business-strategy
(12)
YC Partners
YC Partners is a Frederick, Maryland based fractional CFO firm that embeds licensed CPAs and finance executives into small and mid-market companies, typically in the $10M-$50M revenue range. Founded and led by CPA Nicole Sithithavorn, the firm delivers strategic financial leadership, GAAP reporting, forecasting, and M&A support on month-to-month terms, positioned as roughly 80% of the value of a full-time CFO at 20-40% of the cost.
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.
Cascade
Cascade is a strategy execution platform that pulls corporate strategy out of slide decks and boardrooms and turns it into a living, trackable system the whole organization can run on. It combines strategic planning, OKRs, projects, KPIs and outcome tracking - now layered with AI insights via its Tapestry suite - into one platform so leaders can see whether the plan is actually working. Founded in 2017 and used by thousands of teams across 100+ countries, from vaccine supply chains to Formula One teams.
Evan Armstrong
Evan Armstrong writes about profit and power in technology. He spent four years as lead writer at Every, where his column Napkin Math turned finance terms like revenue, COGS, and net income into deeply reported, deeply funny explainers for an audience of more than 100,000. In April 2026 he walked away to launch The Leverage, a solo publication promising rigorous, actionable, beautiful analysis of tech markets for founders, investors, and senior operators. He had never been paid to write before joining Every, and went on to publish almost 500,000 words there.
Jake Winebaum
Jake Winebaum is an American serial entrepreneur who has spent more than three decades turning observations into companies. He built the business plan for Disney's first internet push and ran Disney Online, co-founded the dot-com incubator eCompanies with EarthLink's Sky Dayton, founded and sold Business.com for $345 million, launched the healthcare marketplace Brighter (acquired by Cigna), and now serves as Executive Chairman of Applied Cognition. A self-described accidental entrepreneur, he is also a serious endurance athlete and the author of a business strategy and growth newsletter, the Strategy Letter.
Allison Blais
Allison Blais is Vice President of Business & Strategic Operations and Chief of Staff to Adobe President David Wadhwani, running day-to-day operations of Digital Media - Adobe's largest business unit. A lawyer-turned-operator, she transitioned from 15+ years in financial services and corporate law into driving strategy for Creative Cloud, Document Cloud, and Adobe Firefly, the company's generative AI platform. Her path from FINRA regulatory analyst to VP at one of the world's most influential software companies is a masterclass in reinvention.
Patrick Bet-David
Patrick Bet-David is an Iranian-American entrepreneur, author, and media personality who fled Iran as a child refugee, served in the 101st Airborne Division, and built PHP Agency into a 40,000-agent life insurance firm before selling it for roughly $250 million. He founded Valuetainment, one of the most-watched business YouTube channels in the world, and hosts the PBD Podcast - a long-form show spanning politics, culture, and business with millions of listeners. A Wall Street Journal bestselling author of 'Your Next Five Moves' and 'Choose Your Enemies Wisely,' Bet-David is known for blunt straight talk, a relentless work ethic forged in a German refugee camp, and a genuine belief that every refugee or immigrant story can have a second act.
Chris Do
Chris Do is a Vietnamese-American designer, Emmy-winning creative director, and founder of The Futur - an educational platform on a mission to teach 1 billion people how to make a living doing what they love. He fled Vietnam as a toddler on April 30, 1975, built Blind into a $7M+ annual motion design studio serving Nike, Xbox, and Sony, then pivoted at 42 to education - amassing 2.7 million YouTube subscribers, 500K community members across 190 countries, and a $5,000/hour consulting rate. His philosophy: hard truths, gently told.
Ben Thompson
Ben Thompson is the founder of Stratechery, the subscription newsletter that essentially invented the paid independent newsletter model. Writing from Taiwan for over a decade before returning to the US in 2025, he developed Aggregation Theory - the most influential framework for understanding how internet platforms accumulate power - while building a solo business earning $5M+ annually from 40,000+ paying subscribers. Substack's founders literally used him as their pitch-deck inspiration. He also co-hosts three podcasts, including Dithering with John Gruber, where every episode is exactly 15 minutes by design.
Packy McCormick
Packy McCormick is the founder of Not Boring, a weekly newsletter with 250,000+ subscribers that covers technology, business strategy, and startups through long-form essays. He also runs Not Boring Capital, a solo-GP venture fund with two funds totaling ~$38M invested across 79+ companies. A former investment banker and startup operator, he turned a writing homework assignment into one of the most-read independent tech publications, pioneering a 'media flywheel' model where newsletter content and venture investing reinforce each other.
Rory Sutherland's Pessimistic (and Brilliant) Predictions for 2026
Rory Sutherland, Vice Chairman of Ogilvy UK and behavioral economics provocateur, delivers a characteristically contrarian set of predictions for 2026. He argues that AI will initially be weaponized by tech companies and consultants as a cost-reduction tool — what he calls the 'doorman fallacy' — stripping out human value while claiming efficiency wins. Drawing on the Austrian vs. Chicago schools of economics, the history of the electric motor, and a devastating critique of self-checkout tills, Sutherland maps out three phases of AI adoption and ends with a rallying cry to marketers: stop selling what you do, and start selling how you think.
Janet Czifrus
Janet Czifrus (born Zsanett Czifrus) is a Hungarian-born transformative coach, TEDx speaker, yoga and meditation teacher, mindful eating coach, and certified doula with over 14 years of management consulting experience across top-tier firms and multinationals. She bridges rigorous business strategy with holistic personal development, focusing on daring women, female founders, and global citizens navigating reinvention. Operating under her coaching brand Zsanett Czifrus Coaching, she runs the newsletter and podcast 'Less Traveled' and the 'Mindful Entrepreneur' community for female founders building service-based businesses.