Startups for Good

Chris Fredericks founded Empowered Ventures, serves as president & CEO, and is a member of the board of directors. Chris has a diverse background in management, accounting and finance, business valuations, mergers and acquisitions, operations, people development, and strategy.

In 2010, he proposed and led the acquisition of TVF (www.tvfinc.com) on behalf of the employees using an employee stock ownership plan (ESOP), which enabled a successful ownership transition for the founder. After overseeing a decade of success as an employee-owned company, Chris and TVF launched Empowered Ventures (www.empowered.ventures) in 2020 to grow and diversify the ESOP...

Jeannie founded Funding U to provide a responsible loan option for academically achieving, low income students who needed last gap funds to complete college, but for whom the only available options were high interest rate credit cards. Her drive to solve this problem came from a decade of working in education nonprofits in Atlanta and an understanding that a mother’s education level holds the single strongest correlation to outcomes of infant mortality, child literacy, household employment and income, and likelihood to live in poverty. 

Today, Funding U has originated $42M in affordable student loans to more tha...

David Blake operates at the intersection of the future of work and the future of politics. David Blake has spent his career innovating in formal education and lifelong learning. He is on a mission to future proof our workforce and use learning and skills to enable everyone to fulfill their personal missions. 

David is the co-founder and CEO of Degreed. Millions of individuals and hundreds of organizations use Degreed’s platform to discover and answer for all of their learning and skills. Prior to Degreed, he helped launched a competency-based, accredited university and was a founding team mem...

Nikhil is the technical cofounder of Hearth. Hearth was founded to give home improvement contractors and businesses the tools to achieve the American Dream. Hearth does this by providing an all-in-one tool suite for owners to manage their operations covering: lead management, quoting, customer financing options, invoicing, contracts, payments, and checking accounts. Nikhil has operated the business since its inception seven years ago, from individual contributor to VP level in product, data, revenue operations, and customer success. Over his time there, Hearth has grown to serve over 14,000 users, a $23M revenue run rate, and raised over $60M in venture...

Normally on Startups For Good, we interview external guests. Today, we turn the mic back around and focus on Purpose Built and what we're up to. Recently, we did a webinar called “Ready to Build. How do I know if I'm ready to be a startup founder?” 

Have you had a nagging feeling that you'd one day like to start a company or have people told you they want to work with you or for you? Perhaps you're in a moment of a career transition where you're exploring your next steps, you could consider yourself a future found...

Adam Jackson is the co-founder and CEO of Freelance Labs, builders of Braintrust, the first user-controlled talent network that provides enterprises with the highly skilled technical and design talent they need.

Prior to founding Braintrust, Adam co-founded Doctor on Demand, the popular video telemedicine provider, with daytime talk show personality Dr. Phil, as well as his son Jay McGraw. Other notable ventures include DriverSide, the first website specifically designed for car owners, which was acquired by Advance Auto Parts in September of 2011 and MarketSquare, the first online local shopping destination on the Internet which was acquired by...

Shannon Farley is an experienced social entrepreneur. She was the founding Executive Director of Spark, the world's largest network of Millennial philanthropists. Prior to joining Spark, Shannon helped start The W. Haywood Burns Institute, a MacArthur Award-winning juvenile justice reform organization. Shannon holds a BA in American Studies from Georgetown University and an MS in Gender and Social Policy from the London School of Economics.

Shannon joins me today to chat about tech nonprofits, and often startup tech nonprofits. Fast Forward celebrates nine years of accelerating dozens of tech nonprofits. And in this episode, we discuss when...

Anna Counselman is co-founder at Upstart (NASDAQ: UPST), a leading AI lending marketplace that partners with banks to improve access to affordable credit. Upstart helps millions of consumers who don’t have access to credit, pay too much for it, or take on credit they can’t ultimately afford. Anna leads business operations where she drives focus on operational scalability, employee experience, and culture-strategy alignment. Since co-founding Upstart, Anna has led Operations, People/HR, and myriad other initiatives before taking on Business Operations. Prior to Upstart, Anna led Gmail Consumer Operations as the business grew from 150 million to 450 million user...

