By All Means

What goes better together than cereal and milk? Christina Dorr Drake is the co-founder and CEO of Willa’s Oat Milk, a brand that is carving out space of its own in the increasingly crowded plant based milk case at select Target locations and grocery stores. Hannah Barnstable is the founder and CEO of Seven Sundays, a natural cereal brand now sold in more than 20,000 stores including Costco, Walmar...

Huck Sorock was a hockey player who worked as a referee during high school to make some money. But it didn’t take long for the entrepreneurial juices to get get going when he saw the inefficiencies of the system hockey leagues used to assign referees to games—no way to swap games online; a lot of the organizing done on paper—and this was just a few years ago, Sorock is only 24. His experience led...

Think about the loss in productivity that happens when a valued employee leaves the company. The loss of institutional knowledge. Or the complete knowledge transfer required when a company changes hands. xBlock is a software tool that uses AI to capture and organize a company’s data—without any extra effort on the employees' part. Co-founder Dena Neek is an AI engineer with an MBA and a background...

Social media for good. That’s how Luke Wendlandt describes Cadre, an app that’s being marketed primarily to businesses as a stigma-free community for employees to address mental health concerns. More than 140 vetted professionals and peer experts hvae created content on Cadre, on any number of issues from anxiety to grief. Currently the app has about 5,000 users. Wendlandt has a big vision for Cad...

DeLonn Crosby is using technology to get kids off screens. His startup, SayKid, is a voice technology company that has developed a screenless, play-based learning platform in the form of a plush robot called the ToyBot. Equipped with Amazon Alexa voice technology, the ToyBot can play games, do magic tricks, and promote active learning by getting kids to think and move. A former corporate social re...

Bruna Valente was a corporate marketer working in industrial manufacturing when a health scare sent her on a personal wellness journey, which led her to the rainforests of her native Brazil. There, she discovered natural botanicals that inspired her to create her own skincare products—face oils and lotion bars. She quickly realized they were good enough to sell. Minnesota-made Terrain Brazilian Bo...

Angie’s Boomchickapop–one of the most legendary homegrown Minnesota brands in recent history and the benchmark for just about every new packaged food startup hoping to make it big. As the story goes: Angie Bastian was a nurse; her husband Dan Bastian a teacher. They bought a kettle corn machine off the internet in 2002, and started selling at festivals, in hopes of making some extra money. Soon th...

In our first Mentor Series pairing, Chuck Runyon, co-founder of Anytime Fitness, the world's largest fitness franchise chain, and its parent company Purpose Brands (formerly Self Esteem Brands), which includes Orangetheory Fitness, Waxing the City, and several other franchise businesses in beauty and fitness talks about transitioning out the CEO role to board chair. He offers advice to Melanie Ric...

A chemical engineer turned community development organizer, Anthony Taylor shares the career journey that led him to founding Melanin in Motion, a Community Wellness Center program that connects children of color—and their families – with active pursuits like skiing, cycling, kayaking. Melanin in Motion was a Twin Cities Business 2024 Community Impact Award winner. “I noticed my white friends, whe...

Peter Mogck and Matt Frakes turned their love of Minnesota lake life, and their desire to start something of their own into Paddle North, a water gear manufacturer best known for its inflatable paddle boards. The company marks its 10th anniversary this year, now with a team of 25 employees, and a line of products that has expanded to include kayaks, utility docks, and apparel The founders share ke...

Pet Evolution is a fast-growing pet supply chain that started with one locally owned store in Woodbury, Minn. back in 2012 and has really picked up steam in the last couple of years since it started franchising. There are now seven stores in the Twin Cities and St. Cloud, and 15 nationally. By the end of the year, 24 are expected to be open, from New York to Oregon. In the $147 billion dollar pet...

Dr. Aho is a surgeon and scientist with an insatiable appetite for invention and more than 20 patents to his name. He was still in his surgical residency at Mayo Clinic when he spotted an opportunity that led him to develop a medical device now in use around the world. Tension pneumothorax is a life-threatening emergency that occurs when air builds up between the lungs and chest wall. It’s not esp...

