business-strategy
(15)
Verdis Norton Started Again at 69 - and Made Retirement Look Premature
After four decades in corporate strategy, a Coast Guard veteran from rural Utah tried retirement. Then Verdis Norton built his consequential second act - a global company begun when he was 69.
Tamas Hevizi Wants AI to Earn Its Keep
After three decades in consulting and enterprise software, Tungsten Automation's strategy chief has a bracing test for artificial intelligence: show what got better.
From the Spreadsheet to the Story: Leandro Caldeira’s Nine-Year Wellhub Climb
An engineer became an operator, an operator became a marketer, and 2,000 check-ins kept the whole career honest. Inside Leandro Caldeira’s long route from BCG decks to Wellhub’s global brand.
Anubhav Kaushal Has Spent 20 Years Learning Where Finance Gets Stuck
From writing software at D. E. Shaw to helping 9fin scale an AI-native credit platform, AK Kaushal has built a career around one stubborn question: how do you make complicated financial systems actually move?
Susan Macke Built a Career by Moving From the Machine Room to the Strategy Table
Before she advised CMOs on strategy, Susan Macke built operating systems, embedded software, and smartphones. Her career is a case study in how technical fluency becomes commercial judgment - one deliberate translation at a time.
Ian Pinner Has Spent 26 Years Learning How Food Moves
Seventeen roles, every region, one company. Ian Pinner's route from wheat trading to ADM's nutrition business shows what happens when a career is built by learning the whole system.
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.
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.
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.