california
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Marty Kropelnicki and the business of being taken for granted
A finance executive found his lasting job in water. From a chocolate delivery during the Oroville evacuation to the long arithmetic of replacing infrastructure, Marty Kropelnicki’s career follows the work behind an ordinary turn of the tap.
Christie Porter Left Room for Someone Else
A request to design a campus in Mexico helped Christie Porter decide to start ONE NINE Architecture. She built the practice around a question that still shapes its work: who else could this help?
Izu Aginwa and the Business That Kept Asking to Exist
Before he co-founded Riches & Saint, Izu Aginwa kept sending prospective clients elsewhere. His route from a Nigerian childhood and campus leadership to a California agency began with people asking for help he already knew how to give.
Kassy Perry knows when to change course
A last-minute newsroom internship became a career in Sacramento public affairs. Thirty years into running her own firm, Kassy Perry is still competing on horseback - and now leads the business alongside the daughter who once raced her around the ring.
Claudia Castillo Ross and the art of making room
From fashion magazines and San Francisco publicity to a working vineyard in Knights Valley, Claudia Castillo Ross has kept returning to a familiar question: how do you bring people together?
Steven Powell and the Trouble With Tomorrow’s Electricity
He spent two decades learning how Southern California Edison works. Now Steven Powell has to help it grow, rebuild and earn trust - while the lights stay on.
Sumit Roy and the art of making next month ordinary
A computer science graduate became the custodian of Realty Income’s monthly dividend promise. His response has been to change where the rent comes from - and keep asking who will pay it.
Greg Steltenpohl’s second act came in a milk bottle
He started selling juice to keep a jazz band going. Thirty years later, Greg Steltenpohl built Califia Farms by giving another business room to change its tune.
George Gebhart and the long road to an ordinary workday
He started with an electric motorcycle in Paraná. Now George Gebhart is putting his powertrain technology into California work trucks, where the real test begins when somebody clocks in.
Prem Chand and the business of getting unstuck
A California farm taught Prem Chand to move things. Building Milestone Technologies taught him what keeps a company moving - and why its founder sometimes has to step aside.
John Pimentel and the business of making the unlikely ordinary
Before co-founding 280 Earth, John Pimentel helped build wind projects and rebuild California freeways. His career keeps returning to the same awkward question: how do you turn a promising idea into something people can actually use?
Melissa Marshall and the art of sharing the big chair
She helped bring CommuniCare and OLE together, with Alicia Hardy taking the CEO seat. Melissa Marshall’s story follows the decisions, doubts, and dry wit behind a career in leadership.
Stanford L. Kurland and the arithmetic of a second act
After 27 years at Countrywide, Stanford L. Kurland started PennyMac in the middle of the mortgage crisis. His second act brought a new business, an old argument and a quieter kind of leadership into the same room.
Gary Goldman and the value of an unfinished education
He built companies before earning his MBA. Now Gary Goldman is building a venture network around the people whose working knowledge rarely makes it onto a pitch deck.
Colin Behring’s two-block theory of a city
A Shanghai internship helped shape Colin Behring’s approach to Oakland: put homes, work and transport close together. His growing Uptown campus now faces a public test over the place of AI computing in the neighborhood.
John Keisler and the business of opening doors
Before he led Sunstone Management, John Keisler taught middle school and helped run Long Beach. His route into venture capital begins with a question that has followed him across all three jobs: who gets a chance to start?
David Wilson and the politics of paying attention
At 22, David Wilson built a business tracking campaign mail, sometimes from dumpsters. Today, RedDog’s president and CEO manages the people and systems that turn political messages into conversations.
Audrey Zagazeta and the work before the groundbreaking
Before a project becomes a place, someone has to examine its consequences. Circlepoint’s president and CEO has built a career in that demanding space between California’s ambitions and the communities that live with them.
Jacob Warren Has Spent a Career Making Sure the Message Gets Through
For nearly three decades, the California interpreter has worked where language, technology and trust meet. His route from schoolrooms and relay calls to library science and Tive follows one durable idea: access to information changes what people can do next.
Anjali Yadav and the Quiet Machinery Behind a Tech Company
Her public footprint is spare, but the work around it is substantial: people, process and the long operational shift from IT consulting to enterprise AI.
