phoenix
(11)
Clate Mask and the business of getting your life back
He joined his brothers-in-law to sell software and get out of debt. Two decades, a company sale and a book about chaos later, Clate Mask is helping Arizona founders build businesses they can actually live with.
Larry Davis and the business of keeping a promise
From industrial wholesalers to home services, Larry Davis has spent his career working on the distance between what a company promises and what a customer receives. His story includes a family-driven departure, a startup built around partnership, and the harder arithmetic of staying in business.
Chase Lane and the art of coming home differently
Before taking charge of his family’s Phoenix agency, Chase Lane studied how complicated organizations work. Now the former Air Force officer is applying those lessons to a business where the family name comes with unfinished business.
Robert Slaughter Found the Pentagon's Missing Update Button
An Air Force physicist watched a promising AI project get stranded between a spreadsheet and an aircraft. His answer was Defense Unicorns - an unusually cheerful company built to make military software move at operational speed.
Megan Simoes Spent 13 Years Learning Every Room - Now She Runs the Hallway Between Them
A graphic designer became a developer, an integrator, a president and, in July 2026, Chief of Staff to Nextiva's CMO. The through-line is not title collecting. It is the patient craft of making specialists work as one team.
Tommy Mello Put a Garage Door Business on Rails
He began with a paint sprayer, a battered car and a useful place in the phone book. The real breakthrough came when Tommy Mello stopped trying to be the best technician in the truck and started building a company that could move without him.
Boots Dunlap Built a Lending Career by Walking Toward the Mess
From combat leadership to post-crash loan workouts, the RRA Capital co-founder has made a practice of entering difficult markets with clear eyes, patient capital and a bias toward strong teams.
Jeni Bell Is Marketing the Business Behind the Bin
After five brands, ten moves and a career spent making technology feel useful, Jeni Bell took on a less visible challenge: turning a vast environmental-services network into a customer experience people can understand.
Stephanie Whitlow and the Quiet Math of Trust
At Western Alliance Bank, Stephanie Whitlow has built a career translating complex institutions into clear promises - then making the organization keep them.
Josh Tabaj
Josh Tabaj is the Chief Marketing Officer and one of four co-founders of Branded Bills, the Arizona headwear and apparel company that turned a hand-branded leather patch into a national custom-merchandise business. Branded Bills started around 2015 in a Mesa garage with a branding iron, a knife, and roughly $1,000 from each founder; its first patch hat went to a South Dakota brewery. The company grew from state-pride hats into a vertically integrated operation that sources and produces its own headwear, runs a custom and corporate-branding division, sells officially licensed collegiate gear, opened its first physical store inside the Phoenix Suns' Footprint Center in 2022, and moved into a 96,000-plus square foot Tempe headquarters in 2025. Tabaj handles the marketing side of that machine - the brand voice, the customer story, and the argument that a logo deserves better than a screen print.
Salman Ahmad
Salman Ahmad is the co-founder and CEO of Mosaic, a Phoenix-based, tech-enabled general contractor reinventing how build-to-rent homes get planned and built. He grew up in a construction household, then stacked degrees in computer science from Arizona State, Stanford, and a PhD from MIT before deciding the most interesting unsolved software problem was the most analog industry there is: pouring foundations and framing walls. Mosaic's software platform, Mosaic Hub, coordinates contractors, schedules, and payments so homebuilders can offload construction the way startups offloaded servers to AWS.