north-america
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The Conference Company That Sells the Collision
For three decades, Strategy Institute has sold something executives insist cannot be scheduled: a useful encounter. Its trick is to engineer the room before anyone enters it.
Kevin Maddock Built a Career on the Revenue That Comes Back
For nearly four decades, Kevin Maddock has worked the quiet machinery of enterprise software - renewals, support and the patient arithmetic of keeping customers. His career is a study in why the second sale can matter more than the first.
Metrie Built a 100-Year Business by Cutting the Paint Job in Half
The family-owned millwork company survived a century by turning trim from an afterthought into a system. Its most useful lesson for builders is simple: sell fewer decisions, fewer job-site steps and fewer reasons for a callback.
Boyd Interactive Paid $170 Million for the Part of Online Gambling Nobody Sees
The casino brand gets the neon. Boyd's quieter wager was on the account system, compliance work and operating muscle underneath it - infrastructure that can power its own apps and other operators' ambitions.
MiddleGround Capital Put the Factory Floor in the Investment Committee
Its founders learned industry from the assembly line and the deal room. Now the firm is testing whether operational fluency can turn overlooked B2B manufacturers into stronger, more valuable businesses.
The 123-Year-Old Private Equity Firm That Starts Planning the Exit on Day One
HKW reviews more than 1,000 opportunities a year, then applies a four-team system to the few it buys. The unusual part is not the funnel - it is that the exit team gets involved as soon as the deal closes.
The Private Equity Firm That Treats Software Like a Repeating Problem
Spotlight Equity Partners buys control of established software companies, then sends operators into the machinery. Its wager is that lessons learned in libraries, databases, identity and industrial maintenance can travel from one niche to the next.
The Pritzkers Built Hyatt and Marmon. Now They Buy the Companies Nobody Will Sell to a Fund.
Tony Pritzker turned a family fortune built on Hyatt and the Marmon Group into a private equity firm that sells patience - and just raised $3.4 billion on the promise it will not rush the exit.
The Water Giant Hiding in Plain Sight
Primo Brands owns many of the water labels Americans recognize, but its real advantage is the system behind them: springs, bottles, refill stations, dispensers and delivery routes. The 2024 merger created scale across nearly every way people buy water - and a difficult integration test to match.
Keel Infrastructure Is Betting the AI Boom Will Be Won Before the Servers Arrive
The company formerly known as Bitfarms has traded Bitcoin mines for a 2.2-gigawatt pipeline of powered sites. Now it has to turn scarce megawatts into long-term tenants.
Miriam Mburu Makes the Complicated Clear
After two decades marketing businesses that resist easy explanation, AIG's North America communications chief has learned that clarity is built - one audience, one team and one useful story at a time.
John Ahlman Wants the Solar App to Be the Thing You Show Your Neighbors
SolarEdge's North America marketing chief has a practical theory of the energy transition: make the hardware work together, make the data legible, and give a happy homeowner something worth showing at the kitchen table.
Joli Kindler Built a Brand Inside the Quietest Corner of Finance
A marketing coordinator who never left, and spent fifteen years turning insurance brokerage into a brand people could actually feel.
The Company Behind Your Oil Change Is Quietly Building Car Care's Operating System
Driven Brands has turned a scattered chore - keeping a car alive - into a portfolio of familiar local shops backed by one shared machine. Its next chapter depends on making that machine simpler, faster and more disciplined.
The Company Behind the Juice Label You Never Noticed
Lassonde sells Oasis, SunRype and Apple & Eve. Its quieter business is helping major retailers put their own names on juice, sauce and soup - a century-old factory skill now producing nearly C$3 billion in annual sales.
The 4,000-Café Bakery That Is Quietly Rebuilding America’s Neighborhood Cake Counter
Paris Baguette’s name points to France, its operating system comes from South Korea, and its growth plan is unmistakably North American. The result is a bakery-café built to make an everyday pastry run feel like an occasion - then repeat it hundreds of times.
How Ferrero Turned a Hazelnut Shortage Hack Into a $22 Billion Snack Empire
The family behind Nutella spent eight decades turning scarcity into a system: invent a distinctive product, control the details, and give it time to become a ritual. Now Ferrero is applying that playbook to everything from protein wafers to Froot Loops.
