Startups for Good

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.

Tamaseb has 7 publications, including two books and five academic papers, holds several patents, and has won medals in national and international Physics and Computing Olympiads. Ali’s latest book “Super Founders: What Data Reveals about Billion-Dollar Startups” became the #1 bestselling Venture Capital and Startup book, is published in over 50 countries and is being translated into over 10 languages. 

Ali and his work have been featured in the WSJ, BBC, Fortune, Guardian, The Telegraph, and Forbes among others and he has given keynote talks at major events and conferences.

We have a fascinating conversation, which I think will blow up some of your myths you might have about what it takes to be a super founder. We discussed the number of co-founders, the founder staying CEO, whether first mover is an advantage, what happens when you have competition, the importance of timing, and we talk about how success is so rarely overnight. He also suggests areas that he thinks founders should be building in for the future.

Today on Startups for Good we cover:

• Misconceptions of the qualities of a founder
• The value of a co-founder
• Survivorship bias
• Myths and stereotypes of being an investor
• The correlation between the amount of money raised and success
• Competition can show that there is a market

Connect with Ali on LinkedIn and Twitter

Ali’s book Super Founders can be purchased where all books are sold

Other references from the show:

Miles’ blogpost on Survivorship bias

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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...

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

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 MSc from Chalmers University, and a BEng from McGill University. 

Jasmin joins me today to talk about being a solo founder. We also address how time inside a VC firm can teach you about being a founder and what it's like to fundraise while you're eight months pregnant.

“I think that one of the things that I talked about is balanced between ambition, visionary, big picture, and, also recognizing, what tools are in your toolbox today and what you can do.” - Jasmin Hume

Today on Startups for Good we cover:

• Environmental Sustainability
• Encouraging people to be plant based
• Fundraising advice
• Building a team and making decisions as a sole founder
• Selecting and engaging with mentors

Learn more about Shiru on their website or connect with them on 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. 

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 from the Yale School of Management and his BA from the College of William & Mary.

On the episode we discussed his journey through the government to startup founder, how a friend inspired him to start his first organization, which decisions to make quickly and which to take your time on and managing multiple consumer channels. 

(On choosing your co-founder) “This is a person who is going to be so with you through the the high highs and low lows, that it's not just about their accomplishments, it's really about their character” - Will Sealy

Today on Startups for Good we cover:

• Common misunderstandings about student loans
• Potential solutions for overwhelmed students
• Common reasons people can’t pay back student loans
• Ways to improve the student loan system
• Getting the most out of business school

Connect with Will and learn more about Summer 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.

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 on their future of work policy through her work with the InterAction Council. She has appeared in publications such as the Wall Street Journal, Fast Company, Conscious Company, and Forbes and is a speaker with emerging technology think-tank Singularity University. She speaks on technological change and the future of work globally with organizations including the World Bank, China’s SAI Task Force for Innovation, the Milken Institute, United States Embassies, the Aspen Institute, the Young Presidents Organization, Palo Alto Networks, Silicon Valley Bank and more. Muriel is a doctoral candidate in industrial-organizational psychology at the University of Georgia and conducted research at Emory University's Goizueta School of Business and the Carl Vinson Institute of Government.

Muriel joins me today to discuss more about their fundraising. They have done over 4 million between pre seed and seed and have an employee count of 31, with 10 full time. We discuss the journey from academic researcher to founder and CEO. What you have to unlearn and what you have to learn. We talk more about the makeup of the workforce these days? And how deskless workers fit in? How they get less attention, perhaps in the public conversation, and in terms of tools that are being built for HR, what the pandemic has meant for her company and for these workers. And we talk about a great offer from her for startup founders.

“I am grateful for this startup experience, and how much it's taught us, just like what actually matters, and getting down to brass tacks and speaking in a language that people understand and can get behind” - Muriel Clauson

Today on Startups for Good we cover:

• Desk-less Employees
• Utilizing SMS for employee communication
• Career development
• Changes in the employment landscape
• The Great Resignation

Connect with Muriel at [email protected] or at Anthill’s 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 The Giving Circle

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 investments have been acquired or gone public, including TIO Networks (by PayPal), Fundera (by Nerdwallet), Coverhound (Brown & Brown), Oportun (Nasdaq:OPRT), Honest Dollar (by Goldman Sachs), L2C (by TransUnion), AccountNow (by Green Dot), CircleLending (by Virgin Group), and RentBureau (by Experian).

Arjan writes regularly, and has been noted in the Wall Street Journal, New York Times, and Economist, and in the documentary, Spent. He speaks regularly including at the White House, SXSW, Stanford, Harvard, and MIT.

On a local level he serves on the Compton Community Development Corporation Board. 

Prior, he spent a decade as an operator in several venture backed startups as a technology leader, product- and general manager including Pierian Spring Software, Cognitive Concepts (acquired by Houghton Mifflin), Capella Learning (now NASDAQ: CPLA), and DoTheGood.

Arjan joins me today to discuss mainly about a piece he wrote for Medium called How missionary are you actually?, which I think has so many insights per sentence. It is mind blowing, how dense and how much information is in the short piece. I thought it was worth a deep dive on the podcast, especially for founders thinking about how to hold themselves accountable to the mission. How to make sure it lives on past your initial excitement. And those moments when you say, Let's go climb that mountain..

