If you wanted to get very rich in America, where would you start? In their new book The Everywhere Millionaire, economists Owen Zidar of Princeton and Eric Zwick of the University of Chicago detail the results of more than a decade spent piecing together millions of tax records and other data to map a part of the American economy that had been hiding in plain sight: the impressive fortunes being built by owners of privately held businesses. Buried in that data are surprising insights into what t...

Allison Ellsworth didn’t start out aiming to reinvent soda. But out of a home-brewed apple cider vinegar concoction came Poppi, one of the fastest-growing beverage brands in America, with an aesthetic built for TikTok and a health-focused message that you can have big flavor with just five grams of sugar. That plus $500 million in sales last year—the brand’s fourth year in business under the name Poppi—was enough for PepsiCo to swoop in and buy the company in May for nearly $2 billion. We spoke with Ellsworth on a bright summer morning at Poppi’s pink-painted headquarters, in East Austin.

“I just got to the horse barn. I’m grazing one of my horses.” Ty Haney is calling from her hometown of Boulder, Colorado, where she now lives most of the time when she’s not in San Francisco. It’s Sunday afternoon, and she’s multitasking, preparing for a major professional announcement and tending to one of the many demands in her post-Texan life as a founder of three companies, mom to two young kids, and wife to country singer Mark Wystrach, of the band Midland.

For many entrepreneurs, running a business with six of your family members would be a recipe for disaster. For Miguel Garza, founding CEO of Siete Foods, it’s been a dream come true. In January, PepsiCo acquired the Mexican American food brand for $1.2 billion. Founded in 2014 and named for the seven members of the Garza family, the company generated $500 million in revenue last year. Siete also created a better-for-you brand of Mexican food that helped usher in a new wave of...

One night in May 2020, Andy Roddick found himself on a Zoom doing what so many did at the height of the pandemic: catching up with friends, kicking around half-serious ideas, and, in his words, “finding the bottom of a bottle of wine." At some point, Roddick asked the group, “What’s getting expedited in your world because of all this?” One friend, an orthopedic surgeon, started explaining how he was diagnosing injuries over FaceTime. Roddick pressed him. Was it actually effective? Yes, the doctor...

"I'm the luckiest guy in the world," Mark Cuban says. It's mid-March and he's on a stage in front of a thousand fans at SXSW with tech founder Falon Fatemi of the new audio-video entertainment platform Fireside talking about, well, just about everything: why everyone should get a crypto wallet, how the metaverse will change media, what TikTok means for pro sports. And, little surprise to anyone who's watched him on Shark Tank or run into him on Twitter, Cuban has well-developed thoughts on each.

When Tyler Haney appeared on the cover of Inc. two years ago, the direct-to-consumer athletic apparel company she founded, Outdoor Voices, was one of the hottest startups in America's hottest startup city, Austin. At gyms and on college campuses, OV's signature color-blocked leggings had become a kind of athleisure uniform for the Instagram set. Shortly after our story appeared, The New Yorker followed up with a long meditation on the brand's appeal. No less than Mickey Drexler, the so-called

"I went outside for the first time in six days," said Everlywell founder and CEO Julia Cheek, via Zoom from her living room in Austin in late March. "I've been working 20 hours a day." Cheek, 36, was three weeks removed from a decision she'd made for Everlywell to offer tests for ­Covid-19. In the time since, the company had been battered by conflicting and confusing guidance from the federal government, a national economic tailspin, and frantic pleas for help from the public.

Jag Bath, an e-commerce veteran of Gilt Groupe and RetailMeNot, became CEO of the Austin-based on-demand delivery service Favor in 2015, fully prepared to execute the Silicon Valley playbook of growth at any cost. But it wasn't until he made a series of painful decisions, and took a much different approach, that the company really succeeded.

Ricardo Mora is an El Paso-based telecom entrepreneur, restaurateur, tech investor, and startup evangelist. His various ventures straddle the U.S. and Mexican markets, and give him a uniquely informed perspective on border politics. Business is better for everyone, he's found over the years, when companies--and people--on both sides of the border work together.

Tom Markusic, the founder and CEO of Cedar Park’s Firefly Aerospace, explains how his venture is different from NASA—and from SpaceX and Blue Origin too.

When fellow Texans Lyle Lovett and Robert Earl Keen go on tour together this fall, it’ll be the latest chapter in a friendship that began when they were students at Texas A&M University. Back then, they’d sit on the porch of the house Keen rented and trade songs, just as they’ll be doing on stages around the country beginning in October. We met with the two singer-songwriters on the outskirts of Austin, at the headquarters of Collings Guitars. They talked about Texas storytelling, learning from

Samuel Brody directs the Center for Texas Beaches and Shores at Texas A&M–Galveston, where he studies coastal environmental planning and natural hazards mitigation. Much of his work has focused on how unfettered development in the Houston area has created the perfect conditions for the kind of flooding that Hurricane Harvey delivered. His message hasn’t always been welcome, but now his audience is bigger than ever. We caught up with Brody a day after blue skies returned to the city.

Munro Cullum likely has a hard time fitting his job title on his business cards: professor of psychiatry, neurology and neurotherapeutics, and neurological surgery at the Peter O’Donnell Jr. Brain Institute at UT Southwestern Medical Center. What the title lacks in brevity it makes up for in specificity by pointing to the man’s qualifications to tackle one of the toughest issues facing football and other sports today.

Over the last few decades, Richard Linklater has become as much of an Austin, Texas, institution as live music and barbecue. While he’s best known for his locally produced films, from his groundbreaking 1991 debut, Slacker, to 2014’s Oscar-nominated Boyhood, to last year’s Everybody Wants Some!!, the fifty-seven-year-old writer-director’s greatest legacy just might be leading the town’s evolution into one of the country’s leading film scenes—an effort that has culminated in the opening of his fi

For a guy who doesn't broadcast his emotions much, Michael Dell is positively jolly. In faded jeans and a starched gray button-down, he settles in at the head of a massive conference-room table and lets out a long belly laugh; his communications executive has just told a story about a recent family-vacation mishap, and Dell rolls back into his laugh like a man who's deep in his comfort zone. He has reason to be happy. It's a week before the 30th birthday of his namesake company, and six months a