When Edward Daciuk launched his first startup, a software company called Periscope, he and his business partner were a little surprised at how much two newcomers were able to accomplish. “We convinced KPMG to give us a check for $200,000 to get their software off the ground,” says Daciuk. “We were 25 or 26. We […]

When Jill Murphy Long was growing up in suburban Pennsylvania, a partial meltdown devastated the nuclear reactor 12 miles away at Three Mile Island. That was back in 1979. Over the years, friends and family started falling ill. A high school boyfriend died of leukemia. Her younger brother was diagnosed with three different kinds of […]

Teaching at Princeton might have been the capstone of a three-decade-long career in academia, but after eight years it wasn’t enough for Alexander Arkadyevich Migdal. “If you look at it one way, it was a paradise,” says the 71-year-old physicist, acknowledging that teaching the same class every semester wasn’t too taxing. “But some people don’t […]

As a little girl living in the Roxbury section of Boston, Tatsha Robertson remembers her eyes lingering on a Boston Herald photo of a black woman and child falling off a fire escape. “It scared me to death,” says Robertson, whose family later moved to Greenville, South Carolina, “but I wanted to be a reporter because of […]

The first time David Ball toured London’s WeWork South Bank, the building was still a construction site. No matter how much he stared at blueprints and walked around floors still lacking furnishings, lights, or even walls, he had trouble picturing this new kind of workspace. “I couldn’t see it,” says Ball, founder of the cutting-edge […]

Mitch Jacobson got a lot of ribbing earlier this year when he took home a prize at the Austin Under 40 Awards. For one thing, he’s 58. “People kept joking about why I had so much gray hair,” says Jacobson, who was honored for being best mentor. For the past seven years, he’s been a […]

When Simon Douglass was considering whether to start his own business, a former boss offered to front him the money. “I realized that I already had enough money saved up,” says Douglass. “That gave me the confidence I needed to strike out on my own.” So in 2014, Douglass used his life savings to launch […]

“My path through life has been fabulously strange,” says Michael C. Bryan, who at one time or another has been an actor, a motivational speaker, and an executive assistant to some big names in the entertainment industry. “People tell me, ‘Wow, you’ve had a really interesting journey to where you are.’” And where he is […]