Alexa Carlin

Her company, Women Empower X, helps women entrepreneurs grow their businesses and brands through WEX's cutting edge courses, events, and publishing division, WEX Press. As CEO, Alexa uses her infectious energy and courageous spirit to empower women to turn their obstacles into opportunities and pursue their dreams. She started first business when she was 17 years old, becoming sole licensee to design jewelry for an L.A. based fashion company backed by Jennifer Aniston & Courtney Cox. She also got Mark Cuban, Shaq, Steve Madden, Rebecca Minkoff, Whitney Port, Marc Jacobs, and Matisyahu among others to join a movement she started in college to instill confidence in girls & young women.

Chris Edmonds and Mark Babbitt

Chris began his consulting company Purposeful Culture Group in 1990, after a 15-year career leading and managing teams. Mark is the President of WorqIQ, a consultancy focused on improving leadership and developing Workplace Intelligence (WQ).

Muddu Sudhakar

He has strong operating experience with startups as CEO of Kazeon (acquired by EMC, 2009), Cetas (acquired by VMware, 2012) and Caspida (acquired by Splunk, 2015) and in public companies such as SVP & GM roles at ServiceNow, Splunk, VMware, and EMC. He also owns more than 40 patents!

Tim Huelskamp

He’s the Co-founder & CEO of 1440 Media, an email newsletter that helps busy professionals stay informed in minutes. At first, the newsletter started with 78 subscribers, just friends and family of Huelskamp and his co-founder. Today, 1440 Media has over 1 million daily readers with an open rate above 50 percent and recently had its five-year anniversary.

Immad Akhund

Immad Akhund was born in Pakistan and moved to/was educated in the UK before coming to Silicon Valley. He founded/sold several companies, and in doing so realized how onerous traditional banks were for entrepreneurs who had to go to a branch in person, fill out paperwork, do backflips to initiate a wire transfer etc. Mercury Bank is “Banking built for startups”, which allows them to scale with real bank accounts, custom made tools, & Mercury’s investor network. It has been a runaway success, already valued at $1.6B and most recently raised a $120M Series B round led by Coatue, with participation from Andreessen Horowitz, CRV, and Sapphire Ventures.

Fred Reichheld

He is the creator of the Net Promoter® system of management, the founder of Bain & Company's Loyalty practice, and the author of five books including the New York Times bestseller The Ultimate Question 2.0. He is currently a Fellow and Senior Advisory Partner at Bain, where he has worked since 1977. His Net Promoter System creates a culture focused on earning the passionate loyalty of customers while inspiring the energy, enthusiasm and creativity of employees to accelerate profitable, sustainable organic growth. He’s a frequent speaker at major business forums & his work on customer loyalty has been widely covered, w/ the Economist calling him the “high priest of loyalty”

Waaris Hundal

As a student, he and his co-founders understood the importance of learning and feel that access to quality and free tutoring is crucial to widespread success. So, they created LocalTutor - an app that provides easy access to free tutoring in hopes of making an impact on everyone's learning, especially during these unprecedented times. Waaris is an ambitious high schooler who is determined to make it big. He is also an active day trader and a self-proclaimed “overall hustler.” His priorities right now are expanding his network, meeting new people, and gaining more insight into what it takes to succeed. His dream is to become the best CEO of his generation.

David Hoffman [0:00]

He was an economist in Washington, DC, before moving to Charlotte, NC, in 2005, when he founded David Hoffman Realty, an Inc. 5000 fastest-growing privately held company. His business serves people from all walks of life, ranging from high-profile clients in search of multimillion-dollar estates. He is also the founder of Covenant First Mortgage and Beyond Title.

Nitin Rakesh [18:20]

He’s an Indian-American businessman, author, & philanthropist, is a distinguished leader in the IT services industry. He joined Mphasis as its CEO and Director in January 2017. Under his leadership, Mphasis set a record of highest deal wins in the history of the company, thus re-defining benchmarks and growing above industry rate. Mphasis' stock price observed an increase of 4x, in four years and revenue from digital projects increased substantially.

