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Jennifer Addabbo Built a Fintech Consultancy by Making the Vendor Sit on the Other Side of the Table
She spent years selling financial technology. Then she crossed the table, built Engage fi around the buyer, and learned that the most useful growth strategy begins with people.
Gamal Wazni Built a Clinic Network by Making the Complicated Feel Local
A physician learned to think like a systems builder. The result was a Tampa practice that became a multistate outpatient platform - one clinic, one protocol and one carefully repeated experience at a time.
The Company That Assumes Every File Is Trying to Kill You
Benny Czarny bootstrapped OPSWAT for 19 years on a simple, paranoid idea: assume every file is malicious. Today that assumption guards 98% of US nuclear plants.
The Home-Service Rollup That Lets Local Operators Keep the Keys
Legacy Service Partners is building national scale behind local HVAC, plumbing and electrical brands. Its wager is that shared systems and patient capital can travel farther when the name on the service van stays familiar.
The Two-Name Burger Chain Betting Its Future on 570 Square Feet
Checkers & Rally’s built a national burger business by selling the same seasoned fries under two regional names. Now the drive-thru specialist is shrinking the restaurant, widening the freezer aisle and testing how much growth can fit inside a very small box.
The Software That Runs the Companies That Run Your IT
Most people have never heard of ConnectWise. But if a small business somewhere fixed your laptop last week, the outsourced IT shop that did it was probably running on ConnectWise software.
Cirkul
Cirkul is a Tampa-based personalized hydration company that makes a reusable water bottle paired with snap-in flavor cartridges and a 'Flavor Dial' that lets drinkers control how much taste, vitamins, electrolytes or caffeine flow into plain water - with zero sugar and zero calories. Founded by former Dartmouth football teammates Garrett Waggoner and Andy Gay, the brand went viral on TikTok, became one of Walmart's fastest-selling home products, and reached a $1 billion valuation.
Garrett Waggoner
Garrett Waggoner is the co-founder and CEO of Cirkul, the Tampa-based hydration company whose reusable bottle and flip-dial flavor cartridges turned a college locker-room frustration into a business valued at $1 billion. A former Dartmouth safety who played professional football in the CFL and worked as a car valet to bootstrap the idea, Waggoner built Cirkul into a roughly $378M-revenue, 800-person operation by insisting on owning its own manufacturing.