Two guys getting fired from their own company usually isn’t the origin story of a multi-billion-dollar business. But that’s exactly what happened to Dave Duffield and Aneel Bhusri after Oracle…
Nobody at Y Combinator in 2019 thought international payroll was a hot idea. Alex Bouaziz and Shuo Wang pitched it anyway. Seven years later, that “boring” idea is worth $17.3…
Two friends splitting a currency swap over Skype is not how most billion-dollar companies start. But that’s exactly how Wise began. I’ve spent years building marketing programs for companies trying…
Most founders think their product is their moat. I’ve managed enough campaigns and enough budgets to tell you that’s rarely true. Features get copied. Pricing gets matched. Buffer’s story is…
David Cancel had just helped take HubSpot public. He was rich, respected, and locked in with golden handcuffs. That should have felt like winning. Instead, it felt like a trap.…
Four engineers in Dublin built a side tool just to talk to their own customers. That tool became Intercom. Sixteen years later, it sold to Salesforce for $3.6 billion. I’ve…
Most rebrands are cosmetic. This one wasn’t. When Sendinblue became Brevo in 2023, plenty of people assumed it was a naming exercise. I didn’t see it that way. I saw…
Two agency owners took on a boring client job in 2010: a lead-capture form for a bathroom fixtures company. They could have built the usual grid of blank fields. Instead,…
Court Lorenzini bought patents from a dead company. That’s the whole origin story, stripped down. No garage. No viral demo. Just a founder who saw value in the wreckage of…
Most founders build a product and then go hunting for a market. Andrey Khusid did the opposite. He had a market — his own frustrated creative agency — and built…