Episodes

Why do we accept broken systems as normal? On Breaking Precedent, Leah Solivan talks with Heather Fernandez, co-founder of Solv, about a career spent questioning the systems everyone else accepts. It started in elementary school, when she asked the monsignor at her church why she couldn't be an altar girl. The daughter of immigrant parents, Heather bought a one-way ticket to Washington, DC after graduating from Cal and landed her first job as deputy press secretary for a freshman congressman fro...

What happens when the kid who scored his first basket on his own team becomes an NBA champion, and then has to start over again? On Breaking Precedent, Leah Solivan talks with former Golden State Warrior Festus Ezeli about a journey nobody could have scripted. Festus grew up in Benin City, Nigeria, finished high school at 14, and moved alone to Yuba City, California, to live with his uncle and chase a dream of becoming a doctor. Strangers kept asking the 6'4" teenager if he played basketball. He...

What does it take to quit your job, skip venture capital entirely, and build two seven-figure businesses on relationships alone? On Breaking Precedent, Leah Solivan talks with Stephanie Cartin, co-founder of Socialfly and Entreprenista, about the day she and co-founder Courtney quit their jobs, May 4, 2012, after ten months of building a social media agency on nights and weekends. Stephanie traces the thread from performing as a child actress in the Washington, DC area, to a Disney Vacation Club...

How do you keep going when your biggest success comes with losing almost everything along the way? On Breaking Precedent, Kass and Mike Lazerow discuss their book Shoveling Shit: A Love Story and what happens when entrepreneurship and marriage collide, especially while raising three kids. They recount their early entrepreneurial roots, meeting in the mid-’90s internet era, and building Golf.com. They sold it to Chipshot during their honeymoon period, lost access to everything when Chipshot ran ...

What happens when a $648 billion market goes uncounted, and who decided it wasn't worth measuring in the first place? This episode follows Erin Harkless Moore from the breakfast table in San Antonio, through Goldman Sachs, Cambridge Associates, and Princeton's endowment, to Pivotal, the organization founded by Melinda French Gates, where she builds an investment program aimed at the people and markets capital has overlooked. It's a conversation about who gets funded, who gets to decide, and wha...

What happens when you turn down an early job at Netflix, back when it was still just an idea about mailing DVDs, and then spend the next decade proving that work doesn't have to happen in an office? This episode follows Gary Swart from running a parts middleman business in New Jersey to leading oDesk for nearly ten years, the company that later merged with Elance to become Upwork. He explains the criteria he now uses for big career decisions, why weighing the people differently might have sent ...

What does it take to keep building a workwear brand for a decade after a top VC tells you, in writing, that utility doesn't belong in women's clothing? This episode traces Sali Christeson's path from a childhood split between a South Carolina farm and her father's rug shop in Istanbul's bazaars to building Argent, the workwear brand she's run for a decade, showing how a VC's rejection, a crisis handled in real time, and a refusal to accept easy either/or choices became the foundation for a comp...

What did Anne Wojcicki see in healthcare that made her leave Wall Street and risk challenging an entire industry to put power back in patients’ hands? Welcome to the brand new season of Breaking Precedent where Leah Solivan interviews 23andMe founder Anne Wojcicki about breaking medical “gatekeeping” by giving consumers direct access to their genetic information and using that data to drive research and prevention. Solivan shares learning she did not carry BRCA2 while pregnant, and Wojcicki rec...

Season 3 of Breaking Precedent is here. This season, Leah sits down with founders, athletes, and builders who refused to accept the world as it was handed to them. From a card game that turns into hard business questions, to rewriting the script for life after sports, to reimagining what healthcare could look like if someone actually believed in you — these are conversations about challenging inherited beliefs, collecting skills, and taking your future into your own hands. Welcome to Season 3....

This summer, Breaking Precedent is revisiting conversations that feel just as resonant now as when they were first recorded. In this episode, Leah Solivan sits down with Aaron Holiday to explore what it means to challenge the systems and assumptions that determine who gets access to opportunity. Aaron is the co-founder and Managing Partner at 645 Ventures. He oversees the firm’s investing approach, strategy, investor relations, and governance. Since founding 645 Ventures in 2014, Aaron has work...

This special compilation of Breaking Precedent brings together origin stories from people who have each broken precedent in a different way. Across leadership, entrepreneurship, education, music, and social mobility, the episode explores how financial constraints, family sacrifices, limited access, and unfamiliar environments can shape the people who learn to challenge what came before them. Stacy Brown-Philpot reflects on stepping into leadership without initially seeking it and the lessons he...

What happens when healthcare innovation stops chasing disruption and starts earning trust? This summer, Breaking Precedent is revisiting conversations that feel just as resonant now as when they were first recorded. In this episode, Leah Solivan sits down with Halle Tecco to explore healthcare as one of the most complex, resistant, and consequential systems in American life. Halle Tecco is a founder, investor, educator, and system-level thinker who has spent her career seeing around corners in...