Shawn Kaplan [2:28]

Shawn Kaplan has been a licensed mortgage banker for over 22 years now. He has personally funded in excess of $1 Billion dollars in residential real estate volume with a clientele base currently exceeding over 10,000 families. His success has been consistently recognized nationally by Scotsman Guide’s Top Originators rankings.

Kirk McLaren [15:25]

He’s the CEO of Foresight CFO & a graduate studies lecturer at Georgetown University School of Continuing Studies. McLaren’s team at Foresight CFO develops selected financial talent into Growth CFOs who work side by side with CEOs across the full business journey, from foundation to succession options. The company’s core values are: Be a TrueTEAM Member, Judgment Driven "WoW", Speaking Up, Continuous Mastery, & Doing Well By Doing Good

Saeju Jong

As a South Korean immigrant born into a family of doctors, Saeju knew his life’s work, would be dedicated to improving the well-being of others. After meeting his co-founder by chance, he created Noom and hasn't looked back, even when nearly on the verge of bankruptcy. The company now has over 500 million downloads and in 2019 the company's revenue has surpassed $237 million, growing over 100x in the last four years.

Dennis Kucinich

Kucinich served as Mayor of Cleveland, Ohio (his hometown) from 1977 - 1979, was in, the Ohio Senate representing the 23rd district from 1995 – 1997 and spent 16 years in the U.S. House of Representatives from 1997 - 2013. He also ran twice for the Democratic nomination for the U.S. President. Growing up poor helped to shape him and his political views. Dennis is also the author of “The Courage to Survive”, an autobiographical work published in 2007 which set the tone for the national debate as we choose new leadership in a time of great crisis and great opportunity. He’s also received the Gandhi Peace Award as well as the US Peace Prize.

Adam Smithline

Adam is the CMO and "bro-founder" of Wayzn. Wayzn debuted at CES 2020 where it won a number of awards and turned even more heads for being able to make sliding patio doors into smart dog doors.

Bobby Ghoshal

Before Carrot, Bobby was the Co-founder of Candid, a digital platform for oral healthcare (CEO Nick Greenfield was on Office Hours earlier this year). During his time there, they were able to raise over $150 million. Contributing to his 15 years of experience as a business focused designer, product leader and user experience, he previously worked as Head of Design and Growth at Wework.

Adam Shaffer

Shaffer was involved in one of the earliest ecommerce websites selling technology and electronics products direct to consumers and businesses, TigerDirect. He was responsible for launching and managing the Company’s ecommerce Marketplace business on Amazon, Ebay and later Walmart.

Bruce Smith

Bruce is an entrepreneur and athlete himself. As a U.S. National Team Rowing Coach and Head of the Charles Regatta winner, he coached the U.S. Lightweight Eight to a Bronze medal at the 2015 World Rowing Championships, and is the former Executive Director of Community Rowing Inc. His goal for Hydrow: to make a positive impact through the sport of rowing, helping people feel more connected to one another & live healthier lives on a daily basis.

Kenny Lofton

Is a former Major League Baseball (MLB) center fielder, where he was a six-time All-Star and four-time Gold Glove winner and amongst the all-time leaders in stolen bases (15th). He is the co-founder of blockchain solutions platform CenterBlock Asset Management and film company Filmpool. He’s a member of the Cleveland Indians Hall of Fame.

J’on Dennis

Is a Certified Public Accountant that has over 20 years of experience with a proven track record scaling organizations, managing corporate financings, and advising on strategic structuring. As a transactional service expert, J’on has provided these services to both large publicly traded companies and emerging start-ups.

Brian Napack

He joined Wiley in December 2017 and is the 14th CEO in Wiley’s 212-year history. Wiley is a global leader in research and education, focused on empowering learners, universities, researchers and corporations to achieve their goals in an ever-changing world. Their Professional Development brands include the For Dummies book series and Bloomberg Press. Prior to Wiley, Brian was a senior advisor with Providence Equity, a prominent private equity investor, president of Macmillan, the global publisher, and a partner at a global management consulting firm.

