Startups for Good

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 how he gives out his personal email address to all his customers.

Today on Startups for Good we cover:

• Handling your competitors
• How a data scientist background is helpful with fintech
• Serving customers before you have a product
• Pros & cons of remote work

Connect with Thomson at [email protected]

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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. 

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, and digital technology. He worked as a member of Barack Obama's field team in 2007 and 2008, managing hundreds of paid staff who organized thousands of volunteers for the then-Senator's successful presidential primary and general election campaigns. Alex then served as a Founding Regional Director of Obama for America – the political mobilization wing of the Democratic National Committee – until 2010.

Alex got his start in real estate at real estate developer Forest City (now Brookfield Properties). He holds a B.A. from Northwestern University and an MBA from the Stanford Graduate School of Business.

Alex splits his time between his native Seattle and Landed’s headquarters in San Francisco, and he and his husband spend their decompression time outdoors, on the dance floor, or playing the “funcles” (fun-uncles) role.

We dive into topics such as what he's learned from politics and brought into startups, more about the details of the housing market and the details of their product, as well as how to welcome emotions into the workplace and use them for higher productivity.

Today on Startups for Good we cover:

• High-cost of housing
• Success with investors 
• Impact capital vs. charitable capital
• Relationships with regulators
• Dealing with fear in a startup

Connect with Alex on landed.com

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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. 

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 Ventures, Euclidean Capital (Jim Simons’s family office), Canvas Ventures, and Unlock Ventures. Prior to founding Possible, Tony and his co-founders collectively spent 26 years building body cameras for cops. Possible is a fully distributed company with team members all across the globe, and Tony has spent the past 18 months as a digital nomad living in various cities across the country. 

Tony joins me today to discuss how within two weeks of announcing the new credit card product, they have over 175,000 people on the waitlist. We talk about trade offs between short term profits and long term mission, product design with mission in mind his personal journey and the consumer debt market in the US.

Today on Startups for Good we cover:

• Why payday loans cost so much
• Lending to lower income communities
• The importance of better data
• International micro lending vs. domestic payday loans
• The debt cycle
• Trade offs in managing mission and the product
• Debt investor experience

Connect with Tony on LinkedIn or through the Possible Financial 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. 

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 trillions of coins and billions of dollars for millions of people, raising over $150M in donations to nonprofits and saving the government billions of dollars, all while providing a valued consumer service and increasing spendable cash power. After the success of Coinstar, Jens realized tri-sector business models could be applied to many types of organizations, with the potential to help transform society.  

Jens has been invited to present tri-sector methodologies at numerous keynotes, business school presentations and curriculum, before the United Nations, and at other gatherings, and he is always seeking opportunities to share his vision for a world where social and economic progress are available to all. 

We talked about the story of Coinstar and when the mission came into it, how he learned how to talk about it, the tri-sector model in more detail. I'm sure you're wondering about it, including some examples of it.

Today on Startups for Good we cover:

• When mission became a part of Coinstar
• Attracting investors when mission is part of the business
• How to continue to innovate
• Tri-sector and how it differs from triple bottom line
• How to identify public sector resources
• Challenges to building software as a non-profit
• Universal basic service

Connect with Jens on LinkedIn or 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. 

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 Wavely, she was the founder and principal at Triody, a boutique consulting firm focused exclusively on supporting early stage healthcare companies, the Vice President of User Experience & Design at Proteus Digital Health, a start-up creating digital medicines to support adherence and diagnostics that grew into a billion dollar company before her departure, and a Health Practice lead at IDEO, a global design and innovation consulting firm, where she built IDEO’s first “Connected Health” business focused on supporting companies that used technology to facilitate healthcare delivery. 

Arna holds a B.S.E. in Computer Science and minor in Modern Dance from Princeton University, and an M.S. in Computer Science/Human Computer Interaction from Stanford University."

A special episode as Arna and Miles went to elementary school together and Purpose Built is an investor in Wavely.

We talked about how to bring a product to market and how to work with academic co founders, how mission driven messages resonate differently with employees and investors and how to build a parent friendly workplace and much, much more.

