Coaches tend to focus on a client’s future rather than psychoanalyze the past. They stress a more holistic evaluation of the client’s life than a business consultant might offer. In theory, if they encounter a client with serious mental health problems, they refer the person to a medical professional, but the line between coaching and therapy is not always distinct, and the industry is essentially unregulated. Professional associations like the International Coaching Federation offer accreditation and oversight. But anyone can call herself a life coach and — following the model of yoga studios, which have long drawn significant income from certification courses for new instructors — offer a pricey training program to make you a life coach, too. (Life coaching is like any new, unregulated profession, with its share of peddlers of false promises.)

Over the past generation, life coaching has split into a dozen subdisciplines, almost all of them dominated by women. Women account for 75 percent of coach practitioners in North America, according to a 2019 study by the federation. One reason for the demographic imbalance, Ms. Mook speculated, is that early on, many coaches came from the worlds of counseling, nursing and other caring professions that also employ many women. And as gender disparities in pay and professional advancement persist in many fields, women let down by traditional support systems may find the sustenance they need in a coach. “This may be a way that women are finding support in their lives,” she said. Spiritual coaching seems to feature the starkest gender imbalance of any coaching field.

Typically, spiritual coaches offer a mix of one-on-one counseling and group coaching, as well as certification programs for aspiring coaches. “Some people say, ‘You’re just a coach that coaches coaches,’” Drea Guinto, who runs Soul Flow Co., based in Central California, told me. “My response is, maybe coaching is an emerging trade that is filling a true need in the population, and that is the reason why people are saying, I see there is profitability in this.” She offers a lifetime-access group coaching program for $3,333, aimed at, according to her website, “soul-preneurs” who are “ambitious” yet “also spiritual” and seeking to launch their own businesses. “I see my clients as healers of different modalities, and my premise is that the world needs more healing,” she said.

Spiritual coaches face an extra dose of mistrust because they base their claim to transform lives and careers not just on self-taught psychology and dubious certifications but also on supernatural beliefs and rituals that they swear have worked for them. Coaches I interviewed told me that trusting the universe can replace chemotherapy, that healing prayers drive away chronic bladder infections, that a professional clairvoyant can read a client’s future in the universe’s “nonphysical, vibrational library,” as a recent Goop article put it, of past lives and future events called the Akashic records.

How should a skeptic think about such claims? “It would surely be pedantic and overscrupulous for those who can get their savage and primitive philosophy of mental healing verified in such experimental ways as this, to give them up at a word of command for more scientific therapeutics,” wrote the pragmatist philosopher William James when he considered testimonies of healing through supernatural “mind cure” more than a century ago. “What are we to think of all this? Has science made too wide a claim?” Perhaps such experiences “show the universe to be a more many-sided affair than any sect, even the scientific sect, allows for.”

Attention to unseen forces in the universe — especially the divine feminine — is partly a means for these coaches to counter the machismo that dominates American entrepreneurial culture. Many spiritual coaches target female would-be entrepreneurs with spiritual business accelerator programs that promise to help you find fulfillment while you make money. “Part of it is strategy, but I come more from the point of view of consciousness — what wants to be birthed through me — versus a more capitalistic, masculine approach to business,” Ms. Guinto said. “Of course we love profit, but the point is unleashing that soul purpose.”

In American culture, entrepreneurship is the highest spiritual discipline. A successful start-up requires the self-abnegation that a monastic vocation used to demand: little sleep, coming to terms with your own failure and sacrificing bodily comforts in the service of a higher cause. The gig economy is an ersatz way to open this vocation to lesser souls, but it seems to fail many seekers. Spiritual coaches are responding to this failure. And in a culture where the feeling of truthiness is more important than scientifically verified facts, it’s natural to embrace a mishmash of spiritual healing practices that just feel right.

Article source: https://www.nytimes.com/2022/06/03/opinion/spiritual-coaches-religion.html

“Tis July’s immortal Fourth; all fountains must run wine today!” Melville wrote in 1851, in “Moby-Dick.” “Would now, it were old Orleans whiskey, or old Ohio, or unspeakable old Monongahela!”

