Founders and Empanadas

At 26, Yusif Gurbanli has already worked at CERN, traded at J.P. Morgan, built aircraft for NASA, and finished a PhD reconstructing human knees with AI. Most people would call that scattered. Yusif calls it the whole...

<p>Dr. Myra Ahmad graduated from medical school in 2022, looked at the system she'd just trained inside, called it dystopian, and decided to build something outside of it instead of starting a residency. Three years...

Dr. Myra Ahmad graduated from medical school in 2022, looked at the system she'd just trained inside, called it dystopian, and decided to build something outside of it instead of starting a residency. Three years later...

<p>Rand Fishkin built Moz from a struggling web-design agency into a $60 million software company and watched venture capital quietly turn it from a business that served customers into one that served investors. His...

Rand Fishkin built Moz from a struggling web-design agency into a $60 million software company and watched venture capital quietly turn it from a business that served customers into one that served investors. His...

<p>Jenna Reback can taste words. Her own name tastes like blueberries, which is why she named her company Blueberry. She has synesthesia, a rare neuro-sensory condition that made childhood disorienting and lonely, and...

<p>Most social apps were built to make you feel connected without requiring you to actually be. Sanjay Guruprasad has been building against that assumption for eight years. His thesis: the only online interaction that...

<p>Andrea Mazzocchi defended her PhD, applied to Y Combinator, and watched the country shut down for COVID all on the same weekend. That was May 2020. By the end of the year, she had a wet lab running, a seed round...

<p>Starting in 2003, years before anyone was using the term, Yu-kai Chou began developing what would become the Octalysis Framework: a model of human motivation built around 8 core drives that influence every decision...

<p>Jessica Murrey won a Regional Emmy at 24 for an anti-child abuse campaign, then spent seven years training young activists and former extremists in countries recovering from genocide and civil war: Myanmar, Burundi...

<p>Sahin Boydas moved from Turkey to San Francisco in 2012 with no network, no warm intros, and a conviction that remote work was going to change everything, about a decade before COVID made it...

<p>Renee Gittins didn't take the conventional path. She built her own.</p><p><br></p><p>She started as a biomedical engineer, then walked away from biotech at 21 to teach herself game development from scratch...

<p>Adam Lieb sold his first gaming website to IGN at age 11. Before he could drive, he was earning $10,000 a week selling virtual goods in MMORPGs. Before he graduated college, he was running a 25-site gaming network...

<p>Tim Morten led production on StarCraft II at Blizzard before founding Frost Giant Studios. In this conversation, he breaks down the economic forces reshaping game development: from the oversaturation crisis (20,000+...

<p>Alex Stewart didn’t raise a round. He didn’t move to San Francisco. He didn’t “grind” 100 hours a week. He built Teamtown, a growing design agency, by doing things differently.</p><p><br></p><p>This week on Founders...