brooklyn
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What David Belt Saw in a Dumpster
Before Newlab, there were swimming pools in a Brooklyn junkyard. David Belt’s career has been an extended argument for giving overlooked places something interesting to do.
Nick West took the stairs
He helped build e-commerce businesses before joining his brother’s running brand. At Bandit, Nick West is testing how far a company can go when it keeps coming back to the people outside its door.
Roger Volodarsky and the trouble with being satisfied
Puffco began with a customer who kept breaking his vape pens. Roger Volodarsky built a company around his own exacting taste, then had to learn when to trust everyone else’s.
Brandon Martinez and the business behind a 30-second joke
When “Harlem Shake” took over YouTube, Brandon Martinez helped turn the dancing into income for music rights holders. His path from INDMUSIC to sneakers and pickleball keeps returning to the people who make a culture worth joining.
Jen Liu and the grandmother who became an English tutor
Jen Liu and Erica Du built an AI grandma to practice Mandarin. The detour became Toko - and a career spent finding ways to make learning easier to begin.
LeAnn Darland and the beer drinkers hiding in plain sight
A Navy intelligence officer turned Google finance manager, LeAnn Darland loved craft beer. With TALEA, she set out to make room for the friends who didn’t.
Maceo Cardinale Kwik and the Trouble With a Good Idea
Datost was finding customers. Maceo Cardinale Kwik was still looking for the computer he wanted to build. His route from a Brooklyn coding blog to camera-free AI glasses includes one profitable detour and two coolers on a sidewalk.
Viraj Puri and the Shorter Journey of a Basil Leaf
A dinner in Brooklyn helped send Viraj Puri into rooftop farming. After building Gotham Greens into a national food business, he now guides the company from a different seat.
Som Ray and the bicycle that was already there
An architect trained to rethink cities found his next design problem on the ride home. At CLIP, Somnath "Som" Ray is building electric assistance for the bicycles people already own.
Alex Patterson and the pleasure of losing
A Brooklyn tax lawyer found his next career in obstacle courses. At BEAT THE BOMB, Alex Patterson turned a lesson about working together into a business with a very colorful penalty.
Zack Holland’s unfinished business
From a neighborhood directory to SelectFew and Averi, Zack Holland has spent his career connecting people with the work they want to do. His next chapter includes Talvi, a writing habit, and a $100 laptop with very few distractions.
Colin Barnhart and the business behind the business
A Wall Street start, a detour through nightclubs, and a recurring question: who keeps a growing business in order? Colin Barnhart built Black Ink Business Services around the work founders kept asking him to do.
Schelton Assoumou and the price of staying put
A former J.P. Morgan banker brings the machinery of real estate finance to a neighborhood question: can a home become more valuable while its owner keeps a place in the community?
Jamie Niu Serota and the art of making other people wait less
After Tesla, Blue Origin and Bowery Farming, Jamie Niu Serota co-founded Podium Automation to tackle a less glamorous obstacle to hardware progress: the wait for a control panel. Her Brooklyn company is built around a supplier’s most useful promise - getting the work done sooner.
Alexander Torrey and the trouble with the empty bottle
A box of hand soap sent Alexander Torrey looking for a better supply chain. After children’s art and reusable deliveries, the AIC co-founder is taking his argument about wasted potential to America’s factory floors.
Lily Ray and the Rhythm of a Changing Search Engine
A drummer who learned search the hard way now studies what happens when the rules change. In 2026, Lily Ray gave that work a second address: her own consultancy, Algorythmic.
Justine LaViolette and the Night That Refused to End
A failed date introduced a filmmaker to her future business partner. Six years, several refusals and one astonishing opening-night queue later, Justine LaViolette had helped turn a familiar queer daydream into a permanent Brooklyn address.
Daniel Kraft Learned to Play the Long Game
Before Daniel Kraft began opening conversations for Clay, he learned to recover a round, carry a team and make a story land. His route from a California golf course to Brooklyn sales is a study in useful range.
Jay Kurahashi-Sofue Wants Money to Move Like Music
An art-history graduate turned crypto marketer has spent a decade translating difficult systems into stories people can use. At Eco and SONARA Records, his two worlds now run on the same principle: remove friction, then let the work travel.
Anthony Vigilante Built a Modern Business Around a 1927 Brooklyn Name
The Brooklyn operator inherited nearly a century of family history. His real work has been turning that inheritance into a system that can still answer when the boiler quits.
