Forbes Daily Briefing

Forbes

The Forbes Daily Briefing shares the best of Forbes reporting on wealth, business, entrepreneurship, leadership and more. Tune in every day, seven days a week, to hear a new story. The Daily Briefing is edited, produced and hosted by Kieran Meadows.

  1. This Family Made An $18 Billion Fortune Selling Fast Drying Concrete

    5 HR AGO

    This Family Made An $18 Billion Fortune Selling Fast Drying Concrete

    For decades, DIYers and construction pros have picked up yellow and red bags of Quikrete concrete mix from the shelves of America’s big box stores like Home Depot and used it for everything from anchoring mailboxes to patching driveways and making outdoor benches and steps. That in turn has generated billions of dollars for the little-known company and the little-known family behind the brand.  But their time in the shadows may have come to an end. In February 2025, the privately-held building materials firm made a big splash when it paid $11.5 billion to acquire publicly traded competitor Summit Materials. The deal, which Forbes estimates boosted Quikrete’s revenue by around 50% to an estimated $12 billion, helped propel the Atlanta-based company onto Forbes’ first ever ranking of America’s Largest Family Businesses, published this week, at No. 43. Based on Forbes’ estimates, Quikrete is the 17th most valuable privately-held family business in America, making its founding Winchester family one of the country’s richest clans, worth an estimated $18 billion, thanks to their estimated 100% ownership of Quikrete. “We’re proud of our heritage as an American, family-run company that has helped revolutionize the building and home improvement industries,” said Quikrete’s longtime former CEO Jim Winchester in a press release celebrating the company’s 75th anniversary in 2015. “From day one, my father Gene Winchester was driven to meet the needs of both contractors and homeowners with the highest-quality products at fair market value, and that commitment remains a core value of Quikrete today.” By Matt Durot, Forbes Staff Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

    7 min
  2. Meet The Former Burmese Refugee Vying To Be The U.S. Military’s Go-To Drone Guy

    1 DAY AGO

    Meet The Former Burmese Refugee Vying To Be The U.S. Military’s Go-To Drone Guy

    Onan overcast April day in the middle of Rhode Island’s Narragansett Bay, Paul Lwin looks like he’s playing a vintage video game. He huddles over a laptop on the deck of the spartan vessel he’s taking out on the water today. Tiny boat icons float across the screen; he draws a box around them, selects a few parameters, and clicks “Start Play.” Seconds later, a set of driverless boats in the bay a mile away begin gliding in parallel with the icons, which leave bright blue tracks on the screen in their wake. Lwin flashes an enormous grin. Each of those autonomous crafts is a “Rampage,” the 14-foot flagship boat of Lwin’s Providence-based company, Havoc, which outfits its vessels with technology that theoretically lets a single human control thousands at once. Lwin, 40, and his cofounder Joe Turner, 42, both Navy vets, aim to become the U.S. military’s go-to maker of specialized software for not just uncrewed boats, but all domains, after recently acquiring a couple of small aerial and land drone startups as well. “The goal here is to make sure you don’t need to know anything about robotics or autonomy,” Lwin explains, showing the steps again on the laptop. “If it’s not this simple, it’s a science experiment. Operators—especially warfighters who don’t have PhDs in robotics, who don’t have PhDs in search algorithms—will never use it if it’s more difficult than this.” By Monica Hunter-Hart, Reporter Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

    7 min
  3. Transport Secretary Sean Duffy Took A Corporate-Sponsored Family Road Trip.

    2 DAYS AGO

    Transport Secretary Sean Duffy Took A Corporate-Sponsored Family Road Trip.

    From dinner at the White House for owners of his meme coin to a $400 million jet gifted by a petromonarchy that will be donated to his presidential library after he leaves office, Donald Trump has led the charge on extracting private gains from public office. His Cabinet appears to have absorbed the lesson. Take Sean Duffy, the former Fox host-turned-Secretary of Transportation. On Friday, his department dropped a trailer on YouTube unveiling the Great American Road Trip, an initiative purportedly designed as a “guide to the historic landmarks, open roads, and small towns that tell 250 years of this country’s story.”  But what the trailer showed was a reality show in which Duffy, his still-a-Fox-host wife Rachel Campos-Duffy and their nine children gallivant around America. They meet a Ben Franklin impersonator in Philadelphia, ride snowmobiles in Montana and hang out with Kid Rock along the way.  All in good fun. “We live in a PornHub world, and this is really good, wholesome family stuff,” Campos-Duffy said in an interview on—where else?—Fox. By Kyle Khan-Mullins, Forbes Staff Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

    7 min
  4. The Payday From These 3 Companies Would Outstrip A Decade Of VC Returns

    3 DAYS AGO

    The Payday From These 3 Companies Would Outstrip A Decade Of VC Returns

    When ride-hailing app Uber listed on the New York Stock Exchange in May 2019, it reset the scales for all venture capitalists. In one of the all-time largest initial public offerings in the United States, the company raised $8.1 billion on a $82 billion valuation.  Early backers like venture fund Benchmark, Google Ventures and Lowercase Capital held stakes worth over $12 billion at the time of the float. But the numbers for that deal — one of the best of the last era of startups — now look quaint.  That’s because the valuation of just three startups, SpaceX, OpenAI and Anthropic, have exploded over the last year. Elon’s space giant is now tipped to go public at a valuation of over $1.5 trillion as soon as June following its merger with xAI in February, which valued the combined business at $1.25 trillion. OpenAI and Anthropic are now valued at $852 billion and $380 billion respectively, with Anthropic reportedly in talks to at least match its archrival’s valuation in a new fundraise. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

