alabama
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The $2,000 Bet That Became Nine Acres of Second Chances
Rev. Shawn Collier started with $2,000, one employee, and a mortgaged building. The durable idea was smaller than the campus that followed: recovery works differently when a facility tries to feel like a family.
Alabama Media Group stopped the presses. The reporting kept going.
The company behind AL.com traded newspaper delivery for a digital portfolio of investigations, local editions and Southern humor. Its hardest assignment is making that mix pay.
The Garbage Trucks That Went to War With Urban Blight
A University of Alabama economics experiment strapped cameras to trash trucks to map urban decay. Five years and $15 million later, City Detect is doing the work of 40 code officers with one vehicle - and cities are starting to fix blight before it spreads.
The Birmingham startup that made pharma pay for trust it never earned
Del Smith and Tiffany Whitlow built a 200,000-member community first and an AI second - and got seven of the ten biggest drug makers to buy the trust they earned.
Leigh Marie Braswell
Leigh Marie Braswell is a Partner at Kleiner Perkins, one of Silicon Valley's most storied venture firms, where she backs early-stage founders building the next wave of AI infrastructure and ML applications. A rural Alabama native who became MIT's top competitive female mathematician, she cut her teeth as an early engineer and the first product manager at Scale AI, helped label data for GPT-2, then sharpened her investment instincts at Founders Fund before joining KP in 2023. Her bets - Windsurf (acquired by Google), Neon (acquired by Databricks), Chronosphere (acquired by Palo Alto Networks), and a first angel check into Ambience Healthcare at a $1.1B valuation - reveal a pattern: she backs fast-moving technical founders before anyone else does, using a poker-trained lens for probabilistic decision-making.