At age 46, startup founder Gene Yu seems to have lived several lives in one.

Before he started his own company, he was a Division 1 tennis player, graduated with a computer science degree from the United States Military Academy, commonly known as West Point, served as a “Green Beret” in the U.S. Army Special Forces, led the rescue of a family friend from a hostage situation and authored a book.

Today, he is also the co-founder and CEO of cybersecurity startup Blackpanda which has raised over $21 million to date, according to an official company announcement.

While he’s undergone extremely rigorous military training, served on battlefields and led major counter-terrorism missions, he said his hardest battle was internal.

Yu was born in Concord, Massachusetts, where he says he was the only Asian kid in his town. He then moved to Cupertino, California when he was 10.

His family background is unique and, in some ways, high-profile: his uncle is Ma Ying-jeou who served as the president of Taiwan from 2008 to 2016.

Growing up as an Asian male in America, he says that he often internalized the messages he was told by society that “you are inferior, you are unattractive, you are not desired, you are not equal.” This took a toll on Yu’s self-esteem.

These feelings of inferiority were, at times, amplified at home. He learned early on to prioritize achievement. “In Asian culture, what we learn is performance equals love, right? Or even better yet, lack of performance equals the absence of love,” Yu told CNBC Make It.

Yu says his early experiences led him to chase achievement as a way of protecting a younger version of himself. “It’s like you are a wounded child, and you’re wearing the Iron Man suit,” he said. “You’re armoring yourself as a traumatized person.”

“I hated my own identity, because it was wounded, right? I wanted to create a new one, and that’s what the military does for you,” he said.

So, at age 17 after graduating from high school, he left home and went straight to West Point, which is known to be a highly prestigious and selective military academy. After that, he joined the U.S. Army Special Forces where he served as an officer and commander.

From his high school years to his time at West Point, he was working approximately 16 to 20 hours a day. That intensity shaped his work ethic which he still carries today.

“At West Point, you’re up at like 5 a.m., and then you’re down at like [midnight] … And it’s six days a week of school, no summer breaks,” he said. “So I definitely know how to work hard, that’s for sure, which I think [helped] at Blackpanda.”

In 2009, Yu’s military career came to a crossroads when his uncle, Ma Ying-jeou, was elected as the president of Taiwan.

“There was [an] investigation around … the fact that my uncle was the sitting president of Taiwan, which had occurred while I was in Special Forces,” said Yu. This period prompted difficult questions about his future.

Ultimately, Yu made the decision to leave the army, which left him feeling disoriented and exiled.

“I had a massive loss of identity,” he said. “I had waves of deep survivor’s guilt, because I knew that I was in my prime as one of the best Special Forces captains the U.S. Army had, and that our boys were overseas, dying and fighting, and I was just chilling out.”

In the years that followed, he struggled to find a new sense of identity. He spent a few years studying Chinese and going back to graduate school at Johns Hopkins University, where he was recruited to work as an equity trader at Credit Suisse.

Eventually, in 2012, he joined Palantir Technologies which he grew to love, only to get retrenched in 2013. “After Palantir let me go … that was the hardest time in my life, by far. And I was also broke…so financially stressed, and couch surfing,” he said.

Then, a crisis involving a family friend named Evelyn Chang pulled him back into action.

In 2013, Chang was taken hostage abroad by terrorist group Abu Sayyaf. Yu helped orchestrate the rescue: He put a team together, went into the Philippines and rescued her after 35 days.

Notably, this mission was what helped inspire the idea for Yu’s company today, Blackpanda.

He realized that companies or entities facing cyberattacks needed the same kind of fast, 24/7 support that crisis insurance and services provide during kidnappings and ransom situations.

“So the same models that are [used in] the physical safety and security world need to be copied in the digital world. That’s what’s missing in cyber security,” he said. He teamed up with some former Green Berets and they all went on to build Blackpanda, an idea shaped from Yu’s unique background.

Today, in reflection, Yu says that attaching identity to accomplishments is “a rigged game.”

