Griffin Spolansky grew up in a family of entrepreneurs and started his first food business at thirteen. By his senior year at the University of Virginia, he had spotted a gap in the protein bar market and cold-pitched a stranger in a university hallway on building it together. That stranger became his business partner, and together they built Mezcla, a protein bar brand that went from a kitchen experiment to one of the fastest-growing names in the category. Five years after t

In early 2019, Dave Marcy was scrolling through social media when he saw a video of his old friend, Ryan Sprance, alongside Gary Vaynerchuk. Dave and Ryan had met 26 years earlier as co-workers at the WWE restaurant in Times Square. After that, they went their separate ways. Marcy spent 14 years in TV advertising, then started his own digital ad agency. Sprance worked in retail management, then built one of Instagram's first lifestyle brands before becoming a social media con

In May 2025, Gage Benevento walked into his manager's office at Amazon and quit. He had spent five years climbing the company ladder from overnight warehouse shifts to engineering program management to launching fulfillment centers across North America — and he was earning $200,000 a year. By every measure that matters in corporate America, he was set. But for the previous two and a half years, his attention had also been on a side project called Haven Golf, a small golf appa