Starting Small

Elisa Marshall was 12 and running an eBay business out of Unionville, Ontario. She had asked for Spice Girl dolls for her birthday, listed a spare on eBay, and watched it go for $85. Her dad helped her work out why: Canada was a test market for the merchandise, so she could buy things that weren’t available in the U.S. anymore. She started buying up everything Spice Girls, from bubblegum to sticke...

Chad McWhinney was in seventh grade in 1986 when he and his fifth-grade brother Troy built a roadside strawberry stand at their grandparents’ mobile home park. They sold out both days of the first weekend. Within a few years, four brothers were running close to 30 stands across Southern California, with around 100 employees, plus pumpkins and Christmas trees in season. They even got city ordinance...

Jared Pobre graduated USC in 1999 with a finance degree, took a short detour into wealth management, and quickly pivoted into the early internet industry instead. By 2001, during the dot-com crash and right after 9/11, he was watching startups collapse around him — so naturally, he started his own lead-gen business on the side while working a day job at Autobitel. Within three months it was doing...

Jonathan Ward ended up on Broadway at seven years old by complete accident. His mom signed him up for an open audition on a trip to New York, mostly just to kill time, and he landed the part in Peter Pan. That turned into a full childhood acting career — Charles in Charge, his own show on Fox called Beans Baxter, and the lead role in Fern Gully next to Robin Williams. He was never actually famous,...

Jamie Siminoff invented the video doorbell in his garage. Five years later, Amazon acquired his company, Ring, for approximately $1 billion. In between, he appeared on Shark Tank, turned down Kevin O'Leary's offer, and went on to build what became one of the show's most successful businesses. The story behind Ring is far more complicated than a doorbell. Jamie spent years building companies, learn...

Walter got his first job at four years old sweeping a lumber yard in Edna, Kansas, a town of 150 people. At seven, his dad co-signed a $125 bank loan so he could buy a pig — and the bank required him to come in quarterly to review his own P&L. By his senior year of high school, that one pig had grown into a fifteen-head cattle operation. One week into his freshman year of college, a rare kidne...

Meredith Cook grew up in Charlotte, North Carolina, one of four kids in a small house with two working parents. She was later diagnosed with ADHD and dyslexia, which made traditional school a struggle, so she skipped college and trained as an esthetician instead — working odd jobs on the side, including driving medical specimens between cities at night for quick cash. She spent nearly a decade wor...

Alysa Seeland grew up on her grandparents' dairy farm in northern Illinois, chased a Division I volleyball scholarship through high school, and pivoted to speech and debate when she realized the sport wasn't going to be her path — placing second in the state of Illinois for original oratory her senior year. She studied communications and English literature at Gordon College, then cut her teeth in...

Charlie Clifford grew up a self-described "scrappy Jersey guy" in a town of 5,000 people, and won his first entrepreneurial prize in sixth grade: a watch, for out-hustling a classmate whose dad rigged the contest by buying magazine subscriptions wholesale for his medical office. After business school at Indiana University, he joined one of the first Peace Corps pilot programs recruiting MBAs — sen...

Adam Wexler played fantasy football since seventh grade — and turned that habit into a $4.15 billion exit. He built his first company out of a dorm room at the University of Georgia, launched a music discovery platform called Go Rankem in Athens, then pivoted into B2B SaaS with clients like Holiday Inn, IHG, Home Depot, UPS, and Coca-Cola before he ever touched sports. In 2015, he incorporated Sid...

Nick Stenson cut his first head of hair at 12 years old, in his mother's Chicago salon, with zero training and a customer's grandson in the chair. He was on track to become an orthopedic surgeon before realizing his mom was doing the same thing doctors do — changing how people carry themselves — one client at a time. He opened his first salon, Caviar Salons, in 2001, eventually running two locatio...

One family recipe has grown into one of the fastest-rising brands in ready-to-drink cocktails. Inspired by her mother's gin, lemonade, and mint summer cooler, Meredith Mills-Merritt founded The Original Southside with a vision to bring premium ingredients, elevated branding, and transparency to a category that had long prioritized convenience over craftsmanship. Leveraging her background in presti...