Now, after nearly a century in oblivion, Pennsylvania rye is finally making a return — rye whiskey is among the fastest-growing spirits categories in the country.

There is now a Whiskey Rebellion Trail, a consortium of distilleries and historic sites around the Mid-Atlantic. And this fall the spirits giant Beam Suntory will release an Old Monongahela version of Old Overholt, a storied Pennsylvania whiskey brand it acquired in 1987.

Old Overholt is named after Abraham Overholt, whose family founded the huge distillery at Broad Ford but got their start at a site called West Overton, 40 miles south of Pittsburgh. Today, at a museum complex called West Overton Village, Mr. Komlenic, the whiskey expert, is helping build out a display on the history of Pennsylvania whiskey.

West Overton Village is getting into the whiskey business as well: Last year Mr. Komlenic oversaw the release of a very small batch of Old Monongahela, distilled and aged in one of the museum’s buildings. It’s spicy, earthy and herbaceous — a flavor that reflects Pennsylvania’s long distilling past, and possibly its future as well.

If You Go …

Mountain Laurel Spirits 925 Canal Street, Bristol, Pa.; 215-781-8300; dadshatrye.com

New Liberty Distillery 1431 Cadwallader Street, Philadelphia; 267-928-4650; newlibertydistillery.com

Stoll Wolfe Distillery 35 North Cedar Street Rear, Lititz, Pa.; 717-799-4499; stollandwolfe.com

Mingo Creek Craft Distillers 68 West Maiden Street, Washington, Pa.; 724-503-4014; libertypolespirits.com

Wigle Whiskey 2401 Smallman Street, Pittsburgh; 412-224-2827; wiglewhiskey.com

West Overton Village 109 West Overton Road, Scottdale, Pa.; 724-887-7910; westovertonvillage.org

Article source: https://www.nytimes.com/2022/06/02/dining/drinks/rye-whiskey-pennsylvania.html

Ms. Abdul Aziz sought asylum in the United States in 2014, leaving her five children — including Sohil, her youngest, who was 12 — in Afghanistan. In early March, Sohil was granted entry under a U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services program that reunifies families of refugees and asylum seekers. After eight years apart, mother and son embraced in a long hug at the Missoula Montana Airport. United We Eat shared the news in a subsequent newsletter, an effort to deepen customers’ familiarity with Ms. Abdul Aziz and her family.

Most customers recognize familiar chefs’ faces and look forward to specific cuisines. Their sole complaint: The meals sell out too quickly.

Jim Streeter, 72, a retired accounting and finance professional in Missoula, waits at his home computer for the Thursday morning emails. One week in February, even that didn’t work. Mr. Streeter walked downstairs to relay the coming week’s menu to his wife, Sara, but by the time he returned to the computer, it had sold out.

Customers say the meals offer culinary diversity they can’t find elsewhere. The Census Bureau estimated Missoula County’s population to be 91.7 percent white in 2021. If not for the United We Eat program, there would be no place for Missoulians to order Congolese, Pakistani or Guinean food.

Tri Pham, 49, a high school counselor who has ordered from United We Eat nearly every week since last fall, says his wife and daughters look forward to the variety. Slips of paper included with each order explain the dishes, their ingredients and the chef’s background. The biography included with Mrs. AlMasri’s meal mentioned her arrival in Missoula during a record-setting cold snap, and described how eggplants for baba ghanouj are typically roasted over an open flame for a slightly smoky flavor.

“We like exposing our girls to it so they have a broader worldview,” Mr. Pham said, “that it’s not just hamburgers and French fries.”

Article source: https://www.nytimes.com/2022/05/26/dining/missoulas-kitchen-refugees.html

But what’s different now is a collision of troubling economic forces combined with the sense that the start-up world’s frenzied behavior of the last few years is due for a reckoning. A decade-long run of low interest rates that enabled investors to take bigger risks on high-growth start-ups is over. The war in Ukraine is causing unpredictable macroeconomic ripples. Inflation seems unlikely to abate anytime soon. Even the big tech companies are faltering, with shares of Amazon and Netflix falling below their prepandemic levels.

“Of all the times we said it feels like a bubble, I do think this time is a little different,” said Albert Wenger, an investor at Union Square Ventures.

