montana
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The Intern, the Long Wire and the Work of Connecting Montana
Jason Williams entered Blackfoot as a law-school intern and returned to lead it through a costly rural fiber conversion. His advantage is not technological bravado, but a lawyer’s patience for trade-offs and a willingness to say where the company arrived late.
The Glamour Is the Wrapper. The Work Is Plumbing.
williamsworks has spent two decades turning celebrity, corporate and philanthropic intent into the unglamorous machinery of change - field research, local partnerships, funding systems and the patience to hand power over.
The Agency Older Than Sliced Bread Survived by Refusing to Act Its Age
Founded as the Great Depression arrived, The Wendt Agency has sold sliced bread, Montana vacations and public-health messages. Its useful trick is not longevity. It is knowing what to keep and what to discard.
Range’s $4 Million Route to 58 Customers
In rural Wyoming, fast internet starts with an expensive stretch of dirt. Range is building for the neighbors at the end of it - and for a new fiber route from Denver to Chicago.
Troy Forrest
Troy Forrest is the Chief Marketing Officer of Murdoch's Ranch & Home Supply, the Bozeman, Montana based retail chain serving ranchers, farmers and outdoor households across the Mountain West. A customer-centric marketer with more than two decades in brand, creative and ecommerce leadership, he previously served as Vice President of Marketing & eCommerce at Vera Bradley and held senior roles at The Buckle, Nasco and Harry & David.
Kris Merkel
Kris Merkel is the President and CEO of S2 Corporation, a Bozeman, Montana deep-tech firm turning rare-earth-doped crystals into an optical computer that watches the entire radio spectrum at once. A physicist by training and a patient operator by temperament, he has spent more than two decades pulling a niche piece of laboratory physics, spatial-spectral holography, out of Montana State University and into the hands of the U.S. Department of Defense, DARPA, and the intelligence community.
BioSqueeze Inc.
BioSqueeze Inc. is a Butte, Montana company and the self-described world leader in commercial biomineralization. Its core technology pumps low-viscosity, self-diverting fluids carrying naturally occurring soil bacteria into oil and gas wells, where the microbes precipitate crystalline calcium carbonate (limestone) to permanently seal leakage pathways as small as one micron. The result is a gas-tight barrier that eliminates sustained casing pressure and stops fugitive methane emissions, helping operators meet well-integrity and environmental obligations across producing, plugged, and storage wells.
Mark Ranalli
Mark Ranalli is the founder, president and CEO of BioSqueeze Inc., a Butte, Montana company that uses biomineralization - natural soil bacteria that grow limestone - to seal microscopic leaks in oil and gas wells and stop fugitive methane. A serial entrepreneur who previously built and led companies in publishing and telecommunications with workforces topping 700, he holds an electrical engineering and computer science degree from Stanford and an MBA from Dartmouth's Tuck School, and has served as a business-school dean. After scaling consumer-internet ventures, he turned to the unglamorous, high-stakes problem of leaky wellbores, backing a decade of Department of Energy and Montana State University research with a $7.4 million Series A.
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.