How Tara Keeney Built ‘Look Who I Found!’ One Walk At A Time

Tara Keeney, founder of "Look Who I Found!", creates 90-second entrepreneur interviews for platforms like Instagram Reels. Keeney launched her show to offer quick, engaging insights from extraordinary people and founders, contrasting with traditional long-form podcasts. Despite starting with minimal equipment and facing numerous rejections, her persistence and iterative approach led to rapid growth, attracting almost 200,000 followers and 15 million monthly views in less than a year. Her unique "walk-and-talk" format has drawn guests like Oprah Winfrey and Jay Shetty, demonstrating that a successful media company can be built by starting imperfectly. Keeney's story highlights the power of conviction and continuous learning in the creator economy.

Podcasting has never been bigger. An estimated 167 million Americans now consume podcasts monthly, an all-time high, according to Edison Research. What was once an audio-first medium is increasingly something we watch: video podcast consumption overtook audio-only consumption among weekly podcast consumers for the first time in 2025, according to Edison Research.

Some of the most prominent podcast hosts are signing nine-figure deals, celebrities are increasingly choosing podcasts over traditional interviews, and YouTube counts more than one billion monthly active viewers of podcast content.

But Tara Keeney, host and founder of Look Who I Found!, noticed something else: she rarely listened to an entire episode.

“I realized I was consuming some of the world’s biggest podcasts almost entirely through Reels and clips,” says Keeney. “I still wanted to learn, I just didn’t always want to listen for two hours.”

Inspired in part by Kareem Rahma’s Subway Takes, a show designed around short-form clips, Keeney saw a gap: entrepreneurship content created for the way the next generation actually consumes media.

“I thought: what about all of us who don’t want to listen to a two-hour podcast, but still want to learn from extraordinary people?” says Keeney.

So Keeney flipped the script on the traditional interview format, building for the way she was already consuming interviews: 90-second clips made for Instagram Reels.

Her premise is simple: “Let’s go for a walk.”

Less than a year after quitting her corporate job in January 2026, Keeney has grown Look Who I Found! to nearly 200,000 followers across platforms and more than 15 million monthly views. Her growing guest list includes some of the people who have inspired her most, including Oprah Winfrey, Jay Shetty and Emma Grede.

It didn’t start quite so polished. Early on, Keeney filmed with a $10 microphone, edited her own videos on CapCut, built her logo using ChatGPT, and sent pitches from a personal email address with a heart in it.

“I often forgot to turn the microphone on or charge my phone,” she shares. “But every time I put something out, I learnt something.”

For Keeney, though, the urgency to start before she was ready came from somewhere much more personal.

She had spent years helping build global brands when her father died suddenly, changing the way she thought about time – and about the idea she couldn’t stop thinking about.

“I stopped asking myself, ‘What if it doesn’t work?’ and started asking, ‘What if I never try?’”

The idea for Look Who I Found! came while Keeney was at her mother’s house. She found herself wondering why she knew so much about celebrities, but so little about the people building some of the world’s biggest companies.

"What if entrepreneurship content could make you feel something before it taught you something?” she remembers thinking.

Keeney picked up her phone, wrote down the idea and sent 250 cold emails that day.

After every ten no’s, Keeney would reassess: Was it the pitch? The format? The wrong person? Was the value unclear?

She estimates she wrote more than 100 versions of her pitch in those early days.

“If you keep hearing ‘no,’ you can’t just keep doing exactly the same thing and call it persistence,” she says. “You have to listen.”

The persistence paid off. An early turning point came when Pret A Manger cofounder Julian Metcalfe agreed to walk with her.

Then Gary Vaynerchuk slid into her Instagram DMs and joined her for a walk. The momentum began extending beyond the interviews themselves.

OpenAI approached Keeney to create founder focused content around Cannes Lions, where she interviewed founders on the ground. That initial collaboration has since developed into a broader partnership spanning events, founder interviews, product launches, and content exploring how entrepreneurs can use AI to build businesses.

And last week, Keeney went for a walk with Oprah Winfrey.

There’s something fitting about Winfrey—who built a media empire by getting people to open up—joining an emerging female interviewer whose format is built around doing much the same.

Something the interviewer and interviewee have in common? Conviction before certainty.

