Most people who show up at Art Expo New York are just artists. María Esther Panesso Mercado is also a lawyer.
The Colombian-born painter is beginning to attract attention at one of the city’s biggest art fairs, Art Expo New York 2026, running through April 12 at Pier 36, is not your typical gallery darling. By day, she defends women in vulnerable situations in Colombian courtrooms. By night, she is in her studio, layering oil and texture onto canvas, creating luminous female figures that have landed on walls in Paris, Miami, and Tokyo.
The Woman Who Refused to Pick a Lane
María Esther Panesso Mercado, who signs her paintings simply as Mercado, was born in Bogotá, Colombia, in 1987. She holds a law degree and a degree in International Business Administration from Universidad de La Sabana, and an MBA from IE Business School in Madrid. She is, by any measure, an overachiever in the traditional sense.
But somewhere between the courtroom and the lecture hall, art kept pulling her back.
“Art has always been my most honest language,” she says. “From a young age, I felt a deep need to express emotion, memory, and strength through visual form.”
She never quit law. She never quit business either. Instead, she built a career that operates on two tracks simultaneously and has somehow managed to become seriously accomplished on both. Forbes Colombia named her one of the 50 Most Creative Colombians in the World. She has exhibited at the Salon d’Automne in Paris, the legendary exhibition founded in 1903 that once showcased Matisse and Picasso. And now she is here, in New York, at one of the most important contemporary art fairs in the country.
The art world tends to reward people who fit neatly into a box. Mercado’s career has often challenged that assumption.
What Happened in Her Childhood Changed Everything She Paints
To understand Mercado’s work, you have to understand where it comes from. She lost her father when she was still young. Her mother stepped up, became the head of the household, and raised her children with what Mercado describes as quiet, unshakeable strength.
That image never left her.
It is why every painting she makes is centered on women. Not women as decorative subjects, not women as passive figures gazing softly into the distance. Women as forces. Women as the people who hold everything together while the world looks the other way.
She signs every painting with her maternal surname, Mercado, not her paternal one. It is her way of saying, every single time she puts brush to canvas, that this is for her mother. That the work is a tribute.
Her legal career deepened that conviction. Years of defending women in Colombia’s courts, women facing poverty, abuse, and systemic disadvantage, gave her a front row seat to what real resilience looks like. It transformed the way she paints.
“Witnessing both fragility and extraordinary strength in real life transformed the way I portray women in my paintings,” she says. “They are not passive figures. They embody power, transcendence, and inner light.”
Her Paintings Look Like Nothing Else in the Room
One of the more recognizable elements of Mercado’s work is its use of contrast.
Her backgrounds are thick, textured, at times quite pronounced, layers of mixed media built up until the surface has genuine physical depth. Then, against that turbulent ground, her figures appear smooth and radiant. Ballet dancers mid-flight. Coastal women standing tall. Feminine forms lit by gold that seems to come from inside the canvas rather than from any external source.
She calls the concept “Dualidades del Alma,” Dualities of the Soul. The idea is that every woman contains multitudes: vulnerability and strength, sacrifice and beauty, discipline and grace. The ballet dancer is her favorite symbol for this. Behind every effortless performance is a body marked by years of pain and work. The dancer makes it look easy. She is not.
Mercado sees that same story in every woman she has ever represented in court.
It presents a relatively cohesive vision for someone who, on paper, should probably be running a law firm full-time. But that is exactly what makes her interesting. She is not splitting her focus. She appears to be building on it, which adds further depth to the work.
Colombia itself shaped that richness. A country of extraordinary cultural depth, of resilience forged through decades of adversity, of communities that transform difficulty into creativity. Mercado carries all of that with her to every international exhibition. For her, showing up in Paris or New York with paintings inspired by Colombian women is not just a career move. It is a responsibility.
She is building toward more: museum-level exhibitions, a wider collector base in the US and Europe, and eventually a foundation to support emerging female artists. She speaks about all of it with the matter-of-fact confidence of someone who has already done harder things.
And she probably has. Try defending women in a Colombian courtroom in the morning and finishing a painting destined for a Paris gallery by midnight. Then tell someone you cannot do two things at once.
María Esther Panesso Mercado is exhibiting at Art Expo New York 2026. Follow her work on Instagram at @mariamercadoarte.
At its 2026 Partner Conference, AGIBOT outlined a direction that reflects a broader inflection point in embodied artificial intelligence: the transition from capability-driven progress to deployment-oriented systems. The company’s messaging focused instead on how these systems are introduced, scaled, and operationalized in real-world environments, under the theme “Redefining Productivity in the AGI Era.”
Photo credit: AGIBOT
AGIBOT, founded in 2023, presented its progression from research to mass production and commercialization within a three-year window, alongside multiple generations of product iteration. More notably, this iteration was framed in the context of deployment, and the company emphasized a cycle in which systems are introduced into specific use cases, evaluated, and refined based on operational feedback. In this model, deployment is not an endpoint but a continuous input into development.
The company also introduced a formal industry framework that outlines the transition from early-stage development (robots that can move) to deployment (robots that can perform work) and eventually to large-scale adoption. Within this framework, AGIBOT identified 2026 as the starting point of the “deployment phase.”
The conference positioned robotics within a broader productivity framework. AGIBOT outlined a series of application scenarios, ranging from retail and logistics to industrial handling and facility operations, as part of what it describes as “production-level solutions.”
These scenarios were further structured into seven standardized solutions across industrial manufacturing, commercial services, and specialized operations, with deployments already running in environments such as production lines, logistics systems, and commercial spaces, according to the company.
Sharebot and the Globalization of Robotics Deployment
The most concrete development introduced during the conference came from the overseas sub-forum, which focused on international expansion and deployment models. Central to this was Sharebot, AGIBOT’s global robotics rental platform.