Mike Morawski

Mike used his time in prison to make a difference. He worked to receive his college bachelor’s degree, developed and taught bible studies, ethics, real estate, and property management classes, served on a prison suicide cadre, was involved in the community outreach program and AA. He was one of the founding members and president of Toastmasters, too.

Meredith Bell

She is co-founder and President of Performance Support Systems. Her company publishes books and software tools that help companies grow strong leaders and teams by improving the way they connect with each other. She is also the host of the popular Grow Strong Leaders podcast, which Blaine has been on and David will be going on. She’s published 125 episodes featuring “business leaders who are committed to their own growth and the development of their people”

Justin Futrell

He is also known as the Pull-Up Guy, after he did 1,000 pull-ups in a day to raise money for the Tanzania Water Fund in 2018. The money raised was for a water well project for the village of Kineto, with about 9,500 people that now has running water inside their medical clinic for the first time. In 2019, he helped raise $25,000 with one goal in mind, to provide clean water access to an entire village in rural Tanzania. He is an Ohio raised, former college football player with a quest to impact millions of lives through clean water initiatives and providing healthcare for employers. He was also in the national spotlight this past August as the “Face of Change” in the Employee Benefits industry.

Shawn Anthony

As the host of School's Over....Now What? The Podcast and as the lead mentor at The Now What Academy, Shawn now serves students and professionals across the world who are stuck in their situations. He uses his gift to bring together industry leaders who share their stories and wisdom. At the age of 14 he became a serial entrepreneur by collaborating with others to host his own events bringing people together by the thousands. Later in life Shawn's ability to collaborate and facilitate was identified by corporate leaders who elevated him to various leadership positions where he was promoted 6 times in 4 years.

Melinda Briana Epler

As CEO of Change Catalyst, she works with the tech industry to solve diversity and inclusion issues. Her popular TED talk “3 Ways to Be a Better Ally in the Workplace” reached one million views in the first 24 days of its release. She is also host of the popular podcast series “Leading With Empathy & Allyship,” and has, spoken on hundreds of global stages, including SXSW, Grace Hopper, Wisdom 2.0, the World Bank, White House, Clinton Foundation, Black Enterprise, Google, Indeed, Capital One, and McKinsey.

Zeke Bronfman

Zeke's entrepreneurial journey includes him and his co-founder, Nate, having a great idea, making it come to life, finding investors, and then navigating through the COVID-19 pandemic. Zeke is the grandson of late Seagram's CEO Edgar Bronfman Sr. who instilled in him respect for high-quality, flavorful beverages.

Scott Donnell [0:00]

Scott is the Founder of GravyStack, the world’s first gamified banking platform for kids and teens. They offer a comprehensive package including a complete bank account, debit card, and financial empowerment games. Their mission is to tackle the issue of financial illiteracy among high school students, as three out of four graduates struggle with basic financial tasks like opening bank accounts, budgeting, and managing expenses.

William Vanderbloemen [12:25]

Drawing on 14 years of research and over 30,000 face-to-face interviews, in Be the Unicorn, he explains how he identifies the standouts or “unicorns.” He combines the results of his career-long study to guide anybody to stand out. He also reveals the 12 teachable traits – the fast, authentic, agile, solver, anticipator, prepared, self-aware, curious, connected, likable, productive, and purpose-driven – which he finds all unicorns have in common. He explains why hiring managers embrace each trait, with actionable takeaways for how readers can incorporate each trait into their personal and professional lives.

Lauren Goldstein [23:23]

Lauren Goldstein is the founder and CEO of the award-winning and globally recognized boutique business consulting firm Golden Key Partnership. Her clients lovingly call her “The Biz Doctor” because her superpower is helping highly specialized, 7-figure service-based entrepreneurs uncover what keeps them stuck in the “trenches” of their business.