Every founder we've covered. Search by name, topic, or tag — or page through the archive.
A critically-neutral profile of Spotify’s Daniel Ek: how he beat music piracy not with lawsuits but with a freemium product better than free, endured two years of label negotiations and sixteen more before profit, and built a 675M-user streaming giant — alongside the artist-payment, Rogan and defence-tech controversies.
A critically-neutral profile of Bumble’s Whitney Wolfe Herd: how she converted her ordeal at Tinder into the "women make the first move" thesis, took Bumble public at 31, and now fights to sustain it through a ~94% stock decline — the founding triumph and the hard aftermath, held honestly together.
A critically-neutral profile of Stripe’s Patrick Collison: the teenage prodigy who sold his first startup at 19, reduced online payments to a few lines of developer code, and built the financial infrastructure of the internet — through a bubble, a markdown, and a full recovery past its old peak to ~$159B.
A critically-neutral profile of Nubank’s David Vélez: the outsider venture capitalist who read Brazil’s broken banking oligopoly as a roadmap, built a no-fee phone-first bank that incumbents couldn’t copy, scaled to 100M+ customers and an NYSE listing — and answered the profitability skeptics by 2023.
A critically-neutral profile of Aliko Dangote: heir to a trading dynasty who built Africa’s biggest industrial empire through backward integration and scale, rode Nigeria’s protectionist policy, bet ~$20bn on a giant refinery — and faces genuine, unresolved questions about market concentration and government ties.
A critically-neutral profile of FusionCharts’ Pallav Nadhani — correcting the famous origin myth (the $1,500 was an article fee; the first product sale was ~$15), and telling the real story: a teenager bootstrapping a profitable, globally-used data-viz product from Kolkata, surviving Flash’s death, and exiting to Idera in 2020.
A critically-neutral profile of Wingify/VWO’s Paras Chopra: a self-taught programmer who bootstrapped a profitable global SaaS from Delhi, kept ~71% to a ~$200M exit, wrote and thought in public, and chose curiosity (the AI lab Lossfunk) over building an empire.
A critically-neutral profile of Zoho’s Sridhar Vembu: from IIT Madras and a Princeton PhD to refusing venture capital, surviving the 2001 bust, building a private billion-dollar software company, "transnational localism" and Zoho University — and the criticisms kept honest.
A critically-neutral profile of Nykaa’s Falguni Nayar: from managing director at Kotak to founding a beauty retailer at around fifty, the inventory-led model that won, the 2021 IPO that briefly made her India’s richest self-made woman, and the reckoning that followed — the post-listing correction, the bonus-issue controversy, and the competition closing in.
A critically-neutral profile of Alibaba’s Jack Ma: the self-taught English teacher, the gaokao failures, the Alipay escrow innovation that won China’s e-commerce, the record 2014 IPO — and the 2020 speech, the suspended Ant IPO, the antitrust fine and restructuring, with documented events kept strictly separate from unknowable state motives.
A critically-neutral profile of Nvidia’s Jensen Huang: from a Kentucky dormitory to Stanford, the 1990s near-bankruptcy, naming the GPU, the decade-long CUDA bet the market mocked, the AlexNet vindication, the AI explosion — and the criticisms (the SEC settlement, China export controls, CUDA lock-in) kept honest.
A critically-neutral profile of Parag Agrawal — from IIT Bombay and a Stanford PhD to Twitter’s CTO chair, an unexpected CEO appointment, the Musk acquisition that consumed his ~11-month tenure, the firing and the severance fight, and his second act at Parallel Web Systems.
From a civil-services dream in a North Indian teacher’s home, to incorporating a company before graduating, to the COVID crucible, to the deliberate pivot home and the Fensso Tech empire — an aspirational, fully candid profile of Divyansh Dixit.
Sir Brian Souter co-founded Stagecoach and turned the deregulation of Britain’s buses into a transport empire. A sourced, critically neutral look at genuine industrial achievement, the proven "predatory" competition findings, the controversial "Keep the Clause" campaign, and the disputed claims about his SNP donations.
Andrew Carnegie rose from a penniless Scottish immigrant boy to the master of American steel, sold out to J. P. Morgan for $303.45M, and gave away roughly 90% of his fortune. A sourced, critically neutral case study that holds his vast philanthropy and the violent 1892 Homestead Strike together, without resolving the contradiction.
Gil Shwed invented the modern firewall, co-founded Check Point, and ran it as CEO for three decades. A sourced, critically neutral case study of a near-spotless founder, the Unit 8200 pipeline, and the legitimate debate over whether his strategic conservatism let rivals like Palo Alto Networks overtake him.
Stef Wertheimer turned a one-man backyard shop in Nahariya into ISCAR, the carbide-tool multinational that became Warren Buffett’s first foreign acquisition. A sourced, critically neutral case study of a near-spotless industrial fortune and the debated efficacy of his "industry for peace" vision.
Dara Khosrowshahi built Expedia by acquisition and then rescued Uber from the Kalanick-era wreckage, taking it public in 2019. A sourced, critically neutral case study of the professional manager as a type — the cleanup, the Khashoggi misstep, and the contested 292-to-1 pay ratio.
Pierre Omidyar built eBay into a profitable, durable internet marketplace and became a billionaire at 31 — then turned to philanthropy and a contested patronage of independent journalism. A sourced, critically neutral look at the clean first act and the unresolved second one.
Abdul Majid Zabuli founded Bank-e-Milli Afghan, the father of Afghanistan’s modern banking system — a privately owned bank given de-facto currency-regulation powers. A sourced, critically neutral case study of institution-building, the entanglement of private banking with the state, and the 1975 nationalisation that captured his creation.
Saad Mohseni founded MOBY Group and brought private radio and modern television to post-2001 Afghanistan, earning the nickname “the Afghan Murdoch.” A sourced, critically neutral case study of a real entrepreneurial achievement, its entanglement with US/Western interests, the Taliban’s “American agent” smear, and the dilemma of broadcasting under censorship.
Sir Jim Ratcliffe assembled INEOS from the assets the majors discarded, became one of Britain’s richest men, and then a household name by buying into Manchester United. A sourced, critically neutral look at the strategy, the Monaco residence, the pollution record, and the football austerity backlash.
Sir James Dyson built a global engineering brand on stubbornness and a bagless vacuum, then drew accusations of contradiction by backing Brexit while moving his HQ to Singapore. A sourced, critically neutral look at the engineering, the abandoned car, the "Dyson amendment," and the disputed supplier allegations.
Hasso Plattner co-founded SAP in 1972 and helped turn it into the world’s largest enterprise-software company and Germany’s most valuable tech firm. A sourced, critically neutral case study of the invisible software that runs the world’s biggest organisations, and a careful separation of SAP’s documented FCPA and “state capture” record from any personal finding against its founder.