Founded in 1979 and acquired in 2005 by Mansueto Ventures LLC, Inc. is the only major brand dedicated exclusively to owners and managers of growing private companies, with the aim to deliver real solutions for today’s innovative company builders.
Every founder who finds traction with their business faces an inevitable evolution in how they spend their time, from being the person who does every thing (sales, tech support, emptying the garbage) to being primarily a people manager. And as the business grows larger and more complex, it becomes time to transition again to a next-level role that is trickier but more profound. Entrepreneur and author Jay Shetty recently put it this way: “The best leaders don’t create more followers, they create more leaders.” (He credited the insight to motivational author Roy T. Bennett.) Shetty’s thoughts on this stage of entrepreneurship were one of the big takeaways for many attendees at this year’s Inc. 5000 Conference & Gala, held in October in Phoenix. “It distilled something critical for me and…
The best of the best. All our lives, we’re encouraged to learn from the best. And if you’re a sports fan, the GOAT in each sport—or even of your favorite team—stands as a symbol of grit, talent, and commitment. Well, just a few months into my role as chief revenue officer of Mansueto Ventures, parent of Inc. and Fast Company, I had the privilege of attending my first Inc. 5000 Conference & Gala (in Phoenix in late October). There, I saw, heard, and broke bread with greatness. I met the leaders and founders of the Inc. 5000, those who have achieved extraordinary growth through one of the most unpredictable economic periods in recent memory. To hear their stories—their accounts of obstacles overcome, of employees inspired, of customers overjoyed—gives me great…
1 Liz Brody In “America’s Rebuilders” (page 44), New York City-based Brody explores the ways entrepreneurs have recovered from catas trophe. “You can talk about rebuilding, but they’re just trying to dig out of serious trauma,” Brody says. “This is the part that’s not talked about.” A National Magazine Award winner, Brody has previously written for Glamour, the Los Angeles Times, and Entrepreneur. 2 Devin Gordon For Inc.’s Winter issue, Gordon interviews Sean Evans (page 96). “This is a man who’s taped nearly 400 episodes of Hot Ones—that’s nearly 4,000 chicken wings he’s eaten on camera—and yet his passion for the process doesn’t seem to have dimmed a bit,” he says. Gordon, who’s based in Brookline, Massachusetts, is a contributor to The New York Times, The Atlantic, and Fast Company.…
"It wasn’t on my radar.” Ty Haney is talking about how she felt when the new owners of Outdoor Voices, the direct-to-consumer apparel brand she had founded in 2013, reached out last year to ask her to return. After Haney grew the company to a $110 million valuation, she endured what she’s described as a “public and painful” exit in 2020 amid a dispute with her board chair. She had moved on and was building a loyalty business called TYB and an energy drink brand, Joggy. “Initially, my reaction was not ‘Hell, yes,’ ” she says. “My reaction was not even curious. It was ‘No.’?" But Haney decided to talk with the new owners, Consortium Brand Partners, which bought Outdoor Voices in 2024, when it was close to bankruptcy. After…
Something very strange has been happening in the business world lately: Midsize companies are quietly disappearing. This is happening even as entrepreneurship in the U.S. economy is booming. From 2021 to 2024, Americans filed 21 million new business applications, a welcome startup renaissance. Meanwhile, the number of midsize companies has plateaued and, depending on your definition, even dropped. Companies with 100 to 499 employees now account for fewer than 1 percent of all U.S. firms, and the number of companies with 250 to 499 employees has fallen by 22.5 percent since 2020, according to research by Doug Tatum, who teaches at the Jim Moran College of Entrepreneurship at Florida State University and is the author of No Man’s Land: Where Growing Companies Fail. So what’s going on here? Some of…
In 1998, Sergey Brin and Larry Page, still students at Stanford, introduced a prototype for the Google search engine in a nowfamous paper. Back then, search engines rarely yielded great results, and people often relied on humancurated lists to find information online. Since then, Google has become an internet gateway for billions of users worldwide—that is, until AI. Thanks to AI-driven search platforms like ChatGPT and Perplexity as well as Google’s own AI-powered summaries, U.S. search referrals dropped from 2.3 billion to fewer than 1.7 billion in a year, according to a 2025 Similarweb report. (Those numbers will likely drop further now that the ChatGPT Atlas browser has launched.) Dubbed zero-click search or Google Zero, the idea is that web searches will no longer result in a click to a…