Before coming to YU, Noam was a professor at Harvard Business School for 13 years.  He was also the founding director of the Founder Central initiative at the University of Southern California and the Lemann Chair in Entrepreneurship there.  He won the MBA teaching awards at both Harvard and USC, and has written two bestselling books, The Founder’s Dilemmas (2012) and Life Is a Startup (2018).

Noam grew up in Los Angeles, received undergraduate degrees in engineering and business from the University of Pennsylvania, and worked as an entrepreneur and venture capitalist before attending Harvard for his MBA and his...

Entrepreneur and investor with a love of learning, a passion for making dreams become reality and having a positive impact on the world. Husband, father and book addict.

Miles is founder/CEO of Purpose Built Ventures Studio where he co-founds winning mission-driven companies with passionate entrepreneurs.

Miles is an Investor in early-stage startups. As Founding Partner of Purpose Built Ventures, he previously invested in tech startups working to make people healthier or wealthier. He has invested in and advised dozens of companies at the earliest stages including Honor, Brightside Health, Remix, Notable Health, and Balto...

Jon has over 15 years of experience in energy investing and project finance. Prior to launching Carbon Direct, he was the Founder and Chief Investment Officer of BBL Commodities, a commodity hedge fund. Jon started his career at J. Aron, the commodities division of Goldman Sachs where he managed a large proprietary trading book across global macro markets with an emphasis on commodities. Jon was then a partner at Glencore, managing the firm’s US derivative business prior to its IPO.

Jon's focus on climate change and negative emissions extends to his work at Columbia University where he si...

Rafi Levi, BSc. Mechanical (Technion, Israel), MSc. N.A.M.E (University of Michigan, USA), has over 35 years of Engineering, project management, business development, and business management experience, in Israel and worldwide.

Rafi joins me today to talk about how much fertilizer is wasted and turns into pollution because farmers don't have the data. The difference between agriculture tech and climate tech and how they can be merged. We discuss doing business in different countries and cultures. We talk about how important it is to be optimistic as a startup founder or employee, and about working with...

Erin Levine is the CEO & Founder of Justice Tech company, Hello Divorce. After 16 years as a divorce lawyer, Erin knows just how broken, toxic, wildly inefficient and unreasonably expensive the family law system is - with Americans spending 30 billion a year on legal fees alone. No longer wanting to be a complicit participant in a process that routes spouses through war, Erin set out to revolutionize how consumers access the law and provide a kinder, easier and cheaper pathway to divorce. Ultimately, Erin's mission is to help people reorganize their lives and families with less stress and mess...

Dr. Seth Feuerstein is the Founder and CEO of Oui Therapeutics. He has expertise across multiple areas of medicine, technology and business. . He is a founding board member of the Center for Biomedical and Interventional Technology at Yale and Executive Director of the Center for Digital Health, Innovation and Excellence. He teaches at the medical school and is the faculty advisor for Innovation in Healthcare at the Yale School of Medicine and has an appointment in the Department of Defense. He works across multiple sectors in healthcare including health insurance, healthcare startups, healthcare investing, clinical care delivery innovation and...

Jeff is a Co-Founder and CEO of Fig Tech. Fig creates onramps for underbanked Americans to repair their credit score and regain access to traditional financial services. Fig started as a collaboration with the United Way in Houston and became the first fintech to be both B Corp certified and a US Treasury recognized Community Development Financial Institution (CDFI). Fig's investors include Techstars, Upper90, Village Capital, and Purpose Built.

Prior to Fig, Jeff previously worked at the Boston Consulting Group in strategy and consumer products. Jeff holds a BS in Chemical Engineering from MIT and an MBA...

Born to immigrant parents in poverty, Jonathan and his family quickly learned the value and need for community (something he discovered later on was very hard to come by for folks on the street). Receiving an opportunity to study at the University of Michigan, Jonathan earned a degree in Informatics, specializing in UX design. After producing a documentary on social change ("Talim" on Amazon), Jonathan developed a tool for restaurants to convert surplus food into funding for local food banks called FoodCircles. From there he helped create Samaritan, with the goal to give people without a home the social...

