Innholdsfortegnelse for October 2022 i Inc. Magazine

A few months ago, I met a woman who I thought was brave. She had started her career as an engineer a few decades ago, back when there were few women engineers and even fewer engineers who were women and, as she is, African American. Though she was well enough regarded to ride out her time in the corporate world and end it with something like S’s and V’s and P’s in her job title, she turned her back on that success and stability to start her own business, a line of skin care products. The recipes for her products were inspired by home remedies from her grandmother’s garden, and she wanted to share their benefits. Oh, she did this, by the way, while raising three children as a single…

“As entrepreneurs, we often believe that data-based decisions can solve all of our problems, a mindset that ignores what I call wild problems. Those are the big, spontaneous, organic, and complex decisions that resist measurement, like whom to marry—or how to run a business. My new book, Wild Problems, offers a blueprint for solving these unsolvables. It can’t tell you whom to fire, but it can help you think critically about the full range of choices available while acknowledging that, maybe, there is no ‘right’ answer—or at least no one-size-fits-all solution.” Read more at inc.com/wild-problems.…

People don’t necessarily think that private equity firms and entrepreneurs have much in common, but Derek McDowell, founder and managing partner of Boyne Capital, a Florida-based private equity firm, understands the pains of growing a business firsthand. After working in traditional private equity firms, McDowell wanted to strike out on his own to implement his ideas on operations and growth strategies. When he started Boyne in 2006, he raised capital deal by deal, unlike firms that start with a large pool of capital. In this way, he built the firm as an entrepreneur, one deal at a time. He created a track record and grew the team-all while minding costs. “We understand well the risks and challenges of being an entrepreneur. A lot of folks in our industry are value…

You don’t become the largest global consumer-focused private equity (PE) firm without developing a knack for spotting winning companies. With 33 years of experience and seven investment platforms that cover 90 percent of global gross domestic product (GDP), L Catterton has invested in more than 250 companies, including success stories like Restoration Hardware, Cholula, P.F. Chang’s, Nutrish Pet Food, and Nutrafol. And the hits keep coming. Earlier this year, one of L Catterton’s portfolio companies—probiotic skin care brand Tula, which grew from less than $10 million in annual revenue when L Catterton invested to more than $150 million in sales in 2021—was acquired by Procter & Gamble. Deservedly, the firm has once again been named to Inc.’s 2022 Founder-Friendly Investors List of PE and venture capital firms strongly committed to…

As a founder himself, Robert F. Smith appreciates when enterprise software entrepreneurs have a crystalized vision about what the market wants and how to provide it. These founders connect the dots between their products and market gaps when no one else sees it. What they may need, though, is help building the company. “We are growth specialists,” says Smith, founder, chairman, and CEO of Vista Equity Partners. “Part of what we do is understand the vision of where the founder and the management team are going.” Companies come to Vista for several reasons. Vista helps organizations accelerate the journey of innovating products, building out an efficient and effective organizational team and structure, and implementing best practices. Vista also provides near certainty. “Founders view us as a highly reliable partner that…

Los Angeles is nothing if not a city for odd business alli ances—see: Martha Stewart and Snoop Dogg. So it’s perhaps to be expected that after Nicole Richie, the daughter of famed singer Lionel, introduced her sisterin-law, the actress Cameron Diaz, to fashion and beauty entrepreneur Katherine Power on New Year’s Eve 2014, the pair would end up going into business together. Today they are the co-founders of Avaline, a new line of “clean wines” that launched in July 2020 with the goal of hitting the Venn diagram intersection of the $1.2 trillion global wellness market and the $418 billion wine market. Avaline, now available via 6,000 national retailers and a direct-to-consumer business launched earlier this year, will ship 80,000 cases of wine, priced $24 to $30 a bottle, in…

“NO. IT NEEDS TO BE NOT PORN MUSIC.” Mike Cessario, co-founder and CEO of Liquid Death, shakes his head as a boom-chicka-wah-wah clip plays from a laptop’s speakers, takes a seat at a long table, and explains that his canned water brand’s new commercial spot needs a wholesome soundtrack to pair with its spokesperson, a XXX-rated celebrity. Andy Pearson, Liquid Death’s vice president for creative, nods in agreement and hits play: “Hi, I’m Cherie DeVille, adult film star,” the actress says to the camera. “And when I want to murder my thirst, I reach for a can of Liquid Death Mountain Water. Because even though I’m into getting my [bleep bleep bleep bleep bleep bleep bleep], one thing I’m not into is single-use plastics.” Moments later, the spot ends with…

WHETHER YOU NEED funding to help turn your startup into a successful business or to grow it into an industry leader, Inc.’s fourth annual Founder-Friendly Investors is a great place to start. Since we last published this list, U.S. businesses have had to contend with record inflation, fears of a coming recession, and a Great Resignation that, uh, just won’t quit. ✤ Finding an investment partner to help you handle these challenges could make the difference between your business gaining an edge or taking a turn for the worse. After all, private equity and venture capital firms don’t fear change. They engineer it. “If they bought the business, it’s not to just keep doing more of the same,” says Bob Gogel, a serial CEO and longtime consultant to entrepreneurs. “It’s…

