Inc.

Going From Employee to Founder

CHRISTINA TOSI MILK BAR Milk Bar, a growing national bakery chain with 12 locations and more than 200 employees
OWNING IT Milk Bar founder and CEO Christina Tosi, who studied engineering, inside her bakery chain’s location in New York City’s West Village.

A trained pastry chef fed up with fancy restaurants, Christina Tosi hatched Milk Bar in 2008 with seed funding from her then-employer, David Chang, founder of the Momofuku noodle bar empire. Today, when the 36-year-old CEO and mastermind of Crack Pies and Compost Cookies isn’t judging on Fox’s MasterChef, she is busy expanding her profitable bakery chain. (Momofuku still owns an undisclosed stake in Milk Bar, which operates separately.) In November, she closed a reported eight-figure funding round from RSE Ventures, which Milk Bar will use to expand locations, e-commerce operations, and product lines.

My mom was an accountant, and my dad was an agricultural economist. They were the most passionate accountant and agricultural economist you could ever meet, and they wanted me to find something I was passionate about at university. So I

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