Misha is the founder of Effective Government California. He believes government is a vitally important institution, and that our responsibility as citizens is to help improve it.

Today Misha will make the case that startup skills are partially transferable into the political and policy domain and encourages you to consider it when it's the right time. And perhaps some issues will be better served, better impacted through advocacy, politics and policy than through startups.

Millennial, Immigrant, Uber driver (36000 mi) turned Techstars fintech startup founder @Line Financial. Previously Product Leader @PayPal (75 consumer fintech patent publications). Dad, Husband, Brother, Proud son of parents who came from extreme poverty, worked hard to give us great education, tolerant values and culture. 

Akshay joins me today to discuss his company, the product and how it works. We talked about what motivates him and the growth of the company. We talked about how to include the voice of the customer inside the company and do that in a systematic way.

After working in private equity and investment banking, Jacob Sills’s passion for criminal justice reform led him to start Uptrust, a communication and engagement platform focused on ending mass incarceration. To date, Uptrust has helped over 300,000 people across 22 states navigate the criminal justice system and avoid violations that could send them to jail or prison. Jacob received his B.A. from Cornell University and his M.B.A. from the Wharton School at the University of Pennsylvania.

Jacob joins me today to discuss how he investigated the market at the beginning to learn how to be a...

Adena Hefets is the co-founder & CEO of Divvy Homes, a proptech company on a mission to make homeownership accessible to everyone. Today, Adena is one of the few female founders to reach double unicorn status and to be valued at approximately $2 billion.

Adena set out to solve a problem she saw in the market: fewer people can afford to purchase a home today than two decades ago. To solve this, she came up with a new way to finance a home purchase through a rent-to-own model that allows renters to gradually build up ownership in their future...

Thomson Nguyen is the founder and CEO of Nearside, a financial services provider and neobanking platform built on the belief that starting a business should be easier. A data scientist turned entrepreneur, Thomson focuses on providing an estimated 60 million entrepreneurs, micro-SMBs, freelancers, gigsters, and unbanked individuals with fair financial products, including free small business checking accounts with no monthly, overdraft or ATM fees and cashback rewards. 

Thomson joins me today to talk about how he was a gig driver in order to learn about working as a gig worker, how he suggests getting started serving customers, and h...

Alex's entrepreneurial journey started long before he ever knew the concept of a business plan. In fact, he did not realize it at the time, but his earliest experiences in childhood gave him the background and understanding of a problem (and how to solve it) that would lead Alex down the entrepreneurial path. Alex has since served in leadership positions at numerous social enterprises and technology start-ups in D.C., London, and San Francisco.

Alex is a proud product of Bellevue Public Schools in his native Washington state; he believes in the productive potential of design, compassion...

Tony Huang is the Co-founder & CEO of Possible Finance, a consumer fintech company focused on improving the financial health of lower-income Americans. Since 2019, Possible has provided small dollar installment loans to over 500,000 Americans to help them cover emergency expenses and build credit history. Recently, Possible announced the Possible Card, an unsecured credit card without interest fees or late fees, just one flat monthly fee. They designed this product so that they never make money from customers being stuck in vicious debt cycles which is unfortunately all too common for subprime credit cardholders. Possible’s lead investors are Union Square Ve...

Jens is the founder of NewImpact, a humanity benefit nonprofit based in Seattle, WA.  NewImpact is seeking to change the way the world finds opportunities and solves problems by pioneering the field of Tri-Sector Innovation.  NewImpact inspires and enables innovators and organizations to design solutions and business models that repurpose and realign the best resources available within the private, social and public sectors. 

Jens first realized the potential for tri-sector innovation when he founded Coinstar in 1990. His goal was to create a company that could simultaneously benefit the private, public, and non-profit sectors. Today, Coinstar has processed tri...

Arna Ionescu Stoll has deep expertise developing complex, multi-touchpoint healthcare products that integrate seamlessly into people’s lives. As the Chief Executive Officer at Wavely Diagnostics, she is guiding Wavely’s technology through development and into viable commercial markets based on her decades of experience developing high impact, innovative healthcare products that solve real human needs. Arna has been a part of the digital health community since before the term “digital health” was coined, and she has served as executive, consultant, and senior advisor to various healthcare, digital health, and medical devices companies.

