Michael Lerner resigned from Yale before tenure to build a school for kids out of juvenile hall. Three years later, a shaft of sunlight over an abandoned radio station convinced him to found…
Tony Conrad co-founded True Ventures, where for two decades he's had a habit of writing the first check into companies nobody else believed in yet — Automattic, Blue Bottle Coffee, Sweetgreen, FitBit,…
Jordan Kurland started collecting Kiss records at six and never really put them down. This episode traces how that turned into a career managing artists — most notably Death Cab for Cutie, who he…
Christine O'Connell thought she had it all figured out — a career built at Georgetown, Oxford, and Thomson Reuters, a life she'd made for herself in London. Then a cancer diagnosis upended life as she…
Alison Bechdel grew up in a small Pennsylvania town in a house that doubled as her family's funeral home, raised by a father who was an English teacher and a closeted gay man keeping secrets that…
meriko borogove spent 22 years at Apple as a founding member of the iPhone team — building the camera from the ground up through generations that turned a phone into the most used photographic device…
If you've listened to Sufjan Stevens, Bon Iver, Phoebe Bridgers, or Taylor Swift, you've heard Rob Moose — you just may not have known it. A Grammy award-winning arranger, violinist, and producer,…
Rich Davis has spent 25 years as one of Washington's top Democratic media consultants, working on races from a mayor's office in Omaha to both of Barack Obama's presidential campaigns. He and his…
Joan Barnes built Gymboree from a church basement and a few thousand dollars into a global brand that eventually sold for $2 billion — and she'll be the first to tell you that's not the part of her…
Lorne Goldberg was one of the top junior tennis players in the world at 18 years old and clear-eyed enough to know it wasn't going to be enough. So he walked away, taught himself finance by reading…
