Early Whurley
For the moment, forget that Chaotic Moon created the app for The Daily, Rupert Murdoch’s groundbreaking newspaper for the iPad. Forget that this two-year-old company works with clients like Sesame Street and the United Nations, Discovery Channel and Hello Kitty. And forget that the company charges a couple million dollars for most of its apps.
For a moment, think only of Chaotic Moon Labs’ Board of Awesomeness: a battery-powered, all terrain skateboard that surges to 32 miles an hour. More
Gordon MacKenzie: Hallmark’s Creative Paradox
Gordon MacKenzie bounces along the sterile corridor at Hallmark Cards Inc. staring at the floor, his silver ponytail bobbing behind him. Suddenly he sees me standing in the lobby and starts skipping like a kid: leaping and landing, leaping and landing. By now I should expect this sort of thing. More
Top Gun
It is late at night in the desert. Mike Manning drives to a bar at a wide spot in the road outside Phoenix. He is meeting someone who has valuable information about Charles Keating Jr. and the alleged siphoning of more than $1 billion in deposits from Lincoln Savings and Loan Association.
Manning’s no cop. He’s a Kansas City lawyer with Morrison Hecker Curtis Kuder & Parrish. And he’s wearing lawyer’s garb, which he regrets the minute he steps into the bar. The place is full of rough characters, and Manning sticks out like a ballerina at a sumo wrestlers’ convention. He turns around, sheds his offending tie, coat, and briefcase, and goes in to wait for the informant. When the person finally arrives, they drink and talk. When Manning can, he stealthily dumps some of his drink into a cup on the floor. More
Hugh Forrest: SXSW Interactive
He’s told the story numerous times but it never makes it into print: Hugh Forrest became director of South by Southwest Interactive—possibly the largest entrepreneurial conference in the world—because he owned a computer.
When he got the gig, in 1988, SXSW was a brand-new music festival, Forrest was a newspaper publisher and the digital revolution wasn’t even a glint in anyone’s eye. Forrest, an Austin native and English major from Kenyon College in Gambier, Ohio, had started an alternative newspaper in town, The Austin Challenger.
“The most alternative thing about it was the publishing schedule,” he quips. More
Bijoy Goswami: Bootstrapping Guru
Bijoy Goswami has a strange role in Austin startups.
With his wild mop of hair and ubiquitous jeans and t-shirt, the bootstrapping guru has a rock star quality to him. He’s written a book used by Leadership Austin and made a movie. He’s known for his mental models of how the universe works. He incorporates his spiritual journey into everything he does and has officiated at the weddings of four of his friends as a member of the Universal Life Church. People are usually inspired by his message and dazzling intellectual display, though some are disgruntled that among all the talk of journeys and anecdotes of successful bootstrapping was no concrete, five-point plan.
But Goswami isn’t about the five-point plan. He’s passionate about the bootstrap method of starting a business as a road to enlightenment. More
Rafael de Cárdenas: Designer
At 36 and slim, with killer credentials, handsome Rafael de Cárdenas has every opportunity to be pretentious and snooty.
But he’s not.
Nor does he project false modesty. He is listed among Elle Décor’s top five “designers to watch” and dubbed by the New York Times as “the hippest thing going in interior design.” And he is quick to explain that as a designer and architect, rather than a decorator, “my role is to give clients something far greater than they could have done on their own.” more
Eloisa Apachito: Taos Pueblo’s Grandmother Else
They call her Grandma Else. Eloisa Apachito’s story is filled with the history of her country and the Taos Pueblo people. She was a surgical nurse in World War II. She helped her brother, Paul Bernal, restore the Blue Lake to Taos Pueblo. She mothered other people’s children who were forced to leave their families and become Europeanized in Indian dormitories in the 1950s and 60s–children who still break into tears of gratitude when they see her, although they are now grandmothers themselves. And she has become grandmother to so many people at the Pueblo that her daughter, Carla Apachito, has gotten used to people showing up at her door asking for “Grandma Else.” more
Hosea Rosenberg From Taos to Top Chef New York
Carol Buckman remembers taking her son, Hosea Rosenberg, to a Russian restaurant in Washington, D.C., when he was about 10 years old. “His eyes were size of saucers through the whole meal,” Buckman recalled. “They’d bring out a dollop of this and a dollop of that. After dinner I said, ‘You really liked this didn’t you?’ and he said ‘Mom, I’ve never seen anything like it.’ I think that was when it really hit him: Wow I want to do this.” More