and deep thinking  Chapters: 2:00 From Orthodox Debates to Indepe

Interior designer Nate Berkus is one of the most recognizable names in design. He started his firm at 24 with nothing but authenticity and hustle, building an empire spanning TV, books, product lines, and high-end interiors that's landed him on the AD100 list for a decade. His journey includes 12 years as Oprah's design expert, surviving the 2004 tsunami, and building a life with Jeremiah Brent as one of TV's first openly gay families. With his new book Foundations releasing November 18th, Nate reflects on what it takes to stay creatively obsessed for 30 years and build a household name in design. What You'll Learn: • How he started his firm at 24 and convinced clients to take a chance on him • Working with Oprah and his strategic approach to media • How surviving the 2004 tsunami fundamentally changed him and his reflections on that experience • Why he believes design is part magic, part alchemy, and part sociology • How he and Jeremiah Brent collaborate as both partners and business collaborators • The f

Writer CEO May Habib is building the future of enterprise AI. Born in Lebanon as the oldest of eight kids, May grew up navigating chaos, multiple languages, and cultures, skills that shaped her into a founder willing to challenge assumptions. After pivoting from Qordoba, she built Writer's own foundational models and spent a decade solving real AI problems for Fortune 500 companies. Now leading a $2B+ company, May shares her bold vision for where AI is headed, from self-evolving LLMs that proactively guide us to why work in 2030 will be unrecognizable. What You'll Learn: How growing up as the oldest of eight in a Lebanese family shaped May's leadership style Why Writer focuses on highly regulated industries like healthcare and financial services The critical difference between generative AI and agentic AI How self-evolving AI will proactively prompt you instead of waiting for commands Why execution is going from scarce and expensive to abundant and on-demand What the average knowledge work

Atria Health Institute founder Alan Tisch is rebuilding America's healthcare system from the ground up. After two near-death experiences in his mid-20s revealed how broken preventive care truly is, Alan made it his life's mission to tackle a system designed to profit from sick people rather than keep them healthy. With a multidisciplinary team of 15 medical specialties and cutting-edge diagnostics, Atria is pioneering the preventive healthcare movement to extend not only lifespan but healthspan. What You'll Learn: Why the healthcare system profits from keeping you sick instead of healthy How a $150 test can prevent heart attacks 20 years before they happen The difference between healthspan and lifespan and why it matters Why team-based care across specialties beats the traditional siloed approach How to think about preventive diagnostics like whole body MRIs and genetic testing Why now is the most exciting time for healthcare Chapters:00:00 Intro02:40 Early Influences and Family Back

ShopMy co-founders Harry Rein and Tiffany Lopinsky are building the most sophisticated three-sided commerce platform that revolutionizes how creators monetize authentic recommendations, how brands scale through trusted advocates, and how consumers discover products through curated networks they actually trust. Powered by intricate product graph technology and advanced data infrastructure that maps millions of products across retailers, they're architecting the future of commerce driven by intentional curation rather than algorithmic impulse buying. What You'll Learn: Why the "curator economy" matters more than the "creator economy" How their Circles feature creates personalized shopping through trusted networks The product philosophy of minimizing "calories" in user experience design How they thought through scaling ShopMy’s audience Why authentic recommendations outperform traditional performance marketing How complementary co-founder skills drive success The "sweep the floors" menta

World quantum expert and professor Jeff Thompson, founder of Logiqal, shares his journey from academia (at Yale, Harvard, MIT, and Princeton) to now building the first scaled quantum computer. He explains why the world needs this breakthrough, how Logiqal’s neutral atom technology makes it possible, and what it could unlock for medicine, materials, and the future of innovation. What You’ll Learn: What is quantum? Why the world needs a scaled quantum computer Jeff’s journey through Yale, Harvard, MIT, and now running a lab at Princeton Why failure drives scientific discovery How Logiqal is using neutral atom technology and ytterbium What quantum could unlock for medicine and materials How Jeff balances academia and entrepreneurship How he sees the global race for quantum computing Chapters:01:58 Intro 08:04 Quantum 101: Bits, Qubits, and Schrödinger’s Cat09:40 The State of Quantum Today: Early Days, Big Potential13:19 What Really Counts as a Quantum Computer?14:35 How Many Qubits Do

Dr. Becky Kennedy from Good Inside shares her journey from private practice psychologist to building the #1 consumer parenting tool on the planet. She reveals how blending emotional connection with practical action helps parents raise resilient kids and become sturdier themselves. What You’ll Learn: • How Dr. Becky built Good Inside into a global parenting movement • The secret to becoming a “sturdy parent” and raising resilient kids • Why parenting feels hard even for good parents and how to navigate it with confidence • How to break cycles of shame and foster deep connection at home • The lessons Dr. Becky learned while scaling a mission-driven brand • Good Inside’s future  Chapters: 0:00 Intro 1:58 Becky’s Origin Story 5:34 Parenting Genres of Our Generation 9:38 Early Career and Education 14:11 Internal Family Systems (IFS) Explained 17:19 Private Practice to Parenting Work 21:15 Instagram and the First Viral Posts 27:39 Founding Good Inside 30:34 Parenting as the Last Frontier 39:15