Prior to her role at Wavel...

Sander Daniels is passionate about ensuring we have good jobs for people in the future as technology accelerates. He spends his time doing what he can to create, connect, and train people into new jobs.

Sander is a founder of Thumbtack, the modern home management platform. Millions of households in the U.S. use the Thumbtack platform to manage their home, and Thumbtack helps hundreds of thousands of local service professionals across 500 occupations grow sustainably. 

Sander has also recently founded Scaled, a recruiting startup focused initially on connecting great People, Legal, and Finance talent to t...

Jimmy Chen is the Founder and CEO of Propel, creators of the Providers app, which is used by over 5 million Americans to manage their SNAP benefits and banking. Propel was founded through a fellowship at the Robin Hood Foundation, and has raised over $80m in venture capital funding from investors including the Financial Health Network, Andreessen Horowitz, Kevin Durant, and Serena Williams. In addition to his work at Propel, Jimmy is Vice Chair of Technology at the eGovernment Payments Council, an industry task force around the future of government payments, he was an advisor to President Biden's Tech Transition...

Chukwudi N. Kanu is a Nigerian-American entrepreneur and investor, laser-focused on leveraging technology to solve today's systemic problems while creating a more equitable & inclusive future. He is the Cofounder & CEO of Humblebrag, a tool for investors to find overlooked pre-seed founders in emerging tech hubs while giving scouts interest on the investment. 

In addition to that, Chukwudi is the Managing Director of Binghamton Alumni Angels, the Binghamton University alumni investment network. He is also an active angel investor that has co-invested with notable investors Bill Trenchard, Naval Ravikant, Arlan Hamilton, and Marc Randolph.

He's been r...

Jonny leads the fundraising team at Wefunder, a platform that lets startup founders raise capital from their customers and community, as well as rich people. Before joining Wefunder, Jonny founded the U.S. team at the non-profit Kiva.org. He is from the UK where he studied history at the University of Cambridge, and is the proud dad of Felicity, Carlyle and Margot.

I've invested with the Wefunder platform in one of the companies that was raising money, and I'm also an investor and a competitor. So I know a little bit about this space, but I...

Shalen is a recovering banker who worked at Deloitte, BNP and SMBC, primarily in M&A and Leveraged Finance. During this time, he co-founded Global Clinic as a volunteer to deliver free cataract and cleft surgeries and primary eye and dental care around remote parts of Asia, which led him to quit banking and dedicate his career to healthcare. Shalen holds math, finance, and public health degrees from LSE, Cambridge, and Harvard.

Before his master’s degree at Harvard, Jake worked as a consultant in healthcare strategy and technology. He focused on innovative care delivery models and ea...

Ali Tamaseb is a partner at DCVC, a Silicon Valley VC fund with over $2 billion under management. The investments Tamaseb led on behalf of DCVC has generated an enterprise value of over $6 billion and the companies he sits on as a board director employ over 3,000 people.

Tamaseb studied Electrical Engineering at University of Tehran, Biomedical Engineering at Imperial College London, and general management at Stanford Graduate School of Business and he was an honoree of the British Alumni Award of 2018 by the British Council, and was the recipient of Imperial College President’s Medal for Outstanding Achievement.

Dr. Jasmin Hume is the Founder and CEO of Shiru, a biotechnology company addressing a critical need in the food industry by providing access to more sustainable and healthy ingredients. Jasmin is an expert in proteins, leveraging deep biochemistry, materials science, and food science knowledge to bring transformative, sustainable foods from concept to reality. In addition to her work as CEO and Founder of Shiru, she is a 2019 graduate of Y Combinator, former Director of Food Chemistry at JUST, and a former summer associate for VC firm Lux Capital. Jasmin holds a doctorate in protein engineering from NYU, an...