The Airport Store That Learned to Sell You Time
Hudson built an airport empire on the things travelers forget. Its next act is turning dead time at the gate into a locally flavored, digitally streamlined retail business.
The Company Behind Your Coffee Break Is Preparing to Split in Two
Keurig Dr Pepper built an unusual empire by pairing supermarket coolers with kitchen counters. Now, after buying JDE Peet's, it is integrating a global coffee business while preparing to turn one sprawling beverage company into two focused ones.
Peloton Capital Management
Peloton Capital Management is betting that the best middle-market businesses need a longer runway, not a faster flip. Its founder-first model has turned patient capital into an 11-company portfolio across healthcare, financial and consumer services.
PENN Entertainment, Inc.
How a family racetrack in Grantville, Pennsylvania grew into a 43-property casino operator - and why it just walked away from ESPN to bet on its own brand.
Edward Pilkington
Across three decades, five regions and a cabinet of familiar labels, Edward Pilkington learned that durable brands need both a fixed identity and the nerve to move with culture.
Global Industrial Company
The 77-year-old distributor has turned the unglamorous work of keeping facilities supplied into a $1.38 billion business. Its next act is to make a sprawling catalog feel less like a warehouse and more like an expert on call.
Ferguson
Ferguson built a $31 billion business around a stubbornly physical promise: when a contractor needs the right valve, fitting or air handler, the answer cannot arrive next week. Its real product is certainty - inventory, expertise and last-mile execution wrapped around more than a million parts.
Pro Padel League
Pro Padel League (PPL) is North America's premier professional padel league, founded in 2023 by CEO Mike Dorfman. It runs a city-based franchise model of 10 teams across the U.S., Canada and Mexico, each fielding both men's and women's sides, with a season of multi-city events culminating in the City's Cup Finals. Backed by a $15M Series A led by Charlotte Hornets governor Rick Schnall, PPL is building the commercial and broadcast infrastructure to capitalize on padel's rapid growth in the American market.
Paul McKnight
Paul McKnight runs the North American arm of John Paul, the Paris-born concierge group that quietly answers the phone when private-jet calendars implode and Michelin reservations vanish. A career CFO turned chief executive, he is the operations spine behind a 600-concierge global network serving luxury brands and their highest-spending customers.
Andre Bliznyuk
Andre Bliznyuk is a General Partner at Runa Capital, where he leads North American investments in software for regulated industries: fintech, edtech, and digital health. Before VC, he spent a decade in capital markets at Goldman Sachs and UBS, running 20+ IPOs. He has backed Brainly, Mambu, Lendio, Smava, and Zopa, with exits at Cloudflare, Goldman Sachs, and Colt Telecom.
Joseph Ros
Joseph Ros is US Partner and General Manager at Entrepreneurs First (EF), the global talent-first investor that backs exceptional individuals before they have a co-founder or company. An EF alum himself - he founded edtech startup HowCloud during EF's third London cohort - Ros joined the team in late 2017, led expansion into Singapore, Hong Kong, and Bangalore, deployed over $20M via EF's Seed SPV, and now runs EF's North American operations from San Francisco, identifying and investing in the country's most ambitious founders from day zero.
Paul Weinstein
Paul Weinstein is the Founder, General Partner, and COO of Azure Capital Partners, a San Francisco-based venture capital firm he founded in 2000 with over $750 million under management across 8 funds and more than 200 investments. A former top-ranked Wall Street equity research analyst covering data communications at firms including Credit Suisse First Boston and Deutsche Bank, Paul transitioned from sell-side analyst to VC investor and has backed transformative technology companies including Docker, VMware, Salesforce (via Prediction.io), and Calix. He focuses on early and mid-stage ventures in cloud infrastructure, enterprise software, AI, and communications technology across North America.
Freddie Heygate
Freddie Heygate is CEO, North America at Just After Midnight, a London-founded managed cloud services and 24/7 digital support company now part of the Ultima group. After spending five years building JAM's Asia-Pacific operations from Singapore, he relocated to Austin, Texas in January 2024 to lead the company's US expansion. With a background spanning digital consultancy, marketing, and business development at agencies including Reading Room and The Drum, Freddie brings over a decade of cross-continental experience helping global brands like Ford, Abbott, and Vodafone keep their digital infrastructure running around the clock.