Fast Company SA - March/April 2015 by Fast Company SA

SPECIAL REPORT: Silicon Valley’s Race Problem

SECRETS OF THE MOST PRODUCTIVE PEOPLE Life-changing wisdom from CEOs, chefs, directors, surgeons, inventors, ELON MUSK & more R35.00

MARCH/APRIL 2015 FASTCOMPANY.CO.ZA

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RICHARD GRIFFIN

How he resurrected Madame Zingara

SUSAN LYNE

Leading AOL’s BBG Ventures

“If you’re at Tesla, you’re ... at the equivalent of Special Forces.”

ELON M U SK

9 772313 330006

CEO and CTO of SpaceX; chairperson of SolarCity; product architect and CEO of Tesla Motors

VIRTUAL WORK REALITY

Why more women are telecommuting

011 232 8000

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CONTENTS SECRETS OF THE MOST PRODUCTIVE PEOPLE 48 Man on a Mission

How South African-born entrepreneur and inventor Elon Musk divides his work week between two companies and still finds the time to try and change the future BY CHRIS WALDBURGER

PLUS From Dawn Till Dusk

Top business leaders reveal their best and worst habits at work, at home and in between

Better, Faster, More Fun

A four-part guide to conquering meetings (p. 53), email (p. 55), to-do lists (p. 59) and mornings (p. 60)

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March/April 2015

“Elon is Neo [from The Matrix]. He sees these zeroes and ones. And he just has a different look at the entire world.” —Lynden Rive, CEO of SolarCity (page 48)

Contents

FE ATURES 32 The Visible Man

Tristan Walker is the highest profile black entrepreneur in Silicon Valley, which has come under fire for its lack of racial diversity in a country that is increasingly minoritypopulated. Can one bold startup transform an ecosystem? BY JJ MCCORVEY

70 A Different Kind of Valley Life

A candid, uncensored conversation with a group of top African-Americans in tech about their experiences, pressures and inherent responsibility for the future BY JJ MCCORVEY

78 Strike Down Bad Ideas

How to manage innovative ideas so that they are effective BY DYLAN KOHLSTÄDT

NEXT 16 Hire Remotely, Close The Gap?

PowerToFly in the US and South African platform RecruitMyMom help women find more flexible work opportunities BY JESSICA LEBER & EVANS MANYONGA

62 Pod Power

Who knew the hottest entertainment form would be audio? BY REBECCA GREENFIELD

If Tristan Walker can build a world-changing business, he will serve as an extraordinary role model for younger African-Americans. (page 32)

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66 Wearables With Style

Fashion designers are releasing more wearables into the market. We take a few on an ill-fated test run BY SARAH KESSLER

Your employees are going to hate this product.

M&CSAATCHI ABEL/12115/E

Introducing the latest in the online landscape and a product that will make your employees like you just a little less. It’s called Fibre and it’s the solution to a better VoIP connection, an enhanced Video experience and the most stable Internet connection to send and receive any Email sizes efficiently. Not to mention full redundancy, meaning absolute minimal downtime. Time to increase your line speed and increase your business’s productivity. No more making a bouncy ball out of office supplies while you’re waiting for that document to upload, Kevin from IT. Sorry.

Visit MWEBBusiness.co.za to sign up for MWEB Fibre or give us a call on 087 700 0111.

Contents

REGULARS 08 From the Publisher 10 From the Editor 14 The Recommender 24 Coffee To Go Gourmet Carts is changing the world of street

“We’re at the very beginning of how [podcasting] is enabling innovation,” says Alex Blumberg from podcast network, Gimlet Media. (page 62)

trading with its mobile solar-powered food carts

30 The Big Future For Little Things

How tiny computers like Kano and Raspberry Pi will rewire our world BY OM MALIK

46 Mirror, Mirror Fashion-biz siblings Rebecca and Uri Minkoff are bringing digital innovations to the fitting-room experience BY DANIELLE SACKS

64 Pay Dirt Aisha Pandor’s tech startup takes the chore out of finding a professional domestic cleaner BY JAMIE LANGEVELDT

74 Skid Row Rises Architect Michael Maltzan reimagines Downtown Los Angeles’ notorious district BY SHAUNACY FERRO

76 Turning Trash Into Treasure

How one local entrepreneur taught Lagos, Nigeria to embrace recycling BY JACLYN TROP

82 The Great Innovation Frontier With the right partnerships and attitudes, Africa is perfectly positioned to take the lead in the next generation of mobile tech BY WALTER BAETS & GUEST WRITER SIFISO DABENGWA

84 Fast Bytes 88 One More Thing Techies love to rethink education and

immigration to help address labour issues. What about reformed prisoners? BY BARATUNDE THURSTON

CRE ATIVE CONVERSATIONS 20 Phoenix Rising

When a fire completely destroyed Richard Griffin’s successful restaurant, Madame Zingara, he sifted through the ashes and started over—with a little help BY ANGUS BEGG

26 Susan Lyne has spent her career on the forefront of cultural change. Today, she leads AOL’s BBG Ventures—a fund dedicated to women-run startups BY JEFF CHU

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GUTTER CREDIT TK

Built By Girls

FROM THE PUBLISHER

Disruptive innovation, and those who failed to embrace it Since we began working on Fast Company SA, we’ve heard the word “disruptive” being thrown around often. Not in the way you might recall from your school days when your teacher would give you a tongue-lashing for your bad behaviour in class—but in a completely different way; I can really appreciate this description of the ‘new’ wave of innovation in business which goes against the grain, metamorphosing the world as we know it. But just what is disruptive innovation? The theory of disruptive innovation was formulated by Clayton Christensen of Harvard Business School in his book, The Innovator’s Dilemma. Mr Christensen used the term to

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describe innovations that create new markets by discovering new categories of customers. They do this partly by harnessing new technologies, but also by developing new business models and exploiting old technologies in new ways. He contrasted disruptive innovation with sustaining innovation, which simply improves existing products. Personal computers, for example, were disruptive innovations because they created a new mass market for computers; previously, expensive mainframe computers had been sold only to big companies and research universities. It is why we said goodbye to our old collection of music cassette tapes when the CD took over, and why our old VHS videos have been gathering dust in the garage since the introduction of DVDs. Nothing is really safe from disruptive innovation, as even Uber has proved on a global scale on the taxi and transport fronts; Skype has done the same with long-distance phone calls, as has Twitter with newspapers. The biggest secret to succeeding with disruptive innovation in business is to know when it’s time to hold on to an existing market by doing the same thing a bit better, or capturing new markets by embracing new technologies and adopting new business models. Here are a few people in history who were definitely on the wrong side of this curve: “I think there is a world market for maybe five computers,” said IBM president Tom Watson in 1943. Thankfully for IBM, his prediction was woefully inaccurate. Last year, the company brought in revenue of around R1.1 trillion, selling computer

hardware and software. “I predict the Internet will soon go spectacularly supernova and in 1996 catastrophically collapse,” according to Robert Metcalfe, founder of 3Com, in 1995. He had promised to “eat his words” if his prediction was wrong. At a conference in 1997, true to his word, he used a food processor to liquefy a copy of the article containing the inaccurate forecast—and then drank it. “The Americans have need of the telephone, but we do not. We have plenty of messenger boys.”—Sir William Preece, engineer-in-chief at the British General Post Office, 1876 “Television won’t be able to hold on to any market it captures after the first six months. People will soon get tired of staring at a plywood box every night.”—Darryl Zanuck, 20th Century Fox studio chief, 1946 And one of my favourites: “Apple is already dead!” This clanger was from Nathan Myhrvold, former CTO of Microsoft. In fairness, it was in 1997 before Apple’s resurrection, but it just shows that disruptive innovation can change the world around us so quickly that most of the time it’s best to get involved—and even better not to put your foot in your mouth if you aren’t.

Robbie Stammers

Publisher robbie@fastcompany.co.za @daStamman

enquiries@seartec.co.za | 021 447 2349 | www.seartec.co.za facebook.com/SeartecSA @SeartecSA

FROM THE EDITOR

Productive productivity I’ve always found it fascinating how some people seem to have more time to accomplish their various goals. How does one individual manage to accomplish so much within a day, a month or even a year, while some of us need more time to do the very same? The question made it a pleasure to put together this issue, as I was looking forward to having it answered. As we took a closer look into the lifestyle choices, habits, motivations and philosophies that some of our subjects live by, one aspect became apparent: Despite some of them living in South Africa and some in the United States, they have a lot in common. To sum it all up, our subjects unanimously affirmed that hard work, honest work, dedicated work, smart work, inspirational work and an unwavering determination were key to their attaining so many goals. These people come from a wide spectrum of disciplines, from CEOs to surgeons and designers, but the fact is: There is no substitute for work, regardless of one’s industry or sector. The biggest secret is also the most common knowledge: Work and more work is the key. Let’s work alert, work smart and work toward making things different. Another highlight in this issue is the coverage of race relations in Silicon Valley. Despite the fact that AfricanAmericans make up 13.2% of the US population, only 1%

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are among technology workers at Facebook, Google, Yahoo, LinkedIn and Twitter. The staggering fact is that only 16% of whites online use Twitter while 22% of online blacks do. Fast Company US editor Robert Safian highlighted that this is actually a missed opportunity for some of the tech giants, as they may not be activating a relevant market segment. Elsewhere in this issue, the magician behind Madame Zingara, Richard Griffin, tells us more about his famous venture (and misadventure) while another personal favourite is the feature on virtual work, which looks at the growing trend of telecommuting—particularly among women. It has not only entrenched itself internationally but also locally. Read it, enjoy it, question it—but above all, work hard to achieve those goals.

Evans Manyonga

evans@fastcompany.co.za @Nyasha1e

PUBLISHER AND EDITOR-IN-CHIEF Robbie Stammers

robbie@fastcompany.co.za

EDITOR Evans Manyonga

evans@fastcompany.co.za

Stacey Storbeck-Nel

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Mauricio Alejo, Celine Grouard, Mitch Payne, Kyle Bean, Jonathan Snyder, Ruth McDowall, Ryan Lowry

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No article or any part of any article in Fast Company South Africa may be reproduced without the prior written consent of the publisher. The information provided and opinions expressed in this publication are provided in good faith, but do not necessarily represent the opinions of Mansueto Ventures in the USA, Insights Publishing or the editor. Neither this magazine, the publisher or Mansueto Ventures in the USA can be held legally liable in any way for damages of any kind whatsoever arising directly or indirectly from any facts or information provided or omitted in these pages, or from any statements made or withheld by this publication. Fast Company is a registered title under Mansueto Ventures and is licensed to Insights Publishing for use in southern Africa only. MARCH/APRIL 2015 FASTCOMPANY.CO.Z A 11

THE RECOMMENDER

What are you loving this month?

Claire Jackson-Bernardo

Lungile Msibi

MD, Alerting the Media & Lecturer, Boston Media House

Brand manager, Emperor Asset Management

E A SY E Q U I T I E S

AS A BR A ND M A N AGER OF A N IN V ESTMENT COMPA N Y, I COME UP WITH WAYS OF M A KING IN V ESTING E ASY TO UNDERSTA ND, A ND DEM YSTIF YING THE M Y THS OF IN V ESTING TO THE GENER A L CONSUMER. E ASY EQUITIES ( W W W.E ASY EQUITIES.CO.Z A ) IS M Y FAVOURITE THING RIGHT NOW BECAUSE IT DOES THIS SO WELL. IT A LLOWS A N YONE TO IN V EST IN THE SH ARES (OR BR A NDS) THE Y LOV E BY SIMPLY CLICKING ON THEIR LOGO A ND CONFIRMING THEIR IN V ESTMENT VA LUE, WHICH CA N BE AS LIT TLE AS R10. THERE’S SOME THING LIBER ATING A BOU T OWNING SH A RES, WH ATE V ER THE VA LUE.

BOOKS

P O L P E T TA Friday nights for me are about friends, family and closing the week on a high note. The best place to do that is Polpetta Italian Restaurant in the 90 Degrees on Rivonia Shopping Centre, Sandton. Their menu offers a selection to suit all tastes. Try their Tomato & Gorgonzola Pizza Bread or the Ivano with grilled fillet steak, but make sure you have the House Salad with the legendary dressing (or buy a bottle!).

Devan Kerr

Head of Specialist Lending, Fulcrum Group

KHAN ACADEMY In our extremely busy and active work lives, often the one thing that takes a back seat is the ability to continue learning and growing in sectors that fall outside the ambit of our primary jobs. Through www.khanacademy.org , Khan Academy offers a very professional and in-depth learning platform that allows you to develop your skills in almost any subject. The functionality of the website allows you to access these e-learning presentations and modules at any time and from any location, even my local coffee shop.

Amanda Reekie

Founding director, ImagineNATION Alliance & ovatoyou

DO THE WORK

THIS BOOK CA ME TO ME AT JUST THE RIGHT TIME —PERFECT FOR ENTREPRENEURS OR A N YONE WHO NEEDS A KICK IN THE BU T T TO START A PROJECT OR TO ‘GE T OU T OF THEIR OWN WAY ’. THE AU THOR E X HORTS ONE IN A CLE V ER, CLE AR WAY TO RECOGNISE ONE’S OWN RESISTA NCE A ND TO SL AY TH AT DR AGON A ND MOV E FORWARD. YOU’LL RE A D IT IN A FE W HOURS: TIN Y BOOK , BIG FONTS A ND PERSON A BLE, MEMOR A BLE A NECDOTES.

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gutter credit tk

BY S T E V E N P R E S S F I E L D

DE STIN ATIONS Marcela Ospina

Business anthropologist

BERLIN

THIS IS A N INCREDIBLE PL ACE. IT IS THE PERFECT BLEND OF HISTORY A ND ART, TECHNOLOGY A ND HUM A N TA LENT, MUSIC A ND EDGINESS. IF YOU H AV E A BROA D VISION OF A ESTHE TICS, A N E Y E FOR BE AU T Y IN THE IMPERFECT, A ND ARE WILLING TO STAY UP A LL NIGHT TO E X PLORE THE PL ACE, BERLIN IS FOR YOU. Stuart De Borgogne

MD, Club Med South Africa

H O N G KO N G The pulse of the city is not just in its majestic glass and sky-reaching steel structures, but also in its cultural spaces that give the metropolis a human touch. Hong Kong is a complex city that many think of as a concrete jungle, but it has a very enriching offering. It is in peeling off those layers that the precious gems of the city are revealed, and always surprise me. For instance, you could be walking between towering skyscrapers, and a few blocks away walk into a small temple dating back centuries. I love the plurality of influences, which comes from a rich blend of cultures that give this city its unique character. I guess this is why I feel at home there because, in its authenticity, the city does not feel isolated but rather embraces diversity in a way that makes for the global city. From the varied culinary offering, the galleries and museums with contemporary and classic art, the layered architecture, the fashion and the numerous idiosyncrasies of the Hong Kong citizen on the street—it remains one of my favourite cities to visit.

Ruan Oosthuizen

CEO, Flume Digital Marketing

AT L A S S H R U G G E D

BY AY N R A N D Although an oldie and not the shortest book to read, it should definitely be a bucket-list item for any bibliophile. What happens when a person has had enough of everything and gives up? What would happen if Atlas (the Greek titan holding the world on his shoulders) shrugged and let the world go? That is exactly what this book is about. I couldn’t read it in one go, rather, I found myself sitting and recalling the book and what was written many a time. What really hit me was how applicable it is to today’s events. Initially, you don’t understand the book, then you relate with it, and then you agree with it—or even feel outraged by it! After it all, you look at the world we live in today and ask if it is not that different.

MARCH/APRIL 2015 FASTCOMPANY.CO.Z A 13

The Recommender

APP ALLEY Gil Oved

Leigh Phillips

Group co-CEO, The Creative Counsel

Operations director, J-Lee inc

IMOVIE

WA Z E This is an old favourite, and still comes out top. It’s an app that connects drivers and their driving experience to one another, creating local driving communities. Combining highly effective GPS with active user input, it improves daily commutes by suggesting alternative routes to avoid traffic, and provides the most up-to-date maps through a community of online map editors. Available on iTunes App Store, Google Play and Windows Phone Store.

This app is amazing and comes standard on iPhones. I just love it because it’s functional and makes it easy to put together and edit your own movies from pictures and vids you take.

Janez Vermeiren

Model, entrepreneur & Top Billing presenter

UBER

Founding director, Life is Awesome Design Studio

P E A K— B R A I N T R A I N I N G I’m loving brainbow’s brain-training ‘gym’ on my iPhone! Its interactive games, goals and challenges keep my brain in tip-top condition—a must for anyone who relies on their grey matter to come up with fresh ideas day in and day out (in other words, all entrepreneurs). As a designer, I’m particularly impressed by the app’s slick UX and sleek design; it’s easy to use and doesn’t feel at all like work. It’s a really great tool that boosts cognitive agility and memory mastery. And, as it’s made for mobile, I get to train my brain wherever and whenever I want. Available on iTunes App Store and Google Play.

gutter credit tk

Currently, I’m like a kid in a candy store because I just received my new metal Hisense Infinity H6 smartphone. I’ve been downloading apps left, right and centre! Google Play really does ensure you’re spoilt for choice. I simply cannot live without my Uber app; it has changed the way I move around. I spend most of my days in Johannesburg, commuting from meeting to meeting, and the Uber app saves me the stress of driving so that I can focus on work that needs to be done. It also saves me money and, most importantly, keeps me safe. Also available on iTunes App Store and Windows Phone Store.

Liné van der Merwe

14 FASTCOMPANY.CO.Z A MARCH/APRIL 2015

ARE AN IDEAS INCUBATOR

NURTURE IDEAS ANALYSE THEM GROW THEM SHAPE THEM

WE MAKE IDEAS HAPPEN

SABS DESIGN INSTITUTE - EMPOWERING THE NEXT GENERATION TO DESIGN THE FUTURE

www.design.sabs.co.za | design@sabs.co.za

N E X T Next

VIRTUAL WORK

The way to close tech’s gender gap? Silicon Valley companies are searching for women to hire, but a new staffing firm says the solution is simple: hire remotely By Jessica Leber

Photograph by Samantha Casolari

16 FASTCOMPANY.CO.Z A MARCH/APRIL 2015

Co-pilots: PowerToFly founders Katharine Zaleski, left, and Milena Berry. “We have a lot to teach people about this way of working,” Berry says.

After years of deflecting or ignoring criticism about its maledominated culture, the tech industry has finally come to a moment of introspection. Companies now say they want to hire more female programmers, and Dana Kelemen would seem to fit the bill. She’s a 34-year-old Perl developer with a decade of experience. There are just a couple of problems: She’s a new mom who would prefer to work from home, and that home happens to be in Romania. Try as she might, the job offers weren’t coming in. And that makes her a prime example of just how complex it will be to truly even out Silicon Valley’s staff. “Everybody talks about this problem, that there aren’t enough women in tech. We actually have women,” says Katharine Zaleski, co-founder of PowerToFly. The recruiting startup vets, coaches and then places female tech applicants, most of whom live (as far as potential employers are

concerned) in the cloud—in places such as Egypt or North Carolina, far from big tech, media and startup cities. “The big issue is that if companies want more women, they have to change themselves.” PowerToFly believes that if companies truly want a more female staff, they can’t just expect to lure women to places like New York or Silicon Valley. They need to rethink who a prospective employee is, and embrace remote working. So far, clients who have hired workers through PowerToFly include a small but impressive list, including publishing companies BuzzFeed (CEO Jonah Peretti is an angel investor) and Hearst, and the startups RebelMouse and Skillcrush. The recruiting platform is trying to sign bigger Valley firms, but the Googles and Facebooks of this world won’t be easily convinced. In September last year, Google executive chairperson Eric Schmidt dismissed remote work in an interview with MIT Technology Review: “The reason [employees] need to show up at work is because of the water-cooler effect. A lot of the conversations are informal; the entity moves forward when people are around. It’s very difficult to do that, even with modern communications technology, when people are remote.” Co-founder of PowerToFly Milena Berry doesn’t buy that argument. She built a

completely remote, 20-person tech team during her seven years as CTO of the activism group, Avaaz. “We enabled efficient handovers and really tried to master remote communication,” she says. “It was fun to give a task in the afternoon and wake up to it being done [the next morning].” She conceived of PowerToFly in 2013, and asked Zaleski to join her. Zaleski understood the problem in a personal way: She had recently given birth to her first child and was frustrated by the difficulty of going back to work in an office. In a prior life, as The Washington Post’s executive director of digital news, she watched her employer struggle to hire qualified developers because it had insisted on in-office workers. (The Post is now a PowerToFly client.) “Women spend 10 years working hard to build experience, and then you either have to go back in for 12 hours a day or pull out. Why can’t there be something in the middle?” says Zaleski, who is 33. She believes companies are missing out on a valuable type of worker: “You spend a lot of time cajoling [people in their twenties]—taking them out to drinks to get them to do things, working on ego issues. Working mothers, they don’t care about that stuff. They get in, they get out.” PowerToFly launched out of beta in August last year and has placed more than 50 women in jobs. Both Berry and Zaleski work in New

York, but their staff of 23 people—22 are women and nine are parents—is spread across seven countries. The platform is heavy on individual attention. Promising candidates are coached on résumé-writing, office skills such as how to ask for a raise, and even their English competency. Their pay is higher than typical remote workers, though the PowerToFly co-founders admit that a programmer like Kelemen in Romania may not earn as much as one inside an office in, say, Palo Alto. Kelemen first heard about PowerToFly on Twitter. She had quit her job at a local company and was hoping to find work at a bigger employer abroad. With PowerToFly’s help, Kelemen was placed on a two-week trial at BuzzFeed, and afterward was brought on fulltime which, because she is not in the United States, meant being hired by PowerToFly and contracted out. The media company has picked up numerous employees through PowerToFly, and its tech and product team is now 40% women—far more balanced than most. Today, Kelemen is working mostly regular hours from her home in Romania, and she’s happy with her pay. “I’m learning a lot,” she says. “Of course, the kind of connection you have when you’re face to face, it’s not here. But I’m fine with that. I think they are fine with that.”

M A KE I T WO R K— R E M OT E LY T H E P O W E R T O F LY C O - F O U N D E R S O N T H E KEYS TO TELECOMMUTING SUCCESS 1. Overcommunicate. Workers Supervisors will trust should . . . you more if they’re not busy worrying about what you’re up to. End each day with a note that details what you worked on that day and what you’re focusing on tomorrow. 1. Hire with caution.

Illustration by Justin Renteria

Employers Don’t hire a candidate should . . . you’re not convinced is

self-motivated. If you can’t fully trust her from the start, you’ll drive yourself (and your remote worker) nuts by constantly monitoring her work.

2. Schedule face time. Set a weekly oneon-one with your supervis or over video chat. It helps to be seen in the office, even if it’s from thousands of kilometres away.

3. Escalate medium, but not message. When you need to reach your employer and she’s not responding to email, try Skype. Then phone. But never sound frustrated; your mode of contact is urgency enough.

2. Assign a buddy. Each remote worker should have a desig nated in-office person to talk to (and a backup one, if the main buddy is out). That way, the remote worker has a peer—and not just the boss—to relate to.

3. Do a reality check. Remote workers tend to feel more pressure to produce than office regulars, just to show they aren’t slacking off. Go out of your way to make sure your employee isn’t over working herself.

MARCH/APRIL 2015 FASTCOMPANY.CO.Z A 17

Home, sweet home office RecruitMyMom is an online platform that helps women find more flexible work opportunities around South Africa Interview by Evans Manyonga Photograph by Brian O’Neil

Phillipa Geard is the founder and CEO of RecruitMyMom, a national online recruiting site that specialises in flexible-hours, reducedhours and consulting opportunities for skilled women—particularly mothers—in South Africa. It was launched in August 2012 and currently has more than 13 000 members. These women represent over 100 different skills and include professionals such as actuaries, chartered accountants, lawyers and engineers. Fast Company: What inspired RecruitMyMom? Geard: I was inspired to start the business after meeting not one, but many, highly talented women with many years of local and international work experience, who had taken a career break and wanted to re-enter the work environment in a flexible manner and had no idea where to begin. In my previous life running a consulting firm, we would consult to companies that needed marketing and media skills, but not necessarily full-time. I felt with the growing trend toward more flexible ways of working, that there was an opportunity to match the skills of moms wanting to work part-time or flexibly to the needs of businesses requiring flexible expertise or part-time resource and support. For women who have taken a career break to focus on family needs, a time comes when they may want to re-enter the workplace, but not on a full-time office-bound basis. Before RecruitMyMom was launched, women with the skills and experience that could add value to a company were unsure as to where to go to find flexible or reduced-time opportunities. Most other recruitment agencies do not focus on reduced-hour or flexible working roles. Likewise, many companies do not have a central way of being able to tap into this incredibly talented pool of skills. There is a growing need for flexible work for both males and females, and technological advancement is making it easier for people to work from home or work with reduced office hours.

webpage and selects LOAD A JOB. Job posting is free. Employers select one of three roles: 1. If they want to fill a permanent role (with reduced hours, flexible hours or work-from-home); 2. A fixed-duration contract role; 3. If they require a professional consultant to assist them for variable hours. Based on the selection, they fill in an online job specification form that describes the opportunity. Once saved, the employer is then contacted by one of our recruitment managers, ensuring every employer has a point of contact within the company. The job is then published and marketed to our members via email notification and social media. “Skilled Mom” members can view the job and apply for the position using an online CV that has been pre-populated on their profile. Employers can then view the CVs of applicants and take the process further. An advantage of using RecruitMyMom is that employers never get inundated with hundreds of irrelevant CVs that take hours to sift through. There is a 5% to 10% placement fee on permanent and fixed-duration contracts, depending on the service level required.

