Matt Duesterberg is co-founder and president of OhmConnect.

Matt's problem: How do you build a business around getting people to save energy? Not all that much. And not all the time. But just enough, at just the right time. OhmConnect is paying customers to reduce their household's energy usage at times of high demand. The company is a window into the bizarre world of energy markets -- and human behavior.

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Chris Best is co-founder and CEO of Substack.

Chris's problem: How do you help writers make a living from a thousand true fans?

Substack is a company that helps writers send subscription-based email newsletters. Which, as Chris says, is a very simple idea, built on top of some very grandiose beliefs about culture and ideas and commerce.

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Harley Finkelstein is the president of Shopify. He may love entrepreneurship more than anyone we've ever met.

Harley’s problem: How do you aggregate the power of millions of small businesses to help them compete against giants?

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Shaun Kinetic is co-founder and chief scientist of Charm Industrial. Shaun’s problem: How do you put billions of tons of carbon back into the ground?

Charm Industrial is fighting climate change in a giant but kind of overlooked corner of the economy: Agriculture. Fields of corn and wheat and soybeans absorb billions of tons of carbon dioxide from the air every year. But then, once the crops are harvested, the leaves and the stalks decompose -- and send a lot of that carbon back into the air.

Shaun's company is trying to grab that carbon and get it back into the ground.

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Al Doan is the executive chairman of the Missouri Star Quilt company.

Al's problem is this: How do you combine low tech and high tech to turn a niche hobby into a wildly successful company?

In 2008, Al and his siblings helped their mom open a quilt shop in Hamilton, Missouri. Now, the business has grown to over 100 million a year in revenue and Jenny Doan, Al's mom, has become the YouTube quilting star. 

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Chris Severn is the co-founder and CEO of Turquoise Health.

Chris's problem is this: How do you figure out the real price trip of a trip to the hospital -- before it happens?

People have been trying to solve this problem for decades, but there's a good reason to think that this time is different. In 2019, the federal government issued a new rule that said insurers and hospitals have to publish their prices. Not just the fake list prices that nobody pays. But the actual, real, negotiated prices. This rule is just starting to take effect. Its impact could be huge.

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Mariana Matus is co-founder and CEO of Biobot Analytics. Her problem: How do you turn sewage into useful public health data?

When she and her co-founder launched the company, wastewater epidemiology was a niche field nobody paid much attention to. The Covid pandemic changed that. Studying wastewater has become one of the most important tools for tracking the pandemic. And Mariana's company, Biobot Analytics, has become a global leader in the field, with tens of millions of dollars in annual revenue.

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Matt Mullenweg co-created WordPress, the open-source software that powers more than 40% of all the websites in the world.

He's also the founder of a for-profit company called Automattic.

Matt's problem is this: How do you build a multibillion-dollar company on top of software that your competitors can use for free?

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Mohammed Ashour is the co-founder and CEO of Aspire Food Group. The company just built the biggest cricket factory in the history of the world.

His problem: How do you sell billions of bugs a year?

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We put man on the moon before we invented the wheeled suitcase. Why did it take so long? Find out in this episode of Patented: History of Inventions, where host Dallas Campbell is joined by expert Katrine Marçal, whose research has revealed an intriguing hidden chapter in the invention story of rolling luggage.

If you're interested in the stories behind the world's greatest inventions — from the mighty steam train to the humble condom - subscribe to Patented: History of Inventions, created by our friends over at History Hit.

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