Startups for Good

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 sits on the board of the Center on Global Energy Policy. He has been a lecturer on energy issues at the university and helps steer the Carbon Dioxide Management program. He is also an advisor to Lawrence Livermore National Lab on negative emissions.

Jonathan joins me today to discuss the combination of advising and investing and how you put those two pieces together. Also, what skills are needed in the climate space. We talked about the impact of the new law, the IRA, what he thinks of voluntary carbon credits. Finally we chat about some of the biggest challenges in building the company.

“Our approach has always been that for carbon management to scale, and that's ultimately the goal of our firm is to enable a vibrant carbon management ecosystem.“ - Johnathan Goldberg

Today on Startups for Good we cover:

• Carbon Management Industry
• Business opportunities in climate tech
• Managing conflicts between regulatory and commercial interests
• Future of carbon credit disclosures
• The importance of aviation fuel
• What’s missing in CFO type skills in early stage companies

To learn more about Carbon Direct on their website

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Thanks for tuning into today’s episode of Startups For Good with your host, Miles Lasater. If you enjoyed this episode, please subscribe and leave a rating and review on your favorite podcast listening app.

Don’t forget to visit our website, connect with Miles on Twitter or  LinkedIn, and share your favorite episodes across social media. For more information about Purpose Built visit our website. 

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 scientific co-founders and how to find early adopters.

“My wife always says, '' You're so optimistic, you never plan for the worst. And I say no, no, I'm so optimistic because I completed planning for the worst. And now I hope for the best. I always plan for the worst.” - Rafi Levi

Today on Startups for Good we cover:

• Current fertilizer assessment protocols
• Dots technology
• Business sweet spots
• Selecting the right business model
• Ag tech innovations
• Distinguishing between science project or company
• Importance of trusting a partner

Connect with Rafi on LinkedIn and on the Dots website 

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Thanks for tuning into today’s episode of Startups For Good with your host, Miles Lasater. If you enjoyed this episode, please subscribe and leave a rating and review on your favorite podcast listening app.

Don’t forget to visit our website, connect with Miles on Twitter or  LinkedIn, and share your favorite episodes across social media. For more information about Purpose Built visit our website.

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 - providing a bridge to financial independence and emotional well being.

Erin and I talked about the mission of Hello Divorce and why it's important barriers to more legal tech, or justice tech innovation. We talk about their fundraising process, and we dive into how to have hard conversations and why it's so important to founders.

“We offer a new and different opportunity for people to get divorced, find solutions that are rooted in fairness, without necessarily making a huge mess out of their divorce.”

 - Erin Levine

Today on Startups for Good we cover:

• Income differentials
• Divorce trends
• Finding solutions rooted in fairness
• Helping couples come to an agreement
• Innovations in legal tech 
• Challenges in building the business
• Having hard conversations
• Big barriers to amicable divorce

Some books recommended by Erin are Brene Brown’s Daring Greatly and Dare to Lead. Also, Glennon Doyle’s Untamed

Connect with Erin on LinkedIn and Instagram or on the Hello Divorce website

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Thanks for tuning into today’s episode of Startups For Good with your host, Miles Lasater. If you enjoyed this episode, please subscribe and leave a rating and review on your favorite podcast listening app.

Don’t forget to visit our website, connect with Miles on Twitter or  LinkedIn, and share your favorite episodes across social media. For more information about Purpose Built visit our website. 

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 early-stage emerging medical technologies.  He sits on multiple for-profit and nonprofit boards.

Seth joins me today to discuss Oui Therapeutics, they built out their research based solution and they're in trials with adults, including the military. We handle a tough topic today around suicide and suicide prevention. If you or anyone you know are having suicidal thoughts, you can call 988, which is the new national crisis hotline or you can text the Crisis Text Hotline at 741741. We speak about mental health, we speak about behavioral health, we think about digital therapeutics, how you transition from academics to business and his journey.

Today on Startups for Good we cover:

• Understanding the rise in suicide rates 
• Challenges and stressors on the brain
• What interventions are available
• Patient experiences for those using Oui Therapeutics
• The limits of certain therapeutics
• The importance of university support of a project
• How to help someone who is suffering

Connect with Seth on LinkedIn

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Thanks for tuning into today’s episode of Startups For Good with your host, Miles Lasater. If you enjoyed this episode, please subscribe and leave a rating and review on your favorite podcast listening app.

Don’t forget to visit our website, connect with Miles on Twitter or  LinkedIn, and share your favorite episodes across social media. For more information about Purpose Built visit our website.

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 in Applied Data Analytics from the Wharton School.

Jeff joins me today to discuss his company Fig. They serve 400,000 customers. One of their products is a loan which average is $400 in size, so unsecured short term loan, they do all of this to serve all these customers with only about 15 employees. There's a lot to learn in this episode about picking your co-founder, his approach to prioritization, thinking about how optimistic to be trade offs in growth and profitability, and why their mission is so important.

Today on Startups for Good we cover:

• Short term loans
• Realizing potential
• Credit reporting services
• Emergency loans
• Why are people still utilizing predatory loans?
• Learning about the needs of the customer
• Cycle of borrowing
• Shiny Object Syndrome

Connect with Jeff on LinkedIn

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Thanks for tuning into today’s episode of Startups For Good with your host, Miles Lasater. If you enjoyed this episode, please subscribe and leave a rating and review on your favorite podcast listening app.

