Ali Donaldson
Ali Donaldson covers how founders, brands, and workers turn cultural moments and shifting norms into business stories for Inc. She focuses on startups, entrepreneurs, and their money, with an emphasis on consumer-facing companies, female-led ventures, and the workplace forces shaping them. Alongside her reporting, she plays a senior editorial role and works as an author and podcast host, extending these themes into long-form features and recorded conversations.
Female Founders Sound the Alarm
Donaldson returns often to stories driven by women entrepreneurs, treating their companies as a lens on policy, funding, and culture. In one piece, more than three dozen female founders describe how tariffs threaten to decimate their businesses and detail the steps they are taking to protect their companies. She profiles Meghan, Duchess of Sussex, repeatedly, writing about her strategy for hiring top talent, the launch of her lifestyle brand As Ever, and her plans to ramp up investments in women-led startups as funding declines.
Her coverage also includes wellness tourism, lactation spaces for working mothers, and beauty brands such as Fazit, where founders turn viral moments into multimillion-dollar categories while keeping control of their businesses.
9 Companies That Dominated Your Feed
Much of Donaldson’s beat sits at the intersection of consumer brands and the attention economy, tracking how products become cultural phenomena.
She writes about cult favorites from breakfast chains and discount retailers to specialty food and beverage brands, including Waffle House’s OutKast merch collaboration, Costco’s new Kirkland Signature hydration sticks, and better-for-you cereal launches tied to trading-card loyalty campaigns. Her features on brands like Smash Kitchen, Touchland, Beehive Meals, and Totem explain how founders use design, storytelling, and social media to turn everyday items - condiments, hand sanitizer, freezer meals, and snack boxes - into fast-growing, often viral businesses.
She also examines how exclusivity fuels growth, documenting how companies such as Amundsen Sports and other founders leverage private clubs and members-only spaces as launchpads in what she calls a growing members-only economy. Donaldson’s contribution to Inc.’s package on companies that dominated social feeds underscores this focus, collecting examples of brands that transformed marketing stunts and community-building into measurable sales.
If You Had a Million for Marketing
Donaldson often steps back from single-company profiles to assemble playbooks for marketing and growth.
Her reporting on text-message campaigns analyzes why brands sent 57 percent more texts in the past year and what founders gain from direct-to-consumer channels, supported by data from marketing platforms and consumer behavior reports. In a feature framed around the question of how founders would spend an extra $1 million on marketing, she gathers perspectives from leaders across industries to show which bets - creator partnerships, experiential activations, data infrastructure, or traditional ads - actually move the needle.
She explores how generative AI is reshaping search through Generative Engine Optimization, interviewing technology executives about how marketers must adapt their SEO strategies for AI-driven discovery. Across these pieces, Donaldson translates abstract trends into concrete tactics that early-stage and growth-stage companies can apply to their own campaigns.
Why Your Best Employees Are Terrified to Take a Sick Day
Another strand of Donaldson’s coverage follows the changing workplace, especially how policy choices affect employees’ day-to-day lives. Through Inc.’s morning newsletter, she writes about workers who are overqualified and underemployed, Gen-Z job seekers adopting desperate strategies to get hired, and why many top performers feel unable to take a sick day. Her pieces on return-to-office mandates, fuel prices, and companies funding employee vacations examine how economic pressures and benefits design shape where and how people work. She reports on studies exposing racial bias in AI hiring tools used by the vast majority of businesses, connecting academic research to the practical concerns of managers and candidates.
Donaldson complements these workplace dispatches with “as told to” narratives from founders and executives, such as cattle-futures firm Kapco Futures and eyewear company Pair Eyewear, that reveal how leaders build businesses and careers amid volatility.
Across profiles, newsletters, and package features, Donaldson’s work is unified by close access to founders and a focus on how money, marketing, and culture interact in modern business. She is drawn to stories where a product, policy, or workplace norm captures public attention, then digs into the operators behind it to show how they seize or miss the opportunity.
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