Sharebot is designed to facilitate deployment by allowing partners to access robotic systems without requiring full ownership. The platform aggregates demand globally while relying on local operators for on-the-ground delivery and execution. Initial rollout spans 14 countries, including the United States, the United Kingdom, France, and Singapore, marking a transition from a domestic platform to a global service network.
The company positions this model as part of a broader Robotics-as-a-Service (RaaS) strategy, where systems are deployed based on usage and operational demand. The model reflects a pragmatic response to market differences. In China, the company reports scaling through a distributed partner network, with thousands of localized operators. In overseas markets, where such fragmentation is less prevalent, the approach shifts toward collaboration with established regional distributors.
Photo credit: AGIBOT
The introduction of a rental model is meant to address one of the primary constraints in robotics adoption: the cost and complexity of deployment.
By lowering upfront barriers, Sharebot helps enable faster entry into new markets and use cases. It also introduces a recurring service model, aligning robotics more closely with operational expenditure rather than capital investment.
Notably, the company highlighted the economic dynamics of overseas markets, where service pricing can exceed domestic levels multiple times over. This helps create a margin structure that supports both expansion and localized service ecosystems.
Ecosystem and Data as Scaling Mechanisms
Alongside Sharebot, AGIBOT introduced broader ecosystem initiatives, including its AIMA (AI Machine Architecture) framework and what it describes as a “hive” data network. While still conceptual in parts, these initiatives point toward a model where deployment data feeds back into system improvement at scale.
Photo credit: AGIBOT
The implication is that value accrues not only from individual deployments but from the aggregation of operational data across environments. Over time, this could enable more standardized deployment processes and more predictable system performance.
For companies operating in robotics and embodied AI, AGIBOT’s model introduces a new set of priorities. Deployment infrastructure, iteration cycles, and partner ecosystems can be as critical as the underlying technology. As AI continues to move into physical environments, the distinction between capability and execution is becoming more pronounced.
Mahjong is booming, Go is going mainstream, and Americans are rediscovering games that have outlasted empires.
You’re probably reading this on a phone right now. But a growing number of New Yorkers have put their devices down — and picked up tiles instead.
Mahjong, the four-player strategy game with roots in 19th-century China, is in the middle of a genuine American revival. Game cafes, private clubs and bar nights centered on mahjong have been multiplying across the city, drawing players in their twenties and thirties who have little interest in the retirement-home reputation the game once carried.
The appeal isn’t complicated: four people, one table, no notifications. In an era defined by fragmented attention and passive entertainment, that has become a selling point all on its own.
A game with real staying power
Mahjong has been played across China and much of East and Southeast Asia for well over a century. It blends memory, pattern recognition and calculated risk — closer to poker in its strategic depth than most people expect on first encounter. Four players draw and discard tiles to complete sets, with enough variation in regional rule sets to keep serious players studying for years.
The game’s resurgence in the US isn’t limited to New York. Mahjong clubs and instructional leagues have been reported in cities including Los Angeles, San Francisco and Chicago, with organizers noting that younger players now make up a significant share of new interest. At the same time, online mahjong platforms are seeing a surge in players, as newcomers turn to digital tables to learn the game and connect with friends remotely.
The ancient games that still beat computers — barely
If mahjong is the social hit, Go is the intellectual one. The two-player strategy game originated in China more than 2,500 years ago and remains one of the most studied games in the world — not just by players, but by computer scientists and AI researchers.
Go stumped artificial intelligence for decades. While computers mastered chess by the late 1990s, Go’s near-limitless board combinations resisted machine dominance until 2016, when DeepMind’s AlphaGo defeated world champion Lee Sedol in a match that made international headlines. The victory was treated as a milestone in AI history — not a footnote in gaming news.That 2016 story brought Go new attention in the West. Clubs affiliated with the American Go Association operate in dozens of US cities, and the game is increasingly taught in schools as a tool for developing strategic thinking.
Xiangqi: the chess you’ve probably never heard of
Xiangqi — known in English as Chinese chess — is one of the most widely played board games in the world by sheer number of participants, with particular strength across China, Vietnam and Chinese diaspora communities globally. In New York, it’s a fixture of parks in Flushing and Sunset Park, where outdoor games draw regular crowds year-round.
The game shares ancestry with Western chess but plays differently: pieces move on intersections rather than squares, a river divides the board, and the pace tends toward faster, more aggressive exchanges. Players familiar with chess often find it disorienting at first — and then difficult to put down.
Sudoku is not what you think it is
Sudoku is widely described as an Asian game — but that’s not quite right. The number puzzle was invented by American Howard Garns and first published in a US magazine in 1979 under the name “Number Place.” It went global after Japanese publisher Nikoli picked it up in 1984 and gave it the name Sudoku. The Japanese connection is real, but the game’s origins are genuinely mixed.
Its cognitive benefits, however, are well-documented. Research has associated regular engagement with logic puzzles to improvements in concentration, working memory and processing speed — making it worth discussing alongside these games regardless of where it came from.
Why now
The timing of the mahjong revival tracks with a broader cultural shift away from passive screen consumption. Sales of board games and tabletop games surged during the pandemic and have not fully retreated. Game cafes, once considered a novelty, are now a stable part of the New York City nightlife landscape.
These games don’t require an algorithm to work. They don’t update, send alerts or optimize for engagement. They require the people playing them to show up, pay attention and lose gracefully — which, depending on your week, might be exactly what you need.
Wall Street is reacting nervously to AI disruption. But advisors who understand that machines can handle labor while professionals focus on judgment may be better positioned to adapt.
Wealth manager stock prices dropped 8 to 12 percent in January 2026 on fears that AI would commoditize financial advice and compress fees across the industry. The concern is legitimate. Some advanced AI models have shown performance comparable to humans on certain complex financial-document tasks. The traditional information advantage advisors once relied on has narrowed significantly. In a world where ChatGPT can draft a financial plan in seconds, what is the advisor for?
The answer is trust, judgment, and execution. None of those things can be automated.