How does the website work? We match the needs of businesses to the skills of women. After entering www.recruitmymom.co.za, an employer simply goes to the employer

Are there requirements to joining? Skilled Moms should meet the following requirements: Be a mom (or stay-at-home dad); ideally have completed a university degree or college

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Philippa Geard (left), founder and CEO of RecruitMyMom, and Tricia Fitchet, one of the site’s regular clients.

heard about. We engage with employers to see how a job can be modified to make it more ‘mom-friendly’, giving employers ideas they might not necessarily have thought of themselves, and ensuring it works for both parties. We verify every job posting to ensure the job and the employer are legitimate. Our members know that if they go for an interview, they are safe. We save these women precious time when it comes to finding work. What are a few of the common job listings? All our jobs are part-office, part-home, half-day, flexible work hours, reduced hours or work-from-home roles. Bookkeeping, personal assistants, financial managers, office assistants and accountants are our most common skill requirements from employers. Social-media writing, translating and proofreading are common work-from-home roles.

diploma; alternatively, must have succeeded in her place of work, and gained a skill she can offer; must have a minimum of two years’ working experience in her area of skill; have a commitment to professionalism and a dedication to excellence; be dependable and reliable to meet deadlines and deliver her best; have a high level of honesty and integrity; and provide excellent customer service. Does RecruitMyMom cover South Africa as a whole? Yes, this is a national website with skilled women based all over the country. Are there age restrictions? Or can women of any age apply? No, there is no age restriction. We have quite a few members who are on retirement and have joined our site. Some just want to supplement their income while others are not yet ready to stop working. In what way does the website benefit mothers or other women? We invest in advertising to attract employers to the website for our members. This site offers moms the opportunity to find flexible or reduced-hour employment without apologising for the fact that they have a need to integrate work and family life. By joining RecruitMyMom, women can find employment that they might otherwise never have

Can mums who already own businesses be a part of the RecruitMyMom family? Yes, employers use RecruitMyMom to employ a professional consultant or outsource work such as administration and payroll to a virtual assistant. Many of the moms we place as our consultants and virtual assistants run their own companies and we support them by using them as consultants for RecruitMyMom. Do you think flexible working is a growing trend? Is South Africa embracing this? Flexible working is definitely a growing trend and will continue to grow. This is not just among mothers: Many men want to have a more flexible way of working so that they, too, can integrate their family and work life. Not being gender-specific, but people have hobbies and interests that they pursue and would want to work that into a flexible working day. The younger generation growing up with mobile devices will not understand why they need to be chained to a desk from 8 a.m. to 6 p.m. to complete a task that can be done remotely. South African companies are slowly waking up to the fact that if they are to benefit from the proven positive bottom-line results of having gender diversity in senior management, they need to find alternative ways of working. Gender diversity is no longer just the politically correct thing to do; it financially benefits companies. Human resource studies show that employees who are offered flexible ways of working are more loyal to that company. Businesses need to get used to measuring employees on performance and productivity, not presence at a desk.

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CRE ATI V E CON V ERSATION

Phoenix Rising WHAT DO YOU DO WHEN A FIRE COMPLETELY DESTROYS YOUR BUSINESS THAT WAS A RUNAWAY SUCCESS? YOU SIFT THROUGH THE ASHES AND START OVER—WITH A LIT TLE HELP FROM A GOOD FRIEND, THREE BUSINESSMEN, YOUR FATHER, A DENTIST AND A SPANISH FISHERMAN

By Angus Begg

The son of an accountant, Richard Griffin ran away from his Plumstead home aged 13 in an act of early teenage rebellion, and started work as a dishwasher. The upshot of that little story is that he didn’t finish school. Today, Griffin operates a fairly large and growing family of restaurants on what he refers to as “blind faith” that “tomorrow will be a better day”. It’s an attitude that has thus far served him well in a career of signature highs and pot-clanging crashes; that, plus the way he looks at opportunities and challenges that confront him.

Arguably Griffin’s first truly standout establishment, Madame Zingara, was in Cape Town’s Loop Street and achieved the sort of public reception any aspiring owner-chef would’ve wanted. It had followed on from Serendipity in neighbouring Long Street a few years earlier, and two other establishments that he bought and sold. It was a time in which he established himself as part of the original handful of restaurateurs to make the city’s partying Long Street the social hot spot it is today. Griffin describes that period as “wild and jaded”, marked by the ubiquitous sex, drugs and rock ‘n’ roll. “Oh yes,” he says with a smirk and a rumbling “oh dear” from somewhere down below in his throat. He almost said, “Those were the days.” They were, I suppose. That’s

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Richard Griffin

MD, Madame Zingara Holdings

just the nature of being a relative pioneer involved in something that’s inevitably impossible to recapture. And while the fateful restaurant fire in 2006 would’ve put a damper on any such nostalgia, it played its part in fulfilling Madame’s destiny. A few months before the tragedy, Griffin had been visiting his sister in Ireland, when he saw a large, early 20th century vintage performance tent named Victoria at the Cork Film Festival. With a keen eye for entertainment opportunities and what he could do with it, he traced the owners—the Klessens family, who have been making the Spiegel (‘mirror’) tents for a century—to Belgium, went over to meet them, liked them, and organised to bring the tent to Cape Town over the summer holiday season. Then a fire completely gutted Madame Zingara. Griffin immediately had 100 staff jobless. He saw the answer to his quandary lying before him: He just had to hope the Klessens would let him have the tent as a permanent home instead of just for the season. “They loved the idea; Victoria had been to every continent except Africa,” he recalls. For roughly R500 000 per month—he was paying in euros—the tent was his. Belgium has had a miserable record in Africa, with the infamous malevolent rule of King Leopold II and that country’s involvement in Rwanda possibly top of its never-to-repeat list. Yet, this adventure had the makings of a much happier African expedition. Victoria came from a time synonymous with the burlesque period in Europe, around the time that Belgian author Hergé created the soon-to-be-beloved Tintin in The Congo (1931). The fact that Marlene Dietrich performed in Victoria adds volumes to what must be a remarkable narrative, of this canvas shelter that has borne witness to so many conversations and encounters; those of artisans who created and fitted the hand-carved teak columns, wooden floors and stained glass mirrors; and the patrons embraced by the rich, red velvet drapes, cherubs and ornate art deco chandeliers within. Griffin’s resurrection of Madame Zingara seemed almost miraculous; sifting through ashes in Cape Town one moment, flying high with Belgian tent-makers in Europe, and living his vision the next. The Nazis, the Vietnam War and the moon landing had come and gone in Victoria’s lifetime, as had apartheid, and she was now playing host to vertically challenged comedians, large ladies (The Original Tons) singing The Supremes, wrestling brothers and a lithe Ukrainian exponent of the rhythmic art of hula-hooping (the acts change with the seasons) in Africa. The concept was a first for South Africa, and it wasn’t long before it caught fire (excuse the pun) in the Mother City. It was a sold-out success, and was soon en route to London. But it wasn’t to be, and instead of sunny skies under which to ride forth on his entrepreneurial steed, in typical English climatic fashion the worldwide recession of 2008 washed out any hopes of a global presence. In January 2009, Griffin returned home to Cape Town to

Back against the wall... After a fire destroyed Madame Zingara, Griffin was forced to re-evaluate his business methods. â&#x20AC;&#x153;I promised to rebuild [the restaurant].â&#x20AC;?

Creative Conversation

“WORK, FOR MANY, IS A PLACE OF SALVATION, WHERE WE CAN ENCOURAGE [PERSONAL] GROWTH. WE HAVE TO PROVIDE THE RIGHT ENVIRONMENT; OUR NEGATIVES HAVE THE POTENTIAL TO BECOME OUR SILVER LINING.”

ponder his ‘challenges’, his visionary tail tucked between his legs. The rented tent went back to Belgium. Before engaging with his future, on his present doorstep was a fair-sized mountain of debt and a few creditors with whom he had to ‘make nice’. So he sold his car, for lodging shared a flat with a friend, and had a little think. Almost inevitably, Griffin’s trademark faith—bulleted by what turned out to be pointless moments of self-doubt—saw him once more ‘enter the fray’. The game was on, and almost immediately the score was: faith one, self-doubt nil. The young Capetonian’s rescue package comprised a motley collection of the wellmeaning: a good friend agreeing to back him with his ‘re-entry’ restaurant—The Bombay Bicycle Club; three businessmen who agreed to handle Madame Zingara’s debt; as well as his accountant father, a dentist and a Spanish fisherman. It was as if The Three Musketeers had taken to the stage in the big tent. This belief in his vision resulted in the establishment of Griffin’s deservedly famed Madame Zingara—what the group’s website refers to as the Theatre of Dreams, “a unique synthesis of decadent dining, theatre and invigorating cirque”, which spends a year each in Cape Town and Johannesburg as well as six months in Durban.

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As managing director, he had been given licence to continue doing what he does best: producing a novel, culinary entertainment experience while serious business minds—by his own admission, somewhat lacking in his previous restaurant life—were now controlling the numbers. Elements of reality, in the shape of fiscal discipline, had sprinkled themselves in and around his fantasy. “I negotiated a weak employment contract… but I promised to rebuild [the restaurant].” As he had already proved that restaurants are what he does best, he set out on a mission to create even more. “Building stores was the fastest way of chipping away at debt,” he says with the ease of a gambler loving his hand. Which explains the massive growth of the Madame Zingara group between 2010 and 2012. Griffin’s fantasy had now made friends with reality. The result was a relative explosion of novel destinations: The Sidewalk Café in Vredehoek; Café Mozart in the ‘old’ central business district; Café Manhattan in De Waterkant; Café Paradiso in Kloof Street, The Company’s Garden Restaurant (his latest venture, in the leafy surrounds of the city’s public gardens); The White Rabbit Wash House (laundry); and Tinapo (“This Is Not A Post Office”), a party, accessories and gift store. Locations for Madame Zingara may change,

but the performance for the public is by and large the same. It almost seems the food has become a sideshow. “My soul is food,” he says, and without any discernible overemphasis he ticks off the steps he has followed along his career path: from his start in the kitchen of Jonkershuis Restaurant as a boy, to what was perhaps his culinary zenith, being executive chef at what is today the Mount Grace Country House & Spa in Magaliesburg (long before Serendipity). He had achieved the latter position with that eminent Johannesburg family of hoteliers, the Brands—the same who started and sold the Grace group of hotels and who, Griffin says, “taught me so much” about the hospitality business. It could be worth noting here that Chippy Brand, patriarch of the family, himself had relatively humble beginnings in this world, living with his family in a caravan on site in the hills of the Magaliesberg mountains while Mount Grace was being built. While Griffin had possibly identified with Chippy’s interesting story of challenging beginnings, he very definitely related to the positive, nurturing way in which the Brands dealt with their staff (and by his own admission, turned out to be one of the most valuable lessons he learnt). But Griffin’s mind is a busy one, and with social and career development parked to the one side of his brain, he was constantly seeking out skills with the other. He set about securing his master’s degree (in chocolate and confectionery) from Le Cordon Bleu International cookery school in London. While that piece of paper might have set him on the road to a serious culinary career, he says his experiences while travelling, cooking meals for families on the Golan Heights and the border of the Gaza Strip—in exchange for

lodging—served his proletarian spirit well. That Griffin is an entrepreneur who professes to want the world to be a better place is not newsworthy in itself; the world is full of them. What sets this young man apart, what makes him an interesting study in South Africa, is his overriding social bent; the fact that he seems genuinely interested in the well-being of his staff—the growing body of people he has taken on in his Madame Zingara group of restaurants. “Work, for many, is a place of salvation, where we can encourage [personal] growth. We have to provide the right environment; our negatives have the potential to become our silver lining,” he says. Like the informal ‘car guard’ outside the Madame Zingara office who was taken on as permanent security at The Bombay Bicycle Club restaurant; or the Congolese car guard I knew from the City Bowl Market on Hope Street, one day parking cars on a Thursday afternoon, the next turbanned and robed in exquisite Indian costume (India seems to be Griffin’s favourite destination) and working as a doorman at the restaurant. But Griffin’s interest in providing work for the enthusiastic and willing is not restricted to the street. Evonic Ashu Mbanda is from Cameroon. He arrived in the city four years ago, armed with an accounting degree, “specialising in micro- and macroeconomics,” to further his studies. As he spoke only French at the time, his mission was diverted, and he found himself working as a barista at a steampunk coffee shop in the city. His reputation must’ve spread because Griffin found him, a meeting took place, “wages were discussed”, and he joined the group. Griffin says he has particularly enjoyed watching Mbanda’s evolution as a barista of note at their Company’s Garden operation. “He makes the best coffees,” he says, and confesses to taking coffee only from his favourite baristas. And if “his people” perform, he says, they can do well. “Staff can earn R500 to R3 000 per shift; obviously some do better than others, depending on their character, the restaurant’s location etc. I mean, some of them do really well—they become floor superstars!” Or not. Both the aforementioned car guards are no longer with the group. Whether some return home to central Africa or more locally here to the streets, it bears noting that restaurants and fixed hours simply aren’t for everyone. And some just don’t cut it. “Oh, ja,” says Griffin, without batting an eyelid. “We’ve had hundreds of bad experiences. We are giving people a platform to perform or play [at Madame Zingara], so yes, there’s obviously

30-SECOND BIO Name

Richard Griffin Title

MD, Madame Zingara Holdings Hometown

Cape Town

Education

Master’s degree from Le Cordon Bleu International, London Previous job

Executive chef, Mount Grace Country House & Spa; founder/owner: Serendipity, House of Serendipity, Griffin’s and the original Madame Zingara First real job

Dishwasher at Jonkershuis Restaurant at Groot Constantia, at age 13

always a risk… but the upside is worth it.” Living his mantra that ‘tomorrow will be a better day’, this entrepreneur battles to think of a downside. “It’ll be great… of course, I’m petrified—with a staff-intensive industry, things will go wrong, the stakes are huge. But I just work harder.” As I write, having wowed Johannesburg audiences for most of last year, this Capetonian-in-love-with-Joburg is treating Durban to Madame Zingara’s splendid and exhausting detail. For a chef—and we should remember that that is Griffin’s training—it must be a logistical windstorm, a bit like a touring rock band. “It’s a massive job. Two-hundred-and-forty staff on the road, 40 or 50 staff on stage, 100 waiters, 80 kitchen staff, riggers, 380 costumes. That’s 167 tonnes on the road.” The upside for Capetonians is that the whole production arrives back in their city in June to celebrate Madame Zingara’s 15th year—albeit without Victoria, which will be getting a ‘refurb’ back in Belgium. “She’s hammered! The [Cape Town] weather nails them,” says Griffin, referring to Victoria and the “other perishables” such as the oak, velvet and glass. He clearly thrives on the energy surrounding the entire Madame Zingara performance, and says he is “more involved than ever”. While this could easily be mistaken for a reference to his newly adopted twoand six-month-old babies, he’s clearly getting a bit more serious about his life. “We can do good in this journey on Earth. I want to leave something behind that matters.” Rather than a financial nest egg, I get the feeling this new father is referring primarily to leaving the world (this part, anyway) a better place, where opportunity is not exclusive. Somewhere we can choose to take decisions that will make a positive difference. When Griffin consciously took the dishwashing gig at Jonkershuis as a 13-year-old, it would be nice to speculate that already in his future subconscious was a restaurant group focusing on “skills development, bursary programmes and foundations”. That such developments have indeed taken place is because the group is working well; “we see staff as a four- to eight-year storyboard, we must build a relationship with them—and then the guest will follow.” The 38 full- and part-time bursaries given out this year are indicators of the type of employer-employee relationships being forged. “This year, we’re about to double the size of our organisation,” he adds. “We’re still reinvesting rather than ‘saving’ (I’d rather buy another tent). And by the end of 2015, there will be four touring products.” Among them will be the Travelling Barbers, which we should see in Cape Town later this year. “It’s about barbers and chicks with tits,” he says. Somehow, I think that given their reception of Madame Zingara—Richard’s vision—South African audiences will lap this up, too. And that ‘tomorrow’ will indeed be that better day for his team.

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WANTED

Coffee to go Gourmet Carts is changing the world of street trading with its mobile solar-powered food carts Young South African entrepreneurs Shaun Barns and Gareth Handley are the creators of The Coffee Station, the first of their ingenious carts. Early in 2014, the two met up and began discussing ways to create an environmentally and socially conscious business. “The concept started by trying to improve on existing hawkers who tend to sell ‘slaptjips’ or boerewors rolls. While designing carts that were mobile for these vendors, we wanted something more unique— and The Coffee Station was born,” Barns explains.

MADE TO ORDER

The custom-designed carts are manufactured in South Africa, using as many reclaimed materials as possible. Each cart comes standard with a bicycle attached for maximum mobility and saves vendors time to set up. They can further be made to facilitate cooking, blending, juicing, refrigeration or waterheating processes.

A CUP OF SUNSHINE

Fast food:

The Coffee Station cart stops by our offices

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While some carts run on electricity (mains) or a generator, The Coffee Station is solar-powered and uses liquefied petroleum gas (LPG). “As with all solar setups, there is a battery pack that stores the energy generated from the sun. The battery pack powers the pump and mini-grinder that grinds the coffee

beans. The LPG heats the boiler, which makes our delicious coffees so piping hot. The machine uses levers to minimise the energy required, and the pressure from steam powers the pouring mechanism. And then at the end of it all, the best coffee you have ever tasted pops out,” explains Barns.

GET YOUR CAFFEINE FIX HERE

The Coffee Station is in action on the last Friday of every month at the Woodmill Lifestyle Market in Stellenbosch, and will be trading for the first time at the KAMERS pop-up market in Cape Town in May. The carts can also be booked for private events. Apart from the gourmet coffees prepared by head barista Ryan Hill, using the popular Deluxe Coffee house blend, the cart also sells Red Espresso, ice tea and hot chocolate.

FOOD ON THE MOVE

Barns believes The Coffee Station and their other carts will be on every street corner in the future. “We have finished the branding and concepts for two carts [The Coffee Station and The Gatsby Station] and are working on four more, which are not necessarily confined to food offerings,” he says. For more info on how you can hire or own a gourmet cart, email info@gourmetcarts.co.za or visit www.facebook. com/coffeestationSA.

FAST COMPANY SURVEY

READY FOR A REVOLUTION The inaugural wiGroup Fast Company SME Mobile Readiness Survey finds mobile technology is pushing productivity

Only a third of South African small and medium enterprises (SMEs) allow customers to purchase products or services via their mobile phone. One in seven don’t think it is important that potential customers can find them on their mobile phones. And nearly 60% of small-business owners have never used a mobile payment service. These are just some of the findings of the inaugural wiGroup Fast Company SME Mobile Readiness Survey. In December 2014, mobile-transacting platform provider, wiGroup, partnered with Fast Company SA to launch a survey targeting small-business owners. The aim: to find out if, how and where they use mobile to drive the success of their businesses. After speaking to more than 200 SME owners and managers from across the country, one thing is clear: South African small businesses are gearing up to use mobile tech in new and exciting ways. This, naturally, is immensely exciting to wiGroup’s head of retail, Peter Miller. “We’ve seen how mobile can level the playing field, enabling businesses to be competitive against companies many times their size. We know that we’re on the edge of a massive shift in how South Africans purchase products and services using their phones as the transactional device. But we haven’t known to what extent South African SME owners are using mobile to drive the success of their businesses—until now.” The companies surveyed are as diverse as our colourful nation, with more than 40 different types of business represented, the bulk of which are one-person, owner-run companies. Twenty percent of respondents had 20 or more employees, with the remainder sitting somewhere in between. The information they provided offered a fascinating glimpse into the near future of

SME sectors. For Miller, the most interesting part of the survey results relate to the question: What is keeping you from enabling mobile for your business? More than 40% of SMEs surveyed indicated they are either already using mobile tech, or are busy putting strategies in place now. However, fears around high costs and security should wake up mobile service providers to the need for more open and transparent communication around their products and services. “We work with companies every day to help them unlock the massive potential that mobile transacting holds for their success. We understand their pain points, their reservations and also their expectations around mobile. That’s why I find it very alarming that the number-one thing keeping SMEs from mobile adoption is that they don’t know anything about it. Clearly, service providers are missing an opportunity to educate this large—and rapidly growing— section of the economy.” Miller says the market is shifting fast. “Less than 10% of the companies that took part in the survey said they have no wish at all to include some form of mobile in their customer offering, which tells me one thing: South African SMEs are ready for mobile, they want it—and with a concerted education drive, we are likely to see an explosion in mobile-driven innovation in the SME market in the coming year. “We are immensely excited at the possibilities. Just think: In a year’s time, our SME sector might look fundamentally different—and possibly quite significantly more successful—than it does now. The potential is there. We just need to take that one further step.”

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CRE ATI V E CON V ERSATION

Susan Lyne

President, BBG Ventures at AOL

“I just always believed there was a bigger world out there” A T R A I LB L A ZER I N M AG A ZI N E S , T ELE V I S I O N , E- CO M M ER CE A N D D I G I TA L M ED I A , SU S A N LY N E H A S S PEN T A C A R EER AT T H E FO R EFR O N T O F CU LT U R A L CH A N G E. TO DAY S H E RU N S B B G V EN T U R E S , AO L’ S N E W R 117- M I LLI O N FU N D D ED I C AT ED TO I N V E S T I N G I N WO M EN - OW N ED S TA RT U P S

Interview by Jeff Chu Photographs by Ben Kulo

Fast Company: Tell us about BBG’s mission and how it fits with AOL. Lyne: Seven percent of venture funding goes to womenled startups. If 93% of the funding is going to 50% of the population, there’s an opportunity to focus on the other half. The other inspiration was #builtbygirls, AOL’s initiative to encourage young women to view technology as their friend. AOL had a millennial [entertainment news] brand called Cambio. We partnered with Girls Who Code and made them a proposition: Create the site that you and your friends would come to every day. They reworked the editorial policy and built new features including a platform allowing girls to contribute content. In October, we relaunched Cambio as a site for girls, #builtbygirls—that’s the BBG in BBG Ventures. We’ve made seven investments so far, all in consumer Internet companies. It’s the area women play in the most, and the area I know best. We’re making $100 000 [R1.1 million] to $200 000 [R2.3 million] investments—seed funding. Every month, Cambio chooses a Girl of the Month—a teen doing something extraordinary in charity work, music, tech etc. Think back to 17-year-old Susan Lyne. What inspired her? I was the oldest child of a father who had more daughters than sons, and I just always believed there was a bigger world out there. There are a ton of girls like that. Now that technology has connected them, you see that even more. For me, reading magazines made me believe that I could do something that was a lot more interesting than if I stayed in my little community outside of Boston.

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More girls now see role models everywhere. You’re going to see a whole lot of young women leaders as a result. What were you reading? Honestly, Seventeen. Magazines were where new ideas got shared and where cultural or social change was beginning to be felt. You eventually started Premiere, which covered the film industry. What did you learn from that experience? Hire people who are really good at things you’re not good at. One mistake a lot of young executives make is thinking they have to do everything. As a result, they do a couple of things really well and a lot of things not so well. They miss the opportunity to create a great team. What are you not good at? Oh, lots of things! Look, there are parts of this new world that I am never going to learn as well as a digital native. Internet marketing—there are 20 people on this floor who are better at that than I ever will be. How do you create a great team? Whom do you hire and promote? At Gilt [which she ran from 2008 to 2010], I set up an informal measurement system: The people who could get their peers invested in their success were the people we should promote. If you can get people who don’t report to you to jump in and help you get something done, you are going to be a really good manager.

Master the mix “Every piece of research that has been done will tell you that diverse teams are more successful.”

