missouri
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the Loft makes the next step obvious
A baklava guide. A better product picture. A shorter route to checkout. The Missouri creative agency turns the small details of buying into the substance of a brand.
Jun Fabella and the business of finding a simpler way
An MBA classmate needed software. Jun Fabella helped build a business. His route from DYNALABS to ANiGENT reveals an engineer’s interest in systems - and the people who make them work.
Commerce Bank's quiet war on waiting
Commerce Bank built its business on personal relationships. Its next move is to remove the paperwork, payment delays and awkward handoffs that get between people and their money.
John Kemper and the art of staying for the answer
He joined Commerce after a consulting assignment and became its chief executive eleven years later. John Kemper’s career turns on a practical question: what happens after the advice is given?
Andy Blunt’s most demanding campaign has no election day
He helped elect a brother and a father, then co-founded a lobbying firm that spread across state capitals. Now Andy Blunt is working toward a result that no ballot can certify: a company that lasts beyond its founders.
Ameren wants you to notice nothing.
The Midwest utility is spending billions on a deceptively simple product: an ordinary day. The hard part is keeping the lights on without making the bill the bigger story.
James Stapleton and the geography of a second chance
He started businesses, taught entrepreneurship, and helped turn a former courthouse into a place to build companies. With Codefi, James Stapleton keeps returning to one question: why should opportunity depend on where you live?
Mark Witkowski and the business beneath your feet
He joined the waterworks business in 2007 and spent years building its financial machinery. Now Core & Main CEO Mark Witkowski is responsible for keeping a much larger network moving, without losing its local knowledge.
Martin Lyons followed the money. Then came the power.
Before he led Ameren, Martin Lyons learned to follow the dollars. His career now turns on a harder calculation: building tomorrow’s power system at a price today’s customers can bear.
The bank that keeps the local names
United Community Bank grew from a Greenfield bank purchase into a multistate business. Employee ownership and a collection of familiar bank names explain the strategy.
Saint Louis Bank bets on knowing the business
A local bank can offer the same familiar products as a national giant. Saint Louis Bank’s wager is that understanding the person using them makes the difference.
Kevin King and the Quiet Art of Keeping Money Close to Home
A lawyer spent years learning where risk hides in the fine print. Then he took charge of a two-branch St. Louis bank where trust, liquidity and local memory all have to balance.
The Firm That Put Three Verbs on the Door
A 38-year-old St. Louis consultancy changed owners and names, then reduced its work to three ordinary verbs: communicate, operate, advocate. The clever part is how often clients need all three at once.
The Little Agency That Learned to Make Science Travel
From a card table and a rented answering machine to billion-impression nutrition campaigns, Communique built a business around one stubborn problem: facts do not move unless someone teaches them how.
The Ad Agency That Found a National Market Outside Its Front Door
Callis spent nearly four decades turning a Missouri address into an unfair advantage: it knows rural America because rural America is home.
The $375,000 clue to Lake Dermatology
At Lake of the Ozarks, Lake Dermatology & MedSpa brought medical and cosmetic skin care to the same address. Today, the Forefront practice there carries that combination forward.
The town that refused to demolish its own future
In 2014, two Cape Girardeau residents talked the city out of demolishing a downtown building and started southeast Missouri's first tech incubator inside it. A decade later, Codefi trains AI workers, builds startups as a co-founder, and pulls venture capital into places the coasts forget.
Levi Malott
Levi Malott is a Missouri-native software engineer turned startup operator and venture capitalist who tested Falcon 9 rocket systems at SpaceX, built ML infrastructure at BetterUp, scaled Pachama's engineering team from 7 to 40 people as VP of Engineering through a $700M valuation, then co-founded Weave Bio as CTO - an AI platform accelerating pharmaceutical regulatory filings that raised a $10M seed round in 2023. Today he serves as Venture Partner at Redbud VC in Columbia, Missouri, backing early-stage tech founders from the heartland.
Wade Foster
Wade Foster is the co-founder and CEO of Zapier, the automation platform connecting 7,000+ apps for over 2 million businesses. He built Zapier from a 2011 hackathon win in Columbia, Missouri into a ~$7 billion company on just $1.4 million in primary venture capital — one of the most capital-efficient growth stories in SaaS history. A jazz saxophonist from Jefferson City, Missouri with an industrial engineering degree and an MBA from Mizzou, Foster has led Zapier as a fully remote, profitable company since 2014, and is now positioning it as the AI orchestration layer for the agentic era.