top of page
KNOX
September 2026
A journal for the new era of entrepreneurship
FOUNDERS BUSINESS CULTURE TECHNOLOGY
COVER STORY
The New Entrepreneur
She’s building leaner. Moving faster. Thinking differently.
Featured Stories
Curated stories and insights for founders and leaders shaping the future
What Blockbuster Got Right and What It Got Wrong
Blockbuster did not fail because it knew nothing about its customer. For years, it understood her extraordinarily well. The real problem was recognizing when the thing customers valued had changed. It is easy to tell the Blockbuster story as a cautionary tale about a company that ignored technology. Blockbuster had stores, Netflix had the internet, and one company failed to change while the other replaced it. It is a satisfying version of the story because it is simple. It is
What Happens When the Screen Disappears?
Snap is betting that the next era of computing will not live in our hands. It will live in the world around us. For almost twenty years, the smartphone has quietly organized modern life. We work through it, shop through it, navigate through it, photograph our lives through it, communicate through it and increasingly access artificial intelligence through it. Entire industries have been built around one fundamental behavior: looking down at a screen. Snap is betting that behav
Inside One of the World's Most Interesting Business Experiments: The Question That Helped Costco Build One of the World's Most Admired Companies
Every extraordinary business begins with a question, but the questions that change industries are rarely the loudest. More often, they quietly challenge an assumption that everyone else has accepted. For decades, retail operated on a straightforward idea: buy products from suppliers, add a markup, and earn a profit every time a customer made a purchase. The more efficiently a retailer managed that equation, the more successful it could become. It was a model so deeply embedde
Why Has 3M Lasted for More Than 120 Years?
Every entrepreneur wants to build something that lasts. Most businesses don't. Companies are founded every day with ambitious goals, innovative products, and talented teams, yet many disappear within a decade. Then there are companies like 3M that continue to evolve after more than 120 years. Most people assume the answer is innovation. Innovation certainly matters, but I don't think it's the most interesting part of the story. Thousands of companies have been innovative. Ver
Cover Story
THE NEW ENTREPRENEUR
She’s building leaner. Moving faster. Thinking differently. There is an old instinct in business that says serious companies should look finished. They should have the plan, the structure, the departments, the strategy deck, the five-year forecast and a polished answer to the question, Where is this going? The new entrepreneur is becoming increasingly comfortable with a different kind of certainty. She may not know exactly where the company will be five years from now, but sh
Founder Profiles
Thoughtful guidance for the decisions that shape what comes next.
A New Era of Entrepreneurship is Here
Bobbie Knox Is Building for the Era That Comes Next Founder, publisher, strategist and builder Bobbie Knox is not trying to predict the future of entrepreneurship. She is creating a business designed to live inside it. There is a particular kind of tension that comes with building a company right now. Technology is accelerating. Entire industries are being reshaped. The cost of starting a business has fallen, while the pressure to stand out has risen. Founders have more tools
Expert Advice
Thoughtful guidance for the decisions that shape what comes next.
Stop Trying to Be for Everyone
The businesses people remember are usually the ones willing to be specific. One of the easiest ways to weaken a business is to keep expanding who it is for. A customer asks for something slightly different, so you add it. A new opportunity appears, so you adjust the offer. Someone tells you the positioning feels too narrow, so you broaden it. None of those decisions seems especially risky on its own. But over time, the business can become harder to understand. The instinct is
What Needs to Work Before I Try to Scale?
Scaling is exciting because it sounds like progress: more customers, more revenue, a larger team and a bigger platform. But scale is not the stage where you discover whether the business works. It is what you pursue after you have evidence that it does. When you scale too early, you do not leave the problems behind. You give them more customers, more money and more places to hide. Before expanding, five things need to work. The Demand People must want what you are selling, no
How Do I Continue When the Original Goal No Longer Fits?
There is a particular kind of frustration that comes from looking at a goal you once felt certain about and realizing you no longer want it in the same way. Maybe you wrote it down at the beginning of the year. You built a plan around it, told people about it and organized your time as if reaching it were only a matter of discipline. But somewhere along the way, something changed. The opportunity does not feel as meaningful. The business model no longer makes sense. The life
bottom of page