Founded in 1979 and acquired in 2005 by Mansueto Ventures LLC, Inc. is the only major brand dedicated exclusively to owners and managers of growing private companies, with the aim to deliver real solutions for today’s innovative company builders.
1 Tekendra Parmar Parmar has worked at Time, Fortune, Harper’s Magazine, and, most recently, Business Insider, as a features editor. For this issue, Parmar writes about the U.S. immigration system and the legal firms seeing growth as they help others navigate its complexities (page 144). The reporting felt “quite personal,” he says, as he’s currently going through the green card process himself. 2 Ellen McGirt Business writer, podcaster, and Design Observer editor-in-chief McGirt profiles the charismatic co-founder and CEO of United Tiny Homes, Gail Kingsbury (page 23), who she says “brings out the best in the kind of talent other people overlook.” The tiny-house-building company’s “remarkable trajectory is a leadership success story in disguise.” “It’s such a thrill to honor the best in entrepreneurial business with this year’s Inc. 5000…
It’s hard not to look around at the world and feel that 2025 is a hinge year in history, capping off a quarter century that has been marked by shock and awe in more ways than one. If you start with the dot-com bubble and move through time to 9/11 and the Iraq War, the invention of the iPhone, and the 2008 financial crisis, you’ve already seen plenty of evidence to call these unprecedented times. And the rate of change seems only to accelerate. “From the pandemic to now, there have been more of these black-swan events,” observes Natalie Gordon, founder and CEO of Babylist (No. 3,370 on this year’s Inc. 5000), based in Emeryville, California. This past year has felt especially hectic. Technology is changing. Society is changing. Our…
Each year at this time, one of the most marvelous experiences for me as a sales leader of the Inc. brand is speaking with and listening to the Inc. 5000 honorees. All of you have such unique stories and journeys, and yet you have so much in common. Your voices lift one another, your customers, your communities, and your colleagues. Your visions and voices collectively reflect grit, uncommon strength, unwavering determination, and ingenuity. But as I listen deeply, what strikes me the most is this: When you’re congratulated on your achievements, so many of you direct that praise to your teams, your customers, your mentors, your families. To anyone but yourselves. Are you being humble? Or does this illustrate a central truth about what it takes for a founder, a…
No. 705 WHEN MOMOFUKU TEMPORARILY SHUTTERED ITS 18 restaurants in March 2020, the culinary brand faced a potential crisis. Founded in 2004 by chef David Chang with the opening of Momofuku Noodle Bar, it had grown into a mini restaurant empire—but lockdown laid bare the fragility of a business model built on razor-thin margins and nonexistent safety nets. Luckily, Momofuku was already poised to do something new. Since accepting the CEO role in 2019, Marguerite Zabar Mariscal had met with Chang weekly to talk about launching a line of consumer packaged goods Mariscal had deep food-world credentials—she’s great-granddaughter of Louis Zabar, founder of iconic Manhattan food store—but the CPG space was new. “All of a sudden, this thing we’d been slowly working on became a lifeline,” she says. Today, Momofuku…
No.108 SHENIQUE SPARKS HAD LONG BEEN her family’s go-to vacation planner. But it was in 2019 that she started to think about putting that skill set to use to generate an additional stream of income. Encouraged by a friend, she started a side hustle as a travel agent and, later that year, officially launched Let Sparks Fly, her luxury travel business. “Initially, my goal was one trip a year, make a little extra money, and that would be it,” Sparks says. “But around year two, it had wings.” Though her first trip—an excursion to Dubai with a group of 27 women—was postponed to 2021 because of Covid restrictions, it brought in $200,000 of revenue. The following year, she produced her second international getaway: a 10-day trip to Greece that took…
ENTREPRENEUR STEPHEN LIU ISN’T YOUR TYPICAL Swiftie, but the 65-year-old former orthopedic surgeon is definitely a fan of what superstar Taylor Swift has done for his apparel business, Forme Science. After she was photographed wearing the company's patented posture-correcting bra during rehearsals for her Eras Tour, sales jumped 400 percent last year. "she was on the Eras Tour everywhere, and apparently that’s a big thing,” he says. Forme wasn’t created to set fashion trends. The idea came about after Liu watched his mother battle late-stage cancer. As her condition progressed, her posture deteriorated. Her shoulders slumped and her rib muscles weakened. Because of this, her breathing became increasingly labored. Liu’s son, Seiji, 32, a Harvard and Wharton School graduate who worked as a finance professional and now serves as Forme’s…