This special summer compilation episode of Breaking Precedent asks a different David and Goliath question: what does it take to change an industry when Goliath controls the rules? Across real estate, rooftop solar, healthcare, consumer products, beverages, and food, the episode traces what happens when founders challenge systems that were built to protect incumbents. Austin Allison describes the lawsuits, legal threats, and cease-and-desist letters that followed dotloop’s attempt to digitize re...

What if the parts of us we try hardest to hide are actually where our strongest leadership begins? This summer, Breaking Precedent is revisiting conversations that feel just as relevant now as when they were first recorded. In this episode, Bonobos co-founder, author, and Pie founder Andy Dunn joins Leah Solivan to talk about building something non-consensus, navigating identity, living with bipolar disorder, and finding meaning beyond achievement. Andy is best known for helping pioneer direct...

This special summer episode of Breaking Precedent asks the question success does not answer for you: now what? Across Olympic competition, company building, professional sports, venture-backed startups, and personal reinvention, the episode traces what happens after the medal, the acquisition, the stadium, or the thing you built no longer defines your day. Nastia Liukin reflects on standing on the Olympic podium and feeling the fear that can arrive inside a moment everyone expects to feel only ...

What happens when leadership becomes a way of creating opportunity for other people? This summer, Breaking Precedent is revisiting conversations that feel just as resonant now as when they were first recorded. In this episode, Leah Solivan sits down with Stacy Brown-Philpot to explore leadership, resilience, trust, and what it means to build systems that help more people participate in wealth creation. Stacy Brown-Philpot is a longtime operator, board leader, investor, and former CEO of TaskRa...

This special summer episode of Breaking Precedent brings together six investors who are each rewriting the assumptions behind who gets funded. Across venture capital, professional sports, and philanthropy, the conversation traces where the industry's oldest excuses fall apart, and what these investors built instead. Samara Mejia Hernandez talks about building Chingona Ventures around the fastest growing, least funded founder population in the country. Stacy Brown-Philpot explains how she and tw...

What happens when culture becomes a form of leadership? This summer, Breaking Precedent is revisiting conversations that feel just as resonant now as when they were first recorded. In this episode, Leah Solivan sits down with Derrick T. Jones, better known as D-Nice, to explore how music, creativity, and shared experience can become infrastructure for connection. D-Nice is a legendary DJ, photographer, producer, and cultural connector whose career spans the early days of hip-hop, reinvention t...

This special summer compilation of Breaking Precedent brings together artists and culture makers who have each broken precedent in a different way. Across Broadway, music, food, visual art, ballet, and memoir, the episode explores how artists sense cultural change before systems have language for it. Rachel Sussman talks about theater that asks hard questions. D-Nice reflects on Club Quarantine as a cultural lifeline. Christina Tosi explains how limitation can become the creative engine. Windy ...

What if the healthcare system is not simply broken, but producing exactly what it was designed to produce? This summer, Breaking Precedent is revisiting conversations that feel just as urgent now as when they were first recorded. In this episode, emergency physician and author Dr. Thomas Fisher joins Leah Solivan to examine what the ER reveals about American society, why caring clinicians can still become trapped inside harmful systems, and what it means to move upstream from treatment toward p...

During our summer break, we're revisiting a compilation of previously released episodes about a healthcare system that is at once the most advanced in the world and one of the most broken. Hear Halle Tecco on why healthcare can't absorb its own innovation, Dr. Thomas Fisher on a system that's working exactly as designed, Lynn Jurich on the research gap that overlooked women's bodies, Kevin Caldwell of Ossium Health on prevention at the cellular level, and Andy Dunn on why mental health is health...

What if the real value in a startup is not the code you write, but the learning you earn? Eric Ries, author of The Lean Startup and Incorruptible, joins Leah Solivan on Breaking Precedent to talk about the painful lessons behind the Lean Startup movement, why AI does not replace human learning, and how founders can build companies designed to stay mission-driven over time. Eric shares the IMVU story that shaped his thinking: after months of engineering work, the team realized they had built ar...

What if talent was never the real differentiator, but access was? Paige Hendrix Buckner, CEO of All Raise, joins Leah Solivan on Breaking Precedent for a conversation about who gets access to opportunity, who gets trusted with capital, and what it actually takes to change an entrenched system from the inside. Paige's path runs through education, public service, startups, venture capital, and now All Raise, where she is focused on increasing the power and influence of women and non-binary inves...

What does it take to chase an impossible dream for sixteen years without becoming someone who cannot let it go? Dr. Eiman Jahangir has spent his adult life inside two systems that rarely sit beside each other: medicine and spaceflight. A cardiologist, professor, and commercial astronaut, he applied to NASA five times across sixteen years, was rejected each time, and finally flew with Blue Origin in August 2024 when commercial space cracked the door open. His first book, A Heart for Space, is n...