Opinions expressed by Entrepreneur contributors are their own. Lodge Cast Iron’s annual shareholder meeting doubles as a family reunion, three generations of Lodges, from a 2-year-old to an 88-year-old, gathered in Chattanooga this June for the skillet company their family has owned since 1896, according to the Wall Street Journal. The company almost fried in 1996, when then-COO Henry Lodge privately worried the business might go bankrupt. But a turnaround came in 2002, when Lodge figured out how to pre-season its pans so customers could use them straight out of the box, no more peeling wax and baking for hours…
Author: Staff Writer
Opinions expressed by Entrepreneur contributors are their own. Talk about a bad case of brain freeze. Rebel Creamery has filed for bankruptcy, less than a month after a judge ordered it to pay nearly $24 million to rival Van Leeuwen Ice Cream for copying its packaging, according to the New York Times. The two brands both sell pastel-colored pints with script lettering and similarly styled flavor names: mint chocolate chip, cookies and cream, pistachio. Van Leeuwen sued in 2021, arguing Rebel’s containers were confusingly close to its own. Judge Eric Komitee agreed, ruling that Rebel’s founders acted in “bad faith.”…
Key Takeaways Anthony O’Neal’s financial turning point came in 2005, when he realized he was “broke.” Despite driving a flashy car, he didn’t have $5 for a meal at McDonald’s. The moment prompted him to stop “faking” wealth and start building it. Anthony O’Neal still remembers the sting of that Friday night in 2005. He was 21 years old and meeting up with his friends at the beach. They all rolled up in spotless Range Rovers, BMWs and Ford Explorers. On the outside, they had it made. Yet none of them had $5 on hand for a meal at McDonald’s.…
Opinions expressed by Entrepreneur contributors are their own. Key Takeaways The most valuable opportunities often emerge through relationships rather than transactions. Strong networks, mentors, advisors and trusted connections can create opportunities that capital alone cannot. As information becomes easier to access through AI, qualities like trust, judgment, reputation and asking better questions become more important. The strongest businesses often grow from ecosystems where founders, investors, advisors and communities help one another — not from entrepreneurs operating in isolation. Entrepreneurship is often portrayed as a race to raise capital, scale faster and chase ever-higher valuations. Yet the companies that endure are…
Colossal Biosciences claims to have brought back the dire wolf, and is now hard at work on its quest to resurrect several other species, including the woolly mammoth and the moa, a giant extinct bird. While that’s happening, the company is also pursuing a quieter, more near-term ambition: incubating a cadre of startups that can capitalize on Colossal’s technology and turn it into distinct businesses. At this point, three companies have been publicly spun out of Colossal. The first was Form Bio, which has raised tens of millions to build an AI-enhanced platform meant to accelerate scientific research based on…
At the San Francisco-based startup Anything AI, there’s a robust team that seems like any fast-growing startup’s organizational chart. There’s Emma, who investigates reported bugs across logs, databases, and code, then drafts the reply; Otis, who runs engineering operations and forecasts launch dates; Clementine, who manages the company’s brand imagery; Tilda, who deals with the CEO’s inbox and calendar and briefs him each morning; and JB, the office manager, who places orders for coconut waters and snacks. The twist? None of these employees are human. They’re AI agents, and Anything thinks they represent the future of how companies staff up…
An unwritten rule has long governed the business world: never let them see you sweat. Leaders are expected to operate as perfectly polished corporate avatars, keeping their personal lives at a safe, academic distance. I’ve never been good at that. I was diagnosed with anorexia at 10 years old. My teenage years were defined by hospital wards, relapses, and a revolving door of residential treatment centers that felt safe in the moment but failed to prepare me for a life of recovery. I spent my sophomore year of high school doing family-based treatment—something my family and I stumbled upon—and it…
Never before has a ketchup bottle been designed with such precise portion control. Heinz has released its first-ever customizable lid that comes with three settings for light, medium, and heavy labeled “Like,” “Love,” and “Crazy Love” for an increasingly heavier pour. If the biggest challenge with old-school glass bottles is not knowing how much ketchup will come out when you have to tilt a half-empty container and hit it with the palm of your hand, a Heinz squeeze bottle with the new “Love Lid” is just the opposite. The “Love Lid” is designed with a patented adjustable cap that Heinz…
Few leaders have a better real-time read on how AI is actually reshaping the workforce than Hayden Brown. As CEO of Upwork, the platform where 18 million freelancers meet the businesses that need them, she sees what the monthly jobs report can’t: which skills are surging, which jobs are quietly disappearing, and why 23% of businesses that moved work to AI are already bringing humans back. Brown shares what she’s actually seeing on the ground, and what the data says about the gap between AI hype and AI reality. This is an abridged transcript of an interview from Rapid Response,…
Opinions expressed by Entrepreneur contributors are their own. Key Takeaways We gave AI the job of writing our code and lost the ability to verify it before it ships, but that’s only half of the problem. The other half is that while you’re still trying to review what your own AI wrote, someone else’s AI is reading it too, and it is faster than you are. For a decade, we chased a single number (how fast we could ship), and AI has now handed that number to everyone, including who or what is attacking you. So, speed is no longer the…