“I think it's really important to find the right investors. I think having people who will support you in building a company, having people that you really enjoy speaking with is much more important than having a check.” - Arna Ionescu Stoll

Today on Startups for Good we cover:

• Using a cell phone to diagnose an ear infection
• Being realistic about timelines
• The biggest surprise when a client becomes your employer
• Human centered design 
• How to seek non-dilutive funding
• Working with academic co-founders
• Creating parent friendly work environments
• How to attract investors and employees with a mission
• Advice for female founders and CEOs

Connect with Arna on LinkedIn, Twitter and Instagram or 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. 

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 top startups, and GroomBuggy, a mobile dog grooming business in the San Francisco Bay Area.

Today on Startups for Good we cover:

• Which makes a bigger impact, policy or tech startup?
• Criteria for startup ideas
• Changing the Silicon Valley mindset
• How to pick the right executive coach
• Creating a globally diverse team
• Knowing when it is time to quit your job
• How parents influence a career path

Connect with Sander on Substack, 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. 

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 Committee, and he has testified in front of Congress on the topic of modernizing America's safety net. Prior to Propel, Jimmy led product teams at LinkedIn and Facebook and studied Symbolic Systems at Stanford University. 

Today on Startups for Good we cover:

• Market opportunity to serve  low income people
• Measuring your positive impact 
• What makes a product respectful
• How a feature can evolve into a business
• Revenue through advertising
• Choosing advertisers that are aligned with company values
• Managing fifty different state government regulations
• Dealing with competition
• Willingness to have frank conversations 

Connect with Jimmy on Twitter or find out more from the Propel website

The Paul Graham article that was mentioned

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. 

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 recognized by LinkedIn, Indeed.com, the United Nations Development Programme, Ernst & Young, Notley, the United States Senate, and Venture For America for his leadership and new ideas.

HumbleBrag is in an earlier stage than other companies we normally feature although it is part of our mini-series on alternative funding models with OnDeck, Wefunder, Pando and Exit to Community.

Today on Startups for Good we cover:

• Deciding on entrepreneurship
• Channeling confidence
• Becoming a scout
• Regulatory constraints
• Tips for raising money
• Locations for future innovation

Connect with Chukwudi on LinkedIN or Twitter

The book discussed in this episode is The Innovation Blindspot by Ross Baird

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. 

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 learned more in this episode. We went deep on how crowdfunding Reg CF offerings work. We also learned about the scale that Wefunder has already achieved with 40% market share, over $450 million dollars raised on the platform, 1800+ founders,  26,000+ jobs created and on a mission to democratize investing in startups and small business.

Today on Startups for Good we cover:

• Community Round
• Marketing vs. building customer relationships
• Transparent reporting and auditing
• Regulation A crowdfunding vs. Regulation A offerings
• How to select the right crowdfunding platform
• Industry specialization
• Measuring mission impact
• Partnership with Micro acquire

References from the show:

Josh Clemente, Founder of Levels episode of Startups for Good

Zero to One by Peter Thiel and Peter Thiel’s TedTalk

Uncharitable by Dan Pollotta 

The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People by Stephen Covey

Connect with Jonny on LinkedIn and Twitter or follow Wefunder on YouTube

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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

This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.startupsforgood.com

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 early value-based care initiatives for providers, payers, and state agencies. He is passionate about building teams and tech that enable thoughtful remote care models for vulnerable populations.

We discussed the transition from the corporate world to being a founder, bringing your authentic self to work, starting a family while being a founder and building a health tech company.

“I think that relationship is really important. So somewhere along the way, you have to turn the dial from extrinsic and intrinsic to make them really start to believe in themselves. And I think that's what we're trying to accomplish here.” - Jake Keteyian

Today on Startups for Good we cover:

• Extrinsic motivation vs. intrinsic motivation
• Making decisions in an nonhierarchical environment
• Deciding on a particular population to work with
• Creating a cohesive vision with many service offerings
• Keeping with company missions while remote
• Smoking cessation rates

Connect with Shane and Jake through LinkedIn, Facebook or Vincere’s website 

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.