We Speak Entrepreneurs

Ben Francis Sewed Gymshark’s First Shirts at 19. The Brand Just Opened Its First American Flagship in New York

Published

3 days ago

November 12, 2026

Ben Francis, founder and CEO of Gymshark. Photo by Ben Francis, CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons.

Ben Francis was a 19 year old university student delivering pizzas when he started sewing fitness clothing with a machine in his family’s garage in Birmingham, England. Thirteen years later, the company he founded posted £646 million in sales, and in December 2025 it opened a 13,000 square foot flagship store on Bond Street in New York City, its largest retail investment outside the United Kingdom.

Gymshark’s fiscal 2025 results, filed at Companies House for the year ending July 31, 2025, showed sales up 6.4% to £646 million, a thirteenth consecutive year of growth. Profits dipped to £7 million before tax, a figure Francis framed openly as the cost of building: money pushed into stores and community rather than taken out. In his summary of the year he said: “We are really investing in the long-term of our brand, and we’ve opened stores in Dubai, Manchester, Amsterdam, Long Island in the U.S., and, most recently, our first U.S. flagship store in New York.”

The United States is Gymshark’s largest market, and 2025 was the year the online brand planted its flag in it. The first U.S. store opened at Roosevelt Field on Long Island in October 2025, Dick’s Sporting Goods became the brand’s first American wholesale partner the same month, and the New York flagship followed on December 13, 2025, with a full floor dedicated to panels, meet and greets and live podcasts. It is retail designed as a community room, the physical version of the influencer and customer community Gymshark was built on from the start.

Francis still runs the company he founded as its chief executive, and the brand he started at a sewing machine now employs more than 900 people and ships to over 130 countries. The next project he teased in his year end message is a first ever public Gymshark gym, set for Miami.

We Speak Entrepreneurs

Lucy Guo Left Scale AI in 2018 and Kept Her Shares. At 30 She Became the Youngest Self Made Woman Billionaire While Building Passes

Published

3 days ago

November 12, 2026

We Speak Media

Lucy Guo, co-founder of Scale AI and founder and CEO of Passes. Photo by KBDBK, CC0, via Wikimedia Commons.

The most valuable decision of Lucy Guo’s career was the one she made on her way out the door. When she left Scale AI in 2018, two years after co-founding it, she kept her stake. In April 2025 Forbes named her the youngest self made woman billionaire in the world, and she earned the title while running a completely different company.

Guo, a self taught coder who dropped out of Carnegie Mellon on a Thiel Fellowship, co-founded Scale AI in 2016 at 21 with Alexandr Wang, who was 19. She ran operations and product design before leaving in 2018, holding on to just under 5% of the company. As Scale’s value climbed, a 2025 tender offer at a $25 billion valuation, followed by Meta’s June 2025 investment at more than $29 billion, that stake carried her net worth to an estimated $1.25 billion at age 30, passing the mark Taylor Swift had set. Forbes counted her among just six self made women billionaires on the planet under 40.

Her working days, though, belong to her second company. Guo founded Passes in 2022, a Los Angeles based platform that lets creators sell subscriptions, chats and content directly to fans in a brand safe setting. Passes has raised about $50 million across three rounds from investors including Bond Capital and Menlo Ventures, at a reported $150 million valuation, and has signed names including gymnast Olivia Dunne and Shaquille O’Neal.

The pairing is the story business students will study. One founder, two companies: the first made her rich because she kept ownership even after she left the building, and the second is the one she is still in the building for, building the creator economy platform she wants to run for the long term.