Startup companies

Startup companies

"designed to be deleted."

"Here we go again, I thought", as I listened to the board member tell me how frustrated he was with the founder of one of their venture firm's most promising investments. Sadly, I knew the call was likely too late to prevent an inevitable cascade of emotional and financial consequences. Working as an executive coach in Silicon Valley with venture capital firms and the companies where they have placed their investments means being at the confluence of high-stakes financial and career risk.

Bailey Baumbick traded a career as a national security consultant to build tech solutions for the challenges she saw at the Pentagon. Elias Rosenfeld left a job in social impact consulting to start a career aimed at revitalizing America's industrial base. Lee Kantowski spent eight years in the Army before switching to defense tech, where he hopes to fix the military's outdated tools.

The concept has drawn huge crowds across Europe because some shoppers abroad have found everything from collectable gold bars to rare Pokémon cards worth up to €2,000. The start-up said that it buys lost e-commerce packages, repackages them and sells them in their "original state", offering shoppers a "real-life treasure hunt" and said it prevents thousands of items from being destroyed. However, it's worth noting that after my visit, a huge amount of packaging was left behind.

"I started to get emails from all kinds of people asking if I could glaze pieces of pottery with their loved ones' remains," he told the WSJ. Unfortunately, dealing with the flood of requests helped Crowe realize that pottery wasn't a great avenue for scaling a business, as it only uses a fraction of a person's dusty leftovers. He ended up revamping his enterprise, coming up with Parting Stones' "solidification service," which begins at $1,195 for pets and $2,495 for humans.

Peering wide-eyed and black-turtlenecked from a shelf load of magazine covers. Honored as a "Woman of the Year" by Glamour. Touted as one of Time's "100 Most Influential People." At age 30, Holmes was regarded as a preternatural business talent - and, more impressively, described as the youngest self-made female billionaire in history - owing to her founding and stewardship of Theranos, a Silicon Valley start-up that promised to revolutionize health care by diagnosing a host of maladies with just a pinprick's worth of blood.

I'm French, but I absolutely love living in LA. Still, during my maternity leave, I returned to Paris to be closer to my family. There, my baby adored singing books. She was only a few months old, but they kept her engaged. When we returned to America, I couldn't find anything similar. At the same time, I was learning all the English nursery rhymes I hadn't grown up with. I loved singing rhymes like "Twinkle Twinkle Little Star" and "Patty Cake."

Aircraft startup Boom Supersonic said Tuesday it will start selling a version of its turbine engine as a stationary power plant, and that its first customer will be data center startup Crusoe. Crusoe will buy 29 of Boom's 42-megawatt turbines for $1.25 billion to generate 1.21 gigawatts for its data centers. Boom said it will announce more details about a turbine factory next year, with first deliveries occurring in 2027.

Leaders need to invite disagreement, not just expect it. When the invitation to offer their opinion is not clear, teams will assume you don't want it. Leaders often don't realize that their status can unconsciously silence dissent. No matter how often leaders stress that no one will be punished for disagreeing, their own zeal, conviction, intelligence, and energy can be intimidating.

Every creative person has had that moment where they look at something beautifully personalized-a monogrammed cutting board, a customized metal tumbler, a sleek engraved leather wallet-and think, "I could totally make that." Once upon a time, that idea would've required a workshop full of industrial tools and a level of skill that bordered on wizardry. Today? Thanks to modern laser engraving technology, that same idea can turn into a real business with surprising ease.

I'm a parent myself. I have three college-age girls. We all want the absolute best for our kids, and I recognize the job market is tough. But it blows my mind how many parents think it's appropriate for them to reach out to me on LinkedIn or by email and say, Hey, if you could talk to my child, you'd be able to inspire them to apply.

My dear friend Jack Ellis is an unending source of founder inspiration. Not only has he recently started embracing AI agentic coding-something he's been holding back on for quite a bit. I think I've mentioned several times on this podcast alone how he and I seem to have quite opposing views on embracing this technology. But something has clicked, and he's been diving headlong into it. So over the next couple months, hopefully he'll explore it more, and after that, I've been trying to get him to come on this podcast and talk about his experiences. Let's give him time to explore it fully.

The world's largest prediction market platform is returning to the U.S. On Wednesday, Polymarket posted on X that users can get on the waitlist for its app, saying the company will start by offering sports betting, with "markets on everything" to follow. Polymarket's impending return to the U.S. comes at a time when prediction market services, including Kalshi and Robinhood, are challenging the likes of DraftKings and FanDuel for a share of the lucrative sports betting market,

Jeff Bezos last month went public with his new AI firm, which is currently being called Project Prometheus. The effort had been in development for a while, but is still relatively secretive. There's no website and only a sparse LinkedIn page describing itself as "AI for the physical economy." The $6.2-billion startup may be facing lots of competition from other AI companies, including giants like Microsoft and OpenAI.

RMFG was launched in July 2024 by Kenneth Cassel, a 32-year-old college dropout and Y Combinator graduate, as well as a father of four. Cassel grew up in a large, blue-collar family in Texas and taught himself to code while working maintenance at a gas station company. "We're in this kind of renaissance where there's a lot of renewed interest in manufacturing," Cassel told Business Insider.

American homeowners manage some of the largest household expenses in the country - mortgage payments, home improvements, utilities, and maintenance - yet credit card rewards have largely ignored these categories in favor of luxury travel and dining perks that feel out of reach for most families. With 86 million owner-occupied homes and mortgage payments averaging $1,500 monthly, homeownership represents the single largest recurring financial commitment for most Americans, creating an untapped opportunity to deliver meaningful financial benefits where households actually spend.

Ostium, a decentralized exchange founded by two Harvard graduates, has raised a $20 million Series A round led by the marquee venture outfit General Catalyst and the crypto arm of the quantitative trading firm Jump Trading, Kaledora Kiernan-Linn, cofounder and CEO, told Fortune. Ostium lets users bet on real-world assets like stocks, metals, oil, and some cryptocurrencies. Traders can take on higher risk through perpetual futures. Unlike traditional futures, these derivatives don't expire on a set date-assuming traders maintain the necessary margin requirements.

"The day the company collapses is the day we drink that beer," Ondracek said.

The rapid succession of robotaxi deployments from companies like Waymo and Zoox have people in the industry, once again, dreaming about how autonomous vehicles might change our daily lives. That includes driverless taxi rides, sure, but also headier ideas like sending an autonomous vehicle to fetch groceries or pick up dry cleaning. If those things are ultimately going to happen, navigating the handoff moments - like where exactly a vehicle should stop to receive the groceries - will be a crucial piece of the puzzle.

Starting a business is an enticing venture, but it's far from smooth sailing. In fact, data from the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics shows that over 20% of small businesses across various sectors don't even make it past the first year. Starting a business isn't for everyone. It demands not only skills and resources within your control but also factors beyond it. There's a degree of luck and timing involved. However, positioned between both sides is an essential element: the expertise of others.

The Trump administration has agreed to inject up to $150 million into xLight, a semiconductor startup developing advanced chip-making technology, marking the second time the U.S. government has taken an equity position in a private startup and further expanding a controversial strategy that has put Washington on the cap tables of American companies. The Wall Street Journal reported Monday that the Commerce Department will provide the funding to xLight