Tom Foster

“If history has taught us anything about revolutions and productivity, it’s that productivity is the tide that lifts all boats,” Brendan Foody declares one morning in February. The sandy-haired 23-year-old co-chief executive officer and co-founder of Mercor has the standard techno-optimist’s conversational habit of jumping from earthly matters—in this case, the field of management consulting—to historical analogies and abstract principles.

Evan Baehr thought he had his body figured out. A clean-cut, 42-year-old tech entrepreneur and investor in Austin, Baehr lives the kind of performance-optimized, data-driven lifestyle that’s become so common in start-up culture. He works out five times a week. He takes 20 daily supplements, from B12 shots to creatine, plus TRT. He gets quarterly blood panels drawn at a boutique functional-medicine clinic that states “illness can become optional.” And recently, he started using nicotine pouches.

Before the Honey Butter Chicken Biscuits took the baseball diamond in their orange-and-white-striped uniforms one humid night last August, the crowd at Whataburger Field, in Corpus Christi, streamed into the minor league ballpark dressed for devotion. There were men in Hawaiian shirts with tiny orange W’s instead of flowers, girls with Whataburger-ribbon bows in their hair and orange fringe swinging from their jean shorts, couples in matching team jerseys, and kids outfitted with the mask and cape of the chain’s mascot, Whataguy.

Tom Goynes still remembers the first time he dipped an oar in the San Marcos River. He’d grown up paddling in the bayous of Houston, where the water was murky and black and anything that fell in disappeared in an instant. On the San Marcos, the spring-fed water was clear as a windowpane and a consistent 72 degrees. “I put my paddle in, and I could see it,” he says.It was 1967, and he was sixteen years old. His mother had paid the entrance fee for him to join his brother and another teen in the T...

Mckay Fugal woke up to an email one morning this past spring that made his stomach drop. The subject line was unremarkable, the tone polite. But the message in the attached document was devastating. Epogee, the supplier of the most critical ingredient in the line of low-fat, high-protein chocolate bars he’d helped invent, was cutting the business off. No negotiation, no warning. Just a brief note to say that any pending orders would be fulfilled, but then no more, effective immediately. Together...

Most mornings, the sidewalk outside Sunrise Community Church becomes a kind of waiting room. Before 8 a.m., a few dozen men and women, some pushing grocery carts or dragging luggage, some barefoot with dazed expressions, converge along a bull-wire fence that lines the South Austin property and take seats, inches from a busy stretch of Menchaca Road at the height of rush hour.Around the corner, kids carrying backpacks exit their parents’ cars and dash behind a tall black fence onto the campus of...

"This is real—everything I’m about to tell you is real,” said Ben Lamm. The billionaire serial founder known for his grand pronouncements and wavy mane of brown hair sat at the edge of a sofa in the posh Austin Proper hotel, located in a downtown high-rise across from Meta’s local headquarters in one direction and a soaring Google skyscraper in another. He fired up a presentation on his laptop. The news he was set to announce—that his Dallas-based company, Colossal Biosciences, had resurrected a seemingly mythical species...

Just above where the San Marcos River tumbles down a small dam several miles east of Interstate 35, the crumbling redbrick hull of an old cotton gin presides over the eastern shore, and a grove of pecan trees shades a wide meadow to the west. It’s as pretty a spot as you’ll find in Central Texas, with year-round 72-degree water and layers of history. Off to the side of the cotton gin, a glint of shiny metal reveals a silver Blue Bird bus parked semipermanently next to a shipping container and a couple of lawn chairs, where a man in shorts rolls a cigarette and leans back to tell his story.

It was after my sonic soul journey and before my infrared-light therapy session in a giant vibrating clamshell that my longevity consultant told me I could stand to drop 20 pounds of fat. I was nearing the end of a new Canyon Ranch program called Longevity8, a five-day immersion in wellness practices aimed at extending one’s healthy lifespan, and I bristled at the suggestion...

For years, the buzz around Me & the Bees lemonade just kept growing. The Austin-based company charmed its way into recent startup lore with its young founder, Mikaila Ulmer, getting stung by a bee at the tender age of 4 and then deciding to sell family-recipe lemonade with honey in it to bring attention to the issue of plunging honeybee populations. What started as a family project in 2009 made it from a few local youth-entrepreneurship fairs all the way to a deal with Daymond John on Shark Tank in 2015. It was a business fairy tale, with nationwide distribution in the largest...

