Indholdsfortegnelse for October 2021 i Inc. Magazine

I am on, as we so often are these days, a Zoom call. I sit on the board of a new think tank that supports global entrepreneurship, the nonprofit arm of a just-founded holding company, and we are gathered for our first real meeting. After an hour and a half of throat clearing and blue-sky babble from the pixelated sea of largely European male faces—industrialists, scions of well-to-do families, lifetime diplomats, even former heads of state—an African American woman commands the call. The 50 or so heads in 50 or so Zoom tiles are replaced with a full-screen view of Phyllis Newhouse, the charismatic mentor, board member, founder, multiyear Inc. 5000 honoree, and now SPAC CEO, who speaks clearly, concisely, and good naturedly, and in just 90 seconds brushes aside…

How will real estate change in the next five years? Virtual 3-D tours and remote, digital closings will be the norm. No more driving downtown to sign a mountain of closing documents. Also, a large number of people will sell their homes through an app, without making big changes—like updating kitchens, painting, and other fixes—to prepare it for sale. Over the next decade? Buying a house will be as easy as trading in your car. It will be transparent, with no information gatekeepers and no surprises. And it will move faster, thanks to the stress-reducing bene fits of tech. Real estate agents will still play a key role, connecting with high-impact, qualified buyers who have already looked around and narrowed the field, and are ready to make an offer. How…

As a self-taught computer programmer, Michael Nardy was not your typical 19-year-old. In 1998, the Boston College student started selling custom software programs for online businesses but realized he needed to connect them to a transaction processing system. He was surprised to learn that processors were woefully inefficient and expensive. “They didn’t have technology of any kind and weren’t price competitive,” says Nardy. He incorporated Electronic Payments in 2000, answering the company's toll-free number from his dorm room. In addition to lower prices, his primary mission was one he upholds today: one-call-for-all service. “We give a single point of contact to minimize credit card processing downtime, because payments are so critical to business,” says Nardy. The company offers 24/7 tech support and ships equipment daily through their facility across the…

All of my biggest mistakes in business have been things my wife warned against. So you might be surprised to learn that the idea to drop our life savings into a small-town book store shortly after our second child was born actually came from her—not from the writer in the family. As we sat at a café in Bastrop, Texas, looking across Main Street at an empty historic storefront, I was skeptical. But she was right. Even the pandemic, which forced us to sit unopened for nearly 12 months at great expense, hasn’t proved her wrong. For most of my life as an author and entrepreneur, my work has been digital. Close to half of the sales of my books are audiobooks and e-books—and the vast majority of all sales…

The first barrier to entry for this year’s Female Founders 100 was simple: survival. If you’re still standing with your vision, your team, and your customers intact in 2021, you’ve persevered. But the women we celebrate this year did much more than that. They tackled the pandemic with creativity and tenacity. They lifted up other women. They built better products and services. They made the world better. They raised the bar. And, in the pages that follow, they reveal how they did it all.…

Calyn Bernard and Christina Carbonell met as executives in the marketing department of Quidsi, the parent company of Diapers.com. There, they learned the ropes of e-commerce and bonded over their hatred of shopping for kids’ clothes, which felt cheap for the price, leaving them to chase sales and sold-out items. They left Quidsi in 2014, convinced they could build a go-to brand for kids with affordable, high-quality essentials. The twist? The vibrantly colored T’s, pants, pajamas, and more would all be gender-neutral. Arming everyone they knew with a promo code, they launched Primary as a direct-to-consumer brand. Seven years later, Primary has over one million customers. BERNARD The idea for Primary came as much from our experience at Diapers.com as it did from our own experience shopping. We couldn’t figure…

Michelle Longmire co-founded Medable in 2015, but it wasn’t until the Covid-19 pandemic that the drug-development software platform came into its own. Medable’s technology helps pharma giants such as AstraZeneca administer remote clinical trials and navigate the complications of pandemic shutdowns, saving time, money, and lives. The company’s valuation leapt from around $100 million to $2 billion in just 18 months, and it has raised more than $300 million in venture capital this year. Now Medable must scramble to keep up with demand. Before becoming an entrepreneur, I was a practicing dermatologist and postdoc researcher at Stanford, searching for identical twins with a condition called systemic sclerosis, a rare autoimmune disorder. But to find those study subjects, I needed to connect with anyone in the world living with this condition…

