392 episodes listed below
Impact business, without the gloss.
Disruptors for GOOD sits at the intersection of social enterprise, climate, fundraising, and practical technology. Its conversations and case studies favor founder journeys, operating models, and the messy tradeoffs behind building organizations with an impact mission.
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Disruptors for GOOD covers social enterprise through the lens of builders, operators, and case studies. The emphasis is concrete. Recent interviews look at donation infrastructure, aid distribution, nonprofit AI, environmental giving networks, and responsible approaches to hard industrial problems. The show is comfortable with mission language, but it spends most of its time on execution. Givebutter becomes a story about reducing friction in fundraising, improving transparency, and building tools that nonprofits can actually use. AidKit becomes a way to talk about how technical systems can help public-benefit work reach more people. Fast Forward opens a window into AI-assisted and AI-powered nonprofits, including how resource-constrained organizations use tools for operations, communications, grant work, and direct impact. The show also steps away from interviews for detailed business case studies. Grove Collaborative is presented as both an ambitious sustainability retailer and a cautionary story about growth, public-market pressure, missed environmental goals, and rebuilding. Tony's Chocolonely becomes a study in supply-chain transparency, farmer relationships, governance, and using ethics as a core product strategy rather than a marketing add-on. B Corp certification gets treated with similar practicality: useful signal, real process, real cost, and not automatically right for every company. Climate and nature are recurring concerns, from One Percent for the Planet to deep-sea mining and critical minerals. The pacing is direct and founder-friendly, often starting with career backstory before moving into the mechanics of the organization. It is not a glossy inspiration reel. It is more useful than that. The show is for listeners who want to understand how impact organizations are financed, structured, scaled, certified, questioned, and sometimes forced to revise their own promises. Its best moments sit where optimism meets operational detail.
Made for: For social entrepreneurs, nonprofit operators, impact investors, sustainability professionals, and business-minded listeners who want practical detail behind mission-driven organizations. It also fits founders studying how values survive contact with scale.
What sets it apart: The show pairs founder interviews with structured business case studies, so listeners hear both personal origin stories and the operating realities behind impact brands. It is especially strong on nonprofit tech, certification, climate, fundraising infrastructure, and the tension between mission and growth.
Disruptors for GOOD is a podcast that showcases global social entrepreneurship and social enterprises committed to ethical fashion, impact investing, climate mitigation, sustainable travel, and businesses generating positive global impact. Through in-depth interviews, Grant Trahant, the founder of Causeartist, engages with innovative and impactful startups and brands worldwide.
Short reviews from the PlayNext desk, based on the episodes we processed.
Kevin Barenblat separates AI that helps nonprofits work from AI used in the services they deliver.
Fast Forward co-founder Kevin Barenblat gives Grant a useful way to think about AI in nonprofits. In a survey of a couple hundred organizations, he separates AI assisted work from AI powered services. The first covers internal tasks such as grant applications and reports.
Regenerative business without the shortcut thinking.
Odd questions, followed patiently down to the incentives.
This episode profiles ten ocean conservation startups combating marine pollution.
Sanchali Pal shares her journey from a curious consumer to founding Commons, a carbon tracking app, inspired by the documentary Food Inc.
Samantha Rudolph shares the accidental inspiration behind Babyation, a modern breast pump company, sparked by a New York Times article and her husband's casual remark.
Grant Trahant interviews Brittany, CEO of AidKit, a public benefit corporation modernizing aid distribution with technical infrastructure.
On Disruptors for GOOD, David Gaines connects La Terza Coffee’s direct-trade sourcing with better economic outcomes for producers.
Max Friedman, CEO of GiveButter, explains how he, Ari Krasner, and Leron Cohen started the nonprofit technology company in a college dorm and grew it past $9 billion in donations.
An interview with Oliver from Impossible Metals about their innovative approach to responsible deep-sea mining using robotics and avoiding traditional dredging methods.
This case study examines Grove Collaborative's journey from a mission-driven startup to a publicly traded company, its challenges, and its efforts to rebuild without abandoning its core mission.
This episode explains what B Corp certification is, its costs, and how to decide if it's worth it for your business.
Tony's Chocolonely grew from Toon van der Koeken's 2005 journalism project into a chocolate company reporting approximately $220 million in 2022 revenue.
Brittany, CEO of AidKit, explains how the public benefit corporation builds infrastructure for emergency relief, cash assistance, and public-benefit delivery.
Kate Williams, CEO of 1% for the Planet, explains how the network connects businesses giving 1% of revenue with vetted environmental nonprofits.
Kevin Barenblat, co-founder of Fast Forward, explains how the nonprofit accelerator has supported more than 100 organizations over 12 years, including AI-focused groups working in health, climate, education, and economic mobility.
Randy Frisch, co-founder and CEO of Trusty, describes an app that uses Google Gemini to identify items from a photo with "over 90% accuracy" so users can assign them to heirs with a video explaining why.
Grant from Disruptors for Good introduces a System Catalyst episode where English Saul interviews One Acre Fund leaders about building trust with governments and communities to support smallholder farmers in Africa.