Will Abel didn’t plan to leave a steady job to build a startup.

He planned to go to med school, he got an MBA, he got a “steady job.” But then he realized there was an opportunity out there too exciting for him to ignore.

That’s when he reconnected with Chris—an engineer he’d built an app with back in high school. Chris had been working at a hard tech incubator, where he kept seeing the same problem: brilliant scientists burning out just trying to survive the grant process.

They decided to build something together.

That’s how Grantease started—a tool designed to make NIH grant writing faster, easier, and more productive, without removing the researcher’s own fingerprints from the work.

Mariya Valeva didn’t grow up around entrepreneurs.

She grew up in Bulgaria, where building your own business was seen as reckless—a choice you made when you didn’t have any better options. It wasn’t something you were encouraged to do. It was something you did if you had no safety net.

“Entrepreneurship in my family wasn’t celebrated,” Mariya says. “It was frowned upon because it was seen as insecure. There was no safety net.”

But that didn’t stop her from trying.

Suresh Narayanan didn’t grow up dreaming about running a company.
He grew up at an airport repair station, watching his dad fix planes.

• His dad had been a Concorde mechanic. Later, he started his own aircraft repair shop in Miami—fixing aircraft parts by hand, fighting for every job.

“My dad had his own business,” Suresh says. “Most summers or whenever I wasn't in school, he'd bring me to work. I'd work to earn my lunch money.”

He didn’t realize it at the time, but those long hours at the hangar shaped everything that came next. Today, Suresh runs Jets MRO—a business jet heavy maintenance company with locations in Dallas and Miami, built around a simple idea: treat mechanics better.

Tudor Matei didn’t grow up planning to be a founder.

He grew up thinking you were supposed to find a good job, stick with it, and keep your head down.

“I was brought up under the assumption that you have a well-paying job and you have a stable job,” he says. “Entrepreneurship wasn’t really in the books for me.”

In fact, his first exposure to business wasn’t glamorous at all. It was fixing computers at a tiny local shop—three employees total—getting his first real glimpse at how small businesses actually run.

At the time, he didn’t think much about it. He was focused on getting his degree in computer science, following the path he thought he was supposed to follow.

After high school, Martin Brown didn’t have a master plan. While his sister had always wanted to be a teacher, Martin never had that clear “this is it” moment. He loved sports. But like most kids in most sports, he got cut at 16.

"I wasn’t good enough," he says.

So he kept moving forward. Took his coaching licenses. Came to the U.S. at 18 to work summer camps. Made a little money. Fell in love with the idea of entrepreneurship—almost by accident.

"The owners of the company I worked for had started it from nothing," he says. "I got the bug."

It wasn’t about being flashy. It was about building something real, from the ground up.

Noah Greenberg didn’t launch Stacker to change the world. He launched it because he didn’t want to work at Amazon.

When the startup he’d been at for six years got acquired, Amazon gave him a choice: take the severance or scroll through 30,000 internal job listings. He gave it twenty minutes.

So he teamed up with three coworkers from that same company.

“All eyes were on: how the f** are we going to make money as quickly as possible,”* he says. “And we got to profitability within that six months.”

That business became Stacker, a newswire and syndication platform that helps brands turn their best editorial into widely distributed content.

Marina Vieva didn’t leave corporate life with a startup idea.

She left with a question: why is it still so hard for women to manage their own health?

After 25 years in risk management, legal, finance, and operations at Fortune 100 companies—many of them in the U.S. and Europe—Marina had built a successful career. But it didn’t feel like hers.

“No matter how externally successful things looked, I was not happy,” she says. “I was climbing the wrong ladder. And the higher I climbed, the harder it was to switch.”

She’d spent years feeling out of place in large corporate structures. The projects she loved most—building new departments, solving messy problems, starting from zero—were all startup environments inside of larger companies.

That clarity didn’t come overnight. It built over time.

Amanda Hofman didn’t want to start a swag company. She wanted to solve a problem she’d experienced firsthand—without getting buried in cardboard boxes.

She sold her first business just before her second child was born—38 weeks pregnant, right under the wire. Then she spent several years home with her kids. But by the time her youngest started kindergarten, she was ready to build something again.

“I knew I wanted to start a business, but I didn’t know what it was going to be,” Amanda says. “I had a long list of things I didn’t want to do. No events. No massive inventory. I wanted something that would fit into my life, not take over my life.”

That’s when she discovered print-on-demand.

“When I learned about the technology, it all clicked,” she says. “It solved everything that was hard about swag. You don’t have to carry inventory. You don’t have to guess what people want. You can offer real design and let people pick what works for them.”

That idea became Go To Market Studio, the company Amanda co-founded to reinvent the way businesses do branded merchandise.

Joey Mucha didn’t start with a business plan. He started with a skee-ball machine in his apartment.

By day, he worked in marketing at a small startup in San Francisco. By night and weekend, he was quietly building something else—renting out arcade games to parties around the city. He didn’t need office space. He didn’t have overhead. He borrowed Zipcars, stored the machines in his apartment, and moved them himself.

“I had a day job. I had the comfort of my salary,” he says. “And then in my nights and weekends did an incredibly lean equipment rental business.”

