The Five Stages of Entrepreneurship, Tested by the Headlines

A class at the International Community School of Bangkok recently taught its listeners that every business follows the same five-step arc: discover a problem, plan around it, gather resources, launch, and finally harvest (sell the company, expand it, or simply enjoy the profits). It's the kind of clean framework that shows up in business-school slide decks everywhere. The seven real founders the show picked to illustrate it, though, have spent the time since proving that harvest rarely looks as tidy as the fifth box on a chart.

A Model Built Around a Fictional Snack Company

On the segment, ICS Bangkok students Mia and Frank walked through the five stages using a hypothetical business called Snack Buddy, a subscription meal service for busy parents. Discovery meant spotting a problem (parents struggling to find healthy, affordable after-school meals) and framing it as a formula: idea equals problem, plus solution, plus business model. Planning turned that idea into a strategy for market, cost, and pricing. Resourcing covered funding, hiring, and supplier partnerships, with a warning that this is where an entrepreneur's personal risk starts to compound. Launch meant opening the doors and fixing what breaks. Harvest, the final stage, meant a stable business generating steady revenue that the founder could expand, sell, or step back from.

It's a reasonable teaching model, borrowed from lifecycle diagrams entrepreneurship courses use worldwide. But models simplify by design, and the show's own choice of real examples tested that simplification almost immediately.

Binance's Founder Went From a Federal Prison to a Presidential Pardon

The most dramatic case is Changpeng Zhao, the Binance co-founder the show described as having "12 billion USD" in crypto holdings despite a criminal record. That record was real: Zhao pleaded guilty in 2023 to failing to maintain an effective anti-money-laundering program at Binance, part of a $4.3 billion settlement the exchange reached with the U.S. Department of Justice, and told the sentencing judge in a letter, "Rest assured that it will never happen again." He was sentenced in April 2024 to four months in federal prison, far short of the 36 months prosecutors had sought, and was released from a California facility in September 2024, according to Bloomberg.

That's where the ICS Bangkok segment left his story, but it didn't end there. On October 23, 2025, President Trump pardoned Zhao outright, according to CNN and CNBC, which White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt framed as correcting a prosecution from "the Biden Administration in their war on cryptocurrency." Critics pointed to the timing: Binance had by then become the exchange hosting the Trump family's own crypto venture, and Senator Elizabeth Warren called the pardon an act of "corruption," saying Zhao had "boosted one of Donald Trump's crypto ventures and lobbied for a pardon." Weeks later, Trump told 60 Minutes he had "no idea who" Zhao was. Whatever the politics, the arc matches nothing in the classroom's harvest stage: neither an exit nor an expansion, just an unresolved legal chapter still generating headlines.

The Body Shop Nearly Didn't Survive Its Founder's Legacy

Anita Roddick, the British founder the show quoted as saying "business shapes the world" and can be "a driving force for societal change," built The Body Shop into a global ethical-cosmetics brand before her death in 2007. The company the podcast described as merely "owned by Natura" had, by the time of recording, already been sold again, and had nearly collapsed. The Body Shop's UK arm fell into administration in February 2024 under then-owner Aurelius, weighed down by more than £276 million in debt after a £71 million annual loss, putting roughly 2,000 jobs at risk and forcing the closure of its U.S. operations entirely, according to Retail Dive and Cosmetics Business. From a peak of more than 3,000 stores worldwide, only 113 UK outlets survived the restructuring.

The revival came fast: in September 2024, a consortium led by Mike Jatania's Aurea Group acquired the brand's assets, and by December, the relaunched Body Shop was reporting a £2 million profit. Roddick's ethical branding survived; the corporate entity behind it did not. It's a harvest stage that ran through bankruptcy court on the way to a much smaller company bearing the same name.

Chobani's Founder Skipped the IPO for Something Bigger

Hamdi Ulukaya's story tracks closer to the textbook version, though the numbers have gotten stranger. The Kurdish-Turkish immigrant the show described as buying "an old yogurt plant in upstate New York in 2005" built Chobani into a Greek yogurt giant; the show cited its 2023 sales figure of more than $2 billion. Chobani filed IPO paperwork in 2021, then shelved those plans in 2022 as public markets cooled. Rather than revive the offering, Ulukaya raised $650 million in October 2025 at a private valuation of $20 billion, according to Forbes and Bloomberg, a figure Bloomberg described as "tech-like" for a yogurt company, and one that pushed Ulukaya's personal net worth past $11 billion. Chobani stayed the top-selling U.S. yogurt brand in 2024, at $3 billion in revenue. He's still building, not exiting; he's just doing it with private capital big enough to make an IPO beside the point.

Two College Roommates Built a Delivery Empire That Keeps Shrinking to Grow

Rafael Ilishayev and Yakir Gola met during their first week at Drexel University and started GoPuff (the on-demand delivery service the podcast said "now operates in 650 U.S. cities") as juniors, after one too many late-night convenience-store runs for their housemates. The company's harvest stage has been anything but linear: GoPuff was valued near $15 billion during the pandemic delivery boom, then went through repeated rounds of layoffs and market exits as venture funding tightened. In November 2025, it raised $250 million at a valuation of $8.5 billion, according to Bloomberg, roughly half its earlier peak, even as investors described it as "the last one standing" among instant-delivery startups after most competitors folded or sold. GoPuff has never gone public, despite years of on-and-off IPO plans; its version of harvest, so far, is surviving long enough to outlast the rest of its category.

"Business shapes the world. It is capable of changing society in almost any way you can imagine."

Smaller Stories, Same Pattern

Not every founder on the show's list generated 2025 headlines, but their stories resist the tidy arc too, just more quietly. Shiza Shahid co-founded the Malala Fund in 2013 after meeting Malala Yousafzai as a teenager in Pakistan; more than a decade later, the organization is still working toward its original goal of twelve years of free secondary education for girls worldwide. Jeanne Lanvin, the French couturier the show credited with pioneering children's fashion before her death in 1946, never got a harvest stage of her own: her house passed through decades of ownership changes and belongs today to Fosun, a Chinese conglomerate run by people who never met her. And Mikaila Ulmer, who started Me & the Bees Lemonade at four years old after being stung twice in one week, is now marking two decades in business following her original 2015 Shark Tank appearance, a rare case where the founder is still the one running the harvest.

Why the Model Still Matters to the Next Generation

None of this makes the five-stage framework wrong, so much as incomplete: a useful map that undersells how long, contested, and reversible the last mile of a business can be. Gen Z is entering entrepreneurship at a record clip: a 2026 Intuit survey found 43% of Gen Z adults plan to start a business this year, more than double the rate for Gen X, and payroll platform Gusto's newest annual report found that for the first time, Gen Z founders outnumbered Baby Boomers in new U.S. business formations during 2025. U.S. business applications hit 5.7 million that same year, a new record, according to LendingTree's analysis of Census Bureau data.

The students building Snack Buddy on a whiteboard are part of that wave. The founders whose real companies they studied are the reminder that the whiteboard version is only the beginning of the story: the headlines, pardons, valuations, and bankruptcy filings that come after discovery, planning, resourcing, and launch are where entrepreneurship actually gets tested.

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