On social media, investors and founders have issued a steady drumbeat of dramatic warnings, comparing negative sentiment to that of the early 2000s dot-com crash and stressing that a pullback is “real.”

Even Bill Gurley, a Silicon Valley venture capital investor who got so tired of warning start-ups about bubbly behavior over the last decade that he gave up, has returned to form. “The ‘unlearning’ process could be painful, surprising and unsettling to many,” he wrote in April.

The uncertainty has caused some venture capital firms to pause deal making. D1 Capital Partners, which participated in roughly 70 start-up deals last year, told founders this year that it had stopped making new investments for six months. The firm said that any deals being announced had been struck before the moratorium, said two people with knowledge of the situation, who declined to be identified because they were not authorized to speak on the record.

Other venture firms have lowered the value of their holdings to match the falling stock market. Sheel Mohnot, an investor at Better Tomorrow Ventures, said his firm had recently reduced the valuations of seven start-ups it invested in out of 88, the most it had ever done in a quarter. The shift was stark compared with just a few months ago, when investors were begging founders to take more money and spend it to grow even faster.

Article source: https://www.nytimes.com/2022/05/11/technology/tech-start-ups.html

Buddy’s Versus the ‘Chads and Brads’

In 2018, Mr. Cantillo started to notice designer pot strains, sold in stylized mylar bags, gaining a kind of cult status in California. “Cannabis culture is very similar to sneaker or streetwear culture, where a certain brand has a lot of clout,” Mr. Cantillo said. So he persuaded Mr. Bronson to buy supply from some of those brands, and he set up an Instagram page to market them. The products sold out immediately. That’s when they adopted the name Buddy’s Bodega, and the business has been growing ever since.

For Buddy’s, a major benefit of legalization is conducting normal business activities — contracting creative agencies, meeting with landlords, licensing specialized software — without hiding what they do.

However, it also comes with complications. States prefer to license businesses that can demonstrate they will succeed, but Buddy’s revenue is off the books, so without an official pardon from the government, it can’t actually show its earnings — or dedicate those earnings toward start-up costs — without raising eyebrows at the Internal Revenue Service. “There’s no statute of limitations on taxes,” said Jason Klimek, a tax lawyer specializing in cannabis at Barclay Damon.

Start-up money is also difficult to come by. Mr. Bronson, who was raised by a single mother, and Mr. Cantillo, whose parents are immigrants, do not have much financial padding to put toward the business. And since marijuana is still illegal on the federal level, most banks won’t give them loans — or even offer them a bank account.

If the Buddy’s owners are granted a license, they will be responsible for filing inventory records, financial statements and corporate documents, like any other licensed business. They will probably need to keep comprehensive records of each plant’s path, from seed to sale. “It’s a whole new world of information you’ve got to navigate,” said Joe Rossi, who leads the cannabis practice at Park Strategies, a lobbying firm that is working pro bono to help Mr. Bronson and Mr. Cantillo apply for a license.

Businesspeople new to the cannabis industry most likely come in with a slew of advantages, including clean cash and clean records — not to mention experience with regulatory frameworks. They are, essentially, starting new companies, just as they would do in any other legal industry.

Article source: https://www.nytimes.com/2022/05/11/nyregion/marijuana-legalization-nyc.html

A Fund-Raising Guru

Still, Mr. Breslow has become something of a legend in the Valley, for his fund-raising prowess and his outspoken behavior. Last summer, he self-published a 58-page book on fund-raising, described on Amazon as an “essential playbook” for start-ups. “Fund-raising is purely a matter of momentum,” he wrote.

Jack Burlinson, an entrepreneur who attended Stanford, said Mr. Breslow counseled him on fund-raising and introduced him to investors. “The fact that I’m tangentially related to him in some way made it easy to raise money,” Mr. Burlinson said.

Mr. Breslow moved back to Florida during the pandemic, where he has been “hacking himself,” Mr. Traina, the early Bolt investor, said. Often photographed in yoga poses, Mr. Breslow — who Forbes reported plays a buffalo-skin drum before bed — told the magazine he wants nothing to do with the “elite circle” of billionaires.