Mina Selim Keeps the Numbers Behind the Blueprints
At Core States Group, the work everyone can see begins with disciplines most people never notice. Division Controller Mina Selim has built a career in that hidden layer, where construction ambition meets financial order.
Andrew Abraham Built Orgain by Listening to the Shelf
Before Orgain reached more than 100,000 stores, its founder answered the phones, improvised an org chart with family names and watched an early batch turn stubbornly solid. His useful talent was never pretending the first plan was sacred.
Anna Bell’s Quiet System for Making Brands Matter
From treasury desks to grocery aisles, the Central Garden & Pet executive has built a career on a deceptively simple idea: listen closely before asking a brand to speak.
Erin Kuhlman Builds the Story Behind the Concrete
For more than 30 years she has done a quietly difficult job - making roads, bridges, and quarries mean something. As Granite Construction's marketing and communications chief, Erin Kuhlman turns dirt, gravel, and concrete into a story people want to tell.
The Person Selling Certainty in a Business Built on Doubt
A marketing job at a company whose products live or die on trust, sold to buyers who read the footnotes. Here is what that work looks like from the inside.
David Stoddard
David Stoddard is a co-founder of Brixton, the Oceanside, California lifestyle apparel brand he started in 2004 with two friends and a single vintage-inspired hat. He built the company out of a garage after a decade working his way up from a $6-an-hour warehouse job at TransWorld Magazine, and grew it into a globally distributed brand known for heritage headwear and clothing. He now serves as a marketing and creative leader for the company, and speaks locally about entrepreneurship and betting on where you come from.
Kevin "K.C." Clarke
Kevin "K.C." Clarke is a Los Angeles-based consumer brand marketer who now leads marketing at DITA Eyewear, the Aliso Viejo-headquartered luxury eyewear house whose frames are handmade in Japan. His career reads like a tour of the Southern California brand economy: Hurley and Vans in action sports, adidas and the Anaheim Ducks in sport and sponsorship, ZICO in beverage, then brand marketing leadership at golf-lifestyle label TravisMathew and VP of Marketing at car-care cult brand Chemical Guys. He holds a BS from Arizona State University's W. P. Carey School of Business and an MBA from USC's Marshall School of Business. The through-line is a preference for brands with obsessive fans rather than merely large audiences - surfers, golfers, detailing enthusiasts, and now collectors of titanium and 18k gold optical frames.
Raju Datla
Raju Datla is a serial entrepreneur and CEO of Fabrix.ai (formerly CloudFabrix), an AI-native IT operations platform he founded in 2015. Before Fabrix.ai, he sold two companies to Cisco - Jahi Networks (~$16M, 2004) and Cloupia ($125M, 2012), the latter becoming the foundation of Cisco's UCS management suite. At Fabrix.ai, he is pioneering Agentic AI for enterprise IT operations through a Robotic Data Automation Fabric that unifies data ingestion, AI agent orchestration, and workflow automation at scale.
Jing Zhu
Jing Zhu is the Founder and CEO of Duet (Dashboard Story, Inc.), a B2B SaaS platform built for non-emergency medical transportation (NEMT) providers across the United States. A Cornell PhD-turned-Berkeley MBA, she spent a decade in corporate healthcare before founding Duet — first as a neighborhood carpooling app, then pivoting to a full-stack dispatching and billing platform that helps wheelchair, stretcher, and ambulatory transport operators run leaner and get paid faster. Based in San Francisco, Zhu leads a 12-person team and has raised $120K in seed funding.
Jon O'Bryan
Jon O'Bryan is the CEO and Co-founder of Atlas (YC W22), an AI-first customer support platform built to replace legacy tools like Zendesk and Intercom. A PhD physicist turned serial entrepreneur, Jon previously co-founded PadSplit - a co-living marketplace that housed 23,000 people across 18 U.S. cities - and Blanket Homes. At Atlas, he is on a mission to transform customer support from a cost center into a revenue driver, bringing together session recording, omnichannel ticketing, AI copilot, and customer timeline tools in a single ergonomic platform backed by Y Combinator and angel investors including Parker Conrad (Rippling), Jack Altman (Lattice), and Arash Ferdowsi (Dropbox).