Foreign Founders

Try Ohai.ai - a personal assistant for your familySheila Lirio Marcelo is a Filipino-American entrepreneur with over 20 years of leadership experience in internet consumer marketplace businesses. She founded Care.com in 2006, taking the company public in 2014 and serving as Chairwoman and CEO until its sale to IAC in 2020. Currently, she is the Co-Founder and CEO of Ohai.ai, an AI technology startup aimed at improving family life. Marcelo has received numerous accolades, including being named on Forbes 50 over 50, recognized as one of Fortune’s “Top 10 Women Entrepreneurs,” and honored as a Henry Crown Fellow and Young Global Leader. She holds a B.A. from Mount Holyoke College, a J.D. and M.B.A from Harvard University, and became the youngest recipient of the Harvard Business School Alumni Achievement Award in 2014.This incredible conversation is worth listening to. We cover more about Sheila’s background as an immigrant founder, compared to her other interviews! Highlight include:Sheila mirroring her entrepreneurial mother from an early ageBeing insecure about starting her first companyWhy she decided to move on from Care.comStarting Ohai.ai to help more familiesEnjoy the episode!If you love this episode, please share and review the podcast! It will help more immigrant and international founders find these content.You can find us here: https://linktr.ee/foreignfounders

I’m so delighted to have my friend, Elizabeth Tishchenko. Elizabeth was previously on episode 10 of the show, as the co-founder of her company, Nevemind, a consumer facing application using AI to manage your life. She shut down the company in 2024, so I wanted to reach out to her again and talk about her experience.Elizabeth is a Ukrainian nomad, serial entrepreneur, and AI consultant, currently serving as CEO of her third startup, FleetMind. A Techstars '23 and Antler '22 alum, she also teaches AI in Business and Product Management at General Assembly.Welcome back to Foreign Founders!In this episode, we talk about:The journey through with Nevemind and shutting down the companyWhere she spent time after moving on and the challenges she facedTeaching AI to product builders and founders - and the tips and tricks!What she is doing with her new role at FleetMindElizabeth Tishchenko LinkedInListen to Elizabeth on Episode 10Enjoy the episode!If you love this episode, please share and review the podcast! It will help more immigrant and international founders find these content.You can find us here: https://linktr.ee/foreignfounders

Every couple needs a smart, shared brain spaceI’m happy to have my friend, Abdullah “Ax” Ali, on Foreign Founders. Ax’s story starts as a war refugee arriving in Baltimore with just $20, working his way through community college to one of the top PhD programs in Human-Computer interactions and publishing over 20 award-winning peer reviewed papers along the way. With stints at Microsoft, Apple, Amazon and Bilt, he’s co-founded 3rd Brain for couples to do life better, together.In this episode, we talk about:Ax’s childhood growing up in a war torn country, moving to Jordan and then to the U.S.Watching “The Social Network” and being inspired to build technology productsPursuing PhD in Human-Computer interactions, and Ax shares the most interesting paper he co-wroteHow Ax and his co-founder used so many different products and techniques to plan as a coupleLinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/theaxali/3rd Brain Website: https://www.3rd-brain.com/iOS: https://apps.apple.com/us/app/3rd-brain-couples-organizer/id6476935088Android: https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.thirdbrainEnjoy the episode!If you love this episode, please share and review the podcast! It will help more immigrant and international founders find these content.You can find us here: https://linktr.ee/foreignfounders

Get your own AI Phoenyx to learn a new languageOriginally from Paraná, a small town in Argentina, Carolina is on a mission to help kids learn a second language at the optimal age—when they are young, their brains are most receptive, and they have the time to explore and grow. After building a successful corporate career in Argentina, she sought a new challenge and moved to the US to earn her MBA at MIT Sloan. Following graduation, Carolina co-founded BetterVet, a mobile veterinary startup that raised $40M in 2022 and recently merged with The Vets. Today, she’s revolutionizing bilingual education for children with MyPhoenyx, an AI-powered smart toy designed to make language learning fun, engaging, and screen-free.In this episode, we talk about:Carolina’s first exposure to learning English as a childGraduating from her MBA program and wearing multiple hats at a startupBalancing hardware, software and AI as she built her first prototype using Raspberry PiCarolina Goncebat LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/carolinagoncebat/MyPhoenyx: https://www.myphoenyx.com/Enjoy the episode!If you love this episode, please share and review the podcast! It will help more immigrant and international founders find these content.You can find us here: https://linktr.ee/foreignfounders

