sacramento
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Caleb Counts and the Long Road from Red Cups to Regulation
He learned customer service selling houses, opened one of Sacramento's earliest dispensaries, and turned red-cup experiments into a multi-state cannabis company. The thread through it all is less glamorous than the product names: listen closely, test repeatedly, and earn the next market.
Peter Duffy Put the Car Lot Inside a Viewfinder
He began with a camera, a route of dealerships and a problem hiding in plain sight. Fourteen years later, Peter Duffy's guide lines have become an operating system for getting vehicles seen - and sold.
The Person Selling Certainty in a Business Built on Doubt
A marketing job at a company whose products live or die on trust, sold to buyers who read the footnotes. Here is what that work looks like from the inside.
Matt Barnard
Matt Barnard is the cofounder and CEO of one.bio, a Sacramento biotechnology company turning plant fiber into odorless, tasteless nutrients that can be dosed into everyday food to reshape the gut microbiome. A seventh-generation Wisconsin farmer turned technology operator, he first became known as the cofounder and CEO of Plenty, the SoftBank-backed indoor vertical farming unicorn. He now applies the same obsession - control what people eat, control their health - to fiber science spun out of UC Davis.
George Kalogeropoulos
George Kalogeropoulos is the co-founder and CEO of HealthSherpa, the private-sector enrollment engine that sits on top of HealthCare.gov. When the federal exchange buckled at its 2013 launch, he and two collaborators built a faster alternative in a matter of days. HealthSherpa has since enrolled more than 10 million Americans in ACA coverage. Raised in Greece by a sculptor father and a tutor mother, he studied political science at Yale, did a stint at Bridgewater Associates, then pivoted a Y Combinator rent-prediction startup into a mission to make health insurance legible.