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.