Unstoppable Entrepreneurs: Lori Rosenkopf on the Many Paths to Startup Success
Release Date: 06/01/2025
The Incredible, Edible… Pea? How Meala is Using Biotech to Render Eggs Obsolete
Business for Good Podcast
If you’ve ever checked the ingredients on a baked good, you know how ubiquitous eggs are. They bind, they lift, they emulsify, they hold moisture — they’re simply the structural engineers of cookies, cakes, and muffins everywhere. But they’re also volatile: prices spike, supply chains break, and for anyone with an egg allergy or who’s avoiding eggs for animal welfare or environmental reasons, eggs aren’t exactly a welcome ingredient to find on the ingredient deck. Enter Hadar Ekhoiz Razmovich, CEO and co-founder of , an Israeli startup that’s figured out how to make peas...
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From Oil Wells to Oak Trees: Ben Dell’s Half-Billion-Dollar Pivot to Carbon Offsetting
Business for Good Podcast
What if planting trees could be not just good for the planet, but also a profitable business? In this episode, I’m talking with Ben Dell, the founder and CEO of — a company that’s raised nearly $400 million, including $250 million of that in 2025, to turn farmland back into thriving native forests across the United States. And he’s already forging major carbon removal deals with the likes of Microsoft and Mercedes F1. Ben’s journey is a fascinating one: he began his career in oil and gas private equity, helping fossil-fuel companies optimize their operations. But during the...
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Ready for a Carpet Made of Human Hair? This Entrepreneur Turns Salon Waste into Textiles
Business for Good Podcast
What if one solution to fashion’s waste problem is literally growing on our own heads? Every day, salons around the world toss out millions of pounds of freshly cut human hair — a clean, protein-rich, renewable resource that mostly ends up in landfills or incinerators. But what if that so-called waste could become the next sustainable textile? My guest on this episode, Zsofia Kollar, is the founder and CEO of , a Netherlands-based startup turning salon hair waste into a high-performance fibre that behaves like wool — but with 43 times lower CO₂ emissions, 20 times less water use, and...
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From Fashion Model to Fission Mission: Isabelle Boemeke’s Nuclear-Powered Future
Business for Good Podcast
When you hear the word nuclear, does your mind flash to mushroom clouds, Chernobyl, or maybe the glowing three-eyed fish from The Simpsons? Well, what if nuclear electricity — far from being an environmental villain — is actually one of the safest, cleanest, and most land-efficient energy sources we have? It turns out that former fashion model Isabelle Boemeke is on a mission to change how we think about nuclear energy. When she and I met a few years ago, in Italy of all places, she was known by many simply as , her online persona that blends fashion, futurism, and fission to make nuclear...
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Fungi-Filled Diapers: How Plastic-Eating Fungi May Change Child-Rearing
Business for Good Podcast
If you’ve ever changed a diaper, you might’ve wondered what happens to it after it goes in the trash. The answer, unfortunately, is that it’ll sit in a landfill for hundreds of years—certainly longer than the baby who briefly wore it will live. In fact, every diaper you wore when you were a baby is still sitting around, at best in a landfill, or perhaps even in the ocean. And did you know the average American baby goes through 6,000 diapers before learning to use a toilet? But what if fungi could change that? In this episode, I sit down with serial entrepreneur Miki Agrawal, the...
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Raising Capital for Alt-Protein in the Midst of the Winter
Business for Good Podcast
Recently had me as a guest on his show, the to talk about ’s . When it came out, more than one Business for Good listener heard it and told me they thought it would make a good episode to release to our audience too, so this episode is simply the conversation Alex and I had for his podcast. If you’ve been following the alternative protein sector (and the broader biotech sector), you’ve likely seen the wave of challenges that fermentation, cultivated, and plant-based startups have faced over the past few years. As recent reporting confirms, ag and food tech investment is at a...
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Bottling the Sky: Aircapture’s Carbon Capture Breakthrough
Business for Good Podcast
When you think about climate change solutions, your mind might go to renewable energy, electric vehicles, or eating less meat. These are all of course important. But even if we stopped all emissions today, we’d still have too much CO2 in the atmosphere and would need to pull a lot of our emissions out of it. That’s the bold mission of , a California-based company pioneering modular direct air capture technology. On this episode, I speak with , Aircapture’s founder and CEO, about how his company is not only working to reduce atmospheric CO₂, but also profitably supplying it to...