Shortly after Bolt closed its January funding round, Mr. Breslow went on Twitter to accuse Stripe, Y Combinator and top investors of conspiring to lock entrepreneurs like him out of fund-raising. He said venture capitalists would express excitement at his “game-changing” product, only to “mysteriously” back away later.

Then, Mr. Breslow decided to step down as chief executive of Bolt, but remains its executive chairman. Maju Kuruvilla, the former chief operating officer, is now chief executive. Mr. Breslow has co-founded a new company in Miami to let people fund clinical trials, Ms. Neve said.

Some Bolt clients are still trying to figure out the company’s unique proposition.

Chip Overstreet, the chief executive of Spiceology, started using Bolt last year to process the payments at his Spokane, Wash.-based spice company. Mr. Overstreet said he was satisfied with the service but was surprised that he couldn’t process orders that are gifts. Bolt has told him it plans to have the feature available by June, he added.

“They just don’t seem to be very innovative,” Mr. Overstreet said.

Article source: https://www.nytimes.com/2022/05/10/business/bolt-start-up-ryan-breslow-investors.html

“We are very fortunate right now given the situation for many others during the pandemic,” said Mr. McCauley, 36, who works for a data orchestration company. “Somehow we are doing even better financially, and it feels a bit awkward.”

Even for those doing well, the economy feels precarious. The University of Michigan’s venerable Index of Consumer Sentiment fell in March to the same levels as 1979, when the inflation rate was a painful 11 percent, before rising in April.

Politicians are mostly quiet about the boom.

“Republicans are not anxious to give President Biden credit for anything,” said Mr. Baker, the economist. “The Democrats could boast about how many people have gotten jobs, and the strong wage growth at the bottom, but they seem reluctant to do this, knowing that many people are being hit by inflation.”

The initial coronavirus outbreak ended the longest U.S. economic expansion in modern history after 128 months. A dramatic downturn began. The federal government stepped in, generously spreading cash around. Spending habits shifted as people stayed home. The recession ended after two months, and the boom resumed.

Jerome H. Powell, the Federal Reserve chair, recently warned that there were too many employers chasing too few workers, saying the labor market was “tight to an unhealthy level.” But for workers, it’s gratifying to have the upper hand in looking for a new position or career.

“Both my husband and I have been able to make job changes that have doubled our income from five years ago,” said Lindsay Bernhagen, 39, who lives in Stevens Point, Wis., and works for a start-up. “It feels like it has mostly been dumb luck.”

A decade ago, the housing market was in chaos. Between 2007 and 2015, more than seven million homes were lost to foreclosure, according to Black Knight. Some of these were speculative purchases or second homes, but many were primary residences. Egged on by lenders, people lived in houses they could not easily afford.

Article source: https://www.nytimes.com/2022/05/10/business/economy-boom-times.html

Kimbal Musk and Mr. Gracias, who left Tesla’s board last year and serves as a SpaceX director, declined to comment for this article.

Today, Mr. Musk oversees or is associated with at least a dozen companies, including public ones, private ones and holding companies such as Wyoming Steel, which he uses to manage real estate. His net worth stands at about $250 billion.

A Close Circle

As Mr. Musk established more companies, he collected associates he could deploy across many of the endeavors.

One was Mary Beth Brown, who was hired in 2002 to essentially be Mr. Musk’s executive assistant. Known as M.B., she soon became a kind of chief of staff, handling media requests and some financial matters for SpaceX and Tesla, as well as helping to manage Mr. Musk’s personal life, said Ashlee Vance, the author of “Elon Musk: Tesla, SpaceX, and the Quest for a Fantastic Future.”

That same year, Mr. Musk hired Gwynne Shotwell as SpaceX’s seventh employee. As the rocket maker’s president and chief operating officer, Ms. Shotwell has overseen the company’s growth, becoming one of Mr. Musk’s longest-lasting employees.

At a conference in 2018, Ms. Shotwell explained how she managed Mr. Musk.

“When Elon says something, you have to pause and not immediately blurt out, ‘Well, that’s impossible,’ or, ‘There’s no way we’re going to do that. I don’t know how,’” she said. “So you zip it, and you think about it. And you find ways to get that done.”

