portland-maine
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Eliah Thanhauser and the education of a mushroom business
Before North Spore had a Portland laboratory, Eliah Thanhauser and two college friends had oyster mushrooms, reused buckets, and a lot to learn. Their next crop was a business that helped other people become growers.
Michael Bourque Kept His Reporter’s License
The former hockey writer arrived at a young Maine insurer knowing almost nothing about insurance. Three decades later, he runs it with the same useful habit: ask the plain question, listen hard, and make the complicated understandable.
Erin Stender Has Been Training for the Long Game
The Omatic CMO has spent two decades turning complex software into a human story. Her other enduring project - from a Boston Marathon pact to a youth-sports board seat - is making movement feel possible.
Heather Martin Makes the Invisible Infrastructure Impossible to Ignore
After two decades turning complicated systems into clear stories, the Maine-based executive has arrived at the grid's least glamorous - and most consequential - layer: the network underneath it all.
Laura Barger's Long Game: Make Finance Feel Like It Was Built for People
Before she marketed wealth infrastructure, Laura Barger learned to see the person at the far end of the product. Her career is a study in making complicated systems legible - and making their promises answerable to evidence.
RockStep Built the Operating System for the Messiest Room in Drug Discovery
Its first workflow engine could handle bespoke academic experiments, then routine pharma studies exposed the cracks. RockStep rebuilt with scientists, turned paper-and-spreadsheet chaos into Climb, and found the strategic buyer that needed its missing half.
Benjamin Chesler
Benjamin Chesler is the CEO of North Spore, a Portland, Maine company that sells mushroom grow kits, spawn, sterile substrates and fungi wellness products to home and commercial growers. Before mushrooms, he co-founded Imperfect Foods, the grocery delivery startup that rescued cosmetically imperfect produce and recovered more than 250 million pounds of food. A Brown graduate and Forbes 30 Under 30 honoree, he is a self-described systems thinker who got his start co-founding the Food Recovery Network as a college student and later helped build startup programs at Northeastern's Roux Institute.
North Spore
North Spore is a Portland, Maine company that makes growing mushrooms at home approachable for everyone. Founded in 2014 by three college friends - a mycologist, an organic farmer, and a photojournalist - it sells grow kits, spawn, substrates, lab supplies, and mushroom wellness products direct to consumers. With more than 350,000 growers served and a 25,000-square-foot production facility, North Spore has grown from a tiny mushroom farm into one of the most recognized mushroom-cultivation brands in the United States.