USA Founder Interviews

How I built a digital media powerhouse focused on Black culture and created a platform that amplifies diverse voices.

How I revolutionized transportation by digitizing the physical world and turning a simple idea into a global tech giant.

How I transformed 7-Eleven through innovation and adaptability, turning challenges into opportunities for global growth.

How I turned $10,000 and a home-made protein bar recipe into a $1 billion business by focusing on community and value over profits.

How I built an AI-powered calorie tracking app that disrupted the fitness industry and scaled to $24M in yearly revenue.

Indra Nooyi led PepsiCo through a period of unprecedented growth, pioneering a focus on health conscious products and sustainable development.

Michael Truell is the co-founder and CEO of Anysphere, the company behind Cursor an AI native code editor built for professional developers. Under his leadership, Cursor became one of the fastest growing AI tools in devtech.

Verun is the co-founder and CEO of Windsurf, an AI‑powered IDE that brings agentic capabilities to developers. Under Verun’s leadership, Windsurf has rapidly become a go‑to platform for building and iterating on code with AI.

Steven is the founder and CEO of MeatEater, a media company and outdoor lifestyle brand. Known for his honest storytelling and conservationist ethos, Steven has grown MeatEater into a multi-channel powerhouse with books, shows, and gear for outdoor enthusiasts.

Anne Mahlum turned Solid Core into a fitness empire, scaling it from one location to over 100 nationwide, with a nine figure exit. From working with the homeless to building a thriving business, Anne’s story is one of resilience, leadership, and innovation.

Ben, Tech Lead for Product Engineering at Anthropic, has played a pivotal role in scaling AI products with a deep focus on safety and alignment. From leaving OpenAI to co-founding Anthropic’s culture of mission driven growth, his journey is one of strategic leadership and foresight in a rapidly evolving industry.

Alex Hormozi, founder of Acquisition.com, scaled businesses past $100M+ in revenue by focusing on volume, consistency, and value creation. Known for his no-nonsense frameworks, Alex helps entrepreneurs avoid common traps while building long-term wealth.

Hayes Barnard, founder of GoodLeap, scaled his company into a multibillion-dollar platform by focusing on resilience, ethical choices, and building value in hard markets. Known for his story of overcoming adversity, Hayes inspires entrepreneurs with lessons on leadership, purpose, and perseverance.

High school dropout to hospitality leader: David Mizrahi turned a failing shawarma shop into a fast growing group behind Salt Steakhouse, LBK Grill, Soya, Pepe Kitchen, Salt Market, and Bubby’s Bagels. His playbook: customer first service, responsible growth, and hands on leadership.

From MW2 video edits to seven figure exits: Jordan Welch built a durable creator operator career through YouTube, drop shipping, and his SaaS company Viral Vault, favoring slow, steady compounding over hype.

Roy Lee built Cluely, a desktop AI that sits over your computer, listens to meetings, reads your screen, and feeds you answers in real time. He embraces the ‘cheat on everything’ framing as a marketing edge, pairs viral short-form growth with product speed, and hires like owners with a large option pool.

Chetan Parikh left a chemical engineering career to build applied AI for healthcare. After exiting EZDI, he founded RAAPID to bring neuro-symbolic and agentic AI to risk adjustment and coding, aiming for trustworthy automation, fewer audits, and coders working at top of license.

Marc Rowan co-founded Apollo Global Management and grew it into one of the largest alternative investment firms in the world. He believes the future of investing is not only in equities but also in private markets, which now underpin most of the economy. His mission is to open these markets to individuals, create better diversification, and redefine wealth management.

Sadi Khan, co-founder and CEO of Aven, is building a fintech that allows homeowners to access cheaper credit by combining home equity and credit card models. After leaving Facebook, he set out to attack America’s persistent credit card interest crisis with technology and conviction.

Mati Staniszewski is the CEO and co-founder of ElevenLabs, a $6.6B voice AI company redefining how humans and machines communicate. With a background in technology and product innovation, Mati has built a voice ecosystem where anyone can clone their voice, create agents, and even earn passive income merging AI ethics, scalability, and creativity into a single frontier.

Krishna Rangasayee is the founder of SiMa.ai, building a full-stack platform for “physical AI.” His focus is clear: run multimodal AI on a single chip under 10 watts, with easy software and strong security so real-world machines can see, hear, and reason at the edge.

Phong Lee leads Strategy’s twin engines: a Bitcoin-backed capital stack and a mature enterprise analytics business. His playbook is simple: build for the customer first, ship with conviction, and let time do the compounding.

Dan Moorehead runs a crypto-first macro shop. His method is simple: find asymmetric trades, size so you can hold through 85% drawdowns, and let time and network effects do the compounding.

Vlad Tenev is turning Robinhood into a financial super app by staying on the frontier of 24-hour equities, crypto as infrastructure, prediction markets, and AI tools like Cortex, while keeping revenue growing fast and costs under control.

Alex Karp has spent two decades building Palantir as a “freak show” that breaks every playbook: flat hierarchy, radical meritocracy, deep ties to the U.S. military, and a culture that treats product building more like art than enterprise software.

Dave Ricks is leading Eli Lilly through the GLP-1 boom and an AI-powered R&D shift, trying to compress drug discovery timelines while keeping a hard focus on safety, access, and real-world outcomes.

Anthony Denier is leading Webull through its first years as a public company, building an AI-enabled global brokerage for sophisticated retail investors while trying to stay nimble, transparent, and close to the everyday trader.

Garry Ridge led WD-40 Company for 25 years, turning a simple blue-and-yellow can into a multi-billion-dollar global brand and a 93% engagement “tribe,” using servant leadership, learning moments, and radical humility as his playbook.