Don’t forget to visit our website, connect with Miles on Twitter or  LinkedIn, and share your favorite episodes across social media. For more information about Purpose Built visit our website. 

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 and financial support needed to leave the street. Through all this, he wants people to meet Jesus and come to know His unconditional love for them.

Jonathan joins me today to discuss the causes of homelessness, ways to address homelessness, how volunteers can help a person without a home, why they chose a for benefit corporation rather than nonprofit and what some of the challenges have been, as well has his advice at the end.

Today on Startups for Good we cover:

• Why Jonathan is drawn to helping the homeless
• Paying generosity forward
• Causes of homelessness
• Leaning on people to help you through tough times
• Does mental illness and substance abuse play a role?
• How Samaritan works
• Raising capital as a public benefit corporation

Connect with Jonathan Twitter and LinkedIn

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Thanks for tuning into today’s episode of Startups For Good with your host, Miles Lasater. If you enjoyed this episode, please subscribe and leave a rating and review on your favorite podcast listening app.

Don’t forget to visit our website, connect with Miles on Twitter or  LinkedIn, and share your favorite episodes across social media. For more information about Purpose Built visit our website. 

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.

Today on Startups for Good we cover:

• Why should startups care about politics
• Changing minds about money in politics
• Goals for a new advocacy organization
• Challenges when building a political startup

Connect with Misha on Twitter and subscribe to their newsletter

The book that Misha referenced is: The Captured Economy by Steve Teles and Brink Lindsey

Subscribe, Rate & Share Your Favorite Episodes!

Thanks for tuning into today’s episode of Startups For Good with your host, Miles Lasater. If you enjoyed this episode, please subscribe and leave a rating and review on your favorite podcast listening app.

Don’t forget to visit our website, connect with Miles on Twitter or  LinkedIn, and share your favorite episodes across social media. For more information about Purpose Built visit our website. 

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.

Today on Startups for Good we cover:

• Lending in a alternate way
• How they have grown  
• What he learned at PayPal
• If the patent system promotes innovation
• How to keep the team focused

Connect with Akshay Linkedin and Twitter

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Thanks for tuning into today’s episode of Startups For Good with your host, Miles Lasater. If you enjoyed this episode, please subscribe and leave a rating and review on your favorite podcast listening app.

Don’t forget to visit our website, connect with Miles on Twitter or  LinkedIn, and share your favorite episodes across social media. For more information about Purpose Built visit our website. 

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 bails bondsman. He actually went to see a bail be set and did the research to understand the market. We talk about finding a co-founder and early customer decisions he's made to protect the mission. We also discussed the importance of market sizing.

“A lot of research has shown that, … If you punish them for five years, instead of two years, it doesn't actually negate it. It's not like a supply demand curve where if the price goes up, you know, demand goes down.” - Jacob Sills

Today on Startups for Good we cover:

• How to change the criminal justice system
• The efficacy of deterrence on crime
• Reasons for people not showing up for their court date
• Selling to the government
• How does low churn and long sales cycle affect growth
• Approaching investors

Connect with Jacob at @jacobrsills on Twitter or on Linkedin

Subscribe, Rate & Share Your Favorite Episodes!

Thanks for tuning into today’s episode of Startups For Good with your host, Miles Lasater. If you enjoyed this episode, please subscribe and leave a rating and review on your favorite podcast listening app.

Don’t forget to visit our website, connect with Miles on Twitter or  LinkedIn, and share your favorite episodes across social media. For more information about Purpose Built visit our website. 

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 homes.

Prior to founding Divvy, Adena joined Square in 2013 and was responsible for building out Square Capital, a merchant cash advance platform with billions in loans outstanding. Prior to joining Square, she was part of the large-cap buyout team at TPG, a private equity firm, where she helped purchase companies in the real estate sector. She started her career as an investment banker at Merrill Lynch. 

Adena holds a Bachelors of Science, Policy Analysis and Management from Cornell University and a Masters of Business Administration, Stanford Graduate School of Business. She was named 40 Under 40 by Fortune and is backed by Andreessen Horowitz, Tiger Capital, and Caffeinated Capital. She currently lives in Oakland, California. 

Adena joins me today and we discuss profitability, first growth trade off, co-founder relationships, the role of a CEO, getting and learning from mentors, along with a lot more.

Today on Startups for Good we cover:

• The high expense of housing
• Thinking about growth
• How investor background helps fundraising
• Self awareness to keep up company growth
• Finding mentors
• Finding the right co-founder
• Working with a startup studio
• The downside to CEO-ness

Connect with Adena on Twitter @AdenaHefets

Books mentioned on the show:

Seven Powers by Hamilton Helmer

The Hard Thing About Hard Things by Ben Horowitz

Subscribe, Rate & Share Your Favorite Episodes!

Thanks for tuning into today’s episode of Startups For Good with your host, Miles Lasater. If you enjoyed this episode, please subscribe and leave a rating and review on your favorite podcast listening app.

Don’t forget to visit our website, connect with Miles on Twitter or  LinkedIn, and share your favorite episodes across social media. For more information about Purpose Built visit our website.