In this episode of Breaking Precedent, host Leah Solivan dives deep into the life-altering journey of Sarah Hoover, author of 'The Motherload.' Sarah discusses how her rage and postpartum depression propelled her to write a raw and honest memoir that challenges societal norms about motherhood. Leah and Sarah unpack topics such as postpartum trauma, the inadequacies of the medical system, and the unique challenges faced by working mothers. Sarah’s story doesn’t just break precedent, it dismantles the silence around maternal mental health and invites us to question the rigid norms we've long accepted.

Guest Bio and Links:

Sarah Hoover is an art historian, writer, and former director at Gagosian Gallery whose work centers around the cultural intersections of womanhood, art, and maternal identity. Her debut book The Mother Load dismantles the myths of motherhood through raw honesty and wit. She lives with her husband and two kids in Manhattan.

Listeners can learn more about Sarah Hoover on her website, and on IG @sarahhoov

Sarah’s book - The Motherload: Episodes from the Brink of Motherhood

Show Notes:

• (0:00) Intro
• (2:00) Leah introduces guest, Sarah Hoover to Breaking Precedent
• (2:30) Icebreaker - child yelp reviews
• (5:00) Sarah’s roots - ballet, art, and indiana
• (7:30) Connecting over ballet
• (13:00) “ I have a very standard birth, but I found it violating and scary and terrifying, and it left me really broken. When my son was born after 19 hours of labor, I felt so assaulted by what I had been through in that delivery room.”
• (15:00) Turning rage into purose
• (20:00) Cultural conditioning and the female burden
• (24:30) Failures of modern medicine and the edinburgh scale
• (31:30) Sarah’s acknowledged the need to seek help
• (32:00) Another layer of stress - entrusting a nanny to help parent
• (33:00) Medical history of maternal care
• (35:30) Trauma-informed care - what needs to change
• (39:00) AI medical care becoming preferred over human medical care?
• (40:00) Leah shares her surrogacy experience and seeing birth from the other side
• (43:00) What writing has taught Sarah
• (50:45) Question:  What's one piece of parenting advice you think is bullshit?
• (53:00) Breaking precedents - you can’t have it all (at once)

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Leah Solivan is the host of Breaking Precedent, a podcast that explores the stories of innovators who are pushing societal boundaries and setting new precedents in their fields. Leah is General Partner at Fuel Capital, where she invests in early-stage companies across consumer technology, hardware, education, marketplaces, and retail. Leah has 15 years of experience building and creating technology products that have reached millions of people around the globe. She started her career at IBM as an engineer in the software group, working on Lotus Notes and Domino. In 2008, Leah founded TaskRabbit, the leading on-demand service marketplace in the world.

Connect with Leah:

Website: breakingprecedent.com/

Instagram: @labunleashed

X: @labunleashed

In this episode of Breaking Precedent, host Leah Solivan sits down with Chris Redlitz and Beverly Parenti, co-founders of The Last Mile, a groundbreaking prison education program that’s transforming lives behind bars through coding, entrepreneurship, and purpose. From venture capital success stories in Silicon Valley to walking the yards of San Quentin and Indiana State Prisons, Chris and Beverly share their radical journey into social innovation. They explore how tech education is breaking generational cycles of incarceration, lowering recidivism rates, and redefining second chances. Chris and Beverly share some deeply moving stories of transformation, including a woman who declined early release to finish the program, and a man who was once cellmates with his father.

Guest Bio and Links:

Chris Redlitz is a venture capitalist and former endurance athlete who co-founded The Last Mile after a pivotal visit to San Quentin prison. With a background in growing companies like Reebok and launching digital ventures, he now channels his entrepreneurial experience into transforming prison education.

Beverly Parenti is a veteran tech entrepreneur and innovator who co-founded The Last Mile to empower incarcerated individuals, particularly women, with marketable skills. As the first-generation daughter of Holocaust survivors, Beverly's life has been profoundly shaped by her father's experiences during World War II. Her father's story of survival became a guiding light in her life, instilling in her the values of resourcefulness, resilience, and relentless perseverance.

