For many, cooking is a chore. After a long day of work, you come home to throw together an easy-yet-healthy-enough meal. After whipping it up and scarfing it down, you're on to the next thing: Family time, unresolved emails, or a quick episode of Netflix before you pass out. ChefSteps wants to change all that. With a vibrant community, a plethora of creative recipes, and most recently, a shiny new piece of hardware, the company plans to change the way regular people feel about cooking at home.

It was snowing. A lot. Boston was in the midst of a blizzard, receiving the most snow ever in recorded history. Kyle and Jessica Waring were stranded in their apartment, racking their brains for something to do. Then, they landed on an idea. What if they sold the snow outside their apartment and shipped it to anyone in the country?

When Payal Kadakia quit her job at Warner Music Group, she didn't have a backup plan. She knew she wasn't happy in her job, but she wasn't sure what she wanted to do next. After a few weeks of soul-searching, she decided on her next move: She was going to start a fitness search engine to help people uncover new classes in their area. Three years and several pivots later, Payal's landed on a business model that works.

Most people would agree: Luck is an integral ingredient to success. The tough part is, getting lucky is all up to chance. You can't predict it. You can't manufacture it. Or can you? In this special episode of The Growth Show, we hear stories from three of our past guests (Chris Savage of Wistia, Jascha Kaykas-Wolff of Mozilla, and Vlad Tenev of Robinhood) about a time they got lucky in business - and find out if getting lucky really comes down to chance.

When was the last time you held back valuable feedback for fear of being mean? We've all done this before. We think we're being kind. But, we aren't. Turns out, this behavior can have drastic consequences when you do this at work - especially when you're a manager.

We all want to be the one to uncover the next big thing - the next big app, the next big trend, the next big growth strategy. We take big bets. We tell our boss that surely this is the thing that's going to take off. If we don't pay attention now, we could be left behind. The truth is, uncovering the next big thing can be very difficult - but it's a necessary skill when you're tasked with growing a company. So how do you go about figuring out which trends are about to take off, and which ones will be duds?

Everlane isn't like many other contemporary fashion brands. While others drive profits by discretely marking up low-cost goods, Everlane discloses the line-by-line costs for producing their products - and how much money they make on each transaction. While others obscure details about their supply chain, Everlane devotes a whole section of their website to photos and information about their factories. How'd the company build such a transparent and nimble brand?

When you're up against companies with household names and centuries of experience, how do you win market share? It's simple: Find out what they don't do well ... and then do that thing very well. That philosophy is what has made Robinhood a fierce competitor in their space. They created a mobile app that makes it easy to buy and sell stocks - for free. In an industry where people typically pay $10 per transaction, Robinhood is quickly gaining traction with both brand new and experienced investors.

In the beginning, Wistia had just a few guys working out of an apartment in Cambridge, Massachusetts. It took them a year to make their first dollar, and then another year to sign on 10 customers. But the folks at Wistia never gave up. Nearly 10 years later, the company's persistence has paid off in spades: They have 200,000 customers using their video marketing platform, and they've hired more than 60 people to grow the company even more.

Pink mustaches. Fist bumps. A seat up front. These quirks help differentiate Lyft as the friendly, human option in an uber-competitive industry. And it's working. Today, the company is one of the fastest-growing ride-sharing apps on the market. We chat with Lyft CMO Kira Wampler about surviving (and thriving) in a competitive industry, scaling non-scalable parts of a company, and hiring the best people for a high-growth team.