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Obvious
Our New Champions to Guide World-Positive Founders
A champion. As a verb, it’s someone who protects or fights for a cause. At Obvious, our Champions program brings together a group of exceptional...
A Game of Inches
Long before Openly began selling home insurance, co-founders Ty Harris and Matt Wielbut kept getting the same feedback from potential investors: “Can you distill your...
Promoting Kahini Shah to Partner
Since joining Obvious in 2022, Kahini has led our world positive AI investments, with a focus on healthcare, governance, and robotics. Kahini has made an...
Obvious, in Hindsight
In 2014, we founded Obvious with the simple idea that the most valuable companies of our time would be the ones solving humanity’s biggest problems....
Engineers Without Borders
Engineering shortages have long plagued the U.S. tech sector. Big tech companies point to immigration restrictions that hamper their efforts to find employees. The idea...
Embedded Finance: The Clue to Inclusion
60 million Americans and 35% of small businesses don’t have access to traditional banking services. Embedded finance is, at its essence, the offering of financial...
Special Episode: Kim Stanley Robinson On Our Climate Future
Host Andrew Beebe speaks to one of the greatest living writers of science fiction, Kim Stanley Robinson.
10 Healthcare Predictions for 2023
The pandemic ebbed and flowed in 2022. It changed how patients interact with healthcare, strained the finances of health systems, and burned out medical professionals....
10 Fintech Predictions for 2023
If 2021 was the golden year for fintech fundraising, with $130 billion invested in financial services startups, 2022 was the year of the major pullback....
10 Food & Wellness Predictions for 2023
In 400 BC, Hippocrates wrote that we should let food be our medicine. Those words are the perfect harbinger for food and wellness trends in...
10 Climate Tech Predictions for 2023
2022 was a big year for Climate Tech, particularly in the U.S. The Inflation Reduction Act, also known as the Climate Bill, was a shot...
10 TechBio Predictions for 2023
We foresee the coming year will be one of convergence in TechBio. Cheaper sequencing and new wet lab tools will enable scaled data generation while...
Building the SMB Central Nervous System
When I was growing up, my parents owned and operated a small golf supply company. They were immigrants from Taiwan who found a niche importing...
The Future of FemTech Is Here
Over the years, I’ve watched the women I love most struggle with a myriad of health issues that are unique to women including fibroids, endometriosis,...
BONUS: Series Wrap Up with Andrew Beebe and Emily Brady
For this bonus episode, we’re flipping the script. Host Andrew Beebe sits down with Emily Brady, Editorial Director at Obvious Ventures. They discuss his takeaways...
Accelerating Fast Charging with Cathy Zoi
Cathy Zoi is the CEO of EVgo, America’s largest fast charging network for electric vehicles. She’s been a leader in climate for over three decades,...
Why We Need Nuclear with Rachel Slaybaugh
Dr. Rachel Slaybaugh is a nuclear expert and investor at DCVC, where she focuses on climate tech. She was Associate Professor of Nuclear Engineering at...
Why a Payments Company Went All In On Carbon Removal
Nan Ransohoff is Head of Climate at Stripe. As part of her role, Nan leads Frontier, an advance market commitment for carbon removal, which is...
From Journalist to VC with Molly Wood
Molly Wood is an investor at the early stage venture firm LAUNCH, and co-host of This Week in Startups. She was a journalist for over...
Building ‘Stuff That Matters’ with Tony Fadell
Tony Fadell led the teams that brought us the iPod, iPhone, and the Nest thermostat. He’s currently Principal at venture firm Future Shape, which invests...
The Optimistic Path Forward with Jason Jacobs
Jason Jacobs is the creator and host of My Climate Journey, a podcast that demystifies climate change and helps people make a difference. Before diving...
Making Big Companies Change with Maria Fujihara
Maria Fujihara is Founder & CEO of SINAI Technologies, the world’s leading enterprise software platform to measure, analyze, price, and reduce emissions. In this episode,...
Building a Climate Army with Jigar Shah
To begin the series, we speak with Jigar Shah, Director for the Loan Programs Office at the U.S. Department of Energy. He’s worked in clean...
Introducing Obvious Ideas
In hindsight, all great ideas are Obvious. The big ideas of today will become market-leading companies in the near future, reimagining every sector of the...
Menopause Meets Its Match. Her Name Is Sally Mueller.
It was all going according to Sally Mueller’s plan. She had an incredible co-founder in Michelle Jacobs, enough capital to book purchase orders for Target’s...
22 Fintech Predictions for 2022 and Beyond
It’s no secret that the financial services sector is fraught with problems, despite being so ingrained in our daily lives. Incumbent banks and insurance companies...
The Unstoppable Determination of Michelle Longmire, MD
A grandfather engaged in developing the hydrogen bomb and establishing the underpinnings of electromagnetic pulse theory. Her father, a molecular biologist involved in the Human...
Orchestration Software: Unlocking Superpowers for SMBs
My friend Kyle, a first-generation Taiwanese immigrant living in Anchorage, Alaska, is not a typical small business owner. Kyle is a salmon fisherman that regularly...
22 Healthcare Predictions For 2022
The past 24 months have been a reckoning for a legacy healthcare system drowning in rising costs and preventable casualties. The gaps in access, resources,...
The World Positive Report Returns
The 2021 World Positive Report is here. We did it again, as you’ll see, for Obvious reasons: Every choice we make impacts out world. Plugging...
The New New Deal
The secular shift toward self-directed employment continues unabated. Startups and investors have an opportunity to address the emergent needs of this new working class—or risk...
