west-virginia
(5)
The Little Agency That Buys a Very Big Megaphone
A compact Charleston shop has learned to make statewide campaigns feel local, turn media buying into measurement, and treat a collapsing building as a scheduling problem.
Academy Programs and the work of getting home
On one road in Fairmont, West Virginia, three residential programs and a school sit close together. The harder task is connecting what happens there to life beyond the campus.
Justin Jarrell Is Building Cybersecurity Where the Stakes Feel Personal
From Air Force intelligence to a West Virginia cyber range, the Forge Security founder has made a career of turning distant digital threats into local, practical work.
Seve Astorg Put the Receipts in the Sales Pitch
A paper packet inside a West Virginia dealership became a software company. Seve Astorg’s enduring idea is disarmingly practical: when a car comes with proof, the conversation changes.
Michael Yan
Michael Yan is the co-founder and CEO of Simplify (YC W21), a San Francisco-based AI-powered job search platform that has helped over 1 million job seekers apply to roughly 100 million job openings. A Morgantown, West Virginia native, Yan dropped out of Stanford to build Simplify after recognizing that students everywhere were lost in the job application chaos. He previously engineered AI/ML systems at Meta, conducted research at MIT CSAIL, and interned at Harvard Medical School. Named to Forbes 30 Under 30 in 2023 (Consumer Technology), Yan has built a 181,000+ follower audience on LinkedIn by sharing brutally practical job search advice - including the URL hack that landed him offers at Meta and Microsoft. Simplify has raised $4.35M from Craft Ventures, Y Combinator, and Soma Capital.