When Jim Barnett needed funding for his employee engagement software company, Glint, the question of whom to call was easy to answer. Barnett’s previous startup, an ad tech company called Turn, had taken investment from Palo Alto, California-based venture capital firm Norwest Venture Partners, and Barnett had served as Norwest’s entrepreneur-in-residence. Norwest invested more than $3 million in Glint as a part of the Redwood City-based firm’s $6.5 million Series A round in 2013, the same year Barnett co-founded it. Jeff Crowe, a Norwest senior managing partner, believed in Glint’s mission to bring employee engagement out of the paper-survey era by creating software that would notify managers of employee feedback in real time. Crowe and Barnett had a strong working relationship from Turn, and it didn’t hurt that Norwest was…

When physical therapist Heidi Jannenga realized that dictation software would help her document her patients’ progress more efficiently, she recruited her then-boyfriend, Brad Jannenga, a software engineer, to build a note-taking platform specifically for her industry. Their Phoenix-based company launched in 2008 and gained traction quickly in a space that had been desperate for an alternative to pen and paper. By 2014, WebPT had attracted more than 5,000 clients and reached $20 million in annual revenue. But Heidi and Brad felt they needed outside expertise to help their company reach its full potential. They’d never started one before, let alone scaled one. The Jannengas, having married, also had nearly all their wealth tied up in startup equity. “There was so much risk for us,” says Heidi. “It wasn’t going to…

STUART LANDESBERG FOUNDED healthy-home products company Grove Collaborative with a mission to make it the most radically sustainable startup in its industry. After soaring to a $1 billion valuation in 2019, his San Francisco-based firm became a public benefit corporation in 2021 and pledged to go plastic-free by 2025. In addition, last year Landesberg turned his attention to taking Grove public through a merger with a SPAC backed by Virgin Group co-founder Richard Branson. But it would ultimately take a personal health crisis to seal the deal. “When I met with Richard Branson in the summer of ’21, the first question he asked wasn’t about cash flow. It was: ‘Why is zero plastic by 2025 the right goal?’ The next thing he said was: ‘OK, you’ve convinced me. Tell me…

“About 11 years ago, I ignored advice that I give to everyone else: Don’t build something without making sure people want it. It’s a lesson I’d known before but just had to learn again. I’d been consulting for a company—Insulated Component Structures of Florida—that had found a way to build prefabricated structures cheaply and in just a few weeks, ship them flat, and assemble them anywhere in the world in a few hours. In 2010, just as we were bringing our product to market, Haiti was hit by a gigantic earthquake and we saw a market opportunity to use our temporary housing for displaced victims. FEMA’s solution was to house those people in tents, and we figured our shelters would be a welcome upgrade. Depending on the application, these fiberglass…

ANY FOUNDER INTERESTED in thriving over the long term needs to be addicted to innovation. I know I am. But there’s long been debate about how best to innovate. In Silicon Valley’s earlier days, Hewlett-Packard adhered to an innovation theory called the next bench. One engineer would ask the engineer sitting on the next bench over to describe the kind of tool he would find helpful. Since HP’s customers at the time were primarily other engineers, that constituted market research. But when HP became a more consumer-focused business, the company discovered, not surprisingly, that it needed to reach out to consumers for innovation inspiration. On the other end of the spectrum was Apple, where Steve Jobs famously noted that asking consumers what they wanted was pointless—how could they know they…

GARRY COOPER WASN’T supposed to be an entrepreneur. After completing a PhD in neuroscience in 2014, he was working at Northwestern University’s medical school when he learned that some of his colleagues needed equipment that was lying unused in his lab. He began distributing the supplies, pushing a cart around the medical school, eventually earning the nickname the Cart Guy. “I was just trying to share resources with people who needed them within the university,” Cooper says. He did more than that. Cooper’s idea ultimately grew into a circular economy business to allow organizations to sell, rent, or donate physical assets they no longer need. By 2016, Cooper, who was then 33 years old, had co-founded Chicago-based Rheaply, a resources exchange platform to help companies manage their purchased goods and…

AMY FAN ISN’T easily rattled. Case in point: When, on May 2, a leaked decision signaled that the country’s highest court planned to overturn the established right to abortion and fracture the groundwork for her entire industry’s existence, the co-founder of Twentyeight Health felt empathy but not shock. For years, she’d noted the changing tide of judicial appointments, and saw “a lot of signals that Roe v. Wade would be overturned.” Her employees? Not so calm. “Our team members are here because they care really deeply about reproductive health access. Like most Americans, they’ve never lived in a world without Roe v. Wade,” Fan says. Indeed, most Americans—62 percent, according to Pew Research—disagree with the court’s decision. “Going back in time five decades in terms of policy felt insane.” So…