It started as a fun project with his kids: creating the “best hot cocoa in the world.” After countless tries, Dean Packingham thought he had succeeded, and everyone who tried his instant cocoa mix agreed. Named for his kids, Mike & Jen’s Hot Cocoa debuted at specialty shops in their hometown of Duluth. Today, it’s sold in more than 1,300 stores nationwide including Costco, Target, and Meijer. Pack...

“People think, oh, it’s just a catchy slogan. No. If marketing does it’s job, it’s what does your brand stand for and how do you buy things. If we do that really well, we’re the number one growth driver of a business.” Margaret Murphy is the founder and CEO of Bold Orange, a Minneapolis-based marketing agency focused on customer experience, growth, acquisition, engagement, and retention. Her compa...

“I thought, you know what I could do? I could make games.” Julien Sharp is a game inventor and industry executive who moved to Minnesota in 2022 to head up the U.S. division of Paris-based Asmodee Group, a global game company with a portfolio that includes Catan, Spot it!, Ticket to Ride, and Star Wars X-Wing. An avid game player, who can solve a Rubik Cube in 45 seconds (which she says is amateur...

Lisa Lavin is on a mission to change the way the world cares for the people we care about. “We don’t have enough resources to take care of the number of people that are aging. So how do we do that? We leverage technology.” Lavin the founder and CEO of Ōmcare, a digital health company that pioneered the Home Health Hub, an interactive telehealth solution which monitors patients taking medication. I...

If you spend any amount of time in or around the startup community in the Twin Cities, you will no doubt hear the name Daren Cotter. Today, most people know him as an investor and advisor—his personal portfolio includes more than 100 startups—primarily software as a service and tech. But before Cotter could focus full time on investing, he had to have an exit of his own. That was InBox Dollars, th...

Laura Roos started Minny & Paul as a way to take the hunt out of discovering high-quality, locally made goods. She launched in 2016 with a selection of themed gift boxes that she thought would be popular with bridal parties or for housewarmings. But very quickly, businesses started requesting large orders of boxes for clients or staff. Today, 80% of Minny & Paul’s business is B2B and the company h...

Ashley Hawks was a successful working model, in print and on runways around the world. But when she thought about her goal of making a magazine cover, she realized, “I’ll still be promoting somebody else's brand, somebody else's lipstick, somebody else's clothing line. And it was this light switch of, I want to be on the cover because of something I did, because of something I built. I want my nam...

“We’re going to be helping hundreds of thousands of patients with our device and that’s probably more than a lifetime of patients I could see as a physician.” By the time Allisa Song started medical school at Mayo Clinic in 2018, she was already the founder of an active medical device startup company called Nanodropper. The idea came to her in 2017, when she happened to read an article titled: "Dr...

Sean Higgins knew he was spending too much time on his phone—going down a YouTube rabbit hole when he meant to go for a run, or call his mom. But rather than fighting the ever-present phone, he imagined a new way to utilize the technology that sits in the palm of our hands—a better way, if you will. BetterYou is a digital coach that uses artificial intelligence to map how we spend our time and mak...

What happens after a founder appears on Shark Tank, and walks away from a $250,000 offer? For Beth Fynbo, her Busy Baby activity mat saw six weeks worth of online sales in in three days. “And two weeks later,” she says, “no one had heard of us.” “I thought Shark Tank was going to be life changing, and it was—just not in the way that I thought.” Fynbo, an Army veteran and former health care account...

“Where passion meets frustration creates motivation.” Erin Pash is the co-founder and CEO of Ellie Mental Health—one of the fastest growing franchise chains you’ve probably never heard of—yet. The Mendota Heights-based company opened its first franchise clinic in July 2022. Now there are more than 200 Ellie Mental Health clinics open around the country with another 450 sold and under development....

When your arteries are blocked, you see a cardiologist. For cancer, there’s the oncologist. But for the 13.5 million Americans dealing with a serious wound—from surgery, an injury or disease, an ostomy bag, or old age—there’s often no one coordinating care until the problem becomes a crisis. Nima Ahmadi saw the white space, and co-founded The Wound Company in 2022 with the intention of creating a...

Kristen Denzer is the founder and CEO of Tierra Encantada, a Spanish immersion daycare that is on its way to becoming a national brand. Currently there are 11 locations in four states—two of them are franchise centers, and an additional 20 franchise units have been sold. It’s already a $22 million business, and Denzer is just getting started. Tierra Encantada is actually her third startup; Denzer...