#entrepreneurship

#entrepreneurship

I've spent 15+ years building across multiple tech ventures and cultures - starting in Vietnam, sharpening my craft in Japan and Singapore, then expanding to the U.S., Australia and Europe. Each stop taught me how different ecosystems turn constraints into capability: how to ship products under pressure, build companies from zero, grow talent pipelines and lead teams through the hardest execution challenges.

Then you should take this business-development course, which will help you take your idea - no worries if it doesn't exist yet, you'll manifest it later! - and spin it into a multimillion-dollar company that you can scale within mere months. Behold this lady, a graduate of said course, who turned her ceramics hobby into a $5,000,000 juggernaut in three years and now lives in Italy with her family, dog, and a bunch of olive trees! This could be you!

While these are certainly high-income skills worth developing, if you don't have this one underrated skill, you will literally get nowhere in your career or in your business. Regardless of how hard you try, how many certifications and tools you add to your skill stack, how good your resume is or how exceptional your portfolio may be, lacking this one skill can leave you far behind in the job market and result in you losing out to competitors in your industry and niche.

I had this idea, and we just said, 'Let's do it.' There's never been any roadblocks in my mind. I think that comes from my parents - they didn't put limits on me.

And unlike most tools in the productivity or publishing space, this one comes with a lifetime subscription for $49 (reg. $540)-no monthly fees and no subscription fatigue necessary. Built for busy entrepreneurs with ideas worth sharing Youbooks pulls together the power of multiple AI models (ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini, and Llama) and a 1,000-step production pipeline to create structured, research-backed manuscripts up to 300,000 words. It even integrates real-time online research to keep things current and customizable, down to tone and voice.

In the summer of 2016, I was 21, living in New York City, and working as an intern for a private-capital research firm. One weekend, I went to the Jersey shore with a group of friends. I'm from Seattle, so I'm not used to seeing airplanes flying banners every couple of minutes. They looked like they were from the 1940s. They were noisy and emitting a lot of smoke.

I'll be bringing makeup services directly to schools, helping students look and feel their best for every special event,

I spent 10 years working for Chase Bank, building a career in corporate banking. It was steady, professional, and came with a clear path forward. But when a prime lot went up for sale in my small hometown of Damascus, Oregon, I saw an opportunity that banking couldn't give me. The property sat right along a major highway that had no drive-thru coffee stands nearby.

At twenty-three, I launched my first real business with another partner-an upscale pet resort. We had climate-controlled suites, a beautiful play yard, and classical music playing softly in the background. An elaborate four-tier fountain greeted guests in the lobby, where you could also view the handcrafted "Catio" patio built by my father himself. Within a few months, it was already turning a profit. On the surface, it seemed like a dream come true. But something felt off.

You check your phone at 3am because your biggest client is eight time zones away. You miss your kid's soccer game because the office "needs" you. You turn down the perfect apartment in Bangkok because your business demands you stay put. Your success has become your prison. Maybe you're the founder who built something amazing but can't leave headquarters. Maybe you're watching friends post from Kyoto while you're stuck in traffic.

I'll never forget standing on the sideline of our first SaberCats match, watching one of our players get leveled by a brutal tackle. Most people would've stayed down. He didn't. He fought for every inch, rolled and kept driving the ball forward. The crowd erupted. That image stuck with me. In rugby, getting hit is part of the game, and when you get hit, you don't stop - you adapt mid-impact.

When Jared Pobre and his wife, former WWE star Stacy Keibler, moved to Jackson Hole, Wyoming, he expected more time outdoors, skiing, hiking, fly-fishing. What he experienced was how extreme conditions accelerate skin aging and damage, leaving his skin raw and red. When searching for solutions for his skincare, not only were options limited, but nothing seemed to help. Out of frustration, he tried one of Keibler's pricey serums.

"My greatest successes happened on the heels of failure," Corcoran wrote. "The moment I made my first profit, it felt like all the long nights and rejection finally paid off. I wanted to invest it in something big that would set me apart."

As entrepreneurs, we're constantly bombarded with recommendations for the same big-name podcasts (How I Built This, The Tim Ferriss Show or Masters of Scale). They're good, but they've become the mainstream playlists of the entrepreneurial world. The real edge comes from discovering voices that are flying under the radar - podcasts that don't just regurgitate clichés but dig into gritty lessons, unconventional strategies and the realities most entrepreneurs are too busy or too cautious to discuss openly.

One employer asked him, Have you thought about taking elocution lessons? Others told him his film ideas which explored diversity in innovative ways - were a bit niche. I was 28 and at the end of my tether, he recalled. I was working a minimum wage job in a call centre, my life on hold, trying to break into TV. But the industry felt very Oxbridge and very white dominated by people with cut-glass BBC accents.

If you had told me as a teenager in Soviet Georgia that one day I'd be running an American public tech company - let alone something like Grindr - I couldn't have grasped it. The moment I stepped out of JFK airport, I felt something different - later I realized it was freedom. America gave me not just liberty, but the chance to unleash my potential, pursue my dreams, and come to terms with being gay.

What sticks in your mind when you think of success in business? Extraordinary achievements and the people who made them happen. Whether it's an incredible marketing campaign or a product that met massive consumer demands, major breakthroughs deserve to be recognized. That's what Inc.'s Best in Business awards are for-recognizing the achievements and success of entrepreneurs and industry leaders across all sectors. With this list, we're honoring companies, projects, people, and initiatives that defined 2025.

Sometimes, we aren't even given the option to try. For example, when the airline issues your boarding pass, the message isn't "try to be at the gate by 9:30 because we'd sure like to try and take off by 10:00!" When the utility company sends your monthly bill, the payment stub doesn't read, "Please try to make your payment so we can try to keep your lights on."

Before going to college, I lived in the Bay Area. I was surrounded by entrepreneurs and founders, so building a company didn't seem incredibly novel to me. But in 2018, I started a company of my own called Injective. We're a blockchain network that provides infrastructure for finance applications. We've raised over $50 million in funding and got Mark Cuban to invest in our vision.

My Korean language proficiency was still very low then, and I worried that communicating would be difficult. But I was surprised that people were friendly and eager to help, even though I didn't speak Korean. At the same time, I saw that Korean society was super, super competitive. People lined up in the university libraries, sat on the benches, and studied so hard. They called it "pali-pali"- quick-quick.

I was reading Brandon Sanderson's latest novel, Wind and Truth, when I came across a sentence that stopped me cold: "A stronger current makes for stronger fish." That's it. That's what entrepreneurship is. We're constantly encountering currents that either facilitate what we want to accomplish-the businesses we want to build, the lives we want to create-or they oppose us, trying to sweep us into dangerous waters. These currents change all the time. They vary in strength depending on where you are in your journey. And here's the thing: they're mostly invisible until you learn to feel them.

At the recent Entrepreneur Level Up Conference, entrepreneurs from across the country gathered to gain strategies, inspiration and practical insights from a lineup of well-known successful entrepreneurs. I was honored to host the conference and partner with Entrepreneur. One of the headliners, Robert Herjavec - investor, entrepreneur and star of Shark Tank - delivered a keynote packed with wisdom for founders navigating today's unpredictable business landscape.

Michael's legal career started at Cadwalader, Wickersham & Taft, the oldest law firm in the U.S. He joined their real estate finance group after graduating from Boston College Law School in 2002. The timing was important-he entered the industry just before the real estate boom of the mid-2000s. "Cadwalader was fast-paced and full of very smart people. I had to learn quickly how to manage complex deals," he recalls.

Since starting First Light, former colleagues have reached out with connections to coffee-growing communities, and I'm excited to build on that,