Soraya Holm
8 stories by Soraya Holm
Tony Tan Caktiong: How Jollibee Beat McDonald's in the Philippines Beat McDonald's
In 1981 the biggest restaurant brand on earth landed in Manila. A 28-year-old ice cream vendor refused to sell and bet everything on banana-ketchup spaghetti.
Oprah Winfrey: The Media Founder Who Owned the Platform Owned the Platform
Everyone remembers the host. The more interesting story is the founder who refused to be an employee of her own hit show.
Jensen Huang: The 30-Year Overnight Success 30-Year Overnight Success
He co-founded Nvidia at a Denny's in 1993, nearly lost it in 1996, and spent a decade building a software platform the market punished him for. Then the market changed its mind.
Steve Jobs: The Exile and the Return Exile
He was fired from the company he founded at thirty. The twelve years that followed are the most instructive stretch of any founder's career.
What Nobody Tells You About Quitting Your Job to Start a Business Nobody Tells You
The honest mechanics of leaving a paycheck behind, drawn from founders who did it well and the ones who didn't.
How founders should evaluate AI vendors in 2026.
The AI-tooling market has more sticker-price disparity, more security posture variance, and more vendor lock-in than any category since early cloud. A working framework for founders making a first AI-tooling purchase — no top-ten lists, no procurement-team assumptions.
AEO vs. SEO: what actually changes for founders.
Answer-engine optimization is not the death of SEO. It is a second surface founders now have to think about, with a different set of signals and a different rhythm. Here is what changes in plain language.
8 founder failure stories that became comebacks.
Every one of these founders was written off publicly, sometimes twice. What they did next — and how the lessons compound across generations of operators — is the actual playbook for surviving a company that goes wrong.