Shows
Founders Without Borders#15: Sneha Saigal | India | Geeks and ExpertsWelcome to the last episode of Season 2! In this episode, we chat with Sneha Saigal - the co-founder and CEO of Geeks and Experts, a platform for startups and scale-ups to hire fractional PR talent on a contract basis. Sneha has over a decade of experience working in early-stage bootstrapped and VC-backed companies across industries, from food tech to social impact, and has obtained her MBA from IESE Business School in Spain. Apart from being a wine sommelier, she is also a top writer on Medium, where she writes about entrepreneurship, immigrant founders, and the future of work.
...2025-01-3140 min
Founders Without Borders#14: Gian Segato | Italy | UniwhereWelcome back to another episode! In this episode, we chat with Gian Segato - a hacker, writer, occasional investor, and exited entrepreneur. He founded and sold Uniwhere, a popular career management app for college students in Italy that went viral and was featured in several international media outlets from SkyNews24 to The Huffington Post. He was born and raised in Italy and currently lives in San Francisco where he is now part of Replit's core AI team.
In this conversation, Gian shares:
- how the roles entrepreneur, writer, researcher, and hacker play in his lif...2024-12-1143 min
Founders Without Borders#13: Swarali Karulkar | India | BollyHealsWelcome back to another episode! In this episode, we chat with Swarali Karulkar, aka Swara, a choreographer, movement therapist, and dance educator. She was born and raised in Mumbai, India, and moved to the US to pursue a career in dance therapy. She's the driving force behind BollyHeals, NYC's premier dance wellness brand. In 2017, Swara introduced the transformative BollyHeals and BollyItems workshop series, combining her love for fusion dance styles, with her expertise in movement therapy. After testing her method across five different countries and 26 cities, she expanded it into the multidimensional brand known as BollyHeals.
In...2024-08-2758 min
Founders Without Borders#12: Rohit Gijare | India | Exodus ArtistyWelcome back to another episode! In this episode, we chat with Rohit Gijare, a dancer, choreographer, creator and founder of Exodus Artistry. Born in India and raised in the U. S. Rohit strives to blend aspects of both of his cultures through art. Dancing since the age of three, Rohit received formal training in Kathak, an Indian classical dance form. He further went on to expand his training in western forms such as hip hop and street jazz through studios such as Broadway Dance Center. He started his dance company Exodus Artistry a few years after college and most...2024-07-0739 min
Founders Without Borders#11: Shai Unterslak | South Africa | Based Social Company (fka. Everything Bagel)Welcome back to another episode! In this episode, we chat with Shai Unterslak, Co-Founder of Based Social Company (formerly known as Everything Bagel), a startup in the consumer AI space. Shai is a South African software engineer and founder based in San Francisco. He sold his first company to one of Africa's biggest scale-ups at age 22, before moving to the US in 2023 to build an AI startup. Since then he has navigated the O-1 visa process, met his co-founder, and is now building something new. On the side, Shai is also very passionate about helping other immigrants realize their dreams and has bee...2024-05-2443 min
Founders Without Borders#10: Mika Reyes | The Philippines | ParallaxWelcome back to another episode! In this episode, we chat with Mika Reyes, Co-Founder and CEO of Parallax, a startup that aims to help people send money and get paid from abroad faster and cheaper. She moved to the U. S. to study at Wesleyan University. Prior to starting her own company, she worked in product roles at LinkedIn, Kumu, and Ripcord. Mika is very passionate about broadening access through tech in emerging markets like her home, the Philippines, and the rest of Southeast Asia. She currently lives in New York City and is an avid dancer.
Mika ta...2024-05-0143 min
Founders Without Borders#9: Arjun "Arj" Agarwal | India | InaamWelcome back to another episode! In this episode, we chat with Arjun "Arj" Agarwal, Founder and CEO of Inaam, an Australian impact investing fintech company. He is a TedX speaker and a globally recognised entrepreneur and leader having worked across 3 continents. At 27, Arj is a social impact advocate working to bridge the global gap between capital, young people and entrepreneurship for a better tomorrow. Although he was born in India, Arj spent the majority of his life growing up in South Africa before relocating to Melbourne, Australia where he currently lives.
Listen to Arj talk about:2024-04-1039 min
Founders Without Borders#8: Alvaro Morales | Peru | OrbWelcome to the first episode of Season 2! In this episode, we chat with Alvaro Morales, Co-Founder and CEO of Orb, a flexible billing engine for modern pricing models and software. Alvaro grew up in Lima, Peru and moved to the US to start his undergraduate education at MIT. Prior to founding Orb, Alvaro was an engineering leader at Asana, where he saw the challenges of pricing, packaging and billing first-hand in a company’s growth journey. He met his co-founder while working at Asana and decided to team up to build Orb about 3 years ago.