The oldest child of a single mother, Delane Parnell grew up in an impoverished neighborhood off Detroit’s Seven Mile Road. His father was murdered a few months before he was born. His mother transported him from home to home as she bounced between jobs. Still, the young Parnell had a knack for business. By the time he was 17, he had parlayed a job mopping floors at a MetroPCS into co-owning three Detroit-area cellphone shops. Seven years later, a chance meeting with a venture capitalist inspired Parnell to move to Los Angeles and found a gaming startup. His company had a name—PlayVS—but little else beyond office space at startup studio Science Inc. Still, he had no funding, no employees. Despite all that, his goal was nothing short of bringing e-sports…

DOUG JONES WAS just two years into his first startup when he got a cold call from Kevin Prokop, co-founder and managing partner of Detroit-based private equity firm Rockbridge Growth Equity. Jones’s content marketing company, Abuv Media, helped online universities identify prospective students, and its more than 50 percent year-over-year growth since it was launched in 2012 had caught Prokop’s attention. Rockbridge had begun as the private equity investment arm of Quicken Loans founder Dan Gilbert’s family office. Eventually, it grew to raise investment capital from institutional investors. Though Gilbert was well-known for owning the NBA’s Cleveland Cavaliers—and his at-times contentious relationship with LeBron James—the Rockbridge investment team kept a lower profile. Or as Jones puts it: “I had no idea who they were.” That changed after members of the…

DOUG HIRSCH AFFORDABLE HEALTH CARE » Hirsch co-founded Santa Monica, California-based GoodRx to help provide Americans with affordable access to prescription medications. PE TRIPLE PLAY » Private equity firms Francisco Partners and Spectrum Equity acquired a majority stake in GoodRx in 2015 before a third PE firm, Silver Lake, made a minority investment in 2018. GOING PUBLIC IN A PANDEMIC » GoodRx went public in September 2020, raising $1.1 billion in its IPO. Where did the idea for GoodRx come from? When my son was 4, he couldn’t get insurance because of a preexisting condition. I was just so angry. Shortly thereafter, I walked into a pharmacy and was told that a prescription for me would cost $500, but if I went across the street it would be $250. I…

IN JANUARY 2018, Jessica Rhodes’s Pensacola, Florida-based telecommunications company, Titanium Wireless, found itself in a slump. Titanium, which Rhodes founded in 2015, had just two employees, both women, and they’d been seeking new clients for months, without much success. Rhodes, having worked in telecommunications her entire life, knew the industry was about 90 percent male. She wondered: Could Titanium’s dry spell be the result of sexism? To find out, Rhodes created an email account with a male alias, “Paul,” and outfitted the signature line with an MBA. As “Paul,” Rhodes sent emails to 30 customers who had taken meetings with Titanium but never replied to follow-ups or prompts to sign a contract—sometimes for months. The first reply came back within the hour. Three responded before the end of the day.…

The seemingly never-ending pandemic has resulted in all kinds of disruptions to supply and demand. There’s been a run on exercise equipment, for one, and at Unorthodox Ventures, we found ourselves uncomfortably in the thick of it when we tried to provide a healthy in-house substitute for the padlocked gym. Just a week after our community gym shut us out, we decided to go shopping for a universal gym. What we anticipated was a fairly straightforward transaction. What we got instead was an exhausting slog through a course strewn with obstacles. More than a year later, we still don’t have equipment that works, and we’re still negotiating with the dealer about who owes what to whom. And, while we’re not quite finished, we’re far enough along to see the finish…

Founded in 1999 AUM $1.4 billion Portfolio Companies: 17 Location Stamford, CT James Andersen managing partner nd co-founder of Clearview Capital, knows what it’s like to start a business in a garage. Or more precisely, directly above a garage with a $29 speakerphone and a card table serving as a conference table. “Most of the people that we invest in started in that place. We understand what it means to start a business on a shoestring and build it to be something truly great,” says Andersen. That empathy helps guide Clearview when it comes to working with founders. Decision-making is “collaborative,” and because founders and their companies are each unique, requires a customized approach. “There are lots of horror stories about private equity firms coming in and doing all the…

Investments 250+ Locations 17, across 5 continents Employees 290+ Assets Under Management $30 billion For L Catterton, investing is much more than just providing capital. The leading consumer-focused private equity firm has a long history of partnering with founders to provide the operational support they need to achieve their vision and drive growth. While many PE firms take a generalist approach, L Catterton exclusively focuses on well-positioned and distinctive consumer businesses in attractive and growing categories. Since its founding in 1989, it has made more than 250 investments in growing consumer companies and iconic brands. L Catterton understands the growth potential in the “natural and better-for-you” space across the baby, personal care, and household categories better than most, explains Avik Pramanik, a partner in L Cat-terton’s Flagship Fund. Fie says…

