Inc.4 min read
The Business of Building a Better Future
Rohit Bhargava | INC.'S NON-OBVIOUS BUSINESS BOOKS The founder of the Non-Obvious Company, Rohit Bhargava is a trend curator and best-selling author of nine books. What vibe do people most want from their place of work? Answer: coffee shop cozy. This
Inc.3 min read
2 Surviving Sweet but Sudden Success
Founder of Issei Despite debuting her company's all-natural, vegan Mochi Gummies at 170 Whole Foods locations just eight months after starting up, Mika Shino's path to retail success was anything but assured. While Shino, 52, had grown up in Japan ea
Inc.1 min read
Piersten gaines
26 Going Fishing for Sharks FOUNDER AND CEO OF PRESSED ROOTS Piersten Gaines's first real pitch, to Shark Tank‘s “Mr. Wonderful,” Kevin O'Leary, did not go well. To start, her concept for Pressed Roots—a Dallas-based salon chain focused on curly and
Inc.3 min read
Be You, but Better
Esther Perel has heard it all. There's the tale of a marriage born of the Iraq War and the one about a twice-married (to each other) couple. And, of course, there's the classic couple's dilemma: She wants change, and he can't let go. Perel has explor
Inc.2 min read
Family Office
The most stressful part of Pistola founder Grace Na's day isn't what you'd expect for the founder of a denim company with 40 employees and a factory right in Los Angeles. It's placing a lunch order for her head of tech and pattern and her head financ
Inc.1 min read
Sebastian Siemiatkowski, Co-founder And CEO Of Payments Platform Klarna, Answers: How Do You Hire People Whose Skill Set You Don't Get?
“The first few years, we weren't really a tech business. We were a sales and marketingdriven business. We called people who were selling stuff online to get them to add our payment method. “None of us cofounders were engineers, so when we started hir
Inc.3 min readSmall Business & Entrepreneurs
Screen Play
Joe Thomas and his co-founders were two weeks away from running out of money for their software startup when, in 2016, they launched a new product and went all in on prerecorded videos as a workplace communication tool. That product generated thousan
Inc.6 min read
Steve Young Shares Lessons From the Private Equity Playbook With a First-Time Founder
Not many entrepreneurs have both professional football and private equity on their résumés. But Steve Young has always been something of an overperformer. During his 15-year career in the NFL, the Hall of Fame quarterback earned himself three Super B
Inc.26 min read
How They Stay On Top
Karen Robinovitz & Sara Schiller Stirring Up Hope in Unexpected Places Co-founders of the Sloomoo Institute TWO things helped Karen Robinovitz, 52 (near right), and Sara Schiller, 53, overcome the most devastating periods in their lives: friends and
Inc.1 min read
Beauty Filter
Countless companies have elevated everyday items to iconic: Apple upgraded the nerdy MP3 player, Nest turned thermostats into real estate selling points, and Aesop made hand soap a status symbol. Ryan Babenzien and Arjan Singh, founders of NYCbased J
Inc.5 min read
1 Leading Through Tough Times
Co-founder, president, and COO of Cloudflare Almost immediately after the October 7 Hamas attacks on Israel that led to the war in Gaza, another battle was brewing. Hackers first went after the Israeli internet with DDoS attacks, deluging websites th
Inc.14 min read
The Guy Who Puts Cops In The Sky
Blake Resnick couldn't quite process what he was seeing on his screen. Like many entrepreneurs, he was struggling to find money, in this case for his tactical drone company, Brinc Drones, which he founded in Las Vegas in 2017. As a 17-year-old. He al
Inc.6 min readIntelligence (AI) & Semantics
AI in HR Tech: A New Era in Human Resources Technology
Small and midsize businesses (SMBs) are no strangers to technology: according to the 2019 Top Technology Trends survey by the software review company Capterra, 80 percent of U.S. small businesses use human resources (HR) software or plan to within th
Inc.1 min readIntelligence (AI) & Semantics
The Book That Built a Tech Founder's Business
“I started reading the book almost immediately after it came out, but never ended up finishing it,” says founder and CEO Gaurav Banga (left) about On Intelligence, JeffHawkins's 2004 exploration of the human brain and how it relates to machine intell
Inc.1 min readChemistry
An Idea Worth Millions
With no data and no prototype—just a team of engineers and sketches from the UCSD library—Molly He, Michael Previte, and Matthew Kellinger sold investors on Element Biosciences. Their San Diego-based startup promised to democratize genomic sequenc in
Inc.4 min read
KATY PERRY & Co-founders of De Soi MORGAN MCLACHLAN HLAN
4 With more chart-topping singles than Diana Ross, Katy Perry, 39, has proved she can craft a hit. The American Idol judge is now imbuing that Midas touch into De Soi, a nonalcoholic apéritifs maker she co-founded alongside Morgan McLachlan in 2020.
