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Lisa Drakeman and the education of a beginner
A Princeton historian became Genmab’s founding CEO, then went back to studying wine. The thread through Lisa Drakeman’s career is a willingness to learn before she knows where it will lead.
Tania Luna and the strange business of giving power away
She once sold surprises for a living. After helping build LifeLabs Learning, Tania Luna turned to a harder question: how much more could a team do if its leader stopped holding all the answers?
Mark L. Cushing and the revolution on the sofa
A trial lawyer followed a phone call into the pet business. Then he began tracing how America’s affection for dogs and cats was rewriting the rules of everyday life.
Ann Marie Sorrell and the business of showing up
A $200 business registration started The Mosaic Group. The relationships Ann Marie Sorrell built around it would carry her from marketing campaigns to conservation ballots - with a few dating stories along the way.
William C. Short and the Business That Must Outlive Its Founder
His great-grandfather built a company that could not survive without him. At A.E. Perkins, William C. Short has made that family lesson a question of ownership, leadership, and what a founder leaves behind.
Michael Gorton’s long way to Mars
At 12, Michael Gorton planned to be the first person on Mars. The Teladoc co-founder took a detour through power systems, internet startups, mountain summits, and novels - without quite abandoning the destination.
Holly Parker knows what is really on the market
The New York broker has sold glass towers, written about starting over and moved her team to Compass. Her recurring subject is the person making the decision.
Julián Torres Gómez and the trouble with a good idea
Before Ontop, there were songs, a restaurant and a container of toilet seats that did not fit. The Colombian founder’s route to global payroll began with a succession of very practical lessons.
Al Kingsley and the art of the awkward question
He helps build the software schools buy, then sits at the table where school spending is questioned. For Al Kingsley, three decades in education technology have made asking better questions a working habit.
Harvey Karp and the Trouble With Retirement
A book made Dr. Harvey Karp a familiar name in parenting. Turning its ideas into SNOO meant finding a designer, building a business with his wife, and giving up on a quiet exit.
AJ Osborne and the Building That Changed Jobs
A former newspaper building in Boise tells the story of AJ Osborne’s approach to self-storage: buy carefully, learn the machinery, and give the business a life beyond its owner’s working day.
Dato' Eric Cheng and the value of an open door
From airline cabins to landed homes and digital-asset exchanges, Dato' Eric Cheng has made a career of entering unfamiliar rooms. In Singapore, his latest gatherings bring the neighbours through his own front door.
Dee Hock and the business of letting go
To build Visa, Dee Hock persuaded competing banks to own a network together. Then he left the organization he had helped create and spent the rest of his career asking how people could work together without surrendering their independence.
Sevetri Wilson and the work that stays behind
A consultant can leave. The work cannot. From a Louisiana services firm to Resilia, Sevetri Wilson built a career around that problem - and is carrying its lessons into her next chapter.
Gene Yu and the art of answering the call
A stolen novel sent Gene Yu to West Point. A family friend’s kidnapping brought him back to crisis response. At Blackpanda, he is trying to make help easier to summon.
Sanjay Prasad and the education of a second act
He arrived in America after a month at sea, built an independent career, and put his own money into a new venture. Sanjay Prasad’s story turns on a question familiar to anyone starting again: what does experience teach you to notice?
William Short and the business that must outlive its founder
A family company disappeared after its founder died. William Short put its name on a new holding company - and made durability the point.
Patrick van der Pijl and the trouble with a good idea
An app for plumbers. A book built by 470 contributors. A consultancy forced to rethink itself. Patrick van der Pijl has spent his career putting business ideas where customers can argue with them.
Chris Ronzio Built a Company Out of the Instructions Everyone Else Forgot to Write
A teenage video hustle taught Chris Ronzio that growth is mostly a problem of memory. Two decades later, Trainual is his answer: write down how the work works, then let people get on with it.
Sajin Nair Is Building a Career on One Uncomfortable Idea: The Funnel Is Tired
After two decades inside B2B sales and marketing, Saicon CMO Sajin Nair has begun questioning the machinery he once helped run. His next act joins an executive mandate with a public experiment in clearer, less theatrical growth.
Kate Johnson Learned to Measure Marketing. Now She Is Learning When to Let Go.
The dscout CMO built her career by making marketing measurable. Her next lesson is harder: in the AI era, good leadership means trading the comfort of a roadmap for the discipline of constant recalibration.
Sean Carroll Wants the Equations Left In
The physicist and philosopher has spent his career refusing the false choice between rigor and wonder. His trick is simple to describe and hard to copy: keep the equations, invite everyone in, and let the questions stay difficult.
Arianna Huffington Has Changed the Subject Again
She built a publication around the internet's appetite for more. Her second company is built around a harder proposition: that progress can begin with less, done deliberately.
Mike Hardenbrook Keeps Turning the Audience Into the Next Business
His companies look different from a distance. Up close, they share one habit: listen carefully, notice the request hiding inside the request, and build the missing next step.
Kristen Gwinn-Becker Is Teaching History to Survive the Search Bar
She went from a history degree at 19 to dot-com-era code, Eleanor Roosevelt's papers, and a company built around one stubborn idea: an archive only matters if people can actually find what is inside.
Gerard Powell Sold the Dream. Then He Rebuilt the Question.
After years of measuring success in exits and possessions, the Rythmia founder built a second act around a harder product to package: personal truth.
Stephanie Wachs Built a Media Company for the Conversations We Usually Avoid
She turned a rejected podcast pitch into Lemonada Media. Now, as CEO, Stephanie Wittels Wachs is betting that intimate, un-Googleable conversations can carry an audio company into its next act.
Del Staecker
He raised the money that built landmarks, then walked away to write in an Idaho cabin. A story about second acts, second lives, and the long road from Old Town Chicago to a shelf full of medals.
Tricia Mahoney
Tricia Mahoney is the Chief Marketing Officer of Twisted X Global Brands, the Decatur, Texas footwear maker behind Twisted X, Twisted X Work, Black Star, CellSole and Wrangler Footwear. With more than three decades in marketing spanning agency and client roles, high-tech and western lifestyle, she is the only female member of the company's C-suite. Since joining in 2019 she has led the launches of collections such as Black Star, Zero-X, Tech X and Wrangler, earned more than 100 industry awards, and built a retailer-first brand strategy. She is also a two-time published author whose third manuscript, Trust the Path, is in development as a book and screenplay.
Vishal Shukla
Vishal Shukla is the co-founder and CEO of Aviz Networks, a San Jose-based company building an AI-first, vendor-agnostic networking platform on top of the open-source SONiC operating system. A networking veteran with more than 20 years of experience, he previously held leadership roles at Cisco, IBM, Mellanox (NVIDIA), and Nortel. He holds 25-plus granted patents, has authored books on SDN, OpenFlow and OpenStack, and wrote 'Deciding the Future: Building New Networks for the AI Era.' Under his leadership Aviz raised a $17M Series A in November 2024 (roughly $31M total), backed by investors including Cisco Investments and Qualcomm Ventures.