The wealth management industry is at an inflection point. AI can now automate the tedious parts of financial planning: document gathering, tax calculation, return preparation, and projection modeling. But it cannot make the judgment calls that matter. Should you sell this stock? When should you take Social Security? What does this inheritance mean for your kids? Those decisions depend on understanding a client’s life, their fears, their goals, and the trade-offs between them. A machine cannot have that conversation.
The firms that may be better positioned could be those that pair AI with licensed professionals in a way that is transparent to the client. A plan that shows exact dollar amounts for each strategy, projected over multiple years, with licensed CPAs and IRS Enrolled Agents validating every number before it leaves the office. That is not a commoditized product. That is the highest form of professional service.
“We use AI to eliminate the busywork,” said Ricky Laviña, co-founder and CEO of Taxfyle, the human-in-the-loop AI tax platform embedded inside wealth management platforms like Robinhood Concierge and Domain Money. “The platform reads documents, extracts data, flags strategies, and drafts the plan. A licensed CPA or IRS Enrolled Agent reviews and signs every number. The result may be that a professional can serve more clients at a higher quality for a lower cost.”
According to Taxfyle, the company operates a network of approximately 7,200 licensed CPAs and IRS Enrolled Agents. According to the company, its AI can complete tasks that might otherwise take a CPA or IRS Enrolled Agent several hours—document collection, data extraction, preliminary analysis—in under 5 minutes. The professional then focuses on the parts that require judgment: interpreting the client’s situation, identifying strategies the AI might have missed, and making sure every line of the return reflects the client’s actual goals. A CPA or IRS Enrolled Agent on the platform can now complete 40 to 50 returns a month instead of 25. This may lead to faster turnaround times for clients, improved operating efficiency for firms, and potentially higher hourly productivity for professionals, even if per-return fees are lower.
The value appears to lie in the pairing. AI alone is dangerous. A model that gets tax calculations right 95 percent of the time sounds impressive until you realize that on a tax return, that remaining 5 percent may carry elevated risks, including audits, penalties, interest, or client dissatisfaction.
But a CPA or IRS Enrolled Agent with an AI copilot is something else. The human layer catches the errors. The AI layer lets the professional focus on strategy instead of data entry. The client gets a plan that is not just mathematically sound but personally aligned.
The competitive advantage is clear. An advisor who offers embedded AI-powered tax planning, with licensed professionals validating every number, can now deliver a three-year tax projection and a filed return in the same client conversation. Clients may leave with clearer estimates of potential tax savings and next steps, which can support retention and referrals.
The broader market is watching. Registered investment advisors, family offices, and private banks are evaluating which platforms to adopt. Some are building internally. Others are waiting to see which approach wins. Those who understand the equation—AI may help lower costs per engagement, while licensed professionals can help maintain quality and client relationships—could be better positioned to navigate the years ahead.
“Within the next few years, many major advisory platforms are expected to incorporate AI tools,” Laviña said. “Some may operate without close involvement from licensed professionals, which could raise quality or compliance concerns. The ones that get the pairing right, where machines handle the labor and professionals make the judgment calls, will own the market. Because clients who receive a clear, actionable plan from their advisor may be more likely to stay with the firm.”
Wall Street is worried about disruption. The advisors who are moving fast are not worried. They are helping shape future industry models.
The information provided in this article is for general informational and educational purposes only. It is not intended as financial advice. Readers should not rely solely on the content of this article and are encouraged to seek professional advice tailored to their specific circumstances. We disclaim any liability for any loss or damage arising directly or indirectly from the use of, or reliance on, the information presented.
Coins falling to white piggy saving , Financial and money deposit concept.
Have you ever asked the question “Is this really it?” It comes up a surprising number of times, especially for high-net-worth individuals, even though they are the people who “have it all.” In reality, many find that having financial success doesn’t necessarily mean they have all of the life satisfaction and fulfillment they anticipated.
And yes, that can buy some things. You can get a bigger house, drive a nicer car and get your kids into a better school. In many cases, it can reduce concerns about financial instability or running out of money.
But money isn’t everything, and one area where it comes up short is happiness.
It’s easy to say money doesn’t make you happy. But what does it mean? What does happiness even mean in the first place?
Here are some lessons on the relationship between money and happiness that have emerged from people who have spent years researching happiness, helping with business exit strategy and consulting with extremely high earners. They help show why wealth alone does not bring the happiness they thought it would — and what anyone (not just rich folks) can do about it.
The Science Behind Happiness
Part of the struggle with connecting money and happiness is misunderstanding what happiness is in the first place. Happiness isn’t quite what most people think it is — it’s not simply a feeling. Yes, there are feelings connected to happiness, which is why it’s easy to make the mistake. But those “happy feelings” aren’t happiness itself.
That’s like saying feeling the sun on your skin is the sun. That warmth is a side effect of the sun. It’s also an indicator that the sun is there, above you. But it isn’t the sun. In the same way, feeling happy is evidence of something else, something more complicated and, ultimately, more fulfilling.
One expert on happiness described the concept as a combination of three “macronutrients”: Enjoyment, satisfaction and meaning. Think about the role those have in a good life. Enjoyment comes from pleasure and memory-making — although, crucially, this tends to carry deeper meaning when shared with others, rather than experienced as simple, solitary pleasure. Satisfaction can be a form of joy that grows from accomplishment and working through challenges. And meaning connects to purpose, goals and significance as part of a life that matters.
See what’s missing here? Money. Now, you can use money to accomplish some of these things. If you invest in a business or athletic training, you can achieve a goal that helps you feel satisfied. You can use money to go on a vacation where you create memories and experience enjoyment. You can use money to support goals and purposes that give your life meaning.
But when you truly want to be happy, money itself tends to play a more limited role than people often expect. It’s the same as oxygen. You need it to stay upright and on target, but it isn’t the end goal. It’s just a tool.