He wasn’t trying to build the next big thing. He was just following what felt interesting—and what made money.

Today, Joey the Cat operates arcade games at 40 locations between San Francisco and Los Angeles. He has deep partnerships with a handful of top-tier venues—places like Thriller Social Club in SF and Eastwood in LA—and a growing footprint that came not from cold calls, but from reputation.

Jeremy Toeman doesn’t call himself an entrepreneur. He’s a builder.

Always has been.

His first invention was a self-feeding cat dispenser made from an old coffee can and some duct tape. He was nine.

“I never really planted a flag that said, ‘I’m an entrepreneur, I just like building things. That’s the common thread.”

But the path has never been linear.

Two lunches changed everything.

The idea? Augie—an AI-powered growth engine for modern marketers..

Kai was part of Google’s design incubator—a dream for anyone with a background in product development. But the more he listened to the founders around him, the more uneasy he felt.

“Everyone was talking about engagement, retention, hours spent in the app, it was all about maximizing attention so you could sell more ads. That’s what success looked like.”

It didn’t sit right.

He started thinking more critically about the attention economy—how most modern tech products are designed not to help you complete a task, but to keep you staring at the screen as long as possible.

It was obvious once he saw it. But no one seemed interested in changing it.

So he did.

Kai launched Light, a company that builds intentionally minimalist phones designed to be used less—not more.

Billy was the kind of kid who went from one sport season to the next without a break—lacrosse, soccer, basketball, repeat. But between all the practices and tournaments, one thing stuck with him more than he realized at the time: he loved having control over his time.

When he figured out how to string lacrosse heads better than anyone else on his team, it quietly became a business. “People would pay me 10 or 20 bucks,” he says. “I didn’t have a real business plan, but I liked that I could take on as many people as I wanted and deliver on my own schedule. I had control.”

That same feeling came rushing back years later—only this time, it wasn’t stringing sticks. It was building Bantee, a social golf app that blends Strava and Instagram to bring golfers together on and off the course.

Gene Williams didn’t invent private coaching for youth sports.

He just knew it could be better.

In college, he made extra money offering basketball lessons to local kids. His wife did the same with soccer. They were both former college athletes—Gene played at Johns Hopkins, she played D1—and coaching was a way to stay close to the game while paying the bills.

At first, they used an online platform to manage bookings and payments.

But one thing led to another and they left that platform, kept coaching, and started wondering: what if they just built the thing they actually wanted?

That was the beginning of Athletes Untapped, a platform that connects parents and young athletes with private coaches in 16 different sports—all for in-person, hyper-local training.

Ryan O’Hara didn’t plan on starting a new category in sales. He just couldn’t stop noticing how broken the old ones were.

For the last 15 years, Ryan’s been on the front lines of B2B go-to-market—cold emailing, cold calling, launching creative stunts, and building sales playbooks from scratch. But sometime around 2021, things started to feel… off.

Jeremy Greenberg doesn’t describe himself as a natural entrepreneur. In fact, he kind of bristles at the label.

He wasn’t running lemonade stands or flipping sneakers in high school. And when he tells the story of how he got here—founder of Crowdwave, a fast-growing AI research platform backed by venture capital—it’s clear that this wasn’t some preordained path. It was a series of pivots, partnerships, and well-timed leaps.

She didn’t want to build a medical device. She wanted to build a habit.

And that’s exactly what she did.

Josefa created Palpa, a breast-shaped sponge for the shower with a built-in simulation of a malignant tumor. The idea is as elegant as it is powerful: teach people what to look for in the safest, most natural environment possible—their own daily routine.

“I started asking—who’s paying the teacher’s salary 365 days a year? Who’s making sure these kids eat every day, not just when a charity dinner is held?”

Michael Sheldrick realized what a lot of well-meaning volunteers don’t: charity alone won’t fix poverty. “No amount of lemonade stands or quiz nights were going to raise the billions needed to end extreme poverty,” he says.

So when he met the other founders of what would become Global Citizen, everything clicked.

Aidan Brannigan runs a creative humor agency that makes memes and skits for some of the biggest B2B companies in the world. Their work is simple but wildly effective: viral organic content in markets where everyone else is playing it safe.

He calls it “No Boring Brands” for a reason.

“I always start with this stat,” he says. “90% of people remember ads that are funny, but only 18% of business leaders actually use humor in their content. There’s a huge gap there. We’re closing it.”

Eric Topchik didn’t have a playbook when he launched Galaxy Golf Cars. He had no experience in the golf cart industry, no roadmap, and no promise that it would work. What he did have was a fire that had been building for years—fueled by burnout, bullsh*t, and a deep belief that there had to be something better out there.

“I just got to a point where I thought—if this is what the next 10 years of my life looks like, I’m going to regret not trying to build something of my own,” he says.

Jared’s brand, Hanna Golf, is proof that you don’t need a factory or a team of engineers to make elite gear—you just need a CNC machine, an audience, and a willingness to learn from failure.

Jared is proving there’s room in the golf world for people with fresh eyes, weird ideas, and a little bit of edge.