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Creative Conversation

“LET YOUR MANAGERS DO THEIR JOBS. GIVE THEM GOALS, GIVE THEM TARGETS, AND GIVE THEM ROPE.” Conventional hiring, especially in tech, often overlooks minorities, women and people with disabilities. What do you see? If you’re looking for an engineer, or a marketer, you ask your friends. Your friends are going to send people like themselves. You’re going to keep replicating the same style and background. There’s been a fair amount written about it out in Silicon Valley, but I can’t tell you I’ve seen a lot of action taken. Every piece of research that has been done will tell you that diverse teams are more successful. Has that been true in your experience? For a long time, I thought that women were naturally smarter and more emotionally evolved. What I found is that when you have too many women around a table, aspects of our strengths can become weaknesses. We look for consensus too quickly, and we don’t forget slights. I would sit there and think, “Oh, my God. If half this table were guys, we’d argue until we got to a conclusion, and then we’d go have a drink together.” When you get a mix, it’s a much more productive dynamic. Tell me about mentors you’ve had. Premiere was the first job I had where I owned it—I was not second in command. It was a hard transition. John Evans, who ran Murdoch Magazines, was fierce about me not “looking for Daddy”—his actual words. I sent my first editor’s letter to him and explained that I wanted some feedback. He said, “Never send this to me again. I don’t buy a dog and bark for it.” The message got through: This is your magazine, and it’s not going to succeed if you’re always looking for someone else to make the final decision. You’ve worked for some prominent bosses. What have you learnt from them? Let your managers do their jobs. Give them goals, give them targets, and give them rope. [Disney CEO] Bob Iger is really good at letting people run a business. When I started working at ABC, he would pop his head into my office a couple of times a week and ask me what I was working on. He never stayed more than a few minutes, and I assumed he was just trying to make the new girl feel at home. Over time, I discovered he spent 30 minutes every afternoon walking the halls, having impromptu conversations with a half dozen people. He said it had turned out to be the single best investment of his time—

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30-SECOND BIO Name

Susan Lyne Title President, BBG Ventures at AOL

Hometown Chestnut Hill, Massachusetts

Education A year at University of California, Berkeley; a year at California College of Art

Previous jobs CEO, AOL’s Brand Group; CEO, Gilt Groupe; president and CEO, Martha Stewart Living Omnimedia; president, ABC Entertainment; editor-in-chief and publication director, Premiere; managing editor, The Village Voice

First real job Assistant to the editorin-chief at City magazine in San Francisco. “It was Francis Ford Coppola’s attempt to create New York magazine for the Bay Area. It was an understaffed weekly, and because it was understaffed, very quickly I got to do more.”

a quick way to stay in touch with the creative execs, an early warning system for any brewing problems, and a signal that he was interested enough in your work to come to you. To this day, I think it’s the smartest thing a chief executive can do to stay current and build loyalty. A couple of weeks after I started at Martha Stewart Living Omnimedia, I went down to West Virginia to visit Martha at Alderson prison. The rules were that I couldn’t talk business results with her, but I could tell her what I was doing and seeing. So I talked about seeing the inspiration boards for a new line of high-end bed linens the design team was developing. Martha asked me if I wanted what I saw. I said I thought they were beautiful and moved on to the next item on my list. She stopped me and said, “That’s not what I asked you. Did you want them? Until you covet them, you have to keep sending them back to work.” That’s why she became such an icon—she never subscribed to the ‘good enough’ theory. It has to be great. Consumers know the difference. What do you do to recharge? Things that open my mind. I’m on the board of Rockefeller University. I went up there last week because Nathan Wolfe, who has been doing virus mapping globally to identify early when viruses are moving from animals to humans, was speaking. There was an opportunity to have dinner with him afterward. I did a similar evening a month or two ago with Atul Gawande, who is one of my favourite writers. His last book was about mortality. We have so many ways that science can extend our lives. But some of the most important ones are very oldfashioned, like his focus on washing your hands and how profound that can be to mortality rates at a hospital. How does that apply to your sphere? The companies that are most interesting to me combine some low-tech element with the best technology. There’s a company we’ve invested in called Gracious Eloise. They are mapping and then digitising your unique handwriting. You can send an email and they will output it as a ‘handwritten’ card. It is taking what is still important to a lot of people— manners, saying thank you—but bringing technology to it. I don’t know how I feel about that. Is it fake manners? No, it’s not! I have terrible handwriting. Much better for me to be able to have that output. Is this human element lacking in tech? Everybody talks about culture being critically important. I’m sure there are many startup tech companies where the interactions are spectacular, but it’s very hard to develop a great culture. The companies that have done it well—Disney, Starbucks, REI—have grown up over time. You can mandate it, but it’s only going to work if the people believe in it.

FAST COMPANY PROMOTION

B U S I N E S S A U T O M AT I O N LEADS TO EUPHORIA A competent telephony system will improve efficiencies and elevate operational structure

The business telephony system is still the lifeblood of business today; one needs to ensure it provides the necessary workflow automation, productivity tracking and management reporting to effectively manage one’s business. Euphoria Telecom CEO George Golding says small and medium enterprises (SMEs) need to invest in a reliable and high-tech communication infrastructure to remain competitive. “Automation is the key to consistent and dependable customer service— and as your business grows, you will need to increasingly rely on automation to offer the

best possible customer service.” The company constantly invests in the development of its system and treats it as a dynamic and ongoing challenge to meet the needs of customers. Furthermore, Euphoria Telecom provides a professional and highly competent business telephony system that will improve business efficiencies and elevate operational structure. Golding says Euphoria’s built-in Telephone Management System (TMS) provides extra insight at no extra cost. “See whom your staff is calling. Outgoing call logs show exactly

Always on call: Automation is the key to consistent and dependable customer service, says CEO George Golding.

which extension dialled which number, and at what time of the day. The call recipients are listed by number—or name if they’re in your address book. You’ll be able to see not just the busiest extensions but also the most frequently dialled numbers. “With detailed records of incoming call volumes every day of the week and hour of the day, you can effectively predict your busiest times, making sure you have all hands on deck for peak periods, and aren’t overstaffed when it’s quiet,” he adds. With Euphoria’s call queue analytics, customers can see all the performance details of their queues—including wait times, response times, queue lengths and peak activity periods. Updated in real time, this can be invaluable in terms of optimising operations and heading off problems before they reach critical point. Golding says one can also assess the performance of agents. “The Euphoria TMS provides detailed reports on the activity of each extension assigned to a queue, throughout the day. View the number of calls received versus the number of calls answered, as well as average call lengths and total call times. It’s a great tool for assessing productivity and encouraging a healthy work ethic.” Euphoria Telecom offers an innovative business telephone service to over 600 SMEs including Galaxy & Co., Romans Pizza, Altech ISIS and Groupon. It is the fastest growing and only locally developed system, with innovation awards from PricewaterhouseCoopers and Accenture. Connect with Euphoria: Cape Town: 021 200 0500 Johannesburg: 010 593 4500 Website: www.euphoria.co.za Facebook & Twitter: euphoriatelecom

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TECHNOVORE

THE BIG FUTURE FOR LITTLE MACHINES HOW TINY COMPUTERS WILL REWIRE OUR WORLD

WO MONTHS AGO, while walking around South Park in San Francisco, thinking big thoughts, I ran into Alex Klein, the 24-yearold co-founder of Kano, a London-based startup. Kano produces a kid-friendly kit that makes it as easy to build a cool computer that connects to the Internet as it is to create a Minecraft world. I felt like I’d run into Steve Jobs at the Homebrew Computer Club in 1975, and I literally walked into a huge idea.

Kano, along with Raspberry Pi and Arduino, are tiny computers that are already inspiring a generation of makers to learn to code and become the hackers of tomorrow. But these kits possess the potential to unshackle us from the past and usher in a new world of computing. Our current infrastructure is built on the decades-old client-server architecture that created the first IT revolution. Whether it’s a PC or one of these Kano computers on a stick, these clients have to use the network to fetch the instructions they need to function. This system worked well in the PC era, and even in the early days of the commercial Internet. But PC makers sold around 100 million machines annually. Compare that to the billions of phones with PC–like powers today. According to ABI Research, there are already more than 16 billion active wireless-connected devices, and that number may exceed 40 billion by 2020. In theory, we could continue to use the same networking formula for this new world. We would need to keep layering more and more bandwidth between clients and servers, allocating more spectrum, laying more fibre, and using more power to run the servers. Telecoms companies are already complaining about the money they’d have to spend to support this future, and the wireless carriers don’t want to invest in faster networks unless they can pass along the cost to their customers. For the longest time, computers have been associated with work. Mainframes were for the Army, government agencies and then large companies.

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PEOPLE ARE USING RASPBERRY PI AND ARDUINO KITS TO MAKE INTELLIGENT TOYS, LAMPS, ALARM CLOCKS, PICTURE FRAMES AND SMALL ROBOTS.

Om Malik

Workstations were for engineers and software programmers. PCs were initially for other white-collar jobs. Now we can take that processing power, shrink it down and put it in cars, thermostats, light bulbs and music systems. People are using Raspberry Pi and Arduino kits to make intelligent toys, lamps, alarm clocks, picture frames and small robots. Those billions of connected devices will be nearly invisible, low-power computers whose primary job will be to gather data from sensors. If we connect them all the same way we’ve always done it, they are going to put a hernia-inducing strain on our wired and wireless networks. These devices are only going to get smaller and more powerful. You can buy a Raspberry Pi with a 700MHz processor and 256MB of memory for about $25 (just under R300). In 2001, a Mac with 450MHz and 64MB of RAM cost $1 800 (about R14 500 at that time). Arduino components are already smaller than an American quarter, and prices on Pi and its brethren will likely drop to just a few dollars by the turn of the decade. What we need to do, then, is accept that all the pieces that once went inside a beige box will now be embedded everywhere, and that we’ll reconnect them in new and interesting ways. It is as if someone scattered and mixed together a few boxes of Legos and the old rules don’t apply. In this world, is it hard to imagine a server the size of a deck of cards that plugs into the back of your Wi-Fi router or TV and runs your house? Or Pandora’s entire music database on a stick that you plug into your car and stream using a mesh network of these small devices rather than the Internet? The tiny-computerdistributed networking era will present a whole new set of software challenges and opportunities—but to folks like Alex Klein of Kano, it may be a walk in the park. Om Malik is a partner at True Ventures, an early-stage investor. He is also founder of Gigaom, a Silicon Valley-based, tech-focused publishing company.

Illustration by Raymond Biesinger

DANIEL SALO

S P E C I A L R E P O R T: B L A C K I N S I L I C O N VA L L E Y

A BOLD ENTREPRENEUR WITH A RADICAL STARTUP

AN AFRICAN-AMERICAN

IN SILICON VALLEY, THOSE TWO PHRASES USUALLY DON’T GO TOGETHER. ENTER TRISTAN WALKER.

The Visible Man BY JJ MCCORVEY

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Gutter Credit Tk

Photographs by Damon Casarez

Art credit teekay

Gutter Credit Tk

Art credit teekay

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S P E C I A L R E P O R T: B L A C K I N S I L I C O N VA L L E Y

TRISTAN WALKER IS IN THE HOUSE.

He is posted up in the vestibule of the Fox Theatre in Redwood City, California, where the hottest venture-capital firm in Silicon Valley, Andreessen Horowitz, has just hosted a screening of a new documentary starring the rapper, Nas. Nas is here, too, but from the way Tristan Walker works the crowd of nearly 1 000, you’d think it was his premiere. Sporting a light-gray Bailey fedora and a speckled charcoal sweatshirt bearing the logo of his new startup, Walker & Company Brands, the debonair 30-year-old dives into the masses, vanishes, re-emerges in a corner deep in conversation, and makes introductions all around, exclaiming: “You two should meet!” During a stationary second, a young black man who can’t be more than 20 years old walks over. “I’ve been following your moves,” he says. “And I’ve been really inspired by you.” Walker is a celebrity in Silicon Valley, known primarily for his success and creativity as head of business development at Foursquare, which he joined in 2009 and left in 2012. Foursquare was one of the original location-based ‘check-in’ apps, and Walker put the startup on the map by landing hundreds of partnerships with merchants and brands such as American Express and BravoTV. His regular appearances at South by Southwest, on television and on Twitter—where he’s garnered an audience of nearly 300 000 followers—promoted both Foursquare and Walker himself. By the time he left to become entrepreneur-in-residence at Andreessen Horowitz, everyone wondered: “What’s next for Tristan?” Walker’s hustle and charisma aren’t the only reasons for his fame. Walker is black. In Silicon Valley, even in 2014, a visible, successful African-American was big news. The technology industry’s lack of minority representation is deplorable. Venture capitalists, startup founders and big-time CEOs like to brag that the tech business is a colour-blind meritocracy, but their boasts don’t reflect the facts. The truth hit like cannon blasts from May to July last year, when tech’s largest firms

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WHO IS TRISTAN WALKER?

Age 30

Childhood home S outh Jamaica Houses, Queens, New York

Current home Palo Alto

Education New York City public schools Hotchkiss School, 1998–2002 SUNY Stony Brook, 2002–2005, class valedictorian Stanford Graduate School of Business, 2008–2010, MBA

Professional experience Intern, Twitter, 2009 D irector of business development, Foursquare, 2009–2012 Entrepreneur-in-residence, Andreessen Horowitz, 2012–2013 Founder and CEO, Walker & Company Brands, 2013– present

Power advisers en Horowitz of Andreessen B Horowitz (mentor, investor) Ron Johnson, former CEO of JCPenney, SVP of retail ops at Apple (investor) D ennis Crowley, co-founder and CEO of Foursquare Charles Hudson, partner at SoftTech VC Mark Suster, partner at Upfront Ventures (investor, confidant)

released figures on the racial and ethnic makeup of their companies. They’d kept this data hidden for years, insisting it was a “trade secret”, but they finally yielded under pressure from civil rights activist Reverend Jesse Jackson, Sr and others. Google was the first, revealing that out of its 46 000 employees, just 2%—and just 1% of its technology workforce—are black. Next up was Yahoo: 12 300 employees, 1% of its tech workforce, are black. Facebook? You guessed it: 1%. Apple’s total workforce is 7% black—but, of course, Apple has 425 retail locations. In case you were wondering, blacks make up 13% of the United States population. “The fact of the matter is,

there are a lot of qualified people of colour out there, who can and should be working in the tech industry,” says David Drummond, senior vice president of corporate development and chief legal officer at Google. “Releasing the numbers creates the opportunity for us to make this more visible, and to do something about it.” While Drummond is, arguably, the highest ranking black executive at a major company in the Valley, Walker is its highest profile AfricanAmerican startup founder and CEO. And he has set Walker & Co. on a decidedly unorthodox course for a Silicon Valley enterprise. As he tries to turn this startup into what he

considers a great company, Walker will face all the usual obstacles that confront a young entrepreneur. But he will also be carving out a narrative with unique challenges. More often than not, the tech industry’s heroes are boyish white males from wealthy suburban enclaves—the Mark Zuckerbergs, Jack Dorseys and Kevin Systroms. Despite the fact that African-Americans have risen to the highest levels of every other aspect of business and popular culture, not a single black entrepreneur has attained that level of success and influence in tech. Against considerable odds, Walker is working to rewrite that playbook, even if his startup has a modest

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R108 million in funding. If Walker can build a worldchanging business, he will serve as an extraordinary role model for younger African-Americans. And perhaps he will prove to those who hold the keys to the Valley’s kingdom that those coming behind him, and those who haven’t benefited from the kind of exposure he has garnered, are worthy of much more than the cursory glance they are now given. As if proof should be necessary. Walker’s challenge is multiplied by his unusual goal for his company. Walker & Co. isn’t an app; it won’t make you instantly famous for kooky videos; it doesn’t even automate anything in your life. Instead, Walker & Co. aims to be the “Procter & Gamble for people of colour”. While the company is armed with Silicon Valley money and infused with Silicon Valley concepts of design and startup culture, it will try to create health and beauty products for minorities, solving problems overlooked by the reigning consumer-goods giants. Its first product is a single-blade razor system called Bevel, which makes it possible for men with coarse or curly hair—the kind that I and most other black men have—to shave without developing razor bumps or other skin irritation. Can a razor be the foundation of a great business? Can it lure young black men and women to Silicon Valley? Can it be a catalyst for real change? Walker knows that his every move will be closely dissected, given his status. While he is adept at turning on the networking charm when necessary, he is not naturally at ease with such public attention. “Man, that is not my scene,” Walker says, slowing to a red light on a desolate highway after we leave the Nas screening. “I don’t really go to those events by myself, unless I’m accepting an award or coming out to show support. Or if I’m with my friends. What am I going to talk to people about?” Inside an appropriately hip, appropriately spare co-working space in San Francisco’s Mission District, a young Asian woman named Misa is addressing an audience assembled by CODE2040, a non-profit Walker co-founded in 2012 with a former businessschool classmate, Laura Weidman Powers. (The organisation’s name nods to the fact that current demographic trends suggest that US will have more ‘minorities’ than whites by 2040.) Its mission is to connect young black and Latino engineers with tech companies such as Facebook, Jawbone and LinkedIn. Misa, who works for the global design firm, Ideo, is hosting a session on ways to close the diversity gap. She begins with slides of products that Ideo has helped to develop, ranging from Apple’s first mouse to a simpler, safer vegetable peeler. “We came to all of these solutions by using design thinking,” she says, referring to one of Silicon Valley’s favourite approaches to solving problems, which Ideo popularised in the early 2000s. She then turns to the audience: “So we’ve brainstormed some reasons why minorities are not more represented in tech, and I wanted to ask you for

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a few thoughts on why that is.” She can barely finish the sentence before a woman at the back of the room blurts out, “WHITE RACISM!!!” The room goes silent. Misa stammers for a few seconds before asking for other opinions. The outspoken attendee isn’t wrong, but the answer to Misa’s query is more complex, of course. “Racism, sexism and other forms of exclusionary behaviour are in and of themselves nuanced and multilayered,” says Freada Kapor Klein, a prominent advocate for tech diversity and founder of the non-profit, Level Playing Field Institute. “We don’t have intentional bigots, but we have very smart, well-meaning, creative people who are systematically engaging in biased behaviour.” It is racist, for example, to approach a recruiting firm with the mandate to fill an engineering position only with someone from one particular Ivy League school, where blacks comprise a single-digit percentage of the student population. It is racist to rely on employee referrals for hires, when the typical social network of a white American is 1% black. And it is racist to impose standards of ‘culture fit’—the absurd notion that employees must behave (and sometimes appear) in a way that makes others feel comfortable—on job candidates. These are typical, and convenient, hiring practices of startup founders. Under enormous pressure to grow their companies fast, they feel entitled to dismiss niceties such as an HR department that may seek out minority candidates. But their very inaction is a manifestation of extreme bias, even if it’s subconscious. The problem does go that deep, into our subconscious and our collective history. After the Ideo presentation, the audience breaks into groups. One proposes that kids may be encouraged to pursue a tech career by Fleer-like Silicon Valley trading cards featuring images of role-model engineers instead of basketball or baseball players. They certainly would have been a different kind of inspiration for young Tristan Walker who, like many African- American boys, idolised sports figures on magazine covers, dreaming of living their lives. This was partly because he was a good athlete, but mostly because musicians, entertainers and sports heroes tend to be the most visible models of black success for young African-Americans. He claims not to have even known of Silicon Valley until he moved there. He was raised in a couple of the roughest neighbourhoods of Queens in New York City. He was one of the 50% of black children in the US who grow up in fatherless homes—his was shot and killed when Walker was only 4 years old. “Me being introverted is partly a function of my upbringing,” Walker says of his generally reserved demeanour. “You couldn’t go outside as much, out of fear of what might happen.” Walker’s brother, Sean, who is 14 years his senior, filled in as a father figure, pushing him to excel in sports. His mother, Bettie, worked two jobs, six days a week—as an administrative assistant at the New York Housing Authority from 8 a.m. to 4 p.m., then at Time Warner Cable from 5 p.m. to 9 p.m.— and enrolled Walker in an afterschool programme at the Boys Club of New York. In eighth grade, he tried out for a basketball team that played against a variety of prep schools around New England. He didn’t make it, but one of the coaches knew that Walker was a straight-A student and suggested he take the SSAT (Secondary School Admission Test) and apply to one of the boarding schools the team played. He did, and one day found himself with a full scholarship to Hotchkiss, a prep athletic powerhouse perched aside bucolic Lake Wononscopomuc in Connecticut. Hotchkiss features prominently in F. Scott Fitzgerald’s This Side of Paradise, and boasts such alumni as Henry Luce, former Supreme Court Justice Potter Stewart, and the scions of Henry Ford. It bears little resemblance to the housing projects of Queens.

“We don’t have intentional bigots, but we have smart, creative people systematically engaging in biased behaviour,” says Kapor Klein.

Expectant:

Gutter Credit Tk

Amoy Walker was eight months pregnant when she and Tristan posed for Fast Company. “I really do not want my child to walk down those aisles [of health and grooming products] and feel ashamed,” said Tristan.

Art credit teekay

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Walker readily acknowledges that attending Hotchkiss gave him an experience that was “markedly different from a lot of folks”. He calls his time there the “four most transformative years” of his life. Instead of navigating the shoals of New York City’s public school system, he went to a place where the average class had just 14 students. Computers and other technologies were plentiful and up-to-date, and classes are offered in AP statistics, microeconomics and computer science, along with Java programming and robotics. “I got to see how the other half lived,” Walker says. He would learn much more than maths and science at Hotchkiss. The air among his peers, mostly offspring of the economically elite, could easily become racially charged. “Sometimes it felt like we were part of a social experiment for rich white kids,” says Ajene Green, who became close friends with Walker at Hotchkiss, and who is now a senior account executive at Spongecell, an ad-tech firm in New York City. When Green and Walker would show up sporting Sean John or Rocawear—popular urban fashion for teens in the early 2000s—there were snickers from the crowd wearing Abercrombie & Fitch and Birkenstock sandals. Students asked to borrow the pair’s clothes as costumes for Spirit Week (a celebration in American high schools to show ‘school spirit’ in anticipation of the homecoming sports festivities). Green remembers one student’s post to the school’s online forum, questioning why, in light of a ‘no hats’ rule, black students were allowed to wear do-rags (meant to maintain cornrows or the wavy texture of military-style cuts), and Jewish students their yarmulkes. Walker wasn’t the type to protest these types of incidents. “I was able to compete,” he says, “not only athletically, but academically.” It was during these years that Walker would develop and hone something widely considered a requirement for the survival, and success, of young black professionals in a white-dominated environment: the ability to be, essentially, two people at once, allowing one’s true self to coexist with an ‘other’ self that is just authentic enough to be unthreatening and to avoid unwarranted stereotypes. Walker has a more euphemistic way of explaining this. “I’ve been given so many experiences to understand how to weave in and out of different social group types,” he says.

When Walker bought his apartment, he was sur prised to find that the rea l estate agent had checked “White/ Caucasian” on the final paperwork. “That’s where I [first] learnt how to do that.” After graduating from Hotchkiss and then excelling at Stony Brook University in New York, Walker landed on Wall Street through SEO, an organisation that offers training and internship programmes to underrepresented minorities in business. He traded stock for Lehman Brothers and J.P. Morgan, and dreamt up any number of moneymaking schemes over long lunches with Green, who worked near him at L’Oréal. Nothing clicked. These were dark days for the Street. Walker decided to try to develop his entrepreneurial skills at Stanford Business School. He was accepted just after losing his job in the first round of layoffs during the 2008 financial crisis. Coming from the literal depression of Wall Street, Walker was struck by the vibrant, inspiring environment of the Bay Area. “I thought it was the most amazing place in the world because there were other 24-year-olds not only making millions of dollars but also changing the world,” he says. “I knew I wanted to be a part of that.” As had been true of Hotchkiss, Stanford presented more than just a classic education. Walker might have learnt the most from a particularly unlikely class, an elective called Acting With Power, in which students would perform scenes to help them become “more comfortable with different hierarchical organisational roles”. “One of the first things actors learn is how to get into character,” says psychologist Deborah Gruenfeld, who developed and taught the class. “How to show up physically and psychologically, as people who they are not. It gives students permission