The Data Behind Money and Happiness
Most people, at some point, learn how to earn money — whether through formal education or experience. But it can be extremely difficult to find a way to learn what to do once you have that money. Obviously, you need to do things like pay the bills, but how do you actually manage your money successfully? Even more important, how can you use your money to build a happy life?
Because the truth is, simply saying “money doesn’t make you happy” isn’t quite accurate. The connection is fairly intuitive. Money removes obstacles and empowers activities. It can help you move through life — including moving closer to things that make you happy.
In other words, there is a direct connection between money and happiness. The issue is that the connection isn’t about getting more money. There doesn’t appear to be a single income level that guarantees happiness. In fact, most psychology research out there has found that, at best, the amount of money you have has a minor effect on your overall happiness, but even then, it’s hard to tell where that small influence comes from.
Another study that ran for 87 years found that wealth, fame and even working hard aren’t what keep us happy and healthy. Those areas of life are positively influenced by good relationships — something that is often elusive and easy to ignore if you’re raking in a huge salary. At least, they’re easy to ignore at first. Over time, many begin to notice gaps between financial success and personal fulfillment. Over time, happiness can quietly fade, even as your bank account continues to grow.
Shifting Your Mindset Toward Happiness (Beyond Money)
When you boil it down, the same thing that keeps a rich person unhappy can hold back someone with no money at all. It isn’t about money, but the wealth mindset around it. An unhealthy, wealthy individual can obsess over money by seeing it as a safety net, a source of pride and proof that they are better than others. The nuance here is that someone without wealth can also obsess over the lack of money, how it makes them insecure around others, and how they are financially unsafe.
This suggests the issue isn’t simply earning more, but rethinking the role money plays in how we define happiness.
This kind of mindset shift can be relevant across a wide range of financial situations, whether you’ve sold a seven-figure business, you just graduated from high school, or anything in between. The solution isn’t shifting how much you have. It comes from rewiring your brain.
If you need a jump-off point, start with the “Is this really it?” question. That’s what wealth coach Mike Brown hears often in his exit strategy business, Unbreakable Wealth. If you find yourself asking that question, don’t treat it as a sign of failure but as a signal. It really means “I know I’m meant for more.” It means you’re growing, evolving, and you’re ready for the next step.
Next, look for clarity in your happiness goals. Don’t just make the goal to “feel happy.” That’s too vague. That will lead you back to money as a crutch to get whatever it is that you think will make you feel happy — even though it won’t work. Instead, be clear and connect your happiness to enjoyment, satisfaction, and meaning.
Finally, maintain a growth mindset. Stay humble and willing to learn. No matter what you’re doing or how successful you are in the goals you set, always stay in a growing, learning mindset.
Money as a Tool, Not a Goal
Money can reveal underlying patterns in how we think and behave. It shows that money is a tool that can help you achieve your dreams. At the same time, it can become a distraction from what actually contributes to a fulfilling life.
No matter how much money you make, no matter how many zeroes are on your paycheck or how big that nest egg gets, it’s important to invest in limiting beliefs about money. If you have a poor relationship with money, simply earning more doesn’t necessarily resolve that pattern.
Instead, you have to rewire your brain. Work to find a balance between having too much and too little. Ask if you’re using money as a tool or a goal. Where do you fall on the spectrum of abundance and scarcity? What deep inner beliefs about money have you inherited as a child or a young adult that are holding you back? Once you see them, tackle them head-on as you work toward defining your version of happiness and building a version of life that feels genuinely fulfilling to you.
The information provided in this article is for general informational and educational purposes only. It is not intended as legal, financial, or professional advice. Readers should not rely solely on the content of this article and are encouraged to seek professional advice tailored to their specific circumstances. We disclaim any liability for any loss or damage arising directly or indirectly from the use of, or reliance on, the information presented.
“Follow your passion” has been an oft-repeated piece of advice for would-be business founders for decades — but this doesn’t necessarily mean that it’s the right guidance. With roughly 50% of businesses failing within their first five years, passion alone may not be enough to create a sustainable business.
Instead, founders should also pay attention to audience pain points.
Yali Saar, founder and CEO of Tailor Brands, an AI “business builder” which reports that it currently handles about two percent of all LLC formations in the United States, presents an excellent case study of this principle.
Originally founded as a logo design platform, Tailor Brands underwent a dramatic pivot into a business formation and compliance platform. Now operating as one of the top business formation services in the country, Tailor Brands’ pivot shows how following pain points can drive business success.
The original vision
When Saar and his team first founded Tailor Brands, they had a relatively simple idea in mind: help founders with fast and affordable logo design, powered by AI. “We were quick to see just how powerful AI could be in logo design, which is a common pain point for many new and small businesses,” Saar explains.
“This is especially true for online businesses, where a professional logo is key to helping them stand out. We developed a system that allowed entrepreneurs to put in some key prompts, like their target market, products and the vibe of their brand and deliver a high-quality logo within minutes. The idea was that founders could get this essential marketing tool quickly and at a lower cost without sacrificing quality.”
This original vision, fueled by the founders’ passion for design, led Tailor Brands to expand its design services to other key marketing assets, including websites, business cards and social media ads. According to Saar, the initial passion-powered business plan proved highly successful, netting roughly one-third of search engine clicks for logo-related searches. It seemed like a recipe that would endure for a long time — but like any business, change is inevitable.
Making the pivot
After establishing itself as a leader in the logo design space, Tailor Brands found itself at risk of being disrupted with the onset of generative AI. At the same time, the potential for automation led many businesses to lay off thousands of workers in the hopes of taking advantage of AI-related savings — a trend that continues in 2026.
With the influx of new would-be entrepreneurs came a recognition of additional pain points far beyond the scope of what Tailor Brands offered at the time. “As we worked with these entrepreneurs on their logo and design needs, we quickly learned that their biggest pain point wasn’t branding. Instead, it was navigating the bureaucracy and paperwork that went with business setup and ongoing compliance,” Saar explains.