    7 min
  5. This $1.3 Billion Startup Records Employees’ Work To Train AI

    4 DAYS AGO

    This $1.3 Billion Startup Records Employees’ Work To Train AI

    Every company these days wants to figure out how to automate people’s work with AI. Turns out, AI can also help with that. Founded in 2019, San Francisco- based startup Scribe makes a browser extension that sits on employees’ laptops, recording their screens and silently watching them work. Along with giving businesses insight into the steps involved in repetitive tasks, Scribe’s AI software can then automatically generate step-by-step guides and tutorials that clearly explain how different teams operate, complete with annotated screenshots and click instructions.  That’s also perfect for teaching AI agents how people work: what to do, which tools to use and how to handle different tasks on their own. “Companies are realizing we need to make our organizations legible to humans and agents,” says CEO and cofounder Jennifer Smith.  Today 80,000 customers including LinkedIn, HubSpot and T-Mobile use Scribe’s guides to train new employees on complex workflows and zero-in on inefficiencies, helping them save time and money. (Teaching agents, rather than humans, is still nascent.) By Rashi Shrivastava, Writer Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

    7 min
  6. This Serial Entrepreneur Wants The FDA To Approve His AI Doctor

    5 DAYS AGO

    This Serial Entrepreneur Wants The FDA To Approve His AI Doctor

    Martin Varsavsky has trouble keeping track of all the ventures he’s started. There are more than a dozen of them, including a handful that became worth more than $1 billion. But Certuma, which launched quietly this winter, may be his biggest idea yet: He plans to build the first FDA-approved AI doctor. “What’s happening now is everyone you know, and probably you yourself, are checking your medical problems with AI. But then what happens when you want action? The AI, after giving you a wonderful, accurate diagnosis of what’s wrong with you, says, ‘I am not a doctor,’” Varsavsky tells Forbes. He ticks off all the questions it might answer this way, from getting a prescription to scheduling imaging. “I want to fix the ‘I am not a doctor’ problem by building AI that is recognized by the FDA and recognized by the states.” AI doctors could help solve an important problem, much like telemedicine did during the Covid-19 pandemic. There simply aren’t enough physicians to serve all the people who need them, especially in rural areas. The shortage is only getting worse. More than 100 million people in the United States face barriers to accessing primary care.Meanwhile, some 46% of counties don’t have a cardiologist; in rural counties, that number rises to 86%. By Amy Feldman, Senior Editor Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

    7 min
  7. Sometimes You Don’t Want A GPU: Groq Cofounder Explains Whirlwind Deal With Nvidia

    6 DAYS AGO

    Sometimes You Don’t Want A GPU: Groq Cofounder Explains Whirlwind Deal With Nvidia

    Last winter, Groq cofounder and CEO Jonathan Ross walked into a meeting with Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang with a pitch for the companies’ tech to work together. He now describes the synergy with a logistics analogy: stop building AI data centers as if every workload wants the same hardware. Training is bulk hauling; inference is last-mile delivery. GPUs can do both, but using the 18-wheeler even when you just need a van can be a lot slower. So: Nvidia’s general-purpose GPUs are the big trucks. Groq’s specialized chips—LPUs, or language processing units, designed to run models fast—are the smaller vans. “If you were building out a logistics network for the entire United States, and I told you your two options were all 18-wheelers or just delivery vans, which one would you pick?” Ross said. “The best answer is both.”  Ross wasn’t just pitching a worldview. He wanted Nvidia’s permission to buy around 100,000 Blackwell chips, likely worth billions. Huang grilled him on the technical details, and then the meeting ended.  When Huang called back three days later, Ross expected a discussion about his GPU purchase order. Instead, the Nvidia CEO cut to the chase. “We should probably move really fast,” Ross recalled him saying. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

    7 min
  8. Why An Unsustainable Bubble Is Growing Inside Fintech

    13 MAY

    Why An Unsustainable Bubble Is Growing Inside Fintech

    The financial technology industry has become a world of haves and have-nots. Take San Francisco payments company Stripe, which helps millions of merchants accept credit cards, process stablecoin transactions and manage billing tasks. In 2025, it brought in $6.9 billion of net revenue and $1.2 billion of earnings before factoring in interest, tax, depreciation and amortization expenses, according to a person familiar with its finances. Revenues were up more than 30% from 2024. That’s world-class scale and growth, but its recent valuation of $159 billion, which has afforded each of the Collison brothers a $17.5 billion fortune, means its private backers think it’s worth nearly five times Adyen, a Dutch fintech and close competitor. Unlike Stripe, Adyen is publicly traded. It processed $1.6 trillion in payments last year compared with Stripe’s $1.9 trillion. Stripe loyalists will point out that it has more business lines than Adyen and is growing faster off of a larger base. But the chances that Stripe could maintain a $159 billion valuation if it went public today are slim. Public investors value e-commerce platform Shopify at $165 billion, and it grew nearly as fast as Stripe last year and had more than double the profits. A Stripe spokesperson declined to comment. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

    6 min
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About

The Forbes Daily Briefing shares the best of Forbes reporting on wealth, business, entrepreneurship, leadership and more. Tune in every day, seven days a week, to hear a new story. The Daily Briefing is edited, produced and hosted by Kieran Meadows.

Information

  • Creator
    Forbes
  • Years Active
    2022 - 2026
  • Episodes
    13
  • Rating
    Clean
  • Copyright
    © Forbes Media LLC

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