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to access parts of themselves they aren’t so familiar with.” Toward the end of his first year in business school, Walker sent an email to David Hornik, a partner at August Capital, and asked to stop by his office and pick his brain. “He was incredibly charming,” says Hornik. “[People] come to Silicon Valley to make money and engage in transactions, rather than to build relationships. His goal is not to optimise the economic value of any given relationship, but to meet smart, interesting people. If it provides value to him in the long run, it’s a lucky circumstance.” Hornik, who knows Twitter co-founder Ev Williams, helped Walker land an internship at the social networking service. Walker spent the next five months leading a team of other Stanford grad school students performing market research on how Twitter could be used for business applications. The project formed the founda tion of what is now the “Twitter 101” section of the platform’s site for corporate users. But Walker’s career didn’t really take off until the following July, when he emailed Dennis Crowley, co-founder and CEO of Foursquare, eight times asking for a job. After Crowley half-seriously offered to meet him, Walker hopped on a flight to New York the next day and showed up at their offices, laptop in hand. Stunned, Crowley and co-founder Naveen Selvadurai challenged him to sign up 30 small businesses as Foursquare merchant partners within a month. He found 300 in a little over a week. After that, he was asked to become the company’s first director of business development. Hotchkiss, Wall Street, Stanford, Twitter and now Foursquare: Bit by bit, Walker had been accepted by an establishment he could never have imagined accessing as a child. Nonetheless, if it was easy for Crowley to offer Walker the job, it was hard for Tristan’s wife, Amoy, to understand why he would even consider it. Walker met Amoy, whose family had emigrated from Jamaica to New York City, while at Stony Brook. Her first move was to ‘poke’ him on Facebook. “He was like, ‘Could you send me a close-up pic?’” she says, cupping her hands on her very pregnant belly. “I called my best friend into my room to take the pic and told her, ‘He is so good-looking! This is going to be my husband!’” We are in the Walkers’ dining room on a warm August afternoon, and Tristan is cringing as his wife goes on. Amoy, a seventh-grade humanities teacher at a private girls’ school, is every bit

the extrovert that Walker isn’t. She is humorous, quick-witted and outspoken, always at the ready to vocalise the things that he won’t. “I didn’t get it,” Amoy says about Walker’s decision to accept the gig at Foursquare, where he took only a $1 000 stipend (about R8 000 at the time) for the first couple of months, and to turn down a lucrative offer from the wellestablished Boston Consulting Group. She turns toward him and says, “I remember, babe, because for a long time that annoyed me.” Turning back to me, she continues: “As a black man, you don’t take risks like that. You don’t get your good degrees and go work at a company that makes no sense. You just don’t do that!”Amoy adds that Walker cried when he left the company for Andreessen Horowitz in 2012. Walker cringes again. To this day, Amoy struggles to explain to her mother what, exactly, it means to work in Silicon Valley, where a black entrepreneur bucks the safety and prestige of becoming a doctor or lawyer, for example, to compete with a cosy network of white men who don’t feel a historical responsibility to pull their entire family into a new level of economic security. “When she came out here to visit,” Amoy continues, “she was like, ‘Why don’t you guys have a new car?’ And I’m like, ‘Don’t you understand that my husband goes to work and gambles every day?’ She just could not understand why someone as smart as Tristan would live his life in this way.” Amoy herself has come around, although she does like to note that if she’d had it her way in the beginning, he’d have taken the consulting gig and they’d have moved to Atlanta. “We would have fit into Atlanta like a hand fits into a glove,” she says. The Valley is nothing like Atlanta. One afternoon, in between interviews, I grab a coffee from the Coupa Café, a venue so famous for business deals that its signature, colourful to-go cup made a cameo during the deposition given by Mark Zuckerberg (played by Jesse Eisenberg) in the movie, The Social Network. I’m not able to discern any pitch meetings, but I am treated to another spectacle that’s a bit less welcome: As I head over to the counter to get some cream for my red-eye, a woman sitting nearby snatches her purse from the chair closest to me, making it pretty clear that I don’t strike her as a regular at the Coupa. Walking the block back to Walker’s threebedroom condo, I wonder what it must be like to work and live in an environment that is still uneasy with his arrival. When he and Amoy

bought their apartment two years ago, he was surprised to find that the real estate agent, with whom he had been negotiating only via phone, had already checked “White/Caucasian” for Walker’s race on the final paperwork. “So I said, ‘Well, this is wrong,’” Walker remembers, grinning. In a cutthroat world like Silicon Valley, having a support system of others navigating a similar professional journey is crucial. I meet many in Walker’s network at his 30th birthday celebration, a crab boil (like a good old braai, but with seafood) held at the house of Faith and Tyler Scriven. Tyler is chief of staff at Palantir Technologies, a data-analysis company backed by the CIA and co-founded by Peter Thiel, who also helped launch PayPal. The party is a wormhole to an undocumented dimension of the Valley. For the first time, I am witnessing a sizable, concentrated group of black technology executives. The couple dozen attendees include Marlon Nichols, an associate director and venture capitalist at Intel Capital; Erin Teague, director of product at Yahoo; Tony Gauda, co-founder of the ‘Dropbox-forenterprise’ startup Bitcasa (and another dataprotection service, ThinAir); and his wife, Jaimel, who runs Walker & Co.’s customer support. There’s music, a feast of succulent seafood, exchanges of top-five lists, and jokes about everyone’s reluctance to connect to the Scrivens’ Wi-Fi for fear that the NSA will snoop on their phones. There’s a palpable, familial vibe. Everyone, including Walker, seems more himself or herself than they usually would be with other professionals. Here, Walker doesn’t have to be ‘on’. His charisma relaxes into goofiness as he greedily hoards a pile of crab legs from his friends or causes a spontaneous eruption of laughter. He also feels comfortable enough to slip back into his introversion as he pleases, observing everyone else while pecking away at stubborn hangnails. Not too long into the festivities, I’m struck: Here is one of the most popular figures in mainstream tech, and yet not a single white person is celebrating his birthday. I cannot help asking Gauda how this could be. He encourages me to pose my question to the group and calls everyone’s attention to me. “Well, I’m just curious,” I begin. “Why aren’t there any white people here?” Not a single person responds; instead, eyebrows raise. There’s silence, with one exception: Gauda is chuckling away, thoroughly amused at having set me up for such an uncomfortable moment. Later, I catch Walker staring at the sky, and I ask what he’s thinking about—partly out of

curiosity, but mostly to make sure I haven’t embarrassed him or ticked him off with my observation. “I’m chillin’, man,” he casually responds. “You need to decompress sometimes, you know? It’s good to have these folks here. This is a safe place.” He’s comforted, but I’m disheartened, even though I can empathise. In an industry that deems itself progressive, innovative, liberal and ‘colour-blind’, it still feels ‘safer’ for blacks to turn inward socially, rather than risk judgment from a world that has often been less than embracing. After Walker left Foursquare, a slew of venture-capital firms offered him positions as their entrepreneur-in-residence. Ben Horowitz, the partner at Andreessen Horowitz who made his firm’s successful pitch, has become a friend and mentor to Walker. He confesses to being “suspicious” of the quantity and swiftness of offers Walker received. “Diversity is kind of a funny thing, in that—” he pauses, searching for the right words, as we often do when grappling with the thorny issue of race “—many people look at numbers and perceptions. For somebody as talented as Tristan, for him to go into a place that doesn’t fully understand him and utilise him, but just likes the idea or perception of being associated with him . . . I was just concerned.” To put things bluntly, Horowitz is saying that he worried Walker would be used as PR to counter the Valley’s image as a fraternity of white guys. Horowitz, who has been called Silicon Valley’s “most inclusive investor”, is himself a case study in the complications of America’s great national disgrace. His father, David, is a former Marxist turned hard-right-winger who has been excoriated for books and speeches advocating what some call racist positions. Ben, whose wife, Felicia, is black, loves hip-hop so much that he leads his Andreessen Horowitz blog posts with choice verses, has rapped on a VH1 TV special, and reportedly dubbed a Brooklyn artist named Divine the “official Andreessen Horowitz rapper”. He knows what he’s talking about, and is unlikely to ever slip up the way Y Combinator president Sam Altman did on Twitter in September last year, when he attributed Wu-Tang Clan’s classic “C.R.E.A.M. (Cash Rules Everything Around Me)” to Wyclef Jean—and even got the title wrong. Horowitz has dedicated time and resources to the success of black tech talent— he sits on the board of CODE2040 and has led Andreessen Horowitz into investments in black-run startups including AgLocal (which was featured in the February 2015 issue of

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Fast Company SA) and Bitcasa. As his own profile has risen, Horowitz has used it to loop celebrities like Nas into Silicon Valley, which could, celebrity be damned, help to create a bigger pool of people who understand and invest in minority entrepreneurs. (Nas is an investor in Walker & Co. and Proven, another AH portfolio company that functions as a job-search app and was co-founded by Pablo Fuentes, a Chilean immigrant.) Mr Horowitz gets a fair share of criticism for his public persona. Several articles from Valleywag blog, including one titled “Ben Horowitz Is Desperate for You to Think He’s Cool”, drew him into an epic Twitter feud with the writer. Some people still find it awkward to watch a white man freely express himself in ways they feel they can’t. “With the utmost respect, it’s easy for Ben Horowitz to tweet rap lyrics, but I have to think twice and three times before I tweet rap lyrics,” says Kanyi Maqubela, a New Yorker originally from Soweto, who has backed Walker & Co. in his role as partner at Collaborative Fund—a seed investor for ‘mission-based’ companies. “We both like rap lyrics just as much. When this Ferguson situation was coming apart at the seams,” he continues, referring to the August 2014 killing of a young, unarmed black man Michael Brown by a police officer in that St. Louis suburb in Missouri, “there were levels of outrage and betrayal in my [Twitter] stream, which I wanted to retweet. But I don’t want to be an ‘angry black man’. I don’t

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want to be pigeonholed to the stereotype.” Whatever this says about Horowitz, he was an effective sounding board for Walker as he used his months as entrepreneur-inresidence to figure out what kind of startup to launch. Walker came up with several ideas including a service to connect truck drivers to more freight jobs and a financial service for people who don’t have cheque or savings accounts. Horowitz vetoed them all—not because they weren’t good, he says, but because he sensed Walker was too focused on creating something that looked typical of Silicon Valley. “There are things that almost no venture capitalist knows that Tristan knew,” Horowitz says. He pushed Walker to create something unique. “But he was very hesitant to do it,” says Horowitz. “Could he end up being the guy who failed while trying to build an infinitesimal company? That would be the worst.” In fact, Walker’s very first brand idea, inspired by the Warby Parker try-by-mail model, was a direct-to-consumer service providing hair extensions—a R2.9-billion business in the US. “A couple of days went by, and he said, ‘A black man, doing a weave company in the Valley?’” says Amoy. “[He] ultimately decided that if he started it and failed, people were going to say it wasn’t intellectual to begin with, so he walked away.” But then he came up with the idea for Walker & Co., a concept both he and Horowitz believe could grow over time into something big. The largest American consumer-goods companies have focused on the largest domestic market, and in so doing have neglected the different needs of minorities. African-Americans have grown accustomed to limited, second-class options when it comes to the health and beauty category. For men, these include depilatory creams and powders such as Magic Shave. Its copper-coloured branding and packaging—often the hue chosen for products targeting black buyers, which generally reside together on what’s come to be known as the ‘black shelf’ or ‘black section’ of an American drugstore aisle—is nearly identical to what it looked like when it was created in 1901. Then there are the desultory products created to combat razor bumps, a problem that, according to Walker, arises for around 80% of black consumers when they use three- and four-blade systems like the ones popularised by Gillette and Bic. Those razors can cut beneath the skin, leading to irritation for customers, especially African-American men, when their coarse or curly follicles start

to grow back. So the ‘black shelf’ is also home to Bump Fighter disposable razors, made by the American Safety Razor Co.—which was bought by Energizer (yes, the bunny battery company)—and aftershave creams such as Bump Patrol, by the M&M Products Co. “I personally haven’t experienced any brands that I felt proud to support,” says Walker. What ultimately solidified his idea for the Bevel shaving system was a visit to the high-end retail chain, The Art of Shaving, which touts customer experience as its defining trait. “Every time I went in there, I’d say, ‘I’m a black man, I have to deal with this razor-bump issue—what should I use?’” he says. “And every single time, they’d suggest these off-brand safety razors.” While African-American women also share the ‘black shelf’, it’s possible that they could have even more troubling issues that are off the radar of mainstream health and beauty companies. During one of my office visits, I spot a cluster of sample shampoos and leave-in conditioners on Walker’s desk. After some needling, he texts me a link to a study in the American Journal of Epidemiology which shows a strong correlation between the harsh chemicals in hair relaxers—commonly used by women of colour—and the development of uterine fibroids, which can lead to infertility and miscarriage. “It’s sad, and it pisses me off,” Walker says, explaining that he didn’t understand this issue until Amoy became pregnant. “If it actually is a lot more prevalent than we think it is, someone should be effecting change on that.” There seemed a need for Walker & Co.— and an opportunity, especially if the company could eventually customise products for a range of minorities. The trick was conveying this need to Silicon Valley’s customary pod of investors. “Pitching to a VC is already a tough experience,” says Erin Teague, a close friend, “but it’s even harder if none of them can really relate to the problem you’re describing. It requires that much more courage.” In one meeting, a white VC announced to Walker that another black person told him that razor bumps weren’t a real problem for men of colour. This inability (and in some cases, unwillingness) to relate helps explain why just 1% of venture-backed startup founders are black. While Walker is thrilled to have made it into that tiny cohort, his company’s funding pales next to that accorded Harry’s, a shaving startup that uses a multiblade razor and targets a broader consumer market. Ten months after its founding, Harry’s had raised

around R1.4 billion in seed funding. Ten months after Walker & Co. was founded, it had raised R28 million in seed funding. Silicon Valley wants its founders to shoot for the biggest customer base possible, but in so doing they risk missing a chance to back companies that may very profitably rule a strong minority niche. In late 2013, Nielsen published a report on the spending habits and media consumption of African-Americans, urging corporations to “think and behave differently toward valuing African-Americans and their economic impact”. The report indicated that black consumers, whose buying power is estimated at about R11.6 trillion, spend nine times as much on products in the “ethnic hair and beauty aids” category than other groups. In other words, it’s a lucrative market that deserves much more than copper-tone boxes on a shelf. “Okay, let me take a look,” Walker says, as I lift my head toward the ceiling of his guest bathroom. He’s teaching me how to use Walker & Co.’s Bevel razor, but he’s also teaching me how to shave. (It’s my first time—since I don’t grow a thick beard, I just use electric clippers when I need to remove unwanted scruff.) The most important thing, he keeps reminding me, is to shave with the natural grain of my hair—not against. “That’s very clearly ‘down’,” he says, analysing my neck to see how the hair grows. “It’s not moving in too crazy a direction. You’ve got it easy!” He finally founded Walker & Company Brands in April 2013. The company shipped its first Bevel in February 2014. Through the brand’s website, customers purchase a $59.95 (about R700) starter kit, which includes the Bevel razor, brush and an initial 30-day supply of shaving cream, priming oil and restoring balm. Ongoing subscribers pay a monthly fee of $29.95 (R350) and receive a steady supply of replenishments. (If you’re thinking that this sounds expensive, you’re not alone—when this article was first published, Walker told the author he was re-examining the pricing strategy of the Bevel.) Walker guides me through the whole morning routine. First, he instructs me to insert the blade into the razor. It’s a single double-sided blade—none of that three- or four-blade stuff for me. Then, he shows me how to spread an olive oil–based liquid called “priming oil” on my face, which he says will let the razor glide across my skin easily. Finally, I apply the shaving cream, which is made with shea butter, white tea and aloe vera. “Remember, no pressure!” he reminds me. “A lot of people say that audible feedback is good,” he says, and I do indeed hear the hair coming off on the blade. There’s an excitement in Walker’s voice when he describes the Bevel’s design. “Think about the winged edge of our razor,” he says, which sheaths the blade on the sides, protecting men from nicks during replacement. “It’s about being thoughtful of someone who’s never even used a razor.” He worked with the New York design firm, Bone & Black, to ensure the aluminium razor’s handle had a matte finish for a nice grip and that the head feels a bit heavy, to ease the task of maintaining the razor at a 30-degree angle while shaving. Right down to the tea-tree oil in the “restoring balm”, which is applied after shaving for a cooling sensation, he believes he has come up with a bevy of little surprises to delight users. “I think you’re good, man!” he says as I mow the last patch of hair from my face. Amoy peeps her head in to ask, “Tristan, did you make sure he exfoliated!?” (I did.) The next day, she checks to make sure I didn’t develop any razor bumps. (I hadn’t.) Walker is now building his ideal company, slowly, with all the care that he put into teaching me how to shave. Walker & Co. is housed in a smallish, open-layout, street-level property just a five-minute walk from his apartment. The day I visit, a mid-volume Spotify playlist runs down hip-hop and R&B classics including “The Rain (Supa Dupa Fly)” by Missy Elliott and Cheryl Lynn’s “Got to Be Real”. Walking beside me, Walker whispers as if he has a secret no one has discovered yet. “If you just look at the team,” he says, “this isn’t typical of Silicon Valley.” He’s right—it’s not exclusively white and Asian, for one thing, and it’s truly diverse, for another. Marketing is run by Michael Plater, a dapper, light-skinned, young black man who is standing at his computer barefoot, checking the performance of online Bevel ads. The engineering team is comprised of Isaac Elias, who is Latino, and Rachel Heaton, a purple-haired white woman. Cassidy Blackwell is a black woman who writes content for the company’s website. Fulfilment operations are run by Mir Anwar, a Pakistani-American who recently left another supply-chain position at DIY– electronics manufacturer, littleBits. Tom Hanley, who is white and enjoys Hawaiian-patterned shirts, is the company’s “lead architect” and Walker’s first employee. Walker randomly tweeted one day that he needed to learn how to code, and Hanley, who tweeted back and offered lessons, eventually quit his job at the camera startup, Lytro, to join the company. When D’Angelo’s version of “Cruisin’” wafts through the speakers, Hanley comments that he likes the original Smokey

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S P E C I A L R E P O R T: B L A C K I N S I L I C O N VA L L E Y

Robinson track better. Mishearing him, Walker pauses our interview and exclaims, “Hold up, you don’t like Smokey Robinson?!?” Then he turns to me: “Quote that!” This sounds like Walker from the crab boil. Building a team that looks like this doesn’t come easy just because Walker is AfricanAmerican. He specifically asks investors and other contacts to first consider candidates diverse in race and gender when he’s looking for leads to fill new positions. “In my mind I was like: On behalf of humanity, thank you,” says Romy Macasieb, Walker & Co.’s senior product manager. “Because what could have happened was, Tristan could have hired all black men.” If you believe the existing research, Walker & Co.’s diversity could prove an enormous asset as the company moves forward. Professor Ronald S. Burt at the University of Chicago pioneered an aspect of network science called “brokerage”, which has shown that individuals connected to disparate “clusters” of people have more creative ideas than those with homogenous, closed social networks. In his book The Difference, Scott Page, a professor at the University of Michigan, went so far as to create a statistical model that showed how diversity can trump even skill when people work in a group to solve a problem. Despite this, and despite the fact that blacks overrepresent on many technology indices—for instance, 22% of black Internet users are on Twitter, versus 16% of whites— most Silicon Valley startups don’t make a conscious effort to tap into the existing pool of minority tech talent. “The majority of employees, managers and engineers in tech agree that innovation and creativity is served by diversity, but a majority are not in favour of company-wide practices to increase diversity,” says Kapor Klein, referring to a 2011 survey of tech firms, called the Tilted Playing Field, conducted by her non-profit. “So that disconnect explains the problem. The starting place is, ‘The system is a meritocracy as it is, and if we tinker with it, we’re introducing bias.’ That needs to be flipped on its head.” For now, Silicon Valley likes the idea of more Tristan Walkers, but doesn’t want to have to work too hard to make that happen. “They very much are rooting for Tristan,” says Walker & Co.’s Plater. “But I always feel there’s that butting of heads where, okay, yeah, you want this guy to win: But is it really because you don’t want your industry to look that way, or do you actually care? They want to be able to point

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at Tristan and say, ‘Look, that’s an example.’” Walker and his diverse team are not even close to being able to declare victory. In so many ways, he’s another first-time company founder trying to find his way. “You can win on customer experience in a whole bunch of ways,” he says, guiding me over to a dry-erase wall in the office, “from overnight shipping to video chats to shipping blades to their destination if they don’t get past TSA [US Transportation Security Administration].” On the wall is a replica of Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos’s famous ‘flywheel’ approach to revenue growth—an interweaving chain that shows how starting with customer satisfaction helps drive site traffic, which helps drive distribution, which generates cash, which

for the stars when he needs to focus on the day-to-day. (“I don’t want to crush his dream,” says Hanley, “but I also want to make sure we keep him realistic about what can happen. It’s like when you’re a kid who gets a big plate of ice cream—you want to eat with your eyes.”) The longer it takes Walker to make Bevel a household name in the black community, the longer P&G and Gillette have to thwart his ambitions. It is unlikely that they will soon develop Walker’s feel for his target market. Bevel’s marketing reflects a mix of his online savvy and his African-American heritage. Its Instagram profile features daily style tips and slick yet gritty professional photography of cityscapes, vintage album covers and, of

“The changing demographic in this country is the greatest economic opportunity of my lifet ime,” Walker says. “There’s an inevitability to this, and I think some of the greatest companies that will be built in the next 50 years will keep that in mind.” helps lower fulfilment costs, and so on. Next to the flywheel are lists of hypothetical models of Bevel customers. Walker gives the rundown on one, Jamal, who’s 27, lives in Chicago, and works as a marketing executive making around R900 000. His 51-year-old mom, Janet, just bought an Android phone, makes R400 000 and listens to The Steve Harvey Morning Show religiously. “If she wants to gift him a subscription, what does that look like?” Walker says. Walker says Bevel is doing well, that subscriptions are growing an average of 50% month over month, with more than 90% of customers returning. (He’s got an app on his phone that sets off a ka-ching sound every time there’s a new Bevel sale or replenishment.) One long-term hope is that white customers, too, will gravitate to Walker & Co. products, drawn by their sheer excellence. But Walker has a tendency to reach

course, the Bevel razor and kit. The Bevel Twitter feed may offer followers an Arthur Ashe quote or a retweet of a satisfied customer. (“When I get that new suit and power it up with @bevel, I’m putting society on notice,” reads a recent one.) Bevel Code, its online men’s magazine, is full of brand ambassadors including musicians, star athletes, business executives and, most important of all, barbers. Yep, barbers. “People believe that this culture leads culture,” Walker says, referring to a study that found 73% of whites and 67% of Hispanics feel blacks influence American mainstream culture. “A lot of times, that culture starts in barbershops and salons.” Walker & Co. has enrolled 20 barbershops across the country in a referral programme, in which barbers use Bevel on customers and receive a commission if the customer later goes online to purchase the product. The

CLOSING THE GAP

THESE FOUR ORGANISATIONS ARE TRYING TO BRING MINORITIES INTO TECH RIGHT NOW CODE2040 Jobs Started by Tristan Walker and Stanford B-school classmate Laura Weidman Powers, this San Francisco–based non-profit helps black and Latino engineering students land internships— and in many cases, full-time gigs—at the likes of Jawbone, Facebook, LinkedIn and Uber. Says Weidman Powers, “This is a way to access the best and brightest undergraduate talent in the country.”

Digital Undivided Funding and Visibility An eight-week “Focus” programme helps female entrepreneurs of colour develop and fund startups. The annual Focus conference features prominent tech minorities as speakers and mentors including Maxine Williams, head of diversity at Facebook, and William Crowder, partner at DreamIt Ventures. Kathryn Finney was inspired to found Digital Undivided by her father, Robert, who lost his job at a brewery—and then became a successful Microsoft engineer.

Black Girls Code Early STEM Introducing African-American girls to computer programming became a passion for former Genentech engineer Kimberly Bryant, when her teenage daughter decided she wanted to develop video games. Her organisation has put 3 000 students in the US and South Africa through after-school classes on web design, mobile app development and robotics. “Only 3% of [US] computer-science grads are women of colour,” Bryant says. “I want to see that triple.”

All Star Code Skills and Training AOL, Dropbox and Spotify sponsor All Star Code, which offers a six-week summer course of instruction in programming and app development to minority male high school students. Founder Christina Lewis Halpern was inspired, in part, by a Harvard Law School prep programme attended by her late father, Reginald Lewis, a prominent businessman famous for owning Beatrice International in the 1990s.

company plans to take over barbershops in cities such as Chicago, Atlanta and New York for events. Walker & Co. will moderate Q&As, play music and host food vendors, all while allowing members of these communities to touch and feel the product, ideally while getting their hair cut. In the long run, Walker & Co. may open its own retail locations. But for now, finding a permanent home for its razors (and its upcoming set of electric clippers) would be a big win for the company. Another focus for Walker is men in the armed forces. Today’s military is 30% non-white, a number that has risen in the past two decades. With this strategy, Walker is borrowing from Gillette’s company founder, the irrepressible King Gillette who, during World War 1, got a contract to become the exclusive supplier of razors and blades to young soldiers. They continued to use the product when they came home, and they encouraged their sons to do so as well. Great companies can flourish as a result of such small but clever moves. In a quaint park in Walker’s neighbourhood, he’s shooting hoops alone on an asphalt court with a netless goal, wearing one of the many Foursquare T-shirts I’ve seen him in— today’s is in Chinese. “Hopefully someone will drive by and see him and stop,” says Amoy, perched beside me on a blanket next to Walker’s black Jambox, wishing her husband could get a game. I inform her that his first opponent won’t be me, since whatever athletic gene my family might have once possessed stopped with my dad. Eventually, Walker comes over and plops down beside us on the blanket. “It took me finally realising that it’s good not to give a shit what people think about me,” he tells me, when I ask him how he overcame the pressure to build the next great social media network. “I didn’t think I could build as great a company with those other ideas as I could with this one.” Silicon Valley is obsessed by the concept of a ‘great company’. One less-noted fact about the Valley’s breakthrough companies is that they can spawn new networks of entrepreneurs hell-bent on creating yet another one. The foremost example of this is the famed “PayPal Mafia”, the group of tight-knit employees who were assembled by cofounders Peter Thiel and Max Levchin, but dispersed after the company was bought by eBay. Helped in part by the fact that they invest in one another’s startups, the collective value that the group members—which include the founders of YouTube, Elon Musk, LinkedIn founder Reid Hoffman, and “super angel” investor Dave McClure—generated through their own ventures has dwarfed the value of that sale. (There is some overlap be tween that group and Walker’s budding network of black friends. Scriven, of Palantir, and Chris Martinez, who co-founded the data-based fertility app Glow with Levchin—both entrepreneurs of colour—are associated with both the PayPal network and the group of professionals who make up the Walkers’ circle.) If Walker & Co. is successful, its ripple effect will be large and transformative, Walker hopes. “I believe CODE2040 and Walker & Co. have the exact same mission, one is just for-profit and the other is not,” Walker later tells me. “The changing demographic in this country is the greatest economic opportunity of my lifetime,” Walker says. “There’s an inevitability to this, and I think some of the greatest companies that will be built in the next 50 years will keep that in mind.” Presumably, it will be easier for them to ‘keep that in mind’ if they come from the rising portions of that demographic shift. If Walker & Co. endures, it could help lead the way for Silicon Valley to embrace a larger group of diverse entrepreneurs to serve this larger pool of diverse cus tomers. In such a future, being a black entrepreneur in Silicon Valley will no longer be remarkable in and of itself. Speaking in July last year of his yet-to-be-born son, Walker said: “If he realises sooner rather than later the importance of not only being a consumer but also a producer, I’ll be a very proud father. Create for the world, right?” On September 26, Walker and Amoy welcomed Avery James into the world at 3.09 kilogrammes. Between his parents and the Glow fertility calendar app they used to help conceive him, he is already a product of his environment. jmccorvey@fastcompany.com

