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I quit my corporate job at 25 to sell pizza with a friend. Now we have 9 locations.

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This as-told-to essay is based on a conversation with Chris Brady, founder and president of Timber Pizza Co. It has been edited for length and clarity.

By the time I started my second job in tech sales in my early 20s, I knew I had no desire to keep working in the corporate world and wanted to do something on my own. My coworker Andrew Dana also felt the same way, so we’d brainstorm different business ideas over lunch.

I had a lightbulb moment while talking to a potential client. I was selling catering and wedding venue advertising and called on a pizza company. The owner started telling me more about his mobile wood-fired pizza business. I called Andrew immediately, and he agreed it was a great idea worth pursuing. Now, Timber Pizza Co. has nine locations and five mobile pizza units.

We started our business with $20,000 and a lot of optimism

I was 25 when I left my corporate sales job to start Timber Pizza, so I didn’t have a lot of capital to work with. My dad lent me $15,000 to get started, and I remember walking a $5,000 check of my own money to the bank. But the beauty of a mobile business is that you don’t need much to get off the ground and can rely on scrappiness.

Without the stress of running a brick-and-mortar business, I knew we could experiment without taking a big swing. The worst thing that would have happened is that I would have had to move back with my parents and get another sales job if it didn’t work out.

Andrew and I both loved pizza, but didn’t have much background in the restaurant world. We went to a pizza camp in Colorado for a weekend to buy our first oven and learn the basics of making pizza, and then came up with our recipe after a lot of trial and error.


Blue truck

Courtesy of Chris Brady



We started driving our 1967 baby-blue Chevy pickup truck, with our oven hitched behind, all around Washington, DC. Our goal was to make pizza people loved, not to take ourselves too seriously. We would ride around in basketball shorts blasting hip-hop music, just trying to have a good time. That definitely made us stand out.

After a year, we opened our first brick-and-mortar

Our first retail location opened in 2016 in DC’s Petworth neighborhood. Baby Blue still exists, but it’s definitely the show pony now, not the workhorse. The business was doing really well, and then in 2017, Bon Appétit recognized us as their “Pizzeria of the Year.” We also got our first Bib Gourmand from the Michelin Guide in 2019.

It felt like we were really hitting our stride and had the business where we wanted to be, but then COVID happened. So in 2021, we decided to bring on some new partners to the business and some capital to help stabilize things. It’s also when we started our franchising journey.

It felt like I was in startup mode again

We had been doing business one way for seven years, but now our goal was to bring Timber with great people to great communities. I really had to rewire my brain to go from how we had done business for the first seven years to how we were going to expand.


Men standing next to blue truck

Courtesy of Chris Brady



Since 2021, we’ve grown to nine locations across the South. The goal is to find our groove, opening between five and eight locations a year over the next three to five years and then continuing to scale after that. We’re looking at markets like Atlanta, Savannah, Greenville, South Carolina, and Wilmington, North Carolina.

There were a lot of days in the first few years with some soul-crushing moments and tough times, especially when we looked at our bank account, but I’m really glad we stuck with it.




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Washington Post union calls for Jeff Bezos to sell the paper after CEO resigns

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Tom Williams/CQ-Roll Call, Inc via Getty Images

  • The Washington Post’s CEO, Will Lewis, departed the paper on Saturday following sweeping layoffs.
  • The Post’s union, in a statement, called Lewis’ exit “overdue.”
  • The union also called for Jeff Bezos, who owns The Post, to sell the publication.

Unionized staffers from The Washington Post issued a statement supporting the abrupt Saturday departure of the publication’s CEO, Will Lewis, and called for Jeff Bezos to sell the paper.

“Will Lewis’s exit is long overdue,” the Washington Post Guild’s statement, which was published on X, read. “His legacy will be the attempted destruction of a great American journalism institution. But it’s not too late to save The Post. Jeff Bezos must immediately rescind these layoffs or sell the paper to someone willing to invest in its future.”

Representatives for the Post union did not immediately respond to a request for comment from Business Insider.

On social media, laid-off reporters celebrated the news of Lewis’ departure. Jada Yuan, a former culture writer at the Post, wrote that she had “never been more thrilled with a news alert.”

“Will Lewis, the absent, ineffective publisher of @washingtonpost has resigned. Or been fired,” she added. “It sucks that it happened after he couldn’t even show up on zoom to lay off 1/3 of the company. But the important thing is he’s gone.”

Lewis’ exit was announced Saturday afternoon, just days after sweeping layoffs hit the legacy publication, leaving hundreds of reporters out of work.

The publication’s unionized employees held a “Save the Post” rally earlier this week, focused on Bezos and Lewis, and said there were risks to press freedom and independent news if legacy publications like the Post are unable to continue operating.




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kelly burch

My rare plants sell for five figures. The business helps me support my extended family, but I work about 100 hours a week.

by with No Comment Xpandfy

This as-told-to essay is based on a conversation with Harry Luu, owner of PlantZaddyTherapy. It has been edited for length and clarity.

I’ve always been a gardener and enjoyed being around plants. While I was in graduate school studying math, my collection of houseplants grew. There’s an attention to detail and a hyperfocus that I found in both mathematics and plants, so my hobby complemented my academic career.

During the pandemic, my interest in rare plants blew up. I started getting a bigger collection and trading up for more valuable plants.

Eventually, my hobby transformed into a business. I finished my graduate degree and started teaching math in California, but three years ago, I left academia to sell plants full-time.

