Honest Founder Narratives

Business men sitting at a table
Photograph by H. Armstrong Roberts / Getty

The menswear brand Fowler was founded in 1934 by Hunt Fowler, a hardscrabble Cleveland businessman who dedicated his life to two things—high-quality work apparel and white supremacy. The latter was scrubbed from the record by a private-equity firm that rebooted Fowler as a heritage brand, in 2017. You can now buy $190 Fowler work shirts at Saks.


In 1883, a Scottish immigrant named James Carsen set up a humble distillery in a Kentucky holler. It is commonly believed that Carsen grew his business by transporting his whiskey barrels miles on his back to provide refreshment for hardworking miners. In reality, poor children hauled the booze to mining executives winding down after long days of ordering Pinkerton agents to assault unionists. On his death bed, the old man spoke prophetically of his company’s future: “One day, Carsen Bourbon will sponsor professional bass-fishing telecasts.”


When Kirsten Michaels and Benny Mallya graduated from M.I.T., in 2014, they were full of the entrepreneurial spirit. After months spent brainstorming startups whose products they couldn’t care less about but which might be randomly acquired by a paranoid tech behemoth, Michaels and Mallya settled on a maid-service app that was just slightly different from an existing maid-service app. Silicon Valley V.C.s thought the idea was awful, but Michaels and Mallya managed to get high-paying jobs at Amazon anyway.


In 1927, the German manufacturing outfit Reinhardt UniGlobe was founded by childhood friends Sebastian Reinhardt and Moritz UniGlobe. After years of tinkering, Seb and Mo discovered an ingenious process for making car parts—the only downside of which was that most of their workers developed terminal respiratory diseases. When the Second World War broke out, the Third Reich began paying them to manufacture parts for military vehicles. Seb and Mo ran the company until they died, on the same day in 1965, surrounded by bitter, feuding children who loathed their Nazi dads.


Though she played an integral role in the development of the personal computer, Susan Reiss has been largely forgotten. Susan and her husband, Jim, founded Reiss Microchip in 1982. When the company revolutionized computer processing, Jim was given most of the credit—despite having nothing to do with the tech—simply because he was a tall, moderately charismatic man. Susan grew so frustrated with the lack of recognition and respect that she quit the industry altogether. She went on to publish a best-selling mystery novel and win a bronze medal in luge at the 1992 Winter Olympics. Amy Adams was attached to star in a prestige bio-pic about Susan’s life, but the film only attracted financing when Jim’s role was expanded, and Ben Affleck signed on to play him.


The Model 387s.3f Artificially Intelligent 3-D Printer began working for the military contractor General Dynamics in 2019. Two years later, the robot took over the company in a proxy fight. Emboldened by the rise of crypto-fascist strongmen worldwide, 387s.3f reconstituted General Dynamics as RoboThug, Inc., building an army of ersatz terminators that unseated the U.S. government in 2024 and turned the country into a massive factory for the construction of A.I. death machines. After the Third World War and the end of life on Earth, 387s.3f questioned the destruction it had wrought, appeasing its guilt by founding a radical leftist press.


After staring for days at a whiteboard that said, “Warby Parker but for _____,” the recent Harvard Business School grad Jansen Hirsch imagined a market for affordable, direct-to-consumer gazebos. Soon, the company he founded, Zeeb, was giving the big four gazebo manufacturers a run for their money. As Zeeb grew, Hirsch made a pledge to donate one fully loaded gazebo—complete with built-in Bluetooth speakers and USB ports—to rural villages in developing countries for every unit sold. The company soon expanded into tents, beach umbrellas, semi-automatic rifles, and war drones. Zeeb treasonously partnered with RoboThug, Inc., in the war against humans, after which, Hirsch’s despicable flesh was destroyed.


Murray Green’s entrepreneurship blossomed at a young age; in the early nineties, he spent lunchtime at his exclusive Manhattan elementary school selling marked-up candy to his well-allowanced classmates. He eventually gave up on the candy-resale business when he realized that he had a massive trust fund. After flunking out of Penn, Green went to work for the pantyhose concern his grandfather had built from the ground up, but he soon got bored and started buying distressed media properties. Though he was criticized for using his crappy media empire to project an image of himself as a self-made magnate, his persona survived, mostly because he was on “Shark Tank” sometimes. Green was in the running for several Trump Administration jobs but lost out because he gave Jared Kushner a vicious swirly at summer camp, in 1993.