What if the secret to solving impossible problems isn't avoiding failure, but learning to leverage it? Serial entrepreneur and inventor Astro Teller, Captain of Moonshots at X (Alphabet's Moonshot Factory), discovered this counterintuitive truth growing up in a family where intelligence was everything. The grandson of Edward Teller, father of the hydrogen bomb, and a Nobel Prize-winning economist, Astro learned that being smart wasn't enough. He had to develop his creativity into his philosophy of "being yourself on purpose." Today, Astro is responsible for steering X’s projects—like Waymo, Dandelion, and Verily—through the bumps and scrapes they meet along the road to reality. In this episode, Astro shares how childhood stories of the Manhattan Project's creative community inspired X's culture, why he transformed from trying to outsmart employees to becoming a "culture engineer," and why intellectual honesty is the real key to turning science fiction into reality.

What if we could predict infrastructure failures before they happen instead of scrambling to fix them after disaster strikes? Serial entrepreneur Alex Hawkinson quips that the Romans would be laughing at us if they saw our current approach to managing the critical systems that power our world. Known as the father of IoT for creating SmartThings—a platform supporting over one billion connected devices before its acquisition by Samsung—Alex is now tackling his most ambitious challenge yet: awakening America's crumbling infrastructure through physical AI. With nearly 500,000 sensors already deployed across water, energy, and essential services, BrightAI is shifting entire industries from reactive maintenance to proactive intelligence. In this episode, Alex shares how BrightAI's observability layer creates an unbreakable competitive moat, how his "swing big" philosophy attracts world-class talent, and why transforming infrastructure management represents humanity's next great technological leap forward.

What happens when humanity faces the sixth mass extinction event in Earth's history? Serial entrepreneur Ben Lamm believes we need a backup plan. With a track record of building and exiting companies across AI, gaming, and conversational intelligence, Ben took on his most audacious venture in 2021: co-founding Colossal Biosciences with Harvard geneticist Dr. George Church to bring extinct species back to life. The company has already successfully de-extincted the dire wolf and aims to return woolly mammoths to the Arctic by 2028. In this episode, Ben shares how his self-described "unemployable" streak became his entrepreneurial superpower, why asking naive questions helps him tackle impossible challenges across industries, and how Colossal's breakthrough technologies represent humanity's essential insurance policy for planetary survival. Follow Inspired on Instagram Follow Inspired on Twitter

With software powering every aspect of our lives, when does quality testing shift from a nicety to an absolute necessity? Despite the stakes, most companies fail to test everything—and even fewer automate their QA processes—leaving critical systems vulnerable to catastrophic bugs. Jon Perl is on a mission to change that. In 2019, he launched QA Wolf to help hundreds of companies automate 80% of their quality assurance processes, accelerating release cycles fivefold and saving customers over $100 million annually. By disrupting the outdated, manual QA status quo, QA Wolf empowers teams to ship faster and more confidently, delivering innovation without compromise. In this episode, Jon shares how a tech mistake sparked the idea for QA Wolf, how they settled on a pricing model that aligns incentives with their customers, and why he believes human-in-the-loop will remain essential until AI achieves flawless accuracy.

For 60 years, Moore's Law and Dennard scaling drove the exponential advancement of computers, making them faster, smaller, and more energy-efficient. But as Nick Harris explains, the era of transistor-based technology has reached its physical limits. The future of computing demands a new solution, and that solution is light. Nick founded Lightmatter in 2017 to fully transform AI data center infrastructure. By harnessing light to process and transmit data, Lightmatter is laying the foundation for the next generation of computing. The company invented the world's first 3D-stacked photonics engine and was most recently valued at $4.4 billion. In this episode, Nick shares why he chose to leave academia after receiving his PhD, how his go-to-market strategy hinged on building real friendships and understanding his customers' internal roadmaps, and why he believes that having an obsession is a gift.

What if building a website wasn’t just for developers, but something anyone could do easily? This was the simple idea that led Avishai Abrahami to create Wix in 2006. What began as a no-code tool to help businesses establish an online presence has grown into a global platform that serves hundreds of millions of users. Under Avishai’s leadership, the company has reached many milestones including the launch of Wix’s first AI website builder in 2016—one the first commercial AI products available to consumers at mass scale. In 2013, Avishai took Wix public, and the company is currently valued at over $11 billion. In this episode, Avishai shares his take on what differentiates exceptional entrepreneurs from the rest, why he believes in meticulously tracking the most granular details, and how important it is to master the balance of seeking feedback while knowing when to trust your own judgment.

