kentucky
(10)
Eric Williams Built a Career Forward - Then Found His Company by Looking Back
The eJOOV co-founder spent two decades learning how goods move. His sharper insight was that the awkward trip home - the return - could become a second sale, a better process and the start of a broader logistics company.
Lori Riggs Built a Marketing Career on One Quiet Rule: Be Useful First
Long before she became Lifepoint Health's chief marketing officer, Lori Riggs found a durable formula for earning attention: solve the audience's problem before promoting the company. Her path from a hospital internship to the C-suite shows what happens when empathy learns to count.
The Kentucky Town That's Been Hiding Inside Your Amp for 60 Years
For six decades a factory in a Kentucky town of 2,500 has been building the speakers inside your amplifier - and letting other brands take the credit.
Insight Communications
For 27 years, Insight Communications wired the parts of the Midwest the coastal giants ignored - then sold the whole thing to Time Warner Cable for about $3 billion.
What Chefs Want!
A one-van produce hustle in Louisville turned into a 16,000-restaurant food-distribution machine by doing the one thing the national giants would not: picking up the phone and asking the chef.
Lyman Stone
Lyman Stone is a demographer who has become one of the most-quoted voices on why people are having fewer babies. He directs the Pronatalism Initiative at the Institute for Family Studies and serves as Director of Research at Demographic Intelligence, where he builds forecasting models of fertility and family formation. A Kentuckian economist turned population scientist, he completed his PhD at McGill University and is a fixture in the New York Times, Wall Street Journal, and on podcasts like Modern Wisdom, arguing that falling birth rates are less about money and more about marriage, meaning, and the things people want but never get around to.
Mitchell Dunn
Mitchell Dunn is a licensed mortgage consultant at Loan Factory (NMLS #1378534) who specializes in down payment assistance, DSCR investor loans, FHA and conventional financing. A former credit analyst, he is licensed across California, Florida, Indiana, Kansas, Kentucky and Texas, and is known for helping self-employed borrowers and clients who have been told 'no' elsewhere.
J. Seth Strattan
J. Seth Strattan, PhD is a General Partner at Two Bear Capital, a Whitefish, Montana-based venture capital firm investing at the crossroads of life sciences and technology. With a PhD in Structural Biology and a BA in Philosophy from Stanford University, Strattan spent years at Stanford building and leading the engineering and data science teams behind landmark genomics consortia - ENCODE, the Human Cell Atlas, and the International Human Epigenomics Consortium - before pivoting to back the founders tackling biology's hardest problems. He is based in Silicon Valley, leads Two Bear Capital's Menlo Park office, and splits his remaining time between Montana and a family farm in the Appalachian Mountains of Kentucky.
David George
David George is a General Partner at Andreessen Horowitz (a16z), where he leads the firm's Growth investing practice - a $15 billion operation he built from scratch after joining in 2019. A former General Atlantic investor who backed Airbnb, Slack, CrowdStrike, and Uber at growth stage, George brings a ruthlessly analytical, 'business model snob' approach to late-stage venture. He has since backed Roblox, Databricks, SpaceX, Stripe, Figma, OpenAI, and Anduril, developing distinctive frameworks around 'what vs. how' innovations, push vs. pull market dynamics, and winner-take-all market structures. A Kentucky native with a wrestling background, a Notre Dame summa cum laude degree, and an MBA from Stanford GSB, George is known for his competitive intensity, deep intellectual frameworks, and a Post-it note on his computer that reads: 'Is the market demanding more of my product?'
Molly Pittman
Molly Pittman is the CEO and Managing Partner of Smart Marketer, a leading digital marketing education and agency company. She rose from an unpaid intern at DigitalMarketer to VP of Marketing by age 24, personally managing over $16 million in profitable ad spend and generating 500,000+ leads. Co-host of the Perpetual Traffic Podcast (5M+ downloads), author of 'Click Happy' (2020), and founder of Fields of Freedom Dog Rescue - a 501(c)(3) nonprofit that has saved 2,500+ dogs from euthanasia in Kentucky.