Catalyst by Camber Creek

John Belizaire and his company's stock price have been on a roller coaster ride. Soluna connects clients with big computer processing needs to the energy to power those calculations. Because it was so heavily tied to Bitcoin mining, the share price has risen and fallen with the cryptocurrency and is now down more than 3000% from its 2021 peak. But John is convinced that he and his team are solving...

If you've ever notarized a document online instead of having to get in your car to drive to a notary public, you have Pat Kinsel to thank. And if one day your identity is not stolen after you purchase something on the web, you may have Pat and his team to thank for that, too. As Co-Founder of the identity-verification company Proof, formerly known as Notarize, Pat Kinsel gets animated about proble...

Jeremy Garelick just wants to make people laugh. But to sustain an incredibly successful career doing that, he has solved some pretty knotty problems. In his twenties, he didn't know how to write a script but transformed himself from a production assistant into a sought-after screenwriter in just a few years. He would go on to co-write The Hangover . When movie studios refused to make the kind of...

There are pivotal moments that have the potential to change so much. We take on new jobs, new projects, get promoted, start hiring for a key role. When the right people coordinate during these small windows of time, great things can happen. But we may not hear about them until the opportunity to connect, do business, or celebrate together has passed. A startup called Ren is fixing this by teeing u...

Aza Nedhari set out to solve an enormous problem facing women giving birth. The US has the highest rate of maternal death of any high-income country, and within the US, that rate is by far the highest for Black women. Researchers estimate that most of these deaths are preventable. To fix this, Aza helped invent a new type of community health worker, a perinatal community health worker, coordinatin...

If you can turn your business into a platform, you probably should. There are amazing multi-billion-dollar products out there, but any one product has limits. Companies that run platforms, by contrast, cultivate ecosystems that make it possible for other businesses and many products to thrive. That is a much bigger market. Deb Liu knows a ton about platforms. It took years of advocacy and strategy...

After the public launch of ChatGPT, Salesforce knew that AI agents were coming for it. AI agents are smart, autonomous programs set loose on an infinite number of specific tasks. The danger was that this giant company that revolutionized business software and popularized the very concept of software as a service might be overtaken by the next big thing. One of the people it turned to to help preve...

If you want to improve your local community, think like a developer. Federal government programs spur billions of dollars of investment in real estate. For example, Opportunity Zones alone account for more than $14 billion per year in private investment driven by tax incentives. But how do these programs work? What are we getting for all that spending? And how do the economic realities of building...

At the University of Maryland, the actor Kevin Bacon funded a “Shark Tank”-style competition for young social entrepreneurs. Instead of investing in skincare brands or gourmet cookies, judges heard pitches from students who wanted to right some wrongs in the world and help people. That competition grew into the University of Maryland's Do Good Institute, which supports classes and research and use...

Nurses are on the front lines of public health. They work in hospitals and sometimes in people’s homes. They’re trained to meet people where they are and communicate across patients, doctors, and policymakers. Nurses are, in effect, some of the medical field’s best diplomats. And today, those skills are being put to the test. The US population is aging at exactly the same time the federal governme...

The company Michael Rudin helps lead is extraordinary. It's more than 100 years old. There are dozens of countries that are younger than that. It's a family business, so personal and professional ties are inextricable. And every asset is in New York City, thus subject to all the local, global, political and economic events that have shaped and sometimes disrupted New York since 1925. That's a lot...

At five feet tall, Amy Norman has periodically been misjudged or overlooked. Even after earning an MBA from one of the most prestigious business schools in the country, she was told she did not have enough gravitas. She felt self-conscious using some stellar credentials to start a business focused on children, and every venture capital firm she spoke with turned her down. But she just kept going—f...

Local news is on life support in the US. Since 2005, more than 3,200 print newspapers have closed or merged. That is a staggering number. But different business models have sprung up to fill that gap, including digital-only and non-profit ventures like a startup media company in Maryland’s biggest city, the Baltimore Banner. How are communities affected when local events simply never become storie...

