skilled-trades
(9)
Cassey Gibson Is Turning Sawdust Into Software
The INNERGY CMO grew up sweeping a pattern-maker's floor. Now she sells software, education and a larger idea: the trades deserve better stories about themselves.
Mark Kasdorf Left the App Economy to Build a Heat-Pump Workforce
After bootstrapping a mobile studio to $25 million and selling it to Accenture, the serial founder chose a harder interface: houses, crews and the stubborn shortage of skilled labor.
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.
Scott Sailer Builds the System Behind the Steel
At Southland Trailers, a second-generation operator turned shop-floor lessons into a system for growth - then made apprenticeships, welding classrooms and a very large pancake breakfast part of the same plan.
Samuel Bottum
Samuel Bottum built a marketing career around a practical idea: a durable brand begins with the people who know the work. At Snap-on, that has meant linking product innovation, customer insight and technical education across one unusually varied career.
Dave Schneider
Dave Schneider is Vice President and Chief Marketing Officer of Red Wing Shoe Company, the family-owned, Minnesota-based maker of iconic American work boots founded in 1905. He leads the company's global marketing practice, spanning brand management, digital and traditional communications, ecommerce, retail experience, brand protection, and corporate communications, reporting directly to the CEO. After years in senior roles at leading agencies including Digitas, Tribal DDB, and BBDO, he brought an agency creative sensibility to an operator's job, championing a marketing model that balances long-term brand equity with performance-driven revenue while putting the skilled-trades workers who wear the boots at the center of the brand's story.
Ruchir Shah
Ruchir Shah is the founder and CEO of SkillCat, a mobile-first training platform that has taught more than 300,000 people to enter skilled trades like HVAC, plumbing, electrical, and appliance repair. A Rice-trained energy engineer with a Stanford MBA, he started building animated industrial simulations after researching the BP oil spill and concluding that bad training kills. His first company, LearnToDrill, trained 25,000 oil and gas workers for clients like Halliburton and BP. When COVID threw skilled workers out of jobs while contractors begged for help, Shah pivoted to SkillCat to bridge that gap with simulation-based, $10-a-month trade education. He also runs the GRIT Foundation to introduce trades careers to underserved youth, and once spent a summer doing stand-up comedy in New York.
Simba Jonga
Simba Jonga is the founder and CEO of Laborup, an AI-powered hiring platform often described as the LinkedIn of manufacturing. A University of Tennessee chemical engineer turned Stanford AI researcher, he built Laborup after watching skilled machinists, welders and technicians struggle to get hired despite working inside high-tech factories. The platform uses an autonomous AI voice agent to interview and vet workers, building profiles in minutes and matching them to high-paying industrial jobs. Laborup has raised $7.7M from investors including NVP, Torch Capital and angels Jeff Dean, Jeff Jordan and Evan Moore, grown a 25,000-strong East Tennessee worker network, and is expanding across the South and Midwest.
Uzoma Orchingwa
Uzoma 'Zo' Orchingwa is a Nigerian-American social entrepreneur and the co-founder and co-CEO of Emerge Career, an AI-powered workforce development and reentry company that partners with governments to train and place justice-involved and low-income people into high-paying, AI-resilient skilled trades. He previously co-founded Ameelio, a technology nonprofit that broke open the exploitative prison communications industry by offering free letters, calls and education to incarcerated people and their families. A Yale-trained lawyer and Cambridge criminologist who moonlit as a DJ, he has been named to MIT Technology Review's 35 Innovators Under 35 and Fast Company's Most Creative People in Business.