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FAST COMPANY PROMOTION

MIND THE GROWTH GAP mLab turns innovative ideas into profitable enterprises

mLab (Mobile Applications Laboratory) is an international network of regional mobile app labs currently located in South Africa, Kenya and Armenia, with the aim of stimulating innovation and economic participation in the mobile information and communication technology (ICT) sectors of these developing regional economies. The lab runs a number of programmes in South Africa aimed at inspiring youth to learn software development skills while connecting developers, designers, entrepreneurs and industry to build apps and services, ultimately growing them into new profitable enterprises. “Our programmes cover the entire enterprise development runway: from creating awareness about the industry opportunity to developing the skills, concepts and products and then taking them to market,” explains Derrick Kotze, CEO of mLab Southern Africa. “As in most other markets, startups tend to mirror existing enterprise structures so, while we don’t have a specific call for social entrepreneurs,

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Code, Hack, Dare, Make: CodeTribe Academy is a collaboration between The Innovation Hub and mLab Southern Africa to increase the skills of talented young ICT enthusiasts.

social upliftment and service delivery is high on the agenda in Africa and drives the opportunity for new enterprises to provide solutions through profitable technologies and service offerings while still creating massive impact, for example M-Pesa and GoMetro among others.” mLab runs a number of virtual programmes, but also has a lab at The Innovation Hub in Pretoria and in Cape Town, with plans to expand the physical lab footprint to other parts of the country over the next 18 months. Research and development (R&D) is an integral element of what the company does. In this aspect, it is supported by various partners including the Department of Science and Technology, the Council for Scientific and Industrial Research, and The Innovation Hub. “What makes us different is our focus on citizen science or rapid open innovation, and so we frame our activities and support in such a way that the R&D is an output of new skills, enterprises and product development, rather than making it the starting point,” Kotze explains. “The mobile services and startup culture follows a much faster route from idea to MVP [minimal viable product], so the traditional R&D methodologies don’t always fit well. Our members thrive on a culture of rapid R&D or ‘skunkworks’, where they have more autonomy and less bureaucracy than normal R&D programmes.”

mlab s o u t h e r n

mLab was originally founded by the World Bank infoDev and Finland’s Ministry for Foreign Affairs, thus it has a strong and continuing relationship with Finland and is part of some of this country’s programmes. Both Finland and Sweden offer an inspiring example of how an economy can be transformed through investment in entrepreneurship, ICT, mobile innovation and strong design thinking. “As a new startup nation, we are often fixated on trying to replicate the Silicon Valley model, which is not a perfect fit for Africa. We like to look elsewhere for models and learnings that will allow us to develop a maker and innovation culture relevant to our own strengths and opportunities.” mLab tries to include various stakeholders and the local communities in its activities. Kotze notes that inclusive innovation is crucial in developing relevant products and services. He believes mobile offers the great promise of inclusiveness and the democratisation of services and information; however, many technologies promising the same fail because they are developed for the communities instead of being developed with the communities they intend to serve. “Without community or user buy-in or an ability for them to see

a f r i c a

real benefit, app downloads won’t translate into actual usage, revenue or profits for any startup or larger organisation [public or private],” he explains. “In South Africa, specifically, we often see a disconnect between those who conceptualise and build the solutions and those who are supposed to use and benefit from them. This disconnect is often caused by the socio-economic and skills inequality fuelled by the growing wealth gap. It is like the saying, ‘write what you know—only when it comes to writing code, we still have a lot of work to do to get communities to write their own stories or solutions. It’s key that any solution targeting the mass base of mobile users should be inclusive through community engagement and, where possible, community skills development so that they actively contribute to the development,” Kotze adds. mLab aims to cater to all emerging and established companies. Kotze notes that companies are facing the same challenge, as they all try to see how they can drive innovation and also find the talent, skills and time to deliver on this. “It doesn’t matter if you are a two-person startup or a multinational: this growth gap exists within all. Organisations can become part of the solution by either supporting software skills development programmes through mLab, participating in rapid R&D or skunkwork hackathons, or procuring some of their ICT services from SMMEs supported by mLab.” He explains that open innovation and collaboration is a culture rather than a methodology, as mLab believes it has the role of providing talented people with as much of the blocks needed to make something new or improved. He argues that innovation is not always about invention, but rather a practice of finding novel ways of using existing methods or technologies to solve new problems. “At mLab we offer world-class infrastructure, equipment, access to our industry and government networks and, most importantly, we offer entrepreneurs, developers and designers access to like-minded peers eager to collaborate. There are very few rules, and failure is not frowned upon because we know that not everything is going to make it to market, and rather embrace the fact that everything is an opportunity to try and reuse, potentially resulting in some breakout innovations,” says Kotze. As a collaborative lab largely driven by a community of creative and ambitious young innovators, designers, developers and entrepreneurs, collaboration is at the core of what the organisation does. “Often the thinking is, especially in large organisations, that you have to enforce collaboration, but I think it’s the most natural way of working when you have an environment with diverse skills and backgrounds and trust. I think diversity and a set of common goals are what promote collaboration at mLab.” There are prerequisites for entities to be part of mLab. Kotze explains that just having an idea is not enough, as mLab expects all its members to work hard within the organisation’s network to build strong teams. Before mLab supports a project, a close review of the balance between impact and commercial viability is undertaken. “Over the last couple of years, we have and continue to identify our place in this rapidly evolving ecosystem and know that we can’t offer a place for everyone, but we are strong partners for individuals seeking to be part of a bigger and more diverse team, organisations that are in the ideas, product development or launch stages of a mobile, machineto-machine or wearable solution, especially those with high-impact solutions,” he says. Email info@mlab.co.za or visit www.mlab.co.za. Find us on Twitter: @mlabsa

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MASTER CLASS

Rebecca and Uri Minkoff

Mirror, mirror H OW T WO FA S H I O N - B IZ S I B LI N G S A R E M I X I N G S T Y LE A N D T ECH

By Danielle Sacks Photographs by Andy Ryan

When accessories and apparel designer Rebecca Minkoff opened her eponymous company’s first store in Manhattan in November last year, she and her brother Uri, the business’s co-founder and CEO, wanted to create a wired environment where the tech was virtually invisible. “We hadn’t seen a lot of innovation in retail since the Apple stores,” says Uri. “What if you took the best from a mobile experience and brought it into the store? We started coming up with names like Retail 3.0 or immersive commerce.”

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Changing the changing room The Minkoffs teamed with eBay to rethink the shopping experience.

In early 2014, the brother-sister team began collaborating with eBay’s retail innovation group to build a new kind of in-store experience (see sidebar below). When shoppers walk in the store, they are greeted by a huge screen that lets them finger-swipe through clothing styles and press SEND TO MY ROOM to try on items. The dressing rooms are interactive, too, with touchscreen mirrors that let customers request different sizes and send info about their session to their phones. Here’s how the Minkoffs are integrating tech with brick-and-mortar retail.

Wall mart Rebecca Minkoff’s Manhattan store brings mobile-shopping touches to traditional retail.

FORGET ABOUT GIMMICKS One early idea was to incorporate social media features into the dressing rooms but, ultimately, the Minkoffs decided to “walk away from parlour tricks like sharing your selfie,” says Uri. Instead, they focused on using technology to smooth out bumps in the shopping experience, such as trying to flag down a salesperson while undressed in a fitting room. Customers can also enhance the trying-on moment with customisable environmental lighting. “As a consumer, I have certain pain points”, like trying on a cocktail dress in blazing fluorescent light, says Rebecca. “I wanted to use technology to ease those moments.”

mirrors—they make us look fat!’” Not good. So the Minkoffs took the eBay team on a shopping trip to track down the most figure-friendly mirrors they could find, and eBay then incorporated the technology into them. “What was best for the tech team wasn’t best for the end consumer,” says Uri. “Now [customers will] sit in front of those mirrors all day because they look skinny.”

F A S H I O N F I R S T, T E C H S E C O N D

T R E AT I T L I K E R E A L-T I M E S O F T WA R E

When the Minkoffs did testing on the first version of their interactive mirror, they encountered an unexpected problem. They brought in a few employees to try it out in the context of an actual fitting room. “They walked out screaming, ‘I’d never ever use this!’” says Uri. “I was like, ‘Why? What’s wrong?’ They said, ‘Those are fat

Digitally capturing shopping sessions is a convenience, but it’s also a data gold mine for the company. It can show what’s trending with customers in different stores and the brand can immediately alter both in-store and online marketing to reflect those preferences. “If we know that in New York people are taking denim into the dressing

room, we can get hyperlocal with our marketing and can change the imagery on our interactive wall and email marketing,” says Uri. “We’re going to treat the store like a software project where every quarter we’ll be rolling out new features. We’ll continue to see what’s working and what isn’t.”

THING BIG — BUT ACT SMALL The Minkoffs decided early on that they’d need a big tech partner to pull off the interactive store, and Uri says he “stalked” eBay. They were wary of teaming with a behemoth, though. “In a big company, a project like this can get lost,” Uri says. But eBay created an “almost autonomous team that was dedicated solely to this. It had very senior executives’ blessings and a very specific budget and timeline. That’s why it worked.”

THE STORE OF THE FUTURE? HOW THE NEW INTERACTIVE S Y S T E M I N R E B E C C A M I N KO F F ’ S NYC BOUTIQUE WORKS

Swipe for options

A small mirror helps out

Save picks for later

As they enter the store, shoppers encounter a huge interactive screen that shows off Minkoff’s wares and allows customers to digitally choose items to try on. An iPad-armed salesperson then brings the requested clothes to a fitting room.

Inside the fitting room, RFID chips attached to the clothing’s tags trigger an interactive mirror to digitally display the items. Using the mirror’s touchscreen, customers can ask a clerk to bring different sizes or styles and can customise their lighting.

Users who have the Rebecca Minkoff mobile app and PayPal can check out right in the fitting room. And if they decide not to buy anything, they can text themselves a digital record of the exact pieces and sizes they tried on in case they change their mind.

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Secrets of the Most Productive People YOUR GUIDE TO BOOSTING YOUR CREATIVE OUTPUT, FEATURING A SENATOR, A CHEF, A BUSINESS OWNER, A SURGEON, THREE CEOS, TWO DIRECTORS AS WELL AS BILLIONAIRE ENTREPRENEUR AND INVENTOR—ELON MUSK. PLUS: HOW TO CONQUER MEETINGS, EMAIL, TO -DO LISTS AND MORNINGS.

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Man on a mission South African-born entrepreneur and inventor Elon Musk is adept at the art of producing the future. How he divides his work week between two companies and still finds the time to try and change the future BY CHRIS WALDBURGER

Gallo Images/Getty Images/ John B. Carnett

Learn to slow down: Of his work week, Elon Musk says: “It’s really varied quite a bit over time. These days it’s probably 80, 85 hours per week. For a while there, it was over 100 hours per week and that’s just… that’s a very high amount of pain. The difficulty and pain of work hours really increased exponentially. It’s not linear.”

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SECRETS OF THE MOST PRODUCTIVE PEOPLE

Despite naming his electric car company, Tesla, Elon Musk has suggested that Nikola Tesla’s arch-rival Thomas Edison, creator of the light bulb, may perhaps be a better role model for him. Edison changed the world by bringing his inventions to market, and it is that combination (grand invention and marketability) that makes Musk such a compelling—and productive—figure of the modern age. What drives Musk is neither the mere building of a business empire, nor the production of simply convenient consumables, but rather the production and marketing of game-changer modern inventions. This sense of endeavour, combined with a resolute hunger for success, almost propels him beyond the usual Henry Ford and Steve Jobs comparisons. This means Musk does not view his work as work per se, but rather as a kind of mission—with all the levels of commitment and, indeed, quixotic madness the word implies. This is why he sunk money into Tesla and SpaceX after making millions with PayPal, when the smart business decision would have been to leverage his Internet success in the same direction. He truly believes he can colonise Mars and launch humanity into an interplanetary era; in a more earthly vein, he equally believes Tesla can catalyse a major shift in energy consumption. This is why Musk had no qualms about giving up

50 FASTCOMPANY.CO.Z A MARCH/APRIL 2015

Tesla’s patents last year. “If we clear a path to the creation of compelling electric vehicles,” he has said, “but then lay intellectual property landmines behind us to inhibit others, we are acting in a manner contrary to that goal.” It is this faith in the desirability of the goal—the admixture of business with profitable idealism—that gets things done. Musk was recently included in The Purpose Economy 100. Those included are deemed to be “transforming our innate need for meaning into the organising principle for innovation and growth in the American economy.” For Musk, purpose is the key ingredient of productivity. Critics have said that Musk, like Jobs, has a “reality distortion field” (a term coined by an Apple employee) around him. Not only does this imbue him with a hard-edged drive, but it leads him to push colleagues and employees to the absolute edge of their abilities. Musk has been known to work up to a 100-hour week, eating on the run and spending time with his five children while emailing—which he describes jokingly as his core competency. Of his work week, he told hybridcars.com: “It’s really varied over time. These days it’s probably 80, 85 hours a week. For a while there, it was over 100 hours a week and that’s just... that’s a very high amount of pain. The difficulty and pain of work hours really increased exponentially. It’s not linear. When the financial crisis hit in 2008/2009, it was just every day, seven days a week, morning till night and dream about work. It was terrible. Bad dreams.” He says his best habit is showering; apparently that is the time for not only hygiene but thought and inspiration. Perhaps it is his only free time. As a designer, he says he tries “to imagine, from a physics standpoint, what an ideal solution would look like and how practical it is.” He rarely draws them out; he is in the shower, after all. It must be noted that Musk has two major companies to look after: Tesla and SpaceX (he is also chairperson of SolarCity), and so his work week is divided by two businesses, with two offices. He is at Tesla on Tuesdays and Wednesdays; at SpaceX on Mondays and Thursdays, while Friday is shared. There have been reports that employees leave their lives behind when they work for Musk, but he is open about the unique sacrifices he asks for as an employer, describing his team as “special forces” as opposed to regular army. The privilege of being ‘special’ carries a cost: The distorting of normal reality. But it is that same ‘reality distortion’ that allows for the vision in the first place. Musk’s cousin, Lynden Rive, who is CEO of SolarCity, compares his famous relative to The Matrix protagonist, Neo: “Elon is Neo. He sees these zeroes and ones. And he just has a different look at the entire world. And he has this rare gift where he’s super intelligent when it comes to engineering and to learning complexity and challenges, but he also understands business and consumer need. And that’s very rare.” Such a quality gives Musk a kind of stubbornness to see his goals through. His belief that he is changing the future drives him, and he passes this drive and goaldirectedness on to those around him. They become ‘special forces’. This, in turn, creates a kind of ‘delusional optimism’ that gets results.

caption: Elon Musk at the Racing Extinction documentary premiere at the 2015 Sundance Film Festival in January at Park City, Utah. Filmmaker Louie Psihoyos used a modified Tesla Model S car to project conservation and extinction statistics in city centres.

WHO IS ELON MUSK? OCCUPATION:

RECOGNITION:

Entrepreneur, engineer, inventor

Musk was listed as one of the World’s 100 Most Influential People in 2013 and 2010. He was also named one of America’s 20 Most Powerful CEOs 40 and Under in 2011, and one of the 75 Most Influential People of the 21st Century in 2008. The Kitty Hawk Foundation recognised him as a Living Legend of Aviation in 2010.

TITLE:

CEO and CTO of SpaceX; chairperson of SolarCity; product architect and CEO of Tesla Motors KNOWN FOR:

Zip2, PayPal, Falcon 9 rocket and Dragon spacecraft, Tesla Roadster, SolarCity, Hyperloop, inspiring Robert Downey Jr.’s Tony Stark/Iron Man character BACKGROUND:

Gallo Images/Getty Images/ Paul Marotta

HIS SUCCESS TEACHES US THAT THE DEGREE OF ENERGY REQUIRED FOR IMMENSE PRODUCTIVITY CORRELATES WITH THE GRANDEUR OF THE GOAL. AS A FORMER SPACEX EMPLOYEE HAS NOTED, “YOU DON’T GET TO MARS WITH A BUNCH OF SOFTIES.” Musk and his companies have needed this quality to overcome a series of obstacles: He was fired from PayPal while on vacation; he had to put his own money into Tesla to avoid bankruptcy; and he won a NASA contract for SpaceX just in time to prevent his historic rocket venture from collapsing. On an online forum, when asked what advice he would give to those working through adversity, he cited Winston Churchill: “If you’re going through hell, keep going.” That’s productivity. And it’s worth noting that both Churchill and Musk seemed and seem to enjoy the journey. If the battle makes sense, the fighting of it comes with a certain relish. And while the swashbuckling and back-breaking efforts that come with such a relish may not be to everyone’s taste, the fact remains: it gets results. Musk may not be saving civilisation from the Nazis; he does nonetheless have a grand vision of his own. His success teaches us that the degree of energy required for immense productivity correlates with the grandeur of the goal. As a former SpaceX employee has noted, “You don’t get to Mars with a bunch of softies.”

Musk was born in June 1971 in Pretoria, South Africa, and taught himself computer programming. At the age of 12, he sold his first computer code for a video game he created, titled Blastar, for $500. He attended Waterkloof House Preparatory School before graduating from Pretoria Boys High and moving to Canada in 1988. He also attended a number of tertiary institutions: Queen’s University, Ontario; University of Pennsylvania and its Wharton School; and two days at Stanford before deciding to pursue his entrepreneurial endeavours. F A M I LY :

Musk’s Canadian-English mother, Maye, is a wellknown model; his British father, Errol, is an electrical/ mechanical engineer. His sister, Tosca, is the founder of Musk Entertainment. He co-founded SolarCity with his cousins, Lyndon and Peter Rive. PERSONAL LIFE:

AWARDS

2006 – Global Green USA Sustainable Design Award 2007 – R&D magazine’s Innovator of the Year Award 2007 – Inc. magazine’s Entrepreneur of the Year Award 2007 – INDEX: Design to Improve Life Award 2007/08 – American Institute of Aeronautics and Astronautics George M. Low Space Transportation Award 2007/08 – National Wildlife Federation National Conservation Achievement Award 2009 – Aviation Week Laureate Award 2009 – FAI Gold Space Medal 2010 – Automotive Executive of the Year Award 2011 – Heinlein Prize 2011 – Churchill Club Award: Legendary Leader 2012 – Gold Medal from the Royal Aeronautical Society 2012 – Smithsonian magazine’s American Ingenuity Award for Technology 2013 – Fortune Businessperson of the Year Award 2014 – The World Technology Network’s World Technology Award for both Energy and Space

Musk has been married three times, twice to the same woman. He has five sons.

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SECRETS OF THE MOST PRODUCTIVE PEOPLE

GET IT TOGETHER The best new productivity apps. By JJ McCorvey

What is your productivity problem?

My memory sucks

I’m overwhelmed and losing my sanity

My schedule is out of control Deep breaths. What’s driving you crazy?

What do you need help remembering? Tasks Bills

Ideas

What throws off your day?

Meetings/ calls Everything

You need: CHECK

Just link up all your accounts, fromcable DStvto from to credit cards; credit cards; the the free app from free app from Intuit monitors everything 24/7, reminding you of payments due and letting you pay bills right from the app.

Passwords

You need:

POST-IT PLUS

Snap a pic of those curling yellow notes covering your work organize space, then organise them on your iPhone or iPad screen. If they iPad screen. If they stem stem a brainstorm, from from a brainstorm, you you can share them with can share them with team members—and team members—and let let them add their own. them add their own.

Will a list do? Or do you need visual aids?

Visual List

Only email when urgent

What type of email user are you?

Everything’s urgent, I can power through it all

EASILYDO

This mobile app offers everything you need in the moment: reminders, traffic updates, pertinent social media posts, and alerts when emails come in from, say, your boss.

I need to be able to look ahead

You need: LIFT

This app and serThis app and vice offers service offersdaily daily plans for sticking to things like yoga, meditayoga, meditation, tion, exercise— exercise—or a or a customized customised goal goal of your of your own.own. The The site’s comsite’s community munity ofas peers, of peers, well asaswell (forasa (for fee) a fee) professional professional coaches, offers encouragement.

People (colleagues, roommates, even my kids) Plan? Ha! You need:

CUBEFREE

Work You need:

You need:

TEMPO

TIPBIT

You need:

Do you live “in the moment,” or are you a longterm planner?

For work or personal?

1PASSWORD

This freemium app generates long, unique passcodes for every site and service, then stores them all. You log in with a click or tap. (Or, for iPhone users, a thumbprint.)

Social media

If you don’t have time to deal with an email right away, hit “read later” and choose when you’d like it to return. You can also create meeting invites from an email, introduce two people with links to their social media pages, and see your contacts’ social media posts.

Personal

In addition to showing the full, hourly scope of your day (plus directions and parking info), Tempo dials conference-call passwords and pulls up contacts’ recent tweets and AngelList activity.

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Sometimes you just have to get away. Cubefree, a free app Cubefree, a free by helpshelps you appCitrix, by Citrix, find co-working you find coworking spaces and cafes around you—with info about Wi-Fi, power outlets, and noise level. It’ll also tell tell youyou if colleagues if colare nearby. (Up to leagues are nearby. you whether to (Up to you whether tojoin jointhem.) them.)

“I know what needs to be done” KIRSTEN GILLIBRAND United States senator from New York and author of Off the Sidelines: Raise Your Voice, Change the World “I might want to do a hundred things in a given day, but I know I have to pick up my kids between 5 and 6. That is the most important thing. So I fit in everything else around that. I know what needs to be done, and then I know what I want to get done.”

TIME SHE WAKES UP:

Between 6:30 and 7 a.m.— “when my 6-year-old wakes up.” FIRST THING SHE DOES IN THE MORNING:

“Make breakfast for my children. They eat it while they watch their cartoons. Then I get myself ready.” MOST PRODUCTIVE SPACE:

“When I think about an

issue I’m trying to solve— a legislative problem—then it’s late at night when I am in bed. It’s silent, and it’s dark.” HOW SHE HANDLES EMAIL:

“I tend to leave email and text for specific questions, like where I need to be at a specific moment. For example, it’ll be my husband, asking, ‘Who’s picking up the kids?’ If my legislative staff asks me for a briefing, I ask for an oral one. I never want to be briefed on email. I’m never in front of a computer—that is a declarative never. I couldn’t

even tell you the password for my computer. I only use my iPhone.” D A I LY B R E A K S ?

“I’ve learnt over the course of my career that I’m far more productive and happy when I make time for some kind of physical activity. I try to schedule it in at least three times a week. If I’m playing squash, I like to play for 45 minutes. I’ll play with anyone I can find. There aren’t many squash players in the Senate, but I’ve played with Al Franken [Democratic senator from Minnesota] many times. It’s not very bipartisan. But softball— that is very bipartisan. Kelly Ayotte [Republican senator from New Hampshire] is my co-captain, and Shelley Moore Capito [Republican congresswoman from West Virginia] is my third baseman. In the autumn, we practise twice a week at 7 a.m., but I try to go early so that I can practise my pitching.” M O T I VAT I O N A L O B J E C T:

“One tool we use to stay motivated and focused is the phrase ‘armour of God’. Any time I’m going to a difficult meeting, my chief of staff says it, because he knows I love that piece of Scripture. It has a lot of meaning to me. I don’t think it has any meaning to him.” B E S T H A B I T:

“Staying positive. You imagine success, and you build from there.” W O R S T H A B I T:

“Not going to the gym if I’m feeling depressed.” LAST THING SHE DOES AT N I G H T:

“Kiss my husband.” TIME SHE GOES TO BED:

“Between 9 and 10 p.m. I need a lot of sleep.” —As told to Jeff Chu

HOW TO MAKE MEETINGS . . . Better Improve collaboration in meetings by removing the chairs from the conference room. Researchers at the Olin Business School at Washington University in St. Louis used body sensors on two groups of participants and found that team members who stood were more engaged, less territorial about their ideas, and generated more creative results.

Faster Begin by asking participants to share what they need to do or say to be fully attentive, says Dick Axelrod, co-author of Let’s Stop Meeting Like This. One person may need a specific piece of information, another person may need to leave at a certain time, and someone else may just want to vent about being in meetings all day. “It’s a clean-slate drill that clears out the noise in everybody’s brains and helps them get ready to work,” he says.

More fun Make meetings more engaging by making them all voluntary, suggests Axelrod. “Eric L indblad, a vice president at B oeing, lets his employees make the decision to attend or leave a meeting early,” he says. “People are there because they want to be there, and he uses attendance or lack thereof to assess how well he conducts his meetings.” —Stephanie Vozza

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SECRETS OF THE MOST PRODUCTIVE PEOPLE

“Listen to your inner voice.” MADODA KHUZWAYO Co-founder and chairperson, Opentenders.com and founder, MynextMail

“I am at my most productive when I’m alone with no contact to the outside world, just music in my ears. This happens when I’m at the gym, I shower, or I’m in front of my laptop. There is something about being able to shut down everything and listen to your inner voice. It brings out the best in me.”

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TIME HE WAKES UP:

4 a.m. Monday to Friday and 8 a.m. on weekends.

take a lot of notes and record every thought and inspiration.

FIRST THING HE DOES IN

PHILOSOPHY

THE MORNING:

Success and happiness belong to those who believe in the beauty of their dreams. Dream big, but with the right intent. Create your own luck. Make it happen.

I train between 5 and 6 a.m. Monday to Friday, so that’s usually the first thing. But when I wake up, I usually switch on the music. I always have a song stuck in my head when I wake up. Music gets me going. APPS AND OTHER ASSISTS:

Besides social media apps—I live on them—I use Evernote a lot. My mind is at its best in the morning and I usually

LUNCH ROUTINE?

