Eric Foster spent 42 years at Swinerton - one of the largest 100% employee-owned construction companies in the US - rising from project engineer in 1982 to CEO in January 2020, the company's 12th chief executive in its 132-year history. A UC Berkeley civil engineering graduate, he led Swinerton through the COVID-19 pandemic, oversaw the launch of mass timber subsidiary Timberlab, and expanded the firm to $4.3 billion in revenue across 20 locations before retiring on January 11, 2024. His career touched landmark San Francisco structures including SFMOMA and the historic Monadnock Building.
Mandy Cabot co-founded Dansko in 1990 from the back of a station wagon and built it into a $140M comfort footwear empire - then gave the whole company to her employees. Now she's running Silk Grass Farms in Belize, a vertically integrated agribusiness sitting atop 24,500 acres of protected rainforest. Chapter three of an already remarkable life.