trust
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Michael Bontrager and the business of staying put
He built Chatham Financial by helping clients understand what banks knew. Now Michael Bontrager is putting his money, family, and appetite for complicated problems to work in Kennett Square.
Kathy Bloomgarden Bet on China Before It Was Obvious. Now She Is Doing It Again With AI.
The Ruder Finn CEO began in a back-office research role, turned Chinese studies into a three-decade strategic advantage, and still prefers the next question to the comfortable answer.
SOC 2 Is a $23 Billion Business Now
SOC 2 used to be a dull audit checkbox. Now it anchors a governance, risk and compliance software market worth roughly $23 billion in 2026. A cohort of startups - Vanta, Drata, Secureframe, Sprinto, Orbiq - turned a painful PDF ritual into recurring revenue, while incumbents like AuditBoard and OneTrust and security giants like CrowdStrike circle the same prize: the business of proving you can be trusted.
Share One
Share One is a Round Rock, Texas company that turns customers into storytellers by producing verified video testimonials. Founded in 2020 by Dan Lievens, it pairs professional human interviewers and editors with a tracking platform to capture, verify, and distribute authentic customer stories, positioning genuine human narratives as a trust signal in a market flooded with AI-generated content.
Seth Godin on the Future of Marketing: Better, Not Louder
In an in-depth virtual conversation on the Entrepreneur Studio podcast, marketing legend Seth Godin joins host Chris Allen to redefine what marketing actually is in the age of AI. Godin argues that marketing was never about hype, ads, or hustle, but about creating the conditions for other people to eagerly spread your idea. He unpacks permission marketing, why a brand is a promise rather than a logo, why authenticity is a trap that should be replaced with consistency, how false proxies mislead companies, and why the real opportunity with AI is to make things better rather than cheaper. Threaded with vivid stories about Carmine's restaurant, a slipper-wearing boiler technician, Volkswagen's emissions scandal, and the wine merchant Garagiste, Godin makes the case that in a world of infinite noise, the winning move is to be better, not louder.
Sprinto
Sprinto is a compliance and trust automation platform that helps cloud-first companies achieve and maintain certifications like SOC 2, ISO 27001, HIPAA, PCI DSS, and GDPR without drowning in spreadsheets. It connects to 300+ business systems, continuously monitors controls, and orchestrates audits end-to-end - turning what used to be a six-month consulting project into a continuous, mostly-automated background process.
Joe Gebbia
Joe Gebbia is the co-founder of Airbnb and a designer-turned-billionaire who helped reshape how humanity thinks about trust between strangers. He graduated from RISD with dual degrees in graphic and industrial design, then turned air mattresses and a breakfast cereal stunt into a $100 billion company. After stepping back from Airbnb in 2022, he founded Samara - a prefab housing company - and in 2025 became America's first Chief Design Officer under the Trump administration, tasked with redesigning the federal government's 27,000+ websites to feel as intuitive as the Apple Store.
Ashley Faus
Ashley Faus is Head of Lifecycle Marketing, Portfolio at Atlassian, a keynote speaker, Stanford instructor, and author of 'Human-Centered Marketing: How to Connect with Audiences in the Age of AI' (Kogan Page, 2025). She's best known for the 'Content Playground' framework - rejecting the linear marketing funnel in favor of a non-linear, audience-driven content ecosystem. A former musical theater major turned B2B marketing strategist, she argues that trust is the one thing AI cannot automate, and has built a career proving it.