I eat healthily 99% of the time. Because of my training routine, I’m on a high-protein regime, with lunch my biggest meal of the day, usually around 1 p.m. It normally consists of 250-300g

chicken breast with 100200g of either brown rice or sweet potato. My chicken is always grilled or steamed. I add green veggies and salads as well.

meetings. I try and get at least four to five hours of sleep during the week. It doesn’t always happen, which is why I sleep a lot on weekends. LAST THING HE DOES

D A I LY B R E A K S ?

AT N I G H T:

I tend to get up and go straight to the gym so that I can have several hours of straight work. This is broken by the need to eat, though. I’m a night owl and also prefer to focus on the technological side of my work late into the night. Some days I’m stuck in long meetings all day and some days I’m stuck in traffic in between

I read—even if it’s just a verse, a paragraph, a story or a motivational quote. I read something. It’s my way of winding down. TIME HE GOES TO BED:

I try and go to bed at 10 p.m., but in most cases it’s usually around midnight. —As told to Evans Manyonga

“Start early”

HOW TO MAKE EMAIL . . . Better

LUKE MCKEND Country director, Google South Africa “Starting early means I get a lot more done. It works for me. The more I have worked, the more I realised that the earlier I wake up, I feel I have purpose and I get things done. Staying up late is more of a drag and you end up wasting the time doing other non-important things.” TIME HE WAKES UP:

Between 4 a.m. and 5 a.m. FIRST THING HE DOES IN THE MORNING:

Eat a banana and go cycling, in that order. APPS AND OTHER ASSISTS:

I mainly use WhatsApp, the Strava running and cycling app, and TuneIn online radio. PHILOSOPHY:

Get enough sleep. All else usually follows. LUNCH ROUTINE:

It’s a bit crappy at the moment. I generally have a look at what’s in the fridge, hopefully finding something that is carb-free. I try to

re sist the chocolates. I eat lunch while catching up on social media, email and the news of the day. D A I LY B R E A K S ?

I cycle between 4:50 until

about 6:30 a.m. Because I’m up early, I can get all my emails done. Also, because I get home earlier enough from cycling, I can spend time with my daughter before she goes off to school. I can also catch up with financial reports and know where we are from a money point of view and a business point of view. I try not to work too much at night, so I work earlier— that way, I can spend more time with my daughter and

family and find out what’s happening in everyone’s life. I mostly make dinner for my family. M O T I VAT I O N A L O B J E C T:

Photos of my daughter on my desk. Looking at them never fails to raise a smile. LAST THING HE DOES

Don’t open an email unless you’re prepared to deal with it right away, says Charles H udson, author of Inbox Freedom: The Zen Master’s Guide to Tackling Your Email & Work. “Instead of camping out at your inbox all day, only open it when you have time to respond, archive, delete, or turn emails into tasks,” he says. “Emails aren’t so o verwhelming when they’re handled just once.”

Faster Draft prefab replies to common emails you receive, such as client requests or media enquiries, says Alexandra Samuel, author of Work Smarter, Rule Your Email. Then save them as signatures in your email client. “It will take seconds to draft a reply instead of minutes to type it from scratch,” she says.

More fun

AT N I G H T:

Read. I read a lot. In between everything else, I read. I’m currently finishing two novels: A Girl Is a Half-Formed Thing and The Debt to Pleasure. TIME HE GOES TO BED:

I’m in bed by 9:30 p.m. — As told to EM

You signed up for that newsletter or deal alert because it looked interesting, but when the emails are mixed with client requests, meeting invites and co-worker messages, you may not take time to enjoy them. Create a filter that searches for “unsubscribe” and put them in a separate folder, suggests Samuel. Then read them when you have time. —SV

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SECRETS OF THE MOST PRODUCTIVE PEOPLE TIME HE WAKES UP:

LUNCH ROUTINE:

LAST THING HE DOES

6 a.m.

“Ninety-nine out of 100 days I have the same thing: soup with chicken and vegetables from a Chinese restaurant, with a spicy sauce.”

“Listen to customer calls. Many nights I will call a customer to clean up [a situation] before heading to bed.”

FIRST THING HE DOES IN

“In the last few hours, I did 300 or 400 emails.” JOHN LEGERE President and CEO, T-Mobile

THE MORNING:

“I wander directly, my phone in hand, to two double espressos. I turn on CNBC and scan my email. l check text messages, Twitter and a couple of newspapers. I often think, I should really do those five minutes of meditation or prayer or something. But no, same shit every day.” APPS AND OTHER ASSISTS:

“Twitter, Instagram and Outlook. I also use a Jawbone Up. I think it’s fascinating because, strangely, if that damn thing on my wrist tells me I didn’t sleep enough, I’m tired.”

AT N I G H T:

D A I LY B R E A K S ?

TIME HE GOES TO BED:

“I try to get out and go for a run, especially if I land in a new city.”

Between 10:30 p.m. and 1:30 a.m. —As told to JJ McCorvey

WH AT HE DOES WITH 15 MINUTES OF FREE TIME:

“I call my daughters, who are 25 and 29. It’s pretty much my only real social time.”

PHILOSOPHY:

“I’m talking to people every minute of every day. It’s a commitment. Just this morning, in the last few hours, I did 300 or 400 emails. I’ve given my email address to all 3 000 TMobile stores. Serious customer escalations come directly to me. I also go to my Twitter following for information. Customers get a kick out of me responding to them, and the employees do, too.”

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“Listen to customers, listen to employees, and shut up and do what they tell you. It’s really not that complicated.”

Photograph by Jose Mandojana

“Focus on power of thought.”

TIME HE WAKES UP:

Usually 5:30 a.m. to get ready for work and prepare breakfast. FIRST THING HE DOES IN THE MORNING:

Beat traffic! APPS AND OTHER ASSISTS:

RIAN BORNMAN Founding director, FlightSite.co.za and FlightSiteAgent.co.za “What I enjoy most in life at the moment, from a business perspective, is seeing our company grow and build our customer experience. [Conservationist and filmmaker] Joan Root once said, ‘Focus on power of thought. The non-risker doesn’t not grow, just gets old.’ I liked that quote because it inspired me to get out there, make mistakes and have fun.”

The one app I check several times a day is Flipboard. My wife and I don’t have a TV, and within a few seconds of using Flipboard I’m up to date with news from around the world, which Flipboard allows the user to curate beautifully. PHILOSOPHY:

Keep learning. I don’t think we ever arrive at our exact intended destination in business, so the fun is to be had along the way, constantly filling the gap between where we want to be and where we are, as opposed to looking to reach a point too far in the future. LUNCH ROUTINE:

The only routine part of lunch is finding some—whether it’s on the go, between meetings, in the office, or tasty leftovers from the night before! D A I LY B R E A K S ?

Being fortunate to be living in Cape Town, we have so many opportunities to recharge, from hiking, swimming and biking, to name but a few. I try to keep an open mind in order to experience new things all the time. M O T I VAT I O N A L O B J E C T:

Motivation is a funny thing. I think in its most basic form, it’s simply realising that everything we do in life, no matter how big or small, we’ve made a decision to do. Realising that is so powerful, because why would one still need to get motivated to do something you’ve chosen to do? L A S T T H I N G H E D O E S AT N I G H T:

Read something. I love finding a good book. TIME HE GOES TO BED:

Usually around 10 p.m.—armed with tea, hopefully a good book, and a panic button! —As told to EM

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SECRETS OF THE MOST PRODUCTIVE PEOPLE

“If it’s not on the agenda, we don’t talk about it.” ADORA CHEUNG CEO, Homejoy (US online cleaning-services platform) “At other companies I used to work for, meetings would just go forever. Everyone would bring up topics they thought of in the past 24 hours. At Homejoy, I have a Google Doc for each recurring meeting, and I ask people to throw in ideas [throughout the week] of what they want to talk about. I’ll go to that doc and prioritise everything that I think we should cover, and then during the meeting we just go down the agenda. If it’s not on the agenda, we don’t talk about it.” TIME SHE WAKES UP:

B E S T H A B I T:

7 a.m.

“I use coding to de-stress. It’s a very focused activity, and I’m always building something that I know is going to be useful for something. Every other weekend I’ll spend a day just coding. It’s a Zen thing for me.”

THE MORNING:

“Map out what I want to accomplish. I don’t go to sleep until I finish everything I set out to do.” APPS AND OTHER ASSISTS:

SaneBox (“for sorting email”), Post-its (“for notes during meetings”), Evernote (“for random thoughts”), Google Calendar on desktop, Sunrise on mobile HOW SHE HANDLES EMAIL:

“LIFO: Last in, first out.” M O T I VAT I O N A L O B J E C T:

“The uniform shirt of the cleaning company I used to work for—so no matter how successful Homejoy becomes, I remember where I started.”

W O R S T H A B I T:

“Waking up in the middle of the night and checking email or opening up a Google Doc on my phone. It’s just instinctive. If it’s after 5 a.m., I’ll look at metrics because that’s when they’re updated. I’ve started making an effort to leave my phone away from the bedroom, but I’ll still get up to go get it.” LAST THING SHE DOES AT N I G H T:

“Check my email.” TIME SHE GOES TO BED: Gutter Credit Tk

FIRST THING SHE DOES IN

3 a.m. —As told to Jillian Goodman

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credit teekay PhotographArt by Mathew Scott

HOW TO MAKE TO-DO LISTS . . . Better Use a to-do list as an intake document and not as a working tool, says Peter Bregman, author of 18 Minutes: Find Your Focus, Master Distraction, and Get the Right Things Done. Make a list of what you need to get done and assign it a time on your calendar. Then run your day from your calendar, not your to-do list. “You’re more likely to complete a task if you give it a when and where,” he says.

Faster Use a to-do list app to record your errands and shopping items, and get an automatic reminder when you’re near the appropriate location, says C arley Knobloch, Today show tech contributor and digital lifestyle expert. Using your phone’s GPS system, apps such as Checkmark 2, Remember the Milk, and Apple Reminders (which is preprogrammed into iPhones) will alert you when you’re driving by, so you can pull over and get it done. “The worst feeling is when you get home, realise you needed to pick up the dry cleaning, and think, ‘I just drove by there!’ ” she says.

More fun

Gutter GUTTER Credit CREDIT Tk TK

Manage your to-do list around your energy level, suggests Amir Salihefendic, founder and CEO of Todoist. When you’re tired, pick tasks that don’t require as much effort, such as email. Save tasks that require more thought, such as writing a proposal or creating a new product, for when you’re more energised. Using your energy level as your guide will help you better engage with your tasks. —SV

Art credit teekay

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SECRETS OF THE MOST PRODUCTIVE PEOPLE

“I carve out time for myself” BOBBI BROWN Chief creative officer, Bobbi Brown Cosmetics, and editor-in-chief, Yahoo Beauty “My day is always insane—and the ‘typical’ day doesn’t exist. Out of the five days of the week, one day I’m at Yahoo, two or three days I’m at Bobbi, and one day I work remotely—that could be anywhere. This is really a secret of my success: I carve out personal time for myself. It’s exercise. It’s going to the grocery store so I can choose my own food for my family. It’s travel. Those are very helpful for me to recharge

myself and rethink everything: How can I do things better? One of the things I’m trying to do is not be a multitasker. But last night, I took a hot bath to relax, and I got in there and I realised I didn’t have anything to read. I didn’t know what to do.” TIME SHE WAKES UP:

PHILOSOPHY:

6 a.m. “I have two dogs that are my alarm clock.”

“Passion, health, team.”

FIRST THING SHE DOES IN

“People who know me know that I can’t spell and I also can’t type. I used to feel bad about it. Now, sometimes, I just say, ‘OMG!’ or ‘Awesome!’ or ‘Not a chance.’ or ‘Call me.’ I try to answer right away.”

THE MORNING:

“Drink two glasses of water and a double espresso.” APPS AND OTHER ASSISTS:

“I use the Notes app that comes with the iPhone for everything from my grocery list at home to people’s birthdays to product ideas to people I meet. I’m also a huge fan of voicemail. To be able to call someone and say, ‘Oh, my God, I have this amazing idea, and you may think this is totally crazy, but…’ I want to blurt it out and clear my head. It may be a good idea or it may not be, but otherwise I’ll forget it.”

HOW SHE HANDLES EMAIL:

WH AT SHE DOES WITH 15 MINUTES OF FREE TIME:

“One of my frustrations when I’m busy is that I have to ask people to get me things, so if I have free time, I do a little shopping. I don’t have a stylist for events—I dress myself, which I guess is obvious. It gives me a bit of freedom.” L A S T T H I N G S H E D O E S AT N I G H T:

“Turn off my television!”

“I do my Zumba exercises during the case.”

TIME SHE WAKES UP:

DR VELMA SCANTLEBURY Associate chief of transplant surgery at Christiana Care Health System in Newark, Delaware (She has performed more than 1 000 kidney transplants in her career.) “It gets pretty monotonous listening to the beep, beep, beep of a heart rate. Normally we’ll have conversations, and people have their favourite radio stations. Sometimes I have large patients—over 250 pounds [113 kilogrammes]—who are very big and deep, so I use a step stool to put me in a higher position so I can reach into their body to do the operation. And there are heavy lights overhead to move around. So I get my workout moving the lights and stepping up and down on my step stool. I can do my Zumba step exercises during the case.” 60 FASTCOMPANY.CO.Z A MARCH/APRIL 2015

“It depends on what time I go to bed. I’m on call 50% of the time. It’s hard to say what time you wake up when you’ve been on the phone or on the computer five or six times between midnight and 6 o’clock.” FIRST THING SHE DOES IN THE MORNING:

“Meditate, if I’m not waking up with a donor kidney on the way.” MOST PRODUCTIVE SPACE:

“I like quiet. My parents live in New York, and I can drive back and forth in the quiet—no music, no nothing, just me and my thoughts. Honestly, I find that those times I can really get a lot of things mentally in order.”

TIME SHE GOES TO BED:

10:30 p.m. —As told to JC

D A I LY B R E A K S ?

“Our clinic is maybe a third of a mile [500 metres] from the hospital floor where we receive patients, so we’re constantly running back and forth. Not a lot of need to take breaks.” M O T I VAT I O N A L O B J E C T:

“A prayer that parents sent to me about a patient we had transplanted. It keeps me focused because sometimes I think that I’ve had enough of this, and it just reminds me that we all have a purpose in life.” B E S T H A B I T:

“Listening. I like to listen.” LAST THING SHE DOES AT N I G H T:

“Pray.” TIME SHE GOES TO BED:

After midnight. —As told

to JG

HOW TO MAKE MORNINGS . . . 1

Better 19

25 26 28 Exercise and27meditation are healthy ways to start the day, but you can also get mood-boosting benefits from spending time in light. Scientists at the Neurobiology Research Unit at the Copenhagen University Hospital in Denmark found that 30 minutes of bright light—from the sun or light-therapy lamps— reduces anxiety.

Faster Make mornings about execution and not assembly, says Julie Morgenstern, author of Never Check Email in the Morning. Everything you need to start your day should be premade, packed or prepped the night before. Don’t leave d ecisions— such as what to wear—for the morning. “We clutch under pressure, and choosing takes more time,” she says.

More fun Improve your mood by travelling to work on public transportation, bicycle or foot. Researchers from the United Kingdom’s University of East Anglia found that commutes involving physical activity improved the effects of sleepless nights and general unhappiness, and travelling by train or bus gave people time to relax, read and socialise. In fact, a study done at the University of Chicago’s Booth School of Business found that talking to strangers gives commuters a boost in happiness. —SV

“I make lists.” BOBBY FLAY US chef, restaurateur and star of Food Network’s Beat Bobby Flay “Whether I’m cooking Thanksgiving dinner or starting a new menu at [his newest restaurant] Gato, I make lists. When I cross things off, it makes me feel accomplished. It’s the only way I can get things done. It wasn’t something I learnt in school—I dropped out of high school, so anything I did then wasn’t successful. I learnt it later.”

TIME HE WAKES UP:

6 a.m. FIRST THING HE DOES IN THE MORNING:

“Read The New York Times. In print. I like hearing the crumpling of the paper.” APPS AND OTHER ASSISTS:

“A yellow legal pad. It’s what I use if I need to write a speech or make a list of ingredients or dishes.” HOW HE HANDLES EMAIL:

“If I don’t answer them right away on my phone, I can miss them. So I look at them again on my laptop at the end of the day for checks and balances.” M O T I VAT I O N A L O B J E C T:

“A good bottle of bourbon—Woodford Reserve. Every once in a while, if it’s been a long day, we’ll have a little bourbon.” Photograph by Edwin Tse

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Pod power H OW T H E I N N OVAT I O N S TA K I N G PL ACE I N P O D C A S T I N G R EFLEC T T H E FU T U R E O F EN T ERTA I N M EN T

By Rebecca Greenfield

Let’s start with a simple fact: More people have downloaded Serial than have watched Girls, Mad Men or Louie. But enough about Serial; the podcasting world will produce bigger hits in the years ahead. What’s most interesting about the series is that it is but the most prominent example of an experiment that could reshape business models throughout the entertainment industry. “We’re at the very beginning of how [podcasting] is enabling innovation,” says Alex Blumberg, a This American Life veteran who struck out on his own in 2014 with a venture-backed

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startup podcast network called Gimlet Media. Adds Jake Shapiro, CEO of PRX, which distributes popular podcasts such as the design show 99% Invisible and Criminal (a nonserialised true-crime programme): “Content production, marketing, the technical distribution, the audience experience, and then the business model: There’s innovation at every one of those layers.” As movie-going wanes, cable bundles crumble and TV ratings wither, those businesses will have to increasingly diversify their revenue models. The experience of podcasters may offer many useful lessons. Podcasting is built on the very assumptions that older media have been forced into making, due to technological advances that have ruined their historic pursuit of a mass audience gathered at a single, scheduled time. Podcasting is a niche entertainment by definition. The primary way of listening is via headphones connected to a smart handheld device. And there never was any ‘appointment listening’ because podcasts are designed to be consumed whenever the listener chooses. Knowing that podcasts are a particularly intimate experience, creators have tried to cement deep relationships with their audiences, primarily by offering truly distinctive programming. “Every time we roll out a show with an inventive format, it surprises us at how well it does,” says Adam Sachs, CEO of podcast network, Earwolf, which scored a hit with The Andy Daly Podcast Pilot Project. Each of that show’s nine episodes is presented as a pilot of a new show, with Daly (a comedian known from Comedy Central’s Review) playing a different character in each. On another Earwolf podcast, called With Special Guest Lauren Lapkus, the guest of the week interviews Lapkus (who played a corrections officer on Orange Is the New Black) as one of her alter egos. “There is no TV show where the star is playing a guest of a talk show,” Sachs says. “There is no TV show where every episode is a pilot. It doesn’t exist anywhere else.” That creative freedom—from format, frequency and length—is why talented performers increasingly want to do podcasts. It’s a more extreme version of what makes showrunners and stars want to work with Netflix, Amazon and HBO. Podcasters have figured out a range of ways to monetise their engaged audiences. The primary one: advertising, in the form of spots read by the podcast’s host. And the payoff for advertisers is huge: One survey of 300 000 podcast listeners found that 63%

bought something a host had promoted on a show. Brendan McDonald, the producer of WTF with Marc Maron, says: “Advertising has really exploded within the last year and a half.” WTF can guarantee advertisers 325 000 downloads an episode. According to McDonald, if WTF is charging the ad rates that other popular podcasts can get—around R200 to R300 per thousand listeners—its average spot costs about R95 000. That’s not network TV money, but it’s about five times greater than the average radio spot. Podcasters feel the freedom to experiment in this arena, too. Gimlet Media is trying to produce ads that “feel authentic and fun”, Blumberg says, “the same way that the editorial content feels.” Some are so good that the documentary podcast StartUp has received fan letters about them, putting the entertainment value of its ads on par with the best Super Bowl commercials. But advertising is not enough for most podcasts. “We really want to diversify the revenue sources,” says Gimlet’s co-founder, Matt Lieber. “There are a lot of experiments in providing things for the audience to buy, whether it’s subscriptions, events or collaborations between host producers and their audiences.” Some of those experiments play out on Kickstarter, but that can be complicated: Celebrities such as Veronica Mars creator Rob Thomas, actor Zach Braff and even Serial host Sarah Koenig have caught flak for crowdfunding. Live touring can be another meaningful revenue stream. It has been a boon for stand-up comedians including Doug Benson and Greg Proops, who now tape their podcasts on the road; Slate, which has made a business out of live performances of its Gabfest shows; and more theatrical productions such as Ben Acker and Ben Blacker’s Thrilling Adventure Hour and Commonplace Books’ Welcome to Night Vale. The latter, a comedic radio drama set in a small town beset by demons, sold about 800 tickets a night for its 76 performances in 2014, with most tickets going for around $25 (R290) or $30 (R350). Live events make up 57% of Night Vale’s revenue, with another 27% coming from online merchandise. Even a few TV shows, including It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia, have toyed with live readings. Still, the podcasting business faces one major roadblock to expanding its own success: There’s no Netflix-style service that tells you what you’d like based on what you consume. SoundCloud, which lets users comment at

particular moments during an audio track, could possibly fill that hole, and is hosting more podcasts of late. BuzzFeed, another possible contender, announced late last year that it, too, would start podcasting. But the leading candidate to play such a central role is Apple, whose music player gave the industry its name 10 years ago. The hottest revenue source for podcasting—and potentially for all media—is content delivered via an app. An app, downloaded most often from the App Store, of course, lets podcasters get better demographic details on their audience, allowing them to sell more targeted—thereby, more expensive—advertising. Apps also get superfans even more involved. Fans can participate in a live chat. They could log in via their social networks and learn which of their friends are also fans. They can take part in the commentary around a show. In-app purchases are always a possibility, and some apps could even include a ‘Donate’ button. WTF has an app, through which it sells subscriptions for access to its extensive back catalogue. Producer McDonald says it has been successful. “The popularity of the app and the way we utilise it has grown along with the audience,” he says. About 10% of WTF listeners, or 35 800 people, pay between $1.99 (R23) and $8.99 (R105) for a premium membership, while more than half of its total audience uses the WTF app to listen to new episodes. Despite being an early supporter of the podcast format, Apple has done little with the medium. But lately, “there are lots of signals that they’re taking it seriously,” says PRX’s Shapiro. In iOS 8, for example, Podcasts is a default app included with every upgrade. Listening to audio programming on an iPhone has never been easier because of iOS improvements that enable auto-syncing and background downloading. Furthermore, says Shapiro, “they’ve got the oneclick payment infrastructure.” Embracing podcasting may be a way for Apple to ingratiate itself with a growing class of new-media creators. The rise of streaming services for TV and movies will put further pressure on Apple’s R53.8-billion iTunes franchise (for fourth quarter 2014), which depends on selling downloads. If it can help podcasters create a thriving business within apps, it could help other entertainment producers connect and make money from their best customers. Coming in late to an industry and yet redefining the way it generates income—that’s what Apple did with iTunes and the iPod. How appropriate if it could replicate that success with podcasting.

INNOVATIV E PODCASTE R S T H E M E D I U M H A S C O M E A L O N G WAY F R O M ‘ T H R E E W H I T E G U Y S TA L K I N G ’ S H O W S A S F O L K S G E T C R E AT I V E W I T H F R E E - F O R M A U D I O

Public Radio Refugees Sarah Koenig Her true-crime narrative Serial captivated the ‘Golden Age of TV’ crowd with edge-of-yourseat storytelling.

Alex Blumberg StartUp, Blumberg’s series about launching a podcast network, offers an irresistibly frank look at entrepreneurship.

W. Kamau Bell and Kevin Avery The hosts of Denzel Washington Is the Greatest Actor of All Time Period discuss one film each week—with salient asides.

Kid Fury and Crissle The Read features two young, black, gay friends offering biting, hilarious takes on topics such as Beyoncé and Ferguson, Missouri.

Tyler Oakley Psychobabble with Oakley and co-host Korey Kuhl gives Oakley’s YouTube fans longer form pop dish.

Grace Helbig Not Too Deep showcases silly interviews with her friends—a preview of her forthcoming E! late-night show?

Aisha Tyler Girl on Guy captures Tyler (Archer) talking mostly with male friends about stuff ‘guys’ love, such as video games, which she loves too.

Tim Ferriss The four-hour guy seeks out experts, culling applicable wisdom from endurance athletes, memory gurus and his pal, Kevin Rose.

