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Billy Thalheimer Is Teaching a Boat to Leave the Water
The REGENT co-founder has spent six years turning a three-verb pitch - float, foil, fly - into a full-size machine. Now comes the harder trick: making a new category of coastal travel feel ordinary.
Frank Tillinghast and the Five-Minute Store
A Rhode Island CPA spent decades learning the apparel trade, then helped turn one of youth sports' least glamorous chores into an online store. His career is a study in what happens when the person counting the costs has also coached the team.
Abe Dane Put Down the Magazine and Built a Better Way to Read
Before Abe Dane helped publishers turn dense libraries into searchable products, he reported from fighter jets, Arctic ice and the early internet. His career is a study in making complicated things useful.
Andrej Strojin
Andrej Strojin is the co-founder and CEO of HAVERHILL, a Warren, Rhode Island fine-jewelry house that makes 14k gold, birthstone-personalized pieces to order rather than in advance. A Slovenian-trained mechanical engineer and former Deloitte and Strategy& consultant, he met fifth-generation jeweler Haverhill Leach on a dating app in 2018, married her four months later, and turned her artisan brand into a fast-scaling direct-to-consumer operation. When COVID shut down suppliers before Mother's Day 2020, the couple built a jewelry assembly line in their garage and cut turnaround from seven days to one. Under Strojin the company has quadrupled sales, reached $16M in 2024 revenue, and landed on the Inc. 5000 three years running.
David Durand
David Durand is the CEO and co-founder of Tizra, the Providence-based digital publishing platform that helps associations and scholarly publishers sell, organize, and deliver high-value content. A PhD computer scientist who has worked with markup languages and hypertext since 1984, he helped shape the standards that quietly run the web - XML, TEI, HyTime, XLink, and WebDAV - and co-wrote the first in-depth guide to HyTime. He taught at Brown, served as Chief Scientist at its Scholarly Technology Group, and turned decades of document-engineering research into a company that powers digital libraries for groups like the American Dental Association.
Maria Gabriela Salvador
Dr. M. Gabriela Salvador is the CEO of Maternova, Inc., a Providence-based global health company that runs an e-commerce marketplace for vetted, life-saving medical devices, diagnostics and nutrition products aimed at low- and middle-income countries. A physician trained as a pediatric ophthalmologist in Argentina, the United States and Mexico, she spent two decades building high-impact health programs at Americares, Grameen Foundation, Freedom from Hunger and Pro Mujer before taking the helm at Maternova in March 2023. Originally from Salta, Argentina, she pairs a medical degree from the National University of Cordoba with a Harvard MPH in health policy and management.
Mark Hellendrung
Mark Hellendrung is the Rhode Island native who bought a fading 1890 beer brand for less than $100,000 and made it New England's again. As owner and CEO of Narragansett Brewing Company, he resurrected a lager that had nearly vanished, brought brewing back to Rhode Island after a 30-plus-year exile, and opened a waterfront brewery and beer hall on the Providence harborfront. Before beer, he ran Nantucket Nectars and coached the team at Magic Hat. His pitch has always been the same: stay homegrown, stay local, and don't sell out to the big guys.