It’s an idea particularly relevant to entrepreneurship, where evidence often arrives after belief. Before Keeney had any proof that Look Who I Found! could resonate with an audience and grow into a brand, she had to trust that it was worth pursuing.

That self-belief got her moving before everything was perfectly in place.

“I definitely wasn’t ready when I started. My first videos were terrible,” Keeney says. “I filmed the floor, my audio didn’t work, I zoomed in too much. Look Who I Found! originally involved me standing awkwardly with a tripod having coffee with founders. It sucked.”

“That’s the point. You will never start with the finished product. You start, you learn, you iterate, you iterate again. I think the best founders in the world are still doing that every single day.”

It was a lesson she had heard before: “Some of the best advice I was ever given was that simply starting puts you ahead of 99.9% of everyone else.”

Each imperfect attempt taught her something and moved her forward.

“I think people massively overestimate the value of having the perfect plan and underestimate the value of movement,” Keeney says. “You learn more from putting something into the world for one day than you can from thinking about it for a month.”

She learned as she went: which videos resonated most, which pitches got responses from founders, and how to make a compelling ask that founders would respond to. The show improved because it was already out in the world.

And she was doing it at a moment when the economics — and even the definition —of podcasting were rapidly changing.

One of Keeney’s biggest inspirations is Jay Shetty, who now operates at the opposite end of the podcasting spectrum.

Seven years after launching On Purpose from his bedroom, Shetty signed a three-year Netflix and Spotify partnership worth a reported $100 million.

Most podcasts begin as long-form episodes, with social clips cut afterward for promotion. Keeney worked in reverse, designing the interview for the feed from the start.

She built the show for the way younger audiences increasingly move between formats. Nearly 70% of Gen Z and millennial fans say they engage with the shows, artists or franchises they follow across multiple platforms, according to Deloitte’s 2026 Digital Media Trends survey.

The walk gives Look Who I Found! something increasingly valuable in an endless feed: a visual identity viewers can recognize before they even know the guest.

But while the format is intentionally recognizable, Keeney wants the conversations inside it to feel anything but rehearsed. She isn’t interested in the perfectly polished CEO answer.

“The founders I find most compelling aren’t trying to sound impressive,” she says. “They’re willing to be human.”

At the same time, Keeney has been building a platform of her own.

Behind the scenes, she has effectively operated as a one-woman media company: researcher, producer, interviewer, editor, publicist, dealmaker and, when necessary, invoice chaser.

Now, as she begins growing her team, Keeney sees that firsthand experience as an advantage: “I know what ‘good’ looks like because I’ve actually done it myself.”

It’s a model increasingly possible in the creator economy, where the tools required to produce and distribute media are more accessible than ever.

The long-term ambition is to turn Look Who I Found! into a global media company built for how people consume content today: fast, human and organic.

“The interviews are only the beginning,” she says.

Revenue today comes primarily from brand partnerships and commercial collaborations. Keeney’s longer-term ambition is to build an entire media business around the Look Who I Found! IP, expanding into new formats, live experiences, programming and global partnerships — all with the mission of making entrepreneurship feel exciting, accessible and culturally relevant.

“The interviews are only the beginning,” she says.

Whether it becomes that remains to be seen. But Keeney has already demonstrated something increasingly relevant to the creator economy: starting a media company no longer necessarily requires a studio, a large production team or even a particularly good microphone.

Sometimes, you have to start before you have any of those things.

One of Keeney’s biggest “pinch me” moments came when Linktree put her on a billboard in Times Square.

Standing beneath it in the middle of the night, Keeney became emotional.

“I lost my dad and miss him more than you could imagine,” she says. “In that moment I remember thinking: it’s so bright, maybe he can see it too.”

It’s easy to forget what happened before the billboard went up: the cringe videos, the unanswered cold emails and a pitch rewritten more than 100 times.

“Success compounds,” Keeney says. “I don’t think people realize that. It rarely just falls into your lap, even if social media can make it look that way.”

Keeney wants someone scrolling through their phone to see the human behind the success and think: Maybe I could do that too.

So consider this your sign to send the email, make the terrible first video, learn from every no, and try again.

Keeney built her brand around walking. But her story is really about movement.