The Quest Pod with Justin Kan

Welcome to The Quest Pod Season 2: Episode 42 with Michelle Phan.

Michelle is a pioneer of the online makeup and beauty genre. Since joining YouTube back in 2006, Michelle has since become one of the top beauty content creator and amassed a following of over 8 million subscribers. She is also an active investor and runs her own cosmetic line named EM Cosmetics (https://www.emcosmetics.com/)

In this episode, Michelle talks about her origin story, the ups and downs of being a content creator, as well as her personal philosophies. She also shares th...

Welcome to The Quest Pod Season 2: Episode 40 with Henry Schuck.

Henry is the founder and CEO of ZoomInfo, a go-to-market intelligence solution for more than 20,000 companies worldwide. The ZoomInfo platform empowers business-to-business sales, marketing, and recruiting professionals to hit their number by pairing best-in-class technology with unrivalled data coverage, accuracy, and depth of company and contact information. Henry got the idea for the company after working as a marketing analyst in college nearly two decades ago, a job he took to help pay his undergrad degree.

In this conversation, Henry discusses ho...

Welcome to The Quest Pod Season 2: Episode 39 with Matthew Stoltz.

Matthew is a curandero, healer, renegade anthropologist and world traveller with vast experience in the world of plant medicines. He first sat with ayahuasca when he travelled to Peru at the age of 19. He didn’t touch it again for 8 years. During that time he studied at Stanford, crashed and burned, struggled with addiction and experienced suicidal thoughts. It took a lot for him to rebuild himself. Part of that journey involved ayahuasca. Matthew has now sat in over 500 ceremonies, 300 of which he was responsible for...

Welcome to The Quest Pod Season 2: Episode 38 with Sahil Bloom.

Sahil spent 7 years at Altamont Capital Partners, an investment fund managing over $3.5B.  

He is now a Partner at The Room Where It Happens (https://theroomwhereithappens.co/), a community designed to spark conversation and bring entrepreneurial minds together. Sahil is also an active angel investor in 35+ tech start-ups.  

To share his learnings and insights in business, finance and tech, Sahil runs a media platform with ~ 400K followers across his Twitter and newsletter, sharing insights into business, finance and t...

It’s Balaji’s world, and we’re all just living in it. If you’ve been hanging out on tech Twitter long enough or listen to any other tech podcasts, then you’re probably familiar with Balaji. He is an angel investor, entrepreneur, and formerly the CTO of Coinbase and General Partner at Andreessen Horowitz. 

In this epic episode, you’ll hear topics ranging from decentralization, crypto, media tech, social networking, China, machine learning, digital privacy and much more. Balaji has one of the most incredible minds I have ever met, and I am excited to bri...

Welcome to The Quest Pod Season 2: Episode 37 with Eren Bali.

Eren was the founding CEO of Udemy, an open online course provider which now offers 180K+ courses to 40M students. He is now the co-founder and CEO of Carbon Health, a vertically integrated, tech-enabled healthcare provider which started in 2015 and was most recently valued at $3.3B. 

Eren started the company after his mother fell ill and the traditional healthcare system took several months to reach the proper diagnosis and treatment. It began as a mobile app enabling patients to communicate directly with doctors, store medical re...

Welcome to The Quest Pod Season 2: Episode 36 with James Beshara.

James is the founder of Magic Mind (https://magicmind.co/) and co-founder of Tilt, an award-winning payments application acquired by Airbnb. He was also a seed investor in Gusto, Clubhouse, Bolt, Mercury and more.

In this conversation, James and Justin open up about the bad habits they held as startup founders, which posed barriers to their productivity and success. They discuss sleep, diet, self-accusation, unrealistic expectations, lack of trust and substance dependence.

More importantly, they discuss the impact these ha...

Welcome to The Quest Pod Season 2: Episode 35 with Scott Harrison: the founder and CEO of charity: water.

After working as a nightclub promoter surrounded by drugs and booze, Scott wanted to find meaning in his life. He volunteered with a healthcare organisation in Liberia as a photojournalist, where he was exposed to one big issue: access to clean drinking water.

He founded charity: water in 2006. Since this time, the organisation has provided fresh water to over 13.2M across 29 countries. In this conversation, we talk about starting a non-profit, innovating in charity wo...

I always like to practice gratitude,  especially on my birthday. The past year has been tumultuous for us all, but I'm fortunate enough to have taken some positive learnings from it. In this podcast, I talk about the benefits of opening yourself up to try new things, zone of competence vs genius, investing your time in those who reciprocate and more. I hope these teachings can welcome more happiness into your life as they did to mine.

I also shared this story on my YouTube channel and Twitter. Drop a comment to let me know wh...

Welcome to The Quest Pod Season 1: Episode 34 with Eric Glyman: a two-time fintech founder shares his advice for innovating in a crowded market.

Eric Glyman is the co-founder and CEO of Ramp, the only corporate card that helps companies spend less. He also previously founded Paribus to help consumers get money back on their online purchases.

Eric’s success reflects the power of customer-centric design: focus on building something that serves and created value for your market, instead of trying to extract as much money from your customers as possible. In this...