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Candan Bolukbas Found the Back Door Was Someone Else’s Front Door
An ethical hacker kept finding the same weakness outside the fortress. He turned that recurring clue into Black Kite - and a career spent making invisible supplier risk legible.
Merritt Group and the Business of Making Complicated Things Matter
For three decades, Merritt Group has made a business of translating dense technology into stories that buyers can repeat. The trick is not louder marketing. It is knowing exactly which details deserve a microphone.
The Campaign That Had to Forget Its Audience
Sage Communications built its name in the place where polished campaigns meet procurement rules, public scrutiny, and sudden policy reversals. Its most revealing work began when a nearly finished idea was told to start over.
David Gorodetski Learned to Make Complexity Behave
He meant to paint. Instead, the Haifa-born founder built a communications career by stripping hard ideas to their essential line - and learned that a well-reasoned no can be more valuable than an easy yes.
Mark Schacknies Keeps Building the Same Machine - Only Faster
Across property booms, platform pivots and two exits, the NFTYDoor co-founder has kept returning to one stubborn question: why does moving money through real estate still require so much friction? His answer is equal parts software, distribution and knowing exactly whom the product must serve.
The Firm That Builds Companies From a CIA Playbook
Most venture firms wait for founders to walk in the door. Red Cell Partners writes the idea first, then goes hunting for the people to build it - a studio model borrowed straight from the intelligence community.
The Hospitality Giant That Owns Almost No Hotels
Hilton runs more than 8,000 hotels across 140-plus countries and barely holds the deeds to any of them. The real business is a fee machine wrapped around 200 million loyalty members - and it started with one man and a cheap hotel in Cisco, Texas.
Acentra Health
Acentra Health is a McLean, Virginia healthcare technology and clinical services company formed in 2023 from the merger of CNSI and Kepro. It builds Medicaid and Medicare systems, care management platforms, and quality-oversight services for state and federal government health programs, combining public-sector software with clinical staff who review authorizations, assessments, and appeals. Backed by The Carlyle Group, it employs roughly 3,300-3,400 people across the U.S. and India.
Oddball
Oddball is a McLean, Virginia-based digital services agency that modernizes how the U.S. government talks to its citizens. It builds and maintains some of the federal government's busiest websites - notably VA.gov for the Department of Veterans Affairs and Medicare.gov for CMS - using human-centered design, agile engineering, and modern cloud infrastructure. Founded in 2016 and led by CEO Travis Sorensen and CTO Rob Wilkinson, the remote-first firm calls itself 'a strangely human digital agency,' and grew to roughly 340-366 employees and ~$117M in annual prime contract revenue before taking a 2025 growth investment from private equity firm Falfurrias Management Partners.