Feedback on the episode? https://forms.gle/Nn7Cyk5rPsfjm5399Hong Kong is one of the commercial and finance capitals of the world. Strategically located in the South China Sea, Hong Kong boasts several advantages including hosting over 9,000 international and Chinese companies with more than half using the city as their regional headquarters and offices. The city hosts a variety of advantages including their highly skilled workforce, world-class infrastructure, and history of international trade.Hong Kong is known to have one of the world’s most efficient and advanced banking systems including Asia’s third largest and the world’s sixth largest stock exchange by market capitalization. We’re delighted to have our guest, Ranjit Unnithan, the Head of Investment Promotion for Invest Hong Kong to share the opportunities available in Hong Kong.

Want to integrate Web3 into your product? Work with MetaKeepWith stints building products at Microsoft, Twitter, and Meta, Naga Samineni knows a thing or two about serving millions and billions of customers. Naga is taking all the knowledge of how to scale high impact global products, and bringing that to Web3 and the next generation of web infrastructure as co-founder of MetaKeep.In this episode, we talk about:Finding opportunities even when resources were scarceDemand to his manager to get exposure and “being in the front seat” in exchange hard workSeeing flaws at a massive scale while building for technology giants that led to founding MetaKeepWhy Blockchain is a powerful solution to legacy systemsEnjoy the episode!If you love this episode, please share and review the podcast! It will help more immigrant and international founders find these content.You can find us here: https://linktr.ee/foreignfounders

Try Authentic Loose Leaf Taiwanese TeaFounded in 2019 by Shanghai-born, NYC-based millennial entrepreneur Maggie (Ranmu) Xue, Us Two Tea is a premium farm-to-cup purveyor of Taiwanese tea. After noticing a lack of widely known and distributed Asian-owned tea brands in the United States, Xue founded Us Two Tea with a clear mission to make Asian tea culture—and Asian culture at large—more accessible to discerning millennial consumers and tea lovers at large. Sourced from family-owned farms in Taiwan, Us Two Tea's Black, Baozhong, Oolong, and Jasmine teas offer the quality of the time-honored Chinese "kung fu" tea ceremony in under three minutes. All teas are cut as loose-leaf teas, then packaged in premium, sustainable 100% corn fiber tea sachets which can be conveniently brewed up to three times. Us Two Tea has been featured in Forbes, Bon Appetit, Bloomberg, Eater, and more.In this episode, we talk about:Never having the desire to start a business watching her motherCareer shift from advertising and graphic design to being a CPG founderWhy most tea brands at stores are American, British or Japanese brandsUs Two Tea Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/ustwotea/Us Two Tea Website: https://www.ustwotea.com/Enjoy the episode!If you love this episode, please share and review the podcast! It will help more immigrant and international founders find these content.You can find us here: https://linktr.ee/foreignfounders

Get Unstuck with your class workSidhant Bendre is the Co-founder of Quizard AI, a Neo VC-backed consumer AI startup that has built a portfolio of products for students and professionals. Since launching out of a college dorm room in 2023, Quizard AI's suite of products has rapidly grown to serve over 4M users globally, generating more than $6 million ARR, and achieving profitability within its first year of operations.His story growing the company and the product is one of the fastest we’ve heard on Foreign Founders, so if you’re on the consumer AI wave this is an episode you don’t want to miss!In this episode, we talk about:Sid’s journey to the USThe big problems he wants to solve with AIStarting Quizard AI and growing it to 4 million users globally with viral videos and a lot of growth experimentsBeing profitable, launching a second successful productFind Sid Bendre on X: https://x.com/SidBendreQuizard AI iOS: https://apps.apple.com/us/app/quizard-ai-homework-helper/id1667996582Quizard AI Android: https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.aihomework&hl=en_US&pli=1 Unstuck: https://unstuckstudy.com/Enjoy the episode!If you love this episode, please share and review the podcast! It will help more immigrant and international founders find these content.You can find us here: https://linktr.ee/foreignfounders

Welcome to Foreign Founders.We're creating slightly different programming where we highlight innovation ecosystems around the world, the first is with Yokohama, Japan.Yokohama is the second largest city in Japan, and only 45 minutes from Tokyo, and home to many large Japanese companies, and many startups. Yokohama has historically been ahead of their time, as they were the first port city to open up influence to foreigners, and today they are focused on becoming an innovation hub for many businesses including climate tech and mobility companies.