Inc.3 min readCorporate Finance
The Burn of Slow Churn
✕ THE PROBLEM “After 38 years in the business, I bragged that I'd never had a single officer quit my company. I liked the people who worked for me. We were a very tight-knit group of friends. I traveled and went on family outings with them and knew t
Inc.3 min read
Think Liberally and Deliberately
IN 2019, MY COMPANY had about 40 full-time employees; it was growing just fine, but I was in search of inspiration. I read one of Bill Gates's year-end recaps in which he reflected on his achievements over the previous year. He wrote about his pencha
Inc.1 min read
Swipe Right to Success
When growing her inclusive underwear brand, Woxer, Alexandra Fuente (above) turned to an unexpectedly effective casting strat egy. “For our first six months of business, we were on a shoestring budget,” she says. “We found models by sending Instagram
Inc.2 min read
Celebrating That Certain Something It Takes to Lead the Way
If there's a common trait among the entrepreneurs featured in this year's Female Founders 250, it is grit. Mika Shino of candymaker Issei encountered setback after setback while trying to manufacture mochi-style gummies, and ended up rolling and cutt
Inc.6 min readIntelligence (AI) & Semantics
AI Gets to Work
Ever since Alan Turing posed the question “Can machines think?” in 1950, fellow scientists have thrown themselves into programming machines to take over tasks traditionally considered to require human cognition. The central question of his defining “
Inc.1 min readCrime & Violence
The Best Self-defense: Let A Lawyer Do It
After nearly two decades defending owners of small to medium-size businesses, Minneapolis-based attorney Aaron Hall understands the pain points of litigation and has a few words of advice on avoiding the financial strain. In Hall's experience, busine
Inc.5 min read
3 Scaling Inspiration With Big Wins
Founder of Billie Jean King Enterprises One detail you may not know about tennis icon Billie Jean King: She's long been a savvy businessperson. Before she made history more than 50 years ago for trouncing former men's tennis champion Bobby Riggs in t
Inc.4 min read
Shelley Zalis
For Shelley Zalis, the easy way isn't worth it. She's a lifelong solar eclipse chaser, jetting from China to the Galápagos Islands to Turkey's Black Sea coast as required just for the chance of glimpsing this rare phenomenon. And in her career, she's
Inc.10 min readCrime & Violence
Michael Peter. the Crusading Kombucha CEO And 200 Years Of Startup-destroying Legal Doctrine
On July 5 of last year, Judge Keathan Frink of the 17th Judicial Circuit Court of Florida logged on to Zoom to preside over a hearing and found himself staring at a man with an American flag cape wrapped around his shoulders, an American flag bandann
Inc.3 min read
At Board Meetings, the CEO Should Get Lost
EVERYONE KNOWS YOU would never hire a fox to guard a henhouse. The fox has an appetite for chicken and the instinct to hunt, which is a clear conflict of interest. Yet plenty of otherwise intelligent people seem to think it's just fine for the CEO of
Inc.1 min read
You've Got Mail. Mark Cuban's Got Tips
Think you don't have enough time to keep up with email? Don't try that excuse with Mark Cuban. The billionaire investor and founder—most recently—of the public benefit corporation Cost Plus Drugs is still filming episodes of Shark Tank, still a minor
Inc.1 min read
Only the strong survive
SUCCESS often breeds success—but triumphs also arise out of necessity. Consider that Airbnb, Uber, and Rent the Runway started during the Great Recession. In many ways, the past year was defined by similar tumult. While the U.S. never technically ent
Inc.11 min readIntelligence (AI) & Semantics
Reid Hoffman—The AI Enthusiast
Venture investor and LinkedIn co-founder Reid Hoffman, 56, was one of the chief architects of the social media age. Now he's turned his attention to artificial intelligence. Besides investing in OpenAI, he's a co-founder, alongside Karén Simonyan and
Inc.3 min read
Get Curious About the World Around You
THE MICROWAVE OVEN was invented by accident in 1945 by Percy Spencer, the lead on a radar project for Raytheon. The story goes that while testing a new vacuum tube, he noticed that a chocolate bar in his pocket had begun to melt. He decided to put so
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