“Because every time that you strive for the next achievement, you think that … Everything is going to be all good, right? But the problem is that if you never heal the original trauma wound, then anyone can still come hurt you from a different angle,” he said.

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On a brisk October afternoon, Ruin — a 15-month-old Dutch Shepherd mix puppy with a dark brindle coat and one floppy ear — takes a break from an obstacle course and perches on a red wooden box inside a barn in Livingston, Montana.

His head sinks into the crook of a Svalinn trainer’s arm, as the trainer deems Ruin one of his favorites. Two hours later, the trainer — now in a foam Michelin-man neck-to-heel suit — crouches near the box, imitating a quiet intruder. He cracks a whip onto a rubber mat. Ruin darts across the barn, leaping teeth-first into that same arm, holding his bite until another trainer yells, “Out.”

Svalinn breeds, raises and sells $175,000 dogs like Ruin who are trained to protect, live and travel with wealthy families. Up to 46 mixed-breed canines at a time live on the company’s 170-acre ranch — located in a town of 9,000 residents, 29 miles east of Bozeman — until they’re roughly age 2. Svalinn brought in $2.97 million in total income and was profitable in 2024, according to documents reviewed by CNBC Make It. (The business hasn’t finalized its 2025 financials.)

After the drill, Ruin rolls onto his back, then licks a reporter’s nose. “What we just saw was a perfect example of the ‘on switch’ and the ‘off switch,’” Svalinn co-founder and president Kim Greene says. “To be able to deploy your dog and get them back into obedience, in just a nanosecond, is a really practiced art.”

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Greene, 51, launched the company, initially called Ridgeback Ltd., in Nairobi, Kenya, in 2005 with her then-husband. It focused on security advising, self-defense training and chaperoning high-profile diplomats through unsafe areas, Greene says.

The business was exciting, stressful and expensive to run, especially while raising twin boys, she says. “We were broke as a joke for a lot of years, so I didn’t even have the luxury of thinking about personal finances. We were hanging on for dear life,” says Greene.

Now, Svalinn has never been financially healthier, she says. And it’s in the right place at the right time: When the company moved to the U.S. in 2013, Greene didn’t know how popular Bozeman would become, especially for wealthy families willing to spend on personal security.

Even if you can afford a Svalinn dog, Greene will try talking you out of the purchase, she says: “This is not a product that’s for everybody. It just isn’t.”

The canines are meant to be family dogs who happen to be highly perceptive and “deployable” if a threat approaches. The company spends two years training each dog in protection, stability, obedience, socialization, agility and, occasionally, scenarios tailored to the pup’s intended family. Svalinn even taught a dog how to ride a horse, trainers say.

Svalinn hires trainers from many different backgrounds — even prioritizing candidates without dog-training experience — so the dogs get used to hearing commands from a variety of voices, says Greene. “Our [clients] don’t need to have superpowers or massive muscles or to bark orders,” she says. “We are laypeople. The dogs are going to laypeople. The dogs have to feel very comfortable knowing that kind of individual.”

A trainer personally delivers each dog to its permanent home and spends about three days teaching the family how to work with the canine, Greene says. Often, the trainer returns 45 days later for a check-in, and many owners later bring their dog to the ranch for boarding and training alongside the younger pups, says Greene.

One customer, retired U.S. Air Force major and Delta Air Lines pilot Stephen Mazzola, says he was attracted to Svalinn over competitors because of the website’s tagline, which emphasizes the dogs’ approachability alongside their discipline: “Bred to love. Trained to protect.”

Mazzola wanted a dog who could be a best friend and keep an eye on his family’s 15-acre property in rural Montana, he says. Their Dutch Shepherd mix Jet has traveled, hiked and attended dinner parties with Mazzola and his wife since April 2024, he says.

“As far as being a member of the family, that is the thing I can’t even put a price tag on,” says Mazzola.

Svalinn’s earliest iteration didn’t involve dogs at all.