“For some industries and locations in particular, this bureaucracy can get extremely complex and overwhelming for a new founder. Existing companies in the space weren’t necessarily making this easier—they weren’t changing to a digital-first mindset. We realized that with the right approach, AI could drastically simplify these processes for founders.”
Evolving for success
Recognizing a pain point and evolving from an existing set of services isn’t something that can be done overnight. The company went through a quiet period as it worked to expand into business formation and compliance services under Saar’s leadership.
“Keeping the core pain points in mind as we went through this shift was critical,” Saar recalls. “We had to understand what problems founders were really facing, as well as the trends that were driving more people to entrepreneurship in the first place. Because if we simply continued to follow our passions at that point, we were going to be displaced ourselves.”
Following a period of reorganization, Tailor Brands did not set out to completely reimagine the platform overnight. Instead, it was built step by step, gradually launching services like LLC formation, while expanding into a broader platform designed to simplify the process of starting and running a business through automation tools and integrations with government systems.
The company has continued to expand its suite of services with additional financial support, an AI guidance tool and more, now offering over 20 different services, alongside its original suite of branding and marketing design services.
“Pivoting to pursue pain points didn’t mean abandoning why we originally started our company in the first place,” Saar explains. “But by taking the time to evaluate where the market was going and what our customers needed the most, we were able to adapt alongside them. It’s allowed us to become an integral part of their founding journey, which gives us so many more opportunities to address their needs than if we had stuck with design.”
The pivot has been successful — per one report, the company has enjoyed 40% annual sales growth, even as the original logo design portion of the business has declined to represent a mere 10% of the company’s overall revenue. Without the pivot, Tailor Brands would hardly exist at the level it does today.
Final takeaways
As the example of Tailor Brands illustrates, passion may lead founders to start their business, but it isn’t necessarily the recipe for sustained success. Instead, by identifying and pursuing the real pain points their target audience is experiencing, founders can pivot in a way that better serves their customers and vastly expands their audience and earning potential.
The information provided in this article is for general informational and educational purposes only. It is not intended as legal, financial, or professional advice. Readers should not rely solely on the content of this article and are encouraged to seek professional advice tailored to their specific circumstances. We disclaim any liability for any loss or damage arising directly or indirectly from the use of, or reliance on, the information presented.
The World’s Leading School for Athletes and Creators
Image credit: ICL Academy
ICL Academy reflects a broader global shift in how young talent is developed, contributing to evolving approaches in digital and hybrid K–12 education. Positioned at the intersection of academia, athletics, and the rapidly expanding creator economy, ICL has evolved far beyond a traditional accredited school into a dynamic, fast-scaling platform serving high-performing athletes and performers across the world. What began as a practical solution to scheduling conflicts has evolved into a more integrated model, where academics, mentorship, content creation, and monetization opportunities are designed to complement one another.
Iva Jovic is proof of what that ecosystem can produce. A 12th grader at ICL and a rising force on the WTA Tour, Jovic’s story captures the academy’s evolution in vivid terms. The rigid architecture of traditional schooling couldn’t keep pace with the demands of her athletic ascent, so she sought a model built from the ground up for high-performance individuals. At ICL, academics don’t compete with ambition—they’re engineered around it. Immersed in a global community of driven, like-minded peers, Jovic found exactly what she needed: the flexibility to compete at the highest level and the environment to grow alongside others who refuse to settle. Today, ranked #16 in the world, she reflects a shifting model of the student-athlete—one in which athletic performance and academics can develop alongside each other.
Image credit: ICL Academy
The Alternative
Kirk Spahn, a fourth-generation educator with over two decades in digital education, recognized the real crisis: “We’ve built a system that treats talent as a scheduling problem instead of recognizing it as a young person’s most important asset.”
Spahn, who previously co-founded Dwight Global, understood that online schools had solved delivery, but hadn’t solved relevance. So in 2019 he evolved ICL Academy into a fully online, WASC-accredited institution serving grades 5 through 12, built from the ground up for ambitious students.
As further acknowledgment, ICL Academy students are admitted to an impressive range of colleges and universities, with students being admitted to Stanford, Harvard, Yale, Princeton, Brown, Northwestern, and Vanderbilt, among others. Niche.com ranks it among the best Private Online High Schools in America with an A+ rating. For families across six continents, the real measure is much simpler: Does the ICL Academy approach actually work? Early indicators suggest it may be effective.
Image credit: ICL Academy
Learning From Champions
What distinguishes ICL Academy fundamentally is its Champion Mentor Program, which centers on knowledge-sharing from individuals who have reached the highest levels in their respective fields. The program brings together accomplished figures from sports, business, and the arts, among others, who contribute to shaping the curriculum.
Rather than relying solely on traditional instruction, students engage with curated insights drawn from real-world experience. Lessons on topics like resilience, competitive pressure, and reinvention are framed through the perspectives of high-performing professionals, offering a more applied and experiential approach to learning. Through the Impact Learning Model, these insights become searchable curriculum addressing real challenges students face such as: How do you maintain perspective during defeat? How do you manage the identity conflict between professional achievement and being a teenager? How do you decide when the stakes are real?
“When a student learns resilience from someone who has lived it at the highest levels,” Spahn explains, “something fundamental shifts.”
Image credit: ICL Academy
The Leadership Difference
Behind ICL Academy’s academic architecture is Avery McGlenn, Head of School. With nearly two decades spanning independent boarding schools, charter networks, and virtual education, McGlenn observed something critical: every institutional model fails the same way, because they treat students as interchangeable.
“I kept seeing brilliant young people forced into the same timeline, same assessment structure, same everything,” McGlenn recalls. “There is a better way.”