PHYLLIS NEWHOUSE HAS THE news on four TV monitors before her desk in a glass office tower. Through the window behind her, beyond the manicured gardens of a mansion once owned by Tyler Perry, a haze hangs over downtown Atlanta. She’s facing the monitors rather than the skyline: Kabul has just fallen to the Taliban, which is of interest to Newhouse not just because she served for 22 years in the U.S. Army. She also runs a 6,500-person cyber security firm, whose clients include the departments of Defense and State. “There’s a lot more cyber fallout than you’d expect,” she says gnomically. Her company, Xtreme Solutions, is busy preparing its clients for a potential surge in digital attacks. Newhouse is also on a Zoom call with three women planning a…

Reshma Saujani, the founder of Girls Who Code, has long worked to close the gender gap in technology. But the early days of the pandemic—and the exhaustion of many of the moms on her team—inspired her to address the broader challenges women in the workforce face. Last year, women earned 84 percent of what men do, according to a 2021 Pew Research Center report. In a 2019 Pew survey, 23 percent of working mothers (versus 15 percent of working fathers) reported having to turn down a promotion because of caregiving responsibilities. The pandemic made things worse. In July 2021, Census data show nearly a million fewer mothers were working than in July 2020. On December 7, 2020, Saujani wrote an op-ed for The Hill asking for paid family leave, affordable…

Joanna McFarland, co-founder and CEO of HopSkipDrive, an on-demand ride service for kids, was steering the firm to its best year ever thanks to a nationwide bus driver shortage, Covid struck, and children stopped going anywhere. With afterschool programs closed indefinitely, McFarland had to lay off most of her staff. A clutch pivot would save the business. McFarland looks back on a momentous year. At a birthday party, all the moms were commiserating over impossible transportation issues. I was feeling guilty that I couldn’t get my son to karate at 3 p.m., and I joked that we should hire one of the moms to drive kids around. The person who is now one of my co-founders said, “Seriously, how do we do this?” We designed our product around one question:…

FOR THE PAST TWO YEARS, Inc.’s Founder-Friendly Private Equity Firms list has shined a light on the PE outfits that support founder-led companies through both good times and, well, global pandemics. This year, we had an epiphany while compiling the list: Private equity firms don’t have a monopoly on being founder-friendly. Venture capitalists are people too. The good news: Whether your company is seeking venture capital or private equity, there’s no shortage of dollars to chase. During the first half of 2021, U.S. venture capital fundraising reached $66 billion in commitments, setting a record for capital raised during the first two quarters of a year, according to financial data firm Refinitiv. Private equity fundraising grew to $218 billion in commitments, the highest figure in a decade. Surprisingly, there’s perhaps never…

VENTURE CAPITALIST SORAYA Darabi was on the way to San Francisco International Airport in 2018 when she got a phone call that stopped her in her tracks. The caller was Phil Wong, co-founder of Misfit Foods, which Darabi’s VC firm, TMV, had invested in earlier that year. Sales of the company’s cold-pressed juices weren’t hitting their targets. He’d decided it was time for a change. “I knew it wasn’t going to be a quick conversation, so I dropped my bag, sat down on a bench in Union Square, and talked to Phil for two hours,” Darabi says. Wong’s idea was to make meat products partially from vegetables. It would be a hard pivot for the company, which had raised a $1 million seed round on the concept of making juices…

Over the past year, Katerina Schneider’s vitamin company, Ritual, doubled its revenue. But with that success came stress and hard lessons—which is how Schneider learned that her outward display of perfection was limiting her ability to lead. As a founder, I didn’t want people to see my vulnerabilities or to think I wasn’t perfect. Having come up in the finance and music industries, I thought I had to have a tough exterior—to put on a mask as a fearless leader, mom, and partner—something many women feel. But that mindset kept me from developing deep personal relationships. The pandemic has made it impossible to separate the realities of life from business. At times over the past year, I would be nursing a baby while leading a call of 20 people. I’d…

Three years ago, during our Series A, I was talking to a lot of people I didn’t know and a lot of people who didn’t know me. And I turned down everyone who wanted to invest with a board seat as a prerequisite. This is highly abnormal; everyone will tell you when you’re raising money that you can’t say no unless you’re already a massive success. But my goal, which I’ve since achieved, was to build the fastest-growing American whiskey brand in history. No one had done what I wanted to do, so I knew it wasn’t going to happen on anyone’s advice. When this process resumed with a later funding round, I had lunch with Helen Johnson-Leipold, one of my investors, to see if she thought I needed to…

