north-carolina
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William Fry and the business of handing over the keys
A trip home to eastern North Carolina sent William Fry toward an overlooked question: who takes over when a small-business owner retires? At American Operator, he is building a path for experienced operators to become owners.
Dell Murphy and the business of staying
After the family hog business was sold, Dell Murphy built a management company for what came next. In Wallace, North Carolina, that work now connects farms, boats, hospitality and another generation of Murphys.
Jennifer Moses and the arithmetic of forever
An accountant takes the helm of a company built to keep its businesses. Jennifer Moses’s route to IMC’s CEO office puts a familiar question on a longer clock: what does it take to earn people’s trust?
Bryan Bunker and the business of giving time back
From commercial real estate to engineered foam, Bryan Bunker has kept returning to the same practical question: how do you help other people do their work? In Zebulon, that question now reaches all the way to the ballpark.
Travis May and the value of the space between
From LiveRamp to Protege, Travis May keeps finding businesses in the gaps between other businesses. At Shaper Capital, he is trying to turn that habit into a company-building practice.
Blake Shewey and the Long Road to a Handpicked Future
Before Blake Shewey became CEO of Snow Companies, she spent years moving through its ranks. Her succession tells a story about earning trust, sharing credit and carrying a founder’s work forward.
Thad Tarkington Found a Business Hiding in the Air Filter
A ruined Saturday suggested a subscription. The stranger clue came later: customers ordering filters for dozens of homes, pointing two college founders toward a much larger problem.
Tucker Hawkinson Learned to Make the Complicated Feel Obvious
From a SpaceX production floor to the tangled internals of restaurant software, Tucker Hawkinson has made a career of finding the hidden structure in difficult systems - and making it useful to the people on the other side of the screen.
John Bradford Found a Software Company Hiding in the Pet Policy
A landlord's recurring nuisance became John Bradford's unlikely blueprint for a national software business - one that asks property managers to judge the animal in front of them, not merely the breed on a list.
Jennifer Byrne Took the Wrong Job - Then Spent 30 Years Fixing the Right Problem
She arrived with a new briefcase, dressed for pharmaceutical sales, and discovered she had been hired to coordinate clinical trials. The misunderstanding became a vocation - and eventually a company built to bring research into everyday care.
Tom Adams and the Blackberry That Refused to Behave
The Pairwise CEO spent decades learning how slowly crops change. Now he is betting that the quickest route to public trust runs through a smoother blackberry, a shorter cherry tree, and benefits people can taste.
Beth Silverman and the Business of Turning No Into a Lease
She spent a career learning how cities, developers and nonprofits talk past one another. Then she built a housing model around the useful part of no.
Luke Combs Took the Long Way to Wembley
He learned guitar at 21, left college with 21 credit hours to go, and built a country career one crowded room at a time. The remarkable part is not simply the stadiums. It is how little distance he puts between the stadium singer and the fellow who once worked the door.
Lindsey Paschal Learned to Market Complexity - Then Took On the Energy Grid
After two decades spent turning specialist software into clear commercial stories, the former teacher and SaaS growth leader has arrived at Energy Exemplar - where the product models systems measured in seconds, decades and continents.
Randy Guard Has Spent a Career Making Complicated Technology Make Sense
An electrical engineer wandered into marketing and stayed for the hard part: translating complex systems into reasons people care. After SAS, Spreedly, and Appian, Randy Guard is taking that habit to Liminal's market-intelligence business.
Grayson Leverenz Learned Scale Backwards - Then Built a Better Way Forward
She went from managing a $14 million brand budget to helping a startup grow with paid media below 1% of revenue. Now the former Spiffy CMO is teaching lean teams how to make strategy and execution share a desk.
Paul Harmon Makes the Invisible Materials Economy Legible
From software support to the C-suite, Paul Harmon's career is a study in translating complexity - turning fibers, films, customer needs and sustainability targets into decisions people can act on.
Tim Willis Keeps Betting on the Space Between Blinks
He built TearScience from a treatment idea into a company acquired by Johnson & Johnson. Then the engineer returned to the same tiny surface with a new question: can an eye drop learn to stay put?
Richard Dest Built a Dental Practice That Learned to Travel
He began with one office in 1985. Then Richard Dest spent decades turning dentistry into an operating system - one that could move beyond the practice door.
Dillon Baxter Bet on a Fork That Could Disappear
A college golfer sold straws door to door, quit banking after one month, lost an $8 million commitment, and kept building. Now PlantSwitch is trying to make the useful life of plastic match the life of the thing it serves.
Michelle Ehmann and the Quiet Architecture of Executive Trust
For more than two decades, Michelle Ehmann has worked in the room where priorities become decisions. Her career offers a practical lesson in the invisible craft of keeping leaders, teams, and commitments moving together.
Robert Mallernee
Robert Mallernee is the founder and CEO of Eton Solutions, the Research Triangle Park company behind AtlasFive, an integrated, cloud-native, AI-driven platform that runs the back office for more than 1,000 of the world's wealthiest families. A CFA with three-plus decades in ultra-high-net-worth wealth management, he built the software inside a real multi-family office (Eton Advisors) before spinning it out to sell to the rest of the industry. His pitch is blunt: spreadsheets are 'separate-sheets,' and the modern family office needs one system, not a hundred. In 2025 Eton closed a $58M Series C to push AtlasFive and EtonAI deeper into private equity, funds and global private banks.
Rhett & Link
Rhett McLaughlin and Link Neal are an American comedy duo and lifelong best friends who have built one of YouTube's most enduring empires — Good Mythical Morning — into a daily talk show with over 19.5 million subscribers and 10.8 billion views. Operating out of Burbank as Mythical Entertainment, they create shows, podcasts, merchandise, books, and live experiences, ranking #4 on Forbes' 2025 highest-earning creator list with $36M in annual earnings.
Josh Rose
Josh Rose is the CEO of Hawthorne Health, Inc. (formerly Hawthorne Effect), a Walnut Creek-based company building the largest community-based clinical trial site network in the U.S. A clinical research industry veteran with over 20 years of experience, Rose previously led decentralized clinical trial strategy at IQVIA and CVS Health before taking the helm at Hawthorne Health in early 2024. Under his leadership, Hawthorne has expanded to 75+ community locations, partnered with 40+ pharma sponsors, and pioneered a model that embeds certified clinical research staff inside independent pharmacies and patients' homes - bringing trials to communities that traditional research networks have long bypassed.