PopCulture Whizzes

Multimedia YouTubers

Celebrity Early Adopters

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MY WAY

PAY D I RT Aisha Pandor sweeps away the hassles of employing a reliable cleaning professional By Jamie Langeveldt

Trying to find a trustworthy, professional domestic cleaner can be extremely difficult. Entrepreneur Aisha Pandor and her husband, Alen Ribic, had first-hand experience with this problem in 2013 while searching for a suitable part-time helper they could employ over the festive season. “The ordeal was cumbersome and painful, and we wanted to use technology to improve and streamline the process of getting someone to help with home cleaning,” she says. They realised there was a growing need for a convenient, fuss-free home-cleaning service that could be called upon at short notice, and also that many South African cleaning professionals were finding it difficult to find employment. “At the other end of the spectrum, we realised that many of South Africa’s 1.2 million registered domestic workers are experienced, honest and dedicated, but are desperately looking for work. There was a dire need for the solution on both sides of the market,” Pandor explains. They solved both issues by creating an online network that brings together clients and reliable domestic help with the click of a few buttons. SweepSouth, launched in June 2014, is an online marketplace for booking domestic cleaning services within a few minutes from your laptop, smartphone or tablet. The cleaning professionals registered on the network go through a rigorous interview process, and are thoroughly referenced and background-checked (they need to have a minimum of two years’ experience), ensuring they have a clean criminal record and are fully insured. They are also rated by fellow clients. “We’re bringing technology to the

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domestic services industry in South Africa, which is well in need of change,” says Pandor. Trying to keep the creative juices flowing can be quite stressful; providing a unique service and keeping up with trends requires constant out-of-the-box thinking. She and Ribic (who is also the company’s chief technical officer) believe listening to the needs of their customers is key. “We read between the lines to find out ways in which we can keep improving our service to delight our customers and our cleaners.” Collaboration is a tremendous way to boost the growth of one’s company, and it has

spouse,” she told Ventureburn.com. In addition to a qualification in Business Management, Pandor holds a PhD in Human Genetics. “I love learning and the process of research and discovery, so I chose to enter into the science field. “I come from a family where individuality was celebrated. My grandfather and greatgrandfather, Joe Matthews [South African activist and politician] and Professor ZK Matthews [prominent academic and an early leader of the ANC] respectively, were intellectuals and extraordinarily forwardthinking for their time, and this mindset was passed on to us as children. It helped me to challenge assumptions often, and be open-minded,” she says. Pandor encourages female entrepreneurs to believe in their vision and translate this into reality. “As a female entrepreneur, you often need a lot of self-belief to overcome naysayers. Try to build great networks (both professionally and at home) around yourself and leverage those networks to your advantage. I suppose that holds for all entrepreneurs,” she notes. A quote by American businessman and management consultant, Peter Drucker, has become Pandor’s code: “The best way to predict the future is to create it”. “I hope to grow SweepSouth into a multinational company and to serve as a great role model for African women in technology.”

“WE REALISED THAT MANY OF SOUTH AFRICA’S 1.2 MILLION REGISTERED DOMESTIC WORKERS ARE EXPERIENCED, HONEST AND DEDICATED, BUT ARE DESPERATELY LOOKING FOR WORK.”

worked well for her. “Collaboration is great, but it must work well for both sides. A fit of vision, goals and professional culture is a must. Also, view your own company as highvalue and exclusive, and be picky when choosing partners—whether they are co-founders, collaborators or investors.” Being in business with her husband works because they respect each other’s skills sets. “It isn’t a case of going into business with your husband or your wife but rather with an excellent partner who happens to be your

Work in progress: With SweepSouth, Pandor hopes to become a great role model for African women in technology.

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Wearables with style? Designers are trying to merge tech and fashion. We took some products on a test run, and the result wasn’t pretty

By Sarah Kessler

Photograph by Mauricio Alejo

The brooding male models peering out from wall-to-wall picture frames during a press event at Ralph Lauren’s slick Manhattan headquarters seem to be scowling at my off-brand attire as I self-consciously sip a blueberry smoothie from a wineglass. My dress is a slightly out-of-season shade of pumpkin, but that’s not the problem. The real issue is my odd assemblage of accessories. On my right hand is a bold black-and-gold ring. My left wrist glints with a shiny plastic medallion clipped to a leather band, and on top of that I wear what looks like a gold mini macaron on a black-rubber bracelet. A bulging metal pendant dangles clumsily from my neck. Combined with the orange dress, all of these black accessories make me look like a secondgrade teacher on Halloween. “What is this?” asks a well-groomed PR person, pointing to the gold bracelet. And so I launch into what has become, over the past couple of days, a familiar tour of my weird jewellery, all of which is some form of supposedly fashionable wearable technology. I have been

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THE BIG IDEA

Rebecca and Uri Minkoff

sporting this jumble of sensors in an attempt to live a vision that tech startups, Kickstarter projects and big brands all share: wearable technology that blends into daily life without screaming, “I’m tracking my steps!” Wearables such as the Jawbone UP and Fitbit have attracted a ton of attention over the past few years, but so far they haven’t received a lot of traction with regular consumers. About a third of the people who did buy those devices stopped using them after six months. The latest strategy of some wearables designers is to make their devices less techy and more of a general lifestyle product—to create smart clothes and accessories that look desirable and can sit right next to ‘dumb’ versions in department stores. That concept is the reason I’m at this event, which is showcasing Ralph Lauren’s own attempt to integrate fashion and tech. A few minutes after I explain my ensemble to the publicist, I’m ushered in to see a tight black shirt that works with an app to show wearers their heart rate, breathing and activity. “Eventually it will just be part of your outfit,” David Lauren, Ralph Lauren’s son and the brand’s head of advertising and marketing operations, tells me later. “You won’t even think about it.” When I began hunting for stylish wearables, I figured tracking down enough products to turn me into a buzzing, connected lab for the genre would be easy. After all, last year investors put an estimated R5.2 billion into wearable devices, and I did find no shortage of product renderings and presale splash pages for devices with style. But very few seemed to exist in a purchasable form. Rings made by a startup called Ringly, which connect to your phone and vibrate when you receive a notification, was made available early this year. The French consumer-tech company, Withings, introduced a much-praised fitness tracker disguised within a sleek Swiss watch; the Activité sold out early and consumers had to wait for the second batch. Also available are Tory Burch’s Fitbit-encasing jewellery, Rebecca Minkoff’s line of smart accessories in collaboration with Case-Mate, and sterling silver cufflinks with an enclosed 16-gigabyte USB drive, from Dalys 1895. As I began the experiment, all I could get my hands on were a $25 (about R280) 3D-printed ring

Celine Grouard

Digital sparkle: Clockwise from top left: the Misfit Shine, the Guardian Angel, the Netatmo June, and the Sesame.

called the Sesame, which doubles as a pass for the Boston subway and has been praised as “stylish” and “the ultimate accessory for fashionistas”; the Netatmo JUNE, a €95 (R1 300) UV sensor that looks like a small chip of disco ball and is supposed to monitor my sun exposure; a $100 (R1 100) sensor, the Misfit Shine, that measures physical activity throughout the day and can be worn as a clasp or necklace; and, finally, the Guardian Angel, a pendant with a button that triggers a fake call on your phone—to help get you out

The issue with wearables isn’t just that many are nerdy and unattractive. It’s that the sensors aren’t necessarily useful. No matter how stylish they get, why wear them?

of, say, a bad date. All in all, I added four pieces of jewellery and three connected apps to my daily clothing ensemble. During my 10-day test run, most reactions to my sudden overabundance of accessories are polite. Others are brutally honest: After I explain the Guardian Angel to a colleague, he jokes, “If you wear that on a first date, you might not be the one who wants to leave.” Ouch. “A lot of [wearable-tech devices] are ugly,” says Ramon Llamas, a research manager with International Data Corp.’s mobile-phones team. “Let’s call a spade a spade. Let’s call something ugly when we know it is.” But I’m not convinced my devices are actually that unattractive. A better way to put it would be to say that, while passable, the connected jewellery is not quite me. And given the limited selection,

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The Big Idea

In order to successfully integrate, fashion and technology need to work together in a natural way from the beginning.

it’s impossible to find options that fit my personal sense of style. Part of the problem is that designing stylish wearables involves a tug-of-war between two industries with very different perspectives. Fashion survives on personal choice and self-expression. Gadget companies aim instead for the one supergadget—the smartphone, the laptop—that appeals to as many people as possible. Definitions of success in the technology and fashion worlds are completely different. For instance, when Intel and Opening Ceremony teamed up to design a bracelet called the MICA (My Intelligent Communication Accessory, available this festive season), Opening Ceremony wanted a metal bracelet that felt luxurious; Intel’s engineers knew an all-metal band would interfere with the device’s tech components. Intel initially designed a square bracelet; Opening Ceremony nudged toward an oval. It took frequent conference calls to

arrive at a design that satisfied both sides. The result of this collaboration is a fairly goodlooking product that disguises a screen. If the MICA were more fashionable, it would be less functional. If it were more functional, it would be less fashionable. It’s an economy of trade-offs. Maybe that’s why so many of these devices prove to be about as useful as they are beautiful— which is to say, not very. While living with my accessories, my life doesn’t really change. The Netatmo JUNE doesn’t have much impact on my sun exposure, since most of the time I forget to open the app. With the Guardian Angel, I don’t come across any situations where it would be less awkward to summon a fake call than to simply walk away. Though I never make it to Boston to use the Sesame as a subway pass, I’ve spent a lot of time—most of it while digging through my purse for a MetroCard—contemplating how convenient it would be if it worked in New

York. Enough to justify wearing the ring every day, though? Probably not. But the biggest problems, I come to realise, are more fundamental. I’m wearing a collection of sensors that each do one thing, and they don’t work together. The issue with wearables isn’t just that many are nerdy and unattractive. It’s that the sensors aren’t necessarily useful. No matter how stylish they get, why wear them? In order to successfully integrate, fashion and technology need to work together in a natural way from the beginning. What I want most aren’t prettier accessories, but rather sensors that blend seamlessly into my clothes without making me look like Inspector Gadget. And I want them to all work with each other in a single system, using one app. At the moment, however, that’s just fantasy. I stop wearing most of these devices as soon as my experiment is over. I do stick with the Shine, though. It uses a watch battery, so I don’t need to remember to charge it, and I like that I can tap it to see progress toward my ‘steps goal’ without looking at my phone. It’s genuinely useful, and it looks okay with most of my wardrobe. Then one morning when I go to put it on, I realise it clashes with a silver bracelet I also want to wear, so I leave it at home. Weeks later, it’s still sitting there on my nightstand— right next to my dusty, long-abandoned Jawbone UP.

TH E FUTU R E O F C LOT H E S? A C O M PA N Y C A L L E D W E A R A B L E E X P E R I M E N T S I S E X P L O R I N G T H E P O S S I B I L I T I E S O F D I G I TA L FA S H I O N

When designers try to mix fashion and digital gizmos, often the results are neither nice to look at nor especially practical. But one company, Wearable Experiments, is working to merge clothing and tech in intriguing ways. “We want to make sure that the garment is clean, comfortable and elegant,” says Billie Whitehouse, who co-founded the New York– and Sydney-based company in 2013 with Ben Moir. “Then we can impregnate it with

technology from there.” Rather than merely create bracelets, rings and watches, Whitehouse is interested in more ambitious concepts, ones that may somehow heighten normal experiences. The Navigate jacket, for exam ple, is a stylish, city-specific jacket that helps its wearers find their way around. The coat’s built-in technology gently ‘taps’ the user on the shoulder to indicate when and in which direction to turn. It’s a simple, intuitive way to get

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directions in cities such as Paris and New York. Other Wearable Experi ments products include Fundawear, which lets couples ‘touch’ each other from afar, and the Alert Shirt, which simulates what professional athletes are feeling during televised sporting events. “We connect people with other people and the places that they love,” says Whitehouse. “Technology no longer has to be just a distraction.” —Nikita Richardson

Birthing wearables: Co-founder Billie Whitehouse wants to “impregnate” clothing with technology.

Laying

foundations

for the

future

• • • • • • •

Arts & Culture Education Entrepreneurship Environment Heritage Job creation Skills development

www.distell.co.za

S P E C I A L R E P O R T: B L A C K I N S I L I C O N VA L L E Y

A Different Kind of Valley Life AS PART OF THE REPORTING ON THIS EDITION’S PROFILE OF TRISTAN WALKER, FAST COMPANY BROUGHT TOGETHER A ROUNDTABLE DISCUSSION OF OTHER AFRICAN-AMERICAN TECH LEADERS. THE GIVE-AND-TAKE WAS FR ANK, FUNNY AND UNCOMPROMISING

Fast Company: What are your thoughts about the diversity reports from Apple, Facebook, Google and other tech companies? Larry “LJ” Erwin: I know the numbers are unsettling, but I applaud the Googles and the Facebooks and Yahoos for actually releasing those numbers. I’ve worked in an industry before called ‘finance’. It’s been around for at least 150 to 175 years, and the numbers (a) are not as open and as transparent as they are at Google and Facebook and (b) are probably about the same, 1% to 3% [of the total workforce]. And they’ve got a 120-year, 125year head start over Silicon Valley. So Silicon Valley is definitely scaling at a faster rate than finance. Tyler Scriven: I have a slightly different view. In the report that Google published, they said they’ve spent roughly $40 million [about R465 million] on diversity efforts over the past 10 years. They’ve spent, I’ll guess, several hundreds of millions of dollars in the past two years on self-driving cars. If companies like Google truly wanted to solve this problem, they’d spend more than $40 million over 10 years and make a much more significant effort. So my conclusion is that right now we actually don’t want to solve it.

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Amoy Walker, seventhgrade teacher at the Girls’ Middle School in Palo Alto

Tristan Walker, CEO of Walker & Company Brands

Faith Scriven, principal at Goodwyn/Powell techrecruiting firm

Tony Gauda, founder of ThinAir and cofounder of Bitcasa

Tyler Scriven, chief of staff at Palantir Technologies

Photograph by Damon Casarez

Jaimel Gauda, director of customer success at Walker & Co.

Erin Teague, director of product at Yahoo

Larry Erwin, account executive of business development at Google

Kanyi Maqubela, venture partner at Collaborative Fund

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S P E C I A L R E P O R T: B L A C K I N S I L I C O N VA L L E Y

Amoy Walker: Just looking at the numbers is not enough. Like, what is the actual issue: Why are there not enough African-Americans in STEM [science, technology, engineering and mathematics], and what’s the recruiting process? That’s what we need to focus on, rather than the chatter around numbers. Erin Teague: The problem starts much earlier, right? Only about 4% of the total engineering graduates every year are black, and only 18% of the total computer-science graduates are women. There need to be more people who enter college and pick these majors. But the real problem is at the top of the funnel, as in K–12 [the sum of primary and secondary education in the US]. Most students decide at a very young age whether or not they’re good in maths and science. Tony Gauda: Traditionally, the AfricanAmerican successes children see are athletes and entertainers; they’re not STEM. I had a home that was very supportive of engineering and STEM, and I just thought it was my only alternative since I couldn’t play basketball, and I definitely can’t dance.

kids to be a lawyer or a doctor, or go to Wall Street to make a lot of money so they can come back and take care of the family. Is the African-American community too cautious for tech and its ‘fail fast’ mantra? Erwin: Black folks like me have to take care of family members at home, so jumping into a startup is very risky when you can make it either on Wall Street or do something more stable in finance. If my company fails, the people who are counting on me also fail. T. Gauda: You have to have a very high risk tolerance, and we are traditionally risk-averse. As it is, just being who we are is extremely risky. Kanyi, you and I talked before about the fact that a lot of the people who are able to take chances in tech—the Mark Zuckerbergs and so on… Kanyi Maqubela: Are rich? [Laughter, crosstalk] Or have access to rich people? Are already in networks where somebody can write them a $50 000 [almost R600 000] cheque? Absolutely. I hear about bootstrapped rounds and angel rounds and friends-andfamily rounds, and I just think to myself, Man!

“The meritocratic glow of Silicon Valley is so frustrating. It creates a pass for people who use things like the ‘culture’ filter. What’s the culture filter? An easy excuse to be prejudiced.” Teague: There need to be people in your household who say, “You should be like this rock-star engineer.” I didn’t even know what a computer programming language was until my freshman year of college. So when you’re 18 and a freshman and decide to study this, you then realise everyone in the class has had exposure to this programming language for 10-plus years. It is hard to compete. On top of that, you’re the only one who’s black, and you’re the only one who’s a woman. You look around and don’t see anyone who looks like you. And, you’re like, Oh, I’m clearly not supposed to be here. [Laughter] In many African-American households— since we don’t descend from centuries of wealth in this country—parents want their

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There are people who just know and are related to folks who can write $50 000 cheques all around them! It’s in their ecosystem. T. Gauda: And imagine that the worst happens, that your startup fails. You’re still good, right? You can just go back to whatever school that you decided to take a leave of absence from… or just draw from your trust fund. But when you start a company and you’re a black entrepreneur, in some cases there is no alternative. It’s a much different experience. Tristan Walker: Let me tell you a story. We only had five Fellows in our first class at CODE2040, but they were amazing. We had one Fellow who had a 4.7 out of a 5.0 GPA [grade point average—calculated by taking the number of grade points a student earned in a given period of time of middle school through

high school], was co-president of his school, varsity athlete at MIT. They went through the programme and excelled. But when they inter viewed at larger companies, they had to do these ‘whiteboard’ interviews, where you’re given a coding challenge and you go to the whiteboard and attack it. And our guys didn’t get hired, right? They had never done a whiteboard interview. So, in that case, is there something wrong with the Fellow, or is there something wrong with the interview process? Folks need to really understand what implicit biases they have. Until they do, the numbers aren’t gonna change. Maqubela: The meritocratic glow of Silicon Valley is so frustrating. It creates a pass for people who use things like the ‘culture’ filter. What’s the culture filter? An easy excuse to be prejudiced. It’s culture bias, like [not hiring someone] because they didn’t like Animal Collective as much as you do? Seriously. A. Walker: What’s Animal Collective? Maqubela: Animal Collective is a great band… [Laughter at Maqubela] No! I’m just not impressed with how impressed we are with ourselves in the Valley, how impressed we are with our processes and attitude. Because we’re actually creating a pass whereby we end up being worse. Do you all feel intense pressure to succeed? Erwin: Absolutely. T. Walker: Yes. I totally do. The harsh reality is that the folks in this room have to show that we can actually make this shit happen to inspire a generation of people to want to be a part of this. Whatever burden that falls on us is what it is, but we have that responsibility. And to the extent that we do, the great thing about this culture is that we’ve taken over every single vertical, co-opted it, and made those verticals more special. T. Gauda: Yeah. I definitely feel a sense of responsibility. In my career, I’ve interviewed and hired more than 100 people, and I can’t remember a black candidate that I passed on. But I had a very low percentage of black candidates. We need to be more visible and make sure more people understand that this is a viable career. Because most people think, “They’re not gonna hire me.” Faith, do you get a lot of people coming to your recruiting firm, asking explicitly for people of colour? Faith Scriven: No, I do not. [Laughter] God, give me the worst question… No, unfortunately, I do not. I work on very specialised projects, and the employers are usually extremely

detailed about what they want. So even for a mid-level or lower-level engineer, they’ll tell us: “I only want someone who went to Stanford,” or someone who has started a company before. So when I’m researching those profiles, I generally come across very few minorities. These employers want the crème de la crème. And when it comes to the crème de la crème based on their criteria, very few are minorities. T. Scriven: And most companies in Silicon Valley say, “We hire from these five schools, period,” right? F. Scriven: Yeah. T. Scriven: If you go to those five schools, the percentage of minorities and the percentage of women is X and Y. Let’s say it’s 3% and 10%. If those companies hire only 10% of the people they interview, then the number [of minority hires] you get is zero. Right? It’s zero. And to the extent that they are unwilling to go outside of those five schools, it’s going to stay zero. Teague: Then, if you happen to get in the door without having gone to one of those schools, you’re going to have to overcome some sig nificant impostor feelings. That is a hard place to be, just feeling like you don’t belong, like you’re not credible.

Stanford, and maybe Cal Berkeley, or maybe Michigan. They are asking what other top programmes could have minorities that meet the expectations. They expanded the search. T. Gauda: The question is whether the people making the hiring decisions will feel empowered to decide that, “Hey, this guy is good enough, this guy can solve the problem even if he’s not from our core group of schools.” Or will they always be worrying, “Is this going to count against me at some point?” That’s a huge issue. Because the last thing they want to do is be in a meeting when this developer is fucking up, and it’s like: “Yeah, he didn’t go to Stanford,” and the boss is like, “We already talked about this, you only hire people from Stanford! What the fuck are you doing?” That conversation will happen. Maqubela: But the conversation that won’t happen is if I hire a black guy and that black guy is fucking up. What that boss is thinking in their head is… T. Gauda: You can’t print that shit.

“If I hire a white Is all the media attention to this subject man and he changing anything? messes up, I don’t Maqubela: Releasing the numbers is playing some role. As a company, you’ll get called out think twice. I just publicly, and people can pile on. If that makes someone think about diversity, just because it’s made a bad all bad marketing for his company, that’s better decision. But if I than nothing, to be frank. T. Gauda: I would just hate for it to stop there. hire a woman of Maqubela: Oh, without a doubt. But it is cata lytic. The social web enables a bit of color and she acceleration. Erwin: People in general are becoming more messes up . . .” aware of technology in their lives. When I was a kid growing up back in the ’90s, I was the only kid on my block with a Tandy 1000. Now kids who are 15, 16 years old have a supercomputer in their pocket. Technology is much more consumer-driven, and people are interacting with it at a much more intimate level. So people are starting to see that maybe technology is something they can go into now because they have an intimate relationship with it.

Do you see any change inside those compa nies that have released their numbers? Erwin: One diversity initiative at Google is expanding its job-search criteria. For the most part, because it was driven by engineers from Stanford, they only wanted engineers from

Sorry, it’s on the record… [Laughter] Maqubela: It drives me nuts, because if I hire a white man and he messes up, I don’t think twice. I just made a bad decision. But if I hire a woman of colour and she messes up, it’s just like… T. Gauda: Did she get the job because you liked her, or did she get the job because she was qualified? In some cases, when you’re the person in power and are making hiring decisions, that pressure is there. Maqubela: Here’s a question. Let’s say I hire a black person and that person makes a mistake. My white colleague thinks, “Did you hire that person just because they’re black?”

My honest answer is, “Yeah, that’s part of it. Yeah, because they’re black I actually gave them a bias, just the same way that because that person is white you gave them a bias, okay?” Why is “Did you do this for somebody just because they’re black” an insult? “Did you do this for somebody just because they’re white?” isn’t an insult, and that happens all the time. Jaimel Gauda: That’s human nature and we’re not allowed to do that. Maqubela: It’s frustrating. People are ‘big-up ping’ each other because they look like each other. People are big-upping each other because they are white. And if I big-up somebody because they’re black, it’s a problem somehow. That drives me nuts because, listen, I recognise [a new black hire]. We have a similar skin tone, and in fact, I do want to support somebody who looks like me. I think that’s a good thing. Let’s encourage that. I don’t see why that is frowned upon. I don’t see why that’s reverse racism. T. Walker: As a black man, if you do something well, people judge it two times in the positive direction. And if you do something terrible, they judge it two times in the negative. T. Gauda: I think it’s 10 times in the negative. [Laughter] I think there’s significant downside. Last question: What would you like to see happen in tech in 20 years? How would you like the tech community to look, in terms of diversity? T. Gauda: I’d like it to be more of this. More people who look like this. I mean, you’ve got a venture capitalist, an entrepreneur, a school teacher, an engineer, a business development individual, and a customer success director. In tech in Silicon Valley, traditionally, if you looked 10 years ago, we didn’t even exist. I mean, we are some of the first. Maqubela: Right. And I want black people to be massively, undeniably successful, so that nobody can say anything. Because they are just killing it. There is no better argument than success. On some level, that means I should get back to work. On another level, it means I should help Tony whenever I can, help Erin whenever I can, invest in the Tristans every time there is an opportunity, because success is the conversation ender. Erwin: And tying in on that, let’s see black entrepreneurs not only start companies but lead them to where they are a household name. Having those profiles of leadership would be very important for the next 20 to 50 years. A. Walker: Go ahead, Walker & Co. [Laughter] Erwin: Big up to Tristan for doing that.

MARCH/APRIL 2015 FASTCOMPANY.CO.Z A 73

FAST CITIES

We have liftoff Using prefab materials was necessary to keep costs down, but presented “a real learning curve” to Maltzan’s contractors.

Skid Row rises

BRINGING HELP TO THE HOMELESS, RIGHT WHERE THEY LIVE

By Shaunacy Ferro

Photograph by Jonathan Snyder

Housing the homeless is a complicated problem, not least because of the stigma attached to the homeless people themselves. “There are still people who think we should isolate these individuals on the outskirts of town,” says Los Angeles architect Michael Maltzan, who has spent his career alternating between luxurious private residences and affordable living spaces for the city’s least

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fortunate residents. Maltzan says his latest project, the Star Apartment Complex, is “part of a much larger movement” to make housing for the homeless part of the urban landscape. Set on top of a former commercial building in LA’s notorious Skid Row, it’s a boxy amalgam of prefabricated residential units, with amenities such as a running track, classroom space, a basketball court and a community kitchen. Creating affordable housing will help the chronically homeless get back on their feet, but it’s only part of the solution. “You can’t just give them an apartment and expect things to work out,” says Maltzan, who has spent 20 years working to revitalise the neighbourhood (this is his third residential complex in the area; a fourth project in nearby Van Nuys is slated to open in 2016). “You need to integrate other services in the building to help create a

bridge for these individuals back into culture.” To that end, Star Apartments’ street-facing spaces have been retrofitted to accommodate LA County Health Services’ Housing for Health programme; case managers from Skid Row Housing Trust, an organisation that has been developing supportive housing for LA’s homeless since 1989; and a medical clinic run by the county and open to the surrounding community. Maltzan views the complex—with units for 102 individuals and families—as a way to create hyperdensity in a city known for its sprawl, and preserve some aspect of architectural heritage in a region that tends to raze the old. “The history of this city is tearing down buildings like that,” he says. “If we’re really looking at how to think about more sustainable cities, then reusing buildings has to be a part of that equation.”

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THE SECRETS OF GENERATION FLUX

Leading AOL’s BBG Ventures

The 2014 World’s

Pharrell Williams | YouTube | Sorbet | Vinny Lingham

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CREATIVE LESSONS FROM SA ENTREPRENEURS Vinny Lingham Ian Fuhr Ndumiso Madlala Pharrell Williams | YouTube | Sorbet | Vinny Lingham

How he resurrected Madame Zingara

“If you’re at Tesla, you’re ... at the equivalent of Special Forces.”

