burlingame
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Rev One Design makes the last revision count
A Bay Area agency built a business around the edits that stand between approved ideas and printed reality. Its work shows why the small stuff deserves a specialist.
Colorprint puts a quarter of its profits back into the neighborhood
The Burlingame printer says it has given more than $307,000 to local charities. Behind that number is a family experience, a quarterly promise, and the everyday business of getting ink onto paper and mail out the door.
Robert Mock Bet the Company on a Seaweed Chip. The Recall Made Him Smarter.
A former derivatives banker tried to make seaweed crunch like a tortilla chip, lost the bet, and rebuilt around a better signal: what shoppers actually put in their carts.
Brent Jackson Put the Corporate Card Inside the Bank
He began with a better card for small businesses. Then customer conversations led Torpago toward a quieter, more consequential job: helping banks issue modern cards under their own names.
Douglas Monsour Built a Computer Company for the Rooms Ordinary PCs Cannot Handle
Since 1989, the Tangent co-founder has followed one durable idea: build computers around the room they must survive, not the spec sheet they happen to carry.
The Computer That Survives the ICU (and the Oil Refinery)
A 1989 PC company quietly reinvented itself around the two markets everyone else avoids: hospitals that hose down their hardware and factories where a spark can kill. Here is how a 150-person shop in Burlingame carved out both.
Ocean's Halo
Ocean's Halo is a California-based natural foods company that grows, harvests and packages organic, ocean-to-table Asian-inspired products - from its signature trayless seaweed snacks to frozen kimbap, broths, noodle bowls and sauces. Founded in 2011 as New Frontier Foods by a group of former finance and tech executives, the brand farms its own organic seaweed in a protected bay off South Korea and sells through roughly 10,000 retail doors including Costco, Whole Foods, Walmart and Target, pairing plant-based nutrition with plastic-free, trayless packaging and a 1% for the Planet conservation pledge.
Brian Manning
Brian Manning is the co-founder and CEO of Xona Space Systems, a Burlingame, California startup building Pulsar, a commercial alternative to GPS broadcast from a planned 258-satellite constellation in low-Earth orbit. A former SpaceX engineer who worked on the Falcon 9 thrust structure, Manning reunited eight Stanford aerospace graduates over pizza and beer in 2019 to chase a question nobody had answered: why has no one built a private, encrypted, centimeter-accurate navigation network? In 2022 Xona launched Huginn, the first commercial satellite navigation mission in orbit, and in March 2026 closed an oversubscribed $170 million Series C to scale manufacturing and begin deploying production satellites.
Hinge Bio
Hinge Bio is a clinical-stage biotechnology company in Burlingame, California, building next-generation antibody therapeutics on its proprietary GEM-DIMER platform. The platform engineers multivalent, multispecific antibodies that bind their targets cooperatively for dramatically enhanced potency. Its lead candidate, HB2198, is a B cell-depleting agent targeting both CD19 and CD20 with enhanced natural killer cell engagement, now in Phase 1 trials for systemic lupus erythematosus and lupus nephritis. The company raised a $30M Series A led by Point72 in January 2025.
Andy Ballard
Andy Ballard is the CEO and co-founder of Wiser Solutions, Inc., the San Mateo-based omnichannel retail intelligence platform he built through the 2017 merger of Quad Analytix and Mobee. A Harvard undergrad and Stanford MBA, Ballard spent nearly a decade at Hellman & Friedman where he sat on the boards of DoubleClick, Getty Images, Internet Brands, and Catalina Marketing before launching Quad Analytix in 2012. Today he leads a 510-person company that tracks billions of online and in-store data points for over 750 global brands and retailers, while also serving on the boards of Domino's Pizza and Etsy, and running Figtree Partners, his software-focused investment firm.
Bob Kearn
Bob Kearn is the President and CEO of COIT Cleaning and Restoration Services, a family-owned franchise business founded in 1950 by Lou Kearn near San Francisco's COIT Tower. Bob has led the company since 1982, growing it into one of the nation's largest specialty cleaning and restoration companies with operations across the United States, Canada, and Thailand. Under his leadership, COIT operates a multi-service franchise model covering carpet cleaning, drapery, upholstery, tile and grout, wood floors, air duct cleaning, water damage restoration, and mold remediation. He holds a BS in Marketing from the University of Colorado Boulder and has championed environmentally friendly cleaning practices including GreenEarth dry cleaning technology.
Kevin Johnson
Kevin H. Johnson is the CEO of Focal Systems, an AI-powered retail operations company deploying shelf-scanning cameras across brick-and-mortar stores worldwide. A 30-year veteran of building and scaling tech businesses, he grew Ebates forty-fold before selling it to Rakuten for $1 billion, then led Udemy as a publicly-traded company, and now applies that commercial track record to the frontier problem of putting real-time AI intelligence into every grocery aisle.
Freemodel
Freemodel is a presale home renovation company that designs, manages, and pays for renovations before a homeowner sells - then collects from escrow at closing. Local project directors run the job; the homeowner sells for more.
Chris O'Neill
Chris O'Neill is a veteran technology executive with 25+ years of leadership across Google, Evernote, Glean, and Xero. Best known for leading Evernote's turnaround as CEO (2015-2018) and doubling its user base, he joined GrowthLoop as CEO in August 2024, steering the composable CDP startup through its AI transformation and Series D funding. A Tuck School of Business (Dartmouth) MBA and former Google Canada Managing Director who scaled that business to billions in revenue, O'Neill is also a board director at Gap Inc. and a published contributor to Fast Company and Fortune on the themes of AI, leadership, and compound growth.