By All Means

Bruna Valente was a corporate marketer working in industrial manufacturing when a health scare sent her on a personal wellness journey, which led her to the rainforests of her native Brazil. There, she discovered...

Angie’s Boomchickapop–one of the most legendary homegrown Minnesota brands in recent history and the benchmark for just about every new packaged food startup hoping to make it big. As the story goes: Angie Bastian was a...

In our first Mentor Series pairing, Chuck Runyon, co-founder of Anytime Fitness, the world's largest fitness franchise chain, and its parent company Purpose Brands (formerly Self Esteem Brands), which includes...

A chemical engineer turned community development organizer, Anthony Taylor shares the career journey that led him to founding Melanin in Motion, a Community Wellness Center program that connects children of color—and...

Peter Mogck and Matt Frakes turned their love of Minnesota lake life, and their desire to start something of their own into Paddle North, a water gear manufacturer best known for its inflatable paddle boards. The...

Pet Evolution is a fast-growing pet supply chain that started with one locally owned store in Woodbury, Minn. back in 2012 and has really picked up steam in the last couple of years since it started franchising. There...

Dr. Aho is a surgeon and scientist with an insatiable appetite for invention and more than 20 patents to his name. He was still in his surgical residency at Mayo Clinic when he spotted an opportunity that led him to...

It started as a fun project with his kids: creating the “best hot cocoa in the world.” After countless tries, Dean Packingham thought he had succeeded, and everyone who tried his instant cocoa mix agreed. Named for his...

“People think, oh, it’s just a catchy slogan. No. If marketing does it’s job, it’s what does your brand stand for and how do you buy things. If we do that really well, we’re the number one growth driver of a business.”...

“I thought, you know what I could do? I could make games.” Julien Sharp is a game inventor and industry executive who moved to Minnesota in 2022 to head up the U.S. division of Paris-based Asmodee Group, a global game...

Lisa Lavin is on a mission to change the way the world cares for the people we care about. “We don’t have enough resources to take care of the number of people that are aging. So how do we do that? We leverage...

If you spend any amount of time in or around the startup community in the Twin Cities, you will no doubt hear the name Daren Cotter. Today, most people know him as an investor and advisor—his personal portfolio includes...

Laura Roos started Minny & Paul as a way to take the hunt out of discovering high-quality, locally made goods. She launched in 2016 with a selection of themed gift boxes that she thought would be popular with bridal...

Ashley Hawks was a successful working model, in print and on runways around the world. But when she thought about her goal of making a magazine cover, she realized, “I’ll still be promoting somebody else's brand...

“We’re going to be helping hundreds of thousands of patients with our device and that’s probably more than a lifetime of patients I could see as a physician.” By the time Allisa Song started medical school at Mayo...