This 39-year-old quit his lineman job during the pandemic and built a $50 million company in his backyard
Josh Smith left his stable job as a lineman during the pandemic to pursue his dream of creating a knife company. After years of honing his craft, he launched Montana Knife Company, which has since generated $50 million in revenue. Smith's journey reflects a blend of passion, expertise, and a keen understanding of market demand for American-made products.
- ▪Josh Smith quit his job as a journeyman lineman to start Montana Knife Company during the pandemic.
- ▪The company generated $50 million in revenue within four years of its launch.
- ▪Smith had been honing his knife-making skills since he was 11 years old and became the youngest master bladesmith at 19.
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Story provenance
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Record
| Original publisher | Fortune |
| Canonical URL | https://fortune.com/2026/05/23/montana-knife-founder-50-million-revenue-startup-american-dream-manufacturing/ |
| Publication time | Sat, 23 May 2026 11:15:00 +0000 |
| Retrieval time | 2026-05-23T11:57:26.515Z |
| Last seen | 2026-05-23T11:57:26.515Z |
| Headline source | Publisher (no WeSearch rewrite) |
| Excerpt source | publisher body |
| Excerpt method | First ~120 words (~800 chars) of extracted publisher body, fair-use limited. |
| Summary | WeSearch · cerebras-chat (WeSearch summarizer) |
| Summary source text | contentText |
| Citation coverage | Summary is a WeSearch-generated derivative; primary citation is the original publisher URL. |
| Cluster | Os-tNGu8fLRu |
| Cluster logic | Grouped by semantic title/content similarity across sources within a rolling window. Same-publisher template collisions are excluded from coverage comparison. |
| Ranking reason | Story pages are not engagement-ranked. Hub feeds use recency, with optional source-diversified chronological ordering (cap consecutive stories per source). No personalized ranking. |
| Publisher visit | Yes — open original |
| Substitutes article? | No — link-out required for full text |
Rights status (four layers)
WeSearch handling by dimension
| Indexing | May the item be indexed (stored, ranked, made findable)? | Allowed |
| Snippet | May a short excerpt of the publisher's text be shown? | Allowed |
| AI summary | May WeSearch generate its own short summary of the article? | Limited |
| Retrieval / RAG | May the content be exposed for third-party retrieval-augmented generation? | Not asserted |
| Model training | May the content be used to train AI models? | Not asserted |
| Commercial reuse | May the content be reused commercially? | Not permitted |
Basis: Derived from the published RSS/Atom feed. Contact: [email protected]. Reviewed: 2026-07-24.
Opening excerpt (first ~120 words) tap to expand
On December 30, 2020, Josh Smith did something most people would consider reckless. He walked away from his job as a journeyman lineman for the power company — a union position, with union pay, in the middle of a pandemic — and bet everything on a knife company he’d been dreaming about for two decades.Recommended Video He was 39 years old. He had a garage, some equipment, and a business name he’d registered 20 years earlier and never used. Four years later, Montana Knife Company did $50 million in revenue. A childhood obsession, a lifelong credential The story doesn’t start in 2020, though. It starts in 1992, when an 11-year-old Josh Smith got a knife for Christmas and his Little League baseball coach invited him into his shop to make one.
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Excerpt limited to ~120 words for fair-use compliance. The full article is at Fortune.
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