Tom Foster

One morning last October, Dan Lewis appeared on Zoom, looking wan and sleepless in his company-branded hoodie, and prepared to address the staff of his soon-to-be shuttered startup, Convoy, for the last time. Squirming in his seat, his voice intermittently catching in his throat, Lewis told the team of hundreds how he'd hoped this day would never come -- couldn't even fathom it, really. Eight years earlier he and a colleague named Grant Goodale had left Amazon with big dreams of disrupting the freight industry with an Uber-like app that would allow

Joe Speiser was looking for a place to hide. It was late February 2018, and he was sitting at his desk in Manhattan, preparing to share the news that would transform his company, LittleThings, from a Cinderella story into a cautionary tale. The problem was, there weren't many hiding places in the LittleThings office -- a 30,000-square-foot open floor plan with few private rooms. Even Speiser, the company's co-founder and CEO, didn't have an office. When the good times were rolling, he liked it that way.

The White House was calling. They wanted Deepak Chopra, the famed alternative-healing entrepreneur and best-selling author, to join President Biden and Indian prime minister Narendra Modi for a state dinner in June. Thanks for the invite, Chopra said, but he already had plans that weekend in England--"launching the Glastonbury Festival with Elton John." Talk about an airtight excuse. It's not easy to get on Deepak Chopra's schedule these days, let alone find him.

Shortly before he launched Splendies, Anthony Coombs had an unsettling job interview. It was 2013, the then-33-year-old had just moved to Los Angeles, and a friend had arranged for him to meet with a partner at a prestigious tech incubator. Thirty minutes after the interview was supposed to begin, the man popped out into the reception area and asked Coombs why he was there, and then he made him wait another 30 minutes. Coombs was stunned, and even more so when he finally took a seat opposite the partner, who put his feet up, crossed his arms, and issued a challenge. "Impress me," the man said.

By the time he'd turned 39, in the spring of 2007, Mark Suster was a doubly successful entrepreneur. A Philadelphia native with a University of Chicago MBA, Suster had worked for Accenture around the globe for eight years, and then launched, in 1999, BuildOnline, an Ireland- and U.K.-based software company that enabled collaboration in the construction industry. He steered that business through the dot-com bust and a merger with an American competitor named Citadon, after which he stepped down as CEO. Then he founded Koral, a maker of content management software, in 2006, and sold that company to Salesforce the following year.

"It needs to be not porn music." Mike Cessario, co- founder and CEO of Liquid Death, shakes his head as a boom-chicka-wah-wah clip plays from a laptop's speakers, takes a seat at a long table, and explains that his canned water brand's new commercial spot needs a wholesome soundtrack to pair with its spokes­person, a XXX-rated celebrity...

A lot of things have been made in South Kearny, New Jersey, over the past 125 years. At the Federal Shipbuilding and Dry Dock Company, along the Hacken­sack River, workers cranked out 440-foot Liberty ships during World War II. Before and after that conflict, Ma Bell's Western Electric Company made telephone cable and transmission equipment that was built to last forever. Too bad Federal and Western Electric didn't last. Neither did a lot of businesses in this swampy New York City borderland, including

The icy weather system that trundled up the Atlantic Seaboard and glazed New York City on February 14, 2007, was nasty, but not the worst that airlines had ever confronted. Mainline carriers such as American and Delta knew the drill. They canceled flights in anticipation while moving equipment and crews to sidestep the storm and minimize disruptions. The newer kid on the tarmac, JetBlue, flew into the storm face first. And flopped.

United States senator Jeff Merkley, an Oregon Democrat, wasn’t happy when he boarded an American Airlines flight from DFW to Portland in early July. The day before, the airline had adjusted its COVID-19 safety policies and resumed selling every available seat, rather than leaving most middle seats empty as it had been doing since the onset of the pandemic. Merkley took to Twitter to voice his displeasure.

