Inc.

One sound bite still lingers from the days before the Great Dot-Com Crash of 2000, courtesy of an investment banker who insisted he wasn’t concerned about the tsunami of funding sloshing around the IPO market. “It’s Wall Street’s job to throw money a

A century ago, arguably the most famous man in America was an innovator and entrepreneur. So was the second-most famous. So when Thomas Edison and Henry Ford embarked on their annual proto-glamping excursions—which, yes, they did, accompanied by less

You cannot run a small or midsize business without having to deal with serious competitors of all sizes. Competition is just one of the challenges the research firm Techaisle examined in its most recent small and midsize business (SMB) report. Other

Having been a passenger on the Miracle on the Hudson plane in 2009, Red Ventures CEO Ric Elias is famously familiar with crashes. But US Airways flight 1549 wasn’t his first unscheduled touchdown. That came years earlier and, though it wasn’t potenti

In 2004, I started working at this restaurant in Berkeley, California—Eccolo, which was founded and run by my mentor, Chris Lee. I came to run the kitchen, and that was my first managerial role. It wasn’t my restaurant—I didn’t have any ownership—but

When you go through an acquisition, it’s always in your mind that maybe you and the new leadership won’t see eye to eye. We had a simple disagreement over price points and strategy. That was it. I had no idea I was going to be fired. It happened on J

My in-laws bought Blackberry Farm in 1976. Back then, it was a super-small team. My mother-in-law cooked and rode a riding lawnmower with her son, Sam—my future husband. Sam and I started dating in high school. When he got into the California Culinar

In 2016, we launched a line of puffer jackets. Pretty much all of the collection was made with virgin plastic. I wanted to figure out how to make them with nonvirgin plastic—either postconsumer, like when you throw out a used water bottle, or postind

We never thought of Harry’s as only a direct-to-consumer company, or as only a subscription service. Eventually, we didn’t think of ourselves as only a men’s shaving company. It’s men’s and women’s personal care. One thing we heard from our customers

ROBERT Elizabeth was in Slovakia teaching English. I was on a low-budget trip through Europe. We saw each other, fell in love, and now, here we are—five kids and 20 years later ELIZABETH We were living in Boulder when I had my second child. The baby

When I was 7, my family moved from the Philippines to New Jersey. In the Philippines, I’d had the best schools and the best teachers. In New Jersey, I was the girl with an accent who ate different foods. Who was put into lower classes, because I was

Scoop is on a mission to improve people’s lives by improving their commutes. Since the enterprise carpooling solution’s launch in 2015, commuters have taken more than 6 million carpool trips and counting using the Scoop app. The company’s fast growth

I was born in El Paso and grew up in Ciudad Juárez, Mexico. My dad worked in the maquiladora industry—the large factories just south of the border—in Juárez, and my mom had a salsa bottling company in El Paso. Every day, I would cross the border to g

In Lagos, there’s huge wealth disparity. You see people who are incredibly wealthy—who ship their cars to Paris to get them serviced. You see people who maybe get one meal every two days. And for the most part, they live side by side. It’s a city of

Fair is more than a company name. It is a mission statement and a core value. The Fair app allows people to shop for cars by choosing monthly payments they can afford. Customers sign for the vehicle they want with their finger and return it when they

I’ve always been really good at assessing new problems, breaking them down into their component parts, and then figuring out how to solve them. In high school, I was always good at math, but I was really good at logic, which is a classic chief operat

I grew up in a very loving family in Taipei. I never felt like I lacked anything. I didn’t realize until I got older that we were poor. But my parents couldn’t afford to care for me. When I was a newborn, my father threatened to drop me off at the or

From day one, the founders of Pegasus Optimization Managers, a natural gas contract compression and solutions provider, set out to differentiate their company with a technically advanced fleet, supported by superior service. That takes the right peop

When I finished school, my dad asked me, “What do you want to do with your life?” I didn’t really know. So he asked, “Well, what’s the biggest problem facing the world?” I said the climate. If we don’t get climate right, nothing else matters. So I go

My first few months back were really difficult. I didn’t feel welcome. Some of that was expected: I was the third CEO in a year. Nothing was going right. There was a time I wondered: “Wow, what did I get myself into?” There were 65 employees when I r

Most companies have practices in place to ensure employee alignment and high performance. 15Five is no exception. More than software, this continuous performance management platform practices “Best-Self Management” by supporting people in becoming th

My favorite bands were ones that just went for it. Early Jane’s Addiction. Metallica. Primus. Nobody ever asked for the kind of music they were playing. I didn’t look for a niche in the market and decide there was a place for a craft beer with a stro

Natural deodorant was long the domain of the granola set—until Jaime Schmidt came along. In 2010, the then-32-year-old living in Portland, Oregon, concocted an aromatic formula in her kitchen and started Schmidt’s, which in 2017 was acquired by Unile

From its 1999 founding in a barn in the heart of Kentucky horse country, Material Handling Systems (MHS) embodied a deep commitment to excellence in everything it did. That drive helped make the company a leading provider of automation solutions to t

Christopher Cabrera’s awakening happened while he was working at a Silicon Valley startup in the 1990s. He was halfway through hiring an eight-person team when his boss pointed out that all of his hires were white guys in their early 20s. “This isn’t

For six years, Matt Stadelman and his co-founders had pushed retirement savings to the bottom of their to-do list, as they plowed any spare cash into growing their St. Paul, Minnesota–based business, Jet Construction & Remodeling. “I was so focused o

This work family knows what it means to lead with love, kindness, and humility. We work together every day knowing that the whole is stronger than the individual. Making the decision to check our egos at the door and celebrating not only our successe

Private equity firms have been called all kinds of nasty names over the years: asset strippers, corporate raiders, vulture capitalists. Don’t be deterred by these labels. The PE firms making headlines over high-profile corporate bankruptcies such as

By early 2012, almost six years after its founding, Austin-based Yeti Coolers was hitting its stride. The maker of high-end coolers for the hook-and-bullet set had grown to 20 employees and finished the previous year with $29 million in sales, which

Recruiting software company Virgil was just three years old when founder Ron Mitchell went looking for an acquisition that would allow the business to scale faster. But, like many young firms, the Chicago-based Virgil, which matches workers with empl

Holly Thaggard wasn’t looking for help for her San Antonio–based, kid-friendly sunscreen company, Supergoop. Being open to ideas, though, she met with lots of people. “I just took all those meetings. Investors wanted to get to know us. We were not ob

Selling your company to the same private equity firm twice may sound a little crazy, but that’s exactly what Bill Clendenen did. And if that doesn’t seem implausible enough, consider that the first time he sold Medic First Aid, a publisher of CPR and

LeBron James, the Boston Red Sox, mall pretzels: These are crucial ingredients in Blaze Pizza’s ambitious recipe for growth. Serial entrepreneurs and spouses Elise and Rick Wetzel co-founded their Pasadena, California–based company in 2011 with a sim

When did you start thinking about selling the company? When you’re running a company, you’re not thinking about selling it. Some people asked, “What’s your exit strategy?” and I was like, “What the hell are you talking about?” As we grew, private equ

Mention Heath Ceramics to design nerds or high-end restaurateurs, and chances are they’ll fawn endlessly over its retro, midcentury tile or brightly glazed stoneware. Heath devotees are nothing new: Since visionary ceramicist Edith Heath and her husb