At ICL Academy, each student’s background, gifts, and identity matter more than institutional convenience. This means flexible assessment scheduling, courses designed for specific populations — including dedicated Sport Psychology and Sports Management offerings — faculty trained as coaches, and counselor-to-student ratios that allow genuine relationships. Scholarships are available for both merit and need, ensuring that motivated students from diverse backgrounds can access the program.
ICL Academy’s teachers don’t manage classrooms; they coach individuals. They’re subject-matter experts providing 1:1 support, helping to ensure that every student feels genuinely known. This isn’t accommodation. It’s design.
What seems impossible — flawless personalization across dozens of time zones, wildly different needs, genuinely individual attention — works because ICL’s COO Dayton Hansen engineered it to work.
Hansen’s operational infrastructure is meant to help reduce the challenges around complex systems. One student takes an exam in the late afternoon because of a morning competition. Another submits work while traveling internationally. A third calibrates her entire course sequence around external performance opportunities.
“When operational systems work,” Hansen explains, “they disappear. You see your daughter thriving athletically and academically, you don’t see the infrastructure. Seamlessness equals success.”
Image credit: ICL Academy
Creative Excellence Reimagined
While ICL built its reputation around student-athletes, a parallel revolution emerged: young artists face the identical impossible choice. A budding recording artist can’t go on tour without consequences. A filmmaker with professional opportunities loses them to school calendars.
Joseph Itaya, Head of Creative and Marketing, started ICL Creative Arts, a community of young creatives reimagining how creative development integrates with rigorous academics. ICL’s origins began here: the school was first accredited in 2015 as a hybrid institution in Los Angeles focused specifically on performing arts students.
As the digital landscape continues to evolve at a rapid pace, Itaya developed the Digital Creator Playbook for Digital Creators —a course designed to equip the next generation of creators with both the creative and business tools needed to succeed. “We want to equip our students not just as content creators, but as digital entrepreneurs,” Itaya explains.
Building on this vision, a comprehensive suite of Creator-focused courses will begin rolling out in Fall 2026, covering key areas such as personal branding, Name Image Likeness (NIL), video production, and digital entrepreneurship. Together, these initiatives aim to bridge the gap between creativity and commerce, preparing students to thrive in an increasingly competitive and opportunity-rich digital ecosystem.
Why This Matters
For university admissions, ICL Academy has reframed the entire conversation. Rather than treating passion as competing with academics, the school positions it as a primary advantage through Impact Projects, substantive work completed in real-world contexts.
A student-athlete conducts sports science research while training. An entrepreneur develops business strategy while building her company. A performing artist studies the business and psychology of creative work while actively performing. By application time, these students compete with demonstrated mastery, professional credibility, and real-world context, not just academic metrics. ICL’s deep understanding of what elite universities actually recruit for, beyond test scores, has become a decisive advantage for families who refuse to compromise in either direction.
Image credit: ICL Academy
The Community Factor
The persistent criticism is inevitable: won’t students be isolated? ICL Academy builds intentional community around shared ambition. Through passion pod collaborations, student-led clubs, live virtual events, and summer abroad programs, students from 50 countries engage authentically — not as random online classmates, but as peers who understand what serious excellence actually demands. Students report more meaningful relationships, not fewer. And something more valuable: more time for their craft, their academics, and their families.
10 Reasons Families Choose ICL Academy
Education Built Around Passion. Academics are designed around each student’s pursuit — whether athletics, creative arts, or entrepreneurship — so learning supports their goals rather than competing with them.
Flexible Scheduling for Elite Performers. Students training, competing, performing, or building ventures schedule coursework and assessments around their commitments, with no penalty for pursuing excellence.
A Global Community of Driven Students. ICL brings together ambitious students from 50 countries who are serious about their craft, creating a culture of motivation, collaboration, and genuine inspiration.
Mentorship from Champions and Industry Leaders. Students gain direct access to masterclasses and mentorship from world-class figures who have shaped the curriculum itself.
Context-Based Learning. Subjects like math, science, writing, and history are taught through the lens of each student’s passion — a tennis player studies angles and speed; a filmmaker unpacks a story through behavioral science.
Highly Personalized Instruction. Small classes, 1:1 office hours, and close faculty relationships can allow teachers to tailor instruction to each student’s strengths, learning style, and goals.
Scholarships Available for Merit and Need. ICL offers scholarships to recognize exceptional talent and ensure that motivated students from diverse backgrounds have access to a world-class education.
Preparation for Top Universities and Careers. Rigorous academics and portfolio-driven Impact Projects help students stand out in competitive college admissions — with placements at Stanford, Harvard, Princeton, and beyond.
Opportunities Beyond the Classroom. Through champion partnerships, guest speakers, the Impact Incubator, and summer programs, students can connect with real industries directly tied to their passions.
A Culture of Champions for Life. ICL emphasizes resilience, leadership, creativity, and purpose — with the goal of developing not just elite performers, but thoughtful, capable individuals prepared for whatever comes next.
Northern California personal injury attorney Craig Fontaine Ashton has spent more than 25 years representing injured clients in disputes with insurance companies and corporations in Sacramento and across Northern California. As co-founder of Ashton & Price, LLP, established in 1996, Ashton has secured over $250 million in settlements, awards, and jury verdicts.
Ashton, a UC Berkeley graduate and Pepperdine Law alum, established his career in San Francisco’s competitive personal injury field. He is known for being trial-ready when negotiations break down. His firm manages cases including auto and pedestrian accidents, premises liability, and commercial vehicle claims, focusing on serious injury cases, providing free consultations and working on a contingency fee basis.
The History of Ashton & Price
Ashton met Christopher Alan Price during their first year at Pepperdine University School of Law. The two immediately began to bond over their UC ties. This led to them forging a friendship that would blossom into an organic partnership. They went from fresh friends to roommates for their last two years of law school, before eventually becoming professional legal partners.