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WOZNI A K

“My work is never a job. My work is my life.”

The World’s Most Innovative companies of 2014

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SUSAN WOJCICKI REBOOTS YOUTUBE TYRA BANKS GOES TO HARVARD WHAT IS GOODVERTISING?

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Co-working Spaces Is this the death of the Cubical Nation?

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The New Photo Economy Your Face is their Fortune

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MY WAY

Bilikiss Adebiyi-Abiola

Co-founder/CEO, Wecyclers

Turning trash into treasure A CLE V ER B U S I N E S S S O LU T I O N B R I N G S R EC YCLI N G TO L AG O S

Lagos, Nigeria is home to 21 million people, but only 40% of their trash is collected. The rest ends up in heaps, spreading disease. To lessen the burden, a local named Bilikiss Adebiyi-Abiola launched the recycling startup, Wecyclers. Its challenge: Teach people to care about trash.

The problem

The epiphany

The execution

The result

“People in the US are very careful about taking care of waste. I thought, Why not Nigeria?” says AdebiyiAbiola. She conceived Wecyclers in 2011, while earning her MBA at MIT. But when she went home, she found that few locals were motivated by talk of helping their environment.

Americans embraced recycling after decades of public service announcements. But in Lagos, she says, “many people just care about what they can get.” To experiment, she bought electronics from Walmart and held a raffle for whomever brought recyclables. About 150 people did.

Lagos generates 735 000 tonnes of plastic each year, worth about R3.4 billion to waste brokers. “That’s money lying on the street,” Adebiyi-Abiola says. So she built an exchange: Lagos residents give Wecyclers their bottles and cans, and receive cash or household items in return.

“Now they think, I shouldn’t just throw this Coke bottle on the floor or out the window,” she says. Wecyclers visits 6 000 homes a week; recyclables are collected and weighed, and rewards are tallied. The process is already netting 40 tonnes of recyclables a month. —Jaclyn Trop

Piling it on Lagos residents give Wecyclers their trash such as plastic bottles, in exchange for cash or household items.

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Photographs by Ruth McDowall

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CEO and CTO of SpaceX; chairperson of SolarCity; product architect and CEO of Tesla Motors

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“My work is never a job. My work is my life.”

JA RED LE T O,

Actor, Musician, Entrepreneur

S A E XC L U S I V E

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INSIGHT S FROM INNOVATI V E SOU TH A FRICA NS Boy Genius: SAM BERGER The Power of Sound: TOYA DELAZY Doing the Indie Shuffle: JASON GRISHKOFF From Corporate to Consulting: ANN NUROCK

Strike down bad ideas SOME BUSINESS OWNERS MAY ACTUALLY BE HARMING THEIR COMPANY WITH ‘EUREK A MOMENTS’; HERE’S HOW TO MANAGE INNOVATIVE CONCEPTS SO THEY ARE EFFECTIVE

By Dylan Kohlstädt

Do you work for someone who never seems to stop thinking about the next big thing that needs to be implemented? You know the type: rushing into the office and stealing productive time to call a meeting about some new idea he thought up on the toilet that morning, implementing untested ideas—and blaming the staff when these backfire. 78 FASTCOMPANY.CO.Z A MARCH/APRIL 2015

Or are you that person? Do you live in constant fear that the competition is getting one up on you? Are you convinced that your ideas are the best and should be implemented immediately, without discussion? Has it occurred to you that you may be doing more harm than good? Here are a few points to ponder:

N E W I D E A S A R E N ’ T A LWAY S G O O D I D E A S Just because you thought of it, and you own the business, doesn’t automatically make you the next marketing sensation. I once worked for a guy who must have been both deaf and blind, because he had the unique ability to ignore the groans and grimaces of his staff when he came up with his next big brainwave and immediately called a meeting to discuss it. What his staff thought was of no consequence to him in any case, he would run with it regardless. And guess what? He ran a struggling little business that constantly battled to make ends meet and was the laughing stock of the industry. Which brings me to my next point.

I N N O VAT I O N C O S T S M O N E Y My ex-boss, let’s call him Andy, would haemorrhage money on ridiculous ideas, and then try and cut costs by short-changing his staff, refusing to pay overtime and the like. All he achieved was a skinny bank balance and a mutinous crew. No successful business would ever spend money on an untested idea, so why would you?

C O N S TA N T I N N O VAT I O N A F F E C T S P R O D U C T I V I T Y If you are constantly throwing new ideas at your staff and expecting them to produce results, you’re going to be disappointed. It’s distracting

FOUR WAYS TO MANAGE YOUR INNOVATIVE IDEAS S O W H AT D O Y O U D O ? I F Y O U A R E T H AT P E R S O N WHO JUST CAN’T HELP GETTING EXCITED BY A B R A I N WAV E , O R W H O O B S E S S E S O V E R W H AT T H E C O M P E T I T I O N M AY B E D O I N G T H AT Y O U H AV E N ’ T THOUGHT OF—HERE ARE A F E W S I M P L E T R I C K S T H AT W I L L H E L P.

Let a new idea incubate You’ve woken up and it hits you like a tonne of bricks—that Eureka moment when you realise just how important it is that men should have nipples. It should be quite obvious that men don’t need nipples, but someone obviously thought it was a good idea at the time and just ran with it. Get the point? Write new ideas on the board and let them sit for a while. If they’re really good, they’ll be brought up again. If not, bin them.

Get feedback from your staff I’m amazed at how many bad businesspeople think their staff are trying to

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Write new ideas on the board and let them sit for a while. If they’re really good, they’ll be brought up again. If not, bin them.

and it’s stressful. Andy was brilliant at it. I swear, the man didn’t sleep. Every day he had a new angle, another spin on a lame idea, and we all had to smile and nod encouragement and pretend he was a genius. For us it was soul-destroying to watch the man sabotage his own business, and the staff turnover in that company was insane: six months to a year on average per person. If you’re an Andy, read on in the sidebar... Dylan Kohlstädt is the founder and account director of Shift ONE: outsource marketing for entrepreneurs. She is an online marketing specialist who is passionate about the user’s experience and about helping entrepreneurs and startups succeed.

sabotage them. Andy wouldn’t hear a word of criticism from one of his employees, yet the talk around the water cooler was anything but negative. We would criticise his decisions, sure, but we all had the best for the company at heart. If he had asked our opinions and actually heeded our advice, the man might actually have had a successful business. Your staff have your back—and if they don’t like an idea, it’s a good bet no one else will, either.

are the reason you’re in business, and you need their advice. Social media platforms abound where you can pitch new ideas and see first-hand the reaction they get. And it doesn’t cost a cent! Usability testing is also cheap and a great way of finding out what customers think before you commit limited resources to implementing the idea.

Do consumer testing

Running into the office and shouting “stop the press!” every time a competitor introduces a new angle into the marketplace only serves to distract everyone. Has

If you’re about to spend money on a new idea and you haven’t tested it, then you deserve to lose your money. Your customers

It doesn’t always matter what your competition is doing

it occurred to you that the competition may also have an impulse-driven man or woman at the helm who might not have done their homework? Using these tips should help you identify good ideas from bad ones. If you’re still having trouble separating the sheep from the goats, Shift ONE has the experience and know-how to work with you in designing a marketing strategy that will get your business noticed, without breaking the bank. Another suggestion is to invest in a business mentor, someone who has experience and a proven track record, who can help temper some of that enthusiasm; he or she may just save your bacon.

THE GRE AT INNOVATION FRONTIER

Walter Baets

Sifiso Dabengwa

DAWN OF A NEW MOBILE ECOSYSTEM F R O M T H E A R A B S P R I N G TO A VA C C I N AT I O N T R I A L TO C U R B E B O L A , M O B I L E I S P L AY I N G A K E Y R O L E I N S H A P I N G A F R I CA — A N D T H I S I S J U ST T H E B E G I N N I N G BY WA LT E R B A E TS A N D G U E ST W R I T E R S I F I S O DA B E N G WA

OBILE GROWTH ON the African continent continues to outstrip that of the rest of the world, rising 18% per year over the past five years in sub-Saharan countries.

Today, Gallup estimates that around 65% of households in sub-Saharan Africa have at least one mobile phone. Such numbers will make it possible for United States-based non-profit organisation, the Grameen Foundation, to deploy its Mobile Technology for Community Health platform in March to monitor trials of a new Ebola vaccination and help turn the tide on the virus that has killed nearly 9 000 people in East Africa. There is no shortage of such tales of the impact of mobile in Africa. And yet, despite its pervasiveness, too many are still waiting for the life-changing effects of technology to reach them; the continent still boasts some of the worst poverty and inequality in the world. Such divisions demand a new response from us. MIT senior lecturer and influential thinker, Otto Scharmer, who lists technology as one of eight “acupuncture points” for institutional innovation with the power to reboot the economic system, says that for technology to reach further, we need “to reinvent how we develop technologies and empower all people to be makers and creators rather than passive recipients.” Now is the time to act. On the one hand, a burgeoning middle class and healthy economic growth have investors lining up on our shores; on the other, cheaper broadband and the convergence of technology are leading to the shaping of new industries and value-adding services, with the potential to truly transform lives and experiences. The GSM Association calls this the “dawn of a new mobile ecosystem”, and Africans need to be ready to shape it to 82 FASTCOMPANY.CO.Z A MARCH/APRIL 2015

IN DEVELOPING THE RIGHT TECHNOLOGY PRODUCTS AND SERVICES OF THE FUTURE, LOCAL KNOWLEDGE WILL BE KEY.

their own ends. This means, among other things, investing in local knowledge and institutions. Africa is littered with misguided attempts to solve its ‘grand challenges’ from the outside in. As authors Esther Duflo and Abhijit Banerjee point out in their best-selling book Poor Economics, “Even the most well-intentioned ideas can get bogged down by ignorance of ground-level realities and inertia at the level of the implementer.” In developing the right technology products and services of the future, local knowledge will be key. Companies with roots in Africa should have an advantage in the coming technology boom, and many are stepping up. Fast Company’s top 10 most innovative companies in Africa for 2014 include Sterio.me, a startup that is rolling out a trial of its mobile e-learning service to 75 schools in Nigeria; and Aweza, a South African translation app that aims to leverage the growing mobile arena and encourage cultures to interact across their defined lines. Investing in and developing this new generation of African tech entrepreneurs must become a prime focus for government business and training institutions. Partnerships will be vital here. The 2014 SEED SA Symposium, a multi-stakeholder forum to foster social and green entrepreneurship in Africa, warns that one of the challenges for African entrepreneurs is securing partnerships with technical experts, and research institutions in particular, to ensure cross-fertilisation. Exciting hybrids are already emerging. Novel partnerships—such as those between the University of Cape Town Graduate School of Business and the MTN Group, and between Silicon Cape and First National Bank—are challenging traditional roles of business in society to unlock greater value for everyday Africans. When mobile arrived in Africa 20 years ago, some predictions pegged market penetration at 2 million. Today, some 635 million Africans are dialled in according to some estimates, with predictions of 1 billion by 2019. This is just the beginning. With the right partnerships and attitudes, Africa is perfectly positioned to build a new economic framework where both business and people can prosper. Walter Baets is the director of the UCT Graduate School of Business and holds the Allan Gray Chair in Values-Based Leadership at the school. Formerly a professor of Complexity, Knowledge and Innovation and associate dean for Innovation and Social Responsibility at Euromed Management—School of Management and Business, he is passionate about building a business school for ‘business that matters’. This edition’s column was co-written by Sifiso Dabengwa, group president and CEO of MTN Group Limited. He holds a BSc in Electrical Engineering, an MBA and an EDP.

CiTi supports medical tech and innovation In March, Barcelona hosted the Mobile Premier Awards, where the best of tech and innovation from around the world were awarded for their apps. South Africa walked away with a few wins, and it is not surprising that two of those are success stories that come out of the Cape Innovation and Technology Initiative (CiTi). CiTi is an incubator and accelerator that supports startups in the tech and IT space through its programmes held at the Bandwidth Barn in Woodstock and in Khayelitsha, Cape Town. The Mobile Triage app, developed by The Open Medicine Project South Africa (TOMPSA) and founded by South African doctors Yaseen Khan and Mohammed Dalwai, has produced a number of top medical apps used by more than 30 000 healthcare providers around the world. It won the Big Impact Award as the app with the most impact potential. “The Mobile Triage app allows healthcare workers in both the private and public sector to perform triage accurately by facilitating the identification of danger signs and symptoms, and colour-codes patients according to priority as either green, yellow, orange or red,” explains Dr Khan. The app is funded by the SA Medical Research Council’s Strategic Health Innovation Partnership and was piloted at Khayelitsha District Hospital where it made a tremendous impact, improving compliance by 88% and decreasing triage time by over 50%, which decreases patient waiting times. CiTi is showing its support of TOMPSA by providing business mentoring and full office facilities at the Bandwidth Barn.

Fast Company SA takes a look at the innovative new ideas and products currently making waves in South Africa and abroad

BYTES New Apple iPad? It is believed Apple is preparing its latest iPad with 12-inch screen and better software. Although still unofficial, industry watchers—such as respected Apple analyst Ming-Chi Kuo of KGI Securities—say Apple plans on launching some time this year. Apple has not confirmed the existence of this new ‘iPad Pro’ or ‘iPad Plus’, but it has become one of the most speculated-about products of the past few years. Rumour has it that the larger iPad’s intended settings would be for educational use and come with a stylus accessory.

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Sony’s Project Morpheus to launch next year On 4 March 2015, at this year’s Game Developers Conference, Sony confirmed that a commercial version of its virtual-reality (VR) headset, Project Morpheus, will go on sale in 2016—on an undisclosed launch date. The headset is designed to work with the PlayStation 4, improving the virtual gaming experience. VR enthusiasts have claimed it is very comfortable to wear, with its black curved visor and white LEDilluminated edging, held in place with a strap that goes all the way around the head. Project Morpheus boats a full-HD 1080p LCD display, with a resolution of 960 x 1080 for each eye. There is no word yet on the pricing; however, according to Sony’s software engineer Anton Mikhailov in EDGE magazine: “We wouldn’t be doing this if we didn’t know that we could make this for an affordable price.”

Another successful Design Indaba The recently held Design Indaba Expo 2015 welcomed a cutting-edge mix of more than 600 creatives from across the African continent and a full Events Arena Programme hosting local and international designers, authors and artists. With a complete makeover in terms of layout and floor design, this year’s expo flaunted fresh, innovative work from exhibitors who pushed their creative boundaries. A curator panel of industry professionals made sure exhibitors showcased original work and produced inspired, creatively conceived stands that set the expo apart from a run-of-the-mill trade fair. Each year, Design Indaba seeks to showcase and reward those who have gone above and beyond in the sectors of design. Whether it is by popular vote, an expert panel or peer review, the expo recognises higher standards of distinction with a series of awards. The Most Beautiful Object in South Africa (MBOISA) was the suspended walkway at Kirstenbosch National Botanical Garden, designed by architect Mark Thomas and engineer Henry Fagan, which is affectionately called the Boomslang; it was the public choice from this year’s 12 nominations for the MBOISA. Inspired by a snake skeleton, the curved steel and timber bridge takes visitors on an awe-inspiring journey, rising up from the forest floor into the trees and bursting out above the canopy—giving spectacular panoramic vistas of the garden and surrounding mountains as well as the Cape Flats below. The other winners can be viewed at www.designindaba.co.za.

First-of-its-kind system for SAA South African Airways (SAA) will become the first airline globally to instal the Satellite Authorisation System (SatAuth). The system—the first of its kind and developed in South Africa—will allow for secure credit-card transactions at any point and real-time positioning of any flight, anywhere, impacting fuel-saving interventions in-flight as well as providing full visibility of actual flight paths versus planned routing at any time. The device was tested at the SAA Technical maintenance facility in Kempton Park, Johannesburg. The airline plans to instal SatAuth across its entire long-haul fleet over time.

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Springleap launches Creative Insights Springleap, the New York– and South African-based technology startup, has continued its forward momentum with the launch of its new Creative Insights division. Utilising the crowdsourcing model used previously for design challenges, clients can now plug into Springleap’s co-creation community as an insights platform for research and qualified feedback. The platform has launched to the public, having already helped more than 20 clients in Beta mode—including Google, Pernod Ricard, Adidas, SKYY Vodka and several advertising agencies. South African companies expanding into other countries can now access on-the-ground feedback from professional creatives on their products, brand, competitors and category, as well as gauging the resonance of their creative campaigns. One of Fast Company SA’s Most Innovative Companies for 2014, Springleap’s proprietary database already comprises more than 22 000 agency-level creatives, and continues to grow daily with a steady influx of new talent from around the world. In conjunction with the new Creative Insights division, Springleap has launched its first product: a monthly syndicated Trend Report covering localised perspectives on marketing and brand activity, plus cultural trends. Aside from identifying burgeoning trends and revealing competitor activity within a particular industry, the trend report can be used to uncover viable future strategies and is a great source for content generation. For more information, visit www.springleap.com.

Upcoming events Fast Company will be attending

EVENTS North-West University Faculty of Education Sciences International Conference

FICPI World Congress 2015

North-West University, Potchefstroom www.nwu.ac.za

The Bureau of the International Federation of Intellectual Property Attorneys (FICPI) and its South African National Group are hosting this year’s World Congress in the city of Cape Town. The FICPI is the only international non-governmental organisation of which the membership consists exclusively of intellectual-property (IP) attorneys in private practice. The theme of the 2015 congress is: “Adapt to Advance—Inspiring IP Offices, the IP Profession and Industry to Promote Innovation and Stimulate Economic Growth”. The technical programme promises to be exceptionally good. Engage and network with colleagues from all over the world, while learning how to position your practice going forward.

13 TO 15 APRIL

The conference theme, “Lead, manage and govern in a diverse and complex context towards quality education for all”, addresses an important issue in the international educational context. A large number of schools are not performing as expected, and leadership is one of the important factors identified to address this. The aim of the conference is to challenge, interpret and develop theory with regard to leadership from different perspectives. International guests include Professor P. Pashiardis (Cyprus), Prof. S. Huber (Switzerland) and Prof. S. Eacott (Australia).

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13 TO 17 APRIL

Cape Town International Convention Centre www.ficpi2015capetown.com

World Travel Market Africa 2015

2nd Annual Wind Energy Summit 2015

15 TO 17 APRIL

16 TO 17 APRIL

The World Travel Market (WTM) Africa forms part of Africa Travel Week, with two other co-located industry events: International Luxury Travel Market Africa and Incentives, Business Travel & Meetings Africa (13 to 15 April). As the only event of its kind in Africa, WTM is a globally recognised brand with a sound reputation for delivering business. Exhibitors from southern Africa and Continental Africa as well as international tourism boards, international hotel brands and product suppliers are invited to exhibit and benefit from quality appointments with buyers from all over Africa and beyond.

Come and listen to 2015’s most qualified wind-energy experts speak about how to implement the financial and legislative changes that will continue to drive industry success into the future. Discussions will include: Financing, Regulation, Technical Excellence, Local Infrastructure, and Beyond the Renewable Energy Independent Power Producer Procurement Programme.

International Franchise & Entrepreneurs Expo 2015

PSASA Break Out Convention

16 TO 18 APRIL

17 TO 19 APRIL

Over the past 17 years, the International Franchise & Entrepreneurs Expo (IFE) has developed into the biggest franchise exhibition in Africa and the most dedicated to not only developing franchising but encouraging small business development and entrepreneurship. With 12% of business activity going through the franchise route at present, the potential for increased franchise growth is high, and shows such as the IFE are the ideal platform for prospective franchisees to find out more about this business format that allows you to get into business for yourself—but not by yourself.

The Professional Speakers Association of Southern Africa is the professional association for speakers in the region. ‘Speakers’ include trainers, facilitators, coaches, consultants, adult educators and keynoters. The 10th annual convention theme, styled around the Breakwater Lodge’s original use as a prison, is “Break Out”: Speakers will encourage delegates to ‘break out’ of limiting thought patterns, outdated business models and bad habits, and break into new opportunities. Seven other preconvention and extra-programme events will take place.

Cape Town International Convention Centre www.wtmafrica.com

Sandton Convention Centre, Johannesburg www.ife.co.za

2015 Enterprise Development and Entrepreneurship Agenda 22 TO 23 APRIL 2015

V&A Waterfront, Cape Town calisto@theglobalinvestgroup.com This conference creates a platform for both the public and private sector to take part in conversations that address the challenges faced in the global economy regarding entrepreneurship, enterprise development and small, medium and micro enterprises. With the theme of “Growing Entrepreneurship with right policies, funding and infrastructure”, obstacles and opportunities will be explored, and investment companies will be given a chance to air their views. Case studies from major stakeholders will be presented from more than 15 organisations.

Southern Sun Cape Sun Hotel, Cape Town www.windenergyupdate.com/south-africa

Protea Breakwater Lodge, Cape Town psasouthernafrica.co.za

Startup Picnic: Entrepreneur’s Fun Day 25 APRIL

Diggers Rugby Football Club, Randburg Sports Complex, Johannesburg www.startuppicnic.co.za The Startup Picnic is a series of casual, informal and fun networking events for established and aspiring entrepreneurs. It’s an opportunity to unwind, make friends, get active, play games, absorb information and tie relationships. Startup Picnic attracts various entrepreneurship stakeholders and organisations, more specifically angel investors, venture capitalists, accelerators and incubators. The day will kick off with a brief breakfast talk by Marumo Lekwankwa—a young transaction-leveraging businessman from Limpopo—after which the picnic will commence with networking and exhibitions on the side.

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ONE MORE THING

WE NEED MORE SHAKAS L E T ’ S E M B R AC E P R I S O N R E F O R M , R AT H E R T H A N J U ST R E T H I N K E D U CAT I O N A N D I M M I G R AT I O N , TO H E L P A D D R E S S L A B O U R I S S U E S

19 years in prison for murder. Since his release in 2010, he’s become a teacher at the University of Michigan, a published author, a soughtafter speaker (his 2014 TED Talk is a must-see) and an MIT Media Lab Director’s Fellow, which is how he and I met. Senghor paid his debt, and he’s a one-person testimonial to the value that exists in everyone. HAKA SENGHOR SPENT

And he doesn’t want to be the only one. There are currently two separate, parallel debates taking place in Silicon Valley about the future of its workforce. One is about how the technology industry can be more diverse. Much of the effort to that end has focused on encouraging girls and people of colour to embrace tech at a young age. The other conversation centres around immigration reform. Industry leaders argue that it’s vital to lure the talent necessary to fill the engineering jobs at companies such as Facebook, Microsoft and Dropbox. This is why Mark Zuckerberg created the lobbying group, FWD.us, although its record has been spotty. I’m all for promoting tech and welcoming immigrants. But neither of these is enough. Not when there are more potential Shaka Senghors behind bars. There are more than 1.5 million prisoners in the United States, many of them non-violent drug offenders. Our society is just now coming to terms with the cost of letting these people rot away in jail for decades. When rehabilitated ex-cons re-enter their communities, they face a jarring cultural disconnect. Not only is it hard to find employment, it’s challenging to adapt to a world that presumes ever more technological literacy. When Senghor went to jail, laptops and suitcases were indistinguishable in size. The only talking car he’d ever heard of was on Knight Rider. But when he was released five years ago, “It was really like, ‘Welcome to an urban episode of The Jetsons!’” he tells me. Senghor admits that he still struggles with life

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Shaka Senghor

WHAT IF THE RESOURCEFULNESS AND HUSTLE CURRENTLY TRAPPED BEHIND BARS COULD FLOOD BACK INTO A NATION THAT NEEDS IT?

Baratunde Thurston

beyond bars, and he’s made it his mission to help reintroduce others to society, including an immersion in tech. He’s teamed up with Van Jones (founder of Rebuild the Dream, one-time Barack Obama green jobs tsar, and CNN political commentator) on #Cut50, Jones’s initiative (with Newt Gingrich!) to trim by half the US prison population. Senghor believes his efforts can help reduce recidivism. Other people are working to create opportunities related to technology for reformed felons. A programme in California called The Last Mile is working to provide entrepreneurship training in prisons. Isidore Electronics, run by Kabira Stokes, hires formerly incarcerated individuals to recycle the electronics we may otherwise toss into landfills—proving that we don’t have to waste our gadgets or our fellow human beings. We can do even more, which is why we should add tech’s biggest brains to the conversation. “The whole idea of coding is iterating and innovating around necessity,” Senghor says. “Well, in [a prison] environment, innovation and iteration are happening out of necessity.” He then regales me with stories of inmates creating tattoo guns out of tape players and heating water without a microwave. In prison, terms such as DIY, makers, hacking and minimum viable product come to life every day. What if the resourcefulness and hustle currently trapped behind bars could flood back into a nation that needs it? The labour potential of these soon-to-be returned citizens could be as profound as getting an 8-year-old excited about tech. And the payoff could come much sooner. Baratunde Thurston is the author of The New York Times bestseller How to Be Black and CEO and co-founder of Cultivated Wit, a creative agency that combines the powers of humour, design and technology.

011 232 8000

solutions@nashua.co.za

The Whole Is Greater Than The Sum Of Its Parts Take an executive education short course and go from good to great. To find out more about our world-class academic programmes, executive education short courses and customised programme offerings contact: 0860 UCT GSB (828 472) INTL +27 (0)21 406 1922 | execed@gsb.uct.ac.za or visit www.gsb.uct.ac.za/execed