Founder-Story

The Pudding There was a time when one dollar was the difference between making it home and not making it home. Not metaphorically. Literally. A gas tank on empty, a checking account with a single dollar in it, and a family that needed to eat that night. The Founder of Liana Banyan — a veteran of no particular note who enlisted at sixteen, served as Infantry then Aviation, and is father of eight — had one dollar in his USAA checking account. And with that one dollar, he could fill up the gas tank. ...

The Pudding Before the platform, before the patents, before any of it — there was a kid in a college library with a stack of books that nobody else wanted to read. He was a freshman. He worked as a student librarian, which mostly meant shelving books and keeping quiet. But the job came with a perk that nobody advertised: access. Not just to the regular collection — to the old collection. The shelves in the back. The ones with books from the 1800s and early 1900s that hadn’t been checked out in decades. Books that smelled like dust and binding glue. Books that existed because nobody had gotten around to removing them. ...

Why Do The Swoop Exists The stories behind Initiative #17 — documented for posterity. The Facebook Friend I was Facebook friends with a woman who had cancer, and would post about it every week in vain attempt to stave off the long-term effects she knew it was going to have on her family. She wrote about how she felt about her children under ten and her husband, and the decisions they had to make about whether to try to save her by taking on lifelong debt that would outlast her by 50 years if it didn’t work. ...