They each passed the California Bar on their first try and segued into working professionally in the legal field. Price joined his father’s law firm in Orange County, while Ashton took an associate attorney position with the Montgomery Street San Francisco PI firm, the Law Offices of Arnold Laub, two doors down from the “King of Torts” legend Melvin Belli, Esquire.
In 1996, Ashton and Price reconnected and founded the personal injury law firm Ashton & Price, LLP. Over the years, the firm has secured $250 million in settlements, awards, and jury verdicts. It has been consistently honored as a Top 10 Personal Injury Law Firm by the American Institute of Personal Injury Attorneys and has been named the Personal Injury Law Firm of the Year by the Consumer Business Review for five consecutive years, helping build a strong local reputation among those searching for the best personal injury attorneys in Sacramento and Northern California.
Photo credit: Craig Fontaine Ashton
Beyond the Office
When he’s not in court, Ashton is training. He is a multiple-time Ironman triathlon finisher, completing 140.6-mile races across New Zealand, Australia, Mexico, and Spain. Today, he applies the same endurance mindset to complex litigation that has fostered such success in his athletic pursuits.
In addition to this extracurricular activity, he also hosts The All Things Legal Show and appears as a legal analyst on regional broadcast affiliates, breaking down high-profile cases for the public and serving a local audience.
Photo credit: Craig Fontaine Ashton
The Importance of Serving Clients
At Ashton & Price, clients enjoy the benefits of access to a superlative medical network combined with the power, strength, and legal leverage of a large, established, personal injury law firm, without losing the irreplaceable value of the personal touch of the direct attorney-client interaction.
For over a quarter of a century, Craig Fontaine Ashton and the lawyers of Ashton & Price have battled insurance companies and corporations on behalf of seriously injured Northern Californians, focusing on serious injury cases, forging and being influenced by the Personal Injury Attorney legends Melvin Belli and Arnold Laub.
Ashton & Price prioritizes direct service at every turn. Supported by state-of-the-art technology and a courteous, highly trained, dedicated support staff, Ashton & Price form real connections with its clients. From the very first meeting through the final case closing or jury trial, every important decision is made directly between the clients and their specific attorney, which is why some clients view the firm as containing some of the best personal injury attorneys in Sacramento.
For Ashton, preparation is non-negotiable, whether it’s race day or trial day.
The information provided in this article is for general informational and educational purposes only. It is not intended as legal, financial, medical, or professional advice. Readers should not rely solely on the content of this article and are encouraged to seek professional advice tailored to their specific circumstances. We disclaim any liability for any loss or damage arising directly or indirectly from the use of, or reliance on, the information presented.
If you were to pitch MEE6’s scope to a room full of venture capitalists (tens of millions of servers, hundreds of millions of users, a profitable subscription business, and a team of dozens), they would nod approvingly and ask about the cap table. The founders, Brendan Rius and Anis Belkacem, would say there is no cap table: they own the whole thing.
Neither founder took a meeting with the major VC firms. They dropped out of college in France, taught themselves everything that mattered by shipping products nobody remembers, and built what is now one of the most widely used community-management platforms on Discord without outside capital or investors.
This makes them difficult to place. The tech press has a well-rehearsed template for founder stories: the Stanford dorm room, the Y Combinator batch, the Series A pop. Rius and Belkacem fit none of it. The company, per the founders, is profitable, unencumbered by debt or outside shareholders, and almost entirely unknown outside the Discord ecosystem it quietly dominates. Which is exactly how they seem to prefer it.
Two Kids Who Learned by Building
Brendan Rius and Anis Belkacem share an origin story that differs mainly in the details. Both started coding at 12. Both spent their teenage years releasing products on the internet and watching what happened.
Belkacem was obsessed with the question of what makes people show up. He launched a long series of websites and small tools before turning 20, each one a test of whether strangers on the internet would care enough to sign up, stick around or come back tomorrow. Most of them didn’t last and that was the point. Every failure gave him a clearer read on what worked and what didn’t. By the time most people his age were choosing a major, he had already built, launched, and killed more products than some founders manage in a career.
Rius was obsessed with how things worked underneath. At 14, he launched a file-sharing platform called Sharea that pulled in thousands of users and taught him what it meant to keep a product running for people who depended on it. At 16, curious about the limits of the systems around him, he found a security flaw on a major financial institution’s website. That got him invited to Le Web, one of Europe’s biggest tech conferences, where he was among the youngest speakers on stage.
Rius was later picked for the No MBA Program at Kima Ventures, which was nine months of sitting in on actual business decisions instead of reading case studies about them. “Those years taught me that systems are only as resilient as the assumptions behind them,” Rius says. “That turned out to be the most useful lesson I could have had before building something that has to run at scale.”
Belkacem had dropped out of college by then, after realizing he was learning more from his own projects than from anything on the syllabus and had set himself a pace of launching one new thing every two weeks because he believed that building was a skill you only keep if you use it. Six months into that routine, one of the projects started getting traction and that project became MEE6. Rius, around the same time, had been grinding through his own series of attempts: a dating app, custom phone covers. None of them went anywhere, but they left him knowing things you only learn from running a live product.
When they met and started working together, it made sense almost immediately. Belkacem had spent years learning what people want from a product, while Rius had spent years learning how to build things that hold up once people actually start using them. Between the two of them, there wasn’t much they hadn’t already gotten wrong at least once.
Building MEE6
When Rius and Belkacem turned their attention to Discord, the platform was expanding rapidly beyond its origins as a gaming app, becoming the default gathering place for every kind of online community imaginable, from university study groups to crypto projects to fan bases with tens of thousands of members. The problem was that Discord gave people the space to build communities, but almost none of the tools to run them.
If you wanted to moderate a server, filter spam, assign roles, and welcome new members, you had to stitch together a dozen single-purpose bots and hope they kept working. Most server owners were volunteers doing this in their spare time, and it was burning them out.