Greene met her husband in Afghanistan, where she’d worked as policy advisor to former Afghanistan President Hamid Karzai, she says. They moved to Nairobi, one of three major African travel hubs, to start Ridgeback — his “passion project,” she says.

When Greene became pregnant, she researched how to safely navigate Nairobi without a firearm or bodyguard. The couple adopted a Dutch Shepherd mix, Banshee, to “be both my best friend as well as my protector,” she says.

People kept their distance from Banshee’s brindle coat and intense stares, almost as if she was a forcefield, says Greene. Greene’s husband decided to incorporate protection dogs to Ridgeback’s other safety offerings, and the company sent employees to the U.S. to learn how to train the canines, Greene says.

Eight years in, Ridgeback had yet to turn a profit, and the family left Nairobi, Greene says. Terrorism threats had increased in the area and Greene wanted a more hands-on education for her first-grade sons, she says. They moved to Wyoming, and then Montana, seeking an outdoor lifestyle for their children. They also wanted their business to operate near pockets of wealth, Greene adds.

Launching in the U.S. felt like starting over, Greene says. The couple flew 30 dogs overseas, filed for new licenses, changed the company’s name and invested in branding and public relations. Svalinn focused entirely on protection dogs by 2015 and became profitable for the first time two years later, after the couple hired a budget-focused employee, says Greene.

But starting over was costly in other ways, Greene says: “We were dead set on making this happen, and it came at a very high price to our lifestyle … My former husband and I were always into the absolute hardest mountain that we could climb.” The couple divorced in 2019 and Greene’s ex-husband left Svalinn in 2020, with an investor buying a majority of the company’s equity. (Greene declined to name the investor.)

Greene initially wanted to sell her shares of the company, but “when I realized Svalinn was a blank slate, that it wasn’t someone else’s story anymore, that it was my story, I got really excited,” she says. “I realized I actually really love what I do.”

When Svalinn moved to Montana, Greene invited prospective clients to the ranch and heard “crickets on the other end” of the phone, she says. “Now, five years later, the answer is, ‘We’ve been looking to come there’ or ‘We come there once a year.’”

The American West sports a growing population of wealthy residents and tourists for multiple reasons: national parks, nostalgia for rural lifestyles and the absence of estate, inheritance and sales taxes, says Yale University sociology professor Justin Farrell, author of 2020 book “Billionaire Wilderness: The Ultra-Wealthy and the Remaking of the American West.”

The ultra-wealthy are also investing in their personal and family’s security, a trend amplified by incidents of public violence toward public figures, says James Hamilton, founder of Hamilton Security Group and a former FBI special agent. Many billionaires have comprehensive security programs, which could include protection dogs, surveillance cameras, safe rooms and a fleet of staff, Hamilton says.

Svalinn’s clients aren’t usually billionaires, Greene notes, but the business is still a logical beneficiary of the trend. Yet Greene doesn’t want to train a dog for every interested buyer, she says, to protect the brand’s exclusivity and quality control. “I would much rather stay boutique and very bespoke,” she says.

Despite once referring to herself as a “reluctant leader,” Greene says she finally feels comfortable with the business and her place within it. “This is my dream life, and it’s wrapped up in my dream job,” she says. “It’s wrapped up in a business that encompasses my whole life with my children … being in this beautiful place [and] doing the activities that I love with people I love being with.”

After the October day of training, Greene takes her own dog, Highlander, onto a small hill overlooking the ranch. They see the barn, snuggled in a valley between snow-capped mountains, cloaked in amber grass and sagebrush.

After a moment of quiet, they walk back down the hill toward the barn. Together, they disappear inside.

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For decades, Berkshire Hathaway chairman Warren Buffett has been dispensing advice not only about business and investing, but also about the keys to a better life.

In many ways, his resume speaks for itself. By the time he stepped down as CEO at the end of 2025, Buffett had built a personal net worth of about $150 billion, according to the Bloomberg Billionaires Index. The company he built from a small New England textiles business is now a conglomerate worth more than $1 trillion.