Maria Fujihara Decarbonizes the World
It was January 2018 when Maria Fujihara, completely broke and in need of airfare back to Brazil from the Bay Area, called her parents as...
Identity-Aligned Interventions
A global pandemic, wildfires, hurricanes, and political unrest. The past 18 months have forced us to face an overwhelming wave of concurrent challenges. Many simmering...
Welcome To (the New) Wall Street
While the 2010s may feel like a lifetime ago, their populist legacy lives on. From the transformation of the news (with Twitter and Medium vying with...
Why We Work
While looking up at our screens for the ninth Zoom meeting, down at our leggings storing a few too many DoorDash deliveries, and back at...
Human-Centered Finance
2020 has led many, myself included, to question their social, moral and financial foundations. Thriving adults have moved back into their parents’ homes (fortunately for me,...
Reimagining ESG Reporting For Startups
The field of impact measurement has evolved meaningfully over the past 20–30 years, most recently with PRI as an investor framework, UNSDGs as a general benchmark, and the B Labs...
Finding Wealth in Health
My Christmas List in 2009: Apple Bottom jeans and boots with the fur (UGGs) My Christmas List in 2019: Apple Watch and biome testing kit (Viome) Might my move from North...
These Robots Learn. Meet Their Teacher.
We’re nearly an hour into our conversation when Samir asks me to stand up. “Stick out your finger,” he says. I tilt my head with...
The Persuasion Equation
“I don’t think of myself as a ‘marketing person.’ I’m a scientist! But marketing matters. Learning to tell the story of Recursion, to share a truthful...
Designing a Better Remote Reality
As we enter month three of shelter-in-place, it is impossible to ignore our increasing acceptance of and dependence on remote work solutions — at least for...
Productivity Tools Go Vertical
For the past five years I’ve been a product manager at FiscalNote, Uber, and Dropbox. In that short time, I witnessed a dramatic transition in productivity tools that...
The New Biology
The Humbling Number & Biological Complexity The humbling number is 10⁶¹⁴. To put that in perspective, your odds of winning the Powerball is on the...
Industrial IQ: Where High Tech Meets Low Tech
The history of Silicon Valley, and what continues to define the technology sector zeitgeist today, can mostly be reduced to a simple tenet: digital solutions...
A Sea Change in Seafood
Valerie Robitaille has been building businesses with family since she was ten, from hawking homemade insect repellent to lemonade-standing on the corner. “I’d even write...
The Top Ten World Positive Stories of 2018
Media is likely to define 2018 as an unending cavalcade of tragedies. Freshly crowned #1’s hit nearly every Worst _____ of All-Time list: hurricanes, wildfires, mass shootings,...
A Boon for Business, Creating a Windfall for Causes
In today’s Silicon Valley rife with hype, Lily Kanter stands out with a refreshingly pragmatic, matter-of-fact mindset. Business basics have been the bedrock of her...
Food Is Medicine, and Neka Pasquale Wants to be Your Doctor.
I’d barely crossed the threshold of her office when Neka stepped on her radiant soapbox. The message was crystal clear and devotedly consumer-centered. “Big Food...
Incredible. Immigrant. Inspiring. Introducing Iman Abuzeid.
Type “Iman Abuzeid” into your browser. Despite her talent and accomplishments — M.D., MBA, startup founder and CEO — not much comes up. Turns out, this is by design....
Building Better Machines That Are Better for Humans
Canvas Co-Founder and CTO Maria Telleria brings her vision, values, and Ph.D. to bear on a construction industry in need of reinvention. Maria Telleria became...
Leslie Silverglide Flips the Fast Food Script
“If you want to do it, do it. Never think small.” This feeling — instilled by her mother — has stayed with MIXT CEO Leslie Silverglide her entire life. Born in Nashville...
It Takes More Than Tech to Redefine a Trillion Dollar Category
In July 2018, one of the first machine learning-discovered compounds was approved by the FDA for phase one clinical trials targeting cerebral cavernous malformation, a genetic disease...
The New Intelligence
The days of traditional, human-driven problem solving—developing a hypothesis, uncovering principles, and testing that hypothesis through deduction, logic, and experimentation—may be coming to an end....
The Seeds of a Building Revolution
Welcome to the slow, unreliable, expensive, and dirty world of residential construction: Neighborhood disruption. Delays. Change orders. Cost overruns. Permitting problems. Noise and air pollution. Unsustainable...
Pouring New Foundations in Construction Tech
In 1943 Abraham Maslow published his seminal paper titled A Theory of Human Motivation, in which he posited a prioritization protocol for human needs, now know...
The Org is Your Product. The People are Your Customers. Design Their Journey.
Despite their stated function, the vast majority of Human Resources and People Ops-related programs are devoid of both humanness and people-ness. Leadership tends to overlook...
Manufacturing Goes Digital
It’s hard to imagine an industry as harsh and unforgiving to technological deployment as manufacturing. Remote facilities. Spotty internet connectivity. Limited (if existent) data streams...
Down With Bias, Up With Profitability
While study after study demonstrate that more inclusive companies outperform their peers financially, practices to diversify company workforces remain in their nascency. Startup CEO’s and Fortune 500 executives continue...
Words of Wisdom From the Queen of Quality Content Marketing
In two and a half short years, First Round Review has become a household name in Silicon Valley by uncorking a sea of “powerful, untapped knowledge trapped...
Artificial Intelligence Wants To Make Us Healthier, If We Let It
Few words are thrown around Silicon Valley as often as Artificial Intelligence (AI) and Machine Learning (ML) these days. Startups promising to create new businesses...
