#entrepreneurship

#entrepreneurship

You check your phone at 3am because your biggest client is eight time zones away. You miss your kid's soccer game because the office "needs" you. You turn down the perfect apartment in Bangkok because your business demands you stay put. Your success has become your prison. Maybe you're the founder who built something amazing but can't leave headquarters. Maybe you're watching friends post from Kyoto while you're stuck in traffic.

I'll never forget standing on the sideline of our first SaberCats match, watching one of our players get leveled by a brutal tackle. Most people would've stayed down. He didn't. He fought for every inch, rolled and kept driving the ball forward. The crowd erupted. That image stuck with me. In rugby, getting hit is part of the game, and when you get hit, you don't stop - you adapt mid-impact.

When Jared Pobre and his wife, former WWE star Stacy Keibler, moved to Jackson Hole, Wyoming, he expected more time outdoors, skiing, hiking, fly-fishing. What he experienced was how extreme conditions accelerate skin aging and damage, leaving his skin raw and red. When searching for solutions for his skincare, not only were options limited, but nothing seemed to help. Out of frustration, he tried one of Keibler's pricey serums.

"My greatest successes happened on the heels of failure," Corcoran wrote. "The moment I made my first profit, it felt like all the long nights and rejection finally paid off. I wanted to invest it in something big that would set me apart."

As entrepreneurs, we're constantly bombarded with recommendations for the same big-name podcasts (How I Built This, The Tim Ferriss Show or Masters of Scale). They're good, but they've become the mainstream playlists of the entrepreneurial world. The real edge comes from discovering voices that are flying under the radar - podcasts that don't just regurgitate clichés but dig into gritty lessons, unconventional strategies and the realities most entrepreneurs are too busy or too cautious to discuss openly.

Retirement was never really in my vocabulary - not in the way people expect. I turned 60 this year. I never thought I'd be launching a tech company at this stage in my life, but here I am, building a startup I love, working 60 to 70 hours a week, and feeling more fulfilled than ever. I've always been an entrepreneur

One employer asked him, Have you thought about taking elocution lessons? Others told him his film ideas which explored diversity in innovative ways - were a bit niche. I was 28 and at the end of my tether, he recalled. I was working a minimum wage job in a call centre, my life on hold, trying to break into TV. But the industry felt very Oxbridge and very white dominated by people with cut-glass BBC accents.

If you had told me as a teenager in Soviet Georgia that one day I'd be running an American public tech company - let alone something like Grindr - I couldn't have grasped it. The moment I stepped out of JFK airport, I felt something different - later I realized it was freedom. America gave me not just liberty, but the chance to unleash my potential, pursue my dreams, and come to terms with being gay.

What sticks in your mind when you think of success in business? Extraordinary achievements and the people who made them happen. Whether it's an incredible marketing campaign or a product that met massive consumer demands, major breakthroughs deserve to be recognized. That's what Inc.'s Best in Business awards are for-recognizing the achievements and success of entrepreneurs and industry leaders across all sectors. With this list, we're honoring companies, projects, people, and initiatives that defined 2025.

Sometimes, we aren't even given the option to try. For example, when the airline issues your boarding pass, the message isn't "try to be at the gate by 9:30 because we'd sure like to try and take off by 10:00!" When the utility company sends your monthly bill, the payment stub doesn't read, "Please try to make your payment so we can try to keep your lights on."

Before going to college, I lived in the Bay Area. I was surrounded by entrepreneurs and founders, so building a company didn't seem incredibly novel to me. But in 2018, I started a company of my own called Injective. We're a blockchain network that provides infrastructure for finance applications. We've raised over $50 million in funding and got Mark Cuban to invest in our vision.

My Korean language proficiency was still very low then, and I worried that communicating would be difficult. But I was surprised that people were friendly and eager to help, even though I didn't speak Korean. At the same time, I saw that Korean society was super, super competitive. People lined up in the university libraries, sat on the benches, and studied so hard. They called it "pali-pali"- quick-quick.

