orlando
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Before the pitch, find the holes
Orlando’s StarterStudio teaches tech founders to test demand, win customers and face the awkward questions investors ask. Its most useful lesson may be knowing which idea to stop building.
Kristina Canada Wants Every Media Dollar to Answer a Harder Question
The Net Conversion CMO has spent two decades turning travel, entertainment and media into measurable business outcomes. Her latest campaign is for something harder to chart: human judgment.
Monica Kozak Makes Global Marketing Personal, Fifteen Minutes at a Time
At Bottomline, a 15-minute Monday ritual reveals Monica Kozak's operating idea: performance travels farther when people know one another. Her route to the C-suite runs through literature, sports broadcasting, agency work, e-commerce and the difficult art of making financial technology feel human.
Net Conversion Built the Plumbing That Makes Media Spend Confess
The Orlando agency buys the ads, joins the messy data behind them, and asks a blunt question: did the money move the business? Its answer is part service firm, part homegrown software stack.
The Vacation Business Is Built on Moments. Jeff Myers Runs the Machine Behind Them.
After 35 years inside one company, Jeff Myers still treats hospitality as a people business - only now the scoreboard includes 4,400 associates, 590,000 tours and more than $2.1 billion in annual sales.
Joe Nunziata Built a Mortgage Company, Sold It, Then Bought It Back
Joe Nunziata’s career is a study in the rarest corporate maneuver: building a company, selling it, and returning to buy it back. Two decades later, his Orlando card-table startup has become the base for a wider real estate services role.
Mark Daley Built the Last-Mile Machine Behind Clinical Trials
A biology graduate became a research coordinator, then built the local operating layer between ambitious study protocols and the people who make them possible. Conquest Research is now a six-location network across Florida, Virginia and Georgia.
She Built an Archaeology Firm Before the Field Had a Playbook
Anne Stokes started SEARCH as a graduate student in 1993. Three decades later, her career offers a field guide to turning patient science into an organization built for consequential work.
FBC Mortgage Sold, Bought Itself Back, Then Put Its Name on a Stadium - Here’s the Mortgage Playbook Builders Keep Buying
The Orlando lender built a national machine by making itself useful to both homebuyers and the people who deliver them. Its most revealing product is not a mortgage rate - it is a partnership system designed to keep complicated closings moving.
The Man Who Sold Two Drinks to Coca-Cola Is Now Buying Snacks, Sneakers and a Football League
Mike Repole spent two decades turning drinks into billion-dollar exits for Coca-Cola. Impact Capital is where he does it again - this time as the buyer, backing snack brands, Tom Brady's wellness empire and a football league.
The Orlando Fund Betting That the Next Big Startup Won't Come From Silicon Valley
A venture firm in Orlando is wagering that the founders worth backing are the ones nobody in Silicon Valley has a flight booked to meet - and it wants to be the first money in.
Tony Walker Sells the Vacation Before You Book It
He started on the timeshare floor and worked his way to the corner office of the biggest name in vacation ownership. The pitch never changed - only the size of the room.
The 280 People Who Sell 75 Million Vacations a Year
It owns no hotels, no theme parks, no roller coasters. Yet Visit Orlando's small team turns Orange County's hotel tax into a $94.5 billion visitor economy - and 468,000 jobs.
Andretti Indoor Karting & Games
The racing surname is real, the karts hit real speed, and the business behind them is quietly turning empty afternoons into corporate team-building budgets - one 14-venue location at a time.
Morgan & Morgan, P.A.
It spends more on advertising than most firms bill in a year, recovered $25 billion for clients, and put its own name on a promise: for the people, not the powerful. Inside America's largest personal injury firm.
Hilton Grand Vacations
Hilton Grand Vacations sells something more complicated than a hotel room: a repeatable claim on future holidays. Its real product is the machinery that turns deeds, points, loans and resort operations into a travel habit for more than 720,000 members.
Travel + Leisure Co.
The company once known as Wyndham Destinations sells the same week of vacation over and over again - and turned a 30-year-old timeshare model into a $4 billion machine built on exchange networks, deeded weeks and a magazine name.
Dusty Tonkin
He has spent nearly three decades learning how people decide to buy a piece of their own vacation. Now he runs sales and marketing for the company that turned that idea into a global business.
Robert Masson
Robert Masson is a neurosurgeon turned founder who runs eXeX (Expanded Existence), an AI and mixed-reality platform that captures surgical mastery and pipes holographic guidance into the sterile field. With more than three decades of spine surgery and 13,000-plus procedures behind him, he made global headlines for bringing the Apple Vision Pro into the operating room as a touch-free logistics tool. He is also the founder of the Masson Spine Institute and, at 52, raced to a podium at the Rolex 24 at Daytona alongside his eldest son.
Bill Catania
Bill Catania is the founder and CEO of OneRail, an Orlando-based last-mile delivery orchestration platform he started in 2018 with his wife Lisa at their kitchen table after a broken refrigerator exposed the gaps in same-day delivery. A three-time founder whose first company began in his Cornell dorm, Catania built OneRail into a venture-backed logistics technology company connecting enterprise retailers to a network of millions of drivers, raising a $42M Series C in late 2024 and earning recognition from Goldman Sachs, Deloitte, Gartner and FreightWaves.