Artie Januario didn’t plan to become a baker. He didn’t even plan to become a founder. But after getting laid off from his tech job in 2023, he decided to bet on something he had been quietly perfecting for years.

A three-layer dessert called millionaire shortbread.

“It’s shortbread, caramel, chocolate. Sounds simple. But when it’s done right, it’s magic,” he says.

That one treat became the foundation for Artie Bars, the brand he co-founded with his wife Nicole. Today, it’s a growing e-commerce business with a cult following, dozens of flavors, a feature in the Wall Street Journal, and a mission to turn a European classic into America’s next favorite dessert.

Dr. Trey Williams didn’t plan to become a founder. He was a pediatrician. A former Air Force officer. A new dad with an MBA and a full plate.

Then one day, the startup he worked for let him go. He had just finished building their telehealth platform. It was done. So was he.

That night, he and his wife sat down to decide what came next. Go back to the grind of corporate healthcare? Or go all in on the side hustle he had started almost by accident?

They chose the second option. That night, The Peds MD was born.

Amanda Nowak was supposed to be writing a job description. She was on vacation, taking her first real break in years. Her plan was simple: hire a general manager, come back refreshed, and keep the business growing.

Instead, she broke down at dinner.

“I told my husband, I hate my business. I don’t ever want to go back,” she says.

At the time, Amanda was running a successful design business with a 5,000-square-foot warehouse, eight employees, and seven-figure revenue. But it didn’t feel like success. It felt like suffocation.

That moment was the beginning of the end. And the beginning of something new.

In 2019, Stephanie Geiger’s life changed in a single conversation.

Her husband had been unfaithful. Their daughter was two years old. And suddenly, everything she thought she knew about her life, her marriage, and her future collapsed.

“I remember thinking, this is not the life I thought I was living. I didn’t know what the past meant anymore. I didn’t know what came next,” she says.

That moment was the catalyst for everything that followed. She stayed in the marriage, not out of denial but with a mission: to rebuild something stronger, if that was possible. Over the next two years, Stephanie and her husband worked to reconcile. It wasn’t a continuation of their old relationship. It was the start of something entirely new.

“I always say we’re in a second marriage now. We had to get to know each other again. Trust each other again. It was a total restart.”

Today, she’s helping others find their own restart.

Chelsey Reynolds didn’t set out to build a business. She just wanted to escape the suffocating red tape of a global corporation.

After back-to-back acquisitions, years of building sales, marketing, and customer success teams from scratch, and an MBA earned during nights and weekends, she found herself in unfamiliar territory: restless, overqualified, and deeply uninspired.

“I started moonlighting with early-stage founders. They were in incubators, had scrappy ideas, and didn’t know where to start,” she says. “And I realized people would pay me to help. I thought, this could be my job.”

When Chelsey Gray walked into the Marine Corps recruiting office, she thought she was meeting with the Army. It didn’t matter. She signed up on the spot.

“They said they were the best, the toughest, the strongest,” she says. “I said, alright. That’s where I belong.”

That decision set the tone for everything that followed. Chelsey grew up with a relentless drive to win—whether in gymnastics, diving, or track. If she lost, she believed it was because she hadn’t worked hard enough. That mindset followed her into the Marines, where she graduated at the top of every class, earned multiple commendations, and learned how to “play the game” of life by treating every goal like a mission.

Today, she’s building a business on that same philosophy.

Katie Thompson never thought of herself as an entrepreneur. She saw herself in support roles, the person behind the scenes, not the one calling the shots. But two years ago, after nearly a decade in the nonprofit world, burnout forced her to pause and ask a hard question.

What would it look like to keep doing meaningful work, but on her own terms?

That question led to the launch of Verse Nonprofit Consulting, a ghostwriting and storytelling studio for nonprofit and mission-driven leaders. Katie had spent years juggling roles that pulled her in a dozen directions. Now she wanted to focus on the one thing that lit her up.

Most people scroll past the comments. Thomas Noh saw a business.

He’s the founder of Socialable AI, a community management platform that helps brands land top comments on viral posts. Think Duolingo-level sass, Netflix-level weird, Wendy’s-level chaos. “We automate DMs and comments,” Thomas says. “But really, what we do is help brands get noticed in the most unexpected places.”

It’s a product that sits at the intersection of marketing, machine learning, and meme culture. And it exists because Thomas hated every other path.

By the time Pippa Susskind realized she didn’t want to be a marine scientist, she was already knee-deep in data sets and seabird populations on a cold, rainy coastline in Aberdeen.

“It was miserable,” she laughs. “I had to analyze the distribution of six different species of terns. I couldn’t figure out the stats, had to ask someone for help, and I just thought—this can’t be it.”

The irony wasn’t lost on her. After years of studying biology and completing a master’s degree in marine science, policy, and law, she found herself completely unmoored by the real-world version of her academic dream. “I realized I needed something more people-facing. I wanted energy, clients, conversations—not spreadsheets.”

That moment of clarity would eventually lead her to a fifteen-year career at FDM Group, where she worked across recruiting, training, and deploying early-career tech talent into companies across the UK and U.S. “I did everything from campus recruitment to running a sales team. And I kept evolving,” she says. “That’s what kept me there for so long.”