I was reading Brandon Sanderson's latest novel, Wind and Truth, when I came across a sentence that stopped me cold: "A stronger current makes for stronger fish." That's it. That's what entrepreneurship is. We're constantly encountering currents that either facilitate what we want to accomplish-the businesses we want to build, the lives we want to create-or they oppose us, trying to sweep us into dangerous waters. These currents change all the time. They vary in strength depending on where you are in your journey. And here's the thing: they're mostly invisible until you learn to feel them.

At the recent Entrepreneur Level Up Conference, entrepreneurs from across the country gathered to gain strategies, inspiration and practical insights from a lineup of well-known successful entrepreneurs. I was honored to host the conference and partner with Entrepreneur. One of the headliners, Robert Herjavec - investor, entrepreneur and star of Shark Tank - delivered a keynote packed with wisdom for founders navigating today's unpredictable business landscape.

Michael's legal career started at Cadwalader, Wickersham & Taft, the oldest law firm in the U.S. He joined their real estate finance group after graduating from Boston College Law School in 2002. The timing was important-he entered the industry just before the real estate boom of the mid-2000s. "Cadwalader was fast-paced and full of very smart people. I had to learn quickly how to manage complex deals," he recalls.

Since starting First Light, former colleagues have reached out with connections to coffee-growing communities, and I'm excited to build on that,

Most entrepreneurs have a business plan. We write it, follow it... and slowly that business grows until it consumes our lives. Suddenly, the company dictates the calendar, family trips are canceled for "urgent" calls and personal decisions take a back seat. I've had countless closed-door conversations with entrepreneurs who, from the outside, seem to have it all, but in private admit that they hate their company and think they are a prisoner.

6:30 a.m. - I don't use an alarm to wake up I plan out my day the night before, so I'm not winging it when I wake up. It's pretty mapped out hour by hour. During the school year, I wake up, get my kids breakfast, get them ready, and take them to school. I'm home around 8 a.m. 8 to 10 a.m. - My workouts start early

In 2005, 2006, it was not the startup economy. All the things we take for granted now were not a thing yet. I still distinctly remember the headline of Zuck turning down that billion-dollar offer [from Yahoo] as being so preposterous. I just thought, my God, if I could have gotten that much money for a few years' worth of work, I would've taken it in a heartbeat.

"He worked all the time, seven days a week," Sims recalls, "so I used to go out with him just to spend time with him. I saw how easy it was for him to repair those appliances, and he was repairing them quickly."

I love creating products that don't just sell, but genuinely change lives, from introducing collagen to the mainstream when I worked at Vital Proteins to now reshaping the fiber space at Supergut. Supergut is a supplement company focused on gut health and metabolic wellness. Our hero ingredient, green banana fiber, supports the gut microbiome. With growing awareness around GLP-1s and gut health, we're aiming to transform the supplement aisle.

Born in 1950, Gladney came of age during times of family hardship, moving often and working several jobs simultaneously to help make ends meet. He self-funded his college education in night classes at the University of Houston obtaining a degree in Economics, while working full-time with the disadvantaged to support himself. Those experiences gave him a deep empathy for people who simply needed a second chance, or a first chance - something that shaped his career and set the trajectory for the rest of his life.

When I first moved to the United States, my goal was simple: survive. I had no connections, little understanding of the system, and a burning desire to build something meaningful. At 33, I shared my journey here - how I used grit, education and a bit of luck to launch a real estate tech startup built on transparency. Four years later, I'm still standing - but I've changed. So has my definition of success.

Gen X founder and CEO of That's It Nutrition walked away from a stable career path in medicine to instead get his MBA and build a $100 million-a-year fruit snack empire. Now, even with three degrees to his name,Lior Lewensztain tells Fortune that he doesn't even look at degrees when hiring. His message to Gen Z: effort and adaptability matter more for success than what you study in school.