inc-5000
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Jason Russell Keeps Changing the Product - and Keeping the Same Skill
Before enterprise software, there were ad agencies, poker chips and furniture sourced in China. The Stable Kernel CEO's real product has always been curiosity - disciplined just enough to become a company.
Jens Nicolaysen
Jens Nicolaysen is the co-founder and Chief Marketing Officer of Shinesty, the Boulder, Colorado apparel brand whose stated mission is to force the world to take itself less seriously. A 2010 marketing graduate of CU Boulder's Leeds School of Business, he spent his early career doing brand strategy and innovation consulting for large consumer companies before launching Shinesty in mid-2014 with fellow Leeds alum Chris White. The company began as a vintage-clothing resale operation with buyers scouring thrift shops in college and ski towns, pivoted to original designs in 2015, and grew into a direct-to-consumer underwear and loungewear business best known for its trademarked Ball Hammock pouch underwear, its holiday and theme-party outfits, and a joke-first marketing voice that Nicolaysen oversees across email, paid media, catalogues and video. Shinesty's story became a six-episode MTV2 series in 2017, the company was named an Inc. 5000 honoree in 2022, and it has raised roughly $8.2 million through a Series A.
Faris Ghawi
Faris Ghawi is the co-founder and CEO of Vytalize Health, a Hoboken-based value-based care company that partners with primary care physicians to manage Medicare patients through data, analytics, and financial incentives. A Lehigh-trained civil engineer who moved into healthcare consulting at EY and then earned an MBA at Columbia, Ghawi launched Vytalize in 2014 with college friends. Under his leadership the company grew to serve hundreds of thousands of Medicare beneficiaries across dozens of states, raised a $100M Series C in 2023, and topped Inc. Magazine's 2024 list as America's fastest-growing private company.
Joe Welu
Joe Welu is the founder and CEO of Total Expert, a Minnesota-based fintech company that built the first customer engagement platform purpose-built for banks, credit unions, and mortgage lenders. He started the company in 2012 from the basement of a real estate office, hiring his first programmers off Craigslist, after a decade running one of the top-selling real estate teams in the U.S. Today Total Expert serves more than 200 financial institutions, including 15 of the top 25 U.S. banks and lenders, and its software touches roughly a quarter of U.S. mortgage production.
Ray Wolf
Ray Wolf is the CEO of Televero Behavioral Health, an Austin-based virtual mental health practice that ranked No. 54 on the 2025 Inc. 5000 with 4,962% three-year growth. A mechanical engineer by training with an MBA from Rensselaer and executive education at Harvard and Stanford, he has spent three decades running operations at Pratt & Whitney, Dell, Brocade, Lumeris, Redirect Health and A2K Partners before taking Televero from a small telepsychiatry practice to a 110-person, multi-state provider network.
Nihal Advani
Nihal Advani is the founder and CEO of QualSights, a Chicago-based insights technology platform that helps global brands decode real-world human behavior through live video, mobile ethnography, sensors and AI. A former internationally ranked junior tennis player from India who came to the US on a full scholarship, he cut his teeth at Google and Microsoft before founding the travel startup Georama in 2012, then pivoting it into QualSights in 2018. On roughly $3.5M raised over a decade, he built one of America's fastest growing market research companies, ranked by Inc. as the fastest growing company in Illinois.
Andrej Strojin
Andrej Strojin is the co-founder and CEO of HAVERHILL, a Warren, Rhode Island fine-jewelry house that makes 14k gold, birthstone-personalized pieces to order rather than in advance. A Slovenian-trained mechanical engineer and former Deloitte and Strategy& consultant, he met fifth-generation jeweler Haverhill Leach on a dating app in 2018, married her four months later, and turned her artisan brand into a fast-scaling direct-to-consumer operation. When COVID shut down suppliers before Mother's Day 2020, the couple built a jewelry assembly line in their garage and cut turnaround from seven days to one. Under Strojin the company has quadrupled sales, reached $16M in 2024 revenue, and landed on the Inc. 5000 three years running.
Brad Berman
Brad Berman is the co-owner and CEO of BodyBio, a family-owned cellular-health and nutritional-supplement company in Millville, New Jersey. He arrived not from a lab but from the beverage aisle, with stops at PepsiCo and FIJI Water, and married into the founding Kane family. Since taking the top job in 2019 he has rebranded the 25-plus-year-old practitioner brand, pushed it into direct-to-consumer and mainstream retail, and steered roughly 41% revenue growth that landed BodyBio on the Inc. 5000.
Dirk Buikema
Dirk Buikema is the founder and CEO of Hyperwear, an Austin-based functional fitness company he started in 2011. A former corporate attorney and semiconductor strategist turned inventor, he holds multiple US patents for training gear including the SandBell sandbag, the Hyper Vest adjustable weighted vest, and the SteelBell. Under his lean, research-driven, direct-to-consumer approach, Hyperwear grew 85% from 2022 to 2024 and landed on the 2025 Inc. 5000 list of America's fastest-growing private companies.
Jennifer Nevins
Jennifer McAllister-Nevins is the CEO and Co-Founder of Savor, a New York-based brand that turns keepsakes and important documents into beautifully designed, display-worthy storage. A former ACLU attorney and Legal Aid Society lawyer who pivoted from legal advocacy to product entrepreneurship, she co-founded Savor in 2014 with Karla the Losen after meeting at their children's school. Under her leadership, Savor grew revenue tenfold in five years, landed on the Inc 5000 at #3206, went viral on TikTok Shop landing in the top 10%, and earned placements at Anthropologie, Pottery Barn Kids, and Nordstrom. Her flagship products - including The Library, The Folio, and the 'In Case I Go Missing' binder - have been featured on Good Morning America, the Today Show, CNN, HGTV, Oprah Daily, Vogue, and The New York Times.
Dmitri Lepikhov
Dmitri Lepikhov is the CEO of MightyCall, a San Francisco-based cloud call center and VoIP platform built for small and mid-sized businesses. Since taking the helm in 2015, he has grown the company by over 500%, landed it on the Inc. 5000, and earned recognition from the U.S. Chamber of Commerce as one of America's most innovative small businesses. A CPA by training with roots in auditing and corporate finance at firms like Deloitte and Severstal, Lepikhov has positioned MightyCall as a G2 Leader in Contact Center Solutions and expanded its engineering footprint to Tashkent, Uzbekistan.
Jeff Lu
Jeff (Jiajun) Lu is the founder and CEO of AKOOL, the generative AI video platform that ranked #1 on the Inc. 5000 list in 2025 with 37,364% revenue growth in three years. A PhD computer scientist who worked on Face ID at Apple and video processing at Google Cloud before building AKOOL on just 8 GPUs in 2020, Lu has turned a side project generating $100K into a $40M-revenue company powering AI avatars and real-time video translation for Coca-Cola, Amazon, Google, and Nvidia.