When some 8,500 ranchers, stockers, feeders, and meat-packers began arriving at the Henry B. Gonzalez Convention Center, in San Antonio, for the annual National Cattlemen’s Beef Association conference and trade show this past February, they had reason to celebrate. Per capita U.S. beef consumption had grown for four years straight. Many consumers were buying more expensive grades of meat, while chefs were transforming humbler portions—the sirloin culotte, the bavette, the brisket—into signature

First came the sound of someone running hard on the breezeway outside, then a banging on the apartment door. Irene Vera opened it to see her neighbor, twenty-year-old Rosa Jimenez, holding a little boy who lay limp in her arms. “Help me! Help me!” Jimenez cried hysterically in Spanish. The boy, she said, had choked on something he had swallowed. Bryan Gutierrez was only 21 months old, and Ver

Known for his cinema verité explorations of American institutions, the documentary filmmaker Frederick Wiseman trained his camera on Dallas’s flagship Neiman Marcus location in 1982. To watch the resulting work, The Store, now is to travel back to a far less troubled age for the retailer that for more than a century has sold the trappings of a luxurious lifestyle to Texans of means.

On an early June day, Brenda Delgado received a devastating email. It came from her ex-boyfriend Dr. Ricardo “Ricky” Paniagua. Brenda was 31, a student in the dental hygiene program at Sanford-Brown College, a for-profit institution in Dallas. She was petite, with eyes the color of almonds and a thick mane of auburn hair that fell to her shoulders. People who knew her described her as

When Josh Luber, co-founder of StockX, was in the sixth grade, he started his first business: selling Bubblicious to his classmates. Covertly, because they weren't allowed to chew gum in school. "It was a great business," he says. "Good margins. I used to hop the fence behind my house, go to the Acme grocery store, and buy four packs of gum for $1. Each pack had five pieces, and I could sell them for a quarter apiece." Like a lot of '80s and '90s kids, Luber also idolized Michael Jordan. He was 6 years old when

A few years ago, Daniel Zubairi caught a job applicant in a flagrant lie. The woman's résumé said she worked at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration. That didn't sound right. Zubairi's Bethesda, Maryland-based cybersecurity company, SydanTech, worked closely with NOAA--and Zubairi had never heard of her. As it happened, Zubairi was at the agency's offices during the woman's phone interview. He asked to meet her in person. "Sir," she said, "I'd like to end the interview now." Click

The cowboy boot is more than a sturdy piece of workwear. It’s more than a fashion statement, too. It’s a vital piece of Texas culture, as complicated, diverse, and ever-evolving as the makeup of our state. We explored the art and culture and traditions that surround the official footwear of Texas—so named by the Texas Lege—with a little help from a few of our favorite neighbors.

To enter 52 Mercer Street, a five-story building in Manhattan's SoHo neighborhood, on a Wednesday this past June, a visitor had to shimmy through a gaggle of paparazzi and three bouncers issuing wristbands and whisking ticketed guests to a single elevator to the top floor. Inside, the co-working space-slash-women's club the Wing had been transformed into an assembly hall. There was a murmur of anticipation among the crowd of roughly 400, most of whom contentedly sat for nearly an hour under instructions not to rise from their assigned seats. It was barely 8:30 a.m.

The view from a luxe office on the seventy-third floor of Houston’s tallest building might give anyone visions of dominance, and it’s easy to understand why Tony Buzbee wouldn’t be immune. He grew up wearing cheap jeans and off-brand shoes in tiny Atlanta, Texas, in the state’s northeast corner. Through brains and grit and sharp elbows, he transformed himself into one of the country’s richest and most famous personal injury lawyers, defending, so he likes to say, working people against greedy corporations.

Joe Exotic was done. For the previous two decades, 55-year-old Joe had been the heart, soul, and ubiquitous public face of a massive private zoo in Wynnewood, Oklahoma, an hour north of the Texas line. He had boasted of owning the largest tiger collection in America. His sixteen-acre park was lined with metal cages, each filled with majestic tigers, lions, bears, alligators, and even tiger-lion hybrids called tiligers. His sun-leathered visage, horseshoe mustache, and blond mullet adorned signs

About a century ago, in central Louisiana, in the town of Harrisonburg, the seat of Catahoula Parish, Arch and Mae Aplin opened a general mercantile store. The Aplins sold everything—dried goods and leather shoes, medicine and cotton shirts, cuts of beef and hammers and nails—and their store was successful, in large part because of its location.