Katy Osborn remembers the day she left her job. She was working at a pepper spray company in Chicago, leading the marketing efforts for a college safety program, when a tense conversation made her realized she and her boss had been “really clashing a lot.” “When I would make decisions, I’d always get some pushback […]

As a kid, Joseph Fjelstad would stand in his schoolyard and look up at the sky every day. “I watched the X-15, which holds the record for the fastest plane, fly by,” Fjelstad recalls. “I was a pesky kid bugging my dad about how it worked. Engineering ran in the blood.” His father, an aerospace […]

“A life-changing experience” is how one WeWork member described it. A “huge deal for my startup,” is how a second member put it, while the woman standing next to her replied that it would be “so incredible for our company.” They were among the 14 winners at WeWork Demo Day, held last weekend all over […]

For Lisa Binderow, the “most intense process I’ve ever gone through in my life” was appearing on Shark Tank. There were months of preparing to be on the popular program, getting to know her business inside and out. She had to figure out its exact valuation and calculate how much funding she would request. And […]

After college, aspiring writer Jason Friesen put his English degree to use in the same way as many of his peers: teaching English abroad. He found himself in Costa Rica, where he picked up Spanish and landed a job at Habitat for Humanity’s corporate office copyediting and translating. But he longed to get his hands […]

It’s not that Nicola Black was itching to strike out on her own. The work she was getting was interesting enough, from doing production for a major newspaper to creating posters and DVD box art for a film and entertainment company. “I would see some of my work in Blockbuster—when it was still around,” says […]

When they started tossing around ideas for their first startup, Beri Meric and Philipp Triebel didn’t hit on IVY right away. In fact, they came up with several ideas—a platform for connecting business school graduates, a members-only dating network—before they got the idea for their “social university.” There have been a lot of changes to […]

The oldest of six children in a family with limited financial resources, Eamon Walsh remembers the annual trip to the thrift store to buy shoes. “My mother said that I’m in the footwear business now because when I was younger I only had one pair of shoes a year,” Walsh says. “I always picked out […]