#entrepreneurship-awards

#entrepreneurship-awards

Inertia Enterprises burst onto the scene in February with a $450 million Series A, making it one of the best capitalized startups in the industry, aiming to bring laser-based fusion reactors to market.

Youth 4 Youth was built by players who are currently living the journey. We're taking the doors we've walked through and holding them open for the next generation.

In the AI era, it should be easier than ever for people to build new businesses. We want to build the services that enable this. This is important for ensuring that people broadly share in the prosperity created by superintelligence.

In an era obsessed with shortcuts, overnight success, and polished social media profiles, adversity is often treated as something to avoid. Something unfortunate. Something that signals failure. That assumption is completely wrong. Adversity is not a flaw in the entrepreneurial journey; it is, in fact, the training ground, the pressure that sharpens one's judgment, accelerates their adaptability and forges the kind of resilience no accelerator, MBA or funding round can manufacture.

According to the Registered Agents Inc. December Business Formation Report, more than 5.9 million new businesses were formed in 2025, an 8% increase over 2024 nationwide. And sure, it's easy to point to the usual heavy hitters, states like Florida and Texas, which posted another standout year and outperformed 2024 month after month.

A colleague and I launched a new company after our previous employer closed. We divided responsibilities so she handled manufacturing and distribution while I managed digital content and marketing. My side of the business grew steadily. But within six months, her operational area began to falter. I began to step in to keep physical projects moving, and key infrastructure on her side wasn't maintained. Despite having access to shared digital project management tools, she frequently framed it as a communication problem.

But if you're innovating within your industry, it's a problem you should expect and prepare for because it means having to operate in two realities-the internal reality where you know the challenges in your industry and how you're going to solve them, and the external reality where nobody else has recognized the problem that needs to be solved. In a highly regulated industry like healthcare, safety, and stability create an inertia that often works against innovation.

As an Asian-American kid growing up to an immigrant mom in North Carolina, I was taught to follow the rules (no exceptions). I was a Boy Scout, graduated top of my class and was hired by Goldman Sachs immediately after graduating undergrad. I had followed what I thought was the "right" path. I was living in the greatest city in the world (New York City, of course) and working at one of the best companies in the world ... but none of it felt right.