Learn more about The Last Mile at their website

Connect with Chris Redlitz on LinkedIn @ChrisRedlitz, and on X @ChrisRedlitz

Connect with Beverly Parenti on LinkedIn @BeverlyParenti and on X @thebev

Show Notes:

• (0:00) Intro
• (1:45) Leah introduces guests, Chris and Beverly to Breaking Precident
• (2:10) Icebreaker - moments that changed everything
• (4:30) Beverly's journey - from retail to PayPal
• (7:00) Chris’s journey from sailing to Silicon Valley
• (10:00) The birth of The Last Mile
• (15:00)  ”What my father taught me was to be resourceful, to be resilient and relentless. and to this day, those three Rs are not only part of my mo, but also things that I teach others.” - Beverly Parenti
• (21:30) First steps - building trust in San Quentin
• (26:00) The business case for prison reform
• (28:00) Impact and success - reducing recidivism
• (31:30) Expansion and new programs
• (35:00) Culture shift - from infractions to aspirations
• (38:00) Rigorous application process
• (43:00) Stories of transformation - Billie and Darnell
• (44:30) Generational change through scholarships
• (46:30) Scaling and adapting the program nationwide
• (52:00) Social enterprises and equity for graduates
• (56:00) What they’ve unlearned
• (1:00:00) Reflections and tuture goals

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Leah Solivan is the host of Breaking Precedent, a podcast that explores the stories of innovators who are pushing societal boundaries and setting new precedents in their fields. Leah is General Partner at Fuel Capital, where she invests in early-stage companies across consumer technology, hardware, education, marketplaces, and retail. Leah has 15 years of experience building and creating technology products that have reached millions of people around the globe. She started her career at IBM as an engineer in the software group, working on Lotus Notes and Domino. In 2008, Leah founded TaskRabbit, the leading on-demand service marketplace in the world.

Connect with Leah:

Website: breakingprecedent.com/

Instagram: @labunleashed

X: @labunleashed

In this episode of Breaking Precedent, host Leah Solivan sits down with Matteo Franceschetti, the visionary founder and CEO of Eight Sleep, to explore how sleep is becoming the most critical, and most overlooked dimension of human performance. From growing up in an Italian town to revolutionizing sleep technology in Silicon Valley, Matteo shares a remarkable journey of grit, ambition, and innovation. He opens up about the transformation from competitive athlete to tech entrepreneur, and why he believes the future of sleep lies in compression, personalization, and AI-driven health scans. The two dive into topics like sleep fitness, temperature regulation, global expansion, and even how sleep training parallels child development.

Guest Bio and Links:

Matteo Franceschetti is the Co-Founder and CEO of Eight Sleep, the sleep fitness company.Eight Sleep developed a proprietary technology which is redesigning sleep by developing cutting-edge AI and machine learning models to track bio signals during the night and optimizing body recovery and rest while asleep. The end goal of the Pod is to compress sleep and scan your body while asleep to monitor your health. Eight Sleep is currently used by pro athletes and top performers across multiple industries and was recognized as one of TIME’s “Best Inventions” in 2018 and 2019, was named one of Fast Company’s “Most Innovative Companies” in 2018, and has raised over $150M in funding from leading investors, including Founders Fund, Softbank, Khosla Ventures, Y Combinator, Valor Equity Partners, General Catalyst, Naval Ravikant, and Patrick Collison.

Discover your perfect sleep set up - Take Quiz

Connect with Matteo Franceschetti on X @m_franceschetti

Show Notes:

• (0:00) Intro
• (1:30) Leah introduces guest, Co-Founder and CEO of Eight Sleep, Matteo Franceschetti
• (2:00) Q: If you could sleep anywhere in the world, where would it be?
• (3:00) Matteo’s early life and career as lawyer
• (9:00) The Birth of Eight Sleep
• (10:30) Innovations in sleep technology
• (13:30) Redefining sleep as performance
• (16:30) Full-body scanning - the future of preventative health
• (19:00) Contrasts between italian and Silicon Valley cultures
• (26:00) The discipline of survival in hardware
• (30:00) Jet lag strategies and biohacking sleep
• (33:30) Early challenges in manufacturing
• (37:00) Sleep’s role in the health tech movement
• (40:00) Eight sleep's operating principles and startup discipline
• (40:30) “ I always push the team to think in terms of hours.”
• (42:30) Closing thoughts

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Leah Solivan is the host of Breaking Precedent, a podcast that explores the stories of innovators who are pushing societal boundaries and setting new precedents in their fields. Leah is General Partner at Fuel Capital, where she invests in early-stage companies across consumer technology, hardware, education, marketplaces, and retail. Leah has 15 years of experience building and creating technology products that have reached millions of people around the globe. She started her career at IBM as an engineer in the software group, working on Lotus Notes and Domino. In 2008, Leah founded TaskRabbit, the leading on-demand service marketplace in the world.

