Uploaded June 2026 | Updated September 2026, 2 weeks ago
This week I’m sitting down with a founder who has built at every scale from a unicorn to a startup and everything in between. Whatever level you’re at, she’s been there.
Julia Collins co-founded Zume, a food tech startup that reached a $2 billion valuation and raised hundreds of millions along the way. She was the first Black woman to co-found a unicorn. But what makes her truly remarkable isn’t the numbers. It’s what she did with everything that came after.
In this episode we get into what was actually happening behind the scenes. The raises. The board dynamics. The heartbreak. The exit. And the lessons that took her the longest to unlearn.
You’ll learn:
✨ What it really takes to raise hundreds of millions of dollars
✨ How she navigated a co-founder fallout and protected herself
✨ Why she believed the more she suffered the more successful she would be
✨ The financial habits she built long before she had any money
✨ What it means to make sustainability the obvious choice
Full Episode - youtu.be/W0P91q12hJI
This week I’m sitting down with a founder who has built at every scale from a unicorn to a startup and everything in between. Whatever level you’re at, she’s been there.
Julia Collins co-founded Zume, a food tech startup that reached a $2 billion valuation and raised hundreds of millions along the way. She was the first Black woman to co-found a unicorn. But what makes her truly remarkable isn’t the numbers. It’s what she did with everything that came after.
In this episode we get into what was actually happening behind the scenes. The raises. The board dynamics. The heartbreak. The exit. And the lessons that took her the longest to unlearn.
You’ll learn:
✨ What it really takes to raise hundreds of millions of dollars
✨ How she navigated a co-founder fallout and protected herself
✨ Why she believed the more she suffered the more successful she would be
✨ The financial habits she built long before she had any money
✨ What it means to make sustainability the obvious choice
Full Episode - youtu.be/W0P91q12hJI