But it wasn’t until after her second child that the idea of launching her own company-Hire Orbitt-began to feel not only possible, but necessary.

Anna Bleers spent decades building iconic brands. But it wasn’t until she walked away from one of the biggest names in advertising that she finally built one of her own.

For years, she led massive campaigns at Leo Burnett and Energy BBDO. Global CPG brands, household names, emerging startups—she’d done it all. Her teams won every major award in the industry. She led client relationships across every stage of growth. She was, by every definition, a heavyweight in the world of brand building.

But behind the scenes, she’d been feeling the itch.

“I always thought I’d stay on the agency side forever,” Anna says. “But the industry was changing. And I realized the version of it I loved wasn’t coming back.”

Ted Lisitsyn didn’t launch Manna Coffee because he wanted to sell espresso. He launched it because he wanted to give people more control over their lives.

He just didn’t know that at first.

Manna began with a frustrating moment—one that’s all too familiar for laid-off tech workers. Ted and his co-founder had just lost their jobs at large companies. They met up in New York, grabbed three cups of coffee, and realized they’d just spent almost $30 on something that used to be affordable.

It wasn’t just the price. It was the system behind it.

Jake Sherman used to help the world’s biggest companies figure out what to build next.

“I spent a year and a half working with a steel company in Mexico,” he says. “Learned everything I could about how steel is made. Then moved on to an over-the-counter pharma company. The projects were always changing.”

Too many big decisions were being made on gut instinct.

“I wanted to dive deeper into the research that should inform those decisions,” Jake says. “You’d be surprised how often people just go with their gut.”

“I knew I needed to level up,” he says. “I wanted to get really good at analyzing data, doing research, learning from customers at a higher level.”

Ashley Love didn’t plan to build a back-office platform. She wanted to open a spa.

“I’d signed a lease. Had an SBA loan ready. I was about to build out the space,” she says. “But then this other thing took off. It wasn’t what I planned—but it was working.”

That “other thing” was a growing list of businesses asking her for fractional CFO support—especially franchise operators. And those weren’t random leads. They were referrals from people who’d worked with Ashley before. People who trusted her.

She followed the momentum.

In less than two years, that pivot became something much bigger: Acctivator

At the end of 2024, her role in talent acquisition was eliminated. She’d just spent three years building out the company’s entire recruiting infrastructure from scratch. Now it was gone. But the reaction she got from her colleagues caught her off guard.

“How are we going to do this without you?” they asked.

It stuck with her. She hadn’t just delivered results—she’d built real relationships. She’d proven her value in a high-stakes, high-pressure environment, and the impact she’d made was obvious. That was the first nudge.

The second came from another recruiter who told her, “When this happened to me, I started my own thing—and never looked back.”

That was all she needed.

Jaclyn Brautigam didn’t start Fordham Fashion to chase runway fame. She started it to fix a problem she’d seen over and over again—emerging designers getting lost in the noise without real support.

“I’ve worked in every part of the fashion industry,” she says. “Big companies, small studios, sales agencies—I kept seeing the same gap. No one was helping designers with the full picture.”

So she built it herself.

John Lee didn’t grow up dreaming of becoming a founder. He just wanted to stop flipping through the SAT college book his parents handed him.

“I literally opened it at random and saw mechanical engineering,” he says. “It said you needed math, science, and a little creativity. I was like—yeah, that sounds good. I’ll do that.”

That random decision would launch him into a career most people would envy: mechanical engineering roles at two of the biggest defense contractors in the country, including satellite work tied to weather systems and space reflectors. But it never quite clicked.

Ashley Waddington didn’t start Ponder This Consulting to land speaking gigs or scale fast. She started it because no one ever taught her how to be a manager—and she wasn’t the only one.

Before launching her business, Ashley spent years moving through the corporate world: customer success, HR, hospitality, advertising, staffing, and sales. She’s seen every flavor of leadership—and every painful consequence of bad management.

“I’ve sat in the seat of the undertrained manager,” she says. “And I’ve also had to report to the ones who made my life miserable. I knew there was a better way.”

Most college students spend their senior year coasting. Sheikha Al-Otaibi spent hers closing deals.

While her classmates were prepping for finals, Sheikha was running sales calls, staffing engineers and project managers for U.S. companies, and blocking off weekends to build Interlix Staffing — the company she co-founded as a sophomore at Babson.

And now, with graduation behind her, she’s going full-time on the business she’s already been scaling for two and a half years.

Simmer Singh didn’t start her business with a grand vision. She started it because she had a newborn—and knew the corporate world wouldn’t wait for her to catch up.

She’d spent over two decades in the talent management world, building a career across India and the U.S. At one point, she was managing global teams. By all accounts, she was thriving. But when her second daughter was born, she saw things differently.

“I just felt like I wanted to do my own thing,” Simmer says. “Be my own boss. Have control over my hours. Be able to throw everything out if she needs me—and just be with her.”

Kevin Kinyon spent 18 years building a bootstrapped marketplace that eventually sold to XO Group. After a well-earned break, he’s back—this time co-founding Petworks, a two-person startup redefining pet care.

From booking wedding bands in the 90s to offering pet psychics and nutrition coaches in 2024, Kevin’s story is a masterclass in staying curious, betting on yourself, and building without raising a dollar.