Durana Elmi knows how to build a business. Before Cymbiotika, she built and exited four companies. She then took a wellness brand with one employee, one product, and almost no infrastructure and helped scale it into a $150 million business alongside her husband Shahab.

In this episode of Aspire, Emma sits down with Durana to unpack the decisions behind that growth. They also get candid about money, marriage, and leadership. Durana shares why financial independence matters deeply to her, what 27 years of building alongside her husband has taught her about disagreement, and how her definition of success has changed from making money to owning her time.

You’ll learn:

• Why Cymbiotika bootstrapped for five years before taking outside capital
• What infrastructure needs to be in place when a business starts growing faster than you can keep up with
• The expensive lessons founders can learn from going into retail too quickly
• What a $25 million strategic raise brought beyond capital
• Why celebrity investors became a part of Cymbiotika’s growth strategy
• How to make decisions when data challenges your instincts

It's easier than ever to launch a beauty brand—and harder than ever to make it last. In this first-ever Aspire founders roundtable, Danessa Myricks (Danessa Myricks Beauty), Dianna Cohen (Crown Affair), and Amy Liu (Tower 28) get honest about what it actually takes to build and scale a brand people believe in.

These aren’t early ideas—they’re Sephora-scale businesses: Tower 28, launched in 2019, now with a reported $228 million valuation; Crown Affair, launched in 2020 and scaled from roughly 55 to 600 Sephora doors, with a dry shampoo that has ranked #1 in the category; and Danessa Myricks Beauty, a profitable-since-launch business that had already grown to roughly 500 SKUs before entering Sephora.

From getting into Sephora and staying there, to raising capital vs. bootstrapping, to building community you can't reverse-engineer—this is the real playbook for 2026.

In this episode, you’ll learn:

• What separates brands that last, and why launching is easy but sustaining is hard
• How to build community with soul, purpose, and mission
• The truth about retail and the operational and financial discipline it takes to scale in Sephora
• How to fund your vision, what outside money is really for, and why finding aligned investors is key
• How founders evolve with intention and decide what to control, when to delegate, and different ways to lead a brand through growth

There’s a lot of dopey financial advice out there. Jill Schlesinger is here to call it out, answer your questions, break down the financial news that actually matters, and help you manage your money without losing your mind. No jargon. No judgment. Just clear, actionable financial guidance about saving, investing, buying a home, managing your career, and deciding how to spend your hard-earned dollars. When it’s time to panic, Jill will tell you. When everyone else is panicking and you shouldn’t be, Jill will tell you that too. Your money. Your move. Let’s go.

Arthur C. Brooks believes we are living through an age of emptiness—a time when more people feel distracted, disconnected, and unsure of what will actually make their lives meaningful. In his latest book, The Meaning of Your Life, the Harvard professor and New York Times bestselling author examines why so many of the things we chase in pursuit of happiness can leave us feeling unsatisfied once we get them.

In this episode, Emma Grede sits down with Brooks to unpack what is driving our unhappiness and what science actually says about building a meaningful life. Brooks reveals the two questions he gives his Harvard students to diagnose whether they’re experiencing a meaning crisis, why our brains struggle in a world of constant comfort, and how to use social media without letting it drain you.

You’ll learn:

• Why achievement rarely satisfies us for as long as we expect
• What money can—and cannot—do for your happiness
• The five-year exercise that reveals whether your priorities match how you spend your time
• What to do in the first and last hour of the day to protect your attention
• The step most people skip that makes new practices stick
• How to pursue a big goal without becoming emotionally attached to the outcome
• The simple ritual to shift your baseline happiness by 15 percent in 12 weeks

Jennifer Garner is an award-winning actor, producer, longtime Save the Children ambassador, and co-founder of Once Upon a Farm, an organic children’s food brand. After rising to fame on Alias, she built a career spanning more than three decades before entering entrepreneurship at 45 and helping grow Once Upon a Farm into a $724 million publicly traded company.

Jennifer joins Emma to talk about the side of success people rarely see: losing years of her life when Alias made her famous, disappearing from friendships, and how the constant presence of paparazzi warped her confidence.

Jennifer shares:

• What Jennifer is only now realizing about approval and earning her place
• How years of rejection and several failed ideas prepared her for entrepreneurship
• What she’s learned about holding anger without burying it
• How to recognize the value you bring without conventional qualifications
• When fame and visibility can help a business, and where they cannot
• What it actually looks like to protect a company’s mission
• Why your biggest chapter doesn’t come with an age limit

In this solo episode, Emma shares how she thinks about money, from the lessons she learned growing up in East London to the principles she uses today. She gets into her personal financial priorities, why your earning power can matter more than your savings, how to negotiate from a position of strength, and why no woman should ever outsource the understanding of her own finances.

In this episode, you’ll learn:

• What your financial priorities should be in your 20s, 30s, 40s, and 50s
• Why your ability to earn can be more valuable than your savings early in your career
• How your beliefs about money can influence what you earn, ask for, and keep
• How to negotiate salary, equity, and other forms of compensation more effectively
• The difference between earning money, building wealth, and protecting what you’ve built
• Why investing early matters—and what can happen when you wait
• How to think about financial independence as freedom, security, and choice

Emma sits down with Krissy Cela, founder and creative director of Oner Active, for an honest conversation about building a bootstrapped business on track to generate close to $300 million this year. Before Oner, Krissy spent a decade building a fitness audience and business from a student laptop, long before either was considered a conventional career path. Today, she owns 50 percent of one of the fastest-growing brands in the category.

But what happens when your life asks you to become someone you don’t yet feel qualified to be, and people still look for reasons not to credit your success to you? This episode is about starting before you feel ready, letting go of the need to prove yourself, and growing into the leader your business requires.

In this episode, Krissy shares:

• Why feeling underqualified should not stop you from building something big
• How she turned an online audience into a loyal customer community
• The early legal and partnership mistakes that shapes how she operates today
• How people-pleasing weakened her leadership, and what changed since she stopped
• Why the ones who doubt you are rarely the ones who end up mattering

For more, subscribe to our weekly newsletter at emmagrede.com.

Erin and Sara Foster have spent more than 15 years working across television, fashion, media and investing. Today, they are behind the hit Netflix series Nobody Wants This, the fashion brand Favorite Daughter, a production company, a venture fund and a growing slate of projects—but their success did not arrive according to a master plan.

In this episode, they join Emma to unpack the failures, pivots and unlikely opportunities that eventually brought everything together. It is a conversation about staying in motion when the path is unclear, discovering your strengths later than expected, and refusing to treat someone else’s success as evidence that you are falling behind.

In this episode, Erin and Sara share:

• What nobody tells you about the years before anything works
• The power of saying yes before the path is clear
• How they built Favorite Daughter without being traditional “fashion girls”
• The different ways scarcity and abundance shape their relationship with money
• What Erin learned from seven years of IVF and 20 rounds of treatment
• Why it’s never too late to find your lane and how failure can redirect you toward the career you were meant for