tempe
(7)
Brotecs makes the sky sound ordinary.
A phone call from a private jet should feel unremarkable. Behind that small convenience sits Brotecs, a software business built around the awkward business of connecting aircraft to Earth.
Unlock puts your house on the tab
Cash today. No monthly payment. A share of your home’s value due later. Unlock has built a business around that trade - and the bill is the part worth understanding.
Krish Ghosh and the case for a careful machine
From Tempe and Kolkata to industrial AI, the DreamzTech founder has spent years connecting software to everyday operations. Now he is asking how much authority the machines should have.
Mark Widmar and the arithmetic of staying in the game
An accountant became the CEO of First Solar, then cancelled a product before it reached the market. Mark Widmar’s career turns on a stubborn question: what is worth building for the long run?
Brian Tate knew when to leave the table
After twelve years in professional poker, Brian Tate put his own money into a breakfast he kept making at home. Oats Overnight grew around a habit he had learned with cards: make a decision, study the response, and adjust.
ESS made the invisible count.
A refrigerant-tracking business became a $59 million acquisition by helping companies see what their scattered records concealed. The surprise: better safety reporting could make the numbers look worse.
Josh Tabaj
Josh Tabaj is the Chief Marketing Officer and one of four co-founders of Branded Bills, the Arizona headwear and apparel company that turned a hand-branded leather patch into a national custom-merchandise business. Branded Bills started around 2015 in a Mesa garage with a branding iron, a knife, and roughly $1,000 from each founder; its first patch hat went to a South Dakota brewery. The company grew from state-pride hats into a vertically integrated operation that sources and produces its own headwear, runs a custom and corporate-branding division, sells officially licensed collegiate gear, opened its first physical store inside the Phoenix Suns' Footprint Center in 2022, and moved into a 96,000-plus square foot Tempe headquarters in 2025. Tabaj handles the marketing side of that machine - the brand voice, the customer story, and the argument that a logo deserves better than a screen print.