Apple: Love Thy Rival In 1997, the creative, efficient, cash-happy heavyweight we know as Apple was on the ropes, getting slapped silly and looking for a place to plotz. The company had gone two years without turning a profit when the board finally sent CEO Gil Amelio out to orchard. Enter—or, rather, reenter—famously fired co-founder Steve Jobs, who, with the game clock winding down, had to act smart and act fast to save his company. He quickly killed the Newton, a category-defining personal digital assistant that was both pricey and kludgy. But the more difficult and humbling move was seeking a strategic partnership with archrival Microsoft. “We have to let go of this notion that for Apple to win, Microsoft has to lose,” Jobs explained. Microsoft invested $150 million, Apple…

There’s never enough time. You wake up before the crack of dawn, only to be greeted by an inbox full of messages about fixing the company firewall and getting better snacks in the office pantry. When you’re done with those, your new hire asks you about an error on his paycheck. And you still haven’t gotten to those social posts. • As much as you want to do it all yourself, eventually you need to delegate the schedule-consuming tasks–whether they’re nonessential, tedious, or just not your bailiwick. That doesn’t necessarily mean hiring and building an in-house team. With a smart outsourcing plan like the ones implemented by the companies on the following pages, you can leave IT security, employee onboarding, and a whole host of other issues to those with…

STACEY ABRAMS HAS a knack for turning failures into successes. After conceding in a tight 2018 gubernatorial race in Georgia, the 47-year-old entrepreneur, lawyer, writer, and former legislator turned her attention to fighting the state’s restrictive voting laws-and ended up helping her party win the presidency and the Senate two years later. As an entrepreneur, Abrams and her seri al co-founder, Lara Hodgson, started and shuttered two businesses before landing on the fast-growing fintech company, called Now (nowcorp.com), that they’ve been building since 2010. The company addresses one of the biggest pain points that Abrams and Hodgson have experienced in their own entrepreneurial journey-one that will ring a loud bell for any founder of a cash-strapped startup who’s had to stare down the impossible choice between paying invoices on time…

About 20 percent of the world’s industrial water pollution comes from textile dyeing. And the denim industry is the worst offender: Most mass-market denim brands rely on petroleum-based dyes and chemicals like formaldehyde and hydrogen cyanide. In 2019, that reality inspired Tammy Hsu and Michelle Zhu to start Huue, which they spun out of Hsu’s grad school work at the University of California at Berkeley, where she developed dyes made from microbial secretions. Huue is working on the launch of its first dye, a natural-but-synthetic indigo. The company’s eight scientists are also developing sustainable dyes and colorants to disrupt other parts of the fashion industry. ZHU My parents were entrepreneurs in the apparel industry. Their brand focused on urban streetwear in the late ’90s and early 2000s, which was why…

A LOT OF THINGS have been made in South Kearny, New Jersey, over the past 125 years. At the Federal Shipbuilding and Dry Dock Company, along the Hacken sack River, workers cranked out 440-foot Liberty ships during World War II. Before and after that conflict, Ma Bell’s Western Electric Company made telephone cable and transmission equipment that was built to last forever. Too bad Federal and Western Electric didn’t last. Neither did a lot of businesses in this swampy New York City borderland, including chemical plants, metal benders, tank farms, warehouses, and manufacturers that spewed who-knows-what into the world before they began to close in the late 1960s. Which is why it’s so hard to fathom that a company called Bowery Farming is growing lettuce, microgreens, herbs, and even strawberries…

155% Growth of U.S. private equity and related investment from the first half of 2020 ($89.2 billion) through the first six months of 2021 ($227.2 billion). IN 2017, BOSTON-BASED staffing technology firm Bullhorn was in fighting shape. The software maker had 500 employees and customers in approximately 150 countries. There was just one problem. Bullhorn was essentially a single-product company, generating the bulk of its revenue from Bullhorn ATS & CRM, its applicant tracking system, launched in 2001, which lets clients manage the entire recruitment process from a single interface. Though Bullhorn had grown significantly since its founding in 1999, co-founder and CEO Art Papas had visions of running a billion-dollar business, and growing through customer acquisition alone wasn’t going to cut it. He wanted to get there faster. Ryan…

IN 2016, INVENTOR and scientist Erik Gentalen reached out to a former colleague with exciting news, and a proposition. “I started a company, and we could use some help,” Gentalen said. The former colleague, Lena Wu, had worked with him around 15 years earlier as the director of business development at Caliper Technologies, a Mountain View, California-based bioresearch firm. Gentalen’s new company, Intabio, would launch his latest invention, an instrument to analyze and ensure the efficacy and safety of biopharmaceutical drugs. Called the Blaze System, the machine could reduce the analysis time from weeks in some cases to less than 30 minutes per sample, dramatically shortening a drug’s development period. Wu joined Intabio’s board later that year and became CEO the next. It was a hire that paid dividends in…