The Unmapped Project

Sign in Subscribe

Unmapped Founders

Unmapped Founders

Founders who went off the map and made their own route. Risk takers, adrenaline junkies, paragliders, entrepreneurs.

Boaz Santiago, founder of Artifact, hanging out at The Good Life incubator in Alachua, Fla.

Building a more inclusive future for startups

“Everything starts with story,” Santiago says. “Your greatest asset is not AI. It’s not Claude code. It’s your story.” For entrepreneurs trying to build companies in the middle of an AI boom, that remains his clearest advice.

Be so damn good they can’t ignore you

Be so damn good they can’t ignore you

She is a woman in sports and media and branding, which means she has spent plenty of time in rooms where a man doing the exact same things would be called driven while she gets called “too much, too loud, too aggressive, too confident.”

The Shoe Dogs

The Shoe Dogs

Some founders arrive with pitch decks and market analysis. Tammy and Ludo arrived with a camper van, a few decades in the footwear business, and the suspicion that the industry had drifted too far into disposable fashion.

Starr Hall never learned to sit still

Starr Hall never learned to sit still

Starr Hall has this formula and it repeats like clockwork: She builds things. She makes a shit ton of money. She exits. She gets bored. She moves on. “I know after two years, I’m out,” she says. “I’ve done what I can do. I need something new.”

Wing Lam hanging out in San Clemente. Doing what he does best, spreading love, peace, and tacos.

Living the Wahoo Way

Before Wahoo’s Fish Taco became a global brand, Wing Lam was handing out tacos to starving surfers in Costa Mesa parking lots.

Barbara Brooks, founder of SecondActWomen in her Cherry Creek office. To women over 40, she has this to say, “We’re not done,” she said. “We’re just getting started.”

Barbara Brooks is not invisible

Up until that point, she hadn’t thought much about her age. It wasn’t part of how she moved through the world or how she understood her value. But as the rejections accumulated, it became clear that it was part of someone else’s calculation she could no longer control.

The Sparrow in the Razor Wire

The Sparrow in the Razor Wire

Inside prison he devoured books on entrepreneurship, spirituality, mindfulness, and personal development. One idea kept circling in his mind. What if prison was not the end of his life? “I asked myself why do I have to view prison as punishment. Why can’t this be a place where I remake myself.”