However, 95-year-old Buffett says there are more important measures of personal worth than monetary wealth.  

″[There’s] one quality that I measure people by enormously, because everybody can do it, and that’s whether people are kind,” he told Becky Quick in the “Warren Buffett: A Life and Legacy” special on CNBC. Tune in to CNBC to watch the special on Sunday, Jan. 18 at 3 p.m. ET.

Kindness is “something that really doesn’t cost you anything,” Buffett said. “It is an act that doesn’t belong to any religion, it doesn’t belong to anything. Why in the world wouldn’t you be kind?”

Buffett sees profit in treating people with respect, following the model of Tom Murphy, the former CEO of Capital Cities/ABC and one of Buffett’s closest friends.

“I don’t know anybody that had more good interactions, whether it was with buying businesses, whether it was operating businesses, whether it was dealing with any person’s problems that came to him. I mean, it was just built into his behavior, in every way,” Buffett said of Murphy.

Murphy’s most prescient advice, per Buffett: “You can always tell someone to go to hell tomorrow.”

While Buffett acknowledged it can be tempting and satisfying to treat people this way, “What have you ever gained?” he asked Quick. “I mean, the only thing is, you may have felt a little bit better.”

That isn’t to say that Buffett conducts business with blind cheeriness and optimism — nor did Murphy, Buffett said. “He wasn’t a Pollyanna. He made all kinds of big decisions,” he said.

But over the course of your life, even if you have to be incisive in your decision-making, you’ll be better off having treated people warmly, Buffett said.

He recalled the reflections of former Fiat chairman Gianni Agnelli: “When you get old, he says, you got the reputation you deserve.”

Buffett said it’s worth it for everyone to make an effort to build a reputation for kindness. “You haven’t given up anything. It’s just so easy, and you get it back with interest,” he said.

The “net happiness of the world” would be better, Buffett said, if every morning, people said to themselves, “I’ll have things that are good and bad that happen to me today, but I can be kind to anybody.”

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It’s a familiar scene: Your kid is stuck on a problem or upset about a situation. Before they’ve even finished explaining, you swoop in with solutions. That’s what good parents do, right?

But when rescuing becomes routine, it undermines the skills kids need to build confidence and resilience. As a clinical psychologist who works with anxious children, teens and parents, and as a parent myself, I know how quickly loving support can turn into overparenting. 

Overparenting blends overinvolvement with overprotection, repeatedly signaling to kids that the world is unsafe and that they can’t handle challenges without adult support. This can chip away at confidence, deepening dependence and amplifying anxiety.

Here are five signs you might be overparenting, and what kids actually need in order to grow and thrive.

When kids struggle, many parents instinctively step in. This might look like negotiating reduced courseloads, intervening with a friend’s parents, or rearranging schedules to minimize discomfort. 

But kids can’t become confident problem-solvers unless they are given the chance to try, stumble and succeed on their own.

What to do: Pause before offering solutions. Then ask, “What do you think you could try?” This encourages independent thinking and teaches kids that their ideas matter.

Many parents worry that experiencing anxiety, sadness or frustration is somehow harmful. This can drive constant reassurance, distraction or attempts to “fix” every upset: “Don’t be sad, let’s do something fun!”

But painful feelings are a natural part of life, and learning to cope with them is essential to healthy development.

What to do: Normalize and name the emotion, then express confidence in your kid’s ability to cope with painful feelings: “It makes sense that you feel frustrated, and I know you can handle it.”

One subtle overparenting pattern is adjusting expectations based on what we fear our child can’t handle, rather than what they’re capable of learning to manage. 

We lower the bar to prevent upset — excusing kids from practice, lessons or other routines because it might be tiring or stressful — and filter all feedback to buffer hurt feelings. This helps our kid feel better in the moment, but expecting fragility can inadvertently teach children to see themselves as fragile.

What to do: Ask yourself whether your expectations fit your child’s age and abilities. Are the challenges they face truly risky, or just uncomfortable? Offer support that helps them grow, rather than shielding them from every difficulty.