David Baszucki turned a simple 3D physics experiment into Roblox, a global platform with hundreds of millions of users, by trusting his gut, chasing virality, and repeatedly rebuilding the product and himself as a leader.

Greg Marcus grew up in a 90-year-old family business and helped steer The Marcus Corporation through streaming, pandemics, and generational change by holding to Ben’s commandments, owning real estate, betting on community, and turning moviegoing into a two-hour vacation with recliners, burgers, and a familiar face on the screen.

John Nunziato walked away from big agencies and timesheets after 9/11 to build Little Big Brands, a 25-year independent shop that puts brand first, ego last. He grew a one-man package design studio into a full brand and advertising partner that evolves global CPGs, keeps clients for decades, and treats asset consistency, long-term relationships, and honest feedback as real competitive edges.

Satya Nadella thinks in decades, not quarters. He sees AI as the next big platform shift after PC, web, mobile, and cloud, and is willing to invest tens of billions into a fungible AI fleet because Microsoft already earns at scale. His leadership mixes long-term vision, careful risk management, and a strong focus on inclusion and real-world impact.

Marc Boroditsky is the revenue leader behind Nebius’ explosive rise as a full-stack AI infrastructure company. He combines old-school enterprise discipline with startup hunger, pushing hard on margins, execution, and deep partnerships. His playbook is simple: win premium AI workloads, move faster than rivals on land and power, and let an elite engineering culture do the talking.

Doug McMillon is the long-time Walmart insider who turned the world’s largest retailer into a people-led, tech-powered giant. He pushes hard on culture, margins, and reinvention, betting billions on wages, e-commerce, and AI while still keeping prices low and growth steady.

Dharmesh Shah is the engineer-founder who turned HubSpot into a multibillion SaaS platform while quietly blogging his way to the top of SEO. Now he is pushing the shift from search engine optimization to answer engine optimization, building agents, tools, and side projects with the same quiet, obsessive intensity.

Eric Siu is the gamer-turned-operator who took over a failing SEO shop, almost shut it down, then rebuilt it into Leveling Up – a multi-million dollar marketing and education company. He now runs multiple businesses under the Leveling Up brand, hosts two podcasts, and treats entrepreneurship as a long-term game.

Sundar Pichai is the engineer-turned-CEO leading Google through what he calls an extraordinary AI inflection point, balancing trillion-dollar infrastructure bets with safety, climate, and long-term societal impact.

Neil Patel is the marketer-turned-operator who rode the SEO wave early, built a $100M agency, and is now obsessed with practical ways to win in the AI gold rush with small, focused teams.

Ryan Serhant is the founder CEO behind SERHANT., building a content to commerce real estate company powered by education and an AI operating system, while balancing public visibility with the private weight of leadership.

Robert Kyncl is the CEO of Warner Music Group, bringing an operator mindset to music as pricing shifts, AI accelerates change, and scale becomes a bigger advantage for artists and rights holders.

Patrick Kelleher leads GXO Logistics with a sharp focus on organic growth, North America expansion, and tech-driven execution. He explains why GXO’s pure-play model moves faster, how automation and AI increase productivity and stickiness, and why performance culture and feedback habits matter when scaling 1200+ operations across global markets.

Alice Bentinck runs Entrepreneurs First like a product company, built on investing in people before they have an idea. She shares how EF survived early uncertainty, why co-founder productivity matters more than likability, and how moving fundraising to San Francisco doubled valuations and sped up revenue by forcing a faster customer-driven pace.

Fred Thiel leads MARA with a power-first mindset: treat land and electrons as a portfolio of assets. He explains why Bitcoin sold off in a risk-off cascade, how leverage and whale moves amplify fear, and why miners should earn optionality by pairing low-cost energy with modular infrastructure for Bitcoin and inference AI.

Brian Schimpf leads Anduril through rapid scale, doubling revenue year over year while reshaping defense around autonomy, speed, and software-driven production. He shares lessons on leadership, talent, accountability, and building systems designed for the future battlefield.

Jeremy Allaire leads Circle in building internet-native financial infrastructure through USDC and programmable digital money. He shares lessons on long-term vision, regulation, leadership, and how stablecoins, AI, and software platforms are reshaping the global financial system.

Salim Ramji leads Vanguard into a new era focused on technology, client-first investing, and long-term value creation. He shares insights on modernizing asset management, responsible AI adoption, leadership transitions, and preserving trust while innovating at massive scale.

Kaveh Ofogh is a physician-founder leading Medico with a mission to deliver constitutionally sound, proactive correctional healthcare. He shares insights on staffing, leadership, accountability, and how strong management systems improve outcomes for patients, employees, and communities.

Garrett Lord is the co-founder and CEO of Handshake, a career network powering millions of students and employers. He shares lessons on resilience, hiring, culture, scaling leadership, and building with Olympic-level standards.

David Lee is the co-founder and CEO of Nex, the company behind Nex Playground, a camera-based family gaming system redefining living-room play through active games, subscriptions, and thoughtful hardware design.

Tom Halverson is CEO of CoBank and a member of the Brookings–AEI Commission on Rural Prosperity, bringing decades of global finance experience to strengthening rural America.

Howard Chan is CEO of Kurv, an investment firm known for active option income strategies that focus on NAV stability, disciplined risk management, and sustainable income.

Kate O’Neill is a tech humanist, author, and CEO of KO Insights, advising global leaders on human-centered technology, ethical AI, and future-ready strategy.

Vikram Pandit is a global finance leader and former CEO of Citigroup, known for leading large institutions through crisis, transformation, and long-term restructuring.