Article source: https://www.nytimes.com/2022/05/03/technology/elon-musk-twitter-plan.html

Independientemente de sus credenciales en el criptomundo, no hay duda de que Belfort puede hablar sobre el tema del fraude financiero, un gran problema en la industria de los activos digitales. En los años noventa, la empresa que fundó, Stratton Oakmont, operaba un sofisticado esquema de manipulación bursátil. En la cima de su riqueza, tanto él como sus socios consumían enormes cantidades de cocaína y metacualona (cuyo nombre comercial es quaalude), y con frecuencia contrataban prostitutas. Al final, Belfort cumplió una condena de 22 meses en prisión.

Debido a esa historia, puede parecer un poco surrealista escuchar a un Belfort más maduro y canoso proclamar que “espera con gran ansia la regulación” de la criptoindustria. “No me interesa separar a las personas de su dinero”, aseveró. “Es lo contrario a lo que hago en este momento”.

De cualquier forma, el taller sobre criptomonedas en su casa no fue gratuito: los invitados pagaron un bitcóin por tener un lugar, o el equivalente en efectivo, aproximadamente 40.000 dólares.

El taller arrancó a las nueve de la mañana un sábado. Los invitados, seleccionados de entre más de 600 solicitantes, se pasearon por el patio trasero de Belfort mientras comían omelets hechos a la carta e intercambiaban consejos sobre minería de bitcoines y la economía del token. Un minero de criptomonedas de Kazajistán se relajaba bajo el sol con un aspirante a influente en cadenas de bloques que dirige una empresa de revestimientos para techos en Idaho. Un empresario de Florida explicó su plan de utilizar NFT en una empresa emergente que promociona como el Tinder de la música. Algunos de los invitados dijeron que habían pagado el taller porque son grandes aficionados del Lobo; otros sencillamente querían conocer a otros empresarios.

Para las 9:15 a. m., fluían las mimosas, pero de Belfort, ni sus luces. “El dólar estadounidense está frito”, comentó el ejecutivo de revestimientos, Doug Bartlett. Pasaron unos minutos. El Lobo seguía sin aparecer. “¿El Lobo todavía está dormido?”, preguntó uno de los invitados en voz alta.

Article source: https://www.nytimes.com/es/2022/04/25/espanol/lobo-wall-street-belfort.html

Unlike most other companies of the era, he chose to run the software online and sell it as a subscription service, a business model that now dominates enterprise computing.

“He was ahead of his time in thinking about where things are going and what’s going to happen next,” said Mohan Gyani, a longtime Keynote board member and friend.

Mr. Gupta took Keynote public in September 1999. In early 2000, he raised $350 million more in a secondary offering, which helped Keynote ride out the tech bust that soon followed.

In 2013, he sold Keynote for $395 million to the private equity firm Thoma Bravo and retired from business software. But he kept a high profile as a philanthropist and by working with a group that represented alumni of the Indian Institutes of Technology (he had attended the campus in Kanpur), said Kanwal Rekhi, a veteran Silicon Valley tech executive and investor who served on the board of Gupta Technologies.

Members of the I.I.T. group included figures from industry, academia and the investment community who could often strongly disagree with one another on a range of topics, said Gunjan Bagla, the chief executive of the consultancy Amritt, who helped lead the group with Mr. Gupta.

“Umang was an exceptional leader who could bring a group from chaos to calmness,” he said.

Umang Gupta was born on Aug. 3, 1949, in Patiala, in the northern Indian state of Punjab, to Ved Prakash Gupta, who worked at India’s labor ministry, and Ramnika Gupta, a politician. Umang’s parents were socialists from different castes who met at the funeral of Mohandas Gandhi, a departure from a traditional arranged marriage.

The couple later separated, and Umang was raised with the help of grandparents.

He spent four years at a military boarding school and was expected to join the National Defense Academy, a tradition in his mother’s family. Instead, he chose I.I.T. Kanpur, where he earned a bachelor’s degree in chemical engineering in 1971. The campus had some of the first IBM computers in India, and Mr. Gupta gained programming skills there as well.

Article source: https://www.nytimes.com/2022/04/22/technology/umang-gupta-dead.html