Andrew Benin Put Olive Oil in a Squeeze Bottle - Then Built for the Grocery Aisle
A trip through Andalusia supplied the obsession. A chef supplied the constraint. Andrew Benin turned both into Graza - and learned that a playful bottle still has to survive the hard arithmetic of retail.
Taryn Rayment
Taryn Rayment is the Chief Marketing Officer of J.McLaughlin, the New York heritage apparel brand, a role she took in April 2024. Over roughly two decades she has run marketing and ecommerce for consumer brands across fashion, footwear, travel goods, and floral delivery - including a stretch as CMO and consumer division head at FTD during the pandemic, CMO at ecoATM Gazelle, and senior digital and CRM leadership at Cole Haan and TUMI. She is known for a data-driven, retention-focused approach to direct-to-consumer marketing and for steering omnichannel and e-commerce growth.
Jack Gierlich
Jack Gierlich is a Brooklyn-based growth marketing founder and fractional CMO who has spent 15+ years scaling healthcare, SaaS, and AI companies. He leads marketing and growth at Leal Health (formerly TrialJectory), an AI-powered platform that helps cancer patients find advanced treatment options, and he moderates several of the largest marketing and business communities on Reddit, reaching millions of readers a month. He describes his craft as building marketing systems that compound rather than one-off campaigns.
James Malley
James Malley is the co-founder and CEO of Paccurate, a New York-based software company whose API decides the cheapest, lowest-waste way to pack every shipment. He grew up around multi-carrier shipping software, trained in theater, and spent years building parcel apps before he and CTO Pat Powers turned a side project fixing carriers' dimensional-weight pricing into a venture-backed cartonization platform used by major retailers and 3PLs.
Johan Brissmyr
Johan Brissmyr is the CEO and co-founder of Castle, a security company that helps online businesses detect fraud, bots, and account takeover in real time. A computer scientist from Lund University, he started building web products in Malmo, Sweden before moving to Silicon Valley through Y Combinator and relocating the company to New York. Castle grew out of a password-storage side project that revealed a bigger opportunity in behavioral risk scoring, and today combines device fingerprinting, behavioral signals, and analytics into APIs used by companies of many sizes.
Madeleine Ormond
Madeleine Ormond is a New York based business strategist and co-founder of The Backflip Group, a boutique consulting firm built to move companies from strategy to reality. She spent more than a decade working inside tech startups and larger technology companies before co-founding the firm, where she leads on product strategy, financial modeling, go-to-market planning, and the kind of hands-on execution that turns a plan into a working operation. Her work centers on helping growing companies test ideas at low risk, sharpen their thinking, and build foundations that scale.
Matt Beaton
Matt Beaton is CEO of Mike's Hot Honey, the Brooklyn-based chili-infused honey brand he built with college friend Mike Kurtz. He joined in 2015 when the company was pulling in $100,000 a year, and grew a one-SKU business into a roughly $40 million operation stocked in more than 30,000 retail stores and 3,000 restaurants. He came out of brand-management jobs at Wrigley and PUR Water and an MBA from Kellogg, and now runs the classic case study for what happens when you refuse to launch a second product.
Matthew Levin
Matthew Levin is the co-founder and CEO of Lariat, an AI-native sales platform built to prospect into brick-and-mortar businesses. A UC Berkeley alum based in Brooklyn, he's a career B2B go-to-market operator whose past stops include Global Head of Marketing at Nosto and VP of Marketing at mParticle, plus early co-founding runs at Plenishable and the Switchboard project.
Michael Dorfman
Michael Dorfman is the CEO of the Pro Padel League, the top-flight professional padel circuit in North America, and the founder of the New York Atlantics franchise. A lifelong Knicks and Rangers fan who picked up padel at Brooklyn's Padel Haus during the pandemic, he left the tech insurance company he co-founded (Koffie Financial) to run the league full-time. In March 2026 he closed a $15 million Series A led by Charlotte Hornets co-owner Rick Schnall, valuing PPL at roughly ten times its seed round from a year earlier.
Prabhdeep Singh
Prabhdeep Singh is the CEO of Steno, a tech-enabled court reporting and litigation support company that recently closed a $49M Series C. He joined as COO in 2024 and was elevated to CEO in June 2026, succeeding co-founder Greg Hong. Before Steno he ran Marketplace at WeWork, Enterprise at Uber Eats, was Chief Growth Officer at Clover Health, and served as Operating Partner at Armory Square Ventures.