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John O’Nolan and the company he can never sell
Ghost’s co-founder made independence a condition of the business. From a music-school detour to a publishing platform built to outlast him, John O’Nolan keeps asking who the tools really serve.
Brooks Running
Brooks Running is a Seattle-based company that designs and sells performance running shoes, apparel, and accessories, and does nothing else. A subsidiary of Berkshire Hathaway, it narrowed its focus to running in 2001 and turned a near-bankrupt shoe maker into a category leader, closing 2025 with roughly $1.5 billion in revenue and its ninth straight year of growth. Its core franchises - the Ghost, Glycerin, and Adrenaline GTS - anchor the No. 1 position in U.S. specialty running retail, built on cushioning and support technologies like DNA LOFT, BioMoGo DNA, and GuideRails.
Casey Newton & Zoe Schiffer
Casey Newton and Zoe Schiffer are two of the most influential tech journalists working today. Newton founded Platformer, a newsletter covering social networks at the intersection of tech and democracy, co-hosts the Hard Fork podcast with the NYT, and broke landmark investigations into Facebook's content moderation crisis. Schiffer co-ran Platformer as managing editor, authored 'Extremely Hardcore: Inside Elon Musk's Twitter' (Penguin Random House, 2024), and now serves as Director of Business & Industry at WIRED. Together they shaped some of the most consequential tech journalism of the 2020s.