Alvaro candidly talks ab...2024-03-1836 min
Founders Without BordersSeason 2 TrailerWe're back with Season 2 of the show! Get ready to hear even more incredible journeys of immigrant founders and their stories of success, failures, resilience, and everything in between.
To stay updated on the latest episodes, please follow Founders Without Borders on Spotify, Instagram, X, and Linkedin.2024-03-1401 min
Founders Without Borders#7: Minn Kim | South Korea | PlymouthWelcome to the last episode of Season 1! In this episode, we chat with Minn Kim, Co-Founder of Plymouth, a company whose mission is to advance technological and scientific progress by enabling the world's most talented people to work in the United States. Minn is an ardent supporter of early-stage founders and has previously demonstrated her passion for the same at Ridge Ventures, On Deck, and Bloomberg Beta. Her work has been featured in TechCrunch, and she also served on the emerging Venture Capital Association board.
Minn candidly shares about:
- her family's journ...2023-11-3048 min
Founders Without Borders#6: Renuka Apte | India | ClockworkWelcome back to another episode! In this episode, we chat with Renuka Apte, Co-Founder and CEO of Clockwork, a company that designs robots that liberates people from everyday mundane tasks with their first robot that helps with manicure. Renuka grew up in Pune, India and moved to the US for her grad school at Georgia Tech. With 13+ years of industry experience, she most recently led infrastructure teams at Dropbox, building a product that impacted 700 million users and was used over 1 billion times daily.
Renuka talks about how:
- her parents helped her ex...2023-11-0842 min
Founders Without Borders#5: Michelle Marcelline | Indonesia | TypedreamWelcome back to another episode! In this episode, we chat with Michelle Marcelline, Co-Founder of Typedream, a YC-backed all-in-one no-code creator tool to build your websites, link in bio, forms, blogs, and sell online. After being inspired by the movie, The Social Network, Michelle knew she wanted to move to the US to start her own company someday. After negotiating and convincing her family in Indonesia to let her move to the US, Michelle started college in 2015 and hasn't looked back since. In addition to being featured in many publications like Tech in Asia, Michelle was also featured on th...2023-10-1842 min
Founders Without Borders#4: Rabia Khan | Pakistan | Serna BioWelcome back to another episode! In this episode, we chat with Dr. Rabia Khan, Founder and CEO of Serna Bio, a YC-backed biotech company building the world's first map of the druggable transcriptome. She was born and raised in Pakistan, went to school in Canada, and eventually moved to the UK where she started her company. In addition to running Serna Bio, Rabia is a member of the Board of Trustees for the UK Dementia Research Institute, and an advisor to No Label Ventures, a fund investing in immigrant founders in the UK and EU.
2023-10-0350 min
Founders Without Borders#3: Julien Denaes | Switzerland | AlpinWelcome back to another episode! In this episode, we chat with Julien Denaes, founder of Alpin, which was acquired by CoreView in 2019. He was born and raised in Switzerland and decided to move to the US for his wife's postdoc, when he discovered the world of startups. He jumped in and failed at his first startup despite going through Techstars but then had 2 successful exits building enterprise SaaS all of that while navigating the immigration process.
Listen to Julien talk about:
- selling everything and moving to the US for his wife's po...2023-09-1349 min
Founders Without Borders#2: Karthik "KP" Puvvada | India | Build in Public FellowshipWelcome back to another episode! In this episode, we chat with Karthik Puvvada (commonly known as KP), founder of the Build In Public Fellowship. He is a serial entrepreneur, a passionate builder, a podcast host, angel investor and recently joined Utopic Ventures as a Partner. KP talked about how he knew he always wanted to be a founder but had to wait 12 years until he could become one because of immigration constraints.
KP had some wise words of wisdom to share about:
- belief capital
- how he got Vanderbilt...2023-08-2146 min
Founders Without Borders#1: Nitin Pachisia | India | Unshackled VenturesWe're kicking off season 1 with Nitin Pachisia, Co-Founder and Managing Partner at Unshackled Ventures, a venture capital firm that invests exclusively in immigrant founders.
Nitin grew up in India and moved to the US for work. After 5 years of working at Deloitte, he moved on to work at a small startup called Kno where he met his future co-founder, Manan Mehta. After leaving Kno to start his own company, he was faced with the challenges of navigating immigration while trying to build his company. His personal experience navigating immigration law led to building Unshackled. We sat down...2023-07-2546 minFounders Without BordersWelcome to Founders Without BordersWelcome to Founders Without Borders, a podcast where our host, Harshita Girase, dives deep into the journeys and stories of immigrant founders building generational businesses.
To stay updated on future guests and episodes, follow us @foundersglobal on Instagram, Linkedin, and Twitter.2023-07-1701 min