Will Sealy is the co-founder and CEO of Summer, a B Corp that's helping student loan borrowers navigate the repayment process to maximize their savings. Prior to Summer, Will worked at SoFi on business strategy and operations, and, prior to that, served as one of the first student loan policy experts at the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (CFPB). Will was a special assistant and policy advisor to Senator Elizabeth Warren at both the CFPB and the U.S. Department of Treasury. In 2010, Will worked on the White House team tasked with implementing the Dodd-Frank Act. Will earned his MBA...

Muriel Clauson is the co-founder of Anthill, HR solutions for employees who don't sit at a desk or computer. Anthill is focused on helping workers in manufacturing and supply chain roles have the same support in their careers as their desked peers. 

Muriel has been an active researcher and advisor on the future of work and artificial intelligence. She has authored scientific publications, was a scientific advisor for several governments and organizations around the world, and is an advisory board member for Humans for AI. Previously, Muriel advised former ambassadors, prime ministers, and presidents across four continents o...

Arjan is a trusted and experienced venture investor and founder of Core Innovation Capital, a leading venture capital fund investing in financial services companies that democratize prosperity. He is a passionate advocate for market-based financial access and empowerment.

His investments include Ripple, NerdWallet, Bestow, and Oportun. He is a Senior Advisor to the Financial Health Network (formerly CFSI), the nation’s leading authority on financial health, which he helped start in 2004. He has served on the CFPB’s Consumer Advisory Board and currently serves on the Fed’s Consumer Advisory Counsel.

Several of Arjan’s investme...

David Helene is the founder and CEO of Edquity (www.edquity.co), a provider of equitable and effective cash transfer administration technology for institutional and government partners.  

Under his leadership, Edquity has worked with over 30 innovative partners in postsecondary education to process over $85 million in emergency grants to over 90,000 students, 40% of whom have been student parents, as well municipalities that include the City of Baltimore. He has helped the organization attract over $8 million in support from some of the most innovation national postsecondary funding partners in the country, including ECMC Foundation, the Lumina Foundation, Strada Education Network, Im...

Ronnie Kwesi Coleman is the CEO and Co-Founder of Meaningful Gigs, a tech-enabled marketplace connecting skilled African designers with companies seeking high quality digital design. After dropping out of college at 20 to support his family in Ghana, Ronnie got a job at a tech startup in Washington, DC. Soon after, he helped launch the VC-backed startup StayNTouch, which grew to 100+ employees and was eventually acquired for $40M. Since co-founding Meaningful Gigs in 2019 Ronnie has led the company’s financial efforts, raising over $1M in seed funding and creating jobs for and upskilling more than 300 African designers. 

A lon...

Alex Mooradian, founder and CEO of Resolve, is a private equity investor turned entrepreneur. He is the Founder and CEO of Resolve, a company which combines caring human experts with powerful technology to provide people with affordable and transparent debt relief solutions. 

Prior to founding Resolve, Alex was Entrepreneur In Residence at Expa and the founder of Readyforce, a company that helps people find jobs and get to work. He was also a Principal at Eos Partners, a growth equity investment fund in New York, and an Associate at First Atlantic Capital and Fremont Partners. Alex began h...

Damola Ogundipe is the CEO of Civic Eagle, a public policy data and software company helping build a limitless world with intelligent and useful public policy data. Damola was born in Nigeria and grew up in Minnesota where he attended the University of Minnesota and later on founded Civic Eagle. 

I’ve been an investor in the company since 2018, they've been a remote only company, which we talked about in the episode. They've grown by three times in the last year, raised over $3 million and grown to  22 people in the company. We also discuss what makes a grea...

Matt Spettel is the co-founder and CEO of CoPilot, a Pittsburgh-based remote personal training startup. With an engineering background from Carnegie Mellon University, Matt specializes in designing and building innovation consumer products and experienced. Since its founding in 2019, CoPilot has raised $10M, grown to 50 full-time employees, and impacted thousands of lives across the globe. 

Matt joins me today to discuss his company CoPilot. I am a happy user and an investor. During this episode, we cover the evolution of the company vision, how to learn about new disciplines as a founder. Matt shares how he always wanted t...