What started as two college friends chasing side hustles and building an Instagram account called @Sauce has grown into one of the most recognizable premium food brands in America. Today, TRUFF can be found in more than 17,000 retail locations nationwide, with an innovation pipeline stretching far beyond hot sauce. Co-Founders Nick Guillen and Nick Ajluni join Starting Small to share how they set...

Before Yes Way Rosé became one of the best-selling rosé brands in America, it started as an Instagram account. Long before they sold a single bottle, Erica Small and Nikki Huganir were building a community around a simple idea: wine didn’t have to be intimidating. It could be fun, approachable, design-forward, and still be high quality. That audience eventually became Yes Way Rosé. Since launching...

Angela Caglia spent decades behind the scenes as one of Hollywood’s most trusted estheticians before launching her own skincare brand. Her career started treating celebrity clients in Los Angeles, including Barbra Streisand, who once asked Angela what her dream was after a facial appointment at her home. Angela told her she wanted to create her own skincare line someday. Streisand’s response? “Why...

Long before SIMPLi hit shelves at Whole Foods, Sprouts, Erewhon, and Wegmans, Sarela and Matt were traveling globally working directly with farmers to source regenerative organic ingredients and rebuild transparency at the root level of food production. What started as a sourcing mission eventually became SIMPLi — a pantry brand focused on traceability, regenerative agriculture, and proving that b...

Lauren Corugedo grew up watching Chef Merito operate like a hidden gem in Los Angeles kitchens long before the rest of the country caught on. Founded in 1985 by her Cuban immigrant grandfather, Chef Merito started with a single carne asada seasoning and built a loyal following through word of mouth, neighborhood markets, and authentic flavor that didn’t compromise to fit trends. Now, nearly 40 yea...

Dr. Kyle Landry wasn’t trying to build another skincare brand. Before Delavie Sciences, he was doing postdoctoral research at Harvard studying extremophiles — organisms capable of surviving radiation, extreme heat, and even the vacuum of space. That research eventually led him to a microorganism connected to NASA and the International Space Station that could withstand conditions most life forms c...

Working full-time while studying for a professional certification, Peter realized the real problem wasn’t intelligence — it was the format. Most working adults were trying to study late at night, squeezed between jobs, bills, and family responsibilities, using outdated materials built for people with unlimited time. So in 2012, before “edtech” became a category everyone chased, Peter and his co-fo...

Shahab Elmi didn’t come from the wellness industry. He came from building and exiting companies — from telecom retail to media — before turning his focus to something much bigger: fixing a broken supplement industry. In 2019, he stepped into Cymbiotika with a simple idea — people shouldn’t have to guess what they’re putting into their bodies. What followed was one of the fastest rises in modern we...

Sandra Powers Murphy spent decades building a career in finance — running her own firm, working with institutional clients, and raising six kids along the way. She wasn’t planning to start a footwear company. Then one night in New York, caught in the rain trying to make a train, she had to take off her heels and run ten blocks barefoot just to get there. That moment stuck with her. After years of...

Mary Hagen knew early she wanted to build something — launching her first business at 20. Today, she’s the CEO of Colossal, a company that’s quietly reshaped how fundraising works. Since joining, Mary has scaled Colossal by over 1000%, helping generate more than $207 million for nonprofits like the National Breast Cancer Foundation, Baby2Baby, PAWS, and the James Beard Foundation. But the real shi...

Julian Tcherassi didn’t start Magiktea trying to compete with traditional tea brands. He found something most people had never heard of — palo azul, a tree bark used for centuries as a natural kidney remedy. When brewed, it does something unexpected. It turns bright blue in the light, thanks to its high concentration of polyphenols — with studies showing it contains up to 8x more antioxidants than...

David Thurston didn’t set out to build the fastest-growing hair color brand in professional beauty history. But that’s exactly what happened. As the founder of Pulp Riot, David created a brand that shook up the salon industry — bold colors, artist-first culture, and a community that felt more like a movement than a product line. Just 23 months after launch, Pulp Riot was acquired by L’Oréal for $1...

Christine de Wendel spent more than a decade helping scale two of Europe’s biggest startup success stories — first at Zalando, then as COO of ManoMano. Both companies grew from early-stage startups into multi-billion-dollar businesses. But at 40 years old, with three kids and years of scale-up experience behind her, Christine decided it was time to build something of her own. That idea became sund...