01 TAKE ONLY SMART MONEY. PINKY COLE, Slutty Vegan PINKY COLE LAUNCHED her Atlanta-based restaurant, Slutty Vegan, in 2018 to prove to people that vegan food could be deli cious—and a little naughty. People agreed: Revenue hit $4 million in six months. Investors soon came knocking—but Cole kept the door shut. “We were profitable, and I wanted more than money,” she says. “I was really serious about looking for a strategic partner.” In May 2022, she finally found that. New Voices and Enlightened Hospitality Investments—the growth equity fund affiliated with Danny Meyer’s Union Square Hospitality Group—led a $25 million Series A round. The former was a no-brainer because it’s the firm of Cole’s longtime mentor, Richelieu Dennis, but the latter came out of the blue. After a few calls, Meyer…

WHEN I WAS a graduate student at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, doing research in cognitive psychology, our lab group went out every now and then for nachos and beers. It was a great opportunity for us to ask our adviser about things that wouldn’t likely come up in our more formal meetings. At one of those gatherings, I summoned up the courage to ask him a question that had been on my mind for some time: “Do you think cognitive psychology can make the world a better place?” I had asked a simple yes-or-no question, so he chose a simple answer: “Yes.” Over the course of the next 30 years, I’ve tried to answer that question myself by working on problems that I hope have real-world applications. In…

Michael Landa’s premium pet food brand, Nulo, was already growing at a rapid clip when he sold a minority stake in the company to private equity firm Main Post Partners in 2018. Nulo had claimed the No. 520 spot on the Inc. 5000 the previous year, with a three-year revenue growth rate of 854 percent. But Landa still wanted to expand its product offerings while staying loyal to the independent retail stores that had helped fuel the brand’s fast growth. While many pet food brands sell their products in big retailers at a lower price than in independent stores, doing so can come at a cost, according to Landa. “Everyone in the independent channel gets pissed, and they kick those brands off the shelf,” he says. To stay in the…

Twist Bioscience had spent two years working on its proprietary DNA manufacturing product and was ready to launch in 2015 when it hit a snag. The software backing the San Francisco-based biotechnology company’s manufacturing process wasn’t ready. “We had to shut down,” says Twist co-founder and CEO Emily Leproust. The company would return to beta, for the time being. It was at that moment that Paul Conley, a managing director at Paladin Capital Group, one of the VC firms that had invested a combined $9 million in Twist’s Series A, stepped in to help. A member of Twist’s board who had founded two software companies, Conley knew what it was like to be in Leproust’s shoes. Rather than applying pressure to launch by a specific date, he offered Leproust a…

In the years since Steve Case wrote the 2016 bestseller The Third Wave, which describes how rapidly changing technology will transform a variety of sectors, his Rise of the Rest Seed Fund has built a portfolio of startups that are doing just that-outside of Silicon Valley. In September came Case’s latest, The Rise of the Rest: How Entrepreneurs in Surprising Places Are Building the New American Dream, which tells the stories of founders across the country who are revitalizing their communities with new ideas and new businesses. “It paints an optimistic view of the future of America because of how much is happening in different places,” Case says. “If you want to move to Silicon Valley, go for it, but if you feel like you need to move to Silicon…

In 2019, after she’d written a New York Times op-ed blasting Nike for maternity policies that didn’t support its sponsored athletes, track and field Olympian Allyson Felix—then a new mother—did something few professional athletes would dare to do: She started a competitor. Alongside her brother, Wes Felix, she co-founded Saysh, a Los Angeles-based women-centric footwear and lifestyle brand that has raised $11.5 million to date. Within 40 days of the website’s launch during the 2021 Olympics, Saysh sold out of its $150 sneakers and had a 25,000-person waitlist. While Felix is the most decorated American track and field athlete in Olympic history—having earned that distinction with her seventh gold medal 10 months after an emergency C-section—she’s ready to move on from the sport that helped her discover her path toward…

I also want to become a big business! when they see trlex builboard, then the would know what it is just like mcdonalds!—Zeb Evans, age 10 THE FIRST TIME ZEB EVANS NEARLY DIED, HE WAS 10. He was Jet-Skiing with his family near a friend’s lakeside home in North Carolina, when he went to dock the craft and came in too fast. Young Zeb hit the dock and flew off the Jet Ski and somersaulted in the air, landing on the side of his stomach on an adjacent dock’s hard metal ramp. The impact sliced open his obliques, and Evans blacked out. His parents rushed him to a nearby hospital, where doctors stitched him up and kept him for observation. On his second night in the hospital, “I had crazy…

Four years after founding the Brazilian-inspired beauty brand Sol de Janeiro in 2015, Heela Yang wasn’t looking for investors. Her company was profitable, and its signature body moisturizer, Bum Bum Cream, had been Sephora’s top-selling skin care product for three years. When one of Yang’s Harvard Business School classmates launched a growth equity firm with a focus on consumer brands and an all-female leadership team, however, Yang saw an opportunity. Alicia Sontag, a former beauty industry executive, had spent 15 years at Estée Lauder and Johnson & Johnson, working with large brands like Clinique, Bobbi Brown, and Neutrogena, before co-founding Prelude Growth Partners in New York City. “They knew the industry so well,” says Yang of her classmate’s firm. Indeed, it was Prelude’s advice, not merely its capital, that would…