Overparenting often emphasizes results — preventing mistakes, smoothing feelings or guaranteeing success — rather than teaching kids how to navigate setbacks. 

This might look like negotiating group assignments with a teacher to ensure your kid gets the “perfect” project partners, arguing with a coach over a disappointing decision, or micromanaging every step in a craft to make sure it’s done correctly. But true growth comes when expectations falter and kids learn to adapt.

What to do: Let mistakes happen. Resist the urge to retrieve forgotten homework, argue a bad grade or buy a treat after a disappointing performance. Support your child as they problem-solve, adapt and learn from the process.

Many overparenting behaviors stem from adult discomfort and fears about failure, judgment or long-term consequences. 

This could look like calling a friend’s parents after a minor disagreement out of concern about social fallout, or hovering over homework because you are anxious about your kid’s performance. While well-intentioned, it’s easy for kids to interpret this behavior as a lack of parental confidence in them, planting seeds of doubt in their own abilities.

What to do: Pause and reflect: “Is this about their safety, or my discomfort with seeing them struggle?” Model how to tolerate discomfort when there’s no immediate solution.

Overparenting often stems from love and protection, yet shielding kids from every challenge can heighten the anxiety we hope to prevent. Swing too far the other way, and neglect breeds the same result.

The key is balance: guide without controlling, support without rescuing, coach while trusting. Resilience develops when kids feel secure enough to try and free enough to learn on their own.

Dr. Meredith Elkins is a clinical psychologist specializing in anxiety disorders in children and parents. She is faculty at Harvard Medical School, co-director of the McLean Anxiety Mastery Program at McLean Hospital and is the author of ”Parenting Anxiety: Breaking the Cycle of Worry and Raising Resilient Kids.”

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As the co-owners and founders of boutique staffing agency The Grapevine, Lori Zuker Briller and Rachel Zaslansky Sheer interview “thousands” of candidates each year.

Their goal is to match strong candidates with “cool, unique and interesting” roles as varied as executive assistant, estate manager and personal chef, Briller tells CNBC Make It.

Drawing on 20 years of running The Grapevine, Sheer and Briller shared their top hiring insights in their upcoming book “Straight From the Grapevine: How to Crush Your Job Search.”

According to Briller, a candidate’s online presence is one of the most “impactful” considerations in the job process.

Candidates should take a hard look at their profiles and ask themselves, “Who are you online? What is your narrative and story online?” she says.

If a candidate’s social media posts or online content don’t align with the image they present in interviews, that can be a “definite red flag” for hirers, according to Sheer.

For example, if someone applying for a child-care role posts content that’s “not on-brand” for a nanny, “it could cost them the job,” she says.

In Briller’s view, it’s best to avoid posting, liking or sharing any content that could call your professionalism into question, particularly on career-focused platforms like LinkedIn.

Recently, Briller says she’s seen an uptick in candidates sharing controversial or overly negative opinions on LinkedIn.

“There’s a lot of ranting going on,” Briller says, particularly about people’s frustrations with past jobs or the hiring process.

Even if your view is justified, venting about a negative job experience online could make you seem like a “disgruntled employee,” career coach Eliana Goldstein previously told CNBC Make It.

According to Goldstein, expressing resentment or anger in a social media post could cause hirers to question your attitude and professionalism.

It’s best to discuss those feelings “with people you’re really close to and trust,” rather sharing them on the internet, she says.

Similarly, Briller advises the job seekers she works with to talk about their career challenges with friends and colleagues, instead of “putting every thought out there” online.

She tells candidates, “Look, it’s not my place to have an opinion. If this is what you want, great. But just be careful, because hiring parties, HR people might see that as problematic.”

Some candidates are “really resistant” to this advice, Briller says: “They’re kind of like, well, it shouldn’t be any of their business.”

Still, job seekers need to accept that their online presence is fair game in the hiring process, Sheer says.

“Everyone checks, everyone Googles, everyone looks on social media now. It’s just part of it,” she says.

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