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Inside Mighty Earth: Glenn Hurowitz on Transforming the Meat Industry
Business for Good Podcast
What if the biggest environmental culprits were hiding in plain sight—right on our dinner plates? While most environmental organizations train their sights on the energy sector, Mighty Earth has taken a bold, and often lonely, stand in confronting the meat industry’s massive role in climate change, deforestation, and biodiversity loss. In this episode, I sit down with Glenn Hurowitz, founder and CEO of , to unpack why the meat industry typically gets ignored by the environmental movement, and what he thinks needs to be done. Glenn has spent decades fighting for the planet, from...
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Turning Waste into Bioplastic Gold with Genecis CEO Luna Yu
Business for Good Podcast
It’s rare that we contemplate where all the plastic we throw out goes, but rest assured that nearly none of it is being recycled. Simply put, it’s usually cheaper to make new plastic than to recycle old plastic, even the plastic you put in the recycling bin. Because it takes plastic centuries to break down, this means for each one of us you could build a mountain of plastic from all the packaging we use over the course of our lives. But what if plastic didn’t have to take centuries to break down, and could actually biodegrade in a matter of days or weeks? That’s exactly the...
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Turning Plants into Plastic-Free Packaging: The Xampla Story
Business for Good Podcast
Plastic pollution is one of the defining environmental challenges of our time—microplastics are now found in our oceans, our soil, our drinking water, and even in our bloodstreams. But what if we could make high-performance materials that look, feel, and function like plastic—without being plastic at all? Enter . Born out of the University of Cambridge, Xampla is a materials science innovation company that’s developed a new class of plastic-free, fully biodegradable materials that offer a drop-in replacement for the most polluting types of plastic. Their flagship line, known as Morro™,...
info_outlineThis episode’s guest is someone who’s spent her career studying—and championing—entrepreneurs who don’t always fit the Silicon Valley mold.
Dr. Lori Rosenkopf is the Vice Dean of Entrepreneurship at the Wharton School and the author of the new book Unstoppable Entrepreneurs: 7 Paths for Unleashing Successful Startups and Creating Value through Innovation. In this short guide, Lori explores how success doesn’t have to mean dropping out of college to start a venture-backed unicorn in your garage. Instead, she highlights seven distinct paths that entrepreneurs can take to build impactful ventures, whether they’re bootstrapped, mission-driven, or even working within larger companies.
Drawing on her years of research and mentoring at one of the world’s top business schools, Lori introduces what she calls the “Six Rs” of entrepreneurial mindset—Reason, Relationships, Resilience, Resources, Results, and Recombination—as core principles that help explain why some founders succeed where others falter.
In this conversation, we talk about the entrepreneurs Lori profiled in her book—from disruptors and acquirers to accidental founders—and what their stories can teach us about resilience and innovation.
If you’ve ever thought “I’m not the typical entrepreneur,” perhaps Lori will convince you that maybe there’s no such thing.
Discussed in this episode
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Lori discusses the work of Spirovant Sciences and its CEO Dr. Joan Lau.
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Paul recommends reading Shoe Dog and Super Founders.
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Wharton offers curriculum in Entrepreneurship & Innovation for both undergraduates and MBAs.
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The Venture Lab is Penn’s home for student entrepreneurs.
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Some entrepreneurs rely on SBA loans rather than equity investments.
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The Hult Competition is a global competition that challenges university students to develop innovative social enterprises that address pressing global issues.
Get to know Lori Rosenkopf
Lori Rosenkopf is the Simon and Midge Palley Professor at the Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania. As Vice Dean for Entrepreneurship, she serves as Wharton’s faculty director for Venture Lab, Penn’s home for student entrepreneurs, and also their San Francisco campus. In a prior role as Vice Dean of Wharton’s Undergraduate Division, she introduced a new curriculum and developed experiential classwork in the tech sector. For over thirty years, Rosenkopf has taught entrepreneurship and management of technology to more than 20,000 high schoolers, undergraduates, MBAs, and executives, connecting these learners to many of the most entrepreneurial alumni at Wharton and Penn through treks, panels, and classes.
Rosenkopf received her PhD in Management of Organizations from Columbia University, her MS in Operations Research from Stanford University, and her BS in Operations Research and Industrial Engineering from Cornell University. She worked as a systems engineer at AT&T Bell Laboratories and Eastman Kodak between her degrees. Rosenkopf lives in Philadelphia with her partner, Allan, and their dog, Winston.