Connect with Leah:

Website: breakingprecedent.com/

Instagram: @labunleashed

X: @labunleashed

In this episode of Breaking Precedent, host Leah Solivan dives deep with Founder of Trulia, Pete Flint. Pete opens up about his early days studying physics at Oxford and how his curiosity eventually led him into the fast-paced world of startups. He talks about his experience at lastminute.com, one of the UK’s hottest tech companies at the time, and what it was like navigating through the chaos of the dot-com crash and the aftermath of 9/11. After moving to Silicon Valley to attend Stanford, Pete shares the story behind the lightbulb moment that sparked Trulia—and how he broke into one of the most tightly regulated industries in the U.S. Now a partner at NFX, Pete reflects on what he's seeing in the next wave of startups, especially around AI, and how the rules of building and scaling companies are changing in real time.

Guest Bio and Links:

Pete Flint is a serial entrepreneur and investor who co-founded Trulia, steering the company through its IPO and a multi-billion-dollar merger with Zillow. Today, he's a General Partner at NFX, investing in early-stage companies that leverage network effects and cutting-edge technologies.

Listeners can learn more about Pete Flint at NFX, and on LinkedIn @PeteFlint

Trulia

Show Notes:

• (0:00) Intro
• (2:00) Leah introduces guest and founder of Trulia, Pete Flint
• (2:30) Pete gives a brief background of himself
• (5:00) Pete's childhood and early influences
• (9:30) How studying physics shaped Pete's thinking
• (12:00) Internships, London startups, and lastminute.com
• (17:30) Dot-com crash lessons
• (20:30) Transition to Silicon Valley and Stanford
• (24:40) The birth of Trulia
• (26:30) Launching during a market collapse
• (38:00) The role of technology in disrupting industries
• (42:00) The Zillow merger
• (44:00) Becoming an Investor
• (47:30) The future of startups and venture capital

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Leah Solivan is the host of Breaking Precedent, a podcast that explores the stories of innovators who are pushing societal boundaries and setting new precedents in their fields. Leah is General Partner at Fuel Capital, where she invests in early-stage companies across consumer technology, hardware, education, marketplaces, and retail. Leah has 15 years of experience building and creating technology products that have reached millions of people around the globe. She started her career at IBM as an engineer in the software group, working on Lotus Notes and Domino. In 2008, Leah founded TaskRabbit, the leading on-demand service marketplace in the world.

Connect with Leah:

Website: breakingprecedent.com/

Instagram: @labunleashed

X: @labunleashed

In this episode of Breaking Precedent, host Leah Solivan dives deep with Dr. Patrick Brown, the founder of Impossible Foods, who left a celebrated career in science to take on one of the most urgent issues of our time - animal agriculture. Together, they discuss how a plant-based alternative could dismantle an outdated, destructive food system and catalyze planetary restoration. Brown shares the origin story behind Impossible Foods, recounting his bold pivot from Stanford professor to food-tech pioneer. He unpacks the global environmental costs of livestock farming and o

Guest Bio and Links:

Patrick Brown is a biochemist, former Stanford professor, and founder of Impossible Foods, a company revolutionizing the way meat is made by eliminating animals from the equation. Through science, sustainability, and purpose-driven entrepreneurship, he is working to replace the global animal agriculture system by 2035.

Listeners can learn more about Patrick Brown on his website, on LinkedIn @PatrickBrown, and on Stanford Profiles

Resources:

Impossible Foods Origins

Show Notes:

• (0:00) Intro
• (2:30) Leah introduces guest and founder of Impossible Foods, Patrick Brown
• (3:30) How Patrick challenged the status quo
• (4:30) ”Impossible Foods has been called a game changer, a disruptor, it's even been called a threat by the traditional meat industry.”
• (7:30) Early life and growing up with a father in the CIA
• (12:30) Patricks early career life
• (19:30) Patrick takes a sabbatical that sparked a revolution
• (24:00) ”The basic problem is not that people love meat. It's that we're using the wrong technology to produce it.”
• (26:30) Reversing climate damage through food system reform
• (32:30) Mission over market - a scientist's radical path
• (37:00) Launching a meat revolution - Impossible Foods
• (39:00) Winning over chefs - Dave Chang and strategic launch
• (44:30) Declining Google’s buyout
• (45:30) Barriers to scale - cost, regulation, and disinformation
• (51:30) The 2035 vision - what it will take to succeed
• (53:00) Final thoughts

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Leah Solivan is the host of Breaking Precedent, a podcast that explores the stories of innovators who are pushing societal boundaries and setting new precedents in their fields. Leah is General Partner at Fuel Capital, where she invests in early-stage companies across consumer technology, hardware, education, marketplaces, and retail. Leah has 15 years of experience building and creating technology products that have reached millions of people around the globe. She started her career at IBM as an engineer in the software group, working on Lotus Notes and Domino. In 2008, Leah founded TaskRabbit, the leading on-demand service marketplace in the world.

