Samir Ibrahim is the co-founder and CEO of SunCulture. When he started the company, he thought he was solving a simple problem: How do you sell solar-powered pumps to help poor farmers irrigate their land? It turned out, he was working on something much bigger: How do you help poor farmers get richer, and create a giant new market from scratch?

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Nabiha Saklayen is the co-founder and CEO of Cellino. Nabiha’s problem is this: How can you make personalized stem cell therapies quickly and cheaply?

 Induced pluripotent stem cells, or IPSCs, have shown tremendous promise as treatments for illnesses like Parkinson’s, leukemia, and heart disease.

On today’s show, Nabiha explains why IPSC manufacturing is still mostly done by hand, how her background in physics and lasers led her into biology, and what it takes to try and build tiny, automated cell factories.

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Tim Bucher is a farmer, and the founder and CEO of Agtonomy. Tim's problem is this: How do you build an autonomous tractor that can work for specialty crops like grapes, olives, apples, and almonds?

On today’s show, Tim explains what makes certain farming processes so difficult to automate, and how autonomy may soon change how we eat.

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Mitch Lee is the co-founder and CEO of Arc Boats. Mitch's problem is this: How do you build competitively priced electric boats?

On today’s show, Mitch explains why water makes electrification so hard, the techno-economic puzzle of building giant battery packs, and how Arc’s high-end wake sport boat opened the door for a new generation of hybrid-electric tugboats.

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Nina Mohanty is the founder and CEO of Bloom Money. Nina’s problem is this: How do you build an app to help immigrants manage their money?

On today’s show, Nina talks about bringing a saving and lending practice into the 21st century, navigating regulators who’ve never seen anything like it, and what global traditions can teach us about the future of money.

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What's Your Problem? host Jacob Goldstein has a new show: Business History.

How did Hitler’s favorite car become synonymous with hippies? What got Thomas Edison tangled up with the electric chair? Did someone murder the guy who invented the movies? On Business History, Jacob and fellow former Planet Money host Robert Smith examine the surprising stories of businesses big and small and find out what you can learn from those who founded them.

In this episode: The inventor that transformed America and the world. Thomas Alva Edison registered over one thousand patents before he died in 1931—and we can thank him for advances in electric power, communications technology, music recording and even the movies. But his biggest breakthrough doesn't get nearly enough attention. In many ways, Edison invented modern inventing. Jacob and Robert they trace the life story of a scrappy young boy with bad hearing who almost singlehandedly invented R&D. This is the first of a three part series on Edison—if you want to hear the full series, ad-free, right now, join Pushkin+ on the Business History show page on Apple Podcasts or at pushkin.fm/plus.

Find Business History (00:10) on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, YouTube, or wherever you get podcasts.

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 Mike Blue is the CEO of HistoSonics. The company recently developed a device that uses ultrasound to destroy tumors.

On today’s show, Mike talks about how a garage-built prototype became an FDA-approved machine; changing the company’s story after a failed clinical trial; and why he loves being a salesman but hates most sales pitches.

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Chris Urmson is the co-founder and CEO of Aurora, a company trying to bring autonomous driving to commercial trucking.

Chris led a team at the 2004 DARPA challenge that launched the autonomous vehicle industry. Then he held a senior role at Google’s self-driving car project, which later became Waymo.

On the show today, he talks about the long arc of autonomous driving, why he left Google, and the future of autonomous trucking.

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