Josh Goldman would never describe himself this way, but he may be one of the most important people in the world. As co-founder of KoBold Metals he has helped develop technologies that do a much better job finding deposits of lithium, nickel, cobalt, and copper, and do so at a fraction of the billions of dollars that have become the industry average. These are items on a shortlist of what governmen...

Whatever industry you’re in, there’s probably a specialist media outlet that you consult on a regular basis. You’re familiar with what they write, but what does that publication look like on the inside? How do they define you, their audience? And what is it you should know to improve the likelihood that they’ll highlight your company? As President of HW Media, Diego Sanchez has answers to all of t...

Does this sound familiar? You’re on a phone call. You tell the person on the other end that you're really craving barbecue for dinner, and within minutes, one of the apps you use serves you an ad for brisket. Or worse yet, you're not even on your phone when you say this, but the ad still finds you. By some estimates, more than half of Americans believe their smartphones are spying on them, recordi...

Bruce Toll, working with his brother Robert, built Toll Brothers from two houses in Pennsylvania into one of the largest home builders in America, which today has a $15 billion market capitalization. We wanted to find out how he managed this, because housing is a very local product. Most local developers don't become regional players, and practically no one reaches national scale. But Bruce Toll j...

Before he founded what became one of the larger independent organic food companies in Southern Ontario, Canada, Ran Goel was not overly occupied with food trends. He started paying attention when he realized what we eat is a gateway to many other things he cares about, like land use, health, and addressing income inequality. 1:26 Ran’s unexpected transition from Wall Street lawyer to leader in the...

In the early days of the mobile web, when Harley Miller decided he wanted to focus on consumer businesses—after many investors felt they’d been burned by brands that failed—he faced criticism. Then he made a whole lot of money with companies like Delivery Hero, HelloFresh, and The Farmer’s Dog, just to name a few. Some look at the millions of customer transactions it would take before a consumer b...

In 2013, Jason Green left his position at the White House—a position he had worked most of his life to obtain—to sit with his terminally ill grandmother and be an audience for the stories she knew about their family and the community they all grew up in. If you stop the description there, it may sound quaint and commendable. But what he learned was that the person he thought of as “Sweet Grandma G...

Energy costs keep rising. In October 2025, at least four states saw utility revenue per kilowatt hour jump more than 20% year over year, and more than 10 states saw increases in the double digits. Most Americans haven’t seen headlines like this since the oil embargo during the Carter administration. Heather Reams knows what it will take to fix this. As President and CEO of Citizens for Responsible...

ChatGPT is biased. So are Claude, Gemini, Grok, and even non-computer-based reasoning systems—that is, people. Computers have inherited and amplified many of our blind spots. But is it okay to acknowledge that? And if it is, what should we do about it? John Pasmore is answering that question. John is founder and CEO of Latimer, a model that can work on its own or in concert with larger foundation...

This is a very special episode of Catalyst, one that offers privileged access to information that was not revealed on one of Netflix's most popular shows. Owning Manhattan is a reality TV series about SERHANT., one of the fastest-growing real estate brands on the planet. Season 2 dropped on December 5, 2025, and within days reached Netflix’s global top-10 list. SERHANT. is a Camber Creek portfolio...

How much money would you give up to make your job a lot more interesting and fun? A few thousand dollars? Tens of thousands? For Atit Jariwala, the answer might be millions. Atit is the founder and CEO of Bridgeton, a real estate company that creates and manages distinctive properties, including boutique hotels. Each Bridgeton property starts from scratch: a new concept, a new location, and a back...

Brad Hargreaves has built his career and several businesses on learning how to act on feedback about what's working while tuning out everything else. The lessons that helped him make thousands of dollars at a time selling furniture as part of a side hustle when he was an undergrad at Yale also helped him build a company that eventually sold for $412 million. There have been big losses along the wa...