What if the media you consume isn’t just how you spend your time—but who you become? Chris Best began his career as a software engineer, driven by the idea that writing code could transform how millions of people work. But after nearly a decade of coding, he recognized an even greater potential with writing: the power to shape who millions of people become. In 2017, Chris launched Substack, a platform that empowers independent writers and creators to own their connection with audiences and earn through paid subscriptions. In this episode, Chris unpacks the “anti-media” philosophy at the heart of Substack—eliminating barriers for writers to share their work and creating a meritocratic space where the most influential voices can be heard. From political commentators and fashion gurus to sports enthusiasts, Substack has grown into a vibrant ecosystem where readers can discover their tribe. Today, the platform boasts over 35 million active readers and more than 4 million paid subscribers. Chris shares how he over

Following the clean-tech bust of the early 2010s, the path to renewable energy was anything but clear. Yet in 2013, Chris Hopper took a bold step forward to co-found Aurora Solar, on a mission to accelerate solar energy adoption. Aurora’s platform streamlines and improves the processes of sales, design, and installation—making solar more accessible and efficient for all. Operating in a tough funding environment, he relied on grit to secure a seed round that enabled the company to bootstrap and grow steadily over the next five years. Today, Aurora Solar has raised over half a billion dollars, achieved a valuation exceeding $4 billion, and has empowered the design of over 10 million solar projects worldwide. Chris shares why he’s grateful for the challenging early days, how Aurora's cloud-based platform uses AI to streamline workflows, and why—despite his forward-thinking mindset—he encourages entrepreneurs to remain open to serendipity.

In 2011, as the rise of digital media cast doubt on the survival of print, Sarah Harrelson broke from convention and launched her own independent magazine: CULTURED. Sarah set out to spotlight artists, writers, curators, and designers overlooked by mainstream outlets and has since become one of the most trusted voices in the world of art and design. Beyond the magazine’s editorial prestige, CULTURED collaborates with leading fashion houses, luxury brands, and galleries. Sarah has had a decades-long career in magazines, beginning with an internship at Elle and including launching the Miami Herald’s Home and Design section, becoming the editor-in-chief of Ocean Drive and Art Basel Magazine, and ultimately founding her own publishing company. In this episode, Sarah shares how intuition shapes her approach to talent discovery, why her belief in the staying power of print remains unchanged, and how the magazine’s strategic focus has evolved to span global markets and adjacent industries.  

In 2013, when Ryan Petersen launched Flexport, he approached the problem from a customer’s perspective. Early in his career, he had worked at his brother’s import-export business, sourcing and selling ATVs, scooters, and dirt bikes from Asia to markets around the world. They built the entire technical platform to facilitate these transactions, and Ryan saw an opportunity to make the freight forwarding industry more efficient. He founded Flexport to make global trade easy and accessible for everyone and has since raised $2.3 billion to fuel the business. Today, Flexport’s platform coordinates logistics from factory floor to customer door, serving companies of all sizes. In 2023 alone, Flexport’s technology moved over $32 billion worth of merchandise. Ryan discusses how he leverages the U.S. Air Force’s OODA (Observe, Orient, Decide, Act) strategy, how AI is helping automate 1% of its freight forwarding workflows each week, and why Flexport’s agility remains the company’s greatest strength.

When Eliot Horowitz, Founder and CEO of Viam, was locked down with his family during COVID, he did what any engineer might do—he built a robot to play chess. Once that project was complete, he turned his attention to his ever-problematic sprinkler system. After that? He added smart software to his HVAC system. Through this series of home improvements, he uncovered a problem he was eager to solve, and his third startup was born. Eliot founded Viam to build a product that connects hardware to software and unlocks AI, automation, and data for the physical world. A career software developer and technology leader, Eliot previously co-founded MongoDB, writing the core code base for the pioneering database and leading the engineering teams for 13 years as CTO. MongoDB went public in 2017 and has a market cap of over $20 billion. Eliot shares why he enforces a no-jerk policy when it comes to hiring, how he evolved as a founder from the seed stage to post-IPO, and why he believes that being the product’s biggest user

In 2007, Emmett co-founded a live streaming service called Justin.tv along with his childhood friend and neighbor, Justin. That first entrepreneurial spark grew into Twitch, an interactive livestreaming service that spans gaming, entertainment, sports, music, and more. Today, at any given moment, more than 2.5 million people globally are engaging with Twitch. While Twitch was acquired by Amazon in 2014 for nearly $1 billion, Emmett has stayed on as CEO and continued to scale. Emmett shares why the company's hardest engineering challenge was scaling live video, why the future of the creator economy is "micro-patronage," and the role Twitch plays in combating loneliness.  Original airdate: Aug 2022