MEE6 started from a simple observation: nobody wanted to deal with twelve bots; they wanted one that did everything. Moderation, role management, engagement features, automated announcements, custom commands, all in one place, all configurable without writing a line of code. It may sound obvious in retrospect, but at the time, nobody had built it properly.
Rius and Belkacem had the skills to build it and no reason to wait for someone else to do it first. So they did, quickly, the way they’d always worked: ship something, see if people use it, fix what’s broken, repeat.
Funding was never really on the table. They were two French dropouts with no connections to investors and, honestly, not much interest in acquiring any. But the decision to bootstrap wasn’t just about necessity. Belkacem is blunt about it: when there’s no outside money, you can’t afford to build something nobody asked for. If a feature doesn’t prove itself quickly, it gets killed. Taking outside money would have meant answering to shareholders and the whole point of MEE6 was to answer to the people using it.
So they tested everything cheaply before building it properly, ran small experiments instead of committing months of development time to features based on guesswork and treated every euro they spent as if it were the last one they had, which for a while it more or less was. That habit stuck. The company still operates the same way.
An Unusual Success Story
What’s remarkable about MEE6 isn’t the scale, though the scale is impressive. It’s that the company got there without any of the machinery that the tech industry considers essential. No fundraising rounds, no advisory board, no growth team optimizing metrics that have nothing to do with whether the product is actually good. It grew because server owners kept telling other server owners about it, which is the slowest and most durable kind of growth there is.
“We never had a launch day,” Rius says. “We just kept making the product better, and more people showed up.”
The same logic is now being applied elsewhere. Rius and Belkacem recently launched T22, a community management platform for Telegram, built on the premise that the problem MEE6 solved isn’t unique to Discord. Wherever large online communities form faster than the tools to manage them, the same frustrations appear. The way they see it, Telegram group owners are facing many of the same challenges Discord server owners faced years ago: growing member bases, limited native moderation tools, and volunteer administrators looking for a little extra support.
They identified a gap, built something to fill it, and kept iterating until their product began growing. In an industry that loves a good announcement, Brendan Rius and Anis Belkacem never made one. They just kept shipping.
Festival food is no longer just a pit stop between sets, it’s becoming part of the main event. And, at the Coachella Valley Music and Arts Festival 2026, one brand turned up the temperature in a way that had fans lining up, filming, and, in some cases, laughing as they desperately reached for water.
Samyang Foods, the South Korean company behind the internet-famous Buldak noodles, returned to the desert this year as the Official Ramen and Hot Sauce Partner, marking its second consecutive year at Coachella. But Samyang Foods is reporting they made history as the first Korean brand to ever sponsor the iconic festival—showing how global food brands are changing up their game at big U.S. events.
And in true Buldak fashion, they didn’t come quietly.
Instead of a single booth or activation, Samyang created what it calls its “spiciest Coachella yet,” anchored by an immersive, multi-stop food experience known as the “Buldak Crawl.” The concept flips traditional festival dining on its head, encouraging attendees to move across the grounds, sampling exclusive dishes and documenting their reactions in real time.
The crawl unfolded across both festival weekends April 10–12 and April 17–19th, turning the entire venue into a spicy playground.
At each stop, fans encountered limited-edition menu items created in collaboration with some of the festival’s most popular food vendors. Fans hit up stops featuring limited-edition items cooked up with top festival food spots. Prince Street Pizza had their Spicy Buldak “Not Ranch” slice, plus other vendors throwing in wild Buldak spins with heat and cool twists. Even desserts got spicy—Sidekicks pulled crowds with Buldak Spicy Banana Funnel Cake, that perfect sweet-spicy mix screaming for Instagram.
Photo Credit: Mckenzie Hilton
Participation was simple and intentionally viral. Festivalgoers who completed the crawl and shared their reactions using #buldakcrawlsweepstakes were entered for a chance to win prizes, turning every bite into content and every reaction into potential reach.
But beneath the spectacle lies a deeper strategy.
Buldak’s rise has been fueled by its ability to turn eating into entertainment. From the global Fire Noodle Challenge to the explosion of mukbang and reaction videos across TikTok, Instagram, and YouTube, the brand has built a fiercely loyal following by leaning into participation rather than passive consumption.
“The core of Buldak is its flavor identity and that uniquely addictive heat,” said Youngsik Shin, CEO of Samyang America. “But just as important is respecting the culture of the young consumers who love Buldak. They don’t just eat it, they experience it, share it, remix it and make it their own. We follow that energy.”
That philosophy is evident in every aspect of the Coachella activation. The Buldak Crawl wasn’t designed to keep people in one place, it was built to mirror how festivalgoers actually move: from stage to stage, from food stand to food stand, constantly exploring. The result is an experience that feels organic to the environment while still delivering a clear brand moment.
It also reflects a broader shift in how brands are engaging with Gen Z and Gen Alpha audiences, who increasingly expect interactivity, customization, and cultural relevance. For them, food isn’t just about taste, it’s about the story, the challenge, and the shareability.
At the same time, Samyang is using the moment to expand beyond its core product. While Buldak noodles remain the centerpiece, the company has been steadily growing its sauce portfolio and experimenting with new formats tailored to U.S. consumers. That includes tapping into the “swicy” trend, the combination of sweet and spicy flavors, and incorporating familiar formats like pizza, tacos, and fries to introduce the brand in a more accessible way.
The strategy appears to be working.
The company reports that, with significant revenue and distribution across 30,000 locations, Samyang has established a strong foothold in the U.S. market. The company has also rapidly scaled its team, growing from just 18 employees to around 100 in three years, with plans to continue hiring as demand accelerates.
Festival food’s turning into its own cultural thing these days, and Buldak at Coachella shows how brands are using big events to pull people into experiences that live way past the weekend. Fans can keep up on Instagram and TikTok.
At Coachella 2026, that meant taking food to new levels—not just taste, but how everyone gets into it.
Because this year, it wasn’t just about what you eat in the desert.
It was about whether you could handle the heat.
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