Human Success Stories

meriko borogove spent 22 years at Apple as a founding member of the iPhone team — building the camera from the ground up through generations that turned a phone into the most used photographic device in human history. In this conversation, meriko talks about what it cost to be inside something that consequential, the life questions that came up after leaving Apple, and why she now splits her time...

If you've listened to Sufjan Stevens, Bon Iver, Phoebe Bridgers, or Taylor Swift, you've heard Rob Moose — you just may not have known it. A Grammy award-winning arranger, violinist, and producer, Moose has contributed to nearly 500 albums, shaping some of the most celebrated records of the past two decades from a position most people never think about. In this conversation, Rob traces his path fr...

Rich Davis has spent 25 years as one of Washington's top Democratic media consultants, working on races from a mayor's office in Omaha to both of Barack Obama's presidential campaigns. He and his business partner built Dixon/Davis Media Group around a simple idea — that the people who pitch the work should be the ones doing it — and turned that into one of the most respected boutique f...

Joan Barnes built Gymboree from a church basement and a few thousand dollars into a global brand that eventually sold for $2 billion — and she'll be the first to tell you that's not the part of her story she's most proud of. In this conversation, Joan traces the wild arc from lonely new mother in 1970s San Francisco to accidental entrepreneur, walking us through the near-misses, collap...

Lorne Goldberg was one of the top junior tennis players in the world at 18 years old and clear-eyed enough to know it wasn't going to be enough. So he walked away, taught himself finance by reading the Wall Street Journal cover to cover, and eventually built one of the largest Chinese quick-service restaurant portfolios in North America. In this conversation with one of his closest friends of...

Growing up in a small town in Appalachian Kentucky, Dawn McGuire understood early on that a life well-lived meant staying curious, staying educated, and showing up for the people around her. That conviction carried her through med school, the AIDS wards of UCSF, a Master's in Divinity, and eventually to founding a free clinic that grew from serving HIV patients to serving veterans — all while writ...

What does success look like when you've helped build one of the most iconic bands in modern music history — and then walked away to start over? In this episode, David and Jonathan Steele sit down with John Paluska, a man who has quietly shaped extraordinary things just outside of the spotlight. For nearly two decades, John managed the rock band Phish from their humble beginnings in a Vermont c...