mountaineering
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The North Face
The North Face is an American outdoor apparel, footwear, and equipment brand founded in San Francisco in 1966. Now a subsidiary of VF Corporation, it designs technical gear for climbers, hikers, skiers, and everyday adventurers - from the Nuptse and Denali jackets to Summit Series expedition kit - alongside a large lifestyle business, and generated roughly $3.7 billion in revenue in fiscal 2025. Its 'Never Stop Exploring' tagline anchors both a product philosophy and impact programs like the Explore Fund.
Evan Kaplan
Evan Kaplan is the CEO of InfluxData, the company behind InfluxDB - the world's most popular open-source time series database with over 1.3 million developers. With nearly 20 years in CEO roles across multiple companies, he took InfluxData from a scrappy open-source project of 3,000 users to a platform handling billions of data points per second for 1,900+ enterprise customers. His path to the C-suite ran not through computer science but through environmental science degrees and years spent as a mountain guide in his late 20s - an unconventional origin story that shows up in how he thinks about resilience and long-term endurance.