I opened my eyes about halfway through the Japanese sound bath. Lee Johnson, a 65-year-old rancher and dead ringer for the actor Sam Elliott, was tiptoeing around the room in his white tube socks, ever so gently ringing a small bell at various distances from the heads of my fifteen classmates, who were lying on yoga mats in a circle, deep in meditation. Johnson, who normally wears work boots and a white hat with his creased Wranglers and handlebar mustache, had been doing this for a good thirty...

Two things happen when the guy sitting next to me floors the gas pedal of his $2.7 million car. First, the raspy growl of the 1,817-horsepower engine mutates from that of a cornered wolf to something even more feral and dangerous. It’s a roar fueled by so much gasoline that, at top speed, the vehicle could travel only about fifteen miles before needing a refill. Second, as we rocket past 100 miles per hour, the combination of speed and unrelenting acceleration sucks the scenery along both sides...

Something stops Clay Dover cold as he strolls behind the restaurant’s counter. The CEO of Velvet Taco has been all smiles and high fives since he entered the chain’s location in the Grandscape shopping center, amid the suburban sprawl north of Dallas. But now, staring at a few chicken strips in a bin under a heat lamp, he cuts off his friendly patter midsentence and pulls out one of the little brown hunks. He turns it over in his hand, tears it apart, takes a bite, and throws the rest in the trash

In a mahogany and marble conference room downstairs from Stephen Curry's apartment near San Francisco's Financial District, 10 executives from a constellation of businesses belonging to the NBA superstar have gathered to coor­di­nate their efforts on various projects. It's just before lunchtime when Tiffany Williams, the COO of Thirty Ink, the parent company of Curry's many ­endeavors, announces it's time to discuss the logistics of a series of events they're planning in New York City this fall. There's an event during Fashion Week with the Japanese tech conglomerate Rakuten, tied to a deal Curry struck to support

Jamie Siminoff can't contain himself. The 47-year-old founder of doorbell-cum-home-security company Ring leans over the edge of the caramel leather sofa on his chartered private jet, like an excited child in the window seat. "There's the river," he says, craning his neck to spot a prize piece of land he owns 20,000 feet below. "The farm is going to be right over there now!" We're flying over the patchwork fields of northeastern Missouri, far from his homes in Los Angeles, Nantucket, and Aspen, Colorado. Siminoff's 75-acre spread lies just outside La Belle, Missouri, a farm town of around 650 people whose population, like its primary indus­try, has been slowly dwindling for 100 years.

A few miles west of where Houston’s highway sprawl fades from a parade of superstores into the steamy low countryside, a slight rise in U.S. 290 reveals a surprise: six perfect circles of close-cropped grass clustered on the prairie like petals on an enormous flower. Here, spread across 86 acres and just an hour’s drive from the heart of the city, the nation’s largest and most advanced collection of cricket grounds attracts hundreds of athletes every week from around the Houston area—and often

When Jason Garrett returned to Dallas as the Cowboys’ new offensive coordinator, in 2007, he knew even before he began house-hunting that one neighborhood would trump all others: Highland Park. He also knew there was really only one realty office you call when you’re looking for a home in Highland Park: Allie Beth Allman & Associates. And he knew that one realtor rises above them all: Allie Beth herself, no last name necessary.

In the airy great room of his three-story penthouse in Manhattan's Tribeca neighborhood, Marc Lore has covered one of the walls of floor-to-ceiling windows with hundreds of colorful Post-it Notes--pink, orange, yellow, green--stuck to giant white sheets of paper, in cascading patterns like pixilated rainbow waterfalls. "I call this my war room," says Lore. Next to him on one of the broad, white sofas sits Kristin Reilly, the chief people officer of Lore's four-year-old food-delivery startup,

Andy Dunn was riding high. It was 2012, and he was running a hot e-commerce fashion company he'd co-founded. He'd cashed out seven figures' worth of shares on the secondary market and was living like he thought a CEO in his early 30s in New York City should be living: large. He bought a black Porsche. He jetted off for weekends in Istanbul and Moscow, and ran up a $10,000 Four Seasons bill in Bali. He went out to clubs and restaurants almost every night: drinks with a potential hire at 6; a dinner date at 8; meeting a friend for more drinks at 10.

One day last fall, Vincenzo Cox, the boys varsity soccer coach at Elsik High School, was catching up on email when he spotted a message that made him spring to attention. It was from Marlene Acuña, who works in the school’s English as a second language program. Cox makes a point of sending Acuña team T-shirts, as a thank-you for all the times she’s alerted him to new kids who turned out to be good soccer players. Acuña had just met with a seventeen-year-old who had recently arrived from Honduras