British Columbia's startup ecosystem has quietly become one of the more dynamic early-stage funding environments in Canada, and few people have watched that shift as closely as Vancouver-based investor Yazan Al Homsi. Deal flow that once concentrated almost exclusively in Toronto and Waterloo is now spreading westward, with seed and Series A rounds closing at a pace that would have seemed unlikely five years ago.Several forces are converging to...
Few toy company founders begin their careers arguing cases in court, but Judd Zebersky is not a typical founder. He earned a JD from the University of Miami School of Law, opened his own firm, and then walked away to figure out how plastic is turned into the things children want most.In 1997,Judd Zebersky flew to China and embedded himself in manufacturing. He spent months in factories, learning production processes he had no prior exposure to....
The path from a solo prototype in Southeast Asia to a platform operating in more than fifty countries took Justin Fulcher the better part of a decade. He started building RingMD in Singapore in 2013, twenty-one years old and working on a product with no formal company structure behind it. Investors found the prototype and asked to get involved. Fulcher's advantage, when he stepped back to look at it, was that by the time he was raising capital,...
The conversation around ultra-high-net-worth wealth management has shifted. For decades, wealthy families competed for access to exclusive investment opportunities. Now, according to Michael Gold Westport, the scarcest resource is different: "Access to capital is no longer limited; access to good judgment is."Gold is the founder and CEO of Gold Family Wealth, a Westport, Connecticut-based advisory practice focused on families with $20 million to...
A book that helps a child feel seen is valuable. A book that also helps that child understand someone very different from themselves is exceptional. Children's author Greg Soros has spent more than 16 years trying to write the second kind, guided by what he describes as the mirrors and windows philosophy. In a recent Walker Magazine profile, he positioned that duality as central to how educators, parents and publishers approach early reading.Why...
Dr. Andrew Jacono operates in multiple spheres simultaneously. He sees private patients in Manhattan and Great Neck, trains the next generation of surgeons at two institutions, produces peer-reviewed research, and travels internationally to share findings at conferences. That range distinguishes him from surgeons who excel only in one area.Teaching and Research as Core PracticeAt Albert Einstein College of Medicine, Dr. Andrew Jacono holds the...
One of the most commonly misunderstood aspects of New York private equity firm 3G Capital management philosophy is the relationship between cost discipline and growth investment. Critics often characterize 3G's zero-based budgeting approach as purely extractive — a mechanism for cutting costs to boost short-term margins. The reality is more nuanced and more interesting.At every company 3G Capital has owned, the cost savings generated through...
Squishmallows may be the product most people associate with Jazwares today, but the company had been building for more than two decades before the brand became a cultural phenomenon. Judd Zebersky, who founded Jazwares in the late 1990s after leaving a law career, set the operational groundwork that made it possible to scale Squishmallows when the timing was right.The acquisition of Kellytoy in 2020 brought Squishmallows into the Jazwares...
Long before energy security became a mainstream concern in the United States and Europe, Kelcy Warren was building the infrastructure to support it. The head of Energy Transfer understood that America's growing production of natural gas needed a pathway to global markets and he began creating one years ahead of the demand.Anticipating the Export EraIn 2014, Warren acquired Lake Charles, a Gulf Coast LNG terminal that had originally been built...
The wealth management industry has spent considerable energy on compliance in recent years. Fee transparency mandates, AI disclosure requirements, and cybersecurity protocols have all moved to the forefront of how firms communicate with clients. Michael Gold, the Westport-based founder of Gold Family Wealth, believes the industry is focusing on the wrong problem.Disclosures describe what advisors are doing. They do not tell clients whether those...