Connect with Leah:

Website: breakingprecedent.com/

Instagram: @labunleashed

X: @labunleashed

In this episode of Breaking Precedent, host Leah Solivan is joined by Selina Tobaccowala, a pioneering tech entrepreneur whose journey began with co-founding Evite and scaling SurveyMonkey to new heights. Selina shares how her childhood fascination with computers, combined with an insatiable drive for problem-solving, led her to break boundaries in Silicon Valley. From navigating the dot-com bubble to her latest venture, HomeBoost, she reveals the principles that have guided her success, including her father’s three essential questions for career decisions. Leah and Selina explore the intersection of technology and impact, the challenges of raising venture capital as a female founder, and how AI is transforming residential energy efficiency.

Guest Bio and Links:

Selina Tobaccowala is a tech entrepreneur and innovator who co-founded Evite, served as President and CTO of SurveyMonkey, and is now revolutionizing home energy efficiency with her latest company, HomeBoost. Selina has a deep passion for using technology to solve real-world problems and she has built and led companies that have transformed industries.

Listeners can connect with Selina Tobaccowala on her IG @sootle

HomeBoost

SurveyMonkey

Evite

Show Notes:

• (0:00) Intro
• (0:00) Leah introduces guest and entrepreneur, Selina Tobaccowala
• (4:30) “ I think it's like different between how you might perceive yourself versus how others might perceive you.”
• (6:00) Selina’s early life and childhood inspirations
• (7:30) Discovering computer science
• (9:00) The accidental basketball captain
• (11:45) Choosing Stanford for college
• (16:00) The birth of Evite
• (22:00) Navigating rapid growth, venture capital, and the reality of selling a startup
• (28:30) Evite's unconventional sale
• (30:30) Joining SurveyMonkey
• (35:00) Lessons from SurveyMonkey
• (37:30)  ”There's always this culture act like an owner, but if people don't feel empowered to take that risk, you can't act like an owner.  And so you have to balance those things together.”
• (39:45) New project: HomeBoost
• (46:00) The simplicity and future of home energy
• (51:00) Advice for non-traditional founders

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Leah Solivan is the host of Breaking Precedent, a podcast that explores the stories of innovators who are pushing societal boundaries and setting new precedents in their fields. Leah is General Partner at Fuel Capital, where she invests in early-stage companies across consumer technology, hardware, education, marketplaces, and retail. Leah has 15 years of experience building and creating technology products that have reached millions of people around the globe. She started her career at IBM as an engineer in the software group, working on Lotus Notes and Domino. In 2008, Leah founded TaskRabbit, the leading on-demand service marketplace in the world.

Connect with Leah:

Website: breakingprecedent.com/

Instagram: @labunleashed

X: @labunleashed

In this episode of Breaking Precedent, host Leah Solivan is joined by Bismarck Lepe, a serial entrepreneur who has shattered conventions at every stage of his life. From growing up as the child of Mexican migrant workers to becoming a Stanford graduate and an early Google employee, Bismarck shares his incredible journey of resilience, innovation, and leadership. He discusses his early entrepreneurial ventures, the lessons learned at Google, and the groundbreaking work of his companies, including Ooyala, WiseLine, and MiSalud. With profound expertise in business, technology, and seizing opportunity, Bismarck provides an inspiring perspective on how vision and perseverance can transform industries.

Guest Bio and Links:

Bismarck Lepe, founder and Executive Chairman of Wizeline, is a seasoned Silicon Valley entrepreneur and investor. As an early Google employee, he left to start Ooyala, an online video platform that sold for $400 million to Telstra in 2014. Passionate about economic growth and education, he has helped transform Guadalajara into a thriving tech hub through Wizeline Academy and StartupGDL, generating over 1,500 jobs and attracting significant investment. Under his leadership, Wizeline expanded to seven countries, with talent spanning 15 nations. For over a decade, he has been a key force in fostering Mexico-Silicon Valley collaboration in technology and entrepreneurship.

