Leap Forward

Kim Beverett was getting an MFA in costume design when her program handed out a worksheet estimating what she’d earn as a freelancer: about $1.50 an hour. Disillusioned, she followed her partner to San Francisco, searched Craigslist for costume design jobs, and landed her first tech job at an avatar startup. She eventually wound up at Apple, where she spent 10 years, eventually running the teams behind some of their most recognizable apps.   During that time, she met her co-founders, and together they built the AI assistant Sky. A couple years later, OpenAI came knocking.  Kim’s leadership style is as singular as her path to get there. Today on the show, Kim and her friend and former Apple colleague Kelsey Peterson on learning to trust your own way of working, even when it looks different from everybody else’s.

In 2021, the book Electrify offered one of the most detailed, practical maps yet for America’s decarbonization. It went viral in climate & policy circles and helped shape the Inflation Reduction Act. Then one of its co-writers, Sam Calisch, took what he thought was the most impactful next step: start a company. Copper puts batteries on the grid by building them into home appliances, starting with an induction stove that plugs into a standard outlet. No electrician required. Today on the show, Sam and his co-writer and mentor Saul Griffith on the ideas in the book, the setbacks since, and what it will take to keep decarbonization moving, one kitchen at a time.

Today, Reddit is the sixth largest website in the world. But it almost stopped existing. A few times. In July 2015, more than 2,000 subreddits went dark, the CEO resigned, and Reddit looked like it might not survive. At the center of its dramatic turnaround is the company’s founder, Steve Huffman, who returned to Reddit to save it from itself. In this episode, how Reddit went from a tiny apartment in Cambridge to become one of the most important spaces for conversation online. And how they’re wrestling to keep that conversation human in the age of AI.

This summer, Leap Forward is going on a short break. We’ll be back this fall with more episodes. Listen for a look back on Season 1 and a taste of what’s next, including a family crisis over a wiped thesis, and some very big ambitions to change the way we think about energy.

Live streaming feels inevitable now. But it started as what Michael Seibel called a "dumb idea."In this episode, Michael traces the unlikely path from a post-Yale road trip to a 24-hour streaming experiment called Justin.tv. Years of pivots and spin-outs later, it grew into Twitch and created the $100 billion live streaming market that's now part of daily life. But first, it had to survive: the swattings, the stretches with only weeks of cash left, and a reality show built around one man's life that was quietly failing.We also hear from Justin Kan, his close friend and cofounder, about the early days and the moment everything turned: when they shut off the camera, handed the platform to anyone who wanted it, and finally watched it reach its true potential.

When Sean Duffy was a medical student interning at IDEO, he came face to face with a hard truth: millions of Americans with chronic disease weren’t getting the support they needed to actually get healthier. In this episode, Sean tells the story of how an unlikely mix of medicine and design thinking led him to spend a year refining an idea that would eventually become Omada - a company that’s since helped over a million people and gone public.We also talked to his former boss at IDEO, David Webster, about the intern application that fell on the floor, and the rare combination of expertise that Sean brought to a huge problem. It’s a story about how ideas don’t arrive fully formed, but get found, tested in strangers’ living rooms, and built through steady commitment.

Scribd took off fast - then hit a wall that nearly broke the company. In this episode, Trip Adler tells the story of building the “Netflix for books,” only to face the moment every founder dreads: when everything comes tumbling down, as growth stalled and much of the team walked away. But while others quit, Trip stayed - spending years rebuilding the company and eventually growing it to more than $300 million in revenue.We also talked to his dad, John Adler - an entrepreneur himself - about the question at the heart of it all: how do you decide if a company is still worth fighting for? Trip’s journey, from Scribd’s hard earned success to starting Created by Humans, shows that sometimes making it simply comes down to not giving up.

It’s common for a tech startup employee to start their own tech startup. It’s rarer for a startup employee to go on to build a baby formula company. When Laura Modi showed up at Walgreens at 11pm to buy baby formula for the first time, she felt ashamed and afraid. So she started a company that didn't just create a healthier formula, but built a community, participated in activism, and made business decisions that didn't sell more, but grew trust. Bobbie became the fastest growing formula company since the 1980s. And a major source of Laura’s business savvy? Her time at Airbnb, under the hospitality legend Chip Conley, who transformed her understanding of a “product.”In this episode, the unusual story behind a fast-growing startup that built a deeper social movement. 

Jimmy Douglas didn’t learn how to fundraise in business school. He learned it at 14, selling vacuum cleaners on commission to help pay the bills after his father - an entrepreneur who once ran a semiconductor company - passed away.  In this episode, Jimmy tells the story of growing up on a Christmas tree farm in Oregon, feeling out of place, working sales jobs to make rent, and eventually leading used car sales at Tesla before deciding, on paternity leave, to finally start his own company: Plug. A marketplace for used electric vehicles that has raised two wildly successful rounds of funding. We also talked to his first investor, Ann Miura-Ko of Floodgate, about what stood out about Jimmy that made her want to chase him down to start a company. Jimmy’s story shows how our most difficult circumstances shape our sharpest skills, and how good founders avoid getting attached to their first idea.

Peter Reinhardt co-founded the analytics firm Segment, and built it into a company that sold for $3.2 billion. But before it worked, everything else they tried didn’t.  In this episode, Peter and his co-founder, Calvin French-Owen, share their humbling story of finding product-market fit: hospital panic attacks, a crisis of faith, and how, with just a few weeks of runway left, they published a Hail Mary concept on Hacker News -- that blew up. It’s a story about how giving up control finally led them to build something people wanted. And forced them to mourn their attachment to vision. Since then, Peter has only increased his ambitions: he launched another successful company, Charm Industrial, that permanently sequesters carbon underground, and is also the CEO of Revoy, that converts semi-trucks into electric vehicles.