Achenyo Idachaba-Obaro harvested the reedy stems of the water hyacinth from a dam near Ibadan with a particular mission in mind. With deceptively beautiful blue flowers, water hyacinths are a blight in the water channels of the West African country. Fast-growing, choking, they keep fishers from their traditional livelihoods. But Idachaba-Obaro, an entrepreneur, was noodling […]
Impact Investing
Trailblazer: How Cotopaxi’s Founder Built a Cult Following and a $160M Salt Lake City-Based Company
Davis Smith, CEO of Cotopaxi, a sustainably sourced outdoor gear and clothing company based in Salt Lake City, Utah, exemplifies how entrepreneurship can make a difference in people’s lives. Nine years ago, he founded Cotopaxi as a certified benefit corporation with the goal of helping underserved communities worldwide. Since its launch, Cotopaxi—known for its colorful […]
Editor’s Note: Rise of The Nice
About 10 years ago, there was genuine debate in Silicon Valley about whether you had to be an asshole to succeed. Silicon Valley was drawing a lot of its formulation of how the business world should be from libertarian thinking, which dominated economic ideas since the 1970s. By the late 2000s, this had evolved into […]
Meet The Founder Taking On America’s Love Affair With Guns
The coronavirus pandemic is having a peculiarly American side effect: Gun sales are surging. Gun shops report crowds. The stocks of publicly traded guns and ammo companies American Outdoor Brands Corp., Vista Corp., and Sturm Ruger & Co. are up. Sales leaped by more than 19% in January and 17% in February, compared with the same months […]
A Missouri Biotech Can Test For Coronavirus In The Air. Why Isn’t The Technology Being Deployed In The US?
A small Drexel, Missouri-based company is selling devices to detect coronavirus in the air to public health agencies in China, Korea and the European Union. But CEO Dave Alburty says the U.S. government, which helped fund and owns some of the equipment, doesn’t seem to remember that it exists. “We’re a little company, and what’s […]
A Powerful Egyptian Woman Led A $670 Million Health Care IPO
Few people, even in Egypt, have heard of Hend El Sherbini. But she built a publicly held lab company with $1.9 Egyptian pounds ($115 million) in revenue that operates in four countries in Africa. With a market cap of $670 million, Integrated Diagnostics Holdings (IDHC) trades on the London Stock Exchange. In an interview in […]
An Oakland Entrepreneur Takes A Real Shot At Reducing Gun Violence
On April 18, 2017, in Fresno, Calif., Kori Ali Muhammad walked up to a Pacific Gas & Electric truck and shot the employee inside. After Muhammad killed his first victim, he kept running. He was on a mission to kill white people, he said later. He shot at a man standing on a nearby street […]