Listeners can learn more about Bismarck Lepe on LinkedIn @BismarckLepe

WizeLine in the Press

MiSalud Health - Designed For Spanish-First Teams on the Move

Show Notes:

• (0:00) Intro
• (2:45) Leah introduces Bismarck Lepe,
• (4:00) Bismarck’s early life and background
• (8:30) Educational journey and parental sacrifices
• (10:15) Starting roots in Southern California and Mexico
• (14:00) Learning English through Sesame Street & Mr. Rogers
• (17:00) Cultural identity & navigating assimilation
• (23:30) Path to Stanford University and a life-changing conversation
• (30:30) Joining Google and the Acquisition of YouTube
• (35:00) Founding Ooyala
• (35:30) Early failures and lessons learned
• (41:00) The 2008 financial crisis and its impact
• (46:00) WizeLine - building tech talent in Mexico
• (51:15) ”Talent is evenly distributed around the world. It's just opportunity and experience that isn't.”
• (53:30) Founding MiSalud - revolutionizing healthcare access
• (1:04:30) Changing perceptions of Mexico & Latinx talent
• (1:06:30) ”Here we were, as a brand, we were a vehicle to change the perception of Mexicans. People weren't talking about soccer players or tequila or mariachi, they were talking about intellectual property that Mexicans were building.”
  
  

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Leah Solivan is the host of Breaking Precedent, a podcast that explores the stories of innovators who are pushing societal boundaries and setting new precedents in their fields. Leah is General Partner at Fuel Capital, where she invests in early-stage companies across consumer technology, hardware, education, marketplaces, and retail. Leah has 15 years of experience building and creating technology products that have reached millions of people around the globe. She started her career at IBM as an engineer in the software group, working on Lotus Notes and Domino. In 2008, Leah founded TaskRabbit, the leading on-demand service marketplace in the world.

Connect with Leah:

Website: breakingprecedent.com/

Instagram: @labunleashed

X: @labunleashed

In this episode of Breaking Precedent, host Leah Solivan sits down with Jes Wolfe, CEO of Rebel Girls, adventurer, and precedent-breaker. Jes shares her experience summiting Mount Aconcagua, one of the tallest mountains in the world, and how she found the strength to keep going after facing an unexpected tragedy on the climb. Jes then discusses the birth of Rebel Girls, and the importance of sharing real-life stories of strong women and how early biases in media, education, and parenting contribute to the confidence gap in girls. Jes shares Rebel Girls’ ambitious mission to reach 100 million girls, the launch of Rebel Girls Sport, an ESPN-style platform designed to engage young fans in women’s sports, and the one major societal norm she would change if she could.

Guest Bio and Links:

Jes Wolfe is the CEO of Rebel Girls, a global storytelling company on a mission to inspire and empower young girls. A lifelong adventurer and leader, Jes has a background in finance, international business, and entrepreneurship. Before joining Rebel Girls, she held roles at Morgan Stanley, the World Bank, and various startups, bringing a wealth of experience in scaling purpose-driven companies. An avid mountaineer, Jes recently summited Mount Aconcagua, demonstrating her philosophy of resilience and ambition. Under her leadership, Rebel Girls continues to break barriers, reaching millions of girls worldwide with stories of fearless women and redefining representation in children’s media.

Listeners can learn more about Jes Wolfe on her website, and on LinkedIn @JesWolfe

Show Notes:

• (0:00) Intro
• (2:45) Leah introduces Jes Wolfe, adventurer, dog mom, and CEO of Rebel Girls
• (5:00) Climbing Mount Aconcagua
• (7:15) Jes shares a personal tragedy while on Mount Aconcagua
• (8:30)  ”It started out as a journey for me and it ended up as a thing for him.”
• (10:00) The physical and mental challenges of summiting
• (13:55)  ”To be successful to do this is you have to break everything down into the smallest parts.”
• (15:00) A little background into Jes’s adventurous childhood
• (18:00) From finance to finding purpose
• (26:00) The next chapter - Rebel Girls
• (27:30) Empowering girls through storytelling
• (31:00) How Rebel Girls is rewriting history and inspiring a new generation
• (35:00) Norms that still need to be challenged
• (37:30)  ”94 percent of parents say that their kids were inspired because of our storytelling and 86 percent said that their daughter's confidence increased because of our storytelling. And to me, that's the ultimate measure of success is, are we achieving what we're setting out to do, which is to help raise a generation of girls that are going to go forth and be awesome and believe in themselves.”
• (40:30) Expanding Rebel Girls' impact
• (42:30) Future goals and inspirations
• (46:00) Rebel Girls Sport
• (51:00) Closing thoughts

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Leah Solivan is the host of Breaking Precedent, a podcast that explores the stories of innovators who are pushing societal boundaries and setting new precedents in their fields. Leah is General Partner at Fuel Capital, where she invests in early-stage companies across consumer technology, hardware, education, marketplaces, and retail. Leah has 15 years of experience building and creating technology products that have reached millions of people around the globe. She started her career at IBM as an engineer in the software group, working on Lotus Notes and Domino. In 2008, Leah founded TaskRabbit, the leading on-demand service marketplace in the world.

Connect with Leah:

Website: breakingprecedent.com/

Instagram: @labunleashed

X: @labunleashed