apprenticeship
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Brian Kwait and the Work That Begins After the Deal
From an Ohio upbringing and an accounting desk to co-founding Odyssey Investment Partners, Brian Kwait has spent decades in the business of building businesses. His career turns on what happens after the papers are signed - and who learns to do the work next.
Pierre Dubuc
He was 11 when he started building a website to teach people how to code. Two decades later that hobby is OpenClassrooms, and Pierre Dubuc still measures its worth in one thing - jobs.
Ruchir Shah
Ruchir Shah is the founder and CEO of SkillCat, a mobile-first training platform that has taught more than 300,000 people to enter skilled trades like HVAC, plumbing, electrical, and appliance repair. A Rice-trained energy engineer with a Stanford MBA, he started building animated industrial simulations after researching the BP oil spill and concluding that bad training kills. His first company, LearnToDrill, trained 25,000 oil and gas workers for clients like Halliburton and BP. When COVID threw skilled workers out of jobs while contractors begged for help, Shah pivoted to SkillCat to bridge that gap with simulation-based, $10-a-month trade education. He also runs the GRIT Foundation to introduce trades careers to underserved youth, and once spent a summer doing stand-up comedy in New York.
Anne Rascón
Anne Rascón is the Executive Director of the Better Health Better Pay Collaborative (BHBP), a nonprofit that stitches together two systems that rarely talk to each other - healthcare and workforce development. She works to connect Medicaid members and Managed Care Organizations with education, training, and employment so that better jobs lead to better health. Her career spans the public, private, and nonprofit sectors, including national workforce training programs and advisory work with the U.S. Department of Labor, large employers, and workforce boards. In 2023 she helped launch the Florida Self-Sufficiency Council with Simply Healthcare and Florida's 24 workforce development boards.
Taylor Pearson
Taylor Pearson is the CEO and co-founder of Mutiny Fund, a multi-strategy long volatility and tail-risk hedge fund whose sub-advisors manage over $10 billion in client assets. Before building Mutiny, he wrote 'The End of Jobs' (2015), an Amazon #1 bestseller translated into five languages that argued entrepreneurship had become safer than employment. He runs 'Interesting Times,' a monthly newsletter for 27,000+ founders, investors, and executives exploring complex systems, finance, and the future of work. A former college football offensive lineman who once marched for Bolivian workers' rights in Argentina, Pearson cold-called his way into digital marketing at minimum wage before buying a software company and eventually co-founding a hedge fund - all while living across eight countries.