Snapshot

The advertising industry has changed immensely in recent years. As media has become increasingly digital, companies have unprecedented options for advertisers to target and measure their marketing campaigns across nearly every media channel and device. With this shift, audience fragmentation has accelerated and presented challenges for advertise…

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Snapshot

Given how fast technology now evolves, it can be easy to take for granted the efforts of pioneering companies, whose research and development pave the way for hundreds of items we use every day.

Wolfspeed Inc is one such company that for over three decades has been a global leader and innovator of wide bandgap semiconductors, harnessing cutting-e…

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Snapshot

Americans love Chipotle. In the highly competitive, quick-service restaurant, and casual dining space, few eateries promise to deliver flavorful food made with fresh, premium quality, and healthy ingredients, at palatable prices. All drivers currently top the preferences for consumer choice.

With its menu of burritos, burrito bowls, quesadillas, …

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Background

In 2007, two serial entrepreneurs, businessman Daniel Hawkins, and electrical engineer John Adams, who worked on early pacemakers, were working at a med-tech incubator. After brainstorming unmet medical needs and how they could be serviced through new technology, Hawkins began exploring kidney stones, learning about the difficulties of targeti…

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Background

Array has been manufacturing solar products in Albuquerque, New Mexico since 1989 after Ron Carlo developed the first solar tracker for Wattsun Corporation. Carlo subsequently purchased Wattsun and formed Array Technologies in 1992. In the years following, the company began shipping trackers to projects across Europe and Australasia, including…

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Background

In 2003, Ben and Moisey Uretsky, who founded the managed hosting business, ServerStack, wanted to create a new product that would combine web hosting and virtual servers and target entrepreneurial software developers after seeing most companies were targeting corporate clients only. In 2011, after extensive research, the Uretskys founded Digit…

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Background

Formed in 1989 through the merger of two small brokerage firms, Linsco and Private Ledger, LPL was designed as an alternative to traditional Wall Street firms. Private Ledger founder Bob Ritzman sought to offer a large group of mutual funds and securities to advisors, without pushing a particular product. And when Todd Robinson purchased Linsc…

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Background

Gogo began in 1991 in a barbecue restaurant in Denison, Texas, where company founder Jimmy Ray sketched his idea for an affordable telephone system for private airplanes on a paper napkin. Initially known as Aircell, the company started providing analog-based voice communications on private aircraft in North America via a partnership with cell…

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Background

Founded in 2006, Enphase transformed the solar industry with a revolutionary microinverter technology that turns sunlight into a safe, reliable, resilient, and scalable source of energy. In the aftermath of the 2001 telecom crash, Martin Fornage of Cerent Corporation was looking for new projects. When he saw the low performance of the string i…

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Background

Evolent was founded in 2011 by members of the current management team, UPMC, an integrated delivery system, and The Advisory Board Company, to enable healthcare providers to pursue a value-based business model and evolve their competitive position.

Over the years, the company has grown both organically and through numerous acquisitions includin…

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Background

While Halozyme was originally founded in 1998 and subsequently went public in 2004, the dramatic catalyst that transformed the company occurred in 2019, following a major restructuring off the back of a spectacular failure of its pancreatic cancer candidate, PEGPH20. Before November 2019, most of Halozyme’s research and development activities …

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Background

Born from an idea for a university paper on the industry for storing digital files online, Aaron Levie started developing the Box service in 2004. Dropping out of school the following year to work on the idea full-time with a long-time friend and cofounder Dylan Smith, the duo initially developed the software in the attic of Smith’s parents’ h…

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Background

Silvergate Bank was formed over 30 years ago as an industrial loan company in Southern California. In 1988, it was originally focused on commercial real estate lending and wholesale deposit activities. Stopping its mortgage operations in 2005 before the subprime meltdown, the bank was in a solid position when the 2008 financial crisis hit, as …

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Background

In 2010, after his previous company Sunbelt Software was acquired, Stu Sjouwerman, a veteran IT industry entrepreneur, put up $1 million of his own money to build the infrastructure for a new security awareness and training company. A year later, due to a chance encounter with a mutual friend, Stu met “the world’s most famous hacker”, Kevin Mi…

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Background

Arista was founded by industry luminaries Andy Bechtolsheim, Ken Duda, and David Cheriton. In 1982, Bechtolsheim co-founded Sun Microsystems, then in 1995, he co-founded Granite Systems with Cheriton, a company that developed gigabit ethernet products, which was acquired by Cisco Systems in 1996. For several years the duo occupied executive po…

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Background

The rare earth industry actually began in the U.S., when in 1949, three venture partners – Herbert S. Woodward, Clarence Watkins, and P. A. Simon – found anomalously high radioactivity in mineral specimens from the Mountain Pass mine. These almost miraculous elements that could change the characteristics of metals, gave rise to an industry for…

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Background

BRCC was founded in 2014 by former Green Beret Evan Hafer, when he took a one-pound roaster in his garage and began roasting, packaging, and shipping bagged coffee called “Freedom Roast” through a friend’s apparel website. The coffee sold well, so Hafer launched his own brand and website and soon added branded accessories to his sales.

The comp…

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Background

Lantheus has been instrumental in pioneering the field of medical imaging. For more than 60 years, it has helped physicians enhance patient care with its broad portfolio of products that illuminate the heart, brain, lungs, and other organs. Beginning with early work that saw Dr. Edward Shapiro innovating with radioactive isotopes in medicine a…

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Background

Founded in 1990 by electrical and computer engineers, Dr. Mike Farmwald and Dr. Mark Horowitz, Rambus was a high-speed interface technology development and marketing company that invented 600 MHz interface technology, which solved memory bottleneck issues faced by system designers. At the time, Rambus’s innovation achieved performance rates ov…

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