My academic career was a safety net for my family of 8

I grew up in Vietnam, and I’m the embodiment of the American dream for my family. They put all their eggs in my basket, which allowed me to come to America and study. Now, I feel it’s fair to return their investment. I support not only myself and my husband, but also my parents, my brother, my sister-in-law, my niece, and my nephew.

Leaving my job while supporting a family of eight in California might seem risky, but it was calculated. I had reached the point where I saw the potential for financial freedom from investments I had made during grad school that had very good returns. I had years of data on plant sales, and also knew I could return to academia if needed, so I had a safety net.

I price based on rarity and desirability, without going too high

I was already connected to the rare plant community, so selling increasingly expensive plants felt like a natural progression. I grew my platform on Palmstreet, an online marketplace.

This year, I had two record-breaking sales in one day. I sold a $16,000 plant (an Anthurium Variegated Forgetii x Heinz, one of only two in the world), then a $26,000 plant (the only specimen of the True Variegated Lux Albo Mother Plant).


Man holding rare plant

A $16,000 plant sold on Palmstreet by Harry Luu

Courtesy of Palmstreet



I’m a math person, so I use a formula to price. I calculate rarity and desirability and compare them with price data from the previous three years. These plants were both very rare and highly desirable, which drove prices up. However, I didn’t want to price them too high, because I’m thinking about the long-term viability for my brand: people have to be able to purchase what I’m selling. Given how rare the plants were, their five-figure prices weren’t too big a splash.

I want to be able to connect with the community more

Despite those big numbers, the business’s income fluctuates dramatically. My best single week was over $200,000 in sales, but other weeks I might have no sales. The market is seasonal, and winter is slow. I’ve had to adapt to not having a steady, reliable income.

The money comes and goes, but the work never stops. Right now, I spend about 100 hours a week on the business. We have plants in our home, and also a large greenhouse on our property. My brother does some of the maintenance care for the plants, but all the breeding decisions are made by me.

I’m on the cusp of the company being able to sustain itself without me working so much. I look forward to that — when I can step back from the business side and focus more on the joy of growing. I would like to share my knowledge about rare plants and take the plants on the road to connect with my community more, since that’s what got me hooked on growing in the first place.




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Bessent: Private equity firms won’t have to sell single-family home rentals

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Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent said that President Donald Trump’s proposal to keep Wall Street players from buying single-family homes would not force them to sell their current holdings.

“These big institutions buy housing, then rent them out, and they’re able to depreciate it. They hide their earnings, pay lower taxes,” he said on Thursday at the Economic Club of Minnesota.

“The idea here is bygones are bygones,” Bessent added. “We’re not going to have a forced sale here.”

On Wednesday, Trump said he would ban institutional investors from purchasing single-family homes in an effort to make housing more affordable for Americans. Single-family homes refer to standalone residential buildings with their own entrance designed for one household.

“For a very long time, buying and owning a home was considered the pinnacle of the American Dream,” Trump wrote on a Truth Social post. “That American dream is increasingly out of reach for far too many people, especially younger Americans.”

Shares of asset manager Blackstone fell 5.6% on Wednesday after Trump’s post. Blackstone, which manages $1 trillion in assets, oversees one of the largest rental housing portfolios in the US, with several hundred thousand single-family homes and apartments. Other stocks similarly fell.

Critics say firms like New York-based Blackstone put pressure on the housing market, reducing the availability of homes and driving prices up. Blackstone closed 1.1% higher at the end of the trading day on Thursday.

The institutional players, meanwhile, say lack of housing supply — not big-business ownership — is pushing prices up.

In Minnesota on Thursday, Bessent said that the administration has not decided on the “exact contours” of this new proposal.

“We want to keep the traditional mom and pop owners in. We want to keep families who rent out to their other family members,” he said.

Bessent said that this practice of large firms buying up single-family homes started during the 2008 financial crisis, when private equity companies were among the few parties with the money to buy these homes.

“They hoovered up the single-family housing stock,” he said.

The US Government Accountability Office found that in 2022, the five largest institutional investors owned nearly 2% of single-family rental homes.




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Trump gives Nvidia the green light to sell its H200 chips in China

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Nvidia just scored a win from President Donald Trump.

In a post on Truth Social on Monday, Trump said he told Chinese leader Xi Jinping that the US would allow Nvidia to sell its H200 chips to “approved customers” in China.

“This policy will support American Jobs, strengthen US Manufacturing, and benefit American Taxpayers,” Trump said in the post.

Trump said, “$25% will be paid to the United States of America.” He has previously proposed having the US take a cut of chip sales to China.

Nvidia’s stock was up in after-hours trading following Trump’s announcement.

“We applaud President Trump’s decision to allow America’s chip industry to compete to support high paying jobs and manufacturing in America,” a spokesperson for Nvidia said in a statement to Business Insider. “Offering H200 to approved commercial customers, vetted by the Department of Commerce, strikes a thoughtful balance that is great for America.”

Nvidia’s powerful H200 chips have been in high demand as AI models become more powerful.

While Nvidia was already able to sell some of its other chips to China, the US government has limited its ability to sell some powerful chips due to national security concerns. Sales of its H20 chips to China during Q3 were “insignificant,” CFO Colette Kress said on its latest earnings call.

“While we were disappointed in the current state that prevents us from shipping more competitive data center compute products to China, we are committed to continued engagement with the US and China governments and will continue to advocate for America’s ability to compete around the world,” Kress said during the Q3 earnings call.

Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang met with Trump last week to discuss export controls on chips.

“I’ve said repeatedly that we support export control, that we should ensure that American companies have the best and the most and first,” Huang told reporters last week.

Nvidia stock was up roughly 2% after hours.




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