Tom Foster

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

Noom Co-founder and CEO Saeju Jeong gets up in the morning in his Manhattan apartment near Central Park and blasts the kind of hard-driving heavy metal music that you might associate with mosh pits and death shrieks, not the perky weight-loss app his company is famous for. "It's my routine of meditation," he says matter-of-factly. "I take a heavy metal bath, let it wash over me. It's the way I channel my mood, and then I am in the game, giving my every spiritual and physical energy to Noom. And then at night I listen to help me detox any unnecessary doubts. I just nail them with heavy metal music."

What an attractive crowd!” cheered Fredrik Eklund, the Swedish-born celebrity real estate broker who stars on the hit Bravo reality show Million Dollar Listing. He stood on the patio of a newly built home in Tarrytown, the tony neighborhood that hugs the shores of Lake Austin, addressing the local brokers who were packed into the yard. It was the launch party for the Austin branch of Douglas Elliman, a brokerage famous in New York and California for selling luxury homes and high-rise condos.

Friends of Eren Bali talk about a certain kind of glow that lights up his face when he gets into conversations about solving problems. The soft-spoken co-founder and CEO of Carbon Health, this year's second-fastest-growing company on the Inc. 5000, has what longtime investor and friend Paul Lee describes as "a weird, quiet confidence about him. He has a calm demeanor, but also this deep curiosity." Lee, who, like Bali, has a degree in mathematics, recognizes a mathematician's way of thinking.

The experience was surreal. Jeff Raider and Andy Katz-Mayfield, the co-founders and co-CEOs of the trendy grooming-products startup Harry's, were wearing suits and ties. They were surrounded by lawyers. And they had just experienced an hours-long grilling by antitrust regulators in a room at the Federal Trade Commission headquarters in Washington, D.C., a hulking limestone edifice on Pennsylvania Avenue. Their apparent sin: competing too well against razor giant Gillette. Isn't antitrust law supposed to work the other way?

Mesh cap backward, face unshaven, Chip Gaines talks with the bluster of a guy at a party who has a story, or a colorful analogy, for everything--which he does. Joanna, his wife and co-founder of the couple's rapidly expanding media and retail brand, Magnolia, sits beside him with an occasionally bemused expression, her black hair tumbling around the shoulders of a creamy sweater as she looks for opportunities to steer the conversation.

A white cowboy hat in hand and hair clinging to the sweat on his forehead, Jason Ballard paces around an 11 1/2-foot-­tall 3-D printer named Vulcan II that stands on a slab of concrete atop a small hill. It's a late-spring day on the outskirts of Austin, the temperature pushing 90 and the humidity not far behind, and the machine is not working--and nobody can figure out why. Ballard squints in the midday sun. "People see these unbelievable stories about this technology, like there are no problems," he says.

Whenever Alan Ash would take off his shirt in his own home, he’d first make sure the blinds were closed. If they weren’t completely shut—if even a sliver of light could creep into the house—he’d tug them down the rest of the way. Alan, who’s 38 years old, lives in the country, about 45 minutes outside Louisville, Kentucky. It wasn’t as if there were many neighbors around who could catch a glimpse through the windows, but Alan needed to be sure. Meanwhile, his fiancée, Rebecca

There were hoodies. Robots. Free drinks. Young founders milling around a loftlike, concrete-floored space. Your typical startup demo day, in other words--except for the presence of a four-star Army general and pockets of uniformed military personnel and besuited corporate types with name tags from giant defense contractors like Booz Allen Hamilton. And the senior U.S. senator from Texas, John Cornyn, standing near the general, along with the mayor of Austin and the speaker of the Texas House of Representatives.

On a cloudless mid-April morning in Texas's Hill Country, about 60 miles west of Austin near a legendary honky-tonk town called Luckenbach, Katie Forrest and her husband, Taylor Collins, eye a herd of bison grazing in a pasture on the 900-acre ranch they purchased last year. About a dozen of the giant beasts have formed a protective circle around two baby bison as they amble, en masse, in their owners' direction. "Oh, my god, I can't believe they're coming over here!" Collins marvels, in the hushed, conspiratorial tone of a nature-show host. "This is crazy. This is as close as anyone will get to a week-old baby bison."

James McKean wants to revolutionize the manual tooth­brush. It's January 2018. The 31-year-old MBA candidate at the University of Pennsylvania's Wharton School whirls his laptop around to show me the prototype designs. Bristle, as the product might be called, has a detach­able head and a colorful pattern on the handle--like faux wood grain, flowers, or plaid. Cus­tomers would pay somewhere around $15 for their first purchase, and then get replacement heads, at $3 or $4 a pop, through a subscript

Nick Woodman is crying. Red-tailed hawks wheel around the sky outside the wall of windows of the GoPro founder's hilltop office in San Mateo, California. A few miles east and far below, the San Francisco Bay twinkles in the late-September light. Mementos of a life spent surfing around the world, driving racecars, and hanging out with his heroes, like surfing legend Kelly Slater, line the credenza behind Woodman's desk. A day ago, the 42-year-old Woodman stood center stage in the planetarium at the California Academy

At any moment, I'm sure of it, Martin Floreani is going to leap out of his chair, launch himself across the table that separates us, clothesline me backward out of my chair, and pin me to the floor. At least, that's the look in his eyes, a barely contained animal ferocity. It's not clear whether he combed his hair this morning, he certainly didn't shave, and he has the kind of fixed stare and clenched jaw that you see on boxers when they meet in the middle of the ring before the opening bell.