Lidija Newman didn’t grow up thinking she’d be an entrepreneur. But she knew early on that she never wanted to be trapped.

She was raised in Serbia during wartime. Her dad was an engineer, but like so many others, had to improvise to survive. He traveled across borders, imported goods, and figured out how to provide for the family when nothing was stable. “That was my first view of entrepreneurship,” Lidija says. “Sometimes you don’t choose it—you just have to figure things out.”

That mindset stayed with her. Even as she built a career in fashion, moved to London, then LA, and worked for some of the biggest names in the industry, there was always a restlessness beneath the surface.

“I tried going back into 9-to-5 so many times,” she says. “But every time I felt trapped. I couldn’t express my creativity. I couldn’t live on my terms.”

Michael Raab didn’t plan to start a business. In fact, for most of his 20-year career in ad tech, he did everything but that.

He ran customer success teams. Led support and operations. Helped build account management from scratch. If it touched the customer lifecycle, he did it. The only thing he didn’t do was sell—which makes it all the more impressive that now, as the founder of Raab Insight Consulting, he’s in the thick of it: prospecting, pitching, and closing his own clients from day one.

“I’ve never been in direct sales before,” he says. “But now I’m writing the messaging, doing the outreach, and having the conversations. And weirdly? I actually like it.”

Entrepreneurship wasn’t a buzzword in her house. It was how you lived. How you worked. How you got paid.

“I built a dropshipping furniture business on the side while I was working full-time,” she says. “Eventually, it paid me enough to leave my job.”

It wasn’t glamorous. She wasn’t pitching investors or building a personal brand. She found a supplier, set up a site, and figured out how to sell chairs while working 9 to 5.

That business funded her next move—her real goal.

In 2023, Lorenza launchedSecure AIs, a startup built to tackle one of the most complex problems in tech: securing and sanitizing data for AI development. But unlike the dropshipping days, this wasn’t an immediate win. It’s been slow. Strategic. Painful, at times.

Cameo is no stranger to doing hard things. Her dad—an experimental, self-taught entrepreneur—once mailed her boxes of gold so she could make earrings in her college dorm room. She sold enough of them to pay her tuition. Years later, when her job at a restaurant chain imploded, she stood at the front door and handed layoff checks to every employee—including herself. And when that life collapsed, she chased a dream instead. She tried to become a rock star. Toured the western U.S. as a lead singer. Got some traction. Signed with a lawyer. Didn’t make it.

For years, she didn’t talk about that chapter. It felt like failure.

“I thought I should’ve been successful. And because I wasn’t, I carried shame. But eventually I realized—how many people never even try?” (Give them a listen here!)

Melvin Varghese didn’t grow up dreaming about building a business. In fact, everything in his upbringing pointed the other way.

“My parents actively did not want me to pursue business at all,” he says.

He was supposed to follow the path they carved.

The plan was stable: teach, see patients, maybe go the tenure track. But a mentor gave him a new perspective. “She told me, think of your skill set as something you can deploy beyond the clinic,”

In 2015, he started a podcast—Selling the Couch—to interview other therapists and learn how they built their practices. It was a side project. No real business model. Just curiosity.

Most people don’t build businesses designed to make themselves obsolete.

Mary Southworth did.

Her company, The Shiftly, helps small and midsize businesses clean up their HR and payroll systems—so clean, in fact, that she doesn’t need to stick around. That’s the goal.

“Our whole motto is HR that wants to get fired,” Mary says. “We go in, clean it up, get it organized, hand it back to you, and leave.”

Caitlin Modestine never planned to be on stages, coaching companies, or building a business from scratch. Her earliest ambition was much simpler: become a third-grade teacher. And she did—landing the job at the very school she grew up in. It was a full-circle moment. Dream realized.

But just months in, everything changed. The archdiocese shut down and merged a number of Catholic schools, including hers. Faculty were laid off and forced to reapply for their own jobs. She was rehired—beating out more senior teachers—and taught for two more years. But something had shifted.

“I realized I wanted to work with big people,” she says. “I wanted to make a bigger impact. I just had this calling that I was meant to do more.”

When Candice Thompson first launched her private therapy practice, she didn’t think of it as a business.

She thought of it as a calling.

“I didn’t realize I had a business until I’d had it for over 10 years,” she says. “As therapists, we’re trained in mental health—but there’s no training in grad school around marketing, scaling, branding. None of it.”

What she did have was deep clinical expertise.
Thousands of supervised hours. Years working in underfunded nonprofits. A passion for helping people find clarity and healing.

Jennifer Cresswell never expected to start her own business.

She built her career the traditional way— she worked her way through the ranks of some of the biggest financial institutions in the country.

But over time, the work stopped fitting.

“Corporate life started to feel like a box,” she says. “I realized I wanted more autonomy, more creativity. I wanted to build something of my own.”

When Ryan Welti boarded a flight from Dallas to Miami, she had no plans to start a company.
She was in yoga teacher training at the time—deep in a moment of personal reset—and casually started sketching out retreat ideas in Freeform on her iPhone.

By the time the plane landed, something had shifted.

“I thought—what if there was an Airbnb for wellness retreats?” she says. “That was it. That was the moment.”

It wasn’t her first idea.
But it was the first one she couldn’t walk away from.

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..