“We believe in Occam’s razor, so pick the simpler versus the more complex solution, when there's a choice. We believe in creative destruction. And so rather than perfect academic rigor, we're fine to always be tinkering and improving it. Then we put together a small group of folks whose job it is to call our bluff, to hold our feet to the fire to insist on intellectual honesty.”  - Arjan Schütte

Today on Startups for Good we cover:

• Misguided perseverance
• Impact externalities report
• Why mission driven startups are intent on financial health
• The importance of writing down the company’s mission 
• Calculating correlations between social impact and enterprise value
• Different ways to levy fees
• Understanding your customer better
• Sharing positive externalities with steak holders
• Taking The Founder’s Pledge

Arjan’s article in Medium

Connect with Arjan through his email at [email protected] or at Core’s 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

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

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, Imaginable Futures, the Michael & Susan Dell Foundation, American Family Insurance Institute for Corporate and Social Impact, Spring Point Partners, WGU Labs, the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, and others. For his work at Edquity, David was named to 2020 Forbes 30 Under 30 in Social Entrepreneurship.

Prior to Edquity, David founded a non-profit college access organization called UniFi Scholars, where he worked with over 400 students around college financial planning, and spent nearly three years at The Clearing House, a financial trade association and payments company representing the interests of the nation’s largest commercial banks. 

David joins me today to discuss changing demographics in students, the importance and purpose of higher ed, why college costs keep rising, taking policy risks as a startup, launching a second product and the role of business in politics. 

Today on Startups for Good we cover:

• Fighting structural inequality
• Rising college costs
• Balancing two customer bases
• Policy risk and evaluation
• Should companies take political positions?

Learn more about Edquity on their website and with David 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 The Giving Circle

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 longtime advocate for Africa, Ronnie’s own Ghanaian heritage inspired him to focus specifically on global equity. With a mission to help people reach their full potential, Meaningful Gigs is impacting people in Africa in real, tangible ways. In just under two years, the company has already placed designers in roles with Starbucks, Bloomberg, Facebook, and IDEO, and has a vision to create 100,000 skilled jobs in Africa by 2028.

Ronnie is also a Co-Founder of the Black Exchange, an organization that helps black entrepreneurs connect with black investors. Ronnie lives in Washington, DC, where he oversees Meaningful Gigs’ world-class team. In his spare time, he can be found playing chess—he’s a nationally-ranked expert!—or playing basketball with friends.

On today's episode I speak with Ronnie about his company which has about 12 full time people and has grown it’s revenue four to five times in 2021. They are also out now to raise a Series A. We discussed finding investors, finding co-founders and how you match your values, the values of the company and how that really comes together. We talk about finding investors when you don't have a network, how to prioritize which investors you want to work with. And we also end up with his advice for aspiring entrepreneurs.

“How you do anything, is how you do everything. So pretty much if you can find a business or do whatever you need to do that harmonizes with your life, and it's not completely separate, it's not something new. Then try to do that.” - Ronnie Kwesi Coleman

Today on Startups for Good we cover:

• How chess is like building a startup
• Probabilistic thinking
• Factors making someone reach their full potential
• Addressing differences across national cultures
• Operating virtually 
• The work force in Africa
• Resolving conflicts amongst founders
• The importance of mission when bringing in investors

Connect with Ronnie on LinkedIn or through the company’s 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 The Giving Circle

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 his career as an Analyst in the Mergers and Acquisition Group at Merrill Lynch.  

A frequent public speaker and panelist on financial technology for good, Alex has spoken at Financial Health Network's Annual EMERGE Forum, Hope Global Forum, and CB Insights' Future of Fintech, among others.

He is a graduate of Georgetown University and Columbia Business School, and lives in the San Francisco Bay Area with his wife and children."

I was so excited about the story when I met Alex that I made an investment. Now, he has progressed quite a bit, and I'm excited to share the story with you. Just before having this conversation he closed another $5 million round. He tells a story of his intense pivot. He had 25 employees and was going in one direction, realized he had to change directions, given the market circumstances and he brought the team down to five people and then back up to eight. They've got eight open positions now and expect to continue to grow. It's a wonderful story of a turnaround in the middle of a startup. We also discuss direct and honest conversations. How this funding environment is actually working for entrepreneurs measuring progress along a mission. When do you persevere or pivot?

“If you no longer are excited to solve that problem, even if it's a big problem, if you're not excited to solve it anymore, personally, it's probably time to move on as well. You know, this job is so much fun, I love doing what I do, I would not want to do anything else with my life”  - Alex Mooradian

Today on Startups for Good we cover:

• Helping people in financial crisis
• Product evolution
• Deciding to change course and the emotional toll
• Communicating to investors who are mission oriented and those that are profit-maximazing 
• Building diversity on the team
• Measuring progress with metrics other than finances

Connect with Alex by email [email protected] and learn more about the company at Resolve’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 The Giving Circle

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 great founder, how to make decisions including a pivot, what building a remote only company is like and how to do it. So you're reaching for greatness, starting Employee Resource Groups early on, and how investors say no, and how they should keep the door open if they want to, and much more. 

Today on Startups for Good we cover:

• Early signs of entrepreneurship
• Knowing when to pivot the model of the company
• Matching your customers to your product or service
• Creating a remote culture
• Hiring and firing best practices
• Saying no to investors

Connect with Damola on Twitter or email him at [email protected]

Miles mentioned the book The Five Dysfunctions of a Team by Patrick Lencioni

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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 The Giving Circle

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 to build robots and how he ended up working on copilot building a team from five to over 50 In one year, and how to successfully fundraise.

Today on Startups for Good we cover:

• Realizing the larger mission
• Combining tech tools and human coaching
• Constantly iterating
• Choosing your ideal customer
• Learning the marketing space
• Building a team with rapid growth
• Tips on fundraising

Connect with Matt on LinkedIn and right now CoPilot is offering a free 14 day trial (no credit card needed) at mycopilot.com to try the service out